Isabella had been engaged to a minister's son named Harkness. He was a young man who justified in every respect the many pleasing proverbs about ministers' sons: yet, in spite of all, had a leal heart, a handsome form and face, a tender touch, and a personal magnetism that enabled him to wring an unwilling consent out of stern old Abraham Myers to his betrothal with his daughter Isabella.
These two young folk worshipped each other, and the wedding day was set. Isabella was to wear a white taffeta frock and white thread mitts. But troublous times had come to Canada. Young Harkness went to the war. Isabella and he had a sad, sad parting, for the imaginative girl was fey of her fate, and clung to him till his heart melted within him. And as he rode away with a long tress of her dark hair on his breast, it was not the sunshine alone that made his eyes so bright and his vision so uncertain.
It was but a puny affray that in the history of the world's wars, but it does not take big battles to make men brave and women's hearts ache. The dark braid had hardly warmed in its place before it was soaked with the blood of the heart on which it lay. The real Isabella Myers died then, too. But a pale apathetic woman in her shape and semblance still went wearily on her way.
Ten years later they married her to Andrew Cutler, a man considerably older than herself, and as her father said, "of the old true blue stock." She gave him a boy and died, well rid of the world. Miss Hannah Myers came to keep house for her brother-in-law. She brought up the baby and took charge of the little hide-covered chest which was full of the books ("poetry books and such," Miss Myers called them) that young Harkness had given Isabella long before. Andrew Cutler lived on after his wife's death to a good old age, being killed at last by falling through the trap-door in his hay-loft. Then Andrew was head of his house.
As Andrew grew up, he developed such a strange resemblance to one long dead, that sometimes, when a movement, gesture, or expression of his brought it more clearly to Miss Myers' eyes, she felt an eerie thrill creep over her. She described the sensation as "cold chills." For it was not a resemblance to his father, or his grandfather, or even to his mother (although he resembled her, too), but he imaged forth the brave, handsome, devil-may-care lover of his mother's girlhood, he who had died ten years before Andrew's birth. Surely the image of that long-lost lover had been deeply graven on that broken heart.
"The Cutler house on the hill," as the villagers described it, was quite a pretentious one in its way. Old Captain Cutler, he of the sword and sash, had not been penniless, by any means, when he left the United States, although he left behind him much valuable property. So when the Canadian Government made him a generous grant, he promptly spent his money in building a house. Now, the forebears of this Captain Cutler had come from England, and many a tale his grandfather had told him of the old farm homestead there, of the garden with brick-paven walks, and brick-built walls upon which grew the espaliered fruit, of the old sun-dial beside the larch tree, and the oaken beams that traversed the plaster of the ceilings, of the flagged kitchen, and the big fire-places. So here on the hill-top overlooking the valley, where later Ovid was to be built, Captain Cutler erected his house, a big stone one with oaken floors, stairways and doors, with heavy rafters of the same sturdy growth, a wide-flagged kitchen, and a hall sheathed in wood half way to the roof, with huge open fire-places. He put a brick wall about his gardens, and over it trained the sprawling branches of currant bushes—red ones, and white and black. Later on, hop vines had been planted here and there along the wall; still later, a row of grape vines had superseded them, and clad the old bricks with fresh festoons of leaves. This made, when the grapes were ripe, a beautiful Bacchanal arabesque of purple fruit and brown stem, twisted tendril and green leaf.
He laid down narrow brick walks, too, and by them planted horse-chestnut trees. He put a sun-dial up, a grey stone column with a round top, whereon was rudely carven the symbols of the hours and a lob-sided hour-glass; for lack of a larch tree he filched a linden from the hill-side.
The garden took in the level plateau on top of the hill, and some of the slope upon the side farthest from Ovid. The hill-side next the village was laden with lindens, which in spring were covered in blossom. Old Captain Cutler sent to England for English ox-heart cherry trees, and for boxwood, and for hawthorns to plant hedges.
The cherry trees flourished and perpetuated themselves in generations of younger trees, the box grew and multiplied, but the hawthorn hedges were failures. All that remained of them was a few scattered hawthorns that had long outgrown the status of the hedge row, and become old gnarled trees.
Miss Myers was very proud of her flower garden, which was a mass of circular, oval and diamond-shaped flower beds, bordered by box, spaced off by narrow bricked walks. There were honeysuckles growing over old-fashioned wooden trellises; and roses, crown imperials and lemon lilies; huge clumps of peonies, pink, white and the common crimson; clove pinks and thyme; lilies of the valley and violets, with bushes of rosemary and patches of balm; spotted tiger lilies, and a fragrant white lily called the day lily; little shrubs of the pink flowering almond, "snow on the mountain," "mist on the hill" and acacia shrubs. And beside these, many more old-fashioned perennial plants, like queen of the meadow and thrift; and every summer Andrew brought her heliotropes, and scented geraniums, and mignonette from town.