"A cedar?" I repeated.
She nodded, her plain face lighting. "That's what Calliope use' to call 'em," she explained; "'I will plant in the wilderness the cedar,' you know—in the Bible." And I did recall the phrase on Calliope's lips, as if it were the theme of her.
From this one and that one, and now and then from her herself, I had heard something of Calliope's love story. Indeed, all Friendship knew it and spoke of it with no possibility of gossip or speculation, but with a kind of genius for consideration. I did not know, however, that it was of this that Liddy meant to speak, for she began her story far afield, with some talk of Oldmoxon house, in which I lived, and of its former tenants.
"Right here in this house is mixed up in it," she said; "I been thinkin' about it all the way up. Not very many have lived here in the Oldmoxon house, and the folks that lived here the year I mean come so quiet nobody knew it until they was here—an' that ain't easy to do in Friendship. First we knew they was in an' housekeepin'. Their accounts was in the name of a Mis' Morgan. We see her now an' then on the street—trim an' elderly an' no airs excep' she wouldn't open up a conversation an' she wouldn't return her calls. 'Most everybody called on her inside the two weeks, but the woman was never home an' she never paid any attention. She didn't seem to have no men folks, an' she settled her bills with checks, like she didn't have any ready money. Little by little we all dropped her, which she ought to of expected. Even when it got around that there was sickness in the house, nobody went near, we feelin' as if we knew as good as the best what dignity calls for.
"But Calliope didn't feel the same about it. Calliope hardly ever felt the same about anything. That is, if it meant feelin' mean. She was a woman that worked, like me, but yet she was wonderful differ'nt. That was when we had our shop together in the house where we lived with the boy—I'll come to him in a minute or two. Besides lace-makin', Calliope had a piano an' taught in the fittin'-room—that was the same as the dinin'-room. Six scholars took. Sometimes I think it was her knowin' music that made her differ'nt.
"We two was sittin' on our porch that night in the first dark. I know a full moon was up back o' the hollyhocks an' makin' its odd little shadows up an' down the yard, an' we could smell the savoury bed. 'Every time I breathe in, somethin' pleasant seems goin' on inside my head,' I rec'lect Calliope's sayin'. But most o' the time we was still an' set watchin' the house on the corner where the New People lived. They had a hard French name an' so we kep' on callin' 'em just the 'New People.' He was youngish an' she was younger an'—she wasn't goin' out anywheres that summer. She was settin' on the porch that night waitin' for him to come home. Before it got dark we'd noticed she had on a pretty white dress an' a flower or two. It seemed sort o' nice—that bein' so, an' her waitin' there dressed so pretty. An' we sort o' set there waitin' for him, too—like you will, you know.
"The boy was in the bed. He wa'n't no relation of Calliope's if you're as strict as some, but accordin' to my idea he was closer than that—closer than kin. He was the grandchild of the man Calliope had been goin' to marry forty-some years before, when she was twenty-odd. Calvert Oldmoxon he was—born an' bred up in this very house. He was quite well off an'—barrin' he was always heathen selfish—it was a splendid match for Calliope, but I never see a girl care so next to nothin' about that. She was sheer crazy about him, an' he seemed just as much so about her. An' then when everything was ready—Calliope's dress done an' layin' on their best-room bed, the minister stayin' home from conference to perform the ceremony, even the white cake made—off goes Calvert Oldmoxon with Martha Boughton, a little high-fly that had just moved to town. A new girl can marry anything she wants in Friendship if she does it quick. So Calliope had to put up from Martha Boughton with just what Jennie Crapwell had to take from Delia, more'n twenty-five years afterwards.
"It was near thirty years before we see either of 'em again. Then, just a little before I'm tellin' you about, a strange woman come here to town one night with a little boy; an' she goes to the hotel, sick, an' sends for Calliope. An' when Calliope gets to the hotel the woman was about breathin' her last. An' it was Mis' Oldmoxon—Martha Boughton, if you please, an' dyin' on the trip she'd made to ask Calliope to forgive her for what she done.
"An' Calliope forgive her, but I don't imagine Calliope was thinkin' much about her at the time. Hangin' round the bed was a little boy—the livin', breathin' image of Calvert Oldmoxon himself. Calliope was mad-daft over children anyway, though she was always kind o' shy o' showin' it, like a good many women are that ain't married. I've seen her pick one up an' gentle it close to her, but let anybody besides me come in the room an' see her an' she'd turn a regular guilt-red. Calliope never was one to let on. But I s'pose seein' that little boy there at the hotel look so much like him was kind o' unbalancin'. So what does she do when Mis' Oldmoxon was cryin' about forgiveness but up an' ask her what was goin' to be done with the boy after she was dead. Calliope would be one to bring the word 'dead' right out, too, an' let the room ring with it—though that ain't the custom in society. Now'days they lie everybody 'way into the grave, givin' 'em to understand that their recovery is certain, till there must be a lots o' dumfounded dead, shot into the next world—you might say unbeknownst. But Calliope wasn't mincin' matters. An' when it come out that the dyin' woman hadn't seen Calvert Oldmoxon for thirty years an' didn't know where he was, an' that the child was an orphan an' would go to collateral kin or some such folks, Calliope plumps out to her to give her the child. The forgiveness Calliope sort o' took for granted—like you will as you get older. An' Mis' Oldmoxon seemed real willin' she should have him. So when Calliope come home from the funeral—she'd rode alone with the little boy for mourners—she just went to work an' lived for that child.
"'"In the wilderness the cedar," Liddy,' she says to me. 'More than one of 'em. I've had 'em right along. My music scholars an' my lace-makin' customers an' all. An', Liddy,' she says to me sort o' shy, 'ain't you noticed,' she says, 'how many neighbours we've had move in an out that's had children? So many o' the little things right around us! Seems like they'd almost been born to me when they come acrost the street, so. An' I've always thought o' that—"In the wilderness the cedar"' she says, 'an' they's always somethin' to be a cedar for me, seems though.'