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

o’ gift to make it pleasant for folks. I guess likely Almiry Todd told you she was a pretty woman, especially in her young days; late years, too, she kep’ her looks and come to be so pleasant lookin’. There, ’tain’t so much matter, I shall be done afore a great while. No; I shan’t trouble the fish a great sight more.”

The old widower sat with his head bowed over his knitting, as if he were hastily shortening the very thread of time. The minutes went slowly by. He stopped his work and clasped his hands firmly together. I saw he had forgotten his guest, and I kept the afternoon watch with him. At last he looked up as if but a moment had passed of his continual loneliness.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m one that has seen trouble,” he said, and began to knit again.

The visible tribute of his careful housekeeping, and the clean bright room which had once enshrined his wife, and now enshrined her memory, was very moving to me; he had no thought for anyone else or for any other place. I began to see her myself in her home⁠—a delicate-looking, faded little woman, who leaned upon his rough strength and affectionate heart, who was always watching for his boat out of this very window, and who always opened the door and welcomed him when he came home.

“I used to laugh at her, poor dear,” said Elijah, as if he read my thought. “I used to make light of her timid notions. She used to be fearful when I was out in bad weather or baffled about gittin’ ashore. She used to say the time seemed long to her, but I’ve found out all about it now. I used to be dreadful thoughtless when I was a young man and the fish was bitin’ well. I’d stay out late some o’ them days, an’ I expect she’d watch an’ watch an’ lose heart a-waitin’. My heart alive! what a supper she’d git, an’ be right there watchin’ from the door, with somethin’ over her head if ’twas cold, waitin’ to hear all about it as I come up the field. Lord, how I think o’ all them little things!”

“This was what she called the best room; in this way,” he said presently, laying his knitting on the table, and leading the way across the front entry and unlocking a door, which he threw open with an air of pride. The best room seemed to me a much sadder and more empty place than the kitchen; its conventionalities lacked the simple perfection of the humbler room and failed on the side of poor ambition; it was only when one remembered what patient saving, and what high respect for society in the abstract go to such furnishing that the little parlor was interesting at all. I could imagine the great day of certain purchases, the bewildering shops of the next large town, the aspiring anxious woman, the clumsy sea-tanned man in his best clothes, so eager to be pleased, but at ease only when they were safe back in the sailboat again, going down the bay with their precious freight, the hoarded money all spent and nothing to think of but tiller and sail. I looked at the unworn carpet, the glass vases on the mantelpiece with their prim bunches of bleached swamp grass and dusty marsh rosemary, and I could read the history of Mrs. Tilley’s best room from its very beginning.

“You see for yourself what beautiful rugs she could make; now I’m going to show you her best tea things she thought so much of,” said the master of the house, opening the door of a shallow cupboard. “That’s real chiny, all of it on those two shelves,” he told me proudly. “I bought it all myself, when we was first married, in the port of Bordeaux. There never was one single piece of it broke until⁠—Well, I used to say, long as she lived, there never was a piece broke, but long at the last I noticed she’d look kind o’ distressed, an’ I thought ’twas ’count o’ me boastin’. When they asked if they should use it when the folks was here to supper, time o’ her funeral, I knew she’d want to have everything nice, and I said ‘certain.’ Some o’ the women they come runnin’ to me an’ called me, while they was takin’ of the chiny down, an’ showed me there was one o’ the cups broke an’ the pieces wropped in paper and pushed way back here, corner o’ the shelf. They didn’t want me to go an’ think they done it. Poor dear! I had to put right out o’ the house when I see that. I knowed in one minute how ’twas. We’d got so used to sayin’ ’twas all there just’s I fetched it home, an’ so when she broke that cup somehow or ’nother she couldn’t frame no words to come an’ tell me. She couldn’t think ’twould vex me, ’twas her own hurt pride. I guess there wa’n’t no other secret ever lay between us.”

The French cups with their gay sprigs of pink and blue, the best tumblers, an old flowered bowl and tea caddy, and a japanned waiter or two adorned the shelves. These, with a few daguerreotypes in a little square pile, had the closet to themselves, and I was conscious of much pleasure in seeing them. One is shown over many a house in these days where the interest may be more complex, but not more definite.

“Those were her best things, poor dear,” said Elijah as he locked the door again. “She told me that last summer before she was taken away that she couldn’t think o’ anything more she wanted, there was everything in the house, an’ all her rooms was furnished pretty. I was goin’ over to the Port, an’ inquired for errands. I used to ask her to say what she wanted, cost