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- Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
The elderly Mrs. Barry had one son, Mark, whom she passionately hoped to marry Lois Wilbur, his childhood friend. Nevertheless, Mark went to the city of Queens, where he fell in love and became engaged to actress Beatrice, much to Mrs. Barry’s dismay. Great story, easy and laid back.
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Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER I
A mild wind was blowing up from the southwest, over the ribbon of resinous firs in the valley, the low-lying wheatfields and the long slopes of aftermath where the lush growth of the clover rivalled the luxuriance of June. From all it brushed in its unfettered sweep it filched somewhat of odor–from the firs the tang of their balsam, from the field-borders the warm breath of smoke-blue asters and sunned, grasses, and from the Barry orchard the aroma of ripening fruit and the pungency of the mint that grew thickly around the roots of the old cherry trees. All these it garnered to itself and poured, as if from an unseen flagon of delight, around the tiny old woman who sat among the grasses where the lane curved down the slope by the beech grove. She drank in the autumnal draught as she knitted and basked in the sunshine that mellowed on the slope around her. It pleased her to sit there in the day’s maturity, under a sky that was curdled over with films of white cloud, and knit placidly while she watched the wind lifting the ferns in the shadows of the birches and combing the long grasses on the slope. She seldom looked at her knitting. Her tiny hands worked ceaselessly but her large and unsunken blue eyes kept on the landscape a watch that missed little, from the stir and flicker of the sapling leaves at her side to the cloud shadows broadening and vanishing on the far away level fields to the south or the occasional wayfarers along the Rutherglen main road that ran, straight as a die, to the west until it dipped suddenly into the curve of the fir valley.
Save for the little old woman with the eager eyes not a living creature could be seen near or far. From the Barry homestead, that had topped the birch hill for three generations, to the opal-tinted horizons of the south and west and the gleam of the ocean north and east the whole world seemed to have fallen for the time being into a pleasant untroubled dream.
To Mrs. Barry, or Aunt Nan, as everybody in Rutherglen, related or unrelated affectionately called her the afternoon was as a cup of delight held to her lips. She drank it in unsatedly, thinking aloud meanwhile as was her habit.
“Isn’t it good to be alive? I want to live as long as there’s afternoons like this. Sakes alive, what smells! Seems to me the very air is dripping with ’em. There’s the mint–and the dead fir. Haven’t I always loved the dead fir? It minds me of when I was a girl and the first Mark and I used to go walking in the lane back of home where the firs grew so thick. That was forty years ago. I must be getting an old woman. How still them firs in the hollow look–as if they were talking to the sky. And what a blue there is over the hills! Strange how it always fades before you get to it! The way with most things I expect. I feel as if I was drinking the sunshine in and storing it up in my heart to last me through the winter. I’m so happy–it doesn’t seem to me that I’d have a thing changed if I could. I’ve had sorrow enough in my life but it’s put behind now and lived over like those furrows the second Mark ploughed in the lane last spring. They looked ugly for a time but now they’re all picked out with asters and golden-rod. It’s a dear way Nature has. And I just love living!”
She dropped her knitting for a minute and softly leaned her withered pink cheek against the creamy satin of the white birch bole behind her. As she watched the Rutherglen road a girl came out from the purple shadow of the firs that overhung it. Aunt Nan recognized her with a smile of delight.
“That’s Lois Wilbur. I don’t know as there’s another soul in the world I’d want to see just now but I do want to see her. She fits into an afternoon like this instead of spoiling it as most folks would do. I hope she’s coming here. If she passes our gate I believe I’ll just run down and lay violent hands on her.”
Aunt Nan was spared this exertion for when Lois Wilbur came to the white gate at the end of the Barry lane she turned in under the big willows. She walked with the elastic step of healthy youth and there was a faint yet rich bloom on her face, born of her windy walk up from the valley.
Although she was not beautiful in any strictly defined sense of the word she possessed a certain charm and distinction of appearance that always left beholders with a pleasurable sense of satisfaction in that softly rounded girlhood of hers, with all its strongly felt potentialities. Those who knew Lois Wilbur best felt, without, perhaps, realizing it, that her greatest charm was the aura of possibility surrounding her–the power of future development that was in her. She was one to whom maturity would bring her best and you felt instinctively that such maturity could be nothing less than beautiful when the crescent of her rich nature should have rounded out into completeness.
Whatever life might bring to this girl–and it must bring much, if not of action yet of feeling and heart-growth–it could not crush her. Its gifts, whether of sorrow or joy, could only tend still further to ripen and enrich the woman soul that looked wistfully yet unshrinkingly out of her level-gazing eyes. For the rest, she was simply the happy, wholesome girl she seemed, fully dowered with youth’s soft curves and virginal bloom, with a dimple or two lurking about her mouth and a saving glint of humor in her frank smile.
As she came up the grassy slope Aunt Nan held out her hand and Lois took it in her smooth, firmly moulded one, looking down at the little woman affectionately.
“I thought you’d come,” said Aunt Nan. “You belong to the afternoon so it brought you. Things that belong together always come together. What a lot of trouble that would save some folks if they only believed it. I was afraid you were going on to the shore and if you had passed our gate you’d have seen a sight now–nothing less than old Aunt Nan careening down the lane at full speed to catch you! Truth is, Lois, I was dying for someone to unload all the thoughts I’ve been gathering out of the afternoon on.”
