II
MRS. BLOSSOM'S VALENTINE
It was a bitter night. Mrs. Blossom refilled the kitchen stove, and threw on more hickory in the fireplace in anticipation of her husband's late return from the village. She drew her little work-table nearer to the blaze, and sat down to her sewing. Then she sighed, and, as she bent over the large willow basket filled with stockings to be darned and clothes to be mended, a tear rolled down her cheek and plashed on the edge.
There was so much she wanted to do for her children—and so little with which to do it! There was March, an artist to his finger-tips, who longed to be an architect; and Rose, lovely in her young girlhood and giving promise of a lovelier womanhood, who was willing to work her way through one of the lesser colleges, if only she could be prepared for entrance. Mary Blossom saw no prospect of being able to do anything for either of them.
And the father! He must be spared first, if he were to be their future bread-winner. Mary Blossom could never forget that day, a year ago this very month, when her husband was brought home on a stretcher, hurt, as they thought, unto death, by a tree falling the wrong way in the woods where he was directing the choppers.
What a year it had been! All they had saved had gone to pay for the extra help hired to carry on the farm and finish the log-cutting. A surgeon had come from the nearest city to give his verdict in the case and help if he could.
The farm was mortgaged to enable them to pay the heavy bills incident to months of sickness and medical attendance; still the father lay helpless, and Mary Blossom's faith and courage were put to their severest test, when both doctor and surgeon pronounced the case hopeless. He might live for years, they said, but useless, so far as his limbs were concerned.
This was in June; and then it was that Mary Blossom, leaving Rose in charge of her father and the children, left her home, and walked bareheaded rapidly up the slope behind the house, across the upland pastures and over into the woodlands, from which they had hoped to derive a sufficient income to provide not only for their necessities, but for their children's education and the comforts of life.
Deep into the heart of them she made her way; and there, in the green silence, broken only by the note of a thrush and the stirring of June leafage above and about her, she knelt and poured out her sorrow-filled heart before God, and cast upon Him the intolerable burden that had rested so long upon her soul.
The shadows were lengthening when at last she turned homewards. Cherry and Budd met her in the pasture, for Rose had grown anxious and sent them to find her.
"Why, where have you been, Martie?" exclaimed the twins. "We were so frightened about you, because you didn't come home."
"You needn't have been; I've been talking with a Friend." And more than that she never said. The children's curiosity was roused, but when they told Rose and asked her what mother meant, Rose's eyes filled with tears, and she kept silence; for she alone knew with Whom her mother had talked that June afternoon.
"Run ahead, Budd, and tell Malachi to harness up Bess. I want him to take a letter down to the village so that it may go on the night mail." Budd flew rather than ran; for there was a look in his mother's face that he had never seen before, and it awed him.
That night a letter went to Doctor Heath, a famous nerve specialist of New York City. It was a letter from Mary Blossom, his old-time friend and schoolmate in the academy at Barton's River. In it she asked him if he would give her his advice in this case, saying she could not accept the decision of the physician and surgeon unless it should be confirmed by him.
"I cannot pay you now," she wrote, "but it was borne in upon me this afternoon to write to you, although you may have forgotten me in these many years, and I have no claim of present friendship, even, upon your time and service; but I must heed the inner command to appeal to you, whatever you may think of me,— if I disobeyed that, I should be disobeying God's voice in my life,"—and signed herself, "Yours in childhood's remembrance."
The next day a telegram was brought up from the village; and the day after the Doctor himself followed it.
It was an anxious week; but the wonderful skill conquered. The pressure on a certain nerve was removed, and for the last six months Benjamin Blossom had been slowly but surely coming back to his old-time health and strength. But again this winter the extra help had been necessary, and it had taxed all Mary Blossom's ingenuity to make both ends meet; for there was the interest on the mortgage to be paid every six months, and the ready money had to go for that.
In the midst of her thoughts, her recollections and plans, she caught the sound of sleigh-bells. The tall clock was just striking ten. Smoothing every line of care and banishing all look of sadness from her face, she met her husband with a cheery smile and a, "I'm so glad you've got home, Ben; it's just twenty below, and the molasses tea is ready for you and Chi."
"Chi!" called Mr. Blossom towards the barn.
"Whoa!" shouted a voice that sounded frosty in spite of itself. "Whoa, Bess!"
"Come into the kitchen before you turn in; there's some hot molasses tea waiting for us."
"Be there in a minute," he shouted back, and Bess pranced into the barn.
"Oh, Mary, this "is" good," said Mr. Blossom, as he slipped out of his buffalo-robe coat and into his warm house-jacket, dropped his boots outside in the shed, and put on his carpet-slippers that had been waiting for him on the hearth.
"It is home, Ben," said his wife, bringing out clean tin cups from the pantry, and putting them to warm beside the kettle on the hearth.
"Yes, with you in it, Mary," he said with the smile that had won him his true-love eighteen years before.
"Come in, Chi," he called towards the shed, whence came sounds as if some one were dancing a double-shuffle in snow-boots.
"'Fraid I'll thaw 'n' make a puddle on the hearth, Mis' Blossom. I'm as stiff as an icicle: guess I'll take my tea perpendic'lar; I ain't fit to sit down."
"Sit down, sit down, Chi," said Mrs. Blossom. "You'll enjoy the tea more; and give yourself a thorough heating before you go to bed. I've put the soapstone in it," she added.
"Well, you beat all, Mis Blossom; just as if you didn't find enough to do for yourself, you go to work n make work." He broke off suddenly, "George Washin'ton!" he exclaimed, "most forgot to give you this letter that come on to-night's mail."
He handed Mrs. Blossom the letter, which, with some difficulty, owing to his stiffened fingers, he extracted from the depths of the tail-pocket of his old overcoat. Then he helped himself to a brimming cup of the tea, and apparently swallowed its contents without once taking breath.
"Why, it's from Doctor Heath!" exclaimed Mrs. Blossom, recognizing the handwriting. "Is it a valentine, I wonder?" she said, feigning to laugh, for her heart sank within her, fearing it might be the bill,-and yet, and yet, the Doctor had said—she got no further with these thoughts, so intent was she on the contents of the letter.
Chi, with an eye to prolonging his stay till he should know the why and wherefore of a letter from the great Doctor at this season of the year, took another cup of the tea.
"Ben, oh, Ben!" cried Mrs. Blossom, in a faint, glad voice; and therewith, to her husband's amazement, she handed him the letter, put both arms around his neck, and, dropping her head on his shoulder, sobbed as if her heart would break.
Chi softly put down his half-emptied cup and tiptoed with creaking boots from the room.
"Can't stand that, nohow," he muttered to himself in the shed; and, forgetting to light his lantern, he felt his way up the backstairs to his lodging in the room overhead, blinded by some suspicious drops of water in his eyes, which he cursed for frost melting from his bushy eyebrows.
"Oh, Ben, think of it!" she cried, when her husband had soothed and calmed her. "Twenty-five dollars a week; that makes a little more than twelve hundred a year. Why, we can pay off all the mortgage and be free from that nightmare."
For answer her husband drew her closer to him, and late into the night they sat before the dying fire, talking and planning for the future.
"Children," she said at breakfast next morning, and her voice sounded so bright and cheery that the room seemed full of sunshine, although the sky was a hard, cold gray, "I've had one valentine already; it came last night from the Doctor."
Chi listened with all his ears.
"Mother!" burst from the children, "where is it?" "Show it to us." "Why didn't you tell us before breakfast?"
"I can't show it to you yet; it's a live one."
"A live one!" chorussed the children.
"You're fooling us, mother," said March.
"Do I look as if I were?" replied his mother.
And March was obliged to confess that she had never looked more in earnest.
Rose left her seat and stole to her father's side. "What does it mean, pater?" she whispered.
"Ask your mother," was all the satisfaction she received, and walked, crestfallen, back to her chair; for when had her father refused her anything?
"When will you tell us, anyway?" said Budd, a little gruffly. He hated a secret.
"I can't tell you that either," said his mother, "and I don't know that I shall tell you until the very last, if you ask in that voice."
Budd screwed his mouth into a smile, and, unbeknown to the rest of the family, reached under the cloth for his mother's hand. He sat next to her, and that had been his way of saying "Forgive me," ever since he was a tiny boy.
He had a squeeze in return and felt happier.
"I say, let's guess," said Cherry. "If I don't do something, I shall burst."
"You express my feelings perfectly, Cherry," said March, gravely, and the guessing began.
"A St. Bernard puppy?" said Budd, who coveted one.
"A Shetland pony," said Cherry.
"The Doctor's coming up here, himself." That was Rose's guess.
"'T ain't likely," growled Budd.
"A tunning 'ittle baby," chirped May.
March failed to think of any live thing the Doctor was likely to send unless it might be a Wyandotte blood-rooster, such as he and the Doctor had talked about last summer.
"You're all cold, cold as ice," laughed their mother, using the words of the game she had so often played with them when they were younger.
"Oh, mother!" they protested. They were almost indignant.
Chi rose and left the table. "Beats me," he muttered, as he took down his axe from a beam in the woodshed. "What in thunder can it be? I ain't goin' to ask questions, but I'll ferret it out,—by George Washin'ton;" and that was Chi's most solemn oath.