THE LITTLE LAND
Ewing found Kensington like a village dropped from the clouds of
stageland, its wide, grass-bordered streets arched with giant elms and
flanked by square old houses, drowsing behind their flower gardens and
green lawns. The house to which he went was equally a stage house. Only
in that land of pretense had he seen its like: a big, square, gray
house, its drab slate roof and red chimneys all but hidden by the elms
that towered above it like mammoth feather dusters, its wide piazzas
screened from the street by a hoary hedge of lilac. The house seemed to
drowse in a comfortable lethargy, confident of the rectitude of builders
long dead who had roughhewn its beams and joined them with wooden pins
before a day of nails. In Ewing's own room, far up between the hunched
shoulders of the house, the windows gave closely on one of the elms, so
that he could hear its whispers night and morning from his canopied bed
of four posts. The other rooms were broad and low of ceiling, and there
were long, high-backed sofas, slim-legged chairs, and tables of mahogany
or rosewood, desks, cabinets, and highboys of an outlandish grace, that
charmed with hints of a mellowed past--of past overlaying past in
sleeping strata.
The woman whose house this was seemed to Ewing to be its true spirit.
She, too, drowsed anciently, a thing of old lace and lavender, yet of a
certain gentle and antique sprightliness, of cheeks preserving a hint of
time-worn pink, mellowed like the scrap of her flowered wedding dress
shut between the leaves of an "Annual" half a century old.
And Ewing found in the house, too, the girl who had once talked half
an hour with him by an exigent tea table. She had been a thing of shy
restraint then, showing with an almost old-fashioned simplicity
against her background of townish sophistication. Now he found her
demurely modern in this huddle of mellowed relics. She it was who
interpreted for him the antique mysteries of house and town. She
paraded before him the treasures of her aunt, from the pewter plates
and silver-gilt candelabra to camphor-scented brocades long hidden in
cedar chests in the ghostly attic. But she performed her office with
irreverence; as when, in the attic's gloom, she held the festal gown
of some departed great-grandmother before her own robust figure to
show how tiny were grandmothers in those days, for the yoke but a
little more than half spanned her breadth as she smirked above it in
scorn of its narrowness.
In that subdued light the girl's skin was flawless, her eyes were shaded
to murkiness, and a mote-ridden shaft of sunlight struck her hair to a
radiant yellow. But out of doors these matters could be seen to another
effect. The hair was only a yellowish brown, the eyes lost their shadows
and became the lucid green of sea waves, and the face was spotted with
tiny freckles, like a bird's egg. He liked her best out of doors,
breathing as she did of wood and field and sky. Skirts she seemed to
wear under protest, as a wood nymph might humor, a little awkwardly, the
prejudice of an indoor tribe with which she chose to tarry. When she
raced over the lawn with her dog, it was not hard to see that clothing
was an ungraceful impediment, even the short-skirted gowns she wore by
day. In the longer affairs of evening, though she strove to subdue her
spirits to them, she still had an air of the open, as if she but played
at being a lady and might forget at any moment. Ewing was shyer of her
when evening brought this change of habit. At such times he found it
easier to talk to Mrs. Laithe, who sat--or, oftener, lay--with her eyes
turned from the light, speaking but little.
"I'm glad to be away from town," she said to him, as he sat a moment
beside her one day, "and I'm glad you're away. I need to be quiet, and
you shall do as you like. Virginia will go about with you and make you
gay. Virginia always makes us gay."
Unconsciously her hand had fallen on his sleeve, curling and fastening
there, and when he rose he was disturbed to see that he had shaken off
so tender a thing.
"I didn't know you were holding me," he said, in apology, and lifted the
fallen hand.
"Such foolish hands! Your sister's are tiny, too, but they look as if
they could turn a doorknob." He leisurely turned it this way and that to
see its lines, and compared the fingernails with his own to show how
absurd they were. And all the time it seemed to the woman that her hand
had a little heart in it that was beating to suffocation.
"There, Virginia is beckoning to you from the path--perhaps you can
finish my hand another time." She laughed. "I hope you're not seriously
annoyed about it."
"It's foolish," he insisted, and replaced it with elaborate care. Then
he ran to join his ruddy cicerone. He found the girl a good comrade, who
helped him to forget those things he wished to forget. Somehow in the
quiet air, that nameless secret thing that had been eating his heart
drew off a little. Almost he could believe it had all been some hideous
mistake.
He tried at first to join Virginia in her sports. Tennis looked
foolishly easy, but after sending four of the balls beyond recovery he
suspected that the game might demand something more than willingness and
strength, and relinquished his racquet to watch the girl. He felt the
glow of the sport in following her swift movements, and he envied the
young men who could play with her.
Golf looked not only easy but useless; and it was with only half a heart
that he essayed it. He splintered a driver at his first attempt, and he
did not venture a second. Still, he liked golf better than tennis, he
decided, for he could carry the bag of things she played with and hunt
lost balls, and wander over the course alone with her. He was never able
to believe that a stroke more or less in holing the ball could be a
matter of real moment, but the girl was worth watching while she
believed it. He had never seen a real girl near before, and he was
surprised to find it so fine a sight.
In the canoe he was more successful, contriving to accomplish by sheer
strength of arm what the girl did more adroitly. They would paddle far
up the little river, to float down in the late afternoon. The river,
too, was a stage river, running between low, willow-fringed banks, or
winding among hay fields that sloped back to the upland, or lush green
meadows where cows were posed effectively. The girl became part of the
picture when they turned to float homeward, facing him from the bow, her
hair glinting yellow and her skin crystal clear against the crimson
cushion she leaned upon.
They rode together, too--he could join her there--over the upland and
far into the little hills, between tangled hedge rows, past little farms
with orchards of ripening fruit. They passed many deserted places,
mournful in their stagnation, overgrown with wild things, the houses
forlornly dismantled, perhaps with the roof sunken, the chimney toppled,
and the weather-beaten walls in ruinous decay. He was touched by these
places. The houses must have been built with high hope, and once have
been alive with full-hearted effort. Their walls had enclosed dreams and
joyous dramas. Then discouragement had fallen and the search for another
place of beginning. He wondered what had become of all the people who
had built these homes. He hoped they had begun in another place with
undimmed resolve and had found peace. Yet there were sinister hints that
their ghosts haunted these spots of their first failures, beseeching of
the ruins something of the first freshness of impulse.
He tried to tell Virginia Bartell that he, too, was like a deserted
farm, falling into ruin. But this only made her laugh. She could not
believe in failure, it seemed. And he laughed with her, after a little.
It was not possible, after all, to suppose that he could go on being a
ruin forever. These frustrated home makers must have succeeded at last,
and so would he. In some manner the girl herself became an assurance of
this. Her mere buoyancy uplifted him.
These times alone with the girl were not always to be had for the
asking. There abounded other youths who prized her companionship; able,
dauntless youths and skilled with accomplishments.
There was one of these, a tall young man, spectacled, of a high shiny
forehead, a student of a youth, who haunted the gray house like a
malignant wraith of erudition, and condescended to the girl almost as
flagrantly as he did to Ewing. His talk, whether of machinery or morals,
socialism or chemistry, was meant to instruct. Wherefore the girl slunk
from him, not always so skilfully as might have been wished--with far
less subtlety, indeed, than her aunt wished.
"I'm almost certain you offended him this afternoon," she remarked on a
day when they had fled flagrantly to the river, "though why you should
wish to avoid him is beyond me. You know that he's from one of the very
oldest families in West Roxbury." The girl's tone was penitent as she
answered: "But I'd promised to go in the canoe with Mr. Ewing." There
was no penitence, however, in the look she flashed at Ewing over her
aunt's shoulder, daring him to prove if he were a man. He nerved himself
in the glance.
"But you see, Mrs. Ranley, I'm from one of the very oldest families in
Hinsdale County, Colorado." The girl applauded him with her eyes, and
the incident was closed with a word of mild gratification from the old
lady. She was pleased to observe that he felt a family pride, even
though any county in Colorado was, of course, beyond consideration.
Their favorite walk home from the golf links led them through a
churchyard, and here they often rested in the cool of the afternoon; not
in the new part where monument and mound were obtrusively recent, but
up the hill from these, where death was so ancient as to be touched
with the grace of the antique. Here, in a pleasant gloom of oak shade,
cypress and elm, they loitered among the drab stones that headed mounds
worn down and overgrown with sweetbrier, wild rose, and matted grass;
and here Mrs. Laithe sometimes joined them for the homeward stroll,
walking too much, Ewing thought, like one who had risen from the
forgotten multitude under foot. Yet, when he spoke of her health she
always responded with her gay assurances, and seemed, indeed, to be more
concerned about his welfare than her own. He had not been able to talk
to her freely. There was so much about Teevan that he felt she would not
understand. Besides, he could not speak to her about Teevan.
At the end of the first week he had written to Teevan to say that he
must talk with him. The little man had replied from his favorite sea
place, naming a day when he would be back in town.
The prospect depressed Ewing anew. It had been easy to lie on his back
in a field, nettled by disgust with himself, and frame speeches of
self-mastery. But reflection had brought him doubt. The speeches would
have to be made, and yet, in a way, he was Teevan's property; Teevan had
invested money in him. This added to his depression. And this was why
the girl reported him to her sister as a youth joyful in odd moments of
forgetting, but sunk in some black despair when he remembered; a young
man she could not at all understand. And Mrs. Laithe, puzzling over his
trouble, divining that Teevan would somehow be at the bottom of it,
determined on a move to aid him, a move that would take her once more to
Teevan himself. She had sought him the night after her talk with
Sydenham, but the interview had come to nothing. Teevan had been so
plausibly solicitous about Ewing's success that she had found herself
unready to tax him with a knowledge of Ewing's identity, or with motives
inimical to him. His excessive amiability, his air of unsuspecting
sincerity, had disarmed her. But this time, she determined, there would
be no more fencing. She would attack straightforwardly.
The day they left the girl lightly bade Ewing farewell with talk of
meetings in town. He had not told her of a resolve formed the day before
when they had ridden to a hill above the village from which they could
see veritable mountains in the distance--his own delectable mountains
they had seemed, calling to him. Instantly he had determined to go back
to his own. Not in defeat, but for fresh courage. He would stay there
working as he could, until Teevan was paid. Then the Rookery would know
him again, and the men of the Monastery--know him going his own way.
He was meditating gloomily on his retreat as the train bore him back to
town with Mrs. Laithe. And she, alive to the distress that showed in his
face, forgot everything but him, the one she had helplessly and
irrevocably taken for her own, half her entreating child, half her
master, terrible and beloved. She watched his face from half-closed
eyes, finding it unutterably sad, and, without her being able to
withhold it, her mind constantly repeated the image of an embrace, to
soothe and sustain him. Incessantly this unsubstantial enfoldment took
place in her inner sense, like some wild drama among ocean-bed things,
far below an unrippled surface. Over and over the phantom woman beat
down his enemies, encircled him from harm, consoled him against her
heart, cherished him like the dear walls of a home. And she could not
halt this phantom play. Once she divided her arms and raised them a
little, as one in a dream faintly acts his vision. Ewing thought she was
drawing her chiffon boa about her, and he replaced it on her shoulders.
Floating about this obsession in her mind was the dismayed thought of
Teevan. She was fixed on going to him for the truth, and this disturbed
her like a coming battle. She was not used to the feeling of antagonism,
she, with her gentle woman's life, but she felt an unknown energy
welling up in her--the fierceness of the defender. She would have the
truth from Teevan.