V
It was morning. It was nine of the clock. Miss Adgate walked, alone, through a path that penetrated to the Wigwam. Almost hidden by a thicket of sweet fern, juniper, barberry and briar which grew at either side, which clung too affectionately to her skirts and from which she had difficulty in disengaging herself, the path, she thought, might have led her to the Palace of The Sleeping Beauty.
It was morning, as I have said, and it was the morning of her first day, and early abroad, Miss Adgate strolled in a pleasant sort of reverie,—thinking of nothing, perhaps, or thinking of a number of things. The Indian summer sunshine filtered upon her through half-bare branches not quite denuded of their yellow and purple and scarlet leafage; and every now and then a leaf came fluttering down in the light breeze. A squirrel, now and then, darted out along a branch, paused—and like an Italian lizard, all a-gleam and a-whisk, gleamed, whisked, and disappeared. But Ruth knew two little black beadlike eyes still watched her, as she went, from behind the lattice-screen of twigs.
Every now and then she passed a formidable, a monumental boulder; moss-grown; covered with grey lichen; dropped there by some glacier, æons since, unless Heaven, it occurred to her, had placed it where it stood, and why not? for picturesque intent?... Every now and then a tardy bluejay flitted by, lighted upon a branch and sent forth his imperious cha, cha, cha!... Or a woodpecker, in the distance, made his tapping noise as he sounded the trees for his meal. A dry twig would break, suddenly,—come tumbling head foremost down, down through a rustle of leaves, and all these sounds struck upon Miss Adgate's ears in her reverie, gave her exquisite pleasure. She enjoyed the romance and the solitude of this wild wood; she delighted in the knowledge that she was walking safely through her own preserves; and treve de compliments, her uncle had left her upon a brief good-bye after an early breakfast. Ruth burned to discover alone, he knew, her domain—General Adgate had divined it without a hint.
“You'll want to take a walk this morning through your woods, Ruth,” said he. “Cross the hill,—you'll find a road to the right leading by a brook,—follow the road,—it takes you over the brook by a bridge and soon becomes a path. No one will molest you, it's yours.”
“What, the brook as well?” queried she, feeling, somehow, like a very little girl in his presence.
“Yes, and the brook as well. You can't get away from your preserves,—they stretch on for miles.”
So it was that Miss Adgate, abroad at nine o'clock, happened to be off for a matutinal stroll through paths wet and dewy, glad of her freedom, glad to be alone in a new world, surrender herself to the romance of a new train of thought.
She came, presently, to a clearing in the wood. The path ended, abruptly, at a flat bed of rock which descended for some hundred feet to another opening in the wood. There were bayberry and barberry and fern along the way, slashed scarlet by the frosts; there were fifty plants she promised to herself to learn the names of, which gave forth strong, sweet scents in the hot sun. Ruth sat down. A swish, through the dry leaves, a stir of the brown grass, told of the frightened escape of some little living thing, and set her heart to palpitating unaccountably with love for it.
Her mood had become a trifle exalted, her perceptions quickened by her promenade. Each insect, bird, bush she came upon began to assume a personality; claimed the privilege to live upon her land. She was the suzerain of their little lives; she could have held a court of justice; she could have dispensed favours, played their games, ruled them, thrown herself into their griefs and joys, with heart and soul. Seated here, in the warm sun, on the warm stone checked with patches of green and brown club-moss, she inhaled the crisp fragrance of the bushes under the sun's kisses; she looked afar, on to the trees below and over their heads at the vivid sky, and upon faraway violet hills, and upon green and orange, brown and guileless meadows. The world seemed good and wonderful, and she felt exceedingly content.
“The Ruth Adgate who spent twenty years of her life in Europe is no more,” she thought, lightly. “The young person who has tasted most of the sweets of European civilisation, walked in marble halls, refused a Duke, run away from the outrage offered her dignity by the offer of a morganatic marriage with a Crown Prince,—the lovesick girl who wandered through the moonlight at the Lido, floated upon the silent lagoons of Venice, discoursed with wits in lovely gardens in Florence, and herself the cause of wit in others, hung upon their discourse—that was quite another person! That was but an early incarnation, never the real Miss Adgate. This is the real Miss Adgate! In spite of every influence to the contrary,—the product of her native land.”
Lucilla, Pontycroft—Pontycroft, Lucilla! How far away they seemed.... Their names stirred her heart as she pronounced them. But even so—was not this best? The present Miss Adgate in a short skirt, a blue, soft felt hat, tip-tilted over her eyes, a stick in her hand, her thoughts for all society; Miss Adgate with this hardy New England nature for background,—Ruth Adgate taking a solitary walk upon her own land, with the feeling that good will and satisfaction smiled at her because of her presence there, was not this the Real person who had found her true niche in the world?
“How singular,” she reflected. “The transformation has taken place overnight. It is almost as though I had been here forever! And to-day I feel as though I had a destiny—as though Fate had something up her sleeve here for me. I've begun like one of Henry Harland's heroines and I'm convinced that whatever the Powers are preparing for me—I shall accept it here,—just as I accept all this—gratefully, gaily, without demur.”
Ruth glanced at the violet hills and the guileless meadows and a thrill passed through her. She jumped up, a white hand held to shade her face.
“Basta! I've rested long enough, the sun here is too hot,” said Miss Adgate. “I think I'll discover what lies beyond, in the heart of that wood there,” and off she started, blushing at her emotion.
A company of crows in a distant field caw-cawed, querulously, at her. Their raucous voices fitted the rough woodland, the vigorous autumn smells, the haze of the mellow golden morning. She came again to the little brown brook gurgling quietly over its bed of brown stones and leaves and the fancy took her to follow its course. Wet feet were of no consequence, determined to see all of her possessions Ruth skirted its purling side and discovered presently that here the brook, lifted from the earth by hand of artifice, was confined to a long, shallow, wooden aqueduct, an aqueduct open to the air and to the tracery of boughs above and to blue skies reflected in the water. Through this conduit the little brook bubbled and bounded, clear as crystal; icy cold to the touch as she dipped her hand in and let the water run along her wrist.
“Ah,” thought the young lady, “this must be our famous spring!—I've reached the headquarters of the Nile or I'm very near them.” And through the trees in truth, she perceived, further on, a rough hut, built to protect the stream's source from inroads of man and beasts.
She sat herself on a fallen tree trunk, leaned back and gazed with half-closed eyelids into the network of branches—oaks, larches, birch, hazel, maple,—nearly bare of foliage. Here again, the ground, checkered with green moss-patches was interspersed with little plants, “which must be all a-flower in the spring,” thought Ruth and she vowed that when spring came she would return to pluck them.
Then—presto!... Without a note of warning—the agreeable independence of her mood vanished. Lucilla, Pontycroft!... Her mind, her heart, her very soul yearned for them. And a homesick longing for the finished, for the humanly beautiful, the artistically beautiful,—an intense craving and desire for a familiar European face—smote her.
“But,——-” she puzzled, “would they, those I want most to see, could they endure this wilderness? No—not Lucilla! Not Lucilla with her love of luxury and her disdain of short skirts.” She laughed. “Pontycroft? Perhaps,” her heart fluttered. She knew he doted upon old, formal gardens, well-clipped lawns; had delight in the glorious army of letters and of art,—that he found in the society too, of princes, entertainment. Still, it might be possible.... He would, at all events, have some whimsical thing to say about it all. She began to fancy that she heard his voice.
“If he were here,” Ruth told herself, “I should ask him to interpret the horrid vision I had last night.” Ruth shivered as she recalled it; rapidly she began an imaginary conversation.
“I was lying in the big, carved, four-post family bedstead in my bedroom,” Ruth informed him. “I was half asleep and half awake and I saw myself coming up the steps into the house just as I did when I arrived. As I came, the house door opened, quickly, from within, and four people rushed towards me, with open arms. One was my father.—He clasped me tenderly and said: 'Welcome, welcome home!'... Behind him, a tall, large, old man clasped me in his arms and he cried: 'Welcome, welcome home!' Then came another and with the same words bade me welcome; I felt very happy, and so glad that I had come! But running down the stairs of the house arrived a tiny, meagre, old lady, whose corkscrew curls bobbed at either side her face. She cried: 'Welcome, welcome!' in a shrill, high voice, seizing me in her embrace. 'Welcome!' she cried again, 'but look out!—We can bite!' And as she said it her two sharp white teeth went through my lips till I screamed with pain and started up—all a-tremble—and then I fell back onto the bed and shook for an hour.”
“My sweet child!” the sane amused voice of Pontycroft made reply. “These old four-post family bedsteads are dangerous affairs to sleep in. Quant-à-moi, I've always avoided 'em.... I'll have nothing whatever to do with them. If my great-aunt, from whom I inherited Pontycroft, had not been of my way o' thinking I should have sold those at Pontycroft to the old furniture dealer in the village. Fortunately, that fearless lady lifted the obloquy of the act from my shoulders by disposing of them herself. One day, while my uncle, her husband, scoured the high seas under Nelson, she got rid of all the old family four-posters. When he returned from the war and asked what had become of 'em she acknowledged she'd discovered a preference for bronze beds and had sent to France for a dozen. But he was far too thankful to be at home again. 'Peace now, at any price,' said he. And he never mentioned four-posters to his lady-wife again, but slept and snored contentedly, for forty odd years, in a red-gold, steel enamelled affair, free of family traditions. You'd better follow my aunt's example, Ruth. Send to Boston for a nice new white enamelled bedstead with a nice new wire mattress and let no more family ghosts worry your ingenuous small head.”
“But, what did it mean? After all, it happened, or I'm mad,” Ruth laughing, heard herself insist.
“Oh,” said Pontycroft,—he gave her one of his droll glances—“if you want your midnight vision interpreted you must ask some older sage, even, than I, to do it. I should say, were it not too obvious to be true, that apple pie with an under crust....”
“Nonsense,” interrupted Ruth.
“The sort invented by your French ancestress, Priscilla Mulline Alden (I've heard she was a rare cordon bleu)” went on Pontycroft, unperturbed, “together with New England brown bread—but—that's all too obvious to be true... what are you laughing at?” he queried, artlessly.
“I'm laughing at the Brown Bread,” retorted Ruth, and she laughed aloud, “there wasn't any.”
“There should have been,” said Ponty, with a deprecating lift of the eyebrows. “It's de rigueur with baked beans.”
“But your little story,” he continued, lighting his cigarette, “belongs probably to those mysterious reflex actions of ancestry acting on a sensitive nervous organisation. You can't expect me to explain them. See, though, that you do look out. Don't, manifestly, offend your ancestors and they won't offend you, and there's my interpretation.”
Again Ruth laughed aloud, gleefully, at the tones of Ponty's voice and again a little thrill of pain and hope pierced her breast. She looked at her watch. It was almost noon and she turned towards home through the glade, by the path along the brook.