At the front stretched a green unmown lawn, lovely to play upon; a high green bank at the end had to be climbed to come to a strawberry bed, where as many as three berries had ripened at a time. Red, white, and black currant bushes, red and yellow raspberries grew in a tangle beyond, and then came the orchard trees—apples, pears, and mulberries.
Phyl had a dim and fading recollection of an earlier home than this—a home that brought memories of more flowers and many more books than this brown-grey, pleasant place of later play-days; a home where her lisping voice had called father a grave, sad-faced scholar, who was in no wise like the laughing, merry-natured man for whom nearly all were wearing these fresh black frocks.
Weenie and the elder little girls were only half-sisters. As a high-spirited, beautiful girl of seventeen Mrs. Conway had won the love of a man double her own age, and one for whom all life had gone sadly. Pleased and touched at the wealth of love he brought her, though she was hardly old enough to reciprocate it properly, she accepted him, and they were married at once, her parents, stern, strict Christians of the old, long dead school, being glad to give their daughter into such safe hands.
[37]
]Three years went by, and the girl was still happy, a little more touched with soberness perhaps at the quiet, reclusive life they led, but a very child again, with two little daughters, Phyl and Dolly, who came to spread sunshine through the quiet, book-filled house. But when Dorothy was barely out of long clothes, and Phyl a slender, restless sprite of three, the girl—wife and mother already before she was twenty-one—was also a widow. Her husband, called on sudden business to Paris, stayed at a hotel where the sheets on his bed were damp, and so sudden and violent an illness followed that he was dead and buried before she had time fairly to realize the news.
Three years slipped by again, the widow living in seclusion, and devoting herself entirely to her little girls. And then, so young yet and full of life, and so overcome by her loneliness, she married again—a widower this time, with a half-grown-up family of boys and girls.
The young, glad love her years reasonably entitled her to, again had slipped past her. Relief at the escape from the rigid discipline of her girlhood’s home, together with the wealth of tender, almost fatherly love showered upon her by her husband, had led her in her first marriage not to miss that blossoming spring-time. And now, saddened and chastened in spirit, it seemed to her that only a man of two-score years could give her the tender protection and cherishing for which she was yearning again.
[38]
]And, again, a wealth of affection was given her: surely few women have passed down life with so great a power of making love spring up for them in every heart. But with these autumn roses of love came also many thorns.
There were the ceaseless discussions that are almost inevitable when a father brings a very young wife home to sons and daughters of almost a like age. And there were years of nursing.
Mr. Conway, a year after the marriage, fell ill of an incurable disease, and until his death, some four years later, the slight shoulders of his new wife carried—and carried cheerfully and patiently—a burden few older women are called upon to bear.
In addition to the unruly household, the wearing struggle to preserve justice and peace between the elder members of the family and her own little girls—now three in number—and the continual nursings for the last two years of her husband’s life, Mrs. Conway picked up the reins of business his fingers had gradually dropped, and managed to guide affairs so as to keep off, for all that time, the ruin with which they had been threatened.