It had been so terrible and sudden, his going from her. Well in the morning, and dead at night; killed by a locomotive and brought to her so mangled that she could never have recognized him as her husband. People had called him over-generous and extravagant, and perhaps he was, but the money he spent so lavishly was always for others, and not for himself, and as the holder of the heavy mortgage on his farm had been content with the interest and never pressed his claim, he had made no effort to lessen it, even after he knew it passed into the hands of Mrs. Marshall-More, who had often expressed a wish to own the place known as the Spring Farm, and so-called from the numerous springs upon it. She would fill it with her city friends and set up quite an English establishment, she said; and now it was hers, to all intents and purposes, for though the deed was in her brother’s name, it was understood that she was mistress of the place and could do what she liked with it. Of the real owner, Max Gordon, her half-brother, little was known, except the fact that he was very wealthy and had for years been engaged to a lady who, by a fall from a horse, had been crippled for life. It was also rumored that the lady had insisted upon releasing her lover from his engagement, but he had refused to be released, and still clung to the hope that she would eventually recover. Just where he was at present, nobody knew. He seldom visited his sister, although she was very proud of him and very fond of talking of her brother Max, who, she said, was so generous and good, although a little queer. He had bidden off the Spring Farm because she asked him to do so, and a few thousand dollars more or less were nothing to him; then, telling her to do what she liked with it, he had gone his way, while poor Lucy Graham’s heart was breaking at the thought of leaving the home which her husband had made so beautiful for her. An old-fashioned place, it is true, but one of those old-fashioned places to which our memory clings fondly, and our thoughts go back with an intense longing years after the flowers we have watered are dead, and the shrubs we have planted are trees pointing to the sky. A great square house, with a wing on either side, a wide hall through the center and a fireplace in every room. A well-kept lawn in front, dotted with shade trees and flowering shrubs, and on one side of it a running brook, fed by a spring on the hillside to the west; borders and beds and mounds of flowers;—tulips and roses and pansies and pinks and peonies and lilies and geraniums and verbenas, each blossoming in its turn and making the garden and grounds a picture of beauty all the summer long. No wonder that Lucy Graham loved it and shrank from leaving it, and shrank, too, from Mrs. Marshall-More’s attempts at consolation, saying only when that lady arose to go, “It was kind in you to come and I thank you for it; but just now my heart aches too hard to be comforted. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, I shall call when you get settled in town, and if I can be of any service to you I will gladly do so,” Mrs. Marshall-More said, as she left the room and went out to her carriage, where she stood for a moment looking up and down the road, and saying to herself, “Where can Archie be?”
CHAPTER II.
WHERE ARCHIE WAS.
A long lane wound away to the westward across a strip of land called the mowing lot, through a bit of woods and on to a grassy hillside, where, under the shade of a butternut tree, a pair of fat, sleek oxen were standing with a look of content in their large, bright eyes as if well pleased with this unwonted freedom from the plough and the cart. Against the side of one of them a young girl was leaning, with her arm thrown across its neck and her hand caressing the long, white horn of the dumb creature which seemed to enjoy it. The girl was Maude Graham, and she made a very pretty picture as she stood there with her short, brown hair curling in soft rings about her forehead; her dark blue eyes, her bright, glowing face, and a mouth which looked as if made for kisses and sweetness rather than the angry words she was hurling at the young man, or boy, for he was only twenty, who stood before her.
“Archie More,” she was saying, “I don’t think it very nice in you to talk to me in that patronizing kind of way, as if you were so much my superior in everything, and trying to convince me that it is nothing for us to give up the dear old place where every stone and stump means somebody to me, for I know them all and have talked with them all, and called them by name, just as I know all the maiden ferns and water lilies and where the earliest arbutus blossoms in the spring. Oh, Archie, how can I leave Spring Farm and never come back again! I think I hate you all for taking it from us, and especially your uncle Max.”
Here she broke down entirely, and laying her face on the shining coat of the ox began to cry as if her heart would break, while Archie looked at her in real distress wondering what he should say. He was a city-bred young man, with a handsome, boyish face, and in a way very fond of Maude, whom he had known ever since he was thirteen and she eleven, and he first came to Merrivale to spend the summer. They had played and fished together in the brook, and rowed together on the pond and quarreled and made up, and latterly they had flirted a little, too, although Archie was careful that the flirting should not go too far, for he felt that there was a vast difference between Archie More, son of Mrs. Marshall-More, and Maude Graham, daughter of a country farmer. And still he thought her the sweetest, prettiest girl he had ever seen, a jolly lot he called her, and he writhed under her bitter words, and when she cried he tried to comfort her and explain matters as best he could. But Maude was not to be appeased. She had felt all the time that the place need not have been sold, that it was a hasty thing, and though she did not blame Archie, she was very sore against Mrs. Marshall-More and her brother, and her only answer to all Archie could say, was:
“You needn’t talk. I hate you all, and your uncle Max the most, and if I ever see him I’ll tell him so, and if I don’t you may tell him for me.”
Archie could keep silent and hear his mother blamed and himself, but he roused in defense of his uncle Max.
“Hate my uncle Max,” he exclaimed. “Why, he is the best man that ever lived, and the kindest. He knew nothing of you, or how you’d feel, when he bought the place; if he had he wouldn’t have done it; and if he could see you now, crying on that ox’s neck, he would give it back to you. That would be just like him.”
“As if I’d take it,” Maude said, scornfully, as she lifted up her head and dashed the tears from her eyes with a rapid movement of both hands. “No, Archie More, I shall never take Spring Farm as a gift from any one, much less from your uncle Max; but I shall buy it of him some day if he keeps it long enough.”