"The things I am beginning to do, it would be impossible for me to resist doing, and it would certainly be impossible for you. The thing I am seeing I have never seen, at close hand, before, though I have taken in something almost its parallel as part of certain picturesqueness of scenes in other countries. But I am LIVING with this and also, through relationship to Rosy, I, in a measure, belong to it, and it belongs to me. You and I may have often seen in American villages crudeness, incompleteness, lack of comfort, and the composition of a picture, a rough ugliness the result of haste and unsettled life which stays nowhere long, but packs up its goods and chattels and wanders farther afield in search of something better or worse, in any case in search of change, but we have never seen ripe, gradual falling to ruin of what generations ago was beautiful. To me it is wonderful and tragic and touching. If you could see the Court, if you could see the village, if you could see the church, if you could see the people, all quietly disintegrating, and so dearly perfect in their way that if one knew absolutely that nothing could be done to save them, one could only stand still and catch one"s breath and burst into tears. The church has stood since the Conquest, and, as it still stands, grey and fine, with its ma.s.s of square tower, and despite the state of its roof, is not yet given wholly to the winds and weather, it will, no doubt, stand a few centuries longer. The Court, however, cannot long remain a possible habitation, if it is not given a new lease of life. I do not mean that it will crumble to-morrow, or the day after, but we should not think it habitable now, even while we should admit that nothing could be more delightful to look at. The cottages in the village are already, many of them, amazing, when regarded as the dwellings of human beings. How long ago the cottagers gave up expecting that anything in particular would be done for them, I do not know. I am impressed by the fact that they are an unexpecting people. Their calm non-expectancy fills me with interest.
Only centuries of waiting for their superiors in rank to do things for them, and the slow formation of the habit of realising that not to submit to disappointment was no use, could have produced the almost SERENITY of their att.i.tude. It is all very well for newborn republican nations--meaning my native land--to sniff sternly and say that such a state of affairs is an insult to the spirit of the race. Perhaps it is now, but it was not apparently centuries ago, which was when it all began and when "Man" and the "Race" had not developed to the point of asking questions, to which they demand replies, about themselves and the things which happened to them. It began in the time of Egbert and Canute, and earlier, in the days of the Druids, when they used peacefully to allow themselves to be burned by the score, enclosed in wicker idols, as natural offerings to placate the G.o.ds. The modern acceptance of things is only a somewhat attenuated remnant of the ancient idea. And this is what I have to deal with and understand.
When I begin to do the things I am going to do, with the aid of your practical advice, if I have your approval, the people will be at first rather afraid of me. They will privately suspect I am mad. It will, also, not seem at all unlikely that an American should be of unreasoningly extravagant and flighty mind. Stornham, having long slumbered in remote peace through lack of railroad convenience, still regards America as almost of the character of wild rumour. Rosy was their one American, and she disappeared from their view so soon that she had not time to make any lasting impression. I am asking myself how difficult, or how simple, it will be to quite understand these people, and to make them understand me. I greatly doubt its being simple. Layers and layers and layers of centuries must be far from easy to burrow through. They look simple, they do not know that they are not simple, but really they are not. Their point of view has been the point of view of the English peasant so many hundred years that an American point of view, which has had no more than a trifling century and a half to form itself in, may find its thews and sinews the less powerful of the two. When I walk down the village street, faces appear at windows, and figures, stolidly, at doors. What I see is that, vaguely and remotely, American though I am, the fact that I am of "her ladyship"s blood,"
and that her ladyship--American though she is--has the claim on them of being the mother of the son of the owner of the land--stirs in them a feeling that I have a shadowy sort of relationship in the whole thing, and with regard to their bad roofs and bad chimneys, to their broken palings, and damp floors, to their comforts and discomforts, a sort of responsibility. That is the whole thing, and you--just you, father--will understand me when I say that I actually like it. I might not like it if I were poor Rosy, but, being myself, I love it. There is something patriarchal in it which moves me.
"Is it an abounding and arrogant delight in power which makes it appeal to me, or is it something better? To feel that every man on the land, every woman, every child knew one, counted on one"s honour and friendship, turned to one believingly in time of stress, to know that one could help and be a finely faithful thing, the very knowledge of it would give one vigour and warm blood in the veins. I wish I had been born to it, I wish the first sounds falling on my newborn ears had been the clanging of the peal from an old Norman church tower, calling out to me, "Welcome; newcomer of our house, long life among us! Welcome!"
Still, though the first sounds that greeted me were probably the rattling of a Fifth Avenue stage, I have brought them SOMETHING, and who knows whether I could have brought it from without the range of that prosaic, but cheerful, rattle."
The rest of the letter was detail of a business-like order. A large envelope contained the detail-notes of things to be done, notes concerning roofs, windows, flooring, park fences, gardens, greenhouses, tool houses, potting sheds, garden walls, gates, woodwork, masonry.
Sharp little sketches, such as b.u.t.tle had seen, notes concerning b.u.t.tle, Fox, Tread, Kedgers, and less accomplished workmen; concerning wages of day labourers, hours, capabilities. b.u.t.tle, if he had chanced to see them, would have broken into a light perspiration at the idea of a young woman having compiled the doc.u.ments. He had never heard of the first Reuben Vanderpoel.
Her father"s reply to Betty was as long as her own to him, and gave her keen pleasure by its support, both of sympathetic interest and practical advice. He left none of her points unnoted, and dealt with each of them as she had most hoped and indeed had felt she knew he would. This was his final summing up:
"If you had been a boy, and I own I am glad you were not--a man wants a daughter--I should have been quite willing to allow you your flutter on Wall Street, or your try at anything you felt you would like to handle.
It would have interested me to look on and see what you were made of, what you wanted, and how you set about trying to get it. It"s a new kind of deal you have undertaken. It"s more romantic than Wall Street, but I think I do see what you see in it. Even apart from Rosy and the boy, it would interest me to see what you would do with it. This is your "flutter." I like the way you face it. If you were a son instead of a daughter, I should see I might have confidence in you. I could not confide to Wall Street what I will tell you--which is that in the midst of the drive and swirl and tumult of my life here, I like what you see in the thing, I like your idea of the lord of the land, who should love the land and the souls born on it, and be the friend and strength of them and give the best and get it back in fair exchange. There"s a steadiness in the thought of such a life among one"s kind which has attractions for a man who has spent years in a maelstrom, s.n.a.t.c.hing at what whirls among the eddies of it. Your notes and sketches and summing up of probable costs did us both credit--I say "both" because your business education is the result of our long talks and journeyings together. You began to train for this when you began going to visit mines and railroads with me at twelve years old. I leave the whole thing in your hands, my girl, I leave Rosy in your hands, and in leaving Rosy to you, you know how I am trusting you with your mother. Your letters to her tell her only what is good for her. She is beginning to look happier and younger already, and is looking forward to the day when Rosy and the boy will come home to visit us, and when we shall go in state to Stornham Court. G.o.d bless her, she is made up of affection and simple trust, and that makes it easy to keep things from her. She has never been ill-treated, and she knows I love her, so when I tell her that things are coming right, she never doubts me.
"While you are rebuilding the place you will rebuild Rosy so that the sight of her may not be a pain when her mother sees her again, which is what she is living for."
CHAPTER XXIII
INTRODUCING G. SELDEN
A bird was perched upon a swaying branch of a slim young sapling near the fence-supported hedge which bounded the park, and Mount Dunstan had stopped to look at it and listen. A soft shower had fallen, and after its pa.s.sing, the sun coming through the light clouds, there had broken forth again in the trees brief trills and calls and fluting of bird notes. The sward and ferns glittered fresh green under the raindrops; the young leaves on trees and hedge seemed visibly to uncurl, the uncovered earth looked richly dark and moist, and sent forth the fragrance from its deeps, which, rising to a man"s nostrils, stirs and thrills him because it is the scent of life"s self. The bird upon the sapling was a robin, the tiny round body perched upon his delicate legs, plump and bright plumaged for mating. He touched his warm red breast with his beak, fluffed out and shook his feathers, and, swelling his throat, poured forth his small, entranced song. It was a gay, brief, jaunty thing, but pure, joyous, gallant, liquid melody. There was dainty bravado in it, saucy demand and allurement. It was addressed to some invisible hearer of the tender s.e.x, and wheresoever she might be hidden--whether in great branch or low thicket or hedge--there was hinted no doubt in her small wooer"s note that she would hear it and in due time respond. Mount Dunstan, listening, even laughed at its confident music. The tiny thing uttering its Call of the World--jubilant in the surety of answer!
Having flung it forth, he paused a moment and waited, his small head turned sideways, his big, round, dew-bright black eye roguishly attentive. Then with more swelling of the throat he trilled and rippled gayly anew, undisturbed and undoubting, but with a trifle of insistence.
Then he listened, tried again two or three times, with brave chirps and exultant little roulades. "Here am I, the bright-breasted, the liquid-eyed, the slender-legged, the joyous and conquering! Listen to me--listen to me. Listen and answer in the call of G.o.d"s world." It was the joy and triumphant faith in the tiny note of the tiny thing--Life as he himself was, though Life whose mystery his man"s hand could have crushed--which, while he laughed, set Mount Dunstan thinking. Spring warmth and spring scents and spring notes set a man"s being in tune with infinite things.
The bright roulade began again, prolonged itself with renewed effort, rose to its height, and ended. From a bush in the thicket farther up the road a liquid answer came. And Mount Dunstan"s laugh at the sound of it was echoed by another which came apparently from the bank rising from the road on the other side of the hedge, and accompanying the laugh was a good-natured nasal voice.
"She"s caught on. There"s no mistake about that. I guess it"s time for you to hustle, Mr. Rob."
Mount Dunstan laughed again. Jem Salter had heard voices like it, and cheerful slang phrases of the same order in his ranch days. On the other side of his park fence there was evidently sitting, through some odd chance, an American of the cheery, casual order, not sufficiently polished by travel to have lost his picturesque national characteristics.
Mount Dunstan put a hand on a broken panel of fence and leaped over into the road.
A bicycle was lying upon the roadside gra.s.s, and on the bank, looking as though he had been sheltering himself under the hedge from the rain, sat a young man in a cheap bicycling suit. His features were sharply cut and keen, his cap was pushed back from his forehead, and he had a pair of shrewdly careless boyish eyes.
Mount Dunstan liked the look of him, and seeing his natural start at the unheralded leap over the gap, which was quite close to him, he spoke.
"Good-morning," he said. "I am afraid I startled you."
"Good-morning," was the response. "It was a bit of a jolt seeing you jump almost over my shoulder. Where did you come from? You must have been just behind me."
"I was," explained Mount Dunstan. "Standing in the park listening to the robin."
The young fellow laughed outright.
"Say," he said, "that was pretty fine, wasn"t it? Wasn"t he getting it off his chest! He was an English robin, I guess. American robins are three or four times as big. I liked that little chap. He was a winner."
"You are an American?"
"Sure," nodding. "Good old Stars and Stripes for mine. First time I"ve been here. Came part for business and part for pleasure. Having the time of my life."
Mount Dunstan sat down beside him. He wanted to hear him talk. He had liked to hear the ranchmen talk. This one was of the city type, but his genial conversational wanderings would be full of quaint slang and good spirits. He was quite ready to converse, as was made manifest by his next speech.
"I"m biking through the country because I once had an old grandmother that was English, and she was always talking about English country, and how green things was, and how there was hedges instead of rail fences.
She thought there was nothing like little old England. Well, as far as roads and hedges go, I"m with her. They"re all right. I wanted a fellow I met crossing, to come with me, but he took a Cook"s trip to Paris.
He"s a gay sort of boy. Said he didn"t want any green lanes in his. He wanted Boolyvard." He laughed again and pushed his cap farther back on his forehead. "Said I wasn"t much of a sport. I tell YOU, a chap that"s got to earn his fifteen per, and live on it, can"t be TOO much of a sport."
"Fifteen per?" Mount Dunstan repeated doubtfully.
His companion chuckled.
"I forgot I was talking to an Englishman. Fifteen dollars per week--that"s what "fifteen per" means. That"s what he told me he gets at Lobenstien"s brewery in New York. Fifteen per. Not much, is it?"
"How does he manage Continental travel on fifteen per?" Mount Dunstan inquired.
"He"s a typewriter and stenographer, and he dug up some extra jobs to do at night. He"s been working and saving two years to do this. We didn"t come over on one of the big liners with the Four Hundred, you can bet.
Took a cheap one, inside cabin, second cla.s.s."
"By George!" said Mount Dunstan. "That was American."
The American eagle slightly flapped his wings. The young man pushed his cap a trifle sideways this time, and flushed a little.
"Well, when an American wants anything he generally reaches out for it."
"Wasn"t it rather--rash, considering the fifteen per?" Mount Dunstan suggested. He was really beginning to enjoy himself.
"What"s the use of making a dollar and sitting on it. I"ve not got fifteen per--steady--and here I am."
Mount Dunstan knew his man, and looked at him with inquiring interest.
He was quite sure he would go on. This was a thing he had seen before--an utter freedom from the insular grudging reserve, a sort of occult perception of the presence of friendly sympathy, and an ingenuous readiness to meet it half way. The youngster, having missed his fellow-traveler, and probably feeling the lack of companionship in his country rides, was in the mood for self-revelation.
"I"m selling for a big concern," he said, "and I"ve got a first-cla.s.s article to carry. Up to date, you know, and all that. It"s the top notch of typewriting machines, the Delkoff. Ever seen it? Here"s my card,"
taking a card from an inside pocket and handing it to him. It was inscribed:
J. BURRIDGE & SON,
DELKOFF TYPEWRITER CO.
BROADWAY, NEW YORK. G. SELDEN.
"That"s my name," he said, pointing to the inscription in the corner.
"I"m G. Selden, the junior a.s.sistant of Mr. Jones."
At the sight of the insignia of his trade, his holiday air dropped from him, and he hastily drew from another pocket an ill.u.s.trated catalogue.