THE JUDGE’S SWEETHEART
It took both Ella Lou and Princess to transport the Christmas guests
from Greenacres over to the Ellis place. Nobody ever called it anything
but just that, the Ellis place, and sometimes, “over to the Judge’s.”
Cousin Roxy said she couldn’t bear to have a nameless home and just as
soon as she could get around to it, she’d see that the Ellis place had a
suitable name.
It was one of the few pretentious houses in all three of the Gileads,
Gilead Green, Gilead Centre, and Gilead Post Office. For seven
generations it had been in the Ellis family. The Judge had a ponderous
volume bound in heavy red morocco, setting forth the history of Windham
County, and the girls loved to pore over it. Seven men with their
families, bound westward towards Hartford in the colonial days of
seeking after home sites, had seen the fertile valley with its
encircling hills, and had settled there. One was an Ellis and the Judge
had his sword and periwig in his library. As for the rest, all one had
to do was go over to the old family burial ground on the wood road and
count them up.
During the fall, this had been a favorite tramp of the Greenacre hikers,
and Jean loved to quote a bit from Stevenson, once they had come in
sight of the old grass grown enclosure, cedar shaded, secluded and
restful:
“There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is if not an
antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go
nowhere else.”
Here they found the last abiding place of old Captain Ephraim Ellis with
his two wives, Lovina Mary and Hephzibah Waiting, one on each side of
him. The Captain rested betwixt the two myrtle covered mounds and each
old slate gravestone leaned towards his.
“Far be it from me,” Cousin Roxy would say heartily, “to speak lightly
of those gone before, but those two headstones tell their own story, and
I’ll bet a cookie the Captain could tell his if he got a chance.”
Every Legislature convening at Hartford since the olden days, had known
an Ellis from Gilead. Only two of the family had taken to wandering,
Billie’s father and Gideon, one of the old Captain’s sons. The girls
wove many tales around Gideon. He must have had the real Argonaut
spirit. Back in the first days of the Revolution he had run away from
the valley home and ended up with Paul Jones on the “Bonhomme Richard.”
Billie loved his memory, the same as he did his own father’s, and the
girls had straightened up his sunken slatestone record, and had planted
some flowers, not white ones, but bravely tinted asters for late fall.
Billie showed them an old silhouette he had found. Mounted on black
silk, the old faded brown paper showed a boy with sensitive mouth and
eager lifted chin, queer high choker collar and black stock. On the back
of the wooden frame was written in a small, firm handwriting, “My
beloved son Gideon, aged nineteen.”
The old house sat far back from the road with a double drive curving
like a big “U” around it. Huge elms upreared their great boughs
protectingly before it, and behind lay a succession of all manner and
kind of buildings from the old forge to the smoke house. One barn stood
across the road and another at the top of the lane for hay. Since Cousin
Roxy had married the Judge, it seemed as if the sunlight had flooded the
old house. Its shuttered windows had faced the road for years, but now
the green blinds were wide open, and it seemed as if the house almost
smiled at the world again.
“I never could see a mite of sense in keeping blinds shut as if somebody
were dead,” Cousin Roxy would say. “Some folks won’t even open the
blinds in their hearts, let alone their houses, so I told the Judge if
he wanted me for a companion, he’d have to take in God’s sunshine too,
’cause I can’t live without plenty of it.”
Kit and Doris were the first to run up the steps and into the center
hall, almost bumping into Billie as he ran to meet them. Behind him came
Mrs. Ellis in a soft gray silk dress. A lace collar encircled her
throat, fastened with an old pink cameo breast-pin. Helen had always
coveted that pin. There was a young damsel on it holding up her full
skirts daintily as she moved towards a sort of chapel, and it was set in
fine, thin old gold.
“Come right in, folkses,” she called happily. “Do stop capering,” as
Doris danced around her. “Merry Christmas, all of you.”
Up the long colonial staircase she led the way into the big guest room.
Down in the parlor Cousin Beth was playing softly on the old melodeon,
“It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old.” The air
was filled with scent of pine and hemlock, and provocative odors of
things cooking stole up the back stairs.
Kit and Billie retreated to a corner with the latter’s book supply. It
was hard to realize that this was really Billie, Cousin Roxy’s “Nature
Boy” of the summer before. Love and encouragement had seemed to round
out his character into a promise of fulfilment in manliness. All of the
old self consciousness and shy abstraction had gone. Even the easy
comradely manner in which he leaned over the Judge’s arm chair showed
the good understanding and sure confidence between the two.
“Yes, he does show up real proud,” Cousin Roxy agreed warmly with Mrs.
Robbins when they were all downstairs before the glowing fire. “Of
course I let him call me Grandma. Pity sakes, that’s little enough to a
love starved child. I’m proud of him too and so’s the Judge. We’re going
to miss him when he goes away to school, but he’s getting along
splendidly. I want him to go where he’ll have plenty of boy
companionship. He’s lived alone with the ants and bees and rabbits long
enough.”
Helen and Doris leaned over Cousin Beth’s shoulders trying the old
carols: “Good King Wencelas,” “Carol, Brothers, Carol,” and “While
Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night.” Jean played for them and just
before dinner was announced, Doris sang all alone in her soft treble,
very earnestly and tenderly, quite as if she saw past the walls of the
quiet New England homestead to where “Calm Judea stretches far her
silver mantled plains.”
Cousin Roxy rocked back and forth softly, her hand shading her eyes as
it did in prayer. When it was over, she said briskly, wiping off her
spectacles,
“Land, I’m not a bit emotional, but that sort of sets my heart strings
tingling. Let’s go to dinner, folkses. The Judge takes Betty in, and
Jerry takes Beth. Then Elliott can take in his old Cousin Roxy, and I
guess Billie can manage all of the girls.”
But the girls laughingly went their own way, Doris holding to the
Judge’s other arm and Helen to her father’s, while Jean lingered behind
a minute to glance about the cheery room. The fire crackled down in the
deep old rock hearth. In each of the windows hung a mountain laurel
wreath tied with red satin ribbon. Festoons of ground pine and evergreen
draped each door and picture. It was all so homelike, Jean thought. Over
the mantel hung a motto worked in colored worsteds on perforated silver
board.
Here abideth peace
But Jean turned away, and pressed her face against the nearest window
pane, looking down at the sombre, frost-touched garden. There wasn’t one
bit of peace in her heart, even while she fairly ached with the longing
to be like the others.
“You’re a coward, Jean Robbins, a deliberate coward,” she told herself.
“You don’t like the country one bit. You love the city where everybody’s
doing something, and it’s just a big race for all. You’re longing for
everything you can’t have, and you’re afraid to face the winter up here.
You might just as well tell yourself the truth. You hate to be poor.”
There came a burst of laughter from the dining-room and Kit calling to
her to hurry up. It appeared that Doris, the tender-hearted, had said
pathetically when Mrs. Gorham, the “help,” brought in the great roast
turkey: “Poor old General Putnam!”
“That isn’t the General,” Billie called from his place. “The General ran
away yesterday.”
Now if Cousin Roxy prided herself on one thing more than another it was
her flock of white turkeys led by the doughty General. All summer long
the girls had looked upon him as a definite personality to be reckoned
with. He was patriarchal in the way he managed his family. And it
appeared that the General’s astuteness and sagacity had not deserted him
when Ben had started after him to turn him into a savory sacrifice.
“First off, he lit up in the apple trees,” Ben explained. “Then as soon
as he saw I was high enough, off he flopped and made for the corn-crib.
Just as I caught up with him there, he chose the wagon sheds and perched
on the rafters, and when I’d almost got hold of his tail feathers, if he
didn’t try the barn and all his wives and descendants after him, mind
you. So I thought I’d let him roost till dark, and when I stole in after
supper, the old codger had gone, bag and baggage. He’ll come back as
soon as he knows our minds ain’t set on wishbones.”
“Then who is this?” asked Kit interestedly, quite as if it were some
personage who rested on the big willow pattern platter in state.
“That is some unnamed patriot who dies for his country’s good,” said the
Judge, solemnly. “Who says whitemeat and who says dark?”
Jean was watching her father. Not since they had moved into the country
had she seen him so cheerful and like himself. The Judge’s geniality was
like a radiating glow, anyway, that included all in its circle, and
Cousin Roxy was in her element, dishing out plenteous platefuls of
Christmas dainties to all those nearest and dearest to her. Way down at
the end of the table sat Joe, wide eyed and silent tongued. Christmas
had never been like this that he knew of. Billie tried to engage him in
conversation, boy fashion, a few times, but gave up the attempt. By the
time he had finished his helping, Joe was far too full for utterance.
In the back of the carriage, driving over from Greenacres, Mrs. Robbins
had placed a big bushel basket, and into this had gone the gifts to be
hung on the tree. After dinner, while the Judge and Mr. Robbins smoked
before the fire, and Kit led the merry-making out in the sitting room,
there were mysterious “goings on” in the big front parlor. Finally
Cousin Beth came softly out, and turned down all the lights.
Jean slipped over to the organ, and as the tall old doors were opened
wide, she played softly,
“Gather around the Christmas tree.”
Doris picked up the melody and led, sitting on a hassock near the doors,
gazing with all her eyes up at the beautiful spreading hemlock, laden
with lights and gifts.
“For pity’s sake, child, what are you crying about?” exclaimed Cousin
Roxy, almost stumbling over a little crumpled figure in a dark corner,
and Joe sobbed sleepily:
“I—I don’t know.”
“Oh, it’s just the heartache and the beauty of it all,” said Helen
fervently. “He’s lonely for his own folks.”
“’Tain’t neither,” groaned Joe. “It’s too much mince pie.”
So under Cousin Roxy’s directions, Billie took him up to his room, and
administered “good hot water and sody.”
“Too bad, ’cause he missed seeing all the things taken off the tree,”
said Cousin Roxy, laying aside Joe’s presents for him, a long warm knit
muffler from herself, a fine jack-knife from the Judge with a pocket
chain on it, a package of Billie’s boy books that he had outgrown, and
ice skates from the Greenacre girls. After much figuring over the
balance left from their Christmas money they had clubbed together on the
skates for him, knowing he would have more fun and exercise out of them
than anything, and he needed something to bring back the sparkle to his
eyes and the color to his cheeks.
“Put them all up on the bed beside him, and he’ll find them in the
morning,” Billie suggested. “If you’ll let him stay, Mrs. Robbins, I’ll
bring him over.”
“Isn’t it queer,” Doris said, with a sigh of deepest satisfaction, as
she watched the others untying their packages. “It isn’t so much what
you get yourself Christmas, it’s seeing everybody else get theirs.” And
just then a wide, flat parcel landed squarely in her lap, and she gave a
surprised gasp.
“The fur mitten isn’t there, but you can snuggle your nose on the muff,”
Jean told her, and Doris held up just what she had been longing for, a
squirrel muff and stole to throw around her neck. “They’re not
neighborhood squirrels, are they, Billie?” she whispered anxiously, and
Billie assured her they were Russian squirrels, and no families’ trees
around Gilead were wearing mourning.
Nearly all of Billie’s presents were books. He had reached the age where
books were like magical windows through which he gazed from Boyhood’s
tower out over the whole wide world of romance and adventure. Up in his
room were all of the things he had treasured in his lonesome days before
the Judge had married Miss Robbins: his home-made fishing tackle, his
collection of butterflies and insects, his first compass and magnifying
glass, the flower calendar and leaf collection, where he had arranged so
carefully every different leaf and blossom in its season.
But now, someway, with the library of books the Judge had given him,
that had been his own father’s, Gilead borders had widened out, and he
had found himself a knight errant on the world’s highway of literature.
He sat on the couch now, burrowing into each new book until Kit sat down
beside him, with a new kodak in one hand and a pair of pink knit bed
slippers in the other.
“And mother’s given me the picture I like best, her Joan of Arc
listening to the voices in the garden at Arles. I love that, Billie. I’m
not artistic like Jean or romantic like Helen. You know that, don’t
you?”
Billie nodded emphatically. Indeed he did know it after half a year of
chumming with Kit.
“But I love the pluck of Joan,” Kit sighed, lips pursed, head up. “I’d
have made a glorious martyr, do you know it? I know she must have
enjoyed the whole thing immensely, even if it did end at the stake. I
think it must be ever so much easier to be a martyr than look after the
seventeen hundred horrid little everyday things that just have to be
done. When it’s time to get up now at 6 A. M. and no fires going, I
shall look up at Joan and register courage and valor.”
Helen sat close to her father, perfectly happy to listen and gaze at the
flickering lights on the big tree. She had gift books too, mostly fairy
tales and what Doris called “princess stories,” a pink tinted ivory
manicure set in a little velvet box, and two cut glass candlesticks with
little pink silk shades. The candlesticks had been part of the “white
hyacinths” saved from the sale at their Long Island home, and Jean had
made the shades and painted them with sprays of forget-me-nots. Cousin
Roxy had knit the prettiest skating caps for each of the girls, and
scarfs to match, and Mrs. Newell gave them old silver spoons that had
been part of their great great-grandmother Peabody’s wedding outfit, and
to each one two homespun linen sheets from the same precious store of
treasures.
“When you come to Weston,” she told Jean, “I’ll show you many of her
things. She was my great grandmother, you know, and I can just vaguely
remember her sitting upstairs in her room in a deep-seated winged
armchair that had pockets and receptacles all around it. I know I looked
on her with a great deal of wonder and veneration, for I was just six.
She wore gray alpaca, Jean, silver gray like her hair, and a little
black silk apron with dried flag root in one pocket and pink and white
peppermints in the other.”
“And a cap,” added Jean, just as if she too could recall the picture.
“A cap of fine black lace with lavender bows, and her name was Mary
Lavinia Peabody.”
“I’d love to be named Mary Lavinia,” quoth Kit over her shoulder. “How
can anybody be staid and faithful unto death with ‘Kit’ hurled at them
all day. But if I had been rightly called Mary Lavinia, oh, Cousin Beth,
I’d have been a darling.”
“I don’t doubt it one bit,” laughed Cousin Beth merrily. “Go along with
you, Kit. It just suits you.”
Doris sat on her favorite hassock clasping a new baby doll in her arms
with an expression of utter contentment on her face. Kit and Jean had
dressed it in the evenings after she had gone to bed, and it had a
complete layette. But Billie had given her his tame crow, Moki, and her
responsibility was divided.
“Where’d you get the name from, Billie?” she asked.
Billie stroked the smooth glossy back of the crow as one might a pet
chicken.
“I found him one day over in the pine woods on the hill. He was just a
little fellow then. The nest was in a dead pine, and somebody’d shot it
all to pieces. The rest of the family had gone, but I found him
fluttering around on the ground, scared to death with a broken wing. Ben
helped me fix it, and he told me to call him Moki. You know he’s read
everything, and he can talk some Indian, Pequod mostly, he says. He
isn’t sure but what there may be some Pequod in him way back, he can
talk it so well, and Moki means ‘Watch out’ in Pequod, Ben says. I call
him that because I used to put him on my shoulder and he’d go anywhere
with me through the woods, and call out when he thought I was in
danger.”
“How do you know what he thought?”
“After you get acquainted with him, you’ll know what he thinks too,”
answered Billie soberly. “Hush, grandfather’s going to say something.”
The Judge rose and stood on the hearth rug, his back to the fire. He was
nearly six feet tall, soldierly, and rugged, his white curly hair
standing out in three distinct tufts just like Pantaloon, Kit always
declared, his eyes keen and bright under their thick brows. He had taken
off his eyeglasses and held them in one hand, tapping them on the other
to emphasize his words. Jean tiptoed around the tree, extinguishing the
last sputtering candles, and sat down softly beside Cousin Roxy.
“I don’t think any of you, beloved children and dear ones, can quite
understand what tonight means to me personally.” He cleared his throat
and looked over at Billie. “I haven’t had a real Christmas here since
Billie’s father was a little boy. I didn’t want a real Christmas either.
Christmas meant no more to me than to some old owl up in the woods,
maybe not as much. But tonight has warmed my heart, built up a good old
fire in it just as you start one going in some old disused rock
fireplace that has been stone cold for years.
“When I was a boy this old house used to be opened up as it is tonight,
decorated with evergreen and hemlock and guests in every room at
Christmas time. I didn’t live here then. My grandfather, old Judge
Winthrop Ellis, was alive, and my father had married and moved over to
the white house on the wood road between Maple Lawn and the old burial
ground. You can still find the cellar of it and the old rock chimney
standing. I used to trot along that wood road to school up at Gayhead
where Doris and Helen have been going, and I had just one companion on
that road, the perkiest, sassiest, most interesting female I ever met in
all my life.” He stopped and chuckled, and Cousin Roxy rubbed her nose
with her forefinger and smiled.
“We knew every spot along the way, where the fringed gentians grew in
the late fall, and where to find arbutus in the spring. The best place
to get black birch and where the checker-berries were thickest. Maybe
just now, it won’t mean so much to you young folks, all these little
landmarks of nature on these old home roads and fields of ours, but when
the shadows begin to lengthen in life’s afternoon, you’ll be glad to
remember them and maybe find them again, for the best part of it all is,
they wait for you with love and welcome and you’ll find the gentians and
the checker-berries growing in just the same places they did fifty years
ago.”
Jean saw her father put out his hand and lay it over her mother’s. His
head was bent forward a trifle and there was a wonderful light in his
eyes.
“And all I wanted to say, apart from the big welcome to you all, and the
good wishes for a joyous season, was this, the greatest blessing life
has brought me is that Roxana has come out of the past to sit right over
there and show me how to have a good time at Christmas once again. God
bless you all.”
“Oh, wasn’t he just a dear,” Kit said, rapturously, when it was all
over, and they were driving back home under the clear starlit sky. “I do
hope when I’m as old as the Judge, I’ll have a flower of romance to
sniff at too. Cousin Roxy watched him just as if he were sixteen instead
of sixty.”
“You’re just as sentimental as Helen and me,” Jean told her, teasingly.
“Well, anybody who wouldn’t get a thrill out of tonight would be a toad
in a claybank. And Jean, did you see Father’s face?”
Jean nodded. It was something not to be discussed, the light in her
father’s face as he had listened. It made her realize more than anything
that had happened in the long months of trial in the country, how worth
while it was, the sacrifice that had brought him back into his home
country for healing and happiness.