CHAPTER I
OPENING THE COTTAGE
“Hello there!” The man with grizzled hair and bronzed face under a shabby yachting-cap stopped in his leisurely ramble up the street of a seaport village, and his eyes lighted at sight of a spare feminine figure, whose lean vigorous arms were shaking a long narrow rug at a cottage gate. “Ahoy there – The Clever Betsy!” he went on.
The energetic woman vouchsafed a sidewise twist of her mouth intended for a smile, but did not cease from her labors, and a cloud of dust met the hastened approach of the seaman.
“Here, there’s enough o’ that! Don’t you know your captain?” he went on, dodging the woolen fringe which snapped near his dark cheek.
“My captain!” retorted the energetic one, while the rug billowed still more wildly. She was a woman of his own middle age, and the cloth tied around her head did not add to her charms; but the man’s eyes softened as they rested on her.
“Here! You carry too much sail. Take a reef!” he cried; and deftly snatching the rug, in an instant it was trailing on the walk behind him, while Betsy Foster stared, offended.
“How long ye been here, Betsy?”
“A couple o’ days,” replied the woman, adjusting the cheese-cloth covering more firmly behind her ears.
“Why didn’t ye let a feller know?”
“Thought I wouldn’t trouble trouble till trouble troubled me.”
The man smiled. “The Clever Betsy,” he said musingly. They regarded one another for a silent moment. “Why ain’t ye ever clever to me?”
She sniffed.
“Why don’t ye fat up some?” he asked again.
“If I was as lazy as you are, probably I should,” she returned, with the sidewise grimace appearing again, and the breeze from the wide ocean a stone’s throw away ruffling the sparse straight locks that escaped from her headdress.
“Goin’ to marry me this time, Betsy?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Same old reason.”
“But I tell ye,” said the man, in half-humorous, half-earnest appeal, “I’ve told ye a dozen times I didn’t know which I liked best then. If you’d happened to go home from singin’-school with me that night it would ’a’ ben you.”
“And I say it ain’t proper respect to Annie’s memory for you to talk that way.”
“I ain’t disrespectful. There never were two such nice girls in one village before. I nearly grew wall-eyed tryin’ to look at you both at once. Annie and I were happy as clams for fifteen years. She’s been gone five, and I’ve asked ye four separate times if you’d go down the hill o’ life with me, and there ain’t any sense in your refusin’ and flappin’ rugs in my face.”
“You know I don’t like this sort o’ foolin’, Hiram. I wish you’d be done with it.”
“I ain’t ever goin’ to be done with it, Betsy, not while you live and I live.”
“Have some sense,” she rejoined. “We both made our choice when we were young and we must abide by it – both of us.”
“You didn’t marry the Bruce family.”
“I did, too.”
Betsy Foster’s eyes, suddenly reminiscent, did not suit in their expression the brusqueness of her tone. She saw again her young self, heart-sick with the disappointment of her girlish fancy, leaving this little village for the city, and finding a haven with the bride who became her friend as well as mistress.
“I did, too,” she repeated. “It was my silver weddin’ only last week, when Mr. Irving had his twenty-fourth birthday.”
“Is Irving that old? Bless me! Then,” hopefully, “if he’s twenty-four he don’t need to be tied to your apron-strings. Strikes me you’re as much of a widow as I am a widower. There ain’t many o’ the Bruce family left for you to be married to. After Irving’s mother died, I can see plain enough why you were a lot o’ help to Mr. Bruce; but when he married again you didn’t have any call to look after him any longer; and seein’ he died about the same time poor Annie did, you’ve been free as air these five years. You don’t need to pretend you think such an awful lot o’ the widder Bruce, ’cause I know ye don’t. Don’t ye suppose I remember how all your feathers stood on end when Mr. Bruce married her?”
Betsy gave a fleeting glance over her shoulder toward the window of the cottage.
“’Twasn’t natural that I should want to see anybody in Irving’s mother’s place, but she’s – ”
“I remember as if ’twas yesterday,” interrupted Hiram, “how you said ’twas Irving she married him for; how that she could never keep her fingers out of any pie, and she didn’t like the hats Mr. Bruce bought for Irving, so she married him to choose ’em herself.”
Betsy’s lips twitched in a short laugh. “Well, I guess there was somethin’ in that,” she answered.
Hiram pursued what he considered his advantage. “When Irving was on the football team at college, you told me yourself, standin’ right by this gate, that she’d go to the game, and when she wasn’t faintin’ because he was knocked out, she was hollerin’ at him how to play.”
Betsy bridled. “Well, what’s all this for?” she demanded.
“It’s to show you plain as the nose on your face that if you ever was married to the Bruce family you’re a widder now; just as much as I’m a widower.”
“No, sir, for better or for worse,” returned Betsy doggedly.
