The Country of the Pointed Firs - Sarah Orne Jewett (top 10 novels to read .txt) 📗

state of society which admitted such personal freedom and a voluntary hermitage. There was something medieval in the behavior of poor Joanna Todd under a disappointment of the heart. The two women had drawn closer together, and were talking on, quite unconscious of a listener.

“Poor Joanna!” said Mrs. Todd again, and sadly shook her head as if there were things one could not speak about.

“I called her a great fool,” declared Mrs. Fosdick, with spirit, “but I pitied her then, and I pity her far more now. Some other minister would have been a great help to her⁠—one that preached self-forgetfulness and doin’ for others to cure our own ills; but Parson Dimmick was a vague person, well meanin’, but very numb in his feelin’s. I don’t suppose at that troubled time Joanna could think of any way to mend her troubles except to run off and hide.”

“Mother used to say she didn’t see how Joanna lived without having nobody to do for, getting her own meals and tending her own poor self day in an’ day out,” said Mrs. Todd sorrowfully.

“There was the hens,” repeated Mrs. Fosdick kindly. “I expect she soon came to makin’ folks o’ them. No, I never went to work to blame Joanna, as some did. She was full o’ feeling, and her troubles hurt her more than she could bear. I see it all now as I couldn’t when I was young.”

“I suppose in old times they had their shut-up convents for just such folks,” said Mrs. Todd, as if she and her friend had disagreed about Joanna once, and were now in happy harmony. She seemed to speak with new openness and freedom. “Oh yes, I was only too pleased when the Reverend Mr. Dimmick invited me to go out with him. He hadn’t been very long in the place when Joanna left home and friends. ’Twas one day that next summer after she went, and I had been married early in the spring. He felt that he ought to go out and visit her. She was a member of the church, and might wish to have him consider her spiritual state. I wa’n’t so sure o’ that, but I always liked Joanna, and I’d come to be her cousin by marriage. Nathan an’ I had conversed about goin’ out to pay her a visit, but he got his chance to sail sooner’n he expected. He always thought everything of her, and last time he come home, knowing nothing of her change, he brought her a beautiful coral pin from a port he’d touched at somewheres up the Mediterranean. So I wrapped the little box in a nice piece of paper and put it in my pocket, and picked her a bunch of fresh lemon balm, and off we started.”

Mrs. Fosdick laughed. “I remember hearin’ about your trials on the v’y’ge,” she said.

“Why, yes,” continued Mrs. Todd in her company manner. “I picked her the balm, an’ we started. Why, yes, Susan, the minister liked to have cost me my life that day. He would fasten the sheet, though I advised against it. He said the rope was rough an’ cut his hand. There was a fresh breeze, an’ he went on talking rather high flown, an’ I felt some interested. All of a sudden there come up a gust, and he gave a screech and stood right up and called for help, ’way out there to sea. I knocked him right over into the bottom o’ the bo’t, getting by to catch hold of the sheet an’ untie it. He wasn’t but a little man; I helped him right up after the squall passed, and made a handsome apology to him, but he did act kind o’ offended.”

“I do think they ought not to settle them landlocked folks in parishes where they’re liable to be on the water,” insisted Mrs. Fosdick. “Think of the families in our parish that was scattered all about the bay, and what a sight o’ sails you used to see, in Mr. Dimmick’s day, standing across to the mainland on a pleasant Sunday morning, filled with churchgoing folks, all sure to want him some time or other! You couldn’t find no doctor that would stand up in the boat and screech if a flaw struck her.”

“Old Dr. Bennett had a beautiful sailboat, didn’t he?” responded Mrs. Todd. “And how well he used to brave the weather! Mother always said that in time o’ trouble that tall white sail used to look like an angel’s wing comin’ over the sea to them that was in pain. Well, there’s a difference in gifts. Mr. Dimmick was not without light.”

“ ’Twas light o’ the moon, then,” snapped Mrs. Fosdick; “he was pompous enough, but I never could remember a single word he said. There, go on, Mis’ Todd; I forget a great deal about that day you went to see poor Joanna.”

“I felt she saw us coming, and knew us a great way off; yes, I seemed to feel it within me,” said our friend, laying down her knitting. “I kept my seat, and took the bo’t inshore without saying a word; there was a short channel that I was sure Mr. Dimmick wasn’t acquainted with, and the tide was very low. She never came out to warn us off nor anything, and I thought, as I hauled the bo’t up on a wave and let the Reverend Mr. Dimmick step out, that it was somethin’ gained to be safe ashore. There was a little smoke out o’ the chimney o’ Joanna’s house, and it did look sort of homelike and pleasant with wild mornin’-glory vines trained up; an’ there was a plot o’ flowers under the front window, portulacas and things. I believe she’d made a garden once, when she was stopping there with her father, and some things must have seeded in. It looked as if she might have gone over to the other side of the island. ’Twas neat and pretty all about the house, and a lovely day in July. We walked up