The Brimming Cup Part 23

"Mr. Welles is interested in gardens and wants to look at yours."

"Not much to look at," said the old lady uncompromisingly.

"I don't want to look at a _garden_!" clamored little Mark, outraged at the idea. "I want to be let go up to Aunt Hetty's yattic where the sword and 'pinning-wheel are."

"Would all you children like that best?" asked Marise.

Their old kinswoman answered for them, "You'd better believe they would.

You always did yourself. Run along, now, children, and don't fall on the attic stairs and hurt yourselves on the wool-hetchels."

The fox-terrier, who had hung in an anguish of uncertainty and hope and fear on the incomprehensible words pa.s.sing between little Mark and the grown-ups, perceiving now that the children ran clattering towards the stairs, took a few agitated steps after them, and ran back to Marise, shivering, begging with his eyes, in a wriggling terror lest he be forbidden to follow them into the fun. Marise motioned him along up the stairs, saying with a laughing, indulgent, amused accent, "Yes, yes, poor Medor, you can go along with the children if you want to."

The steel sinews of the dog's legs stretched taut on the instant, in a great bound of relief. He whirled with a ludicrous and undignified haste, slipping, his toe-nails clicking on the bare floor, tore across the room and dashed up the stairs, drunk with joy.

"If strong emotions are what one wants out of life," commented Marise lightly, to Marsh, "one ought to be born a nervous little dog, given over to the whimsical tyranny of humans."

"There are other ways of coming by strong emotions," answered Marsh, not lightly at all.

"What in the world are wool-hetchels?" asked Mr. Welles as the grown-ups went along the hall towards the side-door.

"Why, when I was a girl, and we spun our own wool yarn ..." began Cousin Hetty, trotting beside him and turning her old face up to his.

Marsh stopped short in the hall-way with a challenging abruptness that brought Marise to a standstill also. The older people went on down the long dusky hail to the door and out into the garden, not noticing that the other two had stopped. The door swung shut behind them.

Marise felt the man's dark eyes on her, searching, determined. They were far from those first days, she thought, when he had tacitly agreed not to look at her like that, very far from those first days of delicacy and lightness of touch.

With a determination as firm as his own, she made her face and eyes opaque, and said on a resolutely gay note, "What's the matter? Can't you stand any more information about early times in Vermont? You must have been having too heavy a dose of Mr. Bayweather. But _I_ like it, you know. I find it awfully interesting to know so in detail about any past period of human life; as much so ... why not? ... as researches into which provinces of France used half-timber houses, and how late?"

"You like a great many things!" he said impatiently.

"We must get out into the garden with the others, or Cousin Hetty will be telling her old-time stories before we arrive," she answered, moving towards the door.

She felt her pulse knocking loud and swift. Strange how a casual interchange of words with him would excite and agitate her. But it had been more than that. Everything _was_, with him.

He gave the sidewise toss of his head, which had come to be so familiar to her, as though he were tossing a lock of hair from his forehead, but he said nothing more, following her down the long hall in silence.

It was as though she had physically felt the steel of his blade slide gratingly once more down from her parry. Her mental att.i.tude had been so entirely that of a fencer, on the alert, watchfully defensive against the quick-flashing attack of the opponent, that she had an instant's absurd fear of letting him walk behind her, as though she might feel a thrust in the back. "How ridiculous of me!" she told herself with an inward laugh of genuine amus.e.m.e.nt. "Women are as bad as fox-terriers for inventing exciting occasions out of nothing at all."

Then in a gust of deep anger, instantly come, instantly gone, "Why do I tolerate this for a moment? I was perfectly all right before. Why don't I simply send him about his business, as I would any other bold meddler?"

But after this, with an abrupt shift to another plane, "That would be acting preposterously, like a silly, self-consciously virtuous matron.

What earthly difference does it make to me what a casual visitor to our town says or does to amuse himself in his casual stay, that may end at any moment? And how scarifyingly he would laugh at me, if he knew what comic relics of old prudish reflexes are stirred up by the contact with his mere human livingness. Heavens! How he would laugh to know me capable of being so 'guindee,' so personal, fearing like any school-girl a flirtation in any man's conversation. He must never see a trace of that. No matter how startled I ever am, he mustn't see anything but a smooth, amused surface. It would be intolerable to have him laugh at me."

Her hand was on the latch, when a deep, m.u.f.fled murmur from the depths admonished her, "Personal vanity ... that's what's at the bottom of all that you are telling yourself. It is a vain woman speaking, and fearing a wound to her vanity."

She resented this, pushed it back, and clicked the latch up firmly, stepping out into the transparent gold of the late-afternoon sunshine.

She turned her head as her companion came up behind her on the garden path, half expecting to have his eyes meet hers with a visible shade of sardonic mockery, and prepared to meet it halfway with a similar amus.e.m.e.nt at the absurdity of human beings, herself included.

He was not looking at her at all, but straight before him, unconscious for an instant that she had turned her eyes on him, and in this instant before the customary mask of self-consciousness dropped over his face, she read there, plain and startling to see, unmistakable to her grown woman's experience of life, the marks of a deep, and painful, and present emotion.

All of her hair-splitting speculations withered to nothing. She did not even wonder what it was that moved him so strangely and dreadfully.

There was no room for thought in the profound awed impersonal sympathy which with a great hush came upon her at the sight of another human being in pain.

He felt some intimate emanation from her, turned towards her, and for the faintest fraction of time they looked at each other through a rent in the veil of life.

Cousin Hetty's old voice called them cheerfully, "Over here, this way under the willow-tree."

They turned in that direction, to hear her saying, "... that was in 1763 and of course they came on horseback, using the Indian trails the men had learned during the French-and-Indian wars. Great-grandmother (she was a twelve-year-old girl then) had brought along a willow switch from their home in Connecticut. When the whole lot of them decided to settle here in the valley, and her folks took this land to be theirs, she stuck her willow switch into the ground, alongside the brook here, and this is the tree it grew to be. Looks pretty battered up, don't it, like other old folks."

Mr. Welles tipped his pale, quiet face back to look up at the great tree, stretching its huge, stiff old limbs mutilated by time and weather, across the tiny, crystal brook dimpling and smiling and murmuring among its many-colored pebbles. "Queer, isn't it," he speculated, "how old the tree has grown, and how the brook has stayed just as young as ever."

"It's the other way around between 'Gene Powers' house and his pine-tree," commented Aunt Hetty. "The pine-tree gets bigger and finer and stronger all the time, seems 'sthough, and the house gets more battered and feeble-looking."

Marise looked across at Marsh and found his eyes on her with an expression she rarely saw in them, almost a peaceful look, as of a man who has had something infinitely satisfying fall to his lot. He smiled at her gently, a good, quiet smile, and looked away into the extravagant splendor of a row of peonies.

Marise felt an inexplicable happiness, clear and sunny like the light in the old garden. She sat down on the bench and fell into a more relaxed and restful pose than she had known for some time. What a sweet and gracious thing life could be after all! Could there be a lovelier place on earth than here among Cousin Hetty's flower-children. Dear old Cousin Hetty, with her wrinkled, stiff exterior, and those bright living eyes of hers. She was the willow-tree outside and the brook inside, that's what she was. What tender childhood recollections were bound up with the sight of that quiet old face.

"And those rose-bushes," continued the old woman, "are all cuttings my great-great-grandmother brought up from Connecticut, and _they_ came from cuttings our folks brought over from England, in 1634. If 'twas a little later in the season, and they were in bloom, you'd see how they're not nearly so I double as most roses. The petals are bigger and not so curled up, more like wild roses."

She sat down beside the others on the long wooden bench, and added, "I never dig around one of those bushes, nor cut a rose to put in a vase, without I feel as though Great-great-grandmother and Grandmother and all the rest were in me, still alive."

"Don't you think," asked Marise of the two men, "that there is something awfully sweet about feeling yourself a part of the past generations, like that? As we do here. To have such a familiarity with any corner of the earth ... well, it seems to me like music, the more familiar it is, the dearer and closer it is ... and when there are several generations of familiarity back of you... . I always feel as though my life were a part of something much bigger than just _my_ life, when I feel it a continuation of their lives, as much as of my own childhood. It always seems deep and quieting to me."

Mr. Welles a.s.sented wistfully, "It makes me envious."

Marsh shook his head, sending up a meditative puff of smoke. "If you want to know how it really strikes me, I'll have to say it sounds plain sleepy to me. Deep and quieting all right, sure enough. But so's opium.

And in my experience, most things just get duller and duller, the more familiar they are. I don't begin to have time in my life for the living I want to do, my own self! I can't let my grandmothers and grandfathers come shoving in for another whirl at it. They've had their turn. And my turn isn't a minute too long for me. Your notion looks to me ... lots of old accepted notions look like that to me ... like a good big dose of soothing syrup to get people safely past the time in their existences when they might do some sure-enough personal living on their own hook."

He paused and added in a meditative murmur, "That time is so d.a.m.n short as it is!"

He turned hastily to the old lady with an apology. "Why, I _beg_ your pardon! I didn't realize I had gone on talking aloud. I was just thinking along to myself. You see, your soothing syrup is working on me, the garden, the sun, the stillness, all the grandmothers and grandfathers sitting around. I am almost half asleep."

"I'm an old maid, I know," said Cousin Hetty piquantly. "But I'm not a proper Ma.s.sachusetts old maid. I'm Vermont, and a swear-word or two don't scare me. I was brought up on first-hand stories of Ethan Allen's talk, and ..."

Marise broke in hastily, in mock alarm, "Now, Cousin Hetty, don't you start in on the story of Ethan Allen and the cowshed that was too short.

I won't have our city visitors scandalized by our lack of ..."

Cousin Hetty's laughter cut her short, as merry and young a sound as the voice of the brook. "I hadn't thought of that story in years!" she said.

She and Marise laughed together, looking at each other. But they said nothing else.

"Aren't you going to _tell_ us?" asked Mr. Welles with a genuine aggrieved surprise which tickled Cousin Hetty into more laughter.

"I shall not rest day or night, till I have found someone who knows that story," said Marsh, adding, "Old Mrs. Powers must know it. And _she_ will love to tell it to me. It is evidently the sort of story which is her great specialty."