Charlotte M. Vaile

“ It was worth Esther Northmore’s while, as Aunt Katharine had suggested, to have seen October in her mother’s country. Even Old Timers, used to the glory that wrapped its hills in the shortening days, doubted gravely whether they had ever known a fall when the woods wore such gorgeous coloring as now, or kept their royal robes so long. All the world seemed flaming in crimson and gold, with fringes of purple at the roadsides, and Esther, walking joyously in the midst, felt her pulses beating to a rhythm she had never caught before in the swinging of the round old world. ”

“ Presently she said, with a sigh, “If one could only be something or do something! When I think of the people who have been great—the heroes, the poets, the artists, people who have accomplished something that lasted—they seem to me the only ones who have been really happy. Just to be one of the mass, and live, and die, and be forgotten, seems so pitiful.”
There had never been any closed doors between Mrs. Northmore’s heart and her daughters. She had been the friend and confidante of each, and she knew this mood of Esther’s; but the day had deepened its color to an unusual sombreness. ”

“ However Stella’s interest in huckleberries might flag later on there was no criticism to be made on her attention at first, and her fingers flew over the bushes at a rate which augured well for the filling of her pail. As for the Northmore girls, they were in ecstasies. Kate settled down to the business at once, though for a while she ate most of the berries she picked, while Esther paused between the handfuls to take long whiffs of the sweet fern which grew everywhere among the bushes, and to fill her eyes with the landscape which looked fairer than ever from the side of this green old hill. ”

“ It was Esther who found words first.
“You never felt like those women, did you, mother? You don’t seem a bit like them. You are always reading and thinking, and you know about a thousand things they’ve never thought of.”
The smile came back to Mrs. Northmore’s eyes, but there was a touch of sadness in it. “My dear girl,” she said, “I’m not half as wise as you think I am; but if I have any wisdom I’m sure I’ve found most of it, and my happiness too, in those same common things. There isn’t such a difference between me and those friends of ours as you imagine.” ”

“ The one is like the victory that comes in youth, when the success of to-day seems the promise for to-morrow; the other is the reward that comes to the worn and enfeebled man, who whispers in the midst of his gladness: “How slight at best are the gains of life!”
Esther was too young to moralize and too busy with the very practical work of helping with the dinner to grow poetical over the harvest scene, but the beauty of it did hold her for a minute with a long admiring gaze as she stood by the well, where she had gone for a pitcher of fresh water. ”

“ Aunt Katharine rose too, and brought her cane down on the floor with a sharp thud. “That’s it!” she said, fiercely. “Boys ’n’ men, you’re all alike, and you’ve got the notion already. You act as if we women folks were weaker creatures than you are. You make us think we are; and then you look for all the tricks that weaker creatures use when they defend themselves. It serves you right if we do use ’em. But it’s a lie all the same, for both of us.”
She drew her lips hard, then, as she saw his hand on the knob of the door, she said, “Tell your grandfather I’ll be up to see him to-morrow.” ”

“ Philip Hadley. He had been too busy all his life, and such gifts as he had were too inherently part of his nature for him to turn an observant eye upon them and mark their value. He seemed to himself a homely, humdrum fellow beside this other who had stepped so lightly into Esther Northmore’s life. There was envy enough in his heart, Heaven knew; but it somehow withheld the thought that wealth was accidental, culture acquired,—poor things at best beside that inner something which makes the man. ”

“ He has been more considerate of us all, and we—yes, I guess we’ve tried harder to be good to him. We couldn’t help it when we remembered how patient she always was.”
The chirping of the crickets seemed to grow fuller and gladder in the summer stillness, and the notes of the whippoorwill came with yet mellower call. It was as if the influence of a sweet, unselfish, loving spirit filled the place, and somehow it did not seem to Esther Northmore at that moment a poor or paltry thing to have lived and died one of the common throng. ”

“ Mrs. Northmore was seated on the cool veranda with her hands in her lap, and that look of tired content which tells of a busy but successful day. A generous hospitality had left her a little worn. Esther sat down on the step at her feet and leaned her arms across her lap in a childish fashion she had never outgrown.
“I wish I didn’t get so tired of people whom I really like,” she said. “It would break Aunt Milly’s heart if she knew how she bores me. It seems to me sometimes I get tired of everybody—everybody but you, mother dear.”
Mrs. Northmore looked into her daughter’s eyes with a smile. ”

“ I believe it’s just because she thinks so much of you. But if she should come to feel as you do about all those things, what good would it do? She couldn’t fight for them. Do you think there’s any fight in Esther Northmore?” She threw out her hand with an impatient gesture. “Oh, they say you’re so clever! But you’re not clever at all if you think that. She’d bear things till they broke her heart before she’d fight.”
Miss Saxon’s lips were drawn tight, and her eyes narrowed to a bright dark line, as if these side-lights that Kate had been throwing on Esther’s character had blinded her a little. ”

“ Aunt Elsie gave her a willing share in the light work of the household, and her grandfather claimed her more and more as a companion in all his goings, and a listener to his tales in the lengthening evenings.
Then there were the visits to Aunt Katharine, and few were the days in which they were omitted. The sight of the girl always brought a smile to the face of the lonely old woman. She was, if possible, more kind than ever, and yet, though Esther could not have explained it, she felt with a puzzled wonder that there was somehow a difference. ”

“ She looked at her niece with a faint sarcastic smile, then said coldly, “I am very fond of your sister.”
The words sounded somehow like a threat. The blood mounted in Kate’s face, and she clinched her hands on the sides of her chair. “I know it,” she said, “and so is every one else fond of her. Grandfather likes her just as much as you do. Perhaps it’s new for you to care for a girl as you care for her, but it’s no new thing for Esther. ”

“ How they did go dashing down the road, and what wonder that excitement was rife in the town that afternoon as to what member of the community was lying at the point of death that the doctor was going at such a rate to see him!
They were on the porch to greet her when she pulled up at the door, Mrs. Northmore and Virgie, with Aunt Milly gorgeous in her best cap and kerchief at the rear; and such a hugging and kissing, such a laughing and crying followed as might have made one wonder what would have happened if the girl had stayed away a year instead of a single summer. ”

“ Nobody quite suits all our moods. I wouldn’t reproach myself on that score, if I were you.”
“But it seems so disloyal, when it’s anybody—anybody that you really care a great deal about,” said Esther. Her mother’s smile kept its tinge of amusement, and the girl’s face grew more serious.
“I wonder sometimes if I’m made like other girls,” she said. “It isn’t just getting tired of people. It’s getting tired of things in general, and longing for something larger than anything that comes into my life. ”

“ There was silence for some time, then Esther said, with her eyes on the sky, over which the clouds were shifting uneasily, “Grandfather, do you think a person could have any doubt in his own mind as to which one of two people he cared for most, if—if he was really in love with either of them?”
“I ain’t sure but he might,” said the deacon, slowly. “It takes a good while to get acquainted with folks, and I don’t know but it’s about as hard sometimes to know your own mind, as ’tis to know anybody else’s—even if ’tis inside of you.” ”

“ The collection which Solomon Ridgeway drew from his box and spread before their dazzled eyes was a marvel of tinsel and glitter. There were brooches and rings and chains enough to have made the fortune of half a dozen pedlers; trumpery stuff, most of it, but what of that?
The owner was not one to let a carping world settle for him the value of his treasure. There was paste that gleamed like diamonds in settings burnished like the finest gold, and there were the colors of topaz and emerald and sapphire and ruby. Who cared whether they flashed in bits of glass or in stones drawn from the mines? ”

“ Some one has acutely remarked that people who break their usual habits by rising very early in the morning are apt to be a little conceited in the first part of the day and somewhat stupid in the last. There was certainly no lack of self-assurance in Kate Northmore, as she took that walk across the dewy fields, with the fresh air blowing on her face, and the twitter of birds sounding from the woods. Not till she actually stood at Aunt Katharine’s threshold was there any tremor of her nerves or any flutter at her heart. ”

“ It lays in a stiff-necked and perverse disposition. When she gets a notion into her head she won’t change it for anybody, and she’s wiser in her own conceit than ‘seven men that can render a reason.’”
“Grandfather himself frequently personates the whole seven,” observed Stella, with a nod at her cousins. She smiled, as if the memory of some past scenes amused her, then said soberly: “The fact of it is, Aunt Katharine is a regular crank. There’s nothing in this world that goes right according to her notion of it, but she’s particularly down on the ways of the men. ”

“ He was no mean chaperon in guiding others over the track of the past, and this afternoon he was at his best.
The old burying-ground lay on the edge of a pine wood, on the outskirts of the village. It was more than half a century since the sod had been disturbed, and grass and daisies possessed the paths which once lay plain between mounds which years had smoothed to almost the common level. There had been no encroachment of a growing town upon its borders to break its quiet with the noise and hurry of a strenuous life. ”

“ Esther was silent. There was no answer to this case of Jacob, dear old Jacob, a prince indeed, with all his meanness, since he could love like that!
“Do you suppose Aunt Katharine really cared for that man?” she asked after a moment.
“I guess most likely she did,” said her grandfather, nodding his head slowly. “She wasn’t the kind to say she’d marry a man unless she loved him. But she never made a sound after he left her. She held her head higher than ever, and the way she worked! You’d have thought she had the strength of ten women in her.” ”

“ It was Aunt Katharine that made her stay. Oh, if you knew Aunt Katharine! She’s a dreadfully strong-minded woman, and she’s taken a terrible fancy to Esther. She’d like to make her feel just as she does about woman’s rights, and never marrying, and all that sort of thing. She’s the one, not Mr. Hadley at all, that has such an influence over Esther.”
“Nonsense!” said Morton Elwell; and he said it with a sharpness that for an instant made Kate almost afraid of him. ”

“ The real happiness lay in doing with success the thing they cared to do. To know our work and do it, Esther, not the sort of work nor the reward, but the finding and doing—that is the true joy of the greatest, and it is open to us all.”
She had spoken with simple seriousness, as she always did when others brought her their troubles, however fanciful. ”

“ Kate had suggested solemnly.
“Then,” said Milly, lifting her finger, and shaking it with slow emphasis, “as sure’s you’re born that cake’ll fall in the pan an’ be sad. There can’t nothin’ on earth prevent it.”
“But that is such an uncertain way,” Kate had objected. “You can’t always tell whether or not a person loves you. Why don’t you name it for somebody that you love yourself? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The journey to New England was more than a mere interlude for the girls. It was a distinct pleasure in itself. To watch the low, rich landscape which had lain around them from their infancy change imperceptibly to one different and bolder; the broad fields narrowing; the long, rolling swells lifting into clear-cut hills; the forests of beech and oak, with smooth, sunlighted floors, giving place to woods filled with a bewitching tangle of vines and ferns—all this was a constant delight to travellers as fresh and unsated as ours. ”

“ The accomplishments of his cousin Kate were certainly out of the ordinary. He looked at her with a growing curiosity, then added loftily: “In this part of the country women don’t milk. We don’t think it’s their business.”
“Well, I’m glad you don’t,” said Kate; “but ’tisn’t such a queer thing for women to do as you seem to think. In most countries women generally do it.”
“I never heard of a woman milking before,” said Tom, doggedly.
Kate’s eyes grew big again. “Why, in stories they always do it,” she cried. ”

“ Here and there broad fields of wheat were already showing a tender green from the springing of the grain which had lain all winter under frost and snow, and between them new-ploughed fields sent up a pleasant smell, the wholesome smell of the kindly earth turning itself again to the sun and the rain. ”