to the field where there was a great square patch of rough, weedy
potato-tops and tall ragweed. One corner was already dug, and I
chose a fat-looking hill where the tops were well withered. There
is all the pleasure that one can have in gold-digging in finding
one's hopes satisfied in the
riches of a good hill of potatoes. I
longed to go on; but it did not seem
frugal to dig any longer after
my basket was full, and at last I took my hoe by the middle and
lifted the basket to go back up the hill. I was sure that Mrs.
Blackett must be
waitingimpatiently to slice the potatoes into the
chowder, layer after layer, with the fish.
"You let me take holt o' that basket, ma'am," said the
pleasant,
anxious voice behind me.
I turned, startled in the silence of the wide field, and saw
an
elderly man, bent in the shoulders as fishermen often are, gray-
headed and clean-shaven, and with a timid air. It was William. He
looked just like his mother, and I had been imagining that he was
large and stout like his sister, Almira Todd; and, strange to say,
my fancy had led me to picture him not far from thirty and a little
loutish. It was necessary instead to pay William the respect due
to age.
I accustomed myself to plain facts on the
instant, and we said
good-morning like old friends. The basket was really heavy, and I
put the hoe through its handle and offered him one end; then we
moved easily toward the house together,
speaking of the fine
weather and of mackerel which were reported to be
striking in all
about the bay. William had been out since three o'clock, and had
taken an extra fare of fish. I could feel that Mrs. Todd's eyes
were upon us as we approached the house, and although I fell behind
in the narrow path, and let William take the basket alone and
precede me at some little distance the rest of the way, I could
plainly hear her greet him.
"Got round to comin' in, didn't you?" she inquired, with
amusement. "Well, now, that's clever. Didn't know's I should see
you to-day, William, an' I wanted to settle an account."
I felt somewhat disturbed and
responsible, but when I joined
them they were on most simple and friendly terms. It became
evident that, with William, it was the first step that cost, and
that, having once joined in social interests, he was able to pursue
them with more or less pleasure. He was about sixty, and not
young-looking for his years, yet so undying is the spirit of youth,
and bashfulness has such a power of survival, that I felt all the
time as if one must try to make the occasion easy for some one who
was young and new to the affairs of social life. He asked politely
if I would like to go up to the great ledge while dinner was
getting ready; so, not without a deep sense of pleasure, and a
delighted look of surprise from the two
hostesses, we started,
William and I, as if both of us felt much younger than we looked.
Such was the
innocence and
simplicity of the moment that when I
heard Mrs. Todd laughing behind us in the kitchen I laughed too,
but William did not even blush. I think he was a little deaf, and
he stepped along before me most
businesslike and
intent upon his
errand.
We went from the upper edge of the field above the house into
a smooth, brown path among the dark spruces. The hot sun brought
out the
fragrance of the pitchy bark, and the shade was pleasant as
we climbed the hill. William stopped once or twice to show
me a great wasps'-nest close by, or some fishhawks'-nests below in
a bit of swamp. He picked a few sprigs of late-blooming linnaea as
we came out upon an open bit of
pasture at the top of the island,
and gave them to me without
speaking, but he knew as well as I that
one could not say half he wished about linnaea. Through this piece
of rough
pasture ran a huge shape of stone like the great backbone
of an
enormous creature. At the end, near the woods, we could
climb up on it and walk along to the highest point; there above the
circle of
pointed firs we could look down over all the island, and
could see the ocean that circled this and a hundred other bits of
island ground, the
mainland shore and all the far horizons. It
gave a sudden sense of space, for nothing stopped the eye or hedged
one in,--that sense of liberty in space and time which great
prospects always give.
"There ain't no such view in the world, I expect," said
William
proudly, and I hastened to speak my heartfelt
tribute of
praise; it was impossible not to feel as if an untraveled boy had
spoken, and yet one loved to have him value his native heath.
X
Where Pennyroyal Grew
WE WERE a little late to dinner, but Mrs. Blackett and Mrs. Todd
were lenient, and we all took our places after William had paused
to wash his hands, like a pious Brahmin, at the well, and put on a
neat blue coat which he took from a peg behind the kitchen door.
Then he
resolutely asked a
blessing in words that I could not hear,
and we ate the chowder and were
thankful. The
kitten went round
and round the table, quite erect, and,
holding on by her fierce
young claws, she stopped to mew with pathos at each elbow, or
darted off to the open door when a song
sparrow forgot himself and
lit in the grass too near. William did not talk much, but his
sister Todd occupied the time and told all the news there was to
tell of Dunnet Landing and its coasts, while the old mother
listened with delight. Her
hospitality was something exquisite;
she had the gift which so many women lack, of being able to make
themselves and their houses belong entirely to a guest's
pleasure,--that
charmingsurrender for the moment of themselves and
whatever belongs to them, so that they make a part of one's
own life that can never be forgotten. Tact is after all a kind of
mindreading, and my
hostess held the golden gift. Sympathy is of
the mind as well as the heart, and Mrs. Blackett's world and mine
were one from the moment we met. Besides, she had that final, that
highest gift of heaven, a perfect self-forgetfulness. Sometimes,
as I watched her eager, sweet old face, I wondered why she had been
set to shine on this
lonely island of the northern coast. It must
have been to keep the balance true, and make up to all her
scattered and depending neighbors for other things which they may
have lacked.
When we had finished
clearing away the old blue plates, and
the
kitten had taken care of her share of the fresh haddock, just
as we were putting back the kitchen chairs in their places, Mrs.
Todd said
briskly that she must go up into the
pasture now to
gather the desired herbs.
"You can stop here an' rest, or you can accompany me," she
announced. "Mother ought to have her nap, and when we come back
she an' William'll sing for you. She admires music," said Mrs.
Todd, turning to speak to her mother.
But Mrs. Blackett tried to say that she couldn't sing as she
used, and perhaps William wouldn't feel like it. She looked tired,
the good old soul, or I should have liked to sit in the peaceful
little house while she slept; I had had much pleasant experience of
pastures already in her daughter's company. But it seemed best to
go with Mrs. Todd, and off we went.
Mrs. Todd carried the
gingham bag which she had brought from
home, and a small heavy burden in the bottom made it hang straight
and
slender from her hand. The way was steep, and she soon grew
breathless, so that we sat down to rest
awhile on a convenient
large stone among the bayberry.
"There, I wanted you to see this,--'tis mother's picture,"
said Mrs. Todd; "'twas taken once when she was up to Portland soon
after she was married. That's me," she added,
opening another worn
case, and displaying the full face of the
cheerful child she looked
like still in spite of being past sixty. "And here's William an'
father together. I take after father, large and heavy, an' William
is like mother's folks, short an' thin. He ought to have made
something o' himself, bein' a man an' so like mother; but though
he's been very steady to work, an' kept up the farm, an' done his
fishin' too right along, he never had mother's snap an' power o'
seein' things just as they be. He's got excellent judgment, too,"
meditated William's sister, but she could not arrive at any
satisfactory decision upon what she
evidently thought his failure
in life. "I think it is well to see any one so happy an' makin'
the most of life just as it falls to hand," she said as she began
to put the daguerreotypes away again; but I reached out my
hand to see her mother's once more, a most flowerlike face of a
lovely young woman in
quaint dress. There was in the eyes a look
of
anticipation and joy, a
far-off look that sought the horizon;
one often sees it in seafaring families, inherited by girls and
boys alike from men who spend their lives at sea, and are always
watching for distant sails or the first loom of the land. At sea
there is nothing to be seen close by, and this has its counterpart
in a sailor's
character, in the large and brave and patient traits
that are developed, the
hopeful pleasantness that one loves so in
a seafarer.
When the family pictures were wrapped again in a big
handkerchief, we set forward in a narrow footpath and made our way
to a
lonely place that faced
northward, where there was more
pasturage and fewer bushes, and we went down to the edge of short
grass above some rocky cliffs where the deep sea broke with a great
noise, though the wind was down and the water looked quiet a little
way from shore. Among the grass grew such pennyroyal as the rest
of the world could not provide. There was a fine
fragrance in the
air as we gathered it sprig by sprig and stepped along carefully,
and Mrs. Todd pressed her
aromatic nosegay between her hands and
offered it to me again and again.
"There's nothin' like it," she said; "oh no, there's no such
pennyr'yal as this in the state of Maine. It's the right pattern
of the plant, and all the rest I ever see is but an imitation.
Don't it do you good?" And I answered with enthusiasm.
"There, dear, I never showed nobody else but mother where to
find this place; 'tis kind of sainted to me. Nathan, my husband,
an' I used to love this place when we was courtin', and"--she
hesitated, and then spoke softly--"when he was lost, 'twas just off
shore tryin' to get in by the short
channel out there between Squaw
Islands, right in sight o' this
headland where we'd set an' made
our plans all summer long."
I had never heard her speak of her husband before, but I felt
that we were friends now since she had brought me to this place.
"'Twas but a dream with us," Mrs. Todd said. "I knew it when
he was gone. I knew it"--and she whispered as if she were at
confession--"I knew it afore he started to go to sea. My heart was
gone out o' my keepin' before I ever saw Nathan; but he loved me
well, and he made me real happy, and he died before he ever knew
what he'd had to know if we'd lived long together. 'Tis very
strange about love. No, Nathan never found out, but my heart was
troubled when I knew him first. There's more women likes to be
loved than there is of those that loves. I spent some happy hours
right here. I always liked Nathan, and he never knew. But this
pennyr'yal always
reminded me, as I'd sit and gather it and hear
him talkin'--it always would
remind me of--the other one."
She looked away from me, and
presently rose and went on by
herself. There was something
lonely and
solitary about her great
determined shape. She might have been Antigone alone on the Theban
plain. It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the
places of great grief and silence. An
absolute, archaic grief
possessed this countrywoman; she seemed like a renewal of some
historic soul, with her sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life
busied with
rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs.
I was not
incompetent at herb-gathering, and after a while,
when I had sat long enough waking myself to new thoughts, and
reading a page of
remembrance with new pleasure, I gathered some
bunches, as I was bound to do, and at last we met again higher up
the shore, in the plain every-day world we had left behind when we
went down to the penny-royal plot. As we walked together along the
high edge of the field we saw a hundred sails about the bay and
farther
seaward; it was mid-afternoon or after, and the day was