AT THE SIGN OF THE FOX
AT THE SIGN OF
THE FOX
_A Romance_
BY
BARBARA
AUTHOR OF “THE GARDEN OF A COMMUTER’S WIFE,”
“PEOPLE OF THE WHIRLPOOL,” AND
“THE WOMAN ERRANT”
NEW YORK
HURST & CO.
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1905,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1905.
Reprinted August, September, December, 1905;
March, 1912.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
This Book is for the Brave
[Illustration]
PRATE NOT TO ME OF WEAKLINGS, WHO
LAMENT THIS LIFE AND NOUGHT ACHIEVE,
I HYMN THE VAST AND VALIANT CREW
OF THOSE WHO HAVE SCANT TIME TO GRIEVE,
FIRM SET THEIR FORTUNES TO RETRIEVE,
THEY SING FOR LUCK A LUSTY STAVE,
THE WORLD’S STANCH WORKERS, BY YOUR LEAVE—
THIS IS THE BALLADE OF THE BRAVE!
—RICHARD BURTON.
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE RIVER KINGDOM 1
II. A BELATED FIRST CAUSE 13
III. THE DECISION OF MISS KEITH 25
IV. INTERLUDE 37
V. A PICTURE 49
VI. THE LAWTONS 64
VII. THE DAY AFTER 84
VIII. TRANSITION 101
IX. THE RETURN 125
X. TATTERS TRANSFERS HIMSELF 144
XI. BREAD 170
XII. REVELATION 195
XIII. AT THE SIGN OF THE FOX 219
XIV. THE UNEXPECTED HAPPENS 243
XV. A MASQUE OF SPRING 263
XVI. THE WAY THE WIND BLEW 282
XVII. LOCKS AND KEYS 302
XVIII. THE RETURN OF MEMORY 324
XIX. SETTERS OF SNARES 342
XX. FIRE OF LEAVES 362
THE PEOPLE
BROOKE LAWTON A Young Woman of To-day, who sees Things as they
might be.
ADAM LAWTON Her Father, a Country-bred New Yorker of Affairs.
PAMELA LAWTON Her Mother, a Brooke of Virginia.
ADAM THE CUB Her Brother, at the Difficult Age of Sixteen.
KEITH WEST Adam Lawton’s Maternal Cousin, who stayed at Home.
LUCY DEAN Brooke’s Friend, who sees Things as they are.
MRS. ENOCH FENTON A Cheerful Cripple.
SILENT STEAD Sportsman and Misanthrope.
MARTE LORENZ Idealist and Artist.
TOM BROWNELL Engaged in climbing the Ladder of Journalism from
the Bottom Rung.
HENRY MAARTEN A Farm Hand working on Shares.
DR. RICHARD RUSSELL Of Oaklands, Friend of Stead and the Lawtons, and
Confidant-general of the County.
THE PIEMAN A Travelling Optimist.
TATTERS A Person, though disguised as an Old Collie Dog.
The Usual Critic’s Chorus, composed of Citizens, Villagers,
Male and Female, Commonplace, Eccentric, or Otherwise.
TIME
The Present Century.
PLACE
Manhattan and the Hill Country of the Moosatuk.
AT THE SIGN OF THE FOX
CHAPTER I
THE RIVER KINGDOM
Robert Stead and Dr. Russell, clad for hunting, tramped down a pent road
through the woodland and halted at the bars that separated it from the
highway.
Like careful woodsmen, they made sure that their guns were at half-cock
before resting them against the tumble-down wall; pulling out pipe
and tobacco pouch, they filled and fingered the smooth bowls with the
deliberation that is akin to restfulness. Then, face to windward, they
applied the match and drew the few rapid puffs that kindle the charmed
fire, and leaning on the top rail, looked down the slope to where the
river, broad and tranquil as it passed, narrowed and grew more elusive
as the eye traced it toward its starting-point in the north country many
miles away.
For more than a hundred miles between its throne in the hill country
and the sea travels the Moosatuk, and all the land through which it
passes is its kingdom. What its stern mood was in the ancient days when
as an ice-floe, maybe, it tore a pathway through the granite hills,
fortressing them with splintered slabs and tossing huge boulders from
its course, man may but guess; but to-day a wild thing, half tamed, it
obeys while it still compels. Above, below, confined by dams, it does the
will of man; and yet, flow where it will, man follows, with his mills,
his factories, his railways, until, by spreading into shallows, it half
eludes his greed. For twenty sinuous miles it follows a free, sunlit
course, now running swift and lapping the banks of little islands wooded
with hemlocks, now stretching itself on the smooth pebbles until it
tempts the unwary to the crossing on a bridge of stepping-stones. For all
this space the ferns and wood flowers stoop from the slanting banks to
snatch its lingering kisses, the wood folk drink from it, the wild fowl
sleep on it, and its waters bear no heavier responsibility or weight than
driftwood or the duck boat, that steals silently forth, a shadow in the
morning twilight, like the Mohican canoes that a mere century ago plied
the selfsame waters.
Such is the Moosatuk where it passes Gilead, a peaceful village halfway
between Stonebridge and Gordon, with its farmsteads filling the fertile
river valley and climbing up the hillside as if to shun railways, until
from below the topmost are lost in the trees, like the aeries of some
furtive hawk or owl of the woods. This was the scene which lay below the
hunters as they paused to rest in the October noon glow before returning
to Stead’s lodge on top of Windy Hill.
For a little space neither man spoke. In fact, the last mile of their
walk had passed in silence save for the occasional smothered exclamation
of the younger hunter, when he came upon a snare, now and then, and broke
it. Even the dry leaves lay untouched in their tracks, for the foot of a
woodsman seems instinctively to avoid the dead twig and leaf-filled rut.
The dogs, two brown-eyed, mobile Gordon setters, well understanding
that the signal of stacked arms and the smell of tobacco meant that
the day’s work was over, started unchidden on a private hunting-trip,
nosing about through the ground-pine and frost-bleached lady-ferns, and
paused with tails swinging in wide circles before a great patch of glossy
wintergreen, where a ruffed grouse or shy Bob-white had doubtless made
his breakfast on the pungent scarlet berries. Out in the little-used
highway, October, herself an Indian in her colour schemes, had set her
loom in the grass-divided wheel tracks, a loom of many strands, wherein
she wove a careful tapestry of russet, bronze, crimson, gold, and ruby
from leaf of beech, sumach, oak, pepperidge, chestnut, birch, and
purpling dogwood, only to drop it as a rug for hoof tracks or fling it
aloft at random, a bit of gracious drapery for the too stern granite.
Between these two men, neither young, as often happens between close
friends of either sex, silence did not come from lack of mutual
understanding. It is only the machine-made or undeveloped brain that
mistakes garrulity for companionship and casts the blight of motiveless
chatter upon the precious gift of silent hours, wherein the soul may
learn to know itself.
More than fifteen years divided their ages, and their temperaments were
wider still apart; you could judge this even from trifles, as the shape
of their pipes and the way in which they held and smoked them.
Robert Stead, turning fifty, tall and well knit, had heavy, matted brown
hair, beard cut close, and impenetrable eyes, whose colour no one could
tell offhand, any more than he might read the meaning of the mustache-hid
mouth. His firm walk and clear skin told of strength and present outdoor
life; his slightly rounded shoulders spoke either of past indoor hours or
the resistless, flinching attitude where a man ceases to face the storms
of life with chest thrown out and head erect as if to say to warring
elements—“See, I am ready; come and do your worst!” “Silent Stead” people
hereabout called him from his taciturnity, and he either held his short
brier close against his lips and puffed between tightly clinched teeth,
as if pulling against time, or in the revulsion let the flame die out
until, forgotten, the pipe hung cold, bitter, and noisome between his
lips.
Dr. Russell’s pipe, a plain meerschaum of moderate length, held with
light firmness, was smoked deliberately as something that soothed yet
held in no thrall, and when its first sweetness passed, with a sharp,
cleansing rap, he returned the pipe to his pocket. Though in the later
sixties, the doctor radiated all the hope of youth. One realized that
his was a face to trust, even before compassing its details; the easy
turn of his shapely, well-poised head, with its closely cut hair blended
of steel and silver, every glance of his searching gray eyes, that
looked frankly from under eyebrows that were still black, conveyed both
comprehension and sympathy. His nose was straight and not too long, and
the thin nostrils quivered with all the sensitiveness of a highly strung
horse, while the mouth was saved from the sternness to which the firm
chin seemed to pledge it by a drooping of the corners that told of a keen
sense of humour. In stature he was of medium height, but his shoulders
were still squared to the burdens of life, and his erect carriage made
him appear tall; but, after all, the secret of his youth lay in a quality
of mind, the very quality that the younger man lacked—his steadfast
faith and confidence in his fellow-men; this had lasted undaunted by
disappointment during the forty years and more that he had held to them
the closest, wisest, and most blessed of human ministries—that of the
good physician.
The doctor’s pipe grew cold, and placing it in one of the deep pockets
of his jacket, he fumbled in the other as he turned to his companion,
saying: “Was I not right, Rob? Give the city boys, with their automobiles
and pretty clothes, and the trolley-car hunters, the first two weeks
of October in which to moult their fine feathers, ruin their firearms
and dispositions, and decide that the Moosatuk has been overhunted, and
we may have the rest of open season to ourselves without danger when
crossing a brush lot in broad daylight of being mistaken for wild turkeys
or what not. It is the eighteenth to-day. We’ve tramped good twenty miles
since daybreak, and whom have we met? A woman looking for cows, two men
stacking slab sides, and some school children on the cross-road, while
we’ve had our fill of air unpeppered by small shot, this glorious view at
every curve and through every gap, and,” freeing his pocket, “a brace of
grouse, another of quail, and three woodcock as an excuse for our outing,
in the eyes of those who insist that excuses, aside from the desire, must
be made for every act.
“Strange, perhaps, that the killing and hunting lust should be an excuse.
I often feel like begging pardon of these little hunched-up feathered
things; but in spite of humanitarian principles, I somehow fear that
we are growing too nice, and when the hunting fever dies out wholly,
something vital is lacking in a man.”
“Hunting fever or not,” replied Stead, kicking a decaying log at his
feet into dust, “I’d rather the woods were full of visible men with guns
than invisible snares. Do you know that I have broken thirty or more
this morning? Some day these setters of snares and I shall meet, and
there will be trouble; it seems that I am destined always to war with
the intangible.” Then he spread his game on the fence, and though it
outranked the doctor’s spoils, he seemed to take no pleasure in it, but
still looked moodily across the river.
“Ah, Rob, Rob,” said the doctor, throwing his arm affectionately about
the shoulder of the taller man, who leaned heavily on the fence-top,
“will your mood never change? Can you not forgive and at least play
bravely at forgetting?
“It is ten years—no, eleven—since your child whom I tended died and Helen
left you, or you her, whichever way you choose to put it. The why of it
all you have never deemed best to tell, and I have never asked, trusting
your manhood. She led her own life then for the four years she lived. I
have managed to see you every year since, in spite of the drifting life
your profession forced upon you. And since the railway’s completion, when
you settled here, I’ve spent a week of my holiday each autumn with you,
hoping to see a change, believing you would waken and live your life out
instead of moping it away. But no! Your work and old comrades need you,
and you still refuse. What is it, Rob? Life seems so good to me with the
threescore and ten in plain sight that I cannot bear to see it playing
through your fingers at fifty.
“Love may be gone, or clouded, let us say, but there is always work, and
work is glorious! Get out of your own shadow, man, and let the sun pass.
It is with you as _The Allegorist_ says:—
“‘One looked into the cup of life,
And let his shadow fall athwart;
The wine gleamed darkly in the cup—
It surely was of bitter sort.’”
Stead withdrew his gaze from the river and turned it on the face of his
companion.
“I know it all, doctor, and much more than you can say. I know you’ve
clung to me when no one else would trouble, and that you drive all those
forty miles from home every autumn, rain or shine, to tramp the woods
with me, to sit beside my fire and give me comfort, and yet—— Do you
remember the old adage, that ‘Life without work is water in a sieve’? but
in the antiphon lies the sting, ‘Work without motive cannot live.’ It is
motive that is dead in me. I think I have forgiven, I delude myself if I
say I have forgotten, but, good God, doctor, can you imagine sitting and
feeling yourself as useless as water in a sieve and _not caring_? That is
my misery. If I could only really care, heart and soul, for anything for
one short month, I would give the rest of my life for it.
“I have not even the primal motive of hunger that sets the wolf
a-prowling. The few yearly thousands my father left me have put that
chance away, and my contempt for that form of cowardice precludes
suicide. So I have actually come to be what passes current for content,
with every one but you. Here I am, located for life on the hillside,
with only half-breed José left of what was, with my books, which can
neither dissemble nor betray, for company, and so long as I have food
I shall have dog friends to follow me by day and sleep by me at night.
Then, as long as eyesight lasts, there is my River Kingdom,” and Stead
stretched his arms, half to relax their tension, toward the silver fillet
shimmering in the valley below, in which at that moment some white gulls,
with black-tipped wings, hanging in the skylike clouds, were mirrored.
Then, giving a nervous, mirthless laugh, he whistled to the dogs, and as
if led to speak of himself too much, he turned to action, and vaulting
over the bars with but a hand touch, trailed his feet through rifts of
glowing leaves, and reaching backward for his gun, said lightly, “Who was
it, by the way, that christened this region The River Kingdom? Was it
your daughter?”
“No, it was not Barbara,” said the doctor, crossing the bars, but more
sedately, his cheery temper relieved at the change of theme. “It was
Brooke Lawton, a cousin or niece or some such kin of Miss Keith West—a
lovable child, full of both romance and common sense. Her father, Adam
Lawton, whom you must have met in your capacity as a civil engineer,
for he has floated many railway schemes, was born here in Gilead in the
West homestead, his mother being of that family. Though he never comes
here, and all the kin but Keith, a first cousin, are dead, some slight
sentiment binds him to the past, and he has kept the little farm abreast
of all improvements and leaves Keith in charge. A few years ago Brooke,
his elder child and only daughter, recovering from an illness, came up
and spent the autumn; and I, being here for the shooting and knowing
Keith well, for she and my sister Lot were schoolmates at Mt. Holyoke
long ago, was called to see her several times.
“But there was little that I could do for her,—indomitable pluck and
dauntless spirits were her best medicine. Well I remember one gray, cold
day, the last of her stay, I found Miss Keith in some alarm about her, as
the child had gone out on foot over two hours before.
“As we stood consulting in the porch, a slim, gray-coated figure, with
soft brown hair flying like a gypsy’s, arms full of autumn leaves and
berries, came swiftly down the lane between house and wood, and throwing
her load on the steps, gazed at it in a sort of ecstasy, from which she
waked only at Miss Keith’s words of chiding.
“‘I—lost?’ she queried, straightening her thick eyebrows into an
expression of incredulity, ‘why, Cousin Keith, I’ve only been to my River
Kingdom collecting tribute, but when I’m grown up and do as I please, I’m
coming back here to reign and have the wild flowers bow to me when I pass
and the little wood beasts follow me in procession.’
“I must have told you of it at the time, for I was stopping with you.
Yes, it was Brooke Lawton who christened the River Kingdom,—but she
never returned, and I heard indirectly that she had gone abroad to study
art. Come to think of it, she must be a grown woman now, at the rate
time goes. All of which reminds me that I sent word that I would go to
Miss Keith’s to-day; she wants counsel of some sort, about what I could
not even surmise from her letter. As she is one of the good middle-aged
women who always wish excuses made for every act, I will take her these
grouse as an apology and tangible explanation as to my clothes and gun,
and as she always insists that I should take a meal with her, you will
not see me until supper-time. If you will tell José to dress and split
the quail, I myself will broil them over the wood coals in your den,
spitted on hickory forks. Metal should never touch wild fowl, but you of
the younger generation do so grudge trouble and seem to have no capacity
for detail,” and, half chiding, half laughing, Dr. Russell shouldered
his beloved gun, picked up the grouse, smoothed the rumpled ruff of the
cock bird, and started on the mile walk downhill to the West homestead,
whistling.
Robert Stead looked after him a moment, and then, calling the dogs to
heel, started up the hillside in an opposite direction. Before him for
a single instant stood the form of the young girl of the River Kingdom,
as Dr. Russell had portrayed her, with arms full of gay leaves and vines
that she had stripped from the hedges as she went, but as he reached her
she vanished, and turning toward the river itself, he was half surprised
to find it still moving as ceaselessly as ever. Love had mocked him long
ago and motive eluded him, but the dog at his side touched his fingers
with caressing tongue, and the River Kingdom still remained.