Heartsease
by
“For as for heartsease, it groweth in a single night.”
“What be you doin’ of, Mis’ Lamson?” asked Mrs. Pettis, coming in from the kitchen, where she had been holding a long conversation with young Mrs. Lamson on the possibility of doing over sugar-barberry. Mrs. Pettis was a heavy woman, bent almost double with rheumatism, and she carried a baggy umbrella for a cane. She was always sighing over the difficulty of “gittin’ round the house,” but nevertheless she made more calls than any one else in the neighborhood. “It kind o’ limbered her up,” she said, “to take a walk after she had been bendin’ over the dish-pan.”
Mrs. Lamson looked up with an alert, bright glance. She was a little creature, and something still girlish lingered in her straight, slender figure and the poise of her head. “Old Lady Lamson” was over eighty, and she dressed with due deference to custom; but everything about her gained, in the wearing, an air of youth. Her aggressively brown front was rumpled a little, as if it had tried to crimp itself, only to be detected before the operation was well begun, and the purple ribbons of her cap flared rakishly aloft.
“I jest took up a garter,” she said, with some apology in her tone. “Kind o’ fiddlin’ work, ain’t it?”
“Last time I was here, you was knittin’ mittins,” continued Mrs. Pettis, seating herself laboriously on the lounge, and leaning forward upon the umbrella clutched steadily in two fat hands. “You’re dretful forehanded. I remember I said so then. ‘Samwel ‘ain’t got a mittin, to his name,’ I says, ‘nor he won’t have ‘fore November.'”
“Well, I guess David’s pretty well on’t for everything now,” answered Mrs. Lamson, with some pride. “He’s got five pair o’ new mittins, an’ my little blue chist full o’ stockin’s. I knit ’em two-an’-two, an’ two-an’-one, an’ toed some on ’em off with white, an’ some with red, so’s to keep ’em in pairs. But Mary said I better not knit any more, for fear the moths’d git into ’em, an’ so I stopped an’ took up this garter. But ’tis dretful fiddlin’ work!”
A brief silence fell upon the two, while the sweet summer scents stole in at the window,–the breath of the cinnamon rose, of growing, grass and good brown earth. Mrs. Pettis pondered, looking vacantly before her, and Old Lady Lamson knit hastily on. Her needles clicked together, and she turned her work with a jerk in beginning a row. But neither was oppressed by lack of speech. They understood each other, and no more thought of “making talk” than of pulling up a seed to learn whether it had germinated. It was Mrs. Pettis who, after, a natural interval; felt moved to speak.
“Mary’s master thoughtful of you, ain’t she? ‘Tain’t many sons’ wives would be so tender of, anybody, now is it?”
Mrs. Lamson looked up sharply, and then, with the same quick movement; bent her eyes on her work.
“Mary means to do jest what’s right,” she answered. “If she don’t make out, it ain’t for lack o’ tryin’.”
“So I says to Samwel this mornin”. ‘Old Lady Lamson ‘ain’t one thing to concert herself with,’ says I, ‘but to git dressed an’ set by the winder. When dinner-time comes, she’s got nothin’ to do but hitch up to the table; an’ she don’t have to touch her hand to a dish.’ Now ain’t that so, Mis’ Lamson?”
“That’s so,” agreed Mrs. Lamson, with a little sigh, instantly suppressed. “It’s different from what I thought to myself ‘twould be when Mary come here. ”Tain’t in natur’ she’ll have the feelin’ for me she would for her own,’ I says; but I b’lieve she has, an’ more too. When she come for good, I made up my mind I’d put ‘Up with everything, an’ say ’twas all in the day’s work; but law! I never had to. She an’ David both act as if I was sugar or salt, I dunno which.”