Chapter IV: At the Old Place

The journey to New England was more than a mere interlude for the girls. It was a distinct pleasure in itself. To watch the low, rich landscape which had lain around them from their infancy change imperceptibly to one different and bolder; the broad fields narrowing; the long, rolling swells lifting into clear-cut hills; the forests of beech and oak, with smooth, sunlighted floors, giving place to woods filled with a bewitching tangle of vines and ferns—all this was a constant delight to travellers as fresh and unsated as ours.

“I like the wide, open stretches better,” said Kate once, when they were winding with many turns between the close-set hills. But Esther did not assent to this. It seemed to her that nature had heaped the measure of her bounty here,—the bounty which is beauty,—not spread it out in even level, and something in her heart responded to the change.

The hills had sharpened to a rugged sternness, the fields were checkered off in little plots by lines of gray stone walls, plots in which men were gathering hay behind oxen instead of horses, when at last they reached the village of Esterly.

They had passed a succession of such villages, catching just a glimpse of pretty homes and shaded streets, with always a spire or two lifted above them,—an endless number it seemed to the girls,—but this was the name for which they had been breathlessly waiting, and it was no sooner spoken than they rose unsteadily in their places and turned their faces toward the door.

“They’ll be here, of course. I only hope we shall know them,” murmured Esther, anxiously.

She need have had no fear. Aside from some functionaries of the station there were but two persons on the platform of the Esterly depot when the Western train drew in, and these two were unmistakable. One of them was an old man, leaning eagerly forward, with his hands clasped on the top of his cane; a small, spare man, with clean-shaven face, and a touch of ruddy color in his cheeks, hair but slightly gray, and bright blue eyes which searched the faces before him without the aid of spectacles. The other was a petite young lady, in a stylish dress, with a mist of golden hair about her face, and a hat, which seemed to belong exactly with the face, tied in a gauzy mesh of something under her chin. She did not look in the least like a goddess, she was too slight and genteel; but she was clearly Stella Saxon.

“Grandfather! Stella!” came from the one side in a moment, and “Girls! Girls!” from the other, as the four met and embraced.

“We knew somebody would be here to meet us,” said Esther, when they had taken another breath and a good look at each other; “but I’d no idea it would be you, grandfather.”

“Hm,” said the old gentleman, evidently enjoying her surprise. “Mebbe you thought I’d be propped up in a big chair waiting for you at the house.”

“If you knew the state of mind he’s been in since morning!” said Stella. “We got Uncle Doctor’s telegram early, saying you’d be here on this train, and grandfather seemed to regard it as a summons to start for you at once. Mother and I had hard work to hold him back at all, and in spite of us he would start an hour before time this afternoon; actually hurried his horse to get here, too,” she added, glancing with a little grimace at the fattest of family horses which was standing before the two-seated carriage at the side of the depot. “I shudder to think what would have happened to him if you hadn’t come.”

She was saying this last to Esther privately. The old gentleman had started briskly off with Kate to look after the trunks. These were to follow to the farm in a spring wagon, and securing them was a matter involving so little delay at this quiet station that the four were very shortly on their way behind the gray nag, which, after receiving an admonishing “cluck” at starting off, was allowed to settle to his own jog-trot without further attention. They made a long circuit through the main street of the village, the old gentleman bowing and smiling to every one he met, and obviously eager to attract attention. But as the houses grew more scattering he laid the reins across his lap, put on a pair of spectacles, and for a full minute gazed through them steadily at his granddaughters.

“You look as your mother did at your age; wonderfully like,” he said, with his eyes on Esther’s face, “and you, too, but not so much,” he added more slowly, turning to Kate. He took off his spectacles and returned them to an old-fashioned steel case; then asked, with much deliberation, “And what do you think of your old grandfather?”

“Why, you look just as I thought you did, only so very much younger,” replied Esther. “I’d no idea you were so strong and active.” She paused an instant, then, with a charming eagerness in her voice, added: “You make me think of the ‘Farmer of Tilsbury Vale.’ You know the poem says,—

“‘His bright eyes look brighter, set off by the streak
Of the unfaded rose that still blooms on his cheek.’”

The old gentleman made no attempt to conceal his elation. He fairly beamed; and Stella murmured in Esther’s ear: “You’ve done it! His youthful looks are his particular vanity; and to have a fresh quotation brought to bear upon the subject!” She lifted her hands as if in despair of expressing the effect on her grandfather, and settled back in her seat. He had turned to Kate and was plainly waiting for her to speak now.

“Well,” said that young lady, regarding him with cheerful scrutiny, “I can’t quote any poetry about it. It’s always Esther who puts in the fine strokes with that sort of thing; but I must say I think you look mighty young for a man of your age.”

In its way this was equally good. Ruel Saxon evidently considered that she had used a very strong expression.

“Well,” he said with complacence, “I guess there ain’t much doubt but what I do bear my age better ’n most men at my time of life. I guess I’m some like Moses about that. You know it says, ‘his eye was not dim nor his natural force abated,’ when he got to be a very old man.”

There was such evident surprise on the part of his granddaughters at this remark that he added: “To be sure, Moses was a good deal older ’n I am; he was a hundred and twenty years old when that was said of him, and I hain’t got to _that_ yet by considerable. But I’m past the time of life that most men get to, a good deal past. I was born in the year seventeen hundred and ninety-one, and if I live till the twenty-first day of next June I shall be eighty-nine years old.”

He paused to let the statement take full effect, and Stella remarked: “That’s the way grandfather always tells his age. He names that year, away back in the last century, and then he tells what his birthday next year will make him. I don’t mind his keeping account for himself that way, but he has the same style of reckoning for the rest of us.”

“Well,” he said, with a twinkle in his eyes, “the women would forget their own ages if it warn’t for me and the big Bible. Now Stella here was born in the year—”

“There,” cried the girl, “what did I tell you! And isn’t it enough to make one feel ancient, the way he rolls out the syllables? Never you mind about me, grandfather. Tell the girls when they were born. I’m sure they’ve forgotten.”

They admitted the fact promptly, but he had not yet exhausted the subject of his own exceptional fortune in withstanding the ravages of age. It was a theme of which he was never weary, largely no doubt from a certain vanity, which time had spared to him in a somewhat unusual measure, along with his physical powers. To have a fresh and interested audience was inspiration enough.

“It’s a great blessing to retain one’s faculties in old age,” he said impressively. “Now I enjoy life, for aught I know, pretty near as much as I ever did; but it ain’t so with everybody. There was Barzillai, for instance. He was a younger man, by eight years, than I am, but he must have been terrible hard of hearing, by his own account, and he’d lost his taste so that there warn’t any flavor to him in the victuals he ate; though he seems to have been an active enough man in some ways,” he added reflectively.

There was a moment’s pause during which Deacon Saxon doubtless mused upon his own mercies, and his granddaughters pondered the question, who the unfortunate octogenarian whom he had just mentioned might be. Esther could not remember ever hearing of any relative of that name, and it hardly seemed to have a local flavor. She was glad when Kate, who seldom remained ignorant for want of asking a question, inquired briskly:—

“Who was this Bar—what’s his name, that you’re talking about?”

“Who was Barzillai?” cried the old man, turning upon the girl an astonished countenance. “Hain’t you never heard of Barzillai, the Gileadite, the man who went down to give sustenance to David when he was fleeing before Absalom? Don’t you know about _that_, and how David afterwards wanted to take him up to Jerusalem with him, but Barzillai said he was too old, and asked the king to let him stay in his own place? Hain’t you read about _him_? Well, I never!”

He paused as in speechless wonder, then ejaculated: “When your mother was your age she could have told all about him and anybody else you could mention out of the Bible. What on airth is she doing that she hain’t trained you up to know about it? I hope she hain’t stopped reading the scriptures herself, living out there in the West.”

“Oh, dear!” cried Kate, quite overwhelmed by this burst, and in her jealousy for her mother indifferent for the moment to the insinuation against her native section. “Mother knows more about the Bible than anybody I ever saw,—except you,—and I’ve no doubt she told us all about that man when we were little” (she made no attempt now at his name), “but I never could remember those Old Testament folks.”

It is doubtful whether Ruel Saxon felt much reassured as to the training his daughter had given her children by the cheerful manner in which Kate made the last admission. For himself his delight in those “Old Testament folks” was perennial. He had pored over their histories till every incident of their lives was as familiar to him as that of his own neighbors. He had entered so intimately into the thoughts and experiences of those ancient worthies that it was no meaningless phrase when, in his daily prayers, he asked that he might “sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of Heaven.”

Ruel Saxon was a type of that class of men, passing away now even from the hills of New England, who from infancy were so steeped in knowledge of the Bible that its incidents formed the very background of their daily thinking, and its language colored their common conversation. It must be confessed that in the Old Testament he found his keenest pleasure, but between the covers of the Old or New there was no spot which was not to him revered and familiar ground. That all scripture was given by inspiration of God, and was “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, and for instruction in righteousness,” was a part of his creed on which no shadow of doubt had ever fallen. The doctrine, according to his lights, he maintained with unction; the instruction he counted himself well qualified to give; and the reproof he felt equally called to administer on all needful occasions.

It was some minutes before he could quite recover from the astonishment of finding himself the direct progenitor of two young people who knew nothing of that worthy Gileadite whose state in old age formed such a striking contrast to his own. Probably he would have delivered a little homily, then and there, on the importance of reading the Bible, had not a turn in the road at the top of a long steep hill brought them suddenly into sight of the old Saxon homestead.

“There ’tis! There’s the old place! Should you know it?” he demanded of his granddaughters.

Esther leaned forward from the back seat where she was sitting with Stella and gazed for a moment, almost holding her breath. Then she lifted a pair of moist shining eyes to her grandfather. “I should know it anywhere,” she said, with a thrill in her voice. “It looks just as I have dreamed of it all these years.”

Indeed it was a picture which might easily hold its place in a loving memory; an old white house, with a wide stone chimney rising in the middle of a square old-fashioned roof, standing in the shelter of a cluster of elms, so tall, so noble, and so gracious in their bearing that the special guardianship of Heaven seemed resting on the spot.

Kate had been looking at it steadily too, but she shook her head as she glanced away. “No,” she said, “I shouldn’t know that I’d ever seen it before; but if you had handed me the reins, grandfather, and told me to find it somewhere on this road, I don’t think I should have turned in at the wrong place.”

They talked of nothing else as they drove slowly toward it. The motion Ruel Saxon had made—a most unusual one—to apply the lash to Dobbin had been checked by Esther, who declared she wanted to take in the details one by one, and begged him, with feeling, not to go too fast, a request which threw Stella into a state of inward convulsion from which she barely recovered in time to prevent the old gentleman from monopolizing the whole distance with an account of the various improvements he had made on the house, notably the last shingling and the raising of the door-sills.

“You might tell the girls how you _didn’t_ change the windows,” she said slyly; but if he was inclined to do this, Esther’s exclamation just then prevented.

“Oh, those dear little old-fashioned windows!” she cried. “They’re blinking in the sunshine just as they used to. Grandfather dear, I’m so glad you haven’t had them changed into something different.”

He winced a little at this, and Stella said magnanimously, “It was really my mother’s idea. She does complain sometimes of the trouble it is to keep all those tiny little window-panes clean, and so grandfather thought one spring that he’d have some new sashes put in, with a single pane of glass above and below. They had it all fixed up between them, but I came home just in time to prevent.” She gave a shudder, then added: “I’ve always believed in special providences since then. Why, the change would have been ruinous, simply ruinous! You know if you can’t have a lovely new house with everything graceful and artistic, the next best thing is to have one that’s old and quaint. I wouldn’t have a thing changed about our house for any consideration. I’ve set my foot down about that.” (With all her daintiness she looked as if she could do it with effect.) “But mother and grandfather understand now, and have given their solemn promise never to make the smallest alteration without consulting me.”

The old gentleman had been listening to this with his mouth pulled down to an expression of resignation which was clearly not natural to him. “Well,” he said, when she had reached her triumphant conclusion, “I’ve always been of the opinion that it’s best to let women-folks have their way about things in the house. It pacifies ’em, and makes ’em willing to let the men manage things of more consequence. You know Solomon says ‘it is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious woman.’”

“That’s a fact, grandfather,” said Stella, cordially; “and there’s no describing how contentious I should be if you set about changing this old house.”

They had almost reached it now. A minute more carried them under the elms, straight to the door. It was open, and under the latticed porch, covered with honeysuckles on one side and bitter-sweet on the other, stood Aunt Elsie waiting to receive them. She was a delicate-looking woman, whose quality, as one read it at first glance, was distinctly that of a lady. That she was somewhat precise and old-fashioned came next, in spite of the graceful French twist in her hair and her pretty lavender dress. She kept her place under the lattice, the color rising slightly in her thin cheeks as the girls came up, and her manner of greeting them, though affectionate, had none of the eager warmth of the earlier meeting.

Aunt Elsie Saxon, beside her vivacious daughter, or her still more sprightly father-in-law, seemed a singularly colorless person, but her quiet unresponsive manner covered a stronger individuality than appeared. The war had made her a widow at the very beginning of the struggle. In the bereavement of those first days she had come with her children to the old home for the help and comfort she sorely needed, but the time never came when she could be spared to leave it. And now for many years she had been mistress of the house, bearing with the somewhat erratic humors of Ruel Saxon as a more impulsive woman could hardly have done, and consoled, no doubt, for much that was trying by the certain knowledge that in his heart he loved and leaned upon her.

There was one other member of the family circle, Tom, the sixteen-year-old boy, but he, it appeared, had some pressing duty in the field. At least he did not show himself till supper time, and then he slipped in with the hired man, who, as well as himself, was duly introduced to the cousins. He was a shy, awkward fellow, with a freckled face, and a pair of shrewd observant eyes, in whose glance Kate thought she detected a lurking disdain for the society of girls. She wanted to begin making his acquaintance at once,—by way of punishment, of course,—but his seat was too far from hers at the table, and he was off like a flash when the meal was over.

It seemed to both the girls that this was the longest day they had ever known, but its hours did not outlast the pleasure they brought. Esther could not rest till she had rambled about the place to find the old familiar things, and her delight, as she came upon one after another, knew no bounds. There was the cherry tree, almost strangled by the grape-vine which hung around it in a thick green canopy, under which she had done miniature housekeeping in those childish days, and a fragment of old blue china, trodden in the ground, was a find to bring a joy like that of relic-hunters in Assyrian mounds, when they come upon some mighty treasure.

“It was a part of our best tea-set, Stella,” she cried. “Don’t you remember how I broke one of grandmother’s company plates by accident, and after mourning over it a little in her gentle way, she gave us the pieces to play with, so I shouldn’t feel too badly?” She wiped the bit on her lace-edged handkerchief and held it for a moment lovingly against her cheek.

There was the bunch of striped grass, growing still at the corner of the garden, and she felt a childish impulse to throw herself on the ground beside it, and hunt, as she used to, for two of the long silky spears which would exactly match. She had never quite done it in the old days. Perhaps she could find them now. She peered up into the tallest of the elms and shouted for joy to find the nest of a fire hangbird swinging just as it used to among the long, lithe branches. She made her way straight to the tree where the pound sweetings grew, and laughed to find that it bore them still, large and golden as ever.

And here again a childish memory came back with a rippling delight over the years that were past. “Do you remember how I tore my dress one day, climbing that tree to get apples?” she appealed to Stella. “I could never bring enough down in my pocket, and if I took a basket up it was sure to spill and the chickens to peck the apples before I got down. One day I gave my dress a horrible tear going up. It scared me at first, and then it dawned upon me, What a place for apples! It was a woollen dress and the skirt was lined. I used that hole for a pocket, and filled the skirt full. It’s a wonder I wasn’t dragged from the tree by the weight of it. The gathers were dragged from the belt, I remember that perfectly, and how grandmother looked when I went in to share the booty with her,” she added, laughing.

Oh, it was pleasant, this wandering over the old place, the finding and remembering!

It was really inside the house that things were most changed; but this, as Stella explained, was really a return to the way they rightly belonged. Much of the furniture which Esther remembered as crowding the dusky garret had come down, and some which her grandmother had rejoiced in as new and handsome had taken its place there. The haircloth sofa and chairs over which she had slipped and slidden in her youthful days had given place to an oak settle and chairs which, in spite of their old-fashioned shape, were roomy and comfortable. One, a delicious old sleepy hollow, covered with the quaintest of chintz, stood in the corner which had been the grandmother’s, and the little, round light-stand was beside it, with the leather-covered Bible smooth as glass, and the candlestick and snuffers, as if she still might sit there of an evening to read.

“Grandfather himself prefers a lamp,” Stella remarked, in passing; “he says he’s got past tallow dips, but out of respect to grandmother’s memory—I impressed that on him strongly—he lets me keep the stand just as she used it.”

She certainly had a genius for restoring the old, and doing it with an art which threw all its stiffness into graceful lines. The fireplace in the sitting room, which had been boarded up in Esther’s day, with a sheet-iron stove in front of it, was open now, and the old brass andirons shone at the front. The old bricks had been cracked with age, but they had been replaced by some blue Dutch tilings representing Bible scenes, which gave the whole a charmingly quaint effect.

“It came high,” Stella said to Esther, who hung on every word of explanation, “and I didn’t know for a while as I should get what I wanted. There was a Colonial tile that would have been perfect, but grandfather wouldn’t hear of it. Then all at once I lighted on this in a shop in Boston, and I knew the deed was done. Grandfather fell a victim to my account of the pictures, and I couldn’t get them quick enough to suit him. I consider that fireplace my greatest triumph.”

The house was really a succession of them. It was only at the pictures on the walls that the girl’s desire to restore the old had stopped. “If there had only been some fine old family portraits!” she said mournfully. “But there weren’t. I suppose our ancestors never had any money to spend for that sort of thing. There was positively nothing but some wretched prints, and one oil painting that grandmother saved her egg-money for months to buy; hideous thing, quite on the order of those that are advertised nowadays, ‘Picture painted while you wait.’ I had to banish them all. There was no other way. But I found some of grandmother’s dear old samplers tucked away in the drawers, and I pinned them up around to take the edge off the other things.”

“The other things” were some of them her own, and they mingled on the walls with photographs of foreign scenes, and here and there an etching with a name pencilled in the corner, to which she called attention as they passed, with the air of one confident of impressing the beholder.

“Oh, I’ve picked up a few good things in the course of my travels,” she said, after one of Esther’s bursts of admiration. “I’ll defy anybody to make a better showing than I with the amount I’ve spent. Mother thinks I’ve spent too much; but it’s my only extravagance, positively my only one, and you have to let yourself out in some direction. It’s all that makes saving worth while.”

She seemed to have no vanity about her own work, but there was one bit of it before which Esther paused with a long delight, turning back from famous Madonnas again and again to gaze at it.

It was a picture of a sweet old face, framed in a grandmother’s cap, very softly done in crayon, and it hung above the little stand in the corner. Below it, pinned carefully on the wall, was an old, old sampler, and the faded letters at the top spelled, “Roxana Fuller, aged eleven.” It was a deft hand, though so young, that had wrought it. There was exquisite needlework in the flowing border, and in the slender maidens at the centre, clasping hands under a weeping willow, above the lines:—

“When ye summers all are fled,
When ye wafting lamp is dead,
Where immortal spirits reign,
There may we two meet again.”

Why these two sweet creatures, evidently in the bloom of life, should have been consoling themselves with this pensive sentiment it was hard to see; but a consolation it may have been to the poor little artist who achieved them to think of Elysian fields where teachers should cease from troubling and samplers be no more.

It had grown dark in the house, too dark for any more searching of its treasures, when the two girls at last sat quietly down in the old south doorway. “If grandmother were only here it would all be perfect,” said Esther, with a long, soft sigh. “Somehow it seems strange that she should be gone, and everything else just as it used to be. I had no idea I should miss her so.”

“I always miss her when I sit in this doorway in the evening,” said Stella. “It was her favorite place. She was so feeble in those last years that she seldom got beyond the threshold, but she said there was always some pleasant smell or sound coming in to find her. You ought to have seen her here in the spring. The door was always boarded up in the winter, with a bank across the threshold to keep out the cold, and she was so happy when it was opened. I used to tell her when the frogs began to peep, and she would listen and smile, and say it seemed to her their voices were softer than they used to be. Dear heart, she was so deaf in those days that I really suppose she only heard them singing in her memory, but it was all the same to her.

“Yes, it was all the same,” she repeated musingly, “and just as real, though grandfather used to argue with her sometimes that a person who couldn’t hear her own name across the room couldn’t hear frogs peeping at a quarter of a mile. And she would admit it sometimes in a humble way, but she always forgot it, and enjoyed the singing just the same the next evening.”

“She wasn’t a bit like grandfather, was she?” asked Esther. She wanted Stella to keep on talking about this sweet old grandmother, whom she herself had known only in a brief childish way.

“Oh, dear, no,” said Stella; “there couldn’t be two people more unlike. She never talked of herself, and she never quoted scripture unless it was one of the promises. Grandfather always lorded it over her in a way, and she was so frail toward the last that he did it more than ever. If the least thing ailed her he thought she was going to die right off, and he always felt it his duty to tell her that she was a very sick woman, and that it would not be surprising if she were drawing near her end.”

She made a soft gurgling in her throat, then went on.

“But that never worried grandmother a bit. She always said she was willing to go if ’twas the Lord’s will; but, do you know, in her heart she really expected to outlive him! She told me so once confidentially, and explained, in her perfectly sweet way, that she knew how to manage him better than any one else, and she was afraid it would be a little hard for us to get along with him if she were gone. She said it had been a subject of prayer with her for years, and she had faith that her prayer would be answered.”

She paused, and Esther said gravely: “But she did die before him, after all. I wonder what she thought about her prayer then.” Stella shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said; “I imagine she didn’t think of it at all, but only that God wanted her. It would have been just like her.”

Esther did not speak for a minute. She was pondering her grandmother’s case, while the crickets in the grass filled the stillness with their chirping, and the long, clear call of a whippoorwill sounded from the woods. Presently she asked, “Did she know at the last that she was really going to die?”

“I think she did,” said Stella. “I’ve always felt sure she did, though no one else feels just as I do about it.”

She clasped her hands about her knees, and a graver note than usual crept into her musical voice, as she went on. “There was something like a paralytic stroke toward the end, and after that she never got up, but lay in bed, not suffering any pain, but only growing weaker every day. I was with her a great deal, and there never was any one easier to take care of. One morning I was watering the flowers in her window and I saw a cluster of buds, that were almost blown, on her tea rose. She was passionately fond of flowers, and that rose was a special favorite, though it blossomed so seldom that any one else would have lost all patience with it. I knew how pleased she would be, so I took it over to her bed. ‘Grandmother,’ I said, ‘there are some buds on your tea rose; it’ll be in bloom in a day or two.’ If you could have seen how her face lighted up! ‘Why, why,’ she said, ‘my tea rose!’ And then she put out her hands all of a tremble, as if she couldn’t believe it without touching. I guided her dear old fingers, and she moved them over the bush as gently as if it had been a baby’s face. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it has blossomed so many times when something beautiful happened! Somehow, it seemed to know. It blossomed when Lucia was married, and the day your mother came home to live with you children; but I never thought it would be so now. A day or two, did you say; only a day or two more?’ And then she closed her eyes with such a smile, and I heard her saying softly to herself,—

“‘There everlasting spring abides,
And never-withering flowers.’

“Her mind wandered a little all that day and the next, and she never once spoke of leaving us, but she slipped away at night as quietly as going to sleep, and in the morning the rose was in bloom. I told grandfather about it afterward, but he didn’t attach any significance to it at all. In fact, I think he felt a little mortified, and he said if she had realized that she was on the brink of eternity she wouldn’t have been thinking about a rose.”

She was silent a minute, then added: “In one way I don’t know but grandmother’s prayer was answered after all, for grandfather seemed different after her death. He has been more considerate of us all, and we—yes, I guess we’ve tried harder to be good to him. We couldn’t help it when we remembered how patient she always was.”

The chirping of the crickets seemed to grow fuller and gladder in the summer stillness, and the notes of the whippoorwill came with yet mellower call. It was as if the influence of a sweet, unselfish, loving spirit filled the place, and somehow it did not seem to Esther Northmore at that moment a poor or paltry thing to have lived and died one of the common throng.