The Open Window: Tales of the Months

by Mabel Osgood Wright

“In Arden where the twilight lingers,

Love may dream but never sleeps,”

ran the words.

John Hewlett, who had drawn himself into a niched doorway on seeing the singer, hearing his own words written long ago and almost forgotten, half started forward and paused with both hands resting on the end of the piano, looking across its length at the singer, who at his motion raised her eyes unconsciously to his. They were a deep violet-blue in colour, but he did not know this then; what he saw was the woman’s heart that lay behind, that seemed at once to awaken and spring to meet his own.

The first song glided into a second, and when, at the end of half an hour, Adela stopped and let her hands drop to her knees, the pallor of emotion rather than fatigue replaced her rich colour; and when her brother presented his friend Hewlett as the writer of the words to which her music had given new meaning, there was not one among the onlookers but who realized in some degree what this birthday festival foreshadowed.

John Hewlett travelled quickly over the fourteen years that separated him from Adela Heyl, back toward enthusiastic youth. In a month’s time, when he said that he loved her, there was really no need of words, and though he never gave the fact utterance, she knew, beyond doubt, that it was the first and only love of his life, as was his marriage that followed in October. For no matter whether a man marries once or thrice, there is but one real marriage, be it the first or the last, and no one knows this better than himself.

Miss Hewlett and Catharine went up from Oaklands to the wedding—the sister, in a flutter of mixed feelings in which sorrow at the probable ceasing to be mistress of the homestead, and delight at having new life come into the house, were mingled. The daughter went purely from a wish not to appear to censure her father’s actions in public, and thereby gained added reputation for being dutiful. In private she expressed her views in words well chosen for their diamond-edged cutting power. She did not approve of matrimony on general principles; in her father’s case she entirely disapproved. Having but a faint memory of her mother, as that of a vague person who had often said “You must not,” and never “I love you,” yet she taxed her father with shortness of memory in no gentle terms, and when he had come down to arrange some household matters prior to the wedding, he found his first wife’s picture placed upon his desk together with a prayer-book he had given her, and which she had carried at their marriage, while at the same time Catharine asked if he was willing that her mother’s furniture should remain in her rooms, or if it was to be sold.

Now, however, nothing could cloud his sunshine, and the technical and loveless remembrances that his daughter cultivated like a crop of birch rods were wholly devoid of sting. (By the way, the development of memory is supposed to be one of the best results of education, but father has often said, out of his experience as a physician who sees behind and below the scenes, that memory is often a destroyer of tenderness, and he thinks a capacity for wise forgetting is often a better quality.)

Being themselves happy, Adela and John Hewlett must, perforce, see all about them happy also, and instead of jostling and overturning the old, they merely planned to expand upon their own lines. The ample homestead was divided, and in the half with the primly drawn blinds and dark green door Miss Hewlett and Catharine reigned, while in the other part with the white door, where the honeysuckle climbed up to the open windows and the fearless Phœbes nested atop the never closed blinds, the Professor lived the indoor part of his new life, the only shadow in it being the twilight of the forest where love dreamed but never slept.

People who predicted trouble were amazed, for, strange to say, Catharine, after the first, never measured swords with Adela so few years her senior; it seemed as though the very intensity of the new wife’s nature was so incomprehensible to her that she shrank from stirring its depths.