Part 11

She rose from her corner of the sofa and seated herself at the piano. _Oft have I travelled in those Realms of Gold_... Presently she had started her two companions, travelling, journeying _in those Realms of Gold_ which Chopin opens to the least of musicians. Chopin's austerity of perfect beauty wrought in a sad sincerity,--entered the New England drawing-room. To General Adgate's ears the music seemed to lend voice at last,--give expression, at last,--to holy, self-repressed, patient lives,--lives of the dead and the gone--particles of whose spirit still clung, perhaps, to the panelled walls, pervaded, perhaps, the air of the old room. To Ruth, this incomplete New England world, which something more than herself and less than herself was, for the nonce, infatuated with, possessed by,--which yet, to certain of her perceptions,--revealed itself as a milieu approaching to semi-barbarism, Oldbridge, melted away. At her own magic touch, Italian landscapes, rich in dreams, rich in love, abundant; decked forth in fair realities, intellectual joys,--complete and vibrant of absolute beauty, harmonious, suggestive,--rose, took shape before her.

“_I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls_, among pink fragrant oleanders,” she repeated, smiling to her thoughts as she played and forgot the present.

Rutherford, Rutherford,--oh,--of course--Rutherford found in those heavenly chords and melodies what every lover finds in Chopin.

Ruth turned around upon her piano stool.

“Have you had enough?” she asked, smiling.

“Enough?” exclaimed the lovesick youth. “I, for one could never have enough.”

“_Toujours perdrix!_” said Ruth and lifted up a warning finger.

“Play us something else, child,” said her uncle in a matter-of-fact tone intended to disperse sentimentality. “Let us hear your Russians and a little Schubert.”

And so Ruth played the Valse Lente from the Fifth Tschaikowsky Symphony and the famous Rachmaninoff which, I believe, everybody plays, and finished at last with the Fourth Fugue of the immortal Bach.

“There!” she exclaimed, “I'm tired.”

“And so am I,” said the transcriber, laying down the pen.

IX

Young Rutherford bounded from his chair. The tall clock in the hall, as though loth to mark the passage of Time,--Time,--who had been its friend for something more than a hundred and fifty years,--the steadfast old clock began to mark three very slow, slow notes.

“Miss Adgate, forgive me! I suppose I ought to go, you should be left to rest!” he held out his hand. “I've never known any pleasure comparable to this afternoon's. May I come again? The whole of Oldbridge shall envy me to-day,--I'm too vain not to tell them where I've lunched. Good-bye, goodbye,” he repeated. He gave Ruth a furtive glance and flushed, very red.

“Good-bye, Rutherford,” said General Adgate. He smiled indulgence to the young man who still malingered. “We'll see you to-night,” he reassured him, with a nod. “Ruth, you're to make yourself splendid tonight. I'm to take you to dine at the Wetherbys. They are giving a dinner party in your honour, for knowing you were not ridden yet with engagements I accepted for you. There will be some sort of a reception afterwards--you'd call it _At Home_ wouldn't you? Everyone's coming. Everybody wants to meet Miss Adgate.” He laughed, as though well pleased.

“I believe he's proud of me,” thought Miss Adgate, gratefully.

The door at last closed on Rutherford. Niece and uncle stood together in the hall, where the voice of the family time-piece, its brass face marking the phases of the sun and moon, underlined the pervading stillness of the house with an austere, admonitative, solemn “tick-tack!”

“Ruth,” said her uncle abruptly, “why did you come to America?”

“Why?--To see you, of course,” Ruth said, her tone one of innocent surprise, but she felt a little guilty catch at her heart.

“Oh,--me!” her uncle said. “You young witch, you never crossed the seas to look at an old man. It was as much my business to cross them to look after you. Come,” said he, with a look of raillery, “there was some precipitating cause. You came in a hurry. Something happened--for you might have put your journey off for another year. Something occurred, to induce you--to come--in a hurry.”

Ruth hesitated. She gave a light laugh--then she looked away. “Shall I really tell you?” she asked.

“The sooner you tell me,” said the old General, “the better,--for then we'll understand one another.”

“I left Europe,”--Ruth said, embarrassed, “because--because--I wanted to see--my uncle--and have a look at my ancestral acres!” she still prevaricated, yet dimpling with amusement.

“Your ancestral acres!”--repeated her uncle, sceptically. “Well?” he encouraged.

“Oh--well--because,--if you must have another reason still, well--because--well--I felt sore.”

“Why?” said General Adgate.

“Why?” said Ruth with a persistent and feminine reluctance to reveal her real self, speak her true reasons: “Uncle,--I wish--you wouldn't ask me!”

“Out with it,” said her uncle.

“Bertram, Crown Prince of Altronde, wanted me to marry him morganatically. I felt outraged, though they told me it would be a legal marriage. Harry Pontycroft and Lucilla sympathised with my disgust and packed me off. And--that is why.”

The old man looked grave. “Damned European whelps,” he muttered. “No wonder your Puritan ancestors shook that dust from their souls. You did well,” he said, patting Ruth on the back.

X

Ruth went upstairs without another word. The upper hall was lined with bookshelves reaching to the ceiling. “I must add a library to this dear place,” she said to herself while she sought for a book. She was tired,--she wanted to lie down, she wanted to wash from her mind the impressions of the day; she felt completely fagged.

General Adgate came upstairs behind her while she was peering along the shelves of calf-bound books. The shelves seemed to hold only a monotonous row on row of histories and works of philosophy.

“Take this,” he said as he passed her, and, pausing, he removed a book from an upper shelf and handed it to her.

This was a volume of Governor Bradford's History of New England.

“But,” Ruth weakly objected, “I wanted a novel!”

“You'll find that more interesting than any novel,” General Adgate threw over his shoulder as he proceeded on to his own apartments.

O Reflex Egotism! Ruth found the book more interesting than any novel.

PART SIXTH

I

|THE Old Town of Oldbridge is rich of one pleasant winding highway along whose route are scattered its prettiest demesnes. Time was, once, when this sun-spattered, tree-bordered thoroughfare enjoyed its dream of peace in drowsy quietude, under spreading lindens and over-arching elms. To-day, however, it stirs in its dream.

Yet its ancient houses stand placidly enough. Comfortable and serene among park-like meadows, life in them goes on with a simple dignity and ease; and if they are the sometime innocent cause of the sin of pride to the families who inherit them, they are sources of arcadian joys to the stranger within their gates. For they are all spotless and restful--and fragrant of the breaths of several hundred years of new-mown hay, rose-arbours, and aromatic pinks, blown through the windows. These old Colonial homes speak eloquently of good life past, of still better life present--to come.

The trolley-track and the pretty road keep company a bit, together; they both turn to the left and passing in all say twenty houses, reach the Common and the Post Office, where a dozen or so more hipped roofs, set among quiet flower gardens and apple orchards lend tradition and a quaint distinction to the really lovely old Green.

The boys of Oldbridge have pre-empted this Green, the most popular of Sports Clubs, and here, after school, as their forbears did, as their fathers and grandfathers did, here they play and tumble and wrestle and fight. From here they cross the road to enter the Public School House, a red brick building which, thirty years ago, supplanted the Dames School, and which balances the old brick Meeting House at the further end.

The haunt, trysting-place, council chamber--where every mischievous plot is hatched, such is the Common. Whence the eternal Boy, lured by near-flowing waters of the Mantic joins his pals upstream for a swim, plays uproarious pranks there, ties a chap's clothes into a hard knot on the bank and when he comes dripping out in search of them chants, in raucous chorus: “_Chaw raw beef--the beef is tough!_”

In Winter, the frozen River Mantic makes an unrivalled skating ground; and the Oldbridge Boy still builds his ice-fortress on the Common, stocks it (ammunition of snow-balls)--and leads his regiment to victory. Here he coasts or hitches his sledge to a huge one fleetly passing, gets a glorious ride--comes home, nose and fingers frost-bitten, exceeding argumentative; talking in loud imperious voice; in truth a very dog of wintry joys.

Too often, after supper, the Boy of Oldbridge takes delectable but stolen interest in the conversation of the village Post Master and his cronies. By the door in Summer--round the stove in Winter, he and they discuss the politics of the hour to many hoary anecdotes between. Pastime sternly prohibited by parents requiring infinite discretion! Thus one steals with muffled tread down by back stairs, one issues forth by back windows, one whistles to one's _fides achates_--and off.

Miss Adgate, who to her regret had never been a small boy, never would be, was none the less of opinion that boys are the most amusing imps and she soon exercised her opportunity for making the acquaintance of a New England lad, Master Jack Enderfield, the twelve-year-old son of Mrs. Enderfield, who lived in the Enderfield House on the Common. Mr. Enderfield, after preaching to his world for fifteen years, had left it, with, he feared on his death-bed, little advantage to its soul. He had gone leaving a library full of theological tracts and treatises, of philosophic books and pamphlets, a comfortable fortune inherited from collateral great-aunts,--and a son, Jack. Jack was blond, blue-eyed, curly haired, of an enquiring expansive nature towards those in whom he felt confidence, and a diverting person. Having met Miss Adgate at his mother's, when she returned the lady's call he considered himself entitled to drop in when he liked at Barracks Hill.

“She's got such stunning hair, mother, and such white hands.... And when she talks it makes a fellow feel good. She uses such pretty words and her voice is low and round. And she listens to a man and draws him out.”

“But, my dear, it may not be convenient for Miss Adgate to receive you so often,” said Mrs. Enderfield. “Miss Adgate has other people to see, other things to do.”

“Oh, she has always time to see me,” replied Jack, with a wave of the hand. “She told Martha to say she was out the other day when the Wetherbys called. She took me up to her sitting room and showed me a lot of jolly European things and gave me this paper knife.” Jack drew from an inside pocket, offering it for inspection, a Venetian filagree paper knife wrapped in soiled and crumpled tissue paper.

The maternal heart could not withstand such obvious proof of favouritism towards her idol. Though warned not to wear his welcome out, Jackie descended frequently upon Barracks Hill, but this, though it concerns, runs ahead, of the story.

II

Miss Adgate received calls for a month; paid them--was dined--was less wined than vastly cocktailed,--in simple or elaborate New England fashion. She returned these hospitalities and she discovered that Oldbridge New and Oldbridge Old held agreeable people. If they treated her a little as an Egeria she accepted the rôle without fuss and gave to modesty its due.

Some of these new acquaintances, of a pretty taste in letters, on far more than nodding terms with art, had, after years spent abroad--fallen like herself alack, upon a day! Alack the day on which we come to the disputably sage conclusion that East,--West.... We know, we learn--too late, sometimes alas, the fatal rest! And they had cast behind them the dust of the East, and they had turned Westward with a very lively sense of the superior enchantments of Europe. But once at home a devout appreciation of the sweet repose ('tis the just phrase), an imperceptible abandonment to that soothing peace which hovers insidious over a New England homestead, ah, ye rewards of Virtue! these had quietly engulfed in sodden well-being, the finer European impressions.

Miss Adgate a little later, perceived that these wise people--settled ere long unblushingly to New Englandism, never again intended to budge. They had accepted, deliberately, the prose of life. And Miss Adgate, enamoured of New England, still kept her head enough to wonder, with some dismay, whether she, too, if she stayed here, she, too, would end by looking upon Oldbridge New and Oldbridge Old as the be-all and end-all of existence! So many things spoke here to her heart. Her tender spirit basked here, all day, in good will. But wasn't Oldbridge just a trifle lacking in effervescence? And yes--didn't Oldbridge take itself a bit solemnly? Ah, yes! And--yes--it had a distressing tendency to be very serious about everything. To none of these states of mind had Ruth been initiated, and every good Catholic knows that mirth is from God, dullness from the Devil.

Miss Adgate, who had hitherto lived on the plane of an impersonal, if somewhat facetious consideration of public matters,--of wit, persiflage; Miss Adgate found when it came to small gossip that she was an irritated listener. Carping criticism made her yawn, she became dumb, had nothing to say. It is indeed a stupid trade! Moreover her soul had ever disported in innocent folly, in gaiety and witty conversation. She soon attracted those who cared for the same light stuff and Barracks Hill became, ere long, the centre of a coterie of frolic, music, and laughter, where personalities except in the ways of honest chaff were tabooed--and no one's affairs, wonder of wonders! were commented upon behind his back.

III

But, after all, Barracks Hill it was, “poetic, historic Barracks Hill,” which spoke to her fancy,--held her heart!

This house and the hill of this house were suggestive; packed full of romance. Ruth, whose temper was a charming compound of mirth love and poesy,--Ruth who had the soul of a poet in the body of a fair woman,--Ruth now fell deep in love with reverie.--She spent long days in a singular sort of trance. Lingering in a room she pondered its messages--wandering upon the hill, she dreamed and mused. The room mysteriously unburdened itself of long pent emotions,--joys and woes; the hill unfolded its soul, opened wide its heart to her; and lonely desolate ghosts--the ghosts of monotonous, innocent, happy, sorry lives confided in her--told her their tales of pain; disclosed to her their rapture of hope, their mysteries of birth and love and aspiration--their tragedy of denial--and of death.

Ruth hearkened to invisible messengers. As she came and went in the still house, they floated towards her light as down,--intangible, so perceptible,--in the quiet house, and through the corridors. But Love's very breath greeted her on the hill.... Love met her there, with exuberance by day; Love wept there, in her heart--bitter tears--by night. Yes, a secret sadness brooded at the core of those ghostly souls. But a musical refrain, a simple entreaty seemed ever in the air and its contrapuntal burden: “_Love, love and laughter! Give us love and laughter!_” they implored--conquered her heart.

“They hope in me!” Ruth thought, wondering and wide-eyed.... “They have confidence in me! The old place believes in me; it trusts me, it knows that I love it; it knows I reverence _them_.... It knows, _they_ know, how my spirit would wish to cull those unfulfilled desires, every one they long to lighten themselves of, and bring each one to its fruition if I can. Yes, each of you dear ghosts, you who have been lonely so long and friendless--you know I'll execute your bidding if I can.”

And, every day, at the little Catholic Parish Church, Ruth said a Rosary for the house and for the souls that had passed through it. And she visited the house, from attic to cellar. She was convinced that on one occasion she saw a veritable ghost who, smiling at her, passed across the attic. She discovered there, at all events, some fine old pieces of furniture, white with dust; and she caused these to be cleansed and polished and placed in the rooms.

IV

One fine December morning Ruth walked with Miranda on the hill. She was beginning to have projects.

“Miranda!” said she,--“Heaven knows where you picked the name up,” mused Ruth. “Dear kitten, I believe I'll invite my European friends here! The fashion is in Europe to come and have a look at America. I'll keep open house, and you and I and General Adgate shall receive the most famous people in Europe at Barracks Hill. And we'll show them what they ought to be curious about, what they've seen only in books,--we'll show them a beautiful old New England town enriched from all sources yet keeping its distinct New England flavour. And I'll give to Oldbridge the enlivening experience,” she said with a gleam, “of hobbing and of nobbing with every light-minded modern who doesn't take life's trivialities solemnly; with every human of talent who cultivates the sweet tonic spirit of levity.”

Miranda listened, his chrysoprase eyes widened--contracted--blazed with intelligent sympathy.

“I'm with you, if it's anything that has to do with fun,” he loudly purred.

Miranda was not a kitten--Miranda was a sleek, a superb tortoise-shell cat. A cat of the masculine persuasion who could have counted six or seven summers if a day. General Adgate had, in “a tonic spirit of levity,” christened him at his birth Miranda--it may be because the Master of Barracks Hill had likened himself that day to Prospero. Be this as may be, Miranda had kept his youth; his idea of beer and skittles was still to play at any game he could find a playmate for; he, at least, was all for sociability.

And it was his friendly habit to follow Ruth, running along the wall of the terrace at her left as she paced the hill. Now, when she addressed him, he drew himself lazily, along the warm stones, stretched himself infinitely, clawed the rough stones deluged in December sunshine, and assuming an irresistible attitude as she spoke, pricked his ears. Then, with a bound made across the turf to an apple-tree, mad for a frolic. He ran up its grey side, lichen-covered, paused, looked down, and jeered at her over his shoulder.

“Why don't you follow me?” he taunted. Took, the next moment, his leap over her head, landed at her feet, was scuttling deliriously through wheel ruts, grass-grown, passage of last year's cartwheels. Burrowing under accumulations of brown crackling leaves, flattening himself lengthwise, poking out a pink nose at her, he showed a pair of questioning, mischievous eyes.

“Send out your invitations,” counselled he, “but first, catch me!”

Ruth plunged to a great rustle of dry leaves, and light and irresponsible as they Miranda darted to a sheltering juniper. Ruth tried to seize him--useless vanity, for he was quicksilver. Up another tree ere she could lay hands on him, he, perhaps not disdainful of a little petting, and at all events Bon Prince, finally relented; he allowed her at last to have her way, come close and take him in her arms.

“You're a duck,” said Ruth, laughing, scratching his ears, laying her cheek against his fur all glossy and fragrant of wood odours. “Such a mercurial duck! You make me feel thrice welcome here. I believe you are the spirit of the place. Yes--the little friendly spirit of the house who attracts and keeps those who love it for its good--who uses every wile, too, and coquetry to do so.”

Miranda at her words slipped struggling through Ruth's arms to earth, arched his back, rubbed himself against her skirts, purred loud and long--circling round her, tail in air and as who should say: “Yes, yes, no doubt. But let us waste no time in sentiment,” and away he bounded to a remoter corner of the hill.

“Of course! he's showing me the place,” she cried. In genuine enjoyment of the sport she ran, eyes brimming with laughter, after the clever fellow as he trotted on; he beguiled her here and he beguiled her there; he discovered nooks to her full of interest and variety. And as she abandoned herself to the game, played and romped with him, it occurred to her once again that this, all this--was not all this verily part of a sort of terrestrial Paradise?

Here,--the chimneys of the house just visible below, here, aloof in a beautiful world,--she stood on the brow of her hill among gnarled fine old apple trees. She went up to one, she laid her cheek against it.

“Yes, I can understand what a sight you were in the Garden of Eden,” she whispered. “In Spring, when your rosy blossoms are out,--in Autumn when you are hung with ripe red and golden fruit! And, yes--Henry Pontycroft's prophecy is fulfilled.... Here is Eve, sulking in her native apple orchard!”

“Derrièr' chez mon père,

Vole, vole mon cour, vole--

Derrièr' chez mon père

Y a un pommier doux--

Tout doux et you!”

“If Adam, or if Pontycroft were here...” she sighed, “I should be vastly tempted---tout doux et you-,--to tempt either of them. Oh, see how the rosy horizon is caught in its net woven of grey leafless branches! The sky is a sumptuous Prussian blue and how it fades at the zenith to palest azure! All the Royal colour is broken up by bold white clouds, and--this--ah, this is far too fair a sight for one pair of eyes to revel in alone. This cries, aloud, for Adam!”

Ruth looked about her. At her feet, oddly enough, curiously enough, a red firm apple, forgotten there,--untouched by frosts,--at her feet lay a fine red pippin. She picked it up, she smiled, she wondered....

“But--but--there's only you--old Puss! Here, catch it,” she cried to Miranda, who came running towards her, scenting the game he loved. With a gentle toss Ruth threw the apple along the turf and left Miranda to the ecstatic enjoyment of patting it, pushing it and rolling over it for quite eleven minutes.

V

Miss Adgate had Miranda's approbation for inoculating Oldbridge with levity. She consulted General Adgate:

“Anything you like, Ruth. Anything you like to keep you here contented.” And he was not in the least fired by her schemes and had nothing further to say. But Miss Adgate sat down at this and scribbled fifty notes, selecting her first guests from all the worlds held in the one London World--the men, the women she liked, whose work she liked; the people who could be irrelevant at a pinch, amused, amusing. She invited them to visit her at Barracks Hill during the coming Summer, and in time she received effusive acceptances to her invitations.

VI

“The Oldbridge Industrial Exhibits opens to-morrow night,” General Adgate, tentatively, said one day. “Do you care to go? You'll find all your friends. The Light Infantry Band will play to us. It's rather jolly.”

If New England days in old New England houses are fruitful (to young women of “high faculties quiescent”), if they are fecund in long, poetic dreams,--if life in Oldbridge does offer limitless advantage for the building of castles in the air--none can deny that it has, too, its own artless way of playing up to the leading lady.

“I wouldn't be left out for all the planets,” protested Ruth. “I'm curious to know what the Oldbridge Industries are.”

“In that case----” answered her uncle.

He went off smiling, she could not conceive why.

“Miss Adgate was a sight for the gods,” vowed Rutherford. “Brown velvet, sables, to suit her brown hair with a red glint in it, and eyes!”