JUNE—THE MOON OF STRAWBERRIES “The Boy will go back to his mother’s people of course, and then at last, Ernest, you will be free to carry out our plans,” said Eileen’s clear voice, in which there was an unconscious note of uncertainty mingled with expectancy. As she spoke, she gave her slender fishing rod an unnecessary jerk that meshed line and hook in the tendrils of an overhanging grape-vine.
Without speaking, her companion secured his own pole in a crotched tree, and swinging out over the stream that rushed noisily past, quickly disentangled the line; then, taking the rod from Eileen, he reeled up the line and cast the fly deftly into the quiet pool below. Twice he framed his lips to answer her question, but those two innocent words, our plans, seemed to stop his voice; at his third essay, his line played out swiftly while the reel sang the tune that the fisherman loves. Then, after a short, exciting bit of play, a splendid brook trout, more than a pound in weight, lay upon the moss beside Eileen.
“There is a King trout for you,” Ernest said; “could anything more beautiful come out of the water?” and he made a fresh cast still farther down the pool.
Eileen’s first glance of admiration changed as she watched the trout quiver. “Put it back, please,” she cried; “now it’s a fairy thing, and more beautiful than any jewels I ever saw; but as soon as the water dries away it will only be a dead fish to be cooked and eaten. I love to catch fish, it’s so exciting, but not to keep them.”
“Yes; but Eileen, after all, to be eaten, that is what it was made for,” answered Ernest, in quiet, practical tones, yet smiling indulgently. “The unkind thing would be to put it back and let it have its fight all over again when some other fellow played it and it had learned fear. Besides, have you forgotten that this is the last day of the fishing and that we came out to get some trout for your father, who is sick and needs tempting, that being your excuse for my leaving work?”
Then they glanced at one another, laughing; the trout went into the creel, and the soft wind came down with the stream, laden with fragrance of grape flowers and the courting ecstasies of birds, then escaped from the trees, and was spread over the low meadows to the eastward, making low music in the long grass, fit accompaniment to the bobolinks that soared from it, singing.
Two more trout were caught in quick succession, then luck and the morning turning together, the pair came out into the open fields under the shade of a group of old willows, to free themselves of the weight of rubber boots, and allow Eileen to rest a few moments after the rough tramp down stream that had been half climbing and half wading.
May was withdrawing her veil, woven of apple blossoms in a green mist of unfolding leaves, to reveal June’s young splendour, and for the two sitting under the willows it was also early June; they were the children of neighbours, and though their parents were of widely different fortunes, they had been friends since Eileen had caught her first sunfish on a pin and string arrangement, rigged by Ernest, and he, for inattention to his lessons, had been forced to wear her pink shirred sunbonnet at school.
Her father was a promoter and politician; his, a farmer and wagon-maker, who, following an oft-repeated story, died just as his son had begun to work his way through college. How often Eileen and he had planned what he would do and be when this was accomplished, and she had done once and for all with the city boarding school to which her mother’s, rather than her father’s, ambition had consigned her. Now she had accomplished in a way and returned, but for family reasons Ernest Wray, a born book-lover, was still plodding in the old paths of his father, the wagon-maker.
“You hear the wind in the grass when you do not hear what I say,” said Eileen, presently, in a tone half laughing, half pettish, as Ernest, placing the creel in the water to keep the trout fresh, secured it from floating away with a stone.
“Come and sit where you must look at me and not beyond or through me, and answer the question I asked you half an hour ago. When does the Boy go to his mother’s people, so that you can carry out your plans?”
“Did you ask me that before?” said Ernest.
“Perhaps not in the same words, but the meaning was the same.”
“Then I did not hear you, for I thought you said our plans, Eileen.”
To the man, the girl stood for everything that beckoned him into the future; to the girl, the man at this time was an indispensable comrade when she was at home, upon whom she was eager to practise certain school-taught theories. Her influence over him fed a growing vanity, standing in the place of love, of which, as yet, she had really no comprehension.
“Put it any way you choose, only tell me when you are going to send the Boy to his relations,” she said, this time in a voice of assurance. “I suppose it is too late now to rent the farm and sell the business before autumn. Of course you are four years too late for college, but you might still manage the law school. Father thinks that the trolley line through the upper road into Bridgeton is an assured thing, and that before long your farm could be turned into money for house lots; that is what we mean to do with our land.”
“There is one unsurmountable objection to my doing all this, Eileen,” said Ernest, speaking slowly, that his voice might not tremble; “I am not going to send the Boy to his mother’s people, and I hope to sell neither the farm nor the wagon shop for many years to come.”
Eileen stared at him in speechless amazement for a moment, when a new idea came to her.
“Then your father left more money than was supposed, so that you can send the Boy to school and keep the place while you study, though I don’t see why you should bother with either him or it,” she said, half angrily. “Surely, after being tied, all your life, to this hill country, where nothing ever happens, you must long to get away as much as I do.”
“And you wish to get away? Of course you will like to travel, but not to go away for good? Would you like to see your homestead cut up and the brook turned into a drain for a new village?” he asked, quickly drawing his eyes from hers to follow the stream.
“Of course it’s a lovely old place, and I’ve had lots of good times there, but I’ve never expected to live in Oaklands all my life. Yes, I’m even willing to go for good and all, I think, quite for the sake of going. You know you were to come, too, and do fine things that should get in the newspapers. Oh, Ernest, have you forgotten all the plans we made before they built the sawmill dam, and we used to canoe from the Ridge falls quite down to Moosatuck?”
The momentary warmth in her voice made him flush, even as he took a new hold on himself to keep back the words that struggled for speech.
“No, Eileen, there is no more money than people thought, nor even as much. The farm must be worked, and the wagon shop also, to give us a living.”
“But why should you support the Boy,” she interrupted, growing incoherent through her disappointment, “just because your father, when he was past sixty, chose to marry a young woman from nobody knows where, and then both died and left the Boy, only seven years old, who has no claim on you, to drag you down? For father told me last night what I never knew before, that house, land, and business all came from your mother’s people.”
The man tingled hotly to know that his neighbour had been discussing the intricacies of his family affairs with Eileen, but in another light it gave him comfort. Her hardness toward the Boy was undoubtedly caught from her father, not born of her own feelings. But she, lashing herself more and more, persisted in her question: “Why should you support the Boy? Why do you not send him to his mother’s people, if she had any?”
“Because I love him, Eileen, and he loves me and needs me. Young as he is, he stifles his loneliness lest it should trouble me, or his mother ‘hear and be too sorry,’ as he puts it.” Ernest spoke quietly, all the uncertainty that had swayed him ending. “His mother’s people live in a crowded city. The Boy has an active mind in a frail body; he needs fresh air and a quiet life if he is to live to manhood, Dr. Russell says; shall I refuse him the chance?”
“And lose your own?”
“Possibly; if only one of us can have it, why not he as well as I?”
“What do you mean to do if you stay here? How can you keep house?”
“Turn the farm largely to fruit, and with helpers enlarge the wagon shop; in spite of cheap Western makers, there is a good demand for hand-made work wagons. As to the house, Aunt Louisa Taylor will care for it, and between us, God willing, we will make the Boy into a man and let him go to college for me. Do you know, Eileen, that a good many of the world’s best soldiers have gone to the fight as substitutes for those who could not, and the work was better done than it would have been by those who grieved because they could not go?”
“Have you lost all your ambition, Ernest? Can you be content with such an empty life? If any tongue but yours had told me of this absurd sacrifice, I would not have believed it.”
“Not all my ambition; I still have my books, and I can buy others. I have my rod and my gun, and all outdoors, besides the Boy, and—memories of what, until to-day, I thought might be. I believed that you cared for me, Eileen, that you liked our old hills and their life; I thought that you, too, loved the bird on the wing and the sound of the wind in the grass. I knew that you would go away to travel for a long while, perhaps, but I thought you would want to return.”
“I do care, Ernest, that is, in a way; but there must be something else to do in my life besides merely caring. Father is going to take mother and me abroad this summer. I was keeping it a secret to tell you to-day, for I thought that you might join us; I’m so disappointed;” and the golden head buried itself in the slender arms that were clasped about the mossy stump of a fast-vanishing willow, and tears washed away the steely look that sometimes crept into Eileen’s gray eyes.
As she crouched thus, a change seemed to come over the perfect June morning; ragged clouds edged with rain came out of the west and darkened the sun; the singing wind turned to a gale that beat a path before it through the ox-eye daisies, and the ripening wild strawberries looked like blood drops in the grass.
The change came and passed rapidly, and with it Eileen’s emotion, and in a moment more they were strolling uphill toward her house as though nothing had happened. True it was she could not picture Oaklands without Ernest; that is, Ernest the man in the open, clad in his loose brown suit, carrying rod and creel, a figure that her imagination turned into a hero of romance. But the other Ernest, the man of the wagon shop, sweat drops on his forehead and uprolled sleeves, superintending some manipulation that he would not leave to the judgment of his workmen, repelled her forcibly. It was this second man that she wished to conceal from her friends of school and city. Many other women in country towns have felt this way at twenty-two. That individual work of the hands has fallen into disrepute is the fault of a feminine point of view as well as the encroachment of machinery.
“When are you going away?” Ernest asked, as he paused at the kitchen door and transferred the trout, wet moss and all, from the creel to the dish that Eileen brought. It was an old-fashioned blue and white platter with cut-off corners; in the centre was the picture of a ruined castle, while the border was wrought in a shell pattern. Ernest had doubtless seen it many times before, yet in the brief moment while he laid the trout upon it every unimportant detail was fixed in his memory, together with the outline of the ten pointed, flexible fingers, tanned with the morning’s fishing, that held the dish.
“Won’t you come in and see father?” Eileen said, without looking up. “He frets so at having to keep upstairs; only indigestion and overwork with his head, the doctor says. This was the beginning of the idea of the trip abroad, and at first, father wouldn’t go, but when he found that he could combine business with the journey, he changed his mind.”
“Not to-day, Eileen, it’s nearly noon.” He might have added that the great work wagon made for Mrs. Jenks-Smith of the Bluffs was to be sent out that afternoon, and that he must go over every bolt and screw, after his father’s habit, before it was delivered; but he refrained, as well as from saying that the Boy would be waiting for him to come home to dinner.
“Why didn’t Wray come in to dinner, and where is Eileen?” asked her father of her mother, as an hour later he finished the second of the delicately broiled trout with a relish that belied the symptoms of indigestion.
“He was busy and couldn’t, and she’s downstairs writing letters, to see if she can’t get one of her classmates to join our trip and make a fourth; she thinks it makes pleasanter travelling.”
“Then she couldn’t coax Wray to go. Well, I’m glad; I thought he’d too much sense to loaf about all summer, as I must. I hope they haven’t quarrelled and she’s turned him down.”
“I thought that and put the question to her, but from what she says, I guess he didn’t give her the chance. I think she’s vexed because he intends to stick to the farm and wagon shop and keep his stepbrother here, and I don’t blame her; a girl with her schooling and a father like you can look higher than a man who works with his hands, even if he has got a whole room full of books and goes down to read Shakespeare and nose out county history that had much better be forgotten with Martin Cortright. Eileen’s handsome, and she’s got a tongue in her head; there’s no knowing what may happen or who she may meet in travelling, or visiting some of her friends that are scattered all over the country.”
“Nonsense; I know very well what I don’t wish to have happen. Wray is worth ten of the pretty boys that lounge about nowadays, and haven’t enough grip either of body or brain to stick to anything.”
Mrs. March, however, did not argue; she had no capacity for it, having had pretty much her own way through life by the mere force of inertia. She had cherished romantic ideals in her youth, but not to the extent of marrying one of them. In fact, she had named her only daughter for the heroine of a novel over which she had shed many comfortable tears, and fortunately, Eileen, of a slimness and fairness hitherto unknown on either side of the family, had grown into the name. Mrs. March was the typical American woman of a country town who has means enough to go to New York at intervals, who after forty regards Europe, indefinite and at large, as the one aim and end of life and needed rest, but who, owing to a limited intelligence, returns from the tour sadder, much wearier, but in no way wiser than when she left, in spite of a miscellaneous collection of photographs and guide books.
Ernest Wray walked slowly uphill, his house being on the main road above the Marches’, while the acres belonging to it climbed one above the other, over the Ridge and down the other side. This road was the highway between Banbury and Bridgeton, and there was a cheerful amount of passing on it. As he pushed open the front gate, he looked about the yard for the Boy, but saw no signs of him. A pair of setter pups came from the porch to meet him, stumbling over their own great soft paws, and fastening their sharp first teeth in his trouser hems, pulling him backward at the same time that their shrill barks welcomed him.
Aunt Louisa Taylor (so called because she had ushered Ernest, as well as most of the younger portion of the community, into the world) was setting the dinner table in the little room out of the summer kitchen, whose windows disclosed a view of both ranges of hills and the valley between.
No, she had not seen the Boy; he had gone to look for wild strawberries with Jeptha Lewis’s children a couple of hours before, Jeptha being the head workman in the wagon shop. As she spoke, Ernest heard footsteps in the room overhead, which was his own; and so he hastened upstairs, calling the Boy’s name, which was Asa, after his father, though when people spoke of him among themselves, they usually said the Boy, because it seemed to distinguish this child of an old man from all other boys of the neighbourhood.
No answer came, so going to the Boy’s room, the great south chamber that had been the child’s mother’s, and finding it empty, Ernest went on to his own, where in a heap on the floor, his head buried in the white-knitted quilt, half crouched, half knelt the Boy. At first Ernest was startled, thinking the child was ill, or had perhaps picked and eaten something poisonous. But as he turned his face up to his half-brother, the expression was of misery of mind, not body.
Sitting in the low rush-bottomed rocker, Ernest drew the Boy to him tenderly, so that the pale, downcast face rested against his shoulder. Raising it gently in his hands, he said, “What is it, Asa? tell big brother.”
“I can’t, oh, I can’t say it,” sobbed the child, yet without shedding a tear. “It’s the Brown boys that told me, and their mother knows it’s true.”
(As the widow Brown had made desperate but unsuccessful efforts to become his housekeeper instead of Aunt Louisa, and annex her unruly brood to his household, Ernest quickly conjectured the report that had reached the Boy.)
“Very well, then, if little brother cannot say it, big brother must try; only look up and say Yes and No, so that he may know that he is guessing right. They said, perhaps, that I am going away and that you are going to live far off with strangers?”
“Yes.”
“They said that everything here belongs to me and nothing to you?”
“Yes.”
“They told you that one day I would marry some one who was very beautiful, like a princess in a fairy tale, and that I should not care for you any more?”
“Yes, oh, yes, that was the worst of all!”
“I have also heard all this, but it is not true.”
“Not even a word, brother?”
“Not even a word.”
“And you want me for always?” said the child, now standing before him and searching the man’s very soul with his solemn brown eyes.
“Only God and your mother know how much.”
“Can I bring my bed right in here close to yours, and put my story-books in the little shelves by yours, and just keep that big lonely room to play in when it’s wet? Yes?”
Then, clasping his arms tight around the man’s neck in an ecstasy of relief, he whispered, “Can I have one more wish, just one more?”
“What is it, Boy? You must name it first, in fair play, you know.”
“May I call you daddy? Boys can have lots of brothers, but a daddy’s very special, and there’s never only one of him, just like you.”
Ernest waited a moment before he answered, for something swayed him that was stronger than his will, impelling him to cry out, “No, not that!”
And then he whispered back, “Yes, Boy, from now on;” and clasping the child in a way that almost hurt, he kissed him on the forehead.
Thus was the compact sealed.
The tension over, the Boy, who could not realize what the other’s promise meant, speedily became a child again, and freeing himself, cried, “Now I shall be here to see the Thrashers hatch out; there’s four eggs in the nest in last year’s pea brush down by the fence; do let us go over and see them, Daddy; if we don’t poke them, they won’t mind.” Then, as they looked across the fields, the Boy laid his cheek against the man’s, and nestling, murmured in a voice of deep content: “Isn’t it a lovely, lovely day, and everything is so happy. Listen: now I can hear the wind talking in the grass, just as you say it talks to you.”
The summer hurried on and slipped away, as it has a way of doing after the rose and strawberry have held their garden carnival, where each crowns the other.
In July the Marches went abroad. Ernest had not broken his habit of dropping in at his neighbour’s house, but he had seen less and less of Eileen, who, very naturally, was absorbed in her preparations and the visit of the young woman who was to be her companion. Before leaving, Eileen had sent Ernest a photograph of herself taken in the filmy summer gown she had last worn. Why she did it, she herself could not have told; neither could Ernest have fathomed her motive if he had tried.
He was about to slip the card into a drawer, then hesitated, and taking from his mantel-shelf in the living-room a picture of Eileen at sixteen, plump, wide-eyed, and serene, for which, at the time, he had carved a somewhat clumsy frame of tulip wood, he substituted the new picture of the lovely, graceful woman with birdlike poise of head and expression, for the old, placing it on his desk.
The Boy, coming in, spied the photograph, and always alert for new impressions, climbed on a chair to look at it, crying, “Oh, Daddy, isn’t this Eileen pretty? She looks up at me just like Pandora peeping up from the box, or a wood-thrush when it’s going to sing. She’s prettier than the Sleeping Beauty in my book. I want to take her up to live on our bureau and be our fairy Princess; may I?”
And the man, wishing to say No, as in many other things the boy asked, answered, “Yes.”
Autumn came—and winter. The Boy began to thrive so well that even father marvelled at the change; there was no outdoor sport fit for his age that Ernest did not enter with him, and the long evenings were filled with delight drawn from all of childhood’s countries, Fairyland being not the least. Christmas was the time set for the Marches to return, but new business at Washington claimed the father, and after a brief week spent in house closing, mother and daughter joined him there; and from that time Eileen came to be more and more of an unreality save to the Boy, who seemed to regard her portrait as a living actuality and the third person of the household, saying one day to the Man: “I’m going to marry the Princess when I grow up if she will wait, and not grow old. Do you think, Daddy, Eileen will ever be old like Aunt Louisa?”
“She will never grow old to me; she has stopped,” the Man answered.
The spring of the following year was cold and very wet, bringing more illness than usual to the well-drained hill country, especially to the children. There was scarlet fever at Bridgeton, and some one brought it to the Ridge School, the Boy being one of its first victims.
“Who is going to nurse the Boy?” asked father. “Aunt Louisa is too old, and no risk must be taken with him. His bed must be moved into the large room with the open chimney, and a log fire kept on the hearth. Would you like me to send over a trained nurse from the Bridgeton Hospital?”
“I will care for him,” said Ernest, setting about the preparation of the room as quietly as a woman could.
That night began a siege that lasted for weeks that seemed like years: on one side deafness and blindness in league with death, on the other side Nature, the doctor, and the Man, while between them lay the Boy.
From the end of the first week the doctor came twice daily, then followed nights when he never went away. Meanwhile, the Man prayed wordless prayers, fought on, refusing to be discouraged, seeming to infuse his own vitality into the Boy’s failing pulse by sheer force of will. Yet all this time the doctor dared not look him in the eyes, so fierce their agonized questioning.
Then at last Nature first routed death, and then slowly, one by one, the others of his train, until one soft, mild day in early April the Man carried a bundle rolled in blankets and, partly unfolding it, set it in the big chair in the sunny corner of the south porch, where, from above the wrappings, two great brown eyes looked out, and the voice of the Boy said clearly, if faintly, “Why, Daddy, I’m so surprised, it’s spring again; and the robin’s sitting tight on her nest, so there must be eggs in it.” Then, lying back, he closed his eyes, with a sigh in which both weakness and content took part, his fingers, thin as birds’ claws, seeking the Man’s, and twining themselves with his.
Presently he said, as if he had been thinking, “I’ve had a big long sleep, I guess, and my throat hurt so, and when I was thirsty, I dreamed that my mother used to turn over my pillow when it burned, and you always came and gave me a cool drink. Did you, Daddy? Was it always you?”
“Yes, always.”
“And did mother turn my pillow? Did you see her?”
“I did not see her, Asa, but then she may have been there; you know the room was often dark.”
“Everything is normal now,” the doctor said that evening when he came in; “in another month, with fresh air and careful feeding, the Boy will be quite himself again.”
Then at last the sluice-gates opened, and the waters of sorrow and joy, so long pent up, rushed forth, and the Man stood before the doctor, his arm before his face, sobbing like a woman.
At first, the doctor was minded to steal away, then, realizing the nerve strain Ernest had undergone, he laid his hand upon the arm to urge him to go to bed, and repressed a start, for the flesh burned under his touch. Worn out by his vigil and carelessness of self, the Man had caught the fever.
“But I cannot go to bed; the Boy is only half out of the woods even now,” protested Ernest, as father told him of his condition in as few words as possible.
“Do not worry about him,” said father, cheerily. “I will fumigate his things to-morrow and take him down to our house and Mrs. Evan’s care if it is necessary, I promise you.” So the Man yielded to the weariness that weighed him down, and soon, in his turn, was tossing in delirium, not knowing that a white-capped nurse was caring for him as he had cared for the Boy.
The fever itself had taken but a slight hold on Ernest; it was the other spectres, worse than death, that threatened him, Deafness and Blindness; his parched throat and tongue refused to form coherent sound, as he lay there with bandaged eyes and ears, that surgery had rendered wholly deaf in the one hope that Nature might repair the necessary wounds.
As the fever left, and consciousness returned to stay, loneliness possessed him, entire and complete; except through the sense of touch, he was utterly isolated from his kind.
The days went by, until one came, after the pain had left his eyes, when they removed the bandages cautiously, and he saw the chintz figures of the wall-paper in the partly darkened room, and heaven itself could not have seemed a fairer vision.
Presently they let him read, a few words at a time, and the nurse wrote answers to his various questions on a pad that she kept upon the bed; but oftentimes, when he thought that he was speaking, he had in reality made no sound, for he could not hear his own voice.
They brought the Boy, now fast gaining colour and strength, in to reassure him, and Asa, who smiled and puffed out his cheeks to show how he was gaining, left in his hand a little bunch of pansies and hardy English violets. The Man pressed them to his face, but scent was as dead as sound. Would he never again hear the wind in the grass, or Eileen’s voice laughing as they went fishing and the fish slipped the hook? Then it came to him, who for a moment had forgotten more recent events, remembering only the past, that hearing had nothing to do with this.
May fluttered past the Man as though on the wings of many birds. The sight of the lilacs under the window, and the apple blossoms scattered through the valley, were his portion of it, and the blood in his veins seemed to grow warm again and his heart began to take courage. The horses were plodding to and fro, ploughing the river meadow, but he did not ask who was guiding the work, or whether the men at the wagon shop were idle or busy; his head was still tired, so tired that he had scarcely the strength to think.
“You must try to rouse him now,” said the specialist, who was watching the unresponsive ears, to father; “with bodily health the hearing will return.”
It was June when he first crawled down the narrow stairs and took the Boy’s seat in the sunny porch, near which his dinner was spread by Aunt Louisa, who bustled about him affectionately, trying by gesture, as well as by written words, to raise his curiosity to the point of questioning how they were managing without him.
Every few days the Boy came with the doctor, now bringing him some little thing that he had made, or a bunch of wayside flowers. One day he brought a knot of white musk roses fastened together with grass. The Man caught at them eagerly, for such grew in the old garden at Eileen’s. Burying his nose in them, their fragrance penetrated the awakening sense, the same moment that a high-pitched peal of the Boy’s laughter, as he made the young dogs do their tricks, reached his ears. Ah! blessed Mother Nature, who had day and night been knitting, knitting, to rejoin the severed nerves and tissues that they might carry the messages to the brain once more!
Strawberries were ripe and passing, and the blush rose on the kitchen porch was shedding its satin petals when the Man said abruptly to father, who had this day come without the Boy: “When may Asa come home, Dr. Russell? It is a shame to trouble your daughter any longer, and besides, I need his company. I’ve been over the farm to-day, and to-morrow I shall go outside to the wagon shop; yes, to-morrow I must take up life again.”
“Trouble my daughter—Mrs. Evan?” stammered the doctor, as though taken by surprise. “Why—oh, yes, to be sure, I’ll bring him over to-morrow, and perhaps I can persuade his foster-mother to come, too, and render an account of him.”
But on the morrow, the Man did not go to the wagon shop as he had said; the day was sultry, and showers threatened, so he wandered down “cross lots” until he met the trout stream, and quite unconsciously followed it until he came upon the group of old willows, under whose shade the old Eileen had vanished.
It was not until he had almost reached the trees that he noticed there were people there, picnickers, probably, yet something led him to pause and look again. Surely, it was the Boy lying upon the grass, with eager upturned face, listening to some one who was evidently reading aloud; but though figure and book were in sight, foliage concealed the face. Another step, and he saw that the reader was Eileen.
The Man must have cried out, for instantly the pair started, and the light fell full upon Eileen’s hair and face, the same as of old, and yet not the same, while the boy came bounding toward him, calling, “Oh, Daddy, so you’ve found out at last where the Princess and I come to read every day!”
“The Princess! How came she here?” said the Man, sick at heart, for he thought the strange haunting dreams of his illness were coming back. “She does not live here now.”
“She didn’t,” cried the boy, babbling on eagerly, as he pulled the Man under the willows, “but they all came back here after you got sick, and my Princess took me up there to live with her in their house; the doctor let her, and we’ve been playing a fairy story all the time, and she’s been, oh, so very good to me, Daddy. She’s made me custard and cookies, and sang me to sleep when my legs ached from forgetting how to walk; ’n besides, her father told Peter how to plant the fields, and he’s set Jeptha figuring on an awful lot of wagons. But I’ve forgotten, I wasn’t to tell, I wasn’t to tell, because in fairy stories, if you tell, the lights go out and everything stops. Oh, Princess and Daddy, play you didn’t hear. Oh, don’t let it all stop!” and the Boy clasped his hands tightly, while an agony of fear passed over his sensitive face.
But the Man had ceased to hear him. Taking two steps that brought him face to face with Eileen, he paused and stood looking down at her, and his expression checked the Boy’s tongue.
“Is this all true?” he almost whispered, and as he spoke he grew white to the lips and reeled.
“Sit down upon the bank; you have walked too far and you are faint,” she said, spreading a shawl that lay beside her on the grass. He dropped to the seat she offered, but never took his eyes from her own, over which the lids drooped lower and lower.
“Is it true?” he repeated.
“We came back in April,” she answered softly.
“Why?”
“Because I saw in the home papers that you were ill, and—I wanted to be near.”
“Why, again?” he questioned, almost cruelly, but now he had reached a point where he could bear no uncertainty, no mere palliation.
“Because, Ernest, though I know that there are many other things in life besides caring,—caring is best;” the drooping lids rose slowly, and the gray eyes looked fully and frankly into his. Then, dropping on her knees beside him, she cried passionately, as she circled with a gesture all the beauty round about, “Can you hear, can you see as you used? Ah, I have been so horribly afraid!”
Clasping his long, thin fingers, that would tremble, about hers, the Man drew Eileen toward him; “I can hear the wind in the grass, I can see what lies behind your eyes, Eileen; do I need more?”
“You won’t let the fairy story stop? Please promise you won’t,” interrupted the Boy, unable to wait longer for his answer.
“Part of it must,” answered Eileen, “because you see, Boy, the Princess who wished to live in a story-book, has turned out to be merely a woman—” “For the sake of her lover who was not a prince,” added the Man.
Then, as the Boy looked at them, the comprehension of it all slowly beamed from his solemn eyes.
“Then I must choose you a new name,” he said.
“Yes, Boy, surely; what shall it be?”
“I will call you Mother, because I love you,” he said very slowly. “Then when other children say it, it won’t hurt me so here,” pressing his hands to his throat; “and my real mother away up there will hear and know that I’m not lonely any more, and that will make her glad.”
And the wind blew on through the wild grass, where never a scythe came to end the song!