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Heartsease
by
“Now, mother, don’t you fall!” she chuckled, midway in the descent; and it was undeniable that the voice sounded much like Mary’s in her anxious mood. “Now, ain’t I a mean creatur’ to stan’ here laughin’ at ’em!” she went on: “Well,’ if she don’t keep things nice! ‘Taters all sprouted; an’ the preserve cupboard never looked better in my day. Mary’s been well brought up,–I’ll say that for her.”
Old Lady Lamson must have spent at least half an hour in the cellar, for when she ascended it was after four o’clock, and the school-children had passed the house on their way home. She heard their voices under the elms at the turn of the road.
“I ain’t to blame if I can’t ketch ’em,” she remarked calmly, as she blew out her light. “I don’t see’s anybody could say I was to blame. An’ I couldn’t walk up to the Tolmans’ to ask ‘Liza. I might fall!”
She set about her preparations for supper. It was a favorite maxim in the household that the meal should be eaten early, “to get it out of the way;” and to-night this unaccustomed handmaid had additional reasons for haste. But the new bread and preserves were ignored. She built a rousing fire in the little kitchen stove; she brought out the moulding-board, and with trembling eagerness proceeded to mix cream-of-tartar biscuits. Not Cellini himself nor Jeannie Carlyle had awaited the results of passionate labor with a more strenuous eagerness; and when she drew out the panful of delicately browned biscuits, she set it down on the table, and looked at it in sheer delight.
“I’ll be whipped if they ain’t as good as if I’d made ’em every night for the last two year!” she cried. “I ain’t got to git my hand in, an’ that’s truth an’ fact!”
She brought out some “cold b’iled dish,” made her strong green tea, and sat down to a banquet such as they taste who have reached the Delectable Mountains. It held within it all the savor of a happy past; it satisfied her hungry soul.
After she had washed the supper dishes and scrupulously swept the hearth, she rested, for a moment’s thought, in the old rocking-chair, and then took her way, candle in hand, to the attic. There was no further self-confidence on the stairs; she was too serious, now. Her hours were going fast. The attic, in spite of the open windows, lay hot under summer’s touch upon the shingles outside, and odorous of the dried herbs hanging in bunches here and there.
“Wormwood–thoroughwort–spearmint,” she mused, as she touched them, one after another, and inhaled their fragrance. “‘Tain’t so long ago I was out pickin’ herbs an’ dryin’ ’em. Well, well, well!”
She made her way under the eaves, and pulled out a hair-trunk, studded with brass nails. A rush-bottomed chair stood near-by, and, setting her candle in it, she knelt before the trunk and began lifting out its contents: a brocaded satin waistcoat of a long-past day, a woolen comforter knit in stripes, a man’s black broadcloth coat. She smoothed them, as she laid them by, and there was a wondering note in her lowered voice.
“My Lord!” she whispered reverently, as if speaking to One who would hear and understand, “it’s over fifty year!”
A pile of yellowed linen lay in the bottom of the trunk, redolent of camphor from contact with its perishable neighbors. She lifted one shirt after another, looking at them in silence. Then she laid back the other clothes, took up her candle and the shirts, and went downstairs again. In hot haste, she rebuilt the kitchen fire, and set two large kettles of water on the stove. She dragged the washing-bench into the back kitchen from its corner in the shed, and on it placed her tubs; and when the water was heated, she put the garments into a tub, and rubbed with the vigor and ease of a woman well accustomed to such work. All the sounds of the night were loud about her, and the song of the whippoorwill came in at the open door. He was very near. His presence should have been a sign of approaching trouble, but Old Lady Lamson did not hear him. Her mind was reading the lettered scroll of a vanished year.