Chapter 13

"You must be hungry," he said simply, and Caroline ate greedily. After he had brought her a tin cup of the spring water, he selected a brown pipe from a half dozen on the shelf and began filling it from a leather pouch that hung on the tree.

"Now let's hear all about it," he said easily.

"I am running away," said Caroline abruptly. At that moment it really seemed that she had planned her flight from the hour that left her, tear-stained and disgraced, in her little bed.

"They didn't treat you well?" he suggested, picking out a red ember from the coals on the point of a knife and applying it to the pipe.

"I'm not to wear my knickers any more," Caroline said, with a gulp, "and my bathing suit has to have a skirt. I've got to stop p-playing with the b-boys--so much, that is," she added, honestly.

The man turned his head slightly.

"That seems hard," he said; "what's the reason?"

"I'm 'most twelve," said Caroline; "you have to be a young lady, then."

"I see," the man said. He looked at her thoughtfully. "I suppose you _would_ look larger in more clothes," he added.

"That's it," she assured him, "I do. That's just it."

"And so you expect to avoid all this by running away?" he asked, settling into his own stump seat. "I am afraid you can't do it."

Caroline set her teeth. He regarded her quizzically.

"See here," he went on, "I wish you'd take my advice in this matter."

They confronted each other in the starlight, a strange pair before the dying fire. The moon had gone, and the stars, though bright, seemed less solid and less certainly gold than before. A cool breeze swept through the wood and Caroline shivered in her torn nightdress. The man stepped into the tent and returned with a long army cloak. This he wrapped round her and resumed his seat, with Rufus on his knee.

"My name," he said, "is Peter. Everybody calls me that--just Peter. I don't know exactly why it is, but a lot of people--all over--have got into the way of taking my advice. Perhaps because I've knocked about all over the world more or less, and haven't got any wife or children or brothers and sisters of my own to advise, so I take it out on everybody else. Perhaps because I try to put myself in the other fellow's place before I advise him. Perhaps because I've had a little trouble of my own, here and there, and haven't forgotten it. Anyhow, I get used to talking things over."

A gentle stirring seemed to pass through the woods: the birds spoke softly back and forth, a squirrel chattered. Again that cool wind swept over the trees.

"Now, take it this week," the man went on, puffing steadily; "you wouldn't believe the people just about here who've asked for my advice. I usually camp up here for a week or so in the summer--the people who own the property like to have me here--and the first day I unpacked, up comes a nice girl--I used to make birch whistles for her mother--to tell me all about her young man. She brought me that spray of honeysuckle over the pipes--grows over the front gate. She wants to marry him before her father gets to like him, but she hates to run away. 'Would you advise me to, Peter?' she says. And I advised her to wait.

"Then there's my friend the blacksmith. He lives in a queer little house with dormer windows under a hill, just off the county road. He's got a new baby, and he was afraid it wouldn't pull through. He knew I'd seen a lot of babies--black and red and yellow--and _he_ wanted my advice. 'Peter, what'll I do?' he says, 'what'll I do?'

"'Why, just wait, Harvey. He'll live. Just wait,' I told him."

Caroline listened with interest. He might have been talking to his equal in years, from his tone.

"Then, oddly enough," he continued, "here's my old friend in the big house up yonder--and she _is_ old--and what do you think she's worried about? She's afraid she _won't_ die! 'Oh, Peter,' she says to me--she's fond of me because I'm the same age as a little boy of hers that died--'it seems to me that I can't wait, Peter! What shall I do?' she says. And I tell _her_ to wait. 'Dear old friend,' said I to her last night, 'it will come. It's bound to come. Just be patient.'"

He paused and knocked his pipe empty.

"Now, as to your case," he said, "I know how you feel. I'm sorry for you--by the Lord, I'm sorry for you! But what's the use of running away? You'll keep on growing up, you know. It's one of the things that doesn't stop. You can't beat the game by wearing knickers, you know. And then, there'd come a time when you'd want to quit, anyhow."

She shook her head.

"Really, you would," he assured her, persuasively. "They all do."

"That's what Uncle Joe says," she admitted, "and Aunt Edith. She changed her mind, she says--"

"Are you talking about Joe Holt?" Peter demanded.

"Yes--do you know him? He lives in a big white house with wistaria on the side," Caroline cried joyfully.

"I was a senior when he was a freshman," said Peter. "Then he's taken the Washburn house."

"Do you know Aunt Edith, too?" asked Caroline.

"Yes," said Peter, after a pause, "yes, I know Aunt Edith--or used to. But I didn't know she--they were up in this country. I haven't seen her--them for a good while. Does--does she sing yet?"

"Oh, yes, but not on the stage any more, you know," Caroline explained.

"I see. Does she sing, I wonder, a song about--Oh, something about 'my heart'?"

"'My heart's own heart,' you mean," Caroline said importantly; "yes, indeed. It's her encore song."

"I see," said Peter again.

He looked into the fire, and there was a long silence. After a while he shook his shoulders like a water-dog.

"Now, Caroline," he said briskly, "here's the way of this business. You can't wear knickers until you're one of the boys, and you can't be one of the boys until you wear knickers. Do you see? So you don't get anywhere."

Caroline looked puzzled. She was suddenly overcome with sleep, and the old familiar names and ways tasted of home and comfort to her soul.

"You're too nice to be a boy, Caroline," said Peter, leaning over her and brushing her azalea-crowned hair tenderly with his lips. "If you persist in this plan of running away to be a boy, some boy, growing up anxiously, somewhere, will never forgive you! Take my advice, and wait--will you? Say 'Yes, Peter.'"

"Yes, Peter," Caroline murmured, drowsily.

"Good girl! Then I'll take you home with my little donkey. I don't believe they've missed you yet. You've come four miles, though, you little gypsy!"

He disappeared behind the trees, and Caroline nodded. Later she woke sufficiently to find herself and Rufus on the blue blanket on the bottom of a little donkey cart; Peter stood by the gentle, long-eared head.

"Thank you, Peter," she murmured, half asleep, "and you'll see Aunt Edith, won't you?"

"I don't believe so," he said, very low. "Not yet. Tell her Peter brought you back. Just Peter. But he can't come yet. Get up, Jenny!"

They wound out by an old wood road. A cool spiciness flowed though the green aisles, and as the tiny donkey struck into a dog trot, the man striding easily at her head, a far-away cock crowed shrilly and the dawn gleamed white.

IX

THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

"Caroline!" Henry D. Thoreau cocked one brindled ear cannily and rapped sharply with his tail on the piazza floor, but there was no other answer to the call. "Caroline!" The insistent voice rang louder; it was a very determined voice. A sleepy Angora cat scowled reprovingly at its violence; a gray and pink parrot mimicked its hortatory note, but after that the midsummer silence settled down again. Only the bees droned heavily among the heavy August roses.

"Don't nag her, dear; it doesn't do any good," a sleepy contralto, rich as creamy chocolate, crooned out of a scarlet-fringed hammock.

"That's all very well for you, Edith, you don't have the responsibility of her. Her father wants her to read a little history every day, and this is the best time--it's too hot for anything else."

"Rather hot for history, dear?"

"It's not too hot for the Moonstone, I notice! She's been at that since breakfast, steadily. Not a word for any one."

"'Moonstone' sounds cool, anyhow," drawled the contralto appeasingly.

"Oh, Edith! You're as bad as the child herself!"

"She's fourteen, dear."

"Fourteen! What is that?"

"Anything but a child, when it's you, Sis. You talk to her as if she were ten."

"You'd think she was, if you saw her riding that donkey--a great girl like her!"

"There it is, dear! One moment she's a baby, the next she's a great girl! It's hard on her, Sis."

"But, Edith--that donkey!"

"Poor Rose-Marie! I rode him myself--bareback and standing up!--when I was fifteen--at a circus. Do you remember?"

The voice chuckled unwillingly. "You always were a tomboy, Deedee! Do you remember Joe's bull fight?"

"And the lemonade stand!" Contralto cried, with a rich swoop of laughter. Their voices took up a happy canon of gold memories; there were no more cries for Caroline.

She was not a hundred yards away from the sister aunts, sheltering under a heavy arbor vitæ, flat on her stomach, her nose glued to the reprehensible Moonstone: that she had heard the calls and resented them the scowl between her eyebrows exhibited. Behind her, patiently at graze, a small, mouse-colored donkey stood, shifting a pair of quaint panniers from side to side and wagging his scarlet ear tassels thoughtfully.

The chapter ended, Caroline rose, peered across to the piazza, nodded to herself at the flow of voices and shrugged her shoulders.

"Good old Aunt Deedee!" she muttered, "she choked her off! Now, for heaven's sake, don't bray, Rose-Marie, and perhaps we can get away. I wouldn't dare get over to the house for a luncheon; we'll have to get along with sweet-boughs."

She slipped the book into one pannier, a cushion into the other and threw a worn steamer rug over the little beast's back; Caroline was a luxurious lounger and rarely traveled without her sumpter mule and his impedimenta. She led him with practiced quiet away from the house and paused under the gnarled old sweet-bough tree: the greenish-yellow, almost translucent globes dotted the lush, warm grass, their languorous sweet filled the air. Selecting a dozen thoughtfully, she added them to the donkey's load, and they went on at a foot pace, through the slowly reddening Baldwins and seek-no-furthers, the tiny lady-apples and the king-of-Tompkins-counties, through the belt of dead, warped fruit trees, blighted and gray--"like those Doré pictures," she murmured to Rose-Marie--down three, crumbling brick steps, where the little fellow picked his way as daintily as a careful lady, and across the dusty road into a pasture trail that led to a wood stretch, sparse at first, thicker as one plunged in deeper. The sun filtered through in delicious diamonds; here and there a resinous pine, steeped in heat, threw out a cloud of balmy odor; a chipmunk scuttered across their path, clicking nervously, only to squat on his haunches and stare beadily at Rose-Marie, taut with quivering curiosity. Caroline scowled at him.

"Rise of the Dutch Republic!" she muttered angrily. "I think not!"

The chipmunk winked sympathetically.

"Your father says it's as interesting as any novel" (with startling mimicry of the piazza voice). "I notice _they_ don't read it!"

The chipmunk's place was empty; only a slight stir among the leaves marked his path.

Caroline's eyes widened, grew dreamy. She leaned her sharp elbows on Rose-Marie's hairy back and threw her weight on him thoughtfully: he checked and stood like a table.

"Do you suppose there really are regular roads through the trees, like the monkeys took Mowgli on?" she queried.

Rose-Marie waved his long, hairy ears meditatively, but said nothing.

"I don't mean in any fairy way," she explained hastily, "but just scientifically. It might be. Corners and turns and short-cuts--why not? they all know them. He may be running home by a back way, now, to call his children to look at Rose-Marie; it's as good as a whole circus parade to them, I suppose. And they talk to each other...."

Held in a muse, she leaned against the donkey; the moments slipped by. She lost all count of time. Her eyes stared emptily at some sunny flicker, some dappled pattern of leaf work; her ears were filled with the forest drone, the mysterious murmur made up of so many nameless instruments that only the Great Conductor can classify and number them. Time ceased to be.

At length she woke with a start, shook herself coltishly, and they pushed on. The wood grew thicker; now and then Rose-Marie had to force his way along the tiny trail; his red tassels caught on the twigs.

"I'll tell you what," Caroline began, suddenly, "I'm going to try that wood track to-day and see where it goes, to the very end. It must go somewhere. Where do they haul the wood from, if there isn't some place at the end? Come on, Rose-Marie!"

At a point where the trail forked she led the donkey along the wider and less interesting way. It was ridged and rutty, and Rose-Marie sniffed disgustedly as he slipped among the gnarled roots; the apples bumped and slid in the pannier. After a while Caroline stopped under a tree, ate three of the apples, gave the donkey two, and resting in an artfully constructed nest of rug and pillow, dipped refreshingly into the Moonstone.

"That's a kind of luncheon," she remarked philosophically, "and now we'll start again. I'll go to the end of this, if it takes all day!"

They settled down to a dogged pace and after an hour, during which the wood grew thinner by imperceptible degrees, found themselves on a relatively easy track that forked suddenly into a genuine country road, stretching far to left and right of them. It was a new country to Caroline; she found no landmarks whatever. The road glared with heat, the dust was powdery, the shade nowhere, once they had cleared the wood. She sighed with fatigue and emptiness; it seemed a long pull, and the harbor far from worth the voyage, when all was said and done.

"What _did_ we want to get to this nasty hot road for, Rose-Marie?" she cried pettishly, shifting from one long leg to the other, shrugging a nervous, bony shoulder. "Oh, what's the sense of anything, anyway?"

Rose-Marie turned a patient, clear brown eye toward her and shook his head vaguely. Gnats buzzed about his flexible ears, and with a swishing fanning motion he displaced them.

"If my back aches," she warned him callously, "you'll have to take me home, you know! Tired or not. It feels as if it might, any minute. I never used to get tired, this way."

A half mile along the road, set off to the left, among cool trees and behind a great well sweep, she perceived suddenly a white farm house. It stood alone, neighborless and well up on a drained, southerly slope; smoke rose languidly from one of its chimneys.

"Perhaps they'll give us some milk, Rose-Marie," said Caroline, "and farms usually have cookies. If there are any children there, you can give 'em rides to pay for it!"

Rose-Marie nodded and they went on with some spirit. As they turned into the deep front yard Caroline almost wept with comfort and a pathetic sense of the wayworn wanderer on the edge of home and rest, so the place breathed of these. Clear and white with the faded whiteness of old New England white shingles, it drowsed under its elms; a fire of nasturtiums smoldered along the broken, flagged path that led to it; phlox and "Bouncing Bets" crowded up among the once formal bed of larkspur on each side the sagging flagstone steps, beneath the simple entrance porch. Old-fashioned green paper shades hung evenly half way down the clean windows; the door stood hospitably ajar.

"Just wait there, Rose-Marie, till I find out about things," said Caroline, tapping lightly on the door. The house was perfectly silent. She tapped again, and it seemed that something heavy moved across the floor in a farther room, but there was no answer. Pushing the door open gently, she stepped in and stood surprised, for she found herself not in the stiff, unused country "parlor" she had expected, but a neat bedroom. A quaint four-poster with a fluted valance, a polished mahogany chest of drawers, a stand by the bed with a Bible worn to a soft gray and a night lamp on it, some faded photographs tacked to the white walls--this was an odd reception room. She hesitated, and again the faint rumbling sound pointed to some person stirring and she went into the next room.

Here was a clean, kindly kitchen of the best; a swept floor, a freshly blackened cooking stove, a row of bright tins. It was carpeted with faded oilcloth, but rag rugs, washed dim and soft-toned, lay here and there, and the room was so large that the spread table, standing in an ell, made only a pleasant episode in it, a certainty of restoring food at needful times.

It was evidently a sitting room as well, in the primitive, clear fashion that groups all domestic life about the central fire that feeds it; a stand with books, a sewing basket, oil lamps for evening reading, all not too far from brick-shaped pans where unmistakable bread rose under a clean, folded, red cloth. The whole place seemed waiting, quietly, hospitably waiting, for just such an empty, discouraged pilgrim as Caroline.

She sank gratefully into a high-backed arm-chair, stuffed to just the hollow of her tired back, covered with a clean, homely patchwork, and drew out the faithful Moonstone from under her elbow.

"Someone'll come soon," she assured herself, and slipped into the story as a hot swimmer slips off his sunny rock into the waiting blue. Another world, a delicious, smooth element--Romance itself--received her, and of hunger and heat, thirst and the fatigue of the road, she knew no more than the blessed dead themselves....

A sharp tap at the farther door disturbed her, and instinctively she called, "Come in!"

A swift, swishing step brushed across the bedroom and a slender, angry-eyed young woman poised like a gull before her.

"Can I get something to eat here?"

Her voice was at once imperious, irritated, unsure of itself. It could not be that the owner of this voice, dressed with that insolent simplicity that need not consider the costly patience of the work-women, ringed like a dowager with great audacious squares of ruby and white diamond, booted and hatted as one who wears and throws away, with a bag of golden mesh on her wrist to pay the price of any whim--it could not be that she doubted what answer she should receive. And yet she did--did, and had before this: so much was evident at first sight. She was a curious gypsyish type, for all her _Rue de la Paix_ curvings and slim, inevitable folds and pleats; a full, drooping mouth in a slender dark face, great brown eyes and heavy waves of black hair. She looked discontented and ready to make some one suffer for it.

"Well--can I?" she repeated, as Caroline stared. "I'm ready to pay, of course."

"I don't know--I don't live here," said Caroline shortly. She felt untidy and badly dressed beside this graceful thing standing in a faint cloud of subtle perfume of her own; her sleeves were too short and her heavy shoes knobby and worn. She wanted furiously to smell sweet like that; and the golden bag--oh, to feel it, powerful and careless, on her wrist!

"Can you find out?" said the girl, eyeing the room attentively; "my car broke down--the man left it in the road and went to Ogdenville for gasoline. I've got to rest somewhere."

"I don't know anything about it," Caroline said coldly. "I'm waiting for someone to come, myself. There's nobody here. I don't live here at all."

With that, and because she was embarrassed and cross and hungry, she opened her book ostentatiously and affected to read busily. The girl frowned angrily a moment, then gave a foreign little shrug of her shoulder and settled herself in a low rocking chair near the bread, her hands loose in her lap. The old clock ticked reprovingly through the hot and conscious silence of the room, but there was no other sound. Caroline could not have lifted her eyes to save her life, and the older girl's lips curled scornfully: her eyelids were sullen.

After a few moments of this intolerable stillness the same low rumbling sound was heard again, this time moving nearer. Something was advancing to the kitchen from a farther room, and as they looked instinctively at the door it pushed open slowly and a sort of foot rest upon wheels appeared; two large wheels followed, and a woman pushed her chair into the kitchen. She was a large, good-looking woman, middle-aged, and not weak, evidently, for she managed her chair easily with one hand; the other held a slice of pink ham on a white platter in her lap. Her face, under a placid parting of grayish fair hair, was rather high colored than of an invalid pallor, her chest broad and deep, her blue eyes at once kind and keen. She wore a neat dress of dark-blue print with a prim, old-fashioned linen collar and a blue bow, a white apron around her plump waist almost covered the patchwork quilt that wrapped her from the hips down: a shell comb showed slightly above her crisp hair. As she faced her two angry guests a smile of unmistakable sincerity and delight greeted them.

"Well, of all things!" she cried eagerly; "how long, 'you been here?"

Caroline waited sulkily for her social superior; the girl was undoubtedly a "young lady." Her errand was soon explained, her question asked.

"Something to eat?" echoed their delighted hostess. "Well, I should think so! I'm just getting my dinner. Of course I'm all alone, this time o' day, but I always say if I'm good enough to cook it well, I'm good enough to eat it comfortable, and I sit down to table just's if the family was all here. There's some that believe in a bite and a bit, when the men folks are out, but I never did. And then--" she blushed shyly like a girl--"I always want to feel ready in case anyone should come. Just in case. He says it's foolishness, but look at you two, now! How'd I feel if I wasn't prepared! And once--in April, 'twas--a sewing-machine man came. I had ham then, too."

She beamed on them, frankly overjoyed in their company, and in the mellow warmth of that honest pleasure the fog and anger in the room rolled back like mist under a noon sun, and Caroline unbent, named herself, and mentioned her donkey and their woodland journey.

"You don't say!"

Quick as a flash their hostess was across the room and peering through the window.

"Well, of all the funny little fellows! I never saw one before, that I remember. Aren't those red tossels neat, though! I s'pose he's tame?"

Caroline put him through his paces, as he came like a dog at her call, and she of the wheel chair applauded like a child at a Punch and Judy.

"We saw so many of those in Italy," said the older girl. "I rode one in the Alps."

The woman's face flushed a deep, quick red; she gripped the arms of her chair and stared at the nervous little jeweled creature before her as if she were a vision of the night.

"Have you been to Italy?" she cried eagerly, "not really!"

"Me? Oh, yes, I've been all over Europe," said the girl indifferently. "Why? Do you like it?"

Now it was the woman who echoed, "Me?"

She flashed a whimsical look at Caroline; instinct taught her that they were two to one, here.

"Why, dear, I've never been out of Lockwood's Corners in my life!"

Simple, rude incredulity pushed out the girl's lip.

"Nonsense!" she said brusquely, "that's ridiculous!"