[Illustration]
IN THE GARDEN OF
DELIGHT
BY
L. H. HAMMOND
AUTHOR OF “THE MASTER-WORD,” “IN BLACK AND
WHITE,” ETC.
NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1916,
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY
To
LUCY AND CALDWELL
IN MEMORY OF THE WHEELED-CHAIR SUMMER
AT PEN-Y-BRYN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A COUNTRY CHILD 1
II. BIRD CORNERS 16
III. IN MAKE-BELIEVE 37
IV. THE DARK O’ THE YEAR 57
V. PREMONITIONS 81
VI. BEFORE THE DAWN 115
VII. SPRING MAGIC 126
VIII. BLACKBIRD DIPLOMACY 150
IX. THE PROOF OF COURAGE 169
X. THE ROUTING OF UNCLE JASON 186
XI. WHERE THE BATTLE WAS FOUGHT 204
XII. IN THE GARDEN OF DELIGHT 229
XIII. WHILE THE NEST WAS BUILDING 241
I
A COUNTRY CHILD
THERE is one thing, at least, in this puzzling world which, though
everything changes it, nothing can spoil: and that is out-of-doors. Long
ago, when this place was stately old Cedarhurst instead of home-y Bird
Corners, and I a wilful small girl climbing trees and tearing my frocks
whenever Great-aunt Virginia and Great-aunt Letitia were both looking
the other way at the same time—a coincidence as blissful as it was
infrequent—I thought being outdoors was heaven enough for anybody.
In the long winter afternoons I sat by the big wood fire in the back
parlor and hemmed towels and napkins—when I wasn’t pulling out
yesterday’s work because Great-aunt Virginia found the stitches too big:
and I looked out at the cold, bare hills, blue and beautiful against the
pale sky, and longed to play over them like the winds, and to be whirled
up into the air like the brown leaves which scurried about them all
winter long. And in the spring, when the budding branches draped the
trees with jewelled mists, all silver and green and gold and ruby-red, I
wished the great-aunts had learned to play on the grass with their whole
selves, instead of just with their fingers on the big old rosewood
piano, which stood stiff and square in the front parlor, an instrument
of torture to rebellious hands that longed to be pulling wild-flowers,
and to ears tuned to catch the songs of birds. And in summer time, when
the rain blotted out the hills, and every leaf of every tree sang the
Song of the Rushing Winds; when the lightning ran zig-zag all over the
sky and the thunder jarred the house—oh, why should great-aunts call
one indoors, and shut the free winds out, and put cotton in their ears,
and make little girls come away from the windows, and the chimneys, and
every place where they wanted to be, instead of leaving them out in the
rain to be drenched like the flowers and shake themselves dry like the
birds?
And in autumn—but those memories are too painful! On frosty days the
house was shut tight, the log fires kindled, and my small person swathed
in insufferable flannels—flannels!—in a Tennessee October! And when I
rebelled, there were fearsome tales of children who had died of
pneumonia, or gone into consumption, because their misguided relatives
had allowed them to play outdoors in the cold.
And yet outdoors was never more beautiful. Some of the hills were far
and blue, and some were near and green, or brown with stubble, or yellow
with stalks of corn. The grass in the pasture was greenest green; and
when I slipped out on the back porch the sycamores down by the brook
rustled their drying leaves and called me as loud as they dared. And the
doves flew by in flocks, and the killdeers whirred up from the valley
with wild, free cries, and the field-larks sang on the fence-posts, or
lighted on the short, sweet grass, the white of their outer tail
feathers shining in the sun. But Great-aunt Letitia would call me back
to the parlor, where she made tea, which she and Great-aunt Virginia
drank, sitting in rosewood arm-chairs, dressed in soft shimmering silks,
with cobwebby lace about their throats.
I myself balanced unhappily upon one of the big square ottomans, too
small to get far enough back on it to have any purchase against the
slippery horsehair, and painfully conscious of Great-aunt Virginia’s
eyes on my awkwardly swinging feet. I kept my place as best I could,
holding a bit of egg-shell china, and sipping my odious cambric tea.
This was the chosen time to instill proper principles of conduct into my
callous little soul. The gentle old aunts made a duet of it, and I
always thought they practiced it together beforehand, like a “piece” on
the piano. It was really very easy not to hear!
I always sat on the ottoman nearest the center table. The other was
nearer the east window, and showed the long front drive bordered by the
stiff lines of cedars, which gave Cedarhurst its name before the
great-aunts were born. But the one by the table had the double advantage
of giving me a dutiful appearance, being equally distant from both of
the arm-chairs, and of allowing me, by an almost imperceptible sliding
to one corner, to look out of the silver-maple window to the jug of
water I kept in the center of the seven trunks, a drinking fountain for
all the birds of the place. I sat very still during the duet, my head
raised a little to see the lowest branches, where the birds always
alighted; and I often quite forgot my cambric tea until Great-aunt
Letitia gently reminded me of it. My docility touched them very much. I
heard Great-aunt Letitia tell Great-aunt Virginia one day that she was
afraid I would never live to grow up, my expression was so rapt when
they urged my duty upon me; and she felt as though there were an
invisible halo above my little brown head. I was running in through the
hall when I heard this, and stopped in breathless amazement. I had no
thought of eavesdropping, but I saw Great-aunt Virginia wipe her eyes;
and Great-aunt Letitia almost sniffed. I sat stiller than ever after
that, and rolled my eyes a little; and Great-aunt Letitia sent for the
doctor, who said I needed calico dresses and mud pies. The great-aunts
were shocked at first, but the doctor was firm. And after that I played
outdoors unless the thermometer was very unkind and the wind in an
especially dangerous quarter.
There are really two of the-most-beautiful-place-in-the-world. One of
them is the real outdoors; and the other is outdoors in the Land of
Make-Believe. The advantage of the real outdoors is that its loveliness
is ready-made. One invents nothing; one merely opens eyes and ears and
soul to drink in beauty and joy, and learns, almost without knowing it,
the most curious and interesting things. The advantage of Make-Believe
is that when things are as they shouldn’t be, one can instantly step
over into that blessed country and make them be exactly what they
should. No one ever sees you do it, either, or guesses that you can make
a world in a twinkling, out of dreams. It has all the charm and mystery
of a fairy ring, or fern seed, or Aladdin’s lamp. One’s body can perch
on a horsehair piano stool, twisting one’s two little meat legs about
its one fat leg of rosewood, and great-aunts may be sure you are
practising scales most faithfully; and all the time you are really
running races in the wind with charming, dirty children who tear their
dresses all day long, and never had their hair in curl-papers in their
lives.
And that is only the beginning. For one can learn so well the road to
that dear land that one never forgets it, even in grown-up days. There
is never any sickness in Make-Believe. One can walk and run there
always, though one’s body lies weak and helpless, or drags slowly about,
year after year, in a world that is full of pain. One can slip away from
the long, black, sleepless nights into a lovely world where imagination
is the motive power, and all one needs and all one longs for lie ready
to one’s hand.
* * * * *
It was the January after I was sixteen that Cedarhurst burned down. It
was a bitter cold time; and the heaviest snow I had ever seen turned my
familiar world into fairyland under the winter moon.
It was Great-aunt Letitia who found the fire. She had been looking for
it all her life. One of the most familiar memories of my childhood is
the waking at night to hear a soft rustle past my open door—the doors
were always left open that we might smell the fire when we really had
one—and to see Great-aunt Letitia, her white hair tucked away under a
dainty nightcap and the light of her candle bringing out soft gleams in
her flowered silk dressing gown, as she followed her highbred nose to
the spot where it assured her a fire had broken out. It used to frighten
me at first; but I grew too accustomed to it even to wake. So it taxed
my credulity to the utmost when, on that bitter night, she roused me to
tell me with tense white lips that Cedarhurst was in flames.
How the fire started, we never knew. It burst through the floor of the
empty guest room first, and the ceiling of the dining-room below it. But
however it started, it was there; and there was no one to fight it but
two fragile old ladies, a half-grown girl, and the terrified Negroes. It
was before the days of rural telephones, and the house was in ruins
before any one in the village knew our need. We carried the news
ourselves when we drove into Chatterton in the gray dawn, shivering with
cold. We were all fully dressed, of course; the great-aunts would have
perished in the flames before they would have shocked the stars of
heaven by appearing outdoors in the mildest disarray. And we saved the
family silver, a portrait or two, great-grandmother’s sewing table, a
few books, and the clothes upon our backs.
On the way to the village Great-aunt Virginia said we had much to be
thankful for in that our lives were spared; but hers, had we known it,
was already lost. She had stood in the snow after the flames barred all
access to the house, until the roof fell in and her birthplace was a
mass of ruins; and before we had been a week at the home of her nephew,
Cousin William Wrenn, she had died of pneumonia, leaving Great-aunt
Letitia and me, as she told us in the parting, alone and unprotected
save for the Father of all, to whom she trusted us.
But Great-aunt Letitia, whom every one expected to wither and droop
without her sister’s sheltering care, developed an amazing power of
decision. She seemed crushed at first. But on the fourth day after
Great-aunt Virginia had been laid to rest in the hillside burial ground
at home, she came into the family sitting room, looking, in her deep
mourning, very tall and white and frail, and announced that she had
decided not to rebuild Cedarhurst, but to go to the city to live.
I could scarcely believe my ears. The city’s outmost edge was only
fifteen miles away, but even the village of Chatterton, peopled largely
by our own relatives, seemed crowded and bustling after the wide quiet
of the fields at home. That this frail, retiring old lady should
contemplate a plunge into the vortex of a city whose inhabitants were
numbered by tens of thousands—really several tens—seemed madness. But
her determination was fixed.
“This dear child needs the advantages of city life,” she declared. “I
always found the country exceedingly quiet myself, and-er not
altogether—progressive. But I deferred to Sister Virginia’s judgment.
Now, however—” her voice trembled a moment, and then went on quite
steadily—“the responsibility is mine, and I cannot shirk it. I think
Lydia should have city advantages. I shall go there and devote myself to
her education, and prepare for her entrance into society at the proper
time.”
Argument was of no avail. When I avouched my preference for the country
she said quietly that I knew nothing of the city yet, and that every one
should try more than one side of life before making a final choice. She
was very gentle, but Great-aunt Virginia herself could not have been
more inflexible. We went, to the envy of my cousin, Billy Wrenn, and to
my own silent and passionate grief.
As I grew older, Aunt Letitia grew younger—younger, that is, in her
ideas and in her desires for me. She cared far more than I about my
clothes, and took a livelier interest in possible lovers. I understood,
beneath this late blossoming of pleasure in what she called gay life,
the starved aspirations of her own youth, shut away in the seclusion of
her beautiful home during the many years of her widowed mother’s
invalidism and morbid grieving for her husband. There were times when
her dead-and-gone girlhood rose to life in her eyes, and a soft color
tinged her delicate cheeks, as she imagined for me some small social
triumph or admired me in some new dress. I divined that she was
immensely interested in my men friends, though her shyness in discussing
them was even greater than her interest. I wondered often if she had a
love-story of her own; but I never knew. My own love-story, when it
came, gave her great happiness; and for three years after my marriage
she lived with us in great content, and passed out at last in utter
peace.
My husband is known in our family circle as the Peon, since he entered
into a contract to work for me without wages for life. He brought into
our home at our marriage his brother’s orphaned child, David Bird, a
little fellow four years of age, who flatly refused to call me auntie
and dubbed me Mammy Lil. That was many years ago; and as the time has
passed the Peon and I have realized with deepening gratitude our debt to
the little child who has given our home its crowning joy. But for David
we would have been childless, growing old alone; for we owe Caro to
David, too. I have never flattered myself that we could have captured
and held the heart of that tricksey birdling if David had not added to
our attractions childhood’s lure to a child.
For our years in the city, however, we found David sufficient in
himself. He has grown up like the Peon’s own son, sturdy, steady, large
of body and of heart. He has stood well in his classes without much
effort; but more because it is his disposition to do thoroughly whatever
he does at all than because of any great love for books. He is
deliberate in manner, and somewhat slow of speech; and his steady gray
eyes seem made to look facts in the face. He has always moved in
straight lines, mentally and physically, cutting through obstacles which
Caro would flutter around in a twinkling; yet somehow he arrived at the
goal in time to secure whatever he set out to obtain. He was rather too
solemn as a child, and regarded me, apparently, somewhat as the Peon did
at times, with an air of amused and affectionate tolerance. I used to
hunt through his small personality for the spark of fun I was sure lay
hidden there, and as the years passed I caught the glint of it more and
more frequently; but it was really Caro who brought it out into the
open, and set it, a perpetual signal, in his eyes.
I found it easy to awaken in him my own love of outdoors, and together
we made friends with such birds as could be enticed to our shady yard in
the city’s outer circle. We were sworn comrades in our enmity to the
English sparrows, and the bond of a common foe was one of the many
things that drew us into a fellowship unusually close. The Peon used to
say that no boy came to genuine manhood without something in the way of
an evil to hate and to fight; and for my part I joyfully set up the
English sparrows as the embodiment of all wickedness, to be destroyed
beak and tail. My own objections to them were the result of long
watching; but David’s hatred sprang to life full-fledged the morning we
found four of the wretched bullies fighting one small chickadee, which
hung head downward from a twig of privet, his eyes shut tight, his claws
clenched, and his throat and breast exposed to his enemies’ vicious
bills. I think some deep thirst for justice seized the child’s soul at
sight of the helpless victim, and ever since he has been mindful of weak
things in a way surprising in a boy so ruggedly strong.
He has been wonderfully mindful of me, always. Long before we left the
city I had learned to enjoy outdoors from a cot under the trees in the
back yard. The pain which was to be by turns my companion, my jailer,
and my emancipator had already laid upon me an iron hand. I was up and
about when the Peon was at home; but when he came in unexpectedly he
learned to look for me under the drooping silver maples in the yard; and
my old-time love of birds was an easy explanation of the many-cushioned
cot and the long hours I daily spent upon it.
David filled the birds’ drinking fountain for me when he came home to
leave his books and get his bat or his football; and I would lie there,
watching my visitors, wondering at the variety of birds to be seen in a
city yard, and wishing the sparrows’ duels were less on the harmless
French order. They never fought because they needed to do it; it was
always for something perfectly futile and foolish. They would leave all
the food I could scatter to tear one crumb from a neighbor. For it is
English sparrow nature never to be satisfied with what they have, to
want only what some one else is enjoying, and to get it for themselves
if they can. David and I were fully agreed that if anything more hateful
was ever created we wished to be spared acquaintance with it.
II
BIRD CORNERS
IT is to Uncle Milton that I owe our return to the country, and all the
delights of Bird Corners.
Uncle Milton is an inheritance from my great-aunts and Cedarhurst, where
he had the finest flowers and the most flourishing vegetable garden in
the country. He is a lean old Negro, tall, and straight as a pine. His
features are finely cut; and with his gray hair, long gray moustache,
regular features, and skin like polished bronze, he makes a
distinguished appearance, even in his old blue jeans. He is a real lover
of the outdoor world, and the earth and the plants know it. He bends
over the flower-beds lovingly, with eyes that see, not dirt, but all
dirt’s possibilities of beauty and life. There is never a plant set
carelessly nor a seed that falls by chance. No wonder all he touches
grows!
That he went to town with Great-aunt Letitia, and stayed there afterward
with me, spoke eloquently of the strength of affection between us. But
after my great-aunt’s death he did not accept the situation without
constant protests, and the advice which my youth and ignorance demanded.
“You ain’t got no mo’ business in de city dan I is, Miss Lil,” he said
spring after spring, as I sat on the grass by the flower-beds and
watched his fork go in and out like clock-work, leaving behind it long
rows of fresh-turned earth. “You done los’ all dem roses you had in yo’
face at home. Ef Miss Ferginny done lived she wouldn’ put up wid dis
foolishness not er minute.”
“But the city is more convenient for Mr. Bird,” I would explain. “Some
day when he is rich enough he expects to give up business, and then we
will go back.”
“He’ll be givin’ up his wife fus’ news you know,” growled the old man,
stopping to thin the thick border of violets. “An’ he’ll be goin’ to
bury you dar by Miss Ferginny and Miss ’Titia befo’ he goes retirin’
from business ef he don’ look out. We-all got er plenty ter live on
now—you got er plenty widout his’n; en ef you ain’t, I kin make er
plenty outen dat groun’. Hit’s de riches’ lan’ in Davis’son county. I
made hit pay befo’, en I kin do hit agin, stidder was’in’ it on po’
white-trash renters like you all do. But I ’clare to gracious, Miss Lil,
ef you-all don’ go, I will. I been mixin’ up wid town niggers till I’m
plumb wo’ out wid ’em. Dis is de las’ spring Milton’ll fix yo’ flowers
in dis mizzable little cramped-up lot.”
He had said this so often that I regarded it as one of Nature’s regular
spring processes; and beyond a sudden deeper stirring of my constant
homesickness, his threats passed unnoticed. But one February morning he
came out and stood by my cot under the trees with a face at once elated
and downcast.
“Are you going to begin the spring work today?” I asked in delight.
He looked embarrassed.
“Hit’s sorter early to rake dem leaves offen de beds yit,” he said. Then
he hesitated. “I ’spec I ain’t gwinter be able ter do de wuk no mo’.”
“Are you sick?” I asked anxiously. Then I saw the new look in his face,
and gasped. “You’re going to the country!” I cried.
“Yassum, I is. I can’t stan’ it yere no longer, Miss Lil: I’m er gittin’
too ole fer town; I des bleeged ter go out whar God made de worl’ en
breathe free en be er man ergin, befo’ I die.”
The years had slipped from him like a cloak. I looked at him
enviously—just as an English sparrow might look at some bird of
stronger flight, I reflected suddenly, and scowled at one of my greedy
kinsman in the walk, trying to gobble all the best crumbs at once.
“I’m glad for you,” I said honestly. “When do you go?”
“When my mont’s out. But I hates ter go, Miss Lil.”
“What am I to do here?” I demanded, the sparrow in me refusing to be
quenched altogether.
“I’ll do de bes’ I kin,” he said. “I been lookin’ roun’ fer you all
winter. But dese town niggers is a onery set, fer sho’. When you-all
comes home Milton’s comin’ back.”
“Never mind,” I said; “we’ll manage somehow.”
I closed my eyes because they were getting full of tears. He moved away,
and I let the tears come. I wanted the country, too; and more and more
as my illness grew, and it became increasingly difficult to take my part
in the busy city life. The more one’s bodily freedom is restricted by
weakness and pain, the more one longs for the unconfined spaces of earth
and air, for wide horizons and sweeping winds, and wings that flash far
up into the sunshine, above the shadows where one must lie, conning the
hard lesson of patient idleness. And I wanted Uncle Milton—the visible
link between me and that dear world of hill and sky for which I longed.
Return to it seemed so bright a possibility while another heart, even
this old Negro’s, held it as dear as I. If he went from me he would
leave my hope bereft. I lay with closed eyes, absorbed in longing for
that dear receding vision of delight.
“Don’ you see how bad she wanter go, Marse John?” said Uncle Milton
again, close beside me. I sprang up in amazement, to find him and the
Peon by my cot. “She ain’t gwine ter say a word ef she think hit’ll
discommerdate you; but de chile’s e’en erbout breakin’ her heart fer de
country, same as I is.”
“Uncle Milton,” I began indignantly; but the old man brushed my words
aside.
“You en Marse John fight hit out, honey,” he said. “Mek ’er tell de
trufe, Marse John. Hit’s you en her fer it now; Milton’s done his bes’.”
He turned deliberately and walked out of the yard.
It did not take the Peon long to get the facts, to answer all my
objections as to the inconvenience to himself, and to settle finally our
immediate return. We would rebuild Cedarhurst at once.
“Oh, no,” I cried, “not Cedarhurst! Let us build our own home, all
sunshine and out-of-doors! It isn’t the old house that I love; it was
too cold and stately and dark—such an indoors kind of house. It’s the
hills I’m homesick for, and the sky, and the biggest maple, and the
pasture, and the sycamores down by the brook.”
“But we can’t sleep in the maple,” objected the Peon, “nor eat in the
pasture when it rains. There must be a house.”
“Oh, of course. But let it be our house—not Great-aunt Virginia’s. You
may really build it any way you please if only you will have porches
enough, and so many windows that wherever you sit you can lift your eyes
and look right out, miles and miles and miles. And I’d like all the
rooms to have a southern exposure, of course, on account of the breeze
and the sun, and east windows for winter mornings, and west windows for
the sunsets. I don’t care about the rest.”
“I insist upon bath-rooms and a kitchen,” said the Peon; “mere scenery
is not a sufficient sanitary basis for life. But what shall we call
it—Cedarhurst?”
“Oh, no! Just a plain, every day, home-y name—something that belongs to
us and the birds. Why, we’re Birds ourselves, Peon, dear. Let’s be
sociable and call it Bird Corners.”
“But there aren’t any corners,” said the practical Peon; “the place lies
straight along the pike.”
That is a man’s way. He thinks he must face facts and shape his course
accordingly, poor slave to the visible that he is. But a woman conquers
facts by turning her back upon them, and playing they are something
else.
“The birds will make the corners,” I explained patiently. “Before I’ve
been putting out crumbs a month there’ll be bird pikes cutting through
the place at every conceivable angle, and crossing each other under that
seven-trunked maple where my cot will be. And if that won’t be bird
corners, what will?”
So we prepared for our homing flight. Uncle Milton went out at once to
trim the trees and prune the shrubbery and vines; and the occasional
days he bestowed on us in town were full of delight for me, filled as
they were with reports of progress at home. For it was home, before dirt
had been broken for the house; the city dwelling was a mere temporary
shelter.
“De jonquils out home is showin’ up fine,” he announced one morning in
mid-February; “hit’s time to sorter stir up dese yere lazy town flowers.
En I’ll trim de trees, too, seein’ I’m ’bout done wid ’em out home. I
’spec de city folks what’ll live yere atter we-all gone’ll want what
little dab er trees dey got in dis yard.”
He looked scornfully at the back yard, generous in size, after the
fashion of our Southern cities, and shaded with fine old trees. But a
little later, high in the hackberry, his love of all earth-rooted things
swept contempt from his heart, and his dark old face shone with
happiness as he wielded the hatchet with rhythmic strokes.
That is always the beginning of the spring work—the severance of death
from life, that life may rise again, even out of death. Where would life
draw this dead matter next? To darkness first, to growth most surely,
and perchance, some day, to wings. And the dark old man with the happy
face was servitor of life—life for the dead as for the living; for
death is but the underside of life.
* * * * *
We went home early in May. The house would not be finished until
October; but outdoors was all ready for us, and we could not waste the
summer for lack of a house.
“You know,” I argued to the Peon, “we had a beautiful time in the
mountains last summer; and we slept in a two-roomed cottage with only
weather-boarding between us and the trees outside. Why can’t we have a
shed with a gasoline stove, and a couple of tents to live in?”
So we had them. The Peon and David drove in to Chatterton daily and took
the train for business and school; and I fed the birds and followed
Uncle Milton, and drank in the changing beauties of earth and sky. And
all summer we watched our home grow, from cellar to roof-tree, till it
became a thing complete, and fitted into the landscape for which it was
designed.
We set it on the old home’s hill, which overlooked the countryside, and
faced it toward the sunrising. The dark lines of cedars which had
bordered the approach to the old house were left at one side, and the
road, curving from their upper end, swept into full sunshine and passed
under a great beech, which spread its tiers of leaves above the doorway.
It is an unpretentious house, rambling about pretty much as it pleases
in its efforts to give southern and eastern and western exposures to all
the rooms. Porches are everywhere, and the windows either open on them,
like doors, or stop a little above the floor at low, cushioned seats,
which tempt one to sink down and wonder once again at the beauty of this
fair country of middle Tennessee. There are no curtains at the windows,
nor mats of vines outside. But up the widely-separated columns of the
porches run clematis and jasmines which cross the great openings in
narrow bands, above and below. So all summer the fretwork of green
leaves frames the landscape, a perfect, yet everchanging picture in each
of the wide spaces. The east end of the living-room is of glass, and my
flowers flourish there in winter time. In my own room the bed stands in
a deep recess formed all of windows on the three sides. A low seat runs
under them within reach of the bed. All through the dark, sleepless
night I can lie there and watch for the first paling of the eastern sky,
and follow the level light as it moves softly along the southern hills,
creating the shadows which make the light so clear.
It must be confessed that some of the kin at Chatterton thought my wits
astray that first summer, and the Peon but a soft-headed, poor-spirited
creature for giving way to my whimsies. Camping out was not as popular
then as it is now; and the older members of the family did not hesitate
to commiserate the Peon and David. That they professed to enjoy our long
picnic only added to the heinousness of my folly.
Cousin Chadwell Grackle and his wife were among my first callers. Cousin
Chad is always to the front when anything new crops up in the family. He
has cried the sins and shortcomings of the whole usual order so long
that even he is half bored with them, and the prospect of something new
to criticise whets his social appetite to the keenest possible edge.
Cousin Jane is his reflection and echo. If she were not, even her stolid
nerves could scarcely have endured his painful type of piety without
disaster.
They drove up one sunshiny morning, after they had seen the Peon and
David pass on their way to town. I was on the cot under the biggest
maple. Its seven trunks fall apart like long-stemmed flowers in a vase,
spreading into a great green tent whose leafy curtains droop in a circle
full seventy feet across.
The blackbirds were my principal guests that morning, a sanctimonious
crew in sleek black coats, solemn, censorious, and self-satisfied to the
last degree. All birds which walk instead of hopping are
awkward-looking; but none are as preposterous as the blackbirds, because
none of them put on such sanctified airs. As they moved about this
morning, their heads thrust meekly forward, ducking modestly as they
stepped, they appeared to be meditating on their neighbors’ sins. But
they had their tribe’s keen eye for the main chance, and it was a swift
bird and a wary one which secured a big crumb with these feathered
Chadbands in the yard.
I looked up at the sound of wheels and nearly choked with swallowing my
laughter. Cousin Chad and Cousin Jane did look so sleek and proper, that
as I rose to meet them I could not refrain from throwing some extra
crumbs on the grass for possible additions to my breakfasting guests.
They descended ponderously and looked at me with the apprehensive
scrutiny one might bestow on a lunatic who is liable to break out
immediately in a fresh place.
“How are you, Lyddy?” inquired Cousin Jane, with sepulchral anxiety.
Cousin Chad, busy with the hitching-post, listened with his back as well
as with his ears. They both know perfectly that I have always been Lil
to everyone except the great-aunts, and that Lyddy has been an
abomination to the entire family connection, and especially to me, since
they first invented it in my childhood. That is why they stick to it.
They believe in chastenings, do my cousins, the Grackles—particularly
when they are the chasteners.
“I’m perfectly well,” I answered, with added emphasis to my usual
formula. “Come and sit down. There’s no need to ask how you and Cousin
Chad are; you look the picture of health.”
“Appearances don’t do to go by, Lyddy,” she answered solemnly, sinking
ponderously on a creaking campstool. “Chadwell’s been havin’ sciatica,
and I’ve stayed awake nights with him till I’m just about worn out. But
I’ve never made my afflictions an excuse for shirkin’ my duty. We came
over to say that as you seem to be without a roof over your heads we’d
take you to board till your house is finished—if it ever is.”
She glanced contemptuously at the amorphous piles of building material
just beyond us.
“You can have the second spare bed-room upstairs,” put in Cousin Chad.
“It’s more to my interest to put you in the front one; but livin’ comes
high any way you take it, and I want to consider you. I reckon John
ain’t able to spend much, with all this building on hand. The back
room’s small, but you three can make out in it. If you want the other,
of course it will cost more. You can come over this evening after John
gets home, and he and I can settle the terms after supper.”
I kept my face quite straight, and made a handsome contribution to
current fiction.
“It’s so kind of you. John will appreciate it as much as I. But we
really enjoy camping, and would not give it up even for those lovely
rooms of yours, Cousin Chad. Thank you so much.”
Cousin Jane’s rubicund complexion assumed a purplish hue.
“Do you intend to kill that delicate child of Henry Bird’s, making him
sleep out in the weather all summer?” she demanded.
“No,” I said, considering; “I don’t intend to kill him, exactly. And he
isn’t at all delicate.”
“Well, he will be by the time you get through with him—if he ain’t
dead,” broke in Cousin Chad. “Lyddy, it’s my duty to speak plainly, and
I’ll not shirk it. Letitia spoiled you from the time you were born, and
John Bird seems bent on keeping it up. David will pay the penalty for
it. We do a very different part by the orphan the Lord made it our duty
to take charge of, I can assure you. Caroline Wrenn’s health is taken
care of, with a view to her future usefulness as a Christian. But of
course you’ll stick to your own ways.—Well, I’ve warned you: my
conscience is clear. Come, Jane: we’d better be going.”
“I’m glad your conscience is clear, Cousin Chad. I know that’s a comfort
to you, if I’m not. But we can be good friends, can’t we, even though
our ideas are different?”
“I shall not turn my back upon you if you’re in trouble, Lyddy, if
that’s what you mean,” he answered. “I hope I know my duty better than
that. But when you want help again you must ask for it. I don’t intend
to offer it.”
“That’s a bargain, then,” I said; “and we must both remember it.”
Cousin Jane looked at me sharply, but Cousin Chad was already heaving
her into the buggy, and she turned to get a good grip on the side. The
vehicle creaked as she settled in it, and groaned when Cousin Chad sank
beside her.
“Good-bye, Lyddy,” she said. “We’ve done our best. I hope you won’t
regret it.”
This quite upset me, and after the cedars hid them I lay laughing until
the thought of poor little Caro suddenly sobered me. What were they
doing to Billy’s child? I must make friends with Cousin Jane, somehow,
and entice the little thing over to Bird Corners as much as possible.
There was no one else whom our erratic manner of life really
scandalized, except Cousin Jason Blue; and he, as he took occasion to
tell me when he met me out driving one day with Caro, never made a fool
of himself like Chad Grackle by meddling. If a woman wanted to follow
her nature and behave like a lunatic, and her husband chose to allow it,
it was none of his business; so he shrugged his shoulders and passed on.
Cousin Jason and the Grackles are the only kin I have in all Chatterton
whose kinship I would discount if I could; but there is no denying they
belong in the family. Cousin Chad’s father was my grandmother’s third
half-cousin on my father’s side; and Cousin Jason’s mother was Cousin
Lysander Hilliard’s step-daughter by his second marriage: there could
scarcely be anything plainer than that.
And if Cousin Jason had his drawbacks, there are none about his
half-sister, Grace, fifteen years his junior, and, except Ella, the
dearest friend I have. She married George Wood soon after I married the
Peon, and they have a daughter, Milly, about the age of Caro Wrenn.
David took kindly to country life, and to his numerous
cousins-by-marriage. There were plenty of boys among them; and though at
first they resented David’s city ways, their respect for him grew
immensely when they found how far he could bat a ball; and after he had
whipped Bob White in single combat he was admitted to Chatterton boydom
as a comrade in full fellowship. There was no particular reason for his
fighting Bob, so far as we dull grown-ups could discover, except that
Bob was the leader of his set, and a fight was considered the necessary
initiation to membership. As soon as this was made clear to him, David
had painstakingly trodden on Bob’s toes, and the preliminaries were
arranged at once. The boys were excellent friends, before and afterward;
and the Peon would not allow me to discuss the matter with David. They
talked it out in private, and reached some amicable male conclusion of
their own.
Of the girl cousins David was loftily tolerant, excepting Caro Wrenn.
She was five years old the spring we came back to the country, when
David was half-past nine. Her mother had died when she was born, and her
father, Billy Wrenn, had gone to Colorado three years afterward, to die
there of consumption. He made Cousin Chad Caro’s guardian before he
died, knowing, as we all did, Cousin Chad’s remarkable ability in
reaping financial harvests from even the smallest investments; but he
left the child herself with her mother’s sister, Sally Martin, never
dreaming that death would again bereave the little creature of a
mother’s love. Sally died, quite suddenly, less than a year after Billy;
and Cousin Chad and Cousin Jane, intent, as usual, on doing their
impeccable duty, assumed sole care of the little heiress, and installed
her in their own childless and virtuous home.
A more incongruous setting for her could scarcely have been found. She
was a tiny creature, with rose-leaf skin, great hazel eyes, a mop of
red-brown curls, and a mouth where laughter bubbled all day long. Quick
and bird-like in all her movements, she flitted in and out of the most
unexpected recesses in the twinkling of an eye, with endless flutterings
of hands and skirts and sweet gurglings of suppressed laughter. Almost
from her cradle she sang—queer little soft croonings which slipped into
tunes before she could speak their words. Cousin Jane scarcely knew what
to make of her, and was torn between a sincere desire to do her
Spartanly-Christian duty by her, and her solemn puzzlement over what she
considered the child’s combination of depravity and charm. Even Cousin
Jane could not be very severe with her; but she had an uneasy sense of
spoiling her every time she forebore the rod, so that I found her more
than willing to turn the child over to me for the greater part of the
time.
This arrangement gave my revered relative ample warrant for looking
closely into my household affairs and reproving me for everything she
did and didn’t discover; it was her duty to know all about a place where
dear Caroline spent so much of her time. And when Caro departed from
Cousin Jane’s ideals, as she did with every movement of body and mind,
it was a great relief to my pious cousin to be able publicly to disavow
all responsibility for the child’s shortcomings. What, as she constantly
inquired, could one expect of Caroline when that scatter-brained Lyddy
would persist in encouraging the child in her flightiness? She published
abroad her own powerlessness to control either Caro or the situation,
and openly washed her hands of the consequences.
Caro and I bore up as best we could, and the Peon and David stood by us
nobly. David, indeed, was ready to fight his idol’s battles with Cousin
Jane herself. In fact, he grew up with a lack of respect for that
excellent lady which tempted her to assume the role of a prophet, in
which capacity she dwelt at large on the penitentiary as David’s
ultimate place of residence. Caro always responded to these
prognostications that, if Davy went to the penimtentium, she would go,
too, as soon as she was big enough, and keep house for him, and make the
cook give them ice-cream every day that came. And so the matter rested.
III
IN MAKE-BELIEVE
IT is four years since I wrote those last words. Not long after, Caro
went away to school. David went North to college that year, and was only
coming home for the regular holidays. He still held to his boyhood
preference, and was determined to be a scientific farmer: and since the
Peon and I were to have him with us always, we wanted him to have a few
years quite away from us in which to make his own adjustments to life.
So they left us the same week, David with all a boy’s love to hold him
back, and a young man’s eagerness to urge him away; and Caro in as
nearly easterly weather as her sunny nature ever experienced.
It was Cousin Jane who first decided on Caro’s banishment. For the sake
of her own peace of mind she had of late years resigned the child almost
entirely to me; but every now and then she had what Caro called a “qualm
spell.” During these painful periods Caro resided with the Grackles,
strictly, not even coming over to take lunch with me. She arose at five
and extinguished her light at nine; and pinned on the wall beside her
bureau, in Cousin Jane’s firm handwriting, was a schedule of useful
occupations for each of the intervening sixteen hours.
She had so much time for devotions, so much for meals, so much for
school, for study, for “domestic occupations,” for “improving and useful
reading,” and for “practical sewing.” Cousin Jane never allowed precious
time wasted on fancy work; and if she thought it was all like the awful
things she had in her parlor I don’t in the least blame her for thinking
it wicked.
However, Caro’s time was laid out for her as exactly as the squares on a
checker-board. She fed the chickens, argued with the old biddies who
wanted to “set” in the wrong place, and wheedled the arrogant old Buff
Orpington, who ruled the hens and Cousin Jane with ease and contempt,
into doing whatever she wanted of him. She made butter that drew
near-smiles to Cousin Jane’s stiff lips, and evolved cakes that called
forth lectures to Cousin Chad on the sin of gluttony. She sewed, without
a murmur, or a particle of trimming, undergarments of good, reliable,
ever-wearing domestic. She was always foresighted enough to make ample
allowance for their shrinking when washed; whereby she both pleased
Cousin Jane and insured an excellent fit for little black Josie when she
returned to us with a halo of virtue above her red-brown curls. She read
history till she could put me to the blush. She washed the best tea-cups
and the Persian cat. She dusted the parlor daily. And from her early
childhood she made irreproachable jam.
It really was excellent training for her; thorough good discipline, as
Cousin Jane would say; especially as it was interspersed with “spells of
Bird-Cornering,” during which she sojourned with the Peon and me. For
the period of discipline always followed an accustomed round. It began
with a Cousin Jane all severity, lynx-eyed to drag poor Caro’s
delinquencies to light and overcome them by unsparing criticism. But
Caro has always made play of everything, finding by the talisman of her
own happy heart the hidden beauty, or laughter, of the ugliest and
solemnest things. She did all Cousin Jane found for her to do—which is
saying a good deal—not only cheerfully, but with whole-souled delight,
as if it were her very meat and drink. Doing it that way, she did it
beyond criticism; and Cousin Jane would begin to relax, unwillingly,
unable to find a flaw, yet with an uneasy feeling that something must be
wrong, or Caro couldn’t possibly be enjoying herself so much. When she
set herself to mortify Caro’s girlish vanity the child met her more than
half-way. She did her best to “slick” her curls, and donned shapeless
gingham aprons as joyously as though they were made of jewels and lace.
Cousin Jane would find herself being mollified to the point of
indulgence in spite of herself; and about that time Caro would come
flying into the yard at Bird Corners and drop fluttering beside me, her
eyes shining with the pure joy of living and the love of living things.
“I’m back again, Mammy Lil,” she would laugh, whirling about on one toe.
“Cousin Jane hasn’t scolded me for four days, and yesterday she almost
patted my head; so I knew she thought I’d had training enough for the
present, and I’d be coming back home in a jiffy. They’re so good to me
in their funny way I’m most ashamed to be glad to come home to you—but
I am, all the same. Where’s Josie? I’ve made three new petticoats and a
night gown for her, out of muslin strong enough to climb trees.”
The truth was that when Caro came back to me it was because Cousin Jane
had detected in her own soul symptoms of the child’s being made an idol:
she had to get rid of her to recover her own moral poise. But she still
intended to do her full duty by her: so when Caro was fifteen she was
sent to boarding school, to remain at least five years. By that time
Cousin Jane hoped to have re-established her own imperturbability
without unduly exposing her charge to the dangerous influences of Bird
Corners.
We had a battle royal concerning the school she should go to, and to
this day Cousin Jane thinks she won. She really has no more idea about
schools than a chinquapin worm, living fat and contented in its own
sufficient little world; and I knew she’d be for sending the child to
some fifth-rate country “college” where she’d be taught poor music and
worse French, and be worked to death learning things the way they
aren’t. So I wrote, ostentatiously, for the catalogue of one of the most
exclusive, nonsensical, and extravagant “finishing schools”; and
privately ordered sent to Cousin Jane one from the school I wished Caro
to attend. It was a sensible place where she’d be taken care of, and
given a chance to grow up to the best of herself in body and mind. I
plead for the finishing school, and sniffed diligently at the other,
even advocating the dreaded “college” as preferable; whereby I had the
comfort of having Caro sent where I wanted her, with Cousin Jane’s mind
so definitely set on keeping her there that I knew her education was
provided for.
Caro rebelled against going. For the first time in her life she did not
want to please us.
“You’re not well enough to do without me and David, too, Mammy Lil,” she
insisted; “it’s just a pretense that you don’t need me; and I don’t care
whether I’m educated or not.”
She yielded to the inevitable between tears and laughter.
“Anyway,” she reflected, “there’s Make-Believe left: you’ll never get
rid of me there, will you? I’ll come there every day of the world, and
David, too: and ten times a day if you want me.”
It was a genuine relief to have her go; it was becoming most difficult
to blind her bright eyes to my illness. It was much simpler to keep up
appearances with the Peon, who left home early and returned late, and
who was often called away for days together. If I sat up as usual when
he was in the house it was becoming necessary to lie quite still all
day.
For weeks after the children left I enjoyed being alone, and the freedom
from effort which it brought. But as the winter wore on, the loneliness
proved a lure to introspection and self-pity—those quicksands of
despair which encircle the country of enforced idleness; and as I lay
under my windows or beneath the trees I began, for pleasure and
companionship, to write the story of our happy life and of the
children’s growing up. But the note-book proved desperately heavy, and
the few pages I filled took weeks instead of days; until at last I
ceased the effort until I should be stronger, as I had ceased so many
other things in this journeying into the Land of Idleness.
I made a new acquaintance that winter—a wretched little blue devil to
whom I gave the name of Grumpy, and with whom I battled from morning
till night, and especially from night till morning. It is not pain that
blue devils thrive on—I had proved that all these many years; it is
idleness that gives them their chance for mischief—the helpless
idleness of utter exhaustion, when one’s thoughts hang vacant, and body
nor mind can longer force its way past the wall of pain to move, however
slowly, in the beautiful outside world of human effort and achievement.
So Grumpy came to Bird Corners. Satan himself knows no self-respecting
devil would have stayed on the premises after the way I treated the
creature; but blue devils respect neither themselves nor anybody else.
An hour after I had flung him out by the heels he would bob up by the
sofa in the finest fettle imaginable, grinning at my exhaustion from our
late encounter. The most I ever could be sure of doing was keeping him
invisible to every one else; but he made up for that in the nights.
Still, one adjusts one’s self to the inevitable in time; and blue devils
are all in the day’s work, I suppose, like the dentist or a cold in
one’s head. One gets through with the visitation somehow, and laughs
afterward because, for the time, at least, it is over.