Tiverton Tales | Page 9

we're married, an' come over here to spy out the land.
He hates the cold. He never stirs till 'way on into June; an' now he's
come to find out."
"Find out what?" inquired Enoch absorbedly. "Well, if you're anyways
put to 't, you send him to me." That manly utterance enunciated from a
"best-room" sofa, by an Enoch clad in his Sunday suit, would have
filled Amelia with rapture; she could have leaned on it as on the Tables
of the Law. But, alas! the scene-setting was meagre, and though Enoch
was very clean, he had no good clothes. He had pointedly refused to
buy them with his wife's money until he should have worked on the
farm to a corresponding amount. She had loved him for it; but every
day his outer poverty hurt her pride. "I guess you better ask him in,"
concluded Enoch. "Don't you let him bother you."
Amelia turned about with the grand air of a woman repulsed.
"He don't bother me," said she, "an' I will let him in." She walked to the
door, stepping on buttons as she went, and conscious, when she broke
them, of a bitter pleasure. It added to her martyrdom.

She flung open the door, and called herself a fool in the doing; for the
little old man outside was in the act of turning away. In another instant,
she might have escaped. But he was only too eager to come back again,
and it seemed to Amelia as if he would run over her, in his desire to get
in.
"There! there! 'Melia," said he, pushing past her, "can't stop to talk till I
git near the fire. Guess you were settin' in the kitchen, wa'n't ye? Don't
make no stranger o' me. That your man?"
She had shut the door, and entered, exasperated anew by the rising
wind. "That's my husband," said she coldly. "Enoch, here's cousin
Josiah Pease."
Enoch looked up benevolently over his spectacles, and put out a horny
left hand, the while the other guarded his heap of treasures. "Pleased to
meet you, sir," said he. "You see I'm tinkerin' a clock."
To Enoch, the explanation was enough. All the simple conventions of
his life might well wait upon a reason potent as this. Josiah Pease went
to the stove, and stood holding his tremulous hands over a cover. He
was a little man, eclipsed in a butternut coat of many capes, and his
parchment face shaded gradually up from it, as if into a harder medium.
His eyes were light, and they had an exceedingly uncomfortable way of
darting from one thing to another, like some insect born to spear and
sting. His head was entirely bald, all save a thin fringe of hair not worth
mentioning, since it disappeared so effectually beneath his collar; and
his general antiquity was grotesquely emphasized by two sets of
aggressive teeth, displaying their falsity from every crown.
Amelia took out the broom, and began sweeping up buttons. She had an
acrid consciousness that by sacrificing them she was somehow
completing the tragedy of her day. Rosie gave a little cry; but Amelia
pointed to the corner where stood the child's chair, exhumed from the
attic, after forty years of rest. "You set there," she said, in an undertone,
"an' keep still."
Rosie obeyed without a word. Such an atmosphere had not enveloped

her since she entered this wonderful house. Remembering vaguely the
days when her own mother had "spells," and she and her father effaced
themselves until times should change, she folded her little hands, and
lapsed back into a condition of mental servitude.
Meanwhile, Amelia followed nervously in the track of Enoch's talk
with cousin Josiah, though her mind kept its undercurrent of foolish
musing. Like all of us, snatched up by the wheels of great emergencies,
she caught at trifles while they whirled her round. Here were
"soldier-buttons." All the other girls had collected them, though she,
having no lover in the war, had traded for her few. Here were the
gold-stones that held her changeable silk, there the little clouded pearls
from her sister's raglan. Annie had died in youth; its glamour still
enwrapped her. Poor Annie! But Rosie had seemed to bring her back.
Amelia swept litter, buttons and all, into the dustpan, and marched to
the stove to throw her booty in. Nobody marked her save Rosie, whose
playthings were endangered; but Enoch's very obtuseness to the
situation was what stayed her hand. She carried the dustpan away into a
closet, and came back, to gather up her tins. A cold rage of nervousness
beset her, so overpowering that she herself was amazed at it.
Meantime, Josiah Pease had divested himself of his coat, and drawn the
grandfather chair into a space