"GUESS who's come to board at the Widder Powers's for the month of
August?" It was Bowser who asked the question, and who immediately
answered it himself, as every man on the porch looked up expectantly.
"Nobody more nor less than a _multimillionaire_! The big boot and shoe
man, William A. Maxwell. Mrs. Powers bought a bill of goods this morning
as long as your arm. It's a windfall for _her_. He offered to pay
regular summer-resort-hotel prices, because she's living on the old farm
where he was born and raised, and he fancied getting back to it for a
spell."
"Family coming with him?" queried Cy Akers, after a moment's meditation
over the surprising fact that a millionaire with the world before him
should elect such a place as the Cross-Roads in which to spend his
vacation.
"No, you can bet your bottom dollar they're not. And they're all abroad
this summer or _he'd_ never got here. They'd had him dragged off to some
fashionable watering-place with them. But when the cat's away the
mice'll play, you know. Mrs. Powers says it is his first visit here
since his mother's funeral twenty years ago, and he seems as tickled as
a boy to get back.
"Yesterday evening he followed the man all around the place while she
was getting supper. She left him setting up in the parlour, but when she
went in to ask him out to the table, he was nowhere to be seen. Pretty
soon he came walking around the corner of the house with a pail of milk
in each hand, sloshing it all over his store clothes. He'd done the
milking himself, and seemed mightily set up over it."
"Lawzee! Billy Maxwell! Don't I remember him?" exclaimed Bud Hines.
"Seems like 'twas only yesterday we used to sit on the same bench at
school doin' our sums out of the same old book. The year old man Prosser
taught, we got into so much devilment that it got to be a regular thing
for him to say, regular as clock-work, almost, 'I'll whip Bud Hines and
Billy Maxwell after the first arithmetic class this morning.' I don't
s'pose he ever thinks of those old times since he's got to be one of the
Four Hundred. Somehow I can hardly sense it, his bein' so rich. He never
seemed any smarter than the rest of us. That's the way of the world,
though, seesaw, one up and the other down. Of course it's my luck to be
the one that's down. Luck always was against me."
"There he is now," exclaimed the storekeeper, and every head turned to
see the stranger stepping briskly along the platform in front of the
depot, on his way to the telegraph office.
He had the alertness of glance and motion that comes from daily contact
with city corners. If there was a slight stoop in his broad shoulders,
and if his closely cut hair and beard were iron gray, that seemed more
the result of bearing heavy responsibilities than the token of advancing
years. His immaculate linen, polished low-cut shoes, and light gray
business suit would have passed unnoticed in the metropolis, but in this
place, where coats and collars were in evidence only on Sunday, they
gave him the appearance of being on dress parade.
Perkins's oldest eyed him as he would a zebra or a giraffe, or some
equally interesting curiosity escaped from a Zoo. He had heard that his
pockets were lined with gold, and that he had been known to pay as much
as five dollars for a single lunch. Five dollars would board a man two
weeks at the Cross-Roads.
With his mouth agape, the boy stood watching the stranger, who
presently came over to the group on the porch with smiling face and
cordial outstretched hand. Despite his gray hair there was something
almost boyish in the eagerness with which he recognised old faces and
claimed old friendships. Bowser's store had been built since his
departure from the neighbourhood, so few of the congenial spirits
accustomed to gather there were familiar to him. But Bud Hines and Cy
Akers were old schoolfellows. When he would have gone up to them with
old-time familiarity, he found a certain restraint in their greeting
which checked his advances.
If he thought he was coming back to them the same freckle-faced,
unconventional country lad they had known as Billy Maxwell, he was
mistaken. He might feel that he was the same at heart; but they looked
on the outward appearance. They saw the successful man of the world who
had outstripped them in the race and passed out of their lives long ago.
They could not conceive of such a change as had metamorphosed the boy
they remembered into the man who stood before them, without feeling that
a corresponding change must have taken place in his attitude toward
them.
They were not conscious that this feeling was expressed in their
reception of him. They laughed at his jokes, and indulged in some
reminiscences, but he felt, in a dim subconscious way, that there was a
barrier between them, and he could never get back to the old familiar
footing.
He turned away, vaguely disappointed. Had he dared to dream that he
would find his lost youth just as he had left it? The fields and hills
were unchanged. The very trees were the same, except that they had added
a few more rings to their girth, and threw a larger circling shade. But
the old chums he had counted on finding had not followed the same law of
growth as the trees. The shade of their sympathies had narrowed, not
expanded, with the passing years, and left him outside their contracted
circle.
Perkins's oldest, awed by reports of his fabulous wealth, could hardly
find his tongue when the distinguished visitor laid a friendly hand on
his embarrassed tow head, and inquired about the old swimming-hole, and
the mill-dam where he used to fish. But the boy's interest grew stronger
every minute as he watched him turning over the limited assortment of
fishing tackle. The men he knew had outlived such frivolous sports. It
was a sight to justify one's gazing open-mouthed,--a grown man
deliberately preparing for a month's idleness.
If the boy could have seen the jointed rods, the reels, the flies, all
the expensive angler's outfit left behind in the Maxwell mansion; if he
could have known of the tarpon this man had caught in Florida bays, and
the fishing he had enjoyed in northern waters, he would have wondered
still more; wondered how a man could be considered in his right mind who
deliberately renounced such privileges to come and drop a common hook,
on a pole of his own cutting, into the shallow pools of the Cross-Roads
creek.
After his purchases no one saw him at the store for several days, but
the boy, dodging across lots, encountered him often,--a solitary figure
wandering by the mill stream, or crashing through the woods with long
eager strides; lying on the orchard grass sometimes with his hat pulled
over his eyes; leaning over the pasture bars in the twilight, and
following with wistful glance the little foot-path stretching white
across the meadows. A pathetic sight to eyes wise enough to see the
pathos,--a world-weary, middle-aged man in vain quest of his lost
boyhood.
On Sunday, Polly, looking across the church from her place in the
miller's pew, recognised the stranger in their midst, and straightway
lost the thread of the sermon in wondering at his presence. She had gone
to school with his daughter, Maud Maxwell. She had danced many a german
with his son Claude. They lived on the same avenue, and passed each
other daily; but this was the first time she had seen him away from the
shadow of the family presence, that seemed to blot out his
individuality.
She had thought of him only as Maud's father, a simple, good-natured
nonentity in his own household. A good business man, but one who could
talk nothing but leather, and whose only part in the family affairs was
to furnish the funds for his wife and children to shine socially.
"Oh, your father's opinion doesn't count," she had heard Mrs. Maxwell
say on more than one occasion, and the children had grown up,
unconsciously copying her patronising attitude toward him. As Polly
studied his face now in the light of other surroundings, she saw that it
was a strong, kindly one; that it was not weakness which made him yield
habitually, until he had become a mere figurehead in his own
establishment. It was only that his peace-loving nature hated domestic
scenes, and his generosity amounted to complete self-effacement when the
happiness of his family was concerned.
His eyes were fixed on the chancel with a wistful reminiscent gaze, and
Polly read something in the careworn face that touched her sympathy.
"Grandfather," she said, at the close of the service, "let's be
neighbourly and ask Mr. Maxwell home to dinner with us. He looks
lonesome."
She was glad afterward that she had suggested it, when she recalled his
evident pleasure in the old man's company. There were chairs out under
the great oak-trees in the yard, and the two sat talking all afternoon
of old times, until the evening shadows began to grow long across the
grass. Then Polly joined them again, and sat with them till the tinkle
of home-going cowbells broke on the restful stillness of the country
Sabbath.
"All the orchestras in all the operas in the world can't make music
that sounds as sweet to me as that does," said Mr. Maxwell, raising his
head from the big armchair to listen. Then he dropped it again with a
sigh.
"It rests me so after the racket of the city. If Julia would only
consent, I'd sell out and come back to-morrow. But she's lost all
interest in the old place. I'm country to the core, but she never was.
She took to city ways like a duck to water, just as soon as she got away
from the farm, and she laughs at me for preferring katydids to the whirr
of electric cars."
A vision rose before the old miller of a little country girl in a pink
cotton gown, who long ago used to wait, bright-eyed and blushing, at the
pasture bars, for Billy to drive home the cows. Many a time he had
passed them at their trysting-place. Then he recalled the superficial,
ambitious woman he had met years afterward when he visited his son. He
shook his head when he thought of her renouncing her social position for
the simple pastoral life her husband longed to find the way back to.
Presently he broke the silence of their several reveries by turning to
Polly.
"What's that piece you recited to me the other night, little girl, about
old times? Say it for Mr. Maxwell." And Polly, clasping her hands in her
lap, and looking away across the August meadows, purple with the royal
pennons of the ironweed, began the musical old poem:
"'Ko-ling, ko-lang, ko-linglelingle,
Way down the darkening dingle
The cows come slowly home.
(And old-time friends and twilight plays
And starry nights and sunny days
Come trooping up the misty ways,
When the cows come home.)
"'And over there on Merlin Hill
Hear the plaintive cry of the whippoorwill.
And the dewdrops lie on the tangled vines,
And over the poplars Venus shines,
And over the silent mill.
"'Ko-ling, ko-lang, ko-linglelingle,
With ting-aling and jingle
The cows come slowly home.
(Let down the bars, let in the train
Of long-gone songs and flowers and rain,
For dear old times come back again,
When the cows come home.)'"
Once as Polly went on, she saw the tears spring to his eyes at the line
"and mother-songs of long-gone years," and she knew that the
"same sweet sound of wordless psalm,
The same sweet smell of buds and balm,"
that had been his delight in the past, were his again as he listened.
But, much to her surprise, as she finished, he rose abruptly, and began
a hurried leave-taking. She understood his manner, however, when his
mood was revealed to her a little later.
At her grandfather's suggestion she walked down to the gate with him, to
point out a short cut across the fields to Mrs. Powers's. Outside the
gate he paused, hat in hand.
"Miss Polly," he began, as if unconsciously taking her into his
confidence, "old times never come back again. Seems as if the bottom had
dropped out of everything. I've done my best to resurrect them, but I
can't do it. I thought if I could once get back to the old place I could
rest as I've not been able to rest for twenty years--that I'd have a
month of perfect enjoyment. But something's the matter.
"Many a time when I've been off at some fashionable resort I've thought
I'd give a fortune to be able to drop my hook in your grandfather's
mill-stream, and feel the old thrill that I used to feel when I was a
boy. I tried it the day I came--caught a little speckled trout, the kind
that used to make me tingle to my finger ends, but somehow it didn't
bring back the old sensation. I just looked at it a minute and put it
back in the water, and threw my pole away.
"Even the swimming-hole down by the mill didn't measure up to the way I
had remembered it. I've fairly ached for a dip into it sometimes, in the
years I've been gone. Seemed as if I could just get into it once, I
could wash myself clear of all the cares and worries of business that
pester a man so. That was a disappointment, too. The change is in me, I
guess, but nothing seems the same."
Polly knew the reason. He had tried so long to mould his habits to fit
his wife's exacting tastes, that he had succeeded better than he
realised. He could not analyse his feelings enough to know that it was
the absence of long accustomed comforts that made him vaguely
dissatisfied with his surroundings; his luxuriously appointed bathroom,
for instance; the perfect service of his carefully trained footmen. Mrs.
Powers's noisy table, where with great clatter she urged every one "to
fall to and help himself," jarred on him, although he was unconscious of
what caused the irritation. As for the rank tobacco Bowser furnished him
when he had exhausted his own special brand of cigars with which he had
stocked his satchel, it was more than flesh and blood could endure. That
is, flesh and blood that had acquired the pampered taste of a
millionaire whose wife is fastidious, and only allows first-class aromas
in the way of the weed.
But Polly knew another reason that his vacation had been a failure. She
divined it as the little Yale pin, stuck jauntily into the front of her
white dress, met the touch of her caressing fingers. The girl in the
pink cotton gown was long dead, and the woman who had grown up in her
stead had no part in the old scenes that he still fondly clung to, with
a sentiment she ridiculed because she could not understand. _There must
always be two when you turn back searching for your lost Eldorado, and
even the two cannot find it, unless they go hand in hand._
* * * * *
Next day Bowser had another piece of news to impart. "Mr. Maxwell went
home this morning. He told Mrs. Powers it was like taking a vacation in
a graveyard, and he'd had enough. He'd have to get back to work again.
So he paid her for the full month, and took the first train back to the
city."
"Well, I'll be switched!" was Bud Hines's comment. "If I had as much
money as he's got, I'd never bother my head about work. I'd sit down and
take it easy all the rest of my born days."
"I don't know," answered Bowser, meditatively. "I reckon a man who's
worked the way Mr. Maxwell has, gets such a big momentum on to himself
that he can't stop, no matter how bad he wants a vacation."
"He's a fool for coming back here for it," said Bud Hines, looking out
across the fields that stretched away on every side in unbroken
monotony.
But miles away, in his city office, the busy millionaire was still
haunted by an unsatisfied longing for those same level meadows. Glimpses
of the old mill-stream and the willows still rose before him in
tantalising freshness, and whenever he closed his tired eyes, down
twilight paths, where tinkling cowbells called, there came again the
glimmer of a little pink gown, to wait for him as it had waited through
all the years, beside the pasture bars.