CHAPTER VI.
A Summer at Home.
Until the present summer Mauney had never gone back to the farm at Lantern Marsh, so that now, with his new mental outlook, he was for the first time enjoying it. William was living on his father’s place and renting the old McBratney property to an Englishman. Time had brought about changes. William was no longer the insupportable person he had once been. His wife Evelyn had adapted herself, cheerfully, to her circumstances. She found no time now to indulge her former love of gramophones and motoring. The two were living happily together, while the wonted sombreness of the old home was gratefully relieved by the shrill voices of two healthy children. William, once the scoffer, was now proud of his brother, while Mauney had learned a tolerance that made William’s bad English even lovably picturesque.
“Well, Maun,” William would say, “you’ve got the book learning fer the hull crowd. But while you’ve been a-studyin’ I’ve been raisin’ a family, an’ there ain’t no good o’ us two tryin’ to argue which is the best. But I’ll take the family every time!”
Then Mauney would laugh and reply, “There’s nothing like being happy, Bill, whatever you have to do to get there.”
He felt that he himself was very gradually arriving. Ahead lay the treasures of history to be expounded to a new generation. With his own hands he was to lift before their eyes the ideals which he had won. It took no more than this glorious prospect to make him very content.
There was sadness, though, in every memory of Lantern Marsh. Time after time during the summer months, thoughts rushed unbidden upon him to shake his being—those family sentiments of past scenes, pathetic differences of opinion, once so important, but now so irrevocable and small. The eye of retrospect sees with a tender sight. Mauney kept fancying that his father’s big form must soon appear at the lane entrance carrying a whiffletree, or his harsh voice be heard swearing at his horses. The man had lived up to his light. Experience forgave him his faults. But now Seth Bard, with all his gruffness and strength, was silent and vanished. Once he had seemed the most immovable body on earth, the one great, availing magnitude. But even the winds that blew from unseen quarters across the desolate marsh were more enduring than he.
And Mauney’s sadness found a strange kind of comfort as he gazed upon that never-ending swamp. It had been there always. Since he had known anything he had known that swamp—bleak and horrid and fascinating, as changing as the phases of his own life; never the same for two days in succession, and yet always the same. On sunny afternoons, great, white clouds hung over it and the blue of the sky lay mirrored in the long, narrow strips of water far out. Then would come the disturbing breezes, growing into winds that moved the trees and reed banks, then into the hurricane that transformed it all, till it vibrated like a living and suffering being, its green acres of sedge whipped to a surface like shot silk, its channels churned to a muddy red, the moving sky glaring with storm, and the stunted hemlocks, huddling frantically together along its edges. This old swamp, hated and loved, defeated, but eternal, was relic of all that Mauney regretted in those sad hours that came upon him during the summer months.
But these remembrances were being pushed back farther and farther out of sense, while the vital events of life occupied him more and more. Coming into the house, tired, but satisfied, after the day’s work in the hayfield, he would sit quietly on the kitchen verandah, watching the sun sink beyond the corner of the big, dark barn. The sound of crickets filled the air with a metallic vibration. His contentment was as deep as the gulf of crimson sky above him, and his happiness as much a-quiver as the air. As he sat here, lulled into grateful meditation, perhaps Evelyn would interrupt him.