Through stained glass Part 44

Leighton drew a long breath.

"I used to lie with my head in Jeanette's lap because it was the only way I could see her eyes. Her lashes were so long that when she raised them it was like the slow flutter of the wings of a b.u.t.terfly at rest.

She did not raise them often. She kept them down--almost against the soft round of her cheek--because--because, she said, she could dream better that way.

"How shall I tell you about her hair? I used to reach up and pull at it until it tumbled. And then, because Jeanette's hair never laughed except when it was the playmate of light, I used to drag her to her feet, across the wall, across the lane, down there to the flat rock just above the spring.

"There we would sit, side by side, and every once in a while look fearfully around, so public seemed that open s.p.a.ce. But all we ever saw for our pains was a squirrel or perhaps a woodchuck looking around fearfully, too. Jeanette would sit with her hands braced behind her, her tumbled hair splashing down over her shoulders and down her back. The setting sun would come skipping over the hills and play in her hair, and Jeanette's hair would laugh--laugh out loud. And I--I would bury my face in it, as you bury your face in flowers, and wonder at the unshed tears that smarted in my eyes."

Leighton stopped to sigh. It was a quivering sigh that made Lewis want to put out his hand and touch his father, but he was afraid to move.

Leighton went on.

"Look well about you, boy. No wheel has jarred this silence for many a year--not since I bought the land you see and closed the road. Man seldom comes here now,--only children in the fall of the year when the chestnuts are ripe. Jeanette liked children. She was never anything but a child herself. Look well about you, I say, for these still woods and fields, with G.o.d's free air blowing over them,--they were your cradle, the cradle of your being.

"It was Jeanette that made me go back to college when college opened, but months later it was William that sent for me when Jeanette was too weak to stop him. The term was almost over. Through all the winter I had never mentioned Jeanette to the folks at home, hoping that my father would let me come home for the summer and wander these hills unwatched.

Now William wrote. I couldn't make out each individual word, but the sum of what he tried to tell flew to my heart.

"Jeanette had disappeared from Aunt Jed's three months before. They had not found her, for they had watched for her only where I was. She had gone to William's little house. She had been hidden away there. While she was well enough, she had not let him send for me. There was panic in William's letter, for he wrote that he would meet the first train by which I could come, and every other train thereafter.

"You heard William say the other day that he had never driven like that since--and there I stopped him. It was since the day I came back to Jeanette he was going to say. We didn't mind the horses breaking that day. Where the going was good, they ran because they felt like it; where it was bad, they ran because I made them. I asked William if he had a doctor, and he said he had. He had done more than that: he had married Mrs. Tuck to look after Jeanette.

"We stopped in the village for the parson. I was going to blurt out the truth to him, but William was wiser. He told him that some one was dying. So we got the old man between us, and I drove while William held him. He would have jumped out. He thought we were mad."

CHAPTER XLVII

Leighton paused as he thought grimly over that ride. Then he went on:

"The last thing my father paid for out of his own pocket on my account was that team of horses from the livery stable. They got to William's all right, but they were broken--broken past repair. Poor beasts! Even so we were only just in time. The old parson married me to Jeanette. I would have killed him if he had hesitated. I didn't have to tell him so; he saw it.

"For one blessed moment Jeanette forgot pain and locked her arms about my neck. Then they pushed me out, and William and the parson with me.

Mrs. Tuck and the doctor stayed in there. You were born." Leighton gripped his hands hard on his stick. "What--what was it the old Woman--the fortune-teller--said?"

"'Child of love art thou,'" repeated Lewis, in a voice lower than his father's. "'At thy birth was thy mother rent asunder, for thou wert conceived too near the heart.'"

Leighton trembled as though with the ague. He nodded his head, already low sunk upon his breast.

"It was that--just that," he whispered. "They called us in, the old preacher and me. Jeanette stayed just for a moment, her hand in mine, her eyes in mine, and then--she was gone. The old parson cried like a child. I wondered why he cried. Suddenly I knew, and my curses rose above his prayers. I sprang for William's rifle in the corner, and before they could stop me, I shot you.

"Boy, I shot to kill; but the best shot at a hundred yards will miss every time at a hundred inches. The bullet just grazed your shoulder, and at the sting of it you began to gasp and presently to cry. Tears afterward the doctor told me you would never have lived to draw a single breath if it hadn't been for that shot. The shock of it was what started your heart, your lungs. They had tried slapping, and it hadn't done any good."

Leighton paused again, before he went on in a dull voice.

"After that I can tell you what happened only from hearsay. Aunt Jed came and took you and what was left of Jeanette, your mother. Sometime you must stop in the churchyard down yonder under the steeple and look for a little slab that tells nothing--nothing except that Jeanette died a wife before the law and--and much beloved before G.o.d.

"They kept me at William's for days until I was in my right mind. The day they took me home was the day father paid for the horses--the day he died. I don't know if he would have forgiven me if he had lived. I never saw him again alive, after he knew. I've often wondered. I would give a lot to know, even to-day, that he would have forgiven. But life is like that. Death strikes and leaves us blind--blind to some vital spring of love, could we but find it and touch it."

Lewis was young. Just to hear the burden that had lain so long upon his father's heart was too much for him. Not for nothing had Leighton lived beside his boy. There, under the still trees, their souls reached out and touched. Lewis dropped his head and arms upon his father's knees and sobbed. He felt as though his whole heart was welling up in tears.

Leighton's hand fell caressingly upon him. He did not speak until his boy had finished crying, then he said:

"I've told you all this because you alone in all the world have a right to know, a right to know your full inheritance--the inheritance of a child of love."

Leighton paused.

"I never saw you again," he went on, "until that day when we met down there at the ends of the earth. Aunt Jed had sent you down there to hide you from me. Before she died she told me where you were and sent me to you. She needn't have told me to go after you.

"As you go on and meet a wider world, you will hear strange things of your father. Believe them all, and then, if you can, still remember.

Don't waste love. That's a prayer and a charge. I've wasted a lot of life and self, but never a jot of love. Now go, boy. Tell them I've stayed behind for supper."

Lewis did not hurry. When he reached the homestead, it was already late.

Mrs. Tuck had kept their supper hot for them. When she saw Lewis come in alone, she rushed up to him with eager questions of his father. Lewis looked with new eyes upon her kindly anxious face.

"It's all right," he said. "Dad stayed behind. He doesn't want any supper."

Mrs. Tuck looked shrewdly at him, and then turned away.

"It ain't never all right," she said half to herself, "when a man full-grown don't want his supper."

Lewis saw nothing more of his father that night. He tried to keep awake, but it was long after sleep had conquered him that Leighton came in. And during the days that followed he saw less and less of his father. Early in the morning Leighton would be up. He would eat, and then wander about the place listlessly with his cigar. His head hanging, he would wander farther and farther from the house until, almost without volition, he would suddenly strike off in a straight line across the hills.

Lewis would have noticed the desertion more had it not been for Natalie.

Natalie claimed and held all his days. Together they walked and drove till Lewis had learned all the highways and byways that Natalie had long since discovered. She liked the byways best, and twice she drove through crowding brush to the foot of the lane that was barred.

"I've often come here," she said, "and I've even tried to pull those bars down, but they're solider than they look. I'm not strong enough.

Will you help me some day? I want to follow that dear old mossy lane to its end, if it has one. It looks as if it led straight into the land of dreams."

"It probably does," said Lewis. "I'll never help you pull down those bars, because, if you've got any heart, you can look at them and see that whoever put them up owns that land of dreams, and there's no land of dreams with room for more than two people, and they must be holding hands."

"You've made me not want to go in there," said Natalie as she turned Gip around. "How could you see it like that? You're not a woman."

Lewis did not answer, but when, two days later, they were out after strawberries, and Natalie led him through a wood in the valley to the foot of the pasture with the oaks and the spring, Lewis stopped her.

"Don't let's go up there, Nan," he said. "That's part of somebody else's land of dreams. Dad's tip there somewhere, I'm sure."

Natalie looked at him, and he saw in her eyes that she knew all that he had not told in words.

CHAPTER XLVIII

Leighton and Lewis made two business trips away from the homestead, and on both occasions, as soon as affairs permitted, hurried back with equal eagerness. Leighton tried to read significance into the fact that Lewis was not chafing at his absence from Folly, but he could not because Lewis wrote to Folly every week, and seemed to revel in telling her everything. Folly's answers were few and far between.

Leighton would have given much to see one of Folly's letters. He wondered if her maid wrote them for her. He used to watch Lewis reading them. They were invariably short--mere notes. Lewis would read each one several times to make it seem like a letter. He seemed to feel that his father would like to see one of the letters, and one day, to keep himself from calling himself coward, he impulsively handed one over.