“I just ran over a hen,” lied Samuel promptly.
CHAPTER X
IDLE DAYS
June was well along before Oliver began seriously to contemplate bringing his self-styled “vacation” to an end. May had been glorious. Not since the year he left college had he known what it was to be idle and, in a manner of speaking, independent. He revelled in privileges that had been denied him for years—such as lying abed in the morning till he felt good and ready to turn out; strolling aimlessly whither he wished without troubling himself over the thought that he had to get back at a given time; loafing;—Lord, he couldn’t remember that there ever had been a time when he actually enjoyed the dishonorable luxury of loafing!—on street corners, in Fry’s drug store, in the public library, on friendly lawns and front porches; fishing, tramping, motoring, reading—all the things he had dreamed of in the black days across the sea.
The country was green and fresh and sparkling with the glories of a summer just taking over the heritage of a blithe and bountiful spring. The dust and grit of jaded August were still far enough away to be unconsidered; the roadside bushes and hedges, the trees and the grass were without the coat of gray that settles down upon them as summer ages; the brooks and the creeks were cool and laughing in a world of plenty, disdainful of the drought that was sure to fall upon and suck them in the blistering “dog days.”
Even the sinister stretches of Death Swamp, across which he looked from the oak-shaded citadel that he would always call home, were not so repelling as they had been in days of yore. The pools, the hummocks, the patches of defiant reeds, the black shades of the quagmires seemed oddly to have lost much of their ugliness; the vastness that used to appall him was gone, just as the old church down the lane seemed to have shrunk from an immense, overpowering structure into a pitiful little shanty supporting a ridiculous little steeple. The swamp was green and almost kindly in its serenity; the wall of willows that surrounded it was greener still and no longer the horrifying barrier beyond which no man dared to tread; the soft blue of the June sky lay upon the still and supposedly bottomless pond in the middle of these useless acres.
But at night—ah, that was different! The swamp turned grim and dismal and forbidding. The grown man became once more the little boy as he looked out over the moonlit waste or tried to pierce its black shadows on a starless night; the same old creepy sensations of dread and terror stole over him, and he who knew not the meaning of fear shivered.
During the first week he spent many happy, care-free hours with Jane Sage. They took long walks through country lanes, visited the old haunts he had known as smuggler, pirate and brigand, and marveled to find that they were still boy and girl. It was hard for him to believe that this tall, beautiful, glowing creature was the Jane Sage of another day, hard for him to realize that this ripe, mature, fully developed woman with the calm, clear eyes of understanding and the soft, deep voice, had once been a spindling, giggling girl in pinafores and pigtails, and later a half-formed maid in unnoticeable shirt waists and ill-hanging skirts. She reminded him that she was twenty-five. Why shouldn’t she be grown-up at twenty-five? What was surprising in that? Everybody else grew up and got old, didn’t they?
“Yes,” said he, “but somehow you seem to have grown up differently from other people. As if magic had something to do with it.”
“I was as grown-up when you went off to France four years ago as I am now. A girl doesn’t change much between twenty-one and twenty-five, you know.”