Carolyn May wanted awfully to speak to Miss Amanda. The brown lady with the pretty roses in her cheeks sat on the log by the brook, her face turned from the path Joseph Stagg and his little niece were coming along. She must have known they were coming down the glade and who they were, for nobody could mistake the identity of Prince, and the dog would not be out in the woods with anybody but his little mistress.
Miss Parlow, however, kept her face steadily turned in the opposite direction. And Uncle Joe was quite as stubborn. He stared straight ahead down the path without letting the figure on the log get into the focus of his vision.
Carolyn May did not see how it was possible for two people who loved each other, or who ever had loved each other, to act so. They must have thought a great deal of each other once upon a time, for Chet Gormley’s mother had said so. The very fact that they now acted as they did proved to the observant child that the situation was not normal.
She wanted to seize Uncle Joe’s hand and whisper to him how pretty Miss Amanda looked. She wanted 113 to run to the lady and talk to her. Thus far she had found little opportunity for knowing Miss Amanda Parlow well, although Carolyn May and the old carpenter were now very good friends.
Hanging to Uncle Joe’s hand, but looking longingly at the silent figure on the log, Carolyn May was going down to the stepping-stones by which they were to cross the brook, when, suddenly, Prince came to a halt right at the upper end of the log and his body stiffened.
“What is it, Prince?” whispered his little mistress. “Come here.”
But the dog did not move. He even growled—not at Miss Amanda, of course, but at something on the log. And it was just then that Carolyn May wanted to scream—and she could not!
For there on the log, raising its flat, wicked head out of an aperture, its lidless eyes glittering, and its forked tongue shooting in and out of its jaws, was a snake, a horrid, silent, writhing creature, the look of which held the little girl horror-stricken and speechless.
Uncle Joe glanced down impatiently, to see what made her hold back so. The child’s feet seemed glued to the earth. She could not take another step.
Writhing out of the hole in the log and coiling, as it did so, into an attitude to strike, the snake looked to be dangerous, indeed. The fact that it was only a large blacksnake and non-poisonous made 114 no difference at that moment to the dog or to the little girl—nor to Joseph Stagg when he saw it.
It was coiled right at Miss Amanda’s back. She did not see it, for she was quite as intent upon keeping her face turned from Mr. Stagg as he had been determined to ignore her presence.
After all, it is the appearance of a snake that terrifies some people. They do not stop to question whether it is furnished with a poison sac or not. The very look of the creature freezes their blood.
Carolyn May was shaking and helpless. Not so Prince. He repeated his challenging growl and then sprang at the vibrating head. Miss Amanda uttered a stifled scream and jumped up from the log, whirling to see what was happening behind her.
Joseph Stagg dropped Carolyn May’s hand and leaped forward with his walking-stick raised to strike. But the mongrel dog was there first. He wisely caught the blacksnake behind the head, his strong, sharp teeth severing its vertebræ.
“Good dog!” shouted Mr. Stagg excitedly. “Fine dog!”
“Oh, Miss Amanda!” shrieked Carolyn May. “I—I thought he was going to sting you—I did!”
She ran to the startled woman and clung to her hand. Prince nosed the dead snake. Mr. Stagg looked exceedingly foolish. Miss Amanda recovered her colour and her voice simultaneously.
“What a brave dog yours is, little girl,” she said to Carolyn May. “And I do so despise snakes!” 115 Then she looked directly at Mr. Stagg and bowed gravely. “I thank you,” she said, but so coldly, so Carolyn May thought, that her voice might have come “just off an iceberg.”
“Oh, I didn’t do anything—really I didn’t,” stammered the man. “It was the dog.”
“Oh!” said Miss Amanda.
“Yes,” repeated Mr. Stagg, “it was the dog.”
Both looked very uncomfortable. Joseph Stagg began to pick up the scattered chestnuts from the overturned basket. The lady stooped and whispered to Carolyn May:
“Come to see me, my dear. I want to know you better.”
“And Prince?” asked the little girl.
“And Prince, of course.”
Then she kissed Carolyn May and slipped quietly away from the brook, disappearing very quickly in the undergrowth. Uncle Joe stood up, with the basket in his hand.
“You’d better call the dog away from that snake, Car’lyn May,” he said in a strangely husky voice. “We’ll be going.”
The little girl approved.
“You surely don’t want to eat it, Prince,” she told her canine friend. “Snakes aren’t meat, nor even fish. Are they, Uncle Joe?”
“Humph! what d’you s’pose they are, then?” he demanded.
“Why, they’re—they’re just insects, aren’t they? 116 Not even dogs should eat them,” and she urged Prince away from the snake.
The muscles of the “insect” still twitched, and its tail snapped about. Prince had his doubts as to whether it was really dead or was “playing possum.”
“Is it true, Uncle Joe,” Carolyn May asked, “that snakes can’t really die till the sun goes down? You see, it still wiggles. Do—do you s’pose it’s suffering?”
“I guess Prince fixed Mr. Snake, all right, at the first bite,” returned Mr. Stagg. “He’s dead. That old idea about the critters holding the spark of life till after sunset is just a superstition. We can safely call that fellow dead and leave him.”
Joseph Stagg and the little girl went on across the stepping-stones, while Prince splashed through the water. Carolyn May was thinking about Miss Amanda Parlow, and she believed her Uncle Joe was, too.
“Uncle Joe,” she said, “would that bad old snake have stung Miss Amanda?”
“Huh? No; I reckon not,” admitted Mr. Stagg absent-mindedly. “Blacksnakes don’t bite. A big one like that can squeeze some.”
“But you were scared of it—like me and Prince. And for Miss Amanda,” said Carolyn May, very much in earnest.
“I guess ’most everybody is scared by the sight of a snake, Car’lyn May.”
“But you were scared for Miss Amanda’s sake—just 117 the same as I was,” repeated the little girl decidedly.
“Well?” he growled, looking away, troubled by her insistence.
“Then you don’t hate her, do you?” the child pursued. “I’m glad of that, Uncle Joe, for I like her very much. I think she’s a beautiful lady.”
To this Uncle Joe said nothing. He was not to be drawn, badger-like, to the mouth of his den. What he really thought of Miss Amanda he kept to himself.
“Anyway,” sighed Carolyn May at last, “she invited me to come to see her, now she’s home from nursing. And, if you haven’t got any objection, Uncle Joe, I’m going to see her.”
“Go ahead,” said Mr. Stagg. “I haven’t anything to say against it.”
But Carolyn May was far from satisfied by this permission. Child as she was, somehow she had gained an appreciation of the tragedy in the lives of Joseph Stagg and Amanda Parlow.
That cry the man had uttered when he sprang to Miss Parlow’s aid had been wrenched from the very depths of his being. Nor had Miss Amanda’s emotion been stirred only by the sight of a snake that was already dead when she had first seen it. Carolyn May had felt the woman’s hand tremble; there had been tears flooding her eyes when she kissed the little girl.
“I guess,” thought Carolyn May wisely, “that 118 when two folks love each other and get angry, the love’s there just the same. Getting mad doesn’t kill it; it only makes ’em feel worse.
“Poor Uncle Joe! Poor Miss Amanda! Maybe if they’d just try to look up and look for brighter things, they’d get over being mad and be happy again.”
She felt that she would really like to advise with somebody on this point. Aunty Rose, of course, was out of the question. She knew that people often advised with their minister when they were in trouble, but to Carolyn May Mr. Driggs did not seem to be just the person with whom to discuss a love-affair. Kindly as the minister was disposed, he lacked the magnetism and sympathy that would urge one to take him into one’s confidence in such a delicate matter.
The little girl quite realised that it was delicate. She longed to help her uncle and Miss Amanda and to bring them together, but she felt, too, that whatever she did or said might do more harm than good.
When Uncle Joe and Carolyn May returned from this adventurous walk, Mr. Stagg went heavily into his own room, closed the door, and even locked it. He went over to the old-fashioned walnut bureau that stood against the wall between the two windows, and stood before it for some moments in an attitude of deep reflection. Finally, he drew his bunch of keys from his pocket and opened one of the two 119 small drawers in the heavy piece of furniture—the only locked drawer there was.
It contained a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends—old school exercises, letters from his sister Hannah, an old-fashioned locket containing locks of his mother’s and of his father’s hair, broken trinkets, childish keepsakes. Indeed, such sentimental remembrances as Joseph Stagg possessed were secreted in this drawer.
From beneath all this litter he drew forth a tintype picture, faded now, but clear enough to show him the features of the two individuals printed on the sensitised plate.
He remembered as keenly as though it were yesterday when and how the picture had been made—at the county fair so many years ago. His own eyes looked out of the photograph proudly. They were much younger eyes than they were now.
And the girl beside him in the picture! Sweet as a wild rose, Mandy Parlow’s lovely, calm countenance promised all the beauty and dignity her matured womanhood had achieved.
“Mandy! Mandy!” he murmured over and over again. “Oh, Mandy! Why? Why?”
He held the tintype for a long, long time in his hand, gazing on it with eyes that saw the vanished years rather than the portraits themselves. Finally, he hid the picture away again, closed and locked the drawer with a sigh, and with slow steps left the room.