At last the time came when I was permitted to take my wife—lovely as a Madonna—out into the sunshine, and, as she sat holding Mary Isabel in her arms, she gathered to herself an ecstasy of relief, a joy of life which atoned, in part, for the inescapable sufferings of maternity.At last the time came when I was permitted to take my wife—lovely as a Madonna—out into the sunshine, and, as she sat holding Mary Isabel in her arms, she gathered to herself an ecstasy of relief, a joy of life which atoned, in part, for the inescapable sufferings of maternity.
At last the time came when I was permitted to take my wife—lovely as a Madonna—out into the sunshine, and, as she sat holding Mary Isabel in her arms, she gathered to herself an ecstasy of relief, a joy of life which atoned, in part, for the inescapable sufferings of maternity.
He saved both mother and child, and when the nurse laid in my arms a little babe, who looked up at me with grave, accusing blue eyes,—the eyes of her mother,—I wondered whether society had a right to put any woman to this cruel test—whether the race was worth maintaining at such a price.
Our loyal friend, Mary Easton (mother of five children), who was present to help us through our stern trial, assured me that maternity had its joys as well as its agonies, and after she had peered into the face of my small daughter she remarked to me with a delightful note of admiration, "Why, she is already aperson!"
So indeed she was. Her head, large and shapely and her eyes wide, dark and curiously reflective, were like her mother's. True, she hadn't much nose, but her hair was abundant and her fingers exquisite. She lay in my big paws with what seemed to me to be tranquil confidence, and though her legs were comically rudimentary, her glance manifested an unassailable dignity. My father insisted she resembled her grandmother.
******
At last came the blessed day when the nurse permitted me to wheel the convalescent out upon the porch. The morning was lovely, with just a hint of autumn in its coolness, and to Zulime it was heavenly sweet, for it seemed that she had emerged from a long dark night of agony and doubt.
As she sat with the babe in her lap looking over the familiar hills, she was more beautiful than she had ever been before. She was a being glorified.
Later in the day, as the sun was going down in a welter of gold and crimson, she came out again and in its splendor I chose to read the promise of a noble future for Mary Isabel. It gave me joy to know that she had taken up herlife beneath the same roof and almost in the same room in which Isabel Garland had laid her burden down.
Yes, the Homestead had a new claimant. In the midst of my father's decaying world a new and vigorous life had miraculously appeared. Beneath the moldering leaves of the leaning oaks a tender yet tenacious shoot was springing from the soil.
CHAPTER TWENTYMary Isabel's Chimney
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mary Isabel's Chimney
No one who reads the lives of writers attentively can fail of perceiving the periods of depression—almost of despair—into which we are all liable to fall—days when nothing that we have done seems worth while—moods of groping indecision during which we groan and most unworthily complain. I am no exception. For several months after the publication ofHesperI experienced a despairing emptiness, a sense of unworthiness, a feeling of weakness which I am certain made me a burden to my long-suffering wife.
"What shall I do now?" I asked myself.
From my standpoint as a novelist of The Great Northwest, there remained another subject of study, the red man—The Sioux and the Algonquin loomed large in the prairie landscape. They were, in fact, quite as significant in the history of the border as the pioneer himself, for they were his antagonists. Not content with using the Indian as an actor in stories likeThe Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, I had done something more direct and worthy through a manuscript which I calledThe Silent Eaters, a story in which I tried to put the Sitting Bull's case as one of his partisans might have depicted it. I had failed for lack of detailed knowledge, and the manuscript lay in my desk untouched.
It was in this period of doubt and disheartenment that I turned to my little daughter with gratitude and a deep senseof the mystery of her coming. The never-ending surprise of her presence filled me with delight. Like billions of other Daddies I forgot my worries as I looked into her tranquil eyes. To protect and educate her seemed at the moment my chiefest care.
During the mother's period of convalescence I acted—in my hours of leisure—as nurse-maid quite indifferent to the smiles of spectators, who made question of my method. I became an expert in holding the babe so that her spine should not be over-taxed, and I think she liked to feel the grip of my big fingers. That she appreciated the lullabies I sang to her I am certain, for even my Aunt Deborah was forced to admit that my control of my daughter's slumber period was remarkably efficient.
The coming of this child changed the universe for me. She brought into my life a new element, a new consideration. The insoluble mystery of sex, the heroism of maternity, the measureless wrongs of womankind and the selfish cruelty of man rose into my thinking with such power that I began to write of them, although they had held but academic interest hitherto. With that tiny woman in my arms I looked into the faces of my fellow men with a sudden realization that the world as it stands to-day is essentially a male world—a world in which the female is but a subservient partner. "It is changing, but it will still be a man's world when you are grown," I said to Mary Isabel.
My devotion, my slavery to this ten-pound daughter greatly amused my friends and neighbors. To see "the grim Klondiker," in meek attendance on a midget sovereign was highly diverting—so I was told by Mary Easton, and I rather think she was right. However, I was undisturbed so long as Mary Isabel did not complain.
She was happy with me. She rode unnumbered joyous miles upon my left elbow and cantered away into dreamland by way of the ancient walnut rocker in which hergrandmother had been wont to sit and dream. Deep in her baby brain-cells I planted vague memories of "Down the River," "Over the Hills in Legions," and "Nellie Wildwood," for I sang to her almost every evening of her infant life.
"Rock-a-bye, baby, thy cradle is green.Papa's a nobleman—mother's a queen,"
was one of her most admired lullabys. It was a marvelous time for me—the happiest I had known since boyhood. Not even my days of courtship have greater charm to me now.
The old soldier was almost as completely subordinated as I. Several times each day he came into the house to say, "Well, how is my granddaughter getting on?" and upon seeing her, invariably remarked, "She's the very image of Belle,"—and indeed she did resemble my mother. He expressed the wish which was alive in my own heart, when he said, "If only Belle could have lived to see her granddaughter."
My new daughter was all important, but the new book could not be neglected.Hesperwas scheduled for publication in October and copy must go to the printer in August, therefore I was forced to leave my wife and babe and go East to attend to the proof-reading and other matters incidental to the birth of another novel. Some lectures in Chicago and Chautauqua took up nearly two weeks of my time and when I arrived in New York, huge bundles of galley-proof were awaiting me.
My publishers were confident that the new book would equalThe Captain of the Gray Horse Troopin popularity, but I was less sanguine. For several weeks I toiled on this job, and at last on the eleventh of September, a day of sweltering heat, I got away on the evening train for the West. In spite of my poverty and notwithstanding thetender age of my daughter, I had decided to fetch my family to New York.
On November tenth, we found ourselves settled in a small apartment overlooking Morningside Park, which seemed a very desirable playground for Mary Isabel.
Relying on my books (which were selling with gratifying persistency) we permitted ourselves a seven-room apartment with a full-sized kitchen and a maid—whom we had brought on from West Salem. We even went so far as to give dinner parties to such of our friends as could be trusted to overlook our lack of plate, and to remain kindly unobservant of the fact that Dora, the baby's nurse, doubled as waitress after cooking the steak.
In this unassuming fashion we fed the Hernes, the Severances, and other of our most valued friends who devoured the puddings which Zulime "tossed up," with a gusto highly flattering to her skill, while the sight of me as baby-tender proved singularly amusing—to some of our guests. It will be seen that we were not cutting entirely loose from the principles of economy in which we had been so carefully schooled—our hospitalities had very distinct (enforced) limits.
Our wedding anniversary came while we were getting settled and my present to Zulime that year was a set of silver which I had purchased with the check for an article called "A Pioneer Wife"—the paper which I had written as a memorial to my mother. In explanation of the fact that all these silver pieces bore the initials I. G., I said, "You are to think of them as a gift from my mother. Imagine that I gave them to her long ago, and that they now come to you, from her, as heirlooms. Let us call them 'The family silver' and hand them down to Mary Isabel in her turn."
Zulime, who always rose to a sentiment of this kind, gratefully accepted this vicarious inheritance and thereafterI was pleased to observe that whenever Mary Isabel wished to break a plate she invariably reached for one of her grandmother's solid silver spoons—they were so much more effective than the plated ones!
Christmas came to us this year with new and tender significance, for "Santy Claus" (who found us at home in New York, rejoicing in our first baby) brought to us our first tree, and the conjunction of these happy events produced in my wife almost perfect happiness. Furthermore, Mary Isabel achieved her first laugh. I am sure of this fact, for I put it down in my notebook, with these words, "She has a lovely smile and a chuckle like her grandmother's. She robs us of solitude, and system, and order, but our world would now be desolate without her." Only when I thought of what her grandfather was missing did I have a sense of regret.
At our feast our daughter sat in the high chair which Katherine Herne had given her, and looked upon the tiny, decorated tree with eyes of rapture, deep, dark-blue eyes in which a seraphic light shone. Her life was beginning far, very far, from the bleak prairie lands in which her Daddy's winter holidays had been spent, and while the silver spoon in her mouth was not of my giving, the one with which she bruised her chair-arm, was veritably one of my rewards.
In order to continue my practice as an Author, I managed to sandwich the writing of an occasional article between spells of minding the baby—and working on club committees. I recall going to Princeton to tell Henry Van Dyke's Club about "The Joys of the Trail," and it pleased me to be introduced as a "Representative of the West." West Point received me in this capacity, and I also read at one of Lounsbury's "Smokers" at Yale, but I was kept from any undue self-congratulation by recognition of the fact that my income was still considerably below the standard of a railway engineer—as perhaps it should be. My "arriving"was always in an accommodation train fifty minutes late.
Evidence of my literary success, if you look at it that way, may have lain in an invitation to dine at Andrew Carnegie's, but a suspicion that I was being patronized made me hesitate. It was only after I learned that Burroughs and Gilder were going that I decided to accept, although I could not see why the ironmaster should include me in his list. I had never met him and was not eager for his recognition.
The guests (nearly all known to me) were most distinguished and it was pleasant to meet with them, even in this palace. We marched into the dining-room keeping step to the music of a bagpipe. The speaking which followed the dinner was admirable. Hamilton Wright Mabie and John Finley were especially adroit and graceful, and Carnegie, who had been furnished with elaborate notes by his secretary, introduced his speakers with tact and humor, although it was evident that in some cases he would have been helpless without his literary furnishing—to which in my case he referred with especial care.
He was an amazement to me. I could not imagine him in the rôle of "Iron King," on the contrary he appeared more like a genial Scotch school-master, one genuinely interested in learning. Had it not been for his air of labored appreciation, and the glamour of his enormous wealth, the dinner would have been wholly enjoyable.
One charming human touch saved the situation. The tablecloth (a magnificent piece of linen) was worked here and there with silken reproductions of the signatures of former distinguished guests. "Mrs. Carnegie," our host explained, "works these signatures into the cloth with her own hands." Each of us was given a soft pencil and requested to add his name.
It happened that Gilder, Seton, Burroughs and myself went away together, and the doorman showed a mild surprisein the fact that no carriage awaited us. Gilder with comic intonation said, "Some of you fellows ought to have saved this situation by ordering a cab."
"As the only man with a stovepipe hat the job was yours," I retorted.
This struck the rest of the party as funny. In truth, each of us except Gilder wore some sort of soft hat, and all together we formed a sinister group. "I don't care whatAndrewthinks of us," Gilder explained, "but I hate to have his butler get such a low conception of American authorship." On this point we all agreed—and took the Madison Avenue street car.
Meanwhile, I was secretly dreaming of getting rich myself.
Every American, with a dollar to spare, at some time in his life takes a shot at a gold mine. It comes early in some lives and late in others, but it comes! In my case it came after the publication ofHesperjust as I was verging on forty-five, and was the result of my brother's connections in Mexico. Impatient of getting money by growing trees he had resigned his position on a rubber farm and was digging gold in Northern Mexico.
Our mine, situated about twenty miles from Camacho, was at the usual critical stage where more capital is needed, therefore in April I persuaded Irving Bacheller and Archer Brown to go down with me and take a look at the property. Of course I had a lump of ore to show them—and it was beautiful!
I recall that when this sample came to me by express, I had my first and only conviction that my financial worries were over. Even Zulime was impressed with my brother's smelter reports which gave the proportion of gold to the ton, precisely set down in bold black figures. All we had to do was to ship a sufficient number of car lots for the year and our income would rival that of Carnegie's.
We decided to break up our little home, and while I went to Mexico, Zulime planned to visit Chicago and await my return. I was loth to dismantle our apartment, and when at the station I said good-by to my little daughter and her mother, I was almost persuaded that nothing was worth the pain of parting from that small shining face and those seeking, clinging hands. She had grown deep into my heart during those winter months.
I felt very poor and lonely as I went to my bed at the club that first night after our separation, and when next day Bacheller invited me out to his new home at Sound Beach, I gratefully accepted, although I was in the middle of getting a new book through the press—a job which my publishers had urged upon me against my better judgment. I felt that I was being hurried.
Bacheller, highly prosperous, was living at this time in a handsome waterside bungalow, with a big sitting-room in which a generous fire glowed. It happened that he was entertaining General Henderson of Iowa, and when in some way it developed that we were all famous singers, a spirited contest arose as to which of us could beat the others. Henderson sang Scotch lyrics very well, and Bacheller was full of tunes from his North Country, whilst I—well if I didn't keep my whiffletree off the wheel, it was not for lack of effort. I sang "Maggie" and "Lily Dale" and "Rosalie the Prairie Flower," all of which made a powerful impression on Henderson; but it was not till I sang "The Rolling Stone," that I fully countered. Irving asked me to repeat this song, but I refused. "You might catch the tune," I explained.
The general's face shone with pleasure but a wistful cadence was in his voice. "Your tunes carry me back to my boyhood," he said, "I heard my mother sing some of them."
He was near the end of his life, although none of us realized it that night, and we all went our ways in the glowof a tender friendship—a friendship deepened by this reminiscent song. Three days later Bacheller and I were entering Mexico on our way to my mine.
Although Bacheller declined to go into partnership with me we had a gorgeous trip, and that was the main object so far as the other fellows were concerned, and as I wrote an article on the caverns of Cacawamilpa which paid my expenses I was content.
In returning to the North by way of El Paso and the Rock Island road, I encountered a sandstorm, whose ferocity dimmed the memory of the one in which my father's wheat was uprooted. It was frightful. From this I passed almost at once to the bloom, the green serenity, and the abundance of my native valley. It was a kind of paradise by contrast to the South-west and to take my little daughter to my bosom, to look into her eyes, to feel her little palms patting my cheeks, was a pleasure such as I had never expected to own. Every father who reads this line will understand me when I declare that she had "developed wonderfully" in the month of my absence. To me every change in my first born was thrilling—and a little sad—for the fairy of to-day was continually displacing the fairy of yesterday.
Believing that this had ended my travels for the summer, I began to work on a novel which should depict the life of a girl, condemned against her will to be a spiritualistic medium,—forced by her parents to serve as a "connecting wire between the world of matter and the world of spirit."
This theme, which lay outside my plan to depict the West, had long demanded to be written, and I now set about it with vigor. As a matter of fact, I knew a great deal about mediums, for at one time I had been a member of the Council of the American Psychical Society, and as a special committee on slate writing and other psychical phenomena had conducted many experiments. I had in my mind (and in my notebooks) a mass of material which formed thebackground of my story,The Tyranny of the Dark. It made a creditable serial and a fairly successful book, but it will probably not count as largely in my record as "Martha's Fireplace," a short story which I wrote at about the same time. I do not regret having done this novel, because at the moment it seemed very much worth while, but I was fully aware, even then, that it had a much narrower appeal than eitherHesperorThe Captain of the Gray Horse Troop.
In the midst of my work on this book our good friends, Mary and Fred Easton, invited us to go with them, in their houseboat, on a trip to the World's Fair in St. Louis. Mrs. Easton offered to take Mary Isabel and her nurse into her own lovely home during our absence, and as Zulime needed the outing we joined the party.
It was a beautiful experience, a kind of dream journey, luxurious, effortless, silent and suggestive,—suggestive of the great river as it was in the time of Dubuque. Sometimes for an hour or more we lost sight of the railway, and the primitive loneliness of the stream awed and humbled us.
For ten days we sailed in such luxury as I had never known before; and when we reached home again it was the splendor of the stream and not the marvels of the Fair which had permanently enriched me. I have forgotten almost every feature of the exhibition, but the sunset light falling athwart the valleys and lighting the sand-bars into burning gold fills my memory to this day.
Here I must make another confession. Up to this time our big living-room had no fireplace. I had thrown out bay-windows, tacked on porches, and constructed bathrooms; but the most vital of all the requisites of a homestead was still lacking. We had no hearth and no outside chimney.
A fireplace was one of the possessions which I really envied my friends. I had never said, "I wish I had Bacheller's house," but I longed to duplicate his fireplace.
Like most of my generation in the West I had been raised beside a stove, with only one early memory of a fireplace, that in my Uncle David's home, in the glow of which, nearly forty years before, I had lain one Thanksgiving night to hear him play the violin—a memory of sweetest quality to me even now. Zulime's childhood had been almost equally bare. She had hung her Christmas stockings before a radiator, as I had strung mine on the wall, behind the kitchen stove. Now suddenly with a small daughter to think of, we both began to long for a fireplace with a desire which led at last toward action—on my part, Zulime was hesitant.
"As our stay in the Old Homestead comes always during the summer, it seems a wilful extravagance to put our hard-earned dollars into an improvement which a renter would consider a nuisance," she argued.
"Nevertheless I'm going to build a fireplace," I replied.
"You mustn't think of it," she protested.
"Consider what a comfort it would be on a rainy day in June," I rejoined. "Think what it would do for the baby on dark mornings."
This had its effect, but even then she would not agree to have it built.
Another deterrent lay in the inexperience of our carpenters and masons, not one of whom had even built a chimney. Everybody had fireplaces in pioneer days, in the days of the Kentucky rifle, the broad-axe and the tallow-dip; but as the era of frame houses came on, the arches had been walled up, and iron stoves of varying ugliness had taken their places. In all the country-side (outside of LaCrosse) there was not a hearthstone of the old-fashioned kind, and though some of the workmen remembered them, not one of them could tell how they were constructed, and the idea of an outside chimney was comically absurd.
All these forces working against me had, thus far, preventedme from experimenting, and perhaps even now the towering base-burner would have remained our family shrine had not Mary Isabel put in a wordless plea. Less than four hundred days old, she was, nevertheless wise in fireplaces. She had begun to burble in the light of the Severances' hearth in Minnesota, and her eyes had reflected the flame and shadow of a noble open fire in Katharine Herne's homestead on Peconic Bay. Her cheeks had reddened like apples in the glory of that hickory flame, and when she came to our small apartment in New York City she had seemed surprised and sadly disappointed by the gas pipes and asbestos mat, which made up a hollow show under a gimcrack mantel. Now here, in her own home, was she to remain without the witchery of crackling flame?
As the cold winds of September began to blow my resolution was taken. "That fireplace must be built. My daughter shall not be cheated of beamed ceilings and the glory of the blazing log."
Zulime, in alarm, again cried out as mother used to do: "Consider the expense!"
"Hang the expense! Consider the comfort, the beauty of the embers. Think of Mary Isabel with her eyes reflecting their light. Imagine the old soldier sitting on the hearth holding his granddaughter——"
She smiled in timorous surrender. "I can see you are bound to do it," she said, "but where can it be built?"
Alas! there was only one available space, a narrow wall between the two west windows. "We'll cut the windows down, or move them," I said, with calm resolution.
"I hate alittlefireplace," protested Zulime.
"It can't be huge," I admitted, "but it can be real. It can be asdeepas we want it."
Having decided upon the enterprise I hurried forth to engage the hands to do the work. I could not endure a day's delay.
The first carpenter with whom I spoke knew nothing about such things. The next one had helped to put in one small "hard-coal, wall pocket," and the third man had seen fireplaces in Norway, but remembered little about their construction. After studying Zulime's sketch of what we wanted, he gloomily remarked, "I don't believe I can make that thinggee."
Zulime was disheartened by all this, but Mary Isabel climbed to my knee as if to say, "Boppa, where is my fireplace?"
My courage returned. "It shall be built if I have to import a mason from Chicago," I declared, and returned to the campaign.
"Can't you build a thing like this?" I asked a plasterer, showing him a magazine picture of a fireplace.
He studied it with care, turning it from side to side. "A rough pile o' brick like that?"
"Just like that."
"Common red brick?"
"Yes, just the kind you use for outside walls."
"If you'll get a carpenter to lay it out maybe I can do it," he answered, but would fix no date for beginning the work.
Three days later when I met him on the street he looked a little shame-faced. "I hoped you'd forgot about that fireplace," he said. "I don't know about that job. I don't just see my way to it. However, if you'll stand by and take all the responsibility, I'll try it."
"When can you come?"
"To-morrow," he said.
"I'll expect you."
I hastened home. I climbed to the top of the old chimney, hammer in hand, and began the work of demolition.
The whole household became involved in the campaign. While the gardener and my father chipped the mortar fromthe bricks which I threw down, Zulime drew another plan for the arch and the hearth, and Mary Isabel sat on the lawn, and shouted at her busy father, high in the sky.
A most distressing clutter developed. The carpenters attacked the house like savage animals, chipping and chiseling till they opened a huge gap from window to window, filling the room with mortar, dust and flies. Zulime was especially appalled by the flies.
"I didn't know you had to slash into the house like that," she said. "It's like murder."
Our neighbors hitherto vastly entertained by our urban eccentricities expressed an intense interest in our plan for an open fire. "Do you expect it to heat the house?" asked Mrs. Dutcher, and Aunt Maria said: "An open fire is nice to look at, but expensive to keep going."
Sam McKinley heartily applauded. "I'm glad to hear you're going back to the old-fashioned fireplace. They were good things to sit by. I'd like one myself, but I never'd get my wife to consent. She says they are too much trouble to keep in order."
At last the mason came, and together he and I laid out the ground plan of the structure. By means of bricks disposed on the lawn I indicated the size of the box, and then, while the carpenter crawled out through the crevasse in the side of the house, we laid a deep foundation of stone. We had just brought the base to the level of the sill when—the annual County Fair broke out!
All work ceased. The workmen went to the ball game and to the cattle show and to the races, leaving our living-room open to the elements, and our lawn desolate with plaster.
For three days we suffered this mutilation. At last the master mason returned, but without his tender. "No matter," I said to him. "I can mix mortar and sand," and Idid. I also carried brick, splashing myself with lime and skinning my hands,—but the chimney grew!
Painfully, with some doubt and hesitancy, but with assuring skill, Otto laid the actual firebox, and when the dark-red, delightfully rude piers of the arch began to rise from the floor within the room, the entire family gathered to admire the structure and to cheer the workmen on their way.
The little inequalities which came into the brickwork delighted us. These "accidentals" as the painters say were quite as we wished them to be. Privately, our bricklayer considered us—"Crazy." The idea of putting common rough brick on theinsideof a house!
The library floor was splotched with mortar, the dining-room was cold and buzzing with impertinent flies, but what of that—the tower of brick was climbing.
The mason called insatiably for more brick, more mortar, and the chimney (the only outside chimney in Hamilton township) rose grandly, alarmingly above the roof—whilst I gained a reputation for princely expenditure which it will take me a long time to live down.
Suddenly discovering that we had no fire-clay for the lining of the firebox, I ordered it by express (another ruinous extravagance), and the work went on. It was almost done when a cold rain began, driving the workmen indoors.
Zulime fairly ached with eagerness to have an end of the mess, and the mason catching the spirit of our unrest worked on in the rain. One by one the bricks slipped into place.
"Oh, how beautiful the fire would be on a day like this!" exclaimed Zulime. "Do you think it will ever be finished? I can't believe it. It's all a dream. It won't draw—or something. It's too good to be true."
"It will be done to-night—and it will draw," I stoutly replied.
At noon, the inside being done, Otto went outside to complete the top, toiling heroically in the drizzle.
At last, for the fourth time we cleaned the room of all but a few chips of the sill, which I intended to use for our first blaze. Then, at my command, Zulime took one end of the thick, rough mantel and together we swung it into place above the arch. Our fireplace was complete! Breathlessly we waited the signal to apply the match.
At five o'clock the mason from the chimney top cheerily called, "Let 'er go!"
Striking a match I handed it to Zulime. She touched it to the shavings. Our chimney took life. It drew! It roared!!
Pulling the curtains close, to shut out the waning daylight, we drew our chairs about our hearth whereon the golden firelight was playing. We forgot our troubles, and Mary Isabel pointing her pink, inch-long forefinger at it, laughed with glee. Never again would she sit above a black hole in the floor to warm her toes.
Out of the corners of the room the mystic ancestral shadows leapt, to play for her sake upon the walls. "She will now acquire the poet's fund of sweet subconscious memories," I declared. "The color of all New England home-life is in that fire. Centuries of history are involved in its flickering shadows. We have put ourselves in touch with our Anglo-Saxon ancestors at last."
"It already looks as ancient as the house," Zulime remarked, and so indeed it did, for its rude inner walls had blackened almost instantly, and its rough, broad, brick hearth fitted harmoniously into the brown floor. The thick plank mantle (stained a smoky-green) seemed already clouded with age. Its expression was perfect—to us, and when father "happened in" and drawing his armchair forward took Mary Isabel in his arms, the firelight playing over his gray hair and on the chubby cheeks of the child, he made a picture immemorial in its suggestion, typifying all the hearths and all the grandsires and fair-skinned babes of New England history.
The old soldier and pioneer loved to take the children on his knees and bask in the light of the fire. At such times he made a picture which typed forth to me all the chimney corners and all the Anglo-Saxon grandsires for a thousand years. In him I saw the past. In them I forecast the future. In him an era was dying, in them Life renewed her swiftly passing web.The old soldier and pioneer loved to take the children on his knees and bask in the light of the fire. At such times he made a picture which typed forth to me all the chimney corners and all the Anglo-Saxon grandsires for a thousand years. In him I saw the past. In them I forecast the future. In him an era was dying, in them Life renewed her swiftly passing web.
The old soldier and pioneer loved to take the children on his knees and bask in the light of the fire. At such times he made a picture which typed forth to me all the chimney corners and all the Anglo-Saxon grandsires for a thousand years. In him I saw the past. In them I forecast the future. In him an era was dying, in them Life renewed her swiftly passing web.
The grim old house had a soul. It was now in the fullest sense a hearth and a home. Oh, Mother and David, were you with us at that moment? Did you look upon us from the dusky corners, adding your faint voices to the chorus of our songs? I hope so. I try to believe so.
That night when Mary Isabel was asleep and I sat alone beside the hearth, another and widely different magic came from those embers. Their tongues of flame, subtly interfused with smoke, called back to memory the many camp-fires I had builded beside the streams, beneath the pines of the mountain west.
Each of my tenting places drew near. At one moment, far in the Skeena Valley, I sat watching the brave fire beat back the darkness and the rain—hearing a glacial river roaring from the night. At another I was encamped in the shelter of a mighty cliff, listening in awe while along its lofty shelves the lions prowled and in the cedars, amid the ruins of prehistoric cities, the wind chanted a solemn rune filled with the voices of those whose bones had long since been mingled with the dust.
Oh, the good days on the trail!I cannot lose you—I will not!Here in the amber of my songI hold you.Here where neither time nor changeCan do you wrong.I sweep you together,The harvest of a continent. The goldOf a thousand days of quest.So, when I am old,Like a chained eagle I can sitAnd dream and dreamOf splendid spaces,The gleam of rivers,And the smell of prairie flowers.So, when I have quite forgotThe heritage of books, I still shall knowThe splendor of the mountains, and the glowOf sunset on the vanished plain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONEThe Fairy World of Childhood
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Fairy World of Childhood
One night just before leaving for the city, I invited a few of my father's old cronies to come in and criticize my new chimney. They all came,—Lottridge, Stevens, Shane, Johnson, McKinley, all the men who meant the most to my sire, and as they took seats about the glowing hearth, the most matter-of-fact of them warmed to its poetic associations, and the sternest of them softened in face and tone beneath its magic light.
Each began by saying, "An open fire is nice to sit by, but not much good as a means of heating the house," and having made this concession to the practical, they each and all passed to minute and loving descriptions of just the kind of fireplaces their people used to have back in Connecticut or Maine or Vermont. Stevens described the ancestral oven, Lottridge told of the family hob and crane, and throughout all this talk a note of wistful tenderness ran. They were stirred to their depths and yet concealed it. Not one had the courage to build such a chimney but every man of them covertly longed for it, dimly perceiving its value as an altar of memory, unconsciously acknowledging its poignant youthful associations. The beauty of vanished faces, the forms of the buried past drew near, and in the golden light of reminiscent dream, each grizzled head took on a softer, nobler outline. The prosaic was forgot. The poetry of their lives was restored.
Father was at his best, hospitable, reminiscent, jocund.His pride in me was expressed in his faith in my ability to keep this fire going.
"Hamlin don't mind a little expense like this chimney," he said. "He put it in just to amuse the baby,—so he says and I believe him. He can afford it—so I'm not saying a word, in fact I like an open fire so well I'm thinking of putting one into my own house."
To this several replied by saying, "We'd have a riot in our house if we put in such an extravagance." Others declared, "It's all a question of dirt. Our wives would never stand the ashes."
We had provided apples and nuts, doughnuts, cider and other characteristic refreshments of the older day, but alas! most of our guests no longer took coffee at night, and only one or two had teeth for popcorn or stomach for doughnuts. As a feast our evening was a failure.
"I used to eat anything at any time," Lottridge explained, "probably that is the reason why I can't do it now. In those days we didn't know anything about 'calories' or 'balanced rations.' We et what was set before us and darn glad to get it."
Shane with quiet humor recalled the days when buckwheat cakes and sausages swimming in pork fat and covered with maple syrup, formed his notion of a good breakfast. "Just one such meal would finish me now," he added with a rueful smile.
These were the men who had been the tireless reapers, the skilled wood-choppers, the husky threshers of the olden time, and as they talked, each of them reverting to significant events in those heroic days, I sobered with a sense of irreparable loss. Pathos and humor mingled in their talk of those far days!
Shane said, "Remember the time I 'bushed' you over in Dunlap's meadow?" To this my father scornfully replied, "You bushed me! I can see you, now, sitting there underthat oak tree mopping your red face. I had you 'petered' before ten o'clock."
It all came back as they talked,—that buoyant world of the reaper and the binder, when harvesting was a kind of Homeric game in which, with rake and scythe, these lusty young sons of the East contended for supremacy in the field. "None of us had an extra dollar," explained Stevens, "but each of us had what was better, good health and a faith in the future. Not one of us had any intention of growing old."
"Old! Thereweren'tany old people in those days," asserted Lottridge.
Along about the middle of the evening they all turned in on a game of "Rummy," finding in cards a welcome relief from the unexpressed torment of the contrast between their decrepit, hopeless present and the glowing, glorious past.
My departure on a lecture trip at ten o'clock disturbed their game only for a moment, and as I rode away I contrasted the noble sanity and the high courage of those white-haired veterans of the Border, with the attitude of certain types of city men I knew. Facing death at something less than arm's length, my father and his fellows nevertheless remained wholesomely interested in life. None of them were pious, some of them were not even religious, but they all had a sturdy faith in the essential justice of the universe. They were still playing the game as best they knew.
Like Eugene Ware they could say—
"Standing by life's river, deep and broad,I take my chances, ignorant but unawed."
As I sat among my fellow members at the Club, three days later, I again recalled my father and his group. Here, too, I was in the Zone of Age. A. M. Palmer, a feeble and melancholy old man, came in and wandered about with noneto do him reverence, and St. Gaudens, who was in the city for medical treatment, shared his dry toast and his cereal coffee with me of a morning. George Warner, who kept a cheerful countenance, admitted that he did so by effort. "I don't like the thought of leaving this good old earth," he confessed one afternoon. "It gives me a pang every time I consider it." None of these men faced death with finer courage than my sire.
As I had a good deal of free time in the afternoon, and as I also had a room at the Club, I saw much of St. Gaudens. We really became acquainted. One morning as we met at breakfast he replied to my question with a groan and a mild cuss word: "Worse, thank you! I've just been to Washington, and on the train last night I ate ice-cream for dinner. I knew I'd regret it, but ice-cream is my weakness." He was at once humorous and savage for, as he explained, "the doctor will not let me work and there is nothing for me to do but sit around the Club library and read or write letters."
He wrote almost as many letters as I did, and so we often faced each other across a desk in the writing room. Sometimes he spoke of President Roosevelt who was employing him on the new designs for our coins, sometimes he alluded to the work awaiting him in his studio. Oh! how homesick we both were! Perhaps he felt the near approach of the hour when his cunning hand must drop its tool. I know the thought came to me, creating a tenderer feeling toward him. I saw him in a sorrowful light. He drew nearer to me, seeming more like a friend and neighbor.
I have said that I had a good deal of time on my hands, and so it seemed to me then and yet during this trip I visited many of my friends, preparedThe Tyranny of the Darkfor serial publication, attended a dinner to Henry James, was one of the Guests of Honor at the Camp Fire Club and acted as teller (with Hopkinson Smith) in theelection which founded the American Academy of Arts and Letters—a fairly full program as I look back upon it, but I had a great many hours to spend in writing to Zulime and in dreaming about Mary Isabel. In spite of all my noble companions, my dinners, speeches and honors I was longing for my little daughter and her fireplace, and at last I put aside all invitations and took the westward trail, counting the hours which intervened between my laggard coach and home.
At times I realized the danger which lay in building so much of my content on the life of one small creature, but for the most part I rejoiced in the fact that she was in my world, even though I had a growing sense of its illusory and generally unsatisfactory character. I found comfort in the knowledge that billions of other men had preceded me and billions more would follow me, and that the only real things in my world were the human relationships. To make my wife and child happy, to leave the world a little better than I found it, these formed my creed.
It was cold, crisp, clear winter when I returned to West Salem and the village again suggested a Christmas card illustration as I walked up the street. The snow cried out under my shoe soles with shrill familiar squeal, carrying me back to the radiant mornings in Iowa when I trod the boardwalks of Osage on my way to the Seminary Chapel, my books under my arm and the courage of youth in my heart. Now a wife and daughter awaited me.
A fire was crackling in the new chimney, and in the light of it, at her mother's feet, sat Mary Isabel. In a moment New York and Chicago were remote, almost mythic places. With my child in my arms, listening to Zulime's gossip of the town wherein the simple old-fashioned joys of life still persisted with wholesome effect, I asked myself, "Why struggle? Why travel, when your wife, your babe, and your hearthstone are here?"
"Once I threatened the world with fire,And thrust my fist in the face of wrong,Making my heart a sounding lyre—Accusing the rulers of earth in song.Now, counting the world of creeds well lostAnd recking the greatest book no prize—Withdrawn from the press and free from the costOf fame and war—in my baby's eyes—In the touch of her tiny, slender palm,I find the ease of a warrior's calm."
Calm! Did I say calm? It was the calm of abject slavery. At command of that minute despot I began to toil frenziedly. At her word I read over and over, and over once again, the Rhymes ofMother Gooseand the Tales ofPeter Wabbitt. TheTin Tan Bookwas her litany, andRed Riding Hoodher sweet terror. Her interest in books was insatiate. She loved all verses, all melodies, even those whose words were wholly beyond her understanding, and her rapt eyes, deep and dark, as my mother's had been, gave me such happiness that to write of it fills me with a pang of regret—for that baby is now a woman.
It will not avail my reader to say, "You were but re-enacting the experiences of innumerable other daddies," for this wasmychild, these weremyhome andmyfire. Without a shred of shame I rejoiced in my subjection then, as I long to recover its contentment now. Life for me was fulfilled. I was doing that which nature and the world required.
Here enters an incongruous fact,—something which I must record with the particularity it deserves. My wife who was accounted a genius, was in truth amazingly "clever" with brush and pencil. Not only had she spent five years in Paris, she had enjoyed several other years of study with her sculptor brother. She could model, she could paint and she could draw,—but—to whom did Mary Isabel turn when she wanted a picture? To her artist mother?Not at all! To me,—to her corn-husker daddy—of course. I was her artist as well as her reader.
To her my hand was a wonder-worker. She was always pleased with what I did. Hour after hour I drew (in amazing outlines) dogs and cows and pigs (pictographs as primitive as those which line the walls of cave dwellings in Arizona) on which she gazed in ecstasy, silent till she suddenly discovered that this effigy meant a cow, then she cried out, "tee dee moomo!" with a joy which afforded me more satisfaction than any acceptance of a story on the part of an editor had ever conveyed. Each scrawl was to her a fresh revelation of the omniscience, the magic of her father—therefore I drew and drew while her recreant mother sat on the other side of the fire and watched us, a wicked smile of amusement—and relief—on her lips.
My daughter was preternaturally interested in magazines,—that is to say she was (at a very early age) vitally concerned with the advertising columns, and forced me to spend a great deal of time turning the pages while she discovered and admired the images of shoes, chairs, tables and babies,—especially babies. It rejoiced her to discover in a book the portrait of a desk which was actually standing in the room, and in matching the fact with the artistic reproduction of the fact, she was, no doubt, laying the foundation of an esthetic appreciation of the universe, but I suffered. Only when she was hungry or sleepy did she permit me, her art instructor, to take a vacation.
In the peaceful intervals when she was in her bed, her mother and I discussed the question, "Where shall we make our winter home?"
My plan to take another apartment in New York seemed of a reckless extravagance to Zulime, who argued for Chicago, and in the end we compromised—on Chicago—where her father and brother and sister lived. November found us settled in a furnished apartment on Jackson Park Avenue,and our Christmas tree was set up there instead of in the Homestead, which was the natural place for it.
Another phase of being Daddy now set in. To me, as a father, the City by the Lake assumed a new and terrifying aspect. Its dirt, its chill winds, its smoke appeared a pitiless league of forces assaulting the tender form of my daughter. My interest in civic reforms augmented. The problems of street cleaning and sanitary milk delivery approached me from an entirely different angle. My sense of social justice was quickened.
In other ways I admitted a change. Something had gone out of my world, or rather something unexpected had come into it. I was no longer whole-hearted in my enjoyment of my Club. My study hours were no longer sacred. My cherub daughter allured. Sometimes as I was dozing in my sleeping car, I heard her chirping voice, "Bappa, come here. I need you." The memory of her small soft body, her trusting eyes, the arch of her brows, made me impatient of my lecture tours. She was my incentive, my chief reason for living and working, and from each of my predatory sorties, I returned to her with a thankfulness which was almost maudlin—in Fuller's eyes. To have her joyous face lifted to mine, to hear her clear voice repeating my mother's songs, restored my faith in the logic of human life. True she interrupted my work and divided my interest, but she also defended me from bitterness and kept me from a darkening outlook on the future. My right to have her could be questioned but my care of her, now that I had her, was a joyous task.
It would not be quite honest in me if I did not admit that this intensity of interest in my daughter took away something from my attitude as a husband, just as Zulime's mother love affected her relationship to me. A new law was at work in both our cases, and I do not question its necessity or its direction. Three is a larger number thantwo, and if the third number brings something unforeseen into the problem it must be accepted. Mary Isabel strengthened the bond between Zulime and myself, but it altered its character. Whatever it lost in one way it gained in another.
Dear little daughter, how she possessed me! Each day she presented some new trait, some new accomplishment. She had begun to understand that Daddy was a writer and that he must not be disturbed during the morning, but in spite of her best resolutions she often tip-toed to my door to inquire brightly, "Poppie, can I come in? Don't you want me?" Of course I wanted her, and so frequently my work gave place to a romp with her. In the afternoons I often took her for a walk or to coast on her new sled rejoicing in the picture she made in her red cloak and hood.
In her presence my somber conceptions of life were forgotten. Joyous and vital, knowing nothing of my worries, she comforted me. She was no longer the "baby" she was "Wenona," my first born, and in spirit we were comrades. More and more she absorbed my thought. "Poppie, I love you better than anything," she often said, and the music of her voice misted my eyes and put a lump into my throat.
When summer came and we went back to the Homestead, I taught her to drive Old Smoker, Uncle William's horse. Under my direction she studied the birds and animals. In city and country alike we came together at nightfall, to read or sing or "play circus." I sang to her all the songs my mother had taught me, I danced with her as she grew older, with Zulime playing the tunes for us, "Money Musk" and "The Campbells are Coming." As we walked the streets the trusting cling of her tiny fingers was inexpressibly sweet.
"Poppie, I'm so happy!" she often said to me after she was three, and the ecstasy which showed in her big blue eyes scared me with its intensity for I knew all too wellthat it could not last. This was her magical time. She was enraptured of the wind and sky and the grass. Every fact in nature was a revelation to her.
"Why, Poppie? What does it? What was that noise?" The dandelions, the dead bird, a snake—these were miracles to her—as they once were to me. She believed in fairies with devotional fervor and I did nothing to shake her faith, on the contrary I would gladly have shared her credence if I could.
Once as we were entering a deep, dark wood, she cautioned me to walk very softly and to speak in a whisper in order that we might catch the Forest Folk at play, and as we trod a specially beautiful forest aisle she cried out, "Isawone, Poppie! Didn't you see that little shining thing?"
I could only say, "Yes, itmusthave been a fairy." I would not destroy her illusion.
She inhabited a world of ineffable beauty, a universe in which minute exquisite winged creatures flashed like flakes of fire, through dusky places. She heard their small faint voices in the whisper of the leaves, and every broad toadstool was to her a resting place for weary elfin messengers hurrying on some mission for their queen. Her own imaginings, like her favorite books, were all of magic wands, golden garments and crystal palaces. Sceptered kings, and jeweled princesses trailing robes of satin were the chief actors in her dreams.
I am aware that many educators consider such reading foolish and harmful, but I care nothing for wire-drawn pedagogic theories. That I did nothing to mar the mystical beauty of the world in which my daughter then dwelt, is my present satisfaction, and I shamelessly acknowledge that I experienced keen pangs of regret as her tender illusions, one after another faded into the chill white light of laterday. Without actually deceiving her, I permitted her to believe that I too, heard the wondrous voices of Titania and her elves in convention behind the rose bush, or the whispers of gnomes hiding among the cornrows.
Good republican that I was, I listened without reproof to her adoring fealty to Kings and Queens. Her love of Knights and tournaments was openly fostered at my hand. "If she should die out of this, her glorious imaginary world, she shall die happy," was my thought, "and if she lives to look back upon it with a woman's eyes, she shall remember it as a shining world in which her Daddy was a rough but kindly councillor, a mortal of whom no fairy need have fear."
The circus was my daughter's royal tournament, an assemblage of all the kings and queens, knights and fairies of her story books. She hated the clowns but the parade of the warriors and their sovereign exalted her. The helmeted spearmen, the lithe charioteers, the hooded drivers sitting astride the heads of vast elephants were characters of the Arabian Nights, passing veritably before her eyes. The winged dancers of the spectacle came straight from the castle of Queen Mab, the pale acrobats were brothers to Hector and Achilles.
As she watched them pass she gripped my hand as if to keep touch with reality, her little heart swollen with almost intolerable delight. "It makes me shiver," she whispered, and I understood.
As the last horseman of the procession was passing, she asked faintly—"Will it come again, Poppie?"
"Yes, it will come once more," I replied, recalling my own sense of loss when the Grand Entry was over.
As the queen, haughty of glance, superb in her robe of silver once more neared us, indolently swaying to the movement of the elephant, who bore his housings of purple andgold with stately solemnity, my daughter's tiny body quivered with ecstasy and her beautiful eyes dilated with an intensity of admiration, of worship which made me sad as well as happy, and then just as the resplendent princess was passing for the last time, Mary Isabel rose in her place and waving a kiss to her liege lady cried out in tones of poignant love and despair, "Good-by, dear Queen!" and I, holding her tender palpitant figure in my arms, heard in that slender silver-sweet cry the lament of childhood, childhood whose dreams were passing never to return.
Chicago did not offer much by way of magnificence but Mary Isabel made the most of what we took her to see. The gold room of the hotel was a part of her imaginary kingdom, conceivably the home of royalty. Standing timidly at the door, she surveyed the golden chairs, the gorgeous ceiling and the deep-toned pictures with a gaze which absorbed every detail. At last she whispered, "Is this the Queen's room?"
"Yes," I replied. "If the Queen should come to Chicago she would live here," and I comforted myself by saying, "You shall have your hour of wonder and romance, even at the expense of a prevarication."
With a sigh she turned away, or rather permitted me to lead her away. "I'm glad I saw it," she said. "Will the Queen ever come to Chicago again?"
"Yes, next spring she will come again," I answered, thus feeding her illusion without a moment's hesitation or a particle of remorse.
Her love of royal robes, gold chariots and Queens' houses did not prevent her from listening with deep delight while I readJock Johnstone, the Tinkler Lad, or sangO'er the Hills In Legions, Boys. She loved most of the songs I was accustomed to sing but certain of the lines vaguely distressed her. She could not endure the pathos of Nellie Gray.
"Oh, my poor Nellie GrayThey have taken you awayAnd I'll never see my darling any more"
put her into deepest anguish.
"Whydid they take her away?" she sobbed. "Didn't theyeversee her any more?"
Only after I explained that they met "down the river" and were very happy ever afterward, would she permit me to finish the ballad. She was similarly troubled by the words,
"I can hear the children callingI can see their sad tears falling."
"Whyare the children calling?" she demanded.
She had a curious horror of anything abnormal. Once I took her to see "Alice in Wonderland" thinking that this would be an enchanting experience for her. Not only was it intolerably repellent to her, it was terrifying, and when the bodies of the characters suddenly lengthened, she sought refuge under the seat. All deformities, grotesqueries were to her horrible, appalling. She refused to look at the actors and at last I took her away.
One afternoon as we were in the garden together she called to me. "Poppie, see the dead birdie!"
On looking I saw a little dead song sparrow. "It's been here all the night and all the day, Poppie. It fell out of the tree when Eddie shooted it. Put it up in the tree again, Poppie."
She seemed to think that if it were put back into its home it would go on living and singing. I don't know why this should have moved me as it did, but it blurred my eyes for a moment. My little daughter was face to face with the great mystery.
O those magical days! Knowing all too well that they could not last and that to lose any part of them was to beforever cheated, I gave my time to her. Over and over again as I met her deep serene glance, I asked (as other parents have done), "Whence came you? From what dusky night rose your starry eyes? Out of what unillumined void flowered your fairy face? Can it be, as some have said, that you are only an automaton, a physical reaction?"
She was the future, my father the past. Birth and death, equally inexplicable, were expressed to me in these two beings, so vital to me, so dependent upon me, and beside me, suffering, joying with me, walked the mother with unfaltering steps.
I was in the midst of a novel at this time, another story of Colorado, which I calledMoney Magic, and without doubt all this distraction and travel weakened it, although Howells spoke well of it. "It is one of your best books," he said, when we next met.
[Mary Isabel reads the book at intervals and places it next toHesperandThe Captain of the Gray Horse Troop.]
Marriage, paternity, householding, during these years unquestionably put the brakes on my work as a writer, but I had no desire to return to bachelorhood. Undoubtedly I had lost something, but I had gained more. As a human being I was enriched beyond my deserving by a wife and a child.
Perhaps I would have gone farther and mounted higher as a selfish solitary bachelor, but that did not trouble me then, and does not now. Concerned with the problem of providing a comfortable winter home for my family, and happy in maintaining the old house in West Salem as a monument to the memory of my mother, I wrote, committed carpentry and lectured.
My frequent absences from home soon made a deep impression on my daughter's mind, and whenever she was naughty I had but to say, "If you do that again Papa will goaway to New York," and she would instantly say, "I'm doodie now papa, I'm doodie——" and yet my mention of going to New York could not have been altogether a punishment for I always brought to her some toy or book. Nothing afforded me keener joy than the moment when I showed her the presents I had brought.
The fact that she loved to have her heavy-handed old Daddy near her, was a kind of miracle, a concession for which I could not be too grateful.
"You shall have a happy childhood," I vowed, "no matter what comes later, you shall remember these days with unalloyed delight. They shall be your heaven, your fairyland."
Each month I set down in my diary some new phrase, some development, some significant event in her life, and when she found this out she loved to have me read what she had said, "When I was a little baby." She listened gravely, contrasting her ignorance at two with her wisdom at five. "Was I cute, Daddy? Did you like me then?" she would ask.
She early learned the meaning of Decoration Day, which she called "Flag Day," and took pride in the fact that her grand-sire was a soldier. Each year she called for her flag and asked to be taken to the cemetery to see the decorations and to hear the bugles blow above the graves, and I always complied; although to me, each year, a more poignant pathos quavered in the wailing cadence of "Lights out," and the passing of the veterans, thinning so rapidly—was like the march of men toward their open graves.
Happily my daughter did not realize any part of this tragic concept. For her it was natural that a soldier should be old and bent. Waving her little flag and shouting with silver-sweet voice she saluted with vague admiration those who were about to die—an age about to die—and in her eyes flamed the spirit of her grand-sire, the love of countrywhich will carry the Republic through every storm no matter from which quarter the wind may spring.
So far as I could, I taught her to take up the traditions which were about to slip from the hands of Richard Garland and his sons, "She shall be our representative, the custodian of our faith."
For four years she remained our only child, and yet I can not say that she was either spoiled or exacting, on the contrary she was a constant, joyous pupil and a lovely appealing teacher. Through her I rediscovered the wonder of the sunrise and the stars. In the study of her face the lost beauty of the rainbow returned to me, in her presence I felt once more the mystic charm of dusk. I reaccepted the universe, putting aside the measureless horror of its recorded wars. I grew strangely selfish. My interests narrowed to my own country, my own home, to my fireside. Counting upon the world well lost, I built upon my daughter's love.
That my wife was equally happy in her parentage was obvious for at times she treated Mary Isabel as if she were a doll, spending many hours of many days designing dainty gowns and hoods for her delight. She could hardly be separated from the child, even for a night and it was in her battles with croup and other nocturnal enemies that her maternal love was tested to the full. I do not assume to know what she felt as a wife, but of her devotion as a mother I am able to write with certainty. On her fell the burden of those hours of sickness in the city, and when the time came for us to go back to the birds and trees of our beloved valley she rejoiced as openly as her daughter. "Now we shall be free of colds and fever," she said.