8. The House on the Hill
The following morning Miss Craig said she thought she would drive down to Woodhow with Margaret Ann herself, and they’d look it over.
“If you children feel like coming down, why don’t you walk over. You can take the short cut through the woods. It’s not far. Like enough you’ll find some bloodroot out by now and saxifrage too. Don’t be like Jean, though. The other day she came up from the brook and said she’d found a calla lily, and it was just skunk cabbage.”
So the girls and Tommy took the short cut through the woods. They were just beginning to show signs of spring. The trees were bare, but under the dry leaves they found the new life springing. It was all new and interesting to them. Down at the Cove they had been in a beautiful part of Long Island but it was all restricted property. Here the woods and meadows spread for miles in every direction. Every pasture bar seemed to invite one to climb over it and explore. And where the woods ended in rocky pastures and wide spreading fields, they came out to a spot where they overlooked Woodhow and its grounds.
Becky and Mrs. Craig were there before them. The side door stood hospitably open and Ella Lou was lying on the front porch just as though she belonged there. It was a curiously interesting old place. First of all, a rock wall enclosed the grounds, with rock columns at the two entrance gates. These were wide, for the drive entered on one side, wound around the house, and came out on the other road, as the house stood at a corner.
The house itself looked like a glorified farmhouse, although it was hard to place it in the history of architecture.
“I think perhaps it started out to be Mid-Victorian with that general squareness and the porch,” said Mrs. Craig.
“That isn’t Mid-Victorian, Mother darling,” Jean interposed. “That’s the Reaction Period in New England. First of all none of the Puritan Women had any time to sit out on porches, so all the houses were made plain-faced. Then after the war they began to turn their minds to lighter things, so they stuck a cupola up here, and tacked on a little porch there, and gave the windows fancy eyebrows, and little scalloped wooden lace ruffles along the edges of the eaves. Isn’t that so, Becky?”
“Well, I declare, Jeannie,” laughed Becky, “maybe you’re right. I’d say, though, it was mostly a hankering after modernization. I don’t set much store by it myself, so long as I’ve got plenty of flowering shrubs around a house, and climbing vines. That makes me think, you’ve got a sight of them here, flowering quince and almond, and peonies, and all sorts of hardy annuals. There used to be a big border of them, I remember, at the back of the house, and behind it was an old-fashioned rose garden.”
“A rose garden!” Kit and Doris gasped.
“Let’s go and see if we can find it,” cried Jean.
Back they went to find it, and after hunting diligently through hazel bushes and upspringing weeds, they found one terrace that dipped into a sunken space once walled in. Now the tumbled gray rocks had half fallen down, and some were sunken in the earth. But still they found some old rose bushes, and several of the large bushes looked hopeful. There was a flagged walk with myrtle growing up between the stones, and a tumble-down arbor that Tommy declared looked exactly like a shipwrecked pilothouse off some boat.
Doris, sitting down on the broad front steps, was listening to the music of falling water in the distance and the wind overhead in the great, slumberous pines. There were four of these, two on each side of the long terrace, with rock maples down near the rock wall and several pear and cherry trees. Along the terrace were flower beds, three on each one, outlined with clam shells.
“Miss Trowbridge used to have gladiolus set out in those beds, with pansies and sweet alyssum set around the edges, and outside again, old-hen-and-her-chickens. They looked real pretty.”
“Who was Miss Trowbridge, Becky?” asked Mrs. Craig. She sat beside Jean, her hands clasped lightly in her lap, her hat lying beside her. There was a look of content on her face, a look that had been a stranger there for many months. Tommy tossed a spray of half-blossomed cherry twigs in her lap and ran away again.
“She was sister to the Trowbridge that owned the mills. She married some man out in Canada, lived awhile out there, then gave up and died. She never did have much backbone that I could see, but she loved flowers. Did you notice a big glass bay window off the dining room? She called that her conservatory. I remember asking her once if it was her ‘conversationary,’ and how she did laugh at me! Well, every one can’t be expected to know everything. It’s all I can do to keep up with Elmhurst these days. Her name was Francelia and she married a McRae.”
“But who had the place after she and her brother died?”
Rebecca never believed in directness when it came to genealogies. She delighted in them, and would slip her glasses down to the middle of her long nose, elevate her chin, and go after a family tree like a government forester.
“Well, according to my way of thinking, it should belong to Sally Hancock and her brother Buzzy. His name’s Seth, but they call him Buzzy. Their mother was Luella Trowbridge, sister to Francelia and Tom who owned the mills, but she married Clint Hancock against everybody’s word, and her father cut her off in his will, and never saw her from the day she was married. Tom did the same, but Francelia used to go over and see her after Sally and Buzzy were born. They live down near Nantic. You must have passed the house, little bit of a gray one with rambler roses all over it, and a well sweep at one side. The property went to Francelia after Tom died, and she had one boy. He’s out in Northwest Canada now and don’t give a snap of his finger for this place, when there’s Sally and Buzzy loving it to death and can’t hardly walk on the grass. Still, I suppose if they went to law, they’d get nothing out of it after all the lawyers had been satisfied.”
Kit and Doris listened open-eyed.
“My goodness, Becky,” exclaimed Kit, “how on earth do you ever manage to keep track of all of them?”
“Keep track of them? Land, child, that ain’t anything after you’ve been to school with them and lived neighbors all your life. You children will like Sally and her brother, and maybe you can help put a little happiness into their lives, poor youngsters.”
“Oh, Mom, I love this place already,” whispered Jean contentedly, snuggling close to her mother’s side.
“Do you, dear?” Mrs. Craig smiled down into her eldest child’s face. For some reason she always waited for Jean’s judgment and opinion.
“Yes, I do, because it isn’t really a farm and still we can have a garden and sell the hay and get out wood and raise all we need for ourselves. I don’t think we can do much else the first year, can we, Becky?”
“If you do all that you’ll be getting along fine. I’m going to start you off chicken raising with a lot of little ones from my incubator. You can buy all you want for ten cents apiece, and if you get about fifteen last year pullets and a rooster, you’ve got your barnyard family all started.”
“Oh, I’d like to take care of the incubator chickens. May I, please?” begged Tommy instantly. “I think one of the saddest things in life is to be hatched without a mother.”
“Sympathetic Tommy,” laughed Kit, catching him down on the grass and rolling him over. “He’s going to adopt all the chickens and gosh knows what else.”
“I’m going to keep bees,” Doris announced dramatically, yet with a certain aloofness in her manner. “I want a garden and bees that bring me home the honey from the clover fields.”
“Lovely,” Jean exclaimed, hugging her knees, and rocking to and fro contentedly. “You always select such royal occupations, Doris. I shall be the middleman of the farm. I am going to find markets for all you raise. I’ll make the farm pay expenses. We’ll need a trailer to attach to the rear bumper of the car to hold the produce. I think we ought to go into the village soon and see about getting one. I want the place, don’t you Mother?”
“I think I shall love it,” said Mrs. Craig, lifting her face to the swaying pine boughs overhead. “I wish that I could stay here now and not have to go away at all.”
“We’d better get started,” said Becky. She rose from the porch step. “Ella Lou’s begun to get restless and that’s to let me know it’s almost noon. She can always tell the time when the sun gets high.”
“I feel sure Mom wants the place, don’t you, Jean?” Kit asked as they went up through the woods towards home. “All the time we were going through the house I could see every bit of our furniture in the right places there. And there’s so much room that Dad will hardly know the difference between this place and the old one at the Cove. He could have that room overlooking the valley on the second floor. You can see the big brown stone dam from there and the ruins of the mill, and hear the falling water. I wish we had time to climb out over the old dam to the mill.”
“It’s better than living right in a village,” Jean answered, pushing aside the young birches that crowded the way. “I rather dreaded that somehow. Everybody’d want to know all about us right off, and why we came up, and what ailed Dad, and everything else. I hope, though, Mother won’t be lonely here. You know, kids, it’s lonely for a woman like her, where Becky doesn’t mind it.”
“We’ll have to pitch in and make up to her for everything she’s left behind,” said Doris solemnly.
“Dear old Dorrie.” Kit put her arm around her sister and squeezed her affectionately.
“It’s all a question of system,” Jean thought aloud, her hands deep in the pockets of her gray flannel slacks. “We’ll have to make a business of living, and learn how to do things we hate to do with the least effort.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, you’re just a bluffer, Jean Craig,” exclaimed Doris suddenly, “just a bluffer. Anyone would think to hear you talk that you actually enjoyed going without things. Of course when we’re with Mother and Dad, or even Becky, we have to put on a whole lot, but when we’re alone I do think we might at least be sincere with ourselves. We all know how we feel at heart about this sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing?” asked Kit, on the offensive instantly. “What are you driving at?”
“Giving up everything we’ve been used to, and living out here in the woods. I’m going to miss the girls most of all.”
“Well, we don’t like losing everything any better than you do, Doris,” Jean said soothingly. “Only—”
“Don’t pat me,” retorted Doris, shaking off her hand. “I know I’m selfish, and I’m beginning to feel sorry I said anything. Only it does look so bleak and forlorn here somehow.”
“But if you have to do a thing, why, you just have to do it, that’s all,” Kit declared. “It’s better to make up your mind you’re going to like it, besides, I really think I am. Look at that cow ahead of us. It must have strayed.”
Through the birches ahead they could see some object obstructing the narrow path, its back towards them. Large as a cow it was, and reddish brown, but in place of short horns, this animal had spreading antlers, and Jean caught sight of its round puff of a tail.
“Hey, kids, it’s a deer!”
At her voice the deer started and pushed into the thick underbrush until it came to a stone wall. They watched it rise and clear it at a bound like a thoroughbred horse, its knees bent under, its head held high. Then it was gone.
“Well, isn’t that simply breathtaking, but I mean, simply divine? Wish we could tame some, don’t you?”
They all agreed.
Tommy ran along the path ahead of them. “I like this ever so much better than the Cove,” he called. “It’s all so wild and free.”
They paused at a spur of land that looked out over the long valley. Little River flowed in a winding course marked by alders and willows. Now that there was no foliage to obscure the view, they could catch a glimpse here and there of a red roof or a white chimney. There was the Smith mill, then the old white Murray homestead with its weather vane standing on a little hill like a big yardarm at large. Then came their own old ruined mill, half tumbling down, with empty window casings, all overgrown with woodbine and poison ivy. Farther up the valley one caught the hum of another mill, purring musically in a sort of crescendo scale ending in a snappy zip as the log broke.
As they neared Maple Grove, Jean exclaimed suddenly, “I just seem to have the feeling that we all belong here somehow! I know we’re going to love it.”