Читать книгу In the Garden of Delight - Lily Hardy Hammond - Страница 4

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It is to Uncle Milton that I owe our return to the country, and all the delights of Bird Corners.

Uncle Milton is an inheritance from my great-aunts and Cedarhurst, where he had the finest flowers and the most flourishing vegetable garden in the country. He is a lean old Negro, tall, and straight as a pine. His features are finely cut; and with his gray hair, long gray moustache, regular features, and skin like polished bronze, he makes a distinguished appearance, even in his old blue jeans. He is a real lover of the outdoor world, and the earth and the plants know it. He bends over the flower-beds lovingly, with eyes that see, not dirt, but all dirt’s possibilities of beauty and life. There is never a plant set carelessly nor a seed that falls by chance. No wonder all he touches grows!

That he went to town with Great-aunt Letitia, and stayed there afterward with me, spoke eloquently of the strength of affection between us. But after my great-aunt’s death he did not accept the situation without constant protests, and the advice which my youth and ignorance demanded.

“You ain’t got no mo’ business in de city dan I is, Miss Lil,” he said spring after spring, as I sat on the grass by the flower-beds and watched his fork go in and out like clock-work, leaving behind it long rows of fresh-turned earth. “You done los’ all dem roses you had in yo’ face at home. Ef Miss Ferginny done lived she wouldn’ put up wid dis foolishness not er minute.”

“But the city is more convenient for Mr. Bird,” I would explain. “Some day when he is rich enough he expects to give up business, and then we will go back.”

“He’ll be givin’ up his wife fus’ news you know,” growled the old man, stopping to thin the thick border of violets. “An’ he’ll be goin’ to bury you dar by Miss Ferginny and Miss ’Titia befo’ he goes retirin’ from business ef he don’ look out. We-all got er plenty ter live on now—you got er plenty widout his’n; en ef you ain’t, I kin make er plenty outen dat groun’. Hit’s de riches’ lan’ in Davis’son county. I made hit pay befo’, en I kin do hit agin, stidder was’in’ it on po’ white-trash renters like you all do. But I ’clare to gracious, Miss Lil, ef you-all don’ go, I will. I been mixin’ up wid town niggers till I’m plumb wo’ out wid ’em. Dis is de las’ spring Milton’ll fix yo’ flowers in dis mizzable little cramped-up lot.”

He had said this so often that I regarded it as one of Nature’s regular spring processes; and beyond a sudden deeper stirring of my constant homesickness, his threats passed unnoticed. But one February morning he came out and stood by my cot under the trees with a face at once elated and downcast.

“Are you going to begin the spring work today?” I asked in delight.

He looked embarrassed.

“Hit’s sorter early to rake dem leaves offen de beds yit,” he said. Then he hesitated. “I ’spec I ain’t gwinter be able ter do de wuk no mo’.”

“Are you sick?” I asked anxiously. Then I saw the new look in his face, and gasped. “You’re going to the country!” I cried.

“Yassum, I is. I can’t stan’ it yere no longer, Miss Lil: I’m er gittin’ too ole fer town; I des bleeged ter go out whar God made de worl’ en breathe free en be er man ergin, befo’ I die.”

The years had slipped from him like a cloak. I looked at him enviously—just as an English sparrow might look at some bird of stronger flight, I reflected suddenly, and scowled at one of my greedy kinsman in the walk, trying to gobble all the best crumbs at once.

“I’m glad for you,” I said honestly. “When do you go?”

“When my mont’s out. But I hates ter go, Miss Lil.”

“What am I to do here?” I demanded, the sparrow in me refusing to be quenched altogether.

“I’ll do de bes’ I kin,” he said. “I been lookin’ roun’ fer you all winter. But dese town niggers is a onery set, fer sho’. When you-all comes home Milton’s comin’ back.”

“Never mind,” I said; “we’ll manage somehow.”

I closed my eyes because they were getting full of tears. He moved away, and I let the tears come. I wanted the country, too; and more and more as my illness grew, and it became increasingly difficult to take my part in the busy city life. The more one’s bodily freedom is restricted by weakness and pain, the more one longs for the unconfined spaces of earth and air, for wide horizons and sweeping winds, and wings that flash far up into the sunshine, above the shadows where one must lie, conning the hard lesson of patient idleness. And I wanted Uncle Milton—the visible link between me and that dear world of hill and sky for which I longed. Return to it seemed so bright a possibility while another heart, even this old Negro’s, held it as dear as I. If he went from me he would leave my hope bereft. I lay with closed eyes, absorbed in longing for that dear receding vision of delight.

“Don’ you see how bad she wanter go, Marse John?” said Uncle Milton again, close beside me. I sprang up in amazement, to find him and the Peon by my cot. “She ain’t gwine ter say a word ef she think hit’ll discommerdate you; but de chile’s e’en erbout breakin’ her heart fer de country, same as I is.”

“Uncle Milton,” I began indignantly; but the old man brushed my words aside.

“You en Marse John fight hit out, honey,” he said. “Mek ’er tell de trufe, Marse John. Hit’s you en her fer it now; Milton’s done his bes’.”

He turned deliberately and walked out of the yard.

It did not take the Peon long to get the facts, to answer all my objections as to the inconvenience to himself, and to settle finally our immediate return. We would rebuild Cedarhurst at once.

“Oh, no,” I cried, “not Cedarhurst! Let us build our own home, all sunshine and out-of-doors! It isn’t the old house that I love; it was too cold and stately and dark—such an indoors kind of house. It’s the hills I’m homesick for, and the sky, and the biggest maple, and the pasture, and the sycamores down by the brook.”

“But we can’t sleep in the maple,” objected the Peon, “nor eat in the pasture when it rains. There must be a house.”

“Oh, of course. But let it be our house—not Great-aunt Virginia’s. You may really build it any way you please if only you will have porches enough, and so many windows that wherever you sit you can lift your eyes and look right out, miles and miles and miles. And I’d like all the rooms to have a southern exposure, of course, on account of the breeze and the sun, and east windows for winter mornings, and west windows for the sunsets. I don’t care about the rest.”

“I insist upon bath-rooms and a kitchen,” said the Peon; “mere scenery is not a sufficient sanitary basis for life. But what shall we call it—Cedarhurst?”

“Oh, no! Just a plain, every day, home-y name—something that belongs to us and the birds. Why, we’re Birds ourselves, Peon, dear. Let’s be sociable and call it Bird Corners.”

“But there aren’t any corners,” said the practical Peon; “the place lies straight along the pike.”

That is a man’s way. He thinks he must face facts and shape his course accordingly, poor slave to the visible that he is. But a woman conquers facts by turning her back upon them, and playing they are something else.

“The birds will make the corners,” I explained patiently. “Before I’ve been putting out crumbs a month there’ll be bird pikes cutting through the place at every conceivable angle, and crossing each other under that seven-trunked maple where my cot will be. And if that won’t be bird corners, what will?”

So we prepared for our homing flight. Uncle Milton went out at once to trim the trees and prune the shrubbery and vines; and the occasional days he bestowed on us in town were full of delight for me, filled as they were with reports of progress at home. For it was home, before dirt had been broken for the house; the city dwelling was a mere temporary shelter.

“De jonquils out home is showin’ up fine,” he announced one morning in mid-February; “hit’s time to sorter stir up dese yere lazy town flowers. En I’ll trim de trees, too, seein’ I’m ’bout done wid ’em out home. I ’spec de city folks what’ll live yere atter we-all gone’ll want what little dab er trees dey got in dis yard.”

He looked scornfully at the back yard, generous in size, after the fashion of our Southern cities, and shaded with fine old trees. But a little later, high in the hackberry, his love of all earth-rooted things swept contempt from his heart, and his dark old face shone with happiness as he wielded the hatchet with rhythmic strokes.

That is always the beginning of the spring work—the severance of death from life, that life may rise again, even out of death. Where would life draw this dead matter next? To darkness first, to growth most surely, and perchance, some day, to wings. And the dark old man with the happy face was servitor of life—life for the dead as for the living; for death is but the underside of life.

We went home early in May. The house would not be finished until October; but outdoors was all ready for us, and we could not waste the summer for lack of a house.

“You know,” I argued to the Peon, “we had a beautiful time in the mountains last summer; and we slept in a two-roomed cottage with only weather-boarding between us and the trees outside. Why can’t we have a shed with a gasoline stove, and a couple of tents to live in?”

So we had them. The Peon and David drove in to Chatterton daily and took the train for business and school; and I fed the birds and followed Uncle Milton, and drank in the changing beauties of earth and sky. And all summer we watched our home grow, from cellar to roof-tree, till it became a thing complete, and fitted into the landscape for which it was designed.

We set it on the old home’s hill, which overlooked the countryside, and faced it toward the sunrising. The dark lines of cedars which had bordered the approach to the old house were left at one side, and the road, curving from their upper end, swept into full sunshine and passed under a great beech, which spread its tiers of leaves above the doorway. It is an unpretentious house, rambling about pretty much as it pleases in its efforts to give southern and eastern and western exposures to all the rooms. Porches are everywhere, and the windows either open on them, like doors, or stop a little above the floor at low, cushioned seats, which tempt one to sink down and wonder once again at the beauty of this fair country of middle Tennessee. There are no curtains at the windows, nor mats of vines outside. But up the widely-separated columns of the porches run clematis and jasmines which cross the great openings in narrow bands, above and below. So all summer the fretwork of green leaves frames the landscape, a perfect, yet everchanging picture in each of the wide spaces. The east end of the living-room is of glass, and my flowers flourish there in winter time. In my own room the bed stands in a deep recess formed all of windows on the three sides. A low seat runs under them within reach of the bed. All through the dark, sleepless night I can lie there and watch for the first paling of the eastern sky, and follow the level light as it moves softly along the southern hills, creating the shadows which make the light so clear.

It must be confessed that some of the kin at Chatterton thought my wits astray that first summer, and the Peon but a soft-headed, poor-spirited creature for giving way to my whimsies. Camping out was not as popular then as it is now; and the older members of the family did not hesitate to commiserate the Peon and David. That they professed to enjoy our long picnic only added to the heinousness of my folly.

Cousin Chadwell Grackle and his wife were among my first callers. Cousin Chad is always to the front when anything new crops up in the family. He has cried the sins and shortcomings of the whole usual order so long that even he is half bored with them, and the prospect of something new to criticise whets his social appetite to the keenest possible edge. Cousin Jane is his reflection and echo. If she were not, even her stolid nerves could scarcely have endured his painful type of piety without disaster.

They drove up one sunshiny morning, after they had seen the Peon and David pass on their way to town. I was on the cot under the biggest maple. Its seven trunks fall apart like long-stemmed flowers in a vase, spreading into a great green tent whose leafy curtains droop in a circle full seventy feet across.

The blackbirds were my principal guests that morning, a sanctimonious crew in sleek black coats, solemn, censorious, and self-satisfied to the last degree. All birds which walk instead of hopping are awkward-looking; but none are as preposterous as the blackbirds, because none of them put on such sanctified airs. As they moved about this morning, their heads thrust meekly forward, ducking modestly as they stepped, they appeared to be meditating on their neighbors’ sins. But they had their tribe’s keen eye for the main chance, and it was a swift bird and a wary one which secured a big crumb with these feathered Chadbands in the yard.

I looked up at the sound of wheels and nearly choked with swallowing my laughter. Cousin Chad and Cousin Jane did look so sleek and proper, that as I rose to meet them I could not refrain from throwing some extra crumbs on the grass for possible additions to my breakfasting guests.

They descended ponderously and looked at me with the apprehensive scrutiny one might bestow on a lunatic who is liable to break out immediately in a fresh place.

“How are you, Lyddy?” inquired Cousin Jane, with sepulchral anxiety. Cousin Chad, busy with the hitching-post, listened with his back as well as with his ears. They both know perfectly that I have always been Lil to everyone except the great-aunts, and that Lyddy has been an abomination to the entire family connection, and especially to me, since they first invented it in my childhood. That is why they stick to it. They believe in chastenings, do my cousins, the Grackles—particularly when they are the chasteners.

“I’m perfectly well,” I answered, with added emphasis to my usual formula. “Come and sit down. There’s no need to ask how you and Cousin Chad are; you look the picture of health.”

“Appearances don’t do to go by, Lyddy,” she answered solemnly, sinking ponderously on a creaking campstool. “Chadwell’s been havin’ sciatica, and I’ve stayed awake nights with him till I’m just about worn out. But I’ve never made my afflictions an excuse for shirkin’ my duty. We came over to say that as you seem to be without a roof over your heads we’d take you to board till your house is finished—if it ever is.”

She glanced contemptuously at the amorphous piles of building material just beyond us.

“You can have the second spare bed-room upstairs,” put in Cousin Chad. “It’s more to my interest to put you in the front one; but livin’ comes high any way you take it, and I want to consider you. I reckon John ain’t able to spend much, with all this building on hand. The back room’s small, but you three can make out in it. If you want the other, of course it will cost more. You can come over this evening after John gets home, and he and I can settle the terms after supper.”

I kept my face quite straight, and made a handsome contribution to current fiction.

“It’s so kind of you. John will appreciate it as much as I. But we really enjoy camping, and would not give it up even for those lovely rooms of yours, Cousin Chad. Thank you so much.”

Cousin Jane’s rubicund complexion assumed a purplish hue.

“Do you intend to kill that delicate child of Henry Bird’s, making him sleep out in the weather all summer?” she demanded.

“No,” I said, considering; “I don’t intend to kill him, exactly. And he isn’t at all delicate.”

“Well, he will be by the time you get through with him—if he ain’t dead,” broke in Cousin Chad. “Lyddy, it’s my duty to speak plainly, and I’ll not shirk it. Letitia spoiled you from the time you were born, and John Bird seems bent on keeping it up. David will pay the penalty for it. We do a very different part by the orphan the Lord made it our duty to take charge of, I can assure you. Caroline Wrenn’s health is taken care of, with a view to her future usefulness as a Christian. But of course you’ll stick to your own ways.—Well, I’ve warned you: my conscience is clear. Come, Jane: we’d better be going.”

“I’m glad your conscience is clear, Cousin Chad. I know that’s a comfort to you, if I’m not. But we can be good friends, can’t we, even though our ideas are different?”

“I shall not turn my back upon you if you’re in trouble, Lyddy, if that’s what you mean,” he answered. “I hope I know my duty better than that. But when you want help again you must ask for it. I don’t intend to offer it.”

“That’s a bargain, then,” I said; “and we must both remember it.”

Cousin Jane looked at me sharply, but Cousin Chad was already heaving her into the buggy, and she turned to get a good grip on the side. The vehicle creaked as she settled in it, and groaned when Cousin Chad sank beside her.

“Good-bye, Lyddy,” she said. “We’ve done our best. I hope you won’t regret it.”

This quite upset me, and after the cedars hid them I lay laughing until the thought of poor little Caro suddenly sobered me. What were they doing to Billy’s child? I must make friends with Cousin Jane, somehow, and entice the little thing over to Bird Corners as much as possible.

There was no one else whom our erratic manner of life really scandalized, except Cousin Jason Blue; and he, as he took occasion to tell me when he met me out driving one day with Caro, never made a fool of himself like Chad Grackle by meddling. If a woman wanted to follow her nature and behave like a lunatic, and her husband chose to allow it, it was none of his business; so he shrugged his shoulders and passed on.

Cousin Jason and the Grackles are the only kin I have in all Chatterton whose kinship I would discount if I could; but there is no denying they belong in the family. Cousin Chad’s father was my grandmother’s third half-cousin on my father’s side; and Cousin Jason’s mother was Cousin Lysander Hilliard’s step-daughter by his second marriage: there could scarcely be anything plainer than that.

And if Cousin Jason had his drawbacks, there are none about his half-sister, Grace, fifteen years his junior, and, except Ella, the dearest friend I have. She married George Wood soon after I married the Peon, and they have a daughter, Milly, about the age of Caro Wrenn.

David took kindly to country life, and to his numerous cousins-by-marriage. There were plenty of boys among them; and though at first they resented David’s city ways, their respect for him grew immensely when they found how far he could bat a ball; and after he had whipped Bob White in single combat he was admitted to Chatterton boydom as a comrade in full fellowship. There was no particular reason for his fighting Bob, so far as we dull grown-ups could discover, except that Bob was the leader of his set, and a fight was considered the necessary initiation to membership. As soon as this was made clear to him, David had painstakingly trodden on Bob’s toes, and the preliminaries were arranged at once. The boys were excellent friends, before and afterward; and the Peon would not allow me to discuss the matter with David. They talked it out in private, and reached some amicable male conclusion of their own.

Of the girl cousins David was loftily tolerant, excepting Caro Wrenn. She was five years old the spring we came back to the country, when David was half-past nine. Her mother had died when she was born, and her father, Billy Wrenn, had gone to Colorado three years afterward, to die there of consumption. He made Cousin Chad Caro’s guardian before he died, knowing, as we all did, Cousin Chad’s remarkable ability in reaping financial harvests from even the smallest investments; but he left the child herself with her mother’s sister, Sally Martin, never dreaming that death would again bereave the little creature of a mother’s love. Sally died, quite suddenly, less than a year after Billy; and Cousin Chad and Cousin Jane, intent, as usual, on doing their impeccable duty, assumed sole care of the little heiress, and installed her in their own childless and virtuous home.

A more incongruous setting for her could scarcely have been found. She was a tiny creature, with rose-leaf skin, great hazel eyes, a mop of red-brown curls, and a mouth where laughter bubbled all day long. Quick and bird-like in all her movements, she flitted in and out of the most unexpected recesses in the twinkling of an eye, with endless flutterings of hands and skirts and sweet gurglings of suppressed laughter. Almost from her cradle she sang—queer little soft croonings which slipped into tunes before she could speak their words. Cousin Jane scarcely knew what to make of her, and was torn between a sincere desire to do her Spartanly-Christian duty by her, and her solemn puzzlement over what she considered the child’s combination of depravity and charm. Even Cousin Jane could not be very severe with her; but she had an uneasy sense of spoiling her every time she forebore the rod, so that I found her more than willing to turn the child over to me for the greater part of the time.

This arrangement gave my revered relative ample warrant for looking closely into my household affairs and reproving me for everything she did and didn’t discover; it was her duty to know all about a place where dear Caroline spent so much of her time. And when Caro departed from Cousin Jane’s ideals, as she did with every movement of body and mind, it was a great relief to my pious cousin to be able publicly to disavow all responsibility for the child’s shortcomings. What, as she constantly inquired, could one expect of Caroline when that scatter-brained Lyddy would persist in encouraging the child in her flightiness? She published abroad her own powerlessness to control either Caro or the situation, and openly washed her hands of the consequences.

Caro and I bore up as best we could, and the Peon and David stood by us nobly. David, indeed, was ready to fight his idol’s battles with Cousin Jane herself. In fact, he grew up with a lack of respect for that excellent lady which tempted her to assume the role of a prophet, in which capacity she dwelt at large on the penitentiary as David’s ultimate place of residence. Caro always responded to these prognostications that, if Davy went to the penimtentium, she would go, too, as soon as she was big enough, and keep house for him, and make the cook give them ice-cream every day that came. And so the matter rested.