CHAPTER XXIV
“THE FLOWER WILL BLOOM ANOTHER YEAR”
I SAT by my fire throughout the long night. When dawn came I rose, went to the door and threw it wide and stepped outside into the unstained air of the morning. There was a carpet of snow on the ground, the bushes were like gleaming teepes, and the limbs of the pine trees were weighted with icicles. I repeated to myself Thoreau’s words: “God exhibits himself in a frosted bush to-day, as much as he did in a burning one to Moses.”
The light was purple and cold and solemn, the moon still hung in the gray of the western sky, but in the East there was a glorious band of crimson and the mountain tops looked as if aflame with little bonfires. As I stood there a ruby-crowned kinglet fluttered from twig to twig of the elderberry bush hard by, emitting its bright “zei, zei,” and a chickadee answered with a merry “chickadee-a-dee, dee, dee,” from the yew grove. I waited. I was praying the kinglet would sing. And presently the tiny thing began. It poured forth its strong sweet notes in a succession of trills.
“Bird,” I said, “you are a wonder. I know that the muscles in your throat are almost microscopic. I have always told Joey—” But here I ceased to admonish the bird, I went back up the porch steps.
As I was closing the door I heard the rattle of the stage as it passed along the river road on its way to the village. The driver shouted a merry Christmas to some one on the road. I threw a fresh log on the fire and sat down heavily in my chair. It was Christmas morning—and they had gone!
I drowsed after a time, lying back in my great chair with the collie asleep at my feet. When I awakened the sun was high, and the world outside my window was so sparkling and bright that it dazzled my sight. I went to the kitchen, kindled a fire, and opened the kitchen door to let the collie out. I was washing my hands at the wash-bench in the corner, when I heard the latch of the door click. Footsteps crossed the floor, some one was coming up behind me saying:
“I have brought a chicken pie for your dinner, Mr. Dale—Dad’ll be along soon—and I wish you a Merry Christmas.”
She stood there as she had so often stood before, a white-covered basket on one arm, the other filled with bundles. But her face was pale to-day, and her glorious hair was swept straight back from her brow and tucked away beneath a net, and her apparel was sober gray. I stared at her and stared and stared, until the pink ran up in her cheek and she dropped the bundles and set down the basket, that she might put her hands over her abashed face. I stood there and felt shaken and dumbfounded, not attempting to speak, afraid indeed of the sound of my own voice.
The fire crackled. Cheerily through the door Wanza had left open behind her, came the chickadee’s note. The sunlight was dazzling as it struck into my eyes from the white oilcloth on the kitchen table. The room seemed suddenly illumined, the air electric and revitalized. At length I stammered out:
“Thank you, thank you!”
“It’s only chicken pie,” she whispered.
“Thank you for not going.”
At that she threw up her head, her hands dropped. She said proudly:
“Did you think I’d go on Christmas Day? Did you think I’d have the heart to go, Mr. Dale?”
“Yes,” I said wearily, “I thought you had gone, Wanza. Why not?”
“And I’ll tell you why not! It’s because you decided Joey was to go that I could not go. I could not go and leave you when I found Joey was to go—oh, no!”
“But you must go some day, Wanza,” I said, scarce knowing what I said.
“And why must I go some day? Why must I? I tell you what I’m going to do, Mr. David Dale, I’m going to stay on here in Roselake, and I am going to live up to the very best there is in me. I am going to improve and grow big and fine and womanly. I’m going to do it right here. And then maybe some day,” she sighed, “when Dad does not need me any more, and you do not need me any more, I will have enough money saved up, and I will go away and get educated.”
In her excitement she had pressed closer to me and laid one hand against my chest. I placed my own hand over it as I said very gently:
“Let me teach you, Wanza—be my pupil. I will become your tutor in earnest, if you will have me. Yes! I will go to your father’s house every day to instruct you,—and it will give me great happiness. Ah, Wanza, now that Joey has gone I feel so futile—so useless! Let me undertake your education, child.”
The burning eyes came up to mine, and questioned them. The pale face flushed. There was a pathetic tremulousness about the lips.
“Say yes,” I urged.
Her head drooped, lowered itself humbly until her hair brushed my arm, and suddenly she kissed my hand, passionately, gratefully. “Oh, Mr. David Dale,” she breathed, “you’re grand! That’s what you are. Yes and yes, and yes!”
And so I ate my dinner with Wanza and Captain Grif sitting opposite me at the table, and Wanza flouted me when I would have served her too liberally with the most succulent bits of the pie, and Captain Grif rallied me when I confessed that I had small appetite, and produced a bottle of root beer and a bag of cheese cakes from the basket.
Night came down at last to my weary soul and soon after it grew dark Wanza and her father departed. I locked the door behind them and I threw myself, dressed as I was, on my bunk and buried my head in the pillows. The evening wore on. The fire sputtered and burned low, the wind came up and hissed around the cabin. A coyote howled from some distant hill. The room grew dark. A pall was on my heart.
As the winter wore on I became vastly interested in Wanza’s education. I gave two hours each day to her lessons. And not many evenings passed without lessons in the snug little room beneath the eaves of the cottage she called home. There with our books open before us, beneath the light from the swinging lamp, we pored over tedious pages shoulder to shoulder, smiled on by old Grif and encouraged by Father O’Shan, who ofttimes shared our evenings.
It was wonderful the improvement I marked in Wanza as the weeks slipped past. Her English improved markedly. She was painstaking and indefatigable. She applied herself so assiduously that I began to fear lest she should overwork, as the warm spring days came on.
“Don’t study too hard,” I cautioned her one day.
“I can’t study too hard,” she flashed back at me. And then she smiled. But I knew she was terribly in earnest.
It was that same day that Father O’Shan quoted to me, as we were walking along the river road together:
“Shed no tear—Oh, shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Weep no more—Oh, weep no more!
Young buds sleep in the root’s white core.”
“Do you mean that for me, Father?” I asked.
“For you—yes. And many like you.”
My heart swelled. I looked about me. Buttercups were gilding the sod—the pussy willows were in bloom along the river. It was the spring.
I went home and raked the dead leaves and pine needles away from under the trees in the Dingle. A few yellow violets were springing up. From beyond the syringa thicket a faint “witchery, witchery, witchery,” greeted my ears.
I went forward cautiously. Peering through the interlaced branches I saw the songster. He was swinging on a thorn bush, a wonderfully brilliant little chorister in his black cap and yellow stole. I whistled. He cocked his head on one side, fixed me with his bright eye, then flew to a willow tree and favored me with another burst of song. This time he seemed to oft repeat, “Which way, oh?” He sang it so persistently that presently I replied, “Straight on, sir.”
I went to the cabin and consulted the calendar. It was the last day of March.
My spirit, that had seemed earthward crushed for months, grew lighter in the sweet spring days that followed. I took the return of April as a long-fore-gone right. I ploughed and planted, I made bird houses and arranged bird-baths in the groves hard by the cabin. I paddled in my canoe on the river, and fished in the adjacent creeks. And I went with Wanza through the woods on many a trillium hunt.
Sometimes almost to breathlessness I felt Wanza’s charm, the galvanism she could always transmit to those with her intensified by some new strange quality I could not name. It was like a fillip given my dispassion. When she laughed and chirped to the squirrels, when she carried a wounded bird in her breast, when she stood on tip-toe, her face like a taper-flame, to greet the whole outdoors with wide-flung arms, I caught my lip between my teeth and watched her with observant eyes. Her beauty grew. Even Father O’Shan remarked it. The gowns of pink she wore once served to deepen the rose tint in her fair cheeks; but her cheeks needed no such service now; they were like a red-rose heart. She had taken to smoothing and banding her hair and twisting it back behind her small ears with big shell pins. Her head seen thus was as lovely a shape as any Greuze ever painted. She frequently wore thin blouses of white, and I seldom saw her feet in sandals—she had a sleeveless black gown that she wore to a country dance one evening when I was her escort. Looking at her that night I could scarcely believe it was Wanza, my old friend and playmate whom I was in attendance upon, and I paid her some rather silly compliments and was promptly rebuked for my gallantry.
It was a tidy enough fortune my dear old father had left me. I had been able to do many things to make Wanza and Captain Grif comfortable and happy during the long winter. Among other things I had purchased a piano for Wanza to replace the old melodeon, and delighted Captain Grif with the gift of a phonograph. And last, but not least, I had made the last payment on the little cottage in which they lived and presented the deed to Captain Grif on his sixty-fifth birthday.
Dear Captain Grif! His manner of accepting this last gift was characteristic.
“Tain’t for myself I’d take it. I’d just about as lief worry along and save and scrimp toward makin’ the final payment— I ’low I’d sooner; I like the glory, and when you have a soft thing handed to you there ben’t nothin’ achieved. I’m meanin’ it, s-ship-mate. Things we earn is the things we ’preciate. But I take it kindly of you. And for Wanza’s sake I thank you and accept. ’Tis hard on the gal—pinchin’ and scrimpin’—and peddlin’ in winter is about played out—the roads is in bad shape for gettin’ about, you’ll ’low. Now with the house paid for, the gal’ll have what she earns for ribbons and furbelows and trinkets. And ownin’ sech a face as hern, Mr. Dale—though it don’t need no adornin’—sure makes a gal long for fixin’s. I’m grateful and pleased for her sake—I sure be.” Tears dimmed his kind old eyes. His hand came out to me. “Shake hands, David Dale, man; you’re a friend—a friend. We need friends—the gal and I—seems like we need ’em more’n we used since all we been through,—and I want to say right here that Wanza never would’a perked up if it hadn’t a been for your helpin’ her this winter. She was pretty well down, Wanza was. Well, in my youth, young folks was different. I used to think—I used to think one time—well, there, by golly, s-ship-mate, it makes no difference what I used to think! I was mistook, I ’low. It sure is great for a man and gal to be such friends as you and Wanza—no foolishness—no tomfoolery!—it’s unusual—I ain’t sayin’ that it tain’t—but it’s fine, s-ship-mate, it’s fine.”
“I’M GRATEFUL AND PLEASED”
Through the winter I had had frequent letters from Haidee—frank, friendly letters, filled with stories of Joey—and a few printed epistles from the lad; one in particular that impressed me; “Joey is all rite,” it said.
I discussed this with Wanza, who said tearfully:
“His saying that makes me think he isn’t. He is such a plucky little chap. He would not have you worrying. Not that I think he’s sick—sure enough sick, you know; but I just feel sure he’s pining.”
“Please—please, Wanza, don’t put that thought into my mind,” I said hastily. “If I thought Joey were happy I could more easily bear his absence.”
She looked at me and shook her head. Then she smiled.
“He’ll do well enough till spring. But he will be counting the days, all right.”