Flood Tide | Page 6

sisters could
have boasted. For disorder and confusion never kept Celestina awake
nights or prevented her from partaking of three hearty meals a day as it
would have Abbie Brewster or Deborah Howland. So long as things
were clean, their being an inch or two, or even a foot, out of plumb did
not worry the new inmate of the gray house an iota. And when Willie
was balked in an "idee" that had "kitched him," and left half-a-dozen
strings and wires swinging in mid-air for weeks together, Celestina
would patiently duck her head as she passed beneath them and offer no
protest more emphatic than to remark:
"Them strings hangin' down over the sink snare me every time I wash a
dish. Ain't you calculatin' ever to take 'em down, Willie?"
The reply vouchsafed would be as mild as the suggestion:
"I reckon they ain't there for eternity, Tiny," the inventor would
respond. "Like as not both you an' me will live to see 'em out of the
way."
That was all the satisfaction Celestina would get from her feeble
complaints; it was all she ever got. Yet in spite of the exasperating
response she adored Willie who had been to her the soul of kindliness
and courtesy ever since she had come to the bluff to live. He might
forget to come to his meals,--forget, in fact, whether he had eaten them
or not; he might venture forth into the village with one gray sock and
one blue one; or when part way to the post-office become lost in reverie
and return home again without ever reaching his destination. Such
incidents had happened and were likely to happen again. Nevertheless,
notwithstanding his absentmindedness, he was never too much
absorbed to maintain toward Celestina an old-fashioned deference very
appealing to one accustomed to being ignored and slighted.
The impulse, it was quite obvious, was prompted less by

conventionality than by a knightliness of heart, and Celestina, who had
never before been the recipient of such courtesies, found herself
inexpressibly touched by the trifling attentions. Often she speculated as
to whether this mental attitude toward all womanhood was one Willie
himself had evolved or whether it was the result of standards instilled
into his sensitive consciousness by the women who had been his
companions through life,--his mother, his aunt, his sister. Whichever
the case there was no question that the old man's bearing toward her
placed her on a pinnacle where gossip was silenced, and transformed
her humble ministrations from those of a hireling into acts of
graciousness and beauty.
Moreover to live in the same house with such an optimist was no
ordinary experience. Well Celestina remembered the day when at
dinner the little old man had choked violently, turning purple in the
face in his fight for breath. She had rushed to his side, terror-stricken,
but between his spasms of coughing the inventor had gasped out:
"Why make so much fuss over what's gone down the wrong way, Tiny?
Think--of--the--things--I've--swallered--all--these--years--that
have--gone down--right!"
The observation was characteristic of Willie's creed of life. He never
emphasized the exceptions but always the big, fine, elemental good in
everything.
Even the name by which he went had been bestowed on him by the
community as a term of endearment. There were, to be sure, other men
in the hamlet whose names had passed into diminutives. There was, for
example, Seth Crocker, whose wife explained that she called him
Sethie "for short." But Sethie's name was never pronounced with the
same affectionate drawl that Willie's was.
No, Willie had his peculiar niche in Wilton and a very sacred niche it
was.
What marvel, therefore, that Celestina reverenced the very earth which
he trod and cheerfully put up with the strings, the wires, the spools, the

tacks, and the pulleys; that she shifted the meals about to suit his
convenience; and that when she was awakened at midnight by a
rhythmic hammering which portended that the inventor had once again
"got kitched with a new idee" she smiled indulgently in the darkness
and instead of cursing the echoes that disturbed her slumber whispered
to herself Jan Eldridge's oft-repeated prediction that the day would
come when Willie Spence would astonish the scoffers of Wilton and
would make his mark.
CHAPTER II
WILLIE HAS AN IDEE
On a day in June so clear that a sea gull loomed mammoth against the
sky; a day when a sail against the horizon was visible for miles; a day
when the whole world seemed swept and garnished as for a festival,
Zenas Henry Brewster drew rein before the Spence cottage, hitched the
Admiral to the picket fence that bordered the highway, and ascending
the bank which sloped abruptly to the road presented himself at the
kitchen door from which issued the