_And then one eventful day_
I suppose it was about that time that we acquired a car--it would be
likely to be about that time. 'Most everybody was getting cars, and Lord
Beaconsfield, good Old Beek, was getting slower each year and could no
longer keep up even with our deliberate progress. Furthermore, I learned
to drive the car, in time. It is true I knocked some splinters from the
barn, put a crimp in a mud-guard, and smashed another man's tail-light
in the process, but nothing fatal occurred, though I found it a pretty
good plan to stick fairly close to my new study on the cedar slope if I
wanted to keep up with the garage and damage bills. Those bills startled
me, at first, and then, like everybody else, I became callous and
reckless, and we did without a good many other things in order that the
car might not go unshod or climb limpingly the stiff New England hills.
And then at last, one eventful day--a day far back in that happy,
halcyon age when ships sailed as freely across the ocean as ferry-boats
across the North River and men roved at will among the nations of the
earth--one sunny August morning, eight years after the day of our
coming, we locked the old house behind us and drove away in the car to a
New York pier and sailed with it (the car, I mean, not the pier) to the
Mediterranean, and the shores of France. In that fair land, while the
world was still at peace, we wandered for more than a year, resting
where we chose, as long as we chose, all the more unhurried and happy
for not knowing that we were seeing the end of the Golden Age. Oh, those
lovely days when we went gipsying along the roads of Provence and
Picardy and Touraine! I cannot write of them now, for in to-day's shock
of battle they have already become unreal and dreamlike. I touch them
and the bloom vanishes. But sometimes when I do not try to write, and
only lean back and close my eyes, I can catch again a little of their
breath and sweetness; I can see the purpling vineyards and the poppied
fields; I can drift once more with Elizabeth and our girls through the
wonderland of France.
[Illustration: _It was on a winter evening that I drove our car back to
its old place in the barn, after its long journeyings by land and sea_]
War came and brought the ruin of the world. It was late in the year when
we returned to America, and it was on a winter evening that I drove our
car back to its old place in the barn, after its long journeyings by
land and sea. Our old house had remained faithful. A fire roaring up the
chimney made it home.
We went to Westbury's, however, for the holidays. Westbury with the
years had become a prosperous contractor, for Brook Ridge was no longer
an abandoned land, but a place of new and beautiful homes. Westbury's
prosperity, however, had not made him proud--not too proud to offer us
old-time Christmas hospitality at his glowing fireside.
V
_Was it the spirit of our garden?_
Summer found us back in the old house, almost as if we had not left it.
Almost, but not quite. Somehow the world had changed. Perhaps it was
just the war--perhaps it was because we were all older--our girls
beginning to have lives of their own--because the family unit was
getting ready to dissolve.
The dissolving began at last one sunny June day when the Pride left us.
It was the young man whom I had noticed around the house a year or two
before who took her away. She seemed to prefer to go with him than to
stay with us, I could not exactly make out why, but I did not think it
best, or safe, to argue the question, and I drove them to the train
afterward.
Then the Hope and the Joy got the notion of spending their summers in
one of those camps that are so much the fashion now, and at last there
came a day that the Hope, who such a little while ago was running
care-free and happy-hearted in the sun, bade us good-by and sailed
away--sailed back across the ocean to France, an enlisted soldier, to do
her part where the world's bravest were battling for the world's
freedom.
For us, indeed, the world had changed; we had little need any more for
the old house that on a July day twelve years before we had found and
made our home. It had seen our brief generation pass; it was ready for
the next. And when, one day, there came a young man and his bride, just
starting on the way we had come, and seeing the beauty of the spot, just
as we had seen it, wanted to own and enjoy it, just as we had owned and
enjoyed it, we yielded it to them gladly, even if sorrowfully, for one
must give up everything, some time or other, and it is an economy of
regret to give to the right person, at the right time.
And now just here I want to record a curious thing. Earlier in these
pages I have spoken of planting one year some white canterbury-bells
that did not grow, or at least, so far as we could discover, did not
bloom. In six seasons we never saw any sign of them, yet on the day we
were leaving our house, closing it for the last time, I found on the
spot where they had been planted, in full bloom, a stalk of white
canterbury-bells! Had the seed germinated after all those years? Was it
the spirit of our garden, sprung up there to tell us good-by? Who can
answer?
[Illustration]
Our abandoned farm is no longer ours. We, too, have abandoned it. Only
the years that we spent there remain to us--a tender and beautiful
memory. Whatever there was of shadow or misfortune has long since
passed, by. I see now all our summers there bathed in mellow sunlight,
all the autumns aglow with red and gold, all the winters clean with
sparkling snow, all the springs green with breaking buds and white with
bloom. If those seasons were not flawless at the time, they have become
so, now when they are added to the past.
And I know that they were indeed happy, for they make my heart ache
remembering, and it is happiness, and not misery, that makes the heart
ache--when it is gone.