Miss Sharp took on a subdued and corrected air.
"It is moved and seconded the previous question," Mrs. Smithe
propounded, with an air of great relief. "It is a vote."
"I don't think we had better do away with everything in this case," Mrs.
Hoyt observed, with a smile of gracious concession. "We might let the
committee of arrangements stand."
"That she's chairman of," whispered Mrs. Crowler, spitefully.
"I don't remember," observed Miss Sharp, gazing into futurity with an
air of abstraction, "that there is anything in the by-laws about the
previous question."
A flutter stirred the entire company. The ladies looked at each other,
and then with one accord turned their regards upon the Hon. Mrs. Hoyt,
as one who, having got them into this difficulty, was in honor bound to
help them out of it.
"I supposed everybody knew," that lady remarked, with icy sweetness,
"that the rules of making motions do not have to be in the by-laws. They
are in"--the speaker hesitated, not being exactly sure of the title of
the volume to which her husband had given so careful attention when
expecting to be nominated: feeling, however, that anything was better
than the appearance of ignorance, she went on precipitately--"in 'Pole's
Manual.'"
Even Miss Sharp had no retort adequate to meet this crushing appeal to
authority, not being sufficiently well informed to connect Pole with
whist, so she contented herself by observing, with a sniff, that for
her part she was glad she did not know so much as some people pretended
to.
"It does seem to me," observed Mrs. Henderson, at this point, "that
we might let this one year go by without a fair. There's been so much
sickness in Rosedale this winter that everybody is tired out, and we had
a great deal better wait till June, and have a strawberry-festival. I
move we put the whole thing off till then."
"Second the motion," cried Miss Snob, with great promptitude.
"I cannot consent to put that motion," the president said, with great
dignity. "We have made up our minds to have a fair now, and we might as
well have it, and be done with it."
"I move," Mrs. Browne put in sweetly, with the intention of suiting
everybody, "that we have a fair _and_ a strawberry-festival."
Miss Snob seconded this motion with her customary enthusiasm.
"It is moved and seconded," the president said, "that we have a fair and
a strawberry-festival. But that seems a great deal; and I think I had
better declare it not a vote, unless doubted."
Nobody was clear about the effects of doubting a negative proposition;
but Mrs. Crowler was pleased to observe, "Well, any way, now I come to
think it over, I think, on the whole, I won't be on the arrangements
committee at all; but I'll be chairman of the finance committee when
that is fixed,--and that'll leave only three on the arrangements."
This moved Mrs. Henderson to resign, and Mrs. Lowell following her
example, Mrs. Hoyt was left in solitary grandeur upon the committee.
Matters were not improved, moreover, when Miss Keene remarked, "If we've
voted 'the previous question,' I don't see but we've still got to fix
the day. All that is undone now."
"Certainly," responded the Hon. Mrs. Sampson Hoyt, with the virtuous joy
of an iconoclast gazing on the ruin he has wrought.
"We don't seem to have anything exactly fixed," the president said, with
a helpless and conciliatory smile. "If somebody would make a motion--"
"It's too late to make any more motions to-day," Miss Sharp interrupted,
with much vigor. "It's ten minutes of six."
At this announcement of the lateness of the hour, the entire company
started to their feet in dismay; and although, when the president and
secretary tried next day to remember what had been done, that the latter
might make up her report, they recorded that the meeting adjourned,
that statement must be regarded as having been purely a parliamentary
fiction, entered in the secretary's book to gratify that instinct innate
in woman's breast to follow exactly the regular and strictest forms of
recognized rules of order.
Tale the Seventh.
A SKETCH IN UMBER.
A SKETCH IN UMBER.
Every life has its history: this is the story of Ruth Welch, the
placid-faced, silver-haired woman who sat in the September twilight
looking out over the moorlands one Saturday evening, and considering
many things.
The house faced toward the south. It looked across a little creek which
made in from the sea, and it had in its prospect only level heaths to
the horizon's edge. On the west stretched the waters of an arm of the
Atlantic, and the tides came twice a day around the low cape into the
inlet, and the wind blew over the moors; but in all directions one
looked upon level wastes,--"the plains," the country people called them,
speaking of them sometimes as "Welch's bogs," or in sections as the
"blueb'ry plains," or the "cramb'ry marshes;" and people who lived
outside of them regarded the moors as painfully dull.
They were not, too, without some excuse for such an opinion. The rhodora
and the kalmia--the "lamb-kill"--in spring spread over sections of
the waste transient sheets of glowing color, but for the most part the
country was either white or brown, and to one not fond of it the effect
of the monotone of hue was depressing. The shade of brown varied,
changing from a grayish or even greenish brown in midsummer to a sombre,
almost uniform umber in autumn, which latter tint now and then during
the winter appeared in desolate patches through the flats of snow, until
in March the whole plain came to light darker and more forbidding than
ever.
All these long months the only break in the low monochrome of the
landscape was the red cottage which still was called "Gran'sir'
Welch's," although the old man had been dead many a year, and the little
garden before it that kept up, with old-fashioned flowers, a show of
bravery until the frosts came. The tint of the old house was dull and
dingy, but in so colorless a setting the hue seemed brighter, as a
single event might assume undue importance in a monotonous life. If
one could have supposed the builder an imaginative man or one given to
refinements of sentiment, it might be easy to imagine that when he built
his house thus alone in the plains, with not another dwelling in sight
and without a break in the level landscape, he felt the need of giving
it some color that should protest against the deadly grayness of all
around and hearten its owner by its warmth of tone.
So overwhelming were the solitude and the unbroken sameness of the
place, however, that an imaginative man would scarcely have chosen it
as an abiding-place, although once involved in its powerful fascination
he would have been held to his life's end. By what accident Gran'sir'
Welch's grandfather had chosen to build here, half a score of miles from
the little fishing village which stood to the people of that region for
the world, no one knew, and very likely no one cared. Folk thereabout
concerned themselves little with reasons for anything, facts being all
they found mental grasp sufficient to hold. Once established in the
plains, however, there was no especial cause to suppose the family would
not continue to live on there until its course was interrupted either by
extinction or by the arrival of the Judgment-Day.
Extinction was not very far off now, since only this white-haired
woman remained to bear the name. Her mother had died in the daughter's
infancy. Mrs. Welch had never adapted herself to the silence and
loneliness of the moors, and her people over at the village declared
that she had "died of the plains;" and it is possible that they were
right. Ruth's father, when she was still but a child, had been lost at
sea; and the girl had been cared for by her grandfather and the old
serving-woman Bethiah, who had once been supposed to be a hired girl,
but had ended by being so thoroughly identified with the family that her
surname was wellnigh forgotten, and she was designated, when she was
spoken of at all, as Bethiah Welch.
The child grew much in the same way as grew the houseleeks in the boxes
beside the southern door, very slowly and dully. Once or twice she went
for a few months to stay with an aunt in the village ten miles away, it
being the unanimous opinion of her relatives that as the Welches always
had known how to read and write it was proper that something should
be done for Ruth's education; and the village school was the only
educational means known in the region. The girl pined for home, however,
and was never content away from the red house. Perhaps by a strange
perversity of circumstance the home-longing of the mother was in the
child transformed into a clinging fondness for the place where the
former was so lonely and alien. The low, level moors were necessary
to Ruth's life; in their colorless monotony she somehow found the
complement for her uneventful life. Perhaps the very dulness developed
her imagination, as special organs appear in animals whose abnormal
conditions of existence render them needful. If this were so, it was no
less true that the moors absorbed whatever mental life they stimulated,
until the girl seemed hardly less a part of them than the knolls of
leathery shrubs, the scattered, shallow pools, the tufts of coarse
grass, or the whispering voices of the wind which all night long and
every night were hurrying to and fro, concerned with unspeakable tidings
which perhaps came from the sea that forever moaned along the moorland's
edges.
Little conscious imagination had Ruth at nineteen; and it was at
nineteen that the single, trifling event of her life occurred. She was
a maiden by no means uncomely. She was not educated in any conventional
sense of the term; but her life alone with her grandfather and old
Bethiah and the great brown moors had bred in her a certain sweet
gravity which was not without its charm, had there been but those to
see who could appreciate it.
Along the front of the house ran a bench, where people seldom sat, since
there were none to sit, but where the milk-pans dried in the sun, a
gleaming row; and one sunny morning late in September the flash of their
shimmer caught the eye of a skipper who in his yacht in the bay studied
the horizon with his glass. He was not yet past those years when a man
still finds amusement in imitating fate and nature by yielding to his
impulses; the gleam suggested pleasant draughts of fresh milk; and
without more ado, he headed the trig little craft in which he and a
brother artist were skirting the coast of the Gulf of Maine for the
little inlet upon which Gran'sir' Welch's red cottage stood.
In those days yachts were less common than now, and both Ruth and
Bethiah left their work to watch the boat as it ran up to the low wharf,
and the snowy sail fell with a musical rattle and clash of metallic
rings.
The skipper, a stalwart young fellow, too handsome by half, came briskly
ashore and did his errand, and while the old servant went for the milk,
stood with Ruth by the open door asking idle questions, to which she
replied without either shyness or boldness. His eyes were just on a
level with hers as she stood on the threshold above him, and their bold,
merry glance saw with full appreciation how clear were her sherry-brown
orbs. He removed his cap and leaned against the door-post, letting his
glance stray over the landscape. Here and there upon the brown surface
his keen eye detected the flame of a scarlet leaf amid the prevailing
russet, but the combined effect of all the red leaves upon the plain
could not warm the sombre wastes.
"Don't you get tired of the sameness?" he asked suddenly, as if the
monotony all at once seemed to him too great to be borne.
"Oh, no," Ruth answered, smiling faintly, "I like it."
He brushed back his curly, golden locks with a shapely brown hand, and
regarded her more closely.
"It is like a fish in the water," was his conclusion when he spoke
again. "It would drown me."
Ruth smiled again, showing her white, even teeth a little, although
she did not in the least understand what he meant; and before the
conversation could go further Bethiah appeared with the milk she had
been getting. Ruth put aside the stranger's offer of pay, and with an
instinct of hospitality which must have been genuine indeed to have
survived so long disuse from lack of opportunity, she stepped down
into the little garden-plot and picked a nosegay of the old-fashioned
flowers which in the southern exposure were still unharmed by frost.
"Put a posy in my button-hole," he requested lightly, when she gave them
to him. "Pick out the prettiest."
She had never stuck a flower in a man's coat, but she was too utterly
devoid of self-consciousness to be shy. She selected a beautiful
clove pink, and smiling her grave smile, thrust the stem through the
buttonhole of his yachting-jacket as he held out the lapel.
"It would be just the color of your cheeks," he said, "if it could only
get sunburned."
A redder glow flushed up at his words, and so tempting was the innocent
face before him that half involuntarily he bent forward to kiss the
smooth lips. The girl drew back, in that grave, unemotional fashion
of hers which was to the stranger so unaccountable at once and so
fascinating, and he failed of his intent.
"Ah, well," he said, in nowise disconcerted, "keep the kiss for your
sweetheart, but thank you for the flowers."
He laughed with a gleeful, deep-toned note, and turned down the
faintly-defined path to the shore again.
Ruth looked on with interest at the hoisting of the sail; she smiled
responsively as the two mariners doffed their caps to her, and then,
regardless of the old superstition of the ill-luck of watching people
out of sight, she kept her eyes fixed upon the pretty little craft as it
skimmed over the waters, as long as it could be seen. Then she turned
a comprehensive glance over all her moors, as if to to take them into
confidence regarding the pleasant incident which had just happened, and
returned to her interrupted domestic duties. The interview had touched
her with no repinings; and even could she have known that in that brief
moment all the romance of her life had been acted, she would scarcely
have sighed. She smiled as she went about her homely occupations, and
flushed a little with the consciousness of innocent vanity as she found
herself glancing into the glass at the reflection of her softly-glowing
cheeks, reddened with health and with the sun.
This September day was the single glowing spot in the slow, mellow
years of Ruth's life. She came and went, slept and waked, perhaps even
dreamed. She was always in a happy, contented repose among her moors,
becoming of them every day more and more completely a part. The wide
plains grew green in spring with transient verdure, the purple petals
of the rhodora flushed through their brief day and dropped into the
shallow brown pools left by the late rains in the hollows; then all the
waste turned to fawn and russet under the suns of summer, and the cycle
of the year was completed by deepening browns and the wide stretches of
snow. Now and again great rolling masses of mist came up from the sea
and hid wold and wave alike from sight, but yet the sense of the plains
was like a presence to Ruth, as with heart warm as an egg beneath the
mother-bird's breast, she went her way and lived her span of life.
She was far from being dull in her feelings. Indeed, for one in her
station and surroundings, she was unusually sensitive to mood of shore
and sky, to the beauty of the sunsets or of the wild flowers which
sprang amid the low shrubs. She was simply content. She was so perfectly
in harmony with her world that she could not be unhappy. She grew as a
bluebell grows. She was not deficient in womanly sentiment. She thought
sometimes of the handsome sailor lad whose bold brown eyes had looked
into hers, and she smiled anew with simple pleasure that he had found
her fair. She remembered the audacious gleam which crossed his face
when he bent forward to kiss her, and she did not forget his words
about a sweetheart. She never spoke of her memories,--she came of a
reticent race, and neither Gran'sir' Welch nor Bethiah was especially
adapted to the reception of confidences,--but she speculated concerning
the sweetheart she never had, and of whose coming fate gave no sign.
There was never any tinge of melancholy in these reflections. She
accepted life too simply to be sad, even with that vague oppression
which seemed to casual observers the obvious consequence of the
overpowering presence of the wastes.
As years went on, she accepted the fact that the time of dreams of love
was past, and with placid content she reflected that the shadow of the
ungiven kiss of the sailor would never be disturbed by the pressure of
lover's lips upon hers.
It is between twenty and thirty that the temperament of a woman becomes
fixed, and all her future irrevocably made or marred. Before this her
character is too flexible, after this too rigid for impressions to be
lasting. During these years the peace of the wide, calm, and sombre
moorlands stamped indelibly upon Ruth a sweet, grave content which
nothing could destroy or shake.
There came a time when into the calm of the old house death rushed, with
that dreadful precipitancy which always marks his coming, even when
expected, and old Gran'sir' Welch, long past fourscore, was, in the
quaint language of the King James version, gathered to his fathers.
In the gray dawn Ruth tapped softly at the hives of the bees which
stood, straw-thatched, against the eastern end of the cottage, and
announced the sad news, firmly believing that unless within twelve hours
the swarms were told of death they would desert their homes. Then in the
sunny autumn afternoon a funeral procession of boats trailed from the
red cottage to the graveyard behind the church in the village, where
slept such of his forefathers as the sea had spared to die in their
beds. With evenly dipping oars went first the quaintly-shaped pinky
bearing the coffin between two stout fisherman, one at prow and one at
stern; while after followed the dories in which were the few nearer
relatives who had come to attend the services at the house.
Ruth sat beside a cousin and listened half unconsciously to the plash of
the oars and the rhythmic beat of the waves against the boat, looking
back with tear-dimmed eyes to the red house until it was by distance
blended with the dun country as the last spark dies amid the ashes. She
was sad, and she felt that oppressive terror which the presence of death
brings; yet her calm was not seriously or permanently shaken.
In their relentless, even course the years moved on, and one day in
spring, when the rhodora was in all its glory, and the one bush of
mountain-laurel in the wide plains, which had strayed into the heath
like a lamb into the wilderness, was as white in the distance as a bunch
of upland maybloom, again Ruth went softly and gravely to tell the bees
that death had been in the red house, and the procession of boats, like
the Egyptian train over the Lake of the Dead, bore away the mortal
remains of faithful old Bethiah.
Ruth's relatives in the village tried to induce her now to come to them,
and when she could not be moved to do this, urged her at least to have
some one live with her. She was getting to be an old woman, they said
among themselves, although in truth she was little past fifty, and since
for that part of the world she was not ill-provided with worldly goods,
there was no lack of those who were willing to take up their abode as
her companion in the red house.
Ruth put all offers aside,--kindly, indeed, but decisively. She was
pleased to live alone; not from a misanthropic dislike of her kind,
but because it was so deep and inexhaustible a delight to her to brood
happily among her plains. More and more she loved these umber wastes,
over which cloud-shadows drifted like the darkening ripple of the wind
on the sea. She knew all their ways, those mysterious paths which wind
between the hillocks of deserted heaths as if worn with the constant
passing of invisible feet, and she was never weary of wandering among
the ragged hummocks, breathing in the salt air from the sea and noting
with happy eyes all the weeds and wild flowers, the shrubs that were too
inconspicuous to be singled out at a distance, but which to the careful
and loving observer revealed themselves as full of beauty. She was fond
of the faint, sweet scents of the opening flowers in spring, of the
dying grass in fall, of the burning peat when fires broke out sometimes
to smoulder until the next rain. She never thought about her feelings or
phrased the matter to herself, but she loved so perfectly these wastes
which seemed so desolate that they were to her as kindred and home;
perhaps even the maternal instinct which is inborn in every woman's
breast found some not quite inadequate expression in her almost
passionate fondness for the great heath.
Her relatives spoke of her always as "odd," and were aggrieved that her
ways should be different from theirs; but everything that continues
comes in time to be accepted, and as the years went on Ruth's method of
life came to seem proper because it had so long been the same. A brawny
armed fisher cousin sailed over from the village every Sunday morning to
see that all was well at the red house, and to bring whatever might be
needed from the village store. Sometimes in winter he found her house
half buried in snow, but he never could report that she appeared either
discontented or sad.
It was of the coming of this emissary that Ruth was thinking on this
Saturday night in September where first this record found her. She had
been reflecting much to-day about dying. In her walk about the heath she
had come upon a dead bird, and the sight had suggested to her her own
end. She acknowledged to herself that she was old, and for perhaps the
only time in her life her thought had formulated a general truth. She
had regarded the tiny corpse at her feet, and then, looking about upon
the moors, it came over her how immortal is the youth of the world and
how brief is man's life. The land about her was no older than when she
had looked upon it with baby eyes. For a single instant a poignant taste
of bitterness seemed set to her lips; then in a moment the very wide,
changeless plain that had caused her pain seemed itself somehow to
assuage it.
To-night sitting here she admitted to herself that her strength had
failed somewhat of late. Yes, she was old. It was almost half a century
ago that that bold-eyed handsome stranger had compared the color in her
cheeks to a clove pink. She smiled serenely, although her reflections
were of age and death, so perfectly did she recall the sunny day and the
air with which the sailor would have kissed her. Placid and content in
the gathering dusk, she smiled her own grave, sweet smile, which it were
scarcely too fanciful to liken to the odor of the clove pink of her
garden-plot whose hue half a century ago had been in her cheek. She had
but one regret in leaving life, and that was to leave her moorlands. She
had found existence so pleasant and had been so well content that she
could not understand why people so usually spoke of life as sad; but
she could not think without pain of leaving the plains behind and going
away to lie in the bleak hillside graveyard where slept her kinsfolk.
It had never occurred to her before to consider to which she held more
strongly, her people or the wide brown stretches of open about her, but
to-night she debated it with herself and decided it. She resolved to say
to her cousin tomorrow that she wished her grave made in the plains.
Very likely her relatives would object. They had always thought her
ideas strange; but they would surely let her have her way in this. She
would even make some concessions and perhaps let Cousin Sarah come to
live with her if they would agree to do as she wished about this. It
would be so great a comfort to her to be assured that she was not in
death to be separated from her dearly loved moors. She liked Sarah well
enough, only that it was so pleasant to live alone with her bees and the
plains. Besides, if she should chance to die alone, who would tell the
bees? It would be a pity to have the fine swarms lost.