CHAPTER XXXIV
PLAINTON, MAINE
It was late in the summer, and Mrs. Cliff dwelt happy and serene in her native town of Plainton, Maine. She had been there during the whole warm season, for Plainton was a place to which people came to be cool and comfortable in summer-time, and if she left her home at all, it would not be in the months of foliage and flowers. It might well be believed by any one who would look out of one of the tall windows of her drawing-room that Mrs. Cliff did not need to leave home for the mere sake of rural beauty. On the other side of the street, where once stretched a block of poor little houses and shops, now lay a beautiful park, The Grove of the Incas.
The zeal of Mr. Burke and the money of Mrs. Cliff had had a powerful influence upon the minds of the contractors and landscape-gardeners who had this great work in hand, and the park, which really covered a very large space in the village, now appeared from certain points of view to extend for miles, so artfully had been arranged its masses of obstructing foliage, and its open vistas of uninterrupted view. The surface of the ground, which had been a little rolling, had been made more unequal and diversified, and over all the little hills and dells, and upon the wide, smooth stretches there was a covering of bright green turf. It had been a season of genial rains, and there had been a special corps of workmen to attend to the grass of the new park.
Great trees were scattered here and there, and many people wondered when they saw them, but these trees, oaks and chestnuts, tall hickories and bright cheerful maples, had been growing where they stood since they were little saplings. The people of Plainton had always been fond of trees, and they had them in their side yards, and in their back yards, and at the front of their houses; and when, within the limits of the new park, all these yards, and houses, and sheds, and fences had been cleared away, there stood the trees. Hundreds of other trees, evergreens and deciduous, many of them of good size, had been brought from the adjacent country on great wheels, which had excited the amazement of the people in the town, and planted in the park.
Through the middle of the grounds ran a wide and turbulent brook, whirling around its rocks and spreading out into its deep and beautiful pools, and where once stood the widow Casey's little house,—which was built on the side of a bank, so that the Caseys went into the second story when they entered by the front,—now leaped a beautiful cataract over that very bank, scattering its spray upon the trunks of the two big chestnuts, one of which used to stand by the side of Mrs. Casey's house, and the other at the front.
In the shade of the four great oak trees which had stood in William Hamilton's back yard, and which he intended to cut down as soon as he had money enough to build a long cow-stable,—for it was his desire to go into the dairy business,—now spread a wide, transparent pool, half surrounded at its upper end by marble terraces, on the edges of which stood tall statues with their white reflections stretching far down into the depths beneath. Here were marble benches, and steps down to the water, and sometimes the bright gleams of sunshine came flittering through the leaves, and sometimes the leaves themselves came fluttering down and floated on the surface of the pool. And when the young people had stood upon the terraces, or had sat together upon the wide marble steps, they could walk away, if they chose, through masses of evergreen shrubbery, whose quiet paths seemed to shut them out from the world.
On a little hill which had once led up to Parson's barn, but now ended quite abruptly in a little precipice with a broad railing on its edge and a summer-house a little back, one could sit and look out over the stretch of bright green lawns, between two clumps of hemlocks, and over a hedge which concealed the ground beyond, along the whole length of the vista made by Becker Street, which obligingly descended slightly from the edge of the park so that its houses were concealed by the hemlocks, and then out upon the country beyond, and to the beautiful hills against the sky; and such a one might well imagine, should he be a stranger, that all he saw was in the Grove of the Incas. Upon all the outer edges of this park there were masses of shrubbery, or little lines of hedge, irregularly disposed, with bits of grass opening upon the street, and here and there a line of slender iron railing with a group of statuary back of it, and so the people when they walked that way scarcely knew when they entered the park, or when they left it.
The home of Mrs. Cliff, itself, had seemed to her to be casting off its newness and ripening into the matured home. Much of this was due to work which had been done upon the garden and surrounding grounds, but much more was due to the imperceptible influence of the Misses Thorpedyke. These ladies had not only taken with them to the house so many of the time-honored objects which they had saved from their old home, but they had brought to bear upon everything around them the courtly tastes of the olden time.