Tiverton Tales | Page 7

after six
months of blameless happiness, had sent him raging home, to kill her
"in her tracks." Could a tramp, pledged to the traditions of an awful
brotherhood, do less? No, even in honor, no! Amelia never knew how
the tide of public apprehension surged about her, nor how her next-door
neighbor looked anxiously out, the first thing on rising, to exclaim,
with a sigh of relief, and possibly a dramatic pang, "There! her smoke's
a-goin'."
Meantime, the tramp fell into all the usages of life indoors; and without,
he worked revolution. He took his natural place at the head of affairs,
and Amelia stood by, rejoicing. Her besetting error of doing things at
the wrong moment had disarranged great combinations as well as small.
Her impetuosity was constantly misleading her, bidding her try, this
one time, whether harvest might not follow faster on the steps of spring.
Enoch's mind was of another cast. For him, tradition reigned, and law
was ever laying out the way. Some months after their marriage, Amelia
had urged him to take away the winter banking about the house, for no
reason save that the Mardens clung to theirs; but he only replied that
he'd known of cold snaps way on into May, and he guessed there was
no particular hurry. The very next day brought a bitter air, laden with
sleet, and Amelia, shivering at the open door, exulted in her feminine
soul at finding him triumphant on his own ground. Enoch seemed, as
usual, unconscious of victory. His immobility had no personal flavor.
He merely acted from an inevitable devotion to the laws of life; and
however often they might prove him right, he never seemed to reason
that Amelia was consequently wrong. Perhaps that was what made it so
pleasant to live with him.
It was "easy sleddin'" now. Amelia grew very young. Her cheeks
gained a bloom, her eyes brightened. She even, as the matrons noticed,
took to crimping her hair. They looked on with a pitying awe. It
seemed a fearsome thing, to do so much for a tramp who would only
kill you in the end. Amelia stepped deftly about the house. She was a
large woman, whose ways had been devoid of grace; but now the
richness of her spiritual condition informed her with a charm. She
crooned a little about her work. Singing voice she had none, but she

grew into a way of putting words together, sometimes a line from the
psalms, sometimes a name she loved, and chanting the sounds, in
unrecorded melody. Meanwhile, little Rosie, always irreproachably
dressed, with a jealous care lest she fall below the popular standard,
roamed in and out of the house, and lightened its dull intervals. She,
like the others, grew at once very happy, because, like them, she
accepted her place without a qualm, as if it had been hers from the
beginning. They were simple natures, and when their joy came, they
knew how to meet it.
But if Enoch was content to follow the beaten ways of life, there was
one window through which he looked into the upper heaven of all:
thereby he saw what it is to create. He was a born mechanician. A
revolving wheel would set him to dreaming, and still him to that
lethargy of mind which is an involuntary sharing in the things that are.
He could lose himself in the life of rhythmic motion; and when he
discovered rusted springs, or cogs unprepared to fulfill their purpose,
he fell upon them with the ardor of a worshiper, and tried to set them
right. Amelia thought he should have invented something, and he
confessed that he had invented many things, but somehow failed in
getting them on the market. That process he mentioned with the
indifference of a man to whom a practical outcome is vague, and who
finds in the ideal a bright reality. Even Amelia could see that to be a
maker was his joy; to reap rewards of making was another and a lower
task.
One cold day in the early spring, he went "up garret" to hunt out an old
saddle, gathering mildew there, and came upon a greater treasure, a
disabled clock. He stepped heavily down, bearing it aloft in both hands.
"See here, 'Melia," asked he, "why don't this go?"
Amelia was scouring tins on the kitchen table. There was a teasing
wind outside, with a flurry of snow, and she had acknowledged that the
irritating weather made her as nervous as a witch. So she had taken to a
job to quiet herself.
"That clock?" she replied. "That was gran'ther Eli's. It give up strikin',

an' then the hands stuck, an' I lost all patience with it. So I bought this
nickel one, an' carted