The Choir Invisible | Page 9

johnny-cake already
made, I could easily take it along."
"My johnny-cakes do not bear transportation."
"I wouldn't transport it far, you know."
"Do stay! Major Falconer will be so disappointed. He said at dinner
there were so many things he wanted to talk to you about. He has been
looking for you to come out. And, then, we have had no news for
weeks. The major has been too busy to go to town; and I!--I am as dry
as one of the gourds of Confucius."
His thoughts settled contentedly upon her once more and his face
cleared.
"I can't stay to supper, but I'll keep the Indians away till the major
comes," he said. "What were you thinking of when I surprised you?"
"What was I thinking of?" She stopped working while she repeated his
words and folded her hands about the handle of the rake as if to rest
awhile. A band of her soft, shining hair, loosened by its own weight
when she had bent over to thin some seed carelessly scattered in the
furrow, now fell across her forehead. She pushed her bonnet back and
stood gathering it a little absently into its place with the tips of her
fingers. Meanwhile he could see that her eyes rested upon the edge of
the wilderness. It seemed to him that she must be thinking of that; and

he noted with pain, as often before, the contrast between her and her
surroundings. From every direction the forest appeared to be rushing in
upon that perilous little reef of a clearing--that unsheltered island of
human life, newly displaying itself amid the ancient, blood-flecked,
horror-haunted sea of woods. And shipwrecked on this island, tossed to
it by one of the long tidal waves of history, there to remain in exile
from the manners, the refinement, the ease, the society to which she
had always been accustomed, this remarkable gentlewoman.
III
HE had learned a great deal about her past, and held it mirrored in his
memory. The general picture of it rose before his eyes now, as he
leaned on the fence this pleasant afternoon in May and watched her
restoring to its place, with delicate strokes of her finger-tips, the lock of
her soft, shining hair.How could any one so fine have thriven amid
conditions so exhausting? Those hard toiling fingers, now grasping the
heavy hoe, once used to tinkle over the spinet; the small, sensitive feet,
now covered with coarse shoe-packs tied with leather thongs, once
shone in rainbow hues of satin slippers and silken hose. A sunbonnet
for the tiara of osprey plumes; a dress spun and woven by her own hand
out of her own flax, instead of the stiff brocade; log hut for
manor-house; one negro boy instead of troops of servants: to have
possessed all that, to have been brought down to all this, and not to
have been ruined by it, never to have lost distinction or been coarsened
by coarseness never to have parted with grace of manner or grace of
spirit, or been bent or broken or overclouded in character and ideals,--it
was all this that made her in his eyes a great woman, a great lady.
He held her in such reverence that, as he caught the serious look in her
eyes at his impulsive question, he was sorry he had asked it: the last
thing he could ever have thought of doing would have been to intrude
upon the privacy of her reflections. "What was I thinking of?"
There was a short silence and then she turned to him eagerly, brightly,
with an entire change of voice and expression-- "But the news from
town--you haven't told me the news." "Oh, there is any amount of
news!" he cried, glad of a chance to retreat from his intrusion. And he

began lightly, recklessly: "A bookbinder has opened a shop on Cross
Street--a capital hand at the business, by the name of Leischman--and
he will bind books at the regular market prices in exchange for linen
rags, maple sugar, and goose-quills. I advise you to keep an eye on
your geese, if the major once takes a notion to have his old Shakespeare
and his other volumes, that had their bindings knocked off in crossing
the Alleghanies, elegantly rebound. You can tell him also that after a
squirrel-hunt in Bourbon County the farmers counted scalps, and they
numbered five thousand five hundred and eighty-nine; so that he is not
the only one who has trouble with his corn. And then you can tell him
that on the common the other day Nelson Tapp and Willis Tandy had a
fearful fight over a land-suit. Now it was Tandy and Tapp; now it was
Tapp and Tandy; but they went off at last and drowned