_Three Meadows, Maine, Friday Afternoon._
It would be tea time anywhere else, Michael Daragh, but it gives no tea here. Eating between meals is deplored and is referred to as "piecing." Will you ask Mrs. Hills to express my tea basket and two cups?
This is a lamb of an island. The land lifts away to low hills and the village has splashed a little way up on the sides. A curtain of filmy fog has just risen clear of the treetops and everything is graciously gray. No one ever comes so late in the season and this awful, little hotel is closing,--it ought to be closed and sealed forever.
Everything about the tiny town is refreshing. A citizen finished up a game of checkers before he went down to consider the case of my trunk. Then it took him some time to wake up his horse, which did a bewildered Lady Macbeth up the street. I was walking beside, and suddenly a roly-poly puppy slipped away from a boy and ran straight under the clumsy hoofs.... You never heard such ki-yi"s. You"d think he was being vivisected. There was a shrieking streak of white and he disappeared under a culvert. The old mare stopped, wide-awake and horror-stricken, and the boy--a pitiful little person with his head held tautly back, almost a hunchback--and the driver and I flew to the spot and all the village Hectors laid their helmets by and gave themselves to the hour. The sweetest old man in rusty black laid right down flat on his stomach and peeked into the dusty tunnel, calling, "Come, pup! Come, pup! Come, _dear_!" But the yammerings went on.
Finally the blacksmith next door put down a pink horseshoe and came out. I"m much obliged for blacksmiths nowadays, aren"t you, Michael Daragh? I love their leaping fires and their worn, leather ap.r.o.ns and their dim, rich Flemish interiors,--in our soft world of push b.u.t.tons.
This one said, "Was they a string around his neck, Dan"l?" Then he went back into his shop and returned with a long stick with a bent nail in the end and began to fish absorbedly into the culvert.
Presently a wild crescendo of shrieks announced his catch. I shut my eyes and covered my ears and when I looked again he was hauling out a quivering lump of baby dog. He felt him all over with grimy, gentle fingers and "allowed they warn"t nothin" broke ... just skairt him outer a year"s growth," handed him back to the boy and went again to his horseshoe. The people pressed close with little clucks of sympathy and made the nicest fuss about it, and the boy turned out to be Daniel Gillespie and I went right on home with him and arranged to move there to-morrow--his mother desiring a day in which to "red up"
for me. I wanted to go at once--I"m so afraid this hotel might close with a snap, with me on the inside. At noon to-day I did not crave any of the ready-to-wear effects on the zebra menu card and asked the aloof young lady under the pompadour how long the chops would take.
""Bout fifteen minutes." "Very well, then," I said, "I"ll take the chops." "_Ain"t_ any."
Don"t you adore that, Michael Daragh?
_The Next Friday, At Deacon Gillespie"s._
The top of the morning to you, Michael Daragh! Here in the rich cream of the day we"re waiting for the mail, Dan"l and I and the pup. Guess where? In the graveyard, and I"m sitting on a tumbled-over tombstone.
I wish I could make you see this spot. I"ve always hated cemeteries, the sleek, prosperous, well-fed, well-groomed sort, but this is indeed G.o.d"s Acre. You step over the broken stones of the wall into a land of gracious gray; gray stone and moss, gray sky and feathery fog. Twice only in my vista a note of color--a low-growing lobelia, intensely blue against the foot of a new grave, and further on a brave geranium, flaunting the scarlet flag of defiance at death; for the rest, the quiet gray of peace and permanence. Involuntarily, one treads softly, as in a room with sleepers ... sleepers of a long, soft sleep ... who have laid them thankfully down to rest and left no call!
I hear the _klip-klup_ of Lizzie, the postman"s horse, so I can"t tell you about the Gillespies until next letter.
Dear M.D., I"m growing so nice you wouldn"t know me for the frenzied vaude-villain of a fortnight past. Some of the old cells in my brains are coming to life again. _Thanks_, Michael Daragh! Do you know what M.D. stands for?--Do-er of Miracles. Isn"t it pretty much of a miracle to make me turn my back on five orders and bring my soul up here to renovate it?
J. V.
_Tuesday._
Michael Daragh, I"m up in my cunning little room with its heaving ceiling and its braided mats and patchwork quilt, and I can look down on the corner of the graveyard and see Dan"l and his dog waiting for Uncle Robert. He is not a real postman but he drives down for his own mail every day and "stops by" with the Gillespies". (Not that they ever have any!) He"s the old man who got down on his rusty black stomach to peek into the culvert and call "Come, pup, come, _dear_!"
He"s the sweetest old thing with Dan"l. The child lives in constant hope of a letter, and every day Uncle Robert (he"s everybody"s uncle) says, "Wall, not _to-day_, Dan"l!" And then Dan"l and the pup trot home.
Dan"l is the most appealing child! I"ve always fancied the freckles and splinters and grime and cheek type of little boy, but Dan"l gets into your heart, some way. He makes me think of Andrea del Sarto"s young St. John in the Wilderness, for he has, in addition to the unearthly sweetness in his eyes, a warmth of coloring at variance with the drained fairness of these islanders. His Canadian mother explains that,--"her that was Angerleek Larrydoo," as the neighbors say, and that just expresses it. She was--but she isn"t any more.
She"s just the Deacon"s "woman." (That is his own gallant phrase: "I guess likely my woman"ll cal"late she c"n do fer y"u," he said when I asked for board.)
She has a sort of petrified prettiness, the ghost of girlhood in a face furrowed and sagging with fretted years. Age and unhappiness have hardened about the sweetness of long ago--like a rose imbedded in ice at a country fair.
And the Deacon! I didn"t know it gave his like, in these lax days. He has a beautifully chiseled old face with an eagle beak and ice-blue eyes, and he looks as if his favorite winter sport were Turning Erring Daughters Out into the Snow.
Dan"l is the only child at home now and they both adore him,--the mother with timid tenderness and the old man with fierce repression.
Even the pup takes on character from the family. I call it Sweet-Alice-Ben-Bolt, because it very nearly weeps with delight when you give it a smile and trembles with fear at your frown. The Deacon is of that large and austere order of persons who "like dogs, in their place"; S.A.B.B. wears his stumpy, little tail at half mast whenever the head of the house is near.
There is some mystery about Dan"l"s watching for a letter. His mother yearns over him and says,--"But, maybe to-morrow, Dannie!" but his father sneers, and then the child seems to shrivel before my eyes.
I wish I could slip some silver-gray fog in this letter, to rub on your burning brow!
J. V.
_Some Day in October._
My days slip by like pearl-gray beads on a rosary, Michael Daragh. I honestly haven"t an idea of the date. But I know Dan"l"s story. We were sitting on the toppled-over tombstone of a st.u.r.dy old patriarch who had buried four wives, just after the postman went by one day, and the child said, defensively, as if in answer to my thought----
"But I did get a letter, once!"
I kept mouse-still, and he told me. Last summer there came to Three Meadows a lazy, charming, gypsy sort of fellow from nowhere, stony broke, to whom the Deacon gave work for his board. Out of Danny"s clipped phrases I could build up the rogue"s personality,--the gay, lavish, careless, happy-go-lucky-ness which warmed the c.o.c.kles of the little lad"s hungry heart.
He was here four months, and then a pal wrote him he could get him a job as handy man with a small circus then in Vermont. But Dan"l"s beloved vagabond hadn"t a sou, and before he could tramp there, the show would be far on its southern way. Naturally, the Deacon refused a loan--I can just see the way his mouth would snap shut like a trap, but Dan"l, what with egg money and his tiny garden, and errand money from summer boarders, had gathered together twenty slow dollars, and he came lavishly forward. The rover blithely promised to pay him back in two monthly payments. He"s never sent a penny. He wrote once; Danny showed me the letter, worn with many rapt readings,--a silly, flowing hand which looks as if it had been done up in curl papers over night--and explained that he"d been sick, and had to buy clothes, but next month, _sure_! And Dan"l was a sport and true blue and a little old pal, and he"d never forget him.
Dan"l"s "bein" so puny" saved him the whole brunt of his father"s rage, but this sneering scorn has been harder to bear,--and the amazing part of it is that the boy doesn"t really care about the money,--lean little Islander though he is. That is merely the symbol of his friend"s good faith. "Ef only he"d jest write "n tell me things," he sighed, "th" money c"d wait. He needs it worse"n I do."
Meanwhile, with eternal-springing hope in his little flat chest he trots down to the graveyard corner every day, and every day Uncle Robert says, with a cheery chirp in italics, "Wall, not _to-day_, Dan"l!"
The child is getting thinner and paler, now the sharp weather is coming. His father wrote a laborious letter by the lamp, one evening, and a week later a good gruff old doctor came over from the mainland and chaffed Danny about his pup and told him to play in the sun and drink plenty of milk and not to fret about school this year. I waylaid him privately and asked if there was anything I could get or do--a tonic, a change. He patted my shoulder and said, "Land t"goodness, no! That youngun"s been a-dying ever since I borned him, fourteen years ago. He warn"t meant for old bones."
Oh, Michael Daragh, I can"t stand it--poor little Daniel in a Lion"s Den of broken faith, and scorn, and creeping death! What can I _do_?
J. V.
CHAPTER X
But it was well into October before the Irishman got the letter which he had been waiting for--the one which sent the color mounting gladly in his lean cheeks. It was not long, but it fairly sang with jubilance and the feel of it in his hand was warm.
_On a Gold and Scarlet Afternoon._
Michael Daragh, I"m at work! Steadily, sanely, surely, at work again!
Long ago, before I began to run after strange G.o.ds, I got a story back from the _New England Monthly_--that Dean of Magazines in her sober brown frock with no jewels or adornments at all,--with a quite wonderful personal note. If I had followed it up, I do believe I"d have landed on that stern and rock-bound coast, but I went over to the flesh pots instead. Now I have made a stern and rock-bound compact with myself. I"m not coming back to New York, and you are not to write me a line, until I"ve written a tale that brown-gowned magazine will take. "Where there is no vision, the people perish,"
the Deacon thundered, at a meeting. I was very near to perishing, when you scolded me awake, Michael Daragh, M.D., Miracle Do-er, G.o.d save you kindly!
That vaudeville work--and I shall do more of it, some day--was like a fast and furious game of tennis under a scorching sun; now I"m delving in a dim, cool library.
I"m going to be as patient as a locust bridge-builder. I know that flocks of long envelopes are coming back, bringing their tales behind them, but one day I shall hear a jubilant note in the _klip-klup_ of Lizzie"s hoofs and Uncle Robert will hand me an envelope of bewitching smallness, with a tiny typed letter inside.... "It is with very great pleasure...."
Until _that_ day break, and the shadows flee away----
J. V.
It was Michael Daragh"s custom to read these letters three times, carefully, and then to tear them in pieces which would be annoyingly and impossibly small to the chambermaid, and to throw them into his waste-paper basket, but this time, after his third perusal, instead of destroying it he put it away in his worn leather wallet. "I"ll be keeping it, just, till the next one comes," he told himself, silently, "so I can be comparing the way she"s coming on--G.o.d love her."
But the next letter to come and several following held no mention of her task. It was as if she had opened the heart of her mind further than she meant to do, and was shyly standing in front of it, now, talking of things remote and removed.
_Friday Morning._