And for a moment they sped in silence, up a side street, into an open
square of shops and brick buildings, for all the world like the High
Street of any English Provincial town.
“But how English it looks!” Ruth exclaimed.
“Does it? Why not?” said General Adgate. “However,” he added, “we pride
ourselves, further on, that we're distinctively American.”
The brick buildings surely enough dissolved into avenues set with superb
elms. Big comfortable houses encircled by verandas,--many adorned
with those fluted Corinthian columns, mark in Oldbridge of the early
nineteenth century,--all snugly set back among flower gardens and lawns,
emanated peace, prosperity, good will.
“This place must be Arcady in summer.... How charming it is,” Ruth
cried, delighted. “These gardens in flower, these trees in leaf----”
“It's not so bad,” said General Adgate, dryly. “Longfellow christened it
the Rose of New England.”
“But------,” he added, “we call this the City of Oldbridge, a modern
matter. You, Ruth, belong to the Court End of the town--you are of what
we call the Old Town.”
Vastly amused at the distinction, a Yankee Faubourg Saint Germain,
Ruth plied him with questions. In five minutes the agreeable news that
she,--the last of the house of Adgate in America, Ruth Adgate verily
the salt of the earth, tracing a clean English ancestry back to the
crusades, to mistier periods beyond, here held her Yankee acres in grant
first from an English Sovereign, and, without a drop of blood-shed from
Indian Sachems,--gave to her humourous sense of proportion somewhat to
smile over.
On they went,--under endless prospects of arching elm trees, whose
branches threw oblique attenuated shadows among the rays of the
descending sun. A few soft clouds at the horizon were tinted rosy
and red. Then the very blue, blue sky, suffused with violet and rose,
suddenly flared. Far and wide, from earth to zenith, far and wide the
sky burst into a glorious scarlet conflagration.
The city lay behind, meadows stretched broadly at either side, and
to the right a pretty line of hill and wood etched itself against the
blushing clouds.
“The beginning of your acres, my dear,” said the old man, bowing his
head. “There they lie, untouched, just as James the First ceded them
to your forefathers, just as the Indian Sachems of the Mohegan Tribe
confirming the gift, withdrew from 'em. The bit of wood there is known
to this day as the Wigwam and the last Indian hut in this State
disappeared when it was destroyed by fire a hundred years ago.”
They had passed a road that wandered into the woodland, they were
rolling smartly by stone walls that shut in a goodly reach of close-cut
lawn all seamed and scarred by grey jutments of rock, which rising,
mounting, reached a hill through terraced gardens trimly laid and
skirting the summit. The carriage took a sharp sweep upward into a
gravelled drive, rolled on a few paces, stopped abruptly before a brown,
rambling house,--Miss Adgate had reached the end of her journey.
“Welcome home,” said General Adgate, as he helped Ruth to alight. He
bent down, kissed her, and led her up the steps into the house.
V
It was morning. It was nine of the clock. Miss Adgate walked, alone,
through a path that penetrated to the Wigwam. Almost hidden by a thicket
of sweet fern, juniper, barberry and briar which grew at either side,
which clung too affectionately to her skirts and from which she had
difficulty in disengaging herself, the path, she thought, might have led
her to the Palace of The Sleeping Beauty.
It was morning, as I have said, and it was the morning of her first
day, and early abroad, Miss Adgate strolled in a pleasant sort of
reverie,--thinking of nothing, perhaps, or thinking of a number of
things. The Indian summer sunshine filtered upon her through half-bare
branches not quite denuded of their yellow and purple and scarlet
leafage; and every now and then a leaf came fluttering down in the light
breeze. A squirrel, now and then, darted out along a branch, paused--and
like an Italian lizard, all a-gleam and a-whisk, gleamed, whisked, and
disappeared. But Ruth knew two little black beadlike eyes still watched
her, as she went, from behind the lattice-screen of twigs.
Every now and then she passed a formidable, a monumental boulder;
moss-grown; covered with grey lichen; dropped there by some glacier,
æons since, unless Heaven, it occurred to her, had placed it where it
stood, and why not? for picturesque intent?... Every now and then a
tardy bluejay flitted by, lighted upon a branch and sent forth his
imperious _cha, cha, cha!_... Or a woodpecker, in the distance, made
his tapping noise as he sounded the trees for his meal. A dry twig
would break, suddenly,--come tumbling head foremost down, down through a
rustle of leaves, and all these sounds struck upon Miss Adgate's ears
in her reverie, gave her exquisite pleasure. She enjoyed the romance and
the solitude of this wild wood; she delighted in the knowledge that
she was walking safely through her own preserves; and _treve de
compliments_, her uncle had left her upon a brief good-bye after
an early breakfast. Ruth burned to discover alone, he knew, her
domain--General Adgate had divined it without a hint.
“You'll want to take a walk this morning through your woods, Ruth,”
said he. “Cross the hill,--you'll find a road to the right leading by
a brook,--follow the road,--it takes you over the brook by a bridge and
soon becomes a path. No one will molest you, it's yours.”
“What, the brook as well?” queried she, feeling, somehow, like a very
little girl in his presence.
“Yes, and the brook as well. You can't get away from your
preserves,--they stretch on for miles.”
So it was that Miss Adgate, abroad at nine o'clock, happened to be off
for a matutinal stroll through paths wet and dewy, glad of her freedom,
glad to be alone in a new world, surrender herself to the romance of a
new train of thought.
She came, presently, to a clearing in the wood. The path ended,
abruptly, at a flat bed of rock which descended for some hundred feet to
another opening in the wood. There were bayberry and barberry and fern
along the way, slashed scarlet by the frosts; there were fifty plants
she promised to herself to learn the names of, which gave forth strong,
sweet scents in the hot sun. Ruth sat down. A swish, through the dry
leaves, a stir of the brown grass, told of the frightened escape of some
little living thing, and set her heart to palpitating unaccountably with
love for it.
Her mood had become a trifle exalted, her perceptions quickened by
her promenade. Each insect, bird, bush she came upon began to assume a
personality; claimed the privilege to live upon her land. She was the
suzerain of their little lives; she could have held a court of justice;
she could have dispensed favours, played their games, ruled them, thrown
herself into their griefs and joys, with heart and soul. Seated here, in
the warm sun, on the warm stone checked with patches of green and brown
club-moss, she inhaled the crisp fragrance of the bushes under the sun's
kisses; she looked afar, on to the trees below and over their heads at
the vivid sky, and upon faraway violet hills, and upon green and orange,
brown and guileless meadows. The world seemed good and wonderful, and
she felt exceedingly content.
“The Ruth Adgate who spent twenty years of her life in Europe is no
more,” she thought, lightly. “The young person who has tasted most of
the sweets of European civilisation, walked in marble halls, refused a
Duke, run away from the outrage offered her dignity by the offer of a
morganatic marriage with a Crown Prince,--the lovesick girl who wandered
through the moonlight at the Lido, floated upon the silent lagoons of
Venice, discoursed with wits in lovely gardens in Florence, and herself
the cause of wit in others, hung upon their discourse--that was quite
another person! That was but an early incarnation, never the real Miss
Adgate. _This_ is the real Miss Adgate! In spite of every influence to
the contrary,--the product of her native land.”
Lucilla, Pontycroft--Pontycroft, Lucilla! How far away they seemed....
Their names stirred her heart as she pronounced them. But even so--was
not this best? The present Miss Adgate in a short skirt, a blue, soft
felt hat, tip-tilted over her eyes, a stick in her hand, her thoughts
for all society; Miss Adgate with this hardy New England nature for
background,--Ruth Adgate taking a solitary walk upon her own land, with
the feeling that good will and satisfaction smiled at her because of
her presence there, was not this the Real person who had found her true
niche in the world?
“How singular,” she reflected. “The transformation has taken place
overnight. It is almost as though I had been here forever! And to-day
I feel as though I had a destiny--as though Fate had something up her
sleeve here for me. I've begun like one of Henry Harland's heroines and
I'm convinced that whatever the Powers are preparing for me--I shall
accept it here,--just as I accept all this--gratefully, gaily, without
demur.”
Ruth glanced at the violet hills and the guileless meadows and a thrill
passed through her. She jumped up, a white hand held to shade her face.
“_Basta!_ I've rested long enough, the sun here is too hot,” said Miss
Adgate. “I think I'll discover what lies beyond, in the heart of that
wood there,” and off she started, blushing at her emotion.
A company of crows in a distant field caw-cawed, querulously, at her.
Their raucous voices fitted the rough woodland, the vigorous autumn
smells, the haze of the mellow golden morning. She came again to the
little brown brook gurgling quietly over its bed of brown stones and
leaves and the fancy took her to follow its course. Wet feet were of no
consequence, determined to see all of her possessions Ruth skirted its
purling side and discovered presently that here the brook, lifted from
the earth by hand of artifice, was confined to a long, shallow, wooden
aqueduct, an aqueduct open to the air and to the tracery of boughs
above and to blue skies reflected in the water. Through this conduit
the little brook bubbled and bounded, clear as crystal; icy cold to the
touch as she dipped her hand in and let the water run along her wrist.
“Ah,” thought the young lady, “this must be our famous spring!--I've
reached the headquarters of the Nile or I'm very near them.” And through
the trees in truth, she perceived, further on, a rough hut, built to
protect the stream's source from inroads of man and beasts.
She sat herself on a fallen tree trunk, leaned back and gazed with
half-closed eyelids into the network of branches--oaks, larches, birch,
hazel, maple,--nearly bare of foliage. Here again, the ground, checkered
with green moss-patches was interspersed with little plants, “which must
be all a-flower in the spring,” thought Ruth and she vowed that when
spring came she would return to pluck them.
Then--presto!... Without a note of warning--the agreeable independence
of her mood vanished. Lucilla, Pontycroft!... Her mind, her heart, her
very soul yearned for them. And a homesick longing for the finished, for
the humanly beautiful, the artistically beautiful,--an intense craving
and desire for a familiar European face--smote her.
“But,-----” she puzzled, “would they, those I want most to see, _could
they endure this wilderness?_ No--not Lucilla! Not Lucilla with her love
of luxury and her disdain of short skirts.” She laughed. “Pontycroft?
Perhaps,” her heart fluttered. She knew he doted upon old, formal
gardens, well-clipped lawns; had delight in the glorious army of
letters and of art,--that he found in the society too, of princes,
entertainment. Still, it might be possible.... He would, at all events,
have some whimsical thing to say about it all. She began to fancy that
she heard his voice.
“If he were here,” Ruth told herself, “I should ask him to interpret
the horrid vision I had last night.” Ruth shivered as she recalled it;
rapidly she began an imaginary conversation.
“I was lying in the big, carved, four-post family bedstead in my
bedroom,” Ruth informed him. “I was half asleep and half awake and I saw
myself coming up the steps into the house just as I did when I arrived.
As I came, the house door opened, quickly, from within, and four people
rushed towards me, with open arms. One was my father.--He clasped me
tenderly and said: 'Welcome, welcome home!'... Behind him, a tall,
large, old man clasped me in his arms and he cried: 'Welcome, welcome
home!' Then came another and with the same words bade me welcome; I felt
very happy, and so glad that I had come! But running down the stairs of
the house arrived a tiny, meagre, old lady, whose corkscrew curls bobbed
at either side her face. She cried: 'Welcome, welcome!' in a shrill,
high voice, seizing me in her embrace. 'Welcome!' she cried again, 'but
_look out!--We can bite!_' And as she said it her two sharp white teeth
went through my lips till I screamed with pain and started up--all
a-tremble--and then I fell back onto the bed and shook for an hour.”
“My sweet child!” the sane amused voice of Pontycroft made reply.
“These old four-post family bedsteads are dangerous affairs to sleep in.
_Quant-à-moi_, I've always avoided 'em.... I'll have nothing whatever
to do with them. If my great-aunt, from whom I inherited Pontycroft, had
not been of my way o' thinking I should have sold those at Pontycroft to
the old furniture dealer in the village. Fortunately, that fearless lady
lifted the obloquy of the act from my shoulders by disposing of them
herself. One day, while my uncle, her husband, scoured the high seas
under Nelson, she got rid of all the old family four-posters. When he
returned from the war and asked what had become of 'em she acknowledged
she'd discovered a preference for bronze beds and had sent to France for
a dozen. But he was far too thankful to be at home again. 'Peace now,
at any price,' said he. And he never mentioned four-posters to his
lady-wife again, but slept and snored contentedly, for forty odd years,
in a red-gold, steel enamelled affair, free of family traditions. You'd
better follow my aunt's example, Ruth. Send to Boston for a nice new
white enamelled bedstead with a nice new wire mattress and let no more
family ghosts worry your ingenuous small head.”
“But, what did it mean? After all, it happened, or I'm mad,” Ruth
laughing, heard herself insist.
“Oh,” said Pontycroft,--he gave her one of his droll glances--“if you
want your midnight vision interpreted you must ask some older sage,
even, than I, to do it. I should say, were it not too obvious to be
true, that apple pie with an under crust....”
“Nonsense,” interrupted Ruth.
“The sort invented by your French ancestress, Priscilla Mulline
Alden (I've heard she was a rare _cordon bleu_)” went on Pontycroft,
unperturbed, “together with New England brown bread--but--that's all too
obvious to be true... what are you laughing at?” he queried, artlessly.
“I'm laughing at the Brown Bread,” retorted Ruth, and she laughed aloud,
“there wasn't any.”
“There should have been,” said Ponty, with a deprecating lift of the
eyebrows. “It's _de rigueur_ with baked beans.”
“But your little story,” he continued, lighting his cigarette, “belongs
probably to those mysterious reflex actions of ancestry acting on a
sensitive nervous organisation. You can't expect me to explain them.
See, though, that you do look out. Don't, manifestly, offend your
ancestors and they won't offend you, and there's my interpretation.”
Again Ruth laughed aloud, gleefully, at the tones of Ponty's voice and
again a little thrill of pain and hope pierced her breast. She looked
at her watch. It was almost noon and she turned towards home through the
glade, by the path along the brook.