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Together, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Part Five - Chapter 44 |
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_ PART FIVE CHAPTER XLIV The old Farm at Grafton had been marvellously transformed. Vickers Price, standing on the terrace the evening of his arrival, looked wistfully for landmarks, for something to recall the place he had loved as a boy, which had gathered charm in his imaginative memory these years of his exile. The Georgian facade of the new house faced the broad meadow through which the wedding party had wandered back to the Farm the day of Isabelle's marriage. Below the brick terrace, elaborate gardens, suggesting remotely Italy, had been laid out on the slope of the New England hill. The thin poplars, struggling to maintain themselves in the bitter blasts of an American winter, gave an unreal air to the place as much as anything. The village of Grafton, which had once been visible as a homely white-dotted road beyond the meadow, had been "planted out." There was a formal garden now where the old barn stood, from which the Colonel's pointers had once yapped their greetings on the arrival of strangers. The new brick stables and the garage were in the woods across the road, connected with the house by telephone. On their arrival by the late train they had had supper quite informally. It had been served by two men, however, and there was a housekeeper to relieve the mistress of the care of the increased establishment. What had bewildered Vickers on his return to America after an absence of ten years, from the moment he had taken ship until the Lanes' new French motor had whisked him up to the Farm--Isabelle still clung to the old name--was the lavish luxury, the increased pace of living, on this side of the ocean. The years he had spent in Italy had been the richest period of our industrial renaissance. In the rising tide of wealth the signs of the old order--the simplicity of the Colonel's day--had been swept away. As Vickers stood rather apart from the others, who were strolling about the terrace, and looked at Dog Mountain, the only perfectly familiar feature in the scene, Isabella tucked her arm under his and led him towards the gardens:-- "Vick, I want you to see what I have done. Don't you think it's much better? I am not altogether satisfied." She glanced back at the long facade: "I think I should have done better with Herring rather than Osgood. But when we started to alter the old place, I didn't mean to do so much to it." Isabelle knew more now than when Osgood had been engaged, two years before, and Herring's reputation had meanwhile quite overshadowed the older architect's. "I told Isabelle at the start," said Cairy, who joined them, "she had better pull the old place down, and have a fresh deal. You had to come to it practically in the end?" He turned to Isabelle teasingly. "Yes," she admitted half regretfully; "that's the way I always do a thing,--walk backwards into it, as John says. But if we had built from the ground up, it wouldn't have been this place, I suppose.... And I don't see why we did it,--Grafton is so far from anything." "It's neither Tuxedo nor Lenox," Cairy suggested. "Just plain Connecticut. Well, you see the Colonel left the place to me,--that was the reason." And also the fact that he had left her only a small portion of his fortune besides. It was an ironical rebuke for his act that much of the small fortune he had given her had gone to transform his beloved Farm into something he would never have recognized. Vickers thought sadly, "If the old Colonel's ghost should haunt this terrace, he couldn't find his way about!" "But it's snug and amusing,--the Farm? Isn't it?" Cairy demanded of Vickers in a consoling manner. "I shouldn't call it snug," Vickers replied, unconsciously edging away from the Southerner, "nor wholly amusing!" "You don't like my efforts!" Isabelle exclaimed wearily. She herself, as she had said, was not satisfied; but money as well as strength and her husband's dislike of "more building" had held her hand. "We all change," Vickers replied humorously. "I can't blame the old place for looking different. I have changed somewhat myself, and you, Cairy,"--he glanced at the figure by his sister's side, which had sleek marks of prosperity as well as the Farm,--"too. All changed but you, Isabelle!" "But I have changed a lot!" she protested. "I have grown better looking, Vickie, and my mind has developed, hasn't it, Tom? One's family never sees any change but the wrinkles!"... Vickers, turning back to the terrace where Fosdick and Gossom were smoking, had a depressed feeling that of all the changes his was the greatest. "I must look in on my little girl," he explained to Isabelle, as he left her and Cairy. Isabelle watched him mount the steps. His small figure had grown heavy from his inactive life abroad. The thick hair had almost gone from the top of his head, and the neat pointed beard had become bushy. In his negligent clothes he looked quite slouchy, she had felt that evening, as if he had long ceased to have any interest in his person. "It's all that beast of a woman," she said resentfully to Cairy, remembering the slender, quite elegant brother of the old days. "And to think of his saddling himself with her brat and lugging her around with him! I couldn't make him drop her in New York with her governess. But it's impossible!" "The lady left him her husband's child, as a souvenir, didn't she?" "I can't think of it!" Isabelle exclaimed, shrugging her shoulders. "To go off with that other man--after all he had given up for her! The beast!" "Perhaps that was the best she could do for him under the circumstances," Cairy remarked philosophically. "But the child must be a bore." He laughed at the comical situation. "Just like Vick!" It was also like Vickers to give Mrs. Conry a large share of his small fortune when she had seen fit to leave him, as Fosdick had told her.... After visiting his small charge, who was lonely this first night in the strange house, Vickers had gone to his room and sat down by the window. Below him on the terrace Fosdick and Gossom were discussing Socialism, the Russian revolution, and the War of Classes. New topics, or rather new forms of old themes, they seemed to Vickers. Fosdick, from his rolling around the earth, had become an expert on the social revolution; he could tell the approximate dates when it "would be pulled off" in all the great countries. He had bought a farm somewhere in Vermont, and had sat down to wait for the social revolution; meantime he was raising apples, and at intervals descended upon the houses of his friends to inveigh against predatory wealth or visited the city for the sake of more robust amusement. Gossom, whose former radicalism was slowly modifying into an "intelligent conservatism," was mildly opposing Fosdick's views. "We have gone too far in this campaign of vilification of wealth,--Americans are sound at the core,--what they want is conservative individualism, a sense of the law," etc. Vickers smiled to himself, and looking out over the old meadow forgot all about the talkers. From the meadow came the sweet scent of the September crop of hay. There was the river at the end of the vista, disappearing into a piece of woodland. The place was sown with memories, and Vickers's eyes were moist as he leaned there, looking forth into the night. It was but a shallow New England brook, this river, meandering through cranberry bogs, with alders and bilberry bushes on either side. He remembered the cranberry picking at this season, and later when the meadow had been flooded, the skating over the bushes that were frozen in the ice, and the snaky forms of the cranberry plants visible at the bottom. All these years he had thought of this little meadow as he had conceived it when a child,--a mighty river flowing on mysteriously through the dark valley,--on, around the woods that made out like a bold headland, then on and on to the remote sea. It was dim and wild, this meadow of his childhood, and the brook was like that river on which was borne to Camelot the silent bark with the fair Elaine. His older brother had taken him down that same brook in a canoe,--a quite wonderful journey. They had started early, just as the August moon was setting; and as they passed the headland of woods--pines and maples fearful in their dark recesses--an early thrush had broken the silence of the glimmering dawn with its sweet call. And another had answered from the depth of the wood, and then another, while the little canoe had slipped noiselessly past into strange lands,--a country altogether new and mysterious.... To-night that old boyhood thrill came over him, as when kneeling in the canoe with suspended paddle, in the half light of dawn, he had heard the thrushes calling from the woods. Then it had seemed that life was like this adventurous journey through the gray meadows, past the silent woods, on into the river below, and the great sea, far, far away! A wonderful journey of enlarging mystery from experience to experience into some great ocean of understanding.... Vickers sat down at the piano by the window, and forgetting all that had taken the place of his dream,--the searing flame of his manhood,--struck the gentle chords of that boyhood journey, something of the river and the meadow and the woods and the gray dawn, which had often sounded in his ears far away in Venice. Isabelle and Cairy, coming up the terrace steps, heard the notes and stopped to listen. "Charming!" Cairy murmured. "His own?" "How I wish he would try to do something, and get his work played by our orchestras! He could if he would only interest himself enough. But the ambition seems gone out of him. He merely smiles when I talk about it." "He'll come back to it," Cairy grinned. "It's in the air here to put your talent in the front window." Vickers played on softly, dreaming of the boy's river of life, at home once more in the old Farm. * * * * * Early the next morning as Vickers stole softly through the corridor, on his way for a stroll, a door opened and Isabelle looked out. "You'll find coffee downstairs, Vick. I remembered your dawn-wandering habit and asked Mrs. Stevens to have it ready for you. I'll join you in a few moments." Before he had finished his coffee, Isabelle appeared and sleepily poured out a cup for herself. The servant was making ready a tray at the sideboard. "Tom is one of your sleepless kind, too," she explained. "He does his writing before the house is awake, so as not to be disturbed, or he says he does. I believe he just turns over and takes another nap!" "Cairy seems at home here," Vickers observed, sipping his coffee. "Of course, Tommy is one of the family," Isabelle replied lightly. "He is much more domesticated than John, though, since his great success last winter, he hasn't been up very much." "Has he made a great success?" Vickers inquired. "What at?" "Haven't you heard of his play! It ran all the winter, and this new one they say will also make a great hit." Vickers, who remembered Cairy in college as one always endeavoring after things out of his reach, looked mildly surprised. "I hadn't heard that he was a dramatist," he said. "I wish _you_ would do something!" Isabelle remarked, feeling that Cairy's success might point for Vickers his own defeat, and stir him into healthy action. "What? Write a play?" "No--you old dear!" She caressed his hand. "I think it would be good for you to feel you were doing something in the world, instead of running about with that absurd child." She wanted to say much more about Delia Conry, but bided a more fitting time. "I haven't run much so far," was all that Vickers replied. "You shouldn't have bothered to come down," he added when the coffee was finished. "I just wanted to poke around the old place as I used to." "I know--and I wanted to be with you, of course, this first time. Don't you remember how we got our own breakfasts when we went shooting in the autumn?" Her brother nodded. "Those were good times, Vick! ... They were the best for both of us," she added less buoyantly. She pushed away her cup, put her arm about his shoulders, and kissed him. "You shouldn't say that, Belle!" "Vickie, it's so nice to hug you and have you all to myself before the others are up. I've missed some one to go batting with me, to hug and bully and chatter with. Now you've come I shall be a girl all over again." And Isabelle was her old self for the first time since Vickers had joined her in Paris a month before,--no longer preoccupied, striving after some satisfaction that never perfectly arrived. Here the past was upon them both,--in spite of Osgood's transformations,--a past when they had been close, in the precious intimacy of brother and sister. Outside in the new, very new Dutch garden, Isabelle resumed her anxieties of the day. "The gardener ought not to have put those bulbs there,--he knows nothing really! I shall have to find another man.... I hope the chauffeur John engaged will get along with the houseman. The last one fought.... Oh, did I tell you that Potts is coming out Saturday,--the great Dr. Potts? He wants to look me over,--get me ready for the winter campaign.... There's Tom, writing at the desk by his window. Hello, Tommy!" Isabelle waved a hand gayly at the balcony above them. Vickers smiled at the disconnected remarks, so like Isabelle. Her conversation was a loose bundle of impressions, reflections, wishes, and feelings, especially her feelings about other people. And Isabelle had a taste for lame cats, as her mother said,--at least those cats that obviously felt their lameness. "You don't like Tom," she rambled on. "Why not? Poor Tommy! he's so sweet and clever. Why don't you like Tom, Vickers? You must like him--because he'll be here a lot, and I am awfully fond of him." "Why 'poor Tom'?" Vickers asked laconically. "He's had such a hard time, a struggle to get on,--his people were poor, very nice though,--the best Virginia, you know.... He's ambitious, and he isn't strong. If this play shouldn't go--he's counting on it so much!" Vickers smilingly drew her hand beneath his arm and led her out through the garden into the meadow. "The same old Belle after all," he murmured. "I don't see that Brother Cairy is badly off,--he has a good deal of petting, I fancy. I have heard all about that Virginia childhood and the rest of it.... Do you remember, Belle, when we used to go over to the Ed Prices' and were scared when we saw a tramp in the bushes on the hill? And how we ran through the willows as if the devil was after us?--Who have the Ed Prices' farm now?" "Don't you know that father gave it to Alice Johnston? Wasn't it nice of him! Her husband is in the road, in St. Louis, doing very well, John says. Alice is over there now,--she brings the children on for the summer.... I don't see much of her--she is so enveloped in children!" "What's become of the brother,--the one I licked and threw into Beaty's pond?" "The world seems to have licked him, too," Isabelle replied, laughing at the old memory. "The last time Alice spoke of him she said he was on some newspaper in Spokane, had been in the Klondike, I believe.... There's Mr. Gossom and Tom! We must go back for breakfast." "Thanks! I have had mine. I think I'll walk over to the Price place and see Alice. Don't look for me before noon." "But there are people coming for luncheon," Isabelle protested. Vickers waved his hand to her and called back, "I think you'll get on very well without me!" Isabelle was already answering Cairy's shout from the terrace. As Vickers took his way through the meadow, he thought how sweet she was, the real Isabelle, when one got to her as he had this morning. But she had never once mentioned John; her husband seemed to be very little in her mind. _ |
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