Part 3

She had a curious way of making one feel welcome without bothering to put the thing into words. Archibald remembered that it had been the same when he had found her in the birch wood.—There had been the same undisturbed acceptance of his coming, the same companionable assumption of his content. There was no aloofness about her mood. Before she had been absorbed in frolicking with babies. Now she was absorbed in the sunset. She took his interest in the babies and in the sunset for granted, shared them with him, and felt that she had fulfilled her duty. There was something oddly intimate about such a welcome. Archibald puzzled over it, as he dropped on the moss beside her and ostensibly gave his undivided attention to the sunset. If she had been startled or formal or coquettish or resentful—those were the beginnings of acquaintance between a man and a woman; but this girl’s life and his might have been running side by side for years. All the futile, tentative things might have been said so long ago that they could be forgotten. There was suggestion of a long lane traversed, of barriers passed, about this taking-for-granted companioning. And yet the splendid simplicity of it put a man in his place, made him feel humbly grateful, eager to be found worthy. He wondered whether she met all strangers in the same way.

As though she had heard his thoughts, the girl turned to him for a moment, looked at him frankly, appraisingly.

“One knows that you won’t spoil it,” she said, the ripple of light that was like the soul of a smile running over her face.

So that was it? Archibald felt enormously flattered. To be recognized at sight by a girl with a smile like that as the sort of man who would not spoil beautiful things, seemed exceedingly worth while. To be good enough for Pegeen and to be understanding enough for the Smiling Lady—honors were coming thick and fast upon him.

And then he justified the girl’s faith in him by quite forgetting her in the glory of the sunset world.

There was no mad riot of crimson and gold in the west. Above the tops of the crouching hills masses of rose-lined clouds with flame at their hearts melted into opal as they dared the sky heights. Bars of palest turquoise gathered the opaline blues to themselves; and, higher still, the faint green faded from the blue, leaving an eastern sea of pale pure azure through which a silver crescent drifted, tangled in foam spume of delicate pink cloud.

Gradually the color died away. The young moon dropped behind the eastern hills. Ashen grays and violets and liquid, indefinite, blue blacks claimed the world.

The Smiling Lady stirred and rose. Archibald joined her and together they went silently down the sweet, scented ways of the dew-wet dusk.

“You’ll come in,” she said when they reached a small white farmhouse nestled under great maples. He followed her into a candle-lighted room where Sandy, the collie, and an elderly woman with a shrewd, homely face rose from before the open fire to greet them.

“Mr. Archibald will be having tea with me, Ellen,” said the Smiling Lady, quite as though having tea with her were a life-long habit of the man’s.

Ellen took one swift, comprehensive look at the visitor as she carried the girl’s coat from the room. The respectful look of a well-trained servant it was, yet Archibald had a feeling that he had been catalogued and the record tucked away in a card index.

“Ellen plays the rôle of a dragon,” Miss Moran explained lightly, “a non-sulphurous dragon. It seems the most independent young woman must offer up concessions to tradition in the form of a dragon—and then I couldn’t get along without Ellen. She was my nurse once upon a time; my mother’s housekeeper afterward. She would not go away with the others—will never go away until she makes the long journey. Money has nothing to do with such service as she gives me. We share what I have and she’s family and friend and servant all in one.”

“You are fortunate to have her,” the man said gently. She nodded. For an instant there was no hint of a smile in her face and Archibald felt as though the candles in the room had suddenly burned out.

“She’s the only one now.”

There was a hurt in her voice, but the next moment she was calling gaily through the half-open door to Ellen.

“Jam, Ellen! Plum jam, with the scones—plenty of it—and in here, please.”

And when Ellen had moved a wicker table to a place before the fire, covered it with the whitest of cloths and set upon it a tray on which a teapot steamed merrily and a salad nestled temptingly among cresses and a covered muffin dish made promises and the plum jam glowed colorfully, the girl in the big wicker chair across the table from Archibald was all cheerfulness.

“Peggy gives you dinners perhaps?” she queried. “Women folk fall into picnicing ways when there are no men about the house to be considered, and I never let meals interfere with sunsets, so I have my tea whenever I come in. Of course we don’t really need an open fire to-night, but I love it so and, thank Heaven, even the summer nights are usually cool enough for it, so I sit here in the evenings and sip and munch and tell over the day’s doings—and, once in a while, I send a pitying thought toward all the folk who are eating dinners in rose-and-gilt city restaurants.”

“Poor wretches,” murmured Archibald, sinking back luxuriously among his cushions and looking around him at the low ceilinged room with its gay chintz and wicker and old mahogany, its companioning books and pictures, its great bowls of June flowers and greenery. A friendly room.

His eyes came back to the mistress of it, and rested there contentedly.

She was busying herself with the tea and he had always liked to watch a pretty woman pouring tea. Not that this woman was pretty. He discarded the word fastidiously. She was something better than pretty, something much more satisfying. Candle light and firelight touched the waves of her thick rippling hair to something like burnished copper, but it was deeply auburn in its shadows. Sun and wind had had their way with her clear skin, had tanned it, had even freckled it—but tenderly, mellowing white to cream, rose flush to ripened peach, splashing a nose far from classic with the faintest of brown touches, melting almost invisibly into the sun warmed tan.

Her mouth was over-large by artist’s canons, but sweetness lurked in its curves and the generous mobile lips were warmly red. And her eyes—Archibald puzzled vainly over their color. Hazel, he had thought them at first sight, but as they looked at him across the tea cups they looked deeply gray—or were they violet in their shadows?

“My friends—the people who _were_ my friends in my rose-and-gilt restaurant days—think I am quite mad because I live up here the year round,” she was saying. “There’s no making them understand that I like it. I tried at first but they insisted upon being sorry for me and that’s a great strain on friendship, you know. So now we exchange pity.”

“You’ve lived here a long time?” asked Archibald.

“Five years. I had no idea of staying when I came. This old farm had come into my father’s hands years before and one summer Mother and I had fixed it up a bit and spent part of a summer in it. It was one of the few things that was left after my father’s death. I came away here for healing,—and I found it—after a time—here among my hills and my own people.”

“Your own people?” the man echoed.

“Yes; they _are_ mine now. The hills and the sky and the fields and the woods began my cure—taught me that beauty hadn’t died because I was unhappy, but it was neighboring that taught me to be happy again. We’re a selfish lot with our loves, aren’t we? I had been quite contented with my half dozen out of the world. The rest didn’t count for me. They were just chorus—merry villagers, you know—quite unimportant except for stage effect. Then when I was left alone, I found that I needed those others—and that they needed me. After I learned that lesson, I put away sorrow. One doesn’t forget, of course. One misses always; but one loves and helps and is glad. It’s a joyful old world, isn’t it?”

“In spots.” The man’s voice was dubious.

“Wait until you’ve adopted the Valley,” advised the girl, laughingly. “You’ve made a splendid beginning with Peggy. In the meantime, Ellen’s bringing hot scones and more plum jam. Who says this is a vale of tears?”

“It has its smiling moments,” confessed the doubting one.

They talked of many things there beside the flickering fire.

The girl and her father had roamed the world in the days before he left her.

“We were alone together after Mother died,” she said, “and he was restless always, though he kept laughter on his lips; so we went here and there, drifting back to New York now and again. He was the best of comrades and welcome everywhere. Dear old Dad! All the world made friends with him. He was Irish. Did I tell you that before? Clever, irresponsible, adorable Irish. Peggy and I have a bond in our Irish blood, but I’ve none of the brogue. The pity of it! Father’s was creamy, always. You should have heard him tell an Irish story—and seen him tell it! No wonder it’s easy for me to be happy even now that he’s gone from me. I learned the way of it from him, though all the time he’d the broken heart over my mother’s going.”

She was talking half to herself now, and smiling into the fire as though she had forgotten the listening man.

“We were in New York when he went away from me,” she said. “I couldn’t believe that he was very ill. He had always been so alive—so splendidly, buoyantly alive. It seemed to me that, in the end, he would laugh at death and beat it off; but he knew.

“One afternoon he put out his hand to me and laughed—his gay laugh that I always loved.

“ ‘I’m leaving you little except my blessing, Acushla,’ he said. ‘But you can’t say I haven’t given you a bully good time for a while.’ Then he went to sleep smiling, and that was the end of it all.”

She did not tell the thing sadly—had even a tender little laugh for the characteristic last words of the reckless, merry father she had loved so dearly; but there was a lump in Archibald’s throat.

She had made him free of something more intimate than her birch glade or her sunset, and he thanked her for it in his heart.

The talk drifted away from personalities after that. She gave him bits of Valley history—humorous chiefly, though now and then pathos or tragedy showed its head, as it will wherever human lives are in question. She sang to him too, sweet old Irish love songs.

“But you should have heard Daddy sing them,” she said. “He had a voice made just for love songs.”

She was all aglow with interest and enthusiasm when he told her of the expedition to Pittsfield.

“Oh, the fun of it,” she crowed jubilantly. “I’ve so longed to get things for her—loads of things—but I couldn’t. There are so many who are in worse need of the little I can do. Did she tell you that I did try to give her a home here when her father disappeared? She wouldn’t come. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me. She made that very clear; but she said that, being well and having Ellen, I didn’t need her. She was ever so much obliged to me but she thought she’d just see to Mrs. Potter and the babies. The Potters were so shiftless. You may be thankful that your artist ways earned you a reputation for shiftlessness here in the Valley. You’d never have had Peggy if you had seemed capable of taking care of yourself.”

She made a list of things for Pegeen’s outfit—necessaries that began where dresses and aprons ended, and she tried hard to reconcile consideration for Archibald’s purse with zeal for Pegeen’s welfare, conscientiously cutting down first extravagant flights of imagination regarding underwear and stockings and then soaring recklessly into the realm of superfluities after a parasol.

“Peg has always been crazy for a parasol,” she explained shamefacedly, “but of course it isn’t really a necessity.”

“The things one is crazy for are the only necessities,” protested Archibald.

She beamed upon him.

“There’s Irish in you, somewhere.” Her eyes welcomed him as one of her blood. “Now most of these New England folk have never even suspected that great truth. They’ve an idea that being crazy for a thing damns it. They’ll look upon a pink parasol for Peggy as a folly. Some of them will look upon it as a sin—but how Peg will adore it! I’d certainly cut down on something useful and uninteresting and buy her a pink parasol. Not an expensive one, you know. That would be silly, because it wouldn’t make her any happier than a cheap one and happiness is the measure of excuse for folly, isn’t it?”

“I wonder,” said Archibald.

She was blithely sure of it, waved doubts away with a careless hand.

“Real happiness, of course. Not the Sodom’s apple kind. The moment the apples begin to taste Sodomy, one must quit being foolish for the price beyond that is too high for defective apples; but as long as folly really makes us happy we’re wise fools. I’ve bought my pink parasols in all kinds of markets and never grudged the underwear and stockings they cost me.”

“You couldn’t drive over to Pittsfield with us,” suggested the man, tentatively.

She shook her head.

“It’s Peggy’s day. I’d spoil it for her. She’s going off alone with a fairy prince and with Aladdin’s lamp tucked under the buggy seat and she’d much better choose foolishly for herself than have some one choose wisely for her—not that I’d be wise. I’m all for pink parasols myself.”

She looked it. Archibald admitted that to himself as he studied the laughing face over which the candle light flickered softly.

Incidentally he made a mental note to the effect that Edison should be pilloried by womankind. Even the rarest of beauties lost charm under an electric glare, while in candle-light hair and eyes and lips and throat took on alluring mysteries—little half lights of confession, swift, fleeting, golden, high lights of revelation. The Smiling Lady’s radiant serenity dissolved into witchery there in the candle light. A dimple the man had not noticed before quivered in her left cheek, disappeared, came back into view. Elusive reservations had crept into the candid eyes. A _very_ pink parasolish Young Person indeed!

Archibald hastily revised certain impressions having to do with Olympian detachment Altogether human, this Lady of the Smiles. No Young Goddess, but half child, half woman, and wholly lovely. It was all wrong that she should be stranded here at the world’s end, among alien folk, that she should be alone save for an old servant, shut away in the heyday of her youth from a world where pink parasols flaunted bravely up and down, gay winding ways.

Then, oddly enough, a trail of faces drifted through his memory, women’s faces seen against rose-colored backgrounds on those same gay winding ways, and following them came a vision of the Smiling Lady, sitting among flowers and long grasses in a sunlit, woodland glade with young life tumbling round her. No, it wasn’t possible to pity her. After all, there were pink parasols—and pink parasols.

IV

Pegeen’s day dawned radiantly, a perfect June day of sun-warmed breezes and drifting, white clouds against an ardent, azure sky, and the small girl was as radiant as the day.

“I couldn’t sleep for thinking of it,” she said happily, as she brought in Archibald’s breakfast.

For a moment she was silent, watching as usual with an anxious little frown while he broke the shell of the two-minute eggs, but when the ordeal was past and she once more made sure that fire and water had not betrayed her, she went on talking. Breakfast was always a conversational interlude at the shack.

“I dreamed a dreadful dream about you getting over to Pittsfield and not having any money and I cried so it waked me up, and then I got to thinking maybe it was a warning or something, so I prayed like fury. Mr. Colby, the minister down in the village, says we oughtn’t to pray for what we want, that we ought to pray for grace to want what the Lord thinks best for us to have, but it seems to me that’s a silly way to pray. When we’ve got a thing we’ve just got to make the best of it and that’s all there is to it, but I believe in getting to work early and praying for something it’ll be easy to make the best of. I told God that if anything horrid _was_ going to happen I wished to goodness He’d stave it off till after I had my hat, and I think He will.”

“Nothing horrid is going to happen.” Archibald spoke with the assurance of one who has inside information.

“We are going to have the time of our young lives, Peggy. Never mind the dishes this morning. You can do them to-morrow.”

She shook her head.

“No, sir, please. That’s a poor way. I’d rather do them. Like as not, if I didn’t a greasy plate would pop into my mind just when I was trying on my hat and spoil things. It’s perfectly terrible to have disagreeable things jump out at you when everything’s pleasant as can be. I’d lots rather clean up as I go along.”

“What if you can’t wash your dirty dishes, Peg?”

The man’s tone was queer, though he smiled, and the girl, sensitive to undercurrents, looked up at him quickly.

“Oh, well,” she said and there was a comforting note in her own voice, “when I simply can’t, I just put them to soak in soapy water and try to forget them. It’s wonderful how easy they are to do after a little if you let them soak while you go off and do something else.”

“Yes—I suppose so.” He was evidently doubtful. “Well, we’re not in a mad rush, so clean up as you go along. It’s a good habit, but I always seem to have dirty dishes left over. Come down to Neals’ when you are ready. I’m going to get the horse.”

A half hour later the two drove down the Valley road, while Mrs. Neal leaned over her front gate to watch them go.

The old buggy was shabby, the old horse was physically and temperamentally incapable of anything more spirited than a jog-trot; but Pegeen could not have been prouder, more rapturous, if she had been taking the road with the coach and four of her dreams.

Her faded blue dress had been washed and starched to aggressive crispness. Her heavy mop of black curls was tied with the cherished pink hair ribbons that had been the Smiling Lady’s last Christmas present. Under the battered old straw hat whose rose-wreathed successor was waiting in Pittsfield for Pegeen’s coming, the expressive face was all aflame with excitement and happiness.

Archibald looked down into the dark blue eyes that were well-springs of bubbling joy, and felt oddly young himself.

“Isn’t it splendid,” the small girl said breathlessly—“going off on an adventure this way, just you and me in a buggy. I’ve been twice before, but in a wagon both times. That was nice too, but a buggy’s so much eleganter. I do hope they’ll all see us. Mrs. Benderby’s washing at the Pratts’ to-day. I told her we were going to start at nine, so she’ll be looking out for us and like as not she’s told everybody else, so they’ll all be watching. Folks here in the Valley are awfully interested in things and they’ve been sort of excited about my going up to take care of you. You see they couldn’t tell how it’d turn out, you being from New York and an artist and not smiling at anybody, and all that, but now when they see me driving to Pittsfield with you in a buggy and you looking so jolly and nice, they’ll know that everything’s come out beautifully. I knew it would all the time ’n’ Miss Moran said:

“ ‘Peg, everybody knows how to smile at the world, but some people are dreadfully out of practice.’ She said when you found out there were other folks in the world beside yourself maybe you’d smile at them, and now you’re beginning to do it. When you get real well acquainted with everybody here in the Valley, I shouldn’t wonder if you’d simply grin. There’s Mrs. Ransom and Sally on their side stoop, watching for us!”

She bounced joyously on the hard leather seat and waved both hands wildly toward two women, who waved answering salutes.

“Mr. Ransom’s a deacon and he won’t let Sally go anywhere except to church, or have beaux or anything. Don’t you think it’s a shame—and she’s pretty as a picture too, and all the boys are perfectly crazy about her. Her mother’s just like a scared little white rabbit—pale blue eyes and wrinkly little nose and everything. The neighbors say she’s afraid to breathe and Sally doesn’t stand up to her father because he takes it out on her mother and Mrs. Ransom’s so afraid. Miss Moran’s about the only one that dares to go there much, but she isn’t afraid of anything and Deacon Ransom can’t be perfectly nasty to her. Nobody can. Why, even Bill Briggs, that drinks so and swears something awful at everybody, he’s got to be real friendly with Miss Moran. She hurt her ankle one day climbing a fence down by the back road and Bill Briggs happened to come along. He wasn’t so very drunk, but anybody else would have been scared half to death of him. Miss Moran just upped and called to him:

“ ‘Oh, Mr. Briggs,’ she said, ‘I’m so glad you came along. I’ve hurt myself and I’ll have to get you to help me home.’ He told folks that he cussed once or twice from habit, but she looked so nice and friendly and so glad he was there and so sure he was going to fix things for her, that he went over and helped her up and took her home—carried her the last part of the way—and when they got to the house she made him come in and have dinner and now he’s sobered up some and he works for her a good deal, but he doesn’t talk hardly at all when he’s around there. He can’t talk without swearing and he doesn’t like to swear before her, so you’d most think he was deaf and dumb when he’s working at her place.”

The drive down the Valley was a continuous performance of waving greetings, and running commentary. Pegeen did not gossip. She simply overflowed; and Archibald found the people of whom she talked taking very definite shape in his mind. He felt distinctly interested in pretty Sally Ransom and profane Bill Briggs and Ginsy Shalloway, the seamstress, who went around sewing and knew all about everybody, and Ezra Watts who wasn’t respectable and was suspected of stealing everything that disappeared.

Really, the country wasn’t the lonely place Archibald had always believed it to be. It was full of people and of drama. And though the man had run away from women and men and vowed himself to misanthropic seclusion, his Valley neighbors seen through Pegeen’s friendly, tolerant eyes seemed likable folk. Even Ezra Watts, the not respectable, got the benefit of Peg’s doubt. “It’s handy to have somebody to lay things on,” she said. “’N’ I guess Ezra gets credit for lots of things he doesn’t do—like when Mr. Sanderson was sure his saw and auger had been stolen and then one day old Granny Sanderson had a dream that they were under the bed springs and sure enough there they were on the cords, where Mr. Sanderson had left them himself when he’d been fixing the bed. Ezra’s got a terrier dog, Bingo, that loves him like everything, and Miss Moran says when Bingo turns his back on Ezra, she’ll believe the man’s as bad as he’s painted, but not till then. It’s awfully hard for Miss Moran to believe anybody’s bad, ’n’ I guess mostly they aren’t.”

On the main street of Pisgah, the little village at the end of the Valley, Pegeen suddenly bounced higher than usual on the buggy seat.

“Oh—please—there’s Jimmy. Oh, do stop, Mr. Archibald.”

A sturdy, barefooted boy sat on the stone wall under a spreading maple tree, whittling nonchalantly and with an air of profound indifference to passersby.

“Jimmy,” called Pegeen eagerly, “Jimmy Dawes.”

The boy looked up from his whittling, showing two merry brown eyes and a most engaging grin.

“’Lo,” he conceded, trying to look as if he had not been watching for Pegeen’s triumphal progress.