Part 2

“Oh, she dragged around, getting weaker and weaker and thinner and thinner and whiter and whiter. I’ll say one thing for O’Neill. He never beat her—not even when he was drunk. He didn’t make a living for her and he didn’t raise a hand to help her, the lazy whelp. Chopped her own wood, she did, when Peggy didn’t pick it up in the woods. The neighbors would have helped but they couldn’t do much—didn’t dare. She was so proud she’d rather starve than take charity. You couldn’t even offer it—just had to do what you could in a round-about, happen-so way.

“By and by she took to her bed and then Peggy had to do everything that got done. She surely was a wonder too—waited on her mother hand and foot, and kept things clean and cooked whenever there was anything to cook, and got wood to keep them all warm, and looked after O’Neill as if he was a bad child that she loved even if he was bad.

“Then her mother died about a year ago. That did for O’Neill. He’d been a brute to the woman, but then he’d been a brute to himself. The drink did it, and some place back in his rotten old soul I guess there was a clean spot that loved her. He was too drunk to see her buried and he kept that way most of the time for two or three months. Lord knows where he got the money for his whisky. Peggy used to help around at the neighbors, taking care of babies mostly. She’s a wonderful hand with babies. Some of the folks offered to take her on and look out for her, but she wouldn’t leave her father, and what little she made she’d use to feed him—washed for him, too, and tried to keep his clothes mended. Her mother had taught her to read and write and spell, and she went to school sometimes when she could. O’Neill’d be off for two or three days at a time and then she’d slip down to the schoolhouse. Miss Keyes, the teacher, says Peg’s the smartest scholar she ever had.”

“Couldn’t some one interfere legally and take her away from her father?” asked Archibald.

Mrs. Neal smiled indulgently.

“You don’t really know Peg yet,” she said. “We all worried a great deal and did what we could to help the child, but as for taking her away from what she thought was her duty—from somebody that was dependent on her—well, you wait till you know Pegeen O’Neill.

“O’Neill, he settled the business himself by going off on one of his sprees and not coming back at all. The Lord knows what became of him. I hope he’s dead and I guess he is, but his mind had sort of been going for a while before he left and Peggy, she has an idea that he just lost his memory and didn’t know where he belonged, or else he’d have come home to her.

“Grieved for him—that youngster did. Not exactly about her being without him, but about his being without her. She was afraid he was somewhere crazy and wasn’t being seen to properly.

“Several of us offered to take her in, after that, but what’d she do but go over to Mrs. Potter’s. She was sick—Mrs. Potter I mean—and had a little baby, and her husband’s work took him away most of the time. Poison poor, they were too. Peg she said they sort of needed her and she’d got the habit of taking care of somebody; so she took on that job until Mrs. Potter died. Then she took care of the baby until its mother’s folks came and got it last month. Peg felt real bad about the baby, but Mrs. Benderby’s husband had died in the winter and she was all alone and walking down to the village, three miles, early every morning to get day’s work and walking home, dog tired, at night; so Peg she said she’d just move over and see to Mrs. Benderby.—Gets up and has fire and breakfast at half-past six for the woman and tidies up the house and mends and has a supper waiting for the poor soul when she comes in at night. That didn’t keep the child busy though; so she took you on.”

“Good heavens!” protested the man. “It’s too much for her.”

“No, it ain’t,”—Mrs. Neal’s smile was reassuring. “It’s just a lark for her at your place and she’ll have good food up there and make a little money, and she can fix Mrs. Benderby up, night and morning, all the same. Peg’s got to take care of something with all her might and it may as well be you and Mrs. Benderby.”

“Well, perhaps it may,” agreed Mrs. Benderby’s fellow beneficiary, humbly.

After that there was a little talk of June peas and lettuce and the vicious propensities of cut worms; and then Mrs. Neal went back to her gardening, while Archibald swung himself over a stone wall into the road, over another wall into a clover field, and made his leisurely way toward the most sketchable of willow-fringed brooks.

For a while he made pretense of working, but even the brook laughed at the faint-heartedness of his efforts and the drooping willow boughs quivered with mirth and the sunlight stealing through the green leaves danced over his canvas and mocked at its futility.

“Work? In June?” sang a bird in the willows and, at the idea, all the summer world laughed with the brook.

“Smell!” whispered the clover sea, billowing away from the tree shadows where he sat.

“Feel!” crooned the breeze, touching his cheek with cool, caressing fingers.

“Look!” shouted the sun, driving shadow-throwing clouds across the low meadowland and up the far blue hills.

“Listen!” lilted the bird in the branches.

Archibald gave up the struggle. Why dabble with paints? Loafing was more glorious business.

“You’re quite right about it,” he said cheerfully to the derisive brook. “I’m a punk painter, but the Lord knew his business when he sketched in June. Come along and show me more of the canvas.”

He set off across the meadow, the brook chuckling its sunlit way beside him and together they wandered down the Valley. A companionable brook it was, full of surprises and whimsies as a woman, running quietly through brown, sun-warmed shallows, working itself into a fury against solid, unyielding stones, dreaming under overhanging elders, glooming among thick clustering pine trees, dashing noisily, recklessly, down steep slopes.

Winding and wandering, it led its comrade around the base of Pine Knob, into a bird-enchanted woodland and whirling suddenly around a sharp corner, swooped out into an open, birch-fringed glade where a host of Quaker ladies powdered the grass and butter-cups made love to them brazenly.

“There!” shouted the brook, leaping a mossy stone for sheer love of splashing, and making rainbows in the sunlight. “What do you think of June now?” With a gurgle of glee it romped away through the birches, but Archibald stayed in the glade.

A girl was sitting among the Quaker ladies. Her hair was full of golden lights. Her eyes were full of laughter. Her lap was full of flowers and puppies and kittens. A big collie dog stood sentinel at her shoulder. At her feet on the grass, two fat babies rolled about in a riotous tussle with a puppy, strayed from the lapful.

A twig cracked under the man’s foot. The dog growled warningly and the girl, glancing round, saw the intruder standing among the birches.

Apparently she was not startled, and she was as little embarrassed.

“Don’t pay any attention to him. It’s principle with him, not passion,” she said, laying a quieting hand on the dog’s head.

Archibald and she might have been meeting every day for months. Not a hint of self-consciousness ruffled her gay serenity. She made no effort to rise—merely sat there in the sunshine with young life rioting over her and round her and smiled up at the stranger out of clear, fearless, brown eyes that were used to greeting friends. There was no room for doubt. This was Pegeen’s Smiling Lady.

Archibald’s cap was in his hand. Apology was on his lips, but looking down at the group, he laughed instead of apologizing. Babies, puppies, kittens—all were staring at him solemnly, uncertainly. The collie was staring, too, with more dignity and with deeper suspicion.

Only the Smiling Lady accepted him without reserve, had no doubts about him.

“We came after flowers,” she said. “At least we intended to get flowers, but there were so many of us, and some of us had such short legs, and all of us except Sandy had such vagabond, inconsequent souls, that we just sat down and rolled around in flowers instead of picking them.”

“I’ve been sketching. At least I intended to sketch,” Archibald paraphrased.

She laughed. The laugh was as satisfactory in its way as the smile.

“Yes, it’s that kind of a day,” she admitted lazily.

She moved a wandering puppy and a kitten or two, to make room for the man on the grassy bank beside her, but there was no coquetry in the invitation—merely a matter-of-fact acceptance of another companion less reliable than the collie perhaps, less amusing than the puppies and kittens and babies, but doubtless well meaning. There was June joy enough for all comers, and she was no monopolist. And when Archibald had stretched himself out on his back beside her, she evidently considered her responsibility ended, took his well being and content for granted, and went back to playing with her young things. The young things, after their first surprise, accepted him in much the same tranquil way. Only Sandy, the collie, maintained a haughty aloofness, stood manifestly on guard.

One of the kittens made a tentative excursion along the man’s recumbent form and curled up in a soft ball on his chest. A puppy of inquiring and friendly turn of mind chewed two or three of the newcomer’s fingers in turn, then gamboled awkwardly up to his head and licked his cheek with a warm, wet tongue. A chubby, laughing baby in sadly faded and much patched blue rompers filled her hot little hands with Quaker ladies and scattered them painstakingly over the front of the artist’s flannel shirt.

“Thank you, Ophelia,” murmured Archibald. “Or perhaps I should say Hamlet,” he added doubtfully.

The Smiling Lady rescued a kitten from the strangle hold of the other diminutive being in blue rompers, and cleared up the situation.

“There’s simply no telling in rompers,” she said. “But that’s Rosamond strewing flowers over you and this is Jeremiah. They’re the Johnston twins, four years old and very active, thank you. Father Johnston is religious and Mother Johnston is romantic and each one named a baby, but I do think Mr. Johnston might have picked out one of the cheerful prophets. Jerry isn’t a bit of a wailer. Jerry and Rosy aren’t such bad little names for them, though, are they?”

“Very good little names,” protested Archibald. “But how do you know which child belongs to which name?”

“You have to go by manners, not by looks,” the Smiling Lady explained. “Now if Jerry’s attention had been concentrated upon you, he wouldn’t have strewn flowers over you. He’d probably have bitten your thumb or poked a finger in your eye. You see, Jerry’s on the way to being a man.”

“A thumb-biting, eye-poking class, I gather?”

“Forceful, let us put it—and yet so helpless, poor things! How is Pegeen?”

“The connection is obvious,” Archibald confessed. “I am wax in her hands. Within a week there won’t be a paint brush in the shack that I can call my own. She’s going to keep me tidy if she has to drive me from home in order to do it. In fact, she did drive me from home this morning. She’s cleaning.”

“She’ll take very good care of you,” said the Smiling Lady, “and _how she will_ love doing it! She’ll mother you as if you were Jerry’s age. Peggy was born for mothering.”

She had risen as she spoke.

“Sandy and I must take all these babies home before they begin clamoring for food,” she said lightly, “and I haven’t a doubt but that Peggy is watching the meadow path for you. Give her my love.”

She took it for granted that he knew her as she knew him. Pegeen was sure to have talked of her and so why bother with formalities? Yet, in spite of her frank acceptance of him, Archibald did not offer to walk home with her.

There was a definite finality about her leave-taking, a door quietly shut. Evidently this unconventional Young Woman made her own laws and limitations, and Archibald, being no dullard in feminine psychology, realized that the man who presumed upon her casual friendliness would be likely to find the door permanently closed. So he stood quietly and watched her going away across the sunshiny glade.

She walked as she spoke, as she looked, as she smiled, with a fine freedom, a blithe assurance; and though the figure that swayed so lightly as it went away between the birches was girlishly slender, there was a subtle hint of strength and vigor in its flowing lines.

As Archibald looked, she stooped to one of the babies, and the man drew a sharp breath of appreciation, noting with an artist’s eye, the gracious curves of her breast under the clinging muslin blouse, the rhythmic length of limb, the modeling of the bare forearms, the well-set head.

When she gathered the child into her arms, tossed it high before cuddling it close against her shoulder, and went on her way as swiftly and lightly as though unburdened, the watcher sighed with satisfaction.

He was still thinking of her as he leaped the wall into his own meadow and swung his cap over his head, in answer to the greeting waved to him by a little figure in the doorway of the shack.

“Not so much beautiful,” he summed up, “as made up of beauties. She’d never drive a man mad, but, holy smoke, what a delight she might be to him in his sane moments.”

III

“Peggy,” said John Archibald, leaning his elbows on the breakfast table, “sit down and let me talk to you.”

The girl who was headed toward the kitchen turned back promptly and sat down across the table from him.

Then she waited tranquilly for him to talk to her. What he had to say might be unimportant. It usually was, but she liked his talk. As she had already explained to the Smiling Lady, it was “so sort of foolish and snarky.”

To-day, however, he seemed inclined to seriousness.

“We’ve got to put things on a business basis, child,” he said firmly.

“Yes, sir,”—Pegeen’s tone was docile but vastly indifferent.

“You’ve been seeing to me for a week now and you know the worst about me. Now the question is, whether you are going to take the job for the summer.”

The dark blue Irish eyes under Peg’s black lashes flooded with anxiety.

“Don’t I suit, sir?” she asked.

“You suit like an easy shoe, Peggy; but do I?”

The thin, freckled, little face blazed into enthusiasm.

“Why, I think you’re splendid, sir—just splendid. Funny, you know, and messy, but I don’t mind that. I love cleaning up after folks if they’re nice, and you’re as nice as can be.”

“Thank you,” said Archibald, gratefully. “Then you think you can keep on seeing to me?”

“Yessir. I’d love it.”

“And the work isn’t too hard?”

“Hard? Why, it isn’t a bit hard. If anybody isn’t sick or drunk or anything like that, seeing to him is as easy as anything.”

“I’m feeling fairly healthy,”—Archibald’s voice was grave—“and I’ll try not to get drunk.”

“Oh, well, then we’ll get along fine, sir. Of course I’d do my best, even if you did get sick or drunk, but it’s lots harder.”

“I should think it might be. Now the next thing to be settled is, what your wages are to be.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t expect wages—not real wages, you know. Just enough to get me some shoes and some aprons. I’d like some big clean-looking aprons that would hide my dresses. My dresses aren’t so very nice, you know, but they’d do under aprons.”

“Miss O’Neill,”—Archibald shook a forefinger at her sternly—“I won’t allow any one to see to me without paying her real wages. I couldn’t be funny and messy with any comfort at all unless there was a wage earner to clean up after me. Now I don’t know how wages go in this Valley, but what would you say to five dollars a week?”

Pegeen stared at him in blank amazement. Then a pitying expression blotted out the surprise.

“You certainly do need seeing to,” she said gently, in the tone of one humoring the harmless insane. “Why, you can get real hired help for five dollars; but, then, a man wouldn’t know.”

“I’ve got more than hired help. I’ve got somebody who does all the work. I’ve got a cook and a housekeeper and a valet and a companion. Now, for the services of four experts I don’t consider five dollars an exorbitant wage. So that’s settled.”

The vivid little face across the table was flushed, excited. It occurred to the man that if the thin cheeks should take on plumpness and the sharp little chin should fill out to rounded curves, and the unchildish, anxious look should quite die out of the great eyes, Pegeen might some day be amazingly pretty. Even as it was, there was an appealing charm about her.

“What’ll I ever do with all that money?” she asked breathlessly.

“Buy a coach and four with it,” advised Archibald.

Her imagination was all aflame at the suggestion.

“Black horses and the coach lined with yellow, and we’ll take Miss Moran and the Johnston twins and Mrs. Neal and Mrs. Benderby and Jimmy Dawes, and the McKenzie baby and—How many does a coach hold?”

“Well, unless it’s a very large coach, I should say you’ve got it about full.”

“All right. Can you drive?”

“I can.”

“Then you’ll sit on the front seat with Miss Moran.”

“Hooray!”

“And the rest of us will be behind with red and green umbrellas, and there’ll be chains that jingle on the horses and Jimmy Dawes will blow a horn—I saw a coach go by down the road once. It was perfectly splendid. Now there isn’t anything but automobiles.”

“Maybe you’d rather buy an automobile.”

She laughed happily.

“No, I’d as leave have a sawmill as one of them. An automobile wouldn’t fit into a fairy story, now would it?”

Archibald visibly made an effort to fit one in and, failing, shook his head despairingly.

“There I told you. We’ve got to have the coach.”

The sensitive face was lighted from brow to chin with merriment.

Yes. She unquestionably would be pretty. She was pretty even now.

“Oh, you _are_ nice,” she sighed happily.

The man reached across the table and clasped the thin little hands in his.

It was good to give happiness—almost better than being happy. Maybe it was the same thing.

“Before we get the coach and four,” he said, “we’ll hire Mrs. Neal’s horse and buggy and drive to Pittsfield and when we get there we will buy those shoes and aprons and some dresses to go under the aprons and a hat—”

“With roses on it,” chanted Pegeen.

“With roses on it,” agreed Archibald.

“And a raincoat for rainy mornings—and stockings—and all sorts of things,” he ended vaguely.

“But they aren’t to come out of the coach money,” he added hastily. “Not a bit of it. They are extra. You are going to have five dollars a week and ‘found.’ ‘Found’ means hats with roses on them.”

Peg’s chin was nestled between her palms. Her eyes were beaming on him. Suddenly a cloud swept over them.

“If you please, sir,” she began and hesitated. The cloud of anxiety had drifted over the whole piquant face.

“If you please, sir,” she began again.

“Yes?” encouraged the man across the table.

“Are you sure you can afford it, sir?” It came out with a rush at last—“I’ve always heard that artists—I don’t really need the things. I’ve got plenty. I can get along first rate with just the shoes and aprons.”

Through Archibald’s mind drifted a fleeting memory of the last gift he had sent to Nadine Ransome. She loved emeralds and many men had given them to her. A dull flush came into his cheeks.

“I’m quite sure I can afford it. You see I had a father who didn’t paint pictures.”

“Oh, well, then—” said Peggy, understandingly.

“We’ll go to Pittsfield on Saturday.”

“Pink roses,” stipulated the small girl, as she carried the breakfast dishes kitchenward.

“Big pink roses,” amended the man.

For a few days after his high-handed adjustment of the wage problem, Archibald painted with something like his old time fervor. For two years, eye and hand and brain had been out of tune; but now the beauty of the world cried out to him again and his brush caught and fixed the meaning of the cry. Men had prophesied great things for him—men who knew. He had believed in great things for himself; but all that had been in the time he could scarcely remember—in the time before he had met Nadine. Since then he had lost faith in himself and in much beside; but now, standing before a finished picture and knowing it was good, the painter admitted to himself that life had its satisfactory moments. Not that he was sure of himself. He was far from it; but agreeable things _did_ happen. There was Pegeen and there was the Smiling Lady and there was June—and he had painted a good picture.

“Peggy,” he said, as the girl passed him on her way to the spring, “God must have had a mighty contented, comfortable feeling at the end of the sixth day.”

“Yessir.” She had no idea what he meant, but it was enough for her that he said a thing. She was willing to swear to it.

He put an affectionate hand upon her shoulder as she came and stood beside him looking at the picture.

“I understand you’re a wonderful hand with babies, Peg,” he said. “What do you do with a baby when he’s cross or bad or wants something he mustn’t have? Spank him, eh?”

Pegeen flushed indignantly.

“Well, I should think not! If that’s all you know about babies! Why, I just go to work and get the poor little thing awfully interested in something else.”

Archibald laughed boyishly.

“Peggy child. That must be the answer. You’re getting me awfully interested in something else.”

“Only you weren’t bad, sir,” protested the small girl, loyally.

A shadow crept over the man’s face.

“Bad enough, Peg—but I might have been worse.”

“Well, you’re good enough for me,” said Peggy, contentedly.

The comforting words rang pleasantly in his ears a half hour later when he plunged into the woods behind the shack and took the trail leading up the steep slope of Pine Knob hill.

The day had been hot for June and the dim cool greenness closed around him deliciously as he made his way through depths of hemlock shadow and gold-decked shallows of birch-filtered light. There was a faint stir of wind in the branches, a rustle of light foot and lighter wing in the hidden places of bough and undergrowth.

Now and then, as he climbed, he caught, through opening among the trees, sudden glimpses of the Valley where the long shadows of late afternoon were flinging themselves across the sunlit breast of the meadow land, and of the range of hills beyond, still gold and green and blue, but with prophetic splashes of deepening purple creeping in and out among the ravines and hollows.

He would be in time to see the sunset from the top of Pine Knob and, at the thought, something Pegeen had said days before flashed into his mind. There was “a place up there where you could look out and out,” and the Smiling Lady often went there to watch the sunset.

Archibald told himself that it would be a pleasant thing to find her there. She was the sort of woman with whom one could watch a miracle.

And so when, pushing aside a screen of thick crowding leaves, he found her sitting on a mossy stone, elbow on knee, chin in hand, eyes a-dream, he was not surprised, only glad that the human note could intrude on Nature’s melody without discord. She fitted in.

“You’re just in time,” she said, looking up at him for an instant in friendly fashion. Then her eyes went back to the fields and hills and sky.