Part 9

“Nonsense; I know very well what I _don’t_ wish to have happen. Wray is worth ten of the pretty boys that lounge about nowadays, and haven’t enough grip either of body or brain to stick to anything.”

Mrs. March, however, did not argue; she had no capacity for it, having had pretty much her own way through life by the mere force of inertia. She had cherished romantic ideals in her youth, but not to the extent of marrying one of them. In fact, she had named her only daughter for the heroine of a novel over which she had shed many comfortable tears, and fortunately, Eileen, of a slimness and fairness hitherto unknown on either side of the family, had grown into the name. Mrs. March was the typical American woman of a country town who has means enough to go to New York at intervals, who after forty regards Europe, indefinite and at large, as the one aim and end of life and needed rest, but who, owing to a limited intelligence, returns from _the_ tour sadder, much wearier, but in no way wiser than when she left, in spite of a miscellaneous collection of photographs and guide books.

* * * * *

Ernest Wray walked slowly uphill, his house being on the main road above the Marches’, while the acres belonging to it climbed one above the other, over the Ridge and down the other side. This road was the highway between Banbury and Bridgeton, and there was a cheerful amount of passing on it. As he pushed open the front gate, he looked about the yard for the Boy, but saw no signs of him. A pair of setter pups came from the porch to meet him, stumbling over their own great soft paws, and fastening their sharp first teeth in his trouser hems, pulling him backward at the same time that their shrill barks welcomed him.

Aunt Louisa Taylor (so called because she had ushered Ernest, as well as most of the younger portion of the community, into the world) was setting the dinner table in the little room out of the summer kitchen, whose windows disclosed a view of both ranges of hills and the valley between.

No, she had not seen the Boy; he had gone to look for wild strawberries with Jeptha Lewis’s children a couple of hours before, Jeptha being the head workman in the wagon shop. As she spoke, Ernest heard footsteps in the room overhead, which was his own; and so he hastened upstairs, calling the Boy’s name, which was Asa, after his father, though when people spoke of him among themselves, they usually said the Boy, because it seemed to distinguish this child of an old man from all other boys of the neighbourhood.

No answer came, so going to the Boy’s room, the great south chamber that had been the child’s mother’s, and finding it empty, Ernest went on to his own, where in a heap on the floor, his head buried in the white-knitted quilt, half crouched, half knelt the Boy. At first Ernest was startled, thinking the child was ill, or had perhaps picked and eaten something poisonous. But as he turned his face up to his half-brother, the expression was of misery of mind, not body.

Sitting in the low rush-bottomed rocker, Ernest drew the Boy to him tenderly, so that the pale, downcast face rested against his shoulder. Raising it gently in his hands, he said, “What is it, Asa? tell big brother.”

“I can’t, oh, I can’t say it,” sobbed the child, yet without shedding a tear. “It’s the Brown boys that told me, and their mother _knows_ it’s true.”

(As the widow Brown had made desperate but unsuccessful efforts to become his housekeeper instead of Aunt Louisa, and annex her unruly brood to his household, Ernest quickly conjectured the report that had reached the Boy.)

“Very well, then, if little brother cannot say it, big brother must try; only look up and say Yes and No, so that he may know that he is guessing right. They said, perhaps, that I am going away and that you are going to live far off with strangers?”

“Yes.”

“They said that everything here belongs to me and nothing to you?”

“Yes.”

“They told you that one day I would marry some one who was very beautiful, like a princess in a fairy tale, and that I should not care for you any more?”

“Yes, oh, yes, that was the worst of all!”

“I have also heard all this, but it is not true.”

“Not even a word, brother?”

“Not even a word.”

“And you want me for always?” said the child, now standing before him and searching the man’s very soul with his solemn brown eyes.

“Only God and your mother know how much.”

“Can I bring my bed right in here close to yours, and put my story-books in the little shelves by yours, and just keep that big lonely room to play in when it’s wet? Yes?”

Then, clasping his arms tight around the man’s neck in an ecstasy of relief, he whispered, “Can I have one more wish, just one more?”

“What is it, Boy? You must name it first, in fair play, you know.”

“May I call you daddy? Boys can have lots of brothers, but a daddy’s very special, and there’s never only one of him, just like you.”

Ernest waited a moment before he answered, for something swayed him that was stronger than his will, impelling him to cry out, “No, not that!”

And then he whispered back, “Yes, Boy, from now on;” and clasping the child in a way that almost hurt, he kissed him on the forehead.

Thus was the compact sealed.

The tension over, the Boy, who could not realize what the other’s promise meant, speedily became a child again, and freeing himself, cried, “Now I shall be here to see the Thrashers hatch out; there’s four eggs in the nest in last year’s pea brush down by the fence; do let us go over and see them, Daddy; if we don’t poke them, they won’t mind.” Then, as they looked across the fields, the Boy laid his cheek against the man’s, and nestling, murmured in a voice of deep content: “Isn’t it a lovely, lovely day, and everything is so happy. Listen: now I can hear the wind talking in the grass, just as you say it talks to you.”

* * * * *

The summer hurried on and slipped away, as it has a way of doing after the rose and strawberry have held their garden carnival, where each crowns the other.

In July the Marches went abroad. Ernest had not broken his habit of dropping in at his neighbour’s house, but he had seen less and less of Eileen, who, very naturally, was absorbed in her preparations and the visit of the young woman who was to be her companion. Before leaving, Eileen had sent Ernest a photograph of herself taken in the filmy summer gown she had last worn. Why she did it, she herself could not have told; neither could Ernest have fathomed her motive if he had tried.

He was about to slip the card into a drawer, then hesitated, and taking from his mantel-shelf in the living-room a picture of Eileen at sixteen, plump, wide-eyed, and serene, for which, at the time, he had carved a somewhat clumsy frame of tulip wood, he substituted the new picture of the lovely, graceful woman with birdlike poise of head and expression, for the old, placing it on his desk.

The Boy, coming in, spied the photograph, and always alert for new impressions, climbed on a chair to look at it, crying, “Oh, Daddy, isn’t this Eileen pretty? She looks up at me just like Pandora peeping up from the box, or a wood-thrush when it’s going to sing. She’s prettier than the Sleeping Beauty in my book. I want to take her up to live on our bureau and be our fairy Princess; may I?”

And the man, wishing to say No, as in many other things the boy asked, answered, “Yes.”

* * * * *

Autumn came—and winter. The Boy began to thrive so well that even father marvelled at the change; there was no outdoor sport fit for his age that Ernest did not enter with him, and the long evenings were filled with delight drawn from all of childhood’s countries, Fairyland being not the least. Christmas was the time set for the Marches to return, but new business at Washington claimed the father, and after a brief week spent in house closing, mother and daughter joined him there; and from that time Eileen came to be more and more of an unreality save to the Boy, who seemed to regard her portrait as a living actuality and the third person of the household, saying one day to the Man: “I’m going to marry the Princess when I grow up if she will wait, and not grow old. Do you think, Daddy, Eileen will ever be old like Aunt Louisa?”

“She will never grow old to me; she has stopped,” the Man answered.

* * * * *

The spring of the following year was cold and very wet, bringing more illness than usual to the well-drained hill country, especially to the children. There was scarlet fever at Bridgeton, and some one brought it to the Ridge School, the Boy being one of its first victims.

“Who is going to nurse the Boy?” asked father. “Aunt Louisa is too old, and no risk must be taken with him. His bed must be moved into the large room with the open chimney, and a log fire kept on the hearth. Would you like me to send over a trained nurse from the Bridgeton Hospital?”

“I will care for him,” said Ernest, setting about the preparation of the room as quietly as a woman could.

That night began a siege that lasted for weeks that seemed like years: on one side deafness and blindness in league with death, on the other side Nature, the doctor, and the Man, while between them lay the Boy.

From the end of the first week the doctor came twice daily, then followed nights when he never went away. Meanwhile, the Man prayed wordless prayers, fought on, refusing to be discouraged, seeming to infuse his own vitality into the Boy’s failing pulse by sheer force of will. Yet all this time the doctor dared not look him in the eyes, so fierce their agonized questioning.

Then at last Nature first routed death, and then slowly, one by one, the others of his train, until one soft, mild day in early April the Man carried a bundle rolled in blankets and, partly unfolding it, set it in the big chair in the sunny corner of the south porch, where, from above the wrappings, two great brown eyes looked out, and the voice of the Boy said clearly, if faintly, “Why, Daddy, I’m so surprised, it’s spring again; and the robin’s sitting tight on her nest, so there must be eggs in it.” Then, lying back, he closed his eyes, with a sigh in which both weakness and content took part, his fingers, thin as birds’ claws, seeking the Man’s, and twining themselves with his.

Presently he said, as if he had been thinking, “I’ve had a big long sleep, I guess, and my throat hurt so, and when I was thirsty, I dreamed that my mother used to turn over my pillow when it burned, and you always came and gave me a cool drink. Did you, Daddy? Was it always you?”

“Yes, always.”

“And did mother turn my pillow? Did you see her?”

“I did not see her, Asa, but then she may have been there; you know the room was often dark.”

“Everything is normal now,” the doctor said that evening when he came in; “in another month, with fresh air and careful feeding, the Boy will be quite himself again.”

Then at last the sluice-gates opened, and the waters of sorrow and joy, so long pent up, rushed forth, and the Man stood before the doctor, his arm before his face, sobbing like a woman.

At first, the doctor was minded to steal away, then, realizing the nerve strain Ernest had undergone, he laid his hand upon the arm to urge him to go to bed, and repressed a start, for the flesh burned under his touch. Worn out by his vigil and carelessness of self, the Man had caught the fever.

“But I cannot go to bed; the Boy is only half out of the woods even now,” protested Ernest, as father told him of his condition in as few words as possible.

“Do not worry about him,” said father, cheerily. “I will fumigate his things to-morrow and take him down to our house and Mrs. Evan’s care if it is necessary, I promise you.” So the Man yielded to the weariness that weighed him down, and soon, in his turn, was tossing in delirium, not knowing that a white-capped nurse was caring for him as he had cared for the Boy.

The fever itself had taken but a slight hold on Ernest; it was the other spectres, worse than death, that threatened him, Deafness and Blindness; his parched throat and tongue refused to form coherent sound, as he lay there with bandaged eyes and ears, that surgery had rendered wholly deaf in the one hope that Nature might repair the necessary wounds.

As the fever left, and consciousness returned to stay, loneliness possessed him, entire and complete; except through the sense of touch, he was utterly isolated from his kind.

The days went by, until one came, after the pain had left his eyes, when they removed the bandages cautiously, and he saw the chintz figures of the wall-paper in the partly darkened room, and heaven itself could not have seemed a fairer vision.

Presently they let him read, a few words at a time, and the nurse wrote answers to his various questions on a pad that she kept upon the bed; but oftentimes, when he thought that he was speaking, he had in reality made no sound, for he could not hear his own voice.

They brought the Boy, now fast gaining colour and strength, in to reassure him, and Asa, who smiled and puffed out his cheeks to show how he was gaining, left in his hand a little bunch of pansies and hardy English violets. The Man pressed them to his face, but scent was as dead as sound. Would he never again hear the wind in the grass, or Eileen’s voice laughing as they went fishing and the fish slipped the hook? Then it came to him, who for a moment had forgotten more recent events, remembering only the past, that hearing had nothing to do with this.

May fluttered past the Man as though on the wings of many birds. The sight of the lilacs under the window, and the apple blossoms scattered through the valley, were his portion of it, and the blood in his veins seemed to grow warm again and his heart began to take courage. The horses were plodding to and fro, ploughing the river meadow, but he did not ask who was guiding the work, or whether the men at the wagon shop were idle or busy; his head was still tired, so tired that he had scarcely the strength to think.

“You must try to rouse him now,” said the specialist, who was watching the unresponsive ears, to father; “with bodily health the hearing will return.”

It was June when he first crawled down the narrow stairs and took the Boy’s seat in the sunny porch, near which his dinner was spread by Aunt Louisa, who bustled about him affectionately, trying by gesture, as well as by written words, to raise his curiosity to the point of questioning how they were managing without him.

Every few days the Boy came with the doctor, now bringing him some little thing that he had made, or a bunch of wayside flowers. One day he brought a knot of white musk roses fastened together with grass. The Man caught at them eagerly, for such grew in the old garden at Eileen’s. Burying his nose in them, their fragrance penetrated the awakening sense, the same moment that a high-pitched peal of the Boy’s laughter, as he made the young dogs do their tricks, reached his ears. Ah! blessed Mother Nature, who had day and night been knitting, knitting, to rejoin the severed nerves and tissues that they might carry the messages to the brain once more!

Strawberries were ripe and passing, and the blush rose on the kitchen porch was shedding its satin petals when the Man said abruptly to father, who had this day come without the Boy: “When may Asa come home, Dr. Russell? It is a shame to trouble your daughter any longer, and besides, I need his company. I’ve been over the farm to-day, and to-morrow I shall go outside to the wagon shop; yes, to-morrow I must take up life again.”

“Trouble my daughter—Mrs. Evan?” stammered the doctor, as though taken by surprise. “Why—oh, yes, to be sure, I’ll bring him over to-morrow, and perhaps I can persuade his foster-mother to come, too, and render an account of him.”

But on the morrow, the Man did not go to the wagon shop as he had said; the day was sultry, and showers threatened, so he wandered down “cross lots” until he met the trout stream, and quite unconsciously followed it until he came upon the group of old willows, under whose shade the old Eileen had vanished.

It was not until he had almost reached the trees that he noticed there were people there, picnickers, probably, yet something led him to pause and look again. Surely, it was the Boy lying upon the grass, with eager upturned face, listening to some one who was evidently reading aloud; but though figure and book were in sight, foliage concealed the face. Another step, and he saw that the reader was Eileen.

The Man must have cried out, for instantly the pair started, and the light fell full upon Eileen’s hair and face, the same as of old, and yet not the same, while the boy came bounding toward him, calling, “Oh, Daddy, so you’ve found out at last where the Princess and I come to read every day!”

“The Princess! How came she here?” said the Man, sick at heart, for he thought the strange haunting dreams of his illness were coming back. “She does not live here now.”

“She didn’t,” cried the boy, babbling on eagerly, as he pulled the Man under the willows, “but they all came back here after you got sick, and my Princess took me up there to live with her in their house; the doctor let her, and we’ve been playing a fairy story all the time, and she’s been, oh, so very good to me, Daddy. She’s made me custard and cookies, and sang me to sleep when my legs ached from forgetting how to walk; ’n besides, her father told Peter how to plant the fields, and he’s set Jeptha figuring on an awful lot of wagons. But I’ve forgotten, I wasn’t to tell, I wasn’t to tell, because in fairy stories, if you tell, the lights go out and everything stops. Oh, Princess and Daddy, play you didn’t hear. Oh, don’t let it all stop!” and the Boy clasped his hands tightly, while an agony of fear passed over his sensitive face.

But the Man had ceased to hear him. Taking two steps that brought him face to face with Eileen, he paused and stood looking down at her, and his expression checked the Boy’s tongue.

“Is this all true?” he almost whispered, and as he spoke he grew white to the lips and reeled.

“Sit down upon the bank; you have walked too far and you are faint,” she said, spreading a shawl that lay beside her on the grass. He dropped to the seat she offered, but never took his eyes from her own, over which the lids drooped lower and lower.

“Is it true?” he repeated.

“We came back in April,” she answered softly.

“Why?”

“Because I saw in the home papers that you were ill, and—I wanted to be near.”

“Why, again?” he questioned, almost cruelly, but now he had reached a point where he could bear no uncertainty, no mere palliation.

“Because, Ernest, though I know that there are many other things in life besides caring,—caring is best;” the drooping lids rose slowly, and the gray eyes looked fully and frankly into his. Then, dropping on her knees beside him, she cried passionately, as she circled with a gesture all the beauty round about, “Can you hear, can you see as you used? Ah, I have been so horribly afraid!”

Clasping his long, thin fingers, that would tremble, about hers, the Man drew Eileen toward him; “I can hear the wind in the grass, I can see what lies behind your eyes, Eileen; do I need more?”

* * * * *

“You won’t let the fairy story stop? Please promise you won’t,” interrupted the Boy, unable to wait longer for his answer.

“Part of it must,” answered Eileen, “because you see, Boy, the Princess who wished to live in a story-book, has turned out to be merely a woman—” “For the sake of her lover who was not a prince,” added the Man.

Then, as the Boy looked at them, the comprehension of it all slowly beamed from his solemn eyes.

“Then I must choose you a new name,” he said.

“Yes, Boy, surely; what shall it be?”

“I will call you Mother, because I love you,” he said very slowly. “Then when other children say it, it won’t hurt me so here,” pressing his hands to his throat; “and my real mother away up there will hear and know that I’m not lonely any more, and that will make her glad.”

And the wind blew on through the wild grass, where never a scythe came to end the song!

VII THE SIMPLE LIFE

=AN EPISODE OF JULY=

THE MIDSUMMER MOON

When Rodney Kent, known as Billy, and Marjory, his wife, instead of taking a honeymoon abroad, immediately tied themselves down by purchasing a very modest house on the west slope of the Oakland Bluffs, their friends held up their hands and rolled their eyes in astonishment.

It is true that the couple themselves had never entertained a thought of the European trip, but their friends, after seeing the amazing display of wedding gifts, concluded that an expensive and protracted honeymoon would be a fitting way to begin the state of life that living up to the presents indicated. They did not formulate that Marjory was the last of a large family whose parents had always lived quite up to their income in rearing and educating their brood, or that Billy, with a host of friends, naturally hospitable and all doors open to him, was as yet only a confidential clerk in a law firm in spite of the fact that the distinguished chief, himself a bachelor until recently, treated Billy like a younger brother.

The young couple, however, from the beginning had faced facts as they were, for at their respective ages of twenty-four and thirty, they not only had a goodish bit of common sense mingled with their affection, but they had also seen more than one matrimonial shallop, at best equipped only for still water and overloaded with unsought responsibilities, founder pitifully in the cross currents of the social sea.

The house had at once absorbed all of Kent’s savings, and was consequently, unlike a city apartment, an object to be considered seriously. This was the attitude that his men friends held toward the venture; neither did it seem strange to any one of the twoscore of assorted male temperaments that the couple should desire to spend their first summer entirely away from the paths of conventional social restraint. All the criticism, of which there was a belated April shower, mingled with not a few hailstones, came from the bride’s friends, her own elder sister Agatha taking the lead by saying to a select few who had dropped in a couple of weeks after the wedding to talk it over and hear the latest news of the bride, that Marjory seemed determined to slump, and had no sense whatever of the duties she owed society. While that any woman with her wedding presents, possessing a grain of pride, would try to make a front during the first year at least, adding as a final thrust, “So selfish in Marjory, short-sighted too; she’ll ruin Billy’s prospects for a place in the firm by keeping him away from all his friends. If they had only taken a smart little apartment, they would have been able to give half a dozen select dinners before the season breaks, and possibly they might have managed to get the Head of the Firm and his wife to come to one, and see the silver service he sent them, or at least give them a return invitation, for if Mrs. Coates should take up Marjory, you know their fortune, social and financial, would be made.”

“Marjory can entertain in the country quite as well as in town, and it’s far less stuffy from now on; it’s almost May, you know,” said little Mary Taylor, called Pussy from her demure and confiding ways, which none the less covered sharp, if delicately pointed, claws, when their use became necessary for the defence of her friends; she had been maid of honour at the wedding, and was a staunch friend of the bride.