August, September, October, November,--so passed the year in gorgeous
recession over Bylow Hill. Among their dismantled trees the three homes
stood unveiled to the town on the meadows and to travellers who looked
from train windows while crossing the river bridge. To those who
inquired whose they were there was always some one more than ready to
give names and details, and to tell how perfect a bond ever had
been--how beautiful a fellowship was yet, now--up there.
Sevenfold they called it, although one of the seven was away; namely,
Lieutenant Godfrey Winslow, of the navy, famed for his splendid behavior
in the late so-and-so affair. That stately house at the right, they
said, was his home what brief times the sea was not.
There lived, it would be added, his younger brother, so rapidly coming
into note,--the eccentric but gifted rector of All Angels; whose great
success in the heart of a Congregational community was due hardly more
to his high talents than to the combined winsomeness and practical
sympathies of his beautiful bride, or to the resourceful wisdom and zeal
of his churchwarden, Leonard Byington.
"Any relation to Byington, your new political leader in these parts?"
"Same man," the answer would be, and there the narrator was sure to fall
into a glowing tribute to the ideal companionship existing between the
rector, his bride, the young district attorney, and Ruth Byington.
What made this intimacy the more interesting was, in the eyes of a
growing number of observers, that, as they said, "Arthur Winslow was not
always an affable man, and was much more rarely a happy one."
Behind and above this popular verdict was that of the old street behind
and above the town,--a sort of revised version, a higher criticism. If
the young rector, this old street explained, oftener looked anxious than
complacent, so in their time, most likely, did St. Paul and St. Peter.
If he was not always affable, why, neither are volcanoes; the man was
all molten metal within. Anyhow, he filled his church to the doors.
Coaching parties of the vastly rich made the town their Sunday stopping
place purely to hear him; not so much because the boldness of his
speculations kept his bishop frightened as because he always fused those
speculations on, white-hot, to the daily issues of private and public
life, in a way to make pampered ladies hold their breath, and men of the
world their brows. Such a man, to whom the least sin seemed black and
bottomless, yet who appeared to know by experience the soul's every
throe in the foulest crimes, was not going to show his joys on the
surface in quips and smiles.
"You should have heard," said the old street, "his sermon to husbands
and wives! His own bride turned pale. He turned pale himself."
It was wonder enough that even the bride could be happy, at such an
altitude, so to speak; immersing herself utterly, as she did, in the
interests that devoured him. All Angels forgot his gloom in the radiance
of her charms,--the sweet genuineness of her formal pieties, the tender
glow and universality of her sympathies, the witchery of her ever ready,
never too ready playfulness. It was captivating to see how instantly and
entirely she had fitted herself into a partnership so exacting; though
it was pitiful to note, on second glance, how the tint and contour of
her cheek were losing their perfection, and her eyes were showing those
rapid alternations of languor and vivacity which story-tellers call a
"hunted look." Yet, oh, yes, she was happy; the pair were happy. It was
as a pair that they were happiest. Else, said the old street, they could
not keep up the old Winslow-Byington alliance so beautifully.
To the truth of this general outline the three homes' domestics,
dominated by Sarah Stebbens, certified with cordial and loyal brevity.
Yet when Ruth wrote Godfrey how well things were going, there lurked
between her bright lines one or two irrepressible meanings that locked
his jaws till they creaked.
In fact, both his brother and hers were "ailing." Both carried a jaded,
almost a broken look, and Arthur was taking things to make him eat and
sleep; while Leonard had daily accepted more and more of the young
rector's complicating cares, until he was really the parish's chief
burden-bearer.
"No," he said to his father, "Arthur carries his whole work manfully on
his own shoulders."
"But, my son," replied the old General, "don't you see you're carrying
Arthur?"
"No, I sha'n't do that," dryly responded the son; but Ruth saw a change
on his brow as on that of a guide who fears he has missed the path.
The four young friends spent many delightful evenings together in the
Winslow house, with Mrs. Morris and the General on one side at cribbage.
Ruth had frequent happy laughs, observing Isabel's gift for making
Leonard talk. It gave her a new joy in both of them to have the lovely
hostess draw him out, out, out, on every matter in the wide arena to
which he so vitally belonged; eliciting a flow of speech so animated
that only afterward did one notice how dumb as any tree on Bylow Hill
he had been in regard to himself.
"They are bow and violin," said Arthur to Ruth, with his dark, unsmiling
face so free from resentment that she gratefully wondered at him, and
was presently ashamed to find herself asking her own mind if he was
growing too subtle for her.
On these occasions Isabel was wont to court Ruth's counsel concerning
her wifely part in Arthur's work, thus often getting Leonard's as well.
Sometimes she impeached his masculine view of things, in her old
skirmishing way. Then she would turn rose-color once more and mirthfully
sigh, while Ruth laughed and wished for Godfrey, and Mrs. Morris
breathed soft ho-ho's from the cribbage board.
So came the Thanksgiving season, with strong, black ice on the mill
pond, where the four skated hand in hand. Then the piling snows stopped
the skating with a white Christmas, the old year sank to rest, the new
rose up, and Bylow Hill, under its bare elms and with the pine-crested
ridge at its back, sat in the cold sunshine like a white sea bird with
its head in its down. And when the nights were frigid and clear its
ruddy lights of lamp and hearth seemed to answer the downward gaze of
the stars in silent gratitude for conditions of happiness strangely
perfect for this imperfect world, and the town marvelled at the young
rector's grasp of his subject when his text was, "The heart knoweth his
own bitterness."