It seemed this gay fanfare had loosed their tongues, for at once a clatter of laughter and merry voices began. Van Kull, the horses being fresh, was busied with his driving; but Mrs. Gower turned to talk with the four behind her, and soon Miss Duval’s flow of animal spirits was set off and exploded in shrieks of shrilly laughter. Miss Farnum, too, said something to make Birmingham roar his catastrophic bass guffaws, and Wemyss took up the cue with Mrs. Hay. Only the two servants sitting facing them maintained the severe aspect which decorum of them demanded.
They were already sweeping down the dewy ravine in the forest, and in a minute more had come to the gate of Mrs. Gower’s demesne; it flew open, the porter bared his head, the porter’s wife and children bobbed up and down behind him; and between the armorial pillars they rolled out upon the common road. A dusty, sleepy road it was, giving no hint of its much use; for, early as it was for them, the people that travelled by the highways, the morning tradesmen’s carts and factory operatives, had long since passed over it to their daily station in life. You would be surprised if you knew how busy this same road could be in the hour or two that followed sunrise. But now it stretched away in silence through the broad green country, and its dust lay heaped in ridges undisturbed. The horses trotted smartly down its gentle slope; and then, breaking into a joyous gallop, rushed them up the other for a mile or more. Here was the factory village; and they swept through it triumphantly, but almost unseen, for all the world was now indoors. A few dogs barked; a few street-children, too young to work in the mills, cheered at them, or jeered, it were hard to say which. There was a great whirring of wheels from the mills, however; and the two free leaders took fright at them, and almost broke away from Van Kull, who held them hard, the big veins swelling in his throat. The coachman facing Arthur leaned far out and looked forward at them anxiously; but no one else minded. Such was the exhilaration of the air and motion, they might have run away and Pussie Duval have but sung her song the louder, while the others laughed the more. At last Van Kull pulled up his smoking team on the face of a big hill, the town a mile or so behind them. It was a very steep hill, or they would have carried it by assault; but now the groom on the cock-horse rode up and hooked his harness to the whiffletree, and the five horses set their necks into the collar, and took the summit slowly, as by siege. As they rose up, the country all behind them was unfolded, ridge by ridge, like a map; Arthur from his back seat faced full toward it. Gradually the chimneys of the factory village sank down into the bosom of the valley; the hills breasting it rose up behind them, until they overlooked their highest ridge; now the village was nearly hidden in the green floor of the valley, and all beyond were faint blue films of mountains; then, as they rose still higher, the rift of luminous air between the near hills and the distant mountains was seen to be paved with the blue flood of the river. The horses paused a moment to take breath; it was marvellously still; now and then the cackle of a hen came up from the valley; a train was crawling along its other side, but it moved as noiselessly as the white specks of sails upon the river.
The sunlight began to be hot, and Wemyss was sent within to fetch the larger sunshades from the “cabin,” as Miss Duval pleased to call it.
“Now you men,” said Flossie, “may go behind and smoke; and Mrs. Hay can take a place in front. You have none of you had your morning cigars, I am sure.” They had not; and after due demurrage the change was made. Four blue clouds arose to heaven from the after-seat; the four fair women grouped together in front; and Van Kull looked now and then askance and backward, as if in envy. And surely if ever an approach to godlike Nirvana is realized on earth, it is when one is moving rapidly through a broad June morning, looking down upon the roundness of the world, and blowing clouds upon it dreamily.
When Lord Birmingham took Van Kull’s place upon the box, giving the latter his seat in the smoke-room, as he termed it, most of the party felt, if they did not show, a delightful drowsiness, which was only dispelled by their arrival at a town and rumors of luncheon. A wild burst of the coaching horn electrified the main street, and they drove up before the principal “hotel,” a vast and ill-aired wooden structure, quite inappropriate to a coaching party, or even to the more civilized usages of life, as Mr. Wemyss with much particularity pointed out. But a private room had been engaged for them, and in this, with some local chickens and the resources of Mrs. Gower’s cellar and grapery, they made out not so badly.
After luncheon the men smoked, and the women retired to their especial quarters, where, it is to be presumed, some took a nap, and others, having sent for the little travelling-bags before mentioned, performed mysterious rites therewith. Wemyss, Lord Birmingham, Miss Duval, Miss Farnum, and Arthur went to walk about the town, and became the subjects of considerable admiring comment. In the country, on the contrary, such had not been the case; nil admirari was a motto faithfully practised, and the old farmers would hardly hitch their trousers and turn about for the loudest horn or the most rattling pace. When they came back to the hotel and found the coach drawn up to the door, there was assembled a considerable concourse of immature populace, who had already passed from the open-mouthed stage to the derisive one, and were making sarcastic and injurious comments upon the coach and its equipment, with that tendency so noteworthy in young America to deride or decry what it does not itself possess.
Off went the horses—the two wheelers were nearly fresh, having only been in the wagonette in the morning—the coachman wound a rapid call upon his horn, attended by an obligato of small boys, and they swayed and swung through the winding street of the hot little town, out into fields and hedgerows again. The hedges were in front of the lawns and villa residences that surrounded the town; and the road was well arched over with elms just breaking into leaf, under which the afternoon sun slanted.
It seemed to the party almost the perfection of life, as the little disconnected comments and the absence of any effort of conversation indicated. Simple being was enough; there was no sicklying over that day’s air and sunlight with any pale cast of thought, as Derwent said. Again they were high up on the slope of the country side; but the great golden bay of the Hudson had become a river here, and close beyond it the blue mountains of the highlands loomed up bold and near.
Now they came down close by the shore of the river; its salted waters were lapping, lapping on the round, weedy shore-stones, and over against them, in the skirt of the hills, lurked already the night. The stream’s broad bosom glowed motionless, bearing here and there a bark or boat; but no Sidney Sewall spoke of these to-night, or cared to trouble with intellectual speculation. Arthur remembered with unconcern that in the past there had been such things as the city, business, hour of duty; what mattered this to them, the chosen ones, bright beings in a world apart? And certainly everyone of the party had a charm our hero had not realized before; even Mrs. Hay, with her strong, sensuous beauty, lent a richness and a color to the grouping.
“It is lovely, after all,” said Miss Farnum, dreamily, voicing his thoughts. Here they were entering a high hanging wood; on the lower side of the road a lofty hewn-stone wall, all overgrown with moss and ivy, surmounted with old-fashioned stone urns now chipped and crumbling away. Over it they could see the winding leaf-heaped walks of a forgotten garden, untended lawns, and old stone garden-seats swathed in moss and mould. “It must be the grounds of some gentleman’s old country-seat,” said Miss Farnum. “Everyone goes farther from the city nowadays.” There was a something begetting thought in this suggestion; the warm sunlight sank sleepily down in the cup there between the woodlands, and the old garden looked like a place where one might take a nap for half a lifetime—say from youth to early old age. It was evidently a place of the old Idlewild, Ik Marvel, Porte-Crayon days, when people lived in their country, wrote of Dobb his ferry, and were as yet unacquainted with Englishmen and other foreigners. There must have been a strong home fragrance in our life in the forties or thereabouts, before the few found out that we are provinces, or the many that we are all the world.... Now they came out by a little water-bay, or lagoon, reaching inland, where the water lay still and a salt crust was on the long plashed grasses. “I suppose the people who live here go to Mount Desert, nowadays,” said Miss Farnum. “I wonder why they left here?”