OPEN WINDOWS
“It always seems to me,” said Cousin Roxy, the first time she drove down
with Billie to spend the day, “as if Maytime is a sort of fulfilled
promise to us, after the winter and spring. When I was a girl, spring up
here behaved itself. It was sweet and balmy and gentle, and now it’s
turned into an uncertain young tomboy. The weather doesn’t really begin
to settle until the middle of May, but when it does—” She drew in a
deep breath, and smiled. “Just look around you at the beauty it gives
us.”
She sat out on the tree seat in the big old-fashioned garden that sloped
from the south side of the house to what Jean called “the close.” The
terraces were a riot of spring bloom; tall gold and purple flag lilies
grew side by side with dainty columbine and poet’s narcissus. Along the
stone walls white and purple lilacs flung their delicious perfume to
every passing breeze. The old apple trees that straggled in uneven rows
up through the hill pasture behind the barn, had been transformed into
gorgeous splashy masses of pink bloom against the tender green of young
foliage.
“What’s Jean doing over there in the orchard?” Kit rose from her knees,
her fingers grimy with the soil, her face flushed and warm from her
labors, and answered her own query.
“She’s wooing the muse of Art. What was her name? Euterpe or Merope?
Well, anyway that’s who she’s wooing, while we, her humble sisters, who
toil and delve after cut worms—Cousin Roxy, why are there any cut
worms? Why are there fretful midges? Or any of those things?”
“Land, child, just as home exercises for our patience,” laughed Mrs.
Ellis, happily.
Jean was out of their hearing. Frowning slightly, with compressed lips,
she bent over her work. With Shad’s help she had rigged up a home-made
easel of birchwood, and a little three legged camp stool. As Shad
himself would have said, she was going to it with a will. The week
before she had sent off five studies to Cousin Beth, and two of her very
best ones, down to Mr. Higginson. Answers had come back from both, full
of criticism, but with plenty of encouragement, too. Mrs. Robbins had
read the two letters and given her eldest the quick impulsive embrace
which ever since her babyhood had been to Jean her highest reward of
merit. But it was from her father, perhaps, that she derived the
greatest happiness. He laid one arm around her shoulders, smiling at her
with a certain whimsical speculation, in his keen, hazel eyes.
“Well, girlie, if you will persist in developing such talent, we can’t
afford to hide this candle light under a bushel. Bethiah has written
also, insisting that you are given your chance to go abroad with her
later on.”
“What does Mother say?” asked Jean, quickly. She knew that the only
thing that might possibly hold her back from the trip abroad would be
her mother’s solicitude and loving fears for her welfare.
“She’s perfectly willing to let you go as long as Cousin Beth goes with
you. It would only be for three months.”
“But when?” interrupted Jean. “It isn’t that I want to know for my own
pleasure, but you don’t know how fearfully precious these last years in
the ’teens seem to me. There’s such a terrible lot of things to learn
before I can really say I’ve finished.”
“And one of the first things you have to learn is just that you never
stop learning. That you never really start to learn until you attain the
humility of knowing your own limitations. So don’t you worry, Jeanie,
you can’t possibly go over to Europe and swallow its Art Galleries in
three months. By the way, if you are really going, you had better start
in learning some of the guide posts.”
He crossed over to one of his book cases, and picked out an old
well-worn Baedeker bound in red morocco, “Northern Italy.” He opened it
lovingly, and its passages were well underlined and marked in pencil all
the way through. There were tiny sprays of pressed flowers and four
leaved clovers, a five pointed fig leaf, and some pale silver gray olive
ones. “Leaves from Vallambrosa,” he quoted, softly. “Your mother and I
followed those old world trails all through our honeymoon, my dear.”
Jean leaned over his shoulder, eagerly, her arms clasped around his
neck, her cheek pressed to his.
“You dear,” she said, fervently. “Do you know what I’m going to do with
the very first five thousand dollars I receive for a masterpiece? I
shall send you and the Motherbird flying back to visit every single one
of those places. Won’t you love it, though?”
“I’d rather take all you kiddies with us. You gain so much more when you
share your knowledge with others. Do you know what this west window
makes me think of, Jean?” He pointed one hand to the small side window
that looked far down the valley. “Somewhere over yonder lies New York.
Often times through the past year, I have stood there, and felt like
Dante at his tower window, in old Guido Di Rimini’s castle at Ravenna.
Joe’s pigeons circling around down there make me think of the doves
which he called ‘Hope’s messengers’ bringing him memories in his exile
from his beloved Florence.”
Jean slipped down on her knees beside him, her face alight with
gladness.
“Oh, Dad, Dad, you do want to go back,” she cried. “You don’t know how
afraid I’ve been that you’d take root up here and stay forever. I know
it’s perfectly splendid, and it has been a place of refuge for us all,
but now that you are getting to be just like your old self—”
Her father’s hand checked her.
“Steady, girlie, steady,” he warned. “Not quite so fast. I am still a
little bit uncertain when I try to speed up. We’ve got to be patient a
little while longer.”
Jean pressed his hand in hers, and understood. If it had been hard for
them to be patient, it had been doubly so for him, groping his way back
slowly, the past year, on the upgrade to health.
Softly she repeated a poem that was a favorite of Cousin Roxy’s, and
which he had liked to hear.
THE HILLS OF REST
Beyond the last horizon’s rim,
Beyond adventure’s farthest quest,
Somewhere they rise, serene and dim,
The happy, happy Hills of Rest.
Upon their sunlit slopes uplift
The castles we have built in Spain—
While fair amid the summer drift
Our faded gardens flower again.
Sweet hours we did not live go by
To soothing note on scented wing;
In golden lettered volume lie
The songs we tried in vain to sing.
They all are there: the days of dream
That built the inner lives of men!
The silent, sacred years we deem
The might be and the might have been.
Some evening when the sky is gold,
I’ll follow day into the west;
Nor pause, nor heed, till I behold
The happy, happy Hills of Rest.
Jean was thinking of their talk as she sat out in the orchard today,
trying to catch some of the fleeting beauty of its blossom laden trees.
It was an accepted fact now, her trip abroad with Mrs. Newell, and they
planned to sail the first week in September, so as to catch the Fall
Academy and Exhibitions, all the way from London south to Rome. A letter
from Bab had told her of the Phelps boy’s success; after fighting for it
a year he had taken the _Prix de Rome_. This would give him a residence
abroad, three years with all expenses paid, full art tuition and one
thousand dollars in cash. Babbie had written:
“I am teasing Mother to trot over there once again, and am pretty sure
she will have to give in. The poor old dear, if only she would be
contented to let me ramble around with Hedda, we would be absolutely
safe, but she always acts as if she were the goose who had not only laid
a golden egg, but had hatched it. And behold me as the resultant genius.
Anyway we’ll all hope to meet you down at Campodino. I hear the
Contessa’s villa there is perfectly wonderful. Mother says it’s just
exactly like the one that Browning rented during his honeymoon. He tells
about it in ‘DeGustibus.’ I believe most of the rooms have been
Americanized since the Contessa married Carlota’s father, and you don’t
have to go down to the seashore when you want to take a bath. But the
walls are lovely and crumbly with plenty of old lizards running in and
out of the mold. I envy you like sixty. I wish I had a Contessa to tuck
me under her wing like that.”
* * * * *
“How are you getting along, girlie?” asked a well known voice behind
her.
“I don’t know, Dad,” said Jean, leaning back with her head on one side,
looking for all the world, as Kit would have said, like a meditative
brown thrush. “I can’t seem to get that queer silver gray effect. You
take a day like this, just before a rain, and it seems to underlie
everything. I’ve tried dark green and gray and sienna, and it doesn’t do
a bit of good.”
“Mix a little Chinese black with every color you use,” said her father,
closing one eye to look at her painting. “It is the old masters’ trick.
You’ll find it in the Flemish school, and the Veronese. It gives you the
atmospheric gray quality in everything. Hello, here come Ralph and
Piney.”
Piney waved her hand in salutation, but joined Kit and Helen in the
lower garden at their grubbing for cut worms.
“If you put plenty of salt in the water when you sprinkle those, it’ll
help a lot,” she told them.
“Oh, we’ve salted them. Shad told us that. We each took a bag of salt
and went out sprinkling one night, and then it rained, and I honestly
believe it was a tonic to the cut worm colony. The only thing to do, is
go after them and annihilate them.”
Ralph lifted his cap in greeting to the group on the terrace, but went
on up to the orchard. Kit watched him with speculative eyes and spoke in
her usual impulsive fashion.
“Do you suppose for one moment that the prince of Saskatoon is coming
wooing my fair sister? Because if he has any such notions at all, I’d
like to tell him she’s not for him,” she said, emphatically. “Now I
believe that I’m a genius, but I have resources. I can do housework, and
be the castle maid of all work, and smile and be a genius still, but
Jean needs nourishing. If he thinks for one moment he’s going to throw
her across his saddle bow and carry her off to Saskatoon, he’s very much
mistaken.”
Piney glanced up at the figures in the orchard, before she answered in
her slow, deliberate fashion,
“I’m sure, I don’t know, but Ralph said he was coming back here every
spring, so he can’t expect to take her away this year.”
Up in the orchard Mr. Robbins talked of apple culture, of the
comparative virtues of Peck’s Pleasants and Shepherd Sweetings, and
whether peaches would grow in Gilead’s climate. From the birch woods
across the road there came the clinking of a cow bell where Buttercup
led some young stock in search of good pasturage. Shad was busy mending
the cultivator that had balked that morning, as he was weeding out the
rows of June peas. He called over to Mr. Robbins for some advice, and
the latter joined him.
Ralph threw himself down in the grass beside the little birch easel.
Jean bent over her canvas, touching in some shadows on the trunks of the
trees, absently. Her thoughts had wandered from the old orchard, as they
did so often these days. It was the future that seemed more real to her,
with its hopes and ambitions, than the present. Gilead was not one half
so tangible as Campodino perched on the Campagna hills with the blue of
the Mediterranean lapping at its feet.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll miss it all?” asked Ralph, suddenly.
“Perhaps,” she glanced down at him in Jean’s own peculiar, impersonal
way. To Ralph, she had always been the little princess royal, ever since
he had first met her, that night a year ago, in the spring gloaming.
Dorrie and Kit had met the stranger more than half way, and even Helen,
the fastidious, had liked him at first sight, but with Jean, there had
always been a certain amount of reserve, her absorption in her work
always had hedged her around with thorns of aloofness and apparent
shyness. “But you see after all, no matter how far one goes, one always
comes back, if there are those you love best waiting for you.”
“You’ll only be gone three months, won’t you?”
Jean shook her head.
“It depends on how I’m getting on. Cousin Beth says I can find out in
that time whether I am just a plain barnyard chicken, or a real wild
swan. Did you ever hear of how the islanders around Nantucket catch the
young wild geese, and clip their wings? They keep them then as decoys,
until there comes a day when the wings are full grown again, and the
geese escape. Wouldn’t it be awful to imagine one were a captive wild
goose, and then try to fly and discover you were just a nice little home
bred White Leghorn pullet.”
“Oh, Jean,” called Kit. “Cousin Roxy’s going, now.”
Ralph rose, and extended his hand.
“I hope your wings carry you far, Jean,” he said earnestly. “We’re
leaving for Saskatoon Monday morning and I’ll hardly get over again as
Honey and I are doing all the packing and crating, but you’ll see me
again next spring, won’t you?”
Jean laid her hand in his, frankly.
“Why, I didn’t know you were going so soon,” she said. “Of course, I’ll
see you if you come back east.”
“I’ll come,” Ralph promised, and he stood where she left him, under the
blossoming apple trees, watching the princess royal of Greenacres join
her family circle.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where
multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer
errors occur.
Where multiple versions of hyphenation occurred, majority use
has been employed.
End of Project Gutenberg's Jean of Greenacres, by Izola L. Forrester