A Woman Named Smith - Marie Conway Oemler (the best novels to read TXT) 📗

on the fly-leaf. Nor was it a book kept for idle show; it plainly had been read, perhaps wept over by a tortured heart, for it fell open at that cry of all sad hearts, the Fifty-first Psalm. I was moving this prie-dieu, when my foot slipped on the bare floor and I dropped it with a crash. Fortunately it was not injured. But what had looked like a mere line of carving on the outer edge of the small shelf—rather a thick and heavy shelf now that one examined it carefully—had been struck smartly, releasing a cunning spring. There opened out a thin slit of a drawer, just big enough to hold a flat book bound in leather and stamped with two letters, "F.H." On the fly-leaf appeared, in his own neat, fine script, "The Diary of Freeman Hynds, Esqr."

The thing seemed incredible, impossible. His own daughter had evidently been unaware of the existence of this book, which he had not had time to destroy. And we, as by a miracle, had fallen upon it—and perhaps the truth!

It was written in so fine and small a hand as was only possible to the users of goose-quill pens; and this tiny, faded, brown writing on the yellowed pages covered a period of years. He had not been one to waste words. Once or twice, as we hurriedly turned the pages, appeared the name "Emily." Mostly it seemed a dry, uninteresting thing, a mere memorandum, where a single entry might cover a whole year.

It was impossible for us to stop our work to read it then and there, or to do more than give it a cursory glance. We turned feverishly to those years that covered, as we figured, the period of the Hynds tragedy. And he had written:

This day was Accus'd Rich'd. my Bro. of robbing us of our Jewells. He protests he knows Naught & my Mthr. believes him as doth Emily. Has a true Heart, Emily. Horrid Confusion & my Fthr. Confound'd.

Impatiently I turned over the pages, raging to read the end, my heart pounding and fluttering.

Two nights since dy'd Scipio, son of old Shooba's wife, the which did send for me—

Thus far had I read, Alicia and I sitting head to head on the hall stairs. In came Schmetz the gardener, raving, gesticulating, and after him old Uncle Adam, stepping delicately, and with a placating smile on his wrinkled countenance.

"Those bulbs that I have planted under the windows of you," raved Schmetz, "the demon hens of le docteur Geddes are with their paws upturning! They upturn with rapidity and completeness, led by a shameless hog of a rooster. Is it the orders of you that I devastate those fowls, Mademoiselle?"

Schmetz was furiously angry, and small wonder. Those had been choice bulbs, some of which he had presented me from his own cherished store—freesias, daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, and the starred narcissus, "such as Proserpine let fall, from Dis's wagon."

"Oh, our flowers!" wailed Alicia, springing to her feet; "and we counting on those bulbs for Christmas!"

I shut Freeman's diary with a snap. Hens were more immediate.

"Put it in the drawer of the library table," called Alicia, running out with Schmetz at her heels. "We'll read it to-night."

When I had done so, closing the door after me, I too ran outside, where some enormous black-and-white hens, led by the biggest rooster I had ever seen, were completing the utter destruction of our flower bed.

We charged down upon them, and they ran to and fro, after the stupid fashion of fowls. Back and forth Alicia, Schmetz, and I chased those brutes; but Adam stood with folded hands, looking on from a safe and sane distance. He refused to have anything to do with Geddes fowls in ol' Mis' Scarlett's yard. Just then the huge rooster ran into my skirts, all but upsetting me. It was the work of a strenuous moment to seize him by the wings and so hold him.

Left to their own devices, the hens scuttled back to their own domain through a break in the palings on our side of the hedge, while in my hands the rooster squawked and plunged and kicked and struggled; it was like trying to hold a feathered hyena.

I was very angry. I had lost my bulb bed. I couldn't wring the neck of the raider, much as I should have liked to do so, but with an arm made strong by a just and righteous rage I lifted that big brute high above my head and hurled him over into his own yard. He sailed through the air like a black and white plane.

"Damn! Oh, damn!" said somebody on the other side of the hedge. There was a horrible grunt, as of one getting all the wind knocked out of him, a scuffle, and the squawks of the big rooster, to which the hens dutifully added a deafening chorus.

"The brute—has just about—murdered me!" grunted Doctor Richard Geddes.

We stood in stricken silence. Swiftly, noiselessly, Uncle Adam faded from sight, putting a solid section of Hynds House between himself and what he felt was coming battle. Uncle Adam had no wish to have to pray me to death, and he wasn't going to run any risks with Doctor Richard Geddes. Where that irascible gentleman was concerned, Uncle Adam, like Br'er Rabbit, would "trus' no mistakes."

A second later, red-faced, half-breathless, but with the light of battle in his eyes, Doctor Geddes appeared, mounted on a ladder on his side of the hedge.

"Who shot off that rooster?"

"Monsieur le docteur, the hens of you began this affray," explained Schmetz, politely. "They are fowls abandoned in their morals, horrible in their habits, and shameless in their behavior. And the husband of these wretches, Monsieur, is a bandit, a brigand, an assassin, fit only to be guillotined. Observe, Monsieur, it happened thus—"

"Schmetz," snapped the doctor, "shut up!—Now then, I want to know who fired off that rooster."

"I did!" I said valiantly. "Look at my bulbs! Just look at my bulbs!"

"Look at my stomach!" roared the doctor. "Just look at my stomach!"

"Mon Dieu! O mon Dieu!" cried Schmetz, dancing up and down. "Monsieur, again I implore that you will remain calm and listen to the voice of reason! Your hens, creatures malicious and accursed—"

"Why should I look at your horrid stomach?" said I, outraged. "I think you had better get down off that ladder and go away!"

"Why should you? Because, you jade, you've all but driven a twenty-pound rooster clean through it—beak, spurs and tail feathers—that's why!" bawled the doctor. "Gad! I shall be black and blue for a fortnight! I'm colicky now: I need a mustard-plaster!"

"Two mustard-plasters," I insisted severely: "one on your tongue and the other on your temper!"

"Temper?" flared the doctor, and flung up his arms. "Temper? Here's a minx that's all but murdered me, and yet has the stark effrontery to blather about temper! You've a bad one yourself, let me tell you! You've the worst, outside of your late aunt—"

"Grand-aunt-in-law; your own cousin-by-blood, whom you greatly resemble in that same matter of family temper, I am given to understand."

"Gatchell told you that!" cried the doctor, wrathfully. "Fish-blooded old mummy! His place is in a Canopic jar! Gatchell hasn't had a thought since 1845."

"Well, if he satisfied himself so long ago as 1845 that you have a frightful temper and that your hens are unutterable nuisances, I see no reason why he should change his mind," I said, frigidly. "You have; and your hens are; and your rooster is a demon!"

"Straight out of the pit; undoubtedly they were hatched under Satan's wings. Monsieur, believe me, Schmetz, when I tell you so."

"Didn't you ask me," I demanded, "to throw them over into your yard when they invaded my premises? Very well: I threw one over and you caught it. Why, then, should you complain?"

"Oh, yes, I caught it!" A horrible sneer twisted his countenance.

Schmetz fell to praying aloud. But he couldn't remember anything save the grace before meat, so he prayed that, in a sonorous voice. For he is a pious man.

The doctor's nose wrinkled and his lips stretched: "Sophronisba!" he hissed, and, having hurled this hand-grenade, scuttled down the ladder like a boy of ten.

Alicia sank upon the ground and rocked to and fro. For a minute I wanted to catch her by the shoulders and shake her soundly; but catching her eye instead, I also fell into helpless laughter. Leaning on his spade, Schmetz stared at us, shaking his grizzled head.

"Name of a cat!" murmured the puzzled Alsatian, and fell to salvaging such bulbs as weren't utterly ruined. We were all busy at this, when a head again appeared over the hedge—a big, leonine head with a tossing mane and a tameless beard. An enormous pair of shoulders followed, a tree-trunk of a leg was swung over, and Doctor Richard Geddes dropped into our garden like a great cat. He strolled over, hands in pockets, and looking down at grubbing us, asked politely: "Making a garden?"

"Oh, no," Alicia told him sweetly, "we're laying out a chicken-run."

"Er—what I came over to say, is that I've got some fine bulbs, myself, this year, particularly fine bulbs—eh, Schmetz?—and more than I need for myself. Will you share them with me, Miss Smith? Please! I—well, I'd be really grateful if you would," said this overgrown boy.

"We'll be enchanted," Alicia said instantly. "When can we have them, please?"

"Now!" cried the doctor, with brightening eyes. "By jingo, I'll get 'em this minute, and plant 'em for you, too!"

And he did. He was on his knees, trowel in hand, shouting to Riedriech, who had come outside for a few minutes' happy arguing with his good friend the doctor, that the socialist argument boiled down amounts to about this—that one should do without boiled eggs for breakfast now, in order that the proletariat may have baked hen for dinner in the millennium; which is lunacy; anybody with a modicum of brains—

"Brains!" snorted Riedriech. "What is it you know about brains? No doctor knows what is on the inside of brains! You make tinkerings mit the inside plumbings, Gott bewahre! and cut up womens and cats and such-like poor little dumb beasts and says you, 'Now I know all about the brains of man.' It is right there where you are wrong, Comrade Geddes!"

"Habet!" said Comrade Geddes.

"Look you," said the old visionary, with sudden passion, "look you on the little bulb here, so dirty and ugly you hide him in the ground quick. So! But by and by comes up green shoots, and blossoms. So it is with the great thoughts of men, the deep race-thoughts, Comrade Geddes—seeds, bulbs, germs, all of them, in the ugly husks of the common people. Out of our muck and grime they come, the little green shoots which the fool will say is poison, maybe, but which the wise know and labor and make room for. I, Riedriech, and workers like me, we go into our graves nothing but husks. But it is out of the buried hearts of us comes green things growing; and then—die Blumen! die Blumen!" said the cabinet-maker, with a still, far-away look.

"And," he finished, with a sad smile, "it is our flowers that you put in vases of gold on your altars. And you say, 'Listen: Jesus the carpenter talks plain words to his fishermen friends.' And, 'Hush! Burns the plowman makes songs in the field!'"

The doctor looked up, and his eyes were very tender; his smile made me wonder. With a swift, friendly hand he patted the rougher hand of the other. And it was at this opportune moment that Mary Magdalen led around a corner of Hynds House no less personages than Mrs. Haile and Miss Martha Hopkins. Their eyes fell upon Doctor Richard Geddes. They looked at each other. They looked at Alicia and me. And I knew their thoughts: "Sirens, both of you!" said Miss Hopkins's eyes.

"How do you do, Doctor Geddes!" said both ladies, as demurely