Hepsey Burke

“What more beautiful and touching thing is there, than the innocent, unsullied modesty of childhood? One might almost say–”

But she never said it, for here again she was forced to pause while another pair of immodest legs appeared over the eaves, much fatter and shorter than the preceding pair. These belonged to Nickey’s boon-companion, the gentle Oliver Wendell Jones. The rest of O. W. J. followed in due time; and, quite ignorant of what awaited him, he began his wriggling descent. Most unfortunately for him, the hem of his nightshirt caught on a large nail in the eaves of the roof; and after a frantic, fruitless, and fearful effort to disconnect himself, he hung suspended in the breeze for one awful moment, like a painted cherub on a Christmas tree, while his mother, recognizing her offspring, rose to go to his assistance.

Then there was a frantic yell, a terrible ripping 80 sound, and Oliver Wendell was seen to drop to the ground clad in the sleeves and the front breadth of his shirt, while the entire back of it, from the collar down, waved triumphantly aloft from the eaves. Oliver Wendell Jones picked himself up, unhurt, but much frightened, and very angry: presenting much the aspect of a punctured tire. Then suddenly discovering the proximity of the missionary circle and missing the rear elevation of his shirt about the same time, in the horror and mortification of the moment, he lost his head entirely. Notwithstanding the protests of his pursuing mother, without waiting for his clothes, he fled, “anywhere, anywhere out of the world,” bawling with wrath and chagrin.

The entire circumference of the missionary circle now burst into roars of laughter. His mother quickly overtook and captured Oliver, tying her apron around his neck as a concession to the popular prejudice against “the altogether.” The gravity of the missionary circle was so thoroughly demoralized that it was impossible to restore order; and Miss Bascom, in the excess of her mortification, stuffed the rest of her manuscript, its eloquent peroration undelivered, into her bag.

When the last guest had departed, Mrs. Burke proceeded to hunt up Nickey, who was dressed and sitting on the top of the corn-crib whittling a stick. His mother began:

“Nicholas Burke, what in the name of conscience does all this idiotic performance mean, I’d like to know?”

Nickey closed his knife. Gazing serenely down at his mother, he replied:

“How’d I know the blamed missionary push was goin’ to meet on the front porch, I’d like to know? Me and Oliver Wendell was just playin’ the house was on fire. We’d gone to bed in the front room, and then I told Ollie the fire was breakin’ out all around us, and the sparks was flyin’, and the stairs was burned away, and there was no way of ’scapin’ but to slide down the rope over the roof. I ’aint to blame for his nightshirt bein’ caught on a nail, and bein’ ripped off him. Maybe the ladies was awful shocked; but they laughed fit to split their sides just the same. Mr. Maxwell laughed louder than ’em all.”

Hepsey retired hastily, lest her face should relax its well-assumed severity.

Maxwell, in the meantime, felt it a part of his duty to console and soothe the ruffled feelings of his zealous and fluent parishioner, and to Virginia’s pride his offer of escort to Willow Bluff was ample reparation for the untoward interruption of her oratory. She 82 delivered into his hands, with sensitive upward glance, the receptacle containing her manuscript, and set a brisk pace, at which she insured the passing of the other guests along the road, making visible her triumph over circumstance and at the same time obviating untimely intrusion of a tete-a-tete conversation.

“You must have given a great deal of time and study to your subject,” remarked Maxwell politely.

“It is very near to my heart,” responded Virginia, in welling tones. “Home-life is, to me, almost a religion. Do you not feel, with me, that it is the most valuable of human qualities, Mr. Maxwell?”

“I do indeed, and one of the most difficult to reduce to a science,”—she glanced up at him apprehensively, whereupon, lest he seemed to have erred in fact, he added,—“as you made us realize in your paper.”

“It is so nice to have your appreciation,” she gurgled. “Often I feel it almost futile to try to influence our cold parish audiences; their attitude is so stolid, so unimaginative. As you must have realized, in the pulpit, they are so hard to lead into untrodden paths. Let us take the way home by the lane,” she added coyly, leading off the road down a sheltered by-way.

The lane was rough, and the lady, tightly and lightly 83 shod, stumbled neatly and grasped her escort’s arm for support—and retained it for comfort.

“What horizons your sermons have spread before us—and, yet,”—she hesitated,—“I often wonder, as my eyes wander over the congregation, how many besides myself, really hear your message, really see what you see.”

Her hand trembled on his arm, and Maxwell was a little at a loss, though anxious not to seem unresponsive to Virginia’s enthusiasm for spiritual vision.

“I feel that my first attention has to be given to the simpler problems, here in Durford,” he replied. “But I am glad if I haven’t been dull, in the process.”

“Dull? No indeed—how can you say that! To my life—you will understand?” (she glanced up with tremulous flutter of eyelids) “—you have brought so much helpfulness and—and warmth.” She sighed eloquently.

Maxwell was no egotist, and was always prone to see only an impersonal significance in parish compliments. A more self-conscious subject for confidences would have replied less openly.

“I am glad—very glad. But you must not think that the help has been one-sided. You have seconded my efforts so energetically—indeed I don’t know what I could have accomplished without such whole-hearted 84 help as you and Mrs. Burke and others have given.”

To the optimistic Virginia the division of the loaves and fishes of his personal gratitude was scarcely heeded. She cherished her own portion, and soon magnified it to a basketful—and soon, again, to a monopoly of the entire supply. As he gave her his hand at the door of Willow Bluff, she was in fit state to invest that common act of friendliness with symbolic significance of a rosy future.

CHAPTER VII

HEPSEY GOES A-FISHING

Mrs. Burke seemed incapable of sitting still, with folded hands, for any length of time; and when the stress of her attention to household work, and her devotion to neighborly good deeds relaxed, she turned to knitting wash-rags as a sportsman turns to his gun, or a toper to his cups. She seemed to find more stimulus for thought and more helpful diversion in the production of one wash-rag than most persons find in a trip abroad.

One day, not very long after the eventful missionary 86 tea, she was sitting in her garden, and knitting more rapidly than usual, as she said to Maxwell:

“What’s been the matter with you these last few weeks? You’ve been lookin’ altogether too sober, and you don’t eat nothin’ to speak of. It must be either liver, or conscience, or heart.”

Secretly, she strongly suspected a cardiac affection, of the romantic variety. She intended to investigate.

Donald laughed as he replied:

“Perhaps it’s all three together; but I’m all right. There’s nothing the matter with me. Every man has his blue days, you know.”

“Yes, but the last month you’ve had too many; and there must be some reason for it. There’s nothin’ so refreshin’ as gettin’ away from your best friends, once in a while. I guess you need a change—pinin’ for the city, maybe. Sakes alive! I can’t see how folks can live that way—all crowded up together, like a lot of prisons.”

“You don’t care to visit in the city, then?”

“Not on your life!”

“But a change is good for everyone. Don’t you ever get away from Durford for a few weeks?”

“Not very often. What with decidin’ where to go, and fussin’ to get ready, and shuttin’ up the house, it’s more trouble than its worth. Then there’s so 87 many things to ’tend to when you get home.”

“But don’t you ever visit relatives?”

“Not on your life, unless I’m subpœna-ed by the coroner: though of course we do get together to celebrate a family funeral or a wedding now and then. Visitin’ is no joke, I tell you. No sir, I’m old enough to know when I’m well off, and home’s the best place for me. I want my own table, and my own bed when it comes night.” She paused, and then remarked meditatively:

“I went down to visit in New York once.”

“Didn’t you enjoy your visit?” Maxwell inquired. “New York’s my home-city.”

“Can’t say I did, awful much. You see, I was visitin’ Sally Ramsdale—Sally Greenway that was. They were livin’ in an apartment, ninth floor up. In the first place, I didn’t like goin’ up stairs in the elevator. I was so scared, I felt as if the end had come, and I was bein’ jerked to my reward in an iron birdcage with a small kid dressed in brass buttons. When I got into the hall it was about two feet wide and darker than Pharaoh’s conscience. It had a string of cells along the side, and one opened into a chimney, and the rest into nothin’ in particular. The middle cell was a dinin’ room where we ate when we could find the way to our mouths. Near as I can recollect, 88 you got into the parlor through the pantry, back of the servant’s room, by jumpin’ over five trunks. You ought to have seen my room. It looked just like a parlor when you first went in. There was somethin’ lookin’ like a cross between an upright piano and writin’ desk. Sally gave it a twist, and it tumbled out into a folding bed. The first night, I laid awake with my eyes on the foot of that bed expectin’ it to rise and stand me on my head; but it didn’t. You took the book of poems off the center table, gave it a flop, and it was a washstand. Everything seemed to shut up into something else it hadn’t ought to. It was a ‘now you see it, and now you don’t see it,’ kind of a room; and I seemed to be foldin’ and unfoldin’ most of the time. Then the ceilin’ was so low that you could hardly get the cover off the soap dish. I felt all the while as if I should smother. My! but I was glad to get home and get a breath of real air.”

“Yes,” Maxwell replied, “people live more natural and healthful lives in the country. The advantages of the city aren’t an unmixed blessing.”

“That’s true enough. That’s no way to live. Just think of havin’ no yard but a window box and a fire escape! I’d smother!

“We folks out here in the country ’aint enjoyin’ a lot of the refinements of city life; anyhow we get 89 along, and the funny part about it is,—it ’aint hard to do, either. In the first place we ’aint so particular, which helps a lot, and besides, as Jonathan Jackson used to say,—there’s compensations. I had one look at Fifth Avenue and I’m not sayin’ it wasn’t all I had heard it was; but if I had to look at it three hundred and sixty-five days a year I wouldn’t trade it for this.

“Why, some days it rains up here, but I can sit at my window and look down the valley, to where the creek runs through, and ’way up into the timber, and the sight of all those green things, livin’ and noddin’ in the rain is a long ways from being disheartenin’,—and when the sun shines I can sit out here, in my garden, with my flowers, and watch the boys playin’ down in the meadow, Bascom’s Holsteins grazin’ over there on the hill, and the air full of the perfume of growin’ things,—they ’aint got anything like that, in New York.”

For a time Mrs. Burke relapsed into silence, while Maxwell smoked his briar pipe as he lay on the grass near by. She realized that the parson had cleverly side-tracked her original subject of conversation, and as she glanced down at him she shook her head with droll deprecation of his guile.

When she first accused him of the blues, it was 90 true that Maxwell’s look had expressed glum depression. Now, he was smiling, and, balked of her prey, Mrs. Burke knitted briskly, contemplating other means drawing him from his covert. Her strategy had been too subtle: she would try a frontal attack.

“Ever think of gettin’ married, Mr. Maxwell?” she inquired abruptly.

For an instant Maxwell colored; but he blew two or three rings of smoke in the air, and then replied carelessly, as he plucked at the grass by his side:

“Oh, yes: every fellow of my age has fancied himself in love some time or other, I suppose.”

“Yes, it’s like measles, or whoopin’-cough; every man has to have it sometime; but you haven’t answered my question.”