Hillsboro People Part 14

As soon as she could see plainly, she cooked a hearty breakfast of broiled bacon and fried mush, and wakened her two charges to eat it. They made a very early start, and there is nothing more to tell about their journey except that at about seven o'clock that evening the two tired horses crept into the main street of Heath Falls, and a very much excited girl asked the first pa.s.ser-by where the Indian herb-doctor lived.

They found him in a little old house of logs--the only one that looked natural to them in the prosperous settlement. When Hannah knocked at the door, he opened it himself. He was a small, very old, dark-brown, and prodigiously wrinkled individual, who held up a candle and looked at Hannah with the most impa.s.sive eyes she had ever seen--like little pools of black water unstirred by any wind.

Hannah's breath came fast.

"Is this the Indian herb-doctor?" she asked.

"Aye," he answered.

When you remember that Hannah was only a little girl, and that she thought she had come to the end of a nightmare of responsibility, it will not surprise you to learn that she now began to cry a little, out of agitation.

"I have brought Ann Mary," she said, "my sister, to be cured. She is in a decline. Will you cure her?"

The herb-doctor showed no surprise. He set the candle down on the shelf, and went out in the bright starlight to where Ann Mary clung to Remember Williams's waist. When he put up his brown old hands to her, she slid down into them and upon the ground. He still held one wrist, and this he continued to do for some moments, looking at the white, drooping girl without moving a muscle of his solemn old face. Then he turned to Hannah, who had stopped crying and was holding her breath in suspense.

"Aye," he said.

At this Hannah caught her sister around the neck, sobbing joyfully:

"He will cure you, Ann Mary; he will cure you!" Then she asked the doctor: "And how long will it take? We can stay but a few days, for the boy and the horses must get back soon."

The herb-doctor considered for a moment.

"It is now the end of June month. By the end of September month she will be cured--not before."

I think I know that that was a black moment for Hannah. She said nothing at all, but the sick girl fell to weeping.

"But, Master Doctor, we cannot stay--we cannot! And now, after all, I shall not be cured!"

Hannah could not bear to see her sweet Ann Mary in tears, and she cried out stoutly:

"Yes, you shall, too! Remember can take the horses back without us, and tell our father. Somehow--I can earn--oh, we _must_!" Then a new fear sprang into her heart. "Oh, sir," she cried to the doctor, "is it dear, your cure? Must one have much silver for it?"

The stolid little old gnome did not look toward her or change his position as he said:

"It costs time--no silver," He moved toward the house. "Go to the minister's to-night," he called from his doorstep. "It is the house of brick." Just before he closed his door he added: "Come here to-morrow morning."

When they reached the great brick house, the other two hung back, afraid of so much grandeur; but three days of travel through the dangers of a primitive forest had hardened Hannah to the lesser fear of strange people.

To the old minister and his wife she told their story very briefly, with a desperate kind of self-possession, so concerned about poor Ann Mary, tired and hungry, waiting out in the night air, that she did not remember to be afraid of the minister's fine linen and smooth, white hands, or of the laces and dark silk of his handsome, white-haired wife, or of the gold braid and red coat of a dark young man with a quick eye who sat in the corner.

The young man said nothing until after the old people had gone out to bring in the wanderers. Then:

"You must be fond, indeed, of your sister, my little la.s.s," he said kindly.

"Sir," said Hannah, "you should _see_ my sister!"

And just then he did see her. Ann Mary came into the brightly lighted room, her eyes wide and dark from the dusk outside, her long black hair, shaken loose from its fastenings, curling up beautifully with the dew, and making a frame for the pearl-like oval of her face. I have seen a miniature of Ann Mary in her youth, and I can guess how she must have looked to the young officer that evening.

The minister's wife gave them all a hot supper, and hurried them off to bed with motherly authority. For the first time in her life, Hannah found herself between linen sheets. She tried to call her sister's attention to this astonis.h.i.+ng magnificence, but fell asleep in the middle of the sentence, and did not wake until late the next morning. Ann Mary had been awake for some time, but did not dare get up, so overcome was she by shyness and reverence for the grandeur of the room and of her hosts.

"Oh, Hannah! Would it not be like heaven to live always in such a place?"

she said.

Hannah could not stop to be shy, or to think about how she would like mahogany beds all the time. She had too much on her mind. They must go at once to the herb-doctor's--they should have been there before--and they must hurry through their breakfast. It is, perhaps, worthy of note that both girls came down the stairs backward, ladders having been, up to that time, their only means of reaching elevations.

During their breakfast, the dark young man, who turned out to be a cousin of the minister's, sat in a corner, playing with his dog's ears, and looking at Ann Mary until she was quite abashed, although the younger girl, at whom he glanced smilingly from time to time, thought he looked very good-natured. After this, Hannah sent Remember Williams home with the horses, giving him fresh and elaborate directions about the right road to take. Then she marched Ann Mary to the herb-doctor's.

"Here, Master Necronsett," she said, "here is Ann Mary to be cured!"

III.

When the doctor told them about his system, Hannah did not like the sound of it at all. Not a drop of "sut tea" or herb-drink was mentioned, but the invalid was to eat all the hearty food Hannah could earn for her. Then, so far from sleeping in a decently tight room, their bed was to stand in a little old shed, set up against Master Necronsett's house. One side of the shed was gone entirely, so that the wind and the sun would come right in on poor, delicate Ann Mary, and there was only an awning of woven bark-withes to let down when it rained.

But even that was not the worst. Hannah listened with growing suspicion while Master Necronsett explained the rest of it. All his magic consisted in the use of a "witch plant," the whole virtue of which depended on one thing. The sick person must be the only one to handle or care for it, from the seed up to the mature plant.

He took them up to his garret, where row after row of dried plants hung, heavy with seed-pods, and with the most careful precautions to avoid touching them himself, or having Hannah do so, he directed Ann Mary to fill a two-quart basin with the seed.

"That will plant a piece of ground about six paces square," he said. "That will raise enough seed for you."

"But who is to dig the ground, and plant, and weed, and water, and all?"

asked Hannah. "If I am to be earning all day, when--"

"The sick person must do all," said the herb-doctor.

Hannah could not believe her senses. Her Ann Mary, who could not even brush her own hair without fatigue, she to take a spade in her--

"Oh, Master Doctor," she cried, "can I not do it for her?"

The old Indian turned his opaque black eyes upon her.

"Nay," he said dryly, "you cannot."

And with that he showed them where the witch garden was to be, close before their little sleeping-hut. That was why, he explained, the patient must spend all her time there, so that by night, as well as by day, she could absorb the magical virtues of the growing plant Hannah thought those were the first sensible words she had heard him say.

She had promised the minister's wife to be back at a certain hour to see about employment, so she dared not stay longer, though it was with a sinking heart that she left her sister to that grim old savage, with his brusque lack of sympathy. However, the minister's wife rea.s.sured her with stories of all the other girls from far and near whom he had cured by that same foolish, silly method; so Hannah turned all her energies upon the spinning which a neighbor-woman had set her to do.

Hired workers have been the same from the days of the Psalmist down to our own, and Hannah, putting her whole heart into her work, accomplished, so her surprised employer told her, twice as much spinning as any serving-girl she had ever hired.

"And excellent good thread, too!" she said, examining it.

If Hannah kept up to _that_, she added, she could have all the work she had time for. She gave the little girl two pennies--two real pennies, the first money Hannah had ever earned. With a head spinning with triumph, she calculated that at that rate she could earn fourpence a day!

She spent a farthing for some fish a little boy brought up from the river, and a halfpenny for some fresh-baked bread, and a part of her precious four-s.h.i.+lling piece for an iron fry-pan, or "spider." Laden with these, she hurried back to see how Ann Mary had endured the old doctor's roughness. She found her sister very tired, but, proudly anxious to show a little spot, perhaps six feet; square, which she had spaded up with intervals of rest.