Flamsted quarries Part 22

IV

It was a careless question, carelessly put, and yet--Aileen Armagh, before she returned to the house, was also asking herself if she meant what she said, asking it with an unwonted timidity of feeling she could not explain. On coming in sight of the terrace, she saw that Mrs.

Champney was still there. She hesitated a moment, then crossed the lawn to the boat house. She wanted to sit there a while in the shade, to think things out with herself if possible. What did this mean--this strange feeling of timidity?

The course of her life was not wholly smooth. It was inevitable that two natures like hers and Mrs. Champney's should clash at times, and the impact was apt to be none of the softest. Twice, Aileen, making a confidant of Octavius, threatened to run away, for the check rein was held too tightly, and the young life became restive under it. When the child first came to Champ-au-Haut, its mistress recognized at once that in her mischief, her wilfulness, her emphatic a.s.sertion of her right of way, there was nothing vicious, and to Octavius Buzzby's amazement, she dealt with her, on the whole, leniently.

"She amuses me," she would say when closing an eye to some of Aileen's escapades that gave a genuine shock to Octavius in the region of his local prejudices.

There had been, indeed, no "folderols" in her education. Sewing, cooking, housework she was taught root and branch in the time not spent at school, both grammar and high. During the last year Mrs. Champney permitted her to learn French and embroidery in a systematic manner at the school established by the gentle Frenchwomen in The Gore; but she steadily refused to permit the girl to cultivate her voice through the medium of proper instruction. This denial of the girl's strongest desire was always a common subject of dissension and irritation; however, after Aileen was seventeen a battle royal of words between the two was a rare occurrence.

At the same time she never objected to Aileen's exercising her talent in her own way. Father Honore encouraged her to sing to the accompaniment of his violin, knowing well that the instrument would do its share in correcting faults. She sang, too, with Luigi Poggi, her "knothole boy"

of the asylum days; and, as seven years before, Nonna Lisa often accompanied with her guitar. The old Italian, who had managed to keep in touch with her one-time _protegee_, and her grandson Luigi, made their appearance in the village one summer after Aileen had been two years in Flamsted. Luigi, now that his vaudeville days were over, was in search of work at the quarries; his grandmother was to keep house for him till he should be able to establish himself in trade--the goal of so many of his thrifty countrymen.

These two Italians were typical of thousands of their nationality who come to our sh.o.r.es; whom our national life, through naturalization and community of interests, is able in a marvellously short time to a.s.similate--and for the public good. Intelligent, business-like, keen at a bargain, but honest and graciously gentle and friendly in manner, Luigi Poggi soon established himself in the affections of Flamsted--in no one's more solidly than in Elmer Wiggins', strange to say, who capitulated to the "foreigner's" progressive business methods--and after three years of hard and satisfactory work at the quarries and in the sheds, by living frugally and saving thriftily he was able to open the first Italian fruit stall in the quarry town. The business was flourishing and already threatened to overrun its quarters. Luigi was in a fair way to become fruit capitalist; his first presidential vote had been cast, and he felt prepared to enjoy to the full his new Americanhood.

But with his young manhood and the fulfilment of its young aspirations, came other desires, other incentives for making his business a success and himself a respected and honored citizen of these United States.

Luigi Poggi was ready to give into Aileen's keeping--whenever she might choose to indicate by a word or look that she was willing to accept the gift--his warm Italian heart that knew no subterfuge in love, but gave generously, joyfully, in the knowledge that there would be ever more and more to bestow. He had not as yet spoken, save with his dark eyes, his loving earnestness of voice, and the readiness with which, ever since his appearance in Flamsted he ran and fetched and carried for her.

Aileen enjoyed this devotion. The legitimate pleasure of knowing she is loved--even when no response can be given--is a girl's normal emotional nourishment. Through it the narrows in her nature widen and the shallows deepen to the dimensions that enable the woman's heart to give, at last, even as she has received,--ay, even more than she can ever hope to receive. This novitiate was now Aileen's.

As a foil, against which Luigi's silent devotion showed to the best advantage, Romanzo Caukins' dogged persistence in telling her on an average of once in two months that he loved her and was waiting for a satisfactory answer, served its end. For six years, while Romanzo remained at Champ-au-Haut, the girl teased, cajoled, tormented, amused, and worried the Colonel's eldest. Of late, since his twenty-first birthday, he had turned the tables on her, and was teasing and worrying her with his love-blind persistence. That she had given him a decided answer more than once made no impression on his determined spirit. In her despair Aileen went to Octavius; but he gave her cold comfort.

"What'd I tell you two years ago, Aileen? Didn't I say you couldn't play with even a slow-match like Roman, if you didn't want a fire later on?

And you wouldn't hear a word to me."

"But I didn't know, Tave! How could I think that just because a boy tags round after you from morning till night for the sake of being amused, that when he gets to be twenty-one he is going to keep on tagging round after you for the rest of his days? I never saw such a leech! He simply won't accept the fact once for all that I won't have him; but he's got to--so now!"

Octavius smiled at the sudden little flurry; he was used to them.

"I take it Roman doesn't think you know your own mind."

"He doesn't! Well, he'll find out I do, then. Oh, dear, why couldn't he just go on being Romanzo Caukins with no nonsense about him, and not make such a goose of himself! Anyway, I'm thankful he's gone; it got so I couldn't so much as tell him to harness up for Mrs. Champney, that he didn't consider it a sign of 'yielding' on my part!" She laughed out.

"Oh, Tavy dear, what should I do without you!--Now if I could make an impression on you, it might be worth while," she added mischievously.

Octavius would have failed to be the man he was had he not felt flattered; he smiled on her indulgently. "Well, I shouldn't tag round after you much if I was thirty year younger; 't ain't my way. But there's one thing, Aileen, I want to say to you, and if you've got any common sense you'll heed me this time: I want you to be mighty careful how you manage with Luigi. You've got no slow-match to play with this time, let me tell you; you've got a regular sleeping volcano like some of them he was born near; and it won't do, I warn you. He ain't Romanzo Caukins--Roman's home made; but t'other is a foreigner; they're different."

"Oh, don't preach, Octavius." She always called him by his unabbreviated name when she was irritated. "I like well enough to sing with Luigi, and go rowing with him, and play tennis, and have the good times, but it's nonsense for you to think he means anything serious. Why, he never spoke a word of love to me in his life!"

"Humph!--that silent kind's the worst; you don't give him a chance."

"And I don't mean to--does that satisfy you?" she demanded. "If it doesn't, I'll tell you something--but it's a secret; you won't tell?"

"Not if you don't want me to; I ain't that kind."

"I know you're not, Tave; that's why I'm going to tell you. Here, let me whisper--"; she bent to his ear; he was seated on a stool in the coach house mending a strap; "--I've waited all this time for that prince to come, and do you suppose for one moment I'd look at any one else?"

"Now that ain't fair to fool me like that, Aileen!"

Octavius was really vexed, but he spoke the last words to empty air, for the girl caught up her skirt and ran like a deer up the lane. He could hear her laughing at his discomfiture; the sound grew fainter and fainter; when it ceased he resumed his work, from time to time shaking his head ominously and talking to himself as a vent for his outraged feelings.

But Aileen spoke the truth. Her vivid imagination, a factor in the true Celtic temperament, provided her with another life, apart from the busy practical one which Mrs. Champney laid out for her. All her childish delights of day-dreaming and joyous romancing, fostered by that first novel which Luigi Poggi thrust through the knothole in the orphan asylum fence, was at once transferred to Alice Van Ostend and her surroundings so soon as the two children established their across-street acquaintance. Upon her arrival in Flamsted, the child's adaptability to changed circ.u.mstances and new environment was furthered by the play of this imagination that fed itself on what others, who lack it, might call the commonplace of life: the house at Champ-au-Haut became her lordly palace; the estate a park; she herself a princess guarded only too well by an aged duenna; Octavius Buzzby and Romanzo Caukins she looked upon as life-servitors.

Now and then the evidence of this unreal life, which she was leading, was made apparent to Octavius and Romanzo by some stilted mode of speech. At such times they humored her; it provided amus.e.m.e.nt of the richest sort. She also continued to invent "novels" for Romanzo's benefit, and many a half-hour the two spent in the carriage house--Aileen aglow with the enthusiasm of narration, and Romanzo intent upon listening, charmed both with the tale and the narrator. In these invented novels, there was always a faithful prince returning after long years of wandering to the faithful princess. This was her one theme with variations.

Sometimes she danced a minuet on the floor of the stable, with this prince as imaginary partner, and Romanzo grew jealous of the bewitching smiles and coquetries she bestowed upon the vacant air. At others she would induce the youth to enter a box stall, telling him to make believe he was at the theatre, and then, forgetting her role of princess, she was again the Aileen Armagh of old--the child on the vaudeville stage, dancing the c.o.o.n dance with such vigor and abandonment that once, when Aileen was nearly sixteen, Octavius, being witness to this flaunting performance, took her severely to task for such untoward actions now that she was grown up. He told her frankly that if Romanzo Caukins was led astray in the future it would be through her carryings-on; at which Aileen looked so dumbfoundered that Octavius at once perceived his mistake, and retreated weakly from his position by telling her if she wanted to dance like that, she'd better dance before him who understood her and her intentions.

At this second speech Aileen stared harder than ever; then going up to him and throwing an arm around his neck, she whispered:

"Tave, dear, are you mad with me? What have I done?--Is it really anything so awful?"

Her distress was so unfeigned that Octavius, not being a woman, comforted her by telling her he was a great botcher. Inwardly he cursed himself for an A No. 1 fool. Aileen never danced the "c.o.o.n" again, but thereafter gave herself such grown-up and stand-off airs in Romanzo's presence, that the youth proceeded in all earnest to lose both head and heart to the girl's gracious blossoming womanhood. Octavius, observing this, groaned in spirit, and henceforth held his tongue when he heard the girl carolling her Irish love songs in the presence of the ingenuous Caukins.

After this, the girl's exuberance of spirits and the sustaining inner life of the imagination helped her wonderfully during the three following years of patient waiting on a confirmed invalid. Of late, Mrs.

Champney had come to depend more and more on the girl's strong youth; to demand more and more from her abundant vitality and lively spirits; and Aileen, although recognizing the anomalous position she held in the Champ-au-Haut household--neither servant nor child, neither companion nor friend--gave of herself; gave as her Irish inheritance prompted her to give: ungrudgingly, faithfully, without reward save the knowledge of a duty performed towards the woman who, in taking her into her household and maintaining her there, had placed her in a position to make friends--such friends!

When the soil is turned over carefully, enriched and prepared perfectly for the seed; when rain is abundant, sunshine plenteous and mother-earth's spring quickening is instinctive, is it to be wondered at that the rootlet delves, the plantlet lifts itself, the bud forms quickly, and unexpectedly spreads its petal-star to the sunlight which enhances its beauty and fructifies its work of reproduction? The natural laws, in this case, work to their prescribed end along lines of favoring circ.u.mstance--and Love is but the working out of the greatest of all Nature's laws. When conditions are adverse, there is only too often struggle, strife, wretchedness. The result is a dwarfing of the product, a lowering of the vital power, a recession from the type. But, on the contrary, when all conditions combine to further the working of this law, we have the rapid and perfect flowering, followed by the beneficent maturity of fruit and seed. Thus Life, the ever-new, becomes immortal.

Small wonder that Aileen Armagh, trying to explain that queer feeling of timidity, should suddenly press her hand hard over her heart! It was throbbing almost to the point of suffocating her, so possessed was it by the joy of a sudden and wonderful presence of love.

The knowledge brought with it a sense of bewildering unreality. She knew now that her day dreams had a substantial basis. She knew now that she had _not_ meant what she said.

For years, ever since the night of the serenade, her vivid imagination had been dwelling on Champney Googe's home-coming; for years he was the central figure in her day dreams, and every dream was made half a reality to her by means of the praises in his behalf which she heard sounded by each man, woman, and child in the ever-increasing circle of her friends. It was always with old Joel Quimber: "When Champ gits back, we'll hev what ye might call the head of a fam'ly agin." Octavius Buzzby spent hours in telling her of the boy's comings and goings and doings at Champ-au-Haut, and the love Louis Champney bore him. Romanzo Caukins set him on the pedestal of his boyish enthusiasm. The Colonel himself was not less enthusiastic than his first born; he never failed to a.s.sure Aileen when she was a guest in his house--an event that became a weekly matter as she grew older--that her lot had fallen in pleasant places; that to his friend, Mrs. Googe, and her son, Champney, she was indebted for the new industrial life which brought with it such advantages to one and all in Flamsted.

To Aurora Googe, the mother of her imaginative ideal, Aileen, attracted from the first by her beauty and motherly kindness towards an orphan waif, gave a child's demonstrative love, afterwards a girl's adoration.

In all this devotion she was abetted by Elvira Caukins to whom Aurora Googe had always been an ideal of womanhood. Moreover, Aileen came to know during these years of Champney Googe's absence that his mother worshipped in reality where she herself worshipped in imagination.

Thus the ground was made ready for the seed. Small wonder that the flowering of love in this warm Irish heart was immediate, when Champney Googe, on the second day after his home-coming, questioned her with that careless challenge in his eyes:

"You wouldn't?"

The sun set before she left the boat house. She ran up the steps to the terrace and, not finding Mrs. Champney there, sought her in the house.

She found her in the library, seated in her easy chair which she had turned to face the portrait of her husband, over the fireplace.

"Why didn't you call me to help you in, Mrs. Champney? I blame myself for not coming sooner."

"I really feel stronger and thought I might as well try it; there is always a first time--and you were with Champney, weren't you?"

"I? Why no--what made you think that?" Mrs. Champney noticed the slight hesitation before the question was put so indifferently, and the quick red that mounted in the girl's cheeks. "Mr. Googe went off half an hour ago with Rag tagging on behind."

"Then he conquered as usual."

"I don't know whether I should call it 'conquering' or not; Rag didn't want to go, that was plain enough to see."