FullReads

But if her mother was the happier for her coming, Jim, radiant with joy, seemed to walk on air. His head was up, his arms were swinging free, and there was a lightness and spring in his movements that made me forget the grotesqueness of his gait. Nor, as the days went by, did this buoyant happiness ever fail him. He and Ruby were inseparable from the time she opened the rude door of her bedroom in the morning until she bade us all good-night and carried with her all the light and charm and joyousness of the day. The camping-out, I may as well state, had been given up as soon as I had mentioned it, she saying to me with a little start, as if frightened at the proposition, that she thought she’d better stay home and help her mother. Then, seeing Jim’s face fall, she added, “But we can be off all day, can’t we?”

And Jim answered that it was all right, just as Ruby said–that we would go fishing instead, and that he had spotted an old trout that lived in a hole down the East Branch that he’d been saving for her, and that he had tied the day before the “very fly that will fix him”–all of which was true, for Ruby landed him the next day with all the skill of a professional, besides a dozen smaller ones whose haunts Jim knew.

And so the weeks flew by, Ruby tramping the forest daily between us or sitting beside me as I painted, noting every stroke of my brush and asking me innumerable questions as to the choice of colors and the mixing of the tints. At other times she would ply me with questions, making me tell her of the things I had seen abroad and of the cities and peoples she had read of; or she would talk of the books she had studied, and of others she wanted to read. Jim would listen eagerly, with a certain pride in his eyes that she knew so much and could talk so well, and when we were alone he would comment on it:

“Nearly catched ye, didn’t she? I see once or twice ye were stumped clean out o’ yer boots on them questions she fired. How her little head holds it all is what bothers me. But I always knowed how it would be; I told the old man so ten year ago. Ain’t one o’ ’em ‘raound here kin touch her.”

At night, under the kerosene lamp in the cabin, she would ask me to read aloud, she looking up into my face and drinking in every word, the others listening, Jim watching every expression that crossed her face.

Dear old Jim! I still see your tender, shrinking eyes peering at her from under your bushy eyebrows and still hear the low ripple of your merry laugh over her volleys of questions. You were so proud of her and so happy in those days! So tender in touch, so gentle of voice, so constant in care!

One morning I had some letters to write, and Ruby and Jim took the rods and went up the brook without me. They both begged me to go, Ruby being particularly urgent, I thought, but I had already delayed the mail too long and so refused point-blank–too abruptly, perhaps, as I thought afterward, when I remembered the keen look of disappointment in her face. When she re-entered the cabin alone an hour later she passed me hurriedly, and calling out to her father that Jim was wanted at the sawmill to fix the wheel and would not be back until morning, shut herself into her room before I could offer myself in Jim’s place–which I would gladly have done, now that her morning’s pleasure had been spoiled.

When she joined us at supper–she had kept her room all day–I saw that her eyes were red, as if she had been crying. I knew then that I had offended her.