If You Touch Them They Vanish | Page 3

"you're a bird. I wish I'd met you when I was a baby."
And she answered:
"Don't be thrackin' mud into the study." And then, "Mister Cotter," she said, "if ye have a heart in your body, put it into the furnace flue. It was always a bad egg for drawin', and betimes the snow will lie six feet deep in the valley."
"I'll put my heart and soul in that flue, Martha, for your sake, and we'll put it to the ordeal by fire. But who's to feed the furnace?"
"Who's to feed the furnace!" she put back her head and laughed. "Who but love, young man? Love will feed the furnace, press the trousers, and clean the boots. There will be no one to care for him but me. Mind that. No one but old Martha. Twenty year I've shed be the knowledge. It's no mere woman ye behold, Mister Cotter, 't is an army!"
"By Jove," he said, "I believe you."
And he passed out with his measuring-stick into the bright sunlight. And there stood, drawing deep breaths of the racy September air, and filling his eyes almost to overflowing with the magic beauty of the valley.
It spread away southward from the base of the cliff upon which he stood, melting at last into blue distance; an open valley studded with groups of astounding trees which were all scarlet and gold. Mountains, deep-green, purple, pale-violet, framed the valley, and through its midst was flung a bright blue necklace of long lakes and serpentine rivers. In the nearest and largest lake, towering castles of white cloud came continuously and went. Very far off, browsing among lily pads, Mr. Cotter could see a cow moose and her calf. And, high over his head, there passed presently a string of black duck. He could hear the strong beating of their wings.
Mr. Cotter was a practical man.
"Why the hell did he do it?" he mused. "He might have married, and wanted a real house in this paradise, and told me to go as far as I liked. He'd have asked us all up to stay--and now, my God! all it can ever be is a cage for a jail-bird."
When at last the cottage was in exquisite order, old Martha sent the others away and stayed on alone. In her room she had an elaborate calendar. To each day was tacked the name of its patron saint.
The old woman was religious, but every night she drew her pencil through the name of a saint, and the days passed, and the Poor Boy's term in prison drew swiftly to an end.
"Monday week," she said. "Next Monday." "Day after to-morrow." "To-morrow." "O Father of mine in heaven; O saints; O Mother heart--to-day!"

III
Old Martha wondered if the Poor Boy would have a smile for her. She imagined that he would look sick and broken, and that if he smiled at all it would be the bitter smile of the wronged. She imagined that he would wear ready-made clothes supplied by the prison authorities; and that he would no longer walk erect, upon swift feet, but bowed over, with dragging steps.
When he came at last what profoundly shocked her was none of this; but that to the superficial eye he had not changed at all. His hair, perhaps, was a little shorter than she remembered; his face was not exactly pale; it was more as if he had sat up too late, and was having an off day. As for the smile for which she hoped and longed, it began when he saw her running toward him, very swiftly for a heavy old woman, and it ended on her cheek.
"My old dear!" he said.
He took her hand and swung it as children do, and walked beside her into the cottage.
The spickness and spanness of it smote him between the eyes; the imagination and the taste which had changed it from a hunting-lodge into a gentleman's house, and the tact which had done away with the photographs of friends, and all things that could remind him of old days. He passed the whole house in review from top to bottom, and gratitude to the old servant grew very warm in the tired heart.
They stepped out from the living-room to the edge of the cliff and looked down the great valley.
"There was no time," said Martha, tremulous with joy, for she had been much praised, "to put the landscape to rights."
The Poor Boy looked up into the blue vault of heaven.
"Stone walls," he said, "and that, have been my landscape."
"But now," she said, "any day you like you can view the world from here to the North Pole."
He smiled.
"That way's south, Martha," he said, "but it will do. We own all the way to the ocean that way; but north only to the lake