Part 5 (1/2)
”I think they are,” said the Major, turning the leaves. They looked at one or two together, recalling reminiscences of the days when she used to talk about them as a child. ”You always insisted that this print of Friday's foot was not of the right shape, and once you even went out in the garden, took off your shoe and stocking, and made a print in a flower-bed to show me,” said the Major, laughing.
”Let us look them all over after tea, and 'Good Queen Bertha' too,” said Sara. ”For Scar and I have come to take you out to tea, father; the dining-room is so dull without you. Besides, I want you to give me some peach preserves, and then say, 'No, Sara, not again,' when I ask for more; and then, after a few minutes, put a large table-spoonful on my plate with your head turned away, while talking to some one else, as though unconscious of what you were doing.”
Scar laughed over this anecdote, and so did Scar's father. ”But perhaps we shall have no peach preserve,” he said, rising.
”We will ask mamma to give us some,” answered Sara. She took his arm, and Scar took his other hand; thus together they entered the dining-room.
Madam Carroll welcomed them; but placidly, as though the Major's coming was a matter of course. Since his daughter's return, however, it had not been a matter of course: first for this reason, then for that, his meals had almost always been sent to the library. Now he was tired; and now the dining-room floor might be damp after Judith Inches'
scrubbing-brush; now there was an east wind, and now there was a west; or else he was not feeling well, and some one might ”drop in,” in which case, as the dining-room opened only into the hall, which was wide, like a room, he should not be able to escape. In actual fact, however, there was very little ”dropping in” at Carroll Farms, unless one should give that name to the visits of the rector, Mr. Owen. Once in a while, in the evening, when the weather was decisively pleasant, the junior warden came to see them. But all their other acquaintances came to the receptions, made a brief call upon the first Thursday afternoon following, and that was all. The sweet little mistress of the mansion had never uttered one syllable upon the subject, yet each member of the circle of Far Edgerley society knew as well as though it had been proclaimed through the town by a herald with a silver trumpet emblazoned with the Carroll arms, that these bimonthly receptions (which were so delightful) and the brief following call comprised all the visits they were expected to pay at Carroll Farms. And surely, when one considered the great pleasure and also improvement derived from these receptions, the four visits a month at the Farms were worth more than forty times four visits at any other residence in the village or its neighborhood.
True, Mrs. Hibbard endeavored to maintain an appearance of importance at her mansion of yellow wood called Chapultepec; but as General Hibbard (of the Mexican War) had now been dead eight years, and as his old house had not been opened for so much as the afternoon sewing society since his departure, its importance, socially considered, existed only in the imagination of his relict--which was, however, in itself quite a domain.
Judith Inches, tall and serious, now brought back the hot dishes, Madam Carroll made the tea (with many pretty little motions and att.i.tudes, which her husband watched), and the meal began. The Major was in excellent spirits. He told stories of Sara's childhood, her obstinacy, her never-failing questions. ”She came to me once, Scar,” he said, ”and announced that Galileo was a humbug. When I asked her why, she said that there was good King David, who knew all about astronomy long before he did; for didn't he say, 'the round world, and they that dwell therein'?
We sang it every Sunday. So that proved plain as day that David knew that the world was round, and that it moved, and all about it, of course. Yet here was this old Italian taking everything to himself! Just like Amerigo Vespucci, another old Italian, who had all America named after himself, leaving poor Columbus, the real discoverer, with nothing but 'Hail, Columbia!' to show for it. She announced all this triumphantly and at the top of her voice, from a window; for I was in the garden. When I told her that the word 'round,' upon which all her argument had been founded, was not in the original text, you should have seen how crest-fallen she was. She said she should never sing that chant again.”
Scar laughed over this story. He did not laugh often, but when he did, it was a happy little sound, which made every one join in it by its merry glee.
”I am afraid I was a very self-conceited little girl, Scar,” his sister said.
As the meal went on, the Major's manner grew all the time more easy. His eyes were no longer restless. His old attention returned, too, in a measure; he kept watch of his wife's plate to ask if she would not have something more; he remembered that Sara preferred bread to the beat biscuit, and placed it near her. The meal ended, they went back to the library. Sara found her old copy of ”Good Queen Bertha's Honey-Broth,”
and she and her father looked at the pictures together, as well as at those of ”Robinson Crusoe.” Each had its a.s.sociation, a few recalled by him, but many more by her. After Scar had gone to bed, and the books had been laid aside, she still sat there talking to him. She talked of her life at Longfields, telling stories in connection with it--stories not long--bright and amusing. The Major's wife meanwhile sat near them, sewing; she sat with her back to the lamp, in order that the light might fall over her shoulder upon the seam. The light did the work she a.s.signed to it, but it also took the opportunity to play over her curls in all sorts of winsome ways, to gleam on her thimble, to glide down her rosy muslin skirt, and touch her little slipper. She said hardly anything; but, as they talked on, every now and then she looked up appreciatively, and smiled. At last she folded up her work, replacing it in her neat rose-lined work-basket; then she sat still in her low chair, with her feet on a footstool, listening.
The old clock, with its fierce gilt corsair climbing over a gla.s.s rock, struck ten.
”Bed-time,” said Sara, pausing.
”Not for me,” observed the Major. ”My time for sleep is always brief; five or six hours are quite enough.”
”I remember,” said his daughter. And the memory, as a memory, was a true one. Until recently the Major's sleep had been as he described it. He had forgotten, or rather he had never been conscious of, the long nights of twelve or thirteen hours' rest which had now become a necessity to him.
”I am afraid I am not like you, father. I am very apt to be sleepy about ten,” said Sara. ”And I suspect it is the same with mamma.”
Madam Carroll did not deny this a.s.sertion. The Major, laughing at the early somnolence of the two ladies, rose to light a candle for his daughter, in the old way. As she took it, and bent to kiss her stepmother good-night, Madam Carroll's eyes met hers, full of an expression which made them bright (ordinarily they were not bright, but soft); the expression was that of warm congratulation.
The next day dawned fair and cloudless--Trinity Sunday. The mountain breeze and the warm sun together made an atmosphere fit for a heaven. On the many knolls of Far Edgerley the tall gra.s.s, carrying with it the slender stalks of the b.u.t.tercups, was bending and waving merrily; the red clover, equally abundant, could not join in this dance, because it had crowded itself so greedily into the desirable fields that all that its close ranks could do was to undulate a little at the top, like a swell pa.s.sing over a pond. Madam Carroll, the Major, and Scar were to drive to church as usual, in the equipage. Sara had preferred to walk.
She started some time before the hour for service, having a fancy to stroll under the churchyard pines for a while by herself. These pines were n.o.ble trees; they had belonged to the primitive forest, and had been left standing along the northern border of the churchyard by the Carroll who had first given the land for the church a hundred years before. The ground beneath them was covered with a thick carpet of their own brown aromatic needles. There were no graves here save one, of an Indian chief, who slept by himself with his face towards the west, while all his white brethren on the other side turned their closed eyes towards the rising sun. It was a beautiful rural G.o.d's-acre, stretching round the church in the old-fas.h.i.+oned way, so that the shadow of the cross on the spire pa.s.sed slowly over all the graves, one by one, as the sun made his journey from the peak of Chillawa.s.see across to Lonely Mountain, behind whose long soft line he always sank, and generally in such a blaze of beautiful light that the children of the village grew up in the vague belief that the edge of the world must be just there, that there it rounded and went downward into a mysterious golden atmosphere, in which, some day, when they had wings, they, too, should sport and float like birds.
Early though it was, Miss Carroll discovered when she entered the church gate that she was not the first comer; the choir ladies were practising within, and other ladies of floral if not musical tastes were arranging mountain laurel in the font and chancel--to the manifest disapproval of Flower, the disapproval being expressed in the eye he had fixed upon them, his ”mountain eye,” as he called his best one. ”It be swep, and it be dustered,” he said to himself. ”What more do the reasonless female creatures want?” Miss Carroll had not joined the choir, although the rector, prompted by his junior warden, had suggested it; Miss Sophia Greer would, therefore, continue to sing the solos undisturbed. She was trying one now. And the other ladies were talking. But this music, this conversation, this arrangement of laurel, and this disapproval of Flower went on within the church. The new-comer had the churchyard to herself; she went over to the pines on its northern side, and strolled to and fro at the edge of the slope, looking at the mountains, whose peaks rose like a grand amphitheatre all round her against the sky.
Her face was sad, but the bitterness, the revolt, were gone; her eyes were quiet and sweet. She had accepted her sorrow. It was a great one.
At first it had been overwhelming; for all the brightness of the past had depended upon her father, all her plans for the present, her hopes for the future. His help, his comprehension, his dear affection and interest, had made up all her life, and she did not know how to go on without them, how to live. Never again could she depend upon him for guidance, never again have the exquisite happiness of his perfect sympathy--for he had always understood her, and no one else ever had, or at least so she thought. She had cared only for him, she had found all her companions.h.i.+p in him; and now she was left alone.
But after a while Love rose, and turned back this tide. The sharp personal pain, the bitter loneliness, gave way to a new tenderness for the stricken man himself. Evidently he was at times partly conscious of this lethargy which was fettering more and more his mental powers, for he exerted himself, he tried to remember, he tried to be brighter, to talk in the old way. And who could tell but that he perceived his failure to accomplish this? Who could tell, when he was silent so often, sitting with his eyes on the carpet, that he was not brooding over it sadly? For a man such as he had been, this must be deep suffering--deep, even though vague--like the sensation of falling in a dream, falling from a height, and continuing to fall, without ever reaching bottom.
Probably he did not catch the full reality; it constantly eluded him; yet every now and then some power of his once fine mind might be awake long enough to make him conscious of a lack, a something that gave him pain, he knew not why. As she thought of this, all her heart went out to him with a loving, protecting tenderness which no words could express; she forgot her own grief in thinking of his, and her trouble took the form of a pa.s.sionate desire to make him happy; to keep even this dim consciousness always from him, if possible; to s.h.i.+eld him from contact with the thoughtless and unfeeling; to so surround his life with love, like a wall, that he should never again remember anything of his loss, never again feel that inarticulate pain, but be like one who has entered a beautiful, tranquil garden, to leave it no more.
This morning, under the pines, she was thinking of all this, as she walked slowly to and fro past the Indian's grave. Flower came out to ring his first bell. His ”first bell” was unimportant, made up of short, business-like notes; he rang it in his working jacket, an old mountain homespun coat, whose swallow-tails had been cut off, so that it now existed as a roundabout. But when, twenty minutes later, he issued forth a second time, he was attired in a coat of thin but s.h.i.+ning black, with b.u.t.ternut trousers and a high pink calico vest. Placing his hat upon the ground beside him, he took the rope in his hand, made a solemn grimace or two to get his mouth into position, and then, closing his eyes, brought out with gravity the first stroke of his ”second bell.”
His second bell consisted of dignified solo notes, with long pauses between. Flower's theory was that each of these notes echoed resonantly through its following pause. But as the bell of St. John's was not one of size or resonance, he could only make the pauses for the echoes which should have been there.
As the first note of this second bell sounded from the elm, all the Episcopal doors of Far Edgerley opened almost simultaneously, and forth came the congregation, pacing with Sunday step down their respective front paths, opening their gates, and proceeding decorously towards St.