On a beautiful evening in June, when the land was sweet with roses, and
the cuckoos called insistently to one another from copse and wood, Owen
Rose brought his wife home, for the second time, to Greenriver.
They had spent the intervening weeks in Italy; and to the end of her
life Toni would look upon those glorious Italian days as her true
honeymoon.
Now, indeed, she and Owen were really lovers, meeting on an equal ground
through the very force of their mutual love. Gone for ever were the old
doubts and misunderstandings, the miserable fooling of inferiority on
Toni's side, the half-unconscious irritation with which Owen had viewed
what seemed to be his wife's limitations.
No miracle had been worked. Toni and Owen both knew very well that in
literary matters Owen would always be superior to Toni; but now that
they were one in ambition, one in feeling, one in heart and soul, this
superiority mattered little.
Now that she was no longer frightened, no longer felt herself despised,
Toni could give her natural intelligence full play; and when once Owen
took the trouble to study Toni closely, he thanked his gods that he had
discovered her worth before it was too late.
What he had taken for stupidity was only diffidence. Toni's brain,
though not so highly specialized as his own, was a very capable, quick
organ all the same; and in the lonely, dreary months of her absence Owen
had learned to value at their true worth the precious gifts of laughter
and sunny, unselfish gaiety which had once lightened the stately old
house. When Toni disappeared, it seemed as though a living sunbeam had
deserted the household; and when, on announcing the news of her safety
and ultimate return, he had seen the faces of the servants break into
relieved smiles, Owen had felt, with a twinge of shame, that even her
dependants had valued Toni more than he, her husband, had known how to
do.
Always, too, the remembrance of the significance of Toni's sacrifice
would keep Owen humble before her. He knew now, beyond all possibility
of doubt, that it had nearly broken her heart to leave him; and though
her tragically childish notion of setting him free by eloping with
Leonard Dowson often brought a tender, half-quizzical smile to his lips,
Owen fully appreciated the love and eager longing which had driven Toni
to that futile step.
If Toni had found her soul, Owen too had gained something which his
character had hitherto lacked; and in his new humility and comprehension
there was the germ, also, of a new content for both of them.
* * * * *
Toni caught her breath in a sob of rapture as the old house came into
view.
Everyone about the place, servants, gardeners, chauffeur, had worked
their hardest during the last excited weeks to bring the whole place to
the highest pitch of perfection; and to Toni's longing eyes the
beautiful old house, in its setting of tall trees, smooth green lawns,
and brilliant, many-hued flowers, had never looked so eminently
attractive, so alluringly home-like before.
There were tears in her eyes as she sprang out of the car and greeted
the waiting Andrews, who stood beside the open door. In the background
Kate and Maggie hovered, all smiles and blushes; and it was evident that
whatever construction a censorious world might have put upon Toni's rash
departure, these faithful souls, at least, believed no evil.
As a matter of fact very little of the truth ever did leak out. When it
was known, as Herrick took good care it should be known, that Mr. Rose
had gone to Italy to join his wife, who was wintering there, and would
return with her after a few weeks spent together by the shores of the
Mediterranean, gossip was at once checked and dumbfounded.
If there had been anything wrong, said the neighbourhood, if Mrs. Rose
had left her husband secretly as had been asserted, surely the fact of
Mr. Rose's going to Italy to join her would not have been given quite so
much publicity.
Not only were there paragraphs in all the society papers--here Barry's
hand was discernible--but there were even portraits of the rising young
author and his wife, taken together in the garden of their whitewashed
villa outside Naples; and it was decided, finally, that Mrs. Rose's
hasty departure had been, after all, a good deal less mysterious than it
had at first appeared.
There was some consolation, to the more determined gossips of the
neighbourhood, in spreading a rumour that the young mistress of
Greenriver was far gone in consumption, and had been ordered to winter
abroad; but Toni's appearance, on the day of her return, was quite
sufficient to give the lie to that particular _canard_.
Browned with the sun, her Southern colouring accentuated by the months
spent in what was, after all, almost her native land, Toni looked the
picture of glowing, vivid health; and when, late that night, she faced
her husband with sparkling eyes across the rose-decked table, Owen
realized, for the first time, that this quaint, half-foreign wife of his
was giving promise of developing into actual beauty.
* * * * *
After dinner they strolled into the garden, Jock, deliriously happy,
pressing closely to his mistress's side; and as they passed between the
sleeping flowers Toni suddenly clung to her husband's arm.
"Owen! Listen. The nightingale! Oh, isn't it perfect--that big yellow
moon--and the roses--and now--_that_."
"Is it better than Italy, Toni? Wouldn't you rather be there--on a night
like this--in that land of beauty and romance?"
For a moment Toni stood still, gazing round her in silence. She looked
at the old grey house, from which the mellow lamplight streamed, the Ten
Little Ladies casting their beams bravely through the big windows of the
gallery upstairs. She looked at the sleeping roses, the velvet lawns,
the tall trees; and her eyes were very peaceful. The golden moonlight
transfigured the scene; from the dreaming river came the creak of oars
moving gently in their rowlocks; and the nightingale's song was dying
softly, tenderly, on the quiet air.
Slowly Toni's gaze came back to her husband's face; and in her eyes,
velvety and black in the moonlight, Owen read her answer before she
spoke.
"Wherever you are is my land of beauty," she said, in a low voice.
"But ... oh, I am so glad, so glad you have brought me home--to
Greenriver."
And as he heard the words, saw, too, the loving little gesture which
accompanied them as she slipped her hand into his arm, Owen felt that
for them both Greenriver was home henceforth.
He stooped and kissed her, quietly, on the white brow beneath the ebony
hair; end as if he had been waiting for the signal, the unseen
nightingale broke once more into song.
THE END
* * * * *
FAMOUS NOVELS BY KATHLYN RHODES
THE LURE OF THE DESERT
THE DESERT DREAMERS
THE WILL OF ALLAH
SWEET LIFE
AFTERWARDS
FLOWER OF GRASS
THE MAKING OF A SOUL
Vivid descriptions of the entrancing scenery of the East, incident
crowding upon incident, romantic situations, exciting intrigues,
unexpected dénouements hold and absorb the interest from start to
finish.
KATHLYN RHODES
is the assured success of 1918,
as GERTRUDE PAGE was the success of 1916
and MABEL BARNES-GRUNDY of 1917.
Fired with enthusiasm to win fame as a novelist, Kathlyn Rhodes began
her career before her school days were ended. "Sweet Life" followed
shortly afterwards; and the appreciation which this won encouraged the
authoress to follow quickly with other stories. Choice of subject she
holds to be of primary importance. With the war depressing us all
around, she believes that many readers prefer stories that permit them
for the time to forget it; and this she achieves by her delightful
flights of fancy through the realms of many lands.
These are the stories to send to your soldier friends to combat the
horrors of warfare and the tedium of the hospitals; and the stories to
read yourself to relieve the weary vigils we must keep at home.