“I said that I would sue for my money, and she said that he would sue me for breach of promise, which he had in writing and signed plainly! I stayed at that hotel until yesterday, wrestling with my pride, and then I grew so homesick, the money I’d taken dwindled, and you know, Brooke, you said that you’d be glad to see me if I ever came back, and so here I am. I’ll work my board out, if you’ll let me, until I can look about and perhaps rent a little place and go to raise chickens—if only you’ll forget all that I’ve told and not repeat it except to Dr. Russell. Just say I’ve changed my mind, for if Enoch Fenton got hold of this there’d be no rest for me short of Middletown Asylum,” and Keith, relaxing at last, began to sob just as she had the day that she had answered James White’s first letter, using Tatters’ head (he had stolen in again) for a pillow.
Both Brooke and Mrs. Lawton, remembering her kindly welcome home in their trouble, said all in their power to reassure her, and the younger woman gave her a rapid sketch of her new business plans, saying that if her hopes were realized fair pay would also be a part of the coöperative living. Something else she was about to add, for with all her sentiment Brooke was far-sighted, but her inborn delicacy stopped her, for the idea seemed harsh and brutal when put in words.
But the third listener read his sister’s thoughts and did not hesitate. Striding into the room, he stood before his astounded kinswoman, towering above her, and said, with an apparently genial smile and hands in pockets: “I’ll make a bargain with you, Cousin Keith, fair and square over the right. I’ll forget all about your trip to Boston, and help you do the same, unless you forget that sister is mistress here, that I’m her backer, and mother the dowager duchess! In which case I shall remember, and with trimmings!” And strange to say, the boy’s unasked championship was possibly the only thing that could have clarified the situation and made the coöperative household a possibility without embarrassment or bitter feeling.
CHAPTER XV
THE MASQUE OF SPRING
The new dweller in the country longs for the coming of May as the only truly gracious month of the New England spring. In a few seasons, however, he learns to regret April, for when that month has gone, and the curtain fairly rises on the Masque of Spring, while it seems as if the orchestra is but playing the overture, and while yet he is watching the drapery curtain of leafage unfold, the throng on foot and wing pass by, all madly whirling to the pipe of Pan as they follow the voice of the ages that guides them to their breeding haunts, lo and behold! spring promise has merged in the summer of fulfilment.
It was Brooke’s first knowledge of the coming of spring in wild nature. Spring in New York means a certain lassitude and enervation—the sun withers and the river winds chill alternately with exasperating inconsistency. The planted tulips put up their decorous heads in the parks at a certain date, much as the women in the streets don their flowery spring head-gear,—both are pleasing to the eye, yet there is nothing spontaneous or unexpected about either; while to come suddenly upon a mat of arbutus or catch the silvery gleam of a mass of bloodroot transfiguring the silence of the woodland, where the leaves of a dozen winters, graduating to leaf mould, muffle the tread, is an event. So every night Brooke longed for the next morning and its surprises, and every morning she was eager for sunset and the night voices. Not that she wished time away,—far from it,—but to her its passing also meant progress, the nearing a certain goal.
Sometimes it seemed to her that in a previous existence she had lived the life of the River Kingdom; perhaps it was the heredity moulded beside the Highland torrents that sang to her in the voice of the Moosatuk. On this last day of April, as she stood at the edge of the pasture, with wands of delicate cherry bloom waving softly between her and the river, like heralds ushering one into the presence of a monarch, the words from the song of the migrant bird, “Out of the South,” came to her lips, and she chanted them softly, watching the old horse holding a nose-to-nose conversation with a neighbour in the next field:—
“I have sought