"Then your life is all before you, to make of it what you will," said he, placing his hand on her shoulder, as she stood with him in the dim hall. He opened the study door. The wood on the grate was blazing brightly. Ollie saw someone standing before it, bending slightly forward in the pose of expectation. He was tall and of familiar figure, and the firelight was playing in the tossed curls of his short, fair hair.

"In there," said the judge, "if you care to go."

Ollie did not stir. Her feet felt rooted to the floor in the wonder and doubt of this strange occurrence.

"Ollie!" cried the man at the hearthstone, calling her name imploringly.

He came forward, holding out pleading hands.

She stood a moment, as if gathering herself to a resolution. A sob rose in her throat, and broke from her lips transformed into a trembling, sharp, glad cry. It was as if she had cast the clot of sorrow from her heart. Then she pa.s.sed into the room and met him.

Judge Maxwell closed the door.

CHAPTER XXIII

LEST I FORGET

Mrs. Newbolt was cutting splints for her new sun-bonnet out of a pasteboard box. She hitched her chair back a little farther into the shadow of the porch, for the impertinent sun was winking on her bright scissors, dazzling her eyes.

It was past the turn of the afternoon; a soft wind was moving with indolence among the tender leaves, sleepy from the scents of lilac and apple bloom which it had drunk on its way. And now it loitered under the eaves of the porch to mix honeysuckle with its stream of drowsy sweets, like a chemist of Araby the Blest preparing a perfume for the harem's pride.

There was the gleam of fresh paint on the walls of the old house. The steps of the porch had been renewed with strong timber, the rotting siding had been replaced. Mrs. Newbolt's chair no longer drew squeaks and groans from the floor of the porch as she rocked, swaying gently as her quick shears shaped the board. New flooring had been laid there, and painted a handsome gray; the falling trellis between gate and door had been plumbed and renewed.

New life was everywhere about the old place, yet its old charm was undisturbed, its old homeliness was unchanged. Comfort had come to dejection, tidiness had been restored to beauty. The windows of the old house now looked upon the highway boldly, owing the world nothing in the way of gla.s.s.

Where the sprawling rail fence had lain for nearly forty years, renewed piecemeal from time to time as it rotted away, its corners full of brambles, its stakes and riders overrun with poison-vine; where this brown, jointed structure had stretched, like a fossil worm, a great transformation had come. The rails were gone, the brambles were cleared away, and a neat white fence of pickets stretched in front of the house.

This was flanked on either hand by a high fence of woven wire, new to that country then, at once the wonder of the old inhabitants, the despair of prowling hogs and the bewilderment of hens. There was a gate now where the old gap had been; it swung shut behind one with an eager little spring, which startled agents and strangers with the sharpness of its click.

The shrubbery had been cleared of dead wood, and the underlying generations of withered honeysuckle vines which had spread under the green upon the old trellis, had been taken away. Freshness was there, the mark of an eager, vigorous hand. The matted blue gra.s.s which sodded the yard had been cut and trimmed to lines along the path. A great and happy change had come over the old place, so long under the shadow.

People stopped to admire it as they pa.s.sed.

"Well, well; it's the doin's of that boy, Joe Newbolt!" they said.

Mrs. Newbolt paused in her clipping of bonnet slats to make a menacing snip at a big white rooster which came picking around the steps. The fowl stretched his long neck and turned his bright eye up to his mistress with a slanting of the head.

"How did you git out of that pen, you old scalawag?" she demanded.

The rooster took a long and dignified step away from her, where he stood, with little appearance of alarm, turning his head, questioning her with his shining eye. She made a little lunge with her shears.

"Yes, I'm goin' to tell Joe on you, you scamp!" she threatened.

"_Coo-doot-cut!_" said the rooster, looking about him with a long stretching of the neck.

"Yes, you better begin to cackle over it," said she, speaking in solemn reproof, as if addressing a child, "for Joe he'll just about cut your sa.s.sy old head clean off! If he don't do that, he'll trim down that wing of yourn till you can't bat a skeeter off your nose with it, you red.i.c.k-lous old critter!"

But it was not the threat of Joe that had drawn the cry of alarm from the fowl. The sound of steps was growing along the path from the front gate, and the fowl scampered off to the cover of the gooseberry vines, as Mrs. Newbolt turned to see who the visitor was. The scissors fell from her lap, and her spool trundled off across the porch.

"Laws, Sol Greening, you give me a start, sneakin' up like that!"

Sol laughed out of his whiskers, with a big, loose-rolling sound, and sat on the porch without waiting to be asked.

"I walked up over the gra.s.s," said he. "It's as soft under your feet as plowed ground. They say Joe's got one of them lawn-cutters to mow it with?"

"Well, what if he has?" she wanted to know. "He's got a good many things and improvements around here that you folks that's lived here for seventy years and more never seen before, I reckon."

"He sure is a great feller for steppin' out his own way!" marveled Sol.

"I never seen such a change in a place inside of a year as Joe's made in this one--never in my mortal borned days. It was a lucky day for Joe when Judge Maxwell took a likin' to him that way."

Mrs. Newbolt was looking away toward the hills, a dreamy cast in her placid face.

"Yes," said she, "there's no denyin' that. But Joe he'd 'a' got along, Judge Maxwell or no Judge Maxwell. Only it'd 'a' been slower and harder for him."

"He would 'a'," nodded Sol, without reservation. "No discountin' on that. That boy beats anything this here country ever perduced, barrin'

none, and I ain't sayin' that, either, ma'am, just to please you."

"Much thanks I owe you for what you think of Joe!" said she, scornfully.

"You was ready enough, not so very long ago, to set the whole world ag'in' him if you could."

"Well, circ.u.mstantial evidence--" began Sol.

"Oh, circ.u.mstantial nest-eggs!" said she, impatiently. "You'd known Joe all his life, and you know very well he didn't shoot Isom Chase any more than you done it yourself!"

"Well, mistakes is humant," sighed Sol, taking advantage of that universal absolution. "They say Judge Maxwell's goin' to leave everything he's got to Joe, and he's got a considerable, I reckon."

"I don't know as Joe'd take it," said she, folding her hands in her lap.

"Judge Maxwell had a hard time to git Joe to let him put in the money to do things around here, and send him to college over in Shelbyville last winter. Joe let him do it on the understandin' that it was a loan, to be paid interest on and paid back when he was able."

"Well, from the start he's makin' it don't look like the judge 'd have very long to wait for his money," said Sol. "Twenty acres of apple trees all in a orchard together, and twenty acres of strawberries set out betwixt and between the rows!"

He looked over the hillside and little ap.r.o.n of valley where Joe's young orchard spread. Each tiny tree was a plume of leaves; the rows stretched out to the hilltop, and over.

"I can figger out how twenty acres of apples can be picked and took care of," reflected Sol, as if going over with himself something which he had given thought to before, "but I'll be durned if I can figger out how any man's goin' to pick and take care of twenty acres of strawberries!"

"Joe knows," said his mother.

"Well, I hope he does," sighed Sol, the sigh being breathed to give expression of what remained unspoken. No matter what his hopes, his doubts were unshaken.

No man had ever taken care of twenty acres of strawberries--nor the twentieth part of one acre, for that matter--in that community. No man could do it, according to the bone-deep belief of Sol and his kind.

"Joe says that's only a little dab of a start," said she.

"Cree-mo-nee!" said Sol, his mouth standing open like a mussel sh.e.l.l in the sun. "When'll they be ripe?"

"Next spring."