CHAPTER XIII

MOUNTED ON PEGASUS

It was one of the habits and customs of Greenacres to open the daily mail up in Mr. Robbins’ own special room, the big sunny study overlooking the outer world so widely.

When they had first planned the rooms, it had been decided that the large south chamber should be Father’s own special corner. From its four windows he could look down on the little bridge and brown rock dam above with its plunging waterfall, and beyond that the widespread lake, dotted with islands, reed and alder fringed, that narrowed again into Little River farther on.

“It’s queer,” Doris said once, when winter was half over. “Nothing ever really looks dead up here. Even with the grass and leaves all dried up, the trees and earth look kind of reddish, you know what I mean, Mother, warm like.”

And they did too, whether it was from the rich russets of the oaks that refused to leave their twigs until spring, or the green laurel underneath, or the rich pines above, or the sorrel tinted earth itself, the land never seemed to lose its ruddy glow except when mantled with snow.

Mr. Robbins stood at a window now, his hands behind his back, looking out at the valley as they came upstairs.

“Do you know, dear,” he remarked. “I think I just saw some wild geese over on that first island, probably resting for the trip north overnight. That means an early spring. And there was a woodpecker on the maple tree this morning too. That is all my news. What have you brought?”

Everyone settled down to personal enjoyment of the mail. There was always plenty of it, letters, papers, new catalogues, and magazines, and it furnished the main diversion of the day.

Jean read hers over, seated in the wide window nook. Bab’s letter was full of the usual studio gossip, and begging her to come for a visit at Easter. But Cousin Beth’s letter was brimful of the coming trip. She wrote she would meet Jean in Boston, and they would motor over if the roads were good.

“Plan on staying at least two months, for it will be work as well as play. I was afraid you might be lonely with just us, so I have invited Carlota to spend her week ends here. You will like her, I am sure. She is a young girl we met last year in Sorrento. Her father is an American sculptor and married a really lovely Contessa. They are deep in the war relief work now, and have sent Carlota over here to study and learn the ways of her father’s country. She is staying with her aunt, the Contessa di Tambolini, the oddest, dearest, little old grande dame you can imagine. You want to call her the Countess Tambourine all the time, she tinkles so. It just suits her, she is so gay and whimsical and brilliant. Come soon, and don’t bother about buying a lot of new clothes. I warn you that you will be in a paint smock most of the time.”

“I wonder what her other name is,” Jean said, folding up the letter. “One of our teachers at the Art Class in New York was telling us her memories of Italy, and she mentioned some American sculptor who had married an Italian countess and lived in a wonderful old villa, at Sorrento, of a dull warm tan color, with terraces and rose gardens and fountains, and nice crumbly stone seats. She went to several of his receptions. Wouldn’t it be odd if he turned out to be Carlota’s father. It’s such a little world, isn’t it, Father?”

“We live in circles, dear,” Mr. Robbins smiled over the wide library table at her flushed eager face. “Little eddies of congeniality where we are constantly finding others with the same tastes and ways of living. Here’s a letter from Ralph, saying they will start east in May, and stay along through the summer, taking Mrs. Hancock and Piney back with them.”

“Piney’ll simply adore the trip way out west,” exclaimed Jean. “She’s hardly talked of anything else all winter but his promise to take them there, and Mrs. Hancock’s just the opposite. She declares her heart is buried right up in the little grave yard behind the church in the Hancock and Trowbridge plot.”

“She’ll go as long as both children are happy,” Mrs. Robbins said. “She has an odd little vein of sentiment in her that makes her cling to the land she knows best and to shrink from the unknown and untried, but I’m sure she’ll go. She’s such a quiet, retiring little country mother to have two wild swans like Honey and Piney, who are regular adventurers. I’ll drive over and have a talk with her as soon as my own bird of passage is on her way.”

Wednesday of the following week was set for Jean’s flitting. This gave nearly a week for preparations, and Kit plunged into them with a zest and vigor that made Jean laugh.

“Well, so little ever happens up here we just have to make the most of goings and comings,” said Kit, warmly. “And besides, I’m rather fond of you, you blessed, skinny old dear, you.”

“Of course, we’re all glad for you,” Helen put in in her serious way. “It’s an opportunity, Mother says, and I suppose we’ll all get one in time.”

Jean glanced up as they sat around the table the last evening, planning and talking. Out in the side entry stood her trunk, packed, locked, and strapped, ready for the early trip in the morning. Doris was trying her best to nurse a frost bitten chicken back to life out by the kitchen stove, where Joe mended her skates for her, but Kit and Helen were freely bestowing advice on the departing one.

“Enjoy yourself all you can, but think of us left at home and don’t stay too long,” advised Helen. “I feel like the second mermaid.”

“What on earth do you mean by the second mermaid?” asked Kit.

“Don’t you see? I’m not the youngest, so I’m second from the youngest, and in ‘The Little Mermaid’ there were sixteen sisters and each had to wait her turn till her fifteenth birthday before she could go up to the surface of the sea, and sit on a rock in the moonlight.”

“Pretty chilly this kind of weather,” Jean laughed. “Can’t I wear a sealskin wrapped around me, please, Helenita?”

“No, she only had seaweed draperies and necklaces of pearls,” Helen answered, thoughtfully.

“I shall remember,” Jean declared. “I’d love to use that idea as a basis for a gown some time, seaweed green trailing silk, and long strands of pearls. If I fail as an artist, I shall devote myself to designing wonderful personality gowns for people, not everyday people, but exceptional ones. Think, Kit, of having some great singer come to your studio, and you listen to her warble for hours, while you lie on a stately divan and try to catch her personality note for a gown.”

“I don’t want to make things for people,” Kit said, emphatically. “I want to soar alone. I’m going with Piney to live in the dreary wood, like the Robber Baron. I’ll wear leather clothes. I love them. I’ve always wanted a whole dress of softest suede in dull hunter’s green. No fringe or beads, just a dress. It could lace up one side, and be so handy.”

“Specially if a grasshopper got down your neck,” Doris added sagely. “I can just see Kit all alone in the woods then.”

They laughed at the voice from the kitchen, and Kit dropped the narrow silk sport tie she was putting the finishing stitches to.

“Oh, dear, I do envy you, Jean, after all. You must write and tell us every blessed thing that happens, for we’ll love to hear it all. Don’t be afraid it won’t be interesting. I wish you’d even keep a diary. Shad says his grandmother did, every day from the time she was fourteen, and she was eighty-six when she died. They had an awful time burning them all up, just barrels of diaries, Shad says. All the history of Gilead.”

Kit’s tone held a note of pathos that was delicious.

“Who cares about what’s happened in Gilead every day for seventy years?” Helen’s query was scoffing, but Jean said,

“Listen. Somebody, I forget who, that Father was telling about, said if the poorest, commonest human being who ever lived could write a perfect account of his daily life, it would be the most wonderful and interesting human document ever written.”

Helen’s expression showed plainly that she did not believe one bit in “sech sentiments,” as Shad himself might have put it. Life was an undiscovered country of enchantment to her where the sunlight of romance made everything rose and gold. She had always been the most detached one in the family. Only Kit with her straightforward, uncompromising tactics ever seemed to really get by the thicket of thorns around the inner palace of the sleeping beauty. Kit had been blessed with so much of her father’s New England directness and sense of humor, that no thorns could hold her out, while Doris and Jean were more like their mother, tender-hearted and keenly responsive to every influence around them.

“I don’t see,” Kit would say sometimes, “which side of the family Helen gets her ways from. I suppose if we could only trace back far enough, we’d find some princess ancestress who trailed her velvet gowns lightsomely over the morning dew and rode a snow white palfrey down forest glades for heavy exercise. Fair Yoland with the Golden Hair.”

“Anyway,” Helen said now, hanging over Jean’s chair, “be sure and write us all about Carlota and the Contessa, because they sound like a story.”

Doris came out of the kitchen with her finger to her lips.

“I’ve just this minute got that chicken to sleep. They’re such light sleepers, but I think it will get well. It only had its poor toes frost bitten. Joe found it on the ground this morning, crowded off the perch. Chickens look so civilized, and they’re not a bit. They’re regular savages.”

She sat down on the arm of Jean’s chair, and hugged the other side, with Helen opposite. And there flashed across Jean’s mind the picture of the evenings ahead without the home circle, without the familiar living-room, and the other room upstairs where at this time the Motherbird would be brushing out her long, soft hair, and listening to some choice bit of reading Mr. Robbins had run across during the day and saved for her.

“I just wish I had a chance to go west like Piney,” Kit said suddenly. “When I’m old enough, I’m going to take up a homestead claim and live on it with a wonderful horse and some dogs, wolf dogs, I think. I wish Piney’d wait till we were both old enough, and had finished school. She could be a forest ranger and I’d raise—”

“Ginseng,” Jean suggested, mischievously. “Goose. It takes far more courage than that just to stick it out on one of these old barren farms, all run down and fairly begging for somebody to take them in hand and love them back to beauty. What do you want to hunt a western claim for?”

“Space,” Kit answered grandly. “I don’t want to see my neighbors’ chimney pots sticking up all around me through the trees. I want to gaze off at a hundred hill tops, and not see somebody’s scarecrow waggling empty sleeves at me. Piney and I have the spirits of eagles.”

“Isn’t that nice,” said Helen, pleasantly. “It’ll make such a good place to spend our vacations, girls. While Piney and Kit are out soaring, we can fish and tramp and have really pleasant times.”

“Come on, girls,” Jean whispered, as Kit’s ire started to rise. “It’s getting late now, truly, and I have to rise while it is yet night, you know. Good night all.”

She held the lamp at the foot of the stairs to light the procession up to their rooms, then went out into the kitchen. Shad sat over the kitchen stove, humming softly under his breath an old camp meeting hymn,

“Swing low, sweet chariot, Bound for to carry me home, Swing low, sweet chariot, Tell them I’ll surely come.”

“Good night, Shad,” she said. “And do be sure and remember what I told you. Joe’s such a little fellow. Don’t you scold him and make him run away again, will you, even if he is aggravating.”

“I’ll be good to him, I promise, Miss Jean,” Shad promised solemnly. “I let my temper run away from me that day, but I’ve joined the church since then, and being a professor of religion I’ve got to walk softly all the days of my life, Mis’ Ellis says. Don’t you worry. Joe and me’s as thick as two peas in a pod. I’ll be a second grand uncle to him before I get through.”

So it rested. Joe was still inclined to be a little perverse where Shad was concerned, and would sulk when scolded. Only Jean had been able to make him see the error of his ways. He would tell the others he guessed he’d run away. But Jean had promptly talked to him, and said if he wanted to run away, to run along any time he felt like it. Joe had looked at her in surprise and relief when she had said it, and had seemed completely satisfied about staying thereafter. It was Cousin Roxy who had given her the idea.

“I had a colt once that was possessed to jump fences and go rambling, so one day after we’d been on the run hunting for it nearly every day, I told Hiram to let all the bars down, and never mind the pesky thing. And it was so nonplussed and surprised that it gave right up and stayed to home. It may be fun jumping fences, but there’s no real excitement in stepping over open bars.”

So Joe had faced open bars for some time, and if he could only get along with Shad, Jean knew he would be safe while she was away. He was an odd child, undemonstrative and shy, but there was something appealing and sympathetic about him, and Jean always felt he was her special charge since she had coaxed him away from Mr. Briggs.

The start next morning was made at seven, before the sun was up. Princess was breathing frostily, and side stepping restlessly. The tears were wet on Jean’s cheeks as she climbed into the seat beside Shad, and turned to wave goodbye to the group on the veranda. She had not felt at all this way when she had left for New York to visit Bab, but someway this did seem, as the Motherbird had said, like her first real flight from the home nest.

“Write us everything,” called Kit, waving both hands to her.

“Come back soon,” wailed Doris, and Helen, running as Kit would have put it, true to form, added her last message,

“Let us know if you meet the Contessa.”

But the Motherbird went back into the house in silence, away from the sitting-room into a little room at the side where Jean had kept her own bookcase, desk, and a few choice pictures. A volume of Browning selections, bound in soft limp tan, lay beside Jean’s old driving gloves on the table. Mrs. Robbins picked up both, laid her cheek against the gloves and closed her eyes. The years were racing by so fast, so fast, she thought, and mothers must be wide eyed and generous and fearless, when the children suddenly began to top heads with one, and feel their wings. She opened the little leather book to a marked passage of Jean’s,

“The swallow has set her young on the rail.”

Ready for the flight, she thought. If it had been Kit now, she would not have felt this curious little pang. Kit was self sufficient and full of buoyancy that was bound to carry her over obstacles, but Jean was sensitive and dependent on her environment for spur and stimulation. She heard a step behind her and turned eagerly as Mr. Robbins came into the room, seeking her. He saw the book and the gloves in her hand, and the look in her eyes uplifted to his own. Very gently he folded his arms around her, his cheek pressed close to her brown hair.

“She’s only seventeen,” whispered the Motherbird.

“Eighteen in April,” he answered. “And dear, she isn’t trusting to her own strength for the flight. Don’t you know this quiet little girl of ours is mounted on Pegasus, and riding him handily in her upward trend?”

But there was no winged horse or genius in view to Jean’s blurred sight as she watched the road unroll before her, and looking back, saw only the curling smoke from Greenacres’ white chimneys.