Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
The Builders
CHAPTER VIII
The Cedars
NO one met her at the little country station, and leaving her bag for old Jonas, she started out alone to walk the two miles to The Cedars. Straight ahead the long, empty road trailed beneath the fresh young foliage of the woods, the little curled red velvet leaves of the oaks shining through the sea-green mist of the hickories and beeches; and she felt that within her soul there was only a continuation of this long, straight emptiness that led on to nothing. Overhead flocks of small fleecy clouds, as white as swans-down, drifted across the changeable April sky, while the breeze, passing through the thick woods, stirred the delicate flower-like shadows on the moist ground. "Spring is so sad," she thought. "I never understood before how much sadder spring is than autumn." This sadness of budding things, of renewing life, of fugitive scents and ephemeral colours, had become poignantly real. "It makes me want something different – something I have never had; and that is the sharpest desire on earth – the desire for a happiness that hasn't a name." A minute afterwards she concluded resolutely, "That is weakness, and I will not be weak. One must either conquer or be conquered by life – and I will not be conquered. Anybody can be miserable, but it takes courage to be happy. It takes courage and determination and intelligence to get the best out of whatever happens, and the only way to begin is to begin by getting the best out of yourself. Now I might have been hurt, but I am not because I won't let myself be. I might be unhappy, but I am not because my life is my own, and I can make of it anything that I choose." Then suddenly she heard an inner voice saying from a great distance, "It is my last chance. I shall never see him again." With the words her memory was illuminated by a flame; and in the burning light she saw clearly the meaning of everything that had happened – of her sorrow, her dumbness, her longing to speak some splendid and memorable word at the last. It was not to Briarlay, it was not even to Letty, that her thoughts had clung at the moment of parting. She had wanted David Blackburn to remember because it was the separation from him, she knew now, that would make her unhappy. Unconsciously, before she had suspected the truth, he had become an inseparable part of her world; unconsciously she had let the very roots of her life entwine themselves about the thought of him.
Standing there in the deserted road, beneath the changeable blue of the sky, she turned to fight this secret and pitiless enemy. "I will not let it conquer me. I will conquer, as I have conquered worse things than this. I believed myself dead because I had once been disappointed. I believed myself secure because I had once been stabbed to the heart. This is the punishment for my pride – this humiliation and bitterness and longing from which I shall never be free." An unyielding cord stretched from her heart back to Briarlay, drawing stronger and tighter with every step of the distance. It would always be there. The pain would not lessen with time. The flame of memory would grow brighter, not paler, with the days, months, and years.
The April wind, soft, provocative, sweet-scented, blew in her face as she looked back; and down the long road, between the rose and green of the woods, an unbroken chain of memories stretched toward her. She saw Blackburn as he had appeared on that first night at Briarlay, standing in the door of his library when she came in from the terrace; she saw him in Letty's room at midnight, sitting beside the night lamp on the candle-stand, with the book, which he did not read, open before him; she saw him in the day nursery, his face enkindled with tenderness; she saw him in the midst of the snowy landscape, when there had been rage in his look at the half-drunken Roane; and she saw him, most clearly of all, as he looked facing, on that last night, the hour that would leave its mark on him for ever. It was as if this chain of memories, beginning in the vague sunshine and shadow of the distance, grew more distinct, more vivid, as it approached, until at last the images of her mind gathered, like actual presences, in the road before her. She could not escape them, she knew. They were as inevitable as regret, and would follow her through the bitter years ahead, as they had followed her through the hours since she had left him. She must stand her ground, and fight for peace as valiantly as she had ever fought in the past.
"I cannot escape it," she said, as she turned to go on, "I must accept it and use it because that is the only way. Mine is only one among millions of aching hearts, and all this pain must leave the world either better or worse than it was – all this pain will be used on the side either of light or of darkness. Even sorrow may stand in the end for the world's happiness, just as the tragedy of this war may make a greater peace in the future. If I can only keep this thought, I shall conquer – war may bring peace, and pain may bring joy – in the end."
Beyond the white gate, the old aspens glimmered silver green in the sunlight, and, half-hidden in a dusky cloud of cedars, she saw the red chimneys and the dormer-windows of the house. Home at last! And home was good however she came to it. With a smile she drew out the bar, and after replacing it, went on with an energetic and resolute step.
The door was open, and looking through the hall, she saw her mother crossing the back porch, with a yellow bowl of freshly churned butter in her hands.
Mrs Meade had grown older in the last six months, and she limped slightly from rheumatism; but her expression of sprightly cheerfulness had not changed, and her full pink face was still pretty. There was something strangely touching in the sight of her active figure, which was beginning at last to stoop, and in her brisk, springy step, which appeared to ignore, without disguising, the limp in her walk. Never, it seemed to Caroline, had she seen her so closely – with so penetrating a flash of understanding and insight. Bare and hard as life had been, she had cast light, not shadow, around her; she had stood always on the side of the world's happiness.
"Mother, dear, I've come home to see you!" cried Caroline gaily.
The old lady turned with a cry. "Why, Caroline, what on earth?" she exclaimed, and carefully set down the bowl she was carrying.
The next instant Caroline was in her arms, laughing and crying together.
"Oh, mother, I wanted to see you, so I came home!"
"Is anything wrong, dear?"
"Nothing that cannot be made right. Nothing in the world that cannot be made right."
Drawing her out on the porch, Mrs. Meade gazed earnestly into her face. "You are a little pale. Have you been ill, Caroline?"
"I never had much colour, you know, but I am perfectly well."
"And happy, darling?" The dear features, on which time was beginning to trace tender lines of anxiety, beamed on her daughter, with the invincible optimism that life had granted in place of bodily ease. As the wind stirred the silvery hair, Caroline noticed that it had grown a little thinner, though it was still as fine and light as spun flax. For the first time she realized that her mother possessed the beauty which is permanent and indestructible – the beauty of a fervent and dominant soul. Age could soften, but it could not destroy, the charm that was independent of physical change.
Caroline smiled brightly. "Happy to be with you, precious mother."
"Maud is in the hospital, you know, and Diana is in New York getting ready to sail. Only Margaret is left with me, and she hasn't been a bit well this winter. She is working hard over her garden."
"Yes, you wrote me. While I am here, I will help her. I want to work very hard."
"Can you stay long now? It will be such a comfort to have you. Home never seems just right when one of you is away, and now there will be three. You knew old Docia was sick, didn't you? We have had to put her daughter Perzelia in the kitchen, and she is only a field hand. The cooking isn't very good, but you won't mind. I always make the coffee and the batter bread."
"You know I shan't mind, but I must go back to work in a week or two. Somebody must keep the dear old roof mended."
Mrs. Meade laughed, and the sound was like music. "It has been leaking all winter." Then she added, while the laugh died on her lips, "Have you left Briarlay for good?"
"Yes, for good. I shall never go back."
"But you seemed so happy there?"
"I shall be still happier somewhere else – for I am going to be happy, mother, wherever I am." Though she smiled as she answered, her eyes left her mother's face, and sought the road, where the long procession of the aspens shivered like gray-green ghosts in the wind.
"I am so glad, dear, but there hasn't been anything to hurt you, has there? I hope Mr. Blackburn hasn't been disagreeable."
"Oh, no, he has been very kind. I cannot begin to tell you how kind he has been." Her voice trembled for an instant, and then went on brightly, "And so has Mrs. Timberlake. At first I didn't like her. I thought she was what Docia calls 'ficy,' but afterwards, as I wrote you so often, she turned out to be very nice and human. First impressions aren't always reliable. If they were life would be easier, and there wouldn't be so many disappointments – but do you know the most valuable lesson I've learned this winter? Well, it is not to trust my first impression – of a cat. The next time old Jonas brings me a lot of kittens and asks me what I think of them, I'm going to answer, 'I can't tell, Jonas, until I discover their hidden qualities.' It's the hidden qualities that make or mar life, and yet we accept or reject people because of something on the surface – something that doesn't really matter at all."
She was gay enough; her voice was steady; her laugh sounded natural; the upward sweep of the black brows was as charming as ever; and the old sunny glance was searching the distance. There was nothing that Mrs. Meade could point to and say "this is different"; yet the change was there, and the mother felt, with the infallible instinct of love, that the daughter who had come home to her was not the Caroline who had left The Cedars six months ago. "She is keeping something from me," thought Mrs. Meade. "For the first time in her life she is keeping something from me."
"Now I must take off my hat and go to work," said Caroline, eagerly, and she added under her breath, "It will rest me to work."
The fragrance of spring was in the air, and through the fortnight that she stayed at The Cedars, it seemed to her that this inescapable sweetness became a reminder and a torture – a reminder of the beauty and the evanescence of youth, a torture to all the sensitive nerves of her imagination, which conjured up delusive visions of happiness. In the beginning she had thought that work would be her salvation, as it had been when she was younger, that every day, every week, would soften the pain, until at last it would melt into the shadows of memory, and cease to trouble her life. But as the days went by, she realized that this emotion differed from that earlier one as maturity differs from adolescence – not in weakness, but in the sharper pang of its regret. Hour by hour, the image of Blackburn grew clearer, not dimmer, in her mind; day by day, the moments that she had spent with him appeared to draw closer instead of retreating farther away. Because he had never been to The Cedars she had believed that she could escape the sharper recollections while she was here; yet she found now that every object at which she looked – the house, the road, the fields, the garden, even the lilacs blooming beneath her window – she found now that all these dear familiar things were attended by a thronging multitude of associations. The place that he had never known was saturated with his presence. "If I could only forget him," she thought. "Caring wouldn't matter so much, if I could only stop thinking." But, through some perversity of will, the very effort that she made to forget him served merely to strengthen the power of remembrance – as if the energy of mind were condensed into some clear and sparkling medium which preserved and intensified the thought of him. After hours of work, in which she had buried the memories of Briarlay, they would awake more ardently as soon as she raised her head and released her hands from her task. The resolution which had carried her through her first tragedy failed her utterly now, for this was a situation, she found, where resolution appeared not to count.
And the bitterest part was that when she looked back now on those last months at Briarlay, she saw them, not as they were in reality, filled with minor cares and innumerable prosaic anxieties, but irradiated by the rosy light her imagination had enkindled about them. She had not known then that she was happy; but it seemed to her now that, if she could only recover the past, if she could only walk up the drive again and enter the house and see Blackburn and Letty, it would mean perfect and unalterable happiness. At night she would dream sometimes of the outside of the house and the drive and the elms, which she saw always shedding their bronze leaves in the autumn; but she never got nearer than the white columns, and the front door remained closed when she rang the bell, and even beat vainly on the knocker. These dreams invariably left her exhausted and in a panic of terror, as if she had seen the door of happiness close in her face. The day afterwards her regret would become almost unendurable, and her longing, which drowned every other interest or emotion, would overwhelm her, like a great flood which had swept away the natural boundaries of existence, and submerged alike the valleys and the peaks of her consciousness. Everything was deluged by it; everything surrendered to the torrent – even the past. Because she had once been hurt so deeply, she had believed that she could never be hurt in the same way again; but she discovered presently that what she had suffered yesterday had only taught her how to suffer more intensely to-day. Nothing had helped her – not blighted love, not disillusionment, not philosophy. All these had been swept like straws on the torrent from which she could not escape.
The days were long, but the nights were far longer, for, with the first fall of the darkness, her imagination was set free. While she was working with Margaret in the garden, or the kitchen, she could keep her mind on the object before her – she could plant or weed until her body ached from fatigue, and the soft air and the smell of earth and of lilacs, became intermingled. But it was worse in the slow, slow evenings, when the three of them sat and talked, with an interminable airy chatter, before the wood-fire, or round the lamp, which still smoked. Then she would run on gaily, talking always against time, longing for the hour that would release her from the presence of the beings she loved best, while some memory of Blackburn glimmered in the fire, or in the old portraits, or through the windows, which looked, uncurtained, out on the stars. There were moments even when some quiver of expression on her mother's face or on Margaret's, some gleam of laughter or trick of gesture, would remind her of him. Then she would ask herself if it were possible that she had loved him before she had ever seen him, and afterwards at Briarlay, when she had believed herself to be so indifferent? And sitting close to her mother and sister, divided from them by an idea which was more impregnable than any physical barrier, she began to feel gradually that her soul was still left there in the house which her mind inhabited so persistently – that her real life, her vital and perpetual being, still went on there in the past, and that here, in the present, beside these dear ones, who loved her so tenderly, there was only a continuous moving shadow of herself. "But how do I know that these aren't the shadows of mother and of Margaret?" she would demand, startled out of her reverie.
At the end of a fortnight a letter came from Mrs. Timberlake, and she read it on the kitchen porch, where Perzelia, the field hand, was singing in a high falsetto, as she bent over the wash-tub.
"We is jew-els – pre-cious – jew-els in – His – c-r-ow-n!" sang Perzelia shrilly, and changing suddenly from hymn to sermon, "Yas, Lawd, I tells de worl'. I tells de worl' dat ef'n dat nigger 'oman don' stop 'er lies on me, I'se gwine ter cut 'er heart out. I'se gwine ter kill 'er jes' de same ez I 'ould a rat. Yas, Lawd, I tells 'er dat. 'We is jew-els – pre-cious – jew-els in His c-r-o-w-n.'"
Mrs. Timberlake wrote in her fine Italian hand:
MY DEAR CAROLINE,
I have thought of you very often, and wanted to write to you, but ever since you left we have been rather upset, and I have been too busy to settle down to pen and paper. For several weeks after you went away Letty was not a bit well. Nobody knew what was the matter with her, and Doctor Boland's medicine did not do her any good. She just seemed to peak and pine, and I said all along it was nothing in the world except missing you that made her sick. Now she is beginning to pick up as children will if you do not worry them too much, and I hope she will soon get her colour back and look as natural as she did while you were here. We have a new trained nurse – a Miss Bradley, from somewhere up in the Shenandoah Valley, but she is very plain and uninteresting, and, between you and me, I believe she bores Letty to death. I never see the child that she does not ask me, "When is Miss Meade coming back?"
We were very anxious to have a word from you after you went away. However, I reckon you felt as if you did not care to write, and I am sure I do not blame you. I suppose you have heard all the gossip that has been going on here – somebody must have written you, for somebody always does write when there is anything unpleasant to say. You know, of course, that Angelica left David the very day you went away, and the town has been fairly ringing with all sorts of dreadful scandals. People believe he was cruel to her, and that she bore his ill-treatment just as long as she could before leaving his house. Only you and I and Mammy Riah will ever know what really happened, and nobody would believe us if we were to come out and tell under oath – which, of course, we can never do. I cannot make out exactly what Angelica means to do, but she has gone somewhere out West, and I reckon she intends to get a divorce and marry Alan, if he ever comes back from the war. You may not have heard that he has gone into the army, and I expect he will be among the very first to be sent to France. Roane is going, too. You cannot imagine how handsome he is in his uniform. He has not touched a drop since we went to war, and I declare he looks exactly like a picture of a crusader of the Middle Ages, which proves how deceptive the best appearances are.
David has not changed a particle through it all. You remember how taciturn he always was, and how he never let anybody even mention Angelica's name to him? Well, it is just the same now, and he is, if possible, more tight-lipped than ever. Nobody knows how he feels, or what he thinks of her behaviour – not even Colonel Ashburton, and you know what close and devoted friends they are. The Colonel told me that once, when he first saw how things were going, he tried to open the subject, and that he could never forget how Blackburn turned him off by talking about something that was way up in the air and had nothing to do with the subject. I am sure David has been cut to the heart, but he will never speak out, and everybody will believe that Angelica has been perfectly right in everything she has done. If it goes on long enough, she will even believe it herself, and that, I reckon, is the reason she is so strong, and always manages to appear sinned against instead of sinning. Nothing can shake her conviction that whatever she wants she ought to have.
Well, my dear, I must stop now and see about dinner. The house is so lonely, though, as far as I can tell, Letty hardly misses her mother at all, and this makes it so provoking when people like Daisy Colfax cry over the child in the street, and carry on about, "poor dear Angelica, who is so heartbroken." That is the way Daisy goes on whenever I see her, and it is what they are saying all over Richmond. They seem to think that David is just keeping Letty out of spite, and I cannot make them believe that Angelica does not want her, and is glad to be relieved of the responsibility. When I say this they put it down as one of my peculiarities – like blinking eyes, or the habit of stuttering when I get excited.
Give my love to your mother, though I reckon she has forgotten old Matty Timberlake, and do drop me a line to let me hear how you are.
Your affectionate friend,MATTY TIMBERLAKE.
Letty sends her dearest, dearest, dearest love.
When she had finished the letter, Caroline looked over the lilacs by the kitchen porch and the broken well-house, to the road beneath the aspens, which still led somewhere – somewhere – to the unattainable. At one corner of the porch Perzelia was singing again, and the sound mingled with the words that Mrs. Timberlake had written.
"We is jew-els, pre-cious jew-els in His c-r-o-w-n."
A fever of restlessness seized Caroline while she listened. The letter, instead of quieting her, had merely sharpened the edge of her longing, and she was filled with hunger for more definite news. In an hour The Cedars had become intolerable to her. She felt that she could not endure another day of empty waiting – of waiting without hope – of the monotonous round of trivial details that led to nothing, of the perpetual, interminable effort to drug feeling with fatigue, to thrust the secondary interests and the things that did not matter into the foreground of her life. "He has never wasted a regret on me," she thought. "He never cared for a minute. I was nothing to him except a friend, a woman who could be trusted." The confession was like the twist of a knife in her heart; and springing to her feet, she picked up the letter she had dropped, and ran into the house.
"I must go back to work, mother darling," she said. "The money I saved is all gone, and I must go back to work."
