The garden looked dreary and desolate in spite of the afternoon
sunshine. The lilac and lavender bushes were past their prime; their
wealth of sweetness had been squandered by riotous offshoots. The wind
played among the branches, and cast changing sun-flecked shadows on the
grass-grown paths, narrowed by the encroachment of the box borders that
had once lined the way with the stiff precision of troops before a royal
progress.
The flowers had the air of being overburdened with the monotony of their
existence. They could never have had that aspect if they had been only
wild flowers and had never experienced human care and companionship.
That made the difference.
The gate hung on rusty hinges; it answered with a long-drawn-out
creaking, as it was pushed open by a man who had been a stranger to the
place for nearly twenty years.
Yes, the garden was certainly smaller than it had been pictured by his
memory. There had been a time when it had appeared as a domain of
extensive proportions, and the wood beyond of marvelous depth and
density.
He was conscious of a sense of disappointment. The property would
scarcely realize as high a price in the market as he had hoped; and it
was incumbent upon him to part with it, if he would be released from the
narrow circumstances that hemmed him in.
He had arranged to meet the lawyer there that afternoon. One of the
latter's clients had already made a bid for the estate. The timber, at
all events, would add to the value.
The house faced southward upon the garden. It was here the man had been
brought up by an old great-aunt. He guessed later that she had grudged
him any of the endearments that death had denied her bestowing upon her
own children. Her affections had all been buried before he was born.
Besides, he took after the wrong branch of the family.
She must have possessed a strong personality. It was difficult to bring
to mind that it was no longer an existent force. Every one, from the
parson to the servants, had stood a little in awe of her. He remembered
the unmoved manner in which she had received the news of the death of a
near relative. It had overwhelmed him with a sudden chill, that so she
would have received tidings of his own. It had taken all the sunshine in
the garden to make him warm again.
In the mood that was growing upon him, it would not have much surprised
him to find her sitting bolt upright in her carved high-back chair, as
she had sat in the time of his earliest recollections,--the thin, yellow
hands, on which the rings stood out, folded in her lap. On one occasion
she had washed his small hands between hers. The hard lustre of the
stones acquired a painful association with the ordeal. The blinds would
be partially drawn in the musk-scented parlor, to save the carpet from
further fading, for there had been a tradition of thrift in the family
from the time of its settlement,--a tradition that had not been
maintained by its latest representative.
Like the atmosphere of a dream, the years grew dim and misty between now
and the time when summer days were longer and sunnier, and it had been
counted to him for righteousness if he had amused himself quietly and
not given trouble.
A stream that he had once dignified with the name of river formed a
boundary between the garden and the wood. Although it had shrunk into
shallow insignificance,--with much beside,--a faint halo of the romance
with which he had endued this early scene of his adventures still clung
to the spot.
As he came to the stream, he saw the reflection of a face in the
water--not his own, but that of one much younger.
It was so he met the boy. The child had been placing stepping-stones to
bridge the stream, and now came across, balancing himself on the
slippery surfaces to test his work. It was odd that he had remained
unobserved until this moment, but that was due to the fact of the
water-rushes on the brink being as tall as he.
The boy's eyes met those of the man with a frank, unclouded gaze. He did
not appear astonished. That is the way when one is young enough to be
continually viewing fresh wonders; one takes everything for granted. He
saw at a glance that this other was not alien to him; his instinct
remained almost as true as those of the wild nature around.
For his own part, he had an unmistakable air of possession about him. He
appeared to belong to the place as much as the hollyhocks and
honeysuckle; and yet, how could that be?
'Probably a child of the caretaker,' the man told himself.
He had authorized the agent to do what was best about keeping the house
in order. He had not noticed what signs it had to show of habitation.
Now he saw from the distance that it had not the unoccupied appearance
he had expected of it; nor the windows, the dark vacant stare of those
that no life behind illumines.
'Do you live here?' he asked of the boy.
'Yes.' The boy turned proudly toward the modest gray pile in the manner
of introducing it, forgetting himself in his subject. 'It's a very old
house. There's a picture over the bureau in the parlor of the man who
built it, and planted the trees in the wood. Hannah says--
'Hannah!'
It was a foolish repetition of the name. Of course there were other
Hannahs in the world. The old servant of that name, who had told the man
stories in his boyhood, had been dead more years than the child could
number.
'Yes,--don't you know Hannah? She'll come and call me in presently, and
then you'll see her. Hannah says they--the trees--have grown up with the
family' (he assumed a queer importance, evidently in unconscious mimicry
of the one who had repeated the tradition to him), 'and that with them
the house will stand or fall. Do you think the roots really reach so
far?'
There was an underlying uneasiness in the tone, which it was impossible
altogether to disguise.
As the other expressed his inability to volunteer an opinion on this
point, the boy went on, seeing that his confidences were treated with
due respect:
'I dug up one myself once--I wished I hadn't afterwards--to make myself
a Christmas tree like I'd read about. I just had to hang some old things
I had on it. It was only a tiny fir, small enough to go in a flower-pot;
but that night the house shook, and the windows rattled as if all the
trees in the forest were trying to get in. I heard them tapping their
boughs ever so angrily against the pane. As soon as it was light, I went
out and planted the Christmas tree again. I hadn't meant to keep it out
of the ground long: they might have known that.'
'Have you no playfellows here?'
The boy gave a comprehensive glance around. 'There are the trees; they
are good fellows. I wouldn't part with one of them. It's fine to hear
them all clap their hands when we are all jolly together. There are
nests in them, too, and squirrels. We see a lot of one another.'
This statement was not difficult to believe: the Holland overalls bore
evident traces of fellowship with mossy trunks.
The boy did most of the talking. He had more to tell of the founder of
the family whose portrait hung in the parlor, and of how, when he--the
child--grew up, he rather thought of writing books, as that same
ancestor had done, and making the name great and famous again. He had
not decided what kind of books he should write yet. Was it very hard to
find words to rhyme, if one tried poetry? He was at no pains to hide
such fancies and ambitions, of which his kind are generally too
sensitive or too ashamed to speak to their elders, and which are as a
rule forgotten as soon as outgrown.
'Shall we go in the wood now?' said the boy. 'It's easy enough to cross
over the stepping-stones.'
'Yes, let us go.' The man was beginning to see everything through the
boy's eyes. The garden was again much as he had remembered it, inclosed
in a world of beautiful mystery. Nothing was really altered. What
alteration he had imagined had been merely a transitory one in himself.
The child had put a warm, eager hand into his; together they went into
the wood, as happy as a pair of truant school boys; they might have been
friends of long standing.
'So this is your enchanted forest?' said the man.
'Not really enchanted,' replied the boy seriously. 'I once read of one,
but of course it was only in a fairy tale. That one vanished as soon as
one spoke the right word. It would be a very wrong word that could make
this vanish.' He had a way of speaking of the wood as if it were some
sacred grove.
His companion suddenly felt guilty, not quite knowing why.
'Of course some one might cut them down.' The boy lowered his voice; it
seemed shameful to mention the perpetration of such a deed aloud. 'It
would be terrible to hear them groan when the axe struck them. The young
ones mightn't mind so much; but it would be bad for the grandfather
trees who've been here from the beginning. Hannah says one would still
hear them wailing on stormy nights.'
'Even if they had been felled and carted away?'
'Yes, even then; though, to be sure, there would be no one to hear the
wailing if it's true that the house must fall, too, at the same time.
But we needn't trouble about that; none of it is likely to happen. You
see, if it did, where should I be?'
He laughed merrily. This last argument appeared to him to be quite
conclusive. Such an important consideration placed the awful contingency
quite out of the question, and transformed it into nothing more than a
joke.
The child's laughter died away as they both stood still to listen. Each
thought he had heard his own name called.
'It's Hannah,' said the boy; and off he raced toward the house, barely
saving himself from running into the arms of another person who had
turned in at the gate.
* * * * *
'Who was the boy who ran round by the espaliers a minute ago? One would
scarcely have judged him to be a child of the caretaker.'
The man's heart sank with a dull thud: something had told him the answer
before it came.
'Child!' The lawyer looked puzzled. 'I did not see one. No children have
any business in this garden; neither is there any caretaker here. The
house has been shut up altogether since the old servant you called
Hannah died, eleven years ago.'
They had reached the veranda. The westering sun had faded off the
windows. It was easy to see that the house was empty. The shutters were
up within, and the panes dark and weather-stained. Birds had built their
nests undisturbed about the chimney stacks. The hearthstones had long
been cold.
'My client is willing to purchase the property on the terms originally
proposed,' the lawyer was saying. 'He contemplates investing in it as a
building site. Of course the timber would have to be felled--'
A breeze passed through the treetops like a shudder. The younger man
interposed:--
'I am sorry you should have had the trouble of coming here, but I have
decided to keep the old place after all--stick and stone. It is not
right it should go out of the family. I must pull my affairs together as
well as I can without that.'
The little phantom of his dead boyhood was to suffer no eviction.