Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/158

144 "I do love you, Timothy," she said, simply. She laid her little thin brown hand on his arm as if in unconscious appeal for help to make him understand. "It isn't that, Timothy. It's what I told you a long time ago; what I have tried to tell you sometimes lately."

His face clouded. "If you love me, how can you love the other thing more?"

She moved her hand from his arm, and feeling his mistake, he took it again and held it gently, his wits going afield for some argument to help his cause, and finding one in the simple piety common to them both. "I thought it was in the Bible that when two people felt as we do they must forsake everything for each other. Haven't you seen that in the Bible?"

She shook her head. "It's there, but I can't think it means me."

"It wasn't intended for you to go away off down there to Athens amongst people you don't know to get learnin'," he persisted. "If it had been best for you to have some great education different from the rest of us, you wouldn't have been born up here in this mountain country. It was just intended for me to take care of you, and for us to make a little home and be happy."

Through an opening between the trees a small clearing showed amidst the verdure of a hillside beyond the white road. There was a low brown house with the pink and white of blossoming apple-trees behind it. A man was ploughing in the field and a woman was crossing the little yard, a child clinging to her skirt.

Melissa rose from her place. "It is time we were going, Timothy," she said. There was something in her voice that he had never heard there before and that went to his heart.

When she got to the rude farmhouse in which she lived, she went into the tiny room cut off from one end of the porch, laid an old geography open on the window-sill whose rough wooden shutter was open to the spring air, and in the fading light turned the pages slowly. Poem or romance she had never seen, nor knew she aught of the world outside the enclosing hills around her humble home save what she had learned from this one book. Nevertheless, because she had so much even as this, the dream-world of her childhood had never faded, nor her feet faltered as she had steadfastly journeyed thitherward.

"But it would never have been built except for you, Timothy. Nobody else would have taken the trouble."

Timothy's reply was slow in coming, and his wife answered for him: "I reckon he got enough pleasure out of it to pay him for the trouble, Melissa. I never saw him take mo' pleasure in anything." Her eyes rested upon her husband with a pride which had not yet grown accustomed to the bliss of possession, and a responsive smile came to Melissa Dean's sweet face.

There was room enough for all three friends on the wide flat stone at the outer edge of the little graveyard, with the shadow of the oaks upon it. Except for the voices of the children at play deeper still in the woods, the silence and the greenness of the forest midsummer lay all about them, sunshine and faint breezes giving light and motion to the multitudinous leaves.

Close at hand was the old meeting-house, older and darker still, but firm on its low foundation of rough moss-grown stones, and seeming as much a part of the landscape as the brown earth on which it stood, or the ancient oaks whose branches lapped above its roof. And a few hundred yards away, distinct, insistent even, the white walls and green blinds and modern, if simple architecture of the new schoolhouse.

The new schoolhouse and Melissa Dean's new kind of teaching had been the sensation of the thinly settled neighborhood for weeks; its first great sensation, indeed, since Wiley Redd had "hid out" for a year to keep from going to the war. Timothy had been as eager as anybody to see what was going on within those walls, which, as head workman, he had helped to rear in the early spring, and to find out the precise use of the simple equipment over whose every detail he had labored with such honest pride; but he would not satisfy his interest until Addie Lee could come also, and bring the baby with her.

The little fellow lay asleep on a quilt