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Updated: May 24, 2025
I called Lurindy and gave her the letter, and after a little while I heard my name, and Lurindy was sitting on the top of the stairs with her head on her knees, and mother was leaning over the banisters.
If Lurindy was the best nurse, she'd ought to have had the privilege of taking care of her own lover, and not of other folks's. Besides, for all I knew, Stephen would be dead before ever I came back, and here I was going away and leaving him! Well, I didn't feel so very bright; so I read the letter. The Doctor asked me what ailed John Talbot.
I thought, if I told him that Miss Jane Talbot wrote now so that Lurindy shouldn't come, and that he was sick just as Stephen was, he wouldn't let me go. So I said I supposed he'd burnt his mouth, like the man in the South, eating cold pudding and porridge; men always cried out at a scratch. And he said, "Oh, do they?" and laughed.
I thought 't wasn't any use to trim myself out in bows and ruffles now, so I just put on my brown gingham and a white linen collar; but Lurindy came and tied a pink ribbon at my throat, and fixed my hair herself, and looked down and said, "Well, I don't see but you're about as pretty as ever you was." That almost finished me; but I contrived to laugh, and got down-stairs.
We've got a cow and the filly and some sheep; and mother shears and cards, and Lurindy spins, I can't spin, it makes my head swim, and I knit, knit socks and sell them. Sometimes I have needles almost as big as a pipe-stem, and choose the coarse, uneven yarn of the thrums, and then the work goes off like machinery.
Pretty soon I found it; it was a skein of linen thread I was going to wind for Lurindy. Then I got the swifts and came and sat down in front of the candle. "There," says I, "the swifts is broken. What shall I do?" "I'll hold the thread, if that's your trouble," says Stephen, and came and sat opposite to me while I wound.
By-and-by I unpacked my trunk, and there was a little parcel in the bottom of it, and I pulled it up. "There, Lurindy," says I, "John told me to tell you to have your wedding-dress ready against he came home, he's gone mate, and here it is." And I unrolled the neatest brown silk you ever saw, just fit for Lurindy, she's so pale and genteel, and threw it into her lap.
"Well, Emmy," says she, "if you like a smooth skin more than a smooth conscience, you're welcome," and went up-stairs herself. I suppose I had ought to 'a' gone, and I suppose I'd ought to wanted to have gone, but somehow it wasn't so much fear as that I didn't want to see Stephen himself now. So Lurindy stayed up chamber, and was there when mother and the doctor come.
I was provoked with mother and Lurindy for answering the thing, and was just going to speak up, when I caught Stephen's eye, and thought better of it. Pretty soon Aunt Mimy produced a bundle of herbs from her pocket, and laid them on the table. "Oh, thank you, Aunt Jemimy," says mother. "Pennyroyal and catnip's always acceptable." "Yes," said Aunt Mimy.
And then we went home very comfortably, and Stephen told mother it was all right, and mother and Lurindy did what they'd got very much into the habit of doing, cried; and I said, I should think I was going to be buried, instead of married; and Stephen took my knitting-work away, and said, as I had knit all our trouble and all our joy into that thing, he meant to keep it just as it was; and that was the end of my knitting sale-socks.
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