mountain to the north, the long fingers of the westering light touched
the foamy white tops of the chestnut trees, still crowned with their
mist of bloom. The light slid across the hollows of the mountain-side,
filling the long curves with dark green shadows, a soft, deep background
for the maples of the nearer lawns, all golden green in the full
sunlight, and for the silver of the wind-ruffled poplars. Locust trees
are on every side, a survival of the native forests. Where the light is
reflected from their leaves, they are a dark bluish green; but where the
sun strikes through them, each leaflet is shining gold, and the long
leaves sway at the end of every branch like giant fronds gleaming under
some Midas touch.
But even the locusts are far away, across the many-acred lawn. The trees
near the house are too young and small to shelter birds; and if I go out
to the locusts their foliage is too light and too high to shade my eyes
from the glare: so I have been missing the birds. If I could stay with
the others it wouldn’t matter; but I must lie alone, and in silence,
resting between lines when I write; and Grumpy is boring company. So
I’ve been casting envious looks at a place across the road. A long hedge
of blossoming privet hides everything but the tree-tops, but there are
dozens of them; and wings flash in and out. It is a large place, larger
than this; I know there’s a corner in it there I wouldn’t be in the way.
The sense of something near and unknown, yet knowable, draws me daily.
The Garden of Delight I call it, and listen for the songs which float
from it, and long for its shade and sunshine.
When the Madam came to sit with me I confessed my daft condition to her,
and she went across the road to the Garden’s owners—two ladies who are
friends of hers—and returned presently with the freedom of the Garden
for me and my chair. I am to go tomorrow.
I wonder sometimes if people dream of the pleasure they can give through
little things. To these ladies I suppose their bit of hospitality is a
trifle soon forgotten; but to me it is pure delight. It will hearten me
for my fight a thousand times, and lift me clear above the pain a
thousand more. It is hard to keep steady when one is so happy. The long,
filmy curves of wind-swept silver in the evening sky grow suddenly dim;
and when they wheel me back to bed I am “fair lifted,” as the Scotch
say, and wait joyfully in the darkness for such sleep as night may
bring.
* * * * *
_July 11th._ The Garden of Delight! A close-shaven sward from which the
tiniest bird stands up distinctly; and trees, and trees, and trees!
Shrubs and vines, rose-beds, azaleas, tall altheas, clumps of iris,
masses of old-fashioned lilies, tangles of honeysuckles on the fences,
beds of early phlox, ragged robins, larkspur, and ferns—all things cool
and quiet and sweet. In the dense shade of tall shrubs they have left
me, the feathery locusts waving overhead, and before me a hitherto
unsuspected vista of beauty—the long, long valley which leads to
Gettysburg, with the mountains guarding it on either side.
Beyond the greensward lies a beautiful bit of wilderness—ferns and wild
flowers under thick-set trees; beyond that, close-shaven grass again,
then a bit of clover, and a tangle out of the very heart of the woods.
And everywhere are birds. And I, who have longed for the woods for
years, and who have never dreamed of finding them outside of the land of
Make-Believe, I am here, far off, a thousand miles from everywhere,
alone with the sky and the winds and the wild mountains, in a silence of
upper air! One can bear one’s body in a place like this: it doesn’t
matter that it cannot run, nor walk. One’s mind can run, and fly, and
rise so high that the pain lies far below, lost, vanished, like a pebble
in the valley when one looks from a free mountain peak against the sky.
For one glorious hour I have run away from it—this pain that wrenches
and grips; I have been free, free! And so my hope grows bold, and I
reach out to touch that happy future when I shall be free in body as
well as in mind: it will come—some day!
And oh, foolish one, remember, and learn! For the Garden of Delight was
close at hand all the time, only I hadn’t the wit to reach it till my
body was carried thither. But there is always a Garden, if one can find
it—a Garden of Delight, hidden behind the hedge!
* * * * *
_July 15th._ The birds are not kind today, even here in the Garden. It
is a grey evening, for one thing, and the light is bad for spying out
secrets among the leaves. The weather is misty and damp, promising the
rain we need; but everything is dry from recent heat, and the insects
may be less juicy than usual, and not very tempting eating. Anyway, the
birds are not here.
The mist, with the dim light of the evening sun upon it, spreads a film
of silver over the blues and greens of the mountains. Down in the valley
it deepens till all the colors are faint and soft, from the pale stubble
of the nearer wheatfields all up the long valley between the mountains,
to where the dim blue of the great battlefield melts into the dim blue
of the sky above it.
It was down this Valley, over the road at my feet, that the men of the
Southern army tramped after the battle was lost. My own kinsmen were
there, following their great leader with the rest, as he passed through
the Valley of Defeat. How much seemed lost to them, who can say? But to
us of a later generation how plain it is that nothing was lost at
Gettysburg which it were well to keep. The really priceless thing they
brought away unharmed—the courage which could accept defeat, and turn,
without a murmur, in the wreck of the old order, to the upbuilding of a
new world. That was a struggle which the world even now knows little of,
though it was as wide as the South and as long as a generation’s
life-time. It was fought singly, and in silence, in each individual
life. Each soul bled inwardly, and only God saw the wounds. But I have
sprung from men who fought that fight. Let me look at the Valley, and
learn.
* * * * *
_July 18th._ The wind is at play in the mountains today, and sweeps up
the Valley with a sound as of rushing waters, bending the trees before
it. The long shadows under the swaying branches know not a moment’s
rest; and the racing clouds shift the shafts of sunlight so rapidly from
place to place that the very earth seems moving, like the lightest leaf.
Few birds are abroad, save the robins, which battle against the unseen
powers of the air, only to be blown like autumn leaves. A thrasher,
dashed suddenly in front of me, began at once a philosophic hunt for
worms—one place was as good as another, no doubt; but a young robin,
the black of his crown still separated from the dark ear-coverts by
bands of gray, crouches frightened where he falls. His half-drooped
wings show a power which explains his venturing abroad; he is full
grown, though not yet in full robin dress. He is learning the old lesson
of the young: that there are things in life which not even grown-ups can
do; and that his liberty is merely a liberty to adjust himself to forces
which he cannot hope to control. No wonder he looks a bit dazed!
The Mistress of the Garden comes out presently to look after her
flowers. Her face is good to see, and her voice to listen to. Her eyes
have the look of one who dwells in that place of peace where happiness
and sorrow are fused into one, and are known as equal essentials of the
highest joy. She is a lover of Nature, too. One inevitably comes to be,
I think, as one travels the long road to serenity of soul. One may
observe Nature in youth, no doubt, and love it, too, somewhat; but the
real sense of kinship with it is a matter of living, and of growth.
* * * * *
_July 25th._ Blessed be trees and sunshine, the open sky, and the free
winds which fill it! And blessed be the freshness and promise of the new
day, coming alike to the light-hearted and to those pain-weary and
discouraged.
And the promise never fails. For, whether the new day brings escape or
courage, relief or a growing power of patience, whether it means joy or
peace, it brings good, and only good; and so through all the soul its
_sursum corda_ rings with sweetness and command.
* * * * *
_July 28th._ After wheeling me over to the Garden yesterday afternoon,
Caro left me, to join in an expedition to Bare Rock. When she had gone,
I discovered to my horror that I had been deposited beneath the branch
of a poplar tree on which some hundreds of caterpillars had just been
hatched out. They were so thick that heads, tails and sides touched
everywhere, as they lay on leaves and stems; not one could move a hair’s
breadth without knocking off the others or climbing over them. What they
thought of my proximity I had no means of finding out; but for me it was
not a joyful occasion. I could move neither my chair nor myself; so I
lay there, gazing up at the wretched things till I began turning into a
caterpillar myself, and felt fuzz and wriggles sprouting all over me.
But before the transformation was too far advanced to be checked, I
heard Caro’s voice behind me.
“Mammy Lil, I don’t want to go walking. May I stay and talk to you?”
I had been feeling specially lonesome of late. I kept telling myself I
was getting morbid from long illness and solitude; but it seemed to me
that Caro almost avoided me. She waited on me most thoughtfully; but her
errands done, she disappeared. There was no more of that dear
companionship, when she used to sit near me, reading, or embroidering,
while she sang dreamily to herself, or cuddled her head against mine on
the pillows in a fellowship which needed no words. Children can’t
possibly understand how bereft one feels, shut out. I knew she loved me
too well to hurt me; yet I had missed her, under the same roof with her,
more than I had missed David far away: the boy had never shut me out
like that.
But her voice was different as she asked her question now. I remembered
how, years ago, she used to come out of her periods of seclusion in the
parlor “nice and social,” as she would sweetly announce, and confess her
little soul inside out, clear to her very toes. Before I saw her face I
knew the barrier was gone, and I was to have her confidence at last.
But, first of all, I craved deliverance from the caterpillars. Some of
them had hunched themselves up ominously, as if they were about to jump
down and float across my nose on silken threads. I was very unhappy
indeed.
Caro squealed in horror when she saw my plight, and snatched me back
from my impending doom. She wheeled me across the shaven grass to the
edge of the wood-tangle, and sat on a rock beside me, facing the long
Valley once filled with marching men—men who marched from the disaster
of outward defeat to the victory of inner conquest.
“Mammy Lil,” she inquired presently, “do you love me any more at all?”
I turned my face to her without speaking. Her eyes filled with sudden
tears, and she laid her cheek against my hand.
“You’re the darlingest mother! If you weren’t, I’d be ashamed to tell
you. Mammy Lil, I’ve wished sometimes I could murder myself, this last
year; I’ve been so cross. It began last summer while I was home on
vacation. Everybody in Chatterton made love to Milly or me last summer,
except David. He was just as he always was—sweet to both of us, but
specially careful of me because he was my brother. And I didn’t feel the
same to him at all. I—Mammy Lil, I was as foolish about David as those
boys were about us two girls: I was in love with him, over head and
ears.” She paused while I stroked her hair.
“You can’t think how ashamed I was. And of course I treated him like a
yellow dog. And he behaved _perfectly_. I was sure, though, that he
didn’t suspect—he, nor any one else. And then, at the end of the
summer, Cousin Jane told me that David and I were to marry. I didn’t
believe you’d ever talked to her about it, of course; but I saw in a
flash what it would mean to you—and that David might do it to please
you. And I was afraid Cousin Jane suspected what a fool I was. And she
went to David, too, and told me that, and told him she’d told me. I did
want to wring Cousin Jane’s neck; and I think yet she deserved it!
“David and I had a talk. She just butted our heads together till we had
to. He said he’d always cared; but he had made up his mind to wait till
I was through school and you were at home again: it wasn’t fair not to.
He was lovely. But he was so quiet—and so confident, it seemed to me. I
tried to lay him out; I was mad. And he wouldn’t blame me a bit for
being mad; but he said he hadn’t asked for any answer yet, and wouldn’t
take one till he did ask for it; and that we mustn’t worry you with
Cousin Jane’s nonsense, and all that.
“Things rocked along at Christmas, except that I cared more than ever.
But when I came back last spring to stay, as soon as you were really
better, David began to show me that he—you know, Mammy Lil, how much
little things can be made to mean. And I began to see he did care just
as I did. We were so happy in April! Only, I kept staving the end of it
off. I didn’t want to be pinned down too soon. But David—he understood.
“Then Cousin Jane had to take a hand again. She’d found out Bob White
wanted to marry me—or thought he did; and Bob is what she calls a
‘catch.’ She nabbed me that day, as I was coming home from Milly’s, and
said the hatefullest things you ever heard in your life—that everybody
said I was ‘setting my cap’ for David and pretending to be taking care
of you when I was just running after him; and that David had given her
to understand he felt very badly about it, because he knew you and I
wanted it so much!
“I knew as well as I knew my name that was a lie out of whole cloth; but
I was just as angry as if it were true. I never had been reconciled to
caring about him before he spoke, anyway. So I went to Cousin Jane’s, as
she told me to, and listened to Bob White’s praises till I was sick of
everything under the sun. And when David and I went out that
afternoon—Mammy Lil, can’t you understand?”
“Dear, I did it myself, once; I ought to understand. But I paid for it
afterwards, as you have done. When you’re an old lady like me you’ll
know better.”
“I know better now,” she said, with a sudden quiver in her voice. “I—I
killed David’s respect for me that afternoon.”
“Nonsense, child,” I exclaimed, “he knows you—and loves you—too well
for that.”
“He doesn’t love me at all; he can’t. I let him think—I pretended—I’d
just been flirting with him; to lead Bob on.” Her voice died in a shamed
silence.
This was serious news, considering David’s nature. If he believed she
really cared for some one else, I knew it would take a long time for the
notion to work out of his head; and while it was in there he wouldn’t
stir. And I had promised not to interfere. I stroked her soft hair in
silence for a minute.
“David will never change in his love for you, dear,” I said; “it’s too
truly a part of him for that. And when people really love one another,
they come together, somehow, soon or late; your Daddy Jack and I were
hopelessly separated for weeks.”
“We’ve been separated nearly three months,” said Caro, dolefully;
“eleven weeks and four days today. But I’m not going to talk about David
any more. What hurts me most of all is the way I’ve treated you. You
ought to hate me if you don’t. I—”
I laid my hand over her mouth.
“What’s the use of being older than you if I can’t understand, child?
And I’ve travelled every step of the way before. Everything that isn’t
right will come right between you and David; but with you and me
everything is right already. Just drop your troubles under the trees,
dearie, as I do, and open your heart to the hills and the sky. Isn’t
today worth yesterday’s storm?”
She sat up and looked across the Valley. The mountains stood out in the
afternoon sunlight all the clearer for the long shadows already
gathering in the hollows; each leaf and grass blade was shining fresh
after the rain, and everywhere was a flutter and stir of wings. A
nuthatch crept down a locust trunk before us, a yellow-billed cuckoo
slipped by overhead; and all down the hillside the swallows swept in
long, beautiful curves, their bright breasts shining against the sun.
“Dear,” I said presently, “don’t you see, out of doors here, how wise it
is to take the long look at life? The mountains make me ashamed of my
fretting. And life is working toward this beauty all the time; the
winters in the way don’t matter; they pass. And yet before they pass
they teach us to love life better when it re-appears. When your
happiness is safe in your hands once more, you won’t hurt it again for a
child’s anger or a fool’s speech. I know; for I learned it, too.”
She laid her cheek against my hand in silence, and we watched together
while the sun went down. The blue shadows overflowed the hollows of the
mountains and met across the green ridges on their sides. Against that
shadowed background the poplars of the Garden, smitten by the last rays
of sunlight, shone like silver, and the locusts like fronds of gold.
Far below, in the Valley, lay the peace of the coming twilight, and all
about us were the soft murmuring of birdlings settling down to rest, and
of mothers crooning over them as they slept. And at last the gardener
came over from the Madam’s, and wheeled me back, with Caro by my side.
* * * * *
_August 2nd._ The Peon is with David now, and I shall soon be having
news. He did not start as early as he hoped, and was detained on the
way; but being there at last, he will soon be able to tell me something
definite about David’s coming home. I haven’t meddled a meddle: not that
I’ve earned any frill to my halo thereby; it’s just that I know by my
own past Caro would catch up with me if I tried it, even if I hadn’t
promised David. So I’m pinning my hopes to the Peon: he has been so very
non-committal that he must have something on his mind. But I can’t share
these hopes with Caro, and they wouldn’t help her if I could: she is in
that stage of penitence where it is against her principles for her to
accept consolation, so far as David is concerned. Her misery, poor
little soul, is the only comfort she can allow herself; and if her
happiness is to have a thorough recovery, the process cannot be hurried.
* * * * *
_August 5th._ I woke at half-past four this morning to find a fat white
cloud sitting on the lawn outside, as if he owned the premises. Not a
mountain visible; and beneath the locusts’ misty arches the trees on the
neighboring lawn gleam pale and uncertain, mere grey-green ghosts of
living things.
The cloud isn’t altogether outside. My books on the stand beside me are
arching their covers with the dampness, and my field-glasses are moist
to the touch; the room feels dank and uncanny, and the heavy air is hard
to breathe. One needs a mental rain-coat on a day like this—especially
when no letters come from a sky-larking Peon!
* * * * *
_August 8th._ Days of rain on the parched earth. Gray days, with soft
mists heaped against the mountains, blending earth and sky in one. Days
when one’s horizon is lost—not gone, but withdrawn from sight; days
when the mountains have vanished and the valleys melted away, and
nothing is very clear to consciousness but this small bed and the pain
which lies upon it. If mists crept as close about one’s inner vision,
doubt would seem normal on days like this, and despair the quintessence
of common sense. Yet under the veiling vapors the brown grass is growing
green again, the hard earth soft, instinct with power, and prodigal of
gifts once more.
Now comes a distant roll of thunder, a wind that sweeps the vapors from
the grass as tears are wiped from sodden eyes, a flash of blinding
light, a bending and tossing of leaf-laden boughs; and over the mountain
the storm-cloud rises, black against the pale gray of the sky. Then up
the valley comes the wall of water; and behind it the world is new.
* * * * *
A special delivery letter from the Peon! Caro stood by while I opened
it, asking nothing, but her color coming and going. It was only a few
lines; but it said he would be here on the tenth. He has written not a
word since he has been out there about the things nearest to all our
hearts; but at least we shall know something in two days more.
XII
IN THE GARDEN OF DELIGHT
_August 10th._ They are having a picnic supper on Bare Rock this
evening, from which nobody in the house is excused but myself. I am glad
they are all gone, for I need a little solitude, in this sudden
whirlwind of happiness, to catch my breath and take a twist on my
emotions.
For the Peon, who is so literally truthful that nobody dares to suspect
him of juggling with words, deliberately stole a march on us and walked
in twenty-four hours ahead of time—with David! Caro and I were over in
the Garden. I was just where I am now, between the altheas and the
locusts; but Caro, who had been wandering restlessly about, had gone
down the hillside, out of sight, following an unknown bird-note. I was
looking at the poplar branch where the caterpillars had clustered. They
had left it stripped of everything but the leaf-stalks, which stood out
now from the bare twigs at every angle, like drunken pins in a cushion.
But the birds had days ago avenged both the branch and me, for not a
crawler was visible on the tree. I was looking at it idly when the Peon
and David suddenly stood under it, coming round the big bed of
hydrangeas between it and the gate!
I scarcely saw the Peon for looking at David; but David was looking for
somebody else.
“Where’s Caro?” he demanded, as he kissed me. “They said at the house
she was over here with you.”
“She’s beyond that little corner of woods,” I said; “go around there and
you’ll see her.”
As he went I fell upon the Peon, and extracted the hitherto suppressed
information that Bob White’s engagement to some visitor from Kentucky
had been announced last month. The Peon had forgotten her name; but he
carried the news to David, who decided it was time for him to see Caro
at once. And the mischief of a time he was taking about it, too, the
Peon observed impatiently; didn’t they intend to take us into the secret
before midnight?
As it was still half an hour to sunset, I reproved him properly; but I
was myself beginning to fear something had gone wrong when they appeared
at last. The dusk had fallen, and I could not see their faces clearly;
but I heard a soft, happy laugh from Caro before they came around the
corner of the woods, and I knew everything was all right.
David had certainly not wasted his time. They were already considering
the house that must be built on the knoll the Peon and I had selected
years ago. It seems he had picked it out himself, and Caro had agreed to
it, in her mud-pie days. Now, having waited so long, and finding Caro in
a mood of undreamed-of submissiveness, he had taken matters into his own
hands, and decided that he would go home as soon as they could settle on
the plans, and begin the house at once.
“We’ll need it, even so, before we can possibly get into it,” he
observed to me. “Do you remember what you said to me that night about
our wedding? I told Caro about it this afternoon, and she couldn’t deny
that we ought not to start out in life by disgracing you as a prophet.
So it’s to be before Christmas—in September, I think.”
“I think you’ve lost your wits,” replied Caro. “It won’t be Christmas if
Mammy Lil isn’t walking about everywhere by Thanksgiving. She needn’t
expect us to live up to her prophecies if she won’t do it herself.”
“But I will,” I replied cheerfully; “I feel it in my bones.”
“It’s surely time,” said David, turning my chair to the gate. The Peon
and Caro walked on ahead, and the boy bent down and rubbed my cheek with
his.
“Sweet Mammy, I know I’ve been hard on you these months; but we’ll both
make it up to you now. Forgive us this time, and let us help to make you
well at last.”
* * * * *
_August 22nd._ What beautiful, happy days we have had! I showed the Peon
all the wonders of the Garden; and David and Caro strayed in and out,
sometimes with the Madam and her other guests, and sometimes in that
dual solitude lovers crave.
I told the Peon about Grumpy one day. I never had mentioned him before,
because I never had been quite sure, if I did, that it wouldn’t break
the spell I had woven, and allow him to appear to others as well as to
me. But I’m not afraid of him any more.
The Peon is so satisfactory! He never thought of laughing at me, but
took in the situation at once. He said the best way to make sure of
getting rid of the wretch was for him to carry Grumpy away when he went.
He could put him in his suit-case—for Grumpy really is the tiniest
creature imaginable to make all the trouble he does; and he could throw
him out of the car window as they were crossing some deep gorge in the
mountains where no human habitation had ever been. A blue devil can’t
possibly live where there are no people; so there’d be an end of his
mischief forever.
Wasn’t that the cleverest scheme? We caught him together yesterday
afternoon, and rammed him into the suit-case, good and tight. And I told
the Peon, before he went, that if he did many more stunts like that,
he’d be a very satisfactory playmate for me when the children are grown
up and in their own house.
And that is the end of Grumpy.
* * * * *