Читать книгу "Good-Morning, Rosamond!" - Constance Lindsay Skinner - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Down the hill and down the valley, where the crossroads pointed east to Poplars Vale and west to Roseborough, and the low, gray stone bridge with its mossy ooze led over the winding river toward Trenton Waters, three miles north, stood a stone tower. In it an old ship’s bell hung, which, so report said, had once rung meal hours and lullabies and other clock stations for a captain and crew whose gory barque flew the “Jolly Roger.” The aged pensioner, who collected the tow-path tolls, rang the strokes of the hour on this bell from six A.M. until six P.M., and, so closely did the low, curving hills advance to smile upon each other from both sides of the running water that they made a channel for the sound—like a great, twisted, golden horn—so that the bell-tones, rung out at the crossroads, were heard at Roseborough and at Poplars Vale and even rolled their echoes, when the wind was kind, upon the town of Trenton Waters.

Nine o’clock! Rosamond heard it pealing as she reached the terrace.

“I must hurry to find whatever it is I am looking for,” she said, “because my Wonderful Day won’t wait. It will move on, hour by hour, just like any other day.”

The house was on a jut of the hill, sheer above the gravel road and midway from the summit. The road must make a long detour about the grounds of Villa Rose ere it could continue its progress round and over the hilltops and on toward more modern and populous districts of Old Canada. At the foot of the incline was the village proper, occupying three streets in triangle about a combined courthouse, police station and gaol, the latter seldom visited even by the constables. On one street corner the post office stood, flanked by a few small houses. The other two streets shared between them the business buildings of Roseborough; such as Bilkin’s meat market and hardware store; Miss Jenny’s millinery and dressmaking establishment; George Dollop’s drugs, stationery and lending library, with John Dollop, plumber, and James Dollop, undertaker, adjoining, and Horace Ruggle of the telegraph office next door; and Brandon’s stables and feed store.

In going over the hill’s brow and on to the vague unknown, the road led past Charleroy College whither the lads within twenty miles came to acquire knowledge. The residential portion of Roseborough, comprising about sixty houses and gardens, spread about the hillsides between the village and Charleroy.

The sun fell aslant over the garden and the orchard, as if indeed it had cast a golden net about Villa Rose to snare the willing lady thereof in a witchery from which she might never escape. To decide that this was to be the great day of her life, a day of splendid adventure, was one thing; to make it so—to make any day a day of adventure in Roseborough—was quite another. Pondering ways and means of conjuring up romance, she fluttered about among the blazing dahlia beds like a huge lavender butterfly.

“Oh!” She stopped suddenly. “I shall not deserve my Wonderful Day if I don’t take Mrs. Lee her flowers and her fruit, as usual.”

She ran back to the verandah and picked up a willow basket containing stout gloves and shears and returned to the flower beds. She lingered only a moment or two among the dahlias. Beyond their haughty glory lay the rose garden, a radiant and random half acre spilling forth every tint and perfume known to the rose family. Here Rosamond’s shears went to work busily. She found delight in the task, for she hummed again the little minuet theme which she had recomposed into this day’s salutation to herself.

When one is young, not only with the fearless years but with the brave desires of youth and eager for fairy tale happenings, so that every other sentence begins with “I wonder!” one must talk; and if fate has set one in a high and lonely place with no young, imaginative twin soul to companion one’s dreams, then one must talk to oneself—not merely in silence but with the uttered phrase. Rosamond talked to herself habitually.

She was musing aloud now:

“I wonder how it would feel to own all this—Villa Rose and its gardens—with love, and then to lose it—and love, too. Mrs. Lee did. I’m afraid I couldn’t be sweet about it, as she is.” She concluded presently that in such circumstances she would even feel resentful when flowers were brought to her from the garden that had once been hers.

She pictured Mrs. Lee in thought as she would see her presently—seated in her bit of garden, knitting, or perhaps indoors, lovingly sorting and dusting the precious (and, it must be confessed, prosy) manuscripts written by her husband during his forty years as professor of literature at Charleroy. She would hear the gentle voice greeting her lovingly—not because she was the rich Mrs. Mearely but because Mrs. Lee instinctively greeted all the world lovingly. Under the white hair and dainty, white lace cap, the kind eyes, which had seen seventy years of life—with its human sun and shadow—go by, would beam out of the delicately wrinkled face with a delight in the flowers’ beauty and fragrance as spontaneous and young as youth itself—the spirit which discounts time because its habitation is with the good and the eternal.

“Maybe it is because she never thinks of herself that she has never found out that she hasn’t things any more.”

Mrs. Lee’s ability to be happy, even after fate had bereft her of everything, was a subject full of unusual interest for Rosamond this morning. By some art this lonely woman, past her seventieth milestone, managed to make every day of her life her “wonderful day.” The song of her “Good-morning!” came out of a deep-toned, divine joy which neither age, poverty, nor grief could blur. The wistful look was in Rosamond’s eyes again as she passed out of the rose garden and into the orchard on her way to make her daily offering.

The orchard lay higher than the garden and the house. Rosamond went on up rustic steps, made of earth and roots, that led between irregular lines of pear trees weighted to the ground with their promise of brown and golden fruit. She made her way to a huge cherry tree, ran nimbly up the ladder, and covered the bottom of her basket with large, red-cheeked, white cherries; then, jumping down, she hastened on up the remaining steps into a small grass plot surrounding a tiny cottage. A beech tree took up its full share of the grounds and, close beside it, as if in friendly converse, rose the rustic, vine-clad top of a well with wet bucket hung high on the roller.

Mrs. Lee sat in a rocker beside the well, knitting. Her ball of yarn was filliping about the sward under the paws of a white kitten whose smudgy face betrayed a nature so obsessed with the entrancing amusements of a woollen tangle that the duty of the daily ablution was wholly forgotten.

“Oh, Mrs. Lee, I’m late; but here they are.” Rosamond held out her basket.

“Good-morning, Mrs. Mearely. How you spoil me, my dear! What lovely roses—oh, and dahlias!—dahlias of the very hue of life itself, the unquenchable crimson flame. How bravely and confidently they give themselves to the sun and blend with its rays! And cherries, too!”

Rosamond laughed.

“Now, Mrs. Lee, how can you pretend to feel such delighted surprise when you knew perfectly well that I’d bring them to-day just as I always do?”

“Ah, my dear, that is the very secret of happiness.” She paused to pick up a dropped stitch, and Rosamond, eager for data on this subject above all others, asked quickly:

“What is the secret of happiness?”

“Why—don’t you know? It is to anticipate only what you know will surely happen. Then your every desire comes to pass. And the surprise you feel is not so much surprise, after all, as a kind of charmed wonder that life is so beautifully arranged.”

“Is life beautifully arranged, Mrs. Lee?” Rosamond took the basket from her friend’s lap, where it interfered with the stocking’s progress, and set it on the grass. She sank down on the broad, rustic seat which surrounded the well’s rim.

“Is it not? I am sure you feel that it is. To you, in particular, in spite of the one great grief, life must seem like a fairy tale. I must pause in discussion of this infinite theme to remark upon your appearance, my dear. You look ravishing this morning. What a beautiful frock! I know that it has been hard for you to put away the last black ribbons. Although it is just what he would wish, it seems to you like wilfully forgetting the beloved one.”

She laid a comforting hand lightly for a moment on Rosamond’s. Rosamond, remembering the manner in which she had discarded the black-garnished, lavender dress, drooped her head quickly to hide alike the little blush of shame that tinted her cheeks and the wicked twinkle that brightened her eyes.

“It is so fortunate,” Mrs. Lee went on, “that there are no ‘styles’ in Roseborough. In Roseborough all your lovely frocks will be as fashionable now as when you bought them, four or five years ago. Miss Jenny says that she does not know what this generation is coming to, because, even in Trenton Waters, they are beginning to ask whether a garment or a ribbon is ‘in style’ before they buy it. Miss Jenny says that she has seen some of those so-called stylish hats, and garments of various kinds, and that she is willing to take her ‘solemn oath in court’—as she expressed it, being very much moved—that a few scissor-snips would have laid the whole in ruins. ‘Mrs. Lee,’ she said to me, ‘when Jenny Hackensee sews a bow on even a child’s hat, or a bone button on the band of a genteel woman’s flannel petticoat, my conscience is satisfied that it will never come off!’ Poor Miss Jenny. She fears that the Roseborough ladies may forget her worth and run after follies. My dear husband used to say that that trait was one of the charms of Roseborough—namely, the loving regard each person in the community has for the general morale.”

“Yes, that trait is very marked in Roseborough.” Again Mrs. Mearely’s drooped head hid a twinkle.

“It rejoices me to see you in that dainty lilac and white. It is just as if the fragrance and tints of spring had lingered to make midsummer more bewitching.”

“Are you going to make me vain again to-day, as you always do?”

“Nonsense, dear child. Does expatiating on the beauty of a rose or a brook make it vain? Beauty is one of heaven’s choicest gifts, and is always to be admired gratefully. How foolish must any fair woman be who allows herself to become vain—as if the beauty admired were her possession exclusively, and not a free gift to the eyes of all beholders! She might as reasonably be conceited about holding up a candle in the dusk.”

Rosamond put out a hand and stopped the knitting for the moment. “You were going to show me how perfectly life is arranged. I need to be shown.” She laughed.

“Perhaps I did, too, at your age. And I was. For I married a remarkable man and life became for me at once very simple and large—something like the process of Nature’s unfoldment under sunlight. Professor Lee’s spirit was just that—a mellow sunshine, which made for growth in those who lived within its radius. A bright and searching spirit it was; for it revealed to you the weeds as well as the grain, but in such a way that you were not hurt or humiliated; your only feeling was a sense of freedom, of relief that a danger had been pointed out, and that you had therefore escaped it.”

“Perhaps it would not be so difficult to give up one’s faults if one were told about them in that way. One would have no reason for trying to excuse them.”

“Ah, that was it exactly! He always said that when you deprived people of the feeling of personal possession in their errors you took away their only reason for clinging to those errors. But for this egoism, we would all see clearly enough how indefensible are many of the traits we justify. My husband would have refused outright, if he could, to believe there was any evil in the world at all. He did insist that it was no true part of any person. That was why he could help others so wonderfully in their moral struggles, because he never censured, never expressed a personal anger, only pointed out the wrong as if it were—as, indeed, he regarded it—an outside thing trying to fasten itself on the unsuspecting individual. He used to say that moral victories over temptation were all-important—because they registered something permanent, a degree of progress won—but that defeats, though pitiable, were not deeply important, because they were of the moment only—the next hour might see victory; some hour must see it.”

“It must have been wonderful for his students to be trained by him—I mean, to be taught first to look at life and themselves by a man who had such a deep faith within him. But weren’t you always busy keeping bad people from taking advantage of him?”

“Mrs. Lee sat in her rocker knitting. Her ball of yarn was filliping about the sward under the paws of a white kitten”

“Sometimes; but far less often than you would think. I came to see that this spirit of my dear husband’s, so far from bringing deception and imposture upon him, really contained its own protection against these things. Those who were unworthy of his interest soon eliminated themselves. He never seemed to guess why they went—but saw them go and wished them well.”

“To live for nearly fifty years with a man like that might make me also believe that life is beautifully arranged. But I am not convinced this morning.”

“You are wilful!”

“I know it. There will be only twenty-four hours in this day and I need at least twice that.” She paused.

Mrs. Lee smiled as she said: “You flit from one subject to another like a bee after honey! My mental wings take slow and reasoned flights. I cannot follow you. What am I to make of your last inconsequential spurt through the air—that, for you, life would be rightly arranged if this particular day could have double hours? If so, why?”

Rosamond laughed.

“Don’t let me give you ‘nerves,’ Mrs. Lee. I know I do lack sequence, and that, to the life companion of a professor of literature, must be very trying. I can begin things wonderfully and I know the ending I want; but I can’t fill in the middle part. The middle is just dots and dashes.”

“Principally dashes,” Mrs. Lee smiled.

“Principally. This time, though, there is a connection. To-day is to be my Wonderful Day. So, if life really is beautifully arranged I must find it out before to-morrow. And even a forty-eight hour day is hardly long enough for one’s only Wonderful Day.”

“Oh, youth, youth! With all life before it, it must still invent limits for itself and tragic ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and ‘perhapses.’ Why must to-day alone be wonderful? Every day has its wonders.”

There was no answer for a moment; then Rosamond leaned over and kissed the elder woman’s cheek—a fragile bit of pale pink and ivory modelling, faintly impressed with many tiny lines. She knew that she could not uncover to Mrs. Lee’s eyes all the remote reasons for her mood of this morning. She who had worn her weeds in loving sorrow and resignation must not be told of the young heart beating its rebellious tattoo for long irksome months, under crape and plain black, black and white, and lavender with black trimmings—nor of the hoydenish kick which had cast the last stage of woe from her forever.

It seemed to Rosamond, then, that the cynic touch of disillusionment, and not the mere passing of time, was what aged; and that, according to such calculation, she was years older than Mrs. Lee. Twenty-four’s responsibility was to guard the couleur de rose for Seventy! Her thoughts culminated in the inward exclamation:

“It makes a difference, even in one’s age, what sort of a man one marries!”

Aloud, she said:

“You see, I called this my ‘Wonderful Day,’ and put on this frock to celebrate it. So I must make it wonderful, mustn’t I?”

“Yes, indeed, my dear, and all the midsummer fairies will help you,” her friend answered.

Mrs. Lee was placidly and patiently unmingling her kitten and her wool, which had revolved and resolved themselves into one untidy ball with a miewing centre.

Two sounds broke upon the lull in conversation.

Near by clattered the hoofs of the letter carrier’s pony rounding the hill’s turn to the front gate. Far down by the river the old bell rang its song of ten o’clock into the mouth of the golden horn valley, and the tones—muted but round and perfect—floated up across the hillside gardens and carried, even here, their separate theme dimly above the murmurs of wind-rippled leaves and dripping bucket.

“Morning, Mrs. Lee. Morning, Mrs. Mearely, ma’am.”

Mr. Horace Ruggle—who was the mail carrier twice daily when he was not the telegraph agent, and vice versa—blinked perspiringly over the gate. Mr. Ruggle was stout—deliberately and tyrannically stout, no doubt his equine would have said, had there been a bit of speech instead of a bit of steel in his mouth—and whatever he did was done with gusty effort.

“Good-morning, Mr. Ruggle. Is it possible that you have a letter for me?” Mrs. Lee queried, putting her knitting aside and rising to the rare occasion. Rosamond ran forward to receive it.

“One for you and one for Mrs. Mearely.” Mr. Ruggle put the letters into Rosamond’s hand. “Yours has come quite a ways; but Mrs. Mearely’s is just from Poplars. It’ll be from her folks, likely. Mebbe her mother’s took sick or her sister’s children’s caught a epidemic; or, more likely yet, has had a accident with that new farm machinery.”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear, I hope not!” Mrs. Lee looked upon him with gentle disapprobation as if she considered his attempts to rival the literary imagination of Edgar Allan Poe wholly out of tune with a midsummer morning in Roseborough. “Do tell me there is nothing of the sort, Mrs. Mearely, I can’t enjoy my own missive until I know. Mr. Ruggle has alarmed me.”

“Telegrapher and postman,” Mr. Ruggle wheezed, mopping his huge cheeks, “I’m the Bad News Syndicate. I made that anecdote first along in the ‘nineties,’ when the newspaper at Trenton joined the news syndicate and gave me the idea; but it’s a joke that’s always good. Back about six years ago, I added something to it that’s made it even better. It’s this: ‘If I carry bad news and don’t know it, who carries worse and knows it?’ Answer: the undertaker.’ ” He took his own time and told it to the bitter end despite Mrs. Lee’s polite, but none-the-less quite marked, attempts to prevent the sombre jest’s completion.

“Yes, yes, Mr. Ruggle. You are fond of your wit, we know; but while you are entertaining us, think of the impatient ones elsewhere waiting for their letters.”

“Right you are, ma’am—impatient for their doom, never thinking as how what they don’t know won’t hurt them.” Mr. Ruggle drew his pony’s head out of the greenery about the fence. “Bad news from Poplars?”

“Oh, no, not at all.” Mrs. Mearely gave him a nod that meant dismissal.

“It is only a line from my sister, Mrs. Lee, saying she can’t come to me for a week.”

“Should think you’d be looking in your own envelope, ma’am,” Mr. Ruggle hinted to Mrs. Lee. “It’s come quite a ways.”

“Not just now; I must find my other glasses first, so I shall wait some time.”

“Well, you may, but I can’t!” The nonplussed Mr. Ruggle masked his disappointment with a facetious air. “Good-day, ladies.” The over-freighted pony jogged on up the hill.

“Dear, dear, I wonder how many thousand times Mr. Ruggle has repeated to me that unpleasant ‘anecdote’ of his, as he insists on calling it.” Mrs. Lee shook her head, with a mild perplexity that any one should evince a taste for such humour.

“Dreadful person!” Rosamond concurred. “Wouldn’t you suppose that an ordinary sense of the fitness of things would keep a fat man from being morbid?”

Mrs. Lee laughed heartily.

“I’m afraid I have been guilty of a tiny fib. Although I generally use my other glasses for reading, I do not positively require them. Still I do feel that I should not be compelled to share my mail with Mr. Ruggle.” She slipped a knitting needle under the flap and opened the envelope deftly. Presently a murmur of delight caused her guest to say:

“No epidemics or accidents in your letter, either! I heard you purr.”