Читать книгу "Good-Morning, Rosamond!" - Constance Lindsay Skinner - Страница 7

Table of Contents

It’s from Jack—our Jack—and he is coming home!” Mrs. Lee’s deeply set, dark eyes were shining, her cheeks flushed; her voice, keen-toned with happiness, denied her three score and ten years.

“Oh, I hardly dared to believe it when he wrote months ago that he would come! But he did mean it—the dear, dear lad. Listen: ‘I will walk in upon you on the morning of the fifteenth.’ The fifteenth? why, that will be to-morrow! To-morrow morning! Oh, think of it, Mrs. Mearely! I, too, am to have my ‘wonderful day’; and it is to be to-morrow!”

“Who is coming to-morrow? It should be a remarkable person indeed to inspire all this joy.”

“Oh, he is! But you shall see for yourself. It is Jack Falcon.”

“And who is Jack Falcon? His hawk-like name makes me none the wiser!” Rosamond laughed in asking.

“Oh, you will not recall him at all. You must have been a small child when he went away. Oh, dear, I am so excited! To-morrow morning! Come in with me, dear friend, and do help advise me what preparations to make. And let me chatter, too; for, really, if I cannot let out some of this exhilaration in words, I fear I shall just puff and puff and go up like a balloon.”

“No, you won’t, for I’ll hold on to you!”

“Oh, come in, dear, and help me—advise me.”

She drew Rosamond’s hand through her arm.

“I shall love to help in anything that makes you so happy. And to-morrow, early, you shall have fresh flowers and fruit—and everything that Villa Rose can supply. If only Amanda and Jemima were there to cook things! But they went to Trenton for the day,” she added, not wishing to cloud Mrs. Lee’s joy by a recital of His Friggets’ sudden sorrow. “But there! I can cook! I’ll bake a cake. It will be fun to do it.”

“Oh, my dear! will you? Oh, think of that!” Mrs. Lee fluttered in ahead of her. “I must decide which room to give him.”

“You haven’t any room. He’ll have to sleep in the well!”

“Ah! I have it! yes! I’ve just thought that I can use the little room as a dining-room and give Jack the dining-room because of the two sun windows looking down toward the river. He will want a sunny room to work in.”

She led the way into the dining-room where light and colour reigned even in the woodwork and draperies. Purple, pink, and blue morning-glories, burdened with bees, peered in at the broad, low windows.

“To work?” Rosamond repeated interrogatively.

“Yes—I haven’t told even you yet. It has been such a secret! It is the professor’s manuscripts. I have arranged them. Oh! it took months to sort them. Look.”

She drew aside the scrim curtains before a low bookcase. The shelves were packed with notebooks and loose pages covered with small, even writing, all lying in neat piles.

“Sit down, my dear, and let me tell you all about it.”

She pressed her guest into a little wicker chair trimmed with rose chintz, and then sat at the table, herself, with half a dozen of the manuscripts before her. Marking a place with her forefinger, she continued:

“You see, since my dear husband went away, these have been my companions.”

“He must have written a great deal that no one else knew about. Why were they never published?”

“Ah, that is the secret, dear! They will be published. These are all thoughts of his, fruits of experience, little jottings on life and human character as he had observed them, descriptive and philosophical essays: the result, as he said, of having been taught faithfully and diversely by youth for forty years.”

“Of being taught by youth!” Rosamond repeated. “Oh! what things youth could teach if age would only let it.” Her eyes sparkled.

“He often spoke of it in that way, as if he were the pupil, and a very fortunate one, of all the hundreds of boys who passed through his hands. And I know that he hoped, in these writings, to give back to his boys—in their maturer life, when they could appreciate it—some of the gold of their youth.”

“Did he care so much for all of them?”

“He cared for every living thing. In loving any individual it was all life that he loved with all its potentialities. It came to me that if I could only publish these notes and essays I would thus extend his influence although he is no longer personally here. I wrote to several of the boys about it. (I must still call them ‘boys,’ although some have their gray and their bald spots, no doubt—and their whiskers!)”

“So Jack Falcon, dear filial soul, is bald and whiskered,” Rosamond murmured. “I might have known it.”

Mrs. Lee, examining the manuscripts, in a search for some special article or paragraph, did not hear her.

“Some of the boys were interested, and some I thought were a trifle indifferent; but Jack wrote that he would come home to help arrange and edit the scattered notes into coherent form. He said he was willing to give a year to the task, if need be. And—think of it—he was ever so far away in southern Europe at the time! Somewhere in those excitable Balkans.”

“The poor old thing was probably scared to death in the Balkans and grasped at the opportunity to get to a quiet spot,” went through Rosamond’s mind, but she said, aloud: “He has a good, loyal heart, evidently, and deserves that I bake him a cake.”

“Indeed he does. Though he was a dreadful cake-thief as a boy. I had to wrap my cakes in a towel and hide them in my bonnet box. He would go barefoot on long tramps through the valley and then come into the house, after we had retired, and eat up everything. The dear boy!”

“He wouldn’t have done it a second time with my cakes! The idea of crawling in through windows at midnight hunting for food! I’d ‘dear boy’ him!”

Mrs. Lee laughed.

“Oh, dear, how I am rambling on! It is the excitement, and not knowing what to tell you first. But I fear that authentic news of Jack Falcon could never be grouped in orderly fashion, for he himself was a very disorderly, lawless person. But so lovable!”

In chattering breathlessly, as she was, her slender fingers had been searching rather inefficiently among the leaflets; but now it appeared that she had found what she wanted.

“Here’s his letter, pinned to this little prose poem about Roseborough.”

“He writes poems about Roseborough?”

“Oh, no, no! It is the professor’s. You see I copied the little gem about our dear old town and enclosed it when I first wrote him about publishing. I wanted it to awaken the home desire in him. He has never married—it is too bad. Wait … oh, here it is. He says:

“I remember that names and dates never stayed in your head, Mother Lee, even simple Anglo-Saxon names. So I won’t burden you with the extensive and excruciating hereditary title of the royal personage who just now employs me at a handsome salary in laying out a recreation garden for his peasants. You would weary and faint before you reached the end of it! Suffice it for your pride to know that I have given to this royal personage the little article about Roseborough. It came about, naturally, one day in the garden that I read it to him. He was charmed with it, touched. So I, of course, let him keep it. He has translated it into his own jawcracking language [‘Jawcracking’ is in brackets—the naughty boy!], and has made an illuminated copy which hangs in his music room where he spends most of his time.

“There, my dear! Is not that something to be proud of? To think that my dear husband is even helping unpronounceable personages in those dreadful Balkans!”

Rosamond’s own cheeks were rosy from sympathetic thrill and she joined warmly in the elder woman’s delight.

“Oh, Mrs. Lee, how lovely! I should think you would be so proud that you would refuse to speak to poor commoners like us! You have known that for weeks and never told it! I should have gone up and down Roseborough with a trumpet.”

“Oh, you must not tell it even now! I wish to keep it until the right moment, when I can give it out in such a way that all Roseborough will feel that the honour does not exalt me, in a personal way, but is theirs as much as mine.”

Rosamond cocked her head, impudently.

“Afraid Mrs. Witherby will scratch?”

“No, you naughty girl! But Roseborough, having the communal spirit so strongly, does not take kindly to personal exaltations. I have learned to respect this sensitiveness.”

Rosamond’s eyes twinkled again, as she listened to Mrs. Lee’s charitable paraphrase on local jealousy.

“What do you suppose it could have been, about Roseborough, that appealed to the Balkan person?” she asked. “Try to imagine Roseborough in the Balkans!”

“Do you know I, too, wondered about that at first? Then I saw how natural it was—and felt that I had been stupid not to comprehend it at once. What should appeal to those poor, sad, explosive Balkans so much as Roseborough’s peacefulness? They must grow very tired of the continuous gun-popping and broken glass, and long for the ‘twelve hours of dreamless sleep’ to which Professor Lee alludes in the article. I always think that the sound of windows, or even glass tumblers, breaking is such a sharp, perturbing noise. I particularly dislike it. And then, too, the pieces of broken glass, flying through the air or scattered in profusion about the roads, are really dangerous.”

She was adjusting her glasses, so did not see the sparkles of merriment in Rosamond’s eyes.

“The article is short—only a few hundred words—let me read it to you. It is entitled” (she paused—dwelling lovingly on the written word before she uttered it) “ ‘Roseborough.’ Listen.” She repeated “Roseborough.”

“Here, where all hearts are tender and sincere, and no harsh word is ever breathed aloud, I will spend my days—be they few or many. Roseborough, thou art the other name of Happiness! Thy fragrance is a spiritual sweet that exudes from fadeless petals. Thy calm days are the flower, and thy velvety, star-veined nights of twelve hours of dreamless sleep are the leafy stem, of my perfect Rose of Content. I am happy indeed to be a busy bee plying my simple art at the centre of this sweetness. For what is my art—and all art? What is the art of pen, brush, chisel, and melodic strain? These are but parts of the great Art of Life, namely the distillation of love. If Happiness be thy other earthly name, dear Roseborough, thy ‘new name’—written in the heavens—is Love. To every seeker of harmony, thou art his end of journeying; to every wanderer, his home.

(Signed) Ph. Autocritus Lee,

21st June, 1895.

“He did not even initial all that he wrote; but he must have felt himself that this was especially fine—of course, as a professor of literature, with degrees, he would know that about his own work as well as about another’s—for he signed it in full and dated it. Except the first name,” she added. “He never signed Phineas but always used Ph. instead, saying that Ph. was short for philosophy and so was he, short of it, in spite of all his profound cogitations.”

She sat gazing at the faded handwriting, though the tears, that slowly formed and coursed her finely wrinkled cheeks, entirely blurred the lines for her.

“ ‘Here where all hearts are tender and sincere.’ To think that he wrote that about Roseborough nearly twenty years ago, my dear! And it was just as true then as it is now.”

Rosamond put both her arms about the older woman’s neck and leaned her cheek against hers.

“His faith saw the beautiful truth of things, nothing else. It was the same quality he loved best in Jack. He used to say that Jack’s faith was like the morning lark. Nothing could keep it from soaring and singing.”

“Then he is the right person to edit those papers and you have reason to be happy.”

Mrs. Lee looked down into Rosamond’s eyes with unwonted solemnity.

“Mrs. Mearely, I am going to tell you something now which, in days to come, you will hear from many others. Then you will remember that it was I who first told it to you—here, in this little room. Professor Lee was one of the world’s great and original minds, though the world has not yet found it out.”

“Dear Mrs. Lee, I am sure he was.”

“While Jack, of course, agrees with me about that, he feels that Professor Lee’s highest value was of another quality. He writes somewhere in this letter—wait; yes, it is in this one—mum-m-m.” She buzzed softly over the lines, hunting for the passage. “Ah! here it is:

“I think that to lay stress, in a preface, upon the vastness and originality of Professor Lee’s intellect would be a mistake. Besides, in these careless days, the words have been misapplied until their meaning is nil.”

She looked up from the letter. “He means by that, dear, that while the words are truly applicable to Professor Lee they would fail to make him so conceived of by the reader; because they have been used noisily by persons of no judgment to describe men of shallow attainments—like some of those unfortunate foreign professors, for instance, who are so pathetically askew about everything. Poor things. It was the electron that set them all off. My dear husband used to say that the atomic theory, though purely materialistic and proving nothing in the world, was nevertheless not inimical to scientists’ sobriety and dignity, but that, when they lost the atom, they lost their heads and their shoes and their shirts as well! The electronic theory proved too exciting for them. He would say to me: ‘My dear, they should have held on to the atom. It was much the safer toy!’ When I saw the other day that radium has shown that matter disappears altogether, I wondered what the poor things would do now. They must be dreadfully disturbed.” She paused, shaking her head from side to side in sympathy.

“What else does Mr. Falcon say about Professor Lee?” Rosamond called her back, tactfully, to the main point.

“Ah! none knows better than Jack that Professor Lee was secretly a very great man. He goes on to say:

“He thought and said the things which all good and loving men have thought and said, and in much the same way. Because like them, he had discovered the truth of those things through living it. That was what made him priceless to us. He was a Sympathy—a refining and strengthening animus—which endured and went with us to meet life. The world of letters, science, and philosophy will hardly note these memoirs, perhaps; but if the day ever comes when greatness is measured by goodness—as he measured it—and hope, faith, and charity form the lens of the scientist’s microscope, then his name, like Abou ben Adhem’s, will lead all the rest!”

“You can see by that last phrase that Jack considers Professor Lee to have been far in advance of his time as a thinker.”

Rosamond did not speak at once. When she did, she said:

“Yes, one can see plainly what he thinks, and also what he feels—which is more important. I think he is a very nice man, your Mr. Falcon; and this afternoon I will bake him a marvellous cake. He deserves it.”

Mention of food brought Mrs. Lee back to the immediate present and its problems.

“Oh, my dear, how good of you! I shall send for Bella Greenup to cook other things. But there is something even more important than food.” She paused and patted her lips with her forefinger, evidently cogitating deeply.

“What?”

“Roseborough—dear, sensitive Roseborough. How shall I present my Jack to Roseborough so that everyone will feel his homecoming—and the book, and all of it—to be a communal event and not merely a selfish, personal pleasure of mine? That will require some planning. Yes, it will need some quite subtle planning.”

She folded her hands on the pile of notebooks. Her absent gaze turned to the window where the splashes of purple and pink morning-glories vignetted a bit of sun-smitten river. She was thinking hard.