III
Bruce had never before worked so hard; Freeman said that the designer of the Parthenon had been a loafer in comparison. After a long and laborious day he would drive to the Freemans with questions about his designs for the memorial that he feared to sleep on. Dale remarked to her husband that it was inspiring to see a young man of Bruce’s fine talent and enthusiasm engrossed upon a task and at the same time in love—an invincible combination.
Carroll had kept in mind the visit to Laconia he had proposed and they made a week-end excursion of it in May. Bruce was glad of the chance to inspect the site of the memorial, and happier than he had expected to be in meeting old friends. It was disclosed that Carroll’s interest in Bruce’s cousin was not quite so incidental as he had pretended. Mills’s secretary had within the year several times visited Laconia, an indication that he was not breaking his heart over Leila.
Bruce stole away from the hotel on Sunday morning to visit his mother’s grave. She had lived so constantly in his thoughts that it seemed strange that she could be lying in the quiet cemetery beside John Storrs. There was something of greatness in her or she would never have risked the loss of his respect and affection. She had trusted him, confident of his magnanimity and love. Strange that in that small town, with its brave little flourish of prosperity, she had lived all those years with that secret in her heart, perhaps with that old passion tormenting her to the end. She had not been afraid of him, had not feared that he would despise her. “O soul of fire within a woman’s clay”—this line from a fugitive poem he had chanced upon in a newspaper expressed her. On his way into town he passed the old home, resenting the presence of the new owner, who could not know what manner of woman had dwelt there, sanctified its walls, given grace to the garden where the sun-dial and the flower beds still spoke of her.... Millicent was like Marian. Very precious had grown this thought, of the spiritual kinship of his mother and Millicent.
Traversing the uneven brick pavements along the maple arched street, it was in his mind that his mother and Millicent would have understood each other. They dreamed the same dreams; the garden walls had not shut out Marian Storrs’s vision of the infinite. A church bell whose clamorous peal was one of his earliest recollections seemed subdued today to a less insistent note by the sweetness of the spring air. Old memories awoke. He remembered a sermon he had heard in the church of the sonorous bell when he was still a child; the fear it had wakened in his heart—a long noisy discourse on the penalties of sin, the horror in store for the damned. And he recalled how his mother had taken his hand and smiled down at him there in the Storrs pew—that adorable smile of hers. And that evening as they sat alone in the garden on the bench by the sun-dial she had comforted him and told him that God—her God—was not the frightful being the visiting minister had pictured, but generous and loving. Yes, Millicent was like Marian Storrs....
After this holiday he fell upon his work with renewed energy—but he saw Millicent frequently. It was much easier to pass through the Harden gate and ring the bell now that the windows of the Mills house were boarded up. Mrs. Harden and the doctor made clear their friendliness—not with parental anxiety to ingratiate themselves with an eligible young man, but out of sincere regard and liking.
“You were raised in a country town and all us folks who were brought up in small towns speak the same language,” Mrs. Harden declared. She conferred the highest degree of her approval by receiving him in the kitchen on the cook’s day out, when she could, in her own phrase, putter around all she pleased. Millicent, enchantingly aproned, shared in the sacred rites of preparing the evening meal on these days of freedom, when there was very likely to be beaten biscuit, in the preparation of which Bruce was duly initiated.
Spring repeated its ancient miracle in the land of the tall corn. A pleasant haven for warm evenings was the Harden’s “back yard” as the Doctor called it, though it was the most artistic garden in town, where Mrs. Harden indulged her taste in old-fashioned flowers; and there was a tea house set in among towering forest trees where Millicent held court. Bruce appearing late, with the excuse that he had been at work, was able to witness the departure of Millicent’s other “company” as her parents designated her visitors, and enjoy an hour with her alone. Their privacy was invaded usually by Mrs. Harden, who appeared with a pitcher of cooling drink and plates of the cakes in which she specialized. She was enormously busy with her work on the orphan asylum board. She was ruining the orphans, the Doctor said; but he was proud of his wife and encouraged her philanthropies. He was building a hospital in his home town—thus, according to Bud Henderson, propitiating the gods for the enormity of his offense against medical ethics in waxing rich off the asthma cure. The Doctor’s sole recreation was fishing; he had found a retired minister, also linked in some way with the Hardens’ home town, who shared his weakness. They frequently rose with the sun and drove in Harden’s car to places where they had fished as boys. Bruce had known people like the Hardens at Laconia. Even in the big handsome house they retained their simplicity, a simplicity which in some degree explained Millicent. It was this quality in her that accounted for much—the sincerity and artlessness with which she expressed beliefs that gained sanctity from her very manner of speaking of them.
On a June night he put into the mail his plans for the memorial and then drove to the Hardens’. Millicent had been playing for some callers who were just leaving.
“If you’re not afraid of being moonstruck, let’s sit out of doors,” she suggested.
“It’s a habit—this winding up my day here! I’ve just finished a little job and laid it tenderly on the knees of the gods.”
“Ah, the mysterious job is done! Is it anything that might be assisted by a friendly thought?”
“Just a bunch of papers in the mail; that’s all.”
They talked listlessly, in keeping with the langurous spirit of the night. The Mills house was plainly visible through the shrubbery. In his complete relaxation, his contentment at being near Millicent, Bruce’s thoughts traveled far afield while he murmured assent to what she was saying. The moonlit garden, its serenity hardly disturbed by the occasional whirr of a motor in the boulevard, invited to meditation, and Millicent was speaking almost as though she were thinking aloud in her musical voice that never lost its charm for him.
“It’s easy to believe all manner of strange things on a night like this! I can even imagine that I was someone else once upon a time....”
“Go right on!” he said, rousing himself, ready for the game which they often played like two children. He turned to face her. “I have a sneaking idea that a thousand years ago at this minute I was sitting peacefully by a well in an oasis with camels and horses and strange dark men sleeping round me; that same lady moon looking down on the scene, making the sandy waste look like a field of snow.”
“That sounds dusty and hot! Now me—I’m on a galley ship driving through the night; a brisk cool wind is blowing; a slave is singing a plaintive song and the captain of the rowers is thumping time for them to row by and the moon is shining down on an island just ahead. It’s all very jolly! We’re off the coast of Greece somewhere, I think.”
“I suppose that being on a ship while I’m away off in a desert I really shouldn’t be talking to you. I couldn’t take my camel on your yacht!”
“There’s telepathy,” she suggested.
“Thanks for the idea! If we’ve arrived in this pleasant garden after a thousand-year journey I certainly shan’t complain!”
“It wouldn’t profit you much if you did! And besides, my feelings would be hurt!” she laughed softly. “I do so love the sound of my own voice—I wonder if that’s because I’ve been silent a thousand years!”
“I hope you weren’t, for—I admire your voice! Looking at the stars does make you think large thoughts. If they had all been flung into space by chance, as a child scatters sand, we’d have had a badly scrambled universe by this time—it must be for something—something pretty important.”
“I wonder....” She bent forward, her elbow on the arm of the chair, her hand laid against her cheek. “Let’s pretend we can see all mankind, from the beginning, following a silken cord that Some One ahead is unwinding and dropping behind as a guide. And we all try to hold fast to it—we lose it over and over again and stumble over those who have fallen in the dark places of the road—then we clutch it again. And we never quite see the leader, but we know he is there, away on ahead trying to guide us to the goal——”
“Yes,” he said eagerly, “the goal——”
“Is happiness! That’s what we’re all searching for! And our Leader has had so many names—those ahead are always crying back a name caught from those ahead of them—down through the ages. But it helps to know that many are on ahead clutching the cord, not going too fast for fear the great host behind may lose their hope and drop the cord altogether!”
“I like that; it’s bully! It’s the life line, the great clue——”
“Yes, yes,” she said, “and even the half gods are not to be sneered at; they’ve tangled up the cord and tied hard knots in it—— Oh, dear! I’m soaring again!”
There had been some question of her going away for the remainder of the summer, and he referred to this presently. He was hoping that she would go before the return of Mills and Leila. The old intimacy between the two houses would revive: it might be that Millicent was ready to marry Mills; and tonight Bruce did not doubt his own love for her—if only he might touch her hand that lay so near and tell her! In the calm night he felt again the acute loneliness that had so beset him in his year-long pilgrimage in search of peace; and he had found at the end a love that was not peace. After the verdict of the judges of the memorial plans was given it would be best for him to leave—go to New York perhaps and try his fortune there, and forget these months that had been so packed with experience.
“We’re likely to stay on here indefinitely,” Millicent was saying. “I’d rather go away in the winter; the summer is really a joy. A lot of the people we know are staying at home. Connie and Shep are not going away, and Dale says she’s not going to budge. And Helen Torrence keeps putting off half a dozen flights she’s threatened to take. And Bud and Maybelle seem content. So why run away from friends?”
“No reason, of course. The corn requires heat and why should we be superior to the corn?”
“I had a letter from Leila today. She says she’s perishing to come home!”
“I’ll wager she is!” laughed Bruce. “What’s going to happen when she comes?”
He picked up his hat and they were slowly crossing the lawn toward the gate.
“You mean Freddie Thomas.”
“I suppose I do mean Fred! But I didn’t mean to pump you. It’s Leila’s business.”
“I’ll be surprised if a few months’ travel doesn’t change Leila. She and Freddy had an awful crush on each other when she left. If she’s still of the same mind—well, her father may find the trip wasn’t so beneficial!”
From her tone Bruce judged that Millicent was not greatly concerned about Leila. She went through the gates with him to his car at the curb.
“Whatever it is you sent shooting through the night—here’s good luck to it!” she said as he climbed into his machine. “Do you suppose that’s the train?”
She raised her hand and bent her head to listen. The rumble of a heavy train and the faint clang of a locomotive bell could be heard beyond the quiet residential neighborhood. He was pleased that she had remembered, sorry now that he had not told her what it was that he had committed to the mails. She snapped her fingers, exclaiming:
“I’ve sent a wish with it, whether it’s to your true love or whatever it is!”
“It wasn’t a love letter,” he called after her as she paused under the gate lamps to wave her hand.