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"Well, yes, if I'm spared," said Aunt 'Viny; and, being spared, on that sweet May-Sunday she carried the smiling little child up the aisle of the meeting-house, and had it baptized Content. Strange to say, yet not all strange, before it was a year old, the baby had found its way quite down into the middle of Aunt 'Viny's heart.
Sorry am I to betray this weakness of Aunt 'Viny's, sorry to know how many strong-minded, intellectual, highly educated and refined women will object to this mean and jealous sentiment in a woman of like passions with themselves.
Then Aunt 'Viny's care diverted her sad thoughts from herself, by sending her upon daily errands to the poor and the sick, so that 'Tenty's pleasant face and voice became the hope of the hour to more than one poverty-stricken or dying woman; and so her own grief, measured by theirs, shrank and withdrew itself day by day, and became something she could now and then forget.
They went to Master Solon's singing-school, it is true; but they never got home to Aunt 'Viny's till half past nine, and 'Tenty never could remember what tunes they sang; and the singers in church next Sunday asked her why she didn't come in when she got as far as the door, and 'Tenty said she thought the benches were all full!
To be sure, it was a deal of trouble; it would ache and cry in a reasonless way, when nobody could tell what ailed it; it would take a great amount of caring-for with ungrateful silence and utter want of demonstration for a long time; but then it was so helpless! irresistible plea to a woman! and under all Miss 'Viny's rough exterior, her heart was as sweet as the kernel of a butternut, though about as hard to discover.
"Let's go out past Miss Viny's," suggested Jake; "there's a bully woods out there." "Aw, no! Let's go to Tick Creek an' go in wadin'." Mrs. Wiggs, seated high above the party and slapping the reins on Cuba's back, allowed the lively debate to continue until trouble threatened, then she interfered: "I think it would be nice to go over to the cemetery.
So she sat in Miss 'Viny's bed-room in an old rush-bottomed rocking-chair, sewing and sewing, day after day, the persistent will and intent to die working out its own fulfilling, her white lips growing more and more bloodless, her transparent cheek more wan, and the temples, from which her lustreless hair was carelessly knotted away, getting more hollow and clear and sharp-angled.
"Please, sir, can't I take Tommy, too? If it hadn't 'a' been for him I never would have been here." So Mr. Redding took them to the rear car, and attaching Lovey Mary firmly to the railing, and Tommy firmly to Mary, returned to his family. "There's Miss Viny's!" cried Lovey Mary, excitedly, as the train whizzed past. "We're getting there.
Old Uncle Dan'l Mule had certainly seen a figure in a white sheet rise up out of that decayed oak stump in the hollow, for he had sworn to it in the boy's presence in Aunt Rhody Sand's cabin the night of her daughter Viny's wedding.
So engrossed were the two in selecting and arranging the flowers that neither thought of the yellowroot or its substitute. Nevertheless, as Lovey Mary tramped briskly back over the railroad-ties with her burden of blossoms, she bore a new thought in her heart which was destined to bring about a surer cure than any of Miss Viny's most efficient herbs.
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