The old Jackson homestead at Vernon Falls was a high, narrow, colonial house with three gables. Upon the broad terrace facing the south side there was a row of graceful, "wineglass" elms. Below the terrace stretched a broad, level meadow, which was marked irregularly by a dark line where a little brook wandered, and beyond the meadow passed the white road to Verulam, the nearest station. From this highway a lane led through copses of alder and birch along the east side of the meadow to the old house, which was withdrawn nearly an eighth of a mile from the public road.
It was an austere, silent, lonely place. Powers Jackson, during the last years of his life, had built a great barn and sheds behind the house with the purpose of making a stock farm, but since his death these had been shut up. He had also built along the terrace a broad veranda, which contrasted strangely with the weather-beaten, hand-made clapboards of the old building. The gaunt, lofty house seemed to be drawing itself away disdainfully from this frivolous addition at its base.
Jackson had often spent his long vacations at the farm with his mother when he was at college. Yet that April afternoon, when he came upon it from the bend in the Verulam road, it seemed to him singularly unreal. His memories of the house and the meadow in front of it had grown and flowered, until in his imagination it had become a spot of tender, aristocratic grace, a harmony of swaying elm branches and turfy lawn, lichened stone walls and marvellous gray clapboards. To-day it rose bare and severe across the brown meadow, unrelieved by the leafless branches of the elms that crisscrossed the south front. The slanting sun struck the little panes of the upper windows, and made them blaze with a mysterious, intensely yellow fire. Involuntarily his pace slackened as he turned from the highroad into the lane. The place appeared strangely silent, deserted. Was Helen there in the old house? Could she understand? Could she forgive him? ...
The northern spring had barely begun. It was cold, grudging, tentative, scarcely touching the brown meadow with faint green. Hiding its charm, like the delicate first bloom of Puritan women, it gave an uncertain promise of future performance—of a hidden, reticent beauty.
Jackson lingered in the lane, watching the sun fade from the window panes, until the air suddenly became chill and the scene was blank. Then, as he stepped on toward the house, he caught sight of a woman\'s figure stooping in the thicket beside the road. His heart began suddenly to beat, telling him, almost before his eyes had recognized the bent figure, that this was his wife. She looked up at last, and seeing him coming toward her, rose and stood there, her hands filled with the tendrils of some plant that she had been plucking up by its roots, her face troubled and disturbed.
"Nell!" he called as he came nearer, "Nell!"
And then he stopped, baffled. For long hours on the train he had thought what he should say when he met her, but now his premeditated words seemed to him futile. He saw the gulf that might lie between them forever, and he looked hesitatingly into her troubled face. She was wonderfully, newly beautiful. Her hair was parted in the middle and rippled loosely over the temples to the ears, in the way she had worn it as a girl, a fashion which he had laughed her out of. She had grown larger, ampler, these last months, and in her linen dress, with its flat collar revealing the white neck, without ornament of any sort, her features came out strong and distinct. That curve of the upper lip, which had always made the face appealing, no longer trembled at the touch of emotion. There was a repression and mature self-command about her, as if, having been driven back upon her own heart, she had recovered possession of herself once more, and no longer belonged to a man. She was beautiful, wholly woman, and yet to her husband waiting there she seemed to be his no longer.
"Nell," he began once more, still standing at a little distance from her, "I have come here to you, as you said."
Her arms hung limply at her sides, with the trailing plant drooping across her skirt, as though, thus taken by surprise, she were waiting for him to declare himself. He stepped nearer quickly, his heart sick with the fear that, after all, it was too late, that she had passed beyond his reach.
"You know what I mean! I have come to tell you that you were right when you went away. You were right all along, and I have been wrong."
But as he spoke she reached out her arms to him, beseeching him, drawing him to her, in commiseration for him. She put her arms on his shoulders, clasping them behind his neck, thus drawing him and holding him from her at the same time. Her lips trembled, and her breath fluttered as she looked into his eyes....
"Francis! Francis!" she murmured, holding him a little from her when he tried to take her in his arms....
And in her eyes and trembling mouth he knew that she could forgive him; but he felt strangely humble and little beside her. He saw himself in her eyes as he had never seen himself before. Slowly she drew him to her and kissed his lips, tenderly, unpassionately.
"The boys are over there by the brook," she said, nodding across the meadow.
They sat down on the crumbling stone wall to wait for them, and presently, catching sight of their father, they came tumbling over the wall with cries of "............