FullReads

Perhaps the touch of the warm water on her hands recalled her to the present.

“Seems good to feel the suds,” she said, happily, holding up one withered hand, and letting the foam drip from her fingers, “I wish’t I could dry outdoor! But when mornin’ come, they’d be all of a sop.”

She washed and rinsed the garments, and, opening a clothes-horse, spread them out to dry. Then she drew a long breath, put out her candle, and wandered to the door. The garden lay before her, unreal in the beauty of moonlight. Every bush seemed an enchanted wood. The old lady went forth, lingering at first, as one too rich for choosing; then with a firmer step. She closed the little gate, and walked out into the country road. She hurried along to the old signboard, and turned aside unerringly into a hollow, there, where she stooped and filled her hands with tansy, pulling it up in great bunches, and pressing it eagerly to her face.

“Seventy-four year ago!” she told the unseen listener of the night, with the same wonder in her voice. “Sir laid dead, an’ they sent me down here to pick tansy to put round him. Seventy-four year ago!”

Still holding it; she rose, and went through the bars into the dewy lane. Down the wandering path, trodden daily by the cows, she walked, and came out in the broad pasture, irregular with its little hillocks, where, as she had been told from her babyhood, the Indians used to plant their corn. She entered the woods by a cart-path hidden from the moon, and went on with a light step, gathering a bit of green here and there,–now hemlock, now a needle from the sticky pine,–and inhaling its balsam on her hands. A sharp descent, and she had reached the spot where the brook ran fast, and where lay “Peggy’s b’ilin’ spring,” named for a great-aunt she had never seen, but whose gold beads she had inherited, and who had consequently seemed to her a person of opulence and ease.

“I wish’t I’d brought a cup,” she said. “There ain’t no such water within twenty mile.”

She crouched beside the little black pool, where the moon glinted in mysterious, wavering, symbols to beckon the gaze upward, and, making a cup of her hand, drank eagerly. There was a sound near-by, as if some wood creature were stirring; she thought she heard a fox barking in the distance. Yet she was really conscious only of the wonder of time, the solemn record of the fleeting years.

When she made her way back through the woods, the moon was sinking, and the shadows had grown heavy. As she reached the bars again, on her homeward track, she stopped suddenly, and her face broke into smiling at the pungent fragrance rising from the bruised herbage beneath her feet. She stooped and gathered one telltale, homely weed, mixed as it was with the pasture grass. “Pennyr’yal,” she said happily, and felt the richness of being.

When Old Lady Lamson had ironed her shirts and put them away again, all hot and sweet from the fire, it was five o’clock, and the birds had long been trying to drag creation up from sleep, to sing with them the wonders of the dawn. At six, she had her cup of tea, and when, at eight, her son drove into the yard, she came placidly to the side door to meet him, her knitting in her hands.

“Well, if I ain’t glad!” called David. “I couldn’t git it out o’ my mind somethin’ ‘d happened to you. Stella’s goin’ to be all right, they think, but nothin’ will do but Mary must stay a spell. Do you s’pose you an’ I could keep house a week or so, if I do the heft o’ the work?”

Old Lady Lamson’s eyes took on the look which sometimes caused her son to inquire suspiciously, “Mother, what you laughin’ at?”

“I guess we can, if we try hard enough,” she said, soberly, rolling up her yarn. “Now you come in, an’ I’ll git you a bite o’ somethin’ t’eat.”