JOHN ANGUS
In the early part of July, a lift having been added to the house to
accommodate his wheel-chair, Miss Felton and Caleb brought Mr.
Esterbrook to Quality Hill. The homecoming was in itself pathetic, but
not to be compared with the starved and yearning affection that beamed
from Miss Felton's eyes every time she looked at him, followed by an
expression of gratitude when he managed to express the simplest wish.
In appearance the old man was as trim and dapper as of old; he never was
allowed to be seen below stairs without his light gray or buff spats,
and this toilet was made afresh every afternoon, though as to the
evening there was no change, for he supped in his room and was put to
bed by eight o'clock.
Of waistcoats and neckties he had a fresh assortment and appeared to
take pleasure in them, and in some way express his choice to Caleb; but
aside from the physical difficulty of speech, such as he could command
had the aphasia warp, so that he usually said the opposite of what he
meant, thus bringing an added bitterness to Miss Elizabeth. When she was
in the room, he followed her with his eyes and sometimes refused to eat
at all unless she fed him, and he often held and patted her hand when
she walked beside his chair under the old shade trees, but when he tried
to call her by name, it was always Emmy that he said and not Elizabeth,
or Beth, as she had been called in childhood.
Sometimes Miss Felton would try to argue, saying:--
"This is Elizabeth. You know Elizabeth, do you not?" but still he would
laugh noiselessly, the laugh of senility not mirth, and nod his head to
and fro, saying:--
"Know Emmy? know Emmy? yes, yes, Emmy!" and sometimes throw kisses to
her with the hand that he could move. So finally she let it pass
unnoticed. But Miss Emmy, being once within hearing of it, conceived an
intense aversion to the poor man, and afterward kept entirely out of his
sight.
After a time of absolute silence, Poppea took up her singing with fresh
interest, and Stephen Latimer noticed the increased volume as well as
sympathy of her voice. After all, it seemed a pity to put any check upon
such a gift, and little by little he began to speak of the desirability
of her still further developing it as an art, even as her brother Philip
was developing his gift of modelling.
Latimer well knew that Poppea's nature was not one of those who can eke
out a life of small things without the force of a mastering love to
blend them into dignity, and so he talked of study abroad and travel
until Poppea herself began to take up the idea.
Early one evening she had been walking up and down the grassy garden
path, watching the poppies fold their petals, palm to palm, for the
night, taking the form of pilgrim's cockle-shells, and all at once it
came to her that these flowers from the old garden on the hill above had
doubtless been planted by her mother long ago, for they were English
poppies, delicate of tint, and not the heavy-hued Orientals. How
wonderful it was, this handing down. Touching them lightly with her
finger-tips as she walked, her heart began to sing back to that long
ago, and then the music welled from her lips, all unconscious that she
had two auditors; John Angus, sitting above on his piazza, muffled and
chilly even in the balmy evening, and a man, who with the air of a
stranger, had been walking up and down the road. Finally he opened the
gate to the post-office house, but instead of following the sound of the
music to its origin, proceeded to the door and knocked.
Presently Oliver Gilbert came stumbling out into the twilight, and, cane
in hand, made his halting way into the garden.
"Poppy," he said, "there is some one who wants to see you; it's that Mr.
Winslow who came down last summer, the day after the Felton ladies had
the party. Do you remember?"
"Yes, Daddy," said Poppea, "I remember,"--the words feeling cold to her
lips like drops of dew.
"Will you come indoors? or shall I tell him you are here?"
"I will come in," she said, rising quickly from the bench on which she
had been seated for a moment. No, she did _not_ want him to come there,
for beside her in the twilight seemed to be sitting the ghost of Hugh.
Yet slow as Gilbert was, he gained the house before her, and when she
reached the porch, it was Bradish Winslow alone who stood in the open
doorway, both hands extended.
"I have been abroad; I did not know until yesterday," he said at once
without other greeting--as if she must have wondered at his silence.
"And now the thing of which you made a barrier has vanished, how can you
keep me out, how can you hold me away even if you want to, little one?
But you don't, you can't; ah, child, child, do you know how I have
missed you? How I had to put the ocean between in order to obey the plea
in your letter?"
He had seized her hands in his greeting and still held them, drawing her
nearer and nearer to him by a power that was not wholly physical force;
while she, having forgotten a certain magnetism she had always felt in
his presence, did not know how to protest.
Finally freeing her hand, she pulled forward a deep porch chair, and
intrenched in its protecting arms, motioned him to take its mate.
"I did not know that you were away," she managed to say at last.
"Then why did you not write me only one word, 'Come'?"
"Because, because," she stammered miserably, "I didn't think of it,
because it was better that you shouldn't," and she hid her face between
her hands to free it from the yearning of his eyes.
"Poppea, do you not understand how much and why I care for you, for
yourself and that only?" he said presently, his voice changing from the
ringing, joyous tone of his greeting to one serious to the verge of
sadness.
"I believe that you do, with all my heart and soul," she answered, and
continued in an almost reverent tone, "Few men would have acted toward
me as you did that night of humiliation. I did not realize it fully
then, but I do now, and this makes me understand all the more the
difference between what you offer me and the best I have to give."
"Even so, a little is a beginning, dear, and I can wait in patience if
you will only let me be near you and teach you what love means. You do
not even yet dream what it is, you, who, above all others I have met,
were made for it and cannot be yourself without it." He saw that Poppea
was moved, was trembling, and for the moment he believed he had almost
won.
"Perhaps I have not yet dreamed as you say," she answered gently, "but
of this I am certain: love does not come by learning, love knows and is
sure."
Winslow's face changed, his throat felt dry, his lips seemed riveted
together, his whole being fell under the spell of a complete depression.
"Then you do know?" he said in a broken, husky voice.
"Yes, I know," she replied like a faint echo.
He did not make any attempt either to reason with her or to go; he
merely sat there in utter dejection, this man of the world and its
affairs, whom women had these many years called callous.
When at last he pulled himself from the chair, he held out both his
hands, but did not go toward Poppea.
"Then it is good-by?" he questioned.
"I'm afraid it must be," she replied, touched by a profound sadness,
"but oh, I do wish for my own sake it need not be, for in spite of
everything I am so very lonely." Then of her own accord she took his
hands and looked into his face, but in her eyes there shone something
that checked the parting kiss that he intended. If she were born for
love, she was no less fashioned for fidelity even to an idea, and
Winslow saw that young as she was and whether she realized it or not, he
had come into her life too late.
* * * * *
John Angus, sitting alone on his piazza, had at first listened in
irritation to the voice below in the garden, then the very quality of
its tone brought back the past as a surging tide that he could not
check. Once more he was at the open-air fête of a foreign city and the
singing of a lovely girl, little more than a child, had crept into his
heart, as her exquisite form and coloring had pleased his critical eye,
and he had let himself go. Then to keep the time schedule he had
arranged between himself and certain inexorable ambitions, he had
suddenly pulled the chain brutally taut, and among those that it had
cruelly bruised, must he not at last count himself?
What if he had not--but what was the use. The singing ceased and with it
his unusual revery. Shivering at the touch of the dew on the arm of his
chair, he went indoors, closing the long porch window after him, and
after wandering listlessly through the lower rooms for a while, climbed
slowly up to his own chamber in the same wing with Philip's rooms, where
he sat reading, and so seemed less lonely. For of late, without spoken
words having passed between, Philip was becoming more and more estranged
from his father, and sought his room or went to the studio as soon as
might be after meals, until John Angus began to wonder, with a
half-physical, half-emotional belief in the supernatural, if it were
possible that Philip knew the policy of the will that he had made, by a
form of second sight.
This thought was uppermost as he entered his private room, and after
lighting the four lamps that it held, closed and locked the door. He
would read the will over once more after he was comfortably fixed in
bed. He could not understand why in July the air should be so cold, yet
as fresh air was his chief necessity, he could not close the windows.
Turning to ring for his valet, that he might light the wood fire that
was laid ready at all seasons, he changed his mind and put a match to it
himself. Drawing a chair before the blaze, that under ordinary
conditions he would have deemed suffocating, he chafed and warmed his
hands. This done, he slowly set about undressing.
When quite ready for bed, he again changed his mind, and throwing on a
dressing-gown, slid back the panel from the small square closet by the
bed, and opening the safe, took from it the will, which, from its
completion, had seemed to exercise a strange fascination over him. He
would read it once more to be sure that all points were covered, and on
the morrow, as he expected to go to town, he would place it once for all
in the safety vault, for such a paper had no place in one's house, even
if under lock and key.
As he turned for the twentieth time the half dozen pages he knew almost
by heart, a voice seemed to be making a running commentary in his ear,
and the pith of it all was: "What have you gained by trying to control
others absolutely all your life? What are you gaining now by trying to
control others absolutely after you are dead?"
The worst of it was that the critic seemed waiting for an answer, and
he, having none ready, sat trying to frame one, but he could not, for
there was none to give.
Suddenly the pain that was an agony ran through the arm and hand that
grasped the will and then gripped his chest. It was one of his seizures,
but more intense than usual. He felt himself realizing that it would
pass off as others had before, but it did not. He could not reach the
bell or little tablet vial on his dresser. He had known, of course, the
end must come some day. Was that time now? The will, stirred by the
tremor of his hand, fairly flaunted in his face.
Why had he made it? Why? "Why not destroy it now," the voice whispered,
"and for once will for good?"
He tried to move, but the agony held him fast, he was suffocating and
not even slowly.
"Try," whispered the voice; "the fire is almost at your feet, and it
will help you."
Then inch by inch he worked himself forward, and unclasping his
stiffening hand, dropped the paper on the hearth.
Would the blaze reach it? Would he live to know?
Yes, the eager flame caught hold; he saw the red seals melt, his
signature disappear, and then--John Angus's greed for power was quenched
by that last act.
It was late the next morning that the man-servant, unable to open the
door, climbed in the open window and found his master fallen back in the
arm-chair, his bed untouched. When, panic-stricken, he opened the door,
calling loudly for help, Philip came quickly in, and saw his father, the
open safe, and the fragments of burnt legal papers on the hearthstone,
and reading the few words that remained, he understood. Putting his arms
about the lifeless form as he never before had dared, he thanked God in
his heart for the single tender memory.
* * * * *
Though due show of public respect was paid in the last rites, as due to
a leading citizen whose name, known to them rather than his person, was
always first on the subscription papers alike for foreign missions and
civic improvements, John Angus's death did not affect any one. The only
person who really took it to heart was Oliver Gilbert. To him the one
idea was paramount, the death of his neighbor before the possibility of
mutual understanding had come, and with the Puritan strain of
self-reproach strong in him, Gilbert, sitting in his little shop,
mentally scourged himself and followed painfully on foot in company with
the humbler members of the town as though the fault lay on his side.
"What shall you do?" Jeanne Latimer had asked Poppea during the next day
when Philip was closeted with her husband in whose hands he had placed
all arrangements.
"Whatever Philip wishes," Poppea answered. "You know he is the family
now, and he will never broach the one point I cannot yield."
"Shall you wear black?" Jeanne continued with some hesitation.
"I think so, for a time," Poppea said with brows knitted, "or else
Philip will feel so entirely alone, so isolated."
In a week's time the lawyer, whom Poppea had met before, came to the
Rectory, where Philip had been staying since the funeral, for the boy
had told Stephen Latimer frankly that he should never again sleep in the
house on Windy Hill, where the servants now remained alone, awaiting
events and orders, or again go to the sombre city house that looked
across Washington Square.
The lawyer met Philip and Mr. Latimer alone, as Poppea had asked to be
released from any part in this interview, and spoke of the will that he
had drawn up within the month and produced the draft of it.
Philip laid on the table the scorched fragments found upon the hearth
on which a visible word here and there was enough to prove identity.
"Then the course of the law lies straight," the lawyer said; "but as Mr.
Philip Angus is a minor until next year, a guardian must be appointed."
"I shall petition that Mr. Latimer acts as such," Philip replied.
"What has Miss Angus--Gilbert--or whatever she persists in calling
herself, to say to that, pray?"
"She bids me say as her spokesman," Philip answered, "that she intends
to make no personal claim in the matter. Whatever may be hereafter
decided will be out of the range of business or of law and will lie only
between her brother and herself."
"A close corporation, it seems," said the lawyer, puckering his mouth
for a contemptuous whistle, but catching sight of a glance in Latimer's
eye, he checked it by remarking:--
"Pray tell me, as between man and man, is this young woman quite sane?
She can claim half of an ample though not princely property."
"Yes, quite sane," said Latimer, in accents as steely and clear-cut as
the man's own, "but the expression of her sanity does not chance to take
a form familiar to members of your calling."
After this the wheels of local probate law began to turn with their
usual deliberation.
At first Miss Emmy proposed to postpone their journey, but now it was
Poppea who urged her on, feeling the positive necessity of a change and
a little time away from familiar places, in which to readjust herself.
She not only now wished to look over the field for musical study at
close range, but dreams flitted through her head of a winter either in
Florence or in Rome in company with Philip, though not, perhaps, at
once; for winter was a perilous time for one of Oliver Gilbert's years,
and this winter the post-office would cease to be, in itself no small
bereavement to him.
Again Satira, her snapping black eyes always fixed eagerly upon the
bustling life of the village centre, came to the fore, and 'Lisha, good,
easy man, acquiesced, acknowledging that "twarn't no further to go up to
the corn and potato fields of mornings than, living on the hill, to hev
to drop down to the village o' nights for a dish of gossip and the
news."
Finally the day before the one for sailing came, and with it the
startling announcement from Oliver Gilbert that he was going to the city
to see Poppea off.
"Land alive! you'll get lost; you don't know how the city's changed
these near twenty years since the time you would fetch Poppy down to
President Lincoln's obsequies!" cried Satira. "I've heard Miss Emmy say
that what were cow pastures where she used to pick dandelions when a
girl are built solid over with emporiums of fashion. Besides, you've
never been aboard anything bigger'n Captain Secors's onion schooner, and
if that big thing they're going on began to get up steam and snort,
_how_ it would quake your vitals. It did mine that trip I took."
_That trip_ being the term applied to a wonderful excursion of the
previous summer, from Bridgeton to the new-found land of pleasure, Coney
Island, whither 'Lisha had taken her, and of which he was destined never
to hear the last.
But Gilbert saying in a tone that barred discussion that he would take
whatever risks there were, the matter was dropped as being decided.
Late in the scorching July afternoon he harnessed his old Roman-nosed
horse to the chaise and disappeared on the cross-road that ran eastward
toward the Moosatuck, without vouchsafing any explanation to his sister,
who, having questioned him in vain, called his attention to the
threatening array of 'thunder-heads' that were rolling over the hills,
every few seconds being rent together by forks of lightning.
He had been gone perhaps half an hour when the storm reached the
village, and great splashes of rain, falling upon the shed roof, were
turned into steam by the heat of the tin.
Poppea, having given the finishing touches to her simple packing, was
setting her room in order, fingering each article lovingly as though she
felt that even should she come back and find all as she left it, yet
there must be a difference.
As the rain increased to a steady downpour, she looked anxiously up the
road and made a mental calculation as to what houses lay on the route
Daddy had taken, and where he would be by now, his probable destination
having been as obscure to her as to Satira.
Meanwhile, the horse and chaise were standing in the shelter of an
abandoned lumber shack in the woods that overhung the west bank of
Moosatuck, while Gilbert, utterly oblivious of the rain that gradually
sifted to him through the heavy leafage, was following a narrow
foot-path. Glancing from side to side, he pulled a long string of
ground-pine here, there a fine branch of strong laurel, and then again a
handful of the dark green, white-veined leaves of the wax-flowered
pipsissewa; when his arms would hold no more and he again reached the
chaise, the thunder-heads were scurrying across the bay and the rain was
over.
Poppea had sorted the evening mail and was sitting at the desk in
Gilbert's workshop when he came in, slowly yet without his cane, and
crossing to where she was, laid his armful of dripping wood-treasure
before her, saying, half-shamedfacedly, yet as to one who would
understand:--
"Will you tie me a nice wreath, Poppy, like the one we always have to
hang up there at Christmas, lacking of course the berries? I guess I'll
go in and change and get a bite to eat, if you'll spell me here for
twenty minutes longer," and Poppea, with a comprehending smile and nod,
buried her face in the fresh, spicy greenery.
What Gilbert wanted with the wreath or did with it when he took it from
her hands presently, she did not know, for later, as she walked up and
down the flagged walk between the porch and gate, thinking of the
details of to-morrow, the latch clicked and Hugh Oldys came through the
wicket.
It was not alone the colorless twilight that made the change in his
face which struck her like a blow. Without having become absolutely
thin, the man of a year before, with height and breadth, good color,
wholesome flesh, natural joy and interest in life and living, seemed to
have passed through some phase that, while it spiritualized in a sense,
had eliminated much that was characteristic.
"Your mother--is she worse?" was Poppea's first question.
"I do not think so, though in a case like hers it is worse to be no
better. I should have been to see you many days ago but for a sudden
change in nurses. No one stays more than a month," he added, breaking
through his habitual reticence on this subject, as though at last he
must have the support of sympathy.
"No one but you, Hugh. Ah, how can you go on so when every one else
falters?"
"Because she is my mother and not theirs; in that lies all."
"All?" Poppea echoed, leaning toward him with such unmistakable
tenderness in her eyes that it must have broken through any self-raised
barrier of the man's had he but seen and compassed it. Yet he never
looked at her directly nor let her read his face, though it was not
until after he had gone that Poppea realized this.
For an hour the conversation drifted to casual things, and save for
Philip, his work and plans, in wholly impersonal channels, they two
sitting on the top step of the porch. When at last Hugh rose to go, and
walking slowly side by side down the narrow path they halted at the
end, one inside the gate, one without, he said, looking backward up the
way they had come, as if into the past:--
"It will be good when you come back, but it isn't to be supposed or
hoped that after you have made the break you will care for this sleepy
little village as you have, Poppea. I have always wondered why you cared
so little for the New York life with the fine opening you made. In the
few months I had there, the fulness and the vigor of it all gripped me
so that leaving was a wrench."
"For New York? Yes, I cared for that and all the best it gives. But the
life? Yes, I cared for that too, in a way, until I stood off and looked
back."
Then, clasping her hands about the post, she said, smiling shyly, with a
little quizzical expression at the corners of her mouth:--
"Do you remember once, long ago, how you and I stood by the railroad
brook and watched a big, striped snake charm and swallow a little green
frog?
"We didn't mean to let the affair come to the swallowing, but though the
beginning was slow, the frog sat still and waited too long, and the end
came quicker than we expected. Then, as the lump that was the frog began
to be moved down the snake's length in being digested, you took your
foot and little by little edged the frog backward out of the snake's
mouth to the ground, slime covered and quite insensible. Then we both
took water in our hands, and dashing it washed the slime away, until
presently the frog came to and hopped away like mad, without ever
looking back.
"Well, once upon a time, Hugh, as the fairy stories say, I was a little
green frog and the life down there the snake; it drew me, and I didn't
want to get away, until, when it was almost too late, one night a great
splash of cold water, thrown by people who did not throw it in kindness,
and that nearly strangled me, brought me to, and I hopped away without
even wishing to look back.
"So when you think to yourself again, 'Poppea will yet love the life of
the city,' remember the little green frog!"
Thus they parted in a sudden ripple of laughter, good friends.
Next day, in the hurry and bustle that always belong to an outgoing
steamer in the season of summer travel, some of those in the crowd on
the deck of the _Normanic_ were attracted by the sight of a young and
well-bred woman of unusual beauty, accompanied by a maid and some one
who might either be her mother or aunt, clinging tearfully about the
neck of an old man, whom she was wishing good-by. While there was
nothing unusual about the parting at such a time, yet the dainty dress
and bearing of the woman were in striking contrast to the homespun
plainness of the man, who wore the long, flowing beard, stiff clothes,
and wide-brimmed Panama hat, his Sunday best for years, that marks the
countryman. Moreover, he carried a home-made hickory cane and clutched
to his breast a bulky newspaper parcel.
When the final blast of "all ashore" was sounded, the air quivering with
the vibrations, the girl loosed her hold, and crying, "Good-by, dear
Daddy!" disappeared in the crowd that gathered by the stairway; while
he, turning toward the gang-plank, marched down it with all the
soldier-like precision his lameness would allow, never looking back, his
bundle still clasped tightly to him.
Boarding a small blue car known as a "bob-tail," Gilbert rode across the
city, carefully scanning his course. When he emerged presently from the
region of crooked ways to where the avenues run north and south and the
streets east and west, and saw ahead an open square, he stopped the car,
and standing at the street curb, shielding his eyes from the pitiless
sun, tried to get his bearings.
"Fourteenth Street," said one lamp-post, "University Place" another.
Yes, the park opposite was Union Square, but where was the house on
whose porch he had stood that April day in eighteen sixty-five when the
procession swung around from Broadway?
A business building covered with signs replaced it; yet at the same
moment, his eyes fell on what he sought. The statue of Lincoln, rugged
and majestic, standing above the cobbled plateau, calm and unmoved by
all the frantic bustle of the street.
Making his way carefully through the traffic, Gilbert approached the
rail about the statue. He paused for a moment, and then, undoing his
parcel, took from it the wreath, rested it on the railing, while he
folded the paper and, winding the string about it, placed it in his
pocket. Then getting stiffly over the barrier, he laid the wreath at
Lincoln's feet, raised his old hat, looking up into Lincoln's face as
one in perfect, if humble, comradeship, while his lips murmured,
"Through you I have finished the course, with you I have kept the
faith!"
The people of the street, big and little, loafer and gamin, who spring
up about an unusual object as swiftly as the circles surround a stone
flung in the water, neither jostled nor jeered nor plucked the wreath
away, for among the simple-minded, hero-worship will never die out save
for lack of heroes.
Then making his way back to Fifth Avenue, Gilbert, seeking the scanty
bits of shade as best he might, walked up its length until he reached
the third open space and turned eastward to the railway station.
At the coming of the evening mail he pottered as usual with the letters
as though that day had been like all the others, and ate his supper with
little sauce of conversation, to the inexpressible disappointment of
Satira Potts.