OCR Text |
Show 1 SHORT STORY OF THE DAY ANOELTJS. ' ; To Hephglbah the world wa a place of weary; days 'and unrestful nights, and life was. a thing of dishes that were never quite washed and of pread that wae never quite baked leaving- something some-thing always to be done. , The sun rose and the sun set, and, Hephilbah came to envy the sun. To her mind, his work extended from the first level ray shot into her room in the morning, to the last rose-flush at night; while as 'for herself, there were the supper dishes and the mending basket yet waiting. To be sure, she knew if" she stooped to think that her sunset must be a sunrise somewhere else; hut Hephilbah never stopped to think; she would have said, had you asked her, that she ftad no time. First, there was the breakfast .for Theron and the hired man in the chill gray dawn of each day; if one were to wrest a living from the stones and sand of the hillside farm, one must be up and at work betimes. Then Harry, Tom and Nellie must be roused, dressed, fed and made ready for the half-mile walk to the red schoolhouse at the crossroads.' After that the day waa one blur of steam, dust, heat and stifling fumes from the oven and the fat kettle, broken always at regular intervals in-tervals by meal-getting and chicken-feeding. chicken-feeding. What mattered the blue of the heavens heav-ens or the green of the earth outside? To Hephilbah the one was "sky" and the other "grass." What mattered the sheen of silver on the emerald velvet of the valley far below? Hephxlbah would have told you that it was only the sun on Otter creek down in Johnson's John-son's meadows. As for the nights, even sleep brought little relief to Hephzibah: for her dreams were of hungry mouths that could not be filled, and of dirt-streaked floors that would not come clean. Last summer a visitor had spent a week at the farm Helen Raymond Hephzlbah's niece from New York; and now a letter had come from this same Helen Raymond, telling Hephxlbah to look out for a package by express. A package by express! . Hephzibah laid the letter down, left the dishes cooling In the pan, and went out into the open yard where she could look far down tha road toward the village. vil-lage. When had she received a package before? be-fore? Even Christmas brought no fascinating fas-cinating boxes or mysterious bundles to her! It would be Interesting to open it; and yet it probably held a book which she would have no time to read or a pretty waist which she would have no chance to wear. Hephzibah turned and walked listlessly list-lessly back to her kitchen and her dishwashing. dish-washing. Twelve hours later her unaccustomed un-accustomed lips were spelling out the words on a small white card which had come with a handsomely framed photograph: pho-tograph: " 'The Angelus. Jean Francois Millet. Mil-let. 1&6." Hephzibah looked from the card to the picture and from the picture back again to the card. Gradually an angry light took the place of the dazed wonder won-der in her eyes. She turned fiercely to her husband. "Theron, why did Helen send me that picture?" she demanded. "Why. Hetty. I I dun'no," faltered the man, "unless she she wanted to ' plcfiis ye ' "Please me! please me!" scoffed Hephzibah. "Did she expect to please me with a thing like that? Look here, Theron. look!" she cried, snatching up the photograph and bringing It close to her husband's face. "Look at that woman wo-man and that man they're us. Theron us. I tell you!" "Oh, come, Hetty," remonstrated Theron; "they ain't Jest the same yer know. She didn't mean nothing Helen Hel-en didn't." "Mean nothing!" repeated Hephzibah. Hephzi-bah. scornfully; "then why, didn't she send something pretty? something that showed up pretty things not Just fields and farmfolk! Why didn't she, Theron why didn't she?" "Why. Hetty, don't! She why, she" "I know," cut in the woman, a bright red flaming Into her cheeks. "'Twas 'cause she thought that was all we could understand dirt, and old clothes, and folks that look like us! Don't we dig and dig like them? Ain't our hands twisted and old and" "Hetty Hetty yer ain't yerself! Yer " "Yes, I am I am! I'm always myselfthere's my-selfthere's never anything else I can be, Theron never!" And Hephzibah threw her apron over her head and ran from the room crying bitterly. "Well, by gum!" muttered the man, as he dropped heavily into the nearest chair. For some days the picture stayed on the shelf over the kitchen sink, where it had .been placed by Theron as the quickest means of Its disposal. Hephzibah Hephzi-bah did not seem to notice it after that first day. and Theron was most willing to let the matter drop. . It must have been a week after the picture's arrival that the minister from the village made his semi-yearly call. "Oh. you have an 'Angefus!' That's fine," he criedappreciatively the minister min-ister always begged to stay In Hehpzl-bah's Hehpzl-bah's kitchen, that room being much more to his mind than was the parlor, carefully guarded from sun and air. "Finer that thing!"; laughed Heph-slbah. Heph-slbah. ' ' -.'- "Ay, that thing," returned the man. quick to detect the scorn in her voice then, with an appeal to the only side of her nature he thought could be reached, he added: "Why, my dear woman, that thing, as you call it, is a copy of a picture pic-ture which in the original wae sold only a few years ago for more than $100,000-4150,000, I think." "Humph! Who could have bought it! That thing!" laughed Hepbslbah again and changed the subject. But she remembered re-membered she must have remembered; for, after the minister had. gone, she took the picture from the shelf and carried car-ried it to the light of the window. "One hundred and fifty thousand dollars," dol-lars," she murmured, "and to think what I'd do with that money!" For some minutes she studied the picture in silence, then she sighed: 'Well, they do look natural like; but only think what a fool to pay $150,000 for a couple of farm folks out in a field!" And yet It was not to the kitchen shelf Hepbslbah carried the ploture that night, but to the parlor the somber, som-ber, sacred parlor. There she propped it up on the center table among plush photograph albums and crochetted mats the dearest of Hephzlbah's treasures. treas-ures. Hephzibah could hardly have explained ex-plained it herself, but after the minister's minis-ter's call that day she fell into the way of going into tha parlor to look at her picture. At first its famous price graced it with a halo of gold; but in time this was forgotten, aryl the picture itself, with its silent, bowed figures, appealed to her with a power she could not understand. un-derstand. - "There's a story to it I know there's a story to it!" she cried at last, one day, and forthwith she hunted up an old lead pencil stub and a bit of yellowed note paper. It was a long hour Hephzibah spent then, an hour of labored. thinking and of carefully guiding of cramped fingers along an unfamiliar way; yet the completed com-pleted note when it reached Helen Raymond's Ray-mond's hands was wonderfully short-. short-. The return letter. was long, and. though Hephzibah did not know it, represented rep-resented hours of ; research - In book stores and libraries. It answered not only Hephzlbah's questions, but attempted at-tempted to respond to the longings and heart hunger Miss Raymond was sure she detected between the lines of Hephzlbah's Heph-zlbah's note. Twelve hours after it was written Hephzibah was on her knees before the picture. "I know you now I know you!" she whispered, exulting ly. "I know why you are real and true. Your master who painted you was like us once like us, and like you! He knew what it was to dig and dig; he knew what it was to work and work till his back and his head and his feet and his hands ached and ached he knew! And so he painted you! "She says you're praying; that you've stopped your work, and 'turned to higher things.' She says we all should have an 'Angelus' in our lives each day. Good God! as if she knew!" Hephzibah Hephzi-bah was on her feet now, her hands to her head. "An 'Angelus'? me?" continued the woman, scornfully. "And where? The dish pan? the wash tub? the chicken yard? A fine 'Angelus,' that! And yet" Hephzibah dropped to her knees again "you look so quiet, so peaceful, and, oh, so rested." "For the land's sake. Hetty, what be you doin'? Have you gone clean crazy?" It was Theron, In the parlor doorway. Hephzibah rose wearily to her feet. "Sometimes I think I have,' Theron," she said. "WeU" he hesitated "ain't it 'most supper time?" "I s'pose it is." she assented, listlessly, listless-ly, and dragged herself from the room. It was not long after this that the picture disappeared from the parlor. Hephzibah has borne it very carefully to her room and hung It on the wall at the foot of her bed, where her eyes would open upon it the first thing every morning. Each day she talked to it. and each day it grew to be more and more a part of her very self. Not until the picture had been there a week, however, did she suddenly realize that it represented the twilight hour; then, like a flash of light, came the inspiration. inspira-tion. "It's a sunset I'll go out at sunset! Now my 'Angelus' will come to me." she cried, softly. "I know it will!" Then did the little hillside farmhouse see strange sights Indeed. Each night, as the sun dropped behind the faraway hills, Hephzibah left her work and passed through the kitchen door, her face uplifted, and her eyes on the distant dis-tant sky line. Sometimes she would turn to the left to the open field and stand there motionless, mo-tionless, unconsciously falling into the reverent attitude now so familiar to her; sometimes she would turn to the right and pause at the brow of the hill, where the valley in all its panorama ot loveliness lay before her; and. sometimes some-times she would walk straight ahead to the old tumbledown gate Where she might face the west and watch the rose change to palest amber- In the sky. At first her eyes saw but grass, sky and dull brown earth, and her thoughts turned to bitterness to her unfinished tasks, but gradually the witchery of the summer night entered her soul and left little room for else. Strange faces peeping in and out of the clouds looked at her from the sky; and fantastic figures, fig-ures, clothed in the evening mist.' swept up the valley to her feet. The grass assumed a deeper green and the a i a,n m ,m isa iSTi rfri ir - m, m. ja.a a -4 trees stood out like sentinels along the .hilltop behind- the house. Even when ; she turned and went back to the kltch 1 en and took upon herself once more th accustomed tasks, her eyes still faintly ' glowed with the memory of what they had seen. . j "It do beat all," said Theron a month later to Helen - Raymond, who was again a visitor at the farm"lt do beat . all. Helen, what's come over yer aunt. She used to be nervous-like, and fretted, fret-ted, an things never went ter suit her. Now she's calm, an her eyes Wnd o .: shine specially when she copies In . from one of them tramps of hers outdoors. out-doors. She says it's her 'Angelus' if ye know what that is; but it strikes trn as mighty queer ft do. Helen. It do!" 1 . And Helen smiled content-rElearr Jr H. Porter, in Harper's Monthly. I - - ' i |