A Daughter of Witches: A Romance

Miss Temperance Tribbey stood at the back door of the old Lansing house, shading her eyes with one hand as she looked towards the gate to discover why Grip, the chained-up mastiff, was barking so viciously.

The great wooden spoon, which she held in her other hand, was dripping with red syrup, and showed that Temperance was preserving fruit. To the eyes of the initiated there were other signs of her occupation. Notably a dangerous expression in her eyes. The warmth of the stove was apt to extend to Miss Tribbey’s temper at such times.

Sidney Martin, coming up the avenue-like lane to the farm-house, did not observe Miss Tribbey standing at the back door, although she saw him; and, therefore, much to his own future detriment and present prejudice in Miss Tribbey’s eyes, he went to the front door, under its heavy pillared porch, and knocked. After he had vanished round the corner of the house towards the ill-chosen door, Miss Tribbey waited impatiently for the knock, calculating whether she could safely leave her fruit on the fire whilst she answered it.

The knock did not come. Muffled by the heavy door, its feeble echo was absorbed by the big rooms between the front door and the kitchen.

“Well!” said Temperance, “has he gone to Heaven all alive, like fish goes to market, or is he got a stroke?”

The cat arched its back against Miss Tribbey’s skirts and so shirked the reply which clearly devolved upon it, there being no other living creature visible in the big kitchen.

“It’s as bad as consumpting to have a man hanging over a body’s head like this,” continued Temperance. “My palpitations is coming on! If I’m took with them and that fruit on the fire, along of a man not knowing enough to knock!”

The fruit in the big copper kettle began to rise insidiously towards the brim.

“I’ll just go and take a speck at him through the shutters,” said she.

She crossed the kitchen, but ere she left it, long housewifely habit made her “give a look to the stove.” The burnished copper kettle was domed by a great crimson bubble, raised sphere-like by the steam.

“My soul!” said Temperance, and took a flight across the kitchen, lifting the heavy pot with one sweep from the fire to the floor. The dome quivered, rose a fraction and collapsed in a mass of rosy foam.

The crisis was past, and just then the expected knock came.

Temperance drew a long breath.

“There!” she said, “that jell’s done for! I’ll have to stand palavering with some agent chap or book-canvasser with my jell a-setting there gettin’ all muddied up.”

This reflection bore her company to the front door, which she opened with an air of calm surprise. Miss Tribbey knew her manners.

“Well, I declare!” she said. “Have you been here long?”

“No—came this very minute,” said Sidney in his soft, penetrating voice.

“Oh, the liar!” said Miss Tribbey to herself, scandalized.

“It’s beautiful here,” he continued. “That field of yellow grain there is worth a journey to see.”

(“Poor crittur,” Miss Tribbey said in relating this afterwards. “Poor, ignorant crittur! Not knowing it’s a burning, heartsick shame to see grain that premature ripe with the hay standing in win’rows in the field, before his eyes.”)

“Ahem!” said Miss Tribbey, her visitor showing signs of relapsing again into that reverie which had made the interval of waiting seem as nothing to him, unconscious as he was of the narrowly averted tragedy with Miss Tribbey’s fruit.

But face to face with her he was too sensitive not to recognize her impatience with his dallying mood. He roused himself and turned towards her with a frank and boyish smile.

“I’m bothering you,” he said, “and doubtless keeping you from something important.”

“I’m making jell,” said she briefly, her attitude growing tense.

“Have you heard Mr. Lansing speak of Sidney Martin?” he asked. “In reference to his coming to stay here this summer? I’m Sidney Martin, and I want to come, if it is convenient to receive me, the beginning of next week, and——”

“Come where?” demanded Temperance.

“Here,” said Sidney, a little embarrassed.

“To this house?”

“Yes,” said Sidney, looking at her with the confidence in his eyes of one who, loving his fellow-creatures more than life, expects and anticipates their love in return; one does not often see this expression, but one often sees the residuum left after the ignorance it bespeaks has been melled and mingled by experience.

“Mr. Lansing is over at the unction sale at Abiron Ranger’s,” said Temperance. “You’ll excuse me, my jell’s a-waitin’ for me, and whatever time other folks has to waste I’ve none! You’ll excuse me! I know nothing about boarders and sich!”

“Boarders,” said Sidney in alarm, looking about for signs of the enemy. “Do you take boarders?”

“It would seem so now,” said Temperance, cuttingly. “It would sertingly seem so.”

“Oh, bless you!” said Sidney. “I’m not a boarder! I’m a visitor. There’s a great difference, isn’t there? I’m the son of old Sidney Martin, the county clerk who went away to Boston and married there. You have heard of him, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have,” said Temperance, throwing one end of her apron over her head to shield off the sun. “Yes, I have, though I was in short petticoats and my hair in a pig-tail when it happened. He went to Bosting and married rich, didn’t he?”

“He married in Boston,” said Sidney. “Where is Mr. Ranger’s?”

“Abiron Ranger lives two miles down the road, across to the right,” said Temperance. “He died a week ago Wednesday, and there’s an unction sale there to-day. There’s goin’ to be a divide up. The widow wants her thirds. A very pushin’ woman Mis’ Ranger is.”

“Two miles more,” said Sidney, with something like a sigh.

Miss Tribbey’s keen eyes noted that he was white as from recent illness.

“Won’t you set down a spell and hev’ a glass of milk?” she asked; “set down in the shade there, and I’ll get it in a jiffy. What’s the sense of standing in a blazing sun like this?”

She whisked off and presently returned with the milk and a plate of New England cookies.