Arthur and Isabel were married in their own little church of All Angels,
at the far end of the old street.
"I cal'late," said a rustic member of his vestry, "th' never was as
pretty a weddin' so simple, nor as simple a weddin' so pretty!"
Because he said it to Leonard Byington he ended with a manly laugh, for
by the anxious glance of his spectacled daughter he knew he had slipped
somewhere in his English. But when he heard Leonard and Ruth, in
greeting the bride's mother, jointly repeat the sentiment as their own,
he was, for a moment, nearly as happy as Mrs. Morris.
"Such a pity Godfrey had to be away!" said Mrs. Morris. It was the only
pity she chose to emphasize.
Godfrey was on distant seas. The north-bound mid-afternoon express bore
away the bridal pair for a week's absence.
"Too short," said a friend or so whom Leonard fell in with as he came
from the railway station, and Leonard admitted that Arthur was badly in
need of rest.
At sunset Ruth came out of her gate and stood to welcome her brother's
tardy return. Both brightly smiled; neither spoke.
When he gave her a letter with a foreign stamp her face lighted
gratefully, but still without words she put it under her belt. Then they
joined hands, and he asked, "Where's father?"
"Inside on the lounge," she replied. Her lips fell into their faraway
smile, to which she added this time a murmur as of reverie, and Leonard
said almost as musingly, "Come, take a short turn."
They moved on to the Winslow gate, and entered the garden by a path
which brought them to a point midway between the old cottage and the
larger house. There it crossed under an arch transecting an arbor that
extended from a side door of the one dwelling to a like one of the
other, and the brother and sister had just passed this embowered spot
and were stepping down a winding descent by which the path sought the
old mill-pond, when behind them they observed two women pass athwart
their track by way of the arbor, and Ruth smiled and murmured again.
The crossing pair were Mrs. Morris and Sarah Stebbens, the Winslows'
life-long housekeeper, deeply immersed in arranging for Isabel to
become lady of the larger house, while her mother, with a single
young maidservant, was to remain mistress of the cottage.
The deep pond to whose edge Leonard and Ruth presently came was a narrow
piece of clear water held in between Bylow Hill and the loftier cliff
beyond by an old stone dam long unused. Rude ledges of sombre rock
underlay its depths and lined and shelved its sides. Broad beeches and
dark hemlocks overhung it. At every turn it mirrored back the slanting
forms of the white and the yellow birch, or slept under green mantles
of lily pads. It bore a haunted air even in the floweriest days of the
year, when every bird of the wood thrilled it with his songs, and it
gave to the entire region the gravest as well as richest note among all
its harmonies. Down the whole way to it some one long gone had gardened
with so wise a hand that later negligence had only made the wild
loveliness of this inmost refuge more affluent and impassioned.
At one point, where the hemlocks hung farthest and lowest over the pool,
and the foot sank deep in a velvet of green mosses, a solid ledge of
dark rock shelved inward from the top of the bank and down through the
flood to a depth cavernous and black. Here, brought from time to time by
the Byington and Winslow playmates, lay a number of mossy stones rounded
by primeval floods, some large enough for seats, some small; and here,
where Ruth had last sat with Godfrey, she now came with her brother.
The habitual fewness of Leonard's words was a thing she prized beyond
count. It made Mrs. Morris nervous, drained her mind's treasury, and
sent her conversational powers borrowing and begging; Isabel it awed;
Arthur it tantalized; to Godfrey it was an appetizing drollery; but to
Ruth it was dearer and clearer than all spoken eloquence.
The same trait in her, only less marked, was as satisfying to him, and
from one rare utterance to another their thoughts moved like consorted
ships from light to light along a home coast. A motion, a glance, a
gleam, a shade, told its tale, as across leagues of silence a shred of
smoke may tell one dweller in the wilderness the way or want of another.
Such converse may have been a mere phase of the New Englander's passion
for economy, or only the survival of a primitive spiritual commerce
which most of us have lost through the easier use of speech and print;
but the sister took calm delight in it, and it bound the two to each
other as though it were itself a sort of goodness or greatness.
"They have it of their mother," the old General sometimes said to
himself.
There were moments, too, when their intercourse was still more subtle,
and now they sat without exchange of glance or gesture, silent as chess
players, looking up the narrow water into a sunset exquisite in the
delicacy of its silvery plumes, fleeces pink and dusk, and illimitable
distances of palest green seen through fan-rays of white light shot down
from one dark, unthreatening cloud.
"Leonard," at length said the sister, as if she had studied every
possibility on the board before touching the chosen piece, "couldn't you
go away for a time?"
And with deliberate readiness the other gentle voice replied, "I don't
think I'd better."
While they spoke their gaze rested on the changing beauties of pool and
sky, and after the brief inquiry and response it still remained, though
the inner glow of their mutual love and worship deepened and warmed as
did the colors of the heavens and of the glassing waters. The brother
knew full well Ruth's poignant sense of his distresses; and to her his
mute tongue and unbent head were a sister's convincement that he would
endure them in a manner wholly faithful to every one of the loved hands
that had lain under his the evening Godfrey had said good-by.
[Illustration: Indeed it was clear that to go away would be unfair.]
Indeed, it was clear that to go away--unless he honestly felt too weak
to remain--would be unfair to almost every person, every interest,
concerned; and such a step was but second choice in Ruth's mind,
conditioned solely on any unreadiness he might have uprightly to bear
the burden brought upon him by--well, after all, by his own too
confident miscalculations in the game of hearts.
To him such flight signified the indeterminate continuance of his
sister's maiden singleness and a like prolongation of her lover's
galling suspense. To Ruth it stood not only for the loss of her brother,
but for the narrowing of their father's already narrowed life,--a
narrowing which might come to mean a shortening as well; and it meant
also the leaving of Isabel and Arthur to their mistake and to their
unskilfulness slowly and patiently to work out its cure. To go away
were, for him, to consent to be the one unbroken string on a noble but
difficult instrument. These thoughts and many more like them passed to
and fro, out through the abstracted eyes of the one, across to the
fading clouds, and back through the abstracted eyes and into the
responding heart of the other.
At length the sister rose. "I must go to father," she said.
The brother stood up. Their eyes exchanged a gentle gaze and tenderly
contracted.
"I will come presently," he replied, and was turning toward the water,
when he paused, threw a hand toward the steep wood across the pool, and
silently bade her listen.
The note he had remotely heard was rare on Bylow Hill since the town had
come in below, and one of the errands which oftenest brought the hill's
dwellers to this nook in solitary pairs was to hearken for that voice of
unearthly rapture,--a rapture above all melancholy and beyond all
mirth,--the call of the hermit thrush.
Now the waiting seemed in vain. The brother's hand sank, the sister
turned, and soon he saw her pass from view among the boughs as she wound
up the rambling path toward the three homes.
At the top she halted, still longing to hear at his side that marvellous
wood-note, and was just starting on once more, when from the same
quarter as before it came again, with new and fervent clearness. With
noiseless foot she sprang back down the bendings of the path, having no
other thought but to find her brother standing as she had left him, a
rapt hearer of the heavenly strain.
She reached the spot, but found no hearkening or standing form. The
young man's stalwart frame lay prone on the green bank, where he had
thrown himself the moment she had left his sight, and his face was
buried in the deep moss.
The stir of her swift coming reached his ear barely in time for him,
as she choked down a cry that had all but escaped her, to turn upon
his back, meet her glance, and drive the agony from his face with a
languorous smile. The melting song pervaded the air, but neither of
them lifted a noting finger.
Leonard rose to his feet. Ruth gave him a hand and then its fellow, and
as he pressed them together she said, "I wish you _would_ go away
for a time."
He dropped one of her hands, and keeping the other, started slowly
homeward; and it was not until they had climbed half the ascent that,
with his most remote yet boyish smile, he replied, "I don't think I'd
better."