Poor little soul, she cried dreadfully. She even tried to work on my sympathies by telling me how Cousin Jane serves up Bob White’s perfections morning, noon, and night. This was welcome news to me, and helped me to disguise the very fluid condition of my supposedly hard heart. I must confess we both cried before she went back: but Caro owned it was fair.
I feel like a yellow dog, of course. One always does when one stands for a painful justice—it’s part of the job. I felt the same shame when she was a little thing and I let her bite the red pepper she snatched in the garden the minute I told her not to touch it. It burns my own mouth to this day. But Caro never snatched against orders again.
And there’s no sense in listening to Grumpy’s prophecies. Where is the pleasure of growing old if one can’t learn to distil from one’s experiences the essential oil of hope? When the Peon and I fell out, hopelessly, desperately, eternally, about six months before we were married, I was just a young thing, and quite pardonable in my belief that my life was ruined forever by the cataclysm. But from the vantage-ground of twenty-odd years of additional living I should be able to detect the flimsiness of the average impenetrable barrier. I don’t think Caro cares for any one else, at least; and if they’re not meddled with they’ll work it out their own way, which must be the best way for the Peon and me. And if he and I can’t enjoy ourselves very much just now, why, we don’t want to when the children are miserable; so that’s all right, of course.
As to their misery, I have at least come far enough in life myself to know that it has—or will have—its mitigations. I never yet have been in a hole—and heaven knows life has been a procession of holes these last years—that I didn’t get out of it with some added capacity of living that made being in holes worth while. Why should I begrudge the children their own hole-adventures and discoveries, their own enrichment of life?
May 22nd. The Peon comes home early these days and takes me out for a ride. I can sit in my chair or lie down at will; and he wheels me over the soft grass to all the places I’ve been longing to see and have only beheld in Make-Believe. We go down to the brook nearly every day about sunset and watch the birds quenching their thirst before bedtime. There are many song sparrows down there; and the killdeers haunt the banks at all time, whirring up when startled with wild cries, their breasts and lifted wings flashing snow-white beneath, and the rich salmon of the lower back gleaming as they rise from the valley into the level sunlight along the brow of the hill. The Peon flattens my chair to a couch, and throws himself on the grass or sits on the roots of a sycamore, while we talk of all the years that the children have been growing up with us, and of what the future is to bring. We are both very strenuously cheerful. And indeed, in our hearts, we do hope honestly to have them both at home again some day. Only it seems rather a long way off sometimes; and the house is so very quiet when we go back.
Sometimes we go back to the spot we picked out years ago as the one where we thought David might like to build his home some day; for though we always hoped to have him with us, we never wanted to rob him of a home of his own. We had never said to one another that we hoped for Caro to make the home for him—to put it into words seemed to infringe on their right to settle that great matter, each to their own heart’s wish: but we had hoped it without words. We go there now, and hope for it openly, bridging our separation with happy dreams, and comforting one another with assurances it is not always easy to feel.
David has not been long enough at his journey’s end for a letter mailed there to reach us; but it seems as if he had been gone for months. And poor little Caro looks so wistful when she starts back to Cousin Jane’s that I feel as though I have been turning her out of doors for the most of my life. It is really not to be borne very much longer. The Peon’s sister wants us to go to her next month, at her summer home in the mountains of Pennsylvania; and Caro will have to come home in time to get me ready. We can spend the summer together, at least.
But before I go I want to see plainer sailing for Milly and Bobolink, as Caro disrespectfully styles Mr. Lincoln. Grace was here for a little while today to tell me good-bye. She is off to stay with George’s mother while the old lady’s daughter takes a trip. Milly was with her, and promised to come back soon. She said she wanted to talk to me, and from the anxious air with which she said it, I’m hoping she is seriously thinking of turning on that jay-bird uncle of hers and teaching him a few of the things he needs to learn.