“You see the rugs, poor dear did them; she wa’n’t very partial to knittin’,” old Elijah went on, after he had counted his stitches. “Our rugs is beginnin’ to show wear, but I can’t master none o’ them womanish tricks. My sister, she tinkers ‘em up. She said last time she was here that she guessed they’d last my time.”
“The old ones are always the prettiest,” I said.
“You ain’t referrin’ to the braided ones now?” answered Mr. Tilley. “You see ours is braided for the most part, an’ their good looks is all in the beginnin’. Poor dear used to say they made an easier floor. I go shufflin’ round the house same’s if ‘twas a bo’t, and I always used to be stubbin’ up the corners o’ the hooked kind. Her an’ me was always havin’ our jokes together same’s a boy an’ girl. Outsiders never’d know nothin’ about it to see us. She had nice manners with all, but to me there was nobody so entertainin’. She’d take off anybody’s natural talk winter evenin’s when we set here alone, so you’d think ‘twas them a-speakin’. There, there!”
I saw that he had dropped a stitch again, and was snarling the blue yarn round his clumsy fingers. He handled it and threw it off at arm’s length as if it were a cod line; and frowned impatiently, but I saw a tear shining on his cheek.
I said that I must be going, it was growing late, and asked if I might come again, and if he would take me out to the fishing grounds someday.
“Yes, come any time you want to,” said my host, “‘tain’t so pleasant as when poor dear was here. Oh, I didn’t want to lose her an’ she didn’t want to go, but it had to be. Such things ain’t for us to say; there’s no yes an’ no to it.”
“You find Almiry Todd one o’ the best o’ women?” said Mr. Tilley as we parted. He was standing in the doorway and I had started off down the narrow green field. “No, there ain’t a better hearted woman in the State o’ Maine. I’ve known her from a girl. She’s had the best o’ mothers. You tell her I’m liable to fetch her up a couple or three nice good mackerel early tomorrow,” he said. “Now don’t let it slip your mind. Poor dear, she always thought a sight o’ Almiry, and she used to remind me there was nobody to fish for her; but I don’t rec’lect it as I ought to. I see you drop a line yourself very handy now an’ then.”
We laughed together like the best of friends, and I spoke again about the fishing grounds, and confessed that I had no fancy for a southerly breeze and a ground swell.
“Nor me neither,” said the old fisherman. “Nobody likes ‘em, say what they may. Poor dear was disobliged by the mere sight of a bo’t. Almiry’s got the best o’ mothers, I expect you know; Mis’ Blackett out to Green Island; and we was always plannin’ to go out when summer come; but there, I couldn’t pick no day’s weather that seemed to suit her just right. I never set out to worry her neither, ‘twa’n’t no kind o’ use; she was so pleasant we couldn’t have no fret nor trouble. ‘Twas never ‘you dear an’ you darlin’’ afore folks, an’ ‘you divil’ behind the door!”
As I looked back from the lower end of the field I saw him still standing, a lonely figure in the doorway. “Poor dear,” I repeated to myself half aloud; “I wonder where she is and what she knows of the little world she left. I wonder what she has been doing these eight years!”
I gave the message about the mackerel to Mrs. Todd.
“Been visitin’ with ‘Lijah?” she asked with interest. “I expect you had kind of a dull session; he ain’t the talkin’ kind; dwellin’ so much long o’ fish seems to make ‘em lose the gift o’ speech.” But when I told her that Mr. Tilley had been talking to me that day, she interrupted me quickly.
“Then ‘twas all about his wife, an’ he can’t say nothin’ too pleasant neither. She was modest with strangers, but there ain’t one o’ her old friends can ever make up her loss. For me, I don’t want to go there no more. There’s some folks you miss and some folks you don’t, when they’re gone, but there ain’t hardly a day I don’t think o’ dear Sarah Tilley. She was always right there; yes, you knew just where to find her like a plain flower. ‘Lijah’s worthy enough; I do esteem ‘Lijah, but he’s a ploddin’ man.”
XXI. The Backward View
AT LAST IT WAS the time of late summer, when the house was cool and damp in the morning, and all the light seemed to come through green leaves; but at the first step out of doors the sunshine always laid a warm hand on my shoulder, and the clear, high sky seemed to lift quickly as I looked at it. There was no autumnal mist on the coast, nor any August fog; instead of these, the sea, the sky, all the long shore line and the inland hills, with every bush of bay and every fir-top, gained a deeper color and a sharper clearness. There was something shining in the air, and a kind of lustre on the water and the pasture grass,—a northern look that, except at this moment of the year, one must go far to seek. The sunshine of a northern summer was coming to its lovely end.
The days were few then at Dunnet Landing, and I let each of them slip away unwillingly as a miser spends his coins. I wished to have one of my first weeks back again, with those long hours when nothing happened except the growth of herbs and the course of the sun. Once I had not even known where to go for a walk; now there were many delightful things to be done and done again, as if I were in London. I felt hurried and full of pleasant engagements, and the days flew by like a handful of flowers flung to the sea wind.
At last I had to say good-by to all my Dunnet Landing friends, and my homelike place in the little house, and return to the world in which I feared to find myself a foreigner. There may be restrictions to such a summer’s happiness, but the ease that belongs to simplicity is charming enough to make up for whatever a simple life may lack, and the gifts of peace are not for those who live in the thick of battle.
I was to take the small unpunctual steamer that went down the bay in the afternoon, and I sat for a while by my window looking out on the green herb garden, with regret for company. Mrs. Todd had hardly spoken all day except in the briefest and most disapproving way; it was as if we were on the edge of a quarrel. It seemed impossible to take my departure with anything like composure. At last I heard a footstep, and looked up to find that Mrs. Todd was standing at the door.
“I’ve seen to everything now,” she told me in an unusually loud and business-like voice. “Your trunks are on the w’arf by this time. Cap’n Bowden he come and took ‘em down himself, an’ is going to see that they’re safe aboard. Yes, I’ve seen to all your ‘rangements,” she repeated in a gentler tone. “These things I’ve left on the kitchen table you’ll want to carry by hand; the basket needn’t be returned. I guess I shall walk over towards the Port now an’ inquire how old Mis’ Edward Caplin is.”
I glanced at my friend’s face, and saw a look that touched me to the heart. I had been sorry enough before to go away.
“I guess you’ll excuse me if I ain’t down there to stand around on the w’arf and see you go,” she said, still trying to be gruff. “Yes, I ought to go over and inquire for Mis’ Edward Caplin; it’s her third shock, and if mother gets in on Sunday she’ll want to know just how the old lady is.” With this last word Mrs. Todd turned and left me as if with sudden thought of something she had forgotten, so that I felt sure she was coming back, but presently I heard her go out of the kitchen door and walk down the path toward the gate. I could not part so; I ran after her to say good-by, but she shook her head and waved her hand without looking back when she heard my hurrying steps, and so went away down the street.
When I went in again the little house had suddenly grown lonely, and my room looked empty as it had the day I came. I and all my belongings had died out of it, and I knew how it would seem when Mrs. Todd came back and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.
I found the little packages on the kitchen table. There was a quaint West Indian basket which I knew its owner had valued, and which I had once admired; there was an affecting provision laid beside it for my seafaring supper, with a neatly tied bunch of southernwood and a twig of bay, and a little old leather box which held the coral pin that Nathan Todd brought home to give to poor Joanna.
There was still an hour to wait, and I went up the hill just above the schoolhouse and sat there thinking of things, and looking off to sea, and watching for the boat to come in sight. I could see Green Island, small and darkly wooded at that distance; below me were the houses of the village with their apple-trees and bits of garden ground. Presently, as I looked at the pastures beyond, I caught a last glimpse of Mrs. Todd herself, walking slowly in the footpath that led along, following the shore toward the Port. At such a distance one can feel the large, positive qualities that control a character. Close at hand, Mrs. Todd seemed able and warm-hearted and quite absorbed in her bustling industries, but her distant figure looked mateless and appealing, with something about it that was strangely self-possessed and mysterious. Now and then she stooped to pick something,—it might have been her favorite pennyroyal,—and at last I lost sight of her as she slowly crossed an open space on one of the higher points of land, and disappeared again behind a dark clump of juniper and the pointed firs.
As I came away on the little coastwise steamer, there was an old sea running which made the surf leap high on all the rocky shores. I stood on deck, looking back, and watched the busy gulls agree and turn, and sway together down the long slopes of air, then separate hastily and plunge into the waves. The tide was setting in, and plenty of small fish were coming with it, unconscious of the silver flashing of the great birds overhead and the quickness of their fierce beaks. The sea was full of life and spirit, the tops of the waves flew back as if they were winged like the gulls themselves, and like them had the freedom of the wind. Out in the main channel we passed a bent-shouldered old fisherman bound for the evening round among his lobster traps. He was toiling along with short oars, and the dory tossed and sank and tossed again with the steamer’s waves. I saw that it was old Elijah Tilley, and though we had so long been strangers we had come to be warm friends, and I wished that he had waited for one of his mates, it was such hard work to row along shore through rough seas and tend the traps alone. As we passed I waved my hand and tried to call to him, and he looked up and answered my farewells by a solemn nod. The little town, with the tall masts of its disabled schooners in the inner bay, stood high above the flat sea for a few minutes then it sank back into the uniformity of the coast, and became indistinguishable from the other towns that looked as if they were crumbled on the furzy-green stoniness of the shore.
The small outer islands of the bay were covered among the ledges with turf that looked as fresh as the early grass; there had been some days of rain the week before, and the darker green of the sweet-fern was scattered on all the pasture heights. It looked like the beginning of summer ashore, though the sheep, round and warm in their winter wool, betrayed the season of the year as they went feeding along the slopes in the low afternoon sunshine. Presently the wind began to blow and we struck out seaward to double the long sheltering headland of the cape, and when I looked back again, the islands and the headland had run together and Dunnet Landing and all its coasts were lost to sight.