Chapter IX: The Proof of Courage

_May 20th._ Caro did not come back until yesterday, though she called the Peon up daily to ask how I was and to send her love. She did not allude to David, and the Peon volunteered no information. But yesterday she dashed in at the gate, driving like a young Jehu, flung the reins to Uncle Milton, who was at work among the roses at the other end of the house, and came flying across the lawn to my cot.

“Oh, Mammy Lil, are you all alone? Has David really gone—to stay, I mean?”

I told her his plans.

She sat on the edge of the cot, her head held high, her eyes sparkling.

“It’s a shame!” she exclaimed indignantly; “how could he have the heart to leave you so?”

I looked at her quizzically. I had been feeling rather forlorn; but suddenly the comical side of my woes presented itself, as it so kindly and so often does, and I wanted to laugh.

“Who ran first?” I inquired.

She flushed to the roots of her curly hair and slipped to the grass beside me, her pretty head on my shoulder.

“We’re pigs, both of us,” she averred contritely. “But, Mammy Lil, David is the worst pig. He really could have stayed: and I—couldn’t. Anyway, I’m glad he’s gone; it’s just about the decentest thing he’s done.”

“You are a consistent child,” I observed, stroking her hair; “but, Caro dear, I’m not accustomed to hearing David criticized from the standpoint of decency, and we won’t begin now. And I wanted him to go very much.”

“Well, anyway, I can come back. I’ll never leave you here by yourself. I’ll go back and pack up this evening, and come home first thing in the morning.”

I shook my head. I had been thinking about it all these long, lonesome days. They are both my children, but David has the first right to our home; and with Caro installed here he will not come back to it. Besides, it isn’t fair. And if they will fight at cross-purposes we must all take the consequences together. I know I am rather a dishevelled shuttle-cock to do duty between their clashing wills; but they will have to have it out, now that they have begun it. And if that hard-hearted little sinner came back here, she’d convince herself in no time that David is the sinner and she is the one and only saint. It never did take long for staying at Cousin Jane’s to pall on Caro; and she’ll probably see things from various points of view before she concludes her experiment.

Poor little soul, she cried dreadfully. She even tried to work on my sympathies by telling me how Cousin Jane serves up Bob White’s perfections morning, noon, and night. This was welcome news to me, and helped me to disguise the very fluid condition of my supposedly hard heart. I must confess we both cried before she went back: but Caro owned it was fair.

I feel like a yellow dog, of course. One always does when one stands for a painful justice—it’s part of the job. I felt the same shame when she was a little thing and I let her bite the red pepper she snatched in the garden the minute I told her not to touch it. It burns my own mouth to this day. But Caro never snatched against orders again.

And there’s no sense in listening to Grumpy’s prophecies. Where is the pleasure of growing old if one can’t learn to distil from one’s experiences the essential oil of hope? When the Peon and I fell out, hopelessly, desperately, eternally, about six months before we were married, I was just a young thing, and quite pardonable in my belief that my life was ruined forever by the cataclysm. But from the vantage-ground of twenty-odd years of additional living I should be able to detect the flimsiness of the average impenetrable barrier. I don’t think Caro cares for any one else, at least; and if they’re not meddled with they’ll work it out their own way, which must be the best way for the Peon and me. And if he and I can’t enjoy ourselves very much just now, why, we don’t want to when the children are miserable; so that’s all right, of course.

As to their misery, I have at least come far enough in life myself to know that it has—or will have—its mitigations. I never yet have been in a hole—and heaven knows life has been a procession of holes these last years—that I didn’t get out of it with some added capacity of living that made being in holes worth while. Why should I begrudge the children their own hole-adventures and discoveries, their own enrichment of life?

* * * * *

_May 22nd._ The Peon comes home early these days and takes me out for a ride. I can sit in my chair or lie down at will; and he wheels me over the soft grass to all the places I’ve been longing to see and have only beheld in Make-Believe. We go down to the brook nearly every day about sunset and watch the birds quenching their thirst before bedtime. There are many song sparrows down there; and the killdeers haunt the banks at all time, whirring up when startled with wild cries, their breasts and lifted wings flashing snow-white beneath, and the rich salmon of the lower back gleaming as they rise from the valley into the level sunlight along the brow of the hill. The Peon flattens my chair to a couch, and throws himself on the grass or sits on the roots of a sycamore, while we talk of all the years that the children have been growing up with us, and of what the future is to bring. We are both very strenuously cheerful. And indeed, in our hearts, we do hope honestly to have them both at home again some day. Only it seems rather a long way off sometimes; and the house is so very quiet when we go back.

Sometimes we go back to the spot we picked out years ago as the one where we thought David might like to build his home some day; for though we always hoped to have him with us, we never wanted to rob him of a home of his own. We had never said to one another that we hoped for Caro to make the home for him—to put it into words seemed to infringe on their right to settle that great matter, each to their own heart’s wish: but we had hoped it without words. We go there now, and hope for it openly, bridging our separation with happy dreams, and comforting one another with assurances it is not always easy to feel.

David has not been long enough at his journey’s end for a letter mailed there to reach us; but it seems as if he had been gone for months. And poor little Caro looks so wistful when she starts back to Cousin Jane’s that I feel as though I have been turning her out of doors for the most of my life. It is really not to be borne very much longer. The Peon’s sister wants us to go to her next month, at her summer home in the mountains of Pennsylvania; and Caro will have to come home in time to get me ready. We can spend the summer together, at least.

But before I go I want to see plainer sailing for Milly and Bobolink, as Caro disrespectfully styles Mr. Lincoln. Grace was here for a little while today to tell me good-bye. She is off to stay with George’s mother while the old lady’s daughter takes a trip. Milly was with her, and promised to come back soon. She said she wanted to talk to me, and from the anxious air with which she said it, I’m hoping she is seriously thinking of turning on that jay-bird uncle of hers and teaching him a few of the things he needs to learn.

* * * * *

_May 25th._ A golden day, after a night of drenching rain. The sky is like October, and under it the winds are at play. And why, when sunshine fills the world, should one suffer one’s eyes to be blinded to it by any mote of pain or trouble held close enough to shut out all the light? I will keep mine at arm’s length, if I die for it, and see around it and over it, yes, and through it, into this beautiful, wonderful world! If one’s feet can’t travel, aren’t one’s eyes an open road of escape?

* * * * *

_May 27th._ Three sleepless nights, a dead weight of weariness, loneliness to the heart’s core, and pain that wrings the flesh—these are among Grumpy’s stock-in-trade this morning, and he flaunts them and a dozen other things, wherever I turn my thoughts. He has heaped up, mountain high, the things I want and can’t have; and there he sits, grinning at the void they leave in my idle, useless life. I must fill that hole, or go under. What have I left?

First, the Peon’s love, and the children’s, and that of my friends. Love: and the Love from which love came. By the time all that is stowed away in the void, it has rather a “gone” look about it—for a void. And Grumpy’s grin has a tuck in it.

Then a sense of humor—the most blessed thing, save love itself, ever given to human kind. It keeps one sane and balanced where without it one would go mad. A source of justice it is, a bond of sympathy, a destroyer of egotism, a solace in suffering, a staff to courage, an open door of escape from all that is unbearable in life.

Next, the power to hold my tongue when things hurt, and to keep the whine out of my voice when I’m nothing but whine inside.

There are love, laughter, and silence; and as void-fillers they go a long way. But there are other things for the chinks. For I can read a little and write a little, and think a little, as against the black idleness of those three years. And beauty—wind in the tree-tops, the arching blue, the flicker of light and shade—beauty everywhere, in fact; and back of beauty the Thought that designed both it and the eyes to see it. Oh, it is a beautiful world! And though one’s body lies idle, one’s thoughts may go everywhere, and are everywhere at home. And may not endurance itself, however passive, yet rise to the point of achievement, if only one endure in the right way? And if liberty be measured by one’s capacity to do without—oh, how can any walls of suffering shut one in when the way up is always open—up, to the presence of God?

* * * * *

_May 28th._ Whenever I think I’ve overcome a temptation, and can afford to rest, something else comes pouncing and catches me napping. This time it was Cousin Jane. I’m not a bit sorry I sent her home—it was high time for her to go. But I needn’t have been so blazing mad when I did it.

She hasn’t been near me for ages, but she came at last, exactly when she very specially should have kept away. So as I lay there on the porch sofa—for I couldn’t get out in the yard this week—I heard the familiar pile-driver tread, and opened my eyes to behold her at the corner of the porch, personified virtue, somewhat overheated by the afternoon sun, and looking rather limp about the collar. But there was nothing limp about her stolid mouth, nor in her hard black eyes. She had come for a purpose, and was not displeased to think I wouldn’t enjoy it.

I’ve been afraid of Cousin Jane all my life. I used to run at the sound of her voice when I was a child at Cedarhurst. More than once I have been gently, but firmly, extracted from a closet by Great-aunt Letitia, and led to her presence to perform the rites required by politeness to even the most unpleasant kin. Somehow it all came back to me—the childish, unreasoning fear. I was so weak, the pain so biting sharp; I could not bear unkindness, too. I turned my head toward the long windows with a wild thought of escape; but when my heart is like this, I can scarcely walk, and I could never have reached my room. Besides, she would come after me: so I made a virtue of necessity and lifted my hand. She saved me the trouble of speaking.

“Good land alive, Lyddy! Are you mopin’ around yet, makin’ out like you’re half dead? I wonder John Bird doesn’t go crazy! I heard you were rompin’ all over the place, throwin’ the birds enough biscuit to feed all the poor folks in town, if you only had religion enough to think about them instead of your own silly whims.”

She came close and settled herself heavily in the Peon’s chair, waving her fan vigorously. She reached across me to the stand on the other side, and rang my bell sharply. Josie appeared at once.

“Go draw me some fresh water, straight out of the well,” she commanded. It was one of her hobbies to ignore the Peon’s water system, and to assume that we depended on a well and a windlass, as she boasted that she still did herself.

“Wouldn’t you rather have a glass of lemonade?” I inquired. “And bring some wafers, Josie.”

Josie’s mother makes wonderful old-time wafers, as thin as paper and as crisp as frosty air. They are beautifully rolled, and melt in one’s mouth: no other cook in the county can achieve them. Cousin Jane ate the entire plateful, and her manner, as she turned to me once more, was a shade less like that of a regiment charging a redoubt.

“What did David go off for?” she demanded. “Have you and John Bird turned him loose? I can’t get a thing out of Caroline, and I know something’s wrong somewhere. What is it?”

“He went to look after some business,” I said.

“Oh, you can tell that to the neighbors that ain’t kin,” she said scornfully. “I want to know what’s wrong. He’s done somethin’, I know, an’ Caroline’s ashamed of it. I can’t get a thing out of her, but she’s a changed girl. An’ more than that, she’s standin’ in her own light. She’s that flighty an’ cross Bob White looks like he don’t know what to make of it. Men ain’t goin’ to stand too much foolishness, an’ first news you know, Caroline can’t get him if she wants him. I’m talkin’ plain, but it’s time.”

“Why don’t you talk to Caro?” I suggested.

“Good land, Lyddy, do you reckon I ain’t? But it’s like water on a duck’s back—in one ear and out the other. An’ besides”—with a sudden deep craft in her beady eyes—“you have to be careful with girls—at least, a person with tact does. I don’t come right out with things to Caroline, like you would. But I just thought I’d get together all the things David’s been doin’ an’ lay ’em before her. I don’t suppose you let her know the half of it, whatever it was. Was it somethin’ about money, or has he been getting into fast ways, drinkin’, or playin’ cards, or—worse? I always knew he would get into mischief sooner or later—he pretends to be so steady: I’ve just been waitin’ for it to come. Why, what’s the matter, Lyddy? What do you want?”

I sat straight up and rang the bell. Josie ran out.

“Get me my chair, Josie, quick,” I said. She whirled it to my side, and I stepped in unaided.

“Take me to my room,” I told her, “and leave me there while you tell Uncle Milton to get Mrs. Grackle’s buggy and to open the gate for her. She is going home at once. Then come back and help me to bed. Do not come back until I send for you, Cousin Jane: I am not well.”

She stared at me, speechless and apoplectic, and as Josie arranged my pillows I saw her driving between the cedars. And above all my anger about David and my consciousness that Great-aunt Letitia would be ashamed of me, above the weakness, and above the tearing, throbbing pain, is the exhilaration of knowing that for once in my life I wasn’t afraid of Cousin Jane. I never will be afraid of her again!

* * * * *

_May 31st._ Trying all one’s life to see things from other peoples’ point of view has this advantage in sickness: it helps one to stand apart from the suffering and to look at it from without, even when whelmed in it, and almost overwhelmed. One sees it as if it were someone else’s sickness, taking the long view of it, as a doctor does. He is sorry for the pain, of course; he knows it is bad. But he expects it. And he expects the backsets, and the blues, and the can-I-ever-get-wells, and all the rest of it. Those things are part of the process of recovery, and do not affect the final outcome. Once past a certain point, the road leads inevitably to one sure goal; the windings in and out don’t count, nor the ups and downs; one is advancing all the time. Now, if a doctor, who doesn’t need it, can get that comfort out of my aches and pains, why shouldn’t I get it, who need it so much?

* * * * *

_June 1st._ Out under the maple again today, and the stars in their courses fighting for me! And why, when a miracle like this happens for Milly and Bobolink, should I despair of David and Caro?

Milly came to see me to have that long talk she spoke about. She had been telephoning every day to know when she could come, so I had Josie call her the moment I found I could go out. And just suppose I had been well enough yesterday—what a misfortune that would have been!

She scattered the crumbs for me, and settled beside me to pour out what Caro calls “her uncle-ish woes;” and while she was doing it, the wood-thrush flew down, only to be shouldered away from the feast by a mannerless jay. Somehow it made me feel perfectly hopeless about Milly, poor little soft, sweet thing, and my eyes filled up with tears; but when I had winked them dry, the thrush went back. The jay pecked at him savagely, and he dashed half-way round the hydrangeas in terror. Milly saw him and caught her breath.

“Uncle Jason _is_ like that,” she said, with a little catch in her voice; “and I can’t stand against him—I can’t! Don’t you see how helpless the thrush is, Cousin Lil?”

But the thrush had stopped in mid-flight. His breast was puffed out like a tiny balloon, the trembling of his legs plain to be seen; he quivered from head to foot. But he turned slowly, his legs shaking under him, and hopped deliberately toward his tormentor, his head high, his swollen breast making a ruff of feathers visible on either side of his back. He went close to the jay and pecked toward him in the air. The jay, startled, gave back an inch. The thrush, still trembling, hopped nearer and pecked, as steadily as if his legs were in their normal condition. The bully backed again. The thrush hopped and pecked.

Milly had leaned forward, her hand on mine. Her face was white and she was breathing quickly.

The jay continued to back. The wood-thrush followed him, inch by inch, unyielding, yet in mortal fear. At last the big coward could stand it no longer. He spread his wings and vanished across the brook. The thrush stood trembling a moment, his feathers slowly flattening along his sides, and then returned quietly to his lunch. Milly rose, a new light in her soft eyes.

“If he can, I can,” she said steadily. “I don’t need to talk any more, Cousin Lil: I’m going home and _do_.”