they drove away.
"Yes," assented Lucy Eastman, slowly; "I think he is; and yet he's
different."
"Oh, yes, he's different," replied Mary Leonard, readily. Both were
quite unconscious of any discrepancy in their statements as they
silently thought over the impression he had made. He was the same
handsome, confident Tom Endover, but there was something gone,--and was
there not something in its place? Had that gay courtesy, that debonair
good fellowship, changed into something more finished, but harder and
more conscious? Was there a suggestion that his old careless charm had
become a calculated and a clearly appreciated facility? Lucy Eastman did
not formulate the question, and it did not even vaguely present itself
to Mary Leonard, so it troubled the pleasure of neither.
"What a day we have had!" they sighed in concert as they drove up again
to the entrance of the inn.
"Lucy," called Mary Leonard, a little later, from one of their
connecting rooms to the other, "I'm going to put on my best black net,
because Tom Endover may call to-night." Then she paused to catch Lucy
Eastman's prompt reply.
"And I shall put on my lavender lawn, but it'll be just our luck to have
it Samuel Hatt."
The next morning Mr. Endover called for them, and they were driven to
the station in his brougham.
He put them on the train, and bought the magazines for them, and waved
his hand to the car window.
"You know, Lucy," said Mary Leonard, as the train pulled out, "Tom
Endover always used to come to see us off."
"Of course he did," said Lucy.
"Do you know, I'm rather glad his wife was out of town," went on Mary
Leonard, after a pause. "I should like to have seen her well enough, but
you know she wasn't an Englefield girl."
"What can she know about old Englefield!" said Lucy, with mild contempt.
"I'm very glad she was out of town."
As they left the city behind them, the early morning sun shone forth
with vivid brilliancy. Against the western sky the buildings stood out
with a peculiar distinctness, as if the yellow light shining upon them
was an illumination inherent in themselves, singling them out of the
landscape, and leaving untouched the cold gray behind them. The lines of
brick and stone had the clearness and precision of a photograph, and yet
were idealized, so that in the yellow, mellow, transparent light a tall,
smoke-begrimed chimney of a distant furnace looked airy and delicate as
an Italian tower.
The "Daily Morning Chronicle"
THE village lay still and silent under the observant sun. The village
street stretched in one direction down the hill to the two-miles-off
railway station, and in the other to the large white house with pillared
portico, from which there was a fine view of the sunset, and beyond
which it still continued, purposeful but lonely, until it came suddenly
upon half a dozen houses which turned out to be another village.
Not a man, woman, or child crossed from one house to another; not a dog
or a cat wandered about in the sunshine. The white houses looked as if
no one lived in them; the white church, with its sloping approach,
looked as if no one ever preached in it and no one ever came to it to
listen. It seemed to Lucyet Stevens, as she sat at the little window of
the post-office, behind which her official face looked so much more
important than it ever did anywhere else, as if the village street
itself were listening for the arrival of the noon mail. For it was
nearly time for the daily period of almost feverish activity. By and by
from the station would come Truman Hanks with the leather bag which, in
village and city alike, is the outward and visible sign of the fidelity
of the government. It is probable that he will bring it up in a single
carriage, for though sometimes he takes the two-seated one, in case
there should be a human arrival who would like to be driven up, this
possibility was so slight a one at this time of year that it was hardly
worth considering. Then the village will awake; the two little girls who
live down below the saw-mill will come up together, confiding on the way
a secret or two, for which the past twenty-four hours would seem to
have afforded slender material. Then old John Thomas will come limping
across from his small house back of the church, to see if there is a
letter for "her,"--she being his wife, and in occasional communication
with their daughter in the city. Then the good-looking, roughly clad
young farmer who takes care of the fine place with the pillared portico
on the hill will saunter down to see if "the folks have sent any word
about coming up for the summer." Then Miss Granger, who lives almost
next door, will throw a shawl over her head and run in to see who has
letters and, incidentally, if she has any herself; and then one or two
wagons will draw up in front of the little store, and the men will come
in for their daily papers.
As Lucyet came around to the daily papers she flushed and looked
impatiently out of the door down the street. Not that the thought of the
daily paper had not been all the time in the background of her mind,
but having allowed her fancy to wander towards the attitude of the
village and its prospective disturbance, she returned to the imminence
of the daily paper again with a thrill of emotion. It was not one of the
metropolitan journals which, as a body, the village subscribed for, nor
was it one of the more widely known of those issued in smaller cities;
it was an unpretentious sheet, neither very ably edited nor extensively
circulated,--the chief spokesman of the nearest county town. But with
all its limitations, its readers represented to Lucyet the great harsh,
unknowing, and yet irresistibly attractive public.
It was not the first time that she had thus watched for it with mute
excitement. Such episodes, though infrequent, had marked her otherwise
uneventful existence at irregular intervals for more than a year. It
would be more correct to say that they had altered its entire course;
that such episodes had given to her life a double character,--one side
of calmness, secrecy, indifference, and the other of delight,
absorption, thrilled with a breathless excitement and uncertainty. But
this time there was a greater than ordinary interest. The verses that
she had sent last were more ambitious in conception; they had
description in them, and mental analysis, and several other things which
very likely she would not have called by their right names, though she
felt their presence: her other contributions had belonged rather to the
poetry of comment. She was sure, almost sure, that they had accepted
these.
Unsophisticated Lucyet never dreamed of enclosing postage for return, so
she could only breathlessly search the printed page to discover whether
her lines were there or in the waste-basket. Friday's edition of the
"Daily Morning Chronicle" was more or less given over to the feeble
claims of general literature. To-day was Friday. Lucyet glanced through
her little window--the tastefully disposed corner of which was
dedicated to the postal service--at the tin of animal crackers, the jar
of prunes, the suspended bacon, and the box of Spanish licorice, and
pondered, half contemptuously, half pitifully, on what had been her life
before she had written poems and sent them to the "Daily Morning
Chronicle." Then her outlook had seemed scarcely wider than that of the
animal crackers with their counterfeit vitality; now it seemed extended
to the horizon of all humanity.
There was the sound of horses' feet coming over the hill. Was it the
mail wagon? No, it was a heavier vehicle; and the voice of the farmer,
slow and lumbering as the animals it encouraged, sounded down the
village street. Over the crest of the hill appeared the summit of a load
of hay going to the scales in front of the tavern to be weighed. So
silent were the place and the hour, that it was like a commotion when
the cart drew up, and the horses were unhitched and weighed, and then
the load driven on, and the owner and the hotel-keeper exchanged
observations of a genial nature. Finally the horses and the wagon
creaked along the hot street down the road which led by the pillared
white house, and again the village was at peace. Lucyet glanced at the
clock. Was the mail going to be late this morning? No. The creaking of
the hay wagon had but just lost itself in the silence, when her quick
ear caught the rattle of the lighter carriage. Her first impulse was to
step to the door and wait for it there, but she did not yield to it; she
would do just as usual, neither more nor less. She would not for worlds
have Truman Hanks suspect any special interest on her part. He might try
to find out its cause; and a hot blush enveloped Lucyet as she
contemplated the possibility of his assigning it to the true one. Only
one person in all the village knew that Lucyet Stevens wrote poetry.
"Most time for the mail to be gittin' heavy," said Truman, as he handed
over the limp receptacle; "the summer boarders'll be along now, before
long."
"Yes, I s'pose they will," answered Lucyet, her fingers trembling as
they unlocked the bag.
"It's a backward season, though," he went on, watching her.
"Yes, it is uncommon backward; the apple blossoms aren't but just
beginning to come out."
It seemed to her that there was suspicion in his observation. He leaned
lazily over the counter, while she took out the mail within the little
office with its front of letter-boxes.
"This hot spell'll bring 'em out. It's the first _hot_ spell we've
had."
"Yes," she assented, blushing again, "it will."
She had spoken of the tardy apple blossoms in her poem,--it was entitled
"Spring." Two or three people, having seen the mail go by, dropped in
and disposed themselves in various attitudes to wait for it to be
distributed. She hurried through the work, her fingers tingling to open
each copy of the newspaper as she laid it in its place. At last it was
done; the little window which had been shut to produce official
seclusion was reopened; and the people came up, one by one, without much
haste, and received the papers and now and then a letter. It did not
take long; and afterward they stood about and talked and traded a
little, their papers unopened in their hands. It was not likely that the
news from outside was going to affect any one of them very much; they
could wait for it; and reading matter was for careful attention at home,
not for skimming over in public places.
Lucyet found their indifference phenomenal; they did not know what might
be waiting for them in the first column of the third page. Was it
waiting for them? The suspense was almost overwhelming; and yet she did
not like to open the copy which lay at her disposal until the store was
empty; she had a nervous feeling that they would all know what she was
looking for. Slowly the group melted away, till there was no one left
except the proprietor, who had gone into the back room to look after
some seed corn, and Silas, the young farmer, who had thrown himself down
into a chair to read his paper at his leisure, and was not noticing
Lucyet. Eagerly she opened the printed sheet. She caught her breath in
the joy of assurance. There it was--"Spring." It stood out as if it were
printed all in capitals. After a furtive look out at the quiet street,
where, in a rusty wagon, an old man was just picking up his reins and
preparing to jog away from the post-office door, and a side glance at
Silas's broad back over by the farther window, Lucyet read over her own
lines. How different they looked from the copy in her own distinct,
formal little handwriting! They had gained something,--but they had
lost something too. They seemed unabashed, almost declamatory, in their
sentiment. They had acquired a new and positive importance; it was as if
the assertions they made had all at once become truths, had ceased to be
tentative. She read them over again. No, they did not tell it all, all
that she meant to say; but they brought back the day, and she was glad
she had written them,--glad with an agitated, inexpressible gladness.
She would like to know what people said of them; for a moment it seemed
to her that she would not mind if they knew that she wrote them.
"Well," said Silas, laying down his paper and standing up, "there isn't
a blamed thing in that paper!"
Lucyet looked up at him startled. Had she heard aright? Then the color
slowly receded from her face and left it pale. Silas was quite
unconscious of having made an unusual statement.
"Well, Lucyet," he went on, "going to the Christian Endeavor to-night?"
"I don't know," she stammered. "No," she added suddenly, "I am not." All
endeavor was a mockery to her stunned soul.
"I dunno as I will either," he observed carelessly as he lounged out.
It was nothing to her whether he went or not, though once it might have
been. She sat still for some minutes after he had gone, looking blankly
at the paper. The page which a few minutes ago had seemed fairly to glow
with interest had become mere columns of print concerning trivial
things; for an instant she saw it with Silas's eyes. John Thomas came
limping for his mail. He had been detained on the way, he explained, and
was late. She handed him his paper through the window, dully,
indifferently. She was suffering a measure of that disappointment which
comes with what we have grown to believe attainment, and is so much more
bitter than that of failure. But the revolt against this unnatural state
of mind came before long. The elasticity of her own enthusiasm
reasserted itself. It could not be that there was nothing in her poem.
She read the lines over again. Two or three were not quite what they
ought to be, somehow; but the rest of them the world would lay hold
of,--that big sympathetic world which knew so much more than Silas
Stevens.
When the hour came to close the office at noon, she locked the drawer
and passed out of the door to the footpath with a sense of triumph under
the habitual shyness of her manner. She still shrank from the publicity
she had achieved, but she was conscious of an undercurrent of desire
that her achievement, since it was real, should be recognized.
When the old postmaster died, leaving Lucyet, his only child, alone in
the world, and interest in official quarters had procured for her the
appointment in her father's place, a home had also been offered her at
Miss Flood's; and it was thither that Lucyet now went for her noonday
meal. Miss Delia Flood was of most kindly disposition and literary
tastes. That these tastes were somewhat prescribed in their
manifestation was no witness against their genuineness. It must be
confessed that Miss Delia's preference was for the sentimental,--though
she would have modestly shrunk from hearing it thus baldly stated,--and,
naturally, for poetry above prose. The modern respect for "strength" in
literature would have impressed her most painfully had she known of it.
The mind turns aside from the contemplation of the effect that a story
or two of Kipling's would have produced upon her could she have grasped
their vocabulary; she would probably have taken to her bed in sheer
fright, as she did in a thunderstorm. Poetry of the heart and emotions,
which never verged, even most distantly, upon what her traditions and
her susceptibilities told her was the indecorous, satisfied her highest
demands, and the less said about nature, except by way of an occasional
willow, or the sad, sweet scent of a jasmine flower, the better. Miss
Delia had fostered Lucyet's love for literature; and it was to Miss
Delia that Lucyet hastened with the great news of the publication of her
poem. It was for this acute pleasure that she had hitherto kept the
knowledge of her attempt from her,--and, too, that her joy might be
full, and that she would not have to suffer the alternating phases of
hope and fear through which Lucyet herself had passed.
As she entered the room where dinner stood on the table and Miss Delia
waited to eat it with her, she suppressed the trembling excitement which
threatened to make itself visible in her manner now that the words were
upon her very lips. They seated themselves at the table. Miss Delia was
small and wiry and grave, and never spilled anything on the tablecloth
when helping.
"Miss Delia," said Lucyet, "I've written a poem."
Her companion looked at her and smiled a shrewd little smile. "I've
guessed as much before now," she said.
"But," said Lucyet, laying down her knife and fork, "it has been
printed."
"Printed, child!" exclaimed Miss Delia, almost dropping hers. At last
the cup of satisfaction was at Lucyet's lips; at least she had not
overestimated the purport of the event to one human being.
"Printed," repeated Lucyet, smiling softly. "Here it is in the paper."
Miss Delia pushed aside her plate, seized the paper, and, opening it,
searched its columns. She had not to look long; there was but one poem.
Lucyet watched with shining eyes. This is what it meant; this was the
realization of her dreams--to see the reader pass over the rest of the
page as trivial, to be arrested with spellbound interest at the word
"Spring," to know that the words that held that absorbed attention were
her words--her own.
As Miss Delia read, gradually her expression changed; from eagerness it
faded into perplexity. Lucyet watched her breathlessly, her hands
clasped, her thin arms and somewhat angular elbows resting on the coarse
tablecloth. From perplexity Miss Delia's look was chilled into what the
observant girl recognized, with a dull pain at her heart, as
disappointment. Lucyet averted her gaze to a dish of ill-shaped boiled
potatoes; there was no need of watching longer the face opposite. Miss
Delia read it all through again, dwelling on certain lines, which she
indicated by her forefinger, with special attention; then she looked up
timidly. She met Lucyet's unsmiling eyes for a moment; then she, too,
looked away, hurriedly, helplessly, to the dish of boiled potatoes.
"I'm sure it is very nice--very nice indeed, Lucyet," she said.
"But you don't like it," said Lucyet.
"Oh, yes, I do," poor Miss Delia hastened to say. "I do like it; the
rhymes are in the right places, and all, and it looks so nice in the
column." Mechanically she pulled her plate back again, and Lucyet did
the same. "I'm proud of you, Lucyet," she went on with a forced little
smile, "that you can write real poetry like that."
"But what if it isn't real poetry?" said Lucyet.
The doubt was wrung from her by the overwhelming bitterness of her
disappointment. A rush of tears was smarting behind her rather
inexpressive eyes; but she held them back. Miss Delia was thoroughly
distressed. She put aside her own serious misgivings.
"But it must be," she argued eagerly, "or they wouldn't have printed
it."
Lucyet shook her head as she forced herself to eat a morsel of bread.
How unconvincing sounded the argument from another's lips! and yet she
knew now that secretly it had carried with it more weight than she had
realized. Miss Delia glanced apprehensively at the folded paper as it
lay on the table. She herself was disappointed, deeply disappointed; she
had expected much, and this,--why, this was, most of it, just what any
one could find out for herself. But she must say something more.
Lucyet's patient silence as she went on with her dinner, never raising
the eyes which had so shone when she first spoke, demanded speech from
her more urgently than louder claims.
"I suppose I thought perhaps there would be more about--about
misfortune, and scattered leaves, and dells,"--poor Miss Delia smiled
deprecatingly, while she felt wildly about for more tangible
reminiscences of her favorite poets, that she might respond to the
unuttered questioning of Lucyet,--"and"--she dropped her eyes--"lovers."
"I don't know anything about dells and lovers," said Lucyet, simply;
"how should I?"
Miss Delia started a little. It had never occurred to her that one must
know about things personally in order to write poetry about them. If it
had, she would never have dreamed of mentioning lovers.
"No, of course not," she said hastily; "but writing about a thing isn't
like knowing about it."
Lucyet was not experienced enough to detect any fallacy in this, and she
dumbly acquiesced.
"You have in all the grass and trees and--and such things as you have
in--very nicely, I'm sure," went on Miss Delia; "only next time"--and
she smiled brightly--"next time you must put in what we don't see every
day--like islands and reefs and such things. I know you could write a
beautiful poem about a reef--a coral reef."
Lucyet tried to smile hopefully in return, but the attempt was a
failure. She had finished her dinner, and she longed to get away; she
was so hurt that she must be alone to see how it was to be borne. She
helped Miss Delia clear the table and wash the dishes, almost in
silence. Two or three times they exchanged words on indifferent
subjects; Miss Delia asked who had had letters, and Lucyet told her, but
it was hard work for both. When it was over, Lucyet paused in the
doorway, putting on her straw hat to go back to the post-office.
Miss Delia stood a moment irresolute, and then stepped to her side.
"Lucyet," she said, her voice trembling, "I don't understand it exactly.
It isn't like the poetry I've been used to. There are things in it that
I don't know what they mean. To be sure, that's so with all poetry that
we do like,"--the tears were in her eyes; it is not an easy thing to
disappoint one's best friend and to be conscious of it,--"but it isn't
like what I thought it was going to be, just about what we see out of
the window. But it's my fault, just as likely as not,"--she laid her
hand on Lucyet's arm,--"that's what I want to say; you mustn't take it
to heart--just 's likely 's not, it's my fault."
Miss Delia did not believe a word of what she was saying, which made it
difficult for her to articulate; but she was making a brave effort in
her sensitive loyalty.
"I know," said Lucyet, gently; "but I guess it isn't your fault;" and
she slipped out to the road on her way to the post-office. Miss Delia
went back, picked up the paper, and, seating herself at the window, she
read "Spring" all through again, word by word; then she laid it aside
again, shaking her head sadly.
Lucyet went quietly behind her little window. Her disappointment
amounted to actual physical pain. She found no comfort, as a wiser
person might have done, in certain of Miss Delia's expressions; she only
realized that her best friend and her most generous critic could find
nothing good in what she had done. Her duty this afternoon was only to
make up the mail for the down train; then her time was her own till the
next mail train came up at half-past five. At two o'clock she closed the
office again and started on a long walk. She longed for the comfort of
the solitary hillsides, where warm patches of sunlight lay at the foot
of ragged stone walls, and there were long stretches of plain and meadow
to be looked over, and rolling hills to comfort the soul. As she climbed
a hill just before the place where a weedy untravelled road turned off
from the highway leading between closely growing underbrush and stone
walls, where now and then a shy bird rustled suddenly and invisibly
among last year's dried leaves, she saw three countrymen standing by the
wayside and talking with as near an approach to earnestness as ever
visits the colloquies of the ordinary unemotional New Englander. One of
them held a copy of the "Daily Chronicle," gesturing with it somewhat
jerkily as he spoke.
For a moment the hope that it is hard to make away with revived in
Lucyet's breast. Were they talking of the poem, she wondered, with a
certain weary interest. She dreaded a fresh disappointment so keenly
that it pained her to speculate much on the chance of it. It was not
impossible that they were saying such meaningless stuff ought never to
have been printed. As the pale girl drew near with the plodding, patient
step which so often proclaims that walking is not a pleasure, but a
necessity, of country life, the men did not lower their voices, which
she heard distinctly as she passed.
"Wal, I tell you, 't was that," said one of them. "He didn't live more'n
a little time after he took it."
"Mebbe he wouldn't have lived anyhow."