"It was from Aunt Dinah"s quilting party I was seeing Nellie home."
How many scores of times had that song echoed through the valley! They had sung it crunching through the snow with their skates on their shoulders; they had hummed it strolling through starry August nights when the still air was heavy with the smell of dew-laden lilies. Now, once more they sang it, like boys and girls together again, and Betty wiped her eyes with a little thrill of pleasure when Jack"s voice joined in the chorus. She had never heard him sing before and she did not know that he had such a deep, sweet voice. It pleased her, too, to know that he was familiar with the song and could join in with the others as readily as if he had always had a part in her happy past.
At the gate she turned for one more look at the house, with its lights streaming from every window, and wondered when she would ever see it again.
"But no matter how long it may be," she thought, "I can carry the cheer of those lights with me always, wherever I go. It"s been such a happy, happy home."
When they reached the station there were only a few moments to wait for the train. She stood holding Lloyd"s hand in silence while the others talked, until they heard it rumbling down the track. It was a fast express that stopped only by special order, and then only long enough to throw the trunks on, so the leave-taking was over in a rush. In another instant she was sitting with her face pressed against the window pane, peering out for a last glimpse of the place. She saw just one quickly vanishing light as they sped by, and whispered, "Good-bye, dear Valley."
A sudden feeling of homesickness took possession of her for one long moment. Then Jack"s hand closed over hers, holding it in a warm, strong clasp, and she knew that he understood just what that parting meant to her. Instantly there sprang up in her heart the knowledge that all she had left behind was as nothing to the love and sympathy that was to enfold her henceforth.
CHAPTER II
TOWARDS THE CANAAN OF HER DESIRE
In Phil Tremont"s office desk, in an inner drawer reserved for private papers, lay a package of letters fastened together by a broad rubber band. "From the Little Vicar," it was labelled, and Mary"s astonishment would have been great, could she have known that every letter she had ever written him was thus preserved. He had kept the first ones, written in a childish, painstaking hand, because they chronicled the doings of the family at Ware"s Wigwam in such an amusing and characteristic way.
The letters after that time had been few and far between until her final return to Lone-Rock, but each one had been kept for some different reason. It had contained a particularly laughable description of some of her Warwick Hall escapades, or some original view of life and the world in general which made it worth preserving.
Then when Mrs. Ware"s letters ceased, and at Phil"s urgent request Mary took up her mother"s custom of writing regularly to him, he kept them because they revealed so much of herself. So brave, so womanly, so strong she had grown, bearing her great sorrow as the Jester did his hidden sword, to prove that "undaunted courage was the jewel of her soul." All during the lonely summer after her mother"s death he expected to go to see her in the fall, but the work which held him in Mexico was not finished, and too much depended upon its successful completion for him to ask for leave of absence.
Then, just as he was about to start back to the States, his chief was taken ill, and asked him to stay and fill his place in another engineering enterprise which he had made a contract for. It was an opportunity too big for Phil to thrust aside, even if his sense of obligation had not been so great to the man who had helped make him what he was. So he consented to stay on another year. The place to which he was sent, where the great new dam was to be constructed, was further in the interior. His papers, brought over on mule back, were a week old when they reached him, and Mary"s letters attained an importance they might not have had otherwise, had he been in a less lonely region.
It was with great satisfaction that he heard of Jack"s marriage. He felt that Mary would be more satisfied to stay on in Lone-Rock indefinitely now that she had Betty"s companionship. Her letters were enthusiastic about the new sister, whom she had long loved, first with the admiration of a little girl for an older one, then with that of a pupil for an adored teacher. Now they seemed of the same age, and of the same mind about essential things, especially the pedestal on which they both placed Jack.
Betty fitted into the family as beautifully as if she had always been a part of it, Mary wrote soon after her arrival. She loved Lone-Rock the moment she laid eyes on it, and made friends with everybody right away.
She thought it an ideal place in which to write, and already was at work on the series which the publishers had asked for. Norman was "simply crazy" about her, and Jack was so happy and proud that it did one"s heart good to see him.
As for Mary herself, it was easy for Phil to see the vast difference that Betty"s coming had made in her life. He laid these letters aside with the others as they came, thankful for the happy spirit that breathed through them, for now he was convinced that she "really felt the gladness she had only feigned before." She was all aglow once more with her old hopes and ambitions. Despite her efforts to hide it he had discerned how dreary the days had been for her hitherto, and now he was glad he could think of her with the background she pictured for him.
Betty"s coming had brightened it wonderfully. But just as he was beginning to be sure she was satisfied and settled, a little note came to disturb his comfort in that belief. It was evidently scrawled in haste and began abruptly without address or date.
""_And it came to pa.s.s . . . when the cloud was taken up . . . they journeyed!_" Oh, Phil, the signal to move on has come at last! I have no idea what it will lead to. It may be to the wells of some Elim, it may be to that part of the wilderness "where there is no water to drink." But wherever it may be I"m convinced that Providence is pointing the way, for the call came without my lifting so much as a little finger. It came through Madam Chartley.
I"m to be secretary for a friend of hers, a Mrs. Dudley Blythe of Riverville, at a big salary--at least it seems big to me--and I"m leaving in the morning. That"s all I know now, but I"ll write you full particulars as soon as I"m settled.
"Manuella, the clever little Mexican maid who has tided us over various emergencies, is coming to help Betty with the work, so that the writing may not be interfered with. Yours, once more on the march towards the Canaan of her desire,
"M. W."
The next was a note scribbled at some junction near the end of her journey.
"Five hours late, so we"ve missed connection and are side-tracked here, waiting for the fast express to pa.s.s us. Nothing at all has happened as there usually does on my travels, and I"ve met no interesting people. But I"ve had a really thrilling time just guessing what my future is to be like. I"ve imagined Mrs. Dudley Blythe to be every kind of a woman that would be likely to employ a secretary, from a stern-eyed suffragette to a modern Mrs. Jellyby interested in the heathen. All I"ve had to build on was Madam Chartley"s night letter and Mrs. Blythe"s telegram in answer to mine, and naturally that was slim material.
"What I"m hoping is, that Mrs. Blythe is a grand society dame, who needs a secretary to attend to her invitations and list of engagements. I"d like for her to be that, or else a successful writer who wanted me to type her ma.n.u.script. It would be so lovely to be behind the scenes at the making of a book, and maybe to meet a lot of literary lions at close range. I"ve blocked out enough scenes from those two situations to fill a two-volume d.u.c.h.ess novel. But, in order to keep from being too greatly disappointed, I tell myself that it"s not at all probable that Mrs. Blythe will be either of those things. Most likely she"s in a big mail-order business of some kind that requires a large correspondence, and I"ll be tamely quoting prices on hats, hair-goods or imported tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs for the next dozen years. I am "minded that:
""There are two moments in a diver"s life.
One when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge, One when, a prince, he rises with his pearl.
_Festus, I plunge!_"
"More anon. MARY."
"June 15, RIVERVILLE.
"Here I am, bobbing up serenely with _something_, but still unable to say whether it be pearl or pebble. Mrs. Blythe is not the grand personage I pictured her to be, for there was no liveried footman to meet me at the station, no carriage in waiting. Nor is she an author. Mrs. Crum, the landlady of this caravansary, told me that. I rattled up in a "bus to the number of the house given in Mrs.
Blythe"s telegram, and found it to be a comfortable looking boarding-house on a quiet side street, shaded by scraggly old sycamores.
Mrs. Blythe had engaged a room for me here, and left a note telling me where and how to find her in the morning.
"It was so near supper-time that Mrs. Crum had to go right down-stairs before I could ask any more questions, and I followed in a very few moments. I am disappointed in one thing. I had hoped to be in an interesting private family. I had hoped that Mrs. Blythe would want me to stay in her house, but I think I shall like it here.
"My room is big and airy and simply furnished, the supper was good, and as far as I can see I"m lots better off than Jo was in "Little Women," when she left home to be a governess.
For one thing, there is no old bearded professor in the background to work on one"s sympathies and get interested in, in lieu of some one better. Of course Professor Baher was dear in lots of ways, but I never could forgive Jo for marrying that bewhiskered old Teuton.
"So far as I have discovered, the boarders are all widows and orphans, though the oldest orphan is old enough to vote, and is a reporter on the Riverville _Herald_. He sat next to me at the table, at supper, and I found out from him that my first guess was partly correct, even if there was no liveried footman to meet me at the station. Mrs. Blythe _is_ one of the social leaders of Riverville and has a lovely home. But this city isn"t large enough to justify any one"s keeping a social secretary. He said so. It"s just a big, commonplace, hustling manufacturing town like a hundred others in the middle West. I didn"t like to ask any personal questions about Mrs.
Blythe of _Orphant Annie_. (That"s the name I couldn"t help giving the young reporter in my own mind. He was introduced as Mr. Sandford Berry.) He looks the character to perfection; sort of old for his years, spry and capable, as if he"d spent his youth in doing the ch.o.r.es and shooing the hens away. Besides, he gave me a lot of wise advice, as if he were a full-fledged man of the world and I a little hayseed from the West who didn"t know enough to get out of the way of a go-cart. He has pale blue pop eyes, and an alert little blond mustache, and his whole air seems to say, "The gobelins"ll git you, if you don"t watch out."
"He took it for granted that I knew all about my future employer, and, of course, I didn"t tell him any better. I just tried in a roundabout way to lead him on to talk of her.
He is very enthusiastic about her work, though I gathered only a vague idea of what it is, despite my clever manoeuvring to find out. He called her a grand little woman. As he has interviewed her several times he knows her personally. What he said was certainly encouraging, but he finished his supper so soon after he began to talk about her that I came up-stairs still knowing very little more than when I went down.
"A street light glimmered in the front windows, so that I did not turn on the gas at first, but sat looking down at the people strolling along the pavement below. The house stands very close to the street, so that I could hear everything any one said in pa.s.sing, and it seemed to bring me right into the thick of things, as I so often wished to be, back there in the desert.
The warm, wet smell of the freshly sprinkled streets, the whiff of an occasional cigar, the sound of a street piano in the next block, all seemed so strange yet so friendly and sociable.
It made me feel for a little while--oh, I can hardly explain it--as if the old Mary Ware that I used to be was a million miles away, and as if the Mary Ware sitting here in Riverville was an entirely different person. I couldn"t make it seem possible that the "me" who was sitting there in the hot June dusk, looking down on the lively streets, was the same person who only a few days before had no other excitement in life than making Jack"s coffee or ironing Norman"s shirts back in the hills of Arizona.
"I wasn"t homesick or lonesome in the least, but I had such a queer, untied, set-adrift sensation, like the man must have had who wrote that hymn, "Lo, on a narrow neck of land, "Twixt two unbounded seas I stand." The yesterdays are one sea, and the to-morrows another, and me, waiting between them, just a sc.r.a.p of humanity--a stranger in a strange city--wondering and wondering and wondering what the next day would bring.
"Then I began to be almost afraid of what I"d undertaken, and all of a sudden grew so cold and depressed that I wished I was back in my own little room in Lone-Rock. The shutters of the back window had been closed all this time, and when I got up to light the gas and write to Jack of my safe arrival, I opened them to see what kind of an outlook I was to have from that window. You can imagine my surprise when I found that it gave me a glimpse of the river.
Such a wide, full, sweeping river, with just enough of a young moon over it to define its banks, and remind me of the beautiful silvery Potomac that I used to watch from my window at Warwick Hall.
"A big steamboat came gliding around the bend, with a deep musical whistle that sent the same kind of an echo booming along the water, and there were lights twinkling from every deck and from the wharves along sh.o.r.e to which it was headed. Somehow it made me think of a song that we used to sing at the Wigwam, and that Holland always sang wrong, for some unaccountable reason insisting on saying "shining" instead of "margin."
""At the _shining_ of the river, lay we every burden down."
"The wide silvery tracks that the crescent moon and the wharf lights made rea.s.sured me, and I stopped worrying about the future, and laid my burden of apprehension and depression right down, and just sat and enjoyed the sight.
Presently I saw a little launch put out from the wharf and go chugging merrily over towards the far side, and suddenly I realized that that other sh.o.r.e was Kentucky. I was in sight of my Promised Land, although my particular portion of it was several hundred miles away. I had been so occupied with other things that I had forgotten what part of the map I was on.
"I stood right up, so excited that I could hardly keep from squealing and whirling around on my toes, as I used to do. My first impulse was to run and tell somebody of my discovery.
Then I remembered with a sort of shock that there wasn"t anybody I could tell. Not a soul in the whole city who _cared_. For a moment that thought made me utterly and wretchedly homesick. But it all pa.s.sed away the moment I began my letter to Jack and Betty. I think the reason that this epistle to you has grown longer and more garrulous than usual, is because you have a.s.sured me so often of your interest in all my comings and goings, and it seems so good to pour out everything to somebody who cares to hear. So, I am sure, you will rejoice with me in the discovery that my back window looks away to the dim sh.o.r.es of my Promised Land, and that that view will help me "to hold out faithful to the end," as old Brother Petree used to say in prayer meeting."