IX
A gay jingle-jangle, the concord of sleigh-bells, the muffled piaffering of horses' hoofs and the door-knocker went again rat-tat.... Voices sounded in the hall, Rutherford and Robert Leffingwell entered the room, Jack's tête-à-tête was interrupted.
“Good-bye, Miss Adgate,” said Jack, abruptly. He cast a scowl of dislike at the jovial face of Rutherford. Before Ruth could make reply Jack was out the front door, and his friend had a glimpse of a pair of boyish legs leaping the offset.
“Splendid way of getting rid of obstacles,” Rutherford said as he followed Miss Adgate's eyes, “but what an odd boy it is! We're in for a blizzard, Miss Adgate,” added he, and he approached the fire and cheerfully rubbed his hands.
“A Blizzard!” cried Ruth. She ran to the window, followed by her two guests.
For a moment Ruth and the two young men watched the flakes descend.... They seemed to fall, fall, from limitless Niagaras of snow, from regions without the world, whose fountain-heads, beyond the skies, might be situate in those wastes of storm and cloud, where a Teutonic Mythology places its gods. The trees swayed gently, but even as Ruth watched them they had begun to bend in torture under a furious gale. Clouds of snow rose and fell like the billows of the sea....
The temperature capriciously dropped to far below zero. Had not Jobias been prepared for this by previous knowledge, the house might have become uninhabitable. But Jobias knew his business and stood by the furnace. All that day and evening he watched it, fed it;—and left his post from time to time only to replenish with fresh baskets of logs the voracious fireplaces in the drawing-rooms, casting above the baskets of wood a paternal smile, an indulgent glance upon those idle ones gathered round the flames.
Sledges, meantime, drove up. Guests departed, guests arrived, unruffled by stress of weather. All, rather, were most obviously exhilarated by it. Ruth's friends were in the maddest spirits. Punch flowed, quips, cranks, peals of laughter made the house resound. The Blizzard adding, at it always does, a fresh elixir, more oxygen to the already supercharged New England atmosphere, Ruth, too, felt unaccountably elated. Her eyes sparkled while the winds howled and hooted, and bullied and tore; the unassuaged tempers of five thousand demons seemed about to take their fill of hate upon an innocent, well-meaning world, but a rosy colour bloomed in Miss Adgate's usually pale cheeks. She had never appeared to such advantage; she had never looked so lovely, appeared so brilliant, nor been so amusing. Rutherford, as though the storm had gone to his head, Rutherford watching her covertly, vowed he could throw himself at her feet before the roomful, and Ruth's intuitions warned her; she had a feminine inkling of danger. She chatted and she laughed from her corner by the table laden with excellent things to eat; but she kept Rutherford at arm's length the while her fancy began to draw a picture of Pontycroft, standing it beside Rutherford. For the first time, she perceived that General Adgate recalled Pontycroft in a measure. Tall, thin, spare, his aquiline features were like Pontycroft's, his bearing was that of a distinguished man. “He has Harry Pontycroft's air of knowing that he knows,” reflected Ruth softly; tenderly to her soul she quoted a line Pontycroft long ago had ironically applied to himself:
“He who Knows that he Knows, follow him.”
Pontycroft loved to discourse for the pleasure of holding forth. General Aldgate was reticent. His voice was low, well modulated; one could not have helped listening to it, or to what he said; even though this had not been wise or witty if often touched with irony.
Rutherford, of medium stature, had the neck of a bull. His skin, originally clear, was yet ensanguined by exposure to wind and weather; he liked an out-of-door life and since he was heir to a fortune and detested the counting house, his life went in hunting, shooting, and fishing. He had a shock of black hair, clear black eyes, rather an attractive habit of darting a keen glance at his interlocutor as he spoke—a glance that seemed to grasp all there was to see, hidden or upon the surface, in a flash. But his voice was nasal, his words rushed, spluttered to be free; they issued chopped in two and left the idea unformulated. It required some familiarity with the American vernacular to understand him.
“And he, a college man!” scoffed Miss Adgate.
But at that instant—while Ruth indulged, I grieve to acknowledge it, the spirit of mockery—a thunderous crash broke the unison of lively voices. The score of people in the rooms flew to the windows. There, tossed to earth, abased from glory, prone upon the ground—imploring boughs lifted to heaven, a wreck—there lay the monster Adgate elm, one of the hoary elms in the carriage sweep. It lay there as neatly cut as with a scimitar. The splendid tree was literally slashed in twain by the Blizzard's invisible weapon, the prostrate thing loomed, portentous, to twenty pairs of eyes.
With the rest, Ruth stared at the fallen King. There was a lump in her throat.... No one spoke.... Every man and woman in the room had waxed intimate with that old tree, had come to man's or woman's estate beside it; they had played under it, insensibly had come to love it, as a part of themselves, as a piece of their pleasant, happy lives. This comrade and landmark was, too, one of the pardonable vanities of Oldbridge.
“Praise Heaven it wasn't the roof,” said, at length, the Master of Barracks Hill. He knew, though, he would have preferred to have it the roof. A roof may be replaced. His niece even, did not suspect the passion of attachment any plant or tree upon his land could stir in him upon occasion.