them. Caro and David sketched them together, and he will have them
worked out at home.
I think Caro half envies him the pleasure of beginning the nest
building, and wants to be there to see; but nobody is willing for me to
go back before the first of October; and the child has a deal of
shopping to do. I will wait here; and Caro will go to New York and visit
Edith Mason, while she selects her bridal plumage.
I find the birds most joyful company these days, and am planning to
cultivate their acquaintance in a less formal manner; for I intend to
get out of this chair.
A wheeled-chair is really an exasperating place to study birds from: I
wonder I never realized it before. This very day the trees are full of
them—new birds, many of them, gathering for the fall migration. They
have been playing hide-and-seek with me all the afternoon—a charming
game if one can do one’s own part of it, and go seeking when the other
hides; but if you can’t, it’s not so hilarious. They poke unknown heads
through the leaves, and survey me coolly. They whisk tails I can’t even
guess at from behind a limb, and are gone. They sing high overhead, with
only a bit of their under feathers visible, or flirt a half-seen wing
behind an opening in the leaves. Sorting heads, tails, and middles is a
hopeless job when you haven’t an idea which belongs to which. If it were
only a Chinese puzzle, you’d know when it was solved; but a tail with
any other head would look as sweet! I’ve thought all summer that if a
hyper-developed sense of touch can serve the blind for eyes, surely time
and patience could do the work of feet for me; but I’m thinking patience
may cease to be a virtue soon!
* * * * *
_August 26th._ We have had two days of storm. They mark both a beginning
and an end; for a subtle change has passed over the mountains and
lingers, though wind and rain be gone. A tinge of brown, merely
suspected before, has deepened and spread until it challenges and
commands the eye. Some of the nearer trees look seared, and the poplars,
especially, look withered and old. But there is a beauty of soul deeper
than that of the flesh and of youth: and the depth and power of Nature’s
charm, like the freedom of our own souls, can be best measured by the
number and splendor of the things which can be laid aside. All the
glamour of the young spring, the splendid lavishness of summer days, the
riot of color and sunshine—these things, which yearly draw us with new
fascination and delight, are but the broidered outer curtain of the
temple. They lure us past them, into the inner court, to a strength
which knows no defeat, to an abundance which can afford to be stripped;
to Law which cannot be thwarted nor checked; and beyond Law to a Power
which reason can neither explain nor explain away.
For myself, I have my message; the hills have spoken it. And the pain
which wrenches is back where it belongs, in the second place—or the
twentieth. Moreover, it will pass—tomorrow, or next year, or in a
life-time: it is not of the things which remain.
And now the clouds are breaking for a sunset glory, and the porch where
I lie, and the lawn beyond it, even the shadowed mountains—all, all,
are flooded with splendid light.
* * * * *
_August 29th._ A letter from Cousin Jane at last! Caro and I both wrote
to her while David was here, but she had not vouchsafed a reply. David
had a satisfactory interview with Cousin Chad, after his return, but
reported Cousin Jane’s reception of him as one befitting an unrepentant
prodigal who had brought his swine home with him. So we have been
looking forward to the reception of a letter from her as a very solemn
occasion indeed. She seems inclined, however, to temper her disapproval
to Caro. She doesn’t expect her to be happy long, she says; and she
handsomely offers not to disturb her present dreams, but to wait until
Caro is disillusioned, when she hopes her “I told you so” will do some
good. She does not intend, however, to cause any breach in the family,
her principles forbidding her to quarrel even with me; and she is
perfectly willing to continue her efforts to set me a proper example.
I suppose, on the whole, that’s doing pretty well for Cousin Jane. I
don’t intend to have any breach in the family, myself, especially over
the children’s wedding; and Caro and I will find some way to appease her
when we go home.
* * * * *
_August 30th._ What bird is that? He is in the locust yonder, only his
breast visible. It is a vivid yellow, with four irregular scarlet
spots—three on one side and one on the other—and across his breast a
long zig-zag line of scarlet like a jagged wound. There isn’t any bird
like that: I know it; and if he doesn’t, he ought to. Yet there he sits,
as calm as if he were in all the books and had as much right in the
Garden as I. I have watched him, and recorded him, yet he doesn’t move.
Well, I’ll just make him: I’m not tied to this chair!
A scarlet tanager, moulting! No wonder I never saw that before. He is
always scarlet-and-black when he goes through Tennessee in the spring,
and yellow and olive when he goes back in the fall. He looks like the
clown in a circus now, and I don’t wonder that he seeks the seclusion of
the mountains to change his clothes. He is gone, of course, before I can
apologize for my intrusion; and I suppose his opinion of me is scarcely
fit to print.
* * * * *
_September 18th._ Caro is back from New York, and we leave a week from
today. We have decided to shave a few days off the limit set by the
Peon: if we don’t hurry, David will have that house half finished before
we get there, and we want to see it go up from the beginning ourselves.
Besides, Caro wants a little time with Milly. Her wedding is set for the
last of October, and Caro’s is to be six weeks later. I’m afraid it will
take strenuous work to get Cousin Jane where we want her by that time;
but if we go home and start on her at once, the thing may be done.
* * * * *
_September 24th._ The last day in the Garden! The Mistress has been out,
and I have been trying, in rather a bungling way, to make her understand
what she has done for me. Neither she nor the Madam can know the whole
of it, and I hope they never will; for they would have to live in the
same prison-house to understand what a door of escape means.
Eh, but the summer is over, and I count my stay by hours!—Yes; but the
summer will never end. Even when the prison is lost sight of, the door
of escape will remain a delight. The things that hurt pass, and are
forgotten; things not understood change and grow clear: but joy does not
change, not kindness, nor anything that makes life worth while. And so,
good-bye to the Garden.
XIII
WHILE THE NEST WAS BUILDING
_September 30th._ We reached home three days ago, having forestalled the
possibility of orders not to come by concealing our plans until we were
on the way.
The house is no house at all yet, of course. Caro calls it the Perchery
at present, and says she will give it a name when we can all sit in it,
instead of roosting on stones outside and staring at the place where it
is going to be. But the cellar is finished, anyway, and is of ample
proportions, as a country cellar should be; and until we get something
else to admire, we find it an absorbing subject of contemplation. Even
Cousin Jane was delighted with it, and still more with Caro’s promise to
go home with her and stay until after the wedding.
Caro went over there as soon as I was settled in bed for a rest, and
came back glowing with triumph. Cousin Jane was coming in the morning to
spend the day, and to take the child back home with her in the evening.
“And oh, Mammy Lil, she’s perfectly charmed with David, and quite
certain she picked him out for me! The shock of it nearly bowled me over
for a minute. You know that big New York bank that failed a week or two
ago? Everybody thought Bob’s father’s bank was mixed up in it, and there
was a regular run on it. David and Daddy Jack were too full of the
Perchery to mention it; but it converted Cousin Jane straight through.
The bank’s all right—I asked David about it, driving home—but you
can’t make Cousin Jane believe it. She thinks a bank should be above
suspicion by anybody, and if it isn’t, it’s a whited sepulchre
forevermore. So she’s delighted that she had the good sense to pass over
a fellow like Bob, who comes from a family of speculators, and choose
for me a good, steady, kind, reliable business man like David Bird,
instead. I wish you could hear her, Mammy Lil; she’s downright edifying.
And she fairly beamed on David, though he hadn’t been near her for
weeks. Everything’s all right, if only the hot weather doesn’t make you
sick. If they’d told us how hot it was, I wouldn’t have brought you
home.”
The heat was extraordinary for the time of the year, and still continues
so; but it didn’t keep Cousin Jane at home, though usually she won’t
budge unless it’s cool.
She was in high good humor, and evidenced it by a peck on my cheek and
the remark that I must be getting better, for I really didn’t look so
very many years older than I was. She approved of the plans for the
house, especially when she found it was to be our wedding gift to Caro;
and she went out “to perch,” at Caro’s invitation, and admired every
stone in the foundations. Then she came in and settled seriously down to
the subject of clothes.
It seems that Grace is lavishing on Milly’s outfit all the pretty things
Cousin Jason prevented her from giving the child in her girlhood; and
Cousin Jane’s family pride has risen in a most desirable and unexpected
manner to demand that Caro shall be as well provided for as her cousin;
so Caro can prepare in peace. Cousin Jane even proposes to help her,
tooth and nail. Caro and I are a little daunted by this excess of zeal,
Cousin Jane’s taste—or lack of it—being a byword in the family. But
Caro will find a way to manage her; and we have already settled the
question of the dress she is to wear at the wedding. I had Caro buy it
for me in New York—a soft, rich, silken fabric—and it is to be made by
the best dressmaker in the city. If we left it to Cousin Jane, she would
get old black Sally to make it, at seventy-five cents a day; she says
it’s sinful to waste money on town dress-makers.
But she doesn’t mind my wasting it for her. If there was a corner of her
heart still congealed it melted when she took the silk between her
finger and thumb, and fully tested its quality.
“It’s an elegant present, Lyddy,” she declared graciously, “an’ I don’t
mind taking it from you one mite. I’ve always said you meant well; an’
it ain’t your fault if you’re foolish.”
Could I ask for a handsomer coat of white-wash than that?
* * * * *
_October 2nd._ Last night was sticky, hot, and still, with the stars
flaming overhead, as though they were trying to burn the heavens. I fell
asleep at last, to be wakened suddenly by a sound as if the wind were
ripping the sky off the earth, and ten million tons of water were
sluicing through the hole. The world was all one glare of light, with
sudden, momentary breaks of darkness, while a roar as of a thousand
batteries surged up from every quarter of the heavens, and filled to
bursting the black void above our heads. I sprang up to close the
windows, my ankles brushed by quick, ghostly touches, as loose papers
skittered over the floor.
The Peon and David came in, in hastily donned attire, for the storm was
altogether out of the ordinary. The house trembled like a living thing,
and in the air about us we could feel the crackle of the blinding light.
Then came a crash that split the earth. A moment later, through the
surging billows of water hurled through the wind-rent air, we saw a
sudden, leaping light, red in the white electric glare. A huddled
company of straw-stacks had been struck by the descending bolt, and not
even that flood of water could quench the flames. The heavy clouds,
weighted almost to earth, caught the sullen glow beneath them, and as
they were flung onward and upward by the screaming wind, carried the
lurid colors of destruction far into the blackness overhead. One moment
a world of blinding white, as the lightning blotted out everything but
its own wild glare. The next, a red and lowering world, sullen,
portentous, with the evil color spreading, climbing, licking out on all
sides in an orgy of ruin and waste whose greed defied the cataracts of
water, and made the wild wind its minister and slave.
The air rocked with the thunderous down-pour under the crashing clouds.
One of the maples fell prone in the lightning’s glare; and from every
side came the sound of rending wood as branches were wrenched and split
and hurled across the lawn. The house shook, while around us and above
us the Titans fought. In the presence of that unveiled power one’s own
small life dwindled to nothingness. One marveled that human feebleness
yet held a place in a world so charged with forces, the least of which
could wipe out all human effort and leave the earth as bare as a
new-sponged slate.
Yet the fury passed. The Titans screamed and fought, but their power
waned. The wind wavered and sank, sobbing like a beaten child; the rain
splashed dully, dripping from porches and eaves; the thunder died on
distant hills, and the lightnings grew fitful and weak. Even the
storm-born flames were spent, until only a hot coal of light glowed
under the breaking clouds. A star shone here and there, mirrored in the
rain-pools of the drenched fields.
David opened the windows, and we drank in the freshness of the
storm-cleansed air. The new-washed leaves, still green with summer time,
whispered in the quietness, and here and there a cricket chirped, or a
night-bird called to its mate. Power was veiled again, withdrawn; and
life that had trembled in the balance resumed its wonted course.
* * * * *
_October 9th._ I asked Grace today about Cousin Jason. I knew she was
worrying over something. Milly might be happy, but she wasn’t. So I
asked her how he did.
“He won’t speak to me, Lil, at all. I have been there two or three
times; but he wouldn’t see me.”
“Isn’t he coming to the wedding?” I asked.
“I wrote to ask him that—to show him we really wanted him; but he sent
the letter back.”
Her eyes filled with unwonted tears, and I had a sudden desire to jerk
my jay-bird cousin’s feathers out by the roots.
“You’ll just have to train your thoughts to keep away from him, Grace,”
I said. “I know you can, for I’ve steered my own clear of a lot of
things I simply don’t dare to fool with. Don’t shake your head at me,
madam! Do you think Milly doesn’t see that look in your eyes when you
sit and think about Cousin Jason? Are you going to let him hurt her?”
“No, I’m not,” she said firmly. “I’ll make my eyes behave.”
“Then you’ll have to make your thoughts behave behind your eyes. You let
Cousin Jason alone. If you’ll quit paying attention to him long enough,
he’ll come round; but as long as you give him a chance to rebuff you,
he’ll amuse himself doing it.”
Grace laughed.
“Shall I follow your advice or your example—you door-mat for Cousin
Jane?”
I laughed myself.
“Never mind. We can find out how to do a thing perfectly, many a time,
just by doing it the way it shouldn’t be done. And I did send Cousin
Jane home once. I know the recording angel put that down to my credit.”
We fell to talking of her plans. Milly and her husband are to live with
her, he going in to his business daily, like the Peon. But Grace wants
them to have this first winter alone together. So as soon as they get
back from their wedding trip, and Caro is married, she expects to go
away with George’s niece, and spend the winter travelling.
The Peon and I will stay at Bird Corners. The children will be gone for
five or six weeks, and by the time they come home the Perchery will
almost be ready for them to begin feathering their nest—And to think
it’s the real Bird Corners, and not Make-Believe at all!
* * * * *
_October 16th._ The young mocking-birds are learning to sing, and their
efforts are altogether charming. They sit apart, crooning, each to
himself, trying their score over and over, thoughtfully, with pauses in
which they seem to search their memories for forgotten notes. It is as
if melody had come with them from the land of dreams, and they were
trying to catch and hold the elusive sweetness, and teach it to come at
their command. The soft, dreamy music floats through the October
sunshine, at once a memory and a hope. It is a song of the garnered
years, an inheritance from old days of love and aspiration, and it
presages days of love and aspiration yet to be. But more than both of
these, it voices the peace of autumn days, when the earth has finished
the long year’s toil, and turns to its hard-won rest in the quiet of the
misty sunshine.
* * * * *
_October 20th._ I don’t need my note-book these days. When one can do so
much living with people the birds are no longer a necessity. I hear
their songs and calls, and know them for the voices of my friends—real
friends for life. But Caro comes over nearly every day, and always there
is so much to talk about. And often Cousin Jane comes too; and it’s
positively exhilarating to see the way Caro and I are corrupting her
morals. That old lady is getting as worldly-minded as if there were not
a blackbird saint in existence.
The dressmaker made her get a modern corset to be fitted in, and she’s
so pleased with herself in it that she wears it all the time. She really
looks like another person, for Caro has coaxed her into curl-papers o’
nights, and the soft gray fluff around her face is amazingly different
from the wide part with the flat straight bands plastered over her
temples and ears. The old Buff Orpington doesn’t know her any more, and
Caro says he shrieks and runs at the sight of her.
Everybody in Chatterton notices the change, and tells her she looks
years younger—as she does; and the other evening Cousin Chad took up
the tale, and grew positively sentimental, right before Caro. Cousin
Jane blushed and bridled as she must have done over forty years ago, and
next day she bought the prettiest stuff for a house dress, and carried
it to the wedding-gown dressmaker to make! She says it’s every woman’s
Christian duty to be attractive in her own home, and that if Chadwell
will be a boy and like frippery, she’ll have to give in to him; the Lord
didn’t give men much sense anyway, and you just have to humor them
along, like children.
I feel rather ashamed of myself, I must confess. I’ve been laughing at
her all these years, like all the rest of the family, and been cross
with her inside, often. And what she needed most was for somebody to see
the simple human need for praise and petting under all her strident
aggressiveness; for as soon as she got it she blossomed out like this! I
said as much to Caro today, and she cocked her head suddenly to one side
as if she heard someone calling her. Then she jumped up, laughing, spun
around on one toe, and caught me in her arms. She said I’d given her
such a big idea I’d taken her breath away. She wouldn’t tell me what it
was, but ran off to the buggy and drove singing down to the gate.
* * * * *
_October 24th._ Caro has given me the shock of my life. I’ve seen she
had some kind of bee in her bonnet for three or four days, but she was
bent on being mysterious, so I didn’t tease.
Yesterday, as I sat on the side porch, whipping lace, I saw her buggy
coming out from between the cedars, and Cousin Jason was in it! Caro was
beaming, as usual, and Cousin Jason looked as if he were having a good
time, and embarrassed to know what to do with it. I went to meet them as
they drove toward the Perchery.
He greeted me awkwardly, and explained that Caro wanted him to see her
house, and that he’d had no more sense than to give in to her and come.
Caro dashed at him at once.
“You mean you had sense enough to come,” she corrected. “Cousin Jason
really has lots of sense, Mammy Lil, only he thought it was nonsense and
tried his best to hide it. We’re going up to town together tomorrow on a
lark—just we two.”
“I haven’t promised yet,” he growled.
“You needn’t promise,” said Caro sweetly. “I told you it wasn’t
necessary. All you need to do is to go.”
She made him admire the house and the plans; and when he objected to her
numerous closets she assured him that his ideas were all wrong, and that
the lack of closets in his own house was the root of most of his
troubles; he needed them to pack his skeletons in, instead of
entertaining them in public. They went off together presently; but Caro
promised to come back this evening and spend the night. I knew I should
have the tale then.
She came, and the three of us had dinner together, the Peon being in
town. And now that she and David are at the piano in the next room, I
must finish the story.
She went straight from here the other day to Cousin Jason’s, and told
him she wanted him to come to Milly’s wedding and give the bride away.
He was too amazed to be angry at first; and when he did get angry, Caro
stood her ground, kept her temper, and gave him what she called a
preachment—a mixture of fun, coaxing, and straight-from-the-shoulder
talking. She made no impression, apparently, so when she was ready to go
she left, assuring him cheerfully that she would be back in the morning
and take the matter up with him again.
He had always liked Caro, and her sheer audacity pleased him. She took
her work the next morning and spent the day. When Cousin Jason grew
weary of argument, he went out on the farm; but Caro was there when he
came back. She had carried over various good things to eat, and gave him
a lunch such as he hadn’t enjoyed since he left Grace’s. She argued,
coaxed, ridiculed, and scolded. And by the time David, who was sworn to
secrecy, came by to take her driving, Cousin Jason had promised to think
the matter over.
I don’t believe it was what the child said that impressed his stubborn
nature; he simply found Caro herself irresistible.
When she left him that day, his anger with Grace, she said, was really a
crumbling ruin; but he didn’t realize it; so she went back next morning
to topple it to its fall. By the middle of the afternoon he had said
that if he could be convinced Grace really wanted him, he would go. Caro
immediately challenged him to go there with her to dinner that night,
take Grace by surprise, and see for himself. When he refused she taunted
him with backing out of his own test, and dared him to the scratch. She
telephoned Grace finally that she wanted to bring a friend to dinner,
and they drove over together.
“Milly and Bobolink were out in his car,” she said; “and Cousin Grace
didn’t see us coming. We walked right in on her in the living-room
before she knew he was there.” Caro paused to wipe her eyes. “I’ll cry
for six months whenever I think about it. I don’t see how Cousin Grace
can care so much—he’s been so hateful to her. I thought she was going
to faint at first. Then she stood there speechless, her hands stretched
out, and her face the most beautiful thing I ever saw. He called her
name and went toward her, and she just slipped into his arms with one
long sob, as if her heart were breaking. And I went out and shut the
door.”
When Milly came in she was plainly overjoyed, for her mother’s sake, if
not for his; and Bobolink, Caro declared, behaved like an archangel. She
inconsistently elucidated this remark by explaining that he had been
brought up on a farm and was as crazy about the country as I am myself;
and he has always kept up his knowledge of agriculture and his interest
in it. Cousin Jason, who had taken him for what he politely terms a city
fool, thawed visibly toward him during the evening. And before he left
he had promised to give the bride away.
Caro, who believes in striking while the iron is hot, offered to go to
town with him the next day to order his dress-suit for the occasion. As
the wedding is to be on the twenty-ninth, there is certainly no time to
lose. But Cousin Jason, who has scorned conventionality all his life,
balked instantly, and declared that if he had to make a fool of himself
to do it he wouldn’t come to the wedding at all.
Grace agreed at once to his wearing anything he chose; but Caro was
resolved to carry her point.