Chapter XII: Part 12

This time, when she recovered, it was into the tender, lustrous eyes of the Marchesa Amaldi that she looked up. As soon as Peppin had brought the news to Le Vigne, the Marchesa had set out for Ghiffa. Amaldi was away on a walking tour in the Carpathians. He had left very suddenly. The Marchesa divined that it was his feeling for Sophy that had caused him to leave so abruptly. She applauded him in her heart while she ached, mother-like, for his unhappiness. Now came this horrible disaster. She was glad that Marco was away. Sheer pity might have stripped him too bare before her, in spite of his powerful reserve. And with the sense of his hopeless, unfortunate love adding to her own passion of pity for this young creature widowed in so horrible a way, the Marchesa gathered Sophy as it were into the very shrine of mother-tenderness. Never again after that were things quite the same between them. Never again could the Marchesa look on Sophy only as a charming woman whom her son unfortunately loved; never again could Sophy forget, that on the heart of Marco's mother she had lain in that tragic hour.

"Can't you cry, my poor darling?... Can't you cry?" the Marchesa kept murmuring, her beautiful large hand folding Sophy's head to her breast, as it had been the head of a child that she was suckling. But no tears would come. It was as though she were bleeding tears inwardly.

When she was strong enough to rise, she said, whispering:

"I want to go to him."

The Marchesa assisted her to her feet without a word. In silence she led her to the communicating door behind which her husband lay, then stepped aside for her to enter.

Sophy closed the door softly as she went in. It was late at night. Candles burned by the bed, on either side. He lay there immensely, majestically long under the white sheet. Sophy went forward unfalteringly, and kneeling down beside him, lifted back the sheet. Awe filled her at the icy splendour of that face. She had not known how beautiful he was, until thus translated into cream-hued marble. His brow seemed to triumph; on his lips was that austere, secretive smile as of Initiation, that only death can give. It seemed to her that it was not her husband who lay there before her, but a majestic High-priest, dead with the words of some mysterious and awful ritual still on his lips, now sealed with that smile of ultimate initiation.

She bent closer, very reverently, and kissed the thick fair hair, then the wonderful, triumphant brow. She had never before touched the dead. This coldness of what had been so warm made her realise in one sick throe that the imagination of Divinity may be abominable....

Then all at once in the stark silence of the room she became conscious of the ticking of his watch, made resonant by the bare wood of the table on which it had been placed. Like a little metal heart it seemed, continuing the unavailing minutes of the life that had stopped, while it went on. And next to the coldness of the familiar brow, that ticking of the dead man's watch seemed to her the most fearful thing that she had ever known or dreamed of. She sank back on her knees, her hands folded upon the bed, gazing at that loftily indifferent face, listening to the steady pulse of the watch.... She could not bring it all near her. A tragedy had taken place in some far planet, and this was the mysterious painting of it on which she looked. That was not Cecil who lay there in that frozen dignity, Cecil who had been like a flame from the hottest core of life's great furnace ... he could never have lapsed into such seemingly voluntary passionlessness, even in death. Had there been a frown of revolt on his forehead, he would have seemed nearer, more real. Thus, he was not Cecil, but a stranger.... She felt confused, impassive and appalled. She was appalled at what she thought her own heartlessness. But then why should she weep for him, when he lay there with such plenitude of satisfaction and agreement on his forbiddingly beautiful, stranger's face?

She went back after an hour into the next room. Her face looked dull and wild at the same time. The Marchesa, who had lain down on the bed, rose and drew her down beside her, keeping gentle but firm hold of her hand. Sophy submitted obediently. She lay until day without moving, her eyes wide open, fixed on the opposite wall. Now and then the Marchesa would turn her head cautiously to see if by chance she had fallen asleep. But the dark eyes were always wide open, fixed on the bright green wallpaper.

"Poor girl," thought the Marchesa. "Poor Marco ... she loved her husband deeply, in spite of all. There may be brain fever unless I can make her cry in some way."

At dawn Sophy was still stretched there moveless, her eyes on the green wall behind which Cecil lay in cold, aloof content.

Robins began their sweet autumnal piping in the hotel garden. A thought came to the Marchesa. Babies waked with birds. She rose softly, and slipped out into the hall. Rosa and Bobby had been given a room just opposite. The Marchesa entered without knocking. The wisdom of the old nurse in the song was in her heart. As she had thought, the boy was awake. He was sitting up in bed, his short red curls tousled, the sleeves of his blue flannel dressing-gown that came far down over his hands, evidently annoying him, for he tugged at them impatiently. He was trying to make two fiercely moustachioed tin soldiers do battle on the pillow that Rosa had laid before him. Every time that one soldier would almost clash swords with the other, down would come the sleeves like a curtain, extinguishing the warriors.

"Bad teeves!" he was scolding them as the Marchesa entered. "_Pias minga a mi_" (You don't please me). He had picked up much dialect since coming to the Lake. Rosa, who also waked with the birds, and who, attired in a red flannel petticoat and cotton under-body, was washing her face in a corner of the room, kept murmuring, "_Pazienza, tousin, pazienza._"

She looked up as the Marchesa entered, horrified to be found by a _Sciora_ in such attire. But the Marchesa did not glance at her. She went straight to Bobby.

He greeted her joyously.

"My 'ady! Take off!" he cried, holding up his muffled hands.

The Marchesa talked with him for about twenty minutes, then she lifted him, all subdued and piteous, into her arms, and carried him to his mother. The sun had now risen and that green light as of watery depths again filled the room.

The Marchesa put the boy down beside Sophy without a word. She did not look at him, but her arm went round him. Bobby snuggled close, then lifted his head and gazed into her white face. He began "pooring" it with his little hand. The Marchesa had turned back the bothersome sleeves. Then he knelt up to see her better.

"Poor dada ... dwownded...." he murmured, caressing her cheek. "Poor muvvah ... all lone...." His lips began to quiver with the sad sound of his own broken words.... "Don't c'y...." he pleaded, big tears bursting from his own eyes.... "Bobby 'tay wiv you.... Bobby tate tare of you.... Don't c'y...."

And with this he began to sob himself as though his little heart would break.

Sophy started from her trance of numbness. She caught the boy to her.... Then her tears came.... Then she remembered Cecil as her young lover ... her husband.... Then he became real to her again, as she clasped his son in her arms and they wept together.

The Marchesa had stolen out.

"_Ringrazio Dio!_" she said in her heart. She, too, was weeping.

PART II

I

Sophy spent the winter that followed her husband's death in the little cottage at Bonchurch. Her one desire, after Cecil's body had been laid in the Chapel-crypt at Dynehurst, was to return "to her own land and her own people." But Bellamy had warned her against an autumn crossing for Bobby, and the sudden change to a severer climate. At first she could not bring herself to walk or ride--the sight of blue water sparkling in the sun was so dreadful to her. And it grew to be almost an hallucination that, whenever she looked on it, she saw also a yellow chair, bobbing drolly to the motion of the waves. Little by little she dominated this aversion from the sea. Had it been a lake near which Bonchurch lay, she could not have borne it. But here, after two months, she began to ride daily, and gradually grew strong again.

It was on a lovely day in June when she reached the little country station of Sweet-Waters. The chuckle of Sweet-Water creek, that just here made a special music among crowding stones, rose dearly familiar. And there--there were her Mountains! Tears shut them out for a moment. Before she could see them clearly again, Charlotte's arms were round her. They clung together speechless.

"Oh!" murmured Sophy at last, her face buried in Charlotte's neck. "Oh, Chartie ... how you smell of _home_!"

This made them both laugh. But they were crying, too. The sisters loved each other as twins sometimes do, though they were not twins. Charlotte was eight years older than Sophy. And there, in the broad afternoon sunlight, Sophy again buried her face in her sister's neck to savour the sweet "home" fragrance.

Then she put Bobby in Charlotte's arms. Now Charlotte was afraid to speak. She pressed the boy to her in silence. At last she said:

"He has your eyes, darling," adding: "_I've_ a new boy to show you, too, you know."

The long, grave shadows of late afternoon, in which there was no sadness, only the serene beauty of sleep, lay over the rolling fields through which the sisters drove homeward, hand in hand. Each native tree and wild-flower went to Sophy's heart. She so loved this friendly, smiling country, that almost she believed it "loved her back again," as children say. The silver-poplars along the road glittered whitely in a soft breeze. The sky changed to sheeted gold above the bluish mountains. As they turned in at the lawn of Sweet-Waters, the old box-shrubs scraped against the carriage in a way that meant home, and only home. Nowhere else in the world were box-trees set so close together on a driveway, that carriages could not pass without being brushed by the stiff leaves.

Sophy smiled, catching at a sprig as they passed, and Charlotte, also smiling, said:

"Yes. Joe is still promising me to clip them properly."

The old red-brick of the house now glowed on them between the boughs of tulip-trees and horse-chestnuts. They passed the clump of great acacia trees, where stood the round, green tables, covered with pots of pink and white geraniums. Sophy recalled that day when the London window-boxes had brought this memory of home. Now she was here. Home was reality--London the memory.

Judge Macon came down the front steps and took her in his arms as though she had been in truth his sister. He was much moved. Somehow to see her in the dull black of widow's weeds struck him as unnatural. Like most men, he hated "mourning." It hurt him to see her brightness thus quenched with crepe.

"Doggone it, Chartie," he said to his wife that night when they were alone, "get that black off of our Sophy as soon as you can. For the Lord's sake, get _some_ of it off right away. A human being can't go through a Virginia summer draped like a hearse!"

Charlotte said:

"Oh, Joe, _don't_ talk so gruesomely. She'll wear white I'm sure--poor darling."

Then she went to his shoulder and cried frankly.

"I hate it as much as you do," she said. "It almost makes me 'lose my religion' to think of Sophy's being a widow. Don't you know how we--how _every one_--always thought of Sophy as being brilliant and happy?"

"Yes, yes; so we did, so we did," he soothed her. Then he added soberly:

"But those are just the people who seem to attract misfortune ... like lightning-rods," he concluded quaintly.

* * * * *

As soon as they had reached the house, Charlotte took Sophy upstairs to show her the nursery she had arranged for Bobby, and the old nursery just across the hall, that she and Sophy used to share together, and which was now to be her sister's bedroom. Even then Charlotte had ventured to suggest timidly:

"Won't you change to something cooler, dear?"

She longed to see Sophy in white blouse and duck skirt as in old days. She opened a closet door, suggestively. "There are some of your summer things hanging here just as they used to. Mammy Nan did them up for you herself."

Sophy stood with her arm about Charlotte's waist, looking at the freshly laundered, white skirts that she had worn as a girl. They seemed like ghosts to her, gleaming there in the dim closet--phantoms of her dead self--of that joyous, exultant, "cock-sure" girl that had been herself and could never come to life again. A new sadness came over her like the sadness with which we look on the garments of the dead.

"No--I don't think I'll change, Chartie," she said gently. "This gown I have on is really cool."

And she picked up a fold of her thin, crepe skirt that Charlotte might see for herself. She did not realise that it was the blackness of her dress that Charlotte wanted changed. She was so used to wearing black now that she felt more at ease in it. It had become a sort of uniform. She was one of the army of sorrow. To wear its prescribed black made her feel less conspicuous. The repellent custom of "mourning" has this illogical consolation for its adherents.

But her sadness faded as she looked round the familiar room. The very smell of it was the same. A scent of India matting and beeswax, and the Russia leather of her sets of Shakespeare and Chaucer. She went from object to object, touching them lovingly. Colour had come to her face. Her grey eyes shone dark. She stood at the foot of the green bed with its painted birds-of-Paradise, now but faint blurs of gold and crimson, looking lovingly at its fluted pillow-slips and coverlet of old, white "honey-comb."

"What happy dreams we've dreamed there, Chartie!" she murmured. "We were such happy things."

Charlotte called from the window for Mammy Nan to bring the youngest of her three sons to see "Miss Sophy." This was William Taliaferro, usually called "Winks," Bobby's senior by three months. Jack and Joey were still out somewhere on the farm. Winks had his mother's yellow-hazel eyes, dark curls, and decision of character. He accepted Sophy for an aunt, after some solemn pondering, and allowed her to take him in her arms. She bore him across the hall to "make friends" with his new cousin. It was delightful to see the two youngsters "taking stock" of each other. Like two young cockerels they stood, fronting each other, heads down, thumbs home to the hilt in red mouths, hackles ready to rise at the least sign--round eyes fixed on round eyes. Bobby was the first to remove a glistening thumb. His delicious little grin shone forth.

"Bobby boy!" he announced. "P'ay sogers!"

Winks considered a second longer. Then he, too, removed his thumb.

"Mh-mh," he assented, and allowed Bobby to take him by the hand. They trotted off like brothers born, to play with the tin soldiers that Rosa had already unpacked.

"_Che amorini!_" sighed she, looking after them with clasped hands. She did not ask more of life than two such _bambini_ to adore. Rosa's was the true mother-heart. Whether born of her own flesh or of another's, children were all in all to her.

Though Sophy felt so dusty from her journey, she would not take the time for a tub, from these first, wondrous hours of homecoming. She longed to be out in the old grounds. Charlotte left her at last, to "see about supper." How the familiar phrase warmed Sophy's heart! She peeped again into the nursery before going down. She had worried a little as to how Rosa would "get on" with the darkies. She need not have done so. She found the dear old negress and the Lombard peasant woman sitting side by side. Rosa looked up as she entered, and patted Mammy Nan's rather embarrassed, satiny-brown face.

"Ees goo-ood," she cooed. "_La Mora e molto buona ... molto simpatica._"

To hear Mammy Nan called "the Moor" made Sophy smile. She stood there smiling at them.

"Rosa's a mighty nice woman, Mammy," she said, slipping easily into the vernacular.

"She sho' do 'pear so," agreed Mammy Nan, amiable but nervous. It seemed so very peculiar to her to have a strange "white 'ooman" patting her cheek and calling her "Cara," when her name was Ann.

II

Sophy went out, while Charlotte "saw about supper," and wandered alone but not lonely through the grounds. It was "sundown," as they say in Virginia. All the west was gold above the darkling violet of the mountains. She went along one of the old brick walks towards the garden. From the stable the scent of horses and fresh straw blew towards her, mingling with the perfume of the June roses. This, too, meant home. The stable was at the foot of the garden. Ever since she could remember, when the wind was due west, the scent of "horse" had mingled with the scent of flowers.

The garden lay in terraces connected by flights of wooden steps. She sat down on the first flight, between two damask-rose trees, and watched the swallows wheeling to nest against the dim gold of the sky. A great bush of calacanthus spread at her feet. She gathered some of the little, hard, maroon-coloured blossoms, and put them inside the breast of her gown. They would only give out their full sweetness thus warmed. Their perfume of strawberries-in-the-sun and fresh vanilla was the very essence of "home." The _tank-tonk_ of cowbells sounded along the meadow field. The cows, just milked, were grazing leisurely again. Frogs crooned softly from the mill-pond. A screech-owl trilled.

The soft, fluctuant ebb and flow of blowing foliage--like an aerial surge playing along skyey strands--came to her from the lawn above. She turned and lay at full length in the warm grass--breast to breast with the earth of home. Her heart beat strong and warm against it--her lips pressed it. And a strange, tender, universal thrill such as she had never known, ran through her as she thus clasped and kissed the soil from which she had sprung, and to which she would one day return....

And suddenly it seemed to her that the greatest gift the gods could send her would be the wish to write again. Ah, if she, the poet that was her truest self, could only rise again! It was not a "resurrection" but a "_risorgimento_" that she longed for. The word came to her with its memory of Amaldi. But he seemed now only like one of the sad phantoms in her phantasmal past. Nothing, not even the lost spirit of poetry, seemed to her so unreal as her past, leaning secure as she now did on the warm earth of home.

"_Risorgo_.... I rise again...." she murmured, pulling the purple-headed meadow-grass from its close sheath, and nibbling the yellow-white waxen stalks absently. That was a home-taste! She stopped thinking more serious thoughts, to smile down at the nibbled stalk in her hand. "You taste of childhood...." she said to the blade of grass. Then she rose to her feet. Charlotte was calling her. As she went towards the house she mused:

"If I ever write another book of verse, I shall call it '_Risorgimento_.'"

For the next two years, winter and summer, Sophy remained at Sweet-Waters. She felt herself a rich woman in these days, for Gerald had insisted on continuing the allowance that he had made Cecil, to her and Cecil's son. This allowance she found to be two thousand pounds a year. Now that she had become a widow with a son to care for, she grew thrifty. During these two years at Sweet-Waters, Judge Macon invested for her every penny of her allowance, with the exception of four hundred pounds a year. This sum, together with her own income of one thousand dollars, enabled her to share the expenses of the household and provide comfortably for herself and Bobby in all other respects. She remembered that at any moment Gerald might marry, and the allowance cease. She knew, of course, that in case Gerald died without issue, Bobby would succeed to the title. About the property, whether it were all entailed or only a part of it, she did not know. She had been quite happy to find that under the English Guardianship of Infants Act, 1886, she, the mother, was sole guardian of her son, as Cecil had appointed no other. One of her greatest trials, after the first shock of her husband's death, had been the dread that Lady Wychcote might have some control over Bobby. It was with bitter reluctance that his grandmother parted with him. She had exacted a promise from Sophy that she would not allow too long a time to elapse before bringing him back to England. "Five years ... I must have five years all to myself," Sophy had answered. It seemed to her that, even in five years' time, she would not be able to come to Dynehurst without horror.

"Do you propose to make an American of Cecil's son?" Lady Wychcote had asked bitterly.

"No. I realise that Bobby must be educated in England. But he will only be seven years old in five years from now. I am not so unreasonable as you think me. If I am to live to take care of him I must go home for a time," Sophy had answered.

The quiet magic of that first homecoming held through the years that followed. If a rose could "shut and be a bud again" it would feel much as Sophy felt during those tranquil years at Sweet-Waters.

Her nephews adored her. She had "a way" with boys. When she went to ride, they usually scuttled along on their ponies, one at either rein. Her "guard of honour" she called them. Joey, the eldest, went to school in winter, but Charlotte taught Jack herself--he was only eight. And he used to make Joey glum with envy during the holidays by telling him of how, in the autumn evenings, Aunt Sophy and he (Jack) would roast chestnuts together before tea--while she told him "Jim hummers of fairy stories."

Sophy read a good deal, but nothing that could touch her too nearly. She was afraid of stirring the deeper self that seemed so sound asleep.

It was odd how bits of her own girlish verse had kept haunting her ever since her return. One she often thought of at this time:

"Frailly partitioned is the Inn of Life:
I will go very softly, lest perchance
I rouse the traveller Sorrow...."

During the autumn of her first year at Sweet-Waters a strange quickening came to her spirit. It came swift and sudden, without warning, as such things always come. "Whereas I was blind, now I see," said the man restored to sight by miracle. Whereas Sophy's creative will had been dead within her, now it lived. It was like the immemorially old and ever new mystery of conception. Her mind was with child--in a supreme, sweet pang it revealed itself. The triumphant blue of an October sky glowed through her window. It was ablaze with silver cloud-sails. Sophy knelt gazing up at this splendour, and within her all was splendour--a glory of thanksgiving--a glory of conscious fertility. The majestic blue of the sky seemed to her like God manifest.

III

It was again June in Virginia--the third summer since Sophy's return. Her new volume of poems, _Risorgimento_, had come out that April. It was being widely reviewed. The "people who mattered" had given it praise. This made her very happy. She had a fortunate nature. Things did not grow stale for her. The powers of wonder and of joy were very strong in her. The lines of George Herbert sang in her heart:

"And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light,
It cannot be,
That I am he,
On whom thy tempests fell all night."

But apart from the resurgence of her poetic gift, her whole life seemed also quickening. As the spring burgeoned and flowered into summer, she herself seemed burgeoning and flowering. A great restlessness came over her. She felt impelled to rush out with the tide of spring into the glittering, newly wakened world.

One afternoon there was a big storm brewing at Sweet-Waters. The sunlight was dulled--the leaves hung listless. Over the mountain just behind the house a huge cloud of thunderous blue-black was swelling slowly. Now and then came a flitter of lightning--a muffled detonation far away. Bobby was very much afraid of thunderstorms. But he was now five years old. Sophy could not bear it that her boy should be afraid of anything. She took him in her arms and went out to watch the coming tempest.

"See, Bobby man," she said. "The world's asleep. Now the Storm is coming to wake her up."

"I 'spec she'd wavver sleep," said Bobby doubtfully.

He gazed in awe at the great cedars, so black and sullen blocked out against the tremendous cloud. The intense stillness scared him almost as much as the approaching hurly-burly.

Suddenly there came a violet flash, followed by a bellowing blare of thunder. At the same time a sibilation of leaves ran through the sultry air.

"Le's we _go_, muvvah! Le's we _go_!" urged Bobby in a small voice.

"Not yet, sweetheart. It's so splendid out here. See that big cloud come flying! It's like Sinbad's roc in the fairy tale. Don't you remember?"

"I don't like wocs," said Bobby falteringly.

Now the wind fell on them with a shout. The trees tossed. They bowed wildly, almost to the sunburnt earth. Twigs and leaves spun through the air. White fringes streamed from the inky cloud; then lightning--the sky blazed with a gigantic frond of fire. A pulse stroke--then a shattering, re-echoing roar.

Bobby pressed hard against his mother's breast. He was too much a man to howl, but his heart was as water within him.

"Le's go _now_, muvvah," he whispered.

"Just a minute more, darling. Don't you want to see the rain come over the mountain? Hark! You can hear it--hundreds of little glass-slippered feet, like Cinderella's--running--running----"

This idea fascinated Bobby for a second, but another blast of thunder was too much for him. He began to tremble.

"Darling," coaxed Sophy, "surely you aren't afraid of God's own thunder?"

"Don't like Dod," said Bobby.

"You mustn't say that, sweetheart. God made the thunder, but he made you and mother, too. He loves you."

"_El pias minga a mi_" (He doesn't please me), said Bobby firmly.

Now the rain swirled over the mountain. In grey-white, hissing clouds it came, as though the earth were red-hot, and the cold drops burst into steam as they smote it. Sophy ran into the house with Bobby. She took him to the upper hall, and knelt down before a door that opened upon the railed roof of the front portico.

"Ah, be a man, Bobby," she pleaded. "You're the only man mother's got in all the world."

He stood with both arms about her neck. The bright, buff freckles showed up clearly on his pale little face. But with underlip thrust out and brows drawn down, his eyelids winking with every flash of lightning, he looked the storm firmly in the face, because "Muvvah" had begged him to be a man.

Charlotte, coming upstairs to see that all window-shutters were properly closed, found them kneeling there together. She had hardly appeared before there came a flash and crash in one, so appalling that Bobby could resist no longer. He flattened himself against his mother's breast and shouted clamorously to be removed.

Then Sophy turned and slipped his hand into Charlotte's. An inspiration had come to her.

"There!" she said. "Stay safe with Aunt Chartie and watch mother! Mother's not afraid!"

The next moment she was out in the scented downpour. To and fro she ran, laughing. Her sleeveless wrapper of white muslin was soon soaked through. The wind beat it close to her in fine, rippled lines. She looked like a living figure from Tanagra. And she had never felt anything more exquisite than this cool, pelting of summer rain against her whole body.

Now and then flares of lightning would illumine her, throwing her light, drenched figure into relief against the wind-blown leaves. She seemed dancing to great tambourines of thunder. Bobby, quite made over by his mother's bravery, gazed on enraptured. She called to him as she whirled:

"Look, Bobby! See how mother loves God's splendid storm!"

Suddenly the boy broke from Charlotte's grasp. He sprang out into the tempest towards his mother.

"Me, too!" he shouted. "_Viva Dio!_" (Long live God!)

* * * * *

Sophy was still smiling to herself over this "_Viva Dio!_" as she braided her damp hair into a loose plait before going down to supper. The placid life at Sweet-Waters was very old-fashioned. During the hot weather there was no dinner served, only this light, simple meal at seven o'clock.

"How like me Bobby is," she thought. "I'm always rebelling against the Deity, and then crying '_Viva Dio!_' in the end."

The storm had passed. She went and stood at her window, drawing in deep breaths of rain-freshened air, dense with sweet-shrub and honeysuckle. A serene level light lay upon the glistening grass--the "clear shining after rain." Now and then a shower of heavy drops loosened by the breeze pattered through the magnolia tree near by. The great tree, splendid with creamy blossoms, looked as though covered by a flight of doves. The birds were at their evening gossip as though no storm had ever been. One alighted on a branch close to her window, beside one of the white, chalice-like flowers, and fluffing up its feathers in a sort of musical frenzy, began its joyous song.

Sophy's heart swelled. It seemed to her that she and the bird and the white, impassioned flower, and the spent storm, and repentant Bobby crying "_Viva Dio!_" were all one. The whole, glad, drenched, shining earth and all that clung to it seemed shouting "_Viva Dio!_"

And she stretched out her arms as though to embrace this thrilling wonder called life, so that the bird broke off its song, and flew away with a loud _frrrrt!_ of startled wings, leaving the great white flower trembling as with ecstasy....

* * * * *

She put on an old, corn-coloured muslin frock for supper, made cottage-fashion with a soft kerchief. It was one of her girlhood's dresses. She was proud to find how easily it hooked about her slim waist. She was still as slender as she had been at twenty. As she ran lightly downstairs she sang to a tune of her own improvisation: "For the rain is over and gone ... the time of the singing of birds has come...."

Her song stopped suddenly. The last turn of the staircase had brought her face to face with a little group in the lower hall--Judge Macon, Charlotte, and two men. One was her cousin Aleck Macfarlane, one was a stranger--a young fellow of about twenty-six. Sophy was struck by the pure Greek type of his head, silhouetted against the outer green of the wet lawn. It looked like some classic bas-relief, seen so in shadow against the light, gleaming grass--bronze on a background of verdigris. He was introduced by Macfarlane.

"My friend, Morris Loring----"

Sophy learned that they had been caught by the storm when they were about a mile from Sweet-Waters. They had taken refuge in a farm-house, and then ridden on.

"We got horribly muddy," said Loring, glancing down at his riding breeches and puttees which were plastered with red clay. He had a fresh, clear voice. Sophy guessed that he was a New Yorker. Now that she saw his face in the light, she thought it manly in spite of being beautiful. She had never before seen a man's face that she thought beautiful. It struck her as very singular. But even in England, where the Anglo-Saxon race so often produces perfect Greek types, she had never seen anything so Hellenic as young Loring. In figure he was tall but slight; the regular horseman's figure--flat-thighed and slim of leg. His riding-clothes were almost _too_ well cut, Sophy thought. Loring appeared to her a little too much like the smart tailor's advertisements of sportsmen attired for riding. But she enjoyed looking at him. She wondered, amused, if he didn't enjoy looking at himself. He, on his side, was thinking: "Lord! What a dazzler! She wins, hands down, over anything I've ever seen!"

Sophy suddenly remembered the loose plait that hung below her waist. She laughed, colouring a little. Loring couldn't get his eyes away from her.

"You must excuse my appearing as Gretchen...." she said. "I got caught in the rain, too. I left my hair down because it wasn't quite dry."

"You really needn't excuse yourself for the way you look, Sophy," said Macfarlane dryly.

Sophy slipped her arm through his.

"Old humbug!" she said affectionately. She was very fond of Aleck. He was about ten years older than she was and had taught her how to ride.

Judge Macon took the two men off to tidy up a bit before supper. As soon as they had disappeared, Charlotte darted to Sophy. She began speaking rapidly in a nervous whisper.

"Sophy!... I'm dreadfully worried--Machunk Creek is 'up' and those two boys (all men under fifty had been 'boys' to Charlotte ever since the birth of her first-born), they'll have to stay all night with us. And they haven't a _thing_ to sleep in...."

"Well, but Joe will lend them things of course," said Sophy.

Charlotte's anxiety did not abate.

"That's just it!" she whispered hoarsely. "This Mr. Loring looks so _very_ fashionable. And Joe never _will_ wear anything but those long, old-fashioned night-shirts! I don't see how I _can_ put one of Joe's night-shirts on the Blue-room bed for Mr. Loring, Sophy! Aleck's different-- I don't mind Aleck."

Sophy stared at her for a second, then she sat down on the lowest step of the stairs and rocked to and fro, hiding her face.

"Sophy! _Sophy!_" said Charlotte, still in that raucous whisper, and shaking her vexedly by the shoulder. "Stop! Get up and help me! You're _too_ trying sometimes!"

Sophy tried earnestly to speak, but laughter kept stopping her.

Charlotte shook her again.

"How selfish of you, Sophy! I can't see where the fun comes in. I tell you I don't _want_ to lay out one of poor, dear Joe's night-shirts for that young man to snigger over."

"I ... I don't believe he's the ... the 'sniggering' sort...." murmured Sophy, wiping her eyes.

"Well, to sneer at, then. You've _got_ to help me. Can't you think of anything?"

Sophy considered. Suddenly her face became convulsed again.

"I ... I might lend him ... a pair of B-Bobby's pyjamas...." she faltered.

Charlotte turned on her heel.

"Very well," she said haughtily. But Sophy ran after her, repentant. She hooked a cajoling arm in Charlotte's stiffened elbow.

"Don't get huffy, dear," she coaxed. "I'm sure one of Joe's night-shirts will do _perfectly_ ... really I do...."

They finally went to the Blue-room together--Charlotte with a white object folded very small over one arm. She laid it on the foot of the bed, outside the old brocade quilt. Then she stood looking discontentedly down on it.

"I'm sure it looks _very_ nice," said Sophy.

But Charlotte stood absorbed. Presently she said:

"I really think I'd better unfold it. He might think it was an extra pillow-case."

And she displayed the quaint garment at greater length.

"Thank heaven I marked these myself with white embroidery cotton," she then murmured. "Joe _will_ mark them with that horrid, indelible ink if I don't watch him like a hawk. Do you think it looks better so?"

"I think it looks perfectly charming," said Sophy gravely. Then she went off again into uncontrollable fits of laughter. "I ... I even think...." she stammered, "that it will be becoming...."

Charlotte turned her back and left the room, perfectly outdone with her. But all during supper Sophy kept smiling now and then, as she pictured Morris Loring's classic head emerging from the Judge's ample night-robe.

IV

October had come. Sophy and Morris Loring were walking together towards the woods that lay along the hills behind Sweet-Waters. He had ridden over from the Macfarlanes' and was to stay to dinner. Bobby trotted soberly by his mother, his mittened hand in hers. He was a reticent child about his deepest feelings. One of these feelings was that he did not like Loring. As he had said of the Deity in His form of _Jupiter tonans_ so he said in his heart of Loring: "_El pias minga a mi._" Bobby thought in the Lake dialect. It was his medium of intercourse with Rosa. He did not know why he did not like Loring. The young man was particularly nice to him--or tried to be. Children are peculiar. What seems "being nice" to grown-ups, does not always appeal to them by any means. For one thing, Loring always addressed him as "General." This soldierly epithet would have pleased some little boys. It did not please Bobby. He preferred to be called by his own name. Doubtless jealousy had something to do with his dislike of Loring. Until the young man had appeared in the neighbourhood, Bobby had had his mother almost entirely to himself. Now "Mr. Lorwing," like the world in the great sonnet, was too much with them. He even intruded on the hours heretofore sacred to Bobby--firelight hours just before bedtime, when "Muvvah" used to tell such lovely fairy tales: hours like this one, in which Bobby had looked forward to gathering the first chestnuts of the season--just he and "Muvvah," with Rosa to throw sticks into the big trees for them. So Bobby trotted along in sober silence, wishing that something would happen to make Mr. Lorwing go away forever.

Rosa walked happily in the rear, gathering a great posy of autumn flowers.

The afternoon was lovely--mild yet sparkling. The blue autumnal haze veiled everything. The sky was almost purple. Against it melted clouds of silverish azure. Just over the yellowing wood hung a frail day-moon.

"What a blue day!" said Sophy, looking up at the fragile disk. "Even the moon is blue--it looks as if it were made of thin blue crystal...."

Loring was looking at her.

"That's a good omen--a 'blue moon,'" he said. "All sorts of wonders happen in a 'blue moon.'"

"Well, we might find a blue rose," said Sophy, smiling.

"I've found one."

"Ah! Shall you press it or preserve it in spirits?"

"Blue roses don't fade."

Sophy answered flippantly that in that case he would always be provided with a unique and inexpensive "button-hole"--much more unique and economical than Mr. Chamberlain's orchid.

Loring was still looking at her. She did not look at him, but kept glancing about her at the October landscape that she loved best of all.

"It seems queer that you're so contented in this quiet old place after having led such a brilliant life abroad," he said. This strain of thought had been roused in him by the mention of Mr. Chamberlain's orchid. "I should think you'd long for it again."

"Not yet," said Sophy.

His face lighted.

"'Not yet'? Then you do feel sometimes that this buried-alive-life won't satisfy you forever?"

"Oh, no! I shall fly far and wide again some day."

Loring was silent. His heart gave a hot twist. This was just what he most feared, that she would "fly far and wide" away from him. He had never in all his exceedingly wilful life desired anything with the frantic vehemence that he desired Sophy. And he was not accustomed to having his desires denied him. At home the household word was: "Morry has such a strong will." This had been the slogan of his childhood: "My will--or nothing. My will--or a burst blood-vessel. Death or punishment in any form--rather than yield my will." He had been rather delicate as a child. So his parents had preferred concession to the convulsions with which he threatened them whenever he was crossed in any way. It was a wonder that he grew up to likable manhood. Yet people thought him "perfectly charming"--a bit spoiled, but delightful. Girls called him "fascinating." His own pals said: "Morry Loring's a good sort. A bit ugly if you cross him--you've got to know how to handle him; but he's all right." By "handling" Loring they meant that one must seem to give him his way while skilfully getting one's own. This was not always practicable. Then coolnesses sprang up. Only two out of the old Harvard set stuck to him. But he was, in fact, not at all a bad sort--provided that you were willing not to announce too positively and publicly that your soul was your own. And his will was certainly strong. It was a brand-new sensation for him to will so ardently the possession of a thing which he was in sick doubt of securing. It had a poignant yet terrible charm of sheer novelty. And at the same time he experienced an inner revelation which shook him even more. It was the undreamed of capacity for adoration. There was no denying it--his spirit was on its knees to Sophy. She seemed to him as beautifully overwhelming as the suddenly revealed goddess to the shepherd of Mount Ida. There was about her, in addition to the aura of beauty and talent, the glamour of a woman who has moved brilliantly in a brilliant world. Had he been told that this naif snobbishness had much to do with his novel emotion of adoration, he would have received the information with a tempest of incredulous and outraged wrath. Yet, though undoubtedly due to it in part, there was also genuine humility in his love for Sophy--that romantic abasement of self which makes a man find a subtle pleasure in the realisation of his own unworthiness.

Loring had come down to Aleck Macfarlane's country place to buy hunters. When he saw Sophy, he believed suddenly in Fate. No mere chance wish to buy hunters had sent him to Virginia. Here was the Lady of Legend--the Princess out of the fairy-tale books of his boyhood. He had always heard of Virginia as romantic. Now he found that it was inhabited by Romance herself in the person of Sophy Chesney. He had heard often of the Hon. Mrs. Cecil Chesney. He knew that she "had written something." Poems were not much "in his line." Yet he sent to Brentano's for Sophy's poems the day after he met her. He was frankly disappointed in them. He had expected something more fiery. And he tried to get a volume of her first book, _The Shadow of a Flame_. But it was out of print. He had given Brentano an order to find it for him. Only that morning the book had arrived from England. He was still tingling with the fearless, young passion of her printed words, as he walked now beside her. Her own words seemed to put him from her--far back with that past self which she no longer was, and which he craved to have her be again. And how young she looked ... what a girl! It was absurd, vexatious, incredible, impossible that so keen a flame should have died down into the white ash of philosophy ... as expressed in her latest poems.

"A penny...." said Sophy.

His long silence disturbed her. He gazed down at her, his bold eyes softening.

"I was thinking that you looked about nineteen, with that black bow on your hair," he said.

"And you say that as if you were about ten," she retorted, laughing.

"I don't feel ten."

"And I don't feel nineteen."

"Yet you're really not quite old enough to be so devilish motherly with me." His tone was quite pettish.

She was teasing him on purpose. She had found out at once that he was badly spoilt. It pleased her to see him wince, and flush, helpless under her amiable elderliness. She liked him very much, but she didn't want any love-making, though she didn't mind his being so evidently in love with her. She thought that a "disappointment in love" might do him no end of good--teach him that he couldn't "swing the earth a trinket at his wrist"--avenge some of the many young women with whom she felt sure that he had flirted outrageously. One wasn't given a Greek head, many millions, and an exaggerated sense of one's Ego, in order that one might practise the homelier virtues, such as unselfishness.

At his "devilish motherly" she laughed out--her ringing, contralto laugh, that was so delicious and that made him want to shake her and to kiss her violently, at one and the same time.

"'Devilish motherly'...." she repeated. "I'm sorry I remind you of Medea--she's the only person I can think of who was 'devilish motherly' ..."

Before Loring could reply, Bobby's voice broke in, austere and haughty.

"My muvvah is _not_ deviliss," he said.

Loring went round beside him.

"Bully for you, General!" he exclaimed. "You'd fight a duel with me this minute, if you could--wouldn't you?"

Bobby pressed close to Sophy. He refused to yield Loring his other hand.

"Please go away," he said coldly. "I don't want you."

"Well ... your 'muvvah' don't want me either."

"No. She wants me," said Bobby.

He looked up at Sophy, his chin quivering. He resented Loring's imitation of the way that he pronounced "mother."

"Don't you?" he appealed to her.

She stooped to him.

"More than anything in the whole, round world or the blue sky," she reassured him. He smiled to feel her lips on his cheek. Close in her ear he whispered:

"We don't want _him_, do we? Make him go away."

"No. We must always be polite," she whispered back.

He sighed deeply.

"It's awful hard being p'lite," he mourned. "Mos' as hard as being good."

They all walked on in silence for a few moments.

Then Bobby said, with what Sophy called his "inspirational look":

"God ain't p'lite, Muvvah."

"Hello!" laughed Loring.

"Sssh!" said Sophy, flashing him a vexed look.

"Why, darling?" she asked her son.

"'Cause ev'y night I talks and talks to God, an' He never even says, 'Mh-Mh, Bobby.' Vat ain't p'lite--are it?"

Loring strode on ahead to have his laugh out. He thought Bobby the "funniest little beggar" in the world. She was always scolding him for laughing at the boy out of season.

"Children and dogs hate being laughed at," she now told him. "Didn't _you_ hate being laughed at when you were little?"

"Can't remember," said Loring. "I suppose so. But as for that, men don't like being laughed at either."

"_You_ don't, I know. But it's very good for you."

"Why isn't it good for the General?"

"My name's Bobby," came the small but haughty voice. At times her son reminded Sophy strikingly of Cecil. This was just Cecil's tone with presuming strangers.

"Very well, Bobby--do _you_ know why it's good for me to be laughed at, but not for you?"

"I don't fink it matters," said Chesney's son, again in exactly the tone that Chesney would have used. Sophy felt too awed to feel amused. She felt that with the law of continuance thus powerful, death, in one sense, ceased to exist.

"You don't like me, do you, Bobby?" asked Loring, looking queerly at the child.

"Not much--p'ease to 'scuse me," replied Bobby.

"Funny little tot you are," said Loring, rather hurt. Then, to his surprise, he suddenly realised that he on his side, didn't really like Bobby. It seemed as if the child came wilfully between him and Sophy. He walked on moodily, cutting with his riding-crop at the pyred flames of golden-rod, his handsome, short-lipped mouth very sullen.

"What's the matter?" asked Sophy, to break another too long silence. "You look like a tinted marble of Endymion in the sulks."

Loring turned on her passionately.

"Mrs. Chesney," said he, "would you mind letting up on my rotten appearance! It isn't my fault that I've got a nose like a damned statue's!"

His face was scarlet. Sophy put her hands up to her own face to temper the brutality of her wild mirth.

V

But this laughter of Sophy was so winsome, as she glanced at him through her shielding fingers, that Loring gave way and began to laugh himself. This was another new sensation for him--the joining in a laugh against himself.

"I'm a frightful ass, I know, to mind so much when you tease me," he said as they walked on. "But you make me feel such a fool--such a 'pretty fellow'...."

"You _are_ a pretty fellow," murmured Sophy. "When you get red with anger like that you're quite dazzling."

"Oh, I say! Don't you think you're a bit _too_ hard on me?" Loring protested.

He still writhed inwardly. It is acute agony to six and twenty to be made fun of by the object of its adoration.

Bobby's voice piped in again.

"_I_ don't fink you're pretty," he remarked.

"Thanks, old chap," said Loring, this time without laughter.

They had reached the woods, on whose edge stood the big chestnuts, all one-sided from the reaching of their branches towards the free sunlight of the open. Behind them stretched the forest, a glitter of trembling yellow, shot with the velvet black of twigs and stems. Here and there a bough of maple fluttered as with swarms of scarlet butterflies. Above the leathern carpet of last year's leaves shone the lilac disks of autumn asters, and the brown, bee-like heads of self-heal, set with tiny, purple trumpets. The chestnuts were thick with greenish-brown burs.

"I see 'em! I see 'em!" Bobby cried, dancing gleefully, and making a noiseless clapping with mittened hands. For a moment the sight of the clustered burs among the pointed, russet leaves had made him forget his Kill-joy, Loring.

"_Oh! Che splendore!_" cried Rosa, running up.

She and Loring threw sticks among the laden branches. The nuts came down with pleasant _swups_ upon the smooth, thick mat of dead leaves.

It was charming to kneel there in the warm October sunlight, at the edge of the rustling wood, pounding away the prickly hulls from the brown, smooth chestnuts. A fresh, pleasant scent rose from the bruised hulls. The breath of the autumn wood was keenly sweet. It smelt of wild grapes and mushrooms. From a field close by stole the odour of pumpkins that had been lying in the sun all day. And this mingled fragrance, so deliciously of the earth earthy, seemed just the perfume that would be shaken from October's russet smock as he strode across the land.

Sophy stood up at last. She lifted her arms in a boyish stretch, and stamped her feet which had "pins and needles" in them from crouching so long. Her big, clubbed plait had been somewhat loosened by her vigorous pounding. Leaves and withered grasses clung to her short, cord skirt. As she stood there stretching her cramped limbs, and laughing nervously as her feet "woke up" again, with the light wind frowzing the loose strands of hair about her face, and her short skirt disclosing her ankles in their tight-laced, brown shooting-boots, she certainly looked quite young enough, and girlish enough, to be Loring's sweetheart rather than Bobby's mother.

And Loring was thinking vehemently, his hands clenched on the chestnuts in his pockets:

"She's _got_ to love me.... I'll _make_ her love me.... I'll _make_ her marry me.... I will.... I will!"

"Ouf!" said Sophy, letting her arms drop. "That was delicious! And what are you so fiercely determined over? You look ... but I won't say what you look like----"

"No ... don't, please," replied Loring shortly.

He turned away to help Rosa adjust the top of her hamper, which would not fit into place over the hard, round chestnuts.

It was beautifully still. The western sky was beginning to redden. A crisp rustling came from the shocks of Indian corn in a near field.

"It must be after five ... time for my Bobbikins to be trotting home," said Sophy, taking his sober face between her hands and crumpling it together like a soft flower. Then she laughed and kissed the crumpled flower of the little face.