Volume 16 / Part 1 — Part I.

It stood in one of the wildest spots in New England, surrounded by woods, a “frame house” in a region of log-houses, and, as such, in spite of defects, a touch beyond the most complete edifice that could be shaped of logs.

The defects were not few. The walls were slightly out of the perpendicular, there were strips of board instead of clapboards and shingles, the immense stone chimney in the centre gave the house the appearance of being an afterthought, and the two windows that looked down toward the road squinted.

Yes, a most absurd little house, with all sorts of blunders in the making of it, but, for all that, a house with a worth of its own. For Jack Maynard had put the frame together with his own unassisted hands, had raised it with but two men to help him, and had finished it off alone. And round about the work, and through and over it, while his hands built visibly, his fancy also built airy habitations, fair and plumb, and changed all the landscape. Before this fairy wand, the forest sank, broad roads unwound, there was a sprinkle of white houses through the green country, like a sprinkle of snow in June; and in place of this rustic nest rose a fair mansion-house, with a comely matron standing in the door, and rosy children playing about.

At this climax of his castle-building Jack Maynard caught breath, and, coming back to the present, found himself halfway up a ladder, with a hammer suspended in his hand, the wild forest swarming with game all about him, and the matron of his vision still Miss Bessie Ware, spinster.

Jack laughed. “So much the better!” he exclaimed, and brought his hammer down with such force, laughing as he struck, that the nail under it bent up double and broke in two, the head half falling to the ground, the point half flattened lengthwise into the board, making a fragment of rustic buhl-work.

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“There's a nail driven into the future,” said the builder, and selected another, and struck with better aim this time, so that the little spike went straight through the board, and pierced an oaken timber, and held the two firmly together, and thus did its work in the present.

“Well done!” said Jack; “you have gone through fifty summers in less than a minute.”

The startled woods rang to every blow, the fox and the deer fled at that tocsin of civilization, and the snake slid away, and set the green grass crawling with its hidden windings. Only one living creature, besides the builder, seemed happy and unafraid, and that was a brown-and-white spaniel that dozed in the shadow of the rising walls, stirring only when his master whistled or spoke to him.

“Wake up, Bruno, and tell me how this suits your eyes,” Jack would call out. Whereat Bruno would lift his lids lazily, show a narrow line of his bright brown eyes, give his tail a slow, laborious wag, and subside to his dreams again, and Jack would go on with his work. It seemed to be his heart, rather than the hammer, that drove the nails in; and every timber, board, latch, and hinge caught a momentary life from his hands, and learned his story from some telegraphing pulse. The very stones of the chimney knew that John Maynard and Bessie Ware were to be married as soon as the house should be ready for them.

There was not a dwelling in sight; but half a mile further down the road toward the nearest town, there was an odd, double log-house, wherein lived Dennis Moran and his Norah, three little girls, and Bessie Ware, Dennis Moran's sister's child.

Jack paused in his work, took off his straw hat to wipe away the perspiration from his face and toss his hair back, first hanging on a round of the ladder just above him the hammer that had driven a nail through fifty summers. As he put his hat on again, he glanced downward, and there, at the foot of the ladder, stood twenty summers, looking up at him out of a face as fair as summers ever formed. The apple-blooms had given it their pink and white, the June heavens were not bluer than those eyes, so oddly full of laughter and languor. The deepest nook under a low-growing spruce, nor shadow in vine-draped cave, nor hollow in a thunder-cloud, ever held richer darkness than that hidden in the loose curls and waves of hair that fell about Bessie Ware's shoulders. No part of the charm of her presence was due to her dress, save an air of fresh neatness. A large apron, gathered up by the corners, was full of fragrant arbor-vitæ boughs, gathered to make a broom of. The large parasol, tilted back that she might look upward, allowed a sunbeam to fall on her forehead.

“Oh! what a tall pink has grown up since I came here!” exclaimed the builder, as he saw her.

“And what a great bear has climbed on to my ladder,” retorted the girl.

He came down from the ladder and began to tell her his plans.

“Bessie, I mean this shall be yet one of the best farms in the state. On that hill I will have corn and clover; there shall be an orchard in the hollow next to it, with peach-trees on the south side of the little rise; and I will plant cranberries in the swamp beyond. In ten years from now, if a man should leave here to-day, he wouldn't know the place.”

Bessie smiled at the magician who was to work such wonders—never [pg 214] doubting but he would—then glanced about at the scene of his exploits. Sombre, blue-green pines brooded over the hill that was one day to be pink with clover, or rustling with corn; oaks, elms, maples, birches, and a great tangle of undergrowth, with rocks and moss, cumbered the ground where peaches were to ripen their dusky cheeks, when Jack should bid them grow, and large, green, and red-streaked and yellow apples were to drop through the still, bright, autumn air; and she knew that the future cranberry-swamp now stood thick and dark with beautiful arborvitæ trees, whose high-piled, flaky boughs, tapering to a point far up in the sunshine, kept cool and dim the little pools of water below, and the black mould in which their strong roots stretched out and interwove. But Jack could do anything when he set out, and her faith in him was so great that she could shut her eyes now and see the open swamp matted over with cranberry-vines, and hear the corn-stalks clash their green swords in the fretting breeze, and the muffled bump of the ripe apple as it fell on the grass.

After a while, Bessie started to go, but came back again.

“I forgot,” she said, and gave her lover a book that had been hidden under the boughs in her apron. “A book-pedlar stopped at our house last night, and he left this. Uncle Dennis doesn't want it, and I do not. Perhaps you can make some sense out of it.”

It was a second-hand copy of Comstock's Natural Philosophy, for schools, and was scribbled through and through by the student who had used it, years before.

Jack took the book.

“And that reminds me of your white-faced boarder,” he said, with a slight laugh. “Is he up yet?”

“Oh! he gets up earlier than any of us,” she answered lightly. “He doesn't act cityfied at all. And you know, Jack, the reason why he is white is because he has been sick. Good-bye! Aunt Norah will want her broom before she gets it.”

Bessie struck into the woods instead of going down to the road, and was soon lost to view. Standing beside her little house, she had looked a tall, fairly-formed lassie; but with the great trunks of primeval forest-trees standing about her, and lifting their green pyramids and cones far into the air, she appeared slim and small enough for a fairy. Even the birds, chippering about full of business, seemed to flout her, as if she were of small consequence—not worth flying from.

She laughed at them, and whispered what she did not dare to say aloud: “Other people besides you can build nests!” then looked quickly around to see if any listener were in sight.

There was a slight, rustling sound, and an eavesdropping squirrel scampered up a tree and peered down with twinkling eyes from a safe height. She was just throwing one of the green twigs in her apron at him, when she heard her name spoken, and turned quickly to meet a pleasant-faced young man, who approached from an opposite direction. This was the white-faced boarder who had left the city to find health in this wild place.

The two walked on together, Bessie as shy as any creature of the woods, and her companion both pleased and amused at her shyness, and trying to draw her out. To his questioning, she told her little story. Her mother was Dennis Moran's youngest sister, her father had been a color-sergeant in the English army. There had been other children, all [pg 215] younger than she, but all had died, some in one country, some in another. For Sergeant Ware's family had followed the army, and seen many lands.

“I am an East Indian,” Bessie said naïvely. “I was born at Calcutta. The others were born in Malta, in England, and in Ireland. It didn't agree with them travelling about from hot to cold. My father died at Gibraltar, and my mother died while she was bringing me to Uncle Dennis Moran's. May God be merciful to them all!”

Mr. James Keene had heard this pious ejaculation many a time before from the lips of humble Catholics, and had found nothing in it to admire. But now, the thought struck him that this constant prayer for mercy on the dead, whenever their names were mentioned, was a beautiful superstition. Of course he thought it a superstition, for he was a New England Protestant of the most liberal sort—that is, he protested against being obliged to believe anything.

They reached the house, near which Dennis Moran and his wife stood watching complacently a brood of new chickens taking their first airing. The young gentleman joined them, and listened with interest to the farm talk of his host.

What had set Dennis Moran, one of the most rigid of Catholics, in a solitude where he saw none of his own country nor faith, and where no priest ever came, he professed himself unable to explain.

“I'm like a fly caught in a spider's web, sir,” he said. “When Norah and I came over, and I didn't just know what to do, except that I wanted to have a farm of my own some day, I hired out to do haying for John Smith's wife—John had died the very week he began to cut his grass, and Norah she helped Mrs. Smith make butter. Then they wanted me to get in the crops, and after that I had a chance to go into the woods logging. When I came out of the woods, Mrs. Smith wanted me to plough and plant for her. And one thing led to another, and there was always something to keep me. Norah had a young one, and Bessie came—a young witch, ten years old,” said Dennis, pulling his niece's hair, as she stood beside him. “So I had to take a house. And the long and short of the matter is, that I've been here going on ten years, when I didn't mean to stay ten weeks. But I shall pull up stakes pretty soon, sir,” says Dennis, straightening up. “I don't mean to stay where I have to go twenty miles to attend to my Easter duties, and where my children are growing up little better than Protestants (he called it Prodestant). I'm pretty sure to move next fall, sir.”

At this announcement, Mrs. Norah tossed up her head and uttered an unspellable, guttural “Oh!” brought from the old land, and preserved unadulterated among the nasal-speaking Yankees. “We hear ducks!”

Whatever might be the meaning and derivation of this remark, the drift of it was evidently depreciatory, and it had the effect of putting an end to her husband's eloquence. Doubtless, Mrs. Moran had heard such announcements made before.

Bessie stole a little hand under her uncle's arm, and smiled into his face, and told him that she had given Jack the book, and soon made him forget his mortification. She knew that he was sometimes boastful, and that the great things he was constantly prophesying of himself never came to pass; but she knew also that he had a kind heart, and it hurt her to see him hurt.

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That same book, which the girl mentioned merely to divert attention, was to be a matter of more consequence to her than she dreamed. It was more important than the wedding-dress and the wedding-cake, which occupied so much of her thoughts—more important than the jealous interference of Jack's mother, who did not like Bessie's foreign blood and religion, though she did like Bessie—more important than even her Uncle Dennis' actual flitting, when fall came—all which we pass by. Only one thing in her life then was of more consequence than that old school-book, which the pedler left because no one would buy it, and that was the earnest and sorrowing advice of good old Father Conners when, against his will, he united her to a Protestant.

John Maynard said later, that before he read that book he was like a beet before it is pulled out of the ground, when it doesn't know but it is a turnip, and firmly believes that it is growing upward instead of downward, and that those waving leaves of its own, which it feels, but sees not, exist in some outer void where nothing is, and that angle-worms are the largest of locomotive creatures.

It is doubtful if the artistic faculty is any more a special gift in the fine than in the useful arts, or if he who creates ideal forms, in order to breathe into them the breath of such life as is in him, is more enthusiastic in his work, or more fascinated by it, than he who, taking captive the powers of nature, binds them to do his will.

This enthusiastic recognition of the work to which nature had appointed him, John Maynard felt from the moment when he first knew that a crowbar is a lever. He read that book that Bessie gave him with interest, then with avidity, and, having read, all the power latent in that wide brow of his waked up, and demanded knowledge. He got other and more complete works on mechanics and studied them in his leisure hours, he made experiments, he examined every piece of mechanism that came in his way.

Coming home one Sunday from a meeting which she had walked six miles to attend, Mrs. Maynard, senior, was horrified to find that her son had paid her a visit during her absence for the sole purpose of picking in pieces her precious Connecticut clock. There lay its speechless fragments spread out on the table, while the yawning frame leaned against the wall. Bessie sat near, looking rather frightened, and Jack, in his shirt-sleeves, sat before the table, an open book at his elbow. He was studying the page intently, his earnest, sunburnt face showing an utter unconsciousness of guilt.

“Land sakes, Jack!” screamed his mother. “You've been and ruined my clock!”

A clock was of value in that region, where half the inhabitants told the hour by sun-marks, by the stars, or by instinct.

He put his hand out to keep her back, but did not look up. “Don't worry, mother,” he said, “and don't touch anything. I'll put the machine together in a few minutes.”

Mrs. Maynard sank into a chair, and gazed distressfully at the ruins. That the pendulum, now lying prone and dismembered, would ever tick again, that those two little hands would ever again tell the time of day, that the weights would run down and have to be wound up every Saturday night, or that she should ever again on any June day hear the faithful little gong strike four o'clock in the morning—her signal for jumping out of bed with the unvarying ejaculation: “Land sakes! [pg 217] it's four o'clock!”—seemed to her impossible.

“And to think that you should do such work on the Sabbath-day!” she groaned out, casting an accusing glance on her daughter-in-law. “You seem to have lost all the religion you ever had since you got married.”

Bessie's blue eyes lighted up: “I think it just as pious for Jack to study, and find out how useful things are made, as to wear out a pair of shoes going to hear Parson Bates talk through his nose, or sit at home and spoil his eyes reading over and over about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

“Come, come!” interposed Jack; “if you two women quarrel, and bother me, I shall spoil the clock.”

This procured silence.

Had he been a little more thoughtful and tender, he would have told his mother that Bessie had tried to dissuade him from touching the clock, and had urged the impropriety of his doing such work on Sunday; but he did not think. She shielded him, and he allowed her to, scarcely aware that she had, indeed.

The young man's prediction was fulfilled. Before sunset, the clock was ticking soberly on the mantelpiece, the minute-hand hitching round its circle, and showing the reluctant hour-hand the way, and Jack was marching homeward through the woods, with his rifle on one arm and his wife on the other.

They were both so silent—that dark-browed man and bright faced woman—that they might almost be taken as kindred of the long shadows and sunstreaks over which they walked. He was building up a visionary entanglement of pulleys in the air, through which power should run with ever-increasing force, and studying how he should dispense with an idle-wheel that belonged in that maze; and she was thinking of him. He was thinking that this forest, that once had bounded his hopes and aspirations, now pressed on his very breathing, and hemmed his steps in, and wishing that he had wings, like that bird flitting before him; and she was watching his eyes till she, too, saw the bird.

Jack stopped, raised his rifle, took a hasty aim, and fired. Bessie ran to pick up the robin:

“How could you, Jack!” she exclaimed reproachfully, as she felt the fluttering heart stop in her hand.

He looked at it without the slightest compunction. “I wanted to see, as it stood on that twig, which way the centre of gravity would fall,” he said. “Don't fret, Bessie! There are birds enough in the world.”

The young wife looked earnestly into her husband's face, as they walked on together. “Jack,” she said, “you might kill me, and then say that there are women enough in the world.”

He laughed, but looked at her kindly, as he made answer: “What would all the women in the world be to me, Bessie, if my woman were out of it?”

Could she ask more?

“Jack, where do you suppose the song has gone to?” she asked, presently.

“Bessie, where does a candle go when it goes out?” was the counter-question.

There had been a season in this man's life, during the brief bud and blossom of his love for Bessie Ware, when his mind had been as full of fancies as a spring maple of blossoms. But he was not by nature fanciful, and, that brief season past, he settled down to facts. Questions which could not be answered he cared not to ask nor ponder on and all speculations, [pg 218] save those which built toward an assured though unseen result, he scouted. The sole impression the bird had made on him was that it was a nice little flying-machine, which he would like to improve on some day. Meantime, he had much to learn.

The extent of his ignorance did not discourage John Maynard, perhaps because it opened out gradually before him, over a new, unknown path starting from the known one. He was strong, fresh, and healthy, and the very novelty of his work, and his coming to it so late, was an assistance to him. “I have a head for all I want to get into it,” he said to his wife. “When my brain gets hold of an idea, it doesn't let go.”

It seemed so, indeed; and sometimes when he sat studying, or thinking, utterly unconscious of all about him, his eyes fixed, yet glimmering, his mouth close shut, his breathing half lost, his whole frame, while the brain worked, so still that his hands and feet grew cold, Bessie became almost afraid of him, and was ready to fancy that some strange and perhaps malign spirit had entered into and taken possession of her husband's soul.

And thus it happened that, after two years, the house that Jack built was abandoned to one of his relatives, and the young couple, with their baby boy, left the forest for the city.

Of course, no one is to suppose that John Maynard failed.

It was summer again, and lavish rains had kept to July the fresh luxuriance of June. The frame house stood nearly as it was when its builder finished it. The walls had changed their bright yellow tint for gray, and a few stones had fallen from the top of the chimney—that was all. The forest still gathered close about, and only a few patches of cultivated land had displaced the stumps and stones. A hop-vine draped the porch at the back of the house, and a group of tall sunflowers grew near one of the open curtainless windows.

Civilization had passed by on the other side, and, though not really so remote, was still invisible. Twice a day, with a low rumble, as of distant thunder, a train of cars passed by through the valley beyond the woods.

There was no sound of childish voices, no glimpse of a child anywhere about. The air bore no more intelligent burden than the low colloquial dropping of a brook over its pebbly bed, the buzzing of bees about a hive, and a rustling of leaves in the faint stir of air that was more a respiration than a breath. The only sign of human life to be seen without was a frail thread of blue smoke that rose from the chimney, and disappeared in the sky.

Inside, on the white floor of the kitchen, the shadows of the sunflowers lay as if painted there, only now and then stirring slightly, as the air breathed on the wide, golden-rayed shields outside. In the chimney-corner, almost as silent as a shadow, an old woman sat in a rocking-chair, knitting, and thinking. The two small windows, with crossing light, made one corner of the room bright; but where this woman sat, her face could be seen plainly only by firelight.

It was a rudely-featured face—one seldom sees finely moulded features in the backwoods—but it showed fortitude, good sense, and that unconscious integrity which is so far nobler than the conscious. The gray hair was drawn tightly back, and fastened high on the head with a yellow horn comb; the tall, spare figure was clad in a gown of dark-blue calico covered with little white dots, and [pg 219] a checked blue-and-white apron tied on with white tape strings, and the hands that held the knitting were bony, large-jointed, and large-veined.

The stick of wood that had been smouldering on the andirons bent in the middle, where a little flickering flame had been gnawing industriously for some time. The flame brightened, and made a dive into this break, where it found a splinter. The stick bent yet more, then suddenly snapped in two, one end dropping into the coals, the other end standing upright in the corner.

“Bless me!” muttered the old woman, dropping her work with a start. “There's a stranger! I wonder who it is.”

She sat gazing dreamily at the brand a moment, and, as her face half settled again, it became evident that the expression was one of profound melancholy as well as thoughtfulness. The lifted eyelids, and the start that roused without brightening, showed that.

After a moment's reverie, she drew a long sigh, and, before resuming her work, took the long iron tongs that leaned in the corner, and most inhospitably tossed the figurative stranger into the coals.

“I wonder why my thoughts run so on Jack and Bessie to-day,” she soliloquized, fixing the end of the knitting-needle into the leather sheath at her side. “I wish I knew how they are. It's my opinion they'd have done as well to stay here. I don't think much of that machinery business.”

The coming event which had thus cast its shadow before, was already at the gate, or, more literally, at the bars. Bessie Maynard had walked alone up the road she had not trodden for years, and now stood leaning there, and looking about with eyes that were at once eager and shrinking. Her face was pale, her mouth tightly closed; she had grown taller, and her appearance disclosed in some indefinable way a capacity for sternness which would scarcely have been suspected, or even credited, in the girl of twenty we left her. A glance would show that she had suffered deeply.

Presently, as she gazed, tears began to dim her eyes. She brushed them away, let down the slim cedar pole that barred her passage, stepped through, replaced the bar, and walked up the path to the house.

The knitter in the chimney-corner heard the sound of advancing steps, and sat still, with her face turned over her shoulder, to watch the door. The steps reached the threshold and paused there, and for a moment the two women gazed at each other—the one silent from astonishment, the other struggling to repress some emotion that rose again to the surface.

The visitor was the first to recover her self-possession. She came in smiling, and held out her hands.

“Haven't you a word of welcome for me, Aunt Nancy?” she asked.

Her voice broke the spell, and the old woman started up with a true country welcome, hearty, and rather rough. It was many a year since Bessie Maynard's hands had felt such a grasp, or her arms such a shake.

“But where is Jack?” asked his aunt, looking toward the door over Bessie's shoulder.

“Oh! he's at home,” was the reply, rather negligently given. “But how are you, Aunt Nancy? Have you room for me to stay awhile? I took a fancy to be quiet a little while this summer. The city is so hot and noisy.”

The old lady repeated her welcomes, mingled with many apologies for the kind of accommodations she [pg 220] had to offer, all the while helping to remove her visitor's bonnet and shawl, drawing up the rocking-chair for her, and pressing her into it.

“Do sit down and rest,” she said. “But where is the baby? Why on earth didn't you bring her?”

Bessie clasped her hands tightly in her lap, and looked steadily at the questioner before answering. “The baby is at home!” she said then, in a low voice.

Aunt Nancy was just turning away for some hospitable purpose, but the look and tone arrested her.

“You don't mean—” she began, but went no further.

“Yes,” replied Bessie quietly; “there is only James left.”

James was the eldest child.

Mrs. Nancy Maynard was not much given to expressions of tenderness—New England people of the old sort seldom were—but she laid her hand softly on her niece's shoulder, and said unsteadily:

“You poor dear, how tried you have been!”

“We have all our trials,” responded the other, with a sort of coldness.

The old woman knew not what to say. She turned away, mending the fire. If Bessie had wept, she would have known how to comfort her; but this strange calmness was embarrassing. Scarcely less embarrassing was the light, indifferent talk that followed, the questions concerning crops, and weather, and little household affairs, evidently put to set aside more serious topics.

This baby was the fourth child that Bessie Maynard had lost. After the first, no child of hers had lived to reach its third year. Each one had been carried away by a sudden distemper. The first death had been announced to John Maynard's aunt in a long letter from Bessie, full of a healthy sorrow, every line stained with tears. John had written the next time, his wife being too much worn out with watching and grief to write. At the third death, there came a line from Bessie: “My little boy is gone, Aunt Nancy. What do you suppose God means?”

Aunt Nancy had wondered somewhat over this strange missive, but had decided that, whatever God meant, Bessie meant resignation.

But now, as she marked her niece's changed face and manner, and recollected that laconic note, she was forced to give up the comforting thought. There might be endurance, but there was no resignation in that face.

The sense of distance and strangeness grew on her, though Bessie began to help her get supper ready, drawing out and laying the table as though she had done it every day of her life, and even remembering the cup that had been hers, and the little iron rack on which she used to set the teapot. “Jack found the brass-headed nail this hangs on miles back in the woods,” she said. “It's a wonder how it got there.”

“Why didn't Jack come with you?” asked Aunt Nancy, catching at the opportunity to say something personal.

A deep blush ran up Bessie's face at being so caught, but her hesitation was only momentary.

“He is too busy,” she answered briefly.

“But I should think he might take a rest now and then,” persisted her aunt.

Bessie gave a short laugh that was not without bitterness.

“What rest can a man take when he has a steam-engine spouting carbonic acid in one side of his brain, a flying-machine in the other side, and a wheel in perpetual motion between them? John is given over to [pg 221] metals and motions. I might as well have a locomotive for a husband. Shall I take up the applesauce in this bowl?”

“Yes. I should think that James might have come.” Aunt Nancy held desperately to the thread she had caught.

“James is a little John,” replied Bessie, pouring the hot, green applesauce into a straight, white bowl with a band of narrow blue stripes around the middle of it. “Never mind my coming alone, Aunt Nancy. I got along very well, and they will do very well without me.”

They sat down to the table, and Bessie made a great pretence of eating, but ate nothing. Then they went out and looked at the garden, talking all the while about nothing, and soon, to the relief of both, it was bed-time.

To Be Continued.