II.
Within doors, in the warm kitchen, Mrs. Derring was getting supper. Aunt Jerusha's chair was drawn up to the stove. With her brown merino skirt turned safely back from the heat and her large feet resting comfortably in front of the oven door, she beamed over her gold-bowed spectacles, the picture of comfort. Uncle Eben, with knees drawn up and boot-heels on the round of a straight wooden chair, rubbed his fingers and chuckled into the conversation.
“Is that Edwards man going with Emily Hutton?” demanded Aunt Jerusha over her spectacles. “I saw his team hitched there as we came along.”
Mrs. Derring was stooping to put wood in the fire. She lifted a flushed face. “Well, I do' know” She hesitated. “He's been there once or twice, I believe.”
“I thought she was Dick's gal,” cackled Uncle Eben from his high seat.
Both women looked at him sternly—Aunt Jerusha on principle, Mrs. Derring from the mother-instinct to defend her young.
“I guess Dick didn't care much about her,” she said decisively. She began to mix the light biscuit for tea.
Uncle Eben dropped his boot-heels and rose with a crestfallen air. He limped towards the sitting-room and buried his ignominy behind the Ashton Weekly Press.
“He's a dreadful trial sometimes,” murmured Aunt Jerusha, with a glance towards the sitting-room door. “He's so affectionate, you know—wants to hold my hand in meeting sometimes, and such like. Of course, the neighbors think it's dreadful queer.” She had closed the oven door that the oven might be hot for the biscuit. She sat drawn well back in her chair, her merino skirt still tucked up and her feet planted firmly on the floor, looking inquiringly over her spectacles at Mrs. Derring.
“Yes, I know.” Mrs. Derring's nod was sympathetic. “Father was some that way too—dreadful affectionate. Only he was more masterful than Eben. Eben seems to give up pretty easy.”
“Well, he has to, because I have to have my own way,” answered Aunt Jerusha, settling herself more firmly in her chair.
The other woman seemed not to have heard her. Her dark eyes were looking wistfully through the window towards the barn. “Richard favors Father some, I think,” she said, as if following out her own thoughts, “and lately, it seems to me, he's grown more like him than ever. I don't seem to understand him.”
Aunt Jerusha nodded sagaciously. “Richard 'ud do well enough if only he'd give up writing poetry and get married and settle down. He needs a woman to look after him.”
Mrs. Derring's thin face flushed. This time it was not the heat of the fire. “I guess, Jerusha”
The door of the kitchen was flung wide. The young man appeared, a pail in each hand. “Well, well, Aunt Jerusha, aren't you thawed out yet?” He crossed the room with the brimming pails and deposited them on the pantry floor.
There was little of the heart-broken lover about him as he turned to the wide wooden sink and, dipping water into the big tin basin, began to wash his face and hands. He performed his public toilet with the unconscious ease of habit, dashing the water over his brown face and neck and running his fingers far back into the thick hair. He emerged from the folds of the heavy crash towel, his face glowing and his eyes shining.
His presence lighted the dim room. Mrs. Derring's face lost its tired look; Uncle Eben limped cheerfully back from the sitting-room; and as they seated themselves at the supper-table the boy's exuberant vitality gave a touch of unity that had been lacking before. Aunt Jerusha softened a little towards Uncle Eben, merely keeping a watchful eye on him, as one might on an irresponsible child.
“You needn't pass him the sweet pickles,” she said.
But it was too late. The dish was already in Uncle Eben's trembling fingers, and a brown drop had fallen on the spotless cloth.
“I knew he'd spill it.” She spoke in an impersonal, detached tone.
Uncle Eben hastily adjusted a glass to cover the spot.
Richard watched the by-play with dancing eyes. Uncle Eben and Aunt Jerusha were always irresistible. But to-night, as he watched them, the smile faded. A thought had flashed across it. Would he and Emily—in thirty years? Impossible. Emily's dimples deepened to heavy lines—her laughing eyes behind spectacles. Absurd! Yet Aunt Jerusha's manner to Uncle Eben was grotesquely like. It all passed in an undercurrent of thought, scarcely recognized as he laughed and talked and played the part of host.
Not until the good-byes had been said and the clumsy wagon had rattled down the road did he bring the thought to the light and face it. He was alone in his room, a small, bare room—like his life. No carpet on the floor, no curtain at the window, but spotlessly clean, from the blue and white homespun spread on the bed to the square stand beside it. He sat on the edge of the bed, one hand shading his eyes from the light of the small lamp, the other holding a picture on which his eyes rested eagerly. It was a small tintype,—the face of a young girl,—the eyes large, dark, and bright, the hair soft and curling, the forehead high, and the lips firmly closed.
It was like, yet curiously unlike, the face that was looking down at it with eager inquiry. These eyes too were large and dark, but they were dreamy instead of bright; the lips were full and flexible instead of thin and closely set; and the broad forehead, even when the shading hand pushed back the hair impatiently, could not be called high. In both dark faces was a certain sturdiness of character. But the girl's face bore the stamp of fully developed powers, and the other that of powers yet unformed.
Something was struggling in it. The youth was striving blindly to hold to a belief in his love for the face before him. That she was lost to him he had accepted without struggle. But that his love for her should go too, that he should not love her always,—his poet nature shrank from the thought. It was sacrilege. She had been so long enthroned in his heart—she belonged there. She might become the wife of another man, let Edwards win her, she was still his. His ideal of her should not be torn from him. He could not bear it. It should not be.
And over his idealism, and around and under it, ran a conviction, a strange certainty, that love was already dead.