Wheat and Huckleberries Part 15

Tom whistled. He was used to Kate now, and never really expected to have the last word. Returning to the subject of the hay-making, he remarked: "Grandfather was down there for a while this afternoon, to show us how fast we ought to work, I suppose-you ought to have seen him bring down the swath-but he couldn't keep it up very long, and made an errand to the house; a good thing he did, too, or he'd have missed that call that tickled him so. I say, that fellow must have been a regular swell for all you girls to be so taken with him."

"Who said _I_ was taken with him?" demanded Kate. "It was his horse I fell in love with."

"Well, the others were, if you weren't," persisted Tom. "Esther seemed to think she never saw such a young man."

"She's seen some that are a good deal nicer," said Kate, with emphasis, and then she added rather irritably: "I shouldn't think a fellow could have much to do who spends his time running round to find out what his great-great-grandfather did. For my part I don't take much stock in that sort of thing."

And on this point they were in perfect agreement. Tom, like Kate, had no great use for ancestors.

Meanwhile the shadows lengthened, and the two slow figures moving across the fields reached the end of their walk. That the days to be spent with Aunt Katharine would seem rather long, Esther fully expected. Yet she had wanted them. She had been honest when she said to Stella at parting: "Don't pity me. I really like it!" and she wondered at the incredulous look with which her cousin had regarded her. With all there was of taste and artistic feeling in common between these two, there was something in Esther, something of seriousness and warmth, which the other partly lacked.

Possibly the girl expected-as Stella had warned her-that the old woman would at once mount the hobby, which she was supposed to keep always saddled and bridled, as soon as they were fairly in the house together, but as a matter of fact, Aunt Katharine did nothing of the kind. She talked, as they sat in the twilight, of Esther herself, of her work at school, and the things she enjoyed most in this summer visit, and then of Esther's mother, recalling incidents of her childhood, and speaking of her ways and traits with an appreciation that filled the girl with surprise and delight.

"Your mother might have done something out of the common," she said as she ended. "She was made larger than most folks, and with all her soft ways, she had more courage. She might have had a great influence. I always said it."

"Mother has a good deal of influence now," said Esther, smiling. "Father says there isn't a lady in our town whose opinions count for as much as hers."

"Of course, of course," said the old woman, with a note of impatience creeping into her voice; "and the upshot of it is that she makes old ways that are wrong seem right, because she, with all _her_ faculties, manages to make the best of 'em. She might have done better than that, _if she'd seen_."

And then she rose suddenly and lighted a lamp. "I always have a chapter before I go to bed," she said. "You might read it to-night."

Esther was surprised. She had somehow gained the impression, in Aunt Katharine's talks with her brother, that she held the scriptures rather lightly, but apparently this was wrong. "What shall I read?" she asked, going to the stand on which lay the Bible, a large and very old one.

"Read me that chapter about Judith," she said, "how she delivered her people out of the hand of Holofernes, and all the city stood up and blessed her."

Esther sat for a moment with a puzzled face, her finger between the leaves of the book. "Is that in Judges?" she asked, with a vague remembrance of a prophetess who led Israel to battle.

The old woman lifted her eyebrows. "Oh, that is in the Apocrypha," she said. "Well, if you don't know about Judith you mustn't begin at the end of her story. Read me about Deborah; that's a good place."

There was no sweeter sleep under the stars that night than came to Esther. She had thought with some foreboding of a feather bed, but it was the best of hair mattresses that Aunt Katharine provided. Even the high-post bedstead, with draperies of ancient pattern, which she had really hoped for, was wanting. There was nothing to prevent the air which came through the wide east window, full of woodsy odors and the droning of happy insects, from coming straight to her pillow.

There was indeed nothing in the room to recall the fas.h.i.+ons of the past except the coverlet, wrought in mazy figures tufted of crocheting cotton, and a round silk pincus.h.i.+on mounted on a standard of gla.s.s, which standard suggested former service as part of a lamp. Aunt Katharine had as little care to preserve the customs of her foremothers as their ways of thinking. She had told the girl to rise when she felt like it; but in the early morning Esther found herself wide awake, and the sound of stirring below brought her quickly to her feet.

Aunt Katharine was busy about the stove when she entered the kitchen, and the sight of her niece in her clean work-ap.r.o.n evidently pleased her. They took a cup of tea with a fresh egg and a slice of toast at the kitchen table, and Esther tried to recall her dream of the night before for the entertainment of the other. "It must have been reading about Deborah that put it into my head," she said. "I thought I was living all by myself in a house that was under a great oak tree, and all sorts of people were coming to me on all sorts of errands, and finally I was going out with a great company of them to battle, but I don't know what the battle was about, or how it came out," she ended lightly. "I think the dream must have broken off when I heard you moving about down here."

"Dreams are queer things," said Aunt Katharine, who had been listening with attention.

"Of course I don't believe in them," Esther made haste to say, "but Aunt Milly always insisted that the first dream you had when you slept in a strange place meant something. I'm sure it meant something to sleep in such a lovely room, and rest as sweetly as I did," she added, with an affectionate smile at the old lady.

Miss Katharine Saxon had long prided herself on a complete indifference to any blandishments of words or manner on the part of her fellow-creatures. It wasn't what people said, nor how they said it, but the principles they lived up to, that const.i.tuted a claim to her regard, as she often declared; but she fell a victim as easily as scores had done before her to the pretty tactful ways of Esther Northmore and her gift for saying pleasant things. Not in years had she been as warm, as open, and confiding as during that visit. In the entertainment of her niece she made no mistake. She let her help in the housework and watched with pleasure while she darned a tablecloth. She was studying the girl, with genuine liking to guide the study.

And Esther, for her part, was watching her Aunt Katharine with growing regard and sympathy. It was a surprise at first, to note the solicitude with which she inquired after the sick child of Patrick Riley, the Irishman who carried on her farm, and came night and morning to attend to her ch.o.r.es; and the girl was not prepared for the almost maternal interest with which the old woman looked after the dumb creatures on her place.

On the subject which she was known to have most at heart-the wrongs of her s.e.x-she said nothing for a while, and Esther was too mindful of those old griefs in her life to provoke the theme. It came casually, the second day, as they sat seeding raisins in the kitchen. A boy had brought a pail of berries to the door, but she refused them. An hour later a girl came with a similar errand, and without hesitating she made the purchase.

"I hope you didn't change your mind on my account," said Esther, when the child was gone, remembering apologetically something she had said in the interval about her own liking for huckleberries. "With all the fruit you have I'm sure we didn't need them."

Miss Saxon smiled. "I didn't change my mind," she said. "I thought some girl would be along, and so I waited."

The boy's face had looked eager, and Esther felt rather sorry for him.

"Don't you suppose he needed the money as much as she did?" she asked rather timidly.

"Mebbe he needed it more," said Aunt Katharine. "The Billingses are worse off than the Esteys, but that ain't the p'int. It's a good thing for a girl to be earning money. It's worth something to her to make a few cents, and know it's her own. That's what the girls need more 'n anything else, and I always help 'em every chance I get."

Esther pondered for a minute without speaking. The old woman's eyes had taken on a look of deep seriousness. "That's the root of all the trouble," she said almost fiercely, "this notion that the women must be forever dependent on the men, and take what's given 'em and be thankful, without trying to do for themselves. I tell you it was never meant that one half of the world should hang on the other half, and look to 'em for the shelter over their heads, and the food they eat, and the clothes they wear. It degrades 'em both."

Esther stopped seeding raisins and looked at her aunt in astonishment.

An arraignment of the existing order of things such as she had not heard before was suggested here. Perhaps the very blankness of her expression appealed more than any protest to the old woman. The defiance went out of her voice, and it was almost a pleading tone in which she went on:-

"Don't you see what comes of it? Don't you see? It makes the girls think they must get married so 's to have a home and somebody to support 'em, and then they plan 'n' contrive-they 'n' their mothers with 'em-how to catch a husband." She shut her lips hard, as if her loathing of the thing were too great for utterance, then went on: "But small blame to 'em, I say, if that's the only thing a woman's fit for; small blame to 'em if they won't let her choose her work for herself and live by it, without calling shame on her for doing it. It's a little better now-thank G.o.d and the women that have been brave enough to go ahead in the face of it!-but I've seen the day when an old maid was looked on as something almost out of nature. 'Let a girl dance in the pig's trough,'

if her younger sister gets married before her. Let her own she's disgraced, and be done with it. That's the old saying, and the spirit of it ain't all dead yet. It never will be till women are as free as men to do whatever thing is _in 'em_ to do, and make the most of it."

Her face had grown white as she talked, and the color had paled a little even in Esther's. "Oh," she said, "I've thought of that, too. I've hated it when people talked as if there was nothing for girls but to get married." The color came back with a quick flush as she added: "I'd rather die than be scheming about that myself; but what can you do? Boys always talk about the work they mean to follow. People would think there was something wrong with them, if they didn't; but if girls say anything-I did try once to talk about what I could do to earn my own living, but father acted as if I was somehow reflecting on him, and mother-though I'm sure she understood me better-seemed worried and troubled."

"That's it, that's it!" said Aunt Katharine, bitterly. "Even those that say a woman's got a right to choose, say under their breath that she'll never be happy if it's anything but getting married. I tell you it's finding your own work and doing it that makes people happy, and that's a law for women as much as men."

"But if you knew your work!" said Esther, piteously. "It seems to me there are very few girls who have anything special they can do."

"That's no more true of girls than 'tis of boys," said Aunt Katharine.

"We should find something for one as well as for the other, _something_ they could work at, if we settled it once for all that they had the same right and need. But we've got to start with that idea right from the beginning."

After that, during the time which remained of the visit, the talk came often into the circle of this thought. Sometimes Miss Saxon talked of the wrongs of women, of their inequality before the law, and of the tyranny of men, with a bitterness before which the girl shrank, but the very vehemence of the other's belief carried her with it, and through it all one thing grew more and more clear to her. It was not hatred of men, but love of her own s.e.x, which lay at the bottom of Katharine Saxon's defiance of the social order. The longing to help women, to lift them into what seemed to her a larger, freer living, had laid hold of her wholly, and held her in the white heat of its consuming pa.s.sion.

Once, when she had been speaking of the struggle which lay before any woman confronted with the problem of supporting a family, Esther said softly: "Grandpa told me about you one night, Aunt Katharine; how you gave up everything and worked so hard to help your sister when she came home with her children. I thought that was grand."

The old woman did not speak for a moment, then she said, with a singular lack of emotion in her voice: "Poor Nancy! Yes, I thought then 'twas my duty to do what I did, and mebbe 'twas; but sometimes I've thought-Nancy and her girls were only a han'ful out of the many-sometimes I've thought mebbe I might have done more good if I'd been fighting for 'em all. I gave the best fifteen years of my life to that old spinning-wheel, and scarcely looked out of my corner." And then the lines of her face stiffened as she added: "But I had my reward. I was saved from marrying-marrying Levi Dodge."

The scorn in her voice as she said the last words was indescribable. For a while neither of them spoke. Then Esther said, leaning toward the other, her heart in her eyes, and her breath coming quick, "Aunt Katharine, wouldn't you have women marry at all?"

She threw up her head with the quick, impatient movement which Esther had come to know so well. "They might all marry and welcome," she said,-"it's the Lord's way to preserve the race,-if only we could get rid of the notions that folks have joined onto it to spoil it."

And then the note that was not of defiance, but pleading, came back to her voice, as she added: "But I'd have some of the women that _see_ stay free from it till we've worked this thing out, and made a fair chance for those that come after us; I'd have 'em show that the world has some interests for women outside of their own homes, and some work they can do besides waiting on their husbands and children; I'd have 'em show that a woman ain't afraid nor ashamed to walk without leaning; and I'd have 'em keep their eyes open to see what's going on. I'd have 'em hold themselves clear of the danger of being blinded even by love to the things that need doing."

No doubt there was much that was wholly vague to Esther Northmore in the vision of service which lay before the mind of Katharine Saxon. But the thought of some renunciation for the sake of others-some work, unselfish and lasting-what generous young soul has not at moments felt the thrill of it? Their eyes met in a glow of sympathy, if not of full understanding, and the clock ticked solemnly in a stillness which, for a minute, neither of them could break.

It was a light step at the open door which suddenly drew their attention. Kate was coming briskly up the walk with a letter in her hand.

"It's from home," she said, as Esther rose to meet her, "and I thought you ought to have it."

She noticed the look of exaltation on her sister's face, and something she had never seen before in Aunt Katharine's. Her efforts at conversation met with little response. She was conscious of some atmosphere surrounding these two which she herself could not penetrate, and she was glad to slip away at the end of a very short call.

"They must have been talking about something awfully serious," she said to Tom afterward. "They looked as solemn as a pair of owls. I hope that girl of Aunt Katharine's will come home when she said she would. For my part, I think Esther's stayed there long enough."

CHAPTER X