Part 13

But at that instant--while Ruth indulged, I grieve to acknowledge it, the spirit of mockery--a thunderous crash broke the unison of lively voices. The score of people in the rooms flew to the windows. There, tossed to earth, abased from glory, prone upon the ground--imploring boughs lifted to heaven, a wreck--there lay the monster Adgate elm, one of the hoary elms in the carriage sweep. It lay there as neatly cut as with a scimitar. The splendid tree was literally slashed in twain by the Blizzard's invisible weapon, the prostrate thing loomed, portentous, to twenty pairs of eyes.

With the rest, Ruth stared at the fallen King. There was a lump in her throat.... No one spoke.... Every man and woman in the room had waxed intimate with that old tree, had come to man's or woman's estate beside it; they had played under it, insensibly had come to love it, as a part of themselves, as a piece of their pleasant, happy lives. This comrade and landmark was, too, one of the pardonable vanities of Oldbridge.

“Praise Heaven it wasn't the roof,” said, at length, the Master of Barracks Hill. He knew, though, he would have preferred to have it the roof. A roof may be replaced. His niece even, did not suspect the passion of attachment any plant or tree upon his land could stir in him upon occasion.

X

Perseveringly the snowflakes descended. They continued to fall, fall, fall, for another thirty-six hours. The wind next morning, though, had stopped, and debris of yesterday's storm had been removed. A trackless white garment of snow spread to the furthest reaches of Barracks Hill.

“This is all very weird,” said Ruth to Miranda, as, side by side, they sat and gazed on leagues and leagues of the white silence. “Miranda, this is all very well--Blizzards are very stirring; simple homely pleasures are very pleasing, this landscape is _very beautiful_, but,-----” Ruth suppressed a yawn.

“Besides, why will young men make geese of themselves? One can't get away from him, Miranda; a Blizzard even, does not keep him away! Miranda! If there's an object, my dear kitten, I detest, it's a sentimental young man.”

“Uncle,” said Ruth, nonchalantly, to General Adgate that evening after supper, as, with Miranda purring snugly beside her, the three sat together in the drawing-room, “I have an invitation from the Bolingbrokes, in Washington. They want me to come to them for a visit. Would you--would you miss me very much?” she coaxed, and she went to him and laid a caressing hand on the old man's cheek--“would you mind, very much, if I were to accept?”

“Mind, my dear?” General Adgate looked at her. “Who am I to say mind? You are your own mistress. Miss you? That's another pair of sleeves.”

“But suppose I bring them back with me,--I mean the Bolingbrokes,” laughed she. “They're such dears.... You'd fall in love with her, the sauciest sprite in Christendom. And he'll welcome the occasion to talk international Politics with you! I believe,” Ruth teased,--she drew up the Empire settle before the fire, she took Miranda to her knees and sat down again; “I believe that it's my Duty--to go--to go fetch them--to play with you.” With a final nod of decision Miss Adgate placed two small, elaborately shod feet, in a pair of high-heeled, steel-embroidered Florentine shoes, upon the fender; she began, with equal decision, to remove the wrappers from _The Athenoum, The Saturday Review_ and a couple of _Morning Posts_.

“Go--my dear,” said the old man gently.

“Dear me! I feel like a brute,” thought Miss Adgate. “What will he do if I return to England? Oh, why will people get fond of people!”

Miranda purred.... The fire responded; a crisp, little musical crepitation; the flames licked the wood, the logs consumed themselves, in a cadenced song of happy Death and blessed Eternity. Punctured by this music silence entered, cozily, warmly descended upon the New England drawing-room.

PART SEVENTH

I

|MISS ADGATE accepted the Bolingbrokes' invitation. She spent six weeks of gaiety in Washington. Indeed it was refreshing to live in the world again, to mix with people of the world; to have cogent reasons for dressing exquisitely every night for dinner, to be taken in to dinner by a facetious attaché, by, even, a complacent, redundant railway magnate; or, happy compromise, by a Member of the Cabinet, for it is well known that a Cabinet Minister may be amusing. Through the interchange of frivolities and banter one could rise, not to more important matters,--is anything much more important to the world than the light touch and a witty conversation? But Miss Adgate found refreshment in living again among people whose thoughts were sometimes occupied by questions impersonal, of more or less consequence to the world's history.

Someone possessed of a grain of humour has assured us that the “World is a good old Chum.”

Miss Adgate found the world at Washington a very good old chum during those six weeks. “In all but the aesthetic sense,” she reflected, “America is an interesting land to live in.” Plentiful wherever she went, tittle-tattle, supplemented by her own observations, helped her to form an idea of how this unwieldy bulk of a nation calling itself The United States of America was being rescued from fatuous chaos, a mass of political corruption and a superfluity of wealth, and lifted into an arrogant, resolute Power. But a Power whose outlook was as far removed from the simple hardy traditions of Puritan America as Earth is from Heaven.

An oligarchy of able men,--a handful,--chosen, directed, inspired by a man yet abler, more audacious than they,--these were moulding, had already changed the destiny, the policy of the United States.

Miss Adgate recognised the efforts of the Man at the Helm. He had followed a fixed idea, and the idea was the Greater Glory of his Country; he had secured with his henchmen indisputable prestige to the Nation, and, thanks to his star, his tenacity, his temerity, America,--feared to-day if not honoured, was powerful. But not alas approved of! “Damn approval!” (the worm will turn,--the watchword passed through the land). “We are ourselves.”

The “ourselves” went very far. This at least was the modest, unexpressed opinion of Miss Adgate,--it was shared, apparently, by the Man at the Helm. He lectured the Nation like a father. The Nation knowing itself to be unwholesome, inchoate, something ruthless, listened meekly.

“But,” Ruth reflected from the vantage of a calm and sympathetic observation: “So many religions, no Faith! Where every man, in disobedience to Christ, chooses to be his own Pope. Yet the Holy Father has dedicated America to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.... But the very elements in America, so violent and so ferocious,--the burning Summers, the cruel Winters, the appalling cataclysms of Nature, if these are reproduced in the violent characters of the people, inclined to rape and rapine on a big or a little scale--at what end, _left to its own devices_, will the American character issue? Will it,” she wondered, “become, inflated with power, the great Master Robber of the World? Or will it perish utterly, hoist by its own petard?”

“_Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Convertere ad Dominum Deum._”... Mournful and tender, in the melodious, yearning, touching accents of Tenebrae, the phrase filled her ears.

“No man at the Helm,” she sorrowfully said to herself, “shall save us for more than his few years of tenure. The race cries for direction, a sane outlet to its emotions. The sole influence which holds anarchy at bay is Holy Mother Church, wise men tell us. Yes, the Divine Authority!.. The sweet miracle of the Catholic Faith may save our people from ending as a nation of brutes; may open to us the gates of Humility and show to us the road to the 'Greater Glory of God.'”

And then, Miss Adgate woke with a start from her musings. She shook her pretty head. She returned to the practice of light banter and witty causerie, the only efficacious methods within reach, she reflected, of furthering the millennium her fancy painted for her native land.

II

“My little dear Ruth,” Lucilla wrote, “we're coming on the most important mission to America. Namely, to see you. Yes, and haven't I a bagful of news for your Royal Highness!

“We sail by the _Cedric_ on the fifteenth of April, Harry can't leave until then. To confess the truth, he is in Altronde. Civillo,--of course you've seen it by the papers,--Civillo is gone to a greater Principality, Bertram is King.

“I want to see you--oh! And Ruth, I burn with curiosity to look on that New England of yours. Harry, I'm convinced, is prepared to settle there. He says, so pathetically, that at his time of life he feels the need of planting cabbages and that the Upper Gardener at Pontycroft gives notice when he tries to. He's heard that in New England gardeners are kind, don't mind a bit; they just let you plant, right down; are affable; make you settle right down and become one of 'em. But Harry says, too, he pines at first hand to solve the inwardness of a land destined to dominate us all.

“Ruth, between you and me, in confidence, if America is to be the future of Europe--well--then I'm glad I shall be dead.

“But between you and me, my dear, what Henry Pontycroft wants is not so much to plant cabbages neither is it to study politics... What he truly-truly wants is a glimpse of the Young Person. He's missed you! Ah! I have news. Your devoted, Lucilla.”

Over this flippant missive Ruth grew hot, then cold, then faint. And she sat, for a long moment in a state of emotional upheaval, of senseless vacuity--the while her head whirled and her heart went thump, thump, thump! It was an entire quarter of an hour before this commotion subsided, and left her with soft flutterings at her throat.

“They're coming, they're coming, they're coming! He's coming... I shall hear his voice, I shall see him. Oh, what has happened? Is it possible that he's free? Oh, my God, my God, help me to wait,” she cried. She began to cry and to sob like a little child. She craved, wanted, longed for, unendurably, overwhelmingly, that he should take her in his arms, caress and fondle her, and, like a veritable little girl pat her cheek and soothe her, let her unburden her woes, let her lie, her head in his breast, while he said to her, “There, little child, there, don't cry.” And it was in Pontycroft's voice that the words fell upon her ears, and it was on Harry Pontycroft's breast that she dried her eyes. And they were Pontycroft's eyes into which her eyes smiled, when, presently, mocking him through her tears, but in oh, such heaven of bliss! she repeated the trite refrain of the tritest, the most foolish of Ballads.

“In God's hands!” said Ruth; she dried her eyes. “Like everything else....”

She put her hat and jacket on and went for a walk. When she reached the house an hour later, she had found her peace, and though her eyes were singularly bright and her manner curiously vivacious, this contributed the more to her success of the evening at the Bolingbrokes'.

“Ruth--” Mrs. Bolingbroke rushed at her, enfolded her in an impetuous hug, “you're delicious! Stay in Washington. Stay in Washington for ever--”

“Come to Barracks Hill with me,” answered the young lady. “I must be flitting almost at once.”

“No, no, no....” protested Mrs. Bolingbroke. But it was peaceably arranged at last that the Bolingbrokes, having a _congé_ at Easter, should come, then, to Barracks Hill.

And so, on the fifteenth day of March, Ruth bade farewell to Washington and travelled back to Oldbridge.

III

One long month and one entire week to wait. If Time was interminable, Miss Adgate resolved to make Time bear fruit. She took herself in hand. She tried to quell the little tremors of joy which kept welling up in her throat when she thought of the end of those five weeks.

“They'll probably not come. They'll change their minds. If they do come--it's more than likely some nonsense of Lucilla's!... Well.... Besides I've other businesses to attend to,” the lady said with a most determined air.

As the least profitless way of passing those interminable days, Ruth set herself to the task of enhancing the natural beauties of Barracks Hill. She caused paths to be cut through the woods; she enlarged the flower gardens; she prepared the Morris House for her June visitors. As to the library and the music-room they had long since been ready for occupation. And in the interim of labour Miss Adgate gave a series of children's parties, calling Jackie Enderfield to her assistance. Her invitations vested in that young gentleman's hands, he became cock-of-the-walk among the girls and boys of Oldbridge and Rutherford was thus kept at bay. Yet notwithstanding these spartan derivatives, Ruth walked on clouds, smiling at love.

“She breathes roses and lilies,” Miss Deborah Massington declared with enthusiasm.

Eighty, thereabout, Miss Deborah was sister to Mrs. Leffingwell and her junior by ten years.

“She has charm,” Mrs. Leffingwell answered, discreetly, while they watched Ruth's erect young buoyant figure disappear beyond the lindens. “She makes one feel that everything's all right--better to come. I wonder...”

Ruth liked an hour spent in these ladies' bow-window; gay and fragrant window, all vivid of sunshine, filled with blossoming geranium and heliotrope. While she entertained them with tales of Italy, which they could never hear enough about, Ruth Adgate reflected that the lives of her grandmothers must have been just such quiet, such repressed, contented lives as these.

Mrs. Leffingwell and Miss Massington, types of New England's most exquisite product--the old lady. The old lady who, with all her gentle unworldliness, is a patrician to her finger tips. As the perfume of rose-leaves is preserved in a fine porcelain jar--so the hushed fragrance of these temperate lives emanates, yet stays, to the end. White, ethereal, peaceful--and pictorially the replicas of Whistler's mother, these two ladies were waited upon by a black servant, whose gorgeous head-gear was the red, blue, and yellow bandanna. Each lady had her window in the low-ceilinged, white-panelled drawing-room; each was clad in good black silk; on each white head a cap reposed of fine Honiton lace--and their gowns were finished with a transparent lace collar and cuffs. Both ladies were slightly deaf; both were omnivorous readers, both were eager listeners; both had the sense of humour; and both were indulgent amused lookers-on at the small games of life which they were no longer privileged to take part in; and if gracious patience be a virtue these ladies may well be considered beautiful products of a fast vanishing Puritan tradition.

Easter fell on the twenty-third of April. The Bolingbrokes arrived at Barracks Hill the day before Easter, but on the morning of their arrival came a disastrous piece of news. Almost the whole of Ruth's fortune had been swept out of existence overnight in one of those cataclysmic melodramas which melodramatic Nature loves to enact in the United States. On Good Friday, the twenty-first of April, nineteen hundred and eight, the town of Wyoming was annihilated by a tornado. The merry monster chose the small hours before midnight, when, giving rein to his pranksome cubfulness, he swept men, women, children into Eternity with hardly a warning.... The mines--they formed the _raison d'être_ of the town--caved in, flooded by a water spout. The entire district was reduced to desolation.

Seated at breakfast, in the crispest of white morning confections, Ruth became informed of this and of her losses through the medium of the Oldbridge _Morning Herald_, whose items she was reading aloud, a concession, to her uncle.

General Adgate, far more than his lovely niece, was affected by the news. Had he not enjoyed vicariously the sense of her wealth? It had tickled his fancy as well as his family pride to see her squander with a lavish hand, without so much as a thought of the value of money. It had pleased his sense of the incongruous that notwithstanding the obvious joy she took in opening her fingers, in letting the gold slide through them, she had acquiesced in, nay adopted, many of the Spartan habits of New England; New England--which has never been purse-proud because she has never, until lately, had very much money in her purse. Ruth, indeed, had all she could do to cheer General Adgate.

“If all is lost, save honour,” she consoled, “_I_ have still some investments in England by the mercy of which I shall not be poverty stricken. I've as much as three thousand safe pounds a year coming from there, you old darling,” she cooed. “Harry Pontycroft invested it for me long ago. That ought to be enough for any woman with economical tastes,” she assured him. “And I've a lot in the bank,--Heaven knows how much! I've never spent anything like my income for I had nothing which seemed worth spending it upon,--since, ugh!--I detest automobiles, and you know it. We can still keep open house this summer and never trouble.”

Of a truth, Miss Adgate experienced relief,--why?--she did not try to fathom--at the thought of her diminished fortunes. She might, possibly, this blithe adventuress, or had she not been expecting guests, she might, even, have tried to persuade General Adgate to lead her to the scene of the disaster. I doubt, though, if she would have succeeded.

A fat cheque went instead by the Red Cross Society to the relief of the sufferers. And lo! the diminishing days were dwindled to a pinpoint.

IV

When Mrs. Bolingbroke heard that Henry Pontycroft and Lucilla Dor were on the sea, bound for America, she could not contain herself.

“Good gracious, Ruth, what are they comin' for?” she exclaimed, wide-eyed, gazing at Ruth.

“Don't know,” said Ruth, putting her nose into a bowlful of fresh roses from Rutherford's hot-houses. “Oddly enough, to see me, perhaps?” she added, laughing, and she made an effort to look her friend squarely and jocosely in the face.

“Richard,” said Mrs. Bolingbroke penetratedly to her husband, “Ruth Adgate is either the most consummate actress or the most innocent dove the good God has ever, in His ability, wrought from the dust of which we are made. If the Pontycrofts are on the sea it's for some extraordinary reason. Ruth either suspects that reason, or she doesn't. But she looked at me with those clear guileless eyes of hers, when she mentioned their coming, and I, for one, can imagine any man telling her he'd burn Troy Town for such a glance. Yet there's that Mr. Rutherford--crazily in love with her, I'm told,--a splendid match as Americans go. She could marry him and his money to-morrow if she liked. And since she's so daft about New England, she could send him into politics and have quite a life. It will be interesting to see how the Pontycrofts will act when they find the sources of her income are swept away.”

“That's not a proper remark for you to make, my dear,” replied the Honourable Richard Bolingbroke, in a tone of unexpected severity. “Henry Pontycroft's a sensitive, quixotic, high-minded, honourable English gentleman. He's rich, moreover. Money plays no part in his coming. Lady Dor I've known since I was a boy. She was a delightful girl, just as now she's a charming woman. They'll be admirable additions to the house party, and that's all that concerns you or me. Pontycroft will keep us in roars of laughter and I'm curious to meet him in New England. You may be sure he'll like this wonderful old place. He'll feel all the arid romance of this aristocratic passionate bleak land. Who knows? He may be the Prince come to wake it, humanise it, with a kiss. Oldbridge will not have looked upon his like--it won't have heard anything to compare with him, either, in its three hundred years of existence; never will again; I hope it may make the best of its opportunity to give him a royal welcome.”

“I feel crushed,” pouted Mrs. Bolingbroke. “How should I, who've never met Henry Pontycroft--know he's the paragon of wit and chivalry?”

“That's precisely what Henry Pontycroft is,” her husband answered gravely, “He _is_ the paragon of wit and chivalry!”

These young folk were pacing side by side in the moonlit garden after the excellent New England repast, called supper; while Miss Adgate and her uncle were busy with callers, upon the veranda. The night was the first of a long series of warm May nights, the moon hung, majestic and round, over the fringes of wood termed the Wigwam. A rustic bench stood invitingly under the big syringa, now a perfumed canopy of white. As they stood on the upper terrace it was easy to distinguish descending terraces marked by rows of silvery budding irises swollen or in bloom.... The magic smells of white and purple lilac were touched with a whiff of apple blossoms from the hill and beyond--below--the Mantic gleamed in the moonlight amid trees all a feathery, spring incrustation of minute green foliage.

“This is a divine spot,” said Bolingbroke, suddenly kissing his wife, “but we must rejoin the others.”

Lucilla Dor and Harry Pontycroft arrived the following day and were installed in the Morris House at the other side of the hill, where two neat Irish girls waited upon them under the enlightening, tempered instruction of Pontycroft's man and of Lucilla's maid.

V

Spring was abroad in her witchery. She had come with a rush, with a good will, with an--abundance, 'and all of a sudden-like'--as she has, after many days of dallying, a way of doing in New England. She had been coy; she had flirted; she had tantalised--a day here, a day there--with dewy warmth of soft blue skies, her robes diaphanous April cloud. Then she had veiled her face, vexed for one knew not what offences,--had turned her coldest shoulder, shed her most frigid tears. She had looked forth, wreathed again in smiles, while she put wonder-working fingers to shrubs and branches... and again she had withdrawn herself in deepest greyest dudgeon.

But now, she was come, come. The birds were building and calling and fluttering, in all the emotion, the refreshing joy of an ever-renewed bridalhood. A young male wren who had discovered a bird-house, fixed on the off-chance of so happy an event as to entice him there--by Jobias, to the top of a rustic pole in the rose garden--tore his throat open in the rapture of telling the world what a place for a nest he had found, and how sweet she was.

“Shameless uxorious creature,” Ponty said, as he came over the hill and paused to listen to him.

Unaccountably enough, Ruth, as he came into the garden, Ruth issued from the house dressed in white; dressed in white, without a hat, a watteau sunshade in her hand.

“Good morning, my pretty maid,” said Pontycroft, “you're not going a-milking in that costume, are you?” He eyed her sharply with the quizzical glint she knew well.

“Good morning,” Ruth answered, in perfect composure. Yet at the anticipation of seeing Pontycroft alone, she had many times felt the earth quake under her,--“I'm going to call upon Lucilla,” she vouchsafed.

“Oh, Lucilla's knocked up. I came with a message from her. She wants me to say she's had her breakfast in bed and won't rise until luncheon. Lucilla's tired from the journey. You two women must have talked yourselves weary, if a mere man may judge of such matter. Oh, the hour at which I caught sight of Paolina conducting you over the hill last night!” said Ponty.

“It was a beautiful moonlit night,” said Ruth, inhaling the morning air with delight, “and so,--why not?”

“Why not, indeed,” he agreed. “What a surprise it was, though, to find the Bolingbrokes here. He's a decent chap.”

“Yes, I like them very much,” Ruth said, absently.