Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Perhaps. But I don’t believe so. We were not born into the other world. The Shakers are very good, and they have been kind to us. Yes, I could be contented among them. Are you going to stay with them, father?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Boynton. “The time hasn’t come to decide, yet. I have been waiting. There is no hurry. I don’t feel that we are here on charity, quite. I am able to render some equivalent.”

  “Yes,” said Egeria, “and I am going to work as soon as they will let me. I know they would like to have us stay and join them.”

  “That was originally my idea. I still propose to do so, if I find them useful. Everything depends” — He stopped uneasily, and glanced at Egeria, but she showed no uneasiness.

  XIV.

  While their place in the community was thus indefinite, they dwelt with the brothers and sisters who had first received them in the office. Egeria helped the sisters in their work there, and they all liked to have her about them, though it was tacitly agreed that she belonged chiefly to Sister Frances, with whom she served, making the beds, wiping the dishes, and putting the rooms in order, while Diantha and Rebecca devoted themselves to the more public duties of the place. As she grew stronger she would not be kept from taking her share in the family work. Frances forbade her helping in the laundry, where one of the brothers, vague through wreaths of steam from the deep boilers, presided over a company of sisters and boys, and afterwards marshaled them in hanging out the community wash; this, she held, involved dangers of rheumatism and relapse; but she allowed her to find a place in the herb-house, where a score of the young Shakeresses, seated on the floor of the wide, low room, before fragrant heaps of catnip, boneset, and lobelia, sorted and cleaned these simples for the brothers in the packing-room below. “That is sort of being out-doors,” said Sister Frances, with a sly allusion to the girl’s well-known passion. Indeed, Egeria’s chief usefulness appeared when the first wild berries came. Her father no longer accompanied her, for he found the heat too great a burden. The women went, five or six in a wagon, with one of the brothers, who drove, to the berry pasture a mile or two away, and they sang their shrill hymns while passing through the pine woods, that gave out a balsamic sweetness in the sun. At the verge of a westward-sloping valley was a stretch of many hundred acres, swept by a forest fire a few years before, and now rank with the vegetation which the havoc had enriched. Blueberries and huckleberries, raspberries and blackberries, battened upon the ashes of the pine and oak and chestnut, and flourished round the charred stumps; the strawberry matted the blackened ground, and ran to the border of the woods, where, among the thin grass, it lifted its fruit on taller stems, and swung its clusters in the airs that drew through the alleys of the forest. Here and there were the shanties of Canadian wood-cutters, whom the Shakers had sent to save what fuel they might from the general loss, and whom, at noonday, the pickers came upon, as they sat in pairs at their doors, with a can of milk between them, dusky, furtive, and intent as animals. From the first of the strawberries to the last of the blackberries, the birds and chipmucks feasted, and only stirred in short flights when the young Shakeresses, shy as themselves, invaded their banquet.

  “Why, Egery,” said one of them, the first day, “you empty your basket faster than any of us, and you said you never picked before. How do you always find such full vines? I do believe it’s because they know you love to pick ’em so, and they just give you a little wink.”

  “Yes,” she answered absently, like one entranced by the rich influences of the time and scene. She drank of the strong vitality of the earth and air and sun, and day by day the potion showed its effect in the serenity of her established health.

  “Oh, nothing in the weather hurts her,” said the girl who had surprised her secret understanding with the berries. “She keeps on with the birds and squirrels when the heat drives us off, and if it comes on to rain it runs off her as if she was a chipmuck or a robin; and next morning, when I’m as full of aches and pains as I can hold, she’s all ready to begin again.”

  “Yee, that’s so, Elizabeth,” said the others, who laughed at this.

  In their way they mingled what jollity they could in their work, and were sometimes demurely freakish in the depths of their poke-bonnets and under the wide brims of their hats. Certain of the elder brethren and sisters had their repute for humor, and made their quaint jokes without a bad conscience; while the younger played little pranks upon one another, with those gigglings and thrusts and pushes which accompany the expression of rustic drollery, and were not severely rebuked. Egeria did not take part in their jocularities; but it was another joke of the young Shakers and Shakeresses, kept children beyond their time and apt to allege children’s excuses when called to account, to say, “She made us do it — she looked so!”

  They all liked her, and in spite of the secular fashion of her dress, to which she still clung, they treated her as if she were one of themselves, and were always to stay with them. Whatever may have been in their hearts, nothing in their manner betrayed surprise at the complete abeyance into which her supposed supernatural gifts had fallen. Perhaps, as people used to supernaturalism, to the caprice with which the other world uses this, they could be surprised at no lapse or access of divination, in any given case. At any rate, they all seemed content with her robust return to life and health, and if they were impatient for proof of the great things that her father had claimed for her, none of them showed impatience.

  There were certain other faculties as dormant in her as her psychological powers. Once, as she passed through the pine woods where Laban had first found her and her father, he leaned across Sister Frances, who sat between them on the wagon-seat, and asked, “Do you know this road?” And when they came to that knoll beside the brook he asked again, “Do you mind this place?” He laughed when she said no. “Well, I don’t much wonder. You didn’t seem to be quite in your right senses. This is the place where I come across you and your father that day.”

  At another time, when a different course brought them home by the Elm Tavern, she dimly recalled the aspect of the house and asked what it was. “It seems as if I had seen it in a dream,” she said.

  “Must ha’ had the nightmare pretty bad,” returned Laban. “It’s a dreadful place.”

  “Dreadful,” repeated Sister Frances. “But it’s just so when you ‘re comin’ down with a fit of sickness, especially fevers. Everything seems in a dream, like.”

  Sister Frances rejoiced like a mother in the girl’s health, which came back to her in no ethereal quality, but in solid evidence, in color and in elasticity of step and touch. She had known her before the fever only in that brief interval in which all her faculties were invested by the disease; and both the spiritual and material change wrought in her by convalescence might well have appeared greater than they were. She had seen her lie down a frail and fearful girl, deeply shadowed, as she fancied, by the memories of a troubled past; and she had seen her rise up and grow, in sympathy with the reviving year, into a broad, tranquil summer of womanly ripeness and strength. To the homely mind of Sister Frances she was like the young maple which Brother Joseph had found in a sombre thicket of the woods, and had set out in the abundant sunshine of the village street before the office gate, where it had thriven in a single year out of all likeness to itself. She admired this tree, and in telling Egeria of her fancy she gave her a pin-cushion she had shaped in its image on the stem of a broken kerosene lamp: it was faithful, even to the emery bag in a red peak, like the first color which the maple showed at top in the autumn.

  When the garden berries began to ripen, the two often talked long together as they sat in the cool basement of the office, sorting them with Shaker conscientiousness, and packing for market only boxes of honest fruit. Then the elder woman tried with maternal tenderness to draw nearer the life of this daughter of her care, in the fond hope that she might always keep her, and not lose her again to the world from which she had wandered.

  “You seem ha
ppy here, Egeria,” she would say, timorously feeling her way toward what had already been talked of in the family; and then, when the girl answered that she had never been so happy before, the sister’s conscience gave her a check. It did not seem right to take advantage of Egeria’s happiness among them to urge her to any step to which she was not moved by conviction. “You know,” she resumed, “that we wouldn’t like anything better than to have you stay among us, — you and your father both. All the family’s agreed about that. But it isn’t for us to prevail without you feel a call to our life. What does your father say?”

  “We have never talked much about it,” said Egeria. “May be he is waiting for me to get well before he makes up his mind.”

  “Why, you look a great deal better than he does, now!” cried Sister Frances, bluntly. “I want you should both stay with us till he gets strong again. I don’t think your father’s over and above strong when he’s well.”

  “Well?” echoed the girl. “Don’t you think he’s well?”

  “Yee,” answered Sister Frances, “but nervous, worried, like. I suppose he hasn’t had a chance yet to wear off the excitement of the world outside. You know you’ve had a good fit of sickness. We all say that whatever happened before you came here, it’s dropped from you like a garment.”

  “Yes, like a garment,” responded Egeria vaguely, letting her busy hands fall into her lap.

  Frances took her by the arm. “Don’t you go and be anxious, now, at what I said about your father.”

  “Oh, no! “said Egeria, recalling herself, and settling to work again.

  “He’s as well as anybody need be. Only you ‘re so very well that anybody, to see you, would suppose you were the well one.”

  “I was wondering,” mused the girl aloud, “if he had anything to perplex him. Sister Frances,” she asked presently, “did any letter come for me while I was sick?”

  “Nay. Did you expect a letter?”

  “No,” said Egeria, “there couldn’t have been any answer.” She blushed, and fell into a reverie so profound that Frances, working alone at the berries, knew not how to bring back the talk to the point from which it had strayed. She was not a person of much native tact, and the community life did not cherish tact among the virtues, counting truth much better; but now Sister Frances attempted a strategic approach.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “the young people who are gathered in have hopes in the world outside that make it hard for them to conform to the true life. And we women, we all know what such hopes are. I was young, and the world looked very bright to me when I was gathered in.”

  “You, Sister Frances? You gathered in? I thought you were brought up in the family from a child.”

  “Nay, I was gathered in — when I was twenty.”

  “When you were twenty? And I am nineteen.”

  “I came to the neighborhood on a visit, and one Sunday I went to a Shaker meeting, and I heard something said that made me think it was the true life. I used to be troubled about religion; but I’ve had peace for many years. At first it was considerable of a cross, wondering whether I’d acted for the best. He’d never said anything to me, and I d’ know as he ever would. But he might have. That was what kept preying on my mind, whenever I got lonesome or doubtful about my choice. But I was helped to put it away. He’s been hero, since — with her. That was the most of a cross of anything. At first, he didn’t know me, so I don’t suppose he ever did care, much.”

  “Had you ever,” said Egeria, in a sort of scare, “done anything that could have made him think you cared?”

  “Nay. I was too proud for that.”

  “But even if you had done such a thing — by a mistake, or by doing something you thought was right, and then you had been afraid he might take it differently — you would have felt safe here.”

  “Yee, I should have felt safe.” Frances waited for Egeria to speak, but the girl was again silent. “I did hope,” resumed the sister, “in those young and foolish days, that he might be gathered in too. Then we could lived in sight of each other. But it wa’n’t to be, and I don’t know as’t would been for the best. Any rate, he got married. I’ve heard they live out in Illinoy, and’t he’s made out real well. And I’m at rest, here.”

  “Sister Frances,” said Egeria, “do you think my father looks sick?”

  “Well, I declare, if you ain’t thinkin’ of that silly talk of mine, yet! Anybody’d look sick alongside of you. I only meant that he was a little more peaked.”

  “Yes,” responded the girl, with a sigh, “he doesn’t look well.”

  She watched him at dinner, that day, and saw that he had a small and fastidious appetite, though the abundance of a Shaker garden was there to tempt him. “Are you feeling well, father?” she asked, when they went out after tea for a little stroll. “You ate hardly anything at dinner, and this evening you didn’t touch your tea.”

  “Yes,” he answered quickly, with a touch of irritation, “I am well; very well; perfectly well. But the hot weather is trying, and — and” —

  “And what?” coaxed the girl. “Have you been thinking about something that worries you? Is there anything on your mind?”

  “No, no. Nothing. Have you ever noticed it before? What has made you notice it?”

  “I don’t know. Sister Frances said she thought you didn’t look as well as I do. That seemed strange.”

  “You are looking very well, Egeria. I am glad to see you looking so well. This fund of physical strength ought to contribute — There is nothing that is necessarily alien in it to — I am truly glad for your sake, my dear, that you are so well.”

  They were walking down the sloping roadside from the office gate toward the clump of old willows in whose midst stood the spacious stone bowl, scooped out of the solid granite by some forgotten brother in former years, and now tenderly, darkly green inside and out, with a tint of cool mold. When they reached the bank beside the trough, he dropped wearily on the grass, but she remained standing, with her arms sunken before her and her fingers intertwined, watching the soft ebullition of the spring in the centre of the bowl. Either she had not been aware of his approach to the matter of their tacit avoidance or she was indifferent to it. A smile played upon her face as the bubble continually rounded itself without breaking upon the surface of the water; and in the mellow light of the waning day she looked strong and very beautiful. Her hair was darker than before her fever; her eyes had lost their look of vigilance and apprehension, and softly burned in their gaze; the sun and wind had enriched her fair Northern complexion with a tinge of the South. An artist or a poet of those who dream backward from fable might have figured her in his fancy as the Young Ceres: she looked so sweet and pure an essence of the harvest landscape, so earthly fair and good.

  Her father glanced at her uneasily. “I don’t like my environment, here,” he broke out. “I am conscious of adverse influences.”

  She slowly lifted her eyes from the fountain, and looked at him with gravely smiling question, as if she had not quite understood.

  “You asked me just now,” he resumed, “whether I had been thinking about any vexatious matter. Have you seen nothing here of late to vex me?”

  “No,” she answered, with the same question, but without the smile.

  “Nothing in the attitude of these people?”

  “Their attitude?”

  “I have tried to believe,” he said vehemently, “that it was my fancy; but I can’t be mistaken. They regard me with distrust; they have withdrawn from me the sympathy upon which I was placing all my hopes of success. No, no,” he added, seeing her about to speak in refutation, “I am right. I feel it, I know it.”

  “They seem kinder to me than ever,” Egeria ventured.

  “They are kinder to you,” returned her father. “They are distinguishing between us. They wish to keep you and to cast me out.”

  Egeria looked incredulous. “But how could they do that? Nothing could separate us!”

  “I am gla
d to hear you say that,” said her father, huskily. “There have been times of late when I thought — when I was afraid — You have seemed indifferent” —

  “Father!”

  “I know that I wronged you.” He turned his face, and they were both silent, till Egeria spoke.

  “If what you think is true, we must go away. Where will we go? Shall we go home?”

  “No, I can’t go there. It’s impossible.”

  Egeria did not reply directly, but after a while she said, “Father, do you ever think of Mr. Hatch?”

  “No. Why should I think of him?”

  “He lent us money, and he expected to find us at home when he got back.”

  “His loan could scarcely have paid the debt he was under to me. I regarded it in that light, and so did he. We had no obligation to be where he expected to find us.”

  “No; but if he went there, and didn’t find us, it would make grandfather very anxious.”

  “I’m not obliged to preserve your grandfather from anxiety. He hasn’t known our movements since we left home. But I do care for Mr. Hatch. I will write him, and tell him where we are. Where was he going?”

  Egeria turned a little white. “I — I don’t know,” she faltered. “I can’t remember. Wait! Yes — he gave me his address, and I — I can’t think what I did with it.”

  “Perhaps you put it in your bag with the money.”

  “Yes — I did. I put it in my bag. It’s gone. Everything about that time seems so dim, so”—” It’s no matter; not the least,” said her father. “He probably hasn’t returned to the East. When he does, he can readily find us out.” Egeria looked grieved and troubled, but he hurried on to say, “The great question is how to bring about the results — the important results — for which I came here. I will ‘not be driven from conditions which I thought so favorable, without an effort. Their leading men may turn against me if they choose; it is their peril and their loss; but the great mass of the community will be with me in any collision.”