Part 9

Ruth, in a misery of wild light-headedness, responded as well as she could to the civilities of her two travelling companions, while they drove through narrow, animated streets. They reached the docks. There lay the massive ship, its relentless black hulk resting abroadside, in ominous expectation of some mysterious coming change. Ruth walked up the white gangway. The turmoil, the excited crowd, the stolid stewards,--lolling,--indifferent yet curious sentinels,--the ragged throng of emigrants passing endlessly into the forecastle, the noise of clanking wains and girders hoisting trunks and freight into mid air, all, gave to her a sense of doom, of the finality of things in chaos.... Half an hour passed before she was able to go to her room. Telegrams were handed to her, even flowers, fruit; thus rapidly does news spread; she had to talk with friends of the Bolingbrokes come to bid them God-speed, to look pleasant and pleased as everybody else did.

But when at last Ruth closed the door of her cabin behind her, she took a little step forward and with a cry threw herself upon the couch. Regardless of Paolina, who was already opening bags and unfolding dresses, she permitted herself the luxury of a passionate outburst of grief. A tornado of pent misery racked her; she pressed her face into the linen pillow to deaden the sound of her sobbing, her hands against her breast.

“Signorina, Signorina, do not feel so badly,” cried the good Italian maid, dropping Ruth's lace and beribboned morning gown and running towards her. “Oh, do not weep. It is very sad to have to leave our lovely Italian land, so beautiful, so _carina_. But do not weep so! What will the Signora Dor say if I allow you to make yourself ill? Think! It is I who should be weeping. It is I who am leaving all behind me, my country, my sister, my mother, and yet I do not weep.” But the tears belied her words and welled from her eyes.

Ruth clasped the girl's hand affectionately. She felt grateful for the warm Italian heart. Paolina at least was there, to keep her recollected in the exquisite life she was forsaking. Why she was forsaking it, now seemed to her an absolutely incomprehensible riddle. For the nonce she could remember not one of her substantial reasons for doing so.

Paolina withdrew the pins from Ruth's hat, removed it from her hair and put it away.

“You have crushed your pretty hat, Signorina,” she said, reproachfully. Then, very much in the tone a mother would use to distract a child:

“You did not see how pale the Signor Pontycroft looked when he said good-bye,” she added, “and Maria told me the Signora had not slept the whole night, but kept going constantly to your door and listening to know whether you were asleep. They love you very much. It must be good to be loved so much,” the girl continued wistfully. “That must comfort you. And you will soon come back to them, to Italy, when you have seen your Signor uncle and your American home--for I am very sure they cannot live without you.”

“Oh, Paolina, I am so unhappy,” Ruth said, simply. “But leave me,” she smiled to the girl through her tears, “I will call you when I feel better.”

Paolina turned to go, then came back, lifted Ruth's hand, kissed it. “I hope you will pardon me, Signorina,” she added shyly, “_Scusi_, if I say, we must always smile, it pleases God better.”

And Paolina left the room.

For a long while, Ruth, quite still, battled with her feelings. A fresh passion of grief overtook her.... When at last it had spent itself, she drew her Rosary, which she carried in the gold bag in her hand, from its sheath. Slowly, the sweetness of the five decades passed into her spirit, she felt comforted. Peace filled her heart. There was only, now and then, the ache, where before there had been uncontrollable despair. She stood up, bathed her face, rang for Paolina, and began removing the tortoise-shell pins from her hair.

“Paolina,” she cried, as the maid entered the room. “Paolina,” she twisted her hair again into its thick coil, “we are going to enjoy ourselves now! No more tears, no more regrets. You are quite right. We must smile to the good God if we wish Him to smile on us! Make haste and give me a short skirt and a warm coat, and my cap and veil. I long to get out and breathe the air and fill my eyes with a sight of the shores of Italy.”

At dinner and during the rest of the evening, as they steamed down the coast towards Naples, Ruth was an irresistible _precis_ of smiles and vivacity. The Bolingbrokes were captivated.

“Richard,” the young Mrs. Bolingbroke told her lord when they were alone together, “that Miss Adgate is a most charmin' girl. What was that nonsense Mrs. Wilberton retailed about her runnin' away from Henry Pontycroft whom she's hopelessly in love with? She is in love with no man! You can't deceive me!” Mrs. Bolingbroke cried gaily. “It's easy to see from the fun she's positively bubblin' over with that her heart isn't weighted by any hopeless passion. She's never been in America before she says, and it's the great adventure of her life.... She's goin' to visit an old uncle, whom she's never seen but adores. Her childlike enjoyment of doin' it quite alone (she has her maid with her) and her eagerness about it, is quite fascinatin'. Although she is so rich, she's evidently seen very little of the world,” said Mrs. Bolingbroke, who happened to be a year Ruth's junior, but had the feeling of knowing the world thoroughly from within and from without.

“Yes,” her husband answered guardedly; he remembered that a First Secretary must show diplomatic reticence in his judgments, even to his wife. “Yes, Miss Adgate does seem rather a decent sort. I dare say the story is all a fabrication. She does seem a nice sort of unsophisticated young creature and I dare say the story's all a fabrication. Just the pretty charitable way people have of talking. I can see no objection to your enjoying as much of her society as you like, Isabel.”

Thus it happened that safe in her husband's blessing upon the friendship, Mrs. Bolingbroke, all unsuspected by Ruth, became her champion.

PART FIFTH

I

|AN Indian summer day, idle and tender, lay over hills and woods, meadows, river. The quaint little Old Town of Oldbridge, set among apple orchards and gardens and avenues of elms, received this last Benediction of Nature with an agreeable _ouf!_ of respite from imminent grim winter approaches.

It is difficult to account, by any utilitarian motive on the part of our “brown and green old Mother Earth,” for her November caprice of a New England Indian summer, though I make no doubt the scientists will have some prosaic reason to give which we are asked to take upon faith. But since fruit, in New England, is garnered in September, and the toughest plants are burned to a crimson glory by October frosts, no ripened fruit or renewal of leaves defend the vagary. And so--will-he nill-he, we praise Heaven which made our “bounteous mother” feminine forsooth; we gratefully credit the enchanted fortnight to her bountiful illogical womanhood.

The Old Town of Oldbridge, then, basking under the Indian summer's morning blandishment while it sipped its mocha and partook of grape-fruit towards eight of the clock, pushed an agreeable _ouf!_--awake to agreeable titillations of excitement. General Adgate's niece, lovely and rich, admirable combination--Miss Adgate (Ruth Adgate, they already called her, didn't she belong to them?) had arrived. The event, discreetly mentioned in the Oldbridge _Morning Herald_, stared them in the face. Some boasted a glimpse of her, the day before, seated in the brougham beside her uncle; a pretty girl with reddish brown hair. Others had seen of her nothing but her outward manifestations on the luggage cart--two big brass-bound cork trunks, a cabin trunk, precisely similar, a square hat-box, a dressing case and a dark-eyed Italian maid.

The man of all work, Jo, brought this luggage into the house, with the gardener's assistance, and up to Ruth's rooms. Now he wiped the perspiration from his face. Arms akimbo, brows warped in puzzled frown, he glared at the encumbrances.

“Well, I be durned!” he burst forth. “Glad I ain't got any of them things to carry round when I go a travelling. One carpet bag's big enough for me, when I visit my folks, to Falls Junction.”

“Lucky you're glad,” Martha, the efficient, the tart, the very tart housemaiden snapped, and put him instantly in his place. “Not likely soon, we'll catch you towering it with a valet and trunks.”

II

As to the unconscious subject of comment and curiosity, Miss Ruth Adgate,--Miss Adgate was ecstatic. Her heart in its rapture wanted to, did, engulf the house, and the land and the hill, and the inmates of the Old Adgate place, and the entire town of Oldbridge. Something new, something strange had indeed happened for her joy had begun to bubble and ferment from the moment her foot passed the threshold of the house. No--from the hour the train, on its sideline to Oldbridge, had begun to move beside the river, bearing her for thirty minutes from one little way-station to another.

The sentiment of an autumnal New England landscape spread beneath clean thoughtless blue skies,--vistas of grey rocks and sedges by the river at the one hand,--where the dark green savins, reminding her of cypresses in Italy, sprang through the grey clefts;--and across the river, hills, low, wooded, interspersed with green and brown and orange pastures, through which cropped the same venerable grey New England rock,--harmonious and austere,--this perspective, enchanting in its tonic beauty, was grievously, alas! debased and disfigured.

Ignoble little wooden packing cases liberally dotted by the way screamed with the crudest colours, 'the crudest rainbow scale disgorges on the palate.' Gigantic hoardings, flaunting ridiculous local remedies and foods for every prevalent disease or dyspeptic stomach insolently stared at one;--the very backs and sides of barns and packing cases were decorated with their insignia!

“They need a Thames Conservancy, a County Council, something,” Ruth protested to her outraged sense of beauty, “to save this splendid river, control such unpuritanical abandonments to colour and commerce.”

Miss Adgate, you perceive, was naïvely confident--oh, serene British confidence! that taste governs the world, that the world rays and rules so soon as the world discovers it is acting in bad taste.

But these blemishes were, after all, insignificant affairs--details incidental to an untutored modern public. What Miss Adgate's inward vision vividly perceived through the windows of the shabby long car with its soiled velvet cushions, and air of unworldliness,--which pleased her,--its smell of stale apples and anthracite coal smoke which didn't please her,--was the _land_. The land without a flaw of commerce! Hidden lives that took her blood back three hundred years, led her imagination.

Undeniably, the effect of this country was not one of abundance.... It was not varied and enhanced by a thousand fair human touches; the neglected land was uncouthly rough.... Nor was it in the least suggestive of the poetry, art, emotion,--the loves, the hates--of nineteen hundred vanished sumptuous years. (One might have likened it rather to the starved and simple beggar-maid waiting for the King.) But it was hers, it was _hers!_... She was _of it!_... Miss Adgate was deliciously cognisant that this fact filled her heart to overflowing with sweet content.

“This land saw my forbears!... This land for three hundred years gave them all they asked of life.... It opened its heart to them, therefore I love it, therefore I love it!” she repeated softly to herself. “And if this elation is patriotism--the mere patriotism dubbed Reflex Egotism by the cynics,--well--poor dears! What dear poor dears the cynics be!”

Miss Ruth Adgate gave a pleased sigh and turned her eyes again upon the view. They fell upon a bit of grey rock, a group of savins and scarlet barberry bushes loitering beside a piece of water... a composition Diaz would have thankfully imprinted, for reproduction, on his retina. The little pool, from brink to brink, coyly reflected these and the clear blue sky, and in the foreground twenty feet of hoarding bore the legend: “Try Grandpa Luther's Syrup of Winter-green for your Baby's Tantrums.”

Ruth fell back with rather a rueful laugh.

III

“Next station?--O--Oldbridge,” sang out the cherubic faced conductor and Ruth's heart began to palpitate.

“I _will_ smile,” she said, “I won't be absurd.” And she fixed her gaze resolutely on the landscape, arrested, at once, by some subtle change in it.

Perceptibly, the meadows displayed a softer, more velvety grass; the trees grew, more finely luxuriant, the cliffs rose boldly. A hint of human intention, the touch of elegance, a something thoroughbred, spoke aloud.... The few last miles through which Miss Adgate jolted gave symptoms of civilisation.

“O--O--ldbridge!”

The guard intoned it nasally, with complete resignation,--a twenty years' fatiguing habit; and an intimation too, in his voice, that the goal of human travel had been reached. The train slackened.... One saw, spanning the river, a black bridge latticing the green and the blue; one caught glimpses of a town, white houses scattered up the slopes of wooded hills.

Several trim white yachts rested on the water; small sailboats glided, hither and yon, and little skiffs and slim rowboats floated by to a leisurely motion, manned by a single young oarsman, a girl seated hatless, in the bow. The gay scene under the yellow sunlight, the rippling, the smiling river, the warm waning afternoon--alive, sparkling, seemed an invitation to her full of promise.

“Come, Paolina,” said Ruth, with inward trepidation. “Come, Paolina.”

Miss Adgate summoned her courage as the train stopped with a jerk.

She passed--heroic effort--through the car to the platform, while Paolina took the dressing-case and followed, moved like her mistress and as tremulous.

Ruth scanned the faces in the friendly brick station. The white head, the features, familiar from photograph presentment, were--not there! But a hand, extended at the last step to help her descend, caused her to turn. Her arms in an instant had flung themselves impulsively about a figure which stood at her side.

“Uncle!” cried Ruth. Her heart ceased to pound, her nervousness gave way to an immense inward satisfaction. Tears sprang to her eyes--but, what did it matter? My heroine would be less charming were she less impressionable and one does not gather upon every bush, an uncle _in loco parentis_.

“Well, well, my dear!--we've got you here at last, Ruth,” said the tall, thin, old man. He looked down at her fondly, a good face full of kindly scrutiny.

“You've brought belongings of sorts?” General Adgate enquired as he conducted Ruth towards the carriage whilst the young girl felt half a dozen pairs of curious eyes fixed upon her.

“If that's your maid tell her there's a seat for her in the luggage cart near Jobias,” said General Adgate. He handed his niece into the brougham, Paolina received her instructions, they drove off.

IV

And for a moment they sped in silence, up a side street, into an open square of shops and brick buildings, for all the world like the High Street of any English Provincial town.

“But how English it looks!” Ruth exclaimed.

“Does it? Why not?” said General Adgate. “However,” he added, “we pride ourselves, further on, that we're distinctively American.”

The brick buildings surely enough dissolved into avenues set with superb elms. Big comfortable houses encircled by verandas,--many adorned with those fluted Corinthian columns, mark in Oldbridge of the early nineteenth century,--all snugly set back among flower gardens and lawns, emanated peace, prosperity, good will.

“This place must be Arcady in summer.... How charming it is,” Ruth cried, delighted. “These gardens in flower, these trees in leaf----”

“It's not so bad,” said General Adgate, dryly. “Longfellow christened it the Rose of New England.”

“But------,” he added, “we call this the City of Oldbridge, a modern matter. You, Ruth, belong to the Court End of the town--you are of what we call the Old Town.”

Vastly amused at the distinction, a Yankee Faubourg Saint Germain, Ruth plied him with questions. In five minutes the agreeable news that she,--the last of the house of Adgate in America, Ruth Adgate verily the salt of the earth, tracing a clean English ancestry back to the crusades, to mistier periods beyond, here held her Yankee acres in grant first from an English Sovereign, and, without a drop of blood-shed from Indian Sachems,--gave to her humourous sense of proportion somewhat to smile over.

On they went,--under endless prospects of arching elm trees, whose branches threw oblique attenuated shadows among the rays of the descending sun. A few soft clouds at the horizon were tinted rosy and red. Then the very blue, blue sky, suffused with violet and rose, suddenly flared. Far and wide, from earth to zenith, far and wide the sky burst into a glorious scarlet conflagration.

The city lay behind, meadows stretched broadly at either side, and to the right a pretty line of hill and wood etched itself against the blushing clouds.

“The beginning of your acres, my dear,” said the old man, bowing his head. “There they lie, untouched, just as James the First ceded them to your forefathers, just as the Indian Sachems of the Mohegan Tribe confirming the gift, withdrew from 'em. The bit of wood there is known to this day as the Wigwam and the last Indian hut in this State disappeared when it was destroyed by fire a hundred years ago.”

They had passed a road that wandered into the woodland, they were rolling smartly by stone walls that shut in a goodly reach of close-cut lawn all seamed and scarred by grey jutments of rock, which rising, mounting, reached a hill through terraced gardens trimly laid and skirting the summit. The carriage took a sharp sweep upward into a gravelled drive, rolled on a few paces, stopped abruptly before a brown, rambling house,--Miss Adgate had reached the end of her journey.

“Welcome home,” said General Adgate, as he helped Ruth to alight. He bent down, kissed her, and led her up the steps into the house.

V

It was morning. It was nine of the clock. Miss Adgate walked, alone, through a path that penetrated to the Wigwam. Almost hidden by a thicket of sweet fern, juniper, barberry and briar which grew at either side, which clung too affectionately to her skirts and from which she had difficulty in disengaging herself, the path, she thought, might have led her to the Palace of The Sleeping Beauty.

It was morning, as I have said, and it was the morning of her first day, and early abroad, Miss Adgate strolled in a pleasant sort of reverie,--thinking of nothing, perhaps, or thinking of a number of things. The Indian summer sunshine filtered upon her through half-bare branches not quite denuded of their yellow and purple and scarlet leafage; and every now and then a leaf came fluttering down in the light breeze. A squirrel, now and then, darted out along a branch, paused--and like an Italian lizard, all a-gleam and a-whisk, gleamed, whisked, and disappeared. But Ruth knew two little black beadlike eyes still watched her, as she went, from behind the lattice-screen of twigs.

Every now and then she passed a formidable, a monumental boulder; moss-grown; covered with grey lichen; dropped there by some glacier, æons since, unless Heaven, it occurred to her, had placed it where it stood, and why not? for picturesque intent?... Every now and then a tardy bluejay flitted by, lighted upon a branch and sent forth his imperious _cha, cha, cha!_... Or a woodpecker, in the distance, made his tapping noise as he sounded the trees for his meal. A dry twig would break, suddenly,--come tumbling head foremost down, down through a rustle of leaves, and all these sounds struck upon Miss Adgate's ears in her reverie, gave her exquisite pleasure. She enjoyed the romance and the solitude of this wild wood; she delighted in the knowledge that she was walking safely through her own preserves; and _treve de compliments_, her uncle had left her upon a brief good-bye after an early breakfast. Ruth burned to discover alone, he knew, her domain--General Adgate had divined it without a hint.

“You'll want to take a walk this morning through your woods, Ruth,” said he. “Cross the hill,--you'll find a road to the right leading by a brook,--follow the road,--it takes you over the brook by a bridge and soon becomes a path. No one will molest you, it's yours.”

“What, the brook as well?” queried she, feeling, somehow, like a very little girl in his presence.

“Yes, and the brook as well. You can't get away from your preserves,--they stretch on for miles.”

So it was that Miss Adgate, abroad at nine o'clock, happened to be off for a matutinal stroll through paths wet and dewy, glad of her freedom, glad to be alone in a new world, surrender herself to the romance of a new train of thought.

She came, presently, to a clearing in the wood. The path ended, abruptly, at a flat bed of rock which descended for some hundred feet to another opening in the wood. There were bayberry and barberry and fern along the way, slashed scarlet by the frosts; there were fifty plants she promised to herself to learn the names of, which gave forth strong, sweet scents in the hot sun. Ruth sat down. A swish, through the dry leaves, a stir of the brown grass, told of the frightened escape of some little living thing, and set her heart to palpitating unaccountably with love for it.

Her mood had become a trifle exalted, her perceptions quickened by her promenade. Each insect, bird, bush she came upon began to assume a personality; claimed the privilege to live upon her land. She was the suzerain of their little lives; she could have held a court of justice; she could have dispensed favours, played their games, ruled them, thrown herself into their griefs and joys, with heart and soul. Seated here, in the warm sun, on the warm stone checked with patches of green and brown club-moss, she inhaled the crisp fragrance of the bushes under the sun's kisses; she looked afar, on to the trees below and over their heads at the vivid sky, and upon faraway violet hills, and upon green and orange, brown and guileless meadows. The world seemed good and wonderful, and she felt exceedingly content.

“The Ruth Adgate who spent twenty years of her life in Europe is no more,” she thought, lightly. “The young person who has tasted most of the sweets of European civilisation, walked in marble halls, refused a Duke, run away from the outrage offered her dignity by the offer of a morganatic marriage with a Crown Prince,--the lovesick girl who wandered through the moonlight at the Lido, floated upon the silent lagoons of Venice, discoursed with wits in lovely gardens in Florence, and herself the cause of wit in others, hung upon their discourse--that was quite another person! That was but an early incarnation, never the real Miss Adgate. _This_ is the real Miss Adgate! In spite of every influence to the contrary,--the product of her native land.”

Lucilla, Pontycroft--Pontycroft, Lucilla! How far away they seemed.... Their names stirred her heart as she pronounced them. But even so--was not this best? The present Miss Adgate in a short skirt, a blue, soft felt hat, tip-tilted over her eyes, a stick in her hand, her thoughts for all society; Miss Adgate with this hardy New England nature for background,--Ruth Adgate taking a solitary walk upon her own land, with the feeling that good will and satisfaction smiled at her because of her presence there, was not this the Real person who had found her true niche in the world?