They were not, too, without some excuse for such an opinion. The rhodora and the kalmia—the “lamb-kill”—in spring spread over sections of the waste transient sheets of glowing color, but for the most part the country was either white or brown, and to one not fond of it the effect of the monotone of hue was depressing. The shade of brown varied, changing from a grayish or even greenish brown in midsummer to a sombre, almost uniform umber in autumn, which latter tint now and then during the winter appeared in desolate patches through the flats of snow, until in March the whole plain came to light darker and more forbidding than ever.
All these long months the only break in the low monochrome of the landscape was the red cottage which still was called “Gran’sir’ Welch’s,” although the old man had been dead many a year, and the little garden before it that kept up, with old-fashioned flowers, a show of bravery until the frosts came. The tint of the old house was dull and dingy, but in so colorless a setting the hue seemed brighter, as a single event might assume undue importance in a monotonous life. If one could have supposed the builder an imaginative man or one given to refinements of sentiment, it might be easy to imagine that when he built his house thus alone in the plains, with not another dwelling in sight and without a break in the level landscape, he felt the need of giving it some color that should protest against the deadly grayness of all around and hearten its owner by its warmth of tone.
So overwhelming were the solitude and the unbroken sameness of the place, however, that an imaginative man would scarcely have chosen it as an abiding-place, although once involved in its powerful fascination he would have been held to his life’s end. By what accident Gran’sir’ Welch’s grandfather had chosen to build here, half a score of miles from the little fishing village which stood to the people of that region for the world, no one knew, and very likely no one cared. Folk thereabout concerned themselves little with reasons for anything, facts being all they found mental grasp sufficient to hold. Once established in the plains, however, there was no especial cause to suppose the family would not continue to live on there until its course was interrupted either by extinction or by the arrival of the Judgment-Day.
Extinction was not very far off now, since only this white-haired woman remained to bear the name. Her mother had died in the daughter’s infancy. Mrs. Welch had never adapted herself to the silence and loneliness of the moors, and her people over at the village declared that she had “died of the plains;” and it is possible that they were right. Ruth’s father, when she was still but a child, had been lost at sea; and the girl had been cared for by her grandfather and the old serving-woman Bethiah, who had once been supposed to be a hired girl, but had ended by being so thoroughly identified with the family that her surname was wellnigh forgotten, and she was designated, when she was spoken of at all, as Bethiah Welch.
The child grew much in the same way as grew the houseleeks in the boxes beside the southern door, very slowly and dully. Once or twice she went for a few months to stay with an aunt in the village ten miles away, it being the unanimous opinion of her relatives that as the Welches always had known how to read and write it was proper that something should be done for Ruth’s education; and the village school was the only educational means known in the region. The girl pined for home, however, and was never content away from the red house. Perhaps by a strange perversity of circumstance the home-longing of the mother was in the child transformed into a clinging fondness for the place where the former was so lonely and alien. The low, level moors were necessary to Ruth’s life; in their colorless monotony she somehow found the complement for her uneventful life. Perhaps the very dulness developed her imagination, as special organs appear in animals whose abnormal conditions of existence render them needful. If this were so, it was no less true that the moors absorbed whatever mental life they stimulated, until the girl seemed hardly less a part of them than the knolls of leathery shrubs, the scattered, shallow pools, the tufts of coarse grass, or the whispering voices of the wind which all night long and every night were hurrying to and fro, concerned with unspeakable tidings which perhaps came from the sea that forever moaned along the moorland’s edges.
Little conscious imagination had Ruth at nineteen; and it was at nineteen that the single, trifling event of her life occurred. She was a maiden by no means uncomely. She was not educated in any conventional sense of the term; but her life alone with her grandfather and old Bethiah and the great brown moors had bred in her a certain sweet gravity which was not without its charm, had there been but those to see who could appreciate it.
Along the front of the house ran a bench, where people seldom sat, since there were none to sit, but where the milk-pans dried in the sun, a gleaming row; and one sunny morning late in September the flash of their shimmer caught the eye of a skipper who in his yacht in the bay studied the horizon with his glass. He was not yet past those years when a man still finds amusement in imitating fate and nature by yielding to his impulses; the gleam suggested pleasant draughts of fresh milk; and without more ado, he headed the trig little craft in which he and a brother artist were skirting the coast of the Gulf of Maine for the little inlet upon which Gran’sir’ Welch’s red cottage stood.
In those days yachts were less common than now, and both Ruth and Bethiah left their work to watch the boat as it ran up to the low wharf, and the snowy sail fell with a musical rattle and clash of metallic rings.
The skipper, a stalwart young fellow, too handsome by half, came briskly ashore and did his errand, and while the old servant went for the milk, stood with Ruth by the open door asking idle questions, to which she replied without either shyness or boldness. His eyes were just on a level with hers as she stood on the threshold above him, and their bold, merry glance saw with full appreciation how clear were her sherry-brown orbs. He removed his cap and leaned against the door-post, letting his glance stray over the landscape. Here and there upon the brown surface his keen eye detected the flame of a scarlet leaf amid the prevailing russet, but the combined effect of all the red leaves upon the plain could not warm the sombre wastes.
“Don’t you get tired of the sameness?” he asked suddenly, as if the monotony all at once seemed to him too great to be borne.