The Cottage of Delight Part 47

"Dear John," she wrote on the margin, in the cramped style of one who writes but seldom, "come to your mother. Do as Sam says. He knows what is best."

CHAPTER X

Among the farmers of that locality it was considered somewhat beneath the dignity of the men to milk the cows, but Joel Eperson had never permitted his little wife to lay her hands to that particularly arduous part of the day's duties. And to-night at dusk he was at this work in the stable-yard, Tilly and the children still being at Mrs. Trott's cabin. He knew why his wife had gone there, and painfully he was comprehending why she was so late in getting back. There would naturally be much to say on a subject like that by the two women in all the world whom such a startling revelation touched so closely. Joel took his pail of milk into the cabin. He put some more wood into the stove that it might be hot and ready for use when Tilly arrived, and then he walked to and fro in the yard, his dull eyes on the dewy fields. On his right, a half-mile distant, the fires of the lime-kilns and brickyards were beginning to glow against the cliffs in the coming darkness, and the songs of the negro stokers and the thwacks of their axes fell on his ears. He emptied the water in the pail and brought up some more from the spring at the foot of the slope. Still his family did not come, and he started out to meet them. He crossed the meadow, skirted his corn, which till only the other day he had looked on with pride, walked between the rows of his cotton-plants to curtail the distance, and finally reached the wood through which ran the path to Mrs. Trott's cabin. As he stood there for a moment he heard voices. Both Tilly and Mrs. Trott were speaking, but he could not see them for the thickened darkness beneath the trees.

"I must hurry now." It was Tilly's voice, and it rang with the lilting tones of triumphant joy. "It is late. Joel will be looking for me."

"Yes, I'll turn back," Mrs. Trott was heard saying. "Let me kiss them once more. Oh, I am so wonderfully happy! Really, dear girl, I'd like to die feeling as I do to-night. You see, I never expected it-- I never dreamt that such a thing could be possible. I thought all chance of ever begging his forgiveness was gone, and now maybe, some day or other, I can. I wouldn't ask him to take me back, you understand, but only to say that he wouldn't hold it against me the rest of his life. But I'd want him to know one thing, Tilly, my sweet child, and that is the things you have done for me on account of--on account of--you know what I mean?"

"Hush, grandmother," Tilly answered, in the tremulous tone which indicated emotions firmly checked. "You must not forget who I now am.

You must not forget that I'm the mother of those darling children."

"No, my child, nor can I forget their n.o.ble father. I wouldn't wound him for the whole world. I love him as--as--yes, I love him as much as I do John, but in a different way, that is all. John was my baby, Joel is my grown-up son. You must never forsake Joel in thought, word, or act.

Remember that."

What Tilly answered Joel refused to hear. He was too honorable a man to listen further, and he turned back and with slow, weighty steps reached his home again. He stood in the kitchen doorway, waiting. He heard Tilly and the children coming. They were singing merrily and romping like sprites across the meadow.

"I'm coming! I'm coming! I'll catch you! Boo!" Tilly cried. "Hide from him, darling--hide behind the bushes! Where is she, brother? She must be lost. Oh, there she is!" This was followed by childish screams of delight and the mother's cooing words.

Joel went to meet them, advancing across the yard and taking little Tilly into his arms.

"I know we are late," his wife said, regretfully, "but grandmother came part of the way back, and you know she walks slowly."

"It is all right," Joel said, pressing little Tilly's cheek to his. "It is not very late."

"Well, I'll hurry with the supper," Tilly answered. It was significant, he reflected, that she did not mention then the reception of the startling news by Mrs. Trott. Even while they all sat at the table Tilly failed to bring it up, and a general air of repression brooded over them.

Indeed, the children had been put to bed, the dishes washed, and husband and wife were alone together in the moonlight at the door, and still the subject in the minds of both had been avoided. He wondered if she expected him to mention the matter. Surely she ought to know that it was not exactly the thing that he, a mere outsider, had the right to pry into. An awkward silence fell between them, the sort of silence that surely boded ill for their future harmony of intercourse. Tilly seemed to sense this, and suddenly put her shoulder to the wheel of duty.

"I didn't get to tell grand-- I didn't get to tell Mrs. Trott, after all." It was significant that she abruptly discarded a formerly accepted term of endearment. "Mr. Cavanaugh was there this morning for that purpose, so--so the greater part of her excitement was over when I got there."

"But she was happy, of course," Joel got out, well knowing that his remark was an empty one.

"Oh yes, of course." Tilly was silent for several minutes. Then she added: "The poor woman is afraid that John will not forgive her. She doesn't want help from him, she declares, and she thinks it would be unwise for them ever again to meet face to face, but she says she would like for him to know how sorry she is for many things. I think, myself, Joel, that it would be inadvisable for--for them to meet, just at present, anyway. Don't you?"

"I don't know. I can't say. I'm not in a position to decide," Joel floundered. "It would depend on him. It is unfortunate that so many miles separate them. He evidently has some established way of living into which she might not fit so well. The mere fact of his being still alive reached her by accident and through no effort on his part."

"I'm sure she has no idea of making any advancement." Tilly seemed to Joel, as she spoke, quite another woman from the one who had been his wife all those years, and Joel simply sat, bent forward, his every nerve and muscle drawn taut by vast swirling forces within him.

"Then you don't think that he would--would forgive her?" asked Tilly, with obvious anxiety which she was striving to minimize.

Joel's prompt reply surprised her. "I know he would," said Joel, "if he knew all the circ.u.mstances. I have never known a n.o.bler man. I don't believe a n.o.bler man ever lived. In trying to help his mother I was only doing what I was sure he would have done for me under the same conditions. If I only knew how to show him what his mother now is I'd do it."

They were silent for a while; then, suddenly, Tilly stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. "Joel," she said, "you are blue to-night." She toyed with the hair on his brow; she bent almost as low as when in that posture she sometimes kissed him, but she did not kiss him to-night, and he noted the fact as a man dying unattended in a dungeon might test his own pulse. He longed to take the little hand so close to his cheek and press it to his famished lips, but something told him that she would (not openly, but inwardly) now actually shrink from such a caress.

"No, don't think I am blue," he protested, fighting forward on his black billows, and grimly smiling. "You are happy and I shall be for your sake. You mustn't observe my cranky ways too closely. I'm all right."

"Somehow I can't exactly believe it." Tilly twisted a lock of his hair between her slow, reluctant fingers. "You seem changed, a little, anyway, and I think we ought to come to a thorough understanding right now. You have an imagination, Joel. You used to write poetry to me, you remember, and for all I know you may now be fancying all sorts of really absurd things. Now be sensible. John and I _did_ love each other away back there, but we were parted and for years I have thought of him as dead. But now he is away off up there, and I am here with you and our darling children. You love them, they love you--and--and you love me, and I--love you. Now be sensible. Can you, even with a crazy flight of your imagination, fancy that John and I ever again will or could be--be like we once were? Throw the idea away if you have it. Of course, I must be happy in discovering that my hasty desertion back there did not cost him his life and Dora's. Oh, that thought worried me! I never let you know how much it worried me! I guess I would have married you much sooner than I did if I had not had that on my mind. But all that is past and gone now. I'm here and John is away off up there. Your idea that he still loves me is ridiculous on the face of it. What was I, even when he was here? Only an ignorant country girl, while he has no doubt grown and learned and altered in a thousand ways. I've seen successful men from big cities. They don't seem to think as we do, or act or speak like us.

I'd be a silly dowdy to such a man. I think, of course, if it comes about naturally, that his mother ought to go to him, but I don't think he ever ought to--to come back here, and I am sure that he won't. I am sure of that--I'm sure of it. He has been burnt once, as the saying is, and that will be enough. But I predict that she will go to him. No, I'll take that back. I said that, but I am not sure. Do you know, it is G.o.d's truth, Joel, that the sweet old soul loves you and me and the children so much now that she would not leave us even--even for John. She let that out this afternoon while Tilly was sleeping in her lap. The very thought of going started her to crying, and it was some time before I got her quiet."

Tilly's hand actually touched his neck, but Joel still felt that he had no right to clasp it. The wild thought of grasping it and drawing his wife's lips down to his possessed him, but he promptly killed the impulse. Grimly he told himself that he would be fondling a shadow, feasting on a husk.

Suddenly she drew her hand away. "I'm awfully tired to-night," she sighed. "I'll go to bed, but you needn't hurry. Shall I fill your pipe?"

"No, thank you," he said, rising as courteously as of old. "I sha'n't smoke any more to-night."

"Well, good night," she said.

"Good night," he echoed.

The flare from the lime-kilns and the brickyards lit the cliffs, hills, and sky. He beard the town clock striking ten. Little Joel had waked, and his mother was gently telling him to go to sleep. The child wanted water. Tilly went to the kitchen for it, and the father heard her sweetly cooing as she held the cup for his son to drink. What a marvel that--_his son and hers_.

CHAPTER XI

"John is not coming. I see that plain enough from this letter,"

Cavanaugh announced to his wife at noon one day, as he entered the sitting-room where she sat sewing on a machine.

"Why, what's wrong?" the old woman asked, in a tone of disappointment.

"I can't tell exactly," Cavanaugh answered. "It is all round about, with this reason and that. He seems to have a mistaken idea that it will stir up an awful rumpus in the papers. He wants to help his mother, and says for me to see her and tell her so. He is willing to make a substantial settlement on her, but she wouldn't take it. Do you hear me? She wouldn't have sc.r.a.ps thrown at her like that. If he came here and made it up she might let him help, but she'll never accept it that way. I am disappointed in him. After the way I wrote, he ought to have come and been done with it."

Mrs. Cavanaugh adjusted her gla.s.ses, took the letter and read it, moving her wrinkled lips as she slowly intoned the words. Then she handed it back.

"Man that you are," she sniffed, "you don't see what ails him. He doesn't once mention Tilly, but in every line there he is thinking of her and her happiness. He'd love to come back here and see the old place and all of us, but he is afraid it will upset Tilly. You said you thought he still loves her-- I _know_ he does. I can see it all through that letter, and I'm sorry for him, poor fellow!"

"Oh, I see what you mean," Cavanaugh said, in a mollified tone, "and I believe you are right, too. He was thinking of her happiness when he ran away, and he is doing it now. Yes, yes, he still loves her. I saw it in a hundred ways when me and him was together up there. He never had room for but one woman in his heart, and she fills it still. She is the drawback in the case, I'll bet. He thinks she is happy with Joel and the children and he doesn't want to break in at this late day. But he will come. Mark my words, he will come to help his mother when I write him more fully. I'll explain, too, that I'll keep it from the papers, and when he gets here he can stay out here with us and keep away from old acquaintances as much as he likes. Yes, he will come."

It ended in accordance with this prediction. One evening at dusk John arrived in town and was delivered by a street-hack at Cavanaugh's door.

He was received with open arms by the old couple and treated as a much-loved son. And he was glad that he came. For the first time since the departure of Dora and the loss of Binks he felt restful and at home.

The delightful old-fas.h.i.+oned room, filled with the very perfume of cleanliness, to which he was a.s.signed, at once charmed and soothed him.

Till late that night the three friends sat talking on the porch. Several times Mrs. Trott was mentioned, but Tilly not once. That she and Joel lived near by and had been the widow's stanch friends John was not yet aware, and the Cavanaughs wondered, half fearfully, what effect that knowledge would have on their guest.

John was waked the next morning by the long, resonant blowing of the whistles at the mills. It was scarcely light, and, only partly conscious at first, he fancied that it was his old signal for rising. He thought he was in his dismal room at his mother's house, and that little ragged Dora was clattering about in the kitchen below. Slowly he came to full comprehension and lay back on his bed and closed his eyes. But it was not to sleep. What a tangle of sordid memories wrapped him about! How profoundly wise, by comparison, had he become! He wondered if the tiny cottage in which he and Tilly had pa.s.sed those few days of blinded bliss were still extant. If so, would he dare visit it? He thought not.

Neither would he care to see again his mother's old home.

Later, when the sun was up, he heard Cavanaugh on the porch, and he rose, dressed, and joined him. Presently breakfast was announced. How the cozy table in its snowy expanse appealed to him--the food he used to like, the open door looking out on a flower-garden, a plot of dewy gra.s.s, and a row of beehives! He had a sense of wanting to live that way always. He was weary of the life that he had just left, and the ephemeral things he had won. His desire for rest was that of an old man whose years are spent. Somehow he felt that he and the Cavanaughs were on a par as to age and experience. They had suffered mildly through long lives--he had suffered keenly in a shorter one.

It was understood between him and Cavanaugh that the first thing to be done was for him to visit his mother. So, when breakfast was over, they fared forth in the cool, brisk air for that walk in the country. As they neared the cabin Cavanaugh saw Joel's house in the distance. He might have descried either Joel or Tilly about the place by careful looking, but was afraid that even a glance in that direction might attract John's attention. Presently Mrs. Trott's cabin was before them, and, leaving his companion in the edge of the wood, Cavanaugh went ahead to prepare the widow for the surprise before her. Presently he came back.

"I must say she was awfully excited," he began. "I was sorry for her.