house, with everything in it like that, if I hadn’t been planning it for someone, could I?”
He didn’t just get it all at once. She “knew how much a house would mean to him”—a house “with everything in it, like that.” Well he knew every detail of it, from the great stone fireplace in the living-room and the little bookcases under the windows—a thought for all the precious intimacies of family life—to the den looking out over the valley and the sun-porch for a baby. He considered them gravely now while she drew meaningless squares and circles about the chimney and the two pine trees on the back of the torn envelope. Then he took the distracting jumble away and gathered her close.
“That was too wonderful of you,” he said. “Shall we leave it just as it is?”
She nodded without looking up. Then she smiled into his eyes, the same old, comrady smile. After all he was just Billy—the same delightful directness, the same steady eyes, clear to the depths, the same unfailing dependableness, the same infinite understanding.
But he did a strange thing when he went home that night. It was long past midnight when his car climbed the hill and turned in at the road gate. The moon was high and the shadows of the pine trees lay like black pools on the grass. He was not a sentimentalist, but he brought a spade and turned the first earth for the foundation of
the new house himself. Then he sat down on the fallen timbers of the old house and looked off across the country to where the ruins of another old house lay rotting in the marshes of the Swamp Farm.
It had been such a pitiful venture, the founding of that house. It wouldn’t have mattered that it had failed economically; many of the happiest families in the world had come through poverty together. But that there should be no trust, no confidence, no hope—nothing but a brooding fear where there should have been a fortress of refuge!
“We could not love the world so much if we had had no childhood in it,” he had read and questioned. He could still feel the warmth of the sun on his back as he sat for a brief half-hour on the bank of a creek, fishing; the coolness of the earth under his bare feet when he first shed his shoes in the spring. He remembered vividly the poignant elation at the discovery of a bush of ripe blackberries in a hidden fence corner. Yet his childhood was something which he would always be trying to forget. It came back to startle him in his dreams sometimes, even yet. It wasn’t fair—a person had only one childhood—but his mother had lived her whole married life in this atmosphere, and had gone out bravely trying to keep a stream of sunshine about the place for the rest of them, self-forgetful to the last.
Perhaps she didn’t know how prevailing the
effort would be—not by what she taught them, but by what she was. By the uncounted sacrifices she had made to give them a chance, their ways had been cast in safe and pleasant places. Here was a heaven on earth opening for him. Jean was happy and interested in a career of her own, and recently, just as happy when the county Agricultural Representative craved her interest in another direction. The mother who had made it all possible had done it single-handed, working desperately to construct a sailing craft for them out of the wreckage of her own life.