The Idyl of Twin Fires Part 15

"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 ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.script 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-fas.h.i.+oned! 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 pa.s.s 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

The next morning I did not urge Miss Goodwin to come to the farm. In fact, I urged her to sit in the sun and rest. It was a glorious day, a real June day, though June was not due till the following Wednesday. It was Sunday, the Sunday preceding Memorial Day. But, as my farm was so far from the centre of the village, and my lawn was so screened from the roads by the house on one side and the pines and maples on the other, I resolved to hazard my reputation and go at my lawn, which the rain at last had settled. I hitched the horse to my improvised drag and smoothed it again, several times, in default of a roller. Then I led the horse back to the barn.

As I came to the barn door again, a carryall was pa.s.sing, 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sured me it was too late to sow gra.s.s, 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 a.s.sented, 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 pa.s.s 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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.