THE HOUSE ON THE HILL
There was a little unfailing spring, always icy cold and crystal pure,
in a certain birch-screened hollow of Rainbow Valley in the lower
corner near the marsh. Not a great many people knew of its existence.
The manse and Ingleside children knew, of course, as they knew
everything else about the magic valley. Occasionally they went there to
get a drink, and it figured in many of their plays as a fountain of old
romance. Anne knew of it and loved it because it somehow reminded her
of the beloved Dryad’s Bubble at Green Gables. Rosemary West knew of
it; it was her fountain of romance, too. Eighteen years ago she had sat
behind it one spring twilight and heard young Martin Crawford stammer
out a confession of fervent, boyish love. She had whispered her own
secret in return, and they had kissed and promised by the wild wood
spring. They had never stood together by it again—Martin had sailed on
his fatal voyage soon after; but to Rosemary West it was always a
sacred spot, hallowed by that immortal hour of youth and love. Whenever
she passed near it she turned aside to hold a secret tryst with an old
dream—a dream from which the pain had long gone, leaving only its
unforgettable sweetness.
The spring was a hidden thing. You might have passed within ten feet of
it and never have suspected its existence. Two generations past a huge
old pine had fallen almost across it. Nothing was left of the tree but
its crumbling trunk out of which the ferns grew thickly, making a green
roof and a lacy screen for the water. A maple-tree grew beside it with
a curiously gnarled and twisted trunk, creeping along the ground for a
little way before shooting up into the air, and so forming a quaint
seat; and September had flung a scarf of pale smoke-blue asters around
the hollow.
John Meredith, taking the cross-lots road through Rainbow Valley on his
way home from some pastoral visitations around the Harbour head one
evening, turned aside to drink of the little spring. Walter Blythe had
shown it to him one afternoon only a few days before, and they had had
a long talk together on the maple seat. John Meredith, under all his
shyness and aloofness, had the heart of a boy. He had been called Jack
in his youth, though nobody in Glen St. Mary would ever have believed
it. Walter and he had taken to each other and had talked unreservedly.
Mr. Meredith found his way into some sealed and sacred chambers of the
lad’s soul wherein not even Di had ever looked. They were to be chums
from that friendly hour and Walter knew that he would never be
frightened of the minister again.
“I never believed before that it was possible to get really acquainted
with a minister,” he told his mother that night.
John Meredith drank from his slender white hand, whose grip of steel
always surprised people who were unacquainted with it, and then sat
down on the maple seat. He was in no hurry to go home; this was a
beautiful spot and he was mentally weary after a round of rather
uninspiring conversations with many good and stupid people. The moon
was rising. Rainbow Valley was wind-haunted and star-sentinelled only
where he was, but afar from the upper end came the gay notes of
children’s laughter and voices.
The ethereal beauty of the asters in the moonlight, the glimmer of the
little spring, the soft croon of the brook, the wavering grace of the
brackens all wove a white magic round John Meredith. He forgot
congregational worries and spiritual problems; the years slipped away
from him; he was a young divinity student again and the roses of June
were blooming red and fragrant on the dark, queenly head of his
Cecilia. He sat there and dreamed like any boy. And it was at this
propitious moment that Rosemary West stepped aside from the by-path and
stood beside him in that dangerous, spell-weaving place. John Meredith
stood up as she came in and saw her—_really_ saw her—for the first
time.
He had met her in his church once or twice and shaken hands with her
abstractedly as he did with anyone he happened to encounter on his way
down the aisle. He had never met her elsewhere, for the Wests were
Episcopalians, with church affinities in Lowbridge, and no occasion for
calling upon them had ever arisen. Before to-night, if anyone had asked
John Meredith what Rosemary West looked like he would not have had the
slightest notion. But he was never to forget her, as she appeared to
him in the glamour of kind moonlight by the spring.
She was certainly not in the least like Cecilia, who had always been
his ideal of womanly beauty. Cecilia had been small and dark and
vivacious—Rosemary West was tall and fair and placid, yet John Meredith
thought he had never seen so beautiful a woman.
She was bareheaded and her golden hair—hair of a warm gold, “molasses
taffy” colour as Di Blythe had said—was pinned in sleek, close coils
over her head; she had large, tranquil, blue eyes that always seemed
full of friendliness, a high white forehead and a finely shaped face.
Rosemary West was always called a “sweet woman.” She was so sweet that
even her high-bred, stately air had never gained for her the reputation
of being “stuck-up,” which it would inevitably have done in the case of
anyone else in Glen St. Mary. Life had taught her to be brave, to be
patient, to love, to forgive. She had watched the ship on which her
lover went sailing out of Four Winds Harbour into the sunset. But,
though she watched long, she had never seen it coming sailing back.
That vigil had taken girlhood from her eyes, yet she kept her youth to
a marvellous degree. Perhaps this was because she always seemed to
preserve that attitude of delighted surprise towards life which most of
us leave behind in childhood—an attitude which not only made Rosemary
herself seem young, but flung a pleasing illusion of youth over the
consciousness of every one who talked to her.
John Meredith was startled by her loveliness and Rosemary was startled
by his presence. She had never thought she would find anyone by that
remote spring, least of all the recluse of Glen St. Mary manse. She
almost dropped the heavy armful of books she was carrying home from the
Glen lending library, and then, to cover her confusion, she told one of
those small fibs which even the best of women do tell at times.
“I—I came for a drink,” she said, stammering a little, in answer to Mr.
Meredith’s grave “good evening, Miss West.” She felt that she was an
unpardonable goose and she longed to shake herself. But John Meredith
was not a vain man and he knew she would likely have been as much
startled had she met old Elder Clow in that unexpected fashion. Her
confusion put him at ease and he forgot to be shy; besides, even the
shyest of men can sometimes be quite audacious in moonlight.
“Let me get you a cup,” he said smiling. There was a cup near by, if he
had only known it, a cracked, handleless blue cup secreted under the
maple by the Rainbow Valley children; but he did not know it, so he
stepped out to one of the birch-trees and stripped a bit of its white
skin away. Deftly he fashioned this into a three-cornered cup, filled
it from the spring, and handed it to Rosemary.
Rosemary took it and drank every drop to punish herself for her fib,
for she was not in the least thirsty, and to drink a fairly large
cupful of water when you are not thirsty is somewhat of an ordeal. Yet
the memory of that draught was to be very pleasant to Rosemary. In
after years it seemed to her that there was something sacramental about
it. Perhaps this was because of what the minister did when she handed
him back the cup. He stooped again and filled it and drank of it
himself. It was only by accident that he put his lips just where
Rosemary had put hers, and Rosemary knew it. Nevertheless, it had a
curious significance for her. They two had drunk of the same cup. She
remembered idly that an old aunt of hers used to say that when two
people did this their after-lives would be linked in some fashion,
whether for good or ill.
John Meredith held the cup uncertainly. He did not know what to do with
it. The logical thing would have been to toss it away, but somehow he
was disinclined to do this. Rosemary held out her hand for it.
“Will you let me have it?” she said. “You made it so knackily. I never
saw anyone make a birch cup so since my little brother used to make
them long ago—before he died.”
“I learned how to make them when _I_ was a boy, camping out one summer.
An old hunter taught me,” said Mr. Meredith. “Let me carry your books,
Miss West.”
Rosemary was startled into another fib and said oh, they were not
heavy. But the minister took them from her with quite a masterful air
and they walked away together. It was the first time Rosemary had stood
by the valley spring without thinking of Martin Crawford. The mystic
tryst had been broken.
The little by-path wound around the marsh and then struck up the long
wooded hill on the top of which Rosemary lived. Beyond, through the
trees, they could see the moonlight shining across the level summer
fields. But the little path was shadowy and narrow. Trees crowded over
it, and trees are never quite as friendly to human beings after
nightfall as they are in daylight. They wrap themselves away from us.
They whisper and plot furtively. If they reach out a hand to us it has
a hostile, tentative touch. People walking amid trees after night
always draw closer together instinctively and involuntarily, making an
alliance, physical and mental, against certain alien powers around
them. Rosemary’s dress brushed against John Meredith as they walked.
Not even an absent-minded minister, who was after all a young man
still, though he firmly believed he had outlived romance, could be
insensible to the charm of the night and the path and the companion.
It is never quite safe to think we have done with life. When we imagine
we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning the page and
showing us yet another chapter. These two people each thought their
hearts belonged irrevocably to the past; but they both found their walk
up that hill very pleasant. Rosemary thought the Glen minister was by
no means as shy and tongue-tied as he had been represented. He seemed
to find no difficulty in talking easily and freely. Glen housewives
would have been amazed had they heard him. But then so many Glen
housewives talked only gossip and the price of eggs, and John Meredith
was not interested in either. He talked to Rosemary of books and music
and wide-world doings and something of his own history, and found that
she could understand and respond. Rosemary, it appeared, possessed a
book which Mr. Meredith had not read and wished to read. She offered to
lend it to him and when they reached the old homestead on the hill he
went in to get it.
The house itself was an old-fashioned gray one, hung with vines,
through which the light in the sitting-room winked in friendly fashion.
It looked down the Glen, over the harbour, silvered in the moonlight,
to the sand-dunes and the moaning ocean. They walked in through a
garden that always seemed to smell of roses, even when no roses were in
bloom. There was a sisterhood of lilies at the gate and a ribbon of
asters on either side of the broad walk, and a lacery of fir trees on
the hill’s edge beyond the house.
“You have the whole world at your doorstep here,” said John Meredith,
with a long breath. “What a view—what an outlook! At times I feel
stifled down there in the Glen. You can breathe up here.”
“It is calm to-night,” said Rosemary laughing. “If there were a wind it
would blow your breath away. We get ‘a’ the airts the wind can blow’ up
here. This place should be called Four Winds instead of the Harbour.”
“I like wind,” he said. “A day when there is no wind seems to me
_dead_. A windy day wakes me up.” He gave a conscious laugh. “On a calm
day I fall into day dreams. No doubt you know my reputation, Miss West.
If I cut you dead the next time we meet don’t put it down to bad
manners. Please understand that it is only abstraction and forgive
me—and speak to me.”
They found Ellen West in the sitting room when they went in. She laid
her glasses down on the book she had been reading and looked at them in
amazement tinctured with something else. But she shook hands amiably
with Mr. Meredith and he sat down and talked to her, while Rosemary
hunted out his book.
Ellen West was ten years older than Rosemary, and so different from her
that it was hard to believe they were sisters. She was dark and
massive, with black hair, thick, black eyebrows and eyes of the clear,
slaty blue of the gulf water in a north wind. She had a rather stern,
forbidding look, but she was in reality very jolly, with a hearty,
gurgling laugh and a deep, mellow, pleasant voice with a suggestion of
masculinity about it. She had once remarked to Rosemary that she would
really like to have a talk with that Presbyterian minister at the Glen,
to see if he could find a word to say to a woman when he was cornered.
She had her chance now and she tackled him on world politics. Miss
Ellen, who was a great reader, had been devouring a book on the Kaiser
of Germany, and she demanded Mr. Meredith’s opinion of him.
“A dangerous man,” was his answer.
“I believe you!” Miss Ellen nodded. “Mark my words, Mr. Meredith, that
man is going to fight somebody yet. He’s _aching_ to. He is going to
set the world on fire.”
“If you mean that he will wantonly precipitate a great war I hardly
think so,” said Mr. Meredith. “The day has gone by for that sort of
thing.”
“Bless you, it hasn’t,” rumbled Ellen. “The day never goes by for men
and nations to make asses of themselves and take to the fists. The
millenniun isn’t _that_ near, Mr. Meredith, and _you_ don’t think it is
any more than I do. As for this Kaiser, mark my words, he is going to
make a heap of trouble”—and Miss Ellen prodded her book emphatically
with her long finger. “Yes, if he isn’t nipped in the bud he’s going to
make trouble. _We’ll_ live to see it—you and I will live to see it, Mr.
Meredith. And who is going to nip him? England should, but she won’t.
_Who_ is going to nip him? Tell me that, Mr. Meredith.”
Mr. Meredith couldn’t tell her, but they plunged into a discussion of
German militarism that lasted long after Rosemary had found the book.
Rosemary said nothing, but sat in a little rocker behind Ellen and
stroked an important black cat meditatively. John Meredith hunted big
game in Europe with Ellen, but he looked oftener at Rosemary than at
Ellen, and Ellen noticed it. After Rosemary had gone to the door with
him and come back Ellen rose and looked at her accusingly.
“Rosemary West, that man has a notion of courting you.”
Rosemary quivered. Ellen’s speech was like a blow to her. It rubbed all
the bloom off the pleasant evening. But she would not let Ellen see how
it hurt her.
“Nonsense,” she said, and laughed, a little too carelessly. “You see a
beau for me in every bush, Ellen. Why he told me all about his wife
to-night—how much she was to him—how empty her death had left the
world.”
“Well, that may be _his_ way of courting,” retorted Ellen. “Men have
all kinds of ways, I understand. But don’t forget your promise,
Rosemary.”
“There is no need of my either forgetting or remembering it,” said
Rosemary, a little wearily. “_You_ forget that I’m an old maid, Ellen.
It is only your sisterly delusion that I am still young and blooming
and dangerous. Mr. Meredith merely wants to be a friend—if he wants
that much itself. He’ll forget us both long before he gets back to the
manse.”
“I’ve no objection to your being friends with him,” conceded Ellen,
“but it musn’t go beyond friendship, remember. I’m always suspicious of
widowers. They are not given to romantic ideas about friendship.
They’re apt to mean business. As for this Presbyterian man, what do
they call him shy for? He’s not a bit shy, though he may be
absent-minded—so absent-minded that he forgot to say goodnight to _me_
when you started to go to the door with him. He’s got brains, too.
There’s so few men round here that can talk sense to a body. I’ve
enjoyed the evening. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of him. But no
philandering, Rosemary, mind you—no philandering.”
Rosemary was quite used to being warned by Ellen from philandering if
she so much as talked five minutes to any marriageable man under eighty
or over eighteen. She had always laughed at the warning with unfeigned
amusement. This time it did not amuse her—it irritated her a little.
Who wanted to philander?
“Don’t be such a goose, Ellen,” she said with unaccustomed shortness as
she took her lamp. She went upstairs without saying goodnight.
Ellen shook her head dubiously and looked at the black cat.
“What is she so cross about, St. George?” she asked. “When you howl
you’re hit, I’ve always heard, George. But she promised, Saint—she
promised, and we Wests always keep our word. So it won’t matter if he
does want to philander, George. She promised. I won’t worry.”
Upstairs, in her room, Rosemary sat for a long while looking out of the
window across the moonlit garden to the distant, shining harbour. She
felt vaguely upset and unsettled. She was suddenly tired of outworn
dreams. And in the garden the petals of the last red rose were
scattered by a sudden little wind. Summer was over—it was autumn.