Next day heaven opened to us--a heaven, as does not always happen, of
some one’s else making. Our dear Avis Knight, fancying that Lawrence
was looking rather worn, persuaded him to shift the world to other
shoulders while he went off for golden apples, and he agreed to a
cruise in the yacht. Whereupon, Avis begged that Pelleas and I bring
Nichola and spend at Little Rosemont the month of their absence. The
roses were in full bloom and Avis said prettily that she longed to
think of us alone there among them. Really, to have inherited North
America would have been nothing to this; for Little Rosemont is my idea
of a palace and I think is by far the most beautiful of the Long Island
country places.
Therefore Pelleas and I went in town to fetch various belongings and
Nichola. Or I think I should say to approach Nichola, that violent and
inevitable force to be reckoned with like the weather and earthquakes.
“Whatever will Nichola say?” we had been wondering all the way on
train and ferry, and “Whatever _will_ Nichola say?” we put it in a kind
of panic, as Pelleas turned the latch-key at our house.
We went at once to the kitchen and as we descended the stairs we heard
her singing low, like a lullaby, that passionate serenade, _Com’ è
gentil_, from Don Pasquale. Her voice is harsh and broken and sadly
alien to serenades but the tones have never lost what might have been
their power of lullaby. Perhaps it is that this is never lost from any
woman’s voice. At all events, old Nichola reduces street-organ song,
and hymn, and _aria di bravura_ to this universal cradle measure.
When we appeared thus suddenly before her she looked up, but she did
not cease her song. She kept her eyes on us and I saw them light, but
the serenade went on and her hands continued their task above the table.
“Nichola,” I said, “we are invited to a most beautiful place on Long
Island to stay a month while our friends are away. We are to take you,
and we must start to-morrow. The house has one hundred and forty rooms,
Nichola, and you shall be my lady’s maid, as you used.”
“And nothing to do, Nichola, but pick roses and sing,” Pelleas added,
beaming.
Our old serving-woman pinched the crust about a plump new pie. On the
board lay a straggling remnant of the dough for the Guinea goat.
Nichola always fashioned from the remnant of pie-crust a Guinea goat
which she baked and, with a blanket of jelly, ate, beginning at the
horns. Once in her native Capri there had appeared, she had told me,
a man from West Africa leading a Guinea goat which she averred could
count; and the incident had so impressed her that she had never since
made a pie without shaping this ruminant quadruped. Whether there
really ever was such a goat I do not know, but Nichola believed in it
and in memoriam molded pie-crust goats by the thousand. She has even
fried them as doughnuts, too; but these are not so successful for the
horns puff out absurdly.
“A hundred and forty rooms, Nichola,” I said, “and you shall be my
lady’s maid.”
“Yah!” Nichola rejoined, interrupting her song rather to attend to
pricking the pie-crust with a fork than to reply to us; “don’t look
for no lady-maiding from me, mem. I’ll be kep’ busy countin’ up the
windows, me. When do we start off?” she wanted to know.
Nichola evidently believed us to be jesting. Later when she found that
our extravagant proposition was the truth she pretended to have known
from the first.
We were in the midst of our simple preparations, when a wonderful thing
occurred to Pelleas. I was folding my gown of heliotrope silk in its
tissues, the gown with the collar of Mechlin which is now my chief
finery, when Pelleas came in our room.
“Etarre,” he said, “you know what day comes next week. And now we shall
spend it at Little Rosemont, alone!”
I knew what he meant. Had we not previously talked of it and mourned
that it was not possible to us to celebrate that day alone, as we had
always dreamed that one’s golden-wedding day should be spent?
“Our wedding day--our golden-wedding day,” I said.
Pelleas nodded. “As if they have not all been golden,” he observed
simply.
There was in every fern a nod for our good fortune as on that next
afternoon Pelleas and Nichola and I drove up the avenue at Little
Rosemont. And at the very park entrance, though of course we did not
know that at the time, a part of our adventure began when the gate was
opened by that brown, smiling young under-gardener Karl, with honest
man’s eyes and a boy’s dimples, who bowed us into the place like a good
genie. As we returned his greeting we felt that he was in a manner
ringing up the curtain on the spectacle but we did not forecast that he
was also to play a most important part.
In the great hall all the servants were gathered to welcome us, an
ensemble of liveries and courtesies in which I distinguished only Mrs.
Woods, the housekeeper, very grave, a little hoarse, and clothed on
with black satin. We escaped as soon as possible, Pelleas and I not
having been formed by heaven to play the important squire and his lady
arriving home to bonfires and village bells and a chorus of our rent
roll. But once safely in the lordly sitting room of our suite, with its
canopies and a dais, and epergnes filled with orchids, I had but to
look at Pelleas to feel wonderfully at home. It is a blessed thing to
love some one so much that you feel at home together in any place of
deserts or perils or even lordly rooms filled with orchids.
On that first evening we were destined to chance upon another blessed
thing of the same quality. After our solitary dinner in the stately
dining-room, Pelleas and I went wandering in the grounds, very still
in the hush of June with June’s little moon lying on the sky. Little
Rosemont is a place of well-swept lawns, and orchards then newly freed
from the spell of their bloom; it is a place of great spaces and long
naves, with groves whose trees seem to have been drawn together to some
secret lyre. The house is a miracle of line and from its deep verandas
one sees afar off a band of the sea, as if some god had struck it from
the gray east. And everywhere at that glad season were the roses,
thousands and thousands of roses--ah, fancy using figures to compute
roses quite as one does in defraying debts. Though indeed as Pelleas
frivolously said, “‘Time brings roses’ but so does money!” For many of
those assembled were from Persia and Cashmere and I dare say from Lud
and Phut. I think that I have never had an experience of great delight
at which a band of familiar, singing things was not present; and when
I remember the month at Little Rosemont it is as if the roses were
the musical interludes, like a Greek chorus, explaining what is. They
hang starry on almost every incident; unless perhaps on that of the
night of our arrival, when we are told that Nichola in the servants’
dining-hall produced a basket which she had brought with her and calmly
took therefrom her Guinea goat of the day before and ate it, before all
assembled, beginning at the horns!
From the driveway on that first walk Pelleas and I looked up to a
balcony over which the roses were at carnival. It was the kind of
balcony that belongs to a moon and I half suspect all such balconies
to be moon-made and invisible by sun or starlight; it was the kind of
balcony that one finds in very old books, and one is certain that if
any other than a lover were to step thereon it would forthwith crumble
away. Pelleas, looking up at the balcony, irrelevantly said:--
“Do you remember the young rector over there in Inglese? The Reverend
Arthur Didbin? Who married Viola to Our Telephone the other day?”
“Yes, of course, Pelleas,” said I, listening. What could the Reverend
Arthur Didbin have to do with this balcony of roses?
“I’ve been thinking,” Pelleas went on, “that next week, on our
golden-wedding day you know, we might have him come up here in the
evening--there will be a full moon then--” he hesitated.
“Yes, yes?” I pressed him, bewildered.
“Well, and we might have him read the service for us, just we three up
there on the balcony. The marriage service, Etarre--unless you think it
would be too stupid and sentimental, you know?”
“Stupid!” I said, “O, Pelleas.”
“Ah, well, Nichola would think we were mad,” he defended his scruples.
“But she thinks so anyway,” I urged, “and besides she will never know.
But Mr. Didbin--what of him?” I asked doubtfully; “will he laugh or
will he understand?”
Pelleas reflected.
“Ah, well,” he said, “Hobart told me that one night when Mr. Didbin’s
train ran into an open switch he walked through six miles of mud to
marry a little country couple whom he had never seen.”
And that confirmed us: The Reverend Arthur Didbin would understand.
We stepped on in the pleasant light talking of this quite as if we had
a claim on moon-made balconies and were the only lovers in the world.
That we were not the only lovers we were soon to discover. At the edge
of a grove, where a midsummer-night-dream of a fountain tinkled, we
emerged on a green slope spangled with little flowers; and on its marge
stood a shallow arbour formed like a shell or a petal and brave with
bloom. We hastened toward it, certain that it had risen from the green
to receive us, and were close upon it before we saw that it was already
occupied. And there sat Bonnie, the little maid whose romance we had
openly fostered, and with her that young Karl, the under-gardener, whom
we observed in an instant Avis could never call Faint Heart any more.
Pelleas glanced at me merrily as we immediately turned aside pretending
to be vastly absorbed in some botanical researches on the spangled
evening slope.
“Bless us, Etarre,” he said, smiling, “what a world it is. You cannot
possibly hollow out an arbour anywhere without two lovers waiting to
occupy it.”
“Ah, yes,” said I, “the only difficulty is that there are more lovers
than arbours. Here are we for example, arbourless.”
But that we did not mind. On the contrary, being meddlers where
arbours and so on are concerned, we set about finding out more of
the two whom we had surprised. This was not difficult because we had
brought with us Nichola; and through her we were destined to develop
huge interest in the household. Nichola indeed talked of them all
perpetually while she was about my small mending and dressing and she
scolded shrilly at matters as she found them quite as she habitually
criticizes all orders and systems. Nichola is in conversation a sad
misanthrope, which is a pity, for she does not know it; and to know it
is, one must suppose, the only compensation for being a misanthrope.
She inveighed for example against the cook and the head laundress who
had a most frightful feud of long standing, jealously nourished, though
neither now had the faintest idea in what it had arisen--was this not
cosmopolitan and almost human of these two? And Nichola railed at the
clannishness of the haughty Scotch butler until he one day opened
an entry door for her, after which she softened her carping, as is
the way of the world also, and objected only to what she called his
“animal brogue,” for all the speeches of earth alien to the Italian
are to Nichola a sign of just so much black inferiority. And she went
on at a furious rate about the scandalous ways of “Reddie,” the second
stableman, who, she declared, “kep’ the actual rats in the stable
floor with their heads off their pillows, what with his playin’ on a
borrow’ fiddle that he’d wen’ to work an’ learnt of himself.” Through
Nichola we also had our attention directed to Mrs. Woods’ groveling
fear of burglars--her one claim to distinction unless one includes
that she pronounced them “burgulars.” And too we heard of the sinful
pride of Sarah McLean of the cedar linen room who declared in the
hearing of the household that one of her ancestors was a _Hittite_.
Where she had acquired this historic impression we never learned nor
with what she had confused the truth; but she stoutly clung to her
original assertion and on one occasion openly told the housekeeper
that as for her family-tree it was in the Old Testament Bible; and
the housekeeper, crossing herself, told this to Nichola who listened,
making the sign of the horn to ward away the evil. It was like learning
the secrets of a village; but the greatest of these realities proved
to be Bonnie McLean, daughter of her of Hittite descent, and Karl, the
under-gardener and the genie of the gate. Picture the agitation of
Pelleas and me when Nichola told us this:--
“Yes, mem,” she said, “them two, they’re in love _pitiful_. But the
young leddy’s mother, she’s a widdy-leddy an’ dependent on. An’ as
for the young fellow, he’s savin’ up fer to get his own mother acrost
from the old country an’ when he does it they’re agoin’ to get marrit.
But he needs eighty dollars an’ so far they say he’s got nine. Ain’t
it the shame, mem, an’ the very potatoes in this house with cluster
diamin’s in their eyes?”
Surely Avis did not know this about the young lovers--Avis, one of
whose frocks would have set the two at housekeeping with the mother
from “the old country” at the head of the table. Pelleas and I were
certain that she did not know, although we have found that there are
charming people of colossal interests to whom one marriage more or less
seems to count for as little as a homeless kitten, or a “fledgling
dead,” or the needless felling of an ancient oak. But it is among these
things that Pelleas and I live, and we believe that in spite of all the
lovers in the world there is yet not enough love to spare one lover’s
happiness. So while the moon swelled to the full and swung through
the black gulf of each night as if it had been shaped by heaven for
that night’s appointment, we moved among the roses of Little Rosemont,
biding our golden-wedding day, gradually becoming more and more intent
upon the romance and the homely realities of that liveried household.
Perhaps it was the story of Bonnie and Karl that suggested to Pelleas
the next step in our adventure; or it may have been our interest in
“Reddie,” whom we unearthed in the stable one afternoon and who,
radiant, played for us for an hour and fervently thanked us when he
had concluded. At all events, as our day of days came on apace Pelleas
became convinced that it was infamously selfish for us to spend it
in our own way. Because heaven had opened to us was that a reason for
occupying heaven to the exclusion of the joys of others?
“Etarre,” he said boldly, “there is not the least virtue in making
those about one happy. That is mere civilization. But there is nobody
about us but Avis’ servants. And she told us to make ourselves at
home. Let’s give all the servants a holiday on that day and get on by
ourselves.”
“We might let them picnic in the grounds,” I suggested doubtfully.
“With lemonade and cake,” Pelleas submitted.
“Lemonade and cake!” I retorted with superiority; “the servants of
to-day expect lobster and champagne.”
“Ah, well,” Pelleas defiantly maintained, “I believe they will like
your cream tarts anyway.” He meditated for a moment and then burst out
daringly: “Etarre! Would Avis care? Of course she could never do it
herself; but do you think she would care if we let them all come up
that night and dance in the great hall?”