The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett [classic english novels .txt] 📗

she an’ William’ll sing for you. She admires music,” said Mrs. Todd, turning to speak to her mother.

But Mrs. Blackett tried to say that she couldn’t sing as she used, and perhaps William wouldn’t feel like it. She looked tired, the good old soul, or I should have liked to sit in the peaceful little house while she slept; I had had much pleasant experience of pastures already in her daughter’s company. But it seemed best to go with Mrs. Todd, and off we went.

Mrs. Todd carried the gingham bag which she had brought from home, and a small heavy burden in the bottom made it hang straight and slender from her hand. The way was steep, and she soon grew breathless, so that we sat down to rest awhile on a convenient large stone among the bayberry.

“There, I wanted you to see this⁠—’tis mother’s picture,” said Mrs. Todd; “ ’twas taken once when she was up to Portland soon after she was married. That’s me,” she added, opening another worn case, and displaying the full face of the cheerful child she looked like still in spite of being past sixty. “And here’s William an’ father together. I take after father, large and heavy, an’ William is like mother’s folks, short an’ thin. He ought to have made something o’ himself, bein’ a man an’ so like mother; but though he’s been very steady to work, an’ kept up the farm, an’ done his fishin’ too right along, he never had mother’s snap an’ power o’ seein’ things just as they be. He’s got excellent judgment, too,” meditated William’s sister, but she could not arrive at any satisfactory decision upon what she evidently thought his failure in life. “I think it is well to see anyone so happy an’ makin’ the most of life just as it falls to hand,” she said as she began to put the daguerreotypes away again; but I reached out my hand to see her mother’s once more, a most flowerlike face of a lovely young woman in quaint dress. There was in the eyes a look of anticipation and joy, a far-off look that sought the horizon; one often sees it in seafaring families, inherited by girls and boys alike from men who spend their lives at sea, and are always watching for distant sails or the first loom of the land. At sea there is nothing to be seen close by, and this has its counterpart in a sailor’s character, in the large and brave and patient traits that are developed, the hopeful pleasantness that one loves so in a seafarer.

When the family pictures were wrapped again in a big handkerchief, we set forward in a narrow footpath and made our way to a lonely place that faced northward, where there was more pasturage and fewer bushes, and we went down to the edge of short grass above some rocky cliffs where the deep sea broke with a great noise, though the wind was down and the water looked quiet a little way from shore. Among the grass grew such pennyroyal as the rest of the world could not provide. There was a fine fragrance in the air as we gathered it sprig by sprig and stepped along carefully, and Mrs. Todd pressed her aromatic nosegay between her hands and offered it to me again and again.

“There’s nothin’ like it,” she said; “oh no, there’s no such pennyr’yal as this in the state of Maine. It’s the right pattern of the plant, and all the rest I ever see is but an imitation. Don’t it do you good?” And I answered with enthusiasm.

“There, dear, I never showed nobody else but mother where to find this place; ’tis kind of sainted to me. Nathan, my husband, an’ I used to love this place when we was courtin’, and”⁠—she hesitated, and then spoke softly⁠—“when he was lost, ’twas just off shore tryin’ to get in by the short channel out there between Squaw Islands, right in sight o’ this headland where we’d set an’ made our plans all summer long.”

I had never heard her speak of her husband before, but I felt that we were friends now since she had brought me to this place.

“ ’Twas but a dream with us,” Mrs. Todd said. “I knew it when he was gone. I knew it”⁠—and she whispered as if she were at confession⁠—“I knew it afore he started to go to sea. My heart was gone out o’ my keepin’ before I ever saw Nathan; but he loved me well, and he made me real happy, and he died before he ever knew what he’d had to know if we’d lived long together. ’Tis very strange about love. No, Nathan never found out, but my heart was troubled when I knew him first. There’s more women likes to be loved than there is of those that loves. I spent some happy hours right here. I always liked Nathan, and he never knew. But this pennyr’yal always reminded me, as I’d sit and gather it and hear him talkin’⁠—it always would remind me of⁠—the other one.”

She looked away from me, and presently rose and went on by herself. There was something lonely and solitary about her great determined shape. She might have been Antigone alone on the Theban plain. It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence. An absolute, archaic grief possessed this countrywoman; she seemed like a renewal of some historic soul, with her sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs.

I was not incompetent at herb-gathering, and after a while, when I had sat long enough waking myself to new thoughts, and reading a page of remembrance with new pleasure, I gathered some bunches, as I was bound to do, and at last we met again higher up the shore, in the plain everyday world we had left behind when we went down