III
“Peggy,” said John Archibald, leaning his elbows on the breakfast table, “sit down and let me talk to you.”
The girl who was headed toward the kitchen turned back promptly and sat down across the table from him.
Then she waited tranquilly for him to talk to her. What he had to say might be unimportant. It usually was, but she liked his talk. As she had already explained to the Smiling Lady, it was “so sort of foolish and snarky.”
To-day, however, he seemed inclined to seriousness.
“We’ve got to put things on a business basis, child,” he said firmly.
“Yes, sir,”—Pegeen’s tone was docile but vastly indifferent.
“You’ve been seeing to me for a week now and you know the worst about me. Now the question is, whether you are going to take the job for the summer.”
The dark blue Irish eyes under Peg’s black lashes flooded with anxiety.
“Don’t I suit, sir?” she asked.
“You suit like an easy shoe, Peggy; but do I?”
The thin, freckled, little face blazed into enthusiasm.
“Why, I think you’re splendid, sir—just splendid. Funny, you know, and messy, but I don’t mind that. I love cleaning up after folks if they’re nice, and you’re as nice as can be.”
“Thank you,” said Archibald, gratefully. “Then you think you can keep on seeing to me?”
“Yessir. I’d love it.”
“And the work isn’t too hard?”
“Hard? Why, it isn’t a bit hard. If anybody isn’t sick or drunk or anything like that, seeing to him is as easy as anything.”
“I’m feeling fairly healthy,”—Archibald’s voice was grave—“and I’ll try not to get drunk.”
“Oh, well, then we’ll get along fine, sir. Of course I’d do my best, even if you did get sick or drunk, but it’s lots harder.”
“I should think it might be. Now the next thing to be settled is, what your wages are to be.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t expect wages—not real wages, you know. Just enough to get me some shoes and some aprons. I’d like some big clean-looking aprons that would hide my dresses. My dresses aren’t so very nice, you know, but they’d do under aprons.”
“Miss O’Neill,”—Archibald shook a forefinger at her sternly—“I won’t allow any one to see to me without paying her real wages. I couldn’t be funny and messy with any comfort at all unless there was a wage earner to clean up after me. Now I don’t know how wages go in this Valley, but what would you say to five dollars a week?”
Pegeen stared at him in blank amazement. Then a pitying expression blotted out the surprise.
“You certainly do need seeing to,” she said gently, in the tone of one humoring the harmless insane. “Why, you can get real hired help for five dollars; but, then, a man wouldn’t know.”
“I’ve got more than hired help. I’ve got somebody who does all the work. I’ve got a cook and a housekeeper and a valet and a companion. Now, for the services of four experts I don’t consider five dollars an exorbitant wage. So that’s settled.”
The vivid little face across the table was flushed, excited. It occurred to the man that if the thin cheeks should take on plumpness and the sharp little chin should fill out to rounded curves, and the unchildish, anxious look should quite die out of the great eyes, Pegeen might some day be amazingly pretty. Even as it was, there was an appealing charm about her.
“What’ll I ever do with all that money?” she asked breathlessly.
“Buy a coach and four with it,” advised Archibald.
Her imagination was all aflame at the suggestion.
“Black horses and the coach lined with yellow, and we’ll take Miss Moran and the Johnston twins and Mrs. Neal and Mrs. Benderby and Jimmy Dawes, and the McKenzie baby and—How many does a coach hold?”
“Well, unless it’s a very large coach, I should say you’ve got it about full.”
“All right. Can you drive?”
“I can.”
“Then you’ll sit on the front seat with Miss Moran.”
“Hooray!”
“And the rest of us will be behind with red and green umbrellas, and there’ll be chains that jingle on the horses and Jimmy Dawes will blow a horn—I saw a coach go by down the road once. It was perfectly splendid. Now there isn’t anything but automobiles.”
“Maybe you’d rather buy an automobile.”
She laughed happily.
“No, I’d as leave have a sawmill as one of them. An automobile wouldn’t fit into a fairy story, now would it?”
Archibald visibly made an effort to fit one in and, failing, shook his head despairingly.
“There I told you. We’ve got to have the coach.”
The sensitive face was lighted from brow to chin with merriment.
Yes. She unquestionably would be pretty. She was pretty even now.
“Oh, you are nice,” she sighed happily.
The man reached across the table and clasped the thin little hands in his.
It was good to give happiness—almost better than being happy. Maybe it was the same thing.
“Before we get the coach and four,” he said, “we’ll hire Mrs. Neal’s horse and buggy and drive to Pittsfield and when we get there we will buy those shoes and aprons and some dresses to go under the aprons and a hat—”
“With roses on it,” chanted Pegeen.
“With roses on it,” agreed Archibald.
“And a raincoat for rainy mornings—and stockings—and all sorts of things,” he ended vaguely.
“But they aren’t to come out of the coach money,” he added hastily. “Not a bit of it. They are extra. You are going to have five dollars a week and ‘found.’ ‘Found’ means hats with roses on them.”
Peg’s chin was nestled between her palms. Her eyes were beaming on him. Suddenly a cloud swept over them.
“If you please, sir,” she began and hesitated. The cloud of anxiety had drifted over the whole piquant face.
“If you please, sir,” she began again.
“Yes?” encouraged the man across the table.
“Are you sure you can afford it, sir?” It came out with a rush at last—“I’ve always heard that artists—I don’t really need the things. I’ve got plenty. I can get along first rate with just the shoes and aprons.”
Through Archibald’s mind drifted a fleeting memory of the last gift he had sent to Nadine Ransome. She loved emeralds and many men had given them to her. A dull flush came into his cheeks.
“I’m quite sure I can afford it. You see I had a father who didn’t paint pictures.”
“Oh, well, then—” said Peggy, understandingly.
“We’ll go to Pittsfield on Saturday.”
“Pink roses,” stipulated the small girl, as she carried the breakfast dishes kitchenward.
“Big pink roses,” amended the man.
For a few days after his high-handed adjustment of the wage problem, Archibald painted with something like his old time fervor. For two years, eye and hand and brain had been out of tune; but now the beauty of the world cried out to him again and his brush caught and fixed the meaning of the cry. Men had prophesied great things for him—men who knew. He had believed in great things for himself; but all that had been in the time he could scarcely remember—in the time before he had met Nadine. Since then he had lost faith in himself and in much beside; but now, standing before a finished picture and knowing it was good, the painter admitted to himself that life had its satisfactory moments. Not that he was sure of himself. He was far from it; but agreeable things did happen. There was Pegeen and there was the Smiling Lady and there was June—and he had painted a good picture.
“Peggy,” he said, as the girl passed him on her way to the spring, “God must have had a mighty contented, comfortable feeling at the end of the sixth day.”
“Yessir.” She had no idea what he meant, but it was enough for her that he said a thing. She was willing to swear to it.
He put an affectionate hand upon her shoulder as she came and stood beside him looking at the picture.
“I understand you’re a wonderful hand with babies, Peg,” he said. “What do you do with a baby when he’s cross or bad or wants something he mustn’t have? Spank him, eh?”
Pegeen flushed indignantly.
“Well, I should think not! If that’s all you know about babies! Why, I just go to work and get the poor little thing awfully interested in something else.”
Archibald laughed boyishly.
“Peggy child. That must be the answer. You’re getting me awfully interested in something else.”
“Only you weren’t bad, sir,” protested the small girl, loyally.
A shadow crept over the man’s face.
“Bad enough, Peg—but I might have been worse.”
“Well, you’re good enough for me,” said Peggy, contentedly.
The comforting words rang pleasantly in his ears a half hour later when he plunged into the woods behind the shack and took the trail leading up the steep slope of Pine Knob hill.
The day had been hot for June and the dim cool greenness closed around him deliciously as he made his way through depths of hemlock shadow and gold-decked shallows of birch-filtered light. There was a faint stir of wind in the branches, a rustle of light foot and lighter wing in the hidden places of bough and undergrowth.
Now and then, as he climbed, he caught, through opening among the trees, sudden glimpses of the Valley where the long shadows of late afternoon were flinging themselves across the sunlit breast of the meadow land, and of the range of hills beyond, still gold and green and blue, but with prophetic splashes of deepening purple creeping in and out among the ravines and hollows.
He would be in time to see the sunset from the top of Pine Knob and, at the thought, something Pegeen had said days before flashed into his mind. There was “a place up there where you could look out and out,” and the Smiling Lady often went there to watch the sunset.
Archibald told himself that it would be a pleasant thing to find her there. She was the sort of woman with whom one could watch a miracle.
And so when, pushing aside a screen of thick crowding leaves, he found her sitting on a mossy stone, elbow on knee, chin in hand, eyes a-dream, he was not surprised, only glad that the human note could intrude on Nature’s melody without discord. She fitted in.
“You’re just in time,” she said, looking up at him for an instant in friendly fashion. Then her eyes went back to the fields and hills and sky.
She had a curious way of making one feel welcome without bothering to put the thing into words. Archibald remembered that it had been the same when he had found her in the birch wood.—There had been the same undisturbed acceptance of his coming, the same companionable assumption of his content. There was no aloofness about her mood. Before she had been absorbed in frolicking with babies. Now she was absorbed in the sunset. She took his interest in the babies and in the sunset for granted, shared them with him, and felt that she had fulfilled her duty. There was something oddly intimate about such a welcome. Archibald puzzled over it, as he dropped on the moss beside her and ostensibly gave his undivided attention to the sunset. If she had been startled or formal or coquettish or resentful—those were the beginnings of acquaintance between a man and a woman; but this girl’s life and his might have been running side by side for years. All the futile, tentative things might have been said so long ago that they could be forgotten. There was suggestion of a long lane traversed, of barriers passed, about this taking-for-granted companioning. And yet the splendid simplicity of it put a man in his place, made him feel humbly grateful, eager to be found worthy. He wondered whether she met all strangers in the same way.
As though she had heard his thoughts, the girl turned to him for a moment, looked at him frankly, appraisingly.
“One knows that you won’t spoil it,” she said, the ripple of light that was like the soul of a smile running over her face.
So that was it? Archibald felt enormously flattered. To be recognized at sight by a girl with a smile like that as the sort of man who would not spoil beautiful things, seemed exceedingly worth while. To be good enough for Pegeen and to be understanding enough for the Smiling Lady—honors were coming thick and fast upon him.
And then he justified the girl’s faith in him by quite forgetting her in the glory of the sunset world.
There was no mad riot of crimson and gold in the west. Above the tops of the crouching hills masses of rose-lined clouds with flame at their hearts melted into opal as they dared the sky heights. Bars of palest turquoise gathered the opaline blues to themselves; and, higher still, the faint green faded from the blue, leaving an eastern sea of pale pure azure through which a silver crescent drifted, tangled in foam spume of delicate pink cloud.
Gradually the color died away. The young moon dropped behind the eastern hills. Ashen grays and violets and liquid, indefinite, blue blacks claimed the world.
The Smiling Lady stirred and rose. Archibald joined her and together they went silently down the sweet, scented ways of the dew-wet dusk.
“You’ll come in,” she said when they reached a small white farmhouse nestled under great maples. He followed her into a candle-lighted room where Sandy, the collie, and an elderly woman with a shrewd, homely face rose from before the open fire to greet them.
“Mr. Archibald will be having tea with me, Ellen,” said the Smiling Lady, quite as though having tea with her were a life-long habit of the man’s.
Ellen took one swift, comprehensive look at the visitor as she carried the girl’s coat from the room. The respectful look of a well-trained servant it was, yet Archibald had a feeling that he had been catalogued and the record tucked away in a card index.
“Ellen plays the rôle of a dragon,” Miss Moran explained lightly, “a non-sulphurous dragon. It seems the most independent young woman must offer up concessions to tradition in the form of a dragon—and then I couldn’t get along without Ellen. She was my nurse once upon a time; my mother’s housekeeper afterward. She would not go away with the others—will never go away until she makes the long journey. Money has nothing to do with such service as she gives me. We share what I have and she’s family and friend and servant all in one.”
“You are fortunate to have her,” the man said gently. She nodded. For an instant there was no hint of a smile in her face and Archibald felt as though the candles in the room had suddenly burned out.
“She’s the only one now.”
There was a hurt in her voice, but the next moment she was calling gaily through the half-open door to Ellen.
“Jam, Ellen! Plum jam, with the scones—plenty of it—and in here, please.”
And when Ellen had moved a wicker table to a place before the fire, covered it with the whitest of cloths and set upon it a tray on which a teapot steamed merrily and a salad nestled temptingly among cresses and a covered muffin dish made promises and the plum jam glowed colorfully, the girl in the big wicker chair across the table from Archibald was all cheerfulness.
“Peggy gives you dinners perhaps?” she queried. “Women folk fall into picnicing ways when there are no men about the house to be considered, and I never let meals interfere with sunsets, so I have my tea whenever I come in. Of course we don’t really need an open fire to-night, but I love it so and, thank Heaven, even the summer nights are usually cool enough for it, so I sit here in the evenings and sip and munch and tell over the day’s doings—and, once in a while, I send a pitying thought toward all the folk who are eating dinners in rose-and-gilt city restaurants.”
“Poor wretches,” murmured Archibald, sinking back luxuriously among his cushions and looking around him at the low ceilinged room with its gay chintz and wicker and old mahogany, its companioning books and pictures, its great bowls of June flowers and greenery. A friendly room.
His eyes came back to the mistress of it, and rested there contentedly.
She was busying herself with the tea and he had always liked to watch a pretty woman pouring tea. Not that this woman was pretty. He discarded the word fastidiously. She was something better than pretty, something much more satisfying. Candle light and firelight touched the waves of her thick rippling hair to something like burnished copper, but it was deeply auburn in its shadows. Sun and wind had had their way with her clear skin, had tanned it, had even freckled it—but tenderly, mellowing white to cream, rose flush to ripened peach, splashing a nose far from classic with the faintest of brown touches, melting almost invisibly into the sun warmed tan.
Her mouth was over-large by artist’s canons, but sweetness lurked in its curves and the generous mobile lips were warmly red. And her eyes—Archibald puzzled vainly over their color. Hazel, he had thought them at first sight, but as they looked at him across the tea cups they looked deeply gray—or were they violet in their shadows?
“My friends—the people who were my friends in my rose-and-gilt restaurant days—think I am quite mad because I live up here the year round,” she was saying. “There’s no making them understand that I like it. I tried at first but they insisted upon being sorry for me and that’s a great strain on friendship, you know. So now we exchange pity.”
“You’ve lived here a long time?” asked Archibald.
“Five years. I had no idea of staying when I came. This old farm had come into my father’s hands years before and one summer Mother and I had fixed it up a bit and spent part of a summer in it. It was one of the few things that was left after my father’s death. I came away here for healing,—and I found it—after a time—here among my hills and my own people.”
“Your own people?” the man echoed.
“Yes; they are mine now. The hills and the sky and the fields and the woods began my cure—taught me that beauty hadn’t died because I was unhappy, but it was neighboring that taught me to be happy again. We’re a selfish lot with our loves, aren’t we? I had been quite contented with my half dozen out of the world. The rest didn’t count for me. They were just chorus—merry villagers, you know—quite unimportant except for stage effect. Then when I was left alone, I found that I needed those others—and that they needed me. After I learned that lesson, I put away sorrow. One doesn’t forget, of course. One misses always; but one loves and helps and is glad. It’s a joyful old world, isn’t it?”
“In spots.” The man’s voice was dubious.
“Wait until you’ve adopted the Valley,” advised the girl, laughingly. “You’ve made a splendid beginning with Peggy. In the meantime, Ellen’s bringing hot scones and more plum jam. Who says this is a vale of tears?”
“It has its smiling moments,” confessed the doubting one.
They talked of many things there beside the flickering fire.
The girl and her father had roamed the world in the days before he left her.
“We were alone together after Mother died,” she said, “and he was restless always, though he kept laughter on his lips; so we went here and there, drifting back to New York now and again. He was the best of comrades and welcome everywhere. Dear old Dad! All the world made friends with him. He was Irish. Did I tell you that before? Clever, irresponsible, adorable Irish. Peggy and I have a bond in our Irish blood, but I’ve none of the brogue. The pity of it! Father’s was creamy, always. You should have heard him tell an Irish story—and seen him tell it! No wonder it’s easy for me to be happy even now that he’s gone from me. I learned the way of it from him, though all the time he’d the broken heart over my mother’s going.”
She was talking half to herself now, and smiling into the fire as though she had forgotten the listening man.
“We were in New York when he went away from me,” she said. “I couldn’t believe that he was very ill. He had always been so alive—so splendidly, buoyantly alive. It seemed to me that, in the end, he would laugh at death and beat it off; but he knew.
“One afternoon he put out his hand to me and laughed—his gay laugh that I always loved.
“ ‘I’m leaving you little except my blessing, Acushla,’ he said. ‘But you can’t say I haven’t given you a bully good time for a while.’ Then he went to sleep smiling, and that was the end of it all.”
She did not tell the thing sadly—had even a tender little laugh for the characteristic last words of the reckless, merry father she had loved so dearly; but there was a lump in Archibald’s throat.
She had made him free of something more intimate than her birch glade or her sunset, and he thanked her for it in his heart.
The talk drifted away from personalities after that. She gave him bits of Valley history—humorous chiefly, though now and then pathos or tragedy showed its head, as it will wherever human lives are in question. She sang to him too, sweet old Irish love songs.
“But you should have heard Daddy sing them,” she said. “He had a voice made just for love songs.”
She was all aglow with interest and enthusiasm when he told her of the expedition to Pittsfield.
“Oh, the fun of it,” she crowed jubilantly. “I’ve so longed to get things for her—loads of things—but I couldn’t. There are so many who are in worse need of the little I can do. Did she tell you that I did try to give her a home here when her father disappeared? She wouldn’t come. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me. She made that very clear; but she said that, being well and having Ellen, I didn’t need her. She was ever so much obliged to me but she thought she’d just see to Mrs. Potter and the babies. The Potters were so shiftless. You may be thankful that your artist ways earned you a reputation for shiftlessness here in the Valley. You’d never have had Peggy if you had seemed capable of taking care of yourself.”
She made a list of things for Pegeen’s outfit—necessaries that began where dresses and aprons ended, and she tried hard to reconcile consideration for Archibald’s purse with zeal for Pegeen’s welfare, conscientiously cutting down first extravagant flights of imagination regarding underwear and stockings and then soaring recklessly into the realm of superfluities after a parasol.
“Peg has always been crazy for a parasol,” she explained shamefacedly, “but of course it isn’t really a necessity.”
“The things one is crazy for are the only necessities,” protested Archibald.
She beamed upon him.
“There’s Irish in you, somewhere.” Her eyes welcomed him as one of her blood. “Now most of these New England folk have never even suspected that great truth. They’ve an idea that being crazy for a thing damns it. They’ll look upon a pink parasol for Peggy as a folly. Some of them will look upon it as a sin—but how Peg will adore it! I’d certainly cut down on something useful and uninteresting and buy her a pink parasol. Not an expensive one, you know. That would be silly, because it wouldn’t make her any happier than a cheap one and happiness is the measure of excuse for folly, isn’t it?”
“I wonder,” said Archibald.
She was blithely sure of it, waved doubts away with a careless hand.
“Real happiness, of course. Not the Sodom’s apple kind. The moment the apples begin to taste Sodomy, one must quit being foolish for the price beyond that is too high for defective apples; but as long as folly really makes us happy we’re wise fools. I’ve bought my pink parasols in all kinds of markets and never grudged the underwear and stockings they cost me.”
“You couldn’t drive over to Pittsfield with us,” suggested the man, tentatively.
She shook her head.
“It’s Peggy’s day. I’d spoil it for her. She’s going off alone with a fairy prince and with Aladdin’s lamp tucked under the buggy seat and she’d much better choose foolishly for herself than have some one choose wisely for her—not that I’d be wise. I’m all for pink parasols myself.”
She looked it. Archibald admitted that to himself as he studied the laughing face over which the candle light flickered softly.
Incidentally he made a mental note to the effect that Edison should be pilloried by womankind. Even the rarest of beauties lost charm under an electric glare, while in candle-light hair and eyes and lips and throat took on alluring mysteries—little half lights of confession, swift, fleeting, golden, high lights of revelation. The Smiling Lady’s radiant serenity dissolved into witchery there in the candle light. A dimple the man had not noticed before quivered in her left cheek, disappeared, came back into view. Elusive reservations had crept into the candid eyes. A very pink parasolish Young Person indeed!
Archibald hastily revised certain impressions having to do with Olympian detachment Altogether human, this Lady of the Smiles. No Young Goddess, but half child, half woman, and wholly lovely. It was all wrong that she should be stranded here at the world’s end, among alien folk, that she should be alone save for an old servant, shut away in the heyday of her youth from a world where pink parasols flaunted bravely up and down, gay winding ways.
Then, oddly enough, a trail of faces drifted through his memory, women’s faces seen against rose-colored backgrounds on those same gay winding ways, and following them came a vision of the Smiling Lady, sitting among flowers and long grasses in a sunlit, woodland glade with young life tumbling round her. No, it wasn’t possible to pity her. After all, there were pink parasols—and pink parasols.