CHAPTER XX

OPEN WINDOWS

“It always seems to me,” said Cousin Roxy, the first time she drove down with Billie to spend the day, “as if Maytime is a sort of fulfilled promise to us, after the winter and spring. When I was a girl, spring up here behaved itself. It was sweet and balmy and gentle, and now it’s turned into an uncertain young tomboy. The weather doesn’t really begin to settle until the middle of May, but when it does—” She drew in a deep breath, and smiled. “Just look around you at the beauty it gives us.”

She sat out on the tree seat in the big old-fashioned garden that sloped from the south side of the house to what Jean called “the close.” The terraces were a riot of spring bloom; tall gold and purple flag lilies grew side by side with dainty columbine and poet’s narcissus. Along the stone walls white and purple lilacs flung their delicious perfume to every passing breeze. The old apple trees that straggled in uneven rows up through the hill pasture behind the barn, had been transformed into gorgeous splashy masses of pink bloom against the tender green of young foliage.

“What’s Jean doing over there in the orchard?” Kit rose from her knees, her fingers grimy with the soil, her face flushed and warm from her labors, and answered her own query.

“She’s wooing the muse of Art. What was her name? Euterpe or Merope? Well, anyway that’s who she’s wooing, while we, her humble sisters, who toil and delve after cut worms—Cousin Roxy, why are there any cut worms? Why are there fretful midges? Or any of those things?”

“Land, child, just as home exercises for our patience,” laughed Mrs. Ellis, happily.

Jean was out of their hearing. Frowning slightly, with compressed lips, she bent over her work. With Shad’s help she had rigged up a home-made easel of birchwood, and a little three legged camp stool. As Shad himself would have said, she was going to it with a will. The week before she had sent off five studies to Cousin Beth, and two of her very best ones, down to Mr. Higginson. Answers had come back from both, full of criticism, but with plenty of encouragement, too. Mrs. Robbins had read the two letters and given her eldest the quick impulsive embrace which ever since her babyhood had been to Jean her highest reward of merit. But it was from her father, perhaps, that she derived the greatest happiness. He laid one arm around her shoulders, smiling at her with a certain whimsical speculation, in his keen, hazel eyes.

“Well, girlie, if you will persist in developing such talent, we can’t afford to hide this candle light under a bushel. Bethiah has written also, insisting that you are given your chance to go abroad with her later on.”

“What does Mother say?” asked Jean, quickly. She knew that the only thing that might possibly hold her back from the trip abroad would be her mother’s solicitude and loving fears for her welfare.

“She’s perfectly willing to let you go as long as Cousin Beth goes with you. It would only be for three months.”

“But when?” interrupted Jean. “It isn’t that I want to know for my own pleasure, but you don’t know how fearfully precious these last years in the ’teens seem to me. There’s such a terrible lot of things to learn before I can really say I’ve finished.”

“And one of the first things you have to learn is just that you never stop learning. That you never really start to learn until you attain the humility of knowing your own limitations. So don’t you worry, Jeanie, you can’t possibly go over to Europe and swallow its Art Galleries in three months. By the way, if you are really going, you had better start in learning some of the guide posts.”

He crossed over to one of his book cases, and picked out an old well-worn Baedeker bound in red morocco, “Northern Italy.” He opened it lovingly, and its passages were well underlined and marked in pencil all the way through. There were tiny sprays of pressed flowers and four leaved clovers, a five pointed fig leaf, and some pale silver gray olive ones. “Leaves from Vallambrosa,” he quoted, softly. “Your mother and I followed those old world trails all through our honeymoon, my dear.”

Jean leaned over his shoulder, eagerly, her arms clasped around his neck, her cheek pressed to his.

“You dear,” she said, fervently. “Do you know what I’m going to do with the very first five thousand dollars I receive for a masterpiece? I shall send you and the Motherbird flying back to visit every single one of those places. Won’t you love it, though?”

“I’d rather take all you kiddies with us. You gain so much more when you share your knowledge with others. Do you know what this west window makes me think of, Jean?” He pointed one hand to the small side window that looked far down the valley. “Somewhere over yonder lies New York. Often times through the past year, I have stood there, and felt like Dante at his tower window, in old Guido Di Rimini’s castle at Ravenna. Joe’s pigeons circling around down there make me think of the doves which he called ‘Hope’s messengers’ bringing him memories in his exile from his beloved Florence.”

Jean slipped down on her knees beside him, her face alight with gladness.

“Oh, Dad, Dad, you do want to go back,” she cried. “You don’t know how afraid I’ve been that you’d take root up here and stay forever. I know it’s perfectly splendid, and it has been a place of refuge for us all, but now that you are getting to be just like your old self—”

Her father’s hand checked her.

“Steady, girlie, steady,” he warned. “Not quite so fast. I am still a little bit uncertain when I try to speed up. We’ve got to be patient a little while longer.”

Jean pressed his hand in hers, and understood. If it had been hard for them to be patient, it had been doubly so for him, groping his way back slowly, the past year, on the upgrade to health.

Softly she repeated a poem that was a favorite of Cousin Roxy’s, and which he had liked to hear.

THE HILLS OF REST

Beyond the last horizon’s rim, Beyond adventure’s farthest quest, Somewhere they rise, serene and dim, The happy, happy Hills of Rest.

Upon their sunlit slopes uplift The castles we have built in Spain— While fair amid the summer drift Our faded gardens flower again.

Sweet hours we did not live go by To soothing note on scented wing; In golden lettered volume lie The songs we tried in vain to sing.

They all are there: the days of dream That built the inner lives of men! The silent, sacred years we deem The might be and the might have been.

Some evening when the sky is gold, I’ll follow day into the west; Nor pause, nor heed, till I behold The happy, happy Hills of Rest.

Jean was thinking of their talk as she sat out in the orchard today, trying to catch some of the fleeting beauty of its blossom laden trees. It was an accepted fact now, her trip abroad with Mrs. Newell, and they planned to sail the first week in September, so as to catch the Fall Academy and Exhibitions, all the way from London south to Rome. A letter from Bab had told her of the Phelps boy’s success; after fighting for it a year he had taken the _Prix de Rome_. This would give him a residence abroad, three years with all expenses paid, full art tuition and one thousand dollars in cash. Babbie had written:

“I am teasing Mother to trot over there once again, and am pretty sure she will have to give in. The poor old dear, if only she would be contented to let me ramble around with Hedda, we would be absolutely safe, but she always acts as if she were the goose who had not only laid a golden egg, but had hatched it. And behold me as the resultant genius. Anyway we’ll all hope to meet you down at Campodino. I hear the Contessa’s villa there is perfectly wonderful. Mother says it’s just exactly like the one that Browning rented during his honeymoon. He tells about it in ‘DeGustibus.’ I believe most of the rooms have been Americanized since the Contessa married Carlota’s father, and you don’t have to go down to the seashore when you want to take a bath. But the walls are lovely and crumbly with plenty of old lizards running in and out of the mold. I envy you like sixty. I wish I had a Contessa to tuck me under her wing like that.”

* * * * *

“How are you getting along, girlie?” asked a well known voice behind her.

“I don’t know, Dad,” said Jean, leaning back with her head on one side, looking for all the world, as Kit would have said, like a meditative brown thrush. “I can’t seem to get that queer silver gray effect. You take a day like this, just before a rain, and it seems to underlie everything. I’ve tried dark green and gray and sienna, and it doesn’t do a bit of good.”

“Mix a little Chinese black with every color you use,” said her father, closing one eye to look at her painting. “It is the old masters’ trick. You’ll find it in the Flemish school, and the Veronese. It gives you the atmospheric gray quality in everything. Hello, here come Ralph and Piney.”

Piney waved her hand in salutation, but joined Kit and Helen in the lower garden at their grubbing for cut worms.

“If you put plenty of salt in the water when you sprinkle those, it’ll help a lot,” she told them.

“Oh, we’ve salted them. Shad told us that. We each took a bag of salt and went out sprinkling one night, and then it rained, and I honestly believe it was a tonic to the cut worm colony. The only thing to do, is go after them and annihilate them.”

Ralph lifted his cap in greeting to the group on the terrace, but went on up to the orchard. Kit watched him with speculative eyes and spoke in her usual impulsive fashion.

“Do you suppose for one moment that the prince of Saskatoon is coming wooing my fair sister? Because if he has any such notions at all, I’d like to tell him she’s not for him,” she said, emphatically. “Now I believe that I’m a genius, but I have resources. I can do housework, and be the castle maid of all work, and smile and be a genius still, but Jean needs nourishing. If he thinks for one moment he’s going to throw her across his saddle bow and carry her off to Saskatoon, he’s very much mistaken.”

Piney glanced up at the figures in the orchard, before she answered in her slow, deliberate fashion,

“I’m sure, I don’t know, but Ralph said he was coming back here every spring, so he can’t expect to take her away this year.”

Up in the orchard Mr. Robbins talked of apple culture, of the comparative virtues of Peck’s Pleasants and Shepherd Sweetings, and whether peaches would grow in Gilead’s climate. From the birch woods across the road there came the clinking of a cow bell where Buttercup led some young stock in search of good pasturage. Shad was busy mending the cultivator that had balked that morning, as he was weeding out the rows of June peas. He called over to Mr. Robbins for some advice, and the latter joined him.

Ralph threw himself down in the grass beside the little birch easel. Jean bent over her canvas, touching in some shadows on the trunks of the trees, absently. Her thoughts had wandered from the old orchard, as they did so often these days. It was the future that seemed more real to her, with its hopes and ambitions, than the present. Gilead was not one half so tangible as Campodino perched on the Campagna hills with the blue of the Mediterranean lapping at its feet.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll miss it all?” asked Ralph, suddenly.

“Perhaps,” she glanced down at him in Jean’s own peculiar, impersonal way. To Ralph, she had always been the little princess royal, ever since he had first met her, that night a year ago, in the spring gloaming. Dorrie and Kit had met the stranger more than half way, and even Helen, the fastidious, had liked him at first sight, but with Jean, there had always been a certain amount of reserve, her absorption in her work always had hedged her around with thorns of aloofness and apparent shyness. “But you see after all, no matter how far one goes, one always comes back, if there are those you love best waiting for you.”

“You’ll only be gone three months, won’t you?”

Jean shook her head.

“It depends on how I’m getting on. Cousin Beth says I can find out in that time whether I am just a plain barnyard chicken, or a real wild swan. Did you ever hear of how the islanders around Nantucket catch the young wild geese, and clip their wings? They keep them then as decoys, until there comes a day when the wings are full grown again, and the geese escape. Wouldn’t it be awful to imagine one were a captive wild goose, and then try to fly and discover you were just a nice little home bred White Leghorn pullet.”

“Oh, Jean,” called Kit. “Cousin Roxy’s going, now.”

Ralph rose, and extended his hand.

“I hope your wings carry you far, Jean,” he said earnestly. “We’re leaving for Saskatoon Monday morning and I’ll hardly get over again as Honey and I are doing all the packing and crating, but you’ll see me again next spring, won’t you?”

Jean laid her hand in his, frankly.

“Why, I didn’t know you were going so soon,” she said. “Of course, I’ll see you if you come back east.”

“I’ll come,” Ralph promised, and he stood where she left him, under the blossoming apple trees, watching the princess royal of Greenacres join her family circle.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

Where multiple versions of hyphenation occurred, majority use has been employed.

End of Project Gutenberg's Jean of Greenacres, by Izola L. Forrester