Way Down East Part 7

"I wish they'd work more and sing less," said the Squire. "All this singing business is too picturesque for me."

"They've about finished, father. I came for the money to pay them off."

It was characteristic of Dave to uphold the rights of the berry-pickers.

They were all friends of his, young men and women who sang in the village choir and who went out among their neighbors' berry patches in summer, and earned a little extra money in picking the fruit. The village thought only the more of them for their thrift, and their singing at the close of their work was generally regarded in the light of a favor.

Zeke, Sam, Cynthia and Amelia who formed the quartet, had all fine voices and no social function for miles around Wakefield was complete without their music.

The Squire said no more about the berry-pickers. Dave handed him a paper on which the time of each berry-picker and the amount of his or her wage was marked opposite. The Squire took it and adjusted his gla.s.ses with a certain grimness--he was honest to the core, but few things came harder to him than parting with money.

Dave and his mother at the churn exchanged a friendly wink. The extracting of coin from the head of the house was no easy process.

Mother and son both enjoyed its accomplishment through an outside agency.

It was too hard a process in the home circle to be at all agreeable.

While the Squire was wrestling with his arithmetic, Dave noticed a strange girl pa.s.s by the outer gate, pause, go on and then return. He looked at her with deep interest. She was so pale and tired-looking it seemed as if she had not strength enough left to walk to the house. Her long lashes rested wearily on the pale cheeks. She lifted them with an effort, and Dave found himself staring eagerly in a pair of great, sorrowful brown eyes.

The girl came on unsteadily up the walk to where the Squire sat, thumbing his account to the berry-pickers. "Well, girl, who are you?" he said, not as unkindly as the words might imply.

The sound of her own voice, as she tried to answer his question, was like the far-off droning of a river. It did not seem to belong to her. "My name is Moore--Anna Moore--and I thought--I hoped perhaps you might be good enough to give me work." The strange faces spun about her eyes.

She tottered and would have fallen if Dave had not caught her.

Dave, the silent, the slow of action, the cool-headed, seemed suddenly bereft of his chilling serenity. "Here, mother, a chair; father, some water, quick." He carried the swooning girl to the shadow of the porch and fanned her tenderly with his broad-brimmed straw hat.

The old people hastened to do his bidding. Dave, excited and issuing orders in that tone, was too unusual to be pa.s.sed over lightly.

"What were you going to say, Miss Moore?" said the Squire as soon as the brown eyes opened.

"I thought, perhaps, I might find something to do here--I'm looking for work."

"Why, my dear," said Mrs. Bartlett, smoothing the dark curls, "you are not fit to stand, let alone work."

"You could not earn your salt," was the Squire's less sympathetic way of expressing the same sentiment. "Where is your home?"

"I have no home." She looked at them desperately, her dark eyes appealing to one and the other, as if they were the jury that held her life in the balance. Only one pair of eyes seemed to hold out any hope.

"If you would only try me I could soon prove to you that I am not worthless." Unconsciously she held out her hand in entreaty.

"Here we are, here we are, all off for Boston!" The voice was Hi's. He was just turning in at the field gate with Kate beside him. Kate, a ravis.h.i.+ng vision, in pink muslin; a smiling, contented vision of happy, rosy girlhood, coming back to the home-nest, where a thousand welcomes awaited her.

"h.e.l.lo, every one!" she said, running in and kissing them in turn, "how nice it is to be home."

They forgot the homeless stranger and her pleading for shelter in their glad welcome to the daughter of the house. She had shrunk back into the shadow. She had never felt the desolation, the utter loneliness of her position so keenly before.

"Hurrah for Kate!" cried the Squire, and everyone took it up and gave three cheers for Kate Brewster.

The wanderer withdrew into the deepest shadow of the porch, that her alien presence might not mar the joyous home-coming of Kate Brewster.

There was no jealousy in her soul for the fair girl who had such a royal welcome back to the home-nest. She would not have robbed her of it if such a thing had been possible, but the sense of her own desolation gripped at the heart like an iron band.

She waited like a mendicant to beg for the chance of earning her bread.

That was all she asked--the chance to work, to eat the bread of independence, and yet she knew how slim the chance was. She had been wandering about seeking employment all day, and no one would give it.

Only Dave had not forgotten the stranger is the joy of Kate's home-coming. He had welcomed the flurry of excitement to say a few words to his mother, his sworn ally in all the little domestic plots.

"Mother," he said, "do contrive to keep that girl. It would be nothing short of murder to turn her out on the highway."

A pressure of the motherly hand a.s.sured Dave that he could rely on her support.

"Well, well, Katie," said the Squire with his arm around his niece's waist, "the old place has been lonely without you!"

"Uncle, who is that girl on the porch?" she asked in an undertone.

"That we don't know; says her name is Moore, and that she wants work.

Kind of sounds like a fairy story, don't it, Kate?"

"Poor thing, poor thing!" was Kate's only answer.

"Amasy," said Mrs. Bartlett, a.s.suming all the courage of a rabbit about to a.s.sert itself, "this family is bigger than it was with Kate home and the professor here, and I am not getting younger--I want you to let me keep this young woman to help me about the house."

The Squire set his jaw, always an ominous sign to his family. "I don't like this takin' strangers, folks we know nothing about; it's mighty suspicious to see a young woman tramping around the country, without a home, looking for work. I don't like it."

The girl, who sat apart while these strangers considered taking her in, as if she had been a friendless dog, arose, her eyes were full of unshed tears, her voice quivered, but pride supported her. Turning to the Squire, she said:

"You are suspicious because you are blest with both home and family. My mother died a few months ago, I myself have been ill. I make this explanation not because your kindness warrants it, sir, but because your family would have been willing to take me on faith." She bowed her head in the direction of Mrs. Bartlett and Dave.

"Well," the Squire interrupted, "you need not go away hungry, you can stop here and eat your dinner, and then Hi Holler can take you in the wagon to the place provided for such unfortunate cases, and where you'll have food and shelter."

"The poor farm, do you mean?" the girl said, wildly; "no, no; if you will not give me work I will not take your charity."

"Father!" exclaimed Dave and his mother together.

"Now, now," said Kate, going up to the Squire and putting her hands on his shoulders, "it seems to me as if my uncle's been getting a little hard while I've been away from home, and I don't think it has improved him a bit. The uncle I left here had a heart as big as a house. What has he done with it?"

Here the professor came to Kate's aid. "Squire," said he, "isn't it written that 'If ye do it unto the least of these, ye do it unto me?'"

"Well, well," said the Squire, "when a man's family are against him, there's only one thing for him to do if he wants any peace of mind, and that is to come round to their way, and I ain't never goin' to have it said I went agin the _Scripter_." He went over to Anna and took her pale, thin hand in his great brown one.

"Well, little woman, they want you to stay, and I am not going to interfere. I leave it to you that I won't live to regret it."

This time the tears splashed down the pale cheeks. "Dear sir, I thank you, and I promise you shall never repent this kindness." Then turning to the rest--"I thank you all. I can only repay you by doing my best."

"Well said, well said," and Kate gave her a sisterly pat on the shoulder.

Anna would not listen to Mrs. Bartlett's kind suggestion that she should rest a little while. She went immediately to the house, removed her hat, and returned completely enveloped in a big gingham ap.r.o.n that proved wonderfully becoming to her dark beauty--or was it that the homeless, hunted look had gone out of those sorrowful eyes?

And so Anna Moore had found a home at last, one in which she would have to work early and late to retain a foothold--but still a home, and the word rang in her ears like a soothing song, after the anguish of the last year. Her youth and beauty, she had long since discovered, were only barriers to the surroundings she sought. There had been many who offered to help the friendless girl, but their offers were such that death seemed preferable, by contrast, and Anna had gone from place to place, seeking only the right to earn her bread, and yet, finding only temptation and danger.

Dave, pa.s.sing out to the barn, stopped for a moment to regard her, as she sat on the lowest step of the porch, with her sleeves rolled above the elbow, working a bowl of b.u.t.ter. He smiled at her encouragingly--it was well that none of his family saw it. Such a smile from the shy, silent Dave might have been a revelation to the home circle.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Martha Perkins and Maria Poole.]