WE PASS AN ORDEAL AND SAIL FOR HOME
The warm days of May and June found Helen and me again riding over the low rolling country back of Deep Harbor. At least, that is what we did on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. On other days we rode at night, not without protest from Mrs. Claybourne. Fortunately, however, the trousseau kept her too deeply employed to offer much resistance.
Spring in that country was the same joy and wonder that it is in England. The fields stayed brown longer, perhaps, for vineyards are slow in coming into leaf, and Indian corn is not planted until late. The woods made up for any delay of the open fields. Such brilliant, tender greens of ferns and mosses, such strange and overpowering scents from grasses and leafy hollows! To be sure, we watched the panorama of spring and early summer with lovers' eyes, but I defy any one not to find that countryside an earthly paradise.
And at night, even in the darkness when there was no moon, we rode miles through velvety black, rich with the odours of growing things. Dogs would bark at our horses from farm-yard gates as we passed, and sleeping cattle near the road would lift drowsy heads in surprise at the sound of our horses' hoofs. There were no motor-cars to come roaring down at us from around corners with dazzling glare of monster eyes, or so few that they were not met on back country roads. We could ride on with loose rein, certain no danger was ahead. It was on these rides that we could really talk and get to know one another. Not that we had rushed at love in the autumn, ignorant of what we did. Yet it seemed as if each day we found new depths to explore and grew nearer to one another the further we went.
I can remember little of what we said or of what subjects we talked about. Much of it was lovers' talk, sometimes too absurd or trivial to put down in black and white, or else too sacred to come staring at one from the pages of a narrative. At other times we spoke of that future, now so near us, and built dream plans—a little cottage with a red-tiled roof to be somewhere in Hertfordshire, with a vegetable garden and standard rose trees; or again, we wandered in fancy through the mysteries of London, buying books off a stall in the Farringdon Road or sitting in some old church near the crossed feet of a Crusader. It was I who built up for her the dream pictures of England—the England of my childhood—the London which, once it is in one's blood, is there forever. Helen had never been abroad, and to her my stories were like those Othello told to Desdemona. She learned to know England in imagination and came to speak familiarly of it, as if she herself had grown up on its soil.
And yet we both loved America too. From a hilltop in May, looking across miles of open country to the blue lake, our hearts would swell with joy that so fair a land was ours. England was to be our country of adventure, in which, side by side, we were to seek fame and do our allotted task in life. We thought no less of one country for the joy with which we looked forward to the other.
On the first of July Knowlton and I turned the factory over to the representatives of the new owners. They were a New York corporation, and I was rather amused to observe that the general manager arrived with the same chip on his shoulder for Deep Harbor that I had first carried. He was a little, fussy man of about thirty-five, with a brown Van Dyke beard, and he asked me, with a haughty air, if I knew where there was anything fit to eat to be found.
"You have had breakfast at Shaefer's," I said. I could see Knowlton's grin over the corner of my shoulder. We were in his office at the factory.
"I have," Mr. Ebling replied, with a grimace.