After supper Margaret sat and talked with Mrs. Viney. The fisherman's wife was a woman of fifty, with a dragging voice, a faint curiosity in her manner. Her iron-gray hair smoothed flat was tied in a little knot behind. Her husband, a good ten years older, had the vitality of a young man compared with his wife. He was grizzled and squat, with thick red face and powerful shoulders. His eyes twinkled sharply under their fleshy lids; but he exhibited no outward curiosity over the two strangers who had dropped down on his island.
"That woman!" Margaret exclaimed disgustedly to Falkner as they went back to the camp.
"Our excellent hostess? What is the matter with her?"
"She's a whiner!" Margaret replied hotly. "The woman is always the whiner,—it makes me despise my sex. What do you suppose she wants? She has a sister in Lawrence, Mass., and Lawrence, Mass., is her Paris! She wants her husband to give up this, all the life he's known since he was a boy, and go to live in Lawrence, Mass., so that she can walk on brick sidewalks and look into shop windows. There's an ideal for you, my dear!"
Falkner laughed at her outburst. After all an ambition for Lawrence, Mass., was not criminal.
"Oh, women! … She wanted me to know that she had seen life,—knew a lady who had rings like mine,—the social instinct in women,—phew! And he smoked his pipe like an honest man and said not a word. He'll never die in Lawrence, Mass."
"But it must be lonely for the poor thing here winters; their children have all gone to the city."
"There are ten families at the other end of the island, if she must have some one to clack with."
"Perhaps she doesn't find the island society congenial," Falkner suggested slyly. He had heard Margaret inveigh against certain less restricted societies.
"But the old man said, 'Winters are best of all—when it's fierce outside, and there's nothing but yourself to amuse yourself with!' That's the man. And he said: 'I like the blows, too. I've been on the sea all my life, and I don't know nothing about it to speak on.' He has a sense of what it means,—all this greatness about him."
"But her element, you forget, is Lawrence, Mass."
"The man has the imagination, if he is a man! If he is a man! Woman just tails on,—as I cling to you, dearest!"
"And sometimes I think you would want to take the lead,—to have your own little way."
"Yes, I like my way, too! But the women who think they can strike out alone—live their own lives, as they say—are foolish. The wise women work through men,—accomplish themselves in those they love. Isn't that bigger than doing all the work yourself?"
"Women create the necessity for man's work."
"You know I don't mean that! … What is bliss is to make the way clear for the one you loved…. I could do that! I'd set my little brain working to smooth away the immediate difficulties, those that hinder, the little things that stick in the way. I'd clean the armor for my lord and bring him nourishing food."
"And point out the particular castle you would like him to capture for your dwelling?"
"Never! If the man were worth serving, he would mark his own game."…
They had walked to the eastern point of the island, where nothing was to be seen but the wide sea. The wind had utterly fallen, leaving the surface of the water mottled with currents from beneath. Far away on the horizon some ships seemed to be sailing—they had wind out there—and their sails still shone in the twilight. About the cliff at their feet the tide ran in black circles. It was still, and the earth was warm and fragrant from the hot day. Margaret rested her head upon his arm and closed her eyes.
"It has been too much for you," he said, concerned.
"No," she murmured, "I am not tired. This is content, at the day's end. It is marvellous,"—she opened her eyes again upon him with a smile of wonder. "I haven't had a moment of fatigue, and I have done so much since yesterday,—more than I have done for years. I wonder what it is gives us women strength or weakness."
"Joy gives strength!"
"Peace gives strength. Sometimes I think that all the weakness in life—women's weakness—is merely wrong adjustment. It is never work that kills—it isn't just living, no matter how hard it is. But it is trying to live when you are dead…. Dearest, if we stayed here, I should be always strong! I know it. All the weariness and the pain and the languor would go; I should be what I was meant to be, what every human being is meant to be,—strong to bear."
"It is a bitter thought."
"I suppose that is why men and women struggle so blindly to set themselves right, why they run away and commit all sorts of follies. They feel within them the capacity for health, for happiness, if they can only get right somehow. And when they find the way—"
She made a little gesture with her hand that swept the troubles from the road.
"If they can be sure, it is almost a duty—to put themselves right, isn't it?"
Here they had come to the temptation which in all their intimate moments they had avoided…. 'Others have remade the pattern of their lives,—why not we?' The woman answered the thought in the man's mind.
"I should never take it, even knowing that it is my one chance for health and all that I desire, not while my father lives, not while my mother-in-law lives; it would add another sorrow to their graves. Nor while my husband has a right to his children. We are all bound in criss-cross in life. Nor would you, dearest, have me; you would hate me,—it would turn our glory to gall!"
It was not her habit to put her hands before her eyes. She was clear with herself, and without the sentimental fog. For the Bishop's creed she cared nothing. For her mother-in-law's prejudices she cared as little. The punishment of Society she would have met with gleeful contempt. People could not take from her what she valued, for she had stripped so much that there was little left in her heart to be deprived of. As for her husband, he did not exist for her; towards him she was spiritually blind. Her children were so much a part of her that she never thought of them as away from her. Where she went, they would be, as a matter of course.
They had never laid all this on the table before them, so to speak, but both had realized it from the beginning. They had walked beside the social precipice serene, but aware of the depths—and the heights.
"I hate to be limited by the opinions, the prejudices, of other people, of any one," the man protested. "There seems a cowardice in silently acquiescing in social laws that I don't respect, because the majority so wills it."
"Not because it is the will of the majority—not that; but because others near you will be made wretched. That is the only morality I have!"
The law of pity in the place of the law of God! A fragile leash for passion and egotism. They both shuddered.
The dusk gathered all about them. Her head still rested on his breast, and her hand stole to his face. She whispered, "So we pay the forfeit—for our blindness!"
"And if I stay—"
"Don't say it! Don't say that! Do you think that I could be here this moment in your arms ifthatwere possible?"
Her voice trembled with scorn, disgust of the adulterous world.
"Hiding and corner lies for us? No, no, my lover,—not foryou!Not even forme. That is the one price too great to pay for happiness. It would kill it all. Kill it! Surely. I should become in your eyes—like one of—them. It would be—oh, you understand!" She buried her head in his coat.
Again she had saved them, kept the balance of their ideal. She would have love, not hidden lust. What she had done this once could never be done again without defilement. She had come to him as to a man condemned to die, to leave the earth forever, and the one most precious thing he wanted and the one most precious thing that she had to give,—that she had given freely—to the man condemned to death.
"We have come all the hard way up the heights to infinite joy, to Peace!Shall we throw ourselves down into the gulf?"…
* * * * *
In the night Falkner woke with a start, putting out his hand to fend off a catastrophe. She was not there by his side! For one moment fear filled his mind, and then as he sprang up he saw her in the faint moonlight, leaning against the post of the veranda, looking out into the night. At his movement she turned.
"The night was too beautiful to sleep through, dearest! I have so much to think about."
She came back to his side and knelt above him, drawing her cloak around her. "See! we are all alone here under the stars." The fog had stolen in from the sea, risen as high as the trees, and lay close over land and ocean. The heavens were cloudless, and the little moon was low. "Those tranquil stars up there! They give us our benediction for the time to come…. We have had our supreme joy—our desire of desires—and now Peace shall enter our hearts and remain there. That is what the night says…. It can never be as it was before for you or me. We shall carry away something from our feast to feed on all our lives. We shall have enough to give others. Love makes you rich—so rich! We must give it away, all our lives. We shall, dearest, never fear."
For the soul has its own sensualities,—its self-delight in pain, in humiliation,—its mood of generosity, too. The penetrating warmth of a great passion irradiates life about it.
"My children, my children," she murmured, "I love them more—I can do for them more. And for dear Mother Pole—and even for him. I shall be gentler—I shall understand…. Love was set before me. I have taken it, and it has made me strong. I will be glad and love the world, all of it, for your sake, because you have blessed me…. Ours is not the fire that turns inward and feeds upon itself!"
"Oh, Margaret, Margaret!—"
"Listen," she murmured, clasping his neck, "you are the Man! You must spread the flame where I cannot. I kiss you. I have eaten of life with you. Together we have understood. Forget me, cease to love me; but always you must be stronger, greater, nobler because you have held me in your arms and loved me. If you cannot carry us upwards, it has been base,—the mere hunger of animals,—my lover! You have made of my weakness strength, and I have given you peace! Pour it out for me in deeds that I may know I have loved a Man, that my hero lives!"
Like a cry of the spirit it rang out into the night between the mist-hidden earth and the silent stars. In the stillness there had come a revelation of life,—the eternal battle of man between the spirit and the flesh, between the seen and the unseen, the struggle infinite and always. Where life is, that must be. And the vision of man's little, misshapen existence,—the incomplete and infinitesimal unit he is,—and also the significance of him,—this material atom, the symbol, the weapon of the spirit, shone forth before them. This the woman had felt in giving herself to him, that the spirit within was freed by the touch of flesh….
Already in the calm night desire and passion seemed to fade from them. Here had ended their passion, and now must begin the accomplishment. When the revelation comes, and the spirit thus speaks through the flesh, it is peace with human beings….
They lay there awake but silent into the gray hours of dawn, and when the mist had spread upwards to the sky, shutting out the stars, they slept.
At breakfast Joe Viney said:—
"I was lobsterin' this morning."
"It must have been the thud of your oars that we heard when we woke."
"Mos' likely,—I was down there at the end of the island, hauling in the pots. It's goin' to be a greasy day. But there's wind comin'."
They could hear the long call of a steamer's whistle and the wail of the fog-horn beyond the next island. The little white house was swathed in the sea mist.
"Better take the steamer at the Neck, if you're going to the city," Mrs.Viney suggested. "It'll be cold and damp sailing this morning."
"Never!" Margaret protested.
Mrs. Viney looked at Margaret pityingly. That a woman from the city should care to come to this forlorn, lonesome spot, "when the summer folks had gone," and sleep out of doors on fir boughs, and go off in a messy sail-boat in a fog, when there was a clean, fast steamer that would take her in an hour to the city—it was a mystery. As she packed some pieces of soggy bread, a little meat, and still soggier cake into a box for their luncheon she shook her head, protesting:—
"You'll spoil that hat o' yourn. It wasn't meant for sailin'."
"No, it wasn't; that's true!" She took off the flower-bedecked hat with its filmy veiling. "Would you like it? I shall find a cap in the boat."
'Clearly,' thought Mrs. Viney, 'the woman is crazy;' but she accepted the hat. Afterwards she said to her husband:—
"I can't make them two out. She ain't young, and she ain't exactly old, and she ain't pretty,—well, she's got the best of the bargain, a little wisp like her." For, womanlike, she admired Falkner in his sweater and flannels, strong and male, with a dark coat of tan on his face.
Viney accompanied them to the boat, waddling across the field, his hands in the armholes of his vest. He said little, but as he shoved them off in their tender, he observed:—
"It's the sort of day you could get lost in mighty easy."
"Oh," Falkner called back cheerily, "I guess I know my way."
"Well, I guess youdo!"
* * * * *
As Viney had said, the wind came through the fog, driving the boat in unseen fashion, while the sail hung almost limp. There was a little eddy of oily water at the stern; they were slipping, sliding through the fog-bank, back to the earth.
"Back to life," Falkner hummed, "back; back, to the land, to the world!"
The fog clung in Margaret's hair, and dimmed her eyes. She bared her arms to feel the cool touch of it on her skin. Clean things, like the sun yesterday, the resinous firs, the salty fog,—clean elemental things,—how she loved them!
"And suppose," Falkner suggested, "I should lose my way in this nest of reefs and islands and we got shipwrecked or carried out to sea?"
"I should hear Ned calling through the fog." A simple answer, but withal enough. Their hour, which they had set themselves, was past. And lying here in the impalpable mist, slipping towards the hidden port, she was filled with ineffable content….
"You are still radiant!" Falkner said wonderingly.
"It can't fade—never wholly! I cherish it." She drew her arms close about her. "Sacred things never utterly die!"
They had found it, they had lived it, they knew—what the unspiritual and carnal millions that clutter God's earth may never know—ecstasy, the secret behind the stars, beyond the verge of the sea, in the great lunar spaces of spirit.
* * * * *
On they glided through the thoroughfares, around island points, across reaches of the sea, sweeping onward now with an audible gurgle in their wake, the sails bellying forward; veering this way, falling off there, as the impassive man touched the tiller, obeying an instinct, seeing into the dark beyond. Now a bit of cliff loomed in the fog, again a shingled roof or a cluster of firs, and the whistling buoy at the harbor's mouth began to bellow sadly,—reminders all of the shell of that world towards which they sailed. And at last the harbor, with its echoing bells and fog-whistles, the protesting shrieks of its man-machines; suddenly the colossal hull of a schooner at anchor. Then the ghostly outlines of the huddled shipping, the city roofs, the steeples, the shriek of engines in the freight yards—they touched the earth! It had ended. The noise of living reverberated in their ears.
Margaret rose with a sigh, and looked back through the closing curtain of fog to an island headland misty and vague.
"My heaven—oh, my heaven! our haven, my master!"
Like two newly wakened beings, stunned by the light and sound around them, they stumbled over the wharf. A large sailing vessel was loading there for its voyage,—a Portuguese ship bound for Demerara, so the black sailor said whom Falkner questioned. With a last look at its tall masts they took their way into the city and so to the station.
Here was the same crowd coming from the trains,—the little human motes pushing hither and thither, hurrying from train to train, dashing, dawdling, loitering. Were they the same motes as two days before? Were they always the same,—marionettes wound to perform the clamorous motions of life? Or were they men and women like themselves, with their own great secrets in their hearts? Above all, the secret that transforms! Had these others, too, gone into the great high places?
They walked to the bridge while they waited for the Bedmouth train. Far down the harbor rose the tall masts of the Portuguese ship.
"Bound for Demerara," murmured Falkner, with a smile; "we might be sailing for the Windward Islands?"
"No," Margaret smiled back; "we love too much for that,—you and I."
Within the old parlor of the Bedmouth house Mrs. Pole was waiting for a step. It came at last.
"The children?" Margaret demanded, kissing the old lady.
"Perfectly well."
"I must go up to them," and she started for the door.
"Wait!" Mrs. Pole said, looking up sadly into the younger woman's pale face, which still held the glow.
"Yes, mother?" The voice rang with a note of vitality, of life, as if to chant, 'I have come back to you from a long way off!' Mrs. Pole said slowly:—
"Lawrence is upstairs. He came on from New York yesterday."
"Oh!"
At the head of the stairs she met her husband, who had heard her voice below.
"You have been away!" he said sharply, an unwonted touch of authority in his voice.
It was in her heart to say: 'Yes, in heaven! Can't you see it in my face?'She replied gently:—
"Yes, I have been—away!"
"Where?"
She looked at him out of her deep eyes, and said slowly:—
"Do you wish me to tell you?"
And after a moment, as if her husband was not there and she were looking through him at something beyond, she went on into the children's room. Pole, steadying himself by the hand-rail, descended the stairs.
He no longer existed, even as a convention, for his wife.
Isabelle had not succeeded in bringing Vickers home with her that first time she had gone abroad. They had had a very pleasant month in the Dolomites, and he had taken her to Paris to join the Woodyards, with whom she returned. Whenever she had spoken to Vickers of coming home he had smiled and made a little joke. Once he said, "Not yet,—I cannot go yet, Belle," and she understood that it was "that beast of a woman," as she called Mrs. Conry, who kept him. She wanted to say to him, "Well, Vick, if you won't leave her, why don't you marry her then!" But gentle as her brother was to her, she did not like to touch on that topic.
She had meant to go over the next spring, but the new house was under way then. A year later a letter from Fosdick, who was returning from Russia by the way of Venice, made her start for Europe at once.
… "Madam," Fosdick wrote, "having sucked our Vickers dry, has left him at last, I am happy to say. Gone off with a fresh orange. Vick doesn't realize his luck,—he's plain dazed. Before the other orange becomes dry, it is our simple duty—yours and mine—to remove the stranded hero out of reach. I think you can do it now…. I forgot to say that the Conry left with him a pledge of her return in the shape of a lump of a girl, her daughter by Conry. Vick seems idiotically tied to this little Conry…. Oh, it is a shame, a shame!"
Isabelle cabled Fosdick to bring Vickers with him to Paris and started with her mother. "No sermons, you know, mother," she warned Mrs. Price. "It's something you and I don't understand."
When Vickers came to their hotel in Paris, it seemed to Isabelle that the last two years had worked more damage than the previous six. There was a dazed and submissive air about her brother that brought the tears to her eyes. In the languid, colorless face before her, she could scarcely find a trace of the pale, tense boy, who had roused her in the middle of the night the day before he left St. Louis….
"Why don't you come to this hotel?" Mrs. Price had demanded.
Vickers had made an excuse, and when his mother had left the room, he said to Isabelle, "You will have to explain to mother that I am not alone."
Isabelle gasped, and Vickers hastened to say, "You see Delia is with me."
"Dick wrote me that she left her child!"
"Yes…. I am really very fond of the poor little thing."
"The beast!" Isabelle muttered.
Vickers shuddered, and Isabelle resolved that no matter what happened she would not allow herself to refer again to either mother or child. Later she walked back with him to his rooms and saw the girl. Delia Conry was a heavily built and homely girl of thirteen, with light gray eyes. All but the eyes were like her father, the builder. There was no hint of the mother's soft, seductive physique.
"Delia," Vickers said gently, "come and speak to my sister, Mrs. Lane."
As the child awkwardly held out a hand, Isabelle felt the tears come into her eyes. Here was her old Vickers,—the gentle, idealistic soul she had loved, the only being it seemed to her then that she had ever really loved.
"Delia and I have been tramping the Louvre," Vickers remarked. "That's the way we are learning history."
Isabelle glanced about the forlorn little sitting-room of the third-class hotel.
"Why did you come here?"
"It does well enough, and it's near the Louvre and places…. It is very reasonable."
Then Isabelle remembered what Fosdick had said about Vickers's gift of half his fortune to Mrs. Conry. "You see the idiot hadn't sense enough to run off with a man who had money. Some damn fool, artist! That's why you must pack Vick away as soon as you can get him to go."
With this in her mind she exclaimed impulsively:—
"You are coming back with us, Vick!"
"To live in America?" he queried with bitter humor. "So you came out as a rescue party!"
"You must get back into life," Isabelle urged vaguely.
"What life? You don't mean the hardware business?"
"Don't be silly! … You can't go on living over here alone by yourself with that child."
"Why not?"
"Oh, because—you mustdosomething, Vick! I want you to be famous."
"That doesn't seem quite possible, now," he replied gently.
"You'll come and live with me—oh, I need you, Vick!"
She threw her arms about him and hugged him tightly to her as she had as a girl. The intensity of her feeling moved him strangely, and her words also. What was it she meant by "needing him"?
"You must—that's the thing!"
Holding her head away she searched his face critically, and her heart was wrung again by the sense of waste in it all. "Poor brother," she murmured, tightening her clasp.
"I'm not going over as a helpless dependent!" he protested, and suddenly without warning he shot out his question,—"And what haveyoumade out of it? How have the years been?"
"Oh, we jog on, John and I,—just the usual thing, you know,—no heights and no depths!"
An expression of futility came momentarily into her eyes. It wasn't what she had pictured to herself, her marriage and life. Somehow she had never quite caught hold of life. But that was a common fate. Why, after all, should she commiserate her brother, take the 'poor Vick' tone that everybody did about him? Had she attained to a much more satisfactory level than he, or had the others who 'poor Vickered' him? There was something in both their natures, perhaps, at jar with life, incapable of effectiveness.
Vickers finally consented to return to America with his mother and sister "for a visit." Delia, he said, ought to see her father, who was a broken man, living in some small place in the West. (Isabelle suspected that Vickers had sent him also money.) Conry had written him lately, asking for news of his daughter.
"Does Vick intend to tote that lump of a girl around with him for the next twenty years?" Mrs. Price demanded of Isabelle, when she heard that Delia was to be of their party.
"I suppose so, unless she totes herself off!"
"The woman dumped her child on him! Well, well, the Colonel had something of the fool in him where women were concerned,—only I looked after that!"
"Mother," Isabelle retorted mischievously, "I am afraid you'll never be able to keep down the fool in us; Vick is pretty nearly all fool, the dear!"
Her brother's return being settled, Isabelle plunged into her shopping, buying many things for both the houses, as well as her dresses. There were friends flitting back and forth, snatches of sight-seeing, and theatres. By the time they took the steamer Isabelle confessed she was a "wreck." Yet she talked of taking an apartment in Paris the next spring and sending her child to a convent, as Mrs. Rogers had done. "It would be nice to have my own corner over here to run to," she explained. "Only Potts wants me to bury myself at Schwalbach."
Cairy joined them at Plymouth. He had been in London making arrangements for the production of a play there, and had hopes of enlarging his sphere.
"Coming home?" he asked Vickers. "That's good!"
"Thank you," Vickers replied dryly.
Cairy had already the atmosphere of success about him. He still limped in a distinguished manner, and his clothes marked him even in the company of well-dressed American men. He had grown stouter,—was worried by the fear of flesh, as he confided to Vickers,—and generally took himself with serious consideration. It was a far call from the days when he had been Gossom's ready pen. He now spoke of his "work" importantly, and was kind to Vickers, who "had made such a mess of things," "with all that money, too." With his large egotism, his uniform success where women were concerned, Vickers's career seemed peculiarly stupid. "No woman," he said to Isabelle, "should be able to break a man." And he thought thankfully of the square blow between the eyes that Conny had dealt him.
In the large gay party of returning Americans that surrounded Isabelle and Cairy on the ship Vickers was like a queer little ghost. He occupied himself with his small charge, reading and walking with her most of the days. Isabelle was conscious of the odd figure Vickers made, in his ill-fitting Italian clothes, with an old Tyrolean cloak of faded green hanging about him, his pale face half hidden by a scrubby beard, his unseeing eyes, wandering over the great steamer, a little girl's hand in his, or reading in a corner of the deserted dining hall.
Vickers was not so dull of eye, however, that he did not observe Isabelle and Cairy, sitting side by side on the deck, talking and reading. They tried to "bring him in," but they had a little language of jokes and references personal to themselves. If Vickers wondered what his sister, as he knew her, found so engrossing in the Southerner, he was answered by a remark Isabelle made:—
"Tom is so charming! … There are few men in America who understand how to talk to a woman, you know."
When Vickers had left his native land, the art of talking to a woman as distinguished from a man had not been developed….
Lane met the party at Quarantine. That was his domestic office,—"meeting" and "seeing off." As he stood on the deck of the bobbing tug waving to his wife, he was a symbol of the American husband, Cairy jokingly pointed out. "There's John holding out the welcoming arms to roving wife." And there were hundreds of them, roving wives, on the deck, very smartly dressed for their return to domesticity, with laden trunks coming up out of the holds, and long customs bills to pay, the expectant husbands waiting at the pier with the necessary money. And there were others with their husbands beside them on the decks, having carried them through Europe, bill-payers and arrangers extraordinary for their majesties, the American wives. Cairy was writing a farce about it with the title, "Coming Home."
Vickers, who scarcely remembered his brother-in-law, looked curiously at the self-possessed, rather heavy man on the tug. He was an effective person, "one who had done something," the kind his countrymen much admired. "Had a pleasant voyage, I suppose, and all well?" Then he had turned to Vickers, and with slight hesitation, as if not sure of his ground, observed, "You will find considerable changes, I suppose."
"I suppose so," Vickers assented, feeling that conversation between them would be limited. In the confusion at the pier while the numerous trunks were being disgorged, Vickers stood apart with Delia Conry and had an opportunity to observe the quiet, efficient manner in which John Lane arranged everything. He had greeted Isabelle and his mother impartially, with a family kiss for both. Vickers caught his brother-in-law's eye on him several times as they were waiting, and once Lane made as if to speak and was silent. Vickers was sensitively aware that this man of affairs could not pretend to understand him,—could at the best merely conceal under general tolerance and family good feeling his real contempt for one who had so completely "made a mess of things." He had foreseen the brother-in-law, and that had been one reason why he had hesitated to return, even for a visit. Lane soon made another effort, saying: "You will find it rather warm in the city. We have had a good deal of hot weather this summer."
"Yes," Vickers replied; "I remember New York in September. But I am used to long summers."
As the stranger's eyes roved over the noisy pier, Lane looked at the little girl, who was rendered dumb by the confusion and clung to Vickers's hand, and then he eyed his brother-in-law again, as if he were recollecting the old Colonel and thinking of the irony in the fact that his only surviving son should be this queer, half-foreign chap.
A large motor waited outside the pier to take the party to the hotel.
"Aren't you coming, Tom?" Isabella asked, as Cairy made for a cab with his luggage.
"I will meet you at the station to-morrow," Cairy called back. "Business!"
"Well,—how is everything?" she asked her husband. "Glad to see me back?"
"Of course."
They darted swiftly up town to an immense hotel, where Lane had engaged rooms for the party. Having seen them into the elevator, he returned by the motor to his office.
The old Farm at Grafton had been marvellously transformed. Vickers Price, standing on the terrace the evening of his arrival, looked wistfully for landmarks, for something to recall the place he had loved as a boy, which had gathered charm in his imaginative memory these years of his exile. The Georgian facade of the new house faced the broad meadow through which the wedding party had wandered back to the Farm the day of Isabelle's marriage. Below the brick terrace, elaborate gardens, suggesting remotely Italy, had been laid out on the slope of the New England hill. The thin poplars, struggling to maintain themselves in the bitter blasts of an American winter, gave an unreal air to the place as much as anything. The village of Grafton, which had once been visible as a homely white-dotted road beyond the meadow, had been "planted out." There was a formal garden now where the old barn stood, from which the Colonel's pointers had once yapped their greetings on the arrival of strangers. The new brick stables and the garage were in the woods across the road, connected with the house by telephone.
On their arrival by the late train they had had supper quite informally. It had been served by two men, however, and there was a housekeeper to relieve the mistress of the care of the increased establishment. What had bewildered Vickers on his return to America after an absence of ten years, from the moment he had taken ship until the Lanes' new French motor had whisked him up to the Farm—Isabelle still clung to the old name—was the lavish luxury, the increased pace of living, on this side of the ocean. The years he had spent in Italy had been the richest period of our industrial renaissance. In the rising tide of wealth the signs of the old order—the simplicity of the Colonel's day—had been swept away.
As Vickers stood rather apart from the others, who were strolling about the terrace, and looked at Dog Mountain, the only perfectly familiar feature in the scene, Isabella tucked her arm under his and led him towards the gardens:—
"Vick, I want you to see what I have done. Don't you think it's much better? I am not altogether satisfied." She glanced back at the long facade: "I think I should have done better with Herring rather than Osgood. But when we started to alter the old place, I didn't mean to do so much to it."
Isabelle knew more now than when Osgood had been engaged, two years before, and Herring's reputation had meanwhile quite overshadowed the older architect's.
"I told Isabelle at the start," said Cairy, who joined them, "she had better pull the old place down, and have a fresh deal. You had to come to it practically in the end?" He turned to Isabelle teasingly.
"Yes," she admitted half regretfully; "that's the way I always do a thing,—walk backwards into it, as John says. But if we had built from the ground up, it wouldn't have been this place, I suppose…. And I don't see why we did it,—Grafton is so far from anything."
"It's neither Tuxedo nor Lenox," Cairy suggested.
"Just plain Connecticut. Well, you see the Colonel left the place to me,—that was the reason."
And also the fact that he had left her only a small portion of his fortune besides. It was an ironical rebuke for his act that much of the small fortune he had given her had gone to transform his beloved Farm into something he would never have recognized. Vickers thought sadly, "If the old Colonel's ghost should haunt this terrace, he couldn't find his way about!"
"But it's snug and amusing,—the Farm? Isn't it?" Cairy demanded of Vickers in a consoling manner.
"I shouldn't call it snug," Vickers replied, unconsciously edging away from the Southerner, "nor wholly amusing!"
"You don't like my efforts!" Isabelle exclaimed wearily. She herself, as she had said, was not satisfied; but money as well as strength and her husband's dislike of "more building" had held her hand.
"We all change," Vickers replied humorously. "I can't blame the old place for looking different. I have changed somewhat myself, and you, Cairy,"—he glanced at the figure by his sister's side, which had sleek marks of prosperity as well as the Farm,—"too. All changed but you, Isabelle!"
"But I have changed a lot!" she protested. "I have grown better looking, Vickie, and my mind has developed, hasn't it, Tom? One's family never sees any change but the wrinkles!"…
Vickers, turning back to the terrace where Fosdick and Gossom were smoking, had a depressed feeling that of all the changes his was the greatest.
"I must look in on my little girl," he explained to Isabelle, as he left her and Cairy.
Isabelle watched him mount the steps. His small figure had grown heavy from his inactive life abroad. The thick hair had almost gone from the top of his head, and the neat pointed beard had become bushy. In his negligent clothes he looked quite slouchy, she had felt that evening, as if he had long ceased to have any interest in his person. "It's all that beast of a woman," she said resentfully to Cairy, remembering the slender, quite elegant brother of the old days. "And to think of his saddling himself with her brat and lugging her around with him! I couldn't make him drop her in New York with her governess. But it's impossible!"
"The lady left him her husband's child, as a souvenir, didn't she?"
"I can't think of it!" Isabelle exclaimed, shrugging her shoulders. "To go off with that other man—after all he had given up for her! The beast!"
"Perhaps that was the best she could do for him under the circumstances," Cairy remarked philosophically. "But the child must be a bore." He laughed at the comical situation.
"Just like Vick!"
It was also like Vickers to give Mrs. Conry a large share of his small fortune when she had seen fit to leave him, as Fosdick had told her….
After visiting his small charge, who was lonely this first night in the strange house, Vickers had gone to his room and sat down by the window. Below him on the terrace Fosdick and Gossom were discussing Socialism, the Russian revolution, and the War of Classes. New topics, or rather new forms of old themes, they seemed to Vickers. Fosdick, from his rolling around the earth, had become an expert on the social revolution; he could tell the approximate dates when it "would be pulled off" in all the great countries. He had bought a farm somewhere in Vermont, and had sat down to wait for the social revolution; meantime he was raising apples, and at intervals descended upon the houses of his friends to inveigh against predatory wealth or visited the city for the sake of more robust amusement. Gossom, whose former radicalism was slowly modifying into an "intelligent conservatism," was mildly opposing Fosdick's views. "We have gone too far in this campaign of vilification of wealth,—Americans are sound at the core,—what they want is conservative individualism, a sense of the law," etc. Vickers smiled to himself, and looking out over the old meadow forgot all about the talkers.
From the meadow came the sweet scent of the September crop of hay. There was the river at the end of the vista, disappearing into a piece of woodland. The place was sown with memories, and Vickers's eyes were moist as he leaned there, looking forth into the night. It was but a shallow New England brook, this river, meandering through cranberry bogs, with alders and bilberry bushes on either side. He remembered the cranberry picking at this season, and later when the meadow had been flooded, the skating over the bushes that were frozen in the ice, and the snaky forms of the cranberry plants visible at the bottom. All these years he had thought of this little meadow as he had conceived it when a child,—a mighty river flowing on mysteriously through the dark valley,—on, around the woods that made out like a bold headland, then on and on to the remote sea. It was dim and wild, this meadow of his childhood, and the brook was like that river on which was borne to Camelot the silent bark with the fair Elaine. His older brother had taken him down that same brook in a canoe,—a quite wonderful journey. They had started early, just as the August moon was setting; and as they passed the headland of woods—pines and maples fearful in their dark recesses—an early thrush had broken the silence of the glimmering dawn with its sweet call. And another had answered from the depth of the wood, and then another, while the little canoe had slipped noiselessly past into strange lands,—a country altogether new and mysterious…. To-night that old boyhood thrill came over him, as when kneeling in the canoe with suspended paddle, in the half light of dawn, he had heard the thrushes calling from the woods. Then it had seemed that life was like this adventurous journey through the gray meadows, past the silent woods, on into the river below, and the great sea, far, far away! A wonderful journey of enlarging mystery from experience to experience into some great ocean of understanding….
Vickers sat down at the piano by the window, and forgetting all that had taken the place of his dream,—the searing flame of his manhood,—struck the gentle chords of that boyhood journey, something of the river and the meadow and the woods and the gray dawn, which had often sounded in his ears far away in Venice.
Isabelle and Cairy, coming up the terrace steps, heard the notes and stopped to listen.
"Charming!" Cairy murmured. "His own?"
"How I wish he would try to do something, and get his work played by our orchestras! He could if he would only interest himself enough. But the ambition seems gone out of him. He merely smiles when I talk about it."
"He'll come back to it," Cairy grinned. "It's in the air here to put your talent in the front window."
Vickers played on softly, dreaming of the boy's river of life, at home once more in the old Farm.
* * * * *
Early the next morning as Vickers stole softly through the corridor, on his way for a stroll, a door opened and Isabelle looked out.
"You'll find coffee downstairs, Vick. I remembered your dawn-wandering habit and asked Mrs. Stevens to have it ready for you. I'll join you in a few moments."
Before he had finished his coffee, Isabelle appeared and sleepily poured out a cup for herself. The servant was making ready a tray at the sideboard.
"Tom is one of your sleepless kind, too," she explained. "He does his writing before the house is awake, so as not to be disturbed, or he says he does. I believe he just turns over and takes another nap!"
"Cairy seems at home here," Vickers observed, sipping his coffee.
"Of course, Tommy is one of the family," Isabelle replied lightly. "He is much more domesticated than John, though, since his great success last winter, he hasn't been up very much."
"Has he made a great success?" Vickers inquired. "What at?"
"Haven't you heard of his play! It ran all the winter, and this new one they say will also make a great hit."
Vickers, who remembered Cairy in college as one always endeavoring after things out of his reach, looked mildly surprised.
"I hadn't heard that he was a dramatist," he said.
"I wishyouwould do something!" Isabelle remarked, feeling that Cairy's success might point for Vickers his own defeat, and stir him into healthy action.
"What? Write a play?"
"No—you old dear!" She caressed his hand. "I think it would be good for you to feel you were doing something in the world, instead of running about with that absurd child." She wanted to say much more about Delia Conry, but bided a more fitting time.
"I haven't run much so far," was all that Vickers replied. "You shouldn't have bothered to come down," he added when the coffee was finished. "I just wanted to poke around the old place as I used to."
"I know—and I wanted to be with you, of course, this first time. Don't you remember how we got our own breakfasts when we went shooting in the autumn?"
Her brother nodded.
"Those were good times, Vick! … They were the best for both of us," she added less buoyantly. She pushed away her cup, put her arm about his shoulders, and kissed him.
"You shouldn't say that, Belle!"
"Vickie, it's so nice to hug you and have you all to myself before the others are up. I've missed some one to go batting with me, to hug and bully and chatter with. Now you've come I shall be a girl all over again."
And Isabelle was her old self for the first time since Vickers had joined her in Paris a month before,—no longer preoccupied, striving after some satisfaction that never perfectly arrived. Here the past was upon them both,—in spite of Osgood's transformations,—a past when they had been close, in the precious intimacy of brother and sister. Outside in the new, very new Dutch garden, Isabelle resumed her anxieties of the day.
"The gardener ought not to have put those bulbs there,—he knows nothing really! I shall have to find another man…. I hope the chauffeur John engaged will get along with the houseman. The last one fought…. Oh, did I tell you that Potts is coming out Saturday,—the great Dr. Potts? He wants to look me over,—get me ready for the winter campaign…. There's Tom, writing at the desk by his window. Hello, Tommy!" Isabelle waved a hand gayly at the balcony above them. Vickers smiled at the disconnected remarks, so like Isabelle. Her conversation was a loose bundle of impressions, reflections, wishes, and feelings, especially her feelings about other people. And Isabelle had a taste for lame cats, as her mother said,—at least those cats that obviously felt their lameness.
"You don't like Tom," she rambled on. "Why not? Poor Tommy! he's so sweet and clever. Why don't you like Tom, Vickers? You must like him—because he'll be here a lot, and I am awfully fond of him."
"Why 'poor Tom'?" Vickers asked laconically.
"He's had such a hard time, a struggle to get on,—his people were poor, very nice though,—the best Virginia, you know…. He's ambitious, and he isn't strong. If this play shouldn't go—he's counting on it so much!"
Vickers smilingly drew her hand beneath his arm and led her out through the garden into the meadow. "The same old Belle after all," he murmured. "I don't see that Brother Cairy is badly off,—he has a good deal of petting, I fancy. I have heard all about that Virginia childhood and the rest of it…. Do you remember, Belle, when we used to go over to the Ed Prices' and were scared when we saw a tramp in the bushes on the hill? And how we ran through the willows as if the devil was after us?—Who have the Ed Prices' farm now?"
"Don't you know that father gave it to Alice Johnston? Wasn't it nice of him! Her husband is in the road, in St. Louis, doing very well, John says. Alice is over there now,—she brings the children on for the summer…. I don't see much of her—she is so enveloped in children!"
"What's become of the brother,—the one I licked and threw into Beaty's pond?"
"The world seems to have licked him, too," Isabelle replied, laughing at the old memory. "The last time Alice spoke of him she said he was on some newspaper in Spokane, had been in the Klondike, I believe…. There's Mr. Gossom and Tom! We must go back for breakfast."
"Thanks! I have had mine. I think I'll walk over to the Price place and seeAlice. Don't look for me before noon."
"But there are people coming for luncheon," Isabelle protested.
Vickers waved his hand to her and called back, "I think you'll get on very well without me!"
Isabelle was already answering Cairy's shout from the terrace. As Vickers took his way through the meadow, he thought how sweet she was, the real Isabelle, when one got to her as he had this morning. But she had never once mentioned John; her husband seemed to be very little in her mind.
Vickers strode off through the meadow that morning in the hope of finding familiar things, and indulging in old memories. The country roads had been widened and improved, and many of the farm-houses had given way to more or less pretentious "places." Motors whirled past him. The hill that he remembered as a veritable mountain was a mere rise in the straightened road over which a fast car plunged at full speed, covering him with dust and leaving behind a sickening odor. He struck off into a wood-lot; here and in the pastures and meadows he found himself again. It was nearly noon before he came up the lane that led to the Ed Price farm.
This was off the beat of the motors, away from the new "estates," at the end of a grassy road bordered by gray birches. The ample old house he remembered very well with its square central chimney and stretch of outbuildings that joined the yellow barn. At his knock a broad-shouldered, smiling woman came to the door, and after a moment's hesitation exclaimed:—
"Why, Vick,—can it be you?"
"Yes, Cousin Alice."
She led him to the orchard in the rear, where with the aid of two little boys she was preparing vegetables for dinner. Tying on a large apron, she said:—
"You see we all have to take a hand. Won't you have a bib and dip in, too?… Children, this is your uncle—cousin. Which is it, Vickers?"
It was pleasant in the long grass under the apple tree, looking across the orchard of gnarled and stubby trees to the lane. Mrs. Johnston worked and talked, while the little boys with furtive glances pecked at the peas like two birds.
"I heard you were coming—I did not know just when. It is good to see you back, Vick!"
There was a comfortable largeness in the atmosphere of this woman, which suited the homely background of the square farm-house and the peaceful orchard. And there was a pleasant warmth in her tone.
"How do you find it?" she asked; "or perhaps you haven't had time yet to know."
"It hardly seems like being home," Vickers admitted, "everything is so changed—everything but this!" he added gratefully, thinking of Alice as well as the farm.
"Yes,—the country has changed, so many rich people have bought places. And your old home—" She hesitated to complete her sentence.
"I can't find my way around there." Vickers laughed. "What would theColonel say!"
Alice looked as if she preferred not to think what the Colonel might say of his daughter's alterations.
"I suppose Isabelle had to have more room,—she has so many people with her. And you will find that life has changed over here in ten years."
"Nothing but change!"
"Except among the poor! … No, Tot, you can't eat the pods. There, boys, take sister and run out to the barn to help Charlie wash the buggy…. How does Isabelle seem to you?"
"I scarcely know—I haven't made up my mind. How does she seem toyou?"
"She does too much,—she's not strong enough," Alice replied evasively.
"No, she doesn't seem strong; but she can't keep still!"
"She gets so little comfort out of anything,—that is the worst of it. Sometimes I wish John weren't so strong,—that he would have an illness, so that Isabelle would have something definite to do."
"She would have a trained nurse!" Vickers suggested with a laugh.
"She is such a dear,—I wish she were happier!"
"Perhaps that isn't in the blood."
"But I never saw a happier creature than she was the day she was married!And John is a fine fellow, and she has everything a woman could want."
"A woman wants a good many things these days."…
They chatted on about Isabelle and her love of people, and then about St. Louis and the old days at Grafton. For the first time since he had landed, it seemed to Vickers, he was permitted to ignore his failure,—he was at home. When he rose to go, Alice protested:—
"But you aren't going back,—it is just our dinner-time, and we haven't said half what we have to say!"
So he dined with the brood of children in the large front room, and afterwards Alice walked down the lane with him.
"I hope you are going to stay here?" she asked warmly.
"Oh, I don't know! America doesn't seem to need me," he replied, endeavoring to joke; "not that I know any place which does. I am waiting to be called."
In spite of the joking manner there was sadness in the voice. Alice was silent for a time and then replied earnestly:—
"Perhaps you are called here—for the present."
"You mean over there?" he asked quickly, nodding in the direction ofGrafton.
"Yes!"
"Why do you think so?"
"You know Isabelle really cares for you as she doesn't for any one else in the world!"
"Yes,—we have always been close."
"But she cares for what youthink—"
Vickers made a gesture, as if it were impossible that any one could do that.
"Yes," Alice continued gently; "a woman never gets wholly away from the influence of one she has admired as Isabelle admired you."
"But one's experience," he mused, "no matter how costly it has been, never seems to be of any use to any one else."
"Can you tell—until the end? … What we don't see in life is so much more than what we see!"
Vickers looked at her gratefully. He would like to feel that he was needed somewhere in this hurried world. Presently there was a childish uproar behind them, and Alice turned back.
"My brood is getting tempestuous; I must say good-by!"
She held Vickers's hand in her warm, firm grasp.
"I hope we shall see you often…. I think that you are called here!"
Vickers returned to the Farm, thinking of Alice Johnston. She had given him of her peace, of her confidence, her large way of taking the issues of life. 'And I used to say that she was a commonplace dumpy country girl!' he mused. He pondered what she had spoken,—the suggestion, vague but comforting, of purpose, of a place for him in the world to fill. Just what was she thinking of? "We'll see," he murmured, as he mounted the steps of the terrace. As Alice had said, the unseen in life was so much more than the seen.
* * * * *
In the formal garden the pretty little English governess was conducting the social game for the two girls. Marian Lane, having shown Delia her pony and her rabbits without eliciting much enthusiasm, now sat and stared at her with politely suppressed scorn for the dull red frock that Vickers had designed for his charge.
"Have you been to dancing school?" she demanded.
"What is that?" Delia asked.
She was dully uncomfortable in the company of this very dainty little creature, who was always dressed in delicate, light fabrics, and seemed to have many possessions. And Miss Betterton had a well-bred manner of putting the stranger outside the little social game. So when Delia spied Vickers, she cried, "There's father!" and ran towards him.
"Uncle Vickers is not Mabel's father," Marian asserted to Miss Betterton.
"Hush, dearie!" the well-bred Miss Betterton replied; "we mustn't talk about that."
When Isabelle and Cairy came up to the house from their afternoon ride, they found Vickers playing croquet with Miss Betterton and the two little girls, who in his society were approaching something like informality in their manner of addressing each other.
"He looks quite domestic," Cairy jeered.
"Hello, Vick! Come over and see the horses," Isabelle called.
At the stable Marian's new pony that Cairy had selected was exhibited. Lane drove up with a friend he had brought from the city for the week end, and the party played with the pony and laughed at his tricks, which Cairy showed off.
"He looks like a cross between an Angora cat and a Newfoundland dog," Cairy remarked, leaning down to feel of his legs. As he stooped the ivory handle of a small revolver pushed out of the hip pocket of his riding breeches.
"What's that, Uncle Tom?" Marian asked, pointing to the pistol.
Cairy drew out the pistol and held it up, with a slight flourish,—"A family weapon!"
Holding the pony with one hand and pointing the revolver at a blossom on a magnolia tree a few paces away, he fired and the white petals came fluttering down. A second report and another blossom fell. The pony jumped and snorted, but it did not disturb Cairy's aim. A third blossom fell, and then he quickly shot the descending bud which had been cut by the previous shot.
"Steady hand!" Lane commented.
"It's an old habit of mine to carry it and practise when I have a chance," Cairy remarked, breaking the revolver. After extracting the shells, he handed the pistol to Isabelle.
"Made in Paris," she read from the chased plate.
"Yes; it's a pretty toy, don't you think?"
"It's a curious shell," Lane remarked, picking up one of the empty shells from the ground.
"Yes, I have to have them specially made," replied Cairy. The toy was handed around and much admired.
"But, Uncle Tom," Marian asked, "why do you carry a pistol?"
"In the South gentlemen always carry pistols."
"Is it very dangerous in the South?" the little girl inquired. Then the older people laughed, and Cairy looked rather foolish.