“What——” she began, and then her quivering lips were silent.
“It’s all right,” said Lanty, in a voice he hardly recognised as his own. “You are mine—mine.”
She laid her face against his breast and there was silence between them. And whilst they supped of Beatitude, proud Vashti Lansing, pale as old ivory, was walking up and down the path their happy feet had trodden such a short while before, tasting the very bitterness of Marah, but compelling her proud lips to tell Sidney Martin the story of their French ancestress.
Vashti Lansing had more than one heritage from the murdered witch wife. The courage which had kept the old Vashti calm and contemptuous before the fagots, upheld the modern Vashti in her time of torture. It is the fashion to sneer at grandfathers—among those who have none. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there are very few Esaus, although there are always plenty of Jacobs, ready to buy birth-rights if money will do it.
It is a good sign if a family guards its traditions carefully. The types presented in these oral picture galleries are sometimes not the best types, but they at least shine forth distinctly from their background, and be their light clear or lurid it is by these beacons that we are guided back to the beginnings of character. How much more eloquent and rich a language is in its meaning to us when we know its root words! that we are guided back to the beginnings of character when we can comprehend its genesis, and trace the subtle transmutation of one characteristic into another; the change of physical courage into moral strength, or perchance—the retrogression of simple tastes to penuriousness, or the substitution of intellectual enthusiasm for the fires of ardent passions. Family tradition is the alphabet of all history! What contrasts are presented amid the pictures thus preserved! And surely there was never greater difference between two ancestors of one house than existed between old Abel Lansing, the donor of the Lansing legacy, and beautiful Germaine Lansing, the wife of pious Jason Lansing. Jason Lansing had wooed and won and wedded his wife whilst he was in England doing the errands of the little colony of wanderers beyond the sea. How his choice fell upon frivolous Germaine, why she accepted her grim lover, none can guess; but certain it is they were an ill-matched pair. Our sympathies are inclined towards the gay little Frenchwoman who sang her chansons of love and ladies’ lattices in the very ears of the elders, and rustled her brocades beneath the disdainful noses of their winsey-clad wives; but the community in which she lived regarded her advent in their midst as a “dispensation” of a peculiar and trying type. Jason Lansing could only sustain his good opinion of himself by remembering that even the patriarchs had not displayed entire good judgment in the bestowal of their affections. Her memory still survived among the Lansings—a frail ghost hung with scornful garlands of forbidden frivolity, and when any of the name outraged the traditional proprieties, it was said that the cloven hoof of French levity was showing itself once more. And with such tales as these, Vashti Lansing beguiled the dewy twilight hours for Sidney Martin, and stole his heart away, whilst her own burned and yearned for a love denied it.
CHAPTER VI.
After the day when, alone upon the hillside, Sidney watched Len Simpson’s funeral wind along the narrow ways of Dole, there ensued for him a sweet calm interlude—a tranquil period, yet surcharged with potentialities.
It was the space between the casting of the grain into the ground and the first blade. At such a time there is no stir upon the surface of the earth, yet in its brown bosom the vital germinal growths are beginning; the husk of individuality is bursting, the tap-root of deeper sympathy is searching for sustenance; and at last upon some happy morning a green glow gladdens the sky, and we say: “Lo, the new grain!” and offer thanks for the promise of the gracious harvest.
But all the after-vigour of the plant depends upon that silent time in the darkness. So the whole fabric of Sidney’s after-life was built up from the beginnings made in that uneventful month, whose days are difficult to chronicle, as beads which slip adown the string and mingle with each other are to count. It passed like a lover’s dream to Sidney, to be remembered afterwards as a season of peace and happiness whose source and sense eluded analysis.