Flood Tide | Page 4

fine day the house on the bluff would
come to dire disaster.
"Somebody's goin' to get hung or strangled on one of them contraptions
Willie's rigged up," Captain Phineas Taylor prophesied impressively to
Zenas Henry as the two men sat smoking in the lee of the wood pile.
"You watch out an' see if they don't."
Indeed there was no denying that Celestina was continually catching
hairpins, hooks, and buttons in the strings; or that some such dilemma
as had been predicted had actually occurred, for one day while alone in
the house a pin fastening the back of her print gown had become
inextricably entangled in the maze amid which she moved, and fearing
Willie's wrath if she should sunder her fetters she had been forced to
stand captive and helplessly witness a newly made sponge cake burn to
a crisp in the oven. She had hoped the ignominious episode would not
reach the outside world; but as Wilton was possessed of a miraculous
power for finding out things the story filtered through the community,
affording the village a laugh and the opportunity to affirm with
ominous shakings of the head that it was only because the Lord looked
out for fools and little children that a worse evil had not long ago
befallen the Spence household.
Willie accepted the banter in good part. Born with a forgiving,
noncombative disposition he seldom took offence and although Janoah
Eldridge, who knew him better perhaps than anyone else on earth did,
acclaimed that this tranquil exterior concealed, as did Tim
Linkinwater's, unsuspected depths of ferocity, Wilton had yet to
encounter its lionlike fury. Instead the mild little inventor, with his
spools and his pulleys, his bits of wire and his measureless reaches of
string, pursued his peaceful though tortuous way, and if his abode
became transformed into a magnified cobweb only himself and
Celestina were inconvenienced thereby.
To Celestina inconvenience was second nature since from the moment

of her birth it had been her lot in life. Arriving in the world prematurely
she had found nothing prepared for her coming and had been forced to
put up with such makeshifts for comfort as could be hurriedly
scrambled together. From that day until the present instant the same
fate had shadowed her path; perhaps it was in her stars. Her parents had
been of dilatory habits and by the time a crib with the necessary pillows
and bedding had been secured, and she had drawn a few peaceful
breaths therein a new baby had arrived and she had been ousted from
her resting place and compelled to surrender it to the more recent
comer. Ever since she had been shunted from pillar to post, sleeping on
cots, on couches, in folding beds and in hammocks, and keeping her
meager possessions in paste-board boxes tucked away beneath tables
and bureaus. Poised on the ragged edge of domesticity she continued
throughout her girlhood to look forward with hope to an eventual state
of permanence. When she was eighteen, however, her mother died and
in the task of bringing up six brothers and sisters younger than herself
all considerations for her personal ease were forgotten. Ten years
passed and her father was no more; than gradually, one after another,
the family she had so patiently reared took wing, leaving Celestina a
lonely spinster of fifty, homeless and practically penniless.
This cruel lack of responsibility on the part of her relatives resulted less
from a want of affection than from a supreme misunderstanding of their
older sister. So completely had Celestina learned to efface her
personality and her inclinations that they reasoned she was utterly
without preferences; that she lacked the homing instinct; and was quite
as happy in one place as in another. Having thus washed their hands of
her they proceeded to sell the Morton homestead and each one pocket
his share of the proceeds. Very scanty this inheritance was, so scanty
that it compelled Celestina to begin a rotation around the village, where
in return for shelter she filled in domestic gaps of various kinds. She
helped here, she helped there; she took care of babies, nursed the sick,
comforted the aged. On she moved from house to house, no enduring
foundation ever remaining beneath her feet. No sooner would she strike
her roots down into a congenial soil than she would be forced to pluck
them up again and find new earth to which to cling.

She might have married a dozen times during her youth had not her
conscience deterred her from deserting her father and the children left
to her care. In fact one persistent swain who refused to take "No" for an
answer had begged Celestina to wait and pray over the matter.
"I never trouble the Lord with things I