Then fell the first great drop—another, and another; the shutter hid the storm-bright square of sky, and down came the rain—trampling on the shingles, drumming in the gutters, drowning the laughing voices below; and suddenly the garret grew cool, and its mellow glow darkened to brown twilight.
Under the gable window there stood for many years a white pine box, with a front that let down on leather hinges. It was very clean inside and faintly odorous. The children called it the bee-box, and they had a story of their own to account for the tradition that this box had once held rich store of honey in the comb.
A queen bee, they said, soaring above the tops of the cherry-trees in swarming-time, had drifted in at the garret window with all the swarm in tow; and where her royal caprice had led them, the faithful workers remained and formed a colony in the bee-box, and, like honest tenants, left a quantity of their sweet wares behind to pay for their winter’s lodging.
There may have been some truth in this story, but the honey was long since gone, and so were the bees. The bee-box, in the children’s time, held only files of old magazines packed away for binding. Of course they never were bound; and the children who used to look at the pictures in them, grew into absent-minded girls with half-lengths of hair falling into their eyes when they stooped too low over their books,—as they always would, to read. The bee-box was crammed till the lid would no longer shut. And now the dusty pages began to gleam and glow, and voices that all the world listened to spoke to those young hearts for the first time in the garret’s stillness.
The rapt young reader, seated on the garret floor, never thought of looking for a date, nor asked, “Who tells this story?” Those voices were as impersonal as the winds and the stars of the summer night.
It might have been twenty years, it might have been but a year before, that Lieutenant Strain led his brave little band into the deadly tropic wilderness of Darien. It is doubtful if those child-readers knew why he was sent, by whom, or what to do. The beginning of the narrative was in a “missing number” of the magazine. It mattered not; they read from the heart, not from the head. It was the toils, the resolves, the sufferings of the men that they cared about,—their characters and conduct under trial. They agonized with “Truxton” over his divided duty, and they wept at his all but dying words:—
“Did I do right, Strain?”
They worshiped, with unquestioning faith, at the shrine of that factitious god of battles, Abbot’s “Napoleon.” With beating hearts and burning cheeks they lived in the tragic realism of “Witching Times.” “Maya, the Princess,” and “The Amber Gods,” “In a Cellar,” “The South Breaker,” stormed their fresh imaginations, and left them feverishly dreaming; and there in the garret’s tropic warmth and stillness they first heard the voice of the great master who gave us Colonel Newcome, and who wrought us to such passionate sympathy with the fortunes of Clive and Ethel. And here, too, the last number was missing, and for a long time the young readers went sorrowing for Clive, and thinking that he and Ethel had been parted all their lives.
These garret readings were frequently a stolen joy, but perhaps “mother” was in the secret of the bee-box, and did not search very closely or call very loud when a girl was missing, about the middle of the warm, midsummer afternoons.
About midsummer the sage was picked and spread upon newspapers upon the garret floor to dry. That was a pleasant task. Children are sensitive to the touch of beauty connected with their labors. Their eyes lingered with delight upon the color, the crêpe-like texture of the fragrant sage, bestrewing the brown garret floor with its delicate life already wilting in the dry, warm air.