Part 12

She was in high good humor, and evidenced it by a peck on my cheek and the remark that I must be getting better, for I really didn’t look so very many years older than I was. She approved of the plans for the house, especially when she found it was to be our wedding gift to Caro; and she went out “to perch,” at Caro’s invitation, and admired every stone in the foundations. Then she came in and settled seriously down to the subject of clothes.

It seems that Grace is lavishing on Milly’s outfit all the pretty things Cousin Jason prevented her from giving the child in her girlhood; and Cousin Jane’s family pride has risen in a most desirable and unexpected manner to demand that Caro shall be as well provided for as her cousin; so Caro can prepare in peace. Cousin Jane even proposes to help her, tooth and nail. Caro and I are a little daunted by this excess of zeal, Cousin Jane’s taste—or lack of it—being a byword in the family. But Caro will find a way to manage her; and we have already settled the question of the dress she is to wear at the wedding. I had Caro buy it for me in New York—a soft, rich, silken fabric—and it is to be made by the best dressmaker in the city. If we left it to Cousin Jane, she would get old black Sally to make it, at seventy-five cents a day; she says it’s sinful to waste money on town dress-makers.

But she doesn’t mind my wasting it for her. If there was a corner of her heart still congealed it melted when she took the silk between her finger and thumb, and fully tested its quality.

“It’s an elegant present, Lyddy,” she declared graciously, “an’ I don’t mind taking it from you one mite. I’ve always said you meant well; an’ it ain’t your fault if you’re foolish.”

Could I ask for a handsomer coat of white-wash than that?

* * * * *

_October 2nd._ Last night was sticky, hot, and still, with the stars flaming overhead, as though they were trying to burn the heavens. I fell asleep at last, to be wakened suddenly by a sound as if the wind were ripping the sky off the earth, and ten million tons of water were sluicing through the hole. The world was all one glare of light, with sudden, momentary breaks of darkness, while a roar as of a thousand batteries surged up from every quarter of the heavens, and filled to bursting the black void above our heads. I sprang up to close the windows, my ankles brushed by quick, ghostly touches, as loose papers skittered over the floor.

The Peon and David came in, in hastily donned attire, for the storm was altogether out of the ordinary. The house trembled like a living thing, and in the air about us we could feel the crackle of the blinding light. Then came a crash that split the earth. A moment later, through the surging billows of water hurled through the wind-rent air, we saw a sudden, leaping light, red in the white electric glare. A huddled company of straw-stacks had been struck by the descending bolt, and not even that flood of water could quench the flames. The heavy clouds, weighted almost to earth, caught the sullen glow beneath them, and as they were flung onward and upward by the screaming wind, carried the lurid colors of destruction far into the blackness overhead. One moment a world of blinding white, as the lightning blotted out everything but its own wild glare. The next, a red and lowering world, sullen, portentous, with the evil color spreading, climbing, licking out on all sides in an orgy of ruin and waste whose greed defied the cataracts of water, and made the wild wind its minister and slave.

The air rocked with the thunderous down-pour under the crashing clouds. One of the maples fell prone in the lightning’s glare; and from every side came the sound of rending wood as branches were wrenched and split and hurled across the lawn. The house shook, while around us and above us the Titans fought. In the presence of that unveiled power one’s own small life dwindled to nothingness. One marveled that human feebleness yet held a place in a world so charged with forces, the least of which could wipe out all human effort and leave the earth as bare as a new-sponged slate.

Yet the fury passed. The Titans screamed and fought, but their power waned. The wind wavered and sank, sobbing like a beaten child; the rain splashed dully, dripping from porches and eaves; the thunder died on distant hills, and the lightnings grew fitful and weak. Even the storm-born flames were spent, until only a hot coal of light glowed under the breaking clouds. A star shone here and there, mirrored in the rain-pools of the drenched fields.

David opened the windows, and we drank in the freshness of the storm-cleansed air. The new-washed leaves, still green with summer time, whispered in the quietness, and here and there a cricket chirped, or a night-bird called to its mate. Power was veiled again, withdrawn; and life that had trembled in the balance resumed its wonted course.

* * * * *

_October 9th._ I asked Grace today about Cousin Jason. I knew she was worrying over something. Milly might be happy, but she wasn’t. So I asked her how he did.

“He won’t speak to me, Lil, at all. I have been there two or three times; but he wouldn’t see me.”

“Isn’t he coming to the wedding?” I asked.

“I wrote to ask him that—to show him we really wanted him; but he sent the letter back.”

Her eyes filled with unwonted tears, and I had a sudden desire to jerk my jay-bird cousin’s feathers out by the roots.

“You’ll just have to train your thoughts to keep away from him, Grace,” I said. “I know you can, for I’ve steered my own clear of a lot of things I simply don’t dare to fool with. Don’t shake your head at me, madam! Do you think Milly doesn’t see that look in your eyes when you sit and think about Cousin Jason? Are you going to let him hurt her?”

“No, I’m not,” she said firmly. “I’ll make my eyes behave.”

“Then you’ll have to make your thoughts behave behind your eyes. You let Cousin Jason alone. If you’ll quit paying attention to him long enough, he’ll come round; but as long as you give him a chance to rebuff you, he’ll amuse himself doing it.”

Grace laughed.

“Shall I follow your advice or your example—you door-mat for Cousin Jane?”

I laughed myself.

“Never mind. We can find out how to do a thing perfectly, many a time, just by doing it the way it shouldn’t be done. And I did send Cousin Jane home once. I know the recording angel put that down to my credit.”

We fell to talking of her plans. Milly and her husband are to live with her, he going in to his business daily, like the Peon. But Grace wants them to have this first winter alone together. So as soon as they get back from their wedding trip, and Caro is married, she expects to go away with George’s niece, and spend the winter travelling.

The Peon and I will stay at Bird Corners. The children will be gone for five or six weeks, and by the time they come home the Perchery will almost be ready for them to begin feathering their nest—And to think it’s the real Bird Corners, and not Make-Believe at all!

* * * * *

_October 16th._ The young mocking-birds are learning to sing, and their efforts are altogether charming. They sit apart, crooning, each to himself, trying their score over and over, thoughtfully, with pauses in which they seem to search their memories for forgotten notes. It is as if melody had come with them from the land of dreams, and they were trying to catch and hold the elusive sweetness, and teach it to come at their command. The soft, dreamy music floats through the October sunshine, at once a memory and a hope. It is a song of the garnered years, an inheritance from old days of love and aspiration, and it presages days of love and aspiration yet to be. But more than both of these, it voices the peace of autumn days, when the earth has finished the long year’s toil, and turns to its hard-won rest in the quiet of the misty sunshine.

* * * * *

_October 20th._ I don’t need my note-book these days. When one can do so much living with people the birds are no longer a necessity. I hear their songs and calls, and know them for the voices of my friends—real friends for life. But Caro comes over nearly every day, and always there is so much to talk about. And often Cousin Jane comes too; and it’s positively exhilarating to see the way Caro and I are corrupting her morals. That old lady is getting as worldly-minded as if there were not a blackbird saint in existence.

The dressmaker made her get a modern corset to be fitted in, and she’s so pleased with herself in it that she wears it all the time. She really looks like another person, for Caro has coaxed her into curl-papers o’ nights, and the soft gray fluff around her face is amazingly different from the wide part with the flat straight bands plastered over her temples and ears. The old Buff Orpington doesn’t know her any more, and Caro says he shrieks and runs at the sight of her.

Everybody in Chatterton notices the change, and tells her she looks years younger—as she does; and the other evening Cousin Chad took up the tale, and grew positively sentimental, right before Caro. Cousin Jane blushed and bridled as she must have done over forty years ago, and next day she bought the prettiest stuff for a house dress, and carried it to the wedding-gown dressmaker to make! She says it’s every woman’s Christian duty to be attractive in her own home, and that if Chadwell will be a boy and like frippery, she’ll have to give in to him; the Lord didn’t give men much sense anyway, and you just have to humor them along, like children.

I feel rather ashamed of myself, I must confess. I’ve been laughing at her all these years, like all the rest of the family, and been cross with her inside, often. And what she needed most was for somebody to see the simple human need for praise and petting under all her strident aggressiveness; for as soon as she got it she blossomed out like this! I said as much to Caro today, and she cocked her head suddenly to one side as if she heard someone calling her. Then she jumped up, laughing, spun around on one toe, and caught me in her arms. She said I’d given her such a big idea I’d taken her breath away. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, but ran off to the buggy and drove singing down to the gate.

* * * * *

_October 24th._ Caro has given me the shock of my life. I’ve seen she had some kind of bee in her bonnet for three or four days, but she was bent on being mysterious, so I didn’t tease.

Yesterday, as I sat on the side porch, whipping lace, I saw her buggy coming out from between the cedars, and Cousin Jason was in it! Caro was beaming, as usual, and Cousin Jason looked as if he were having a good time, and embarrassed to know what to do with it. I went to meet them as they drove toward the Perchery.

He greeted me awkwardly, and explained that Caro wanted him to see her house, and that he’d had no more sense than to give in to her and come. Caro dashed at him at once.

“You mean you had sense enough to come,” she corrected. “Cousin Jason really has lots of sense, Mammy Lil, only he thought it was nonsense and tried his best to hide it. We’re going up to town together tomorrow on a lark—just we two.”

“I haven’t promised yet,” he growled.

“You needn’t promise,” said Caro sweetly. “I told you it wasn’t necessary. All you need to do is to go.”

She made him admire the house and the plans; and when he objected to her numerous closets she assured him that his ideas were all wrong, and that the lack of closets in his own house was the root of most of his troubles; he needed them to pack his skeletons in, instead of entertaining them in public. They went off together presently; but Caro promised to come back this evening and spend the night. I knew I should have the tale then.

She came, and the three of us had dinner together, the Peon being in town. And now that she and David are at the piano in the next room, I must finish the story.

She went straight from here the other day to Cousin Jason’s, and told him she wanted him to come to Milly’s wedding and give the bride away. He was too amazed to be angry at first; and when he did get angry, Caro stood her ground, kept her temper, and gave him what she called a preachment—a mixture of fun, coaxing, and straight-from-the-shoulder talking. She made no impression, apparently, so when she was ready to go she left, assuring him cheerfully that she would be back in the morning and take the matter up with him again.

He had always liked Caro, and her sheer audacity pleased him. She took her work the next morning and spent the day. When Cousin Jason grew weary of argument, he went out on the farm; but Caro was there when he came back. She had carried over various good things to eat, and gave him a lunch such as he hadn’t enjoyed since he left Grace’s. She argued, coaxed, ridiculed, and scolded. And by the time David, who was sworn to secrecy, came by to take her driving, Cousin Jason had promised to think the matter over.

I don’t believe it was what the child said that impressed his stubborn nature; he simply found Caro herself irresistible.

When she left him that day, his anger with Grace, she said, was really a crumbling ruin; but he didn’t realize it; so she went back next morning to topple it to its fall. By the middle of the afternoon he had said that if he could be convinced Grace really wanted him, he would go. Caro immediately challenged him to go there with her to dinner that night, take Grace by surprise, and see for himself. When he refused she taunted him with backing out of his own test, and dared him to the scratch. She telephoned Grace finally that she wanted to bring a friend to dinner, and they drove over together.

“Milly and Bobolink were out in his car,” she said; “and Cousin Grace didn’t see us coming. We walked right in on her in the living-room before she knew he was there.” Caro paused to wipe her eyes. “I’ll cry for six months whenever I think about it. I don’t see how Cousin Grace can care so much—he’s been so hateful to her. I thought she was going to faint at first. Then she stood there speechless, her hands stretched out, and her face the most beautiful thing I ever saw. He called her name and went toward her, and she just slipped into his arms with one long sob, as if her heart were breaking. And I went out and shut the door.”

When Milly came in she was plainly overjoyed, for her mother’s sake, if not for his; and Bobolink, Caro declared, behaved like an archangel. She inconsistently elucidated this remark by explaining that he had been brought up on a farm and was as crazy about the country as I am myself; and he has always kept up his knowledge of agriculture and his interest in it. Cousin Jason, who had taken him for what he politely terms a city fool, thawed visibly toward him during the evening. And before he left he had promised to give the bride away.

Caro, who believes in striking while the iron is hot, offered to go to town with him the next day to order his dress-suit for the occasion. As the wedding is to be on the twenty-ninth, there is certainly no time to lose. But Cousin Jason, who has scorned conventionality all his life, balked instantly, and declared that if he had to make a fool of himself to do it he wouldn’t come to the wedding at all.

Grace agreed at once to his wearing anything he chose; but Caro was resolved to carry her point.

“You see, Mammy Lil, he was just in retreat, and I had to rout him. If I had let him make a stand about the clothes he’d wear I’d have been throwing away my victory. So I told him he had to have a dress-suit. He’d need it for my wedding as well as Milly’s. I didn’t tell him before Cousin Grace; I waited till he drove me back to Cousin Jane’s. And next day I went over again to sit up with him about it.”

“He ought to have admired your persistence.”

“That’s just what I told him. He began to weaken a little, so I brought him over and showed him the Perchery as a reward. And he went this very day. The tailor said he couldn’t make it in time, and Cousin Jason crowed and said he’d told me so. But I explained to the tailor that he could make it, and that he had it to do. So he agreed. We bought gloves, and a tie, and everything; and I made him get his hair cut, and he’s going to look scrumptious. You really haven’t an idea what can be done with an old relation till you begin to furbish him up.”

* * * * *

_October 30th._ Milly was married in church, and she and Cousin Jason and Grace stopped by here on their way to the wedding for me to see them. Milly was beautiful, and no bride but Caro could be sweeter; and Grace, all in silvery gray, with that deep light in her eyes, was like nothing but the Moonlight Sonata. As to Cousin Jason, he was furbished almost past recognition; and my admiration pleased him like a boy.

Caro fluttered about them, radiant in her bridesmaid’s dress, and followed by David’s adoring eyes. The Peon escorted Grace; and after awhile I watched the carriages coming back. Before they left for the station Caro telephoned me, and Uncle Milton wheeled me down to the gate, where I waved my handkerchief and cast my handful of rice as they drove by, Milly’s exquisite face alight with a look her husband may well carry in his heart always.

* * * * *

_November 29th._ How fast the days slip by! Milly came home early in the week, and yesterday was the Thanksgiving I prophesied about to David last spring.

Certainly I am going all about the house; and to emphasize my success as a seer we had a family gathering at Thanksgiving dinner. The bride and groom were here, of course, and Grace, who leaves as soon as Caro is married, and Cousin Jason—resplendent, by the way, in his dress-suit, which he considered a capital joke on Caro. Cousin Jane looked not a day over fifty, and Cousin Chad had done some furbishing himself to keep her company.

To think of a dinner party at Bird Corners again, after all these years! The Peon and I beamed at one another from the ends of the table; and in the centre, the bride and groom faced the bride-and-groom-to-be, with the older people tucked in at the corners. And it was all so good to see and hear—such a fairy tale come true—that, as I lie here today resting, I am just too happy for words.

David and Caro are to be married next Wednesday—married here, at Bird Corners. I dare not risk going to the church yet, and Cousin Jane’s is quite as far away. Besides, both the children want it here, and it is and always has been Caro’s home as well as David’s. Cousin Jane has really been sweet about it; and it is all settled that she and Caro are to come over in time for me to help dress the bride. Grace is coming tomorrow, and will stay with me until it is all over and she goes away herself.

* * * * *

_December 9th._ The wedding day was perfect—cloudless blue, and the little red wren singing his matins in the lilac almost before it was light. I am glad the child is a winter bride. She can afford to ignore the seasons, for she carries spring-time in her heart, like her namesake out of doors.

It was all beautiful, and I with my own hands helped to make it so. But nothing about it is very clear to me except the look in the children’s eyes—_our_ children, both of them, at last. Caro’s joy had sobered her, so that she walked the earth in radiance, instead of fluttering, light-winged, above it; but David’s joy had set him on the heights. Oh, my son, my son, child of my soul always! I could not have borne the look upon his face if I had not known Caro through and through. But now I am not afraid.

Grace went the day after the wedding, and left me in a world where real and Make-Believe are blended into one. The Peon comes home early, and together we walk across the grass to the Perchery, and talk of how he wheeled me there in those sorrowful days last spring, when it seemed the knoll would never know the nest we longed to see there. And in the evening we sit in the firelight together, and hear the childish voices of long ago in the room, and childish feet in the hall. And we laugh over the good old days, and smile over the new days, which are better. And before I go to bed we go to the window and look at the children’s house, standing clear against the stars. And they come and stand beside us there, their tiny hands in ours—the dear, long-ago little children, who will be with us always, though the big children, dearer still, come and go across the grass between their home and ours.

THE END

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Notes:

Punctuation and obvious typesetting errors have been corrected without note. When variation in spelling or hyphenation occurred, majority use has been employed.

[End of _In the Garden of Delight_, by Lily Hardy Hammond]

End of Project Gutenberg's In the Garden of Delight, by Lily Hardy Hammond