Chapter 15

"'Well, then,' he declared, 'I am going back to Lincoln with you to-morrow.' And, in spite of all I could say, he did. He had his beard shaved off, bought himself some civilized clothes, and made his appearance with me on the streets of Lincoln as naturally as if he had gone away but the day before. His life in the mountains had given him an air of decision, a certain quiet energy and determination which impressed one immediately with the sense of his being a man of strong character, with a powerful will under perfect control. I grew to have so much confidence in him that I thought his coming would somehow be a benefit to Grace, though I could not see how; in fact, when I tried to reason about it, I told myself exactly the contrary. But Phil seemed to have such implicit confidence in himself, to be so self-sufficient and so ready for any emergency, and altogether such a perfect man of action, that he inspired belief and confidence in others.

"We met Herbert on our way up from the station: he was standing in front of the 'Gazette' office, laughing and talking with Sudden's barkeeper. He greeted Phil with cordiality, in spite of the latter's distant bearing, and told him Grace would be greatly pleased at his arrival.

"'I suppose she will be glad to see me,' said Phil, as we passed on. And she was glad, very glad, to see him, but she was far from being made happy by his coming. I sent a note out to her, and Phil and I followed shortly after. I did not watch their meeting,--I thought, somehow, that no one ought to see it,--but I knew he took her in his arms; and when she came out on the porch to bring me in there were tears in her eyes.

"We all sat and talked for a long while, Grace with her hand in Phil's and her eyes on his face, when she was not looking anxiously after my awkward attempts at caring for her baby; for of course Nannie had been brought out almost the first thing. I think, from the way in which she carefully avoided asking him his reasons for coming back, that she divined what they were. I imagined that she blamed me as being the prime cause; but there was nothing I could say to undeceive her. In fact, I thought it better for her to believe so than to know the truth.

"'She is miserably unhappy, George,' said Phil gloomily, as we walked away. 'But you were right not to tell me. I can do nothing to help her: I cannot even openly sympathize with her. It would have been better to have kept on thinking she was happy: there was a bitter kind of satisfaction to me in that, but still it was a satisfaction.'

"Nevertheless Phil did not go back to the mountains. He stayed on here for a month or more, dividing his time pretty equally between my office and Grace's little parlor. He very seldom met Herbert. Now and then they would be together at the cottage for half an hour, if Herbert happened to come home while he was there, and when they met on the street they would merely pass the time of day.

"One evening before going to supper I waited until after seven o'clock for Phil to come in, and just as I had given him up, and was starting away alone, he entered the office, looking pale as a ghost, and evidently in great distress of spirit.

"'For God's sake, Phil, what is the matter?' I exclaimed, as he sank upon the sofa and covered his face with his hands.

"'Go away, George: go away and leave me,' was all he said; then he got up and began walking violently up and down the room. At last he came near me and put his hand on my shoulder. 'I've killed her, George, I am afraid; At least I have killed him right before her eyes, and she may never get over it. I didn't mean to, George, you know that; but he came home drunk, and I had gone to bid Grace good-by,--for I had made up my mind, George, to leave to-morrow,--and he came in. We had been talking of father, and Grace was very sad and wretched, and there were tears in her eyes when she kissed me, just as he came in and saw us. She was frightened at his brutality, and clung to me in terror, when he began swearing in a torrent of passion and calling her the vilest of names. He struck at us with his cane. If he had struck me he might yet have been alive; but when I saw the great red welt on Grace's neck and heard her cry out, I was wild, George. For an instant, I believe, I could have stamped him into bits, and if it had been my last act on earth I could not have helped striking him.'

"While he spoke, Phil stood with his hand on my shoulder, looking into my eyes, as if he wanted me to judge him, as if he would read in my very look whether I blamed him or not. I took his hand.

"'I thought you would understand,' he went on. 'I did not know I was going to kill him, but I think I tried to: I struck him with all my might, Grace threw herself between us and begged me not to hurt him after he had fallen down, and took hold of my arm as if to hold me. But when she saw the blood running from his temple, where he had struck it on the window-sill, and how still and motionless he lay, she tried to go to him, but could not for weakness and fainting. I carried her into Mrs. Stanley's, and have not seen her since, but the doctor says she is very ill. Herbert was dead when they went into the room after I told them what had happened; and I suppose I had better give myself up to the law.'

"You can have no idea how I felt to see my dearest friend in such a position. And poor Grace!--it was much worse for her. I thought with Phil that she might never survive the shock and misery of it all. But she did, and came out, weak and broken down as she was, to give her testimony at Phil's trial. We had no trouble in getting a jury to acquit him, and he went back to Colorado without bidding Grace good-by, although she would have seen him and was even anxious to do so. Some persons here, mostly women, pretended to think that there had been more cause for Herbert's jealousy than was generally supposed; but they belonged to the sanctimonious, hypocritical custom-worshippers. All really good people remembered what Herbert had been, and refused to see in him a martyr or even a wronged man.

"After that Grace supported herself by dress-making and teaching music; and some two years ago, when we heard that Phil had been killed by a mine's caving in, and that he had left a little fortune to her and Nannie, I, as his executor and her friend, induced her to take and use it,--which she did, with simplicity and thankfulness and with her heart full of pity and love for poor Phil. Yes, poor Phil! those five or six years must have been full of misery to him, and he was probably thankful when the end came. We never heard from him until after his death. There was a letter that came to me with the will, that had been written long before. None but they two know what was in it; and I, for one, do not want to inquire."

George sat for a long while in silence, looking at the glowing coals in the huge reservoir stove. Neither Perry nor I cared to interrupt his revery. At last he roused himself.

"Well, boys," he said, "it is late: I think we had better go. It is all over now, and life has gone on calmly for years. Other people have forgotten that there ever were such persons as Phil or Herbert."

When Perry and I reached our room we found it was almost three o'clock. George had walked with us to the door, and very little had been said between us. I took a cigarette and lay down on the bed. "Perry," I said, as he was lighting the gas.

"Sur to you," he answered, in a way he had of imitating a certain barkeeper of our acquaintance.

"What do you think of George?"

"You know what I think of him as well as I do."

"Yes; but I mean in connection with this that he has told us."

"I think he acted just like himself all the way through."

"Don't you think he has been in love with Mrs. Herbert from the first?"

"Am I in the habit of imagining such nonsense?"

"You may think it nonsense," I answered, with the quiet fervor of conviction, "but I am sure it is nothing but the real state of the case."

"Bosh!" exclaimed Perry, throwing his boots into a corner; and therewith the discussion closed.

About a week ago I had a letter from him, though, in which he recalled this circumstance and acknowledged that I had been in the right. "They are going to be married in the fall," he wrote. "I hope they may be happy, and I suppose they will be; but I don't think Mrs. Herbert ought to marry him unless she loves him; and I am fearful that she only thinks to reward long years of faithful affection. George deserves more than that." This was a good deal for Perry to manage to say. He usually keeps as far away from such subjects as he well can,--which is partly the reason, I think, that his opinion thereon is not greatly to be trusted. As for me, I am sure George's wife will love him as much as he deserves,--though this is almost an infinite amount,--and that she has not been far from loving him from the beginning. I have bought a pair of vases to send them; and I expect that Miss Lucretia Knowles will say, when she learns how much they cost, that I was very extravagant. Not that Lu is close or stingy at all; but she has promised to wait until I have made a start in life, and is naturally impatient for me to get on as rapidly as possible.

FRANK PARKE.

THE WOOD-THRUSH AT SUNSET.

Lover of solitude, Poet and priest of nature's mysteries, If but a step intrude, Thy oracle is mute, thy music dies.

Oft have I lightly wooed Sweet Poesy to give me pause of pain, Oft in her singing mood Sought to surprise her haunt, and sought in vain.

And thou art shy as she, But mortal, or I had not found thy shrine, To listen breathlessly If I may make thy hoarded secret mine.

Thy tender mottled breast, Dappled the color of our primal sod, Now quick and song-possessed, Doth seem to hold the very joy of God,--

Joy hid from mortal quest Of bosky loves on silver-moonéd eves, And the high-hearted best That swells thy throat with joy among the leaves.

Like the Muezzin's call From some high minaret when day is done, Among the beeches tall Thy voice proclaims, "There is no God but one."

And but one Beauty, too, Of whose sweet synthesis we ever fail: She flies if we pursue, Like thy swift wing down some dim intervale.

For thou art lightly gone; Gone is the flute-like note, the yearning strain, And all the air forlorn Is breathless till it hear thy voice again.

But thou wilt not return; Thou hast the secret of thy joy to keep, And other hearts must learn Thy tuneful message, ere the world may sleep,--

Sleep lulled by many a dream Of sylvan sounds that woo the ear in vain, While still thy numbers seem To voice the pain of bliss, the bliss of pain.

MARY C. PECKHAM.

A FOREST BEAUTY.

Last spring, or possibly it was early in June, I was walking, in company with an intelligent farmer, through a bit of heavy forest that bordered some fields of corn and wheat, when a golden, flame-like gleam from the midst of the last year's leaves and twigs on the ground at my feet attracted my sight. I stooped and picked up a large fragment of a flower of the _Liriodendron Tulipifera_ which had been let fall by some foraging squirrel from the dark-green and fragrant top of the giant tree nearest us. Strange to say, my farmer friend, who owned the rich Indiana soil in which the tree grew, did not know, until I told him, that the "poplar," as he called the tulip-tree, bears flowers. For twenty years he had owned this farm, during which time he had cut down acres of forest for rails and lumber, without ever having discovered the gorgeous blossom which to me is the finest mass of form and color to be seen in our American woods. As I had a commission from an artist to procure a spray of these blooms for her, I at once began to search the tree-top with my eyes. The bole, or stem, rose sixty feet, tapering but slightly, to where some heavy and gnarled limbs put forth, their extremities lost in masses of peculiarly dark, rich foliage. At first I could distinguish no flowers, but at length here and there a suppressed glow of orange shot with a redder tinge showed through the dusky gloom of the leaves. Lo! there they were, hundreds of them, over three inches in diameter, bold, gaudy, rich, the best possible examples of nature's pristine exuberance of force and color. Two gray squirrels were frisking about among the highest sprays, and it was my good fortune that my friend carried on his shoulder a forty-four-calibre rifle; for, though it was death to the nimble little animals, it proved to be the instrument with which I procured my coveted flowers. It suggested the probability that, if bullets could fetch down squirrels from that tree-top, they might also serve to clip off and let fall some of the finest clusters or sprays of tulip. The experiment was tried, with excellent result. I made the little artist glad with some of the grandest specimens I have ever seen.

The tulip-tree is of such colossal size and it branches so high above ground that it is little wonder few persons, even of those most used to the woods, ever see its bloom, which is commonly enveloped in a mass of large, dark leaves. These leaves are peculiarly outlined, having short lobes at the sides and a truncated end, while the stem is slender, long, and wire-like. The flower has six petals and three transparent sepals. In its centre rises a pale-green cone surrounded by from eighteen to thirty stamens. Sap-green, yellow of various shades, orange-vermilion, and vague traces of some inimitable scarlet, are the colors curiously blended together within and without the grand cup-shaped corolla. It is Edgar Fawcett who draws an exquisite poetic parallel between the oriole and the tulip,--albeit he evidently did not mean the flower of our Liriodendron, which is nearer the oriole colors. The association of the bird with the flower goes further than color, too; for the tulip-tree is a favorite haunt of the orioles. Audubon, in the plates of his great ornithological work, recognizes this by sketching the bird and some rather flat and weak tulip-sprays together on the same sheet. I have fancied that nature in some way favors this massing of colors by placing the food of certain birds where their plumage will show to best advantage on the one hand, or serve to render them invisible, on the other, while they are feeding. The golden-winged woodpecker, the downy woodpecker, the red-bellied woodpecker, and that grand bird the pileated woodpecker, all seem to prefer the tulip-tree for their nesting-place, pecking their holes into the rotten boughs, sometimes even piercing an outer rim of the fragrant green wood in order to reach a hollow place. I remember, when I was a boy, lying in a dark old wood in Kentucky and watching a pileated woodpecker at work on a dead tulip-bough that seemed to afford a great number of dainty morsels of food. There were streaks of hard wood through the rotten, and whenever his great horny beak struck one of these it would sound as loud and clear as the blow of a carpenter's hammer. This fine bird is almost extinct now, having totally disappeared from nine-tenths of the area of its former habitat. I never see a tulip-tree without recollecting the wild, strangely-hilarious cry of the _Hylotomus pileatus_; and I cannot help associating the giant bloom, its strength of form and vigor of color, with the scarlet crest and king-like bearing of the bird. The big trees of California excepted, our tulip-bearing Liriodendron is the largest growth of the North-American forests; for, while the plane-tree and the liquidambar-(sweet-gum) tree sometimes measure more in diameter near the ground, they are usually hollow, and consequently bulged there, while the tulip springs boldly out of the ground a solid shaft of clear, clean, and sweetly-fragrant wood, sixty or seventy feet of the bole being often entirely without limbs, with an average diameter of from three to five feet. I found a stump in Indiana nearly eight feet in diameter (measured three feet above the ground), and a tree in Clarke County, Kentucky, of about the same girth, tapering slowly to the first branch, fifty-eight feet from the root.

In nearly all the Western and Southern States the tulip is generally called poplar, and the lumber manufactured from it goes by the same name, while in the East it is known as white-wood. The bark is very thick and cork-like, exhaling an odor peculiarly pungent and agreeable; the buds and tender twigs in the spring have a taste entirely individual and unique, very pleasant to some persons, but quite repellent to others. Gray squirrels and the young of the fox-squirrel eat the buds and flowers as well as the cone-shaped fruit. Humming-birds and bumble-bees in the blossoming-time make a dreamy booming among the shadowy sprays. A saccharine, sticky substance, not unlike honey-dew, may often be found in the hollows of the immense petals, in search of which large black ants make pilgrimages from the root to the top of the largest tulip-trees, patiently toiling for two or three hours over the rough bark, among the bewildering wrinkles of which it is, a wonder how the way is kept with such unerring certainty. I have calculated that in making such a journey the ant does what is equivalent to a man's pedestrian tour from New York City to the Adirondacks by the roughest route, and all for a smack of wild honey! But the ant makes his long excursion with neither alpenstock nor luncheon, and without sleeping or even resting on the way.

The tulip-tree grows best in warm loam in which there is a mixture of sand and vegetable mould superposed on clay and gravel. About its roots you may find the lady-slipper and the dog-tooth violet, each in its season. Its bark often bears the rarest lichens, and, near the ground, short green moss as soft and thick as velvet. The poison-ivy and the beautiful Virginia creeper like to clamber up the rough trunk, sometimes clothing the huge tree from foot to top in a mantle of brown feelers and glossy leaves. Seen at a distance, the tulip-tree and the black-walnut-tree look very much alike; but upon approaching them the superior symmetry and beauty of the former are at once discovered. The leaves of the walnut are gracefully arranged, but they admit too much light; while the tulip presents grand masses of dense foliage upheld by knotty, big-veined branches, the perfect embodiment of vigor.

In the days of bee-hunting in the West, I may safely say that a majority of bee-trees were tulips. I have found two of these wild Hyblas since I began my studies for this paper; but the trees have become so valuable that the bees are left unmolested with their humming and their honey. It seems that no more appropriate place for a nest of these wild nectar-brewers could be chosen than the hollow bough of a giant tulip,--a den whose door is curtained with leaves and washed round with odorous airs, where the superb flowers, with their wealth of golden pollen and racy sweets, blaze out from the cool shadows above and beneath. But the sly old 'coon, that miniature Bruin of our Western woods, is a great lover of honey, and not at all a respecter of the rights of wild bees. He is tireless in his efforts to reach every deposit of waxy comb and amber distillation within the range of his keen power of scent. The only honey that escapes him is that in a hollow too small for him to enter and too deep for his fore-paws to reach the bottom.

Poe, in his story of the Gold-Bug, falls into one of his characteristic errors of conscience. The purposes of his plot required that a very large and tall tree should be climbed, and, to be picturesque, a tulip was chosen. But, in order to give a truthful air to the story, the following minutely incorrect description is given: "In youth the tulip-tree, or _Liriodendron Tulipiferum_, the most magnificent of American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a great height without lateral branches; but in its riper age the bark becomes gnarled and uneven, while _many short limbs make their appearance on the stem_" The italics are mine, and the sentence italicized contains an unblushing libel upon the most beautiful of all trees. Short branches never "appear on the stems" of old tulip-trees. The bark, however, does grow rough and deeply seamed with age. I have seen pieces of it six inches thick, which, when cut, showed a fine grain with cloudy waves of rich brown color, not unlike the darkest mahogany. But Poe, no matter how unconscionable his methods of art, had the true artistic judgment, and he made the tulip-tree serve a picturesque turn in the building of his fascinating story; though one would have had more confidence in his descriptions of foliage if it had been May instead of November.

The growth of the tulip-tree, under favorable circumstances, is strong and rapid, and, when not crowded or shaded by older trees, it begins flowering when from eighteen to twenty-five years old. The blooming-season, according to the exigences of weather, begins from May 20 to June 10 in Indiana, and lasts about a week. The fruit following the flower is a cone an inch and a half long and nearly an inch in diameter at the base, of a greenish--yellow color, very pungent and odorous, and full of germs like those of a pine-cone. The tree is easily grown from the seed. Its roots are long, flexible, and tough, and when young are pale yellow and of bitterish taste, but slightly flavored with the stronger tulip individuality which characterizes the juice and sap of the buds and the bark of the twigs. The leaves, as I have said, are dark and rich, but their shape and color are not the half of their beauty. There is a charm in their motion, be the wind ever so light, that is indescribable. The rustle they make is not "sad" or "uncertain," but cheerful and forceful. The garments of some young giantess, such as Baudelaire sings of, might make that rustling as she would run past one in a land of colossal persons and things.