The Idyl of Twin Fires

“I think it is wonderful,” said I. “I have my home at last! And how you have helped me!”

“Yes, you have your home,” said she. “Oh, it is such a nice one!”

She turned away, and went over to the east fire, poking it with her toe. I lit my pipe, sat down at my old, familiar desk, heaved a great sigh of comfort, and opened a manuscript.

“It’s only four o’clock,” said I. “I can get in that hour I wasted in sleep this morning. Can you find something to read?”

“I ought to,” she smiled.

I plunged into the manuscript–a silly novel. I heard Miss Goodwin on the other side of the settle, taking down a book. I read on. The room was very still. Presently the stillness roused me from my work, and I looked up. I could not see the girl, so I rose from my chair and tiptoed around the settle. She was sitting with a closed book on her knee, gazing into the fire. I sat down, too, and touched her arm.

“What is there?” I asked, pointing to the flames.

She looked around, with a half-wistful little smile. “You are not making up that lost hour,” she answered.

“But the room was so still,” said I, “that I wondered where you were.”

“Perhaps I was many miles away,” she replied. “Do you want me to make a noise?”

“You might sing for me.”

“I should hate to make the thrush jealous. No, my accomplishments cease with philology. I’m very happy here, really. You must go back to your work.”

I went back, and read a few more pages of the silly novel.

“This story is so silly I really think it would be a success,” I called out.

A head peeped up at me over the settle. “You aren’t working,” she reproached. “I’m going away, so you won’t have me to talk to.”

“Very well, I’ll go with you,” I cried, slamming the manuscript into a drawer. “I’ll come down here and work after supper.”

“No, you’ll work till five o’clock.”

“Not unless you’ll stay!”

The eyes looked at me over the settle, and I looked steadily back. We each smiled a little, silently.

“Very well,” said she, as the head disappeared.

I read on, vaguely aware that the west was breaking, and the room growing warm. Presently I heard a window opened and felt the cooler rush of rain-freshened air from the fragrant orchard. Then I heard the painters come downstairs, talking, and tramp out through the kitchen. It was five o’clock. But I still read on, to finish a chapter. The painters had departed. The entire house was still.

Suddenly there stole through the room the soft andante theme of a Mozart sonata, and the low sun at almost the same instant dropped into the clear blue hole in the west and flooded the room. I let the manuscript fall, and sat listening peacefully for a full minute. Then I moved across the floor and stood behind the player. How cheerful the room looked, how booky and old-fashioned! It seemed as if I had always dwelt there. It seemed as if this figure at the piano had always dwelt there. How easy it would be to put out my hands and rest them on her shoulders, and lay my cheek to her hair! The impulse was ridiculously strong to do so, and I tingled to my finger tips with a strange excitement.

“Come,” I said, “it is after five, and the sun is out. We will go to hear the thrush.”

The girl faced around on the bench, raising her face to mine, “Yes, let us,” she answered. “How lovely the room looks now. Oh, the nice new old room!”

She lingered in the doorway a second, and then we stepped out of the front entrance, where we stood entranced by the freshness of the rain-washed world in the low light of afternoon, and the heavy fragrance of wet lilac buds enveloped us. Then the girl gathered her skirts up and we went down through the orchard, where the ground was strewn with the fallen petals, through the maples where the song sparrow was singing, and in among the dripping pines. The brook was whispering secret things, and the drip from the trees made a soft tinkle, just detectable, on its pools.

We waited one minute, two minutes, three minutes in silence, and then the fairy clarion sounded, the “cool bars of melody from the everlasting evening.” It sounded with a thrilling nearness, so lovely that it almost hurt, and instinctively I put out my hand and felt for hers. She yielded it, and so we stood, hand in hand, while the thrush sang once, twice, three times, now near, now farther away, and then it seemed from the very edge of my clearing. I still held her hand, as we waited for another burst of melody. But he evidently did not intend to sing again. My fingers closed tighter over hers as I felt her face turn toward mine, and she answered their pressure while her eyes glistened, I thought, with tears. Then her hand slipped away.

“Don’t speak,” she said, leading the way out of the grove.

We went into the house again to make sure that the fires had burned down. The room was darker now, filled with twilight shadows. The last of the logs were glowing red on the hearths, and the air was hot and heavy after the fresh outdoors. But how cheerful, how friendly, how like a human thing, with human feelings of warmth and welcome, the room seemed to me!

“It has been a wonderful day,” said I, as we turned from the fires to pass out. “I wonder if I shall ever have so much joy again in my house?”

The girl at my side did not answer. I looked at her, and saw that she was struggling with tears.

I did instinctively the only thing my clumsy ignorance could suggest–put my hand upon hers. She withdrew it quickly.

“No, no!” she cried under her breath. “Oh, I am such a fool! Fool–Middle English fool, fole, fol; Icelandic, fol; old French fol–always the same word!”

She broke into a plaintive little laugh, ran through the hall and lifted the stove lid to see if the fire there was out, and hastened to the road, where I had difficulty to keep pace with her as we walked up the slope to supper.

“You need a rest more than you think, I guess,” I tried to say, but she only answered, “I need it less!” and made off at once to her room. That night I didn’t go back to my house to work. I didn’t work at all. I looked out of my window at a young moon for a long while, and then–yes, I confess it, though I was thirty years old, I wrote a sonnet!

Chapter X
WE CLIMB A HILL TOGETHER

As I came to the barn door again, a carryall was passing, with a woman and a stout girl on the back seat, and another stout girl and a man on the front seat. The women were dressed in their starched best, the man, an elderly farmer with a white beard, in the blue uniform and slouch hat of the G. A. R. They were going to Memorial service. I instinctively saluted as the old fellow nodded to me in his friendly, country way, and he dropped the reins with a pleased smile and brought his own hand snap up to his hat brim. I watched the carryall disappear, hearing it rattle over the bridge across my brook, and for the first time felt myself a stranger in this community. I suddenly wanted to go with them to church, to hear the drone of the organ and the soft wind rushing by the open windows, bringing in the scent of lilacs, to see the faces of my neighbours about me, to chat with them on the church steps when the service was over. I realized how absorbed I had been in my own little farm, and resolved to begin getting acquainted with the town as soon as possible. Then I picked up a rake, and went back to the lawn.

As soon as I had eliminated the horse’s hoofprints, I got a bag of lawn seed and scattered it, probably using a good deal more than was necessary. Mike had assured me it was too late to sow grass, but I hoped for fool’s luck. I sowed it carefully about the sundial beds, so that none should fall on them, but over the rest of the lawn I let it fall from on high, delighting in the way it drifted with the gentle wind on its drop to earth. I had not sown long before the birds began to come, by ones, then by twos and threes and fours, till it seemed as if fifty of them were hopping about. I shooed them away, but back they came.

“Well,” thought I, “lawn seed is not so terribly expensive, and they can’t pick it all up!” I scattered it thicker than ever, and then harrowed it under a little with a rake, working till one o’clock, for Sunday dinner was at one-thirty. Then I went back to Bert’s, with only a peep into my big south room to see how cheerful it looked. I found Miss Goodwin still sitting where I had left her, under the sycamore before the house.

“You see, I’ve obeyed,” she smiled. “I’ve not read, nor even thought. I’ve ’jest set.’ But I’m beginning to get restless.”

“Good,” said I. “Shall we celebrate the Sabbath by taking a walk? I’d like to have you show me Bentford.”

She assented, and right after dinner we set out, I having donned my knickerbockers and a collar for the first time since my arrival, and feeling no little discomfort from the starched band around my throat.

“The size of it is,” I groaned, “all my clothes are now too small for me. If you stay here till July, you’ll probably have to send for an entire new wardrobe.”

“That’s the fear which haunts me,” she smiled, as we crossed my brook and turned up the hill toward the first of the big estates. In front of this estate we paused and peeped through the hedge. The family had evidently arrived, for the unmistakable sounds of a pianola were issuing from the house. The great formal garden, still gay with Darwin tulips and beginning to show banks of iris flowers against lilac shrubbery, looked extremely expensive. The residence itself, of brown stucco, closely resembled a sublimated $100,000 ice-house. An expensive motor stood before the door.

“How rich and ugly it is,” said Miss Goodwin, turning away. “Let’s not look at houses. Let’s find some woods to walk in.”

We looked about us toward the high hills which ring the Bentford valley, and struck off toward what seemed the nearest. The side road we were on soon brought us to the main highway up the valley to the next town, and a motor whizzed past us, leaving a cloud of dust, then a second, and a third. We got off the highway as speedily as possible, crossing a farm pasture and entering the timber on the first slope of the big hill. Here a wood road led up, and we loitered along it, finding late violets and great clumps of red trilliums here and there.

The girl sprang upon the first violets with a little cry of joy, picking them eagerly and pressing them to her nose. “Smell!” she laughed, holding them up to mine. She soon had her hands full, and was forced to pass by the next bed–as I told her, with the regret of a child who has eaten all the cake he can at a church supper.

“No child ever ate all the cake he could,” she laughed. “Oh, please dig up some trilliums and plant them in your garden, or rather in your woods!”

“How are we going to get them home?” said I. “We’ll have to dig up some of the earth, too, with the roots.”

“I know,” she answered. “Even if I am a highbrow, I’ve not quite forgotten my childhood lessons in manual work–which I always hated till now. I’ll weave a basket.”

Looking about, I saw a wild grape vine, and I pulled it down from the tree to which it was clinging. “I feel like a suffragette,” said I, “destroying the clinging vine.”

“Cut it into two-foot lengths,” she retorted, “and don’t make poor puns.” She sat on the brown needles at the foot of a pine, and began twisting the pieces of vine into a rough basket. I sat beside her and watched her work. Out beyond us was a sun-soaked clearing, a tiny swamp on the hillside, and the sunlight dappled in across her skirt. As she worked, a wood thrush called far off, his last long-drawn note ringing like a sweet, wistful fairy horn. The white fingers paused in their weaving, and our eyes met. She did not speak, but looked smiling into my face as the call was repeated, while her throat fluttered. Then, without speaking, she turned back to her work. I, too, was silent. What need was there of words?

“Was that a hermit, too?” she asked presently. “It sounded different.”

“No, a wood thrush,” said I. “He’s not so Mozartian.”

She finished the basket and held it out proudly. “There!” she cried. “It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t art, but it will hold trilliums.”

She dusted off her skirt, and I helped her to her feet. We continued up the road, looking for trilliums, and when the first large clump appeared pushing up their dark red blooms from the leafy mould, we were both on our knees beside it, prying it up, earth and all. We soon had the basket filled, and then pressed on straight up the hillside, leaving the wood road. It was a steep scramble, over rocks where the thin, mossy soil slipped from under foot, and through tangles of mountain laurel bushes. I had frequently to help her, for she was not used to climbing, and she was breathing hard.

“Let’s stop,” said I. “This is too hard work for you.”

She grasped a dead stick, like a banner staff, struck an attitude, and cried, “Excelsior!”

“No, sir,” she added, “I’m going to reach the top of this hill and look down the other side if I die on the summit. I know now for the first time why Annie Peck and Hudson Stuck risked their lives on Mount Something-or-other in the Andes and Mount McKinley in Alaska. It’s a grand sensation. I feel the primal urge!”

“Didn’t you ever climb a mountain?” I queried, incredulous.

“Never,” she answered. “Never even a baby mountain like this. My altitude record is the top step of the Columbia University library.”

“You poor child!” I cried. “Why, I’ll carry you to the top! I never realized that you were such a hopeless urbanite.”

We went on more slowly, for the way was very steep now, and between helping her and holding the trilliums level I had my hands full. Laughing when we had the breath, we scrambled through the last of the shrubbery, and suddenly stood on a flat rock at the summit, with the world spread out below us like a map. I set down the basket, wiped my face, and ruefully felt of my wilted collar. The girl sank, panting, on the rock, fanned herself with her wisp of a handkerchief, and gazed out over the green Bentford valley below to the far hills in the south. The sky above us was very blue and lazy afternoon clouds were floating in it. Far up here only a few birds peeped in the scrub. We seemed strangely alone in that privacy of the peak.

“’Silent upon a peak in Darien!’” I heard her say, as if to herself. Then she turned her eager face to mine. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she cried. “Look, all the world like a map below you, and all this sky to see at once, and the cooling breeze and the feeling that you are above everybody! Oh, I love it! Quick, now let me see the other side!”

She ran across the rock, and I after her. From this side we looked between the trees into the valley to the north, the next valley to Bentford, and saw a blue lake, like a piece of the sky dropped down, and several large estates, and the green and brown checkerboards of farms, and far off a white steeple above the trees, and then once more on the horizon the eternal ring of blue mountains. Even as we gazed, from somewhere below us drifted up, faint and sweet, the sound of a church bell.

“Oh, it is nice on the roof of the world!” she cried. “Think of that–here am I, a Ph. D. in philology, and the only adjective I can find is ’nice’!”

“It’s all in how you say it,” I smiled. “I think I understand. I called you ’poor child’ a few moments ago because you’d never been on a high hilltop. Now I take it back. Think of getting those first virgin impressions when you are old enough to appreciate them! I envy you. I was only five when they took me up Mount Washington.”

“I should think you’d have insisted on the Matterhorn by the time you were ten,” she laughed. “I should.”

We hunted out some soft moss in the shade, and sat down to get cool in the summit breeze before the descent. The girl spoke little, her eyes wandering constantly off over the view with the light of discovery in them. In my own staid way, I had always fancied I enjoyed the quieter pleasures of the outdoors as much as any one, but before this rapture I was almost abashed. If I did not speak, it was chiefly because I feared to drop clumsy words into her mood.

But presently I did suggest that we must be starting down. As there was no path visible–later I have found that since the advent of motors there are never any paths where the walking is in the least strenuous!–we took the way we had come, and began the descent. Naturally I went ahead, and helped her all I could. To one unaccustomed to hard walking, a steep descent is more tiresome than a climb, and I began to fear that I had led her into an excess. But she came bravely tumbling along behind. In some places I had to put up my arms and lift her down. In others she had to slide one foot far ahead for a secure resting-place, with a reckless show of stocking. But she laughed it all off gayly. We missed, somehow, the way we had taken up, and presently found ourselves on a ledge with a clean drop of eight feet. I prospected to right and left, found a place where the drop was only six, and jumped. Then she lowered the basket to me, sat on the edge herself, leaned out and put her arms about my neck, and I swung her off. As I set her on the ground again our faces were close together for an instant, and I could feel rather than see her eyes laughing into mine.

“This is a very pleasant hill,” said I.

“But we are almost to the wood road now,” she darted back, jumping into the lead.

A moment more, and we stood in the wood road, and presently we came upon a spring under a rock, and plunged our faces into it and drank. She looked up with the water dripping from her saucy nose, and quoted: “’As rivers of water in a dry place.’ I’m learning lots to-day. Now it’s the elemental force of the Bible similes.”

“All the wisdom isn’t in New York–and dictionaries,” said I.

“There, now you’ve mentioned the Dictionary! How could you!” she cried, and suddenly, like a child, snapped water into my face.

“You’ve ruined my collar,” said I solemnly.

“Your collar looks like a fat man’s at a dance in July,” said she. “Let’s give the poor trilliums a drink.”

She put the basket by the spring, dipped her hands in the water, and then let palmsful drop on the wilted flowers. “How woodsy they smell!” she cried, leaning over them. “Now I’m going to wash my face again.”

She was like a child. She buried her face in the water, and when she emerged the little curly hairs on her temples were dripping. “I’d like to wade in it!” she exclaimed. “I wonder if I dare!”

“Go ahead,” said I. “I’ll go down the road and wait.”

“That wouldn’t be daring,” she twinkled.

“Well, I’ll sit here and wait.”

She looked at me saucily, and laughed, shaking her head.

“Coward,” said I.

But she only laughed again, sprang up, and started rapidly away.

I caught her by the arm. “Easy, easy,” I cautioned. “You’re a broken-down, nervous wreck, remember. You mustn’t overdo things.”

Her moods were many that afternoon. Again she looked at me, but didn’t laugh. Her eyes, instead, held a sort of startled gratitude, like those of a person, unused to kindness, suddenly befriended. She was no longer the child let loose in the woods. She walked slowly at my side, and so we came down to the high-road again. At the road we looked back to the hilltop where we had been.

“How much easier the climb looks than it is,” said she.

“That’s the way of hills–and other things,” said I sententiously.

“I knew about the other things,” she answered. “Now I’ve learned it about the hills. It seems as if I were learning all the old similes wrong end foremost, doesn’t it?–springs and–and all?”

Her tone was wistful, and it was with difficulty that I refrained from touching her hand. “Oh, there’s something to be said for that method,” I answered cheerfully. “Think of all the pleasant things you have to learn. The other way around you get the grim realism last.”

But a thought plagued her as we turned down the side road to my house. However, her face cleared as we drew near, and as the house itself appeared she clapped her hands, crying, “Now, where are we going to put the trilliums?”

“At the edge of the pines,” I suggested, “where they can talk with the brook?”

“Yes, that’s the place.” Suddenly she paused, looked back up the slope, and cried, “Do you suppose this brook is that spring?”

I hastily ran over the contour of the country we had passed through, and saw that indeed the spring must be its headwaters.

“I’m so glad!” she cried.

“Why?” I asked.

She darted a look at me, with twinkling eyes. “I shan’t tell you,” she said.

I got a trowel, and we planted the withered trilliums in partial shade between the maples and the pines, and gave them water. Then I showed her the newly sown lawn, and we peeped in to see the Hiroshiges over the twin fires.

“Now, home and to bed for you,” I cried. “I know you’ve done too much.”

“I know I’ve had a wonderful time,” she answered soberly. “I’ve–I’ve–it’s hard to explain–but I’ve somehow connected up this house with the wild country about it. Do you understand? If I had a house in the country, I should want it where I could get out, this way, on a Sunday afternoon into the woods and bring home trilliums. It wouldn’t seem right, complete, if I couldn’t. I’d want my own dear garden, and then a great big, God’s garden over the fence somewhere.”

“That is how I feel, too,” said I. “Only I want, also, to connect up my place with my neighbours; I want myself to be a part of the human environment. I thought of that this morning, as I saw the folks going by to church. If I ever get Twin Fires done, I’m going to join the Grange!”

“But Twin Fires comes first, doesn’t it? I fear I’ve been selfish to drag you off to-day.”

“Drag me off is good!” I laughed. “You poor little city-bred, you, as if your enjoyment hadn’t given me the happiest day of my life! Only I’m afraid you did too much.”

“I am pretty tired,” she admitted, with a happy smile. “But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

I was pretty tired myself, but I did a remarkably good evening’s work, nevertheless, only pausing before the start to wonder why it was she wept one night when she wasn’t tired, and smiled the next when she had tramped ten miles. But a man cannot afford to ponder such problems in feminine psychology too closely if he has anything else to do!

Chapter XI
ACTÆON AND DIANA

I looked about the garden. The roses had not yet come, so we couldn’t very well plant them. I judged that the morning of a warm, sunny day was no time to transplant seedlings. The painting was not yet completed inside, so I could fix up no more of my rooms. The vegetable garden didn’t appear to need cultivation. We couldn’t paint the trellis, as there was no green paint.

“Good gracious!” I exclaimed, “this is the first time I’ve been at a loss for something to do. It’s a terrible sensation.”

“Couldn’t we build a bird bath?” she suggested.

“Madam,” said I, “you are a genius!”

“At the brook?” she added.

“No, not the brook. I’ve a better idea. Up in Stephen Parrish’s lovely garden in Cornish I once saw a bird bath which we’ll try to duplicate, here on the lawn, so the birds will have the water handy to wash down the grass seed they are eating so fast. Let’s see; we’ll need bricks, sand, cement, a mason’s trowel, a spade, a hoe, a level, a box to mix in, and a box for a frame.”

I had nearly a whole bag of cement left over from my dab at orchard renovation, and there were plenty of packing-boxes. I selected one which was exactly square, about two feet on each side, and carefully knocked the bottom out. A shallower one did for a mixing-box. Down cellar, where my heater had been installed, was a barrow load of extra bricks which the plumber had left behind–inefficient business but very convenient for me. Sand was easily procured by digging a hole near the brook.

“Now,” said I, “my plan is to put the bird bath on the east edge of the lawn, halfway between the house and the rose aqueduct, corresponding to the sundial in the centre, and to a white bench which will be placed at the west side when the grape arbour is built.”

“Approved,” laughed Miss Goodwin.

We measured off the spot, and I trundled the barrow to a pile of coal ashes behind the barn–where the previous owner had deposited them–and brought back enough to make a frost-proof foundation. After we had packed these into the ground and levelled them off, I mixed a lot of cement, laid it over thick, set the bottomless box frame down upon it, levelled that, and working from the inside, of course, laid the bricks up against the box, with a great deal of cement between them, and built up the four sides. As the girl had no gloves, I would not allow her to handle the cement (for nothing cracks the skin so badly, as I had discovered in my orchard work). But she kept busy mixing with the hoe, and handing me bricks. Some I broke and put in endwise, and I was careful to give all as irregular a setting as possible, till the top was reached. Then, of course, I laid an even line of the best bricks all the way around, and levelled them carefully. We had scarcely got the last brick on when we heard Bert’s carryall rattle over the bridge and Bert’s voice yelling “Dinner!”

“Oh, dear! That cement in the box will harden!” I cried. “Dump it all in.”

We tipped up the box, dumped the contents down into the hollow centre of the brick work, and hurried home to a cold dinner, for Mrs. Bert, too, had taken a holiday that morning. But we were so impatient to be back at our work that we didn’t care. On our return we filled the rest of the hollow up with cement and stones to within three inches of the top. Then, mixing more cement, with only two parts of fine sand to one of cement, I laid over an even surface of the mixture and filled all the corners and cracks between the top row of bricks, making a square bowl, as it were, two inches deep, on the top of the little brick pile. We let it settle a few moments, and then carefully broke away the box. There stood the bird bath, needing only some cleaning away of cement which had squeezed out between bricks, and some filling in of hollows caused in removing the frame. It really looked quite neat and attractive, and not too formally bricky, as so much cement showed.

“Can we put water in it yet?” the girl asked.

“Surely,” said I. “Cement will harden under water. And we’ll plant climbing nasturtiums around it, too.”

I spaded up the ground at the base a little, and we went to the seed bed and dug up half a dozen climbing nasturtiums, which were already six or seven inches high. We set them in, got a pail of water from the brook and watered them, and carefully filled the bath level with the brim. Then we removed all the tools and boxes to the shed again, and came back to the south door to survey our work.

We passed through the house. The kitchen, dining-room, and hall were finished and the paint drying. They looked very fresh and bright. The south room, as we stepped into it, was flooded with sunlight and cheerful with rugs and books. Flinging wide the glass door, we stepped out upon the terrace of the pergola-to-be, and looked toward the new bird bath. Upon its rim sat a song sparrow! Even as we watched, another came and fluttered his feet and breast daintily through the trembling little mirror of water. Then came a robin and drove them both away.

“The pig!” laughed Miss Goodwin. “Do you know, I’ve got a poorer opinion of robins since I came here. We city dwellers think of robins as harbingers of spring, and all that, and they epitomize the bird world. But when you really are in that world, you find they are rather large and vulgar and–and sort of upper West Side-y. They aren’t half so nice as the song sparrows, or the Peabodies, and, of course, compared with the thrushes–well, it’s like comparing Owen Meredith with Keats, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be too hard on the robins,” I smiled.

We looked our fill at the new bird bath, which was already functioning, as she said her boss on the dictionary would put it, and at the white sundial pillar, and at our prospective aqueduct of roses, and at the farm and the far hills beyond–and then she suddenly announced with great energy that she was going to saw wood.

“You may saw just one piece,” said I, “and then you are going to take a book and rest. I’m going to work, myself. Twin Fires is getting in shape fast enough now so I can give up part of the daytime to the purely mundane task of paying the bills.”

I wheeled up a big dead apple branch from the orchard to the wood shed, put it on the buck, gave her the buck-saw, and watched her first efforts, grinning.

“Go away,” she laughed. “You bother me.”

So I went, opened the west window by my desk to the wandering summer breeze, and went at my toil. Presently I heard her tiptoeing into the room.

“Done?” said I.

She nodded. “Now I want–let’s see what I want–well, I guess ’Marius the Epicurean’ and ’Alice in Wonderland’ will do. I’m going to sit in the orchard. You work here till five or your salary will be docked. Good-bye.”

I heard her go out by the front door, and then silence settled over the sun-filled, cheerful room, while I plugged away at my tasks. I don’t know how long I worked, but finally my attention began to wander. I wondered if she were still in the orchard. I looked out upon the sweet stretches of my farm, with the golden light of afternoon upon it, and work became a burden. “Shall I ever be able to work, except at night, or on rainy days!” I wondered with a smile, as I tossed the manuscript I was reading into a drawer, and went out through the front entrance.

The girl was nowhere to be seen. “She’s probably in her beloved pines,” I reflected. “It would be a good time to clear out a path in the pines.” I turned back to get a hatchet, and then went down toward the brook.

I trod as noiselessly as I could through the maples, thinking to surprise her at her reading, and took care in the pines not to step on any dead twigs. She was nowhere to be seen near the upper end of the grove, but as I advanced I heard a splashing louder than the soft ripple of the brook, and suddenly around a thick tree at a bend in the stream, where the brook ran out toward the tamarack swamp in the corner of my farm, I came upon her. She had her shoes and stockings off, and with her skirts held high she was wading with solemn, quiet delight in a little pool. Her back was toward me. I could have discreetly retreated, and she been none the wiser. But, alas! Actæon was neither the first nor the last of his sex. The water rippled so coolly around her white ankles! The sunlight dappled down so charmingly upon her chestnut hair! And I said, with a laugh, “So that is why you wanted my brook to come from the spring!”

She turned with a little exclamation, the colour flaming to her cheeks. Then she, too, laughed, as she stood in the brook, holding her skirts above the water.

“Consider yourself turned to a stag,” she said.

“All right,” I answered, “but don’t stay in that cold water too long.”

“If I do it will be your fault,” she smiled, with a sidelong glance. Then she turned and began wading tentatively downstream. But the brook deepened suddenly, and she sank almost to her knees, catching her skirts up just in time. I withdrew hastily, and called back to her to come out. When I heard her on the bank, I brought her a big handkerchief for a towel, and withdrew once more, telling her to hurry and help me plan the path through the pines. In a moment or two she was by my side. We looked at each other. Her face was still flushed, but her eyes were merry. We were standing on almost the exact spot where we had first met. But now there seemed in some subtle wise a new bond of intimacy between us, a bond that had not existed before this hour. I could not analyze it, but I felt it, and I knew she felt it. But what she said was:

“I told you to work till five o’clock.”

“It’s half-past four,” I answered. “Besides, you must have sent for me. Something suddenly prompted me to come out and hunt you up, at any rate.”

“To say I sent for you is rather–rather forward, under the circumstances, don’t you think?”

“It might be–and it might not be,” I answered. “Did you have a good time?”

“The best I ever had–till you spoiled it,” she exclaimed. “Oh, the nice, cold brook! Now, let’s build the path you spoke about once.”

We went back to the maples, where the ground was open, and selected a spot on the edge of the pines where the path would most naturally enter. Then we let it wind along by the brook, lopping off dead branches which were in the way, and removing one or two small trees. Once we took it across the brook, laying a line of stepping-stones, and out almost to the stone wall, where one could get a momentary glimpse of the road and over the road the blue mountains. Then we bent it in again, crossed the brook once more just above the point where she had waded, and there I rolled a large stone to the edge of the pool–“for you to sit on next time,” I explained. Finally we skirted the tamarack swamp, took the path up through the fringe of pines at the southern end of the field crops, and let it come back to the house beside the hayfield wall. When we reached this wall, it was nearly six o’clock.

“Now, let’s just walk back through it!” she cried. “To-morrow we can bring the wheelbarrow, can’t we, and pick up the litter we’ve made?”

“I can, at any rate, while you wade,” said I.

She shot a little look up into my face. “I guess I’ll help,” she smiled.

In the low afternoon light we turned about and retraced our steps. There was but a fringe of pines along the southern wall, and as they were forty-year-old trees here the view both back to the house and over the wall into the next pasture was airy and open. Then the path led through a corner of the tamarack swamp where in wet weather I should have to put down some planks, and where the cattails grew breast high on either side. Then it entered the thick pine grove where a great many of the trees were evidently not more than fifteen or twenty years old and grew very close. The sunlight was shut out, save for daggers of blue between the trunks toward the west. The air seemed hushed, as if twilight were already brooding here. The little brook rippled softly.

As we came to the first crossing, I pointed to the pool, already dark with shadow, and said, “It was wrong of me to play Actæon to your Diana, but I am not ashamed nor sorry. You were very charming in the dappled light, and you were doing a natural thing, and in among these little pines, perhaps, two friends may be two friends, though they are man and woman.”

She did not reply at once, but stood beside me looking at the dark pool and apparently listening to the whisper of the running water against the stepping-stones. Finally she said with a little laugh, “I have always thought that perhaps Diana was unduly severe. Come, we must be moving on.”

As the path swung out by the road, we heard a carriage, and stopped, keeping very still, to watch it drive past within twenty feet of us. The occupants were quite unaware of our existence behind the thin screen of roadside alders.

“How exciting!” she half whispered when the carriage had gone by.

Once more we entered the pines, following the new path over the brook again to the spot where we first had met. There I touched her hand. “Let us wait for the thrush here,” I whispered.

I could see her glimmering face lifted to mine. “Why here?” she asked.

“Because it was here we first heard him.”

“Oh, forgive me,” she answered. “I didn’t realize! The path has made it look different, I guess. Forgive me.”

She spoke very low, and her voice was grieving. Did it mean so much to her? A sudden pang went through my heart–and then a sudden hot wave of joy–and then sudden doubts. I was silent. So was the thrush. Presently I touched her hand again, gently.

“Come,” said I, “we have scared him with our chopping. He will come back, though, and then we will walk down the clean path, making no noise, and hear him sing.”

“Nice path,” she said, “to come out of your door, through your orchard, and wander up a path by a brook, through your own pines! Oh, fortunate mortal!”

“And find Diana wading in a pool,” I added.

Again she shot an odd, questioning look at me, and shook her head. Then she ran into the south room and put the books back on the shelves.

“Which one did you read, Marius or Alice?” I asked.

“Neither,” she smiled, as I locked the house behind us.

Chapter XII
SHOPPING AS A DISSIPATION

“Heavens!” I cried, “I never thought of that! But I’ve got silver, anyway. I’ve kept all my mother’s silver. It’s in a tin box in the bottom drawer of my desk.”

“Well, that’s something,” she admitted. “Have you got tablecloths and napkins and kitchen utensils–to cook with, you know? And have you got some bedding for Mrs. Pillig and son Peter?”

I ruefully shook my head. “I’ve got a sleeping-bag, though, which Peter could put on the floor. What am I going to do?”

“I think you’re going to make a trip to-morrow to the nearest large town, and stock up,” she smiled.

“Am I going alone?”

She laughed at me. “No, you helpless child, mamma will go with you.”

So the next morning we set off early, provided with a list of necessary articles compiled with Mrs. Bert’s assistance. We tramped over to Bentford and took the train there for a city some seventeen miles away, which we reached about half-past eight. It was a clean, neat little city, with fine old trees on the residence streets, and prosperous, well-stocked shops. The girl was dressed jauntily in blue, and I wore my last year’s best suit and a hat and collar. I sniffed the city smell, and declared, “Rather nice, just for a contrast. I’ve got an all-dressed-up-in-my-best feeling. Have you?”

“It is a lark,” she smiled. “I never saw a city from the country point of view before. It seems queer to me–as if I didn’t belong in it.”

“You don’t,” said I; “you belong in the country.”

She said nothing, but led me into a shop. It was a household-goods shop, and here we looked at dishes first. The woman who waited on us assumed a motherly air. It began to dawn upon me that she thought we were stocking our little prospective home. I shot a covert glance at the girl. Her eyes were twinkling, her colour high. I said nothing, but pointed to the dinner set I desired.

She laughed. “That’s Royal Worcester,” she said.

“What of it? I like it.”

“Well, then, look at it all you can now,” she answered, “for you can’t have it.”

The clerk laughed. “You see what you’re in for, young man,” she said, with the familiarity which rather too often characterizes clerks in our semi-rural regions.

I fear I coloured more than Miss Goodwin, which didn’t help matters any.

“Please show us something at a reasonable cost,” the girl said, with a curious, dignified severity, which was effective.

“That will do, won’t it, Mr. Upton?” she presently asked, with pointed emphasis on the formal address, as a pretty set of dishes with a simple pattern on the edge was displayed for $25.

“Admirably,” said I. “But I wanted the crimson and gold ones.”

“Now for the kitchen things,” said she, with her old smile again.

Here we made use of Mrs. Bert’s list, and left our order to be filled. As we stepped out on the street, we looked at each other, and laughed.

“It’s preposterous, but I suppose the evidence is against us,” she twinkled.

“The evidence is against us, at any rate,” I answered.

She looked away quickly, and said, “Where is the furniture store?”

We found it, and here we looked at iron beds for Mrs. Pillig and son Peter, and for one of the spare rooms so that I might have a guest up after college closed. She let me have the bed I wanted for the spare room, but the other two had to be plainer–or rather less plain, for the cheaper furniture is, the more jimcracky it appears to be. I asked the clerk why simplicity is always expensive, but he threw no light on the point. Next we bought a few cheap bedroom chairs, and a cheap bureau for Mrs. Pillig, and a better bureau for the spare room. I bought no other furniture, preferring to wait till I could get to New York or Boston, or better yet pick up old mahogany at country auctions, which I then believed in my ignorance was possible. Then we invaded the dry-goods shop, where again I stood helplessly by while the girl bought bedding and tablecloths and napkins and dishcloths and towels.

“I know you haven’t any decent towels,” she said, “because you’ve been a bachelor so long, and sent ’em to laundries. I send mine to laundries, too. That’s how I know.”

I stood by helplessly, but not without emotion. Many emotions are possible to a man while watching a woman shop, the most common, perhaps, being impatience. Your average woman shopping is the epitome of irresolution, or so it seems to the man. She always explains the huge pile of goods, which she compels the poor clerk to heap on the counter, by an alleged desire to get the most for her money–though she almost invariably comes back to the first thing exhibited and buys that in the end. A mere man buys the first thing he likes then and there. But my companion was not the usual woman shopper. She wanted towels of a certain grade, for instance, inspected them, and if they were up to her standard bought them without further to-do. At my enthusiastic comments she smiled. “That’s because it is your money I’m spending. I don’t have to count the pennies!”

No, my emotion was not one of impatience. Indeed, I should have liked to prolong the process. It was one which only a man with his bachelor days fresh in mind can understand. It was the subtle thrill of being led helpless by a woman who is intent on providing him creature comforts which he could not arrange for himself, of seeing her purchase for him the most intimate of domestic necessities, and inevitably filling his mind with thoughts of her in his establishment. If I were a woman and wanted to win a man, I should make him take me shopping when he needed new towels!

We finished in the dry-goods store at last, and I said, “I am sorry.”

“Why?” asked the girl.

“Because,” I answered, “with every purchase you make for me, you lay a new brick in the structure of our friendship–or a new towel!”

She turned her face quickly away, and made no reply.

Our next quest was for a sundial plate, but it was a vain search, for not a store in town carried such an article. As we came out of the last shop, she sighed. “Well, I can’t spend any more of your money!” she said. “But I’ve really saved it for you. Goodness knows how much you’d have spent by yourself. Why, you wanted the most expensive kind of everything!”

“Of course,” said I; “nothing is too good for Twin Fires.”

“Well, it’s lucky I was along, then.”

“Lucky isn’t just the word,” said I. “I feel already as if Twin Fires was as much yours as mine.”

Again she made no reply, except to ask when the train went back. But the train had long since gone back. It was nearly two o’clock, and we realized that we were hungry. So we gayly hunted out the hotel, and here I took command. “I’m going to order this lunch,” I declared, “and the expense go hang. We’ll have a regular spree, cocktails and all.”

The hotel was really a good one, and the presence of several motor parties gave the café almost a metropolitan appearance. The change from Mrs. Bert’s simple service to this was abrupt, and we were in the highest spirits. The cocktails came, and we clinked glasses.

“To Twin Fires!” said the girl.

“To the fairy godmother of Twin Fires!” said I.

Our eyes met as our glasses touched, and something electric passed between us. Then we drank.

“That is my first cocktail,” she laughed, as she set her glass down.

“Heavens!” I exclaimed, “and we in a public place!”

It was my first since I came to Bentford, and we both enjoyed the luxury of dissipation, and laughed brazenly at our enjoyment. Then the lunch came, and we enjoyed that, and then we caught a train, and half an hour later were walking toward the farm. We passed the golf links on the way, at the end of the beautiful, elm-hung main street of Bentford, and saw players striding over the green turf along the winding river.

“Quick, drag me past!” I cried. “Oh, Lord, lead us not into temptation!”

“Haven’t you joined yet?” she asked.

“No, I don’t dare. I shan’t join till the farm is in running order. The game is like Brand’s conscience, it demands all or nothing.”

“You men are dreadful babies about your sports,” she said.

“Yes’m,” I replied, “quite so. We haven’t the firm-mindedness of your sex, about bridge, for instance.”

“I never played a game of bridge in my life,” said she indignantly.

“I wasn’t thinking of you, but your sex,” I answered.

“You find a difference?”

“Decidedly.”

“That is just what Sentimental Tommy told every woman he met.”

“Except Grizel–of whom it was true.” I looked at her keenly, and she cast down her eyes.

“A farmer shouldn’t talk in literary allusions,” she said softly.

“Well,” I laughed, “they’ve got me past the golf links!”

We reached Twin Fires, and walked out to see if the roses were all alive, though they hadn’t had time to die. Then I went into the house to work, and she gathered a few sprays of lilac, and while I was settling down at my desk she arranged them in water and stood them on the mantels, humming to herself. Then she turned to go.

“Don’t go,” I cried.

She looked at me with a little smile, as if of query.

“It’s been such a nice day,” I added, “and it’s so pleasant to feel you here in the house. Please strum something while I work.”

“For ten minutes,” she replied, sitting down at the piano. “Then I must work, too–horrid letters.”

She rose presently, while I was scarce aware of it, and slipped out. I worked on, in silence save for the talk of the painters putting aside their brushes after the day’s work. But I could smell the lilacs she had left, and the scent of them seemed like the wraith of her presence in the sunny room.

Chapter XIII
THE ADVENT OF THE PILLIGS

I’ve set many a seedling since and needed no table to tell me how, but I have never recaptured quite the glee of that soft, cloudy June morning, when my shiny new trowel transferred unknown plants to the flats on the wheelbarrow, and a voice beside me read:

“’Phlox Drummondi. This is one of the finest annuals, being hardy, easy of cultivation, and making as a summer bedding plant an effective and brilliant display. The flowers are of long duration and of most gorgeous and varied colours. One foot. One fourth ounce, special mixture; contains all the finest and most brilliant colours.’ Wait, now, P–ph–phlox–my, this is like the dictionary! Here we are! Plant twelve inches apart. My goodness, if you plant all those twelve inches apart, you’ll fill the whole farm! Where are you going to put them?”

“Why not around the sundial?” said I. “They appear to be low and of a superlative variety of brilliant colour. And they’re an old-fashioned posy.”

“Everything is superlative in a seed catalogue, I observe,” she smiled. “Peter Bell could never have written a successful catalogue, could he? Yes, I think they’d be lovely round the sundial, with something tall on the outside, in clumps. Something white, like the pillar, to show them off.”

We wheeled out the phlox plants and set them in the circular beds ringing the sundial, working on boards laid down on the ground, for my grass seed was sprouting, if rather spindly and in patches. Then we returned for something tall and white. Alas! we went over the catalogue once, twice, three times, but there was nothing in my seed bed which would do! The stock was little higher than the phlox. White annual larkspur would have served, if there had been any–but there wasn’t.

“It’s the last time anybody else ever picks my seeds for me!” I declared. “Gee, I’ll know a few things by next year.”

“Gee, but you must fill up those sundial beds, this year,” said she. “Oh, dear, I did want some tall clumps of white on the outside!”

“Well, here are asters. Asters are white, sometimes. See if these are. Giant comet, that sounds rather exciting. Also, débutante. They ought to be showy. Most débutantes are nowadays.”

She scanned my box of empty seed envelopes. “Oh, dear, the giant comets are mixed,” she said. “But”–with a look at the catalogue–“the débutantes are white. They grow only a foot and a half, but they are white.”

“Well, they’ll have to fox trot round the dial, then,” said I.

I dug them up, and we put them in clumps in the irregularities on the outside edges of the beds, first filling the holes part full of water, as I had seen Mike do with the cauliflower plants.

“Let me do some,” she pleaded. “Here I’ve been reading the old catalogue all the morning, while you’ve been digging in the nice dirt.”

She kneeled on the board, holding a plant caressingly in her hand, and with her naked fingers set it and firmed it in the moist earth. Then she set a second, and a third, holding up her grimy fingers gleefully.

“Oh, you nice earth!” she finally exclaimed, digging both hands eagerly in to the wrists.

After dinner we spaded up little beds at the foot of each pillar of the rose arch, and put flowers in each of them, facing the house, set a row of Phlox Drummondi along the line where the grape arbour was to be, to mark more clearly the western edge of the lawn, and finally took a load of the remaining seedlings, of various sorts, down to the brook, just below the orchard, where I planned some day to build a pool and develop a lovely garden nook. Here the soil was black and rich for a foot or more in depth, and after spading and raking out the weeds and grasses we had four little beds, though roughly and hastily made, two on each side of the stream, with the future pool, as it were, in the centre. These we filled with the remaining seedlings, helter skelter, just for a splash of colour, and watered from the brook itself.

Then we straightened our stiff backs, and scurried for shelter from the coming rain. We reached Bert’s just as the first big drops began to fall.

“Nice rain!” she cried, turning to look at it from under the porch. “You’ll give all the flowers a drink, and they’ll live and be beautiful in the garden of Twin Fires.”

“Do you like flowers as well as philology, really?” I asked.

“I don’t see what’s to prevent my liking both,” she smiled, as she disappeared up the stairs.

The next day it was still raining. I set off alone to make ready for the arrival of the Pilligs. I was standing on my kitchen porch talking to Mike when they arrived. It was a memorable moment. I heard the sound of wheels, and looked up. A wagon was approaching, driven by an old man. Beside him, beneath a cotton umbrella, sat a thin woman in black, with gray hair and a worried look. Behind them, on a battered trunk, sat Peter, who was not thin, who wore no worried look, and who chewed gum. Beneath the wagon, invisible at first, trotted a mud-bespattered yellow pup. The wagon stopped.

“Good morning, Mr. Upton,” said Mrs. Pillig. “This is me and Peter.”

“Where’s Buster?” said Peter.

At the word Buster, the yellow pup emerged from beneath the cart, wagging the longest tail, in proportion to the dog, ever seen on a canine. It would be more correct to say that the tail wagged him, for with every excited motion his whole body was undulated to the ears, to counterbalance that tail.

I went out and aided Mrs. Pillig to alight, and then Mike and I lifted the trunk to the porch. I looked at the dog, which had also joined us on the porch, where he was leaving muddy paw marks.

“Do I understand that Buster is also an arrival?” said I.

“Oh, dear me, Mr. Upton, you must excuse me,” Mrs. Pillig cried anxiously. “Mrs. John Barker’s boy Leslie gave Buster to Peter a month ago, and of course I sent him right back, but he wouldn’t stay back, and yesterday we took him away again, and this morning he just suddenly appeared behind the wagon, and I told Peter he couldn’t come, and Peter cried, and Buster wouldn’t go back, and I’ll make Peter take him away just as soon as the rain stops.”

“Well, I hadn’t bargained on Buster, that’s a fact,” said I. I didn’t like dogs; most people don’t who’ve never had one. But he was such a forlornly muddy mongrel pup, and so eloquent of tail, that I spoke his name on an impulse, and put out my hand. The great tail wagged him to the ears, and with the friendliest of undulations he was all at once close to me, with his nose in my palm. Then he suddenly sat up on his hind legs, dangled his front paws, looked me square in the eyes, and barked.

That was too much for me. “Peter,” said I, “you may keep Buster.”

“Golly, I’d ’a’ had a hard time not to,” said that young person, immediately making for the barn, with Buster at his heels.

Mrs. Pillig and I went inside. While she was inspecting the kitchen, Mike and I carried her trunk up the back stairs.

“I hope your bed comes to-day,” said I, returning. “You see, the house is largely furnished from my two rooms at college, and there was hardly enough to go around.”

Mrs. Pillig looked into the south room. “Did you have all them books in your two rooms at college?” she asked.

I nodded.

“They must ’a’ been pretty big rooms,” she said. “Books is awful things to keep dusted.”

“Which reminds me,” I smiled, leading her over to my desk, at which I pointed impressively. “Woman!” said I, in sepulchral tones, “that desk is never to be dusted, never to be touched. Not a paper is to be removed from it. No matter how dirty, how littered it gets, never touch it under pain of death!”

She looked at me a second with her worried eyes wide open, and then a smile came over her wan, thin face.

“I guess you be n’t so terrible as you sound,” she said. “But I won’t touch it. Anything else I’m not to touch?”

“Yes,” I answered. “The ashes in those two fireplaces. The ashes there are never to be taken out, no matter if they are piled a foot thick, and spill all over the floor. A noble pile of ashes is a room’s best recommendation. Those are the only two orders I have. In all else, I’m at your mercy. But on those two points you are at mine–and I have none!”

“Well, I reckon I’ll wash the kitchen windows,” said Mrs. Pillig.

I was sawing up a few more sticks from the orchard, when the express man drove up with the beds, the crockery, and so on. I called son Peter, who responded with Buster at his heels. “Peter,” said I, “you and I’ll now set up the beds. You ought to be in school, though, by the way. Why aren’t you?”

“Hed ter bring maw over here,” said Peter.

“That’s too bad. Aren’t you sorry?”

Peter grinned at me and slowly winked. I was very stern. “Nevertheless, you’ll have a lesson,” I said. “You shall tell me the capitals of all the states while we set up your bed.”

Peter and I carried the beds, springs, and mattresses upstairs, and while we were joining the frames I began with Massachusetts and made him tell me all the capitals he could. We got into a dispute over the capital of Montana, Peter maintaining it was Butte, and I defending Helena. The debate waxed warm, and suddenly Buster appeared upon the scene, his tail following him up the stairs, to see what the trouble was. He began to leave mud tracks all over the freshly painted floor, so that we had to grab him up and wipe his paws with a rag. Peter held him while I wiped, and we fell to laughing, and forgot Montana.

“You’ll have to get rubbers for him,” said I.

This idea amused Peter tremendously. “Gee, rubbers on a dog!” he cried. “Buster’d eat ’em off in two seconds. Say, where’s Buster goin’ to sleep?”

We had to turn aside on our way downstairs for more furniture to make Buster a bed in a box full of excelsior in the shed. We put him in it, and went back to the porch. Buster followed us. We took him back, and put him in the box once more. He whacked the sides with his tail, as if he enjoyed the game–and jumped out as soon as we turned away.

“Gee, he’s too wide awake now,” said Peter.

So we fell over Buster for the rest of the morning. I never saw a dog before nor since who could so successfully get under your feet as Buster. If I started upstairs with the frame of a pine bureau on my back, Buster was on the third step, between my legs. If I was carrying in a stack of plates from the barrel of crockery, Buster was wedged in the screen door, pushing it open ahead of me, to let it snap back in my face. When I scolded him, he undulated his silly yellow body, sprang upon his hind legs, and licked my hands. If I tried to kick him, he regarded it as a game, and bit my shoe lace. Peter’s shoe laces, I noted, were in shreds. But Buster disappeared after a time, and Peter and I got the china and kitchenware all in, and Mrs. Pillig had it washed and in the cupboards before he reappeared. He came down the front stairs with one of my bath slippers in his mouth, and, with a profoundly proud undulation of tail and body, laid it at my feet for me to throw, barking loudly. We all laughed, but I took the slipper and beat him with it, while Peter appeared on the verge of tears.

“No, Buster,” I cried. “You keep out of doors. Peter, put him out.”

Peter resentfully deposited the pup on the porch, and took my slipper back upstairs. Meanwhile, Buster, after looking wistfully through the screen door a second, pushed it open with his nose and paw and reëntered, immediately sitting up on his hind legs and gazing into my eyes with the most human look I ever saw.

“Buster,” said I, “you are the limit. Very well, stay in. I give up!”

Buster plopped down on all fours, as if he understood perfectly, and took a bite at my shoe string. I patted his head. I had to. The pup was irresistible.

“And what time will you have your dinner?” asked Mrs. Pillig. “There’s no meat in the house. Guess you forgot to order the butcher to stop; but there’s eggs.”

“Eggs will do,” said I, “and one o’clock. Bert has his at twelve, but I want mine at one. Maybe I shall have a guest.”

“A guest!” she cried. “You wouldn’t be puttin’ a guest on me the first mornin’!”

“Well, it’s doubtful, I’m afraid,” I answered. “Perhaps I’ll wait till to-morrow night, and have three guests for supper–just Bert and his wife and their boarder–sort of a housewarming, you know. I want you to make a pie.”

“Well, I reckon I can wait on table stylish enough for Mrs. Temple,” said she, “and I’ll make a lemon pie that’ll make Bert Temple sorry he didn’t marry me.”