Page:McClure's Magazine v10 no3 to v11 no2.djvu/89

 and watched for the men to come in from their work in the far north meadow; she descried a curl of smoke rising from the kitchen chimney, a queer, ghastly little caricature of a smile flashing across her face.

"Now, if I was near enough to hear the stove-lids rattle," she whispered, "I could 'most imagine I was dead and in my grave, like Mis' Howard said."

For a long time she stood with her eyes at the crevice and her hands grasping the rough frame of the cellar door, watching that changing, darkening spiral of smoke. Once the kitchen door opened, and a woman stood for an instant in sight. The watcher squinted her eyes in a desperate endeavor to concentrate her gaze.

"I s'pose it's Mis' Rhynearson," she muttered, with a resentful snap in her tone. "It's just like her to take possession of a body's house and act as if she owned it! I can't see how Abra'm can like them Rhynearsons so well; they're such pestiferous folks. To think of her there, a-livin' high off the fresh bread and cakes and pies that I baked, and the cheese I made, and the butter I churned, and me here a-starvin'!"

The contrast was too pitiful. In all her hard, meager life she had never before known the pangs of hunger and thirst. Her eyes filled, and the vision was for a time shut out. When she looked again, the curling smoke was scarcely discernible, and all the angles of the old house were toned down by the softening shadow of approaching night.

She could make out the figure of a man standing by the bars. It might be one of the hands, or—it might be—yes, it was Abra'm! He had turned and was going slowly toward the house, and she knew him by the forward stoop of his body and that characteristic something in the way he set his feet down as he walked.

She thought he would go in at the kitchen door, but he passed around to the front porch, and sat down alone on the steps.

Presently it struck her that his head was bowed upon his hands-and that his attitude was one of deep dejection. But she was not quite sure; he was so far away, and the shadows lay deep between. Still, the longer she looked the more his fading outline seemed to appeal to her, until at last she was overcome with the conviction that sorrow, rather than anger, ruled in her husband's heart.

"He ain't mad at me! I just seem to feel he ain't mad at me! Oh, Abra'm! Abra'm!" She shrieked his name aloud again and again, each frenzied effort shriller than the last; but the narrow crevice threw the greater part of the sound back into the cellar, and Abraham Spencer sat still, with bent head, unhearing, until the night had thickened and shut him from her sight.

The black hours that followed were terrible to her. Remorse and a reawakened longing to live, and to go back to her deserted duties, now united with hunger and thirst to torture her. In the middle of the hot, stifling night she was forced to drain the last swallow of milk from the bottle, and still her thirst was so great that she tossed and moaned in the fitful bits of sleep that came to her. Once she was awakened by a touch, a weight like that of a hand upon her shoulder, and she started up with a glad cry on her lips; but it was only her cell-mate the rat. He scampered away to his own corner, and she lay there with a convulsive horror upon her, watching and listening lest he return. She told herself that he would come back tomorrow night, when she would have less strength to frighten him away; and all the nights after, when her poor body might lie there lifeless, at his mercy.

She wondered, with an awful, shuddering wonder, whether it could be that her soul must linger near and witness the degrading annihilation of its erstwhile tenement. A maddening horror of death seized her. She staggered across to the opposite bin, and made a desperate attempt to eat one of the raw, moldy potatoes.

At the first hint of morning she was again on the apple-box, with her eyes at the crevice. But now there was a thick white fog all over the land, and no vaguest outline of her home was visible to her.

The wrens were bickering spitefully over their nest, not an arm's length away from her face.

"Oh, hush!" she said to them, pityingly, from the bitter depths of her own experience. "You poor, blind little things; you don't know how short life is, after all, and how little it matters if things don't go just to suit you." The small pair were struck motionless and dumb by the mere sound of her voice, and forgot to renew their quarrel. Presently the father bird went away to his day's work, and the little mother settled down to the monotony of her home duties, both unconscious of the yearning eyes of the lone watcher at the crevice.