i don't know how all this is going to end, and i wish my mind wasn't in a kind of tingle. however, i'll do the best i can and not hold myself at all responsible for myself, and then who will there be to blame?
there are a great many kinds of good-feeling in this world, from radiant joy down to perfect bliss; but this spring i have got an attack of just old-fashioned happiness that looks as if it might become chronic.
i am so happy that i planted my garden all crooked, my eyes upon the clouds with the birds sailing against them, and when i became conscious i found wicked flaunting poppies sprouted right up against the sweet modest clove-pinks, while the whole paper of bachelor's-buttons was sowed over everything—which i immediately began to dig right up again, blushing furiously to myself over the trowel, and glad that i had caught myself before they grew up to laugh in my face. however, i got that laugh anyway, and i might just as well have left them, for billy ran to the gate and called dr. john to come in and make molly stop digging up his buttons. billy claims everything in this garden, and he thought they would grow up into the kind of buttons you pop out of a gun.
"so you're digging up the bachelor-buttons, mrs. molly?" the doctor asked as he leaned over the gate. i went on digging without looking up at him. i couldn't look up because i was blushing still worse. sometimes i hate that man, and if he wasn't billy's father i wouldn't be as friendly with him as i am. but somebody has to look after billy.
i believe it will be a real relief to write down how i feel about him in his old book, and i shall do it whenever i can't stand him any longer; and if he gave the horrid, red leather thing to me to make me miserable he can't do it; not this spring! i wish i dare burn it up and forget about it, but i daren't! this record on the first page is enough to reduce me—to tears, and i wonder why it doesn't.
i weigh one hundred and sixty pounds, set down in black and white, and it is a tragedy! i don't believe that man at the weighing machine is so very reliable in his weights, though he had a very pleasant smile while he was weighing me. still, i had better get some scales of my own, smiles are so deceptive.
i am five feet three inches tall or short, whichever way one looks at me. i thought i was taller, but i suppose i shall have to believe my own yardstick.
but as to my waist measure, i positively refuse to write that down, even if i have half promised dr. john a dozen times over to do it, while i only really left him to suppose i would. it is bad enough to know that your belt has to be reduced to twenty-three inches without putting down how much it measures now in figures to insult yourself with. no, i intend to have this for my happy spring.
yes, i suppose it would have been lots better for my happiness if i had kept quiet about it all, but at the time i thought i had better consult him over the matter. now i'm sorry i did. that is one thing about being a widow, you are accustomed to consulting a man, whether you want to or not, and you can't get over the habit immediately. poor mr. carter, my husband, hasn't been dead much over six years, and i must be missing him most awfully, though just lately i can't remember not to forget about him a great deal of the time.
still, that letter was enough to upset anybody, and no wonder i ran right across my garden, through billy's hedge-hole and over into dr. john's surgery to tell him about it; but i ought not to have been agitated enough to let him take the letter right out of my hand and read it.
"so after ten years alfred bennett is coming back to offer his bachelor's-buttons to you, mrs. molly?" he said in the voice he always uses when he makes fun of billy and me, and which never fails to make us both mad.
i didn't look at him directly, but i felt his hand shake with the letter in it.
"not ten, only eight! he went away when i was seventeen," i answered with dignity, wishing i dared be snappy at him: though i never am.
"and after eight years he wants to come back and find you squeezed into a twenty-inch waist, blue muslin rag you wore at parting? no wonder alfred didn't succeed as a bank clerk, but had to make his hit in the colonies. he's such a big gun that it is a pity he had to return to his native heath and find even such a slight disappointment as a one-yard waist measure around his—his—"
"oh, it's not, it's not that much," i fairly gasped and i couldn't help the tears coming into my eyes. i have never said much about it, but nobody knows how it hurts me to be as—large as i am. just writing it down in a book mortifies me dreadfully. it's been coming on worse and worse every year since i married. poor mr. carter had a very good appetite, and i don't know why i should have felt that i had to eat so much every day to keep him company; i wasn't always so considerate about him. then he didn't want me to go for long walks with the dogs any more, because married women oughtn't to, or ride horseback either—no amusement left but himself; and—and—i just couldn't help the tears coming and dripping as i thought about it all and that awful waist measure in inches.
"stop crying this minute, molly," said dr. john suddenly in the deep voice he uses to billy and me when we are really ill or tired. "you know i was only teasing you and i won't let you——"
but i sobbed some more. i like him when his eyes come out from under his bushy brows and are all tender and full of sorry for us.
"i can't help it," i gulped in my sleeve. "i did use to like alfred bennett. my heart almost broke when he went away. i used to be beautiful and slim, and now i feel as if my own fat ghost has come to haunt me all my life. i am so ashamed! if a woman can't cry over her own dead beauty, what can she cry over?" by this time i was really crying.
then what happened to me was that dr. john took me by the shoulders and gave me one good shake.
"you foolish child," he said in the deepest voice i almost ever heard him use. "you are just a lovely perfect flower, but if you will be happier to have alfred bennett come and find you as slim as a scarlet runner, i can show you how to do it. will you do just as i tell you?"
"yes, i will," i sniffed in a comforted voice. what woman wouldn't be comforted by being called a "perfect flower"? i looked out between my fingers to see what more he was going to say, but he had turned to a shelf and taken down two books.
"now," he said in his most businesslike voice, as cool as a bucket of water fresh from the spring, "it is no trouble at all to take off your surplus avoirdupois at the rate of two and a half pounds a week if you follow these directions. as i take it, you are about twenty-five pounds over your normal weight. it will take over two months to reduce you, and we will allow an extra month for further beautifying, so that when mr. bennett arrives he will find the lady of his adoration in proper trim to be adored. yes, just be still until i write these directions in this little red leather blank-book for you, and every day i want you to keep an exact record of the conditions of which i make note. no, don't talk while i make out these diet lists! i wish you would go upstairs and see if you don't think we ought to get billy a thinner set of nightgowns. it seems to me he must be too warm in the ones he is wearing."
when he speaks to me in that tone of voice i always do it. and i needed billy badly at that very moment. i took him out of his little cot by dr. john's big bed and sat down with him in my arms over by the window, through which the early moon came streaming. billy is so little, so very little not to have a mother to rock him all the times he needs it, that i take every opportunity to give it to him i find—when he's unconscious and can't help himself. she died before she ever even saw him, and i've always tried to do what i could to make it up to him.
poor mr. carter said when billy cut his teeth that a neighbour's baby can be worse than your own. he didn't like children, and the baby's crying disturbed him, so many a night i walked billy out in the garden until daylight, while mr. carter and dr. john both slept. always his little, warm, wilty body has comforted me for the emptiness of not having a little one of my own. and he's very congenial, too, for he's slim and flowery, pink and dimply, and as mannish as his father, in funny little flashes.
"git a stick to punch it, molly," he was murmuring in his sleep. then i heard the doctor call me and i had to kiss him, put him back in his bed, and go downstairs.
dr. john was standing by the table with this horrid small book in his hand, and his mouth was set in a straight line and his eyes were deep back under their brows. i don't like him that way, yet my heart jumped so it was hard to look as meek as i felt it best under the circumstances; but i looked out from under my lashes cautiously.
"there you are, mrs. molly," he said briskly as he handed me this book. "get weighed and measured and sized-up generally in the morning, and follow all the directions. also make every record i have noted so that i can have the proper data to help you as you go along—or rather down. and if you will be faithful about it to me, or rather alfred, i think we can be sure of buttoning that blue muslin dress without even the aid of the button-hook." his voice had the "if you can" note in it that always sets me off.
"had we better get the kiddie some thinner night-rigging?" he hastened to ask as i was just about to explode. he knows the signs.
"thank you, dr. moore! i hate the very ground you walk on, and i'll attend to those night-clothes myself to-morrow," i answered, and i sailed out of that surgery and down the path toward my own house beyond his hedge. but i carried this book tight in my hand, and i made up my mind that i would do it all if it killed me. i would show him i could be faithful—to whom i would decide later on. but i hadn't read far into this book when i committed myself to myself like that!
i don't know just how long i sat by the open window all by myself, bathed in a perfect flood of moonlight and loneliness. it was not a bit of comfort to hear aunt adeline snoring away in her room upstairs. it takes the greatest congeniality to make a person's snoring a pleasure to anybody, and aunt adeline and i are not that way.
when poor mr. carter died, the next day she said, "now, mary, you are entirely too young to live all your long years of widowhood alone, and as i am in the same condition, i will let my cottage, and move up the street into your house to protect and console you." and she did—the moving and the protecting.
mr. henderson has been dead forty-two years. he only lived three months after he married aunt adeline, and her crêpe veil is over a yard long yet. men are the dust under her feet, but she likes dr. john to come over and sit with us, because she can consult with him about what mr. henderson really died of, and talk with him about the sad state of poor mr. carter's liver for a year before he died. i just go on rocking billy and singing hymns to him in such a way that i can't hear the conversation. mr. carter's liver got on my nerves alive, and dead it does worse. but it hurts when the doctor has to take the little sleep-boy out of my arms to carry him home; though i like it when he says under his breath, "thank you, molly."
and as i sat and thought how near he and i had been to each other in all our troubles, i excused myself for running to him with that letter, and i acknowledged to myself that i had no right to get vexed when he teased me, for he had been kind and interested about helping me get thin by the time alfred came back to see me. i couldn't tell which i was blushing all to myself about, the "perfect flower" he had called me, or the "lovely lily" alfred had reminded me in his letter that i had been when he left me.
why don't people realise that a seventeen-year-old girl's heart is a sensitive wind-flower that may be shattered by a breath? mine shattered when alfred went away to find something he could do to make a living, and aunt adeline gave the hard green stem to mr. carter when she insisted on marrying me to him. poor mr. carter!
no, i wasn't nineteen, and this town was full of women who were aunts and cousins and law-kin to me, and nobody did anything for me. they all said, with a sigh of relief, "it will be such a nice safe thing for you, molly." and they really didn't mean anything by tying up a gay, frolicking, prancing colt of a girl with a terribly ponderous bridle.
no, the town didn't mean anything but kindness by marrying me to mr. carter, and they didn't consider him in the matter at all, poor man! of that i feel sure. hillsboro is like that. it settled itself here in this north country a few hundreds of years ago, and has been hatching and clucking over its own small affairs ever since. all the houses stand back from the street with their wings spread out over their gardens, and mothers here go on hovering even to the third and fourth generation. lots of times young, long-legged boys scramble out of the nests and go off and decide to grow up where their crow will be heard by the world. alfred was one of them.
and, too, occasionally some man comes along from the big world and marries a girl and takes her away with him, but mostly they stay and go to hovering life on a corner of the family estate. that's what i did.
i was a poor, little, lonely chick with frivolous tendencies, and they all clucked me over into this carter nest, which they considered well-feathered for me. it gave them all a sensation when they found out from the will just how well it was feathered. and it gave me one too. all that money would make me nervous if mr. carter hadn't made dr. john its guardian, though i sometimes feel that the responsibility of me makes him treat me as if he were my step-grandfather-in-law. but all in all, though stiff in its manners, hillsboro is lovely and loving; and couldn't inquisitiveness be called just real affection with a kind of turn in its eye?
and there i sat in my front room, being embraced in a perfume of everybody's lilacs and hawthorns and affectionate interest and moonlight, with a letter in my hand from the man whose two photographs and letters i used to keep locked up in my desk. is it any wonder i tingled when he told me that he had never come back because he couldn't have me, and that now the minute he landed in england he was going to lay his heart at my feet? i added his colonial honours to his prostrate heart myself, and my own beat at the prospect. all the eight years faded away, and i was again back in the old garden down at aunt adeline's cottage saying good-bye, folded up in his arms. that's the way my memory put the scene to me, but the word "folded" made me remember that blue muslin dress again. i had promised to keep it and wear it for him when he came back—and i couldn't forget that the blue belt was just twenty-three inches and mine is—no, i won't write it. i had got that dress out of the old trunk not ten minutes after i had read the letter and measured it.
no, nobody would blame me for running right across the garden to dr. john with such a real trouble as that! all of a sudden i hugged the letter and the little book and laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks.
then, before i went to bed, i went round my garden and had family prayers with my flowers. i do that because they are all the family i've got, and god knows that all his budding things need encouragement, whether it is a widow or a snowball-bush. he'll give it to us!
and i'm praying again as i sit here and watch for the doctor's light to go out. i hate to go to sleep and leave it burning, for he sits up so late and he is so gaunt and thin and tired-looking most times. that's what the last prayer is about, almost always—sleep for him and no night call!
