Mrs. Dill and her husband, Myron, grown middle-aged together, and yet, even through the attrition of the years, no more according in temperament than at the start, sat on opposite sides of the hearth and looked at each other, he with calmness, from his invincible authority, and she fluttering a little, yet making no question but of a dutiful concurrence. She had bright blue eyes behind gold-rimmed gla.s.ses, a thin face with a nose slightly aquiline, and reddish hair that was her cross, because it curled by nature and she constrained it. Sometimes, when it kinked unusually, either in moist weather or because she had forgotten to smooth it, and when the pupils of her eyes enlarged under c.u.mulative excitement, she looked young and impetuously willful; but the times were rare, and perhaps her husband had never, since their courting days, noted any such exhilaration. He was a large, imperious-looking man, with a cascade of silvery beard which he affected to tolerate because the expenditure of time in shaving might be turned with profit into the channel of business or of worship; but his wife, noting how he stroked the beard at intervals of meditation, judged that he was moved by something like pride in its luxuriance. Then she chided herself for the thought.

It was balmy spring weather, but they had taken their places at the hearthstone from old habit when a matter of importance had to be considered. Their two chairs were the seats of authority in the domestic realm.

Mrs. Dill stooped, took up the turkey-wing, and gave the clean hearth a perfunctory flick. Then she returned the wing to its place and leaned back in her chair, gazing absently at the shining andirons.

"Well," she said, "Henrietta Parkman was in this mornin', and she told me you'd bought the medder; but I didn't hardly believe it."

"Yes," said Myron. He spoke in rather a consequential voice, and cleared his throat frequently in the course of talking, as if to accord his organs a good working chance. "The deeds were pa.s.sed last week, and it's bein' recorded."

"What you goin' to do with it?"

"I bought it because it lays next to the Turnbull place, and when that come into my hands last fall, I knew 'twas only a matter o' time till I got the medder, too."

"Well, what you goin' to do with it?"

A tinge of anxiety was apparent in her voice, a wistful suggestiveness, as if she could conceive of uses that would be almost too fortunate to be hoped for. Myron hesitated. It often looked as if he judged it unwise to answer in any haste questions concerning the domestic polity, and Mrs. Dill was used to these periods of incubation. She had even thought once, in a moment of illuminative comparison, that her husband seemed to submit a bill before one branch of his mental legislature before carrying it on to the next.

"I'm goin' to pasture my cows in it," he responded. "I shall buy in some more stock this spring, and I expect to set up a milk-route."

"How under the sun you goin' to manage that?" She seldom questioned her lawful head, but the surprise of the moment spurred her into a query more expressive of her own mood than a probing of his. "You can't keep any more cows'n you've got now. The barn ain't big enough."

"The Turnbull barn is. I've seen the day when there was forty head o'

cattle tied up there from fall to spring."

"The Turnbull barn's twenty minutes' walk from here. You can't go over there mornin' and evenin', milkin' and feedin' the critters. You'd be all the time on the road."

"Yes," said Myron, "'tis a good stretch. So I've made up my mind we'd move over there."

A significant note had come into his voice. It indicated a complexity of understanding: chiefly that she would by nature resist what he had to say, and then resume her customary acquiescence. But for a moment she forgot that he was Mr. Dill, and that she had promised to obey him.

"Why, Myron," she said, with a mild pa.s.sion, warmed by her incredulity, "we've lived on this place thirty year."

"Yes, yes," said her husband. "I know that. What's the use o' goin' back over the ground, and tellin' me things I know as well as you do? What if 'tis thirty year? Time we got into better quarters."

"But they ain't better. Only it's more work."

Myron got up and moved back his chair.

"I don't think o' movin' till long about the middle o' May," he rejoined. "You can kinder keep your mind on it and, when you get round to your spring cleanin', pick up as you go. Some things you can fold right into chists, blankets and winter clo'es, and then you won't have to handle 'em over twice. If Herman comes back from gettin' the horse shod, you tell him to take an axe, and come down where I be in the long lot, fencin'. I want him."

He paused for a hearty draught from the dipper at the pump, pulled his hat on tightly, and went out through the shed to his forenoon's work.

Mrs. Dill rose from her seat, and stepped quickly to the window to watch him away. She often did it when he had most puzzled her and roused in her a resistance which was inevitable, she knew by long experience, but also, as her dutiful nature agreed, the result in her of an unconquerable old Adam which had never yet felt the transforming touch of grace. When his tall, powerful figure had disappeared beyond the rise at the end of the lot, she gave a great willful sigh, as if she depended on it to ease her heart, put her ap.r.o.n to her eyes, and held it there, pressing back the tears.

Herman drove into the yard, and she did not hear him. She went to the fireplace now, and leaned her head against the corner of the mantel, looking down, with a bitter stolidity, at the hearth. Herman unharnessed, and came in, a tall brown-haired fellow with dark eyes full of softness, and a deep simplicity of feeling. As his foot struck the sill, his mother roused herself, and became at once animated by a commonplace activity. She did not face him, for fear he should find the tear-marks on her cheeks; but when he had thrown his cap into a chair, and gone to the sink to plunge his face in cold water, and came out dripping, she did steal a look at him, and at once softened into a smiling pleasure. He was her handsome son always, but to-day he looked brilliantly excited; eager, also, as if he had something to share with her, and was timid about presenting it.

"Mother!" said Herman. He was standing before her now, smiling invitingly, and she smiled back again and picked a bit of lint from his collar for the excuse of coming near him, and proving to herself her proud ownership. "I've had a letter."

"From Annie?"

He nodded.

"What's she say?" asked his mother. But before he could answer, she threw in a caressing invitation. "You want I should get you a piece o'

gingerbread and a gla.s.s o' milk?"

"No, I ain't hungry. She says she's kep' school about long enough, and if I'm goin' to farm it, she'll farm it, too. I guess she'd be married the first o' the summer, if we could fetch it."

Mrs. Dill stepped over to the hearth and sank into her chair. It seemed as if there were to be another family council. Her silence stirred him.

"I asked her," he hastened to say. "I coaxed her, mother. She ain't as forward as I make it out, the way I've told it."

"No," said his mother absently. She was resting her elbows on the chair-arm, and, with hands lightly clasped, gazing thoughtfully into s.p.a.ce. Fine lines had sprung into her forehead, and now she took off her gla.s.ses and wiped them carefully on her ap.r.o.n, as if that would help her to an inner vision. "No, I know that. Annie's a nice girl. There's nothin' forward about Annie. But I was only wonderin' where you could live. This house is terrible small."

"You know what I thought," Herman reminded her. He spoke impetuously as if begging her to remember, and therefore throw the weight of her expectation in with his. "When father bought the Turnbull place I thought, as much as ever I did anything in my life, he meant to make it over to me."

His mother's eyes stayed persistently downcast. A little flush rose to her cheeks.

"Well," she temporized, "you ain't goin' to count your chickens before they're hatched. It's a poor way. It never leads to anything but disappointment in the end."

"Why, mother," said Herman warmly, "you thought so too. We talked it over only night before last, and you said you guessed father'd put me on to that farm."

"I said I didn't know what he'd bought it for, if 'twa'n't for that,"

she amended. "Don't you build on anything I said. Don't you do it, Hermie."

Her son stood there frowning in perplexity, his hands deep in his pockets, and his feet apart.

"But you said so yourself, mother," he persisted. "I told you how I'd always helped father out, long past my majority, and never hinted for anything beyond my board and clothes. And when I got engaged to Annie, I went to him and said, 'Father, now's the time to give me a start, or let me cut loose from here.' And he never answered me a word; but a couple of weeks after that he bought the Turnbull place. And last week it was, he said to me, kind of quick, as if he'd made up his mind to somethin', and wa'n't quite ready to talk it over, 'I've got a sort of a new scheme afoot.' And then 'twas I wrote to Annie and asked her how soon she could be ready to come, if I was ready to have her. You know all that, mother.

What makes you act as if you didn't?"

The argument was too warm for Mrs. Dill. She rose from her chair and began putting up the table-leaf and setting out the necessary dishes for a batch of cake.

"Your father wanted you should take an axe and go down where he is in the long lot," she remarked. "And I wouldn't open your head to him about what we've been sayin', Hermie. You talk it over with mother. That's the best way."

"Why, course I sha'n't speak of it till I have to." He took up his cap, and then with an air of aggrieved dignity turned to the door. "But the time'll come when I've got to speak of it. Lot Collins was tellin' me only this mornin' over to the blacksmith's, how his father's took him into partnership, and Lot's only twenty-one this spring. His father ain't wasted a day."

"Well, that's a real business, blacksmithin' is," his mother hastened to reply.

"So's farmin' a real business. And father's treated me from the word 'go' like a hired man and nothin' else. He's bought and sold without openin' his head to me. I wonder I've grown up at all. I wonder I ain't in tyers, makin' mud-pies. If 'twa'n't for you and Annie, I shouldn't think I was any kind of a man."

His angry pa.s.sion was terribly appealing to her. It made her heart ache, and she had much ado to keep from taking him to her arms, big as he was, and comforting him, as she used to, years ago, when he came in with frostbitten fingers or the dire array of cuts and bruises. But she judged it best, in the interest of domestic government, to quell emotion that could have, she knew, no hopeful issue, and she began breaking eggs into her mixing bowl and then beating them with a brisk hand.

"Father never was one to talk over his business with anybody, even the nearest," she rejoined. "You know that, Hermie. We've got to take folks as we find 'em. Now you go ahead down to the long lot. He'll be wonderin' where you be."

Herman strode away, after one incredulous look at her, a shaft she felt through her downcast lids. It demanded whether father and mother had equally forsaken him, and gave her a quick, sharp pang, and a blinding flash of tears. But she went on mixing cake, and battling arguments as she worked, and when her tin was in the oven, washed her baking dishes methodically and then sat down by the window to read the weekly paper.

But as she read, she glanced up, now and then, at the familiar walls of her kitchen, and through the window at the trees just shimmering into green and the skyey intervals over them. This was the pictured landscape she had worked on, framed by these wide, low windows, for all the years she had lived here, doing her wifely duties soberly, and her motherly ones with a hidden and ecstatic buoyancy.

The house, the bit of the world it gave upon, seemed a part of her life, the containing husk of all the fruitage born to her. It was incredible that she was to give it up and undertake not only a heavier load of work but a new scene for it, at a time when she longed to fold her hands and sit musing while young things filled the picture with beautiful dancing motions, and the loves and fears she remembered as a part of the warm reality of it, but not now so intimately her own. It was as if the heaped-up basket of earthly fruits had pa.s.sed her by, to be given into other hands; but she had eaten and was content, if only she might see the banquet lamps and hear the happy laughter. She began to feel light-headed from the pain of it all, the pleasures and sadnesses of memory, the fear of antic.i.p.ation, and turned again to her paper with the intent of giving her mind to safe and homely things. But something caught her eyes and held them. A window seemed to be opened before her.

She looked through it into her tumultuous past. Or was this a weapon put into her hand for the exacting future?

That night Myron Dill came into the sitting-room after his ch.o.r.es were done, and lay down on the lounge between the two front windows. He composed himself on his back with his hands placidly folded, and there his wife found him when she came in after her own completed list of deeds. He did not look up at her, and she was glad. She did not know how her eyes gleamed behind the glittering plane of their gla.s.ses, nor how deep the red was in her cheeks; but she was conscious of an inward tumult which must, she knew, somehow betray itself. For an instant she stood and looked at her husband, in what might have been relenting or antic.i.p.ation of the road she had to take. She knew so well what mantle of repose was over him: how he liked the peeping of the frogs through the open window, and what measure of satisfaction there was for him in the consciousness of full rest and the certainty that next day would usher in a crowding horde of duties he felt perfectly able to administer. Mrs. Dill was a feminine creature, charged to the full with the love of service and unerring intuition as to the manner of it, and she did love to "see menfolks comfortable."