Part 15

There were other considerations, too. It was no small inducement that he could be near his mother in Greendale. He had realized more than ever of late how hard it was for her to have her loved ones so scattered. His father was in China, his sister in Constantinople, he himself might just as well be at the uttermost parts of the earth for all she saw of him under normal conditions. And his going to Greendale would put an end to that source of regret and anxiety.

But, chief of all naturally, was the knowledge that the arrangement would bring joy to Sylvia. In spite of her sincere willingness to go anywhere with him he knew it was hard for her to leave the beloved home of her heart. And now there would be no need of such a sacrifice. The cottage and the Hall were but a stone throw apart, an admirable proximity so far as the professional partnership was concerned.

So Phil wired, "Accept gladly, if Sylvia approves," and had hardly sent the message before an enthusiastic letter arrived from Sylvia imploring him to say yes to Doctor Tom's proposition if it were not in any way contrary to his wishes and ambitions.

"Of course it is just too heavenly to think of our living at Arden Hall," she had written, "but, Phil, don't let any thought of me influence your decision. Whatever you want, I want. You know I'd be happy going to sea in a sieve with you if you elected to be a sieve pilot. But, oh Phil, I can't help hoping you will want to come to Greendale."

All of which made Sylvia's approval fairly evident.

Soon after this Phil went to call on the Huntleys, who had been kindness itself to him and to his mother during the latter's stay in the city. The doctor was not at home but Mrs. Huntley was delighted to see him and hovered over him with tea and sandwiches and cakes as a fond female bird hovers over its offspring with juicy worms.

When Phil came to revealing his future plans he did so a little warily remembering how he had refused Justin Huntley's generous offer. But Mrs. Huntley seemed genuinely pleased.

"How lovely for you! Now you can marry that sweet girl and everything will be quite all right, will it not?"

Phil explained that everything would have been quite all right in any case since the "sweet girl" had been willing to come to him if he had not been able to come to her.

"Quite as it should be," Mrs. Huntley had declared approvingly. "But I am glad it has come out as it has just the same. Do you know, Philip, I've always been a little glad you didn't take Justin's offer, dearly as I should have loved to have you with us."

Phil hesitated to speak, not being quite certain of his hostess' course of reasoning. But she soon enlightened him.

"It isn't the kind of work for a young man," she went on. "It is too disillusioning. Don't you think so? It might have made you a little--just a little--cynical, you know. Mightn't it? It is hard to keep your faith in human nature when you have a practice like Justin's." She paused a moment then continued with unusual affirmatives. "Justin was a country practitioner in a little town once. He took his father's place. Wonderful old man--Justin's father! As much of a priest as a doctor Justin used to say. He lived among kind, simple, hard-working people and they loved him like a father. You should have seen them flocking in from the farms and mountains to his funeral. There was a kind of personal relation you don't get in cities."

"No," agreed Phil. "Anyway, you don't get it in Dr. Huntley's kind of practice. I get some few chunks of personality at the clinic."

"Sometimes I've wished Justin had stayed in the country and followed his father's steps. But I suppose it had to be this way. Justin wasn't satisfied until he had worked his way to the top, though sometimes one wonders what the top really is," she sighed. "But, anyway, I am glad your father's son is going to have a different outlook. Justin will be glad, too. He liked your refusal, though it disappointed him. He understood."

"He has been very good to me, and you, too," said Phil, warmly. "I hope you don't think I don't appreciate his kindness and was ungrateful. It was a big thing to offer a young man. But I couldn't take it. I had to hold tight for my kind of a job. And, thanks to luck and Doctor Daly, I have it."

Watching the fine, earnest, young face, with its clear, honest, blue eyes, and that firm, strong chin, Mrs. Huntley thought Phil Lorrimer owed his opportunity chiefly to his own intrinsic worth, clear head, and fine ideals, which was true. But perhaps almost more was he beholden to a big-souled missionary out in China who had set him a standard of manhood to follow and a gentle, low-voiced woman who lived at the foot of Sylvia's Hill and had a gift for mothering.

July brought Stephen Kinnard back to Greendale after much wandering, from Alaska to Mexico, from Mexico to Quebec, and finally to Maryland. He had written charming desultory letters from time to time to Felicia and had been especially rejoiced over her having won the competition as he had prophesied. But never in any of the letters had he pressed again the question he had asked in September. Among other arts Stephen Kinnard possessed the art of long patience and the power of biding his time.

Occasionally jolly, friendly, brotherly epistles had come for Hope, too. At first Hope had blushed delightfully over them and read and reread them until she fairly knew them by heart. But as the letters came less frequently she gradually ceased to watch for them. Youth needs something more substantial than a chimera to feed upon. Moreover, in June, a young architect had come to Greendale to build Doctor Tom's hospital, a rather clever young man with some Beaux Arts letters after his name and a good eye for a pretty girl. Passing up the Hill and down it as he did frequently in his interviews with the Doctor, he had occasion to go by the Oriole Inn and it took him remarkably little time to discover that it was agreeable to drop in afternoons for a cup of tea in the quaint dining-room or out under the trees which the orioles still haunted. Perhaps not the least of the charms of the place was the presence of the fair-haired, slender lily of a girl who hovered about with a pleasing anxiety that he be well served and often took the task of ministration upon herself in her zeal.

Out of the corner of her eye Martha watched this too, even as she had watched Hope and Stephen the previous summer. It had for some time been evident to Martha's astute vision that so long as Hope remained unclaimed there would always be honey seekers about her sweet rose. Much as she dreaded to have Hope marry she thought she would prefer the sad certainty of such a contingency to the eternal worrying lest Hope be somehow hurt and her white flower-likeness be made to droop in the dust. The young architect apparently meant business. By July he was spending most of his free hours in Hope's society. Martha had almost settled down to acquiesce in the idea of Hope's surrender when she heard that Stephen Kinnard was back in Greendale, news which brought the anxious pucker back to her forehead.

But she need not have worried. Hope was pleased to see Stephen as a younger sister might have been glad to welcome back a long absent brother. She had all but forgotten she had ever had any dreams about him. The real love which was daily more engrossing made the pale little phantom love so insignificant as to be scarcely a thing to be recalled. It had been love and not the lover that Hope had hungered for from the first.

As for Stephen himself, Hope had never dwelt except upon the outer margins of his consciousness. He had admired her as the artist in him always paid tribute to beauty wherever he found it. He had a fatal gift of kindness always and gave careless largess easily to lovely women whenever they had the luck to cross his path. That Hope had invested him, even temporarily, with the glamour of her sweet, shy, little dreams he had no manner of idea. He had, from the beginning, paid homage to a higher court.

Shrewdly perceiving that the chief obstacle to his suit was Sylvia, Stephen did not blunder into a premature insistence. Sylvia's wedding was set for early September. He could afford to wait a little, though he took pains to make himself very useful and desirable in little ways to the household on the Hill while he waited.

During the summer Sylvia had a few brief letters from Jack. He was well, intensely thrilled by the experience he was undergoing, rejoicing endlessly, apparently, in his luck at having at last found a genuine task which he could pursue with all the zest of play. Physical courage had always been an inherent characteristic with him. Danger agreed with him as he had said to Sylvia. In deeds of daring he had always delighted, simply, with no fuss about it. Jack was never spectacular. It was merely that being a good gambler he liked hazards. This game of life and death made an excellent substitute for the game of love in which he had gallantly lost. In fact it seemed he found even greater satisfaction in it. At any rate, he was in it, as he had been in love, with all his might and main and with all his heart.

Sylvia's engagement, expected as it had been, had appeared to disturb little less than the surface of his exultant, new found joy of service. Perhaps the larger issues swallowed up his private grief even as they had swallowed Hilda Jensen's. Certainly he had little time for thought or brooding. Life crowded thick around him. He was in the same unit with John Armstrong and that in itself was a satisfaction, for the two had long been staunch friends. Hilda, also, he saw occasionally as she was working in the hospital at Neuilly, not far from the front.

It was Hilda who wrote in August that Jack had been wounded and was in the hospital in her care. The injury, though painful, was not serious and Jack made light of it as well he might, for he had been "cite" for "distinguished service under fire" and won the Croix de Guerre.

"The men all say he has a charmed life," wrote Hilda. "The Poilus are quite superstitious about him. He goes anywhere, everywhere with his car, in the most unheard of, impossible places with the utmost disregard of it and himself. John says he never saw anything like him. He keeps them all, French and American alike, in an uproar of mirth, too. Even in the hospital it is the same. He tells his funniest stories and makes his absurdest jokes and has everybody in a good humor without trying. He is the sunniest fellow I ever knew. You can't down him. You needn't worry about him as far as you are concerned, Sylvia. I don't mean he doesn't care. He does care tremendously. He deserves the Croix de Guerre, in love, too. He has been under fire. You can see that. But what I mean is, he is so thoroughly wholesome and happy-hearted he will come out all right. He can't help it. John says it is making a man of him over here, and I believe it is true, though I think you started that process.

"But, oh, Sylvia, it is dreadful! If ever it ends I shall fly back to safe, peaceful, happy America and try to forget all the agonies I've seen and lived over here. We all hope America will manage to keep out of war, but it seems as if she could not long do so with safety and honor. It is hard to forget the _Lusitania_, and for us it is almost harder to forget Belgium. Americans at home will never fully understand Belgium. For us it has been stamped with red hot irons upon our minds and memories. We cannot forget."

As Sylvia eagerly read this letter she couldn't help hoping that somehow or other this terrible experience Hilda and Jack were going through together might, in time, bring them still nearer. Women are incorrigible matchmakers where their old lovers are concerned, and Jack and Hilda had long been good friends. They were both too essentially sane and too young to let their lives be wrecked by the hapless experiences with which they had started out. If only they might find consolation and happiness in each other Sylvia thought she would have nothing left to wish for.

And so summer days came and went, with their joys and their sorrows, their dreams and their despairs, their losses and their gains, woven all into the common web of life. And finally again came September.

*CHAPTER XXVI*

*THE END AND THE BEGINNING*

Cloudless September afternoon! The same blue space of sky beyond the shining-leaved magnolia; the same pink and white riot of cosmos; the same dial dedicating itself to none but sunny hours! And again Barb and Suzanne and Sylvia on the porch at Arden Hall. Externally everything was much as it had been a twelve month ago. But the year had brought its changes and left its traces as years will. As the shell's growth is marked by its increasing number of circles so spiritual development stamps its impress upon human faces and even more on human souls. Barb and Suzanne and Sylvia were less unchanged than the outer world. All three had grown in the grace of wisdom, each according to her way and measure.

Barb was still quiet and humble of heart, but the year had given her the poise which comes from increasing self dependence and even more from depths and widths of experience. Barbara was learning to base life broad on the roots of things and faced the world serenely content if a little gravely, going the "softlier all her days for the dream's sake" as so many women do.

Suzanne was, on the surface, the least changed. She still flashed out conversational audacities and delighted in "taking a shot at the idols" as she put it. But underneath the jewel-like hardness and brilliance of the exterior there was a difference. Her theories of life were not so polished and compact and perfected. She had undergone more than one seismic upheaval of emotion during the year and her "cock-sureness" was shattered if not annihilated. But the greatest difference lay in her deepened power of human sympathy and understanding. The success of "Melissa on the Road" had not been mere accident but a logical outgrowth of its author's surer insight into life, and the play was an even more certain indication that Suzanne in finding herself had found something universal at the same time.

As for Sylvia--but let Sylvia speak for herself. Suzanne, lolling as before in Sylvia's hammock, again pronounced judgment.

"I never knew a person for whom the whole universe seemed to be working the way it does for you, Sylvia Arden. Now, if I had wanted to live in a certain place Roger would have been called to Kamchatka or Kalamazoo or some other God forgotten spot. But just because you had your heart set on living at Arden Hall the fates come galloping up to present Phil a choice professional opening on a charger."

"Do you know whether a charger is a horse or a platter?" laughed Sylvia. "I should never know from your phrasing."

"It is both, of course. Don't criticize my diction. Diction is my business. And don't crab. Honest, Sylvia, don't you think your luck is altogether out of proportion to your deserts?"

"'In the course of justice which of us should see salvation?'" quoted Sylvia. "Oh, I know, Suzanne. It is almost too good to be true that Phil can find the right kind of work in Greendale and we can live here at Arden Hall. But you are mistaken about my having set my heart on living here. I love it better than any place on earth but I would have gone anywhere with Phil. Even the Hall wanes in comparison with him." And Sylvia blushed charmingly as she made the admission.

"Of course you think so. Quite the proper sentiment to express twenty-four hours before your wedding. May the Lord give me grace to feel the same next December when I follow your lead to the altar. But, Sylvia, you don't really know what you are talking about. I can't imagine you in a little apartment. You're too--spacious."

Sylvia smiled.

"Oh, I believe I could have adjusted my spaciousness if necessary. But I'm rather glad I don't have to. I'd rather--spread."

"You _will_ spread, too," put in Barb. "You and Phil will have a wonderful opportunity to really live here, more than you could ever have done in the city."

"I hope so." Sylvia's eyes were thoughtful as she looked out across the lawn, past the magnolia to the blue sky, just as she had a year ago. She looked as if she saw visions. Perhaps she did. The "home trust" which she and Felicia had formed years ago was still an integral part of her scheme of things. She meant her home to be a home in the truest sense, not just a house beneath whose roof she could shelter herself and her loved ones. She wanted her doors to stand open wide to the world--especially the lonely people. "The lonely people" were always very close to Sylvia's heart perhaps because her own lonely girlhood had given her the clew to the yearning that nearly all the world knows at times.

"You are going to keep on being viciously contented," accused Suzanne.

"I hope so," said Sylvia again. "I feel that way at present, anyway. I am afraid I'll never do anything very big, Suzanne. You and Barb are going to leave me way behind, I know. I haven't any special ambition except to be happy myself and to make other people within my range happy, too."

"You are a genius at that. Remember what Mr. Kinnard said. Don't let Suzanne tease you, Sylvia. You have the secret of living. If all the people in the world wanted to be happy themselves and tried to see that other people near them were happy, why--"

"The millennium would have come," finished Suzanne. "You are blooming sentimentalists both of you, though I don't deny there is a little solid sense behind your sentiment. Anyway, I have a sneaking notion I shall have a sort of satisfaction knowing that down here on your Hill things are going to be a little more the way they ought to be than is customary in this cranky old world."

"Why, Suzanne! That is just what I was thinking," cried Barb. "I see so much sin and sordidness and misery and things so snarled and twisted that it seems as if they never would smooth out. I'm going to see even more this year if I go in for the probation work. And it is wonderful to me to be able to think that it is all clean and sweet and happy and kind in Sylvia's world. It is kindness somehow that is important. If we would all be kind the way Christ taught us there wouldn't be any war and hate and competition and oppression. We'd all be just brothers and sisters."

"Maybe that is what we are growing into," said Sylvia soberly. "Thank you, Barb. I like that--what you said just now. Remember, if you want to send anybody down to my--_our_ garden-- It is Phil's, too--we shall be glad to take her--or him--in. We want to help."

"We want to help." That is the keynote of the new democracy. And Barb and Suzanne and Sylvia, each in her own way, had enlisted in the shining army which is none other than the army of love.

And indoors, while the three girls were thus philosophizing about the universe at large, Felicia and Stephen had suddenly concentrated upon themselves.

"Felicia," Stephen was saying, "I have waited very patiently. Haven't you a different answer for me this time? I am not going to pretend I shall go away broken-hearted if it is no. My heart is a little too old to break, but if you could make it yes it will make all the difference in the world. Couldn't you say it, dear? Sylvia won't need you after to-morrow. And you know the kiddies won't be the losers. We'll see to that. Those reasons of yours aren't operative any more, you know."

"But there is still Sydney," she reminded him gravely, her face averted.

"There is," he admitted. "Ah, but, Felicia, you can't live all your days on a memory--even so vital a one. I don't expect to take Syd's place. I don't even want to. But, Felicia, look at me. Haven't I somewhere a place all my own in your heart?"

And then Felicia lifted her eyes, still forget-me-not blue like Marianna's.

"Yes, Stephen, I believe you have--a big place. If you want me as I am, the best of me gone, the rest is all yours."

Night and stillness of night on Arden Hall and Sylvia's garden! Suddenly out of the darkness Sylvia stole down the broad staircase, candle in hand, like a vestal virgin, in her white silk robe, her dark hair unbound, lying loose upon her shoulders.

On the wall, near the foot of the stairs hung two portraits; one, of a dark-eyed young man, the other a lovely young girl, looking out with wistful, wondering gaze upon the world.

Straight to the portraits went Sylvia, holding her candle high. For a moment she stood there with uplifted face and rapt gaze, trying to speak to these two, to bespeak their blessing this night on the daughter who was to follow in their footsteps to-morrow in giving herself in marriage to the mate she loved.

"If only you were here," she sighed. "I do want you so, Father! Mother! Please try to know and be glad I am so happy. Please be glad. I want you to be glad."

In the flickering light of the uplifted candle it seemed to Sylvia as if her father's dark eyes smiled down into hers as if he understood and was glad as she desired.

"The truest and the kindest," she whispered. "That was what Doctor Tom said, and I know you must have been. Phil is like that, too, Father. I'm glad you know. Good night."

Then she turned to the fair girl whom it had always been a little hard to think of as a mother, she was so tiny and sweet and girlish herself and her eyes looked so incredibly young and innocent.

"Little Mother!" crooned Sylvia. "Little, little Mother! I wonder if you were afraid at all. Did you ever feel like running away even from him? This marrying is such a big, solemn business. Didn't you feel a teeny little bit scared about it all? It isn't that you are afraid of him. It is rather yourself you don't trust, as if you weren't quite tall enough to reach up to marriage. Marriage is so high, so dreadfully high. But it is all right, isn't it, little Mother? You just have to trust love, don't you? Good night, little Mother. Please love me up there where you are."

This rite over, Sylvia turned to go back upstairs. But the moonlight fell in bright patines across the floor from the latticed windows, beside the front door, and Sylvia had never been able to resist moonlight. Hastily she set down her candle and snatched up a black velvet cloak from the rack and throwing it about her shoulders, covering her thin silken draperies, she unbolted the rear door which led out into the garden and ran down the steps into the enchanted world outside.

Even as she reached the path she uttered a half startled exclamation. A tall form was pacing up and down under the willow-trees, silhouetted against the whiteness of the garden space. She did not retreat however but stood motionless as a statue with the moonlight full upon her. In a moment the silhouetted figure turned and came swiftly toward her.

"Sylvia!"

"Phil!"

For a second she was swept into Phil's arms, his kiss on her lips. Then they stood apart, looking at each other as if all at once they had discovered some new, sacred thing which all their love up to now had not taught them.

"Phil, I'm glad--glad it is you," breathed Sylvia. "Glad I'm going to be yours."

"Forever and ever, amen," said Phil Lorrimer, as solemnly as if he were pronouncing his own wedding service.