Asquam proper is an old fishing-village on the bayside. The new Asquam has intruded with its narrow-eaved frame cottages among the gray old houses, and has shouldered away the colonial Merchants' Hall with a moving-picture theater, garish with playbills and posters. Two large and well-patronized summer hotels flourish on the highest elevation (Asquam people say that their town is "flatter'n a johnny cake"), from which a view of the open sea can be had, as well as of the peninsulas and islands which crowd the bay.
On the third day of April the hotels and many of the cottages were closed, with weathered shutters at the windows and a general air of desolation about their windy piazzas. Asquam, both new and old, presented a rather bleak and dismal appearance to three persons who alighted thankfully from the big trolley-car in which they had lurched through miles of flat, mist-hung country for the past forty minutes.
The station-agent sat on a tilted-up box and discussed the new arrivals with one of his ever-present cronies.
"Whut they standin' ther' fer?" he said. "Some folks ain't got enough sense to go in outen the rain, seems so."
"'T ain't rainin'--not so's to call it so," said the crony, whose name was Smith. "The gell's pretty."
"Ya-as, kind o'," agreed the station-agent, tilting back critically. "Boy's upstandin'."
"Which one?"
"Big 'n. Little 'un ain't got no git-up-'n'-git fer one o' his size. Look at him holdin' to her hand."
"Sunthin' ails him," Smith said. "Ain't all there I guess."
The station-agent nodded a condescending agreement, and cocked his foot on another box. At this moment the upstanding boy detached himself from his companions, and strode to where the old man sat.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "can you tell me how far it is to the Baldwin farm, and whether any of Mr. Sturgis's freight has come yet?"
"Baldwin fa'm?" and the station-agent scratched his ear. "Oh, you mean out on the Winterbottom Road, hey? 'Beout two mile."
"And Mr. Sturgis's freight?"
"Nawthin' come fer that name," said the agent, "'less these be them." He indicated four small packages in the baggage-room.
"Oh no," said Ken, "they're big things--beds, and things like that. Well, please let me know if they do come. I'm Mr. Sturgis."
"Oh, you be," said the agent, comprehensively.
"Ain't gonna walk away out to the Baldwin place with all them valises, air you?" Smith inquired, breaking silence for the first time.
"I don't know how else we'll get there," Ken said.
"Yay--Hop!" shouted Smith, unexpectedly, with a most astonishing siren-like whoop.
Before Ken had time to wonder whether it was a prearranged signal for attack, or merely that the man had lost his wits, an ancient person in overalls and a faded black coat appeared from behind the baggage-house. "Hey? Well?" said he.
"Take these folks up to the Baldwin place," Smith commanded; "and don't ye go losin' no wheels this time--ye got a young lady aboard." At which sally all the old men chuckled creakily.
But the young lady showed no apprehension, only some relief, as she stepped into the tottering surrey which Hop drove up beside the platform. As the old driver slapped the reins on the placid horse's woolly back, the station-agent turned to Smith.
"George," he said, "the little 'un ain't cracked. He 's blind."
"Well, gosh!" said Smith, with feeling.
Winterbottom Road unrolled itself into a white length of half-laid dust, between blown, sweet-smelling bay-clumps and boulder-filled meadows.
"Is it being nice?" Kirk asked, for the twentieth time since they had left the train for the trolley-car.
Felicia had been thanking fortune that she'd remembered to stop at the Asquam Market and lay in a few provisions. She woke from calculations of how many meals her family could make of the supplies she had bought, and looked about.
"We're near the bay," she said; "that is you can see little silvery flashes of it between trees. They're pointy trees--junipers, I think and there are a lot of rocks in the fields, and wild-flowers. Nothing like any place you Ve ever been in--wild, and salty, and--yes, quite nice."
They passed several low, sturdy farm-houses, and one or two boarded-up summer cottages; then two white chimneys showed above a dark green tumble of trees, and the ancient Hopkins pointed with his whip saying:
"Ther' you be. Kind o' dull this time year, I guess; but my! Asquam's real uppy, come summer--machines a-goin', an' city folks an' such. Reckon I'll leave you at the gate where I kin turn good."
The flap-flop of the horse's hoofs died on Winterbottom Road, and no sound came but the wind sighing in old apple-boughs, and from somewhere the melancholy creaking of a swinging shutter. The gate-way was grown about with grass; Ken crushed it as he forced open the gate, and the faint, sweet smell rose. Kirk held Felicia's sleeve, for she was carrying two bags. He stumbled eagerly through the tall dry grass of last summer's unmown growth.
"Now can you see it?Now?"
But Felicia had stopped, and Kirk stopped, too.
"Are we there? Why don't you say anything?"
Felicia said nothing because she could not trust her voice. Kirk knew every shade of it; she could not deceive him. Gaunt and gray the "fine old farm-house" stood its ground before them. Old it assuredly was, and once fine, perhaps, as its solid square chimneys and mullioned windows attested. But oh, the gray grimness of it! the sagging shutter that creaked, the burdocks that choked the stone door-step, the desolate wind that surged in the orchard trees and would not be still!
Ken did what Felicia could not do. He laughed--a real laugh, and swept Kirk into warm, familiar arms.
"It's a big, jolly, fine old place!" he said. "Its windows twinkle merrily, and the front door is only waiting for the key I have in my pocket. We've got home, Quirk--haven't we, Phil?"
Felicia blessed Ken. She almost fancied that the windows did twinkle kindly. The big front door swung open without any discourteous hesitation, and Ken stood in the hall.
"Phew--dark!" he said. "Wait here, you fellows, while I get some shutters open."
They could hear his footsteps sound hollowly in the back rooms, and shafts of dusky light, preceded by hammerings and thumpings, began presently to band the inside of the house. Felicia stepped upon the painted floor of the bare hall, glanced up the narrow stairs, and then stood in the musty, half-lit emptiness of what she guessed to be the living-room, waiting for Ken. Kirk did not explore. He stood quite still beside his sister, sorting out sounds, analyzing smells. Ken came in, very dusty, rubbing his hands on his trousers.
"Lots of fireplaces, anyway," he said. "Put down your things--if you've anywhere to put 'em. I'll load all the duffle into this room and see if there 's any wood in the woodshed. Glory! No beds, no blankets! There'llhaveto be wood, if the orchard primeval is sacrificed!" And he went, whistling blithely.
"This is an adventure," Felicia whispered dramatically to Kirk. "We've never had a real one before; have we?"
"Oh, it's nice!" Kirk cried suddenly. "It's low and still, and--the house wants us, Phil!"
"The house wants us," murmured Felicia. "I believe that's going to help me."
It was quite the queerest supper that the three had ever cooked or eaten. Perhaps "cooked" is not exactly the right word for what happened to the can of peas and the can of baked beans. Ken did find wood--not in the woodshed, but strewing the orchard grass; hard old apple-wood, gray and tough. It burned merrily enough in the living-room fireplace, and the chimney responded with a hollow rushing as the hot air poured into it.
"It makes it seem as if there were something alive here besides us, anyway," Felicia said.
They were all sitting on the hearth, warming their fingers, and when the apple-wood fire burned down to coals that now and again spurted short-lived flame, they set the can of peas and the can of baked beans among the embers. They turned them gingerly from time to time with two sticks, and laughed a great deal. The laughter echoed about in the empty stillness of the house.
Ken's knife was of the massive and useful sort that contains a whole array of formidable tools. These included a can-opener, which now did duty on the smoked tins. It had been previously used to punch holes in the tops of the cans before they went among the coals--"for we don't want the blessed things blowing up," Ken had said. Nothing at all was the matter with the contents of the cans, however, in spite of the strange process of cookery. The Sturgises ate peas and baked beans on chunks of unbuttered bread (cut with another part of Ken's knife) and decided that nothing had ever tasted quite so good.
"No dish-washing, at any rate," said Ken; "we've eaten our dishes."
Kirk chose to find this very entertaining, and consumed another "bread-plate," as he termed it, on the spot.
The cooking being finished, more gnarly apple-wood was put on the fire, and the black, awkward shadows of three figures leaped out of the bare wall and danced there in the ruddy gloom. Bedtime loomed nearer and nearer as a grave problem, and Ken and Felicia were silent, each wondering how the floor could be made softest.
"The Japanese sleep on the floor," Ken said, "and they have blocks of wood for pillows. Our bags are the size, and, I imagine, the consistency, of blocks of wood.N'est-ce pas, oui, oui?"
"I'd rather sleep on a rolled-up something-or-otheroutof my bag than on the bag itself, any day--or night," Felicia remarked.
"As you please," Ken said; "but act quickly. Our brother yawns."
"Bedtime, honey," Felicia laughed to Kirk. "Even queerer than supper-time was."
"A bed by night, a hard-wood floor by day," Ken misquoted murmurously.
"Hard-wood!" Felicia sniffed. "Hardwood!"
The problem now arose: which was most to be desired, an overcoat under you to soften the floor, or on top of you to keep you warm?
"If he has my overcoat, it'll do both," Ken suggested. "Put his sweater on, too." "But what'llyoudo?" Kirk objected.
"Roll up inyourovercoat, of course," Ken said.
This also entertained Kirk.
"No, but really?" he said, sober all at once.
"Don't you fret about me. I'll haul it away from you after you're asleep."
And Kirk snuggled into the capacious folds of Ken's Burberry, apparently confident that his brother really would claim it when he needed it.
Ken and Felicia sat up, feeding the fire occasionally, until long after Kirk's quiet breathing told them that he was asleep.
"Well, we've made rather a mess of things, so far," Ken observed, somewhat cheerlessly.
"We were ninnies not to think that none of the stuff would have come," Felicia said. "We'llhaveto do something before to-morrow night. This is all right for once,but--!"
"Goodness knows when the things will come," said Ken, poking at the fore-stick. "The old personage said that all the freight, express, everything, comes by that weird trolley-line, at its own convenience."
"Shouldn't you think that they'd have something dependable, in a summer place?" Felicia signed. "Oh, it seems as if we'd been living for years in houses with no furniture in them. And the home things will simply rattle, here."
"I wish we could have brought more of them," Ken said. "We'll have to rout around to-morrow and buy an oil-stove or something and a couple of chairs to sit on. Ah hum! Let's turn in, Phil. We've a tight room and a fire, anyhow. Shall you be warm enough?"
"Plenty. I've my coat, and a sweater. But what are you going to do?"
"Oh, I'll sit up a bit longer and stoke. And really, Kirk's overcoat spreads out farther than you'd think. He's tallish, nowadays."
Felicia discovered that there are ways and ways of sleeping on the floor. She found, after sundry writhings, the right way, and drifted off to sleep long before she expected to.
Ken woke later in the stillness of the last hours of night. The room was scarcely lit by the smoldering brands of the fire; its silence hardly stirred by the murmurous hissing of the logs. Without, small marsh frogs trilled their silver welcome to the spring, an unceasing jingle of tiny bell-notes. Kirk was cuddled close beside Ken, and woke abruptly as Ken drew him nearer.
"You didn't take your overcoat," he whispered.
"We'll both have it, now," his brother said. "Curl up tight, old man; it'll wrap round the two of us."
"Is it night still?" Kirk asked.
"Black night," Ken whispered; "stars at the window, and a tree swaying across it. And in here a sort of dusky lightness--dark in the corners, and shadows on the walls, and the fire glowing away. Phil's asleep on the other side of the hearth, and she looks very nice. And listen--hear the toads?"
"Is that what they are? I thought it was a fairy something. They make nice noises! Where do they live?"
"In some marsh. They sit there and fiddle away on bramble roots and sing about various things they like."
"What nice toads!" murmured Kirk.
"Sh-sh!"whispered Ken; "we're waking Phil. Good night--good morning, I mean. Warm enough now?"
"Yes. Oh, Ken,aren'twe having fun?"
"Aren't we, though!" breathed his brother, pulling the end of the Burberry over Kirk's shoulders.
The sun is a good thing. It clears away not only the dark shadows in the corners of empty rooms, but also the gloom that settles in anxious people's minds at midnight. The rising of the sun made, to be sure, small difference to Kirk, whose mind harbored very little gloom, and was lit principally by the spirits of those around him. Consequently, when his brother and sister began reveling in the clear, cold dawn, Kirk executed a joyous littlepas seulin the middle of the living-room floor and set off on a tour of exploration. He returned from it with his fingers very dusty, and a loop of cobwebs over his hair.
"It's all corners," he said, as Felicia caught him to brush him off, "andsteps. Two steps down and one up, and just when you aren't 'specting it."
"You'd better go easy," Ken counseled, "until you've had a personally conducted tour. You'll break your neck."
"I'm being careful. And I know already about this door. There's a kink in the wall and then a hump in the floor-boards just before you get there. It's an exciting house."
"That it is!" said Ken, reaching with a forked stick for the handle of the galvanized iron pail which sat upon the fire. Nobody ever heard of boiling eggs in a galvanized iron pail but that is exactly what the Sturgises did. The pail, in an excellent state of preservation, had been found in the woodshed. The pump yielded, unhesitatingly, any amount of delicious cold water, and though three eggs did look surprisingly small in the bottom of the pail, they boiled quite as well as if they'd been in a saucepan.
"Only think of all the kettles and things I brought!" Felicia mourned. "We'll have to buy some plates and cups, though, Ken." Most of the Sturgis china was reposing in a well-packed barrel in a room over Mr. Dodge's garage, accompanied by many other things for which their owners longed.
"How the dickens do we capture the eggs!" Ken demanded. "Pigs in clover's not in it. Lend a hand, Phil!"
Ken walked to Asquam almost immediately after breakfast, and Felicia explored their new abode most thoroughly, inside and out. Corners and steps there were in plenty, as Kirk had said; it seemed as if the house had been built in several pieces and patched together. Two biggish rooms downstairs, besides the kitchen; a large, built-in, white-doored closet in the living-room,--quite jolly, Felicia thought,--rusty nails driven in unbelievable quantities in all the walls. She couldn't imagine how any one could have wanted to hang anything in some of the queer places where nails sprouted, and she longed to get at them with a claw-hammer.
Upstairs there was one big room (for Ken and Kirk, Phil thought), a little one for herself, and what she immediately named "The Poke-Hole" for trunks and such things. When Mother came home, as come she must, the extra downstairs room could be fitted up for her, Felicia decided--or the boys could take it over for themselves. The upstairs rooms were all under the eaves, and, at present, were hot and musty. Felicia pounded open the windows which had small, old-fashioned panes, somewhat lacking in putty. In came the good April air fresh after the murk of yesterday, and smelling of salt, and heathy grass, and spring. It summoned Felicia peremptorily, and she ran downstairs and out to look at the "ten acres of land, peach and apple orchards."
Kirk went, too, his hand in hers.
"It's an easy house," he confided. "You'd think it would be hard, but the floor's different all over--bumpy, and as soon as I find out which bump means what, I'll know how to go all over the place. I dare say it's the same out here."
Felicia was not so sure. It seemed a trackless waste of blown grass for one to navigate in the dark. It was always a mystery to her how Kirk found his way through the mazy confusion of unseen surroundings. Now, on unfamiliar ground, he was unsure of himself, but in a place he knew, it was seldom that he asked or accepted guidance. The house was not forbidding, Felicia decided--only tired, and very shabby. The burdocks at the door-step could be easily disposed of. It was a wide stone door-step, as she had hoped and from it, though there was not much view of the bay, there were nice things to be seen. Before it, the orchard dropped away at one side, leaving a wide vista of brown meadows, sown with more of the pointy trees and grayed here and there by rocks; beyond that, a silver slip of water, and the far shore blue, blue in the distance. To the right of the house the land rolled away over another dun meadow that stopped at a rather civilized-looking hedge, above which rose a dense tumble of high trees. To the left lay the over-grown dooryard, the old lichened stone wall, and the sagging gate which opened to Winterbottom Road. Felicia tried to describe it all to Kirk, and wondered as she gazed at him, standing beside her with the eager, listening look his face so often wore, how much of it could mean anything to him hut an incomprehensible string of words.
Ken returned from Asquam in Hop's chariot, surrounded by bundles.
"Luxury!" he proclaimed, when the spoils were unloaded. "An oil-stove, two burners--and food, and beautiful plates with posies on 'em--and tin spoons! And I met Mrs. Hopkins and she almost fainted when I told her we'd slept on the floor. She wanted us to come to her house, but it's the size of a butter-box, and stuffy; so she insisted on sending three quilts. Behold! And the oil-stove was cheap because one of the doors was broken (which I can fix). So there you are!"
"No sign of the goods, I suppose?"
"Our goods? Law, no! Old Mr. Thingummy put on his spectacles and peered around as if he expected to find them behind the door!"
"Oh, my only aunt! Theyarewonderful plates!" Felicia cried, as she extracted one from its wrapper.
"That's my idea of high art," Ken said, "I got them at the Asquam Utility Emporium. And have you remarked the chairs? Mrs. Hopkins sent those, too. They were in her corn-crib,--on the rafters,--and she said if we didn't see convenient to bring 'em back, never mind, 'cause she was plumb tired of clutterin' 'em round from here to thar."
"Mrs. Hopkins seems to be an angel unawares," said Felicia, with enthusiastic misapplication.
It was the finding of the ancient sickle near the well that gave Ken the bright idea of cutting down the tall, dry grass for bedding.
"Not that it's much of a weapon," he said. "Far less like a sickle than a dissipated saw, to quote. But the edge is rusted so thin that I believe it'll do the trick."
Kirk gathered the grass up into soft scratchy heaps as Ken mowed it, keeping at a respectful distance behind the swinging sickle. Ken began to whistle, then stopped to hear the marsh frogs, which were still chorusing their mad joy in the flight of winter.
"I made up a pome about those thar toads," Ken said, "last night after you'd gone to sleep again."
Kirk leaped dangerously near the sickle.
"You haven't made me a pome for ages!" he cried. "Stop sickling and do it--quick!"
"It's a grand one," Ken said; "listen to this!
"Down in the marshes the sounds beginOf a far-away fairy violin,Faint and reedy and cobweb thin.
"Cricket and marsh-frog and brown tree-toad,Sit in the sedgy grass by the road,Each at the door of his own abode;
"Each with a fairy fiddle or fluteFashioned out of a briar root;The fairies join their notes, to boot.
"Sitting all in a magic ring,They lift their voices and sing and sing,Because it is April, 'Spring! Spring!'"
"Thatisa nice one!" Kirk agreed. "It sounds real. I don't know how you can do it."
A faint clapping was heard from the direction of the house, and turning, Ken saw his sister dropping him a curtsey at the door. "That," she said, "is a poem, not a pome--a perfectly good one."
"Go 'way!" shouted Ken. "You're a wicked interloper. And you don't even know why Kirk and I write pomes about toads, so you don't!"
"I never could see," Ken remarked that night, "why people are so keen about beds of roses. If you ask me, I should think they'd be uncommon prickly and uncomfortable. Give me a bed of herbs--where love is, don't you know?"
"It wasn't a bed of herbs," Felicia contended; "it was a dinner of them. This isn't herbs, anyway. And think of the delectable smell of the bed of roses!"
"But every rose would have its thorn," Ken objected. "No, no, 'herbs' is preferable."
This argument was being held during the try-out of the grass beds in the living-room.
"See-saw, Margery Daw, She packed up her bed and lay upon straw,"
sang Felicia.
But the grasswasan improvement. Grass below and Mrs. Hop's quilts above, with the overcoats in reserve--the Sturgises considered themselves quite luxurious, after last night's shift at sleep.
"What care we if the beds don't come?" Ken said. "We could live this way all summer. Let them perish untended in the trolley freight-house."
But when Kirk was asleep, the note of the conversation dropped. Ken and Felicia talked till late into the night, in earnest undertones, of ways and means and the needs of the old house.
And slowly, slowly, all the wheels did begin to turn together. Some of the freight came,--notably the beds,--after a week of waiting. Ken and Hop carried them upstairs and set them up, with much toil. Ken chopped down two dead apple-trees, and filled the shed with substantial fuel. The Asquam Market would deliver out Winterbottom Road after May first. Trunks came, with old clothes, and Braille books and other books--and things that Felicia had not been able to leave behind at the last moment. Eventually, came a table, and the Sturgises set their posied plates upon it, and lighted their two candles stuck in saucers, and proclaimed themselves ready to entertain.
"And," thought Felicia, pausing at the kitchen door, "what a difference it does make!"
Firelight and candle-light wrought together their gracious spell on the old room. The tin spoons gleamed like silver, the big brown crash towel that Ken had jokingly laid across the table looked quite like a runner. The light ran and glowed on the white-plastered ceiling and the heavy beams; it flung a mellow aureole about Kirk, who was very carefully arranging three tumblers on the table.
The two candle-flames swayed suddenly and straightened, as Ken opened the outer door and came in.
He too, paused, looking at the little oasis in the dark, silent house.
"We're beginning," he said, "to make friends with the glum old place."
There was much to be done. The rusty nails were pulled out, and others substituted in places where things could really be hung on them--notably in the kitchen, where they supported Felicia's pots and pans in neatly ordered rows. The burdocks disappeared, the shutters were persuaded not to squeak, the few pieces of furniture from home were settled in places where they would look largest. Yes, the house began to be friendly. The rooms were not, after all, so enormous as Felicia had thought. The furniture made them look much smaller. At the Asquam Utility Emporium, Felicia purchased several yards of white cheese-cloth from which she fashioned curtains for the living-room windows. She also cleaned the windows themselves, and Ken did a wondrous amount of scrubbing.
Now, when fire and candle-light shone out in the living room, it looked indeed like a room in which to live--so thought the Sturgises, who asked little.
"Come out here, Phil," Ken whispered plucking his sister by the sleeve, one evening just before supper. Mystified, she followed him out into the soft April twilight; he drew her away from the door a little and bade her look back.
There were new green leaves on the little bush by the door-stone; they gleamed startlingly light in the dusk. A new moon hung beside the stalwart white chimney--all the house was a mouse-colored shadow against the darkening sky. The living-room windows showed as orange squares cut cheerfully from the night. Through the filmy whiteness of the cheese-cloth curtains, could be seen the fire, the table spread for supper, the gallant candles, Kirk lying on the hearth, reading.
"Doesn't it look like a place to live in--and to have a nice time in?" Ken asked.
"Oh," Felicia said, "it almost does!"
The civilized-looking hedge had been long since investigated. The plot of land it enclosed--reached, for the Sturgises, through a breach in the hedge--was very different from the wild country which surrounded it. The place had once been a very beautiful garden, but years and neglect had made of it a half-formal wilderness, fascinating in its over-grown beauty and its hint of earlier glory. For Kirk, it was an enchanted land of close-pressing leafy alleys, pungent with the smell of box; of brick-paved paths chanced on unexpectedly--followed cautiously to the rim of empty, stone-coped pools. He and Felicia, or he and Ken, went there when cookery or carpentry left an elder free. For when they had discovered that the tall old house, though by no means so neglected as the garden, was as empty, they ventured often into the place. Kirk invented endless tales of enchanted castles, and peopled the still lawns and deserted alleys with every hero he had ever read or heard of. Who could tell? They might indeed lurk in the silent tangle--invisible to him only as all else was invisible. So he liked to think, and wandered, rapt, up and down the grass-grown paths of this enchanting play-ground.
It was not far to the hedge--over the rail fence, across the stubbly meadow. Kirk had been privately amassing landmarks. He had enough, he considered, to venture forth alone to the garden of mystery. Felicia was in the kitchen--not eating bread and honey, but reading a cook-book and making think-lines in her forehead. Ken was in Asquam. Kirk stepped off the door-stone; sharp to the right, along the wall of the house, then a stretch in the open to the well, over the fence--and then nothing but certain queer stones and the bare feel of the faint path that had already been worn in the meadow.
Kirk won the breach in the hedge and squeezed through. Then he was alone in the warm, green-smelling stillness of the trees. He found his way from the moss velvet under the pines to the paved path, and followed it, unhesitating, to the terrace before the house. On the shallow, sun-warmed steps he sat playing with fir-cones, fingering their scaly curves and sniffing their dry, brown fragrance. He swept a handful of them out of his lap and stood up, preparatory to questing further up the stone steps, to the house itself. But suddenly he stood quite still, for he knew that he was not alone in the garden. He knew, also, that it was neither Ken nor Felicia who stood looking at him. Had one of the fairy-tale heroes materialized, after all, and slipped out of magic coverts to walk with him? Rather uncertainly, he said, "Is somebody there?"
His voice sounded very small in the outdoor silence. Suppose no one were there at all! How silly it would sound to be addressing a tree! There was a moment of stillness, and then a rather old voice said:
"Considering that you are looking straight at me, that seems a somewhat foolish question."
So therewassome one! Kirk said:
"I can't see you, because I can't see anything."
After a pause, the voice said, "Forgive me." But indeed, at first glance, the grave shadowed beauty of Kirk's eyes did not betray their blindness.
"Are you one of the enchanted things, or a person?" Kirk inquired.
"I might say, now, that I am enchanted," said the voice, drily.
"I don't think I quite know what you mean," Kirk said. "You sound like aPuck of Pook's Hillsort of person."
"Nothing so exciting. Though Oak and Ash and Thorn do grow in my garden."
"Dothey? I haven't found them. I knew it was a different place, ever so different from anything near--different from the other side of the hedge."
"I am not so young as you," said the voice, "to stand about hatless on an April afternoon. Let us come in and sit on either side of the chimney-corner."
And a long, dry, firm hand took Kirk's, and Kirk followed unhesitatingly where it led.
The smoothness of old polished floors, a sense of height, absolute silence, a dry, aromatic smell--this was Kirk's impression as he crossed the threshold, walking carefully and softly, that he might not break the spellbound stillness of the house. Then came the familiar crackle of an open fire, and Kirk was piloted into the delicious cozy depths of a big chair beside the hearth. Creakings, as of another chair being pulled up, then a contented sigh, indicated that his host had sat down opposite him.
"May I now ask your name?" the voice inquired.
"I'm Kirkleigh Sturgis, at Applegate Farm," said Kirk.
"' ... I s'pose you know, Miss Jean,That I'm Young Richard o' Taunton Dean....'"
murmured the old gentleman.
Kirk pricked up his ears instantly. "Phil sings that," he said delightedly. "I'm glad you know it. But you would."
"Who'd have thoughtyouwould know it?" said the voice. "I am fond ofYoung Richard. Is Phil your brother?"
"She's my sister--but I have a brother. He's sixteen, and he's almost as high as the doorways at Applegate Farm."
"I seem not to know where Applegate Farm is," the old gentleman mused.
"It's quite next door to you," said Kirk.
"They call it the Baldwin place, really. But Ken happened to think that Baldwin's a kind of apple, and thereisan orchard and a gate, so we called it that."
"The old farm-house across the meadow!" There was a shade of perplexity in the voice. "You livethere?"
"It's the most beautiful place in the world," said Kirk, with conviction, "except your garden."
"Beautiful--to you! Why?"
"Oh, everything!" Kirk said, frowning, and trying to put into words what was really joy in life and spring and the love of his brother and sister. "Everything--the wind in the trees, and in the chimney at night, and the little toads that sing,--do you ever hear them?--and the fire, and, and--everything!"
"And youth," said the old gentleman to himself, "and an unconscious courage to surmount all obstacles. But perhaps, after all, the unseen part of Applegate Farm is the more beautiful." Aloud, he said: "Do you like to look at odd things? That is--I mean--"
Kirk helped him out. "I do like to," he said. "I look at them with my fingers--but it's all the same."
Such things to look at! They were deposited, one after the other, in Kirk's eager hands,--the intricate carving of Japanese ivory, entrancingly smooth--almost like something warm and living, after one had held it for a few adoring moments in careful hands. And there was a Burmese ebony elephant, with a ruby in his forehead.
"A ruby is red," Kirk murmured; "it is like the fire. And the elephant is black. I see him very well."
"Once upon a time," said the old gentleman, "a rajah rode on him--a rajah no bigger than your finger. And his turban was encrusted with the most precious of jewels, and his robe was stiff with gold. The elephant wore anklets of beaten silver, and they clinked as he walked."
Kirk's face was intent, listening. The little ebony elephant stood motionless on his palm, dim in the firelight.
"I hear them clinking," he said, "and the people shouting--oh, so far away!"
He put the treasure back into his host's hand, at last. "I'd like, please, to look atyou," he said. "It won't hurt," he added quickly, instantly conscious of some unspoken hesitancy.
"I have no fear of that," said the voice, "but you will find little worth the looking for."
Kirk, nevertheless, stood beside the old gentleman's chair, ready with a quick, light hand to visualize his friend's features.
"My hair, if that will help you," the voice told him, "is quite white, and my eyes are usually rather blue."
"Blue," murmured Kirk, his fingers flitting down the fine lines of the old gentleman's profile; "that's cool and nice, like the sea and the wind. Your face is like the ivory thing--smooth and--and carved. I think you really must be something different and rather enchanted."
But the old man had caught both Kirk's hands and spread them out in his own. There was a moment of silence, and then he said:
"Do you care for music, my child?"
"I love Phil's songs," Kirk answered, puzzled a little by a different note in the voice he was beginning to know. "She sings and plays the accompaniments on the piano."
"Do you ever sing?"
"Only when I'm all alone." The color rushed for an instant to Kirk's cheeks, why, he could not have said.
"Without a word, the old gentleman, still holding Kirk's hands, pushed him gently into the chair he had himself been sitting in. There was a little time of stillness, filled only by the crack and rustle of the fire. Then, into the silence, crept the first dew-clear notes of Chopin's F Sharp Major Nocturne. The liquid beauty of the last bars had scarcely died away, when the unseen piano gave forth, tragically exultant, the glorious chords of the Twentieth Prelude--climbing higher and higher in a mournful triumph of minor chords and sinking at last into the final solemn splendor of the closing measures. The old gentleman turned on the piano-stool to find Kirk weeping passionately and silently into the cushions of the big chair.
"Have I done more than I meant?" he questioned himself, "or is it only the proof?" His bands on Kirk's quivering shoulders, he asked, "What is it?"
Kirk sat up, ashamed, and wondering why he had cried. "It was because it was so much more wonderful than anything that ever happened," he said unsteadily. "And I never can do it."
The musician almost shook him.
"But you can," he said; "you must! How can youhelpyourself, with those hands? Has no one guessed? How stupid all the world is!"
He pulled Kirk suddenly to the piano, swept him abruptly into the wiry circle of his arm.
"See," he whispered; "oh, listen!"
He spread Kirk's fingers above the keyboard--brought them down on a fine chord of the Chopin prelude, and for one instant Kirk felt coursing through him a feeling inexplicable as it was exciting--as painful as it was glad. The next moment the chord died; the old man was again the gentle friend of the fireside.
"I am stupid," he said, "and ill-advised. Let's have tea."
The tea came, magically--delicious cambric tea and cinnamon toast. Kirk and the old gentleman talked of the farm, and of Asquam, and other every-day subjects, till the spring dusk gathered at the window, and the musician started up. "Your folk will be anxious," he said. "We must be off. But you will come to me again, will you not?"
Nothing could have kept Kirk away, and he said so.
"And what'syourname, please?" he asked. "I've told you mine." A silence made him add, "Of course, if you mind telling me--"
Silence still, and Kirk, inspired, said:
"Phil was reading a book aloud to Mother, once, and it was partly about a man who made wonderful music and they called him 'Maestro.' Would you mind if I called you Maestro--just for something to call you, you know?"
He feared, in the stillness, that he had hurt his friend's feelings, but the voice, when it next spoke, was kind and grave.
"I am unworthy," it said, "but I should like you to call me Maestro. Come--it is falling dusk. I'll go with you to the end of the meadow."
And they went out together into the April twilight.
Ken and Felicia were just beginning to be really anxious, when Kirk tumbled in at the living-room door, with a headlong tale of enchanted hearthstones, ebony elephants, cinnamon toast, music that had made him cry, and most of all, of the benevolent, mysterious presence who had wrought all this. Phil and Ken shook their heads, suggested that some supper would make Kirk feel better, and set a boundary limit of the orchard and meadow fence on his peregrinations.
"But I promised him I'd come again," Kirk protested; "and I can find the way. Imust, because he says I can make music like that--and he's the only person who could show me how."
Felicia extracted a more coherent story as she sat on the edge of Kirk's bed later that evening. She came downstairs sober and strangely elated, to electrify her brother by saying:
"Something queer has happened to Kirk. He's too excited, but he's simply shining. And do you suppose it can possibly be true that he has music in him? I meanreal, extraordinary music, like--Beethoven or somebody."
But Ken roared so gleefully over the ridiculous idea of his small brother's remotely resembling Beethoven, that Phil suddenly thought herself very silly, and lapsed into somewhat humiliated silence.
It was some time before the cares of a household permitted the Sturgises to do very much exploring. One of their first expeditions, however, had been straight to the bay from the farm-house--a scramble through wild, long-deserted pastures, an amazingly thick young alder grove, and finally out on the stony, salty water's edge. Here all was silver to the sea's rim, where the bay met wider waters; in the opposite direction it narrowed till it was not more than a river, winding among salt flats and sudden rocky points until it lost itself in a maze of blue among the distant uplands. The other shore was just beginning to be tenderly alight with April green, and Felicia caught her breath for very joy at the faint pink of distant maple boughs and the smell of spring and the sea. A song-sparrow dropped a sudden, clear throatful of notes, and Kirk, too, caught the rapture of the spring and flung wide his arms in impartial welcome.
Ken had been poking down the shore and came back now, evidently with something to say.
"There's the queerest little inlet down there," he said, "with a tide eddy that runs into it. And there's an old motor-boat hove way up on the rocks in there among the bushes."
"What about it?" Felicia asked.
"I merely wished it were ours."
"Naturally it's some one else's."
"He takes mighty poor care of it, then. The engine's all rusted up, and there's a hole stove in the bottom."
"Thenweshouldn't want it."
"It could be fixed," Ken murmured; "easily. I examined it."
He stared out at the misty bay's end, thinking, somehow, of theCelestine, which he had not forgotten in his anxieties as a householder.
But even the joy of April on the bayside was shadowed when the mail came to Applegate Farm that day. The United States mail was represented, in the environs of Asquam, by a preposterously small wagon,--more like a longitudinal slice of a milk-cart than anything else,--drawn by two thin, rangy horses that seemed all out of proportion to their load. Their rhythmic and leisurely trot jangled a loud but not unmusical bell which hung from some hidden part of the wagon's anatomy, and warned all dwellers on Rural Route No. 1 that the United States mail, ably piloted by Mr. Truman Hobart, was on its way.
The jangling stopped at Applegate Farm, and Mr. Hobart delved into a soap-box in his cart and extracted the Sturgis mail, which he delivered into Kirk's outstretched hand. Mr. Hobart waited, as usual, to watch, admire, and marvel at Kirk's unhesitating progress to the house, and then he clucked to the horses and tinkled on his way.
There was a penciled note from Mrs. Sturgis, forwarded, as always, from Westover Street, where she, of course, thought her children were (they sent all their letters for her to Mr. Dodge, that they might bear the Bedford postmark--and very difficult letters those were to write!), a bill from the City Transfer Company (carting: 1 table, etc., etc.), and a letter from Mr. Dodge. It was this letter which shadowed Applegate Farm and dug a new think-line in Ken's young forehead. For Rocky Head Granite was, it seemed, by no means so firm as its name sounded. Mr. Dodge's hopes for it were unfulfilled. It was very little indeed that could now be wrung from it. The Fidelity was for Mother--with a margin, scant enough, to eke out the young Sturgises' income. There was the bill for carting, other bills, daily expenses. Felicia, reading over Ken's shoulder, bit her lip.
"Come back to town, my dear boy," wrote Mr. Dodge, "and I will try to get you something to do. You are all welcome to my house and help as long as you may have need."
It had been dawning more and more on Ken that he had been an idiot not to stay in town, where therewaswork to do. He had hated to prick Phil's ideal bubble and cancel the lease on the farm,--for it was really she who had picked out the place,--but he was becoming aware that he should have done so. This latest turn in the Sturgis fortunes made it evident that something must be done to bring more money than the invested capital yielded. There was no work here; unless perhaps he might hire out as a farm-hand, at small wages indeed. And he knew nothing of farm work. Nevertheless, he and Felicia shook their heads at Mr. Dodge's proposal. They sat at the table within the mellow ring of lamplight, after Kirk had gone to bed, and thrashed out their problem,--pride fighting need and vanquishing judgment. It was a good letter that Kenelm sent Mr. Dodge, and the attorney shook his own head as he read it in his study, and said:
"I admire your principle, my boy--but oh, I pity your inexperience!"