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He went up to bed at the usual time, however, but his mother coming into his little bedroom about half an hour afterward, was surprised to find him almost hidden by blanket and quilt, though it was a warm night in August. "Why, Bert, you'll smother. Do let me pull off some of these clothes." But Bert held them tightly down. "I ain't cold, mother. I mean I ain't warm." "Are you sick?" "No'm."
Just as this thought was drifting through her mind, the door opened and she hurriedly stuffed Jack's letter beneath her silk quilt. Radmore walked in, and his face softened as he looked down on the pale, fragile-looking girl for she did look very much like a girl lying on the sofa. "I've brought you a lot of messages from Old Place," he began. "They really are most awfully miserable about you!"
Finally, as if struck with a happy thought and relieved to get back to every-day things, she exclaimed: "Tell you what, Mrs. Peters, why don't you take the quilt in with you? It might take up her mind." "Why, I think that's a real nice idea, Mrs. Hale," agreed the sheriff's wife, as if she too were glad to come into the atmosphere of a simple kindness.
And when I was only a week in the convent he died and he was buried in Oughterard, where his people came from. O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!" She stopped, choking with sobs, and, overcome by emotion, flung herself face downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt.
And they actually smelled of flowers. For that matter, there were rosebuds on the silken coverlet. It took me a week to get chummy with that rosebud-and-down quilt.
When she saw an indistinct shape in the corner, and mistook his knees raised under the quilt for his shoulders, she imagined a horrible body there, and stood still in terror. But an irresistible impulse drew her forward. She cautiously took one step and then another, and found herself in the middle of a small room containing baggage.
Anna looked at him hungrily; she saw how he had grown and changed in her absence. She knew, and did not know, the bare legs so long now, that were thrust out below the quilt, those short-cropped curls on his neck in which she had so often kissed him. She touched all this and could say nothing; tears choked her. "What are you crying for, mother?" he said, waking completely up.
"I made every stitch o' that spread the year before me and Abram was married," she said. "I put it on my bed when we went to housekeepin'; it was on the bed when Abram died, and when I die I want 'em to cover me with it." There was a life-history in the simple words. I thought of Desdemona and her bridal sheets, and I did not offer to help Aunt Jane as she folded this quilt.
She lay flat on her back, the little emaciated wisp of humanity, hardly raising the piecework quilt enough to make the bed seem occupied, and to account for the thin, worn old face on the pillow. But as I entered the room her eyes seized on mine, and I was aware of nothing but them and some fury of determination behind them.
When the men came in from the field to supper, some luckless wight was sure to be caught, and tossed up and down in the quilt amid the laughter and shouts of the company. But of all the bees, the apple-bee was the chief. In these old and young joined.
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