(Written by the Story Girl)
Jasper Dale lived alone in the old homestead which he had named Golden
Milestone. In Carlisle this giving one’s farm a name was looked upon as
a piece of affectation; but if a place must be named why not give it
a sensible name with some meaning to it? Why Golden Milestone, when
Pinewood or Hillslope or, if you wanted to be very fanciful, Ivy Lodge,
might be had for the taking?
He had lived alone at Golden Milestone since his mother’s death; he had
been twenty then and he was close upon forty now, though he did not look
it. But neither could it be said that he looked young; he had never at
any time looked young with common youth; there had always been something
in his appearance that stamped him as different from the ordinary run
of men, and, apart from his shyness, built up an intangible, invisible
barrier between him and his kind. He had lived all his life in Carlisle;
and all the Carlisle people knew of or about him--although they thought
they knew everything--was that he was painfully, abnormally shy. He
never went anywhere except to church; he never took part in Carlisle’s
simple social life; even with most men he was distant and reserved; as
for women, he never spoke to or looked at them; if one spoke to him,
even if she were a matronly old mother in Israel, he was at once in an
agony of painful blushes. He had no friends in the sense of companions;
to all outward appearance his life was solitary and devoid of any human
interest.
He had no housekeeper; but his old house, furnished as it had been in
his mother’s lifetime, was cleanly and daintily kept. The quaint rooms
were as free from dust and disorder as a woman could have had them. This
was known, because Jasper Dale occasionally had his hired man’s wife,
Mrs. Griggs, in to scrub for him. On the morning she was expected he
betook himself to woods and fields, returning only at night-fall. During
his absence Mrs. Griggs was frankly wont to explore the house from
cellar to attic, and her report of its condition was always the
same--“neat as wax.” To be sure, there was one room that was always
locked against her, the west gable, looking out on the garden and the
hill of pines beyond. But Mrs. Griggs knew that in the lifetime of
Jasper Dale’s mother it had been unfurnished. She supposed it still
remained so, and felt no especial curiosity concerning it, though she
always tried the door.
Jasper Dale had a good farm, well cultivated; he had a large garden
where he worked most of his spare time in summer; it was supposed that
he read a great deal, since the postmistress declared that he was always
getting books and magazines by mail. He seemed well contented with his
existence and people let him alone, since that was the greatest kindness
they could do him. It was unsupposable that he would ever marry; nobody
ever had supposed it.
“Jasper Dale never so much as THOUGHT about a woman,” Carlisle oracles
declared. Oracles, however, are not always to be trusted.
One day Mrs. Griggs went away from the Dale place with a very curious
story, which she diligently spread far and wide. It made a good deal
of talk, but people, although they listened eagerly, and wondered and
questioned, were rather incredulous about it. They thought Mrs. Griggs
must be drawing considerably upon her imagination; there were not
lacking those who declared that she had invented the whole account,
since her reputation for strict veracity was not wholly unquestioned.
Mrs. Griggs’s story was as follows:--
One day she found the door of the west gable unlocked. She went in,
expecting to see bare walls and a collection of odds and ends. Instead
she found herself in a finely furnished room. Delicate lace curtains
hung before the small, square, broad-silled windows. The walls were
adorned with pictures in much finer taste than Mrs. Griggs could
appreciate. There was a bookcase between the windows filled with
choicely bound books. Beside it stood a little table with a very dainty
work-basket on it. By the basket Mrs. Griggs saw a pair of tiny scissors
and a silver thimble. A wicker rocker, comfortable with silk cushions,
was near it. Above the bookcase a woman’s picture hung--a water-colour,
if Mrs. Griggs had but known it--representing a pale, very sweet face,
with large, dark eyes and a wistful expression under loose masses of
black, lustrous hair. Just beneath the picture, on the top shelf of the
bookcase, was a vaseful of flowers. Another vaseful stood on the table
beside the basket.
All this was astonishing enough. But what puzzled Mrs. Griggs completely
was the fact that a woman’s dress was hanging over a chair before the
mirror--a pale blue, silken affair. And on the floor beside it were two
little blue satin slippers!
Good Mrs. Griggs did not leave the room until she had thoroughly
explored it, even to shaking out the blue dress and discovering it to be
a tea-gown--wrapper, she called it. But she found nothing to throw any
light on the mystery. The fact that the simple name “Alice” was written
on the fly-leaves of all the books only deepened it, for it was a name
unknown in the Dale family. In this puzzled state she was obliged to
depart, nor did she ever find the door unlocked again; and, discovering
that people thought she was romancing when she talked about the
mysterious west gable at Golden Milestone, she indignantly held her
peace concerning the whole affair.
But Mrs. Griggs had told no more than the simple truth. Jasper Dale,
under all his shyness and aloofness, possessed a nature full of delicate
romance and poesy, which, denied expression in the common ways of life,
bloomed out in the realm of fancy and imagination. Left alone, just when
the boy’s nature was deepening into the man’s, he turned to this ideal
kingdom for all he believed the real world could never give him. Love--a
strange, almost mystical love--played its part here for him. He shadowed
forth to himself the vision of a woman, loving and beloved; he cherished
it until it became almost as real to him as his own personality and he
gave this dream woman the name he liked best--Alice. In fancy he walked
and talked with her, spoke words of love to her, and heard words of love
in return. When he came from work at the close of day she met him at his
threshold in the twilight--a strange, fair, starry shape, as elusive and
spiritual as a blossom reflected in a pool by moonlight--with welcome on
her lips and in her eyes.
One day, when he was in Charlottetown on business, he had been struck by
a picture in the window of a store. It was strangely like the woman of
his dream love. He went in, awkward and embarrassed, and bought it. When
he took it home he did not know where to put it. It was out of place
among the dim old engravings of bewigged portraits and conventional
landscapes on the walls of Golden Milestone. As he pondered the matter
in his garden that evening he had an inspiration. The sunset, flaming on
the windows of the west gable, kindled them into burning rose. Amid the
splendour he fancied Alice’s fair face peeping archly down at him from
the room. The inspiration came then. It should be her room; he would fit
it up for her; and her picture should hang there.
He was all summer carrying out his plan. Nobody must know or suspect,
so he must go slowly and secretly. One by one the furnishings were
purchased and brought home under cover of darkness. He arranged them
with his own hands. He bought the books he thought she would like best
and wrote her name in them; he got the little feminine knick-knacks of
basket and thimble. Finally he saw in a store a pale blue tea-gown and
the satin slippers. He had always fancied her as dressed in blue. He
bought them and took them home to her room. Thereafter it was sacred to
her; he always knocked on its door before he entered; he kept it sweet
with fresh flowers; he sat there in the purple summer evenings and
talked aloud to her or read his favourite books to her. In his fancy she
sat opposite to him in her rocker, clad in the trailing blue gown, with
her head leaning on one slender hand, as white as a twilight star.
But Carlisle people knew nothing of this--would have thought him tinged
with mild lunacy if they had known. To them, he was just the shy, simple
farmer he appeared. They never knew or guessed at the real Jasper Dale.
One spring Alice Reade came to teach music in Carlisle. Her pupils
worshipped her, but the grown people thought she was rather too distant
and reserved. They had been used to merry, jolly girls who joined
eagerly in the social life of the place. Alice Reade held herself aloof
from it--not disdainfully, but as one to whom these things were of small
importance. She was very fond of books and solitary rambles; she was
not at all shy but she was as sensitive as a flower; and after a time
Carlisle people were content to let her live her own life and no longer
resented her unlikeness to themselves.
She boarded with the Armstrongs, who lived beyond Golden Milestone
around the hill of pines. Until the snow disappeared she went out to the
main road by the long Armstrong lane; but when spring came she was wont
to take a shorter way, down the pine hill, across the brook, past Jasper
Dale’s garden, and out through his lane. And one day, as she went by,
Jasper Dale was working in his garden.
He was on his knees in a corner, setting out a bunch of roots--an
unsightly little tangle of rainbow possibilities. It was a still spring
morning; the world was green with young leaves; a little wind blew down
from the pines and lost itself willingly among the budding delights of
the garden. The grass opened eyes of blue violets. The sky was high
and cloudless, turquoise-blue, shading off into milkiness on the far
horizons. Birds were singing along the brook valley. Rollicking robins
were whistling joyously in the pines. Jasper Dale’s heart was filled to
over-flowing with a realization of all the virgin loveliness around him;
the feeling in his soul had the sacredness of a prayer. At this moment
he looked up and saw Alice Reade.
She was standing outside the garden fence, in the shadow of a great pine
tree, looking not at him, for she was unaware of his presence, but
at the virginal bloom of the plum trees in a far corner, with all her
delight in it outblossoming freely in her face. For a moment Jasper Dale
believed that his dream love had taken visible form before him. She was
like--so like; not in feature, perhaps, but in grace and colouring--the
grace of a slender, lissome form and the colouring of cloudy hair and
wistful, dark gray eyes, and curving red mouth; and more than all, she
was like her in expression--in the subtle revelation of personality
exhaling from her like perfume from a flower. It was as if his own had
come to him at last and his whole soul suddenly leaped out to meet and
welcome her.
Then her eyes fell upon him and the spell was broken. Jasper remained
kneeling mutely there, shy man once more, crimson with blushes, a
strange, almost pitiful creature in his abject confusion. A little smile
flickered about the delicate corners of her mouth, but she turned and
walked swiftly away down the lane.
Jasper looked after her with a new, painful sense of loss and
loveliness. It had been agony to feel her conscious eyes upon him, but
he realized now that there had been a strange sweetness in it, too. It
was still greater pain to watch her going from him.
He thought she must be the new music teacher but he did not even know
her name. She had been dressed in blue, too--a pale, dainty blue; but
that was of course; he had known she must wear it; and he was sure her
name must be Alice. When, later on, he discovered that it was, he felt
no surprise.
He carried some mayflowers up to the west gable and put them under the
picture. But the charm had gone out of the tribute; and looking at the
picture, he thought how scant was the justice it did her. Her face
was so much sweeter, her eyes so much softer, her hair so much more
lustrous. The soul of his love had gone from the room and from the
picture and from his dreams. When he tried to think of the Alice he
loved he saw, not the shadowy spirit occupant of the west gable, but the
young girl who had stood under the pine, beautiful with the beauty of
moonlight, of starshine on still water, of white, wind-swayed flowers
growing in silent, shadowy places. He did not then realize what this
meant: had he realized it he would have suffered bitterly; as it was
he felt only a vague discomfort--a curious sense of loss and gain
commingled.
He saw her again that afternoon on her way home. She did not pause by
the garden but walked swiftly past. Thereafter, every day for a week he
watched unseen to see her pass his home. Once a little child was with
her, clinging to her hand. No child had ever before had any part in the
shy man’s dream life. But that night in the twilight the vision of
the rocking-chair was a girl in a blue print dress, with a little,
golden-haired shape at her knee--a shape that lisped and prattled and
called her “mother;” and both of them were his.
It was the next day that he failed for the first time to put flowers
in the west gable. Instead, he cut a loose handful of daffodils and,
looking furtively about him as if committing a crime, he laid them
across the footpath under the pine. She must pass that way; her feet
would crush them if she failed to see them. Then he slipped back into
his garden, half exultant, half repentant. From a safe retreat he saw
her pass by and stoop to lift his flowers. Thereafter he put some in the
same place every day.
When Alice Reade saw the flowers she knew at once who had put them
there, and divined that they were for her. She lifted them tenderly in
much surprise and pleasure. She had heard all about Jasper Dale and his
shyness; but before she had heard about him she had seen him in church
and liked him. She thought his face and his dark blue eyes beautiful;
she even liked the long brown hair that Carlisle people laughed at. That
he was quite different from other people she had understood at once, but
she thought the difference in his favour. Perhaps her sensitive nature
divined and responded to the beauty in his. At least, in her eyes Jasper
Dale was never a ridiculous figure.
When she heard the story of the west gable, which most people
disbelieved, she believed it, although she did not understand it. It
invested the shy man with interest and romance. She felt that she would
have liked, out of no impertinent curiosity, to solve the mystery; she
believed that it contained the key to his character.
Thereafter, every day she found flowers under the pine tree; she wished
to see Jasper to thank him, unaware that he watched her daily from the
screen of shrubbery in his garden; but it was some time before she found
the opportunity. One evening she passed when he, not expecting her, was
leaning against his garden fence with a book in his hand. She stopped
under the pine.
“Mr. Dale,” she said softly, “I want to thank you for your flowers.”
Jasper, startled, wished that he might sink into the ground. His anguish
of embarrassment made her smile a little. He could not speak, so she
went on gently.
“It has been so good of you. They have given me so much pleasure--I wish
you could know how much.”
“It was nothing--nothing,” stammered Jasper. His book had fallen on the
ground at her feet, and she picked it up and held it out to him.
“So you like Ruskin,” she said. “I do, too. But I haven’t read this.”
“If you--would care--to read it--you may have it,” Jasper contrived to
say.
She carried the book away with her. He did not again hide when she
passed, and when she brought the book back they talked a little about
it over the fence. He lent her others, and got some from her in return;
they fell into the habit of discussing them. Jasper did not find it hard
to talk to her now; it seemed as if he were talking to his dream Alice,
and it came strangely natural to him. He did not talk volubly, but
Alice thought what he did say was worth while. His words lingered in her
memory and made music. She always found his flowers under the pine, and
she always wore some of them, but she did not know if he noticed this or
not.
One evening Jasper walked shyly with her from his gate up the pine hill.
After that he always walked that far with her. She would have missed him
much if he had failed to do so; yet it did not occur to her that she was
learning to love him. She would have laughed with girlish scorn at the
idea. She liked him very much; she thought his nature beautiful in
its simplicity and purity; in spite of his shyness she felt more
delightfully at home in his society than in that of any other person she
had ever met. He was one of those rare souls whose friendship is at once
a pleasure and a benediction, showering light from their own crystal
clearness into all the dark corners in the souls of others, until, for
the time being at least, they reflected his own nobility. But she never
thought of love. Like other girls she had her dreams of a possible
Prince Charming, young and handsome and debonair. It never occurred
to her that he might be found in the shy, dreamy recluse of Golden
Milestone.
In August came a day of gold and blue. Alice Reade, coming through the
trees, with the wind blowing her little dark love-locks tricksily about
under her wide blue hat, found a fragrant heap of mignonette under
the pine. She lifted it and buried her face in it, drinking in the
wholesome, modest perfume.
She had hoped Jasper would be in his garden, since she wished to ask him
for a book she greatly desired to read. But she saw him sitting on the
rustic seat at the further side. His back was towards her, and he was
partially screened by a copse of lilacs.
Alice, blushing slightly, unlatched the garden gate, and went down the
path. She had never been in the garden before, and she found her heart
beating in a strange fashion.
He did not hear her footsteps, and she was close behind him when she
heard his voice, and realized that he was talking to himself, in a low,
dreamy tone. As the meaning of his words dawned on her consciousness she
started and grew crimson. She could not move or speak; as one in a
dream she stood and listened to the shy man’s reverie, guiltless of any
thought of eavesdropping.
“How much I love you, Alice,” Jasper Dale was saying, unafraid, with no
shyness in voice or manner. “I wonder what you would say if you knew.
You would laugh at me--sweet as you are, you would laugh in mockery. I
can never tell you. I can only dream of telling you. In my dream you are
standing here by me, dear. I can see you very plainly, my sweet lady, so
tall and gracious, with your dark hair and your maiden eyes. I can dream
that I tell you my love; that--maddest, sweetest dream of all--that you
love me in return. Everything is possible in dreams, you know, dear. My
dreams are all I have, so I go far in them, even to dreaming that you
are my wife. I dream how I shall fix up my dull old house for you. One
room will need nothing more--it is your room, dear, and has been ready
for you a long time--long before that day I saw you under the pine. Your
books and your chair and your picture are there, dear--only the picture
is not half lovely enough. But the other rooms of the house must be made
to bloom out freshly for you. What a delight it is thus to dream of
what I would do for you! Then I would bring you home, dear, and lead
you through my garden and into my house as its mistress. I would see you
standing beside me in the old mirror at the end of the hall--a bride,
in your pale blue dress, with a blush on your face. I would lead you
through all the rooms made ready for your coming, and then to your own.
I would see you sitting in your own chair and all my dreams would
find rich fulfilment in that royal moment. Oh, Alice, we would have a
beautiful life together! It’s sweet to make believe about it. You will
sing to me in the twilight, and we will gather early flowers together
in the spring days. When I come home from work, tired, you will put
your arms about me and lay your head on my shoulder. I will stroke
it--so--that bonny, glossy head of yours. Alice, my Alice--all mine in
my dream--never to be mine in real life--how I love you!”
The Alice behind him could bear no more. She gave a little choking cry
that betrayed her presence. Jasper Dale sprang up and gazed upon her. He
saw her standing there, amid the languorous shadows of August, pale with
feeling, wide-eyed, trembling.
For a moment shyness wrung him. Then every trace of it was banished by a
sudden, strange, fierce anger that swept over him. He felt outraged and
hurt to the death; he felt as if he had been cheated out of something
incalculably precious--as if sacrilege had been done to his most holy
sanctuary of emotion. White, tense with his anger, he looked at her and
spoke, his lips as pale as if his fiery words scathed them.
“How dare you? You have spied on me--you have crept in and listened! How
dare you? Do you know what you have done, girl? You have destroyed all
that made life worth while to me. My dream is dead. It could not live
when it was betrayed. And it was all I had. Oh, laugh at me--mock me! I
know that I am ridiculous! What of it? It never could have hurt you! Why
must you creep in like this to hear me and put me to shame? Oh, I love
you--I will say it, laugh as you will. Is it such a strange thing that I
should have a heart like other men? This will make sport for you! I, who
love you better than my life, better than any other man in the world
can love you, will be a jest to you all your life. I love you--and yet
I think I could hate you--you have destroyed my dream--you have done me
deadly wrong.”
“Jasper! Jasper!” cried Alice, finding her voice. His anger hurt her
with a pain she could not endure. It was unbearable that Jasper should
be angry with her. In that moment she realized that she loved him--that
the words he had spoken when unconscious of her presence were the
sweetest she had ever heard, or ever could hear. Nothing mattered at
all, save that he loved her and was angry with her.
“Don’t say such dreadful things to me,” she stammered, “I did not
mean to listen. I could not help it. I shall never laugh at you. Oh,
Jasper”--she looked bravely at him and the fine soul of her shone
through the flesh like an illuminating lamp--“I am glad that you love
me! and I am glad I chanced to overhear you, since you would never have
had the courage to tell me otherwise. Glad--glad! Do you understand,
Jasper?”
Jasper looked at her with the eyes of one who, looking through pain,
sees rapture beyond.
“Is it possible?” he said, wonderingly. “Alice--I am so much older
than you--and they call me the Awkward Man--they say I am unlike other
people”--
“You ARE unlike other people,” she said softly, “and that is why I love
you. I know now that I must have loved you ever since I saw you.”
“I loved you long before I saw you,” said Jasper.
He came close to her and drew her into his arms, tenderly and
reverently, all his shyness and awkwardness swallowed up in the grace
of his great happiness. In the old garden he kissed her lips and Alice
entered into her own.