Part 14

Presently a floe of ice clouds high in air crossed the sun, and at the same time something passed over Jane Mostyn’s face. Dropping her hold of the basket, she fell back a few steps, and giving a little shiver she could not repress, said: “John, we have forgotten the two houses in the valley. How can we be free and live on the hilltop? We can do without the money, but the tradition,—ah, what shall we do?”

“Do? Be married first and think it out afterwards; one more look, dearest, and then we will go down,” and, neither desiring to argue, they gazed in silence.

Presently Jane Mostyn gave an exclamation, and a look almost of awe crossed her face, and then an expression of deep content rested upon it.

“I have it,” she said. “Just then I saw it as plainly as in a mirage; after we are married, then let us marry our houses, move them to the hilltop, and join them in one house on the boundary line; thus shall we keep not only the letter, but the spirit also, by taking _them_ up out of the valley with us.”

Again he drew her close, but now there were tears in his eyes, also.

* * * * *

Five hours later, Westover Village was electrified by the sight of Jane Mostyn and John Hale entering the Rectory arm in arm, soon to be followed by Mrs. Atwood, who, bearing an enormous bunch of bride’s roses, drew up to the door in her motor-car and alighted with great ceremony. Shortly after, word came by way of the back door that the couple were married, Mrs. Atwood being both witness and bridesmaid; but as they left by a circuitous route in Mrs. Atwood’s car, while that worthy woman walked home, the next question, To whose house would they go? remained unanswered until the following week, when it was found that they had gone to neither, but were stopping at a quiet place ten miles farther up the Moosatuck.

The next month brought a still greater shock, when a contractor from Bridgeton with a gang of men began the labour of moving the two houses up the hill toward a newly dug cellar on the party line, that the gossips had decided was intended to support a great farm barn.

* * * * *

Another September and the new home had already become old to the two who were never tired of looking out and up, and with this double marriage all the old-time mental influence that Jane had held came back. John Hale was putting the finishing touches to a novel that competent critics said would more than make its mark, so unusual was it in conception as well as full of sweet and mellow strength.

The title alone was not decided, and as John one afternoon was striving for a simple combination of words that should suggest, and yet not reveal, the motive, Jane came into the room with an armful of late wild flowers and stood by his table arranging them in a jar that she always kept filled there. As she stretched out her arm to add some long, feathery white sprays by way of background, John caught her wrist, exclaiming, “See, you have also brought me the title; our book shall be called ‘Groundsel-Tree’!”

X THE OPEN WINDOW

=OCTOBER=—THE DEER MOON

When Professor Hewlett resigned from the chair of English Literature and Letters at B—— College and returned, avowedly, to spend the rest of his days in the home of his forefathers, all Oakland was very glad, but, at the same time, not a little puzzled as to the outcome of the change.

There is certainly nothing extraordinary when a man of sixty-five, even though he is still at his intellectual prime, wishes to free himself from harness, and, without wholly leaving the road for the pasture, travel at his own gait; it was the domestic side of the man’s life toward which interest turned, and this side consisted of the possibility of adjusting his family and work under the same roof, for even in his hours of leisure, no one could believe that John Hewlett would let his mental faculties lie dormant.

To an outsider this adjustment would have seemed the simplest matter possible, for though the Professor had been twice married, he had survived both wives, each of whom had left an only daughter; but these two, who composed his family, were as unlike in temperament as in personal appearance.

The first Mrs. Hewlett, a very handsome woman, whom the Professor had married the year after leaving college, was several years his senior. The Hewletts and Bartons had been people of culture as well as neighbours, and the marriage was the logical outcome of long friendship, rather than the focus of spontaneous love. Father, who was the friend of both, says that at this time John Hewlett was a dreamer, who walked head and shoulders in the air, never heeded his footing, and knew nothing of life; while Catharine Barton had made up her mind on practically every matter of importance, a quality upon which she prided herself being that if she once made a decision, she never allowed circumstances to change it. Aggressively devoted to what she considered her husband’s best interests, had she lived, it is very doubtful if John Hewlett would either have gained fame as a scholar, or won a host of friends by his delightful personality. In half a dozen years he found himself alone with a little daughter Catharine, who was turning four, a beautiful child, but having the ice of her mother’s blood in her veins, and rigid even at that tender age, sitting bolt upright in her father’s lap and checking him with wide-eyed reproof if, in clasping her to him, her gown or hair was rumpled. Then the Professor gave the child over to his people to rear, and, turning his face away from women, save in the polite abstract, devoted himself to work.

The Hewlett homestead—a square, substantial structure of the type that has four large rooms on a floor with an L, a wide, central hall, and large fireplaces—fell at this time to the Professor and an older sister, to whom he confided the little Catharine. Without plan or premeditation the house naturally divided itself in half, Miss Hewlett instinctively occupying the northern portion where the strong sunlight did not persist in penetrating to the fading of the much-treasured Turkey carpet that was an heirloom, while the southern portion the Professor filled with his books and such simple fittings as he needed,—a high chest of drawers, and a bed that had been his mother’s, with carved spiral posts and head and foot-rail, being his only ambitious possessions; but in this part of the house the windows were never closed on the sun, that seemed to come in and transfigure and vitalize the Professor’s solitude.

As Catharine grew up, she became more and more incomprehensible to her father, and kept even her very precise, ancestor-worshipping aunt in a state of constant repression by her ideas of propriety and etiquette. At twelve, she never committed the indiscretion of biting an apple, but always pared and cut it with a silver fruit-knife; at eighteen she left school and convinced her aunt that it was time for her to take charge of her father’s mending and the dusting of his study, in which she sat for an hour or so every day that he was at home, this being in the order of her preconceived ideas of duty and pride in his mental achievements, rather than from the love that makes ministry of every form a necessity.

Professor Hewlett, yearning for some sign of affection, took heart at these demonstrations and prepared at once to make Catharine a partner in his simple pleasures as well as a companion in his work, going so far as to suggest that together they establish a winter home in the college town where heretofore he had merely had bachelor accommodations.

To this, Catharine showed quiet, respectful, but determined opposition: she did not wish to leave her quarters at the homestead where she had built around herself an imaginary position of importance. It was one thing to chide her father for always wearing his stockings on the same feet and so poking through the big toe unnecessarily (as though any one does such things on purpose or could if he tried); to persist in sorting his letters and papers, labelling them “answered,” “unanswered,” “lecture notes,” and “proof sheets,” until he was no longer able to find anything; or to hold up her forehead for a good-night kiss,—but to change her plan of living and be submerged by numbers in a larger place was quite another, and asking too much.

Poor old young Professor! He went back to his work that autumn more fully convinced than ever that in it lay all that life had to offer him. Winter had never seemed so long as this, in which his fortieth birthday was creeping toward him with the spring and May. Some of his associates planned a little festival to celebrate the birthday, quite among themselves, arranging that Adela Heyl, a sister of one of the number, who had a fine voice and was coming to pass the spring in the town, should sing some of his songs, that she, without knowing more than the initials of the author, had found sympathetic and had set to music. For as a reflex to the serious student side of the man, he had both a vein of romance in him and a love of nature so exquisite and so delicately keyed that it was in itself an art.

It was a little late when Professor Hewlett entered the Heyls’ cosey, unpretentious house, and while he was touched by the comradeship that was the motive of the festival, yet he at once drew within himself and became diffident at sight of the feminine element that had been introduced in what he had expected was to be a sort of bachelor gathering; for, seated at the piano was a young woman clad in white with a cluster of the white “Poet’s Narcissus” set against her low-coiled dark hair. Shoulder curve and cheek told of the glory of a perfect development; the chin was dimple cleft and dark lashes veiled the colour of the eyes that were fixed on the keys of the instrument, as the accompaniment trickled through her fingers, and her throat began to quiver with song like the vibratory prelude of the wood-thrush.

“In Arden where the twilight lingers, Love may dream but never sleeps,”

ran the words.

John Hewlett, who had drawn himself into a niched doorway on seeing the singer, hearing his own words written long ago and almost forgotten, half started forward and paused with both hands resting on the end of the piano, looking across its length at the singer, who at his motion raised her eyes unconsciously to his. They were a deep violet-blue in colour, but he did not know this then; what he saw was the woman’s heart that lay behind, that seemed at once to awaken and spring to meet his own.

The first song glided into a second, and when, at the end of half an hour, Adela stopped and let her hands drop to her knees, the pallor of emotion rather than fatigue replaced her rich colour; and when her brother presented his friend Hewlett as the writer of the words to which her music had given new meaning, there was not one among the onlookers but who realized in some degree what this birthday festival foreshadowed.

John Hewlett travelled quickly over the fourteen years that separated him from Adela Heyl, back toward enthusiastic youth. In a month’s time, when he said that he loved her, there was really no need of words, and though he never gave the fact utterance, she knew, beyond doubt, that it was the first and only love of his life, as was his marriage that followed in October. For no matter whether a man marries once or thrice, there is but one real marriage, be it the first or the last, and no one knows this better than himself.

Miss Hewlett and Catharine went up from Oaklands to the wedding—the sister, in a flutter of mixed feelings in which sorrow at the probable ceasing to be mistress of the homestead, and delight at having new life come into the house, were mingled. The daughter went purely from a wish not to appear to censure her father’s actions in public, and thereby gained added reputation for being dutiful. In private she expressed her views in words well chosen for their diamond-edged cutting power. She did not approve of matrimony on general principles; in her father’s case she entirely disapproved. Having but a faint memory of her mother, as that of a vague person who had often said “You must not,” and never “I love you,” yet she taxed her father with shortness of memory in no gentle terms, and when he had come down to arrange some household matters prior to the wedding, he found his first wife’s picture placed upon his desk together with a prayer-book he had given her, and which she had carried at their marriage, while at the same time Catharine asked if he was willing that her mother’s furniture should remain in her rooms, or if it was to be sold.

Now, however, nothing could cloud his sunshine, and the technical and loveless remembrances that his daughter cultivated like a crop of birch rods were wholly devoid of sting. (By the way, the development of memory is supposed to be one of the best results of education, but father has often said, out of his experience as a physician who sees behind and below the scenes, that memory is often a destroyer of tenderness, and he thinks a capacity for wise forgetting is often a better quality.)

Being themselves happy, Adela and John Hewlett must, perforce, see all about them happy also, and instead of jostling and overturning the old, they merely planned to expand upon their own lines. The ample homestead was divided, and in the half with the primly drawn blinds and dark green door Miss Hewlett and Catharine reigned, while in the other part with the white door, where the honeysuckle climbed up to the open windows and the fearless Phœbes nested atop the never closed blinds, the Professor lived the indoor part of his new life, the only shadow in it being the twilight of the forest where love dreamed but never slept.

People who predicted trouble were amazed, for, strange to say, Catharine, after the first, never measured swords with Adela so few years her senior; it seemed as though the very intensity of the new wife’s nature was so incomprehensible to her that she shrank from stirring its depths.

Three years passed, and John Hewlett’s name was spoken among English scholars as that of a great power, even though not yet at its height. In the fourth a deeper note was struck upon his heartstrings, a note above the joy of which was an instant reverberation of sadness, for the cry of his new-born child had apprehension for its echo,—a sudden and unaccountable fragility that had come upon Adela, against which science and love, though hand in hand, fought in vain.

“Her name is Rosalind,” he had said in the first happy days of reaction before, for him at least, the apprehension had taken shape, “for she came to us out of the forest of Arden.” Adela, raising herself by a great effort, put the child into his arms, and folding her in them against his breast, whispered, “Rosalind—that is the name I wished, so that I knew you would say it. Take her, and whatever happens, no matter what else she must lack, let it not be love.”

Two months later, in October, the fifth year of the marriage, and he sat alone with the little Rosalind again gathered in his arms, for Adela as a visible presence had gone.

* * * * *

Catharine, more moved than any one had supposed possible, offered to care for the baby when it became necessary for her father to return to college, while Miss Hewlett fairly begged for the child; but to both he turned a deaf ear. Under no circumstances should the child be separated from him, so Rosalind and a kindly middle-aged nurse, of father’s choosing, went back with Professor Hewlett to the university.

During her first five years it seemed that the little girl would be fairly killed with kindness; report of every tooth was carried from house to house, as if it had been the news of the endowment of a new chair. At five, Rosalind had the direct manners of her father enveloped in a bit of coy, feminine charm quite her own. While she was gracious to every one, she belonged only to him, who was also the measure by which she gauged the actions of the outward world. She slept in a crib beside him, breakfasted with him, dined when he lunched, and had a little table and chair in the corner of his study.

“It’s all very well for now,” people said, “but wait until she is a few years older, and she will need younger companionship.”

At ten, Rosalind began to pour her father’s coffee, perched in a high-backed chair with her toes hardly touching the footstool. She was a child at heart and full of the whims and tempers of childhood; she both loved and hated with a will, but as she took all her perplexities to her father to be sifted, he still managed to shield her from trouble, and in the next years that followed, the love of books, woods, flowers, and birds were woven into the fabric that bound the pair together. The little crib by his bedside had been replaced by a white, draped bed in the adjoining dressing-room, but she still knelt at his knees to say “Our Father,” and in her love blended the actual and spiritual father in her prayers.

“Wait until she is eighteen and the beaux begin to come,” said the croakers; “her father will then have to give up first place, and may not be able to shield her from disappointment.”

But at twenty the change had not yet come; all the younger men flocked to her, but her fraternal comradeship was so decided that one boundary-line served for all. One, Henry Benton, a man of thirty, a favourite of her father’s and likely to succeed him also, showed others what he felt, even though Rosalind did not see it, and one of those who saw was the Professor, and he stood appalled.

To him Rosalind was still a child to whom his love was sufficient; as a woman she found him still all in all, but did he wish it to be so now that he realized? He was nearing sixty-five and soon to retire from the university, for though his mental vigour was unimpaired, he had oftentimes an unaccountable fatigue that made father tell him that one cannot expect the heart at threescore to stand the pressure it did at two. What would happen after him? It might then be too late. Had he been selfish all these years, selfish through blind contentment?

Father love is often the most unselfish of all affections and best able to act free from hope of reward, and less self-centred than the mother love, even as her body is centred and dependent upon her maternity. Yet he felt himself at that moment an egotist.

Though it cut the Professor to the quick, he did all that a tactful man might to throw Benton and Rosalind naturally together, until, though she showed no tell-tale eagerness or emotion, she looked for his coming as a matter of course.

At this juncture, the spring of his retiring came, and the Professor and Rosalind came back to Oaklands, where Catharine, now over forty, was living alone, Miss Hewlett having decided the fall before upon a year’s trip abroad; and it was toward the possible spectacle of the daughters as rivals and the father’s position between the two, that village attention was turned, for it would be very marked should two separate households be maintained for only three people.

Rosalind did not seem to care for the title or prerogative of “housekeeper” so long as she was her father’s companion. Together they had made a plan for a garden entirely encircling the house, where even the shady corners should be forced to yield bloom, but this scheme was laid away until another season, because the Professor seemed to feel an ever increasing weariness now that the harness had been laid aside and there was no real necessity for exertion. No, there was one thing more,—there was still a volume of critical essays, prepared for the work of the university, to go to press. Rosalind begged her father to wait for a while and rest, but when he still persevered, she, too, threw herself into the work, that was completed at midsummer.

Then came a month of golden days, yet through them ran a thrill as of coming harm that Rosalind felt, but could not formulate; her father clung to her more closely than ever, but when she glanced up at him, instead of meeting a quick response as of old, his eyes seemed fixed upon something in the far-away horizon.

One day when father dropped in for a friendly rather than a professional call, he found the Professor alone,—in itself quite an unusual happening,—his face drawn and white with pain, hand pressed to side, and then together they faced the inevitable as they had done twice before. It might be months hence or even a year or two, or it might be any day, such is _angina’s_ subtle cruelty.

“Shall I tell Rosalind?” asked father; “it is best that she should know.”

“The time has come at last, then, when I can no longer stand between her and sorrow,” said the Professor, scanning father’s face with a piteous clinging to hope that was heartbreaking.

“No, John,” replied father, taking the hands that were fast becoming veined and transparent, between his own; “the time has come when you may no longer stand between her and either sorrow or love, for one is born of the other, and it is not in the plan of God or nature that she be spared; but if in her love for you she has learned to keep the windows open wide to the sun of things, you will not have failed in your hope.”

“Then all may yet be well with her,” he said slowly, making an evident effort to steady his voice, while at the same time as he glanced out of the window near which they sat, his pained expression changed to one of complete content, and, following his gaze, father looked into the upturned face of Rosalind, who stood below, her mother’s wonderful violet eyes flashing greeting between their long lashes, her arms filled with the crimson, gold, and sapphire glory of late September—boughs of swamp maple, pepperidge, birch, candelebra of fringed gentian, and smoke of seeded clematis.

Once in the room and her plunder arranged in some great blue jars, something either in the air or in an unconscious glance exchanged between the men made her start and then look from one to the other, and kneeling by her father’s chair, she took his face between her hands, and scanning every line said:—

“You are more tired to-day, Daddy, when I thought the bright frosty air would begin to make you better, or did I stay too long and make you worry, dearest?” Then springing up lightly, she followed father, who, without leavetaking, was stealing from the room.

“What is it, Dr. Russell?” she panted, when they had reached the end of the passage; “has anything happened since I went away? Are there any new symptoms?”

“Your father and I have been talking of grave things, dear child,” he answered; “no, there is nothing new,” and afterward he confessed that he was coward enough almost to run away. Reëntering the room, she again dropped to her place by her father’s knee; now it was his turn to take her face between his hands and draw her to him, seeking by unavailing tenderness to break the force of the blow that must come.

“What is it, father?” asked the lips, but before the words were framed, her heart knew the truth. Hiding her head against the breast where her mother had pressed it, more than twenty years before, and forgetting everything except that she had become a child again in her dread, she sobbed, “You must not go without me, for I cannot stay behind alone; wait, oh, father, do wait a little longer.”