was. As a fact, he was a struggling young author, he had come South for
two weeks' vacation, and on the first morning he was planning to live
here--he must be light-headed. With a touch of his heel and a word and a
quick pull on the curb, his good horse broke into a canter, and then,
under the loosened rein, into a rousing gallop, and Philip went dashing
down the country road, past the soft, rolling landscape, and under cool
caves of foliage, vivid with emerald greens of May, thoughts and dreams
all dissolved in exhilaration of the glorious movement, the nearest
thing to flying that the wingless animal, man, may achieve.
He opened his coat as the blood rushed faster through him, and a paper
fluttered from his pocket. He caught it, and as he pulled the horse to a
trot, he saw that it was his cousin's letter. So, walking now along the
brown shadows and golden sunlight of the long white pike, he fell to
wondering about the family he was going to visit. He opened the folded
letter and read:
"My dear Cousin," it said--the kinship was the first thought in John
Fairfield's mind--"I received your welcome letter on the 14th. I am
delighted that you are coming at last to Kentucky, and I consider that
it is high time you paid Fairfield, which has been the cradle of your
stock for many generations, the compliment of looking at it. We closed
our house in Lexington three weeks ago, and are settled out here now for
the summer, and find it lovelier than ever. My family consists only of
myself and Shelby, my one child, who is now twenty-two years of age. We
are both ready to give you an old-time Kentucky welcome, and Westerly is
ready to receive you at any moment you wish to come."
The rest was merely arrangement for meeting the traveller, all of which
was done away with by his earlier arrival.
"A prim old party, with an exalted idea of the family," commented Philip
mentally. "Well-to-do, apparently, or he wouldn't be having a winter
house in the city. I wonder what the boy Shelby is like. At twenty-two
he should be doing something more profitable than spending an entire
summer out here, I should say."
The questions faded into the general content of his mind at the glimpse
of another stately old pillared homestead, white and deep down its
avenue of locusts. At length he stopped his horse to wait for a ragged
negro trudging cheerfully down the road.
"Do you know a place around here called Fairfield?" he asked.
"Yessah. I does that, sah. It's that ar' place right hyeh, sah, by yo'
hoss. That ar's Fahfiel'. Shall I open the gate fo' you, boss?" and
Philip turned to see a hingeless ruin of boards held together by the
persuasion of rusty wire.
"The home of my fathers looks down in the mouth," he reflected aloud.
The old negro's eyes, gleaming from under shaggy sheds of eyebrows,
watched him, and he caught the words.
"Is you a Fahfiel', boss?" he asked eagerly. "Is you my young Marse?" He
jumped at the conclusion promptly. "You favors de fam'ly mightily, sah.
I heard you was comin'"; the rag of a hat went off and he bowed low.
"Hit's cert'nly good news fo' Fahfiel', Marse Philip, hit's mighty good
news fo' us niggers, sah. I'se b'longed to the Fahfiel' fam'ly a hund'ed
years, Marse--me and my folks, and I wishes yo' a welcome home,
sah--welcome home, Marse Philip."
Philip bent with a quick movement from his horse, and gripped the
twisted old black hand, speechless. This humble welcome on the highway
caught at his heart deep down, and the appeal of the colored people to
Southerners, who know them, the thrilling appeal of a gentle, loyal
race, doomed to live forever behind a veil and hopeless without
bitterness, stirred for the first time his manhood. It touched him to be
taken for granted as the child of his people; it pleased him that he
should be "Marse Philip" as a matter of course, because there had always
been a Marse Philip at the place. It was bred deeper in the bone of him
than he knew, to understand the soul of the black man; the stuff he was
made of had been Southern two hundred years.
The old man went off down the white limestone road singing to himself,
and Philip rode slowly under the locusts and beeches up the long drive,
grass-grown and lost in places, that wound through the woodland
three-quarters of a mile to his house. And as he moved through the park,
through sunlight and shadow of these great trees that were his, he felt
like a knight of King Arthur, like some young knight long exiled, at
last coming to his own. He longed with an unreasonable seizure of
desire to come here to live, to take care of it, beautify it, fill it
with life and prosperity as it had once been filled, surround it with
cheerful faces of colored people whom he might make happy and
comfortable. If only he had money to pay off the mortgage, to put the
place once in order, it would be the ideal setting for the life that
seemed marked out for him--the life of a writer.
The horse turned a corner and broke into a canter up the slope, and as
the shoulder of the hill fell away there stood before him the picture of
his childhood come to life, smiling drowsily in the morning sunlight
with shuttered windows that were its sleeping eyes--the great white
house of Fairfield. Its high pillars reached to the roof; its big wings
stretched away at either side; the flicker of the shadow of the leaves
played over it tenderly and hid broken bits of woodwork, patches of
paint cracked away, window-panes gone here and there. It stood as if too
proud to apologize or to look sad for such small matters, as serene, as
stately as in its prime. And its master, looking at it for the first
time, loved it.
He rode around to the side and tied his mount to an old horse-rack, and
then walked up the wide front steps as if each lift were an event. He
turned the handle of the big door without much hope that it would yield,
but it opened willingly, and he stood inside. A broom lay in a corner,
windows were open--his cousin had been making ready for him. There was
the huge mahogany sofa, horse-hair-covered, in the window under the
stairs, where his mother had read "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." Philip
stepped softly across the wide hall and laid his head where must have
rested the brown hair of the little girl who had come to be, first all
of his life, and then its dearest memory. Half an hour he spent in the
old house, and its walls echoed to his footsteps as if in ready homage,
and each empty room whose door he opened met him with a sweet half
familiarity. The whole place was filled with the presence of the child
who had loved it and left it, and for whom this tall man, her child,
longed now as if for a little sister who should be here, and whom he
missed. With her memory came the thought of the five-year-old uncle who
had made history for the family so disastrously. He must see the garden
where that other Philip had gone with his father to hide the money on
the fated Christmas morning. He closed the house door behind him
carefully, as if he would not disturb a little girl reading in the
window, a little boy sleeping perhaps in the nursery above. Then he
walked down the broad sweep of the driveway, the gravel crunching under
the grass, and across what had been a bit of velvet lawn, and stood for
a moment with his hand on a broken vase, weed-filled, which capped the
stone post of a gateway.
All the garden was misty with memories. Where a tall golden flower
nodded alone, from out of the tangled thicket of an old flower-bed, a
bright-haired child might have laughed with just that air of startled,
gay naughtiness, from the forbidden centre of the blossoms. In the
moulded tan-bark of the path was a vague print, like the ghost of a
footprint that had passed down the way a lifetime ago. The box, half
dead, half sprouted into high unkept growth, still stood stiffly against
the riotous overflow of weeds as if it yet held loyally to its business
of guarding the borders, Philip shifted his gaze slowly, lingering over
the dim contours, the shadowy shape of what the garden had been.
Suddenly his eyes opened wide. How was this? There was a hedge as neat,
as clipped, as any of Southampton in mid-season, and over it a glory of
roses, red and white and pink and yellow, waved gay banners to him in
trim luxuriance. He swung toward them, and the breeze brought him for
the first time in his life the fragrance of box in sunshine.
Four feet tall, shaven and thick and shining, the old hedge stood, and
the garnered sweetness of a hundred years' slow growth breathed
delicately from it toward the great-great-grandson of the man who
planted it. A box hedge takes as long in the making as a gentleman, and
when they are done the two are much of a sort. No plant in all the
garden has so subtle an air of breeding, so gentle a reserve, yet so
gracious a message of sweetness for all of the world who will stop to
learn it. It keeps a firm dignity under the stress of tempest when
lighter growths are tossed and torn; it shines bright through the snow;
it has a well-bred willingness to be background, with the well-bred gift
of presence, whether as background or foreground. The soul of the
box-tree is an aristocrat, and the sap that runs through it is the blue
blood of vegetation.
Saluting him bravely in the hot sunshine with its myriad shining
sword-points, the old hedge sent out to Philip on the May breeze its
ancient welcome of aromatic fragrance, and the tall roses crowded gayly
to look over its edge at the new master. Slowly, a little dazed at this
oasis of shining order in the neglected garden, he walked to the opening
and stepped inside the hedge. The rose garden! The famous rose garden of
Fairfield, and as his mother had described it, in full splendor of
cared-for, orderly bloom. Across the paths he stepped swiftly till he
stood amid the roses, giant bushes of Jacqueminot and Maréchal Niel; of
pink and white and red and yellow blooms in thick array. The glory of
them intoxicated him. That he should own all of this beauty seemed too
good to be true, and instantly he wanted to taste his ownership. The
thought came to him that he would enter into his heritage with strong
hands here in the rose garden; he caught a deep-red Jacqueminot almost
roughly by its gorgeous head and broke off the stem. He would gather a
bunch, a huge, unreasonable bunch of his own flowers. Hungrily he broke
one after another; his shoulders bent over them, he was deep in the
bushes.
"I reckon I shall have to ask you not to pick any more of those roses,"
a voice said.
Philip threw up his head as if he had been shot; he turned sharply with
a great thrill, for he thought his mother spoke to him. Perhaps it was
only the Southern inflection so long unheard, perhaps the sunlight that
shone in his eyes dazzled him, but, as he stared, the white figure
before him seemed to him to look exactly as his mother had looked long
ago. Stumbling over his words, he caught at the first that came.
"I--I think it's all right," he said.
The girl smiled frankly, yet with a dignity in her puzzled air. "I'm
afraid I shall have to be right decided," she said. "These roses are
private property and I mustn't let you have them."
"Oh!" Philip dropped the great bunch of gorgeous color guiltily by his
side, but still held tightly the prickly mass of stems, knowing his
right, yet half wondering if he could have made a mistake. He stammered:
"I thought--to whom do they belong?"
"They belong to my cousin, Mr. Philip Fairfield Beckwith"--the sound of
his own name was pleasant as the falling voice strayed through it. "He
is coming home in a few days, so I want them to look their prettiest for
him--for his first sight of them. I take care of this rose garden," she
said, and laid a motherly hand on the nearest flower. Then she smiled.
"It doesn't seem right hospitable to stop you, but if you will come over
to Westerly, to our house, father will be glad to see you, and I will
certainly give you all the flowers you want." The sweet and masterful
apparition looked with a gracious certainty of obedience straight into
Philip's bewildered eyes.
[Illustration: "I reckon I shall have to ask you not pick any more of
those roses," a voice said.]
"The boy Shelby!" Many a time in the months after Philip Beckwith
smiled to himself reminiscently, tenderly, as he thought of "the boy
Shelby" whom he had read into John Fairfield's letter; "the boy Shelby"
who was twenty-two years old and the only child; "the boy Shelby" whom
he had blamed with such easy severity for idling at Fairfield; "the boy
Shelby" who was no boy at all, but this white flower of girlhood,
called--after the quaint and reasonable Southern way--as a boy is
called, by the surname of her mother's people.
Toward Westerly, out of the garden of the old time, out of the dimness
of a forgotten past, the two took their radiant youth and the brightness
of to-day. But a breeze blew across the tangle of weeds and flowers as
they wandered away, and whispered a hope, perhaps a promise; for as it
touched them each tall stalk nodded gayly and the box hedges rustled
delicately an answering undertone. And just at the edge of the woodland,
before they were out of sight, the girl turned and threw a kiss back to
the roses and the box.
"I always do that," she said. "I love them so!"
Two weeks later a great train rolled into the Grand Central Station of
New York at half-past six at night, and from it stepped a monstrosity--a
young man without a heart. He had left all of it, more than he had
thought he owned, in Kentucky. But he had brought back with him memories
which gave him more joy than ever the heart had done, to his best
knowledge, in all the years. They were memories of long and sunshiny
days; of afternoons spent in the saddle, rushing through grassy lanes
where trumpet-flowers flamed over gray farm fences, or trotting slowly
down white roads; of whole mornings only an hour long, passed in the
enchanted stillness of an old garden; of gay, desultory searches through
its length and breadth, and in the park that held it, for buried
treasure: of moonlit nights; of roses and June and Kentucky--and always,
through all the memories, the presence that made them what they were,
that of a girl he loved.
No word of love had been spoken, but the two weeks had made over his
life; and he went back to his work with a definite object, a hope
stronger than ambition, and, set to it as music to words, came
insistently another hope, a dream that he did not let himself dwell
on--a longing to make enough money to pay off the mortgage and put
Fairfield in order, and live and work there all his life--with Shelby.
That was where the thrill of the thought came in, but the place was very
dear to him in itself.
The months went, and the point of living now were the mails from the
South, and the feast days were the days that brought letters from
Fairfield. He had promised to go back for a week at Christmas, and he
worked and hoarded all the months between with a thought which he did
not formulate, but which ruled his down-sitting and his up-rising, the
thought that if he did well and his bank account grew enough to justify
it he might, when he saw her at Christmas, tell her what he hoped; ask
her--he finished the thought with a jump of his heart. He never worked
harder or better, and each check that came in meant a step toward the
promised land; and each seemed for the joy that was in it to quicken his
pace, to lengthen his stride, to strengthen his touch. Early in November
he found one night when he came to his rooms two letters waiting for
him with the welcome Kentucky postmark. They were in John Fairfield's
handwriting and in his daughter's, and "_place aux dames_" ruled rather
than respect to age, for he opened Shelby's first. His eyes smiling, he
read it.
"I am knitting you a diamond necklace for Christmas," she wrote. "Will
you like that? Or be sure to write me if you'd rather have me hunt in
the garden and dig you up a box of money. I'll tell you--there ought to
be luck in the day, for it was hidden on Christmas and it should be
found on Christmas; so on Christmas morning we'll have another look, and
if you find it I'll catch you 'Christmas gif'' as the darkies do, and
you'll have to give it to me, and if I find it I'll give it to you; so
that's fair, isn't it? Anyway--" and Philip's eyes jumped from line to
line, devouring the clear, running writing. "So bring a little present
with you, please--just a tiny something for me," she ended, "for I'm
certainly going to catch you 'Christmas gif'.'"
Philip folded the letter back into its envelope and put it in his
pocket, and his heart felt warmer for the scrap of paper over it. Then
he cut John Fairfield's open dreamily, his mind still on the words he
had read, on the threat--"I'm going to catch you 'Christmas gif'.'" What
was there good enough to give her? Himself, he thought humbly, very far
from it. With a sigh that was not sad he dismissed the question and
began to read the other letter. He stood reading it by the fading light
from the window, his hat thrown by him on a chair, his overcoat still
on, and, as he read, the smile died from his face. With drawn brows he
read on to the end, and then the letter dropped from his fingers to the
floor and he did not notice; his eyes stared widely at the high building
across the street, the endless rows of windows, the lights flashing into
them here and there. But he saw none of it. He saw a stretch of quiet
woodland, an old house with great white pillars, a silent, neglected
garden, with box hedges sweet and ragged, all waiting for him to come
and take care of them--the home of his fathers, the home he had meant,
had expected--he knew it now--would be some day his own, the home he
had lost! John Fairfield's letter was to tell him that the mortgage on
the place, running now so many years, was suddenly to be foreclosed;
that, property not being worth much in the neighborhood, no one would
take it up; that on January 2nd, Fairfield, the house and land, were to
be sold at auction. It was a hard blow to Philip Beckwith. With his
hands in his overcoat pockets he began to walk up and down the room,
trying to plan, to see if by any chance he might save this place he
loved. It would mean eight thousand dollars to pay the mortgage. One or
two thousand more would put the estate in order, but that might wait if
he could only tide over this danger, save the house and land. An hour he
walked so, forgetting dinner, forgetting the heavy coat which he still
wore, and then he gave it up. With all he had saved--and it was a fair
and promising beginning--he could not much more than half pay the
mortgage, and there was no way, which he would consider, by which he
could get the money. Fairfield would have to go, and he set his teeth
and clinched his fists as he thought how he wanted to keep it. A year
ago it had meant nothing to him, a year from now if things went his way
he could have paid the mortgage. That it should happen just this
year--just now! He could not go down at Christmas; it would break his
heart to see the place again as his own when it was just slipping from
his grasp. He would wait until it was all over, and go, perhaps, in the
spring. The great hope of his life was still his own, but Fairfield had
been the setting of that hope; he must readjust his world before he saw
Shelby again. So he wrote them that he would not come at present, and
then tried to dull the ache of his loss with hard work.
But three days before Christmas, out of the unknown forces beyond his
reasoning swept a wave of desire to go South, which took him off his
feet. Trained to trust his brain and deny his impulse as he was, yet
there was a vein of sentiment, almost of superstition, in him which the
thought of the old place pricked sharply to life. This longing was
something beyond him--he must go--and he had thrown his decisions to the
winds and was feverish until he could get away.
As before, he rode out from the Phoenix Hotel, and at ten o'clock in
the morning he turned into Fairfield. It was a still, bright Christmas
morning, crisp and cool, and the air like wine. The house stood bravely
in the sunlight, but the branches above it were bare and no softening
leafage hid the marks of time; it looked old and sad and deserted
to-day, and its master gazed at it with a pang in his heart. It was his,
and he could not save it. He turned away and walked slowly to the
garden, and stood a moment as he had stood last May, with his hand on
the stone gateway. It was very silent and lonely here, in the hush of
winter; nothing stirred; even the shadows of the interlaced branches
above lay almost motionless across the walks.
Something moved to his left, down the pathway--he turned to look. Had
his heart stopped, that he felt this strange, cold feeling in his
breast? Were his eyes--could he be seeing? Was this insanity? Fifty feet
down the path, half in the weaving shadows, half in clear sunlight,
stood the little boy of his life-long vision, in the dress with the
black velvet squares, his little uncle, dead forty years ago. As he
gazed, his breath stopping, the child smiled and held up to him, as of
old, a key on a scarlet string, and turned and flitted as if a flower
had taken wing, away between the box hedges. Philip, his feet moving as
if without his will, followed him. Again the baby face turned its
smiling dark eyes toward him, and Philip knew that the child was calling
him, though there was no sound; and again without volition of his own
his feet took him where it led. He felt his breath coming difficultly,
and suddenly a gasp shook him--there was no footprint on the unfrozen
earth where the vision had passed. Yet there before him, moving through
the deep sunlit silence of the garden, was the familiar, sturdy little
form in its old-world dress. Philip's eyes were open; he was awake,
walking; he saw it. Across the neglected tangle it glided, and into the
trim order of Shelby's rose garden; in the opening between the box walls
it wheeled again, and the sun shone clear on the bronze hair and fresh
face, and the scarlet string flashed and the key glinted at the end of
it. Philip's fascinated eyes saw all of that. Then the apparition
slipped into the shadow of the beech trees and Philip quickened his step
breathlessly, for it seemed that life and death hung on the sight. In
and out through the trees it moved; once more the face turned toward
him; he caught the quick brightness of a smile. The little chap had
disappeared behind the broad tree-trunk, and Philip, catching his
breath, hurried to see him appear again. He was gone. The little spirit
that had strayed from over the border of a world--who can say how far,
how near?--unafraid in this earth-corner once its home, had slipped away
into eternity through the white gate of ghosts and dreams.
Philip's heart was pumping painfully as he came, dazed and staring, to
the place where the apparition had vanished. It was a giant beech tree,
all of two hundred and fifty years old, and around its base ran a broken
wooden bench, where pretty girls of Fairfield had listened to their
sweethearts, where children destined to be generals and judges had
played with their black mammies, where gray-haired judges and generals
had come back to think over the fights that were fought out. There were
letters carved into the strong bark, the branches swung down
whisperingly, the green tent of the forest seemed filled with the memory
of those who had camped there and gone on. Philip's feet stumbled over
the roots as he circled the veteran; he peered this way and that, but
the woodland was hushed and empty; the birds whistled above, the grasses
rustled below, unconscious, casual, as if they knew nothing of a
child-soul that had wandered back on Christmas day with a Christmas
message, perhaps, of good-will to its own.