It was reported that he was trying to get Treewoofe. Some said Hugh refused to sell and had snubbed Frank cruelly; others had it that he was considering the offer. Kate had always had a fancy for Treewoofe.
Joscelyn heard all the rumors with many others. She had not seen Frank since that night in Bay Silver Church but gossip soon informed her that he was after Kate. Well, what did it matter? She had always despised Kate Muir. It was nothing to her whom this new Frank, red-nosed and puffy-eyed, married. But when she heard that he was going to buy Treewoofe a fresh agony possessed her. Frank at Treewoofe! Black, mustached little Kate mistress of Treewoofe! Joscelyn fled to her room to face the thought and found it could not be faced.
It had been a hard day for her. Her mother and Aunt Rachel had bickered almost continually, owing to Aunt Rachel’s having upset her stomach eating something she should not. Aunt Rachel had been “on a diet” ever since the night Joscelyn had told her about the Jordan water. She had fretted so over it that she grew ill and Roger had been called in. Joscelyn hated herself for having told Aunt Rachel—poor Aunt Rachel who had so little to make life worth living. She would have bitten her tongue out if that would have unsaid the fatal words. Nothing could unsay them; stricken Aunt Rachel took the bottle off the parlor mantel and buried it in the garden; then she proceeded to develop “stomach trouble,” and Joscelyn soon had plenty of other reasons for wishing she had held her tongue. Aunt Rachel’s stomach became the pivot about which all the meals revolved; they could not have this and they could not have that because “poor Rachel” could not eat it. If they had it “poor Rachel” could not resist the temptation and calamity followed. The previous evening company had come to tea and something extra had to be provided. Mrs. Clifford had warned Rachel that the cheese soufflé would not agree with her stomach and Rachel had responded pettishly that she guessed it was her own stomach. Today was the consequence and Joscelyn had to set her teeth to endure it—as a sort of penance because it was all her fault. But this news about Treewoofe was unbearable.
She looked up at it, lying in its mysterious silence of moonlit snow fields, with flying shadows from the passing clouds of the windy night sweeping over it, so that it now became almost invisible in the silver loveliness of the winter landscape, and again loomed suddenly forth at her on its white eerie hill in that cold ghostly moonlight. Was Hugh there? Was he going to sell Treewoofe? Was he going to get a divorce and marry Pauline Dark? The silence around her seemed verily to shriek these questions at her. And there was no answer.
It had been a hard autumn and winter for Joscelyn. She felt indescribably poorer. Life had tricked her—betrayed her—mocked her. And when her romantic infatuation, as she now bitterly saw it, had vanished, her old feeling for Hugh had come back. All at once he was dear—so dear. Not that she held any hope that matters could ever be put right between them. Hugh, she was sure, hated her now, if he did not actually despise her. Besides, he was going to go to the States for a divorce and would marry Pauline. Everybody said so.
Joscelyn was racked with jealousy. She hated the very sight of Pauline. She felt that Pauline already pictured herself as Hugh’s wife and mistress of Treewoofe. She remembered how she had seen Hugh and Pauline talking together at Aunt Becky’s funeral and looking up at Treewoofe. But it was still more dreadful to think of Frank and Kate being there. That was desecration. As long as Hugh was at Treewoofe, even with Pauline, Joscelyn would not feel so helplessly bereft. Every day and night she looked up at Treewoofe, loving and craving it the more intensely that she dared not let herself love and crave Hugh. She saw it on stormy days, with swirls of snow blowing around it—under frosty sunsets when its lights burned like jewels over the rose tints of the snowy fields—on mild afternoons when the gray rain wrapped it like a cloak—in the pale gold and misty silver of early, windless mornings. Always it was there, her home—her real and only home—luring, repellent, scornful, desirable by turns. Her home from which she must always be an exile through her own folly. Pauline would be there—or fat, giggling Kate. Joscelyn gritted her strong white teeth. A mad impulse assailed her. Suppose she went to Hugh—now—when he was sitting alone in that lonely house with the winter wind blowing around it—and flung herself at his feet—asked him to forgive her—to take her back—humiliated herself in the very dust? No, she could never do that. She might if she had any hope he still cared. But she knew he didn’t. He was in love with Pauline now—everybody said so—Pauline with her slim darkness and her long velvety eyes. She, Joscelyn, was a woman without love—without a home—without roots. She must spend the rest of her life forever beating with futile hands at closed doors. An old line of poetry, read long ago and forgotten for years, flickered back into memory:
“Exceeding comfortless and worn and old
For a dream’s sake.”
Yes, that had been written for her. “For a dream’s sake.” And now the dream was over.
“Joscelyn,” wailed Aunt Rachel from the hall, “I wish you’d fill the hot-water bottle and bring it up and lay it acrost my stomach. If that don’t help you’ll have to phone for Roger. And I suppose he’ll be off joy-riding with Gay Penhallow. It’s off with the old love and on with the new mighty easy nowadays. People don’t seem to have any deep feelings any more. Aunty But’s just been in on her way to Gresham’s. They’ve sent for her three times already on false alarms, but she guesses this is genuine. She says Gresham was yelling over the phone as if ’twas him was having the baby ’stead of his wife. She says she knows for a fact that Aunt Becky’s jug is to be raffled off. Dandy got stewed at Billy Dark’s silver wedding and let it out. Raffling’ s immoral and oughter be stopped by law.”
“Dandy didn’t get drunk at the wedding,” said Joscelyn wearily. “He took an overdose of pain-killer to cure a stomachache before he went and it made him act very queerly; but he kept fast hold on his secrets, Aunt Rachel.”
“It’s awful what stories get around,” sighed Aunt Rachel. “And Aunty But says Mar’gret Penhallow’s getting a lot of silly, fashionable clo’es to be married in. Mar’gret wants taking down a peg or two, and if my stomach was what it used to be”—Aunt Rachel gave a hollow groan—“I’d go and do it. But somehow I can’t get up much pep nowadays—living on slops.”
5
Likely Gay was “joy-riding” with Roger the night Aunt Rachel’s stomach was acting up. If not, it was a safe wager that Roger was talking to her in the living-room at Maywood, with a driftwood fire dreaming dreams of fairy colors in the grate and a maddeningly complacent mother painstakingly effacing herself as soon as he came. Gay, who couldn’t bear to be alone with herself, did not know what she would have done through that terrible autumn and winter without Roger.
By night she was still given over to torture but by day she had achieved self-command. The clan had decided that she hadn’t cared so much for Noel Gibson after all. They thought she had taken it pretty well. Gay knew they were watching her to see how she did take it and she held her head up before the world. She would not give all those heartless gossipers food for talk. She would not let them think she knew of their whispers and their curious eyes. She did not laugh very much—she who had always been a girl of the merriest silver laughter—and Stanton Grundy said to himself, as he looked at her in church, “The bloom’s gone,” and, old cynic though he was, thought he would enjoy “booting” Noel Gibson. Some of the clan thought Gay was “improved” since certain little airs and graces had been dropped. All in all, they did not talk or think about her nearly as much as sensitive little Gay thought they were doing. They had their own lives to live and their own loves and hates and ambitions to suffer and scheme and plan for. And, anyway, Roger could be trusted to handle the situation.
At first, when they went riding, Gay wanted to go in silence—silence in which a hurt heart could find some strength to bear its pain. But one night she said suddenly,
“Talk to me, Roger. Don’t ask me to talk—
I can’t—but just talk to me.”
Roger, to his own surprise, found that he could. He had never talked much to Gay before. He had always felt that he could talk of nothing that would interest her. There had been such a gap between her youth and his maturity. But the gap had disappeared. Roger found himself telling her things he had never told anybody. He had never talked of his experiences overseas to anyone but he found himself relating them to Gay. At first Gay only listened; then, insensibly, she began to talk, too. She took to reading the newspapers—which worried Mrs. Howard, who was afraid Gay was getting “strong-minded.” But Gay only wanted to learn more about the things Roger talked of, so that he would not think her an empty-headed goose. She had, without realizing it, come a long, long way from the tortured little creature who had lain under the birches, that September night, and cried her heart out. No longer an isolated, selfish unit, she had become one with her kind. She had realized what someone had called “the infinite sadness of living” and the realization had made a woman of her. Her April days were ended.
There was a sad peace in knowing nothing could ever happen to her again—that life held nothing for her but Roger’s friendship. But she would always have that; and with it she could face existence. How splendid Roger was! She had never half appreciated him before. Tender—strong—unselfish. Seeing the best in everybody. He told her things about the clan she had never known before—not the petty gossip everybody knew or the secret scandals Aunt Becky and her ilk knew—but noble things and kindly things and simple, wholesome things that made Gay feel she came of a pretty decent stock, after all, and must live up to the traditions of it. It was amazing how good people really were. Even her own Darks and Penhallows whom she had laughed at or disliked. Who would have supposed that Mercy Penhallow, malicious Mercy who was afraid to be out after dark—perhaps for fear of the ghosts of reputations she had slain—could have been a perfect heroine during the terrible Spanish flu epidemic? Or that William Y., who held the mortgage on Leonard Stanley’s farm, should, when Leonard died, leaving a wife and eight children, have gone to Mrs. Leonard—pompously, because William Y. couldn’t help being pompous—and torn the mortgage to pieces before her eyes? Or that shrinking little Mrs. Artemas Dark, seeing that big bully of a Rob Griscom at the harbor cruelly beating his dog one day, had flown through the gate, snatched the whip from the thunderstruck Griscom, and whipped him around and around his own house until he had fallen on his knees before her and begged for mercy?
And—Gay thought it suddenly one evening before the driftwood fire—what nice dimples Roger had in his thin cheeks when he smiled!
Still, Gay had her bad hours—hours when her heart ached fiercely for her lost happiness—hours when she wanted nothing but Noel. If she could only wake and find it all a dream—if she could only feel his arms about her again and find it all a dream—if she could only feel his arms about her again and hear him saying he loved her and her only! She wanted to be happy again. Not just this dull resignation with the moonlight of friendship to show the narrow path of life. She wanted love and full sunshine and—Noel. Everything was summed up in Noel. And Noel was with Nan.
Gay saw nothing of Nan now. Mrs. Alpheus had found herself no longer able to endure the dullness of Indian Spring and had taken an apartment in town. She never saw Noel either. She wondered when he and Nan would be married and how she could get out of going to the wedding. Nan would invite her, she was sure of that. Nan who had told her so confidently that she was going to take Noel from her. And Gay had been so sure she couldn’t. Oh, poor little fool!
“Life isn’t fair,” said Gay, her lips quivering. For an hour she would be nothing but little, jilted, heartbroken Gay again, only wanting Noel. If he would only come back to her! If he would only find out how selfish and vain and—and—empty Nan was! Nan couldn’t love anybody—not really. Of course she loved Noel after a fashion—nobody could help loving Noel—but never, never as Gay loved him.
There came an evening at the end of a blustery March day when Mercy Penhallow told Mrs. Howard that Mrs. Alpheus had told her that Noel and Nan would be married in June. There was to be a clan church wedding with bridesmaids in mauve taffeta, tulle hats of mauve and pink, and corsage bouquets of pink sweet peas. Nan had everything planned out to the smallest detail. Also her house. She was even, so Mercy said, going to have sheets in her guest-room to match her guests’ hair—nile-green for red hair, orchid for brunettes, pale blue for golden hair. And all the furniture was to be extremely modern.
“I expect she’s even got the nursery planned out,” said Mercy sarcastically.
Mrs. Howard did not tell Gay about the nile-green and orchid sheets or the mauve and pink bridesmaids but she did tell her of the wedding. Gay took it quietly, her eyes growing a little larger in her small white face. Then she went up to her room and shut the door.
Why had she kept hoping—hoping? She must have been hoping, else this would not twist her heart-strings so. She took a bundle of Noel’s letters out of her desk. She had never been able to burn them before but she must do it now. Here they all were—the ones he had written her first on top—fat, bulging letters. They grew thinner and thinner. The later ones were pitifully thin. Still, they were from Noel. Something of his dear personality was in them. Could she burn them? An old verse came into her head—a verse from a sentimental poem in an old faded scrapbook of her mother’s. There had been a time when Gay had thought it so lovely and sweet and sad. She quoted it now about Noel’s letters, feeling that it was very appropriate.
“Yes—yes,” said poor Gay trembling,
“Yes, the flames the link shall sever
Their red tongues will never tell,
When I’ve crossed the mystic river
They will keep my secret well.”
She laid Noel’s first letter in the grate and held a lighted match to it. The little flames began to eat it greedily. Gay dropped the match and covered her face. She couldn’t bear to look at it. She couldn’t burn those dear letters. It was too much to ask of herself. She snatched up the rest of them, her body racked by painful little sobs, and hurried them back into her desk. They were all she had left. Nobody could blame her for keeping them.
She sat at her window for a while before she went to bed. A red, red sun was sinking between two young spruces in Drowned John’s hill pasture. After it disappeared there came the unearthly loveliness of a calm blue winter twilight over snow. A weird moon with a cloud-ribbed face was rising over the sad, dark harbor. Winter birches with stars in their hair were tossing all around the house. There was a strange charm about the evening. She wished Roger could see it with her. He loved evenings like this. There had been a little snow that day, following on the heels of the mad galloping March wind, and the hedge of young firs to the left of the house was white with it. Something about them made her think of the apple blossoms on the day of Aunt Becky’s levee. How happy she had been then. And it had all gone with the apple blossoms.
“I feel so old,” said Gay, looking particularly young and piteous.
6
Little Brian Dark was alone in his kitchen loft one night in late March, looking out on a landscape that was black and ugly in the ugliest time of year—when the winter whiteness has gone, leaving only the bare bones of the world exposed to view. There was a cold, yellow strip of sky in the west under a sullen, cloudy sky, hanging over frozen fields. The trees looked as if they could never live again.
Brian, as usual, was lonely and hungry and tired. As long as the light lasted he had consoled himself by looking at the gorgeous pictures of good things to eat in the advertising pages of a pile of old magazines under the eaves. What curly, delicious strips of bacon—what tempting muffins—what mouth-melting cakes with icing! Were there really people in the world—perhaps little boys—who ate such delicious things?
The lamp in the Dollar living-room was out but a light burned in the little room upstairs loo
king out on the kitchen roof. Brian knew that Lennie Dollar slept there; he had envied Lennie all winter because he had such a warm cozy little room to sleep in. Often during the past winter Brian had wished he could snuggle in there, too. The loft was always cold, but it had been colder this winter than ever because in the preceding autumn Brian had accidentally broken one of the window panes and Uncle Duncan and Aunt Alethea were so angry with him because of his carelessness that they would not replace it. Brian had stuffed an old sweater in it but that did not keep all the extra cold out.
Yet Brian was not so entirely friendless as he had been. There was Cricket. One little white blossom of love had begun to bloom in the arid desert of his unwelcome existence. Cricket would soon come now. He pulled out the old sweater before he lay down on his bed, so that Cricket could get in.
He lay there expectantly, listening to the eerie sounds the spruce trees made outside in the dark. It was time Cricket came. Surely Cricket would come. Surely nothing had happened to Cricket. Brian lived in daily terror that something would happen to Cricket.
Cricket had been coming every night for three weeks. He had been there alone one night, very lonely and unhappy as usual. Aunt Alethea had been angry with him and had sent him supperless to bed. He looked out of the window. The sky was sharp and brilliant, the stars cold and bright. He was such a little fellow to be all alone in a great, lonely world. He had prayed to his dead mother in heaven for food and comfort. He was afraid that God, even a young God, might be too busy looking after more important things to bother about him, but Mother would have time. Brian knew a little about his mother now. One day he had met the old Moon Man on his ceaseless quest and the Moon Man had stopped and beckoned to him. Brian’s knees knocked together as he obeyed. He did not dare disobey, although he went in such terror of the Moon Man. And then he found the Moon Man was looking down at him with gentle, kind eyes.