But when at the end of the long day they reached the valley, and when
her father came innocently into the garden and stood staring vaguely at
her for a moment--for her visit, and the day of Alix's return had been
kept a secret--her first act was to burst into tears. She clung to the
fatherly shoulder as if she were a storm-beaten bird safely home again,
and although she immediately laughed at herself, and told the
sympathetically watching Peter and Alix that she didn't know what was
the matter with her, it was only to interrupt the words with fresh
tears.
Tears of joy, she told them, laughing at the moisture in her father's
eyes. Hanging on his arm, she went back into the old sitting room
again, under the banksia rose; went up the brown stairway to the old,
clean, woody-smelling bedroom. Her hat and wraps went into the closet;
she danced and exclaimed and exulted over every familiar detail.
She and Alix ran downstairs before supper, and into the garden, and
Cherry drew deep, refreshing breaths of the cool air and laughed over
every bush and flower. Peter came out to join them, her father came
down, and she kissed him again; she could not be close enough to him.
She had a special joyous word for Hong; she laughed and teased and
questioned Anne, when Anne and Justin came back from an afternoon
concert in the city, with an interest and enthusiasm most gratifying to
both.
After dinner she had her old place on the arm of her father's porch
chair; Alix, with Buck's smooth head in her lap, sat on the porch step
beside Peter, and the lovers murmured from the darkness of the hammock
under the shadow of the rose vine. It was happy talk in the sweet
evening coolness; everybody seemed harmonious and in sympathy to-night.
Alix asked Peter's advice regarding her White Minorcas and respectfully
promised to act upon it, and Cherry showed him a new side, an
affectionate, little sisterly deference and confidence quite different
from her old childish sulkiness and pretty caprice.
"Bedtime!" said her father presently, and she laughed in sheer pleasure.
"Daddy--that sounds so nice again!"
"But you do look fagged and pale, little girl," he told her. "You're to
stay in bed in the morning."
"Oh, I'll be down!" she assured him. But she did not come down in the
morning, none the less. She was tired in soul and body, and glad to let
them spoil her again, glad to rest and sleep in the heavenly peace and
quiet of the old home.
Midsummer heat was upon the little valley, but here under the redwoods
there was always coolness; delicious odours of warm sap and loamy
sweetness drifted into Cherry's darkened room; the morning was fresh
and foggy, and the night before she had smiled drowsily to stir from
first sleep and find her father bending over her, drawing up an extra
blanket in the old way. All night long she slept deeply and sweetly, as
she had slept through all the nights of childhood; it was ten o'clock
when Alix came smiling in with a breakfast tray. Presently she carried
it away, and Cherry, with a deep sigh from the fullness of her content,
turned on her side and drowsed again.
Waking, after a while, she locked her hands under her head, and lay
listening happily to the old and familiar sounds of home. She heard
Hong bargaining in his own minor chatter with a fruit vendor, and Alix
and her father chuckling over some small confidence in the porch. She
heard the subdued clink of dishes, the squawk of a surprised chicken,
and the girls' murmuring voices.
It was Saturday, Cherry remembered, when Peter's voice suddenly sounded
above the others and was hastily hushed for her sake; Peter was always
there at three o'clock on Saturdays. There was another voice, too,
pleasant and crisp and even a trifle fastidious; that must be Justin.
Late in the afternoon, rested, fresh, and her old sweet self in the
white ruffles, she came down to join them. They had settled themselves
under the redwoods, Anne and Justin, Peter and Alix and Buck, the dog,
all jumped up to greet her. Cherry very quietly subsided into a wicker
chair, listened rather than talked, moved her lovely eyes
affectionately from one to another.
Peter hardly moved his eyes from her, although he did not often address
her directly; Justin was quite obviously overcome by the unexpected
beauty of Anne's cousin; Anne herself, with an undefined pang, admitted
in her soul that Cherry was prettier than ever; and even Alix was
affected. With the lovely background of the forest, the shade of her
thin wide hat lightly shadowing her face, with the dew of her long
sleep and recent bath enhancing the childish purity of her skin, and
with her blue eyes full of content, Cherry was a picture of exquisite
youth and grace and charm. It was not the less winning because she
seemed genuinely unconscious of it to-day; perhaps before the girls and
Anne's precise little fledgling lawyer no self-conscious thought of
conquest had entered her head.
The dog had gone to her knee and laid his bronze mane against the white
ruffles, and while she listened and smiled, she idly fondled and petted
him with her childish, ringed hand.
"And the next experience is to be at Red Creek?" Justin asked,
delighted with this addition to the family circle and beaming about
upon everyone.
"Mr. Lloyd is there now," Cherry smiled. "Do you know Red Creek?--I'll
have to call you Justin, since you're going to be my cousin so soon,"
she interrupted herself to say shyly.
"No--I--er--I--er--don't!" Justin stammered.
Anne said vivaciously:
"Of course you're to call him Justin! And he's to call you Cherry,
too--those are my orders, Frenny, and don't you dare disobey!"
"But did you get onto the artful and engaging smile Justin gave
Cherry?" Alix giggled later to Peter. She and Peter were in the pantry,
deep in the manufacture of a certain sort of canape. "Why, he was all
in a heap over her!" continued Alix elegantly, as she sampled a small
piece of smeared toast with a severe and wrinkled brow. "Try a little
mustard in it," she suggested, adding confidentially, "You know Cherry
is really too pretty for any use! The rest of us can diet for
complexion or diet for figures, and this hat will be becoming or that
dress will always look well--but Cherry, why, she just knocks us all
galley-west! What's the use of struggling and brushing your hair and
worrying about your clothes, when a girl like Cherry will come along
and sit down and have everybody staring!"
"She is, of course, quite extraordinary!" Peter conceded as he punched
two small holes in the top of a tin of olive oil. The oil welled up
through the holes and he wiped his fingers on a corner of Alix's apron.
"It's just the difference," Alix said, "between being nice looking,
which half the women in the word are, and being a beauty. I remember
that when Cherry was only about ten I used to look at her and think
that there was something rather--well, rather arresting about her face.
It was such an aristocratic little face. I remember her in those old
bluejacket blouses--"
"Yes, I do, too!" Peter said quickly, straightening up from restoring
the vinegar demijohn to an obscure position in a lower cupboard.
"Well--These have to go in the oven now; I'll take them out. Aren't you
going to change for dinner? It's after six now!"
"Since you ask me, I'll see what frock Deshabille has laid out!" Alix
yawned, disappearing in the direction of the sitting room, where he
found her a few minutes later absorbed in a book.
The evening was cooler, with sudden wind and a promise of storm. They
grouped themselves about a fire in the old way; Anne and Justin sitting
close together on the settle, as Martin and Cherry had done a year ago.
Cherry sat next her father with her hand linked in his; neither hand
moved for a long, long time. Alix, sitting on the floor, with her lean
cheeks painted by the fire, played with the dog and rallied Peter about
some love affair, the details of which made him laugh vexedly in spite
of himself. Cherry watched them, a little puzzled at the familiarity of
Peter beside this fire; had he been so entirely one of the family a
year ago? She could almost envy him, feeling herself removed by so long
and strange a twelvemonth.
"Be that as it may, my dear," said Alix, "the fact remains that you
taught this Fenton woman to drive your car, didn't you? And you told
her that she was the best woman driver you ever knew, a better driver
even than Miss Strickland; didn't you?"
"I did not," Peter said, unmovedly smoking and watching the fire.
"Why, Peter, you did! She said you did!"
"Well, then, she said what is not true!"
"She distinctly told me," Alix remarked, "that dear Mr. Joyce had said
that she was the best woman driver he ever saw."
"Well, I may have said something like that," Peter growled, flushing.
Alix laughed exultingly. "I tell you I loathe her!" he added.
"Daddy, we have a lovely home!" Cherry said softly, her eyes moving
from the shabby books and the shabby rugs to Alix's piano shining in
the gloom of the far corner. It was all homelike and pleasant, and
somehow the atmosphere was newly inspiring to her; she had felt that
the talk at dinner, the old eager controversy about books and singers
and politics and science, was--well, not brilliant, perhaps, but worth
while. She was beginning to think Peter extremely clever and only
Alix's quick tongue a match for him, and to feel that her father knew
every book and had seen every worthwhile play in the world.
Martin, whose deep dissatisfaction with conditions at the "Emmy Younger
Mine" Cherry well knew, had entered into a correspondence some months
before relative to a position at another mine that seemed better to
him, and instead of coming down for a day or two at the time of Anne's
wedding, as Cherry had hoped he might, wrote her that the authorities
at the Red Creek plant had "jumped at him," and that he was closing up
all his affairs at the "Emmy Younger" and had arranged to ship all
their household effects direct to the new home. He knew nothing of Red
Creek, except that it was a small inland town in the San Joachim
region, but Cherry's delight at the thought of any alternative for the
"Emmy Younger" was a revelation to Alix. Martin told his wife
generously that he hoped she would stay with her father until the move
was accomplished, and Cherry, with a clear conscience, established
herself in her old room. She wrote constantly to her husband and often
spoke appreciatively of Mart's kindness.
Anne's marriage took place in mid-September. It was a much more formal
and elaborate affair than Cherry's had been, because, as Anne
explained, "Frenny's people have been so generous about giving him up,
you know. After all, he's the last of the Littles; all the others are
Folsoms and Randalls. And I want them to realize that he is marrying a
gentlewoman!"
The older Littles and all the Folsoms and Randalls came to the wedding,
self-respecting, thrifty people who were, for the most part, as Alix
summarized it, "buying little homes on the installment plan in
desirable residential districts of Oakland and Berkeley." There were
bright-faced school teachers, in dark plaid silk waists, and young
matrons in carefully planned colour schemes of brown and gray; and they
all told Alix and Cherry about the family, the members who were
daughters of the Revolution, and the members who belonged to the
Society of the Daughters of Officers of the Civil War.
Cherry and Alix went upstairs after the ceremony as Alix and Anne had
done a year ago, but there was deep relief and amusement in their mood
to-day, and it was with real pleasure in the closer intimacy that the
little group gathered about the fire that night.
After that life went on serenely, and it was only occasionally that the
girls were reminded that Cherry was a married woman with a husband
expecting her shortly to return to him. When she and Alix took part in
the village fairs and bazaars, Alix was still a little thrilled to see
their names in print, "Miss Strickland and her sister Mrs. Lloyd, who
is visiting her," but to Cherry all the romance seemed to have vanished
from her new estate. November passed, and Christmas came, and there was
some talk of Martin's joining them for Christmas. But he did not come;
he was extremely busy at the new mine and comfortable in a village
boarding-house.
It was in early March that Alix spoke to her father about it; spoke in
her casual and vague fashion, but gave him food for serious thought,
nevertheless.
"Dad," said Alix suddenly at the lunch table one day when Cherry
happened to be shopping in the city, "were you and Mother ever
separated when you were married?"
"No--" the doctor, remembering, shook his head. "Your mother never was
happy away from her home!"
"Not even to visit her own family?" persisted Alix.
"Not ever," he answered. "We always planned a long visit in the
East--but she never would go without me. She went to your Uncle
Vincent's house in Palo Alto once, but she came home the next
day--didn't feel comfortable away from home!"
"How long do you suppose Martin will let us have Cherry?" Alix asked.
Her father looked quickly at her and a troubled expression crossed his
face.
"The circumstances seem to make it wise to keep her here until he is
sure that this new position is the right one!" he said.
"If I know anything about Martin," Alix said, "no position is ever
going to be the right one for him. I mean," she added as her father
gave her an alarmed look, "I simply mean that he is that sort of man.
And it seems to me--odd, the way he and Cherry take their marriage! Now
when she got here, five months--six months ago," Alix went on as her
father watched her in close and distressed attention, "Cherry was
always talking about going back to Mart--every time he sent her money
she would say that she ought to keep it for a sudden summons. But she
doesn't do that now. You've been giving her her own allowance right
along, and she has settled down just as she was. A day or two ago
Martin sent her twenty dollars and she has gone into town to spend it
to-day--"
She hesitated, shrugged her shoulders.
"You think she ought to go back?" her father asked.
"No, I don't think so!" Alix answered, eagerly. "I don't think anything
about it. But--but IS that marriage? Is that really for better or for
worse? I mean," she interrupted herself hastily, "as time goes on it
will get harder and harder for her; there will seem to be less and less
reason for going! Mrs. Brown was talking to me about it yesterday, and
she asked in that catty, smiling way she has--"
"Trust the women to gossip!" the doctor said, impatiently.
"Well, nobody minds their gossip!" his daughter assured him. "And for
my part I think it's a shame that a girl can't come back home as simply
as that, if she wants to!" she added, boldly.
"Don't talk nonsense!" her father said, mildly. "You think," he added,
reluctantly, "that it wasn't a good thing for her, eh?"
"Well--" Alix began. "She doesn't seem like other married women," she
said, doubtfully. "And the only thing is, will she ever want to go
back, if she isn't rather--rather coerced. Martin is odd, you know; he
has a kind of stolid, stupid pride. He wrote her weeks ago and asked
her to come, and she wrote back that if he would find her a cottage,
she would; she couldn't go to his boarding-house, she hated boarding!
Martin answered that he would, some day, and she said to me, 'Oh, now
he's cross!' Now, mind you," Alix broke off vehemently, "I'd change the
entire institution of marriage, if it was me! I'd end all this--"
"Well, we won't go into that!" her father interrupted her, hastily, for
Alix had aired these views before and he was not in sympathy with them.
"And I guess you're right: the child is a woman now, with a woman's
responsibilities," he added. "And her place is with her husband.
They'll have to solve life together, to learn together. I'll speak to
Cherry!"
Alix, watching him walk away, thought that she had never seen Dad look
old before. She saw the shadow on his kind face all the rest of that
day.
It was only the next morning when he opened the question with Cherry.
It was a brilliant morning, with spring already in the air. Cherry, on
the porch steps, was reading a letter from Martin. Her father sat down
beside her. She had on one of her old gowns, and bathed in soft
sunlight, looked eighteen again. Emerald grass was already filming the
ground about the house; from under the deep rich brown of the forest
flooring spring had thrust a million tiny spears of green. The redwoods
wore plushy plumes of blue new foliage, and a wild lilac at the edge of
the clearing drifted like pale smoke against the dark woods. Everywhere
life was soaking and bursting after heavy rains; the very posts of the
garden fence were sprouting little feathery tips. The air was sweet and
pungent and damp and fresh, the sky high and blue, and across the
granite face of Tamalpais a last scarf of mist was floating.
"Well, what has Martin to say?" asked the doctor.
"Oh, he doesn't like it much!" Cherry said, making a little face. "He
describes the village as perfectly hopeless. He's moved into the little
house in E Street, and gotten two stoves up."
"And when does he want his girl?" her father pursued.
"He doesn't say," Cherry answered, innocently. "I think he is really
happier to have me here, where he knows I am well off!" she said. "I
know I am," she ended after a moment's thought.
Her father was conscious of a pang; he had not even formed the thought
in his own mind that Cherry was unhappy. He was as trusting and as
innocent as his daughters in many ways; he shrank from the unwelcome
facts of life. His own childhood had been hard and disciplinary, and at
Cherry's age he had been concerned only with realities, with the need
of food and clothes and shelter. That a life could be spoiled simply by
contact with an unsympathetic personality was incomprehensible to him.
The child, he told himself, had a good husband, a home and health, and
undeveloped resources within herself. It was puzzling and painful to
him to realize that there was needed something more--and that that
something was lacking. He felt a sudden anger at Martin; why wasn't
Martin managing this affair!
"Mart doesn't mention any time!" he mused.
"Thanks to you!" Cherry said, dimpling mischievously. "He wrote quite
firmly, just before Christmas," she added, "but I told him that Dad had
been such an angel and liked so much to have me here--" And Cherry's
smile was full of childish triumph.
"My dear," her father said, spurred to sudden courage by a realization
that the matter might easily become serious, "you mustn't abuse his
generosity. Suppose you write that you'll join him--this is
March--suppose you say the first of April?"
Cherry flushed and looked down. Her lips trembled. There was a moment
of unhappy silence.
"Very well, Dad," she said in a low voice. A second later she had
jumped to her feet and vanished in the house. Her father roamed the
woods in wretched misgivings, coming in at lunch time to find her in
her place, smiling, but traces of tears about her lovely eyes.
Nothing more was said for a day or two, and then Cherry read aloud to
the family an affectionate letter in which Martin said that everything
would be ready for her whenever she came now.