Through stained glass Part 43

Natalie could not eat that night. She slipped away early to bed--to the little, old-fashioned bed that had been Aunt Jed's. It, too, was a four-poster; but so pompous a name overweighted its daintiness. So light were its tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs in white, so snowy the mounds of its pillows and the narrow reach of its counterpane, that it seemed more like a nesting-place for untainted dreams than the sensible, stocky little bed it was.

Natalie went to bed and to sleep, but scarcely had the last gleam faded from the western sky when she awoke. A sudden terror seized her. The pillow beneath her cheek was wet. Upon her heart a great weight pressed down and down. For a moment she rebelled. She had gone to sleep in the lap of her happiest day. How could she wake to grief? A single word tapped at her brain: Folly, Folly. And then she knew--she knew the wound her happy day had left; and wide-eyed, fighting for breath, her arms outstretched, she felt the slow birth of the pain that lives and lives and grows with life.

Natalie cried easily for happiness, and so the tears that she could spare to grief were few. Not for nothing had she been born to the note of joy. Through all her life, so troubled, so thinly spread with pleasures, she had clung to her inheritance. Often had her mind questioned her heart: "What is there in this empty day? Why do you laugh? Why do you sing?" And ever her heart had answered, "I laugh and sing because, if not to-day, then to-morrow, the full day cometh."

But to-night her inheritance seemed a little and a cruel thing.

Wide-eyed she prayed for the tears that would not come. Dry were her eyes, dry was her throat, and dry the pressing weight upon her heart.

Hours pa.s.sed, and then she put forth her strength. She slipped from the bed and walked with groping hands toward the open window. In the semi-darkness she moved like a tall, pale light. Down her back and across her bosom her hair fell like a caressing shadow. Her white feet made no sound.

She reached the window and knelt, her arms folded upon the low sill. She tossed the hair from before her face and looked out upon the still night. How far were the stars to-night--as cold and far as on that night of long ago when she had stood on the top of the highest hill and called to the desert for Lew!

She stayed at the window for a long time, and found meager comfort at last in the thought that Lewis could not have guessed. How could he have guessed what she herself had not known? She arose and went back to bed.

Then she lay thinking and planning a course that should keep not only Lewis but also Mrs. Leighton and mammy blind to the wound she bore. And while she was in the midst of planning, sleep came and made good its ancient right to lock hands with tired youth.

Leighton was crestfallen to see in what high spirits Lew had come back from his first day with Natalie. He lost faith at once in H lne's cure.

Then, as they went to bed, he clutched at a straw.

"Lew," he asked, "did you tell your pal everything?"

"Everything I could think of in the time," said Lewis, smiling. "One day isn't much when you've got half of two lives to go over. Of course there were things we forgot. We'll have them to tell to-morrow."

"Was Folly one of the things you forgot?"

"No," answered Lewis and paused, a puzzled look on his brow. He was wondering why he had remembered Folly. To-night she seemed very far away. Then he threw back his head and looked at his father. "Why did you ask that?"

Leighton did not answer for a moment. Finally he said:

"Because it's the one thing you hadn't a right to keep to yourself. I'm glad you saw that. Always start square with a woman. If you do,--afterward,--she'll forgive you anything."

Lewis went to bed with the puzzled look still on his face. It was not because he had _seen_ anything that he had told of Folly. He had told of her simply as a part of chronology--something that couldn't be skipped without leaving a gap. Now he wondered, if he had had time to think, would he have told? He had scarcely put the question to himself when sleep blotted out thought.

On the next day Leighton had the bays. .h.i.tched to what was left of the carryall, and with Silas and Lewis drove over to Aunt Jed's to pay his respects to Mrs. Leighton. Natalie and Lew went off for a ramble in the hills. Mammy bustled about her kitchen dreaming out a dream of an early dinner for the company, and murmuring instructions to Ephy, a pale little slip of a woman whom the household, seeking to help, had installed as helper. Mrs. Leighton stayed with Leighton out under the elms. They talked little, but they said much.

It was still early in the day when Leighton said:

"I shall call you Ann. You must call me Glen."

"Of course," answered Mrs. Leighton, and then wondered why it was "of course." "I suppose," she said aloud, "it's 'of course' because of Lew.

I feel as though I were sitting here years ahead, talking to Lew when his head will be turning gray."

"Don't!" cried Leighton. "Don't say that! Lew travels a different road."

Mrs. Leighton looked up, surprised at his tone.

"Perhaps you don't see what we can see. Perhaps you don't know what you have done for Lew."

"I have done nothing for Lew," said Leighton, quickly. "If anything has been done for Lew, it was done in the years when I was far from him in body, in mind, and in spirit. Lew would have been himself without me. It is doubtful whether he would have been himself without you. I--I don't forget that."

CHAPTER XLVI

At four o'clock Leighton sent for Silas.

"Take the team home, Silas," he said. "We're going to walk. Come along, Lew."

"It's awfully early, Dad," said Lew, with a protesting glance at the high sun.

"The next to the last thing a man learns in social finesse," said Leighton, "and the very last rule that reaches the brain of woman, is to say good-by while it's still a shock to one's hosts."

"And it's still a shock to-day," said Mrs. Leighton, smiling. "But you mustn't quarrel with what your father's said, Lew," she added. "He's given you the key to the heart of 'Come again!'"

"As if Lew would ever need that!" cried Natalie.

Soon after leaving the house, Leighton struck off to the right and up.

His step was not springy. His head hung low on his breast, and his fingers gripped nervously at the light stick he carried. He did not speak, and Lewis knew enough not to break that silence. They crossed a field, Leighton walking slightly ahead. He did not have to look up to lead the way.

Presently they came into a lane. It dipped off to the left, into the valley. It was bordered by low, gray stone walls. On its right hung a thick wood of second-growth trees--a New England wood, various beyond the variety of any other forest on earth. It breathed a mingled essence of faint odors. The fronds of the trees reached over and embowered the lane.

On the left the view was open to the valley by reason of a pasture. The low stone wall was topped by a snaky fence of split rails. They were so old, so gray, that they, too, seemed of stone. Beyond them sloped the meager pasture-land; brown, almost barren even in the youth of the year.

It was strewn with flat, outcropping rocks. Here and there rose a mighty oak. A splotch of green marked a spring. Below the spring one saw the pale blush of laurel in early June.

Leighton stopped and prodded the road with his stick. Lewis looked down.

He saw that his father's hand was trembling. His eyes wandered to a big stone that peeped from the loam in the very track of any pa.s.sing wheel.

The stone was covered with moss--old moss. It was a long time since wheels had pa.s.sed that way.

Leighton walked on a few steps, and then paused again, his eyes fixed on a spot at the right of the lane where the old wall had tumbled and brought with it a tangled ma.s.s of fox-grape vine. He left the roadway and sat on the lower wall, his back against a rail. He motioned to Lewis to sit down too.

"I have brought you here," said Leighton and stopped. His voice had been so low that Lewis had understood not a word. "I have brought you here,"

said Leighton again, and this time clearly, "to tell you about your mother."

Lewis restrained himself from looking at his father's face.

"Your mother's name," went on Leighton, "was Jeanette O'Reilly. She was a milk-maid. That is, she didn't have to milk the cows, but she took charge of the milk when it came into the creamery and did to and with it all the things that women do with milk. I only knew your mother when she was seventeen. No one seemed to know where Jeanette came from. Perhaps Aunt Jed knew. I think she did, but she never told. I never asked. To me Jeanette came straight from the hand of G.o.d.

"I have known many beautiful women, but since Jeanette, the beauty of women has not spoken to the soul of me. There is a beauty--and it was hers--that cries out, just as a still and glorious morning cries out, to the open windows of the soul. To me Jeanette was all sighing, sobbing beauty. Beauty did not rest upon her; it glowed through her. She alone was the prism through which my eyes could look upon the Promised Land. I knew it, and so--I told my father.

"I was only a boy, not yet of age. My father never hesitated. All the power that law and tradition allowed he brought to bear. He forbade me to visit Aunt Jed's or to see Jeanette again. He gave me to understand that the years held no hope for me--that on the day I broke his command I would cut myself off from him and home. To clinch things, he sent me away to college a month early, and put me under a tutor.

"There is a love that forgets all else--that forgets honor. I forged a letter to the authorities and signed my father's name to it. It told them to send me back at once--that my mother was ill. I came back to these hills, but not home. Far back in the woods here William Tuck had a hut. He was a wood-cutter. He lived alone. He owed nothing to any man.

Many a time we had shot and fished together. I came back to William.

"This lane doesn't lead to Aunt Jed's. This land never belonged to her.

Here we used to meet, Jeanette and I. You see the ma.s.s of fox-grape over yonder? In that day the wall hadn't tumbled. It stood straight and firm.

The fox-grape sprang from it and climbed in a great veil over the young trees. Behind that wall, in the cool dusk of the grapevine, we used to sit and laugh inside when a rare buggy or a wagon went by."