sister, in a flutter of mixed feelings in which sorrow at the probable
ceasing to be mistress of the homestead, and delight at having new life
come into the house, were mingled. The daughter went purely from a wish
not to appear to censure her father’s actions in public, and thereby
gained added reputation for being dutiful. In private she expressed her
views in words well chosen for their diamond-edged cutting power. She
did not approve of matrimony on general principles; in her father’s case
she entirely disapproved. Having but a faint memory of her mother, as
that of a vague person who had often said “You must not,” and never “I
love you,” yet she taxed her father with shortness of memory in no
gentle terms, and when he had come down to arrange some household
matters prior to the wedding, he found his first wife’s picture placed
upon his desk together with a prayer-book he had given her, and which
she had carried at their marriage, while at the same time Catharine
asked if he was willing that her mother’s furniture should remain in her
rooms, or if it was to be sold.
Now, however, nothing could cloud his sunshine, and the technical and
loveless remembrances that his daughter cultivated like a crop of birch
rods were wholly devoid of sting. (By the way, the development of memory
is supposed to be one of the best results of education, but father has
often said, out of his experience as a physician who sees behind and
below the scenes, that memory is often a destroyer of tenderness, and he
thinks a capacity for wise forgetting is often a better quality.)
Being themselves happy, Adela and John Hewlett must, perforce, see all
about them happy also, and instead of jostling and overturning the old,
they merely planned to expand upon their own lines. The ample homestead
was divided, and in the half with the primly drawn blinds and dark green
door Miss Hewlett and Catharine reigned, while in the other part with
the white door, where the honeysuckle climbed up to the open windows and
the fearless Phœbes nested atop the never closed blinds, the Professor
lived the indoor part of his new life, the only shadow in it being the
twilight of the forest where love dreamed but never slept.
People who predicted trouble were amazed, for, strange to say,
Catharine, after the first, never measured swords with Adela so few
years her senior; it seemed as though the very intensity of the new
wife’s nature was so incomprehensible to her that she shrank from
stirring its depths.
Three years passed, and John Hewlett’s name was spoken among English
scholars as that of a great power, even though not yet at its height. In
the fourth a deeper note was struck upon his heartstrings, a note above
the joy of which was an instant reverberation of sadness, for the cry of
his new-born child had apprehension for its echo,—a sudden and
unaccountable fragility that had come upon Adela, against which science
and love, though hand in hand, fought in vain.
“Her name is Rosalind,” he had said in the first happy days of reaction
before, for him at least, the apprehension had taken shape, “for she
came to us out of the forest of Arden.” Adela, raising herself by a
great effort, put the child into his arms, and folding her in them
against his breast, whispered, “Rosalind—that is the name I wished, so
that I knew you would say it. Take her, and whatever happens, no matter
what else she must lack, let it not be love.”
Two months later, in October, the fifth year of the marriage, and he sat
alone with the little Rosalind again gathered in his arms, for Adela as
a visible presence had gone.
* * * * *
Catharine, more moved than any one had supposed possible, offered to
care for the baby when it became necessary for her father to return to
college, while Miss Hewlett fairly begged for the child; but to both he
turned a deaf ear. Under no circumstances should the child be separated
from him, so Rosalind and a kindly middle-aged nurse, of father’s
choosing, went back with Professor Hewlett to the university.
During her first five years it seemed that the little girl would be
fairly killed with kindness; report of every tooth was carried from
house to house, as if it had been the news of the endowment of a new
chair. At five, Rosalind had the direct manners of her father enveloped
in a bit of coy, feminine charm quite her own. While she was gracious to
every one, she belonged only to him, who was also the measure by which
she gauged the actions of the outward world. She slept in a crib beside
him, breakfasted with him, dined when he lunched, and had a little table
and chair in the corner of his study.
“It’s all very well for now,” people said, “but wait until she is a few
years older, and she will need younger companionship.”
At ten, Rosalind began to pour her father’s coffee, perched in a
high-backed chair with her toes hardly touching the footstool. She was a
child at heart and full of the whims and tempers of childhood; she both
loved and hated with a will, but as she took all her perplexities to her
father to be sifted, he still managed to shield her from trouble, and in
the next years that followed, the love of books, woods, flowers, and
birds were woven into the fabric that bound the pair together. The
little crib by his bedside had been replaced by a white, draped bed in
the adjoining dressing-room, but she still knelt at his knees to say
“Our Father,” and in her love blended the actual and spiritual father in
her prayers.
“Wait until she is eighteen and the beaux begin to come,” said the
croakers; “her father will then have to give up first place, and may not
be able to shield her from disappointment.”
But at twenty the change had not yet come; all the younger men flocked
to her, but her fraternal comradeship was so decided that one
boundary-line served for all. One, Henry Benton, a man of thirty, a
favourite of her father’s and likely to succeed him also, showed others
what he felt, even though Rosalind did not see it, and one of those who
saw was the Professor, and he stood appalled.
To him Rosalind was still a child to whom his love was sufficient; as a
woman she found him still all in all, but did he wish it to be so now
that he realized? He was nearing sixty-five and soon to retire from the
university, for though his mental vigour was unimpaired, he had
oftentimes an unaccountable fatigue that made father tell him that one
cannot expect the heart at threescore to stand the pressure it did at
two. What would happen after him? It might then be too late. Had he been
selfish all these years, selfish through blind contentment?
Father love is often the most unselfish of all affections and best able
to act free from hope of reward, and less self-centred than the mother
love, even as her body is centred and dependent upon her maternity. Yet
he felt himself at that moment an egotist.
Though it cut the Professor to the quick, he did all that a tactful man
might to throw Benton and Rosalind naturally together, until, though she
showed no tell-tale eagerness or emotion, she looked for his coming as a
matter of course.
At this juncture, the spring of his retiring came, and the Professor and
Rosalind came back to Oaklands, where Catharine, now over forty, was
living alone, Miss Hewlett having decided the fall before upon a year’s
trip abroad; and it was toward the possible spectacle of the daughters
as rivals and the father’s position between the two, that village
attention was turned, for it would be very marked should two separate
households be maintained for only three people.
Rosalind did not seem to care for the title or prerogative of
“housekeeper” so long as she was her father’s companion. Together they
had made a plan for a garden entirely encircling the house, where even
the shady corners should be forced to yield bloom, but this scheme was
laid away until another season, because the Professor seemed to feel an
ever increasing weariness now that the harness had been laid aside and
there was no real necessity for exertion. No, there was one thing
more,—there was still a volume of critical essays, prepared for the
work of the university, to go to press. Rosalind begged her father to
wait for a while and rest, but when he still persevered, she, too, threw
herself into the work, that was completed at midsummer.
Then came a month of golden days, yet through them ran a thrill as of
coming harm that Rosalind felt, but could not formulate; her father
clung to her more closely than ever, but when she glanced up at him,
instead of meeting a quick response as of old, his eyes seemed fixed
upon something in the far-away horizon.
One day when father dropped in for a friendly rather than a professional
call, he found the Professor alone,—in itself quite an unusual
happening,—his face drawn and white with pain, hand pressed to side,
and then together they faced the inevitable as they had done twice
before. It might be months hence or even a year or two, or it might be
any day, such is _angina’s_ subtle cruelty.
“Shall I tell Rosalind?” asked father; “it is best that she should
know.”
“The time has come at last, then, when I can no longer stand between her
and sorrow,” said the Professor, scanning father’s face with a piteous
clinging to hope that was heartbreaking.
“No, John,” replied father, taking the hands that were fast becoming
veined and transparent, between his own; “the time has come when you may
no longer stand between her and either sorrow or love, for one is born
of the other, and it is not in the plan of God or nature that she be
spared; but if in her love for you she has learned to keep the windows
open wide to the sun of things, you will not have failed in your hope.”
“Then all may yet be well with her,” he said slowly, making an evident
effort to steady his voice, while at the same time as he glanced out of
the window near which they sat, his pained expression changed to one of
complete content, and, following his gaze, father looked into the
upturned face of Rosalind, who stood below, her mother’s wonderful
violet eyes flashing greeting between their long lashes, her arms filled
with the crimson, gold, and sapphire glory of late September—boughs of
swamp maple, pepperidge, birch, candelebra of fringed gentian, and smoke
of seeded clematis.
Once in the room and her plunder arranged in some great blue jars,
something either in the air or in an unconscious glance exchanged
between the men made her start and then look from one to the other, and
kneeling by her father’s chair, she took his face between her hands, and
scanning every line said:—
“You are more tired to-day, Daddy, when I thought the bright frosty air
would begin to make you better, or did I stay too long and make you
worry, dearest?” Then springing up lightly, she followed father, who,
without leavetaking, was stealing from the room.
“What is it, Dr. Russell?” she panted, when they had reached the end of
the passage; “has anything happened since I went away? Are there any new
symptoms?”
“Your father and I have been talking of grave things, dear child,” he
answered; “no, there is nothing new,” and afterward he confessed that he
was coward enough almost to run away. Reëntering the room, she again
dropped to her place by her father’s knee; now it was his turn to take
her face between his hands and draw her to him, seeking by unavailing
tenderness to break the force of the blow that must come.
“What is it, father?” asked the lips, but before the words were framed,
her heart knew the truth. Hiding her head against the breast where her
mother had pressed it, more than twenty years before, and forgetting
everything except that she had become a child again in her dread, she
sobbed, “You must not go without me, for I cannot stay behind alone;
wait, oh, father, do wait a little longer.”
“Beloved,—my heart flower,—your mother went alone, and yet I have
stayed until now. Do you know what she said when she knew that she must
first tread the path and she laid you in my arms? ‘Whatever else she
must lack, let it not be love,’ and for this I have lived and hoped.
Some day there will dawn in and for you a love to which mine will become
as the shadow. Keep the soul windows open lest it pass by, even as we
open the house windows to air and sun.”
Then for another whole month the arrow lay hid in the quiver, until
Rosalind sometimes dreamed that it was not there at all. Oftentimes they
would sit all day in the deep bay-window of her father’s chamber with
the October sunshine piercing them and the call notes of the migrant
birds falling from the trees now scant of leaf, until plans had been
made between the two as for the separation of a necessary journey. But
all this time, Catharine held aloof as of old; grieved she was, but with
her sorrow was a formality; by temperament she was one of those
unfortunates who always look backward to the morning that has passed
rather than forward to that which shall be.
Frosts came, and under the leafless trees below the window Rosalind
scattered food for the birds as her father sat by watching her, now he
did not leave his chair. Soon the arrow was poised again in the bow,
and, conscious of its vibration, her father said at the end of a day
when he had kept his bed, after Catharine, coming in, had drawn down the
blinds to shut out the moonlight, lest it trouble him: “Open the
windows, beloved, and when I go away in spirit, yet still lie here, do
not close them, for moon or sun, nor place things near me that cast
black shadows, lest the habit of darkness follow you.”
That night father was sent for, but this time he could not stay the hand
that drew the bow: in the morning, strange people came to the room with
the bay-window about which the honeysuckle still bloomed in spite of
frost. As they went in, Rosalind said, “Leave him on his bed, and do not
close the blinds.”
Catharine’s side of the house was soon in utter darkness, and a dry-eyed
figure clad in black sat in a sepulchral room refusing herself to those
who came to sympathize. As the morning lengthened, she crossed the
hallway and went upstairs, pausing with an exclamation of horror upon
her lips before the open door of the great room. There her father lay
upon his bed, across which the sun streamed, a smile upon his lips as if
in sleep, while upon the counterpane and scattered all about were
flowers. Clad in a soft white gown that had belonged to summer, Rosalind
was garlanding the slender rails at top and foot of bed; yet as
Catharine looked, the words of reproof she meant to say, halted and
remained unuttered, and she crept down the stairs again, realizing for
the first time in her life the loneliness of heart that was hers.
While daylight stayed, Rosalind never faltered, and a sort of exaltation
took the place of tears. “How do you keepers of the faith reconcile the
going of those whose lives are not lived out?” she suddenly asked the
Anglican Catholic priest, who had been the family friend since before
her father’s first marriage, an ecclesiastic of the type more often
found in cathedral than in New England towns, a quiet man and very
human.
“What others think, I do not know,” he replied; “for myself, I believe
that each one of us is taken at the time, best, not for those that he
leaves behind, but for himself, and this has been my experience.”
“But my mother was young and had all life before her,” said Rosalind, in
doubt.
“She had tasted all the bliss of love and loving, and she left it before
one bitter drop had entered the draught.”
“But father was still happy in spite of past sorrow; why was it best for
him?”
“Because he had reached the summit of his life and work; is it a good
thing to find one’s self groping backward?”
“Why do I stay behind then?” she pleaded with outstretched hands.
“Because your work of love begun must find its culmination;” and when he
had gone, Rosalind sat with hands clasped in her lap, lost in wonder.
With night came tears. Ah, for one word, a sign or token; if any one
could send a word back, surely it would be the father to his “heart
child.”
She lighted candles and grouped them on mantel-shelf and stand, but
their light was pale compared to that of the moon. Then she stole away
outside the door for rest that must be had. How long she slept she did
not know, but awakening with beating heart at a dream that was half
reality, she thought she heard a rustling in the great room: opening the
door, she saw a snowbird circling about, gray and white, against the
moonlight, and even as she looked, it lighted on the rail above her
father’s head and settled to sleep, head under wing.
“The open window,” whispered Rosalind, and peace filled her heart.
* * * * *
Among all those who came to sympathize by word or deed in the three days
that followed, one face was missed; Rosalind wondered at it, and then
questioned her own disappointment as the days went by, each tense with
readjustment, not knowing that absent on a journey at first, he had in
tenderness dreaded to push into a house of mourning.
At last one day, a man, whose resolute yet self-restrained face was
unfamiliar in the village, came slowly up the street, pausing afar off
to look at the house that from his point of view only showed closed
shutters. Presently he walked slowly on, and as he passed the gate,
turned quickly as for a last look at a place where he did not dare
intrude.
In the open window of the sunlit half sat Rosalind, dressed in white, a
flower at her throat, an open book before her, while on her sweet human
face rested the reflected light as from another world.
Then the man took courage, and, turning back, he knocked at the white
door.
XI
THE RAT-CATCHER
=NOVEMBER=—THE MAGIC MOON
When Black Frost comes to the lowlands, he sometimes loiters for many
nights along the river meadows, and sometimes climbs swiftly into the
hill country, Wabeno the Magician always following in his wake cloaked
in the golden haze of dreams called Indian Summer.
Through the long nights the Magic Moon lights the little beasts to their
hunting, but ice fingers lock the shallow pools before day dawn, and, in
spite of alluring sunny noons, both man and beast seek shelter, one by
the fireside, where the singing logs repeat the songs they once learned
from the rain on the leaves in the forest, the other in ground hole,
rock lair, or, if sociably inclined, in house chinks, and crannies. In
this particular November, however, the village of Oaklands was
undergoing a new and strange experience born of the sudden preference of
a nimble, four-footed rodent for houses with warm cellars and
well-stocked larders, over the more remote barns and granaries. In
short, the north end of the village, and some of the outlying houses as
well, were suffering from a raid of rats that would have competed in
numbers with the army lured to cover by the Pied Piper.
All country dwellers expect to house a few of the wood folk in the hard
season, whether they will or no. The bats hang themselves up in the
attic behind the chimney, and the squirrels use a loose shingle as a
storehouse door; the wood rats burrow under the stable floor, and the
pretty, white-footed mouse with pelt and eyes like a deer will often
venture to the hearth corner, and not only remain unharmed, but even
make himself a welcome guest by his strange singing.
Rats, however,—the great relentless rats of city docks and sewers, that
carry both destruction and disease in their march,—are a wholly
different matter.
The plague had its beginning in what was considered a necessary
improvement for the health of the village as well as its morals, the
demolition of an old tavern that for a century had stood at the
crossways opposite the railway station at the side of the road where, a
few hundred rods higher up, was Martin Cortright’s cottage. The tavern,
a relic of stage-coach days, and flanked by great barns and pastures of
many acres that reached uphill quite to the Cortrights’ boundaries, had
gradually fallen, until it became a road-house of the worst type, with
its barns crumbling, filthy with the litter of years, and the land used
for the rooting-ground of a breed of black swill-fed pigs. Its malodour
had so offended the nose of public spirit as embodied in the Anglican
Catholic, the Severely Protestant, Mrs. Jenks-Smith, Martin Cortright,
and father, as health officer, that a public subscription had been
secured, the place bought, the buildings, including the pig-pens, razed,
and the land ploughed up to sweeten, preparatory to turning the plot
into a sort of park to be a playground for the school children. All this
had taken place in the early spring, and by fall every trace and odour
of the nuisance that had existed was gone; but the Committee, when they
had paid off all scores, had not reckoned with the rats that for
generations had been housed upon the premises. During the summer, these
rats evidently turned tramps, and, using the wide-chinked stone fences
for runways, by which they travelled from farm to farm, lived in luxury,
unobserved, though everywhere came complaint of the loss of young
chickens and eggs, this being laid to cats, hawks, and weasels. But no
sooner did Black Frost show himself than the winter homing instinct that
comes upon man, as well as the lesser animals, seized the rats, and from
all sides they began to travel back to their old haunts; these lacking,
they sought the nearest shelter.
The Cortrights were away in early autumn, and late the first night after
their return, Lavinia, candle in hand, going down the front stairs of
her well-ordered and supposedly mouse-proof house, encountered a
gray-whiskered rat coming up with so fixed a purpose, that even her
shrieks and Martin’s coming only drove him to the hall below where,
according to the testimony of Martin and Lavinia, he backed into a
corner and put up a successful fight against Martin, armed with an
umbrella, the wall paper receiving the whole of the damage. The maid,
intrenched in the hall above, whispered a different version of the
encounter, which was that the Master, being short-sighted, and lacking
his glasses, had charged at the corner where the rat was not, much to
the rat’s advantage.
Be this as it may, the postmaster, after having a ham cleaned to the
bone and some valuable mail gnawed, tried traps in vain and resorted to
poison, with the dire result that, in a week, after the stove fires were
started, his family were obliged to go to his wife’s mother’s, while the
movable part of the business took refuge in a corner of the Town House.
Soon the one absorbing topic in Oaklands, that eclipsed even the town
and presidential elections, both of which fell due that November, taking
precedence of the local tax rate, new roads, tariff, tainted money, or
trusts, was—“What shall we do with the rats?”
The Village Pharmacy, as the chief shop of the place is called, has many
attributes of a department store and club-room as well, in the cold
months. Here the men meet, who do not care to stay at home, or go to
read in the library, foregather in the saloon, or play poker by a
lantern in a corner of the windowless blacksmith’s shop. Among these,
the rats came as a new subject, that was welcome, if its cause was not.
Better still, the Pharmacy coterie had a recent recruit and one that
added not a little to the spice of its life, one Tom Scott, who owned a
Queen Anne villa (no, it wasn’t a house or a cottage; if you know the
modern English suburban home of this type, you will understand),
together with all the proper outside ornaments, and ten acres of land
halfway up the east road to the Bluffs. The place was close to what
Evan, in the earlier and snobbish days of the Bluff Colony, used to call
“the dead line,” because in the beginning there had been social war to
the knife between the big landowners who lived above the line, and the
small owners of the commuting tribe who lived below.
Mr. Scott had lived in Oaklands for eight years, during which time his
two golden-haired daughters had turned from apple-cheeked schoolgirls to
young women with the regular profiles and peculiar modulation of voice
that tell of English origin. Their mother had the same features, voice,
and colouring, but slimness had developed into the turtlesque figure of
a staunch type of British matron in her early fifties, who has no
American prototype. Fat women we have galore, but they usually carry
their weight gaily, not ponderously, and seldom outlive their capability
for wearing shirtwaists.