Hagar 8

Hagar 8

"I don't know," said Hagar. "I haven't seen grandmother to-day. Uncle

Bob--"

 

"Well, chicken?"

 

"They'd tell you, wouldn't they, if my mother was going to die?"

 

Captain Bob, having relieved Luna of the thorn, gave his attention

fully to his great-niece. He was slow and kindly and unexacting and

incurious and unimaginative, and the unusual never occurred to him

before it happened. "Maria going to die? That's damned nonsense,

partridge! Haven't heard a breath of it--isn't anything to hear. Nobody

dies at Gilead Balm--hasn't been a death here since the War. Besides,

Medway's away.--Mustn't get notions in your head--makes you unhappy,

and things go on just the same as ever." He pulled her down on the step

beside him. "Look at Luna, now! She ain't notionate--are you, Luna?

Luna and I are going over the hills this morning to find Old Miss's

guineas for her. Don't you want to go along?"

 

"I don't believe I do, thank you, Uncle Bob."

 

Mrs. LeGrand came out upon the porch, fresh and charming in a figured

dimity with a blue ribbon. "Mrs. Ashendyne and Serena are talking to

Dr. Bude, and as you men must be famished, Captain Bob, I am going to

ring for breakfast and pour out your coffee for you--"

 

In the hall Hagar appealed to her. "Mrs. LeGrand, can't I go into

grandmother's room and hear what Dr. Bude says about my mother?" But

Mrs. LeGrand smiled and shook her head and laid hands on her. "No,

indeed, dear child! Your mother's all right. You come with me, and have

your breakfast."

 

The Bishop appearing at the stair foot, she turned to greet him. Hagar,

slipping from her touch, stole down the hall to Old Miss's chamber and

tried the door. It gave and let her in. Old Miss was seated in the big

chair, Dr. Bude and the Colonel were standing on either side of the

hearth, and Miss Serena was between them and the door.

 

"Hagar!" exclaimed Miss Serena. "Don't come in now, dear. Grandmother

and I will be out to breakfast in a moment."

 

But Hagar had the courage of unhappiness and groping and fear for the

most loved. She fled straight to Dr. Bude. "Dr. Bude--oh, Dr. Bude--is

my mother going to die?"

 

"No, Bude," said the Colonel from the other side of the hearth.

 

Dr. Bude, an able country doctor, loved and honoured, devoted and

fatherly and wise, made a "Tchk!" with his tongue against the roof of

his mouth.

 

Old Miss, leaving the big chair, came and took Hagar and drew her back

with her into the deep chintz hollows. No one might doubt that Old Miss

loved her granddaughter. Now her clasp was as stately as ever, but her

voice was quite gentle, though of course authoritative--else it could

not have belonged to Old Miss. "Your mother had a bad night, dear, and

so, to make her quiet and comfortable, we sent early for Dr. Bude. She

is going to sleep now, and to-morrow you shall go in and see her. But

you can only go if you are a good, obedient child. Yes, I am telling

you the truth. I think Maria will get well. I have never thought

anything else.--Now, run away and get your breakfast, and to-day you

and Thomasine and Maggie and Corker shall go raspberrying."

 

Dr. Bude spoke from the braided rug. "No one knows, Hagar, what's

going to happen in this old world, do they? But Nature has a way of

taking care of people quite regardless and without waiting to consult

the doctors. I've watched Nature right closely, and I never give up

anything. Your mother's right ill, my dear, but so have a lot of other

people been right ill and gotten well. You go pick your raspberries,

and maybe to-morrow you can see her--"

 

"Can't I see her to-night?"

 

"Well, maybe--maybe--" said the doctor.

 

The raspberry patches were almost two miles away, past a number of

shaggy hills and dales. A wood road led that way, and Hagar and

Thomasine and Maggie and Corker, with Jinnie, a coloured woman, to take

care of them, felt the damp leaf mould under their feet. A breeze,

coming through oak and pine, tossed their hair and fluttered the girls'

skirts and the broad collar of Corker's voluminous shirt. The sky was

bright blue, with two or three large clouds like sailing vessels with

all sail on. A cat-bird sang to split its throat. They saw a black

snake, and a rabbit showed a white tip of tail, and a lightning-blasted

pine with a large empty bird-nest in the topmost crotch, ineffably

lonely and deserted against the deep sky, engaged their attention. They

had various adventures. Each of the children carried a tin bucket for

berries, and Jinnie carried a white-oak split basket with dinner in

it--sandwiches and rusks and a jar with milk and snowball cakes. They

were going to stay all day. That was what usually they loved. It was so

adventurous.

 

Corker strode along whistling. Maggie whistled, too, as well as a boy,

though he looked disdain at her and said, "Huh! Girls can't whistle!"

 

"Dar's a piece of poetry I done heard," said Jinnie,--

 

"'Er whistlin' woman an' er crowin' hen,

Dey ain' gwine come ter no good end.'"

 

Thomasine hummed as she walked. She had filled her bucket with various

matters as she went along, and now she was engaged in fashioning out

of the green burrs of the burdock a basket with an elaborate handle.

"Don't you want some burrs?" she asked Hagar, walking beside her.

Thomasine was always considerate and would give away almost anything

she had.

 

Hagar took the burrs and began also to make a basket. She was being

good. And, indeed, as the moments passed, the heavy, painful feeling

about her heart went away. The doctor had said and grandmother had

said, and Uncle Bob and Phoebe and every one.... The raspberries.

She instantly visualized one of the blue willow saucers filled with

raspberries, carried in by herself to her mother, at supper-time.

Yarrow was in bloom and Black-eyed Susans and the tall white Jerusalem

candles. Coming back she would gather a big bouquet for the grey jar

on her mother's table. She grew light-hearted. A bronze butterfly

fluttered before her, the heavy odour of the pine filled her nostrils,

the sky was so blue, the air so sweet--there was a pearly cloud like

a castle and another like a little boat--a little boat. Off went her

fancy, lizard-quick, feather-light.

 

"Swing low, sweet chariot--"

 

sang Jinnie as she walked.

 

The raspberry patches were in sunny hollows. There was a span-wide

stream, running pure over a gravel bed, and a grazed-over hillside,

green and short-piled as velvet, and deep woods closing in, shutting

out. Summer sunshine bathed every grass blade and berry leaf, summer

winds cooled the air, bees and grasshoppers and birds, squirrels in the

woods, rippling water, wind in the leaves made summer sounds. It was

a happy day. Sometimes Hagar, Thomasine, Maggie, Corker, and Jinnie

picked purply-red berries from the same bush; sometimes they scattered

and combined in twos and threes. Sometimes each established a corner

and picked in an elfin solitude. Sometimes they conversed or bubbled

over with laughter, sometimes they kept a serious silence. It was a

matter of rivalry as to whose bucket should first be filled. Hagar

strayed off at last to an angle of an old rail fence. The berries, as

she found, were very fine here. She called the news to the others, but

they said they had fine bushes, too, and so she picked on with a world

of her own about her. The June-bugs droned and droned, her fingers

moved slower and slower. At last she stopped picking, and, lying down

on a sunken rock by the fence, fell to dreaming. Her dreams were

already shot with thought, and she was apt, when she seemed most idle,

to be silently, inwardly growing. Now she was thinking about Heaven

and about God. She was a great committer of poetry to memory, and now,

while she lay filtering sand through her hands as through an hourglass,

she said over a stanza hard to learn, which yet she had learned some

days ago.

 

"Trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home--"

 

When she had repeated it dreamily, in an inward whisper, the problem of

why, in that case, she was so far from home engaged her attention. The

"here" and the "there--" God away, away off on a throne with angels,

and Hagar Ashendyne, in a blue sunbonnet here by a Virginia rail fence,

with raspberry stain on her hands. _Home_ was where you lived. God was

everywhere; then, was God right here, too? But Hagar Ashendyne couldn't

see the throne and the gold steps and floor and the angels. She could

make a picture of them, just as she could of Solomon's throne, or

Pharaoh's throne, or Queen Victoria's throne, but the picture didn't

stir anything at her heart. She wasn't homesick for the court. She was

homesick to be a good woman when she grew up, and to learn all the time

and to know beautiful things, but she wasn't homesick for Heaven where

God lived. Then was she wicked? Hagar wondered and wondered. The yellow

sand dropped from between her palms.... God in the sand, God in me, God

here and now.... Then God also is trying to grow more God.... Hagar

drew a great sigh, and for the moment gave it up.

 

Before her on the grey rail was a slender, burnished insect, all

gold-and-green armour. Around the lock of the fence came, like a

gold-and-green moving stiletto, a lizard which took and devoured the

gold-and-green insect.... God in the lizard, God in the insect, God

devouring God, making Himself feed Himself, growing so.... The sun

suddenly left the grass and the raspberry bushes. A cloud had hidden

it. Other cloud masses, here pearly white, here somewhat dark, were

boiling up from the horizon.

 

Jinnie called the children together. "What we gwine do? Look like er

storm. Reckon we better light out fer home!"

 

Protests arose. "Ho!" cried Corker, "it ain't going to be a storm. I

haven't got my bucket more'n half full and we haven't had a picnic

neither! Let's stay!"

 

"Let's stay," echoed Maggie. "Who's afraid of a little bit of storm

anyhow?"

 

"It's lots better for it to catch us here in the open," argued

Thomasine. "They're all tall trees in the wood. But _I_ think the

clouds are getting smaller--there's the sun again!"