The crimson leather of the case has darkened, and the gilt of the frame is flecked in places. In most lights the portrait itself is only a ghostly blur, like a damp breath across a mirror, but woo it long enough, and Grandmother gazes forth in all her bridal splendor. Her shoulders are drawn firm and erect to display to best advantage the scant, short cape which almost conceals her hands and arms. A beaded bag is artfully arranged to peep from among the folds of the plaid skirt. But the face above the knotted East India scarf is too demure and serene for any touch of pride. The little blue-plumed bonnet outlines the oval breadth of forehead, then sweeps away on either side, to leave room for the tiny pink roses between its brim and the girlish cheek. Their petals curve delicately against the dark bunches of curls.
From the portrait in my hand, I look at Grandmother herself as she rocks gently by her window. Her soft, lined face flushes with the shy pink of the daguerreotype's when I say how beautiful she was then and how lovely now. Sometimes, if I coax long enough, she tells me of the days before the beaded bag or the leghorn bonnet. Then in a bright, low-ceilinged room a little girl climbs with deliberate care to the window-sill to water the white rosebush beneath, or the sunset filters through dark boles of pine trees to splash, with yellow radiance, a narrow-skirted, crisp-ruffed little figure bent over her sampler on the wide veranda.
She tells me, too, of her own grandmother and the stories before the tallow dips are lighted, when the old lady's cap glimmers through the dusk. The little girl leans close against her knee to hear once more of the sacking by the British, - how the beat of their oars sounded from the bay at the further side of the pines, and how frightened Black Pompey's face looked as he reconnoitered from the tallest, with his master stamping in impatience at the foot. She grows breathless as she hears of the hurried flight on horseback, and the women and children cowering in pillions. She heaves a deep sigh of relief as her grandmother reaches the return to a house which the "Redcoats" have left still standing, though they have slashed the great feather beds and dashed the brown milk crocks into a hundred pieces.
Now grandmother is nearing the days of the daguerreotype in her stories. She does not tell me of her blue eyes, the eyes of a great beauty, and the dark curls dancing against her white throat; but I can see them all. She is growing dignified, she declares, and has stopped sending the old lead cannon ball (relic of British days) whizzing and leaping over the smooth length of the veranda. Indeed, I think she has reached the time of "the rare old book."
It stands in my bookcase where the rich leather of Shakespeare and Milton overshadows its dimmed gray binding, as their mightier music drowns its slender spinet note. "The Poetical Works of Miss Landon," so reads the title-page, and opposite is "L. E. L." herself with her hair in a wondrously wired bow above the penciled eyebrows, and an alluring pout on her poetess lips. In the table of contents there is no mark opposite "The Violet" - Grandmother's lover would have his message unassuming as the flower. Farther on through the mellowed pages one fern-like arrow guides the reader to the poem's final stanza:-
"Let Nature spread her loveliest
By spring or summer nurst;
Yet still I love the violet best,
Because I loved it first."
Concerning the years which follow, Grandmother is rather silent. I hear of the wedding journey and the taking of the daguerreotype, but her modesty allows only occasional glimpses of the busy hours in dairy or garden. In times of rejoicing or sadness she takes the children in the vast family carriage and drives forty miles down the hills to the old hom. Here Aunt Sally Ann reigns supreme.
Aunt Sally Ann is slim, unbelievably slim and majestical. She brushes her fluff of auburn hair to an immovable satin line above each temple. She is most methodical; the high heels of her slippers click as she places them exactly together by the valance of the high-post bed. A fine disciplinarian, too, Grandmother assures me; little fingers once tapped by her shears never reach again for the dazzling sewing-bird whose bill grasps her work.
She had lovers a-plenty in spite of her remoteness of bearing. One handsome young gallant was forced to go on a short journey. The heart under Aunt Sally Ann's plum-colored basque quickened its beating, and one curl escaped from its satin band as they parted. But the lover's note, penned in the ardor of moonlight, shattered the romance forever: "Good-knight my dear, my dearest dear." If his spelling had but equaled his fervor!
But it is of the farm itself, her home for so many years, that Grandmother speaks increasingly often, - of the whiteness of the house reflected in the snowy phlox of the garden, of the trumpet vines which trail over the lower windows, and the wax bushes which drop their strange fruit upon its sills. I know just how the humming-bird builds each year in the crotch of the yellow rose, and I know, although I have never seen them, how the orchards slope to the great clover field, and the clover field in turn to the swamp, where red-winged blackbirds flash from the emerald tufts and dragon flies quiver in air. I am initiated, too, into the secrets of the meadows. I could find the pennyroyal in the thin pasture grass or the bee-balm where it flaunts its vagrant glory. Even the haunt of the healing goldthread is no mystery to me.
The sailor marooned ashore feels the very wash of the tides through his blood, while his eyes ache for the flash of a white wing over a green sea plain. So our exile from the hilltop farm longs each year for the low-toned glow of violets by the spring-house door, or the cry of phoebes from the dim barn eaves.
The patch of sky is deceptively blue beyond Grandmother's window and the chipmunks leap up the maple trunk in a truly summerlike way.
"Now that the sewing's done," Grandmother begins artfully, "I think I'll go home and help in the house-cleaning."
"But it's only February, Grandmother."
"I must put up some cherries, too, this year. They forgot it, last."
"It is n't Easter yet, Grandmother."
"The raspberries are ripe by the old wall, and the blueberries. I must tell them to sow buckwheat in the long meadow."