Part 7

“I think most people have a horrid idea about souls, don’t you?” she said. “Sort of foggy, lonesome things that go floating around trying to be happy when they haven’t got anything to be happy with. Honestly, that kind of souls would have just about as good a time in heaven as Bill Briggs does at grange parties. They don’t have liquor and he says he isn’t built for conversation. I think heaven’s going to be heaps cozier than the ministers say. I’m counting on having legs and hands and eyes and nose and everything, just the way I have here, only no aches or freckles or anything, and only beautiful things to feel and see and smell—and stacks of little child angels to see to, so that we won’t miss having the old people and sick people to take care of. I’m expecting to enjoy heaven and if I do it’ll have to be mighty different from the way they tell about it.”

“I know a job in heaven that would suit you,” Archibald said, “but another angel has it. Maybe he’d take you on to help.”

“Tell me,” she urged eagerly.

“Well, it’s in the Japanese heaven; but I suppose we’ll all be talking the same language when we get over there so that won’t shut you out. There’s a Japanese angel—Jizo, they call him,—and he puts in his whole time playing with the souls of the little children that come to heaven, so that they won’t be lonesome for their mothers.”

“Oh, my stars!” The small girl was all aglow. “What a bee-autiful job! Wouldn’t it be cunning to see—all those blessed little baby souls playing around and that big kind angel making up games for them and seeing to them for God? But one angel couldn’t do it—not possibly. Maybe he could when the world started and there weren’t many children going to heaven, but now he’d have to have somebody else. Oh, I do hope he’ll let me help. That’s the most interesting thing I ever heard about heaven. Mostly it sounds stupid, but I always did think God would be too sensible to let us all sit around and rest forever. I wonder if that Jizo thought up his job for himself and asked for it or if God just gave it to him. Mr. Frisbie says the Japanese are awfully smart but that they’re ruining wages—only I don’t suppose they bother about wages in heaven. I wouldn’t want wages.”

Archibald rose and stretched himself, laughing down at the earnest little face upturned to him.

“I’m willing to bet your month’s wages here that you’ll be given a chance to take care of somebody in heaven,” he said. “They say the seraphim are for adoration and the cherubim are for service. Well, I can see you chumming with the cherubs.”

Pegeen looked perturbed.

“Miss Moran has pictures of them,” she said doubtfully. “They aren’t anything but heads and wings.”

“That’s the painters’ fault. They couldn’t imagine anything as beautiful as a cherub so they gave up before they got fairly started.” The small girl on the doorstep nodded understanding and relief.

“You need legs and hands if you’re going to do much,” she said, “and if I don’t set mine going you won’t have any supper.”

Wiggles and Spunky improved so rapidly under expert treatment that bandages and boric acid were speedily put aside and the two new members of the household were promoted from obscurity to family intimacy.

A crow with an injured wing, and a squirrel rescued at the eleventh hour from Wiggles, and two fluffy yellow chickens whose hysterical mother had tramped on them during a panic over a temporary scarcity of worms, were at various times added to the family group, but the crow and the chickens and the squirrel were merely transients. Once repaired, they went back to the wild life and Mrs. Neal’s chicken yard, though Peterkin, the crow, came back occasionally to sit on the birch tree by the kitchen door and caw at Peg; and Jabberwok, the squirrel, had a nest in a near-by oak from which he threw acorns at Wiggles with unerring aim.

Boots was a transient too, but he did not need bandaging or doctoring and he stayed on as a day boarder for a long time.

Archibald almost stumbled over him one day as he came through the woodshed after an early morning fishing excursion with Jimmy Dawes. He had brought Jimmy home to breakfast and then came in the back way, triumphantly waving creditable strings of trout.

A gurgle of appreciation sounded at Archibald’s feet and he stepped back, hastily looking down into the round staring eyes of a fat baby who sat comfortably strapped into a pine box and held out chubby hands toward the shining fish.

“Well, I’ll be—” began the man. Then he remembered Jimmy, and left the remark hanging in the air unfinished.

“Hello!” commented Jimmy. “Going in for baby farming?”

“Peg!” Archibald’s voice held alarm and protest. It brought Pegeen out from the kitchen, frying pan in hand.

“Hello, Jimmy! Going to stay for breakfast? My, what a lot of fish!”

Suddenly she saw the question in Archibald’s face and her glance followed his to the occupant of the box.

“Oh, yes,” she explained. “That’s Boots—Mrs. McKenzie’s Boots. His mother’s sick and there isn’t anybody except old Granny McKenzie and she can’t possibly do everything and take care of Boots too. I ran over there this morning to see how sick Mrs. McKenzie was and everything was a mess and the poor old lady was most crazy. I’d have stayed, only of course there’s you; so I helped tidy things up and then I just brought Boots along with me. I knew you’d want me to. He won’t be a mite of trouble. I never saw such a good baby. I can look after him here, daytimes and take him home with me nights. He’s so cunning. Look at him laugh.”

She dropped on her knees beside the box and waggled her head at the baby, who discarded his wide-eyed solemnity for a dimpling, gurgling hilarity that would have disarmed the most confirmed baby hater.

“What d’ you guess Jizo’d think of _him_?” Peg asked enthusiastically. She was so happy in her new responsibility, so utterly confident of Archibald’s readiness to share it with her, that the protest faded out of him. He stooped and experimentally poked at the baby’s ribs with a fishy forefinger which Boots promptly grabbed, crowing in triumph as he held fast to it.

Something curious happened to the stooping man. He wasn’t at all sure what it was but knew that it had to do with the feeling of that tiny hand curled round his finger. The hand was so absurdly small and soft and clinging. He had never noticed babies. People had them, but they had always seemed to him one of the necessary evils, mitigated in his own class by the existence of vigilant nurses who kept their charges out of sight and hearing.

He wouldn’t have believed that there could be something extraordinarily pleasant about having a baby hang fast to one’s forefinger and jump up and down with pride in the feat.

“Strong little beggar, isn’t he?” he said with a shamefaced glance at Jimmy that bespoke masculine sympathy for his embarrassment But Jimmy was used to babies.

“Jolly kid!” he said, swinging his string of fish toward the baby who abandoned Archibald’s finger to clutch at the slippery prize. “I’ll fix the trout for you, Peg.”

Archibald straightened up and looked at the boy admiringly. Nothing disturbed Jimmy’s cheerful nonchalance—but then Jimmy had not a strange baby deposited, without warning, in his family circle. He would eat his breakfast and go home, but the baby, apparently, was to stay at the shack.

“What did you call him, Peg?” the alleged Head of the Family asked feebly.

“Well, his name’s Bruce,—after the spider man, you know. The McKenzies are Scotch. But they call him ‘Boots.’ Baby talk’s silly but I do think Boots is a nice funny little name, don’t you?”

She went back to the kitchen with Jimmy, and Archibald followed, with a backward glance at the baby who resigned himself philosophically to the desertion and settled back among the pillows with the evident intention of going to sleep at once.

“Good old Boots!” murmured the man to whom philosophy had always come hard.

As he washed his hands at the kitchen pump, he eyed his forefinger with a whimsical smile. Queer little thing, a baby’s hand. He could imagine that if the baby happened to be a man’s own—after all, perhaps even neighboring wasn’t the last word. Human brotherhood was a big thing, but a man’s own—

“D’ you like them fried in corn meal, Mr. Archibald?” called Pegeen.

He said that he did.

VIII

The horses came from town and, though stabled by Mr. Neal, were in a way additional members of the shack family.

“For a man who fled to the country to be alone, this is going some,” Archibald said to himself, as for the first time he rode up the meadow path, leading a second saddled horse. Pegeen and Wiggles and Spunky and Boots and Peterkin—who was not yet well enough to respond to the call of the wild, were all on hand to welcome the new animals, and Archibald’s eyes twinkled as he viewed the collection.

“This is where you take your first riding lesson, Peg. I’m going to put you on Zip,” he said gaily. “Will the menagerie break loose if you take your eye off it? Suppose the baby should choke the pup and the pup should bite the cat and the cat should eat the crow?”

“They’ll be good,” promised Pegeen comfortably as she loosened the baby’s strangle-hold on the pup. “Aren’t those horses splendid? I wonder how Susy feels about them. It’s real hard on her, I think, having them come into her own barn, putting on city airs, and saying snippy things about farm horses and farm ways.—I’ll bet they do. They look that way—sort of proud and finicky and stuck up, but maybe the country’ll do them lots of good. They’re most certain to like Susy after they really get to know her. She’s so sensible and nice.”

“Sure thing,” agreed Archibald. “Nothing like living in the country for giving one a sense of values.”

Peggy’s face was flushed with excitement. Her lips and eyes were brimming with smiles as she waited to be tossed up to the saddle.

“I’ve been on Susy and on Mr. Frisbie’s Dick,” she said, her voice trembling a little with eagerness, “but never on a real, prancy riding horse like Zip.”

“Not afraid?” Archibald asked, noticing the quiver of the voice.

She looked surprised.

“Afraid? Me? Not a bit. Some way or other I always forget to be afraid of things till afterwards; but I’m so excited that my throat’s all shirred up in puckers.”

For an hour he taught her the laws of bit and bridle and saddle and horse nature; and she took to it all, as a duck takes to water, quick, fearless, bubbling over with joy.

“You’ll make a horsewoman, Peg,” Archibald said, as he lifted her down from the saddle at last. “I’ll have you jumping fences, before the summer is over.”

“Miss Moran used to. She’d make her horse jump anything. Mr. Meredith and she didn’t pay a bit of attention to fences—unless there was something they didn’t want to trample down.”

Archibald turned to her quickly.

“Meredith? Who’s Meredith?”

Pegeen settled herself comfortably for a bit of gossip. She loved to tell Archibald about people. He was always so interested.

“Why, he’s the one that’s going to marry Miss Moran,” she explained. “Anyway, that’s what everybody thinks; but they don’t seem to be in a very big hurry about it. He’s awfully rich and he goes scooting off to Europe and around the world and everywhere; but he comes up here every summer and stays a long while—over in Pittsfield. I guess he couldn’t stand boarding anywhere around here. He looks as if he’d be real particular. But he comes over most every day in a motor car, and he and Miss Moran have perfectly beautiful times. He’s lots older than she is—only I don’t believe he’s as old as his hair is. It’s gray; but his face doesn’t match it very well—except his eyes. Sometimes they look sort of old and sad. He’s real handsome—and nice too; only he’s nice in a proud way—not a bit like you. I couldn’t ever see to him. I wouldn’t suit—but he’d buy me anything I needed—if somebody’d tell him I needed it. I guess most rich people are like that. They want to be kind to poor folks, but they don’t know how. I don’t see how you ever found out exactly the right way. It isn’t just giving money. It’s being friends. Mr. Meredith couldn’t neighbor the way you do, no matter how hard he tried. Miss Moran takes him around to see folks and he’s as nice and polite as can be; but everybody knows he’s come just to please her and that he’ll never come again unless she brings him. He gave the money for the free library down in Pisgah and he fixed up the schoolhouse, and when Joe Daniels got hurt last summer Mr. Meredith had a big doctor come all the way from New York to mend Joe’s back, and when the Potters were going to be put out of their house and hadn’t a bit of money he paid off the mortgage and got Mr. Potter a job over in Pittsfield—but he didn’t do any of it for the Valley. He did it for Miss Moran. I’ll bet he wouldn’t know Joe Daniels or Mr. Potter if he’d meet them on the road. So, you see, nobody bothers about being grateful to him. They’re just grateful to Miss Moran. I suppose she’s grateful to him, and that’s all he wants; but I’d hate not to get more fun out of doing things for people than he does. I’d want to see them being happy because I’d done the things, wouldn’t you? My stars, but I do love to see people being happy, when it’s my doings.”

“What makes you think Miss Moran is going to marry him?” Archibald asked. He did not seem as interested in abstract discussions as he usually did.

“Why, anybody can see that he wants her to.”

“And she?”

Pegeen thought it over.

“Well, I don’t know that she wants to so very hard; but I guess she doesn’t mind. He’s so awfully good to her and she’s known him for years and years and her father thought a heap of him—Ellen told me that—and you know it’s nice and comfortable to have somebody looking out for you and loving you better than anything. Miss Moran gets lonesome sometimes. It’s all right about neighboring, but you do need somebody special—only it seems as if I’d like to be more excited about it, if I were going to marry anybody—and I’d want him younger. Gray hair’s elegant looking; but I think a lover ought to have brown hair, don’t you? Yellow wouldn’t be as bad as gray; but I’d choose brown.”

“Did Ellen tell you anything else about him?” Pegeen shook her head.

“Nothing much. Ellen never does talk much; but I asked her one day whether Miss Moran had known Mr. Meredith a long time and that’s how she came to tell me about her father’s thinking so much of him. I don’t believe Ellen wants them to get married.”

“Why not?” There was a note of eagerness in Archibald’s voice.

“Oh, I don’t know. She said he was a fine man and all; but that springtime was mating time; and then she folded up her lips the way she does when she doesn’t like things.”

Archibald dropped the subject, mounted his horse, and took Zip’s bridle rein.

“I’m going over to see whether Miss Moran feels like riding,” he said crisply. There was an aggressive air about him as he rode away, and Pegeen watched him with puzzled eyes until he disappeared around a bend in the road. Then she seated herself and tried to accommodate Boots and Wiggles and Spunky in her small gingham lap, all at one time.

“Wiggles,” she said seriously, “I don’t believe he liked it about Mr. Meredith. No, sir; he didn’t like it one bit. Do you suppose?—Oh, my stars, Wiggles, wouldn’t it be lovely?” She patted Boots’ back with an experienced hand until he had traveled far into Slumberland. Then she turned once more to the pup, who sat waiting with his head on one side and his intelligent brown eyes fixed on her face.

“Wiggles,” she said, “you can bite Mr. Meredith when he comes. I won’t care.”

The pup gave an ecstatic lunge and licked her cheek with his wet, red tongue. She laughed, as she wiped off the kiss.

“I was sure you’d _love_ to bite him,” she said approvingly, “only you’d better do it when he hasn’t got that white bull terrier of his with him. Jimmy says it’s a terrible fighter.”

* * * * *

The Smiling Lady felt like riding. She felt so much like it that she sparkled in the most amazing way at the mere mention of it.

“Such beauties,” she said, leaning across the porch railing to pat the horses. “And how fine for Peggy to learn to ride! She wasn’t afraid, was she?”

“Afraid? Peg?” Archibald laughed the idea to scorn.

“Yes; that’s so,” agreed the Smiling Lady. “She’s Irish. We’re the reckless lot. It’s only ourselves we’ve to fear. Just a few minutes, and I’ll get my habit.”

She ran upstairs and Archibald, waiting, heard her singing somewhere, gay lilting snatches of song that told of joy at the heart of her.

In ten minutes a slim boyish figure came out upon the porch. She was all in brown from the crown of her soft felt hat to the toes of her smart tan boots. The long coat had been made by a tailor who knew his business. The soft shirt and stock were eminently correct. She was well turned out, this young Amazon.

A light pressure of a boot in his hand and she was in the saddle. A moment more and they were off into the sweet of Summitland.

“I’ll take you along the back road and up Witch Hill,” she said. “It has the name of names for it, and how that ever happened I can’t imagine. The loveliest places usually have the worst names. There’s Hog Hill Road. It’s a dream of loveliness, and how any one ever had the heart to turn hogs loose on it! Of course they say it’s the hog back shape of the hill that gave it its name, but when I ride there, even on the heavenliest day, I fancy I hear gruntings. Now Witch Road is all magic. It lives up to its name. There’s a tradition that once upon a time an old witch lived in a little hut that’s crumbling away beside the road at the hilltop. I’ve an idea she threw a spell over the whole hill and it lingers. There’s Ezra Watts!”

“Good morning, Mr. Watts!”

A man, standing in the doorway of a dilapidated little house over whose forlornness a willow wept miserably, muttered an almost inaudible salutation. His weak, evil face did not lighten even for the Smiling Lady. Slouching, ragged, dirty, he stood in the sunshine like a blot on the summer day, and stared out at the riders sullenly from under a matted thatch of thick, straggling, black hair.

“Pleasant, friendly chap!” Archibald commented lightly.

The Smiling Lady sighed.

And then they forgot him, for they turned from the sunshiny back road, into an enchanted wood where a wide mossy trail wound gently, gently upward through shifting light and shade. Moist, pungent wood scents haunted the air. The gurgle of running water, insistent, mirthful, told that hidden among the ferns and mosses a brook followed the road companionably.

“It comes out into the open farther up,” the girl said as she listened, “but down here it hides just for the fun of the thing.”

“A naiad’s trick,” Archibald suggested. “Probably there are fauns abroad.”

“No; only the Little People,” she corrected. “I’m all for Irish fairies myself. The poets and the artists and the mythology classes have taken the heart out of the Greek ideas, but the Celts—Oh, well, we’ve had our own troubles with poets, but they haven’t killed and stuffed all our gods and heroes and Little People yet. Father and I used to spend months in Ireland every year and I’ve heard such tales there—Oh, such tales! I’d always the hope of seeing the Little People myself or of stepping off into the Green World, and finding my way to Tir ’nan Og. Things like that seem so possible in Ireland, and some way or other Witch Mill is the same for me. It’s full of shapes I can’t quite see and voices I can’t quite hear, and I look and listen and wait. I’m always excited up here. The wonderful thing might happen any moment. There are places like that, you know!”

She was talking lightly but there were dreams in her eyes.

Archibald’s thoughts ran back to the girl of the puppies and kittens and babies in the birch wood, to the girl of the fireside confidence and the Irish love songs, to the gay, grubby girl of the vegetable garden, to the girl of the June roses and the heart for neighboring. Then he came back to the girl of the boyish clothes and the dreaming face who rode beside him up the Witch Way, listening and looking and waiting for the Wonderful Thing; and he too found it easy to believe in wonders. The enchanted wood was having its way with him.

Up and up they climbed. The road rose very gradually, winding its leisurely way through glades and glens, losing itself among pine shadows, loafing across sunlit clearings; and always at its side was the brook, whispering and chuckling and hinting at mysteries.

“It comes from a great spring at the very top of the hill beside the witch’s cottage,” the Smiling Lady said as she leaned to watch the sunlight playing over smooth brown stones beneath the liquid green of a fern-fringed pool.

“I usually lunch up there—and by the same token I’ve sandwiches in my pockets now. Nature worship’s an appetizing thing and Ellen knows it, but I didn’t give her time to do her best to-day and it’s a nuisance to carry more than sandwiches anyway. Supper will be waiting when we go home.”

“You come up here often?” the man asked. Back of the question there was an eagerness, even a protest. It had occurred to him that Meredith and she had ridden up this way and lunched beside the Witch’s Well; and there was something about the idea that he found unpleasant, most unpleasant.

“Oh, yes, often,” she was saying.—“Or at least I did come when I had my horse. It’s a long walk and the road isn’t very practicable for driving. I’ve had beautiful days up here.”

He could not ask with whom she had shared them and he assured himself stoutly that the matter was of no importance to him anyway—only, of course, a man whom Peg and Nora didn’t like—Personally, he was altogether unconcerned. Oh, altogether—still he rather hoped she had not brought Meredith up Witch Way.

The road found the hilltop at last and wandered off, inconsequently along the ridge; but the brook and the Girl and the Man stayed behind at the Witch’s Well.

It lay cool and gleaming among moss-covered rocks. Little ferns and lush green grasses crept down between the rocks to peer into the water. A great old tree flung shadows down upon it. Under the tree a mossy cushion invited, promised.

The Smiling Lady slipped from her saddle before Archibald could reach her and dropped down beside the well with a sigh of content. When the man came back from tying the horses in the shade, she was leaning against the huge tree trunk, her hat thrown on the ground beside her—a Rosalind in ultra modern doublet and hose and fair enough to justify an Orlando in hanging verses on all the trees of the enchanted wood.

Pegeen had been quite truthful. “Sometimes they did show.” For an instant a vision of the polite and embarrassed bachelor clergyman in Pisgah, of the perturbed ladies’ aid society and the agitated Valley censors caused Archibald’s lips to twitch nervously, but he smothered the smile at its birth and stretched himself out luxuriously on the moss at the neatly booted feet.

Even in riding breeches and boots she was more utterly without self-consciousness, more simply, adorably feminine than any other woman in muslin and blue ribbons. It would be blind virtue that could call the Smiling Lady immodest.

“I could have loved that witch,” he said lazily, closing his eyes the better to feel the moss beneath his head and the breeze on his cheeks and to hear the drip, drip of water trickling among the rocks, and then opening them hastily not to lose sight of the face against the background of rugged bark.

“I’ve felt that way myself,” the girl confessed.—“A woman who would come away up here into the quiet places and settle down with the forest at her back and the spring near her door and the whole Valley spread out before her eyes!