It happened that the Story Girl and I both got up very early on the morning of the Awkward Man’s wedding day. Uncle Alec was going to Charlottetown that day, and I, awakened at daybreak by the sounds in the kitchen beneath us, remembered that I had forgotten to ask him to bring me a certain school-book I wanted. So I hurriedly dressed and hastened down to tell him before he went. I was joined on the stairs by the Story Girl, who said she had wakened and, not feeling like going to sleep again, thought she might as well get up.
“I had such a funny dream last night,” she said. “I dreamed that I heard a voice calling me from away down in Uncle Stephen’s Walk—‘Sara, Sara, Sara,’ it kept calling. I didn’t know whose it was, and yet it seemed like a voice I knew. I wakened up while it was calling, and it seemed so real I could hardly believe it was a dream. It was bright moonlight, and I felt just like getting up and going out to the orchard. But I knew that would be silly and of course I didn’t go. But I kept on wanting to and I couldn’t sleep any more. Wasn’t it queer?”
When Uncle Alec had gone I proposed a saunter to the farther end of the orchard, where I had left a book the preceding evening. A young morn was walking rosily on the hills as we passed down Uncle Stephen’s Walk, with Paddy trotting before us. High overhead was the spirit-like blue of paling skies; the east was a great arc of crystal, smitten through with auroral crimsonings; just above it was one milk-white star of morning, like a pearl on a silver sea. A light wind of dawn was weaving an orient spell.
“It’s lovely to be up as early as this, isn’t it?” said the Story Girl. “The world seems so different just at sunrise, doesn’t it? It makes me feel just like getting up to see the sun rise every morning of my life after this. But I know I won’t. I’ll likely sleep later than ever tomorrow morning. But I wish I could.”
“The Awkward Man and Miss Reade are going to have a lovely day for their wedding,” I said.
“Yes, and I’m so glad. Beautiful Alice deserves everything good. Why, Bev—why, Bev! Who is that in the hammock?”
I looked. The hammock was swung under the two end trees of the Walk. In it a man was lying, asleep, his head pillowed on his overcoat. He was sleeping easily, lightly, and wholesomely. He had a pointed brown beard and thick wavy brown hair. His cheeks were a dusky red and the lashes of his closed eyes were as long and dark and silken as a girl’s. He wore a light gray suit, and on the slender white hand that hung down over the hammock’s edge was a spark of diamond fire.
It seemed to me that I knew his face, although assuredly I had never seen him before. While I groped among vague speculations the Story Girl gave a queer, choked little cry. The next moment she had sprung over the intervening space, dropped on her knees by the hammock, and flung her arms about the man’s neck.
“Father! Father!” she cried, while I stood, rooted to the ground in my amazement.
The sleeper stirred and opened two large, exceedingly brilliant hazel eyes. For a moment he gazed rather blankly at the brown-curled young lady who was embracing him. Then a most delightful smile broke over his face; he sprang up and caught her to his heart.
“Sara—Sara—my little Sara! To think I didn’t know you at first glance! But you are almost a woman. And when I saw you last you were just a little girl of eight. My own little Sara!”
“Father—father—sometimes I’ve wondered if you were ever coming back to me,” I heard the Story Girl say, as I turned and scuttled up the Walk, realizing that I was not wanted there just then and would be little missed. Various emotions and speculations possessed my mind in my retreat; but chiefly did I feel a sense of triumph in being the bearer of exciting news.
“Aunt Janet, Uncle Blair is here,” I announced breathlessly at the kitchen door.
Aunt Janet, who was kneading her bread, turned round and lifted floury hands. Felicity and Cecily, who were just entering the kitchen, rosy from slumber, stopped still and stared at me.
“Uncle who?” exclaimed Aunt Janet.
“Uncle Blair—the Story Girl’s father, you know. He’s here.”
“WHERE?”
“Down in the orchard. He was asleep in the hammock. We found him there.”
“Dear me!” said Aunt Janet, sitting down helplessly. “If that isn’t like Blair! Of course he couldn’t come like anybody else. I wonder,” she added in a tone unheard by anyone else save myself, “I wonder if he has come to take the child away.”
My elation went out like a snuffed candle. I had never thought of this. If Uncle Blair took the Story Girl away would not life become rather savourless on the hill farm? I turned and followed Felicity and Cecily out in a very subdued mood.
Uncle Blair and the Story Girl were just coming out of the orchard. His arm was about her and hers was on his shoulder. Laughter and tears were contending in her eyes. Only once before—when Peter had come back from the Valley of the Shadow—had I seen the Story Girl cry. Emotion had to go very deep with her ere it touched the source of tears. I had always known that she loved her father passionately, though she rarely talked of him, understanding that her uncles and aunts were not whole-heartedly his friends.
But Aunt Janet’s welcome was cordial enough, though a trifle flustered. Whatever thrifty, hard-working farmer folk might think of gay, Bohemian Blair Stanley in his absence, in his presence even they liked him, by the grace of some winsome, lovable quality in the soul of him. He had “a way with him”—revealed even in the manner with which he caught staid Aunt Janet in his arms, swung her matronly form around as though she had been a slim schoolgirl, and kissed her rosy cheek.
“Sister o’ mine, are you never going to grow old?” he said. “Here you are at forty-five with the roses of sixteen—and not a gray hair, I’ll wager.”
“Blair, Blair, it is you who are always young,” laughed Aunt Janet, not ill pleased. “Where in the world did you come from? And what is this I hear of your sleeping all night in the hammock?”
“I’ve been painting in the Lake District all summer, as you know,” answered Uncle Blair, “and one day I just got homesick to see my little girl. So I sailed for Montreal without further delay. I got here at eleven last night—the station-master’s son drove me down. Nice boy. The old house was in darkness and I thought it would be a shame to rouse you all out of bed after a hard day’s work. So I decided that I would spend the night in the orchard. It was moonlight, you know, and moonlight in an old orchard is one of the few things left over from the Golden Age.”
“It was very foolish of you,” said practical Aunt Janet. “These September nights are real chilly. You might have caught your death of cold—or a bad dose of rheumatism.”
“So I might. No doubt it was foolish of me,” agreed Uncle Blair gaily. “It must have been the fault, of the moonlight. Moonlight, you know, Sister Janet, has an intoxicating quality. It is a fine, airy, silver wine, such as fairies may drink at their revels, unharmed of it; but when a mere mortal sips of it, it mounts straightway to his brain, to the undoing of his daylight common sense. However, I have got neither cold nor rheumatism, as a sensible person would have done had he ever been lured into doing such a non-sensible thing; there is a special Providence for us foolish folk. I enjoyed my night in the orchard; for a time I was companioned by sweet old memories; and then I fell asleep listening to the murmurs of the wind in those old trees yonder. And I had a beautiful dream, Janet. I dreamed that the old orchard blossomed again, as it did that spring eighteen years ago. I dreamed that its sunshine was the sunshine of spring, not autumn. There was newness of life in my dream, Janet, and the sweetness of forgotten words.”
“Wasn’t it strange about MY dream?” whispered the Story Girl to me.
“Well, you’d better come in and have some breakfast,” said Aunt Janet. “These are my little girls—Felicity and Cecily.”
“I remember them as two most adorable tots,” said Uncle Blair, shaking hands. “They haven’t changed quite so much as my own baby-child. Why, she’s a woman, Janet—she’s a woman.”
“She’s child enough still,” said Aunt Janet hastily.
The Story Girl shook her long brown curls.
“I’m fifteen,” she said. “And you ought to see me in my long dress, father.”
“We must not be separated any longer, dear heart,” I heard Uncle Blair say tenderly. I hoped that he meant he would stay in Canada—not that he would take the Story Girl away.
Apart from this we had a gay day with Uncle Blair. He evidently liked our society better than that of the grown-ups, for he was a child himself at heart, gay, irresponsible, always acting on the impulse of the moment. We all found him a delightful companion. There was no school that day, as Mr. Perkins was absent, attending a meeting of the Teachers’ Convention, so we spent most of its golden hours in the orchard with Uncle Blair, listening to his fascinating accounts of foreign wanderings. He also drew all our pictures for us, and this was especially delightful, for the day of the camera was only just dawning and none of us had ever had even our photographs taken. Sara Ray’s pleasure was, as usual, quite spoiled by wondering what her mother would say of it, for Mrs. Ray had, so it appeared, some very peculiar prejudices against the taking or making of any kind of picture whatsoever, owing to an exceedingly strict interpretation of the second commandment. Dan suggested that she need not tell her mother anything about it; but Sara shook her head.
“I’ll have to tell her. I’ve made it a rule to tell ma everything I do ever since the Judgment Day.”
“Besides,” added Cecily seriously, “the Family Guide says one ought to tell one’s mother everything.”
“It’s pretty hard sometimes, though,” sighed Sara. “Ma scolds so much when I do tell her things, that it sort of discourages me. But when I think of how dreadful I felt the time of the Judgment Day over deceiving her in some things it nerves me up. I’d do almost anything rather than feel like that the next time the Judgment Day comes.”
“Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell a story,” said Uncle Blair. “What do you mean by speaking of the Judgment Day in the past tense?”
The Story Girl told him the tale of that dreadful Sunday in the preceding summer and we all laughed with him at ourselves.
“All the same,” muttered Peter, “I don’t want to have another experience like that. I hope I’ll be dead the next time the Judgment Day comes.”
“But you’ll be raised up for it,” said Felix.
“Oh, that’ll be all right. I won’t mind that. I won’t know anything about it till it really happens. It’s the expecting it that’s the worst.”
“I don’t think you ought to talk of such things,” said Felicity.
When evening came we all went to Golden Milestone. We knew the Awkward Man and his bride were expected home at sunset, and we meant to scatter flowers on the path by which she must enter her new home. It was the Story Girl’s idea, but I don’t think Aunt Janet would have let us go if Uncle Blair had not pleaded for us. He asked to be taken along, too, and we agreed, if he would stand out of sight when the newly married pair came home.
“You see, father, the Awkward Man won’t mind us, because we’re only children and he knows us well,” explained the Story Girl, “but if he sees you, a stranger, it might confuse him and we might spoil the homecoming, and that would be such a pity.”
So we went to Golden Milestone, laden with all the flowery spoil we could plunder from both gardens. It was a clear amber-tinted September evening and far away, over Markdale Harbour, a great round red moon was rising as we waited. Uncle Blair was hidden behind the wind-blown tassels of the pines at the gate, but he and the Story Girl kept waving their hands at each other and calling out gay, mirthful jests.
“Do you really feel acquainted with your father?” whispered Sara Ray wonderingly. “It’s long since you saw him.”
“If I hadn’t seen him for a hundred years it wouldn’t make any difference that way,” laughed the Story Girl.
“S-s-h-s-s-h—they’re coming,” whispered Felicity excitedly.
And then they came—Beautiful Alice blushing and lovely, in the prettiest of pretty blue dresses, and the Awkward Man, so fervently happy that he quite forgot to be awkward. He lifted her out of the buggy gallantly and led her forward to us, smiling. We retreated before them, scattering our flowers lavishly on the path, and Alice Dale walked to the very doorstep of her new home over a carpet of blossoms. On the step they both paused and turned towards us, and we shyly did the proper thing in the way of congratulations and good wishes.
“It was so sweet of you to do this,” said the smiling bride.
“It was lovely to be able to do it for you, dearest,” whispered the Story Girl, “and oh, Miss Reade—Mrs. Dale, I mean—we all hope you’ll be so, so happy for ever.”
“I am sure I shall,” said Alice Dale, turning to her husband. He looked down into her eyes—and we were quite forgotten by both of them. We saw it, and slipped away, while Jasper Dale drew his wife into their home and shut the world out.
We scampered joyously away through the moonlit dusk. Uncle Blair joined us at the gate and the Story Girl asked him what he thought of the bride.
“When she dies white violets will grow out of her dust,” he answered.
“Uncle Blair says even queerer things than the Story Girl,” Felicity whispered to me.
And so that beautiful day went away from us, slipping through our fingers as we tried to hold it. It hooded itself in shadows and fared forth on the road that is lighted by the white stars of evening. It had been a gift of Paradise. Its hours had all been fair and beloved. From dawn flush to fall of night there had been naught to mar it. It took with it its smiles and laughter. But it left the boon of memory.
“I am going away with father when he goes. He is going to spend the winter in Paris, and I am to go to school there.”
The Story Girl told us this one day in the orchard. There was a little elation in her tone, but more regret. The news was not a great surprise to us. We had felt it in the air ever since Uncle Blair’s arrival. Aunt Janet had been very unwilling to let the Story Girl go. But Uncle Blair was inexorable. It was time, he said, that she should go to a better school than the little country one in Carlisle; and besides, he did not want her to grow into womanhood a stranger to him. So it was finally decided that she was to go.
“Just think, you are going to Europe,” said Sara Ray in an awe-struck tone. “Won’t that be splendid!”
“I suppose I’ll like it after a while,” said the Story Girl slowly, “but I know I’ll be dreadfully homesick at first. Of course, it will be lovely to be with father, but oh, I’ll miss the rest of you so much!”
“Just think how WE’LL miss YOU,” sighed Cecily. “It will be so lonesome here this winter, with you and Peter both gone. Oh, dear, I do wish things didn’t have to change.”
Felicity said nothing. She kept looking down at the grass on which she sat, absently pulling at the slender blades. Presently we saw two big tears roll down over her cheeks. The Story Girl looked surprised.
“Are you crying because I’m going away, Felicity?” she asked.
“Of course I am,” answered Felicity, with a big sob. “Do you think I’ve no f-f-eeling?”
“I didn’t think you’d care much,” said the Story Girl frankly. “You’ve never seemed to like me very much.”
“I d-don’t wear my h-heart on my sleeve,” said poor Felicity, with an attempt at dignity. “I think you m-might stay. Your father would let you s-stay if you c-coaxed him.”
“Well, you see I’d have to go some time,” sighed the Story Girl, “and the longer it was put off the harder it would be. But I do feel dreadfully about it. I can’t even take poor Paddy. I’ll have to leave him behind, and oh, I want you all to promise to be kind to him for my sake.”
We all solemnly assured her that we would.
“I’ll g-give him cream every m-morning and n-night,” sobbed Felicity, “but I’ll never be able to look at him without crying. He’ll make me think of you.”
“Well, I’m not going right away,” said the Story Girl, more cheerfully. “Not till the last of October. So we have over a month yet to have a good time in. Let’s all just determine to make it a splendid month for the last. We won’t think about my going at all till we have to, and we won’t have any quarrels among us, and we’ll just enjoy ourselves all we possibly can. So don’t cry any more, Felicity. I’m awfully glad you do like me and am sorry I’m going away, but let’s all forget it for a month.”
Felicity sighed, and tucked away her damp handkerchief.
“It isn’t so easy for me to forget things, but I’ll try,” she said disconsolately, “and if you want any more cooking lessons before you go I’ll be real glad to teach you anything I know.”
This was a high plane of self-sacrifice for Felicity to attain. But the Story Girl shook her head.
“No, I’m not going to bother my head about cooking lessons this last month. It’s too vexing.”
“Do you remember the time you made the pudding—” began Peter, and suddenly stopped.
“Out of sawdust?” finished the Story Girl cheerfully. “You needn’t be afraid to mention it to me after this. I don’t mind any more. I begin to see the fun of it now. I should think I do remember it—and the time I baked the bread before it was raised enough.”
“People have made worse mistakes than that,” said Felicity kindly.
“Such as using tooth-powd—” but here Dan stopped abruptly, remembering the Story Girl’s plea for a beautiful month. Felicity coloured, but said nothing—did not even LOOK anything.
“We HAVE had lots of fun together one way or another,” said Cecily, retrospectively.
“Just think how much we’ve laughed this last year or so,” said the Story Girl. “We’ve had good times together; but I think we’ll have lots more splendid years ahead.”
“Eden is always behind us—Paradise always before,” said Uncle Blair, coming up in time to hear her. He said it with a sigh that was immediately lost in one of his delightful smiles.
“I like Uncle Blair so much better than I expected to,” Felicity confided to me. “Mother says he’s a rolling stone, but there really is something very nice about him, although he says a great many things I don’t understand. I suppose the Story Girl will have a very gay time in Paris.”
“She’s going to school and she’ll have to study hard,” I said.
“She says she’s going to study for the stage,” said Felicity. “Uncle Roger thinks it is all right, and says she’ll be very famous some day. But mother thinks it’s dreadful, and so do I.”
“Aunt Julia is a concert singer,” I said.
“Oh, that’s very different. But I hope poor Sara will get on all right,” sighed Felicity. “You never know what may happen to a person in those foreign countries. And everybody says Paris is such a wicked place. But we must hope for the best,” she concluded in a resigned tone.
That evening the Story Girl and I drove the cows to pasture after milking, and when we came home we sought out Uncle Blair in the orchard. He was sauntering up and down Uncle Stephen’s Walk, his hands clasped behind him and his beautiful, youthful face uplifted to the western sky where waves of night were breaking on a dim primrose shore of sunset.
“See that star over there in the south-west?” he said, as we joined him. “The one just above that pine? An evening star shining over a dark pine tree is the whitest thing in the universe—because it is LIVING whiteness—whiteness possessing a soul. How full this old orchard is of twilight! Do you know, I have been trysting here with ghosts.”
“The Family Ghost?” I asked, very stupidly.
“No, not the Family Ghost. I never saw beautiful, broken-hearted Emily yet. Your mother saw her once, Sara—that was a strange thing,” he added absently, as if to himself.
“Did mother really see her?” whispered the Story Girl.
“Well, she always believed she did. Who knows?”
“Do you think there are such things as ghosts, Uncle Blair?” I asked curiously.
“I never saw any, Beverley.”
“But you said you were trysting with ghosts here this evening,” said the Story Girl.
“Oh, yes—the ghosts of the old years. I love this orchard because of its many ghosts. We are good comrades, those ghosts and I; we walk and talk—we even laugh together—sorrowful laughter that has sorrow’s own sweetness. And always there comes to me one dear phantom and wanders hand in hand with me—a lost lady of the old years.”
“My mother?” said the Story Girl very softly.
“Yes, your mother. Here, in her old haunts, it is impossible for me to believe that she can be dead—that her LAUGHTER can be dead. She was the gayest, sweetest thing—and so young—only three years older than you, Sara. Yonder old house had been glad because of her for eighteen years when I met her first.”
“I wish I could remember her,” said the Story Girl, with a little sigh. “I haven’t even a picture of her. Why didn’t you paint one, father?”
“She would never let me. She had some queer, funny, half-playful, half-earnest superstition about it. But I always meant to when she would become willing to let me. And then—she died. Her twin brother Felix died the same day. There was something strange about that, too. I was holding her in my arms and she was looking up at me; suddenly she looked past me and gave a little start. ‘Felix!’ she said. For a moment she trembled and then she smiled and looked up at me again a little beseechingly. ‘Felix has come for me, dear,’ she said. ‘We were always together before you came—you must not mind—you must be glad I do not have to go alone.’ Well, who knows? But she left me, Sara—she left me.”
There was that in Uncle Blair’s voice that kept us silent for a time. Then the Story Girl said, still very softly:
“What did mother look like, father? I don’t look the least little bit like her, do I?”
“No, I wish you did, you brown thing. Your mother’s face was as white as a wood-lily, with only a faint dream of rose in her cheeks. She had the eyes of one who always had a song in her heart—blue as a mist, those eyes were. She had dark lashes, and a little red mouth that quivered when she was very sad or very happy like a crimson rose too rudely shaken by the wind. She was as slim and lithe as a young, white-stemmed birch tree. How I loved her! How happy we were! But he who accepts human love must bind it to his soul with pain, and she is not lost to me. Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”
Uncle Blair looked up at the evening star. We saw that he had forgotten us, and we slipped away, hand in hand, leaving him alone in the memory-haunted shadows of the old orchard.
October that year gathered up all the spilled sunshine of the summer and clad herself in it as in a garment. The Story Girl had asked us to try to make the last month together beautiful, and Nature seconded our efforts, giving us that most beautiful of beautiful things—a gracious and perfect moon of falling leaves. There was not in all that vanished October one day that did not come in with auroral splendour and go out attended by a fair galaxy of evening stars—not a day when there were not golden lights in the wide pastures and purple hazes in the ripened distances. Never was anything so gorgeous as the maple trees that year. Maples are trees that have primeval fire in their souls. It glows out a little in their early youth, before the leaves open, in the redness and rosy-yellowness of their blossoms, but in summer it is carefully hidden under a demure, silver-lined greenness. Then when autumn comes, the maples give up trying to be sober and flame out in all the barbaric splendour and gorgeousness of their real nature, making of the hills things out of an Arabian Nights dream in the golden prime of good Haroun Alraschid.
You may never know what scarlet and crimson really are until you see them in their perfection on an October hillside, under the unfathomable blue of an autumn sky. All the glow and radiance and joy at earth’s heart seem to have broken loose in a splendid determination to express itself for once before the frost of winter chills her beating pulses. It is the year’s carnival ere the dull Lenten days of leafless valleys and penitential mists come.
The time of apple-picking had come around once more and we worked joyously. Uncle Blair picked apples with us, and between him and the Story Girl it was an October never to be forgotten.
“Will you go far afield for a walk with me to-day?” he said to her and me, one idle afternoon of opal skies, pied meadows and misty hills.
It was Saturday and Peter had gone home; Felix and Dan were helping Uncle Alec top turnips; Cecily and Felicity were making cookies for Sunday, so the Story Girl and I were alone in Uncle Stephen’s Walk.
We liked to be alone together that last month, to think the long, long thoughts of youth and talk about our futures. There had grown up between us that summer a bond of sympathy that did not exist between us and the others. We were older than they—the Story Girl was fifteen and I was nearly that; and all at once it seemed as if we were immeasurably older than the rest, and possessed of dreams and visions and forward-reaching hopes which they could not possibly share or understand. At times we were still children, still interested in childish things. But there came hours when we seemed to our two selves very grown up and old, and in those hours we talked our dreams and visions and hopes, vague and splendid, as all such are, over together, and so began to build up, out of the rainbow fragments of our childhood’s companionship, that rare and beautiful friendship which was to last all our lives, enriching and enstarring them. For there is no bond more lasting than that formed by the mutual confidences of that magic time when youth is slipping from the sheath of childhood and beginning to wonder what lies for it beyond those misty hills that bound the golden road.
“Where are you going?” asked the Story Girl.
“To ‘the woods that belt the gray hillside’—ay, and overflow beyond it into many a valley purple-folded in immemorial peace,” answered Uncle Blair. “I have a fancy for one more ramble in Prince Edward Island woods before I leave Canada again. But I would not go alone. So come, you two gay youthful things to whom all life is yet fair and good, and we will seek the path to Arcady. There will be many little things along our way to make us glad. Joyful sounds will ‘come ringing down the wind;’ a wealth of gypsy gold will be ours for the gathering; we will learn the potent, unutterable charm of a dim spruce wood and the grace of flexile mountain ashes fringing a lonely glen; we will tryst with the folk of fur and feather; we’ll hearken to the music of gray old firs. Come, and you’ll have a ramble and an afternoon that you will both remember all your lives.”
We did have it; never has its remembrance faded; that idyllic afternoon of roving in the old Carlisle woods with the Story Girl and Uncle Blair gleams in my book of years, a page of living beauty. Yet it was but a few hours of simplest pleasure; we wandered pathlessly through the sylvan calm of those dear places which seemed that day to be full of a great friendliness; Uncle Blair sauntered along behind us, whistling softly; sometimes he talked to himself; we delighted in those brief reveries of his; Uncle Blair was the only man I have ever known who could, when he so willed, “talk like a book,” and do it without seeming ridiculous; perhaps it was because he had the knack of choosing “fit audience, though few,” and the proper time to appeal to that audience.
We went across the fields, intending to skirt the woods at the back of Uncle Alec’s farm and find a lane that cut through Uncle Roger’s woods; but before we came to it we stumbled on a sly, winding little path quite by accident—if, indeed, there can be such a thing as accident in the woods, where I am tempted to think we are led by the Good People along such of their fairy ways as they have a mind for us to walk in.
“Go to, let us explore this,” said Uncle Blair. “It always drags terribly at my heart to go past a wood lane if I can make any excuse at all for traversing it: for it is the by-ways that lead to the heart of the woods and we must follow them if we would know the forest and be known of it. When we can really feel its wild heart beating against ours its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own for ever, so that no matter where we go or how wide we wander in the noisy ways of cities or over the lone ways of the sea, we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship.”
“I always feel so SATISFIED in the woods,” said the Story Girl dreamily, as we turned in under the low-swinging fir boughs. “Trees seem such friendly things.”
“They are the most friendly things in God’s good creation,” said Uncle Blair emphatically. “And it is so easy to live with them. To hold converse with pines, to whisper secrets with the poplars, to listen to the tales of old romance that beeches have to tell, to walk in eloquent silence with self-contained firs, is to learn what real companionship is. Besides, trees are the same all over the world. A beech tree on the slopes of the Pyrenees is just what a beech tree here in these Carlisle woods is; and there used to be an old pine hereabouts whose twin brother I was well acquainted with in a dell among the Apennines. Listen to those squirrels, will you, chattering over yonder. Did you ever hear such a fuss over nothing? Squirrels are the gossips and busybodies of the woods; they haven’t learned the fine reserve of its other denizens. But after all, there is a certain shrill friendliness in their greeting.”
“They seem to be scolding us,” I said, laughing.
“Oh, they are not half such scolds as they sound,” answered Uncle Blair gaily. “If they would but ‘tak a thought and mend’ their shrew-like ways they would be dear, lovable creatures enough.”
“If I had to be an animal I think I’d like to be a squirrel,” said the Story Girl. “It must be next best thing to flying.”
“Just see what a spring that fellow gave,” laughed Uncle Blair. “And now listen to his song of triumph! I suppose that chasm he cleared seemed as wide and deep to him as Niagara Gorge would to us if we leaped over it. Well, the wood people are a happy folk and very well satisfied with themselves.”
Those who have followed a dim, winding, balsamic path to the unexpected hollow where a wood-spring lies have found the rarest secret the forest can reveal. Such was our good fortune that day. At the end of our path we found it, under the pines, a crystal-clear thing with lips unkissed by so much as a stray sunbeam.
“It is easy to dream that this is one of the haunted springs of old romance,” said Uncle Blair. “‘Tis an enchanted spot this, I am very sure, and we should go softly, speaking low, lest we disturb the rest of a white, wet naiad, or break some spell that has cost long years of mystic weaving.”
“It’s so easy to believe things in the woods,” said the Story Girl, shaping a cup from a bit of golden-brown birch bark and filling it at the spring.
“Drink a toast in that water, Sara,” said Uncle Blair. “There’s not a doubt that it has some potent quality of magic in it and the wish you wish over it will come true.”
The Story Girl lifted her golden-hued flagon to her red lips. Her hazel eyes laughed at us over the brim.
“Here’s to our futures,” she cried, “I wish that every day of our lives may be better than the one that went before.”
“An extravagant wish—a very wish of youth,” commented Uncle Blair, “and yet in spite of its extravagance, a wish that will come true if you are true to yourselves. In that case, every day WILL be better than all that went before—but there will be many days, dear lad and lass, when you will not believe it.”
We did not understand him, but we knew Uncle Blair never explained his meaning. When asked it he was wont to answer with a smile, “Some day you’ll grow to it. Wait for that.” So we addressed ourselves to follow the brook that stole away from the spring in its windings and doublings and tricky surprises.
“A brook,” quoth Uncle Blair, “is the most changeful, bewitching, lovable thing in the world. It is never in the same mind or mood two minutes. Here it is sighing and murmuring as if its heart were broken. But listen—yonder by the birches it is laughing as if it were enjoying some capital joke all by itself.”
It was indeed a changeful brook; here it would make a pool, dark and brooding and still, where we bent to look at our mirrored faces; then it grew communicative and gossiped shallowly over a broken pebble bed where there was a diamond dance of sunbeams and no troutling or minnow could glide through without being seen. Sometimes its banks were high and steep, hung with slender ashes and birches; again they were mere, low margins, green with delicate mosses, shelving out of the wood. Once it came to a little precipice and flung itself over undauntedly in an indignation of foam, gathering itself up rather dizzily among the mossy stones below. It was some time before it got over its vexation; it went boiling and muttering along, fighting with the rotten logs that lie across it, and making far more fuss than was necessary over every root that interfered with it. We were getting tired of its ill-humour and talked of leaving it, when it suddenly grew sweet-tempered again, swooped around a curve—and presto, we were in fairyland.
It was a little dell far in the heart of the woods. A row of birches fringed the brook, and each birch seemed more exquisitely graceful and golden than her sisters. The woods receded from it on every hand, leaving it lying in a pool of amber sunshine. The yellow trees were mirrored in the placid stream, with now and then a leaf falling on the water, mayhap to drift away and be used, as Uncle Blair suggested, by some adventurous wood sprite who had it in mind to fare forth to some far-off, legendary region where all the brooks ran into the sea.
“Oh, what a lovely place!” I exclaimed, looking around me with delight.
“A spell of eternity is woven over it, surely,” murmured Uncle Blair. “Winter may not touch it, or spring ever revisit it. It should be like this for ever.”
“Let us never come here again,” said the Story Girl softly, “never, no matter how often we may be in Carlisle. Then we will never see it changed or different. We can always remember it just as we see it now, and it will be like this for ever for us.”
“I’m going to sketch it,” said Uncle Blair.
While he sketched it the Story Girl and I sat on the banks of the brook and she told me the story of the Sighing Reed. It was a very simple little story, that of the slender brown reed which grew by the forest pool and always was sad and sighing because it could not utter music like the brook and the birds and the winds. All the bright, beautiful things around it mocked it and laughed at it for its folly. Who would ever look for music in it, a plain, brown, unbeautiful thing? But one day a youth came through the wood; he was as beautiful as the spring; he cut the brown reed and fashioned it according to his liking; and then he put it to his lips and breathed on it; and, oh, the music that floated through the forest! It was so entrancing that everything—brooks and birds and winds—grew silent to listen to it. Never had anything so lovely been heard; it was the music that had for so long been shut up in the soul of the sighing reed and was set free at last through its pain and suffering.
I had heard the Story Girl tell many a more dramatic tale; but that one stands out for me in memory above them all, partly, perhaps, because of the spot in which she told it, partly because it was the last one I was to hear her tell for many years—the last one she was ever to tell me on the golden road.
When Uncle Blair had finished his sketch the shafts of sunshine were turning crimson and growing more and more remote; the early autumn twilight was falling over the woods. We left our dell, saying good-bye to it for ever, as the Story Girl had suggested, and we went slowly homeward through the fir woods, where a haunting, indescribable odour stole out to meet us.
“There is magic in the scent of dying fir,” Uncle Blair was saying aloud to himself, as if forgetting he was not quite alone. “It gets into our blood like some rare, subtly-compounded wine, and thrills us with unutterable sweetnesses, as of recollections from some other fairer life, lived in some happier star. Compared to it, all other scents seem heavy and earth-born, luring to the valleys instead of the heights. But the tang of the fir summons onward and upward to some ‘far-off, divine event’—some spiritual peak of attainment whence we shall see with unfaltering, unclouded vision the spires of some aerial City Beautiful, or the fulfilment of some fair, fadeless land of promise.”
He was silent for a moment, then added in a lower tone,
“Felicity, you loved the scent of dying fir. If you were here tonight with me—Felicity—Felicity!”
Something in his voice made me suddenly sad. I was comforted when I felt the Story Girl slip her hand into mine. So we walked out of the woods into the autumn dusk.
We were in a little valley. Half-way up the opposite slope a brush fire was burning clearly and steadily in a maple grove. There was something indescribably alluring in that fire, glowing so redly against the dark background of forest and twilit hill.
“Let us go to it,” cried Uncle Blair, gaily, casting aside his sorrowful mood and catching our hands. “A wood fire at night has a fascination not to be resisted by those of mortal race. Hasten—we must not lose time.”
“Oh, it will burn a long time yet,” I gasped, for Uncle Blair was whisking us up the hill at a merciless rate.
“You can’t be sure. It may have been lighted by some good, honest farmer-man, bent on tidying up his sugar orchard, but it may also, for anything we know, have been kindled by no earthly woodman as a beacon or summons to the tribes of fairyland, and may vanish away if we tarry.”
It did not vanish and presently we found ourselves in the grove. It was very beautiful; the fire burned with a clear, steady glow and a soft crackle; the long arcades beneath the trees were illuminated with a rosy radiance, beyond which lurked companies of gray and purple shadows. Everything was very still and dreamy and remote.
“It is impossible that out there, just over the hill, lies a village of men, where tame household lamps are shining,” said Uncle Blair.
“I feel as if we must be thousands of miles away from everything we’ve ever known,” murmured the Story Girl.
“So you are!” said Uncle Blair emphatically. “You’re back in the youth of the race—back in the beguilement of the young world. Everything is in this hour—the beauty of classic myths, the primal charm of the silent and the open, the lure of mystery. Why, it’s a time and place when and where everything might come true—when the men in green might creep out to join hands and dance around the fire, or dryads steal from their trees to warm their white limbs, grown chilly in October frosts, by the blaze. I wouldn’t be much surprised if we should see something of the kind. Isn’t that the flash of an ivory shoulder through yonder gloom? And didn’t you see a queer little elfin face peering at us around that twisted gray trunk? But one can’t be sure. Mortal eyesight is too slow and clumsy a thing to match against the flicker of a pixy-litten fire.”
Hand in hand we wandered through that enchanted place, seeking the folk of elf-land, “and heard their mystic voices calling, from fairy knoll and haunted hill.” Not till the fire died down into ashes did we leave the grove. Then we found that the full moon was gleaming lustrously from a cloudless sky across the valley. Between us and her stretched up a tall pine, wondrously straight and slender and branchless to its very top, where it overflowed in a crest of dark boughs against the silvery splendour behind it. Beyond, the hill farms were lying in a suave, white radiance.
“Doesn’t it seem a long, long time to you since we left home this afternoon?” asked the Story Girl. “And yet it is only a few hours.”
Only a few hours—true; yet such hours were worth a cycle of common years untouched by the glory and the dream.