It was late in the afternoon when Archibald turned up at the shack, and Pegeen, arrayed in one of the cheapest of the new frocks and very dressy as to hair ribbons and shoes, came down the path to meet him.
“It was a shame for them to scare you off so you didn’t even come home to dinner,” she said indignantly, “but you needn’t have been afraid. I shooed them all away at half-past eleven; they had to go home and get their own dinners anyway.”
“I wasn’t afraid of my neighbors. I was gardening for one of them.”
For a moment she looked puzzled. Then she knew.
“Miss Moran! Well, if she isn’t the greatest! She could make anybody garden; was it flowers or vegetables?”
“Beans.”
“Too bad,” said Peg, regretfully. “Of course it’s all nice and exciting and like helping God with his chores, but flowers seem best. They’re so perfectly lovely when they come up and blossom—but then, I love string beans, don’t you? Only they’re just green and I think it’s more fun to help make something bright colored.”
“Did you ever have a garden of your own?” Archibald asked. They had reached the shack now and he dropped down on the doorstep and filled his pipe. Pegeen sat down beside him, after carefully turning up the abbreviated skirt of her new dress.
“No use dirtying it any faster than I have to,” she explained. “Every washing takes it out of them even when they aren’t pink. No, I never had a garden—what you’d call a real garden. We never had much garden. Sometimes Dad would put in corn or potatoes but mostly he forgot, and if he didn’t forget them, he did after he’d put them in, and I didn’t have much time to take care of them. I had some poppies once though, perfectly wonderful poppies. Miss Moran gave me the seeds. I hadn’t ever planted any flower seeds at all till one day I was down at her house and she was working in the flower garden and let me help. I sowed some seed of those great big blue larkspur—delphiniums she calls them, but I think larkspur’s nicest, don’t you?—and some poppies too. Poppies have got the cunningest baby seeds that you don’t dare cover up warm at all for fear you’ll choke them to death. She let me take some poppy seed home, and I dug a place right outside Mother’s window. She was sick then, you know, and after the poppies blossomed, I used to get Mother up every single day to see them. They were the gladdest, brightest, danciest things, but they used to make Mother sort of sad sometimes.”
She sat quiet for a few moments, looking out with wistful eyes toward the far hills, and Archibald laid a large hand over the two small ones clasped in her lap. The sober little face flashed a quick response. Happiness was always knocking at the door of Pegeen’s heart even when sorrow housed there.
“My poppies down at Miss Moran’s were nice too,” she went on, “but I was awfully disappointed about my larkspur. It didn’t bloom a bit that summer, and Miss Moran had said it would be blue, and I like blue best of anything, don’t you? It isn’t so bright as red, but it’s such a way-deep-down-glad color. Well, that fall, Miss Moran had me move the larkspur plants over by the lily bed; and one day the next summer, when I hadn’t been up there for weeks, John came after me with the horse and said Miss Moran wanted me in a hurry. I was afraid she was sick, but she wasn’t She just grabbed me when I got there and said:
“ ‘Peggy O’Neill, you’ve been working miracles. Come along quick and see them.’
“So we held hands and raced to the garden and there were my larkspurs all blossoming—a great big patch of them with white lilies cuddling up close to them! Blue? Why, you never saw anything bluer. I looked at them and my legs went wobbly and I flopped right down and cried. Yes, sir, honestly I did. I couldn’t stand having helped God make anything so beautiful. He was used to it but I wasn’t. Isn’t it wonderful that He could think of so many perfectly splendid things to make in seven days? There’s no telling what He’d have done, if He’d taken a year to do it. Did you ever try to think of something more that would have been awfully nice and that He could have done if He’d taken more time? I’ve tried lots of times, but I never could. It seems as if He hadn’t forgotten a thing.
“I’ve never felt the same about myself since I helped Him with those larkspurs. They bloom every summer, and every time I see them, I feel as if I’d made a piece of sky. You get Miss Moran to let you plant some larkspur in her garden. You won’t ever feel real downhearted and discouraged about yourself afterward. I do think a flower garden’s the sweetest thing. I wish we had one.”
“Why don’t we have one?” asked Archibald.
Pegeen looked at him doubtfully, saw determination in his face, and fairly crowed for joy.
“Out in front and along the path! Poppies and bachelor buttons and marigolds and lots of things that’ll bloom quick—and then larkspur and phlox and lilies to bloom next summer.”
Her exultant voice suddenly wavered and dropped, and the joy died out of her.
For a moment the man did not understand. Then he looked ahead and saw the end of the summer’s trail. Oddly enough he too shrank from the vision.
“I’m coming back, Peg,” he promised quickly. “I’m surely coming back. The heart of the world is up here among the hills, I believe, and there’s nothing to keep me away.”
She smiled again then—but a misty little smile.
“I just thought—all of a sudden—” she explained falteringly. “A summer’s so short and I’m being so happy—and it’s half-past June already.”
“That’s why we must hurry with our garden.” There was a sympathetic mist in the man’s own eyes, but he resolutely dragged the talk away from sentiment. It’s a way men have.
“We’ll plant all sorts of splendid things and the Smiling Lady will teach us to work miracles,” he said.
“She’ll give us loads of baby plants. She loves starting new gardens.” Pegeen was cheerful again now. He had said he would come back and it was easy for her to believe in happiness.
“To-morrow I’ll dig the beds,” promised Archibald. “Now tell me what the neighbors thought of your new finery.”
Pegeen was all excitement.
“They couldn’t believe it. They honestly couldn’t. Ginsy Shalloway’ll talk herself to death about them, and Mrs. Frisbie said that either you were cracked or just a natural spendthrift, and Mrs. Neal spoke right up and said you were a big-hearted young gentleman, that’s what you were; and I hugged her for it and they’re all crazy to know what you get paid for your pictures, and I said maybe you’d let me take you to see them only maybe not, because you had lots of painting to do and couldn’t let visiting interfere. So you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
“But I do want to, Peg. I’m going to garden and to neighbor. I’m credibly informed that there’s the road to being happy most of the time and contented all the time. I’m going to send to town for a horse of mine that’s eating his head off in the stables, and we’ll rent a cart, and then we can neighbor fast and furiously all up and down the Valley.”
“Oh, my stars!” crooned Pegeen, in ecstasy.
“Can you ride your horse?” she asked suddenly.
“That’s what he’s for, chiefly. Why?”
“Well, I just thought maybe you’d lend him to Miss Moran when you weren’t neighboring. She loves riding better than anything and she had a beautiful riding horse when she came, but he hurt himself jumping the pasture fence and died, and she couldn’t afford to get another. She’s the loveliest thing on horseback—but, do you know, she rides straddle just like a boy and she wears breeches and sometimes they show; folks here thought it was awful at first. They buzzed around to each other’s houses like a swarm of bees, talking about it, and they thought maybe Mr. Colby, the minister, ought to take it up. And he wouldn’t. He said she didn’t go to his church, and that anyway it wasn’t a thing for a single man to take up with a young lady. So then they thought the ladies’ aid would have to do something, but they sort of put it off, and then Mr. Frisbie went to Boston to spend a week with his rich brother that’s a minister in a big church there. He came back telling that the parks up there were simply full of ladies riding straddle and that his brother’s wife said all the richest and properest ladies wore breeches when they rode and that it was countrified to be shocked. So then everybody quieted down. Mrs. Neal says Ginsy Shalloway sent for a pattern for riding breeches, but I don’t believe she’s ever had a call for it.”
Archibald, who had been chuckling over the Valley’s consternation, had an inspiration.
“Peggy,” he said, “I wonder if Mrs. Neal could stable two horses for me. You and I are going to do our neighboring behind a pair—but remember, Peg, I never heard that the Smiling Lady rode. That extra riding horse is going to be a lucky accident. Incidentally, I’m going to teach you to ride him.”
“Oh, my stars!” The small girl crooned it again, from heart fullness. “And I didn’t even pray for you to come! If I could have thought of anything as nice as you, I’d have prayed for it, but I couldn’t. So I just said ‘God bless me’ and I guess He thought that meant sending you.”
“God bless you, Peg,” Archibald said very softly. He couldn’t remember having asked God to bless any one, since far away bedtimes in which a very small boy and a very loving mother and a certain little white bed in a cheerful nursery figured hazily. Come to think of it, he hadn’t been on speaking terms with God at all, since those old days; but here in the Happy Valley one met Him at every turn and He seemed very friendly.
The dinner missed at noon was, according to Nora’s prophecy, warmed up for supper; and after it was eaten and the dishes had been washed Archibald walked down to Mrs. Benderby’s with Pegeen, because she was later than usual and the shadows were black.
As the two passed out of the meadow, they found Mr. and Mrs. Neal standing in the middle of the road in front of their home, talking excitedly and looking down toward Pisgah, where a red glow lighted the sky from behind a crouching black hill.
“What’s up?” Archibald asked. “Oh, I see—fire. What do you think it is?”
“Another barn, I guess,” Mr. Neal said grimly. “From the looks, I should say ’twas Frisbie’s. Getting past a joke, this thing is. Makes a man feel darned uncomfortable when he goes to bed. Something’s got to be done. That’s the fifth.”
“Fifth what?”
“Fifth barn burning! Set on fire every one of ’em. Nobody suspected at first, but the fires began coming along too regular to be accidental and then there were signs of the work found, but they ain’t been able to catch the fire-bug. He don’t seem to steal anything—crazy, most likely. Just likes to watch the things burn, but there’s been a big loss and one house went too, and folks are mighty stirred up about it. I don’t feel none too easy myself. There’s no telling where the thing’ll hit next.”
“Had detectives on the job, I suppose?” said Archibald.
“Oh, yes, the town got a couple of ’em up here. Ate everything within sight and looked wise and got nowheres. They sort of suspected Ezra Watts, but, jumping Jerusha, everybody else had thought of that before they did. That’s the first rule up here when anything goes wrong. Suspect Ezra. He’s a good deal of a pill, Ezra is, and I don’t put much past him in the way of meanness, but I can’t say as I held him accountable for the drought last year or for my horses having pink eye this spring. I’ve got a leaning toward proof, and there ain’t a ghost of proof against Ezra in this barn business—except just his general cussedness and that he thinks he’s got a grudge against the Valley folks—but I’m kind of afraid some of the young fellows’ll handle him rough, without asking for proof, if this barn burning keeps up. When Nick Bullard and Lem Tollerton and that crowd get a drink or two aboard, they don’t set much store by law and order. I kind of figure that this would be a healthy time for Ezra to visit somewheres without waiting to be invited.”
“You don’t mean that they’d really harm him?” Archibald said incredulously.
“Well, as I said, there’s just a few of the boys that ain’t strong on law and order, when they’re full of liquor ’n’ animal spirits ’n’ have what they’d call a good cause. Of course the rest of us would stop them if we got wind of their deviltry in time, but we generally don’t and then when it’s over there’s nobody wants to run them down and jail them because everybody knows their families and neighbors are with them. Last time they made trouble they beat up a peddler that had been cheating all the women. Can’t say he didn’t deserve a licking, but the boys overdid it and got considerable of a scare themselves. Thought they’d killed the fellow.
“Ma and I took him in and nursed him up and turned him out all right. He did talk some about suing for assault and all that, but, shucks, how’d he know who to sue? The boys wore masks. He was some scared too, and so he went off as soon as he was able—and glad to go. Glad to have him go, we were. You’ve got to do you’re duty, but I must say I ain’t strong on Samaritaning when the hurt party’s as low down a skunk as that peddler was.
“The boys ain’t been taking any law into their hands since that, but the whole neighborhood’s so stirred up over this fire-bug—”
“Stop borrowing trouble, Pa,” Mrs. Neal interrupted. “Nice idea of his neighbors you’ll be giving Mr. Archibald. You’re getting as nervous as a tadpole over this barn business.”
“Too nervous to put up a pair of horses for me, if I send for them?” inquired Archibald laughingly, but Mr. Neal’s face was serious as he answered.
“At your own risk. I’ll be glad to take them but you’d better insure them.”
Archibald met Mrs. Benderby for the first time that night. She was sitting on the porch as he and Peg turned in at the gate, and, rising from her chair, came forward to meet them.
“This is Mr. Archibald,” Pegeen announced with an air of proud proprietorship.
The woman gave him a thin cold hand. The chill of it made him peer more closely at her through the starlit gloom, but he could see her face only in dim outlines. Scanty hair brushed smoothly back from the forehead and fastened in a tight knob at the back of the head left hollow temples in view and below them Archibald made out sunken cheeks and the angles of a sharp chin. But it was the woman’s figure that emphasized most clearly the chill of the bony hand. Even in the starlight, the sunken chest and rounded shoulders, the sagging droop of the whole body told their tale of hard work and physical unfitness and utter weariness.
“I’m glad to meet you,” Mrs. Benderby was saying. “Peg’s told me how wonderful good you’ve been to her and I think a sight of Peg. I’d ought to.”
There was weariness in the voice too, yet it strove for a brisk cheerfulness that was evidently its natural note.
Something tugged suddenly at Archibald’s heartstrings. Life was too hard for women.
“Yes; you and I couldn’t do without Pegeen,” he said. The friendly warmth of his voice affected the tired little woman as had the warm strength of his hand-clasp. Therewassomething about Peg’s Mr. Archibald, she admitted to herself—something that cheered one up a bit. That “you and I” had a folksy sort of ring. He wasn’t stuck up if he did come from New York.
She smiled in the dark and though he could not see the smile he heard it in her voice.
“When you get used to having Peg around, nothing goes right without her,” she said. “Seems as if she always knew what you needed or wanted before you did. She spoils people, Peg does—gets ’em so they can’t live alone and most of us has to live alone sooner or later—even when there’s plenty of folks living in the same house with us.”
Archibald nodded. He had lived alone “with plenty of folks” and he knew what she meant.
“Won’t you sit down, sir?” Mrs. Benderby asked. “We’ll go indoors if you say, but it’s kind of cool and restful out here in the dark. I like being in the dark, evenings. You can’t see things you’d ought to get up and do.”
She had dropped into her rocking chair again and Archibald sat down on a broken-backed bench, while Pegeen went into the house. He could hear her bustling about in the kitchen and humming a gay tune as she worked.
“Ain’t she the cheerfulest thing?” Mrs. Benderby said, after a quiet moment in which she too had been listening to the quick, light steps and the rollicking tune. “Seems as if, as soon as she’s around, I feel rested. You just can’t slump down when Peg’s boosting you. Even thinking about her’s better than medicine. Some days when I ain’t my best and the work don’t go good, I hang on to the thought of Peg as if ’twas a patent life-preserver. Funny, ain’t it—a little scrap of a big-eyed thing like her! She ain’t exactly pretty, Peg ain’t, but I think the angels must be some like her.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” Archibald agreed. He could understand why Pegeen had felt that she must go over and see to Mrs. Benderby. He felt strongly impelled to see to her himself—and he smiled as it occurred to him that perhaps he was really neighboring.
“You must put your heart into the gardens and the people,” the Smiling Lady had said. Well, he seemed to be putting his heart into Mrs. Benderby. Something ought to be done about her, something even more than Pegeen was doing. He didn’t like the remembrance of that clammy hand or the ache of weariness in the voice that held no trace of complaint or bitterness.
“You and Peg and I will have to look after each other a little,” he said later as he rose to go. “Of course I know that Peg could see to both of us competently with one hand tied behind her, but you and I will get into the game for our own sakes. I’m going to depend upon you to advise me about the child. Women understand such things better than men.”
“I’d be proud to help,” she said eagerly.
It seemed to him that the hand she gave him in good night had a thrill of warmth in it and that the bent shoulders had straightened just a little.
“Good night, Peg,” he called through the open door.
The small girl came running out.
“I was just getting ready for morning,” she explained. “Mrs. Benderby has to go off real early, and any way I thought it’d be nice for you and her to get acquainted without me there.
“It was awfully good of you to bring me home. I wasn’t afraid—not really—only it’s so comfortable not to have to be not afraid. Good night.”
And as he went through the gate, she called again.
“Good night I’ll be up to you early.”
Archibald walked home with the friendly, childish voice ringing in his ears and in his heart an unaccountably fervent thankfulness that she surely would be “up to him early.” Morning—even a June morning—wouldn’t, be a cheerful thing with Pegeen away.
The next day was a momentous one at the shack. Archibald and Pegeen started their garden and Wiggles was taken into the family. The garden came along according to plan but Wiggles was accidental. Peggy brought him with her when she arrived in the morning and the first intimation of his presence came to Archibald with a request for an antiseptic bandage.
“I saw you had some in your trunk, and it’s time for you to get up anyway,” Peggy called through the bedroom door.
“Are you hurt?” he asked in alarm.
“No, I’m all right. It’s a dog. I guess it was an automobile. Anyway its leg’s hurt.”
The explanation was hardly lucid but Archibald gathered that first aid measures were being taken for the dog not for the automobile.
“Wait a minute and I’ll help,” he said as he passed a roll of bandage through the partly opened door.
“It’d only spoil your breakfast.” She was serious but practical. “I can do it. I’ve done it to lots of things. There’s peroxide on the mantel and he’s as patient as can be.”
When Archibald, shaven and dressed, left his room a half hour later, there were no signs of casualty and Pegeen was as serene as usual.
“He’s all fixed,” she said. “It wasn’t so terribly bad, but he couldn’t walk and of course I couldn’t leave him down there.”
“Of course not,” agreed Archibald.
But after breakfast, as she led him out to see the cripple, a shade of anxiety crossed her face.
“He isn’t a handsome dog,” she warned—“not exactly handsome, but he’ll be real cute when I’ve washed him—and he won’t be a bit of trouble to you. I’ll keep him in the shed and I’ll—”
“Piffle, Peg!” interrupted the man rudely. “We needed a dog.”
The dirty, shaggy little beast lying on a pile of burlap in the shed was not handsome. Pegeen had spoken within bounds. Mongrel was written large on him, but a strain of Airedale, albeit with a bar sinister across it, gave his ugliness a redeeming dash of distinction, and when two beseeching, friendly brown eyes met Archibald’s and the whole dog from sniffing nose to frantically wagging tail, wiggled propitiation, the man took the new-comer into the family with something like enthusiasm.
“He’snothandsome, Peg,” he agreed, “but he’s a jolly little chap. We’ll call him Wiggles.”
A day or two later, Archibald coming home from a morning’s painting found Pegeen with something on her mind.
After a little it came out.
“Do you like kittens, Mr. Archibald?” she asked with elaborate casualness.
“Oh, so-so.” He was absorbed in cleaning his pipe.
“I think it’s awful to drown them, don’t you?”
He caught the note of anxiety in her voice and looked at her quickly.
“Miss Moran does too,” she urged in defense of her position. “Maybe she’d take it if you don’t want me to have it, but I’d like to doctor its eyes first. It’ll be lovely when its eyes are well—and the boys had a piece of fish line and a stone. They thought it was fun. I flew right at Benny Crocker and slapped him—as hard as ever I could—and he was so surprised he dropped the kitten and then I grabbed it up—and I always did want to slap Benny anyway. If I’d been a boy I’d have licked him long ago and I don’t see why being a girl—only of course long hair’s handy to pull—but they didn’t get a chance to-day. I can run as fast as any boy, if I do have skirts. It’s gray with one white paw. I think you’d like it, if its eyes weren’t sore. I’m putting boric acid in them. That’s what the doctor gave Mrs. Neal for hers when they were red and hurt her and she loaned me some.”
“What does Wiggles say about it?” Archibald asked gravely.
Pegeen giggled.
“I wouldn’t dare tell you,” she said. “He swore. Honestly he did—dog swearing anyhow—but when he found I liked the kitten, he quieted down and now he just laughs when the spunky little thing spits at him. I do love a dog that has a long nose so he can laugh, don’t you? I wouldn’t have one of those snub-nosed, sulky looking dogs for anything—unless it was sick or something and needed to be taken care of.”
“Oh, Peg, Peg! Are we going to take care of all the halt and maimed and blind?”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “Well,—they aren’t all likely to come along our way and anyway I won’t have any more here if you hate it; but you see I always did—and I can’t leave them alone at Mrs. Benderby’s all day and so I—but of course we won’t have any more here if it bothers you—just Wiggles and Spunky. I thought we’d call kitten Spunky. She’s so little and she stands up to Wiggles as if she were his size. I sort of think that kitten’s Irish.”
“Bless you, child, I don’t mind running a foundling asylum. Why should I? I’m one of the foundlings and I’m as grateful to you as Wiggles and Spunky ever can be.”
She looked at him soberly for a moment and then she smiled. There was something extra special about Pegeen’s smile. A hint of it was not always playing about her lips and eyes as the elusive promise of smiles always lurked in Nora Moran’s face. The child’s sensitive mouth and great dark blue eyes were profoundly serious much of the time—quietly happy but serious for all that. When the smiles came, they flashed out suddenly, radiantly, a surprise, an illumination, a wave of gaiety rippling from brow to chin and overflowing the whole child. Even her hair ribbons seemed to quiver with it, her short skirts to swish with mirth, her slim little feet to move to dance tunes.
To see it once was to want more of it.
“Making you happy is sheer, wanton self-indulgence, Peg,” Archibald said as he studied her face. “I’ll not acquire merit by anything I do to set you smiling. That’s sure.”
She did not understand but that made no difference. He often talked over her head, but words were unimportant. The essential thing was that he should be pleased with her and he was. She could see that. Moreover, he wasn’t prejudiced against stray kittens.
“But I won’t show her to you until her eyes are better,” she said wisely. “A smashed leg like Wiggles’ is sort of interesting when it’s all bandaged up, but you’ve got to love a thing considerable much not to mind sore eyes. If I ever get sick and stay sick a long time, I do hope it’ll be a nice, clean, interesting kind of sickness—but what I’d like best would be to be sitting out in the sunshine feeling happy and then just not to be there—like Mr. Benderby. It was hard on Mrs. Benderby, but wasn’t it perfectly lovely for him? Out under the big apple tree he was, and it was all in bloom and there were orioles nesting in it. I think that was wonderful, don’t you? I’d have liked that for Mother—only it was so lovely for me to have a chance to take care of her. I guess that’s why God doesn’t let everybody go in beautiful ways. He knows they’re going to be so happy in a little while that having been sick won’t count and He lets them go the hard way so that the people who love them and are going to have to stay on without them can have the comfort of taking care of them.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Archibald.
They were occupying their favorite seat on the doorstep now. Pegeen’s elbows were on her knees, her hands cupping her chin, her eyes gazing out across the Valley.
“What do you think souls look like, Mr. Archibald?” she asked suddenly.
Archibald considered the subject and acknowledged that he had no theories on it.
“Well, I’ve thought about it lots,” Peg said cheerfully. Her discussions of life, death, and immortality were always imperturbably cheerful. Nothing morbid touched her. Life was a fact and death was a fact and immortality was a fact. They were all vastly interesting. Why not wonder about them and talk about them?
“I think most people have a horrid idea about souls, don’t you?” she said. “Sort of foggy, lonesome things that go floating around trying to be happy when they haven’t got anything to be happy with. Honestly, that kind of souls would have just about as good a time in heaven as Bill Briggs does at grange parties. They don’t have liquor and he says he isn’t built for conversation. I think heaven’s going to be heaps cozier than the ministers say. I’m counting on having legs and hands and eyes and nose and everything, just the way I have here, only no aches or freckles or anything, and only beautiful things to feel and see and smell—and stacks of little child angels to see to, so that we won’t miss having the old people and sick people to take care of. I’m expecting to enjoy heaven and if I do it’ll have to be mighty different from the way they tell about it.”
“I know a job in heaven that would suit you,” Archibald said, “but another angel has it. Maybe he’d take you on to help.”
“Tell me,” she urged eagerly.
“Well, it’s in the Japanese heaven; but I suppose we’ll all be talking the same language when we get over there so that won’t shut you out. There’s a Japanese angel—Jizo, they call him,—and he puts in his whole time playing with the souls of the little children that come to heaven, so that they won’t be lonesome for their mothers.”
“Oh, my stars!” The small girl was all aglow. “What a bee-autiful job! Wouldn’t it be cunning to see—all those blessed little baby souls playing around and that big kind angel making up games for them and seeing to them for God? But one angel couldn’t do it—not possibly. Maybe he could when the world started and there weren’t many children going to heaven, but now he’d have to have somebody else. Oh, I do hope he’ll let me help. That’s the most interesting thing I ever heard about heaven. Mostly it sounds stupid, but I always did think God would be too sensible to let us all sit around and rest forever. I wonder if that Jizo thought up his job for himself and asked for it or if God just gave it to him. Mr. Frisbie says the Japanese are awfully smart but that they’re ruining wages—only I don’t suppose they bother about wages in heaven. I wouldn’t want wages.”
Archibald rose and stretched himself, laughing down at the earnest little face upturned to him.
“I’m willing to bet your month’s wages here that you’ll be given a chance to take care of somebody in heaven,” he said. “They say the seraphim are for adoration and the cherubim are for service. Well, I can see you chumming with the cherubs.”
Pegeen looked perturbed.
“Miss Moran has pictures of them,” she said doubtfully. “They aren’t anything but heads and wings.”
“That’s the painters’ fault. They couldn’t imagine anything as beautiful as a cherub so they gave up before they got fairly started.” The small girl on the doorstep nodded understanding and relief.
“You need legs and hands if you’re going to do much,” she said, “and if I don’t set mine going you won’t have any supper.”
Wiggles and Spunky improved so rapidly under expert treatment that bandages and boric acid were speedily put aside and the two new members of the household were promoted from obscurity to family intimacy.
A crow with an injured wing, and a squirrel rescued at the eleventh hour from Wiggles, and two fluffy yellow chickens whose hysterical mother had tramped on them during a panic over a temporary scarcity of worms, were at various times added to the family group, but the crow and the chickens and the squirrel were merely transients. Once repaired, they went back to the wild life and Mrs. Neal’s chicken yard, though Peterkin, the crow, came back occasionally to sit on the birch tree by the kitchen door and caw at Peg; and Jabberwok, the squirrel, had a nest in a near-by oak from which he threw acorns at Wiggles with unerring aim.
Boots was a transient too, but he did not need bandaging or doctoring and he stayed on as a day boarder for a long time.
Archibald almost stumbled over him one day as he came through the woodshed after an early morning fishing excursion with Jimmy Dawes. He had brought Jimmy home to breakfast and then came in the back way, triumphantly waving creditable strings of trout.
A gurgle of appreciation sounded at Archibald’s feet and he stepped back, hastily looking down into the round staring eyes of a fat baby who sat comfortably strapped into a pine box and held out chubby hands toward the shining fish.
“Well, I’ll be—” began the man. Then he remembered Jimmy, and left the remark hanging in the air unfinished.
“Hello!” commented Jimmy. “Going in for baby farming?”
“Peg!” Archibald’s voice held alarm and protest. It brought Pegeen out from the kitchen, frying pan in hand.
“Hello, Jimmy! Going to stay for breakfast? My, what a lot of fish!”
Suddenly she saw the question in Archibald’s face and her glance followed his to the occupant of the box.
“Oh, yes,” she explained. “That’s Boots—Mrs. McKenzie’s Boots. His mother’s sick and there isn’t anybody except old Granny McKenzie and she can’t possibly do everything and take care of Boots too. I ran over there this morning to see how sick Mrs. McKenzie was and everything was a mess and the poor old lady was most crazy. I’d have stayed, only of course there’s you; so I helped tidy things up and then I just brought Boots along with me. I knew you’d want me to. He won’t be a mite of trouble. I never saw such a good baby. I can look after him here, daytimes and take him home with me nights. He’s so cunning. Look at him laugh.”
She dropped on her knees beside the box and waggled her head at the baby, who discarded his wide-eyed solemnity for a dimpling, gurgling hilarity that would have disarmed the most confirmed baby hater.
“What d’ you guess Jizo’d think ofhim?” Peg asked enthusiastically. She was so happy in her new responsibility, so utterly confident of Archibald’s readiness to share it with her, that the protest faded out of him. He stooped and experimentally poked at the baby’s ribs with a fishy forefinger which Boots promptly grabbed, crowing in triumph as he held fast to it.
Something curious happened to the stooping man. He wasn’t at all sure what it was but knew that it had to do with the feeling of that tiny hand curled round his finger. The hand was so absurdly small and soft and clinging. He had never noticed babies. People had them, but they had always seemed to him one of the necessary evils, mitigated in his own class by the existence of vigilant nurses who kept their charges out of sight and hearing.
He wouldn’t have believed that there could be something extraordinarily pleasant about having a baby hang fast to one’s forefinger and jump up and down with pride in the feat.
“Strong little beggar, isn’t he?” he said with a shamefaced glance at Jimmy that bespoke masculine sympathy for his embarrassment But Jimmy was used to babies.
“Jolly kid!” he said, swinging his string of fish toward the baby who abandoned Archibald’s finger to clutch at the slippery prize. “I’ll fix the trout for you, Peg.”
Archibald straightened up and looked at the boy admiringly. Nothing disturbed Jimmy’s cheerful nonchalance—but then Jimmy had not a strange baby deposited, without warning, in his family circle. He would eat his breakfast and go home, but the baby, apparently, was to stay at the shack.
“What did you call him, Peg?” the alleged Head of the Family asked feebly.
“Well, his name’s Bruce,—after the spider man, you know. The McKenzies are Scotch. But they call him ‘Boots.’ Baby talk’s silly but I do think Boots is a nice funny little name, don’t you?”
She went back to the kitchen with Jimmy, and Archibald followed, with a backward glance at the baby who resigned himself philosophically to the desertion and settled back among the pillows with the evident intention of going to sleep at once.
“Good old Boots!” murmured the man to whom philosophy had always come hard.
As he washed his hands at the kitchen pump, he eyed his forefinger with a whimsical smile. Queer little thing, a baby’s hand. He could imagine that if the baby happened to be a man’s own—after all, perhaps even neighboring wasn’t the last word. Human brotherhood was a big thing, but a man’s own—
“D’ you like them fried in corn meal, Mr. Archibald?” called Pegeen.
He said that he did.
The horses came from town and, though stabled by Mr. Neal, were in a way additional members of the shack family.
“For a man who fled to the country to be alone, this is going some,” Archibald said to himself, as for the first time he rode up the meadow path, leading a second saddled horse. Pegeen and Wiggles and Spunky and Boots and Peterkin—who was not yet well enough to respond to the call of the wild, were all on hand to welcome the new animals, and Archibald’s eyes twinkled as he viewed the collection.
“This is where you take your first riding lesson, Peg. I’m going to put you on Zip,” he said gaily. “Will the menagerie break loose if you take your eye off it? Suppose the baby should choke the pup and the pup should bite the cat and the cat should eat the crow?”
“They’ll be good,” promised Pegeen comfortably as she loosened the baby’s strangle-hold on the pup. “Aren’t those horses splendid? I wonder how Susy feels about them. It’s real hard on her, I think, having them come into her own barn, putting on city airs, and saying snippy things about farm horses and farm ways.—I’ll bet they do. They look that way—sort of proud and finicky and stuck up, but maybe the country’ll do them lots of good. They’re most certain to like Susy after they really get to know her. She’s so sensible and nice.”
“Sure thing,” agreed Archibald. “Nothing like living in the country for giving one a sense of values.”
Peggy’s face was flushed with excitement. Her lips and eyes were brimming with smiles as she waited to be tossed up to the saddle.
“I’ve been on Susy and on Mr. Frisbie’s Dick,” she said, her voice trembling a little with eagerness, “but never on a real, prancy riding horse like Zip.”
“Not afraid?” Archibald asked, noticing the quiver of the voice.
She looked surprised.
“Afraid? Me? Not a bit. Some way or other I always forget to be afraid of things till afterwards; but I’m so excited that my throat’s all shirred up in puckers.”
For an hour he taught her the laws of bit and bridle and saddle and horse nature; and she took to it all, as a duck takes to water, quick, fearless, bubbling over with joy.
“You’ll make a horsewoman, Peg,” Archibald said, as he lifted her down from the saddle at last. “I’ll have you jumping fences, before the summer is over.”
“Miss Moran used to. She’d make her horse jump anything. Mr. Meredith and she didn’t pay a bit of attention to fences—unless there was something they didn’t want to trample down.”
Archibald turned to her quickly.
“Meredith? Who’s Meredith?”
Pegeen settled herself comfortably for a bit of gossip. She loved to tell Archibald about people. He was always so interested.
“Why, he’s the one that’s going to marry Miss Moran,” she explained. “Anyway, that’s what everybody thinks; but they don’t seem to be in a very big hurry about it. He’s awfully rich and he goes scooting off to Europe and around the world and everywhere; but he comes up here every summer and stays a long while—over in Pittsfield. I guess he couldn’t stand boarding anywhere around here. He looks as if he’d be real particular. But he comes over most every day in a motor car, and he and Miss Moran have perfectly beautiful times. He’s lots older than she is—only I don’t believe he’s as old as his hair is. It’s gray; but his face doesn’t match it very well—except his eyes. Sometimes they look sort of old and sad. He’s real handsome—and nice too; only he’s nice in a proud way—not a bit like you. I couldn’t ever see to him. I wouldn’t suit—but he’d buy me anything I needed—if somebody’d tell him I needed it. I guess most rich people are like that. They want to be kind to poor folks, but they don’t know how. I don’t see how you ever found out exactly the right way. It isn’t just giving money. It’s being friends. Mr. Meredith couldn’t neighbor the way you do, no matter how hard he tried. Miss Moran takes him around to see folks and he’s as nice and polite as can be; but everybody knows he’s come just to please her and that he’ll never come again unless she brings him. He gave the money for the free library down in Pisgah and he fixed up the schoolhouse, and when Joe Daniels got hurt last summer Mr. Meredith had a big doctor come all the way from New York to mend Joe’s back, and when the Potters were going to be put out of their house and hadn’t a bit of money he paid off the mortgage and got Mr. Potter a job over in Pittsfield—but he didn’t do any of it for the Valley. He did it for Miss Moran. I’ll bet he wouldn’t know Joe Daniels or Mr. Potter if he’d meet them on the road. So, you see, nobody bothers about being grateful to him. They’re just grateful to Miss Moran. I suppose she’s grateful to him, and that’s all he wants; but I’d hate not to get more fun out of doing things for people than he does. I’d want to see them being happy because I’d done the things, wouldn’t you? My stars, but I do love to see people being happy, when it’s my doings.”
“What makes you think Miss Moran is going to marry him?” Archibald asked. He did not seem as interested in abstract discussions as he usually did.
“Why, anybody can see that he wants her to.”
“And she?”
Pegeen thought it over.
“Well, I don’t know that she wants to so very hard; but I guess she doesn’t mind. He’s so awfully good to her and she’s known him for years and years and her father thought a heap of him—Ellen told me that—and you know it’s nice and comfortable to have somebody looking out for you and loving you better than anything. Miss Moran gets lonesome sometimes. It’s all right about neighboring, but you do need somebody special—only it seems as if I’d like to be more excited about it, if I were going to marry anybody—and I’d want him younger. Gray hair’s elegant looking; but I think a lover ought to have brown hair, don’t you? Yellow wouldn’t be as bad as gray; but I’d choose brown.”
“Did Ellen tell you anything else about him?” Pegeen shook her head.
“Nothing much. Ellen never does talk much; but I asked her one day whether Miss Moran had known Mr. Meredith a long time and that’s how she came to tell me about her father’s thinking so much of him. I don’t believe Ellen wants them to get married.”
“Why not?” There was a note of eagerness in Archibald’s voice.
“Oh, I don’t know. She said he was a fine man and all; but that springtime was mating time; and then she folded up her lips the way she does when she doesn’t like things.”
Archibald dropped the subject, mounted his horse, and took Zip’s bridle rein.
“I’m going over to see whether Miss Moran feels like riding,” he said crisply. There was an aggressive air about him as he rode away, and Pegeen watched him with puzzled eyes until he disappeared around a bend in the road. Then she seated herself and tried to accommodate Boots and Wiggles and Spunky in her small gingham lap, all at one time.
“Wiggles,” she said seriously, “I don’t believe he liked it about Mr. Meredith. No, sir; he didn’t like it one bit. Do you suppose?—Oh, my stars, Wiggles, wouldn’t it be lovely?” She patted Boots’ back with an experienced hand until he had traveled far into Slumberland. Then she turned once more to the pup, who sat waiting with his head on one side and his intelligent brown eyes fixed on her face.
“Wiggles,” she said, “you can bite Mr. Meredith when he comes. I won’t care.”
The pup gave an ecstatic lunge and licked her cheek with his wet, red tongue. She laughed, as she wiped off the kiss.
“I was sure you’dloveto bite him,” she said approvingly, “only you’d better do it when he hasn’t got that white bull terrier of his with him. Jimmy says it’s a terrible fighter.”
The Smiling Lady felt like riding. She felt so much like it that she sparkled in the most amazing way at the mere mention of it.
“Such beauties,” she said, leaning across the porch railing to pat the horses. “And how fine for Peggy to learn to ride! She wasn’t afraid, was she?”
“Afraid? Peg?” Archibald laughed the idea to scorn.
“Yes; that’s so,” agreed the Smiling Lady. “She’s Irish. We’re the reckless lot. It’s only ourselves we’ve to fear. Just a few minutes, and I’ll get my habit.”
She ran upstairs and Archibald, waiting, heard her singing somewhere, gay lilting snatches of song that told of joy at the heart of her.
In ten minutes a slim boyish figure came out upon the porch. She was all in brown from the crown of her soft felt hat to the toes of her smart tan boots. The long coat had been made by a tailor who knew his business. The soft shirt and stock were eminently correct. She was well turned out, this young Amazon.
A light pressure of a boot in his hand and she was in the saddle. A moment more and they were off into the sweet of Summitland.
“I’ll take you along the back road and up Witch Hill,” she said. “It has the name of names for it, and how that ever happened I can’t imagine. The loveliest places usually have the worst names. There’s Hog Hill Road. It’s a dream of loveliness, and how any one ever had the heart to turn hogs loose on it! Of course they say it’s the hog back shape of the hill that gave it its name, but when I ride there, even on the heavenliest day, I fancy I hear gruntings. Now Witch Road is all magic. It lives up to its name. There’s a tradition that once upon a time an old witch lived in a little hut that’s crumbling away beside the road at the hilltop. I’ve an idea she threw a spell over the whole hill and it lingers. There’s Ezra Watts!”
“Good morning, Mr. Watts!”
A man, standing in the doorway of a dilapidated little house over whose forlornness a willow wept miserably, muttered an almost inaudible salutation. His weak, evil face did not lighten even for the Smiling Lady. Slouching, ragged, dirty, he stood in the sunshine like a blot on the summer day, and stared out at the riders sullenly from under a matted thatch of thick, straggling, black hair.
“Pleasant, friendly chap!” Archibald commented lightly.
The Smiling Lady sighed.
And then they forgot him, for they turned from the sunshiny back road, into an enchanted wood where a wide mossy trail wound gently, gently upward through shifting light and shade. Moist, pungent wood scents haunted the air. The gurgle of running water, insistent, mirthful, told that hidden among the ferns and mosses a brook followed the road companionably.
“It comes out into the open farther up,” the girl said as she listened, “but down here it hides just for the fun of the thing.”
“A naiad’s trick,” Archibald suggested. “Probably there are fauns abroad.”
“No; only the Little People,” she corrected. “I’m all for Irish fairies myself. The poets and the artists and the mythology classes have taken the heart out of the Greek ideas, but the Celts—Oh, well, we’ve had our own troubles with poets, but they haven’t killed and stuffed all our gods and heroes and Little People yet. Father and I used to spend months in Ireland every year and I’ve heard such tales there—Oh, such tales! I’d always the hope of seeing the Little People myself or of stepping off into the Green World, and finding my way to Tir ’nan Og. Things like that seem so possible in Ireland, and some way or other Witch Mill is the same for me. It’s full of shapes I can’t quite see and voices I can’t quite hear, and I look and listen and wait. I’m always excited up here. The wonderful thing might happen any moment. There are places like that, you know!”
She was talking lightly but there were dreams in her eyes.
Archibald’s thoughts ran back to the girl of the puppies and kittens and babies in the birch wood, to the girl of the fireside confidence and the Irish love songs, to the gay, grubby girl of the vegetable garden, to the girl of the June roses and the heart for neighboring. Then he came back to the girl of the boyish clothes and the dreaming face who rode beside him up the Witch Way, listening and looking and waiting for the Wonderful Thing; and he too found it easy to believe in wonders. The enchanted wood was having its way with him.
Up and up they climbed. The road rose very gradually, winding its leisurely way through glades and glens, losing itself among pine shadows, loafing across sunlit clearings; and always at its side was the brook, whispering and chuckling and hinting at mysteries.
“It comes from a great spring at the very top of the hill beside the witch’s cottage,” the Smiling Lady said as she leaned to watch the sunlight playing over smooth brown stones beneath the liquid green of a fern-fringed pool.
“I usually lunch up there—and by the same token I’ve sandwiches in my pockets now. Nature worship’s an appetizing thing and Ellen knows it, but I didn’t give her time to do her best to-day and it’s a nuisance to carry more than sandwiches anyway. Supper will be waiting when we go home.”
“You come up here often?” the man asked. Back of the question there was an eagerness, even a protest. It had occurred to him that Meredith and she had ridden up this way and lunched beside the Witch’s Well; and there was something about the idea that he found unpleasant, most unpleasant.
“Oh, yes, often,” she was saying.—“Or at least I did come when I had my horse. It’s a long walk and the road isn’t very practicable for driving. I’ve had beautiful days up here.”
He could not ask with whom she had shared them and he assured himself stoutly that the matter was of no importance to him anyway—only, of course, a man whom Peg and Nora didn’t like—Personally, he was altogether unconcerned. Oh, altogether—still he rather hoped she had not brought Meredith up Witch Way.
The road found the hilltop at last and wandered off, inconsequently along the ridge; but the brook and the Girl and the Man stayed behind at the Witch’s Well.
It lay cool and gleaming among moss-covered rocks. Little ferns and lush green grasses crept down between the rocks to peer into the water. A great old tree flung shadows down upon it. Under the tree a mossy cushion invited, promised.
The Smiling Lady slipped from her saddle before Archibald could reach her and dropped down beside the well with a sigh of content. When the man came back from tying the horses in the shade, she was leaning against the huge tree trunk, her hat thrown on the ground beside her—a Rosalind in ultra modern doublet and hose and fair enough to justify an Orlando in hanging verses on all the trees of the enchanted wood.
Pegeen had been quite truthful. “Sometimes they did show.” For an instant a vision of the polite and embarrassed bachelor clergyman in Pisgah, of the perturbed ladies’ aid society and the agitated Valley censors caused Archibald’s lips to twitch nervously, but he smothered the smile at its birth and stretched himself out luxuriously on the moss at the neatly booted feet.
Even in riding breeches and boots she was more utterly without self-consciousness, more simply, adorably feminine than any other woman in muslin and blue ribbons. It would be blind virtue that could call the Smiling Lady immodest.
“I could have loved that witch,” he said lazily, closing his eyes the better to feel the moss beneath his head and the breeze on his cheeks and to hear the drip, drip of water trickling among the rocks, and then opening them hastily not to lose sight of the face against the background of rugged bark.
“I’ve felt that way myself,” the girl confessed.—“A woman who would come away up here into the quiet places and settle down with the forest at her back and the spring near her door and the whole Valley spread out before her eyes!
“It’s a heavenly sweet place to sit on a summer’s day, weaving spells, isn’t it? They say she was old and ugly, but I think that was only when she went down among the Valley folk. Up here she must have been young and beautiful and she smiled a wonderful smile as she worked enchantment. I’m sure of it.”
“It’s believable,” admitted the man who was watching her face. It was easy, astonishingly easy, for him to believe in a witch who was young and beautiful and who sat on a hilltop smiling and working enchantment.
They idled the afternoon away with talk and laughter and drowsy silences; and being very humanly hungry in the midst of all the glamour, they finally ate Ellen’s six sandwiches and sighed for more.
“The next time,” said the Smiling Lady, “we will bring a knapsack luncheon and make tea.”
“The next time!” He liked the promise in it.
She rose to her knees and leaning over the spring cupped her hands and drank.
“You knew,” she said seriously, looking back across her shoulder at Archibald, “that it’s the Well at the World’s End?”
“I guessed it,” he said as seriously.