Books: Life at High Tide
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Various >> Life at High Tide
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"Oh, you may make fun," said Anna, snapping open the frothy thing she
called a sunshade, "but you don't know how I lie awake nights,
shuddering lest Lena grow up a near-sighted girl with no color and
serious views."
Millicent only smiled as the great machine moved off. The sunshine,
the rare and ordered beauty of the place, the fragrance of the soft
winds, all lapped her in indolence. As they neared the gate that gave
upon the open road, a turn brought them in sight of the front of the
house. It was very beautiful. She breathed deeply in the content of
the sight--the delicate lines, the soft color, the perfection of
detail. In the gardens were stained, mellow columns and balustrades
which Anna had brought from the dismantled palace in the Italian hills
where she had found them. Everywhere wealth made its subtlest, most
delicate appeal to her eyes.
"My house," thought Millicent, as they shot out of the grounds, "shall
be different, but as beautiful. The Tudor style, I think, and for my
out-of-door glory a vast rose-garden,--acres, if I please!" Then she
called sternly to her straying imagination. She was picturing what she
might have as the wife of the man before her--the man whose first
proposal she had unhesitatingly refused, whose appearance at Lakeholm
she had regarded as proof of disloyalty on Anna's part--the man who at
the best represented to her only the artistic possibilities of riches.
She dismissed her reverie with a frown and joined in the talk.
"Do you know," she confessed, "I forget where it is that we are going?"
"We're coming back to the Monroes' for luncheon," Mrs. Dinsmore
reminded her. "But Mr. Brockton is going to skim over most of the
Berkshires first. I think you said you hadn't been in this part of the
country before, Mr. Brockton?"
"No," said Brockton, "I haven't had much chance to get acquainted with
the playgrounds of the country. I've been too busy earning a holiday.
But I've earned it all right." He turned to emphasize his boast with a
nod toward Millicent. She blushed. His very chauffeur must redden at
his braggart air, she thought. The Tudor castle grew dim in her vision.
"What do you think of the bubble, Miss Harned?" he went on. "Goes like
a bird, don't she?"
"Indeed she does," answered Millicent, characteristically making
immediate atonement in voice and look for the mental criticism of the
moment before. "It's really going like a bird. I don't suppose we
shall ever have a sensation more like flying."
"Not until our celestial pinions are adjusted," said Anna. Brockton
laughed, but Millicent went on:
"Seriously, the loveliest belief I ever lost was the one in the wings
with which my virtues should be at last rewarded. To breast the ether
among the whirling stars,--didn't you ever lie awake and think of the
possibility of that, Anna?"
"Never! I'm no poet in a state of suffocation, as I sometimes suspect
you of being."
"As for heaven," declared Brockton, "I don't take much stock in all
that. We're here--we know that--and we'd better make the most of it.
For all we know, it's our last chance to have a good time. Better take
all that's coming to you here and now, Miss Harned, and not count much
on those wings of yours."
Millicent smiled mechanically. Could any Elizabethan garden of delight
compensate for the misery of having each butterfly of fancy crushed
between Lemuel Brockton's big hands in this fashion?
They were entering a village. Before them was the triangular green
with the soldier's monument upon it. About it were the post-office,
the stores, the small neat houses of the place. A white church,
tall-steepled, green-shuttered, rose behind the monument, and with it
dominated the square. A wagon or two toiled lazily along the road;
before the stores a few dusty buggies were tied. The place seemed
drowsy to stagnation in the summer heat. Why, Millicent wondered, were
towns so crude and unlovely in the midst of a country so beautiful?
There was a sudden explosive sound, and, with a crunch and a jerk
which almost threw them from their seats, the machine came to a
standstill. Brockton and his chauffeur were out in an instant, the one
peering beneath, the other examining more closely. He emerged in a
moment, and there was a jargon of explanation, unintelligible to the
two women. All that Anna and Millicent understood was that the
accident was not serious; that they would be delayed only a few
minutes, and that Brockton was very angry with some one for the
mishap. The two men worked together. Anna looked at her cousin.
"I'm dead sleepy," she half whispered. "The wind in my face and the
sun are too soporific for me. Let us not say a word to each other."
"You read last night," Millicent accused her. "But I don't feel
particularly conversational myself."
She leaned back and surveyed the scene again. She could read the words
graved on the granite block beneath the bronze soldier:
"To the men of Warren who fought that their country might be whole and
their fellows free this tribute of love is erected."
And there followed the honor-roll of Warren's fallen.
Millicent's sensitive lips quivered a little. Her ready imagination
pictured them coming to this very square, perhaps,--the men of Warren.
Boys from the hill farms, men from the village shops, the blacksmith
who had worked in the light of yonder old forge, the carpenter who was
father to the one now leisurely hammering a yellow L upon that
weather-stained house,--she saw them all. What had led them? What call
had sounded in their ears that they should leave their ploughshares in
the furrows, their tills, their anvils, and their benches? What better
thing had stirred with the primeval instinct for fight, with the
unquenchable, restless longing for adventure, to send them forth? She
read the words again--"that their country might be whole and their
fellows free."
She moved impatiently. For now an old shadowy theory of hers--an
inheritance from the theories of the recluse, her father--stirred from
a long-drugged quiet: a theory that there was a disintegrating
unpatriotism in the untouched, charmed life of riches she and her
fellows sought. She felt the disturbing conviction that those common
men--she could almost hear their blundering speech, see their uncouth
yawns at the sights and sounds of beauty on which she fed her
soul--that those men had wells of life within them purer, sweeter,
than she. She averted her eyes from the monument.
"Honey!" called a voice, full-throated and loving--"honey, where are you?"
There was a play-tent on the little patch of yard before the brown
cottage to the left. The voice had come from the narrow piazza.
Millicent shivered as she looked at it, with its gingerbread
decorations already succumbing to the strain of the seasons. The
answer came from the tent:
"Here I am, muvver. Did you want me?"
She came out--a child of five or six years. The round-eyed solemnity
of babyhood had not left her yet. She brought her small doll family
with her, and a benevolent collie ambled beside her. Her mother
watched, tenderness beautifying her brown eyes: she was a young woman,
no older than Millicent, but her face was more lined than Anna's; a
strand of dark hair was blown across her cheek; there were fruit
stains on her apron. All the marks of a busy household life were about
her, all the bounteous restfulness of a woman well beloved, and the
anxieties of a loving woman. She gave the automobile a passing glance,
but it had no interest for her. Her eyes came back to caress the young
thing which toiled up the steps to her, babbling of a morning's events
in the tent.
"Yes, sweetheart, that was very nice," she said, in answer to some
breathless demand for sympathy. "And mother has brought you the bread
and jam she promised you this morning. Will you eat it here, or in the
tent?"
"Couldn't I come into the kitchen to eat it, where you are?"
"Why, yes, honey, if you want to."
The door closed upon the vision of intimate love. Millicent saw Lena
walking sedately with the governess of no charm and encyclopaedic
information.
"Now we're all right," called Brockton, loudly. "Upon my word, Mrs.
Dinsmore, I think you were asleep! Miss Harned, you can't be as
entertaining as I thought if your cousin falls asleep with you."
"But think how soothing I must be; that's even better than to be
entertaining."
"By ginger! I never found that out--that you were soothing, I mean."
It was evident that Mr. Brockton intended a compliment. Anna Dinsmore
saw the annoyed red whip out upon Millicent's cheeks. She interposed a
few ready, irrelevant questions before the tide of Brockton's
flattery.
They made their swift way through the hills, sometimes overlooking the
winding course of the river, sometimes skirting the great estates of
the region, again whizzing noisily through an old village. Anna and
Brockton sustained the weight of conversation. Millicent smiled in
vague sympathy with their laughter and Joined at random in the talk.
Obstinately her mind had stayed behind her--with the men of Warren,
with the round-faced child, and the woman to whose life love and not
art gave all its beauty.
They approached one of the larger old towns of the country--a place
with a bustling main street and elm-shaded thoroughfares branching
from it. Here were ample, well-kept lawns and houses of prosperous
dignity. It seemed charming to Millicent with its air of unhurried
activity or undrowsy repose.
"What is this, Anna?" she asked.
Anna told her.
"Riverfield?" Millicent repeated the name, but in a strange voice.
Anna stared a little.
"Yes. Why? Do you know any one here?"
"No." The word trickled slowly, unwillingly, from Millicent.
"Lovely town, and there are some good places outside," said Anna. "The
Ostranders have one, and Jimson, the artist. But the native city, or
whatever you call it, is adorable. It has that air of rewarded virtue
which makes one ashamed of one's life--"
"I wish"--Millicent still spoke remotely, as if out of a sleep--"I
wish, Mr. Brockton, that we might find a little library and museum
they have here."
"Why, of course!"
"Are you going to compare it with the Vatican, Millicent?" asked Anna,
flippantly. Millicent turned a distant, starry gaze upon her cousin.
"No," she said; and then, in a flash of sympathy and fright, Anna
remembered that it had been for some little Berkshire town that Will
Hayter had built a library and museum just before his death, six years
before--the town from which his family had originally come. Her memory
worked rapidly, constructing the story. The blood dyed her face at the
thought of her obtuseness. Then she set her lips firmly. She had done
her best; if a wanton fate chose to interfere now and make Millicent
slave to the phantom of her early, radiant love, she, Anna, could do
no more!
"Here we are, I guess," called Brockton. The machine shot into a broad
street. A promenade between a double row of elms down its centre gave
it a spacious dignity. The modest courthouse stood on one side, as
green-bowered as if Justice were a smiling goddess; a few churches
broke the stretch of houses. And on the other side the library and
museum stood.
"Pretty little building, but plain," commented Brockton, making
disparaging note of its graceful severity.
"It's exactly suited to the place; it epitomizes its spirit," said
Anna, glibly. "It's austere without being forbidding--perfect Colonial
adaptation of the Greek."
Millicent made no architectural observation. Instead she said: "If you
don't mind, I should like to go in for a while. You could pick me up
later, perhaps on your way back to--Where is it we are lunching?"
Consternation looked out of Anna's eyes, bewilderment out of
Brockton's. But Millicent turned to them with such gentle command in
her gaze that they could offer no protest.
"Come back in half an hour, if you are ready," she said. Upon Anna,
whose baffled look followed her up the flagging between the
close-clipt lawns, there came the feeling that she was leaving her
cousin alone with the beloved dead.
"Now what--" began Brockton, in full-toned protest,--"what the--"
"That was the last thing Will Hayter did,"--Anna interrupted his
question. "And the first, so to speak. It was a fairly important
commission. Jessup, the Trya Drop liniment man, came from
Riverfield--he has a mammoth place outside now. When he began to coin
money faster than the mint, he gave lots of things to his
birthplace--which has always blushed for him. It's prouder that
Whittier once spent Sunday with one of its citizens than that Alonzo
Jessup is its son. Well, he gave the library and museum, and the
commission went to Will Hayter. The Hayters came from here two or
three generations ago. It was just before his death, and Millicent has
been abroad almost ever since. So she had never seen it."
Brockton gave a look of speechless chagrin at his hostess, which she
answered haughtily:
"My dear Mr. Brockton, after all, I never undertook to be a
marriage-broker!" Then she glanced at the chauffeur and forbore.
Meantime Millicent sat in one of the square exhibition-halls. The
sweet air, with the scent of hay from the farther country faintly
impregnating it, blew through the quiet. No one else shared the room
with her. The even light soothed her eyes, the stillness calmed the
fluttering apprehension in her breast which had presaged she knew not
what fresh anguish of loss. There were pictures on the walls--one or
two not despicable originals which Trya Drop Jessup had given, many
copies, and a few specimens of Riverfield's native talent. But she saw
none of them, any more than one sees the windows and the paintings in
a great cathedral in the first fulness of reverence. To her this was a
sacred place. That grief had lost its poignancy, that youth and health
with cruel insistence had reasserted their sway over her life, did not
mean forgetfulness, unfaith.
"Truly, truly,"--she almost breathed the words aloud,--"there has been
no other one. That was my love, young as we were. But I must fill up
the days--I must fill up the days."
* * * * *
Her eyes were fixed unseeingly upon a great canvas at the other end of
the hall. Some Riverfield hand had portrayed a Riverfield
imagination's conception of the moment in the life of Christ when, the
temptations of Satan withstood, angels came to Him upon the mountain.
In the lower distance the kingdoms of the world grew dim beneath the
shadow that fell from the vanquished and retreating tempter, and from
the opening heavens a dazzling cloud of angels streamed toward the
solitary Figure on the height. By and by Millicent's eyes took note of
it. She half smiled. There was daring at least!
Then the picture faded, and again the persistent figure of the child
which had so filled her imagination came before her. But this time it
was toward herself that the rosy face was turned and limpid eyes
lifted in unquestioning dependence. She was the mother; she stood on
the piazza, and by her side he stood, who had been so dear in himself,
so infinitely dearer in the thought of all that should be; toward them
the child came; they were enveloped by breathless love for each other
and for that being, innocent, trusting, which their love had called
into life. So, dimly, she had dreamed in the radiant days of old.
Almost she could feel his hand upon her shoulder, hear his voice full
of tenderness that expressed itself only in tone, not in word, taking
refuge from too great feeling in jest. She closed her eyes against the
vision that made her faint with anguish.
Some one entered the room with a brisk little trot; Millicent opened
her eyes and turned her head. A small woman, "old maid" from the top
of her neat gray head to the toe of her list shoes, came forward. She
held a pad and pencil and wore the badge of authority in her manner.
At sight of Millicent she paused, blinking behind her glasses.
Millicent came slowly out of her trance; recognition dawned upon her.
She rose.
"Miss Hayter--Aunt Harriet!" she cried, advancing.
"It is you, then!" chirped the elder lady. "My dear, who could have
expected this?"
"Not I, for one!" She held both Miss Hayter's hands. "I had no idea
you were here. Surely you haven't given up your beloved Boston
school?"
"Oh no. Only in the summer I come here for a month and substitute for
the regular curator while she is on her vacation. It"--she struggled
against a constitutional distaste for self-revelation--"it seems like
a little visit with Will, somehow."
Millicent's throat throbbed with a strangled sob. No one had spoken
his name in so long! Her people had had no interest but to banish the
memory of him from her heart; this quaint little aunt of his, who had
adored him and lived for him, was the first who had spoken of him
in--she did not know how many years. She held tight to the old hands,
her eyes clung to the withering face. "Say it again," she whispered;
"say his name."
"Why, my dear," cried the older woman, "is it still as hard as this?
Come, sit down here with me. Of course I knew that you were not one of
the changing kind,"--Millicent winced,--"but I'm sorry to think you
should suffer now as keenly as you do."
"It is not just that," said Millicent, shamefacedly. "Only, seeing you
unexpectedly gave me a pang. And then, being in the place he built--"
The older woman patted her hand soothingly. "I understand," she said.
"I've always understood. When--when you didn't write after the very
first, I knew it was because you couldn't, not because you forgot. You
were really made for each other, you two. I think I never saw two such
radiant, happy creatures in the world. Ah, well!" she wiped a sudden
dew from her glasses, "waiting's hard, my dear, but it ends,--it
ends."
Millicent was hurt by the unbroken faith in her, by the unquestioning
belief she could not share. She looked wistfully upon the shining,
tearful eyes.
"It is very beautiful to think that," she said, "but, dear Aunt
Harriet, you are mistaken about me. I am going to tell you everything.
I--I loved your nephew. I shall not love any one else. It happened to
come to me in perfectness when I was young--love. But I live, I am
well, I am alive to pleasure and pain. How shall I fill up my life but
with the things that still matter to me?"
"You think of marrying, you mean?" Aunt Harriet's voice was dry and
harsh. "Well--I am sure Will would wish your happiness, and I--it
would not be for me to object. Every day it is done, and very often
rightly, I suppose; for money, for companionship, for the chance of
self-development, women marry without love. I--I could only wish you
happiness."
"You--do not understand."
"My dear,"--her voice softened again; something in the pallor and the
quivering pain of the girl touched her,--"I do not mean to speak
hardly to you. It seems to me like this: when it comes to piecing out
a life that has been broken, as yours was--as mine was, my dear, as
mine was--there are two ways of doing it. Either you keep your ideal
of perfect love, and lead your poor every-day life of odds and ends,
like mine, filling your days with the best scraps of pleasure or
usefulness you may, or you give up your ideal of perfect love and
marry, and have your home and your children and your rounded outward
life. There is, maybe, no question of higher or lower. Each one of us
does what her nature bids her. I had always thought of you as one
who--But it is not for me to judge."
Her voice was gentle, and she did not look at Millicent. Her eyes
seemed to pierce the canvas on the opposite wall and the hangings and
the stones behind it, and to see a far image of souls in the struggle
of choice. The woman beside her sat silent, her thoughts with the
idealists--the men who gave up the comfort of their firesides, the
gain of their occupations, and followed whither the vision led; the
woman whose home was built upon love and who would see only infamy in
houses founded otherwise; the poor soul beside her, stronger in
courage, more aspiring in thought, than she, with all her delicacies,
her refinements of taste. The ideal had led them all--the ideal, as it
had once shone for her and for him whose spirit had informed and
beautified the spot where she sat and made her choice.
"Aunt Harriet," she said, and her face was like the sudden flashing of
stars between torn clouds,--"Aunt Harriet--" She could not utter the
decision in words. "May I come to see you--and learn something from
you?"
Miss Hayter looked. There was no need to question. No knight ever rose
from his accolade with a face more glorified than Millicent's when she
silently dedicated herself to the shining company of those who keep
unsullied the early vision.
As she passed out of the hall, her eyes fell again upon the painting
of the Temptation. She read the black and gilt legend below it--"And
Angels Came and Ministered Unto Him." Then she laughed down upon the
old-fashioned figure trotting by her side. "And angels came," she
said.
Her rapt look frightened Anna when the automobile returned for her.
Then the heart of that frivolous woman was stricken for a moment with
wistfulness.
"You seem very happy," she faltered, "and--amused, is it? What are you
smiling over?"
"I am still thinking of angels. Would you ever have dreamed, Anna,
that they sometimes wore list shoes, and sometimes ate bread and jam,
and occasionally spoke with granite lips? They do."
Brockton stirred uneasily, foreboding failure. And Anna sighed,
mourning two lost visions.
KEEPERS OF A CHARGE
BY GRACE ELLERY CHANNING
The Doctor's brougham stood at the door; the Doctor's liveried
servants waited at the foot of the stairs; the Doctor himself in his
study was gathering together his paraphernalia for the day, and the
Doctor's face was a study.
He was tired; he was cross; he was feeling ill. His nervous hands were
unsteady; his movements were by jerks; his face was a knitted tangle
of lines. He had rheumatism in both shoulders, and a headache, and a
pain in his chest. He had slept but little, and one of his patients
had had the happy idea of despatching a messenger for him in the dead
hour of the night. The Doctor never went out nights, and she ought to
have known this, but her only son was ill and she was persuaded he
could not survive a dozen hours together without the Doctor's personal
attendance.
It never seemed to occur to any of his patients that his own life was
of the smallest consequence in the balance with theirs or that of any
member of their families. Occasionally, when his rheumatism was
exceptionally severe or his cough racking, this reflection embittered
the Doctor. At other times--and this was generally--he accepted with
philosophy this integral selfishness of clients as a part of their
inevitable constitution. They were a set of people necessarily
immersed and absorbed in their own woes, or in that extension of their
woes which was still more passionately their own, and even more
unmercifully insisted upon in proportion to the decent veneer of
altruism it possessed.
Without being strictly a handsome man, the Doctor produced the effect
of one. Nothing gives distinction like character, and this he had and
to spare. He was not a popular physician, but a famous one; the day
was long past when his professional success depended upon anything so
personal as appearance or manner. He could afford to be--and he
frequently was--as disagreeable as he felt; desperate sufferers could
not afford to resent it, and their relatives, in the grim struggle for
a precious life, swallowed without a protest the brusqueries and
rebuffs of the man who held in, the hollow of his potent hand their
jewel of existence.
He had his passionate detractors and his personal devotees, and these
last afflicted him far more than the first. Like the priest, the
physician cannot escape taking on superhuman proportions in the eyes
of those to whom he has rendered back life, their own or a dearer, and
the Doctor (having long outlived the time when it flattered him) was
often exasperated to the limits of endurance by the blind faith which
asked miracles of him as simply as cups of tea. The strain these
women--they were mostly women, of course--put upon him was beyond
belief, and he got but a mild pleasure out of the reflection that,
being in their nature foolish, they could not help it.
It was quite in keeping, therefore, that one of them should have
broken up his night's sleep. He knew those attacks of the boy's by
heart; there was exactly one chance in one hundred that his presence
should be necessary. He had sent a safe remedy, telephoned a severe
but soothing message, and mentally prayed now for patience to meet the
irrational, angered eyes of maternity, and to administer a reproof
equally gentle and deterrent--gentle, for of course the woman's nerves
had to be allowed for; she had been nursing this boy for months. The
Doctor slipped into his long, fur-trimmed overcoat and reached for his
tall hat.
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