PART III THE AMBROSIAL YOUTH

“His flesh is angel’s flesh, all alive.”

“Honor to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws of the universe, the soul worships truth and love, honor and courtesy flow into all deeds.”

Emerson.

September weather was over the world before I felt able to be carried out-of-doors. I had been very ill, but at my worst I remember having Jennie on my mind, and hanging to her hand while I pleaded over and over the cause of the little child.

Now, though weak, I had reached a state of rapturous convalescence, and reached it quite suddenly. Julian lifted me out to the shaded lawn, where Jennie had wadded a rocking-chair with pillows. The leaves were turning, but none had fallen. Lena’s birds hanging in a row along the eaves of the porch kept it up at a great rate, the canary seeming to recognize me and give me the name he had long since invented for me: turning his head and calling through the bars, “Maë, Maë!”

Lena and Fritz came around the corner of the house and grinned. Lena had saved the biggest pear on the dwarf tree for me, and Fritz brought a nosegay of marigolds, strong enough to stifle many invalids. “It’s quite like a Harvest Home,” said Julian. “We ought to strap a corn-shock on Leander’s back and lead him in the procession.”

Then Jennie went into the house to bring out T’férgore. Jennie was not only my doctor, but she had turned up her sleeves and showed Lena how to cook the dishes I could eat. She had discharged two nurses, one after the other, and relied on herself and Lena’s help, and Julian’s solicitude.

“You never know what a woman is until you try her in a family crisis,” said Julian, sitting down near me. “I wasn’t enamored of your Dr. Purdy before, but I’ll say this of her now: she has the coolest head, the readiest hand, and the largest fund of domestic skill of any woman I ever saw.”

“I always told you that,” said I in a superior tone.

“She’s stayed by us to the neglect of her city practice, I’m afraid,” said Julian.

“She is just getting into practice,” I assured him, “and before coming out here announced her intention of leaving town for a change. It has been a severe change, though.”

“But a man has been here importuning her about something.”

I took hold of the arms of my chair. “What kind of a man, Julian?”

“Oh, an ordinary person. Nothing striking about him. I thought he looked very sulky the last time he went away.”

“Jennie was short with him, was she?”

“She saw him only a few minutes each time, after the first, and I thought she was rather peremptory. There’s Doctor Theophilus again, and he’s footed it from the Avenue station. The Reverend never was so devoted to us as he has been since T’férgore’s arrival,” said Julian, smiling drolly.

I had a nervous dread of Julian’s uncle; he was the most respectable man who ever had the right to add Doctor of Divinity to his name. Large, broad, and ponderous, his mere presence seemed to reprehend the playful antics of life. I was afraid of his long upper lip, which shut as close as a snuff-box lid. His white neckties awed me, and the solidity of his choice words reproached me. Behind his back, and in spite of Julian’s laughing remonstrance, I had rechristened Uncle Doctor Theophilus, whose surname was Marvin, The Old Daguerreotype. It is true he had not his case on, though the snap with which it formerly shut had probably passed into his lips. I could even fancy that when you got a side-light on him he retained the glare of the old daguerreotype, and effaced himself in a sheet of glitter. His expression seemed unalterably made up; and though he looked more ancient than other men of his age, I knew he thought himself well taken, and all his tints neat without being gaudy. He oppressed me so that I frequently wanted to rub him out. I always trod on a stone and turned my foot, or ran against a chair, when the Old Daguerreotype was by. Or he threw me into a nervous trance, and I sat with parted lips, glaring eyes, and aching neck, fancying that my own daguerreotype was being taken. Aunt Doctor Theophilus used to be a worthy companion picture to him, but death years ago effaced her lineaments and snapped her case shut, to be opened no more.

I felt that I could hardly stand the Old Daguerreotype just at this time, but said to Julian it was kind of him, taken in such a precise attitude as he was, to dust himself walking out from the Avenue, on our account.

“Oh, it isn’t the first time he has done it,” said Julian. “Something about our rural domicile has seized upon Uncle Doctor. He didn’t go out of town this year, and he’s taking whiffs of the country between sermons.”

“Between poses,” I suggested softly. “I hope Jennie isn’t bothered by his coming. She takes strong antipathies, and he does make one’s backbone ache.”

“Oh, she stands it,” said Julian laughing, “affably, as if she were the artist who had taken him.”

I turned around towards Jennie as Julian went to the gate to meet his uncle. She was bringing T’férgore across the porch and smoothing down the angel robes. She herself looked like a Madonna picture, pale and somewhat saddened, but most womanly, most touching.

“Jennie,” I said, as she put T’férgore on my lap, standing before me to do so, “you have taken care of me as only a woman can, and pulled me through to paradise.”

“Well,” she replied quickly, “you took care of me first. I think I must have been out of my senses. But having this little monster to handle made things appear very different.”

T’férgore blinked lazily, and struck out with ineffectual fists. The cherub-wings were perhaps hidden in folds of mull, but gazing on this wonderful creature’s allurements, I was seized with a Saturn-like desire to bite and devour every flower-tinted atom. I forgot that the Old Daguerreotype was at the gate, and worried my prey, breaking into a rhapsody of baby Romany.

In the midst of my Bess’ums and S’eetums, and Old Dol’ums, Uncle Doctor appeared before me, and bent himself at T’férgore’s shrine, with an expression nearly as idiotic as my own. He clucked, whistled, and snapped his fingers, and for one moment I thought he was going to dance. But his legs were taken too stiffly for that, and he only limbered his entire length and cracked the glass in a way which damaged him forever as my Old Daguerreotype.

Then he straightened himself up apologetically and shook hands with Jennie, saying in his most ministerial tones, “And how are you to-day, Dr. Jane?”

I must say that everything Uncle Doctor did on this occasion astonished me. It was the first time I had been permitted to see a visitor, and they should have prepared me for the unusual side-lights I should now catch upon the Old Daguerreotype. He held professional women in disdain, and I had heard him utter homilies against wives who tacked all their maiden or acquired names before their husband’s cognomen. Yet here he was parading Dr. Jane’s title, and almost capering before her in his exuberant desire to win favor.

They sat down around me, and I noticed how unembarrassed Jennie was by the Daguerreotype’s white tie and the clip of his lips and fearful respectability.

“A little daughter in the house,” said Uncle Doctor Theophilus, indicating with pomp the human atom in my lap, “is indeed a well-spring of pleasure.”

“We counted on her brother Trotwood Copperfield, instead of his sister Betsey Trotwood,” said Julian.

“It was a mere fancy,” I insisted, “and girls are just as good as boys any day.”

“Better,” granted Julian.

“I’m quite as glad that T’férgore is a girl.”

“But it disarranges the name,” said Julian. “His name was Fergus Dering, but I think we shall have to call her Ferguson.”

“Not at all,” I dissented indignantly.

“T’férgore!” mused Uncle Doctor Theophilus. “What kind of un-Christian appellation have you stumbled upon there?”

“The name being Fergus,” explained Julian, “we call her—as Lena would put it—T’férgore in short.”

We sat in silences of several minutes at a time, hearing an apple drop in the orchard, the call of the katydids, or the restless stepping of Leander in his stable. Already the smoky light of autumn was mellowing distances.

“How remote this little spot appears to be from the centres of traffic,” said Uncle Doctor Theophilus, with a pulpit gesture.

“It’s a good place for fever patients,” said Dr. Jane in a tone of authority. “There’s health in the air of the house.”

“Yes, I should apprehend as much,” asserted Uncle Doctor Theophilus.

“You mean the intellectual atmosphere, of course,” said Julian, as a whiff of the sauerkraut Lena did love came around the house. “Oh yes, we are remote, but we have had great company here. Emerson has uttered wisdom from your chair, Uncle Doctor, and near him sat Hawthorne, and against that tree leaned Thoreau. We have even had what some fantastic literary fellow calls the tone poets all around us, and no end of painters and sketchers.”

“It’s nothing but a play of ours,” I explained. “Whenever I wished we had such people for visitors, Julian piled chairs full of their books, or their music, or stood up copies of their pictures. Then we talked to them, and Julian read from them in reply, or I ran over the musical score, or he hung a picture where it could speak for itself. In that way he thinks we enjoyed just as close communion with them as their nearest friends ever had; because their elusive souls would speak to us more directly and coherently than if they were sitting opposite us in the flesh.”

The Old Daguerreotype shook his head indulgently over such pastime. On deliberation, however, he said the next time we had such a gathering he would like to join it.

After supper, and while Uncle Doctor Theophilus and Julian were trailing their feet through the grass, carrying their hands behind them, and all but chewing the bovine cud in their ruminative gazing on the bee-hives, the orchard, the stable, and meadow, Jennie put on her hat and gloves to drive our relative back to the Avenue station. I knew the drive would be good for her.

“You can come home the long way, through the creek—the water is always low—after you have left him at his train,” I hinted.

“I guess I shall go the long way,” said Jennie. “It will be pleasanter having someone to talk with.”

T’férgore and I exchanged a long stare; that is, I exchanged a long stare with T’férgore for a series of self-absorbed blinks.

“I am so glad,” I then remarked to Jennie, “that you aren’t put out by the old Dag—Doctor; when I say old, I mean, of course, reverend; for he isn’t really elderly, you know.”

“He doesn’t put me out a bit,” answered Jennie. “He is very quieting to me. I believe he is a sound man.”

“There is no man sounder,” I declared. “And he was just as good as he could be to his wife. I think she actually died because there was nothing more she could ask of life. I never saw such a self-satisfied expression as she had—outside of a miniature. His position is excellent and influential, too. A woman can’t help looking at that sort of thing when she is once married.”

Jennie turned about to face me, smiling. “Now, don’t, my dear, don’t,” she objected. “Let us not give our talk any such bias.”

“Oh, I won’t,” I exclaimed apprehensively. “I’m not throwing anybody at you at all. I was just going to say that though he is such an excellent man, and near to Julian and all that, he ossifies the working of my joints: I feel in such awe of him.”

“I don’t,” said Jennie.

“Yes; I’ve noticed that.”

“I think his society is wholesome for me.”

“Yes; it seems to be mutual,” I could not help suggesting. “Either you or T’férgore is limbering him up until I do believe in the course of time his presence will become wholesome for me.”

Leander, drawing Jennie and the Old Daguerreotype in our red cart, went briskly down the road, and Julian and T’férgore and I sat watching them.

“They will loiter through the woods,” mused I, “and watch the festoons of grapevine, and get a sniff of sycamore leaves and pennyroyal mixed with loam.”

“Yes,” said Julian. “Next week I shall take you and Ferguson off through the woodsiest drive of them all.”

“Julian,” I remonstrated, “her name isn’t and it never will be Ferguson.”

“Oh, well,” said Julian, “the bill is laid on the table then. Another motion will be in order.”

“And they’ll see bunches of goldenrod in a thicket,” I continued, returning to Leander’s load, “and the Old Daguerreotype will jump out to get it for her, footing it lightsomely among the burrs.”

“You make quite a beau of our uncle,” said Julian, turning his cigar over.

“Well, I should think anybody could see that’s what he wants to be considered.”

“He has my consent,” said Julian.

“Mine, too,” said I, taking high grounds; “but I’m not so sure about Jennie. She’s a woman who has been hard to suit. Nothing else stood in the way of her marrying long ago.”

I looked keenly at Julian, but he evidently knew naught about the one month divorced man with a wife and five children—the youngest two years old. It was the only secret I had ever kept from him, and it burned guiltily at the roots of my tongue. But the woman who reveals to her lord and master some unlovely weakness of her own sex helps him to a judgment-seat too dangerously lofty.

“She’s what you may really call superior,” admitted Julian, “but far enough into the woods to be afraid of the crooked stick. And Uncle Theoph. isn’t so bad.”

“No,” I granted generously: “he doesn’t make me half as miserable as he used to. And I know he won’t mind getting bugs down his neck and stumbling over old logs for yellow and chocolate colored pawpaw leaves and branches of fire-red maple, if Jennie wants him to.”

“I wonder,” Julian ruminated, “if Aunt Marvin ever made him dance around when they were young together and she had a ribbon headdress on her hair, and he choked himself with a stock.”

“No,” said I, “she was his first wife.”

Julian reached over, at the risk of waking T’férgore, and laid his arm across my shoulder.

“Besides, she never cried,” I added. “And a good husband is just like a growing crop: he needs to be rained on.”

Julian uttered a little grunt of contempt, but it was the kind of contempt which magnified the importance of his own sex and therefore did no real harm to ours.

“Uncle Doctor Theophilus is lonely,” said Julian, “having once lived the life of a family man.”

“And Jennie is lonely, too,” I admitted, “having never lived the life of a family woman. Think how hard it is to stand outside of—say the little farm—and see T’férgore come home, and our comfort and satisfaction.”

“Man: his wife: his child:” ruminated Julian. “The family; the little spot of our own ground. That’s the primitive and true life.”

We heard the creek frogs lifting up their voices.

“Next summer when T’férgore is big enough to be carried across the field,” said I, “I will make a Kate Greenaway dress with a yoke, and flare a hat of muslin for her, or better still, pucker her face into a frilly cap, and set her down in the midst of the clover where there aren’t any bees.”

“And put a crook in her hand,” said Julian. “For now we are her sheep. We can’t stray across blue water until the shepherdess permits.”