PAGE 3
Coronation
by
The day was clear, with a sharp breath of frost. The fields gleamed with frost, offering to the eye a fine shimmer as of diamond-dust under the brilliant blue sky, overspread in places with a dapple of little white clouds.
“White frost and mackerel sky; going to be falling weather,” Jim said, aloud, as he went out of the yard, crunching the crisp grass under heel.
Susan Adkins at a window saw his lips moving. His talking to himself made her nervous, although it did not render her distrustful of his sanity. It was fortunate that Susan had not told Jim that she disliked his habit. In that case he would have deprived himself of that slight solace; he would not have dreamed of opposing Susan’s wishes. Jim had a great pity for the nervous whims, as he regarded them, of women — a pity so intense and tender that it verged on respect and veneration. He passed his nieces’ house on the way to the minister’s, and both were looking out of windows and saw his lips moving.
“There he goes, talking to himself like a crazy loon,” said Amanda.
Alma nodded.
Jim went on, blissfully unconscious. He talked in a quiet monotone; only now and then his voice rose; only now and then there were accompanying gestures. Jim had a straight mile down the broad village street to walk before he reached the church and the parsonage beside it.
Jim and the minister had been friends since boyhood. They were graduates and classmates of the same college. Jim had had unusual educational advantages for a man coming from a simple family. The front door of the parsonage flew open when Jim entered the gate, and the minister stood there smiling. He was a tall, thin man with a wide mouth, which either smiled charmingly or was set with severity. He was as brown and dry as a wayside weed which winter had subdued as to bloom but could not entirely prostrate with all its icy storms and compelling blasts. Jim, advancing eagerly toward the warm welcome in the door, was a small man, and bent at that, but he had a handsome old face, with the rose of youth on the cheeks and the light of youth in the blue eyes, and the quick changes of youth, before emotions, about the mouth.
“Hullo, Jim!” cried Dr. Edward Hayward. Hayward, for a doctor of divinity, was considered somewhat lacking in dignity at times; still, he was Dr. Hayward, and the failing was condoned. Moreover, he was a Hayward, and the Haywards had been, from the memory of the oldest inhabitant, the great people of the village. Dr. Hayward’s house was presided over by his widowed cousin, a lady of enough dignity to make up for any lack of it in the minister. There were three servants, besides the old butler who had been Hayward’s attendant when he had been a young man in college. Village people were proud of their minister, with his degree and what they considered an imposing household retinue.
Hayward led, and Jim followed, to the least pretentious room in the house — not the study proper, which was lofty, book-lined, and leather-furnished, curtained with broad sweeps of crimson damask, but a little shabby place back of it, accessible by a narrow door. The little room was lined with shelves; they held few books, but a collection of queer and dusty things — strange weapons, minerals, odds and ends — which the minister loved and with which his lady cousin never interfered.
“Louisa,” Hayward had told his cousin when she entered upon her post, “do as you like with the whole house, but let my little study alone. Let it look as if it had been stirred up with a garden-rake — that little room is my territory, and no disgrace to you, my dear, if the dust rises in clouds at every step.”
Jim was as fond of the little room as his friend. He entered, and sighed a great sigh of satisfaction as he sank into the shabby, dusty hollow of a large chair before the hearth fire. Immediately a black cat leaped into his lap, gazed at him with green-jewel eyes, worked her paws, purred, settled into a coil, and slept. Jim lit his pipe and threw the match blissfully on the floor. Dr. Hayward set an electric coffee-urn at its work, for the little room was a curious mixture of the comfortable old and the comfortable modern.