CHAPTER IV

THE JUDGE’S SWEETHEART

It took both Ella Lou and Princess to transport the Christmas guests from Greenacres over to the Ellis place. Nobody ever called it anything but just that, the Ellis place, and sometimes, “over to the Judge’s.” Cousin Roxy said she couldn’t bear to have a nameless home and just as soon as she could get around to it, she’d see that the Ellis place had a suitable name.

It was one of the few pretentious houses in all three of the Gileads, Gilead Green, Gilead Centre, and Gilead Post Office. For seven generations it had been in the Ellis family. The Judge had a ponderous volume bound in heavy red morocco, setting forth the history of Windham County, and the girls loved to pore over it. Seven men with their families, bound westward towards Hartford in the colonial days of seeking after home sites, had seen the fertile valley with its encircling hills, and had settled there. One was an Ellis and the Judge had his sword and periwig in his library. As for the rest, all one had to do was go over to the old family burial ground on the wood road and count them up.

During the fall, this had been a favorite tramp of the Greenacre hikers, and Jean loved to quote a bit from Stevenson, once they had come in sight of the old grass grown enclosure, cedar shaded, secluded and restful:

“There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.”

Here they found the last abiding place of old Captain Ephraim Ellis with his two wives, Lovina Mary and Hephzibah Waiting, one on each side of him. The Captain rested betwixt the two myrtle covered mounds and each old slate gravestone leaned towards his.

“Far be it from me,” Cousin Roxy would say heartily, “to speak lightly of those gone before, but those two headstones tell their own story, and I’ll bet a cookie the Captain could tell his if he got a chance.”

Every Legislature convening at Hartford since the olden days, had known an Ellis from Gilead. Only two of the family had taken to wandering, Billie’s father and Gideon, one of the old Captain’s sons. The girls wove many tales around Gideon. He must have had the real Argonaut spirit. Back in the first days of the Revolution he had run away from the valley home and ended up with Paul Jones on the “Bonhomme Richard.”

Billie loved his memory, the same as he did his own father’s, and the girls had straightened up his sunken slatestone record, and had planted some flowers, not white ones, but bravely tinted asters for late fall. Billie showed them an old silhouette he had found. Mounted on black silk, the old faded brown paper showed a boy with sensitive mouth and eager lifted chin, queer high choker collar and black stock. On the back of the wooden frame was written in a small, firm handwriting, “My beloved son Gideon, aged nineteen.”

The old house sat far back from the road with a double drive curving like a big “U” around it. Huge elms upreared their great boughs protectingly before it, and behind lay a succession of all manner and kind of buildings from the old forge to the smoke house. One barn stood across the road and another at the top of the lane for hay. Since Cousin Roxy had married the Judge, it seemed as if the sunlight had flooded the old house. Its shuttered windows had faced the road for years, but now the green blinds were wide open, and it seemed as if the house almost smiled at the world again.

“I never could see a mite of sense in keeping blinds shut as if somebody were dead,” Cousin Roxy would say. “Some folks won’t even open the blinds in their hearts, let alone their houses, so I told the Judge if he wanted me for a companion, he’d have to take in God’s sunshine too, ’cause I can’t live without plenty of it.”

Kit and Doris were the first to run up the steps and into the center hall, almost bumping into Billie as he ran to meet them. Behind him came Mrs. Ellis in a soft gray silk dress. A lace collar encircled her throat, fastened with an old pink cameo breast-pin. Helen had always coveted that pin. There was a young damsel on it holding up her full skirts daintily as she moved towards a sort of chapel, and it was set in fine, thin old gold.

“Come right in, folkses,” she called happily. “Do stop capering,” as Doris danced around her. “Merry Christmas, all of you.”

Up the long colonial staircase she led the way into the big guest room. Down in the parlor Cousin Beth was playing softly on the old melodeon, “It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old.” The air was filled with scent of pine and hemlock, and provocative odors of things cooking stole up the back stairs.

Kit and Billie retreated to a corner with the latter’s book supply. It was hard to realize that this was really Billie, Cousin Roxy’s “Nature Boy” of the summer before. Love and encouragement had seemed to round out his character into a promise of fulfilment in manliness. All of the old self consciousness and shy abstraction had gone. Even the easy comradely manner in which he leaned over the Judge’s arm chair showed the good understanding and sure confidence between the two.

“Yes, he does show up real proud,” Cousin Roxy agreed warmly with Mrs. Robbins when they were all downstairs before the glowing fire. “Of course I let him call me Grandma. Pity sakes, that’s little enough to a love starved child. I’m proud of him too and so’s the Judge. We’re going to miss him when he goes away to school, but he’s getting along splendidly. I want him to go where he’ll have plenty of boy companionship. He’s lived alone with the ants and bees and rabbits long enough.”

Helen and Doris leaned over Cousin Beth’s shoulders trying the old carols: “Good King Wencelas,” “Carol, Brothers, Carol,” and “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night.” Jean played for them and just before dinner was announced, Doris sang all alone in her soft treble, very earnestly and tenderly, quite as if she saw past the walls of the quiet New England homestead to where “Calm Judea stretches far her silver mantled plains.”

Cousin Roxy rocked back and forth softly, her hand shading her eyes as it did in prayer. When it was over, she said briskly, wiping off her spectacles,

“Land, I’m not a bit emotional, but that sort of sets my heart strings tingling. Let’s go to dinner, folkses. The Judge takes Betty in, and Jerry takes Beth. Then Elliott can take in his old Cousin Roxy, and I guess Billie can manage all of the girls.”

But the girls laughingly went their own way, Doris holding to the Judge’s other arm and Helen to her father’s, while Jean lingered behind a minute to glance about the cheery room. The fire crackled down in the deep old rock hearth. In each of the windows hung a mountain laurel wreath tied with red satin ribbon. Festoons of ground pine and evergreen draped each door and picture. It was all so homelike, Jean thought. Over the mantel hung a motto worked in colored worsteds on perforated silver board.

Here abideth peace

But Jean turned away, and pressed her face against the nearest window pane, looking down at the sombre, frost-touched garden. There wasn’t one bit of peace in her heart, even while she fairly ached with the longing to be like the others.

“You’re a coward, Jean Robbins, a deliberate coward,” she told herself. “You don’t like the country one bit. You love the city where everybody’s doing something, and it’s just a big race for all. You’re longing for everything you can’t have, and you’re afraid to face the winter up here. You might just as well tell yourself the truth. You hate to be poor.”

There came a burst of laughter from the dining-room and Kit calling to her to hurry up. It appeared that Doris, the tender-hearted, had said pathetically when Mrs. Gorham, the “help,” brought in the great roast turkey: “Poor old General Putnam!”

“That isn’t the General,” Billie called from his place. “The General ran away yesterday.”

Now if Cousin Roxy prided herself on one thing more than another it was her flock of white turkeys led by the doughty General. All summer long the girls had looked upon him as a definite personality to be reckoned with. He was patriarchal in the way he managed his family. And it appeared that the General’s astuteness and sagacity had not deserted him when Ben had started after him to turn him into a savory sacrifice.

“First off, he lit up in the apple trees,” Ben explained. “Then as soon as he saw I was high enough, off he flopped and made for the corn-crib. Just as I caught up with him there, he chose the wagon sheds and perched on the rafters, and when I’d almost got hold of his tail feathers, if he didn’t try the barn and all his wives and descendants after him, mind you. So I thought I’d let him roost till dark, and when I stole in after supper, the old codger had gone, bag and baggage. He’ll come back as soon as he knows our minds ain’t set on wishbones.”

“Then who is this?” asked Kit interestedly, quite as if it were some personage who rested on the big willow pattern platter in state.

“That is some unnamed patriot who dies for his country’s good,” said the Judge, solemnly. “Who says whitemeat and who says dark?”

Jean was watching her father. Not since they had moved into the country had she seen him so cheerful and like himself. The Judge’s geniality was like a radiating glow, anyway, that included all in its circle, and Cousin Roxy was in her element, dishing out plenteous platefuls of Christmas dainties to all those nearest and dearest to her. Way down at the end of the table sat Joe, wide eyed and silent tongued. Christmas had never been like this that he knew of. Billie tried to engage him in conversation, boy fashion, a few times, but gave up the attempt. By the time he had finished his helping, Joe was far too full for utterance.

In the back of the carriage, driving over from Greenacres, Mrs. Robbins had placed a big bushel basket, and into this had gone the gifts to be hung on the tree. After dinner, while the Judge and Mr. Robbins smoked before the fire, and Kit led the merry-making out in the sitting room, there were mysterious “goings on” in the big front parlor. Finally Cousin Beth came softly out, and turned down all the lights.

Jean slipped over to the organ, and as the tall old doors were opened wide, she played softly,

“Gather around the Christmas tree.”

Doris picked up the melody and led, sitting on a hassock near the doors, gazing with all her eyes up at the beautiful spreading hemlock, laden with lights and gifts.

“For pity’s sake, child, what are you crying about?” exclaimed Cousin Roxy, almost stumbling over a little crumpled figure in a dark corner, and Joe sobbed sleepily:

“I—I don’t know.”

“Oh, it’s just the heartache and the beauty of it all,” said Helen fervently. “He’s lonely for his own folks.”

“’Tain’t neither,” groaned Joe. “It’s too much mince pie.”

So under Cousin Roxy’s directions, Billie took him up to his room, and administered “good hot water and sody.”

“Too bad, ’cause he missed seeing all the things taken off the tree,” said Cousin Roxy, laying aside Joe’s presents for him, a long warm knit muffler from herself, a fine jack-knife from the Judge with a pocket chain on it, a package of Billie’s boy books that he had outgrown, and ice skates from the Greenacre girls. After much figuring over the balance left from their Christmas money they had clubbed together on the skates for him, knowing he would have more fun and exercise out of them than anything, and he needed something to bring back the sparkle to his eyes and the color to his cheeks.

“Put them all up on the bed beside him, and he’ll find them in the morning,” Billie suggested. “If you’ll let him stay, Mrs. Robbins, I’ll bring him over.”

“Isn’t it queer,” Doris said, with a sigh of deepest satisfaction, as she watched the others untying their packages. “It isn’t so much what you get yourself Christmas, it’s seeing everybody else get theirs.” And just then a wide, flat parcel landed squarely in her lap, and she gave a surprised gasp.

“The fur mitten isn’t there, but you can snuggle your nose on the muff,” Jean told her, and Doris held up just what she had been longing for, a squirrel muff and stole to throw around her neck. “They’re not neighborhood squirrels, are they, Billie?” she whispered anxiously, and Billie assured her they were Russian squirrels, and no families’ trees around Gilead were wearing mourning.

Nearly all of Billie’s presents were books. He had reached the age where books were like magical windows through which he gazed from Boyhood’s tower out over the whole wide world of romance and adventure. Up in his room were all of the things he had treasured in his lonesome days before the Judge had married Miss Robbins: his home-made fishing tackle, his collection of butterflies and insects, his first compass and magnifying glass, the flower calendar and leaf collection, where he had arranged so carefully every different leaf and blossom in its season.

But now, someway, with the library of books the Judge had given him, that had been his own father’s, Gilead borders had widened out, and he had found himself a knight errant on the world’s highway of literature. He sat on the couch now, burrowing into each new book until Kit sat down beside him, with a new kodak in one hand and a pair of pink knit bed slippers in the other.

“And mother’s given me the picture I like best, her Joan of Arc listening to the voices in the garden at Arles. I love that, Billie. I’m not artistic like Jean or romantic like Helen. You know that, don’t you?”

Billie nodded emphatically. Indeed he did know it after half a year of chumming with Kit.

“But I love the pluck of Joan,” Kit sighed, lips pursed, head up. “I’d have made a glorious martyr, do you know it? I know she must have enjoyed the whole thing immensely, even if it did end at the stake. I think it must be ever so much easier to be a martyr than look after the seventeen hundred horrid little everyday things that just have to be done. When it’s time to get up now at 6 A. M. and no fires going, I shall look up at Joan and register courage and valor.”

Helen sat close to her father, perfectly happy to listen and gaze at the flickering lights on the big tree. She had gift books too, mostly fairy tales and what Doris called “princess stories,” a pink tinted ivory manicure set in a little velvet box, and two cut glass candlesticks with little pink silk shades. The candlesticks had been part of the “white hyacinths” saved from the sale at their Long Island home, and Jean had made the shades and painted them with sprays of forget-me-nots. Cousin Roxy had knit the prettiest skating caps for each of the girls, and scarfs to match, and Mrs. Newell gave them old silver spoons that had been part of their great great-grandmother Peabody’s wedding outfit, and to each one two homespun linen sheets from the same precious store of treasures.

“When you come to Weston,” she told Jean, “I’ll show you many of her things. She was my great grandmother, you know, and I can just vaguely remember her sitting upstairs in her room in a deep-seated winged armchair that had pockets and receptacles all around it. I know I looked on her with a great deal of wonder and veneration, for I was just six. She wore gray alpaca, Jean, silver gray like her hair, and a little black silk apron with dried flag root in one pocket and pink and white peppermints in the other.”

“And a cap,” added Jean, just as if she too could recall the picture.

“A cap of fine black lace with lavender bows, and her name was Mary Lavinia Peabody.”

“I’d love to be named Mary Lavinia,” quoth Kit over her shoulder. “How can anybody be staid and faithful unto death with ‘Kit’ hurled at them all day. But if I had been rightly called Mary Lavinia, oh, Cousin Beth, I’d have been a darling.”

“I don’t doubt it one bit,” laughed Cousin Beth merrily. “Go along with you, Kit. It just suits you.”

Doris sat on her favorite hassock clasping a new baby doll in her arms with an expression of utter contentment on her face. Kit and Jean had dressed it in the evenings after she had gone to bed, and it had a complete layette. But Billie had given her his tame crow, Moki, and her responsibility was divided.

“Where’d you get the name from, Billie?” she asked.

Billie stroked the smooth glossy back of the crow as one might a pet chicken.

“I found him one day over in the pine woods on the hill. He was just a little fellow then. The nest was in a dead pine, and somebody’d shot it all to pieces. The rest of the family had gone, but I found him fluttering around on the ground, scared to death with a broken wing. Ben helped me fix it, and he told me to call him Moki. You know he’s read everything, and he can talk some Indian, Pequod mostly, he says. He isn’t sure but what there may be some Pequod in him way back, he can talk it so well, and Moki means ‘Watch out’ in Pequod, Ben says. I call him that because I used to put him on my shoulder and he’d go anywhere with me through the woods, and call out when he thought I was in danger.”

“How do you know what he thought?”

“After you get acquainted with him, you’ll know what he thinks too,” answered Billie soberly. “Hush, grandfather’s going to say something.”

The Judge rose and stood on the hearth rug, his back to the fire. He was nearly six feet tall, soldierly, and rugged, his white curly hair standing out in three distinct tufts just like Pantaloon, Kit always declared, his eyes keen and bright under their thick brows. He had taken off his eyeglasses and held them in one hand, tapping them on the other to emphasize his words. Jean tiptoed around the tree, extinguishing the last sputtering candles, and sat down softly beside Cousin Roxy.

“I don’t think any of you, beloved children and dear ones, can quite understand what tonight means to me personally.” He cleared his throat and looked over at Billie. “I haven’t had a real Christmas here since Billie’s father was a little boy. I didn’t want a real Christmas either. Christmas meant no more to me than to some old owl up in the woods, maybe not as much. But tonight has warmed my heart, built up a good old fire in it just as you start one going in some old disused rock fireplace that has been stone cold for years.

“When I was a boy this old house used to be opened up as it is tonight, decorated with evergreen and hemlock and guests in every room at Christmas time. I didn’t live here then. My grandfather, old Judge Winthrop Ellis, was alive, and my father had married and moved over to the white house on the wood road between Maple Lawn and the old burial ground. You can still find the cellar of it and the old rock chimney standing. I used to trot along that wood road to school up at Gayhead where Doris and Helen have been going, and I had just one companion on that road, the perkiest, sassiest, most interesting female I ever met in all my life.” He stopped and chuckled, and Cousin Roxy rubbed her nose with her forefinger and smiled.

“We knew every spot along the way, where the fringed gentians grew in the late fall, and where to find arbutus in the spring. The best place to get black birch and where the checker-berries were thickest. Maybe just now, it won’t mean so much to you young folks, all these little landmarks of nature on these old home roads and fields of ours, but when the shadows begin to lengthen in life’s afternoon, you’ll be glad to remember them and maybe find them again, for the best part of it all is, they wait for you with love and welcome and you’ll find the gentians and the checker-berries growing in just the same places they did fifty years ago.”

Jean saw her father put out his hand and lay it over her mother’s. His head was bent forward a trifle and there was a wonderful light in his eyes.

“And all I wanted to say, apart from the big welcome to you all, and the good wishes for a joyous season, was this, the greatest blessing life has brought me is that Roxana has come out of the past to sit right over there and show me how to have a good time at Christmas once again. God bless you all.”

“Oh, wasn’t he just a dear,” Kit said, rapturously, when it was all over, and they were driving back home under the clear starlit sky. “I do hope when I’m as old as the Judge, I’ll have a flower of romance to sniff at too. Cousin Roxy watched him just as if he were sixteen instead of sixty.”

“You’re just as sentimental as Helen and me,” Jean told her, teasingly.

“Well, anybody who wouldn’t get a thrill out of tonight would be a toad in a claybank. And Jean, did you see Father’s face?”

Jean nodded. It was something not to be discussed, the light in her father’s face as he had listened. It made her realize more than anything that had happened in the long months of trial in the country, how worth while it was, the sacrifice that had brought him back into his home country for healing and happiness.