_ CHAPTER II. THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS
However good at pretending Felice might wish you to be she would never like you to pretend you were the crumpled little person that Major Trenton and Certain Legal Matters picked up from the narcissi border. It wasn't only her sprained ankle that frightened her, though that hurt dreadfully of course, but it was all of the persons running with lanterns, the housemaids from the kitchen and Zeb and Marthy from the stable, and from over the top of the wall had vaulted an enormously tall young man who had insisted on dashing off for a doctor. Just having so many persons about all at once terrified her.
But when the ankle was bandaged and the doctor had left her lying comfortably on her own bed with Marthy beside her, Grandfather came and sent Marthy away. It was nearly midnight, the world outside was still save for the hoarse sounds of the shipping craft outside in the bay.
"You may as well know," said the Major sternly, "that I happened to look out of the window, just before you fell--this young man who was kissing you has been chivalrous enough to insist that it was quite all his fault, that you did not know he was going to kiss you--but of course I am not so stupid as to believe that you did not expect something of the sort when you climbed up to the top of the wall. Knowing the women of your race as I do I might have suspected something of the sort--" he folded his arms, and looked so stern in the dim light of her bedside lamp that Felicia shivered, "et I hardly thought you would have the opportunity, carefully guarded as you have been. I have told the young man that he must make no further attempt to see you. And the doctor assures me you will be able to continue the journey that we have planned."
And when he was gone and Marthy had come back to put out the light Felicia asked just one thing.
"Did Maman have to stay in bed because she fell off a bench?"
Marthy's gruff voice cleared itself in her throat, she wasn't sure whether she wanted to laugh or cry at the absurd question.
"Not for that," she answered briefly, "don't let that fret ye, my precious lamb, that foot of yours will be good as new in the matter of a week maybe."
"Even if it wasn't evaire," Felicia persisted, "I'd be proud, proud, proud I climbed the wall--I shall tell Maman so--"
There was a long silence in the room. The lamp was out now; Marthy was at the door ready to go. Felice could only feel her approaching the bed. Her rough kindly voice blurred out of the darkness.
"Precious lamb, were you thinking to see your mother?"
In spite of her aching ankle the girl sat up in the bed. She laughed softly.
"Silly old Marthy! Don't you know? That's what we're going to the House in the Woods for--to see how Maman has made her garden lovely--I was so proud, proud, proud when I knew Grandy was going to take me-- I've waited so long since Maman went away--"
"God forgive him!" moaned Marthy, so softly that the girl did not hear her, but aloud she said compassionately, "Don't be settin' your heart too much--on seeing her--" and shut the door softly without saying goodnight.
But when the kindly soul came to help her down the stately stairway in the morning the tears were coursing freely over her lean and grizzled cheeks. She talked in a husky whisper all the way down.
"We've not been in the manner of friends, him being so careful and all of ye, but oh, Miss Felice, it's proud I am that I watched you in your bit of a yard and it's sorry I am that you're going--and it's long the days will be till you come back--and if there's anything that Zeb or I could do for you--"
They were in the hallway now, the Major was waiting and some strange men were carrying the last of the baggage outside to the carriage. Suddenly Felice put her two arms around Marthy's neck and whispered, whispered very softly and lifted her face away blushing,
"You can tell Dudley Hamilt I've gone to the House in the Woods--when he comes to ask you--" she said.
The Major was very impressive in his travelling coat, so stern and solemn that Felicia hardly dared to look at him until after they were on the steamer. He was really very gentle with her, he tried his best to make her comfortable, he did not refer at all to the events of the night before as he wrapped a steamer rug about her and helped the whining-voiced stewardess to prop a pillow under the bandaged ankle.
It was a desolate day, gray and overcast. The shore-line was blurred out before Felicia had so much as a fair look at it. The wind blew, raw and cold, but she shook her head when they suggested she let them take her into the cabin. She just lay with closed eyes and cuddled a little black velvet cap, a boy's cap, under her chin and with every chug of the engines her heart echoed,
"This is too far for Dudley Hamilt to come--he will nevaire find me--" She scarcely spoke to the Major. Poor Major! He walked the deck, his thin cane, tap, tap, tapping and his great caped coat bundled tight around him.
The morning of the second day they changed to an even smaller and dingier steamer. That was the day that the spring rain fell heavier and heavier. Felice lay bundled in blankets in the narrow stateroom and cried softly. There wasn't even a stewardess on this steamer to comfort her. Sometimes the Major stopped outside and asked her quietly what she would like. There was nothing she liked, but in the mid- afternoon she pulled herself together and let the Major wrap her coat about her and leaned on his arm to limp out of her stateroom and down the wobbling gang-plank and across a dirty, water-soaked wharf to the platform where the local train awaited. And after that she sat another dreary hour, while the ancient engine complainingly coughed its way through the bleak, gray woods to the ugly brown station that was their destination.
It was late afternoon. The rain had not really ceased to fall, but the sky was clearing a bit in the west as the girl stared curiously about her, while the baggage man helped the trainmen with their luggage. Suddenly the girl cried out with joy,
"Look, there is Maman's cart--"
For around the corner of the station space crept an ox-cart driven by a half grown boy. But in the hollow of the plains, just before he had reached that dreary town, the boy had stopped his cart and gathered sprawling boughs of wild cherry blossoms, those first harbingers of spring in that bleak northern country, and fastened them to the wooden yoke that held the oxen to the wagon and tied the lovely things sweet with rain, to the poles at the rear and made a sort of fairy chariot for the little lady who was coming to dwell in the woods.
He smiled at her under his slouchy cap as he stumbled stiffly toward the Major.
"The horse," he stammered, "--her foot got sore las' thing--this were all we had to fetch ye in--Piqueur--he's too old fur drivin' to the village any more, so Margot--she sends me--"
There were chairs in the back of the ox cart, odd chairs built of bent hickory with buffalo robes tucked in them. The boy swung Felice into one of them easily. He tucked the soft fur about her vigorously.
"Better wrop up good," he warned her solemnly, "S'cold." He was perfectly good-humored at the Major's sharp reprimand at the way he handled the luggage. The Major clambered in, the oxen started slowly. As soon as they had passed through the ugly village they turned out of the woods into a narrow road through sandy plains, an interminable road it seemed to Felice. Last year's sere leaves rattled on the scrub oaks; the wind-blown juniper bushes made dark spots against the wet brown of the sand and the cart swayed lumberingly through the heavy road. The girl was cold and tired and hungry but she held her head high and gazed straight before her into the fast falling twilight.
Up hill, the narrow winding road across that almost endless plain led. Sometimes the boy let the oxen stop to rest and the rising steam from their wet flanks told how hard even those sturdy beasts found the climb. Just as she was thinking that she could endure it no longer, Felice glimpsed a faint light on a plateau-like place above them. The boy gestured with his whip.
"Thar, Major," he called back cheerfully over his shoulder, "We're a- gittin' thar--"
They were through the plains at last, ascending a sharp, rocky road for the last quarter of a mile which grew still narrower but was lined with enormous bare trees that creaked and moaned in the evening wind. Felice was really very frightened.
"Now that's luck," cried the boy cheerily, looking back at her. He was pointing with his crude whip. It was quite dark now save for a faint light below the horizon of the sand dunes, but over her shoulder as she looked where he gestured Felice saw the thin crescent of the new moon.
When she looked ahead again she could glimpse the dark outlines of the great stone house. It looked cold and formidable. It was set far back from the rising road, a long way back from the massive gate posts beside the tiny gate house where flickering lights burned on the sills of three little mullioned windows. They drove through the gates, across the flagstone-paved drive of the stable yard and came to a slow stop under the inky shadows of the wooden gallery that was built across the front of the house. A woman was hurrying down the sagging steps, such a fat, comfortable woman that Felice unconsciously leaned toward her even before she could see the alert black eyes and the wide smiling mouth. She held a lantern high above her gray curly head. It shone upon the figure of a bent old man, who stood, his cap in his hands, at the foot of the steps. He was weeping. His voice was throaty with suppressed sobs and Felice couldn't understand at all what he said because he cried out in French when he saw the Major. But she could understand the welcome cheer of the fat woman's greeting as she called,
"It's all ready--supper and all--just as though it were twenty years ago, Monsieur! Ah--" sympathy rang in her voice as the Major helped Felice descend, "I did not know--she is--lame--" Her lantern was on the ground now, her sturdy arm had encircled the slender figure in the coat, "Margot will help--so--"
And that was the way that Felice went into the House in the Woods. That was the way she entered the broad and draughty hall, with the formidably big rooms on either side dimly lighted by the queer candle lamps and the faint glow from the fires on the chilly marble hearths.
A table was set before the fire in the dining salon. It looked dismayingly long, with its deep lace cover and the branched candelabra. The very height of the carved chairs that were placed at either end seemed appalling.
But when Felice was seated in one of them, with her coat still huddled about her, she looked around with artless curiosity, and watched as in a dream, while the Major put his hand on Margot's sturdy shoulder.
"You've kept it well--" was all he said. But when he had dropped his hand Margot was wiping her eyes on her apron.
Piqueur served supper, his old hands trembling as he placed the dishes before them. A hot thin soup, that warmed Felice and made her send a wavering smile across the table, a platter of ham boiled in apple cider whose delicious odors made her sniff hungrily, and after he had served the meat the old man put thin glasses beside their plates and brought a bottle of wine, wrapped carefully in an old napkin, and stood behind his master's place.
And the Major, standing after he had filled Felice's glass, lifted his own high:
"Felicia," he said slowly, "We will drink to your home coming--"
It was all so, strange that she did not notice until Piqueur set a dish of custard before her that all the silver with which she was eating was marked with the same odd mark that had adorned her silver drinking mug back in the nursery in Brooklyn. She stared at it as she held a thin spoon aloft.
"Look, Grandy," she cried, "it has my honey bee!"
He nodded.
He scarcely seemed to heed her, already he had risen and was pacing restlessly about the room, peering out the windows, addressing staccato questions in French to Piqueur. He pulled the shabby silken rope at the doorway and a bell trilled somewhere faintly. Margot came running.
"It is good to hear" she said as she entered. And helping Felice up the circular stairway she murmured tenderly, "You cannot know, Miss Felicia, how glad we are, my uncle Piqueur and I, that the house is opened once more--you're not so tall as your mother, are you?" She was positively chattering now. Felice caught her arm more closely.
"Oh, where is Maman?" she demanded. Margot shook her head. She sighed. She was opening the door of the upper room. She did not answer for a full moment. Her lips worked nervously before she spoke.
"She is not here. But this is the bed where she always slept when she was young--the bed at which she laughed so much--ah, Miss Felicia, don't you think you will like it? See how droll--" her brown wrinkled hand rested on a beautifully carved corner post, "These are little monkeys climbing for fruit--when she was a baby Mademoiselle Octavia used to put her hands on them so--"
Felice smiled.
"I know. She used to tell me," she confided. "She told me that Poquelin, the father of Moliere, made it." She was wan with fatigue, poor child, even after she lay, warm and cozy, in the great bed that had been her mother's. And the last thing she saw as she closed her eyes in the wavering candle light was Margot's fat and comfortable figure, trudging toward the fireplace to spread out her coat to dry--
It had been a fearful week for Margot, this week since the Major's curt message to make the house ready had come. For all that she was forty-five and sturdy and skilful at the myriad tasks that her uncle Piqueur's rheumatism and age had gradually let fall upon her shoulders during the slow passing years, this had been a job that put her on her mettle. Eighteen years of dust and disorder had Margot somehow or other weeded out of that building. But even with the pale spring sunshine and wind to help her and even with the huge fires they had kept kindled all day in the broad fireplaces, the corridors were still damp and cold and musty. And she was weak with fatigue and excitement. She sat down beside the fireplace, her tired body relaxing as she stared through the gloom at the figure in the canopied bed.
"She is not so beautiful as Octavia--" she thought, "but she is very sweet--and her eyes--they have that same longing to be happy--" she sighed as she tiptoed clumsily out of the room and down the draughty stairway. She stood respectfully beside the Major's chair. "Monsieur," she said gravely, "does Miss Felicia know anything at all about all of us?"
He looked up at her quickly, his dark eyes sparkling with anger at her audacity, but something in her sober, respectful gaze quieted him.
"I do not desire that she shall--" he answered. "It is better not to have her--but--" his voice faltered. "I regret that she does not understand that her mother--that Miss Octavia--" his thin old hand tightened its grip on the frail arm of the chair, "I do not know," he ended miserably, "just how it came about that she is expecting to find Miss Octavia here--in the garden. Perhaps you can tell her something to comfort her--perhaps--"
Gray-haired, wrinkled, her skin brown from exposure, Margot leaned forward, her eyes shining with excitement.
"Sometimes I think," she said distinctly, "that Miss Octavia
is in the garden, Monsieur--" She laughed softly at his start. "Do not think I am out of my wits--" She tapped her head significantly. "I do not mean like a ghost--I do not see her. Only there is something, most of all in the springtime--that makes me happy. Perhaps Octavia's daughter will feel it. Perhaps that thing, whatever it is, will make it easier for me--" she wiped her eyes, "to answer all things she will ask me--"
Upstairs in the four-poster bed that Poquelin had carved, Felicia slept, she smiled as she stirred in her slumbers. She was very tired. "Maman," she muttered drowsily as the Major paused outside her door on his way to his room, "In the garden--" and the Major listened and sighed.
She awoke to the diddling drone of Piqueur's quavering voice. In the clear sweetness of the May morning above the twittering of the birds it raised itself, the quaint measures delighting her ears. Even in Piqueur's thin falsetto the old melody sang itself--tender, graceful, spirited, never lagging--he was dropping pea seeds into the trench that Margot had prepared in the kitchen dooryard, he was always content when he was planting.
Felicia limped to the window across the moth-eaten carpet with its faded doves and roses. She flung the casement out and listened eagerly.
"Piqueur," she cried entreatingly "tell me just what it says--that song you sing." But it was Margot who leaned on her hoe and looked up at the girl and laughed.
"He sings of a girl--of more than one girl--who takes care of sheep-- the song tells them to hurry up--that time drips through the fingers like water--" Margot's own throaty voice joined lustily into her uncle's refrain, but a second later she was translating once more. "You must find your fun in the spring forests--when you're young--"
The girl in the window above them clapped her hands. A slender black- haired, eager-eyed dryad, whose shabby brocaded dressing gown trailed around her bandaged foot--
"Oh, wait! wait!" she cried, "Wait until I can do it--" her lips pursed themselves delicately and a second later the lilting trill of her lovely whistle took up the refrain of Maitre Guedron's song.
She stretched out her young hands toward the woods. The tardy tree tops were budding at last, their lovely bronze and red and tender green shining in the morning light.
"'In the spring forests,'" she cried, "'you must find your fun'--are those the words of the song, Margot?--Oh, look, look!" she pointed joyously to a blackbird on top the swaying maple outside her window. He whistled--she whistled, saucily back.
"Oh!" sighed Margot. "It is good to be young. It is good--go back to your bed, little one, I'll bring your breakfast."
But Felicia couldn't go back to bed. She hobbled delightedly from window to window, staring out at the open space in front of the house, with its descending terraces and the gray jungle of underbrush that hid the edge of the clearing. She turned eagerly when Margot entered with a tray. She was bubbling with joy.
"Is Maman comfortable this morning?" she was chattering. "Will she be in the garden? Where is the garden? I've looked and I can't see it--or is she in her bed yet? And is it up-stairs?"
Margot's hands trembled. She put the tray down on the bedside table and pulled the girl across the room and coaxed her into the bed, rubbing the small bandaged foot, cuddling the quilts about her, as she tucked the pillows. "So many questions!" she evaded. "Eat your breakfast and I will help you dress--"
Felicia snuggled under the covers and nibbled her toast hungrily.
"Yesterday," she confided, "I was unhappy; it seemed too far to come-- I was afraid, from something Marthy said, that I wasn't going to find Maman--she said I mustn't set my heart on it--"
Margot sighed. She came close to the bed and took Felicia's hands in hers.
"Listen carefully," she entreated, "the thing I have to tell you is hard. You see when Octavia went away from you she did not come here, she--"
"Where did she go?" demanded Felicia sitting bolt upright.
"She went--" Margot's throaty voice dragged painfully, "She went where all good women go when their work is done--"
"Her work wasn't done," objected Felice. "She said it would be a great deal of work to build the garden over, she said she was afraid it would be all weeds--Piqueur was so old--she said--Oh! why are you weeping, Margot?"
"When she went away from me first," moaned Margot, "I thought I could never stand it--it was so still and so lonely here in the woods without her--and now, after all these years that I have learned to live without her--it is as if she had gone away again to have to try-- to tell you--" she knelt at the bedside, her lips moved piteously. "Try to understand, little one, she is gone--neither you nor I can find her--"
"Nor the Major?" asked Felicia incredulously.
"The Major least of all," said Margot firmly. "She is not--"
"Not what?" demanded Felicia..
She was sitting on the edge of the bed now looking very little in the ancient dressing gown.
"She is not living any more," sighed Margot.
There was a long pause, a pause in which the drone of Piqueur's voice, still singing Maitre Guedron's old song, floated through the open casement.
"Not living?" questioned Felicia, her eyes widening with frightened-- comprehension--"Oh! Oh!" her voice rose tempestuously, angrily, "You shall not say such dreadful things! They are not true! The Major said we should come to this house in the Woods, he said--" she paused, her mind groped back over the years.
The rising tide of her anger swept her fear that this strange woman was telling the truth farther and farther out of her thoughts. She rose, absurdly majestic as she steadied herself with one slender arm against the quaint carved post of the bed. She pointed toward the doorway.
"You'd better go away, Margot," she ordered clearly, "You can't stay here and talk so to me--" the childish simplicity of her phrases was absurdly inadequate to express her scorn, "You do not know that I have a vairee bad temper--I make myself proud, proud, proud when I lose it --but it will make you vairee unhappy if I do--I say and I do most dreadful things when I'm angry--If I call for the Major he will come and send you away--for always and forevaire--as he did Mademoiselle D'Ormy--and no matter how sorry I am afterward he will not let you stay--"
Indeed, this idea of appealing to her grandfather had come the instant before when she heard his voice outside interrupting Piqueur's song. She limped swiftly across the space toward the window, she leaned far out and called to her grandfather, who stood in the courtyard below, gravely inspecting the lame mare that the boy had brought from the stable. So intent was Felicia with her question that she forgot her recent fear of the Major.
"Grandy!" she called, her clear tones ringing down to him, "Grandy, you will have to come and send this Margot away--you will--"
He came up the stairs to her slowly, pausing formally outside her door to tap for Margot to open for him; but even before he was in the room, looking very pale and stern and old with his beautiful head lifted high above the ruffled shirt and his peaked hat held in his hand, the girl's eager appeal had begun.
"This Margot," Felicia's words tumbled impetuously, "She's been telling me lies--she says Maman isn't here--that she isn't in the garden--or in the house--she says she--"
"You'd better stay, Margot," said Major Trenton, "I think Miss Felicia will need you. Felicia, let Margot wrap that gown about you, it's chilly here. Felicia, we do not know how to make you understand about your mother--we did not want to make you sad when you were little so I did not tell you. It was her wish that I should not distress you--" his face worked pitifully, "--with the manner of her going--what she said to you about the garden--you did not understand, my dear--She had a notion, my little Octavia, that we do not die--that only our bodies die--many other people believe this--are you listening, Felicia? She thought that her spirit," he groped for words, "the Something she called the 'Happy part of her' couldn't--'stop'--as she called it--she said-" his lips were quivering, "that part of her would always try to stay in the house where you lived so long and in this garden and house in which she lived when she was young--like you--that is all--What Margot tells you is quite true--she is not living--she has not been living since you were eleven--she died--" his words trailed miserably, "She is not living--" he repeated feebly.
The girl's eyes had never left his since he had begun his inadequate explanation, she did not cry out, she merely stood there, pale, unbelieving and stared at him.
"And she said the Happy Part of her would be here?"
He nodded.
"Then," said Felicia calmly, "If she said so, she will, and you and Margot are both stupid and bad to tell me that she won't--If you will find my shoes--" she turned petulantly to Margot, "I will walk until I find her--"
"But you cannot find her, she is gone--" the deep agony of his voice rang in the great room, "Quite gone--"
"Where has she gone?" demanded Felice stubbornly.
He gestured his despair.
It was Margot who came to the rescue, sane Margot, who had collected her senses once more. She pattered across the room to the wardrobe, calling over her shoulder as she tugged at the door.
"Wait, wait," she entreated, "You will understand some day! Just now we won't talk about it any more. She's not here but she has left so many things for you! So many messages for you! So much for you to do! Look, Miss Felicia!" She held aloft a broad sun-hat and a pair of gauntleted gloves, "Just where she hung them--as if she knew you might want them! These are the things she wore when she worked in the garden--here's her wicker basket with the trowel and the hand fork-- and here's the garden book--" She was standing before Felicia now holding out the treasures. "If you'll sit over there by the window I can tell you about the day she found this book--"
The hurt look was fading from the girl's eyes; she reached out her hands for these things that had been her mother's; she was quite docile as the Major helped her to the chair by the window. She had the garden book cuddled under her arm; she was holding the gloves against her cheek; she looked like a child instead of a grown-up person.
You won't have to pretend you can see Felicia's great-great- grandmother's garden book--you can really see it in the library of Octavia House if you care to ask the Poetry Girl to show it to you-- but perhaps you'll like to pretend that you can see the seventeen year old Felicia, wrapped in that shabby brocaded dressing gown sitting beside the window staring at the stained title page, trying to read the faint inked inscription. Perhaps you'll like to pretend too, that you can hear her grandfather's voice steadying itself as he leans over the back of the chair and translates the inscription for her. The book's in English, you know, but that written inscription is in French.
"It says," read her grandfather, "something like this:
"'To my little Madame Folly
Whom others call Prudence Langhorne
I present this book, for I have heard
A woman can be very happy building a garden--'"
"And whose name is this?" Felicia put her finger on the broad sprawl after the inscription.
"It's the initial of the man who gave it to her--J.--" said her grandfather grimly.
"And J. gave this book to Maman?"
Margot chuckled.
"No--no--" she explained. "Your Maman found this book over there in the cupboard--it's a very old book, Cherie. It is a book that a man gave to--" her fat fingers checked off the generations lightly, "a lady named Prudence--she was the mother of Josepha--and Josepha was the mother of a Louisa. It was this Louisa who was your mother's mother--now do you see? And think, Miss Felicia--" she waved her hand toward the opened door of the wardrobe, "what many, many things they've left here for you! When Octavia was just as old as you she rummaged and rummaged every day--" Margot wiped her eyes with the back of her hand--the Major moved toward the window and looked down upon the garden. "She put them all in order, each one's clothes in a different place, I was the one who helped her. And she used to laugh while we sorted the things and say what fun it would be for the next one who came to see them--that's you, Miss Felicia--"
"Oh! Oh!" breathed Felicia, her eyes shining like stars. "How sweet of her! How sweet of you, Margot, to keep them all for me! You are sweet, sweet, sweet to bring me her gloves! Once she told me about this hat, I knew its ribbons would be blue! I know how they tie in back so's it won't make me warm under my chin--she told me--look, isn't this the way?" Her slender hands lifted the hat to her hair, so sweetly rumpled from her pillows, "Look, Grandy, look at me! I am wearing Maman's hat --she told me I could wear it when I came to the House in the Woods! Do you think it looks well on me?" Her naive vanity almost broke their hearts. "Do you, Grandy? Look at me!"
He turned slowly. He stepped bravely toward her and lifted her hand and kissed it.
"You look very charming, my dear," he murmured, he was breathing hard, "very charming--I'll go back to the stable, if you'll excuse me-- Margot will show you the other things--" he was in the doorway now, his head held high, "as she told you they've all been kept for you carefully. I hope they will make you very happy."
He closed the door softly.
Things to make her happy! Ah! Margot! Cunning Margot! spreading the treasures of those dear dead women before their imperious little descendant! Wise old Margot, who must speak so carefully that she will not break that girl's heart! Margot, who must undo all the trouble that years of evasions from Grandy and lies from Mademoiselle D'Ormy have stored up for her!
With what infinite tact did she bring them out, those vanities And trinkets of those girls of bygone days; with what adroit eloquence did she introduce all their foibles and virtues to Felicia! Oh, but she was a fine old gossip, was Margot! She couldn't quite trust herself to touch Octavia's clothes that first day. She plunged wildly into Louisa's.
While Felice's hands were busy over a shagreen jewel case filled with hideous garnet and gilt breast-pins and bracelets of the sixties, Margot leaned from the casement and called,
"Bele, oh, Bele! You careless boy! Bring some wood for Miss Felice! Make a fire up here! It's damp!"
And while the boy, embarrassed and awkward, was kindling the fire Margot fled to the kitchen to juggle wildly with her pots and pans and leave a thousand directions for Piqueur about what to serve for the Major's lunch.
"Never tell me a man knows how to bring up a child," she scolded as she stirred her soup, "never tell me that! He's done as well as he could but he's made a fine mess of it--the poor child! Thinking Miss Octavia would be here--not knowing so much as a new-born kitten-- that's as much sense as she has--as a little new-born kitten!"
And she hurried back with a delectable luncheon on a tray.
Outside the sun had hid itself and the fickle spring clouds were dripping over the desolate garden. But at the fireside, curled up in the winged chair with her bandaged foot propped comfortably on a foot- stool, Felicia sat through the long afternoon and chattered and laughed and clapped her little hands.
Oh, those foolish clothes that had belonged to Louisa! With their silly--whaleboned waists and their grotesque basques and impossible pleatings! Felicia couldn't get one of those bodies half around her healthy young waist. But she liked the bonnets and the shawls. They were adorable. The shawls were so soft, so quaintly shaped, the bonnets were fairly ravishing. Felicia tried them on, peering into a carved tortoise shell hand mirror, and giggled whimsically at the little flowered ones with lacy ties and the stuffy winter ones with velvet bows.
"Miss Louisa was very handsome," Margot informed her, "My aunt says she was the handsomest girl she ever saw--but very high-minded, very uppish!"
"I know about her," Felice answered easily, "Mademoiselle D'Ormy belonged to her. Louisa went to Paris, you know, and Mademoiselle lived there. Mademoiselle used to tell me she bought clothes and clothes and clothes! Are these those clothes?"
Margot nodded.
"Josepha's clothes came from Paris too--" she spread a great brocaded velvet coat before her, "Josepha wasn't pretty at all like the rest of them, she looked like her father, they said, and he was a homely old man--Josepha had a temper--I never saw her--I wasn't even born when she went away, but my aunt served her and she said Mistress Josepha had an air--a way with her--if things didn't suit her--" she lowered her voice impressively--"Ah--what she wouldn't do, that Josepha! Once my aunt took her an omelette--a beautiful omelette cooked with chopped fine carrots and peas and parsley and a big tall glass of milk for her breakfast, but Josepha, she had desired broiled chicken that morning, so she walked straight to the window here where I'm standing and threw the omelette out--She would always throw things--that one--her shoes-- or anything--when she was angry--"
Felicia blushed.
"Margot," she confided, "this morning when I was angry I was like that--I wanted to throw things, only I hadn't anything just then to throw--but when I was little I did--my bath sponge, you know, and once a key--" she grew thoughtful, "the key to the storeroom where Mademoiselle hid things--Margot, you won't hide these things, will you?" she hugged a wee muff jealously to her breast, "You won't, will you?"
Margot chuckled and shrugged her shoulders. The room was filled with the finery she had dragged from the tall wardrobe. On the chairs, over the bed, hanging from the pegs of the cupboard, of every conceivable color and shape, those forgotten clothes glimmered and shone.
"These are the oldest of all--" Margot was kneeling and tugging at a carved cedar chest that was under the bed, "These are the things that belonged to the first one of you, the things that belonged to Prudence Langhorne." She dragged the chest triumphantly to the girl's side. "On top,--" the odor of the cedar was wafted out into the room like the odor of the pine plains through which Felice had been driving yesterday, "here, these are things she had when she came to live in this house that was built for her--plain enough, eh?" She spread the gray stuffs and brown linsey woolseys out scornfully. Their voluminous skirts and long tight sleeves and queer flat yellowed collars were stupid enough in the midst of all the splendor about them. "But look, now look, what she wore after she came--"
Felicia looked. And not even all the frills and fabrics that she had already exclaimed over could compare with the loveliness of these frocks of Mistress Prudence. They were so dainty, so fragile I With their delicate yellowed laces! They were so soft and faded with age! Each little frock was packed by itself in a yellowed linen case, each had shoes and stockings and sometimes a gay little head dress folded away with it. Short-waisted, scant skirted--
"Oh! Oh!" cried Felice, "these are the ones I love best of all! These are the ones I'll wear! Oh Margot! That darling rosy one!" She bobbed out of the chair excitably, "Look at the little silver shoes for it! Oh Margot, dress me in it at once! Oh, Margot! How pretty I'll be for dinner every day--"
You should have seen her when she limped down the stairs for supper! Margot had brought her one of the Major's canes and tied some faded cherry ribbons on its gold handle. Piqueur was just lighting the candles when the two descended. Grandfather sat by the fire, his head drooping. It had been a hard day, this day he had spent with old memories. He had grieved over Octavia, he had yearned for Louisa, he had pondered mightily concerning Josepha who had been so angry with him when he had married her daughter. But he'd thought not at all of little Madame Folly in whose house he sat and brooded, not until he looked up and saw her great-great-granddaughter standing in the doorway, dressed in a cherry-colored gown, all gay with tarnished silver ribbons and yellowed lace. Because she didn't know any other way to dress her hair, she had tucked it in its usual knot at the nape of her lovely neck, but on top the neat parting was perched a narrow gold circlet with a tiny cherry-colored plume and she held her head audaciously high as she swept him a mighty curtsy.
"Louisa's things aren't pretty at all," she babbled breathlessly, "and Josepha's I can't wear--but oh, Grandy, aren't Prudence's just sweet!"
"They look like Imprudence's," he bantered as he rose.
She brought forth other treasures from under her curved arm.
"And look! Little chess men and a little chess board. Get a table! I'll checkmate you before even dinner is ready! Margot has to go brown the chickens--hurry Margot, I'm hungry--"
She had come into her own. She was like a young queen come to her throne. From that very moment she ruled them all,--Grandy, Margot, Piqueur and Bele as though they were her slaves.
She adored every inch of her domain, she could scarcely wait for the ankle to heal so that she could rove about the overgrown paths in the woods and tumbled walks and weed-covered lawns. She could not get up early enough in the morning to do all her eager young heart longed to do. Rebuilding the garden was a sacred trust; hadn't Maman told her to do it? All day long, her serious face shaded by the old garden hat, her slender hands encased in the gauntleted gloves, she prowled about the terraces or rummaged in the tool house, usually with the beloved THEORY AND PRACTISE OF GARDENING under her arm. Sometimes she spread it open on a dilapidated bench so that she could read its solemn dissertations. The very title page appalled one with the gravity of the task. In flourishing type it boasted of its august contents--
Wherein Is fully handled
all that relates to the fine gardens
commonly called pleasure gardens
as Parterres, Groves, Bowling Greens.
Containing
Divers plans and general dispositions.
Methods of planting, and raising in little time,
all the plants requisite in a garden.
Done from the French original in Paris
anno domini 1709
Daytime was not long enough for its perusal. Night after night, she sat hunched up in the Poquelin bed and pored over her beloved book. Sometimes after she read she would run and peer out from her casement window in the moonlight and scowl over the wilderness that lay below her, the wilderness that had once been a garden. The cleared space that stretched for two or three hundred yards before the house was divided into three flat terraces whose crumbling banks had lost their once careful outlines; and at the bottom of the lowest terrace a tottering lattice, sagging with old vines, made a background for the fountain in whose rubbish-filled depths a chubby cupid struggled patiently with an impossible marble duck.
"If I could only see how it went--" she would fret, "I can't see which one of them it is."
For in the back of the Garden book were many folded charts and maps, so big that they stretched out enormously over the counterpane of the bed. Sometimes Felicia thought that Mistress Prudence' garden must have been built after "The Sixteenth Practise"--that was a brave plan "with three terraces and a fountain at the base," but sometimes she thought it must be after the "single star cut into cabinets."
At first she contented herself with gardening in the Bowling Green with Piqueur feebly turning over the weedy sod and Bele tramping to and fro with barrows of manure. Her Bowling Green was in the very center of the second terrace. She had discovered that directly she began.
"In France," she read, "a bowling green differs from what you call a bowling green in England. We mean no other by this word than certain hollow sinking and slopes of turf which are practised in the middle of a parterre. A Bowling Green is the most agreeable compartment of a garden, when rightly placed most pleasant to the eye beside the pleasure it affords us of lying on its sloping banks in the shade during hottest weather."
Only it wasn't so easy to read as it looks now we're writing it over. For "The Theory and Practise of Gardening" made you rub your eyes and groan, it was such a puzzling sort of book. To begin with its type was bewildering with its s's all turned like f's and its italics so thin you could scarcely decipher them. Besides that, the author, who remained discreetly anonymous, but none the less unwarrantably conceited, had a maddening way of spreading over a whole page the way not to do things--he didn't state at the start that it was the wrong way he was relating, he just meandered on, letting the reader suppose that was the rightest way possible as he wrote at length pertaining to:
"How to grow Box Trees from seed.
"The box tree is a green shrub of greatest use and one of the most necessary in the garden. There are two sorts, the dwarf box which we French call Buis A' Artous much used for planting the embroidery of Parterres. It naturally does not grow very much which makes it called dwarf box. The other kind is the Box Tree of the woods, which advances much higher and has bigger leaves which make it fit to form Pallisades and green Tufts for Garnishing. It comes up in the shade but is a long time gaining any considerable height. It is put to a great many petty uses, as making balls--as the climate of France is very different from that of the Indies in the degree heat
it is better to raise from slips and layers than to try to sow seed which is a great time coming up."
The book quite frankly disclosed the terrors as well as the joys of the game. It was most disconcerting to read of
"The Distempers and Insects that Attack....The great Enemies are Rabbets, Garden Mise, Moles, Caterpillars, Maybugs, Ants, Snails, Turks, Canthardies and an abundance of weeds, the names of which are unknown to us--"
She shouted with youthful laughter as she read it, the echoes of her merriment sounding through the empty halls. She doubled her little fist and shook it toward the candle, flickering low in its socket.
"That's what has hidden the garden," she murmured, "that's why I can't see it--" she wrinkled her nose in disgust. "--Abundance-of-weeds-- Piqueur and Bele will settle you!"
All through the verdant spring, all through the quick hot summer the girl puzzled over the unanswered riddle--the scheme of the garden. Piqueur and Bele and Margot toiled valiantly pulling up the myriad abundance-of-weeds, but in vain. It was not until the resplendent autumn had passed that she had any inkling of the real pattern. There came a glorious moonlit night, a chilly night when she snuggled under the blankets and yawned over the chapter that told her "how to mulch plants for winter." The wind blew so chill that at midnight she pattered across the old carpet to make the casement fast. The whole cleared space below her glistened with the fairy glamour of the first frost. Under the magic silvery whiteness the lost "parterres and cabinets and lozenges" with their paths and borders stood out as clearly in the moonlight as the day when Madame Prudence's workmen had charted them there. She laughed aloud as she ran back and turned to the map labelled "The twentieth and laft practife which is the most superb and which is The Bifected Oval."
"Oh, Oh!" she murmured as she leaned across the stone sill, unmindful of the cold, to blow a tiny kiss to the fountain cupid, "How stupid I was not to see! You just live in half the oval and the kitchen garden and the stables are the other half--"
She could scarcely wait for morning to impart her wonderful news to Grandy and the others.
"Some say it can be done within five years, but ye author believes from experiences both at Versailles and in ye south of England that a decade or more is necessary to establish any garden--"
Which warning from the fat brown leather book made it easier for Felice, you see, because she never hoped to accomplish the garden in a little time. Besides, Piqueur was, as Octavia had foretold "too old." But it was Margot--oh, heaven-sent Margot, and the adoring, clumsy Bele who toiled like four men, and so cabinet by cabinet, parterre by parterre, terrace by terrace, the superb old garden began to grow lovely once more.
Think of the victory of the summer when the hedges were at last properly trimmed! Think of the joy of the flatly rolled turf, the spring that they found a massive iron roller in an unused shed at the back of the carriage house! Think of the wonder of that day when the little fountain laughed again, its pipe unchoked and its overflow trickling neatly away under the hidden terra-cotta drains!
The busy days lost themselves in weeks, the weeks dripped endlessly from season to season. By the time the second spring had come it was as though Felicia had lived in the House in the Woods forever.
The only links with the old life were the two or three visits of Certain Legal Matters; and as Felice hated him as much as ever she hid herself all she could during his short stays.
It was during his second visit that Felicia had her first real encounter with the doughty lawyer. It was in March that he came, and Felicia and Margot were deep in their spring plans. They needed a great many things that they didn't have for the garden. It was practical Margot who suggested casually,
"Why couldn't you ask Mr. Burrel? He could send them to the junction and I could go with the oxen--I have always asked him for vegetable seeds when I sent the spring list of supplies--write in a paper, Cherie, all that we need--put down the roses and the trees and the lily bulbs and all--tell him that he must send them."
She was rather cunning about it, was Felice. She waited until the lawyer was strolling impatiently in the gallery waiting for the cart to drive around from the stable. She approached him boldly, holding out her list.
"These are some things we need for our garden," she said. "You will please have them sent at once."
He stared at the imperious young creature. It was the first time she had ever voluntarily spoken with him. He took the list. He was very ill at ease.
"I am not certain," he began as he stared amazed at the lengthy order, "that I can arrange for--er--"
Inwardly quaking Felice answered him. Her low voice sounded astonishingly calm to her.
"But we must have them," she announced. She played her trump card valiantly, "You can give it back to me if you can't get them, I have another person--who can attend to--Certain Legal Matters for me--" Her voice trailed faintly, she was really rather frightened.
"May I ask whom?" the lawyer demanded in amazement.
"I know where he is," she asserted childishly. "He is in Temple Bar, Brooklyn, and he would get them for me quickly, I'm sure. You see, in April we shall need these things for the planting. He told me--" she added this with delicious positiveness, "to remember to let him know if you did not manage things properly."
The cart had clattered around now, Piqueur was waiting politely. The lawyer frankly gaped at her, his eyes narrowed. He looked very pale in the afternoon light. His thick hand reached out for the list.
"I--I will see that you get what you wish, Miss Felicia--" he capitulated. "You do not need to ask any one else about it--I'm glad to do you the favor--"
And all the way across the Pine Plains to the station he questioned Piqueur as to whether the Major or Felice had had any visitors. But Piqueur, who had always hated the lawyer, cunningly evaded the cross- examination. And in less than a week after Burrel's departure Margot drove the ox-cart across the plains and brought it back fairly laden with florists' crates and boxes.
Life was not all easy. Keeping the Major happy grew more and more difficult. If Felicia found the House in the Woods joyous, he did not. He brooded restlessly save for the hours they spent together over the chess board or at dinner; sometimes he slowly paced the long gallery or the hallways, but more often he sat gloomily, his hand on his cane, his chin resting on his hand and looked sadly across the terrace where Felice directed her workers. He, like Piqueur, was growing "too old." He was really seventy-four that summer. Margot knew when his birthday came and tried to make a little feast but he ignored it. He tried to pretend a polite interest in the reconstruction of the garden but his heart was not in it. He liked better to sit indoors in his carved chair. Even on the warmest days when evening came he wanted a fire kindled on the chilly marble hearth.
Felicia labored patiently at "making him happy." She had long since made him a partner in her own game that she called pretending. "Pretending" just as in the old days when she had played with Maman. Of course, she had to whistle to pretend and he still affected a scorn of the whistling he had once forbidden. The "pretending" usually took place directly after dinner. She would kiss the top of his forehead audaciously and dance before him with a deep curtsy.
"Let's pretend, Grandy! Let's pretend I'm not Felice! Let's pretend I'm a blanchisseuse--that's a washerlady. This is a thing that Piqueur's mother learned in France when she was young--whenever Margot and I spread our linen on the grass to bleach we whistle this--"
Or sometimes she would demurely assure him that she was, "--a girl who's pulling roses to sell the man who makes perfume--" She would snatch up her needlework basket and swing it at her hip and pull the roses down from the mantelpiece vases and all the while she would whistle, with her dear little chin perkily lifted and her sparkling eyes watching to see if the Major was listening.
The song he liked best of all was the song of the hunt. I think he liked the audacity with which she appropriated his peaked hat and perched it jauntily on her own head and caught away his cane to use for a riding crop. "This song," she would explain joyously, "is for autumn, when all the men and women are waiting on their restless horses for the master of the hunt to blow his horn--" Her cupped hands at her lips made a beautiful horn and her whistle rang valiantly in the great ceilinged room but the hunting song usually lost itself in a whirr of laughter and frills as the huntress dropped breathless on the footstool at the Major's side and put her sleek head against his knee.
"Grandy," she whispered once, "You stub-stub-stubborn man! Why don't you learn to pretend! Why don't you make believe they're all here?" she waved her hand toward the portraits around them! "I pretend they're proud, proud, proud I'm here! It must have been vairee stupid for them before I came!"
The Major was not her only audience. She frequently "pretended" for Margot and Piqueur and Bele, prancing gaily-about them in their snug kitchen on the long winter evenings when they huddled by their fire. For them she whistled all the droll bits of Marthy's songs that she remembered. Piqueur only listened solemnly, with his smothered briar pipe held politely in his hand; but Margot, buxom, and red cheeked with her iron gray hair tucked under her flaring cap would sit and gape and laugh and quite forget her knitting whenever she could hear,
"He who would woo a widow must not dally He must make hay while the sun doth shine He must not say 'Widow, be mine--be mine!--'"
Felicia's absurd whine for the timorous lover always made Bele snort from his corner,
"But boldly cry 'Widow, thou MUST--'"
Ah, the deep contralto of that boyish voice of hers roundly mouthing the pompous swain's wooing!
She could always make Margot cry when she "pretended"
The Wreck of the Polly Ann--with her gray eyes wide with excitement as she described the rolling waves from the top of the rigging! I don't suppose she ever knew all of the words of any of these songs or ballads, she never did any of them quite the same any time, but she caught at the plot and she babbled a scrap or two of the chorus and she always knew every lilting turn of the tunes.
There was one "pretend" she could only do when she was alone. She did not try it often. Sometimes on the spring nights when the tender breezes let the half-awakened wistaria flutter outside her window, she would blow out all her candles and lean far across the sill and stare at her unfinished garden.
And when the house was still, oh, heart-breakingly still, she would kneel beside the bed and whisper,
"Let's pretend! Let's pretend we're back in your room, Maman! Let's pretend it's THAT NIGHT! Let's pretend they've just brought me in from the garden! And that you're laughing a little because you've heard him say,
"'Second cap I've lost here! Lost one when I was a little shaver! There was a girl--why, girl--!'
"Oh Maman! Maman! If you'd only been there! You wouldn't have brought me away!"
She kept the choir boy's black velvet cap in the lowest drawer of the wardrobe. Once Margot saw it when she was tidying things.
"I don't remember this--" she murmured curiously.
And Felicia had snatched it away jealously and cuddled it under her chin.
"Because that's mine!" she had retorted passionately, "It's mine! Mine! And it didn't belong evaire to any other woman only me!"
And the years slipped away like Time in Maitre Guedron's song and every year the garden grew a little lovelier and every year Felicia grew a little more sedate and every year Piqueur and the Major grew "too old." Until Piqueur no longer left his fireside and as for the Major--well, there came a day when the Major fell prostrate by the staircase and lay for a long time breathing very hard. That was a terrifying time until Bele brought a doctor from the village. He was a good little doctor, round faced and pink cheeked, quite the youngest thing, save Bele, that Felicia had seen in many years. And he pulled the Major back to something like life--a something that played chess very slowly and sometimes called Felicia Octavia and sometimes querulously murmured,
"Louisa, I forbid you to go to Paris--it's a bad business--"
She "pretended" nothing in these days, simply went gravely about the myriad tasks that awaited her, directing the stupid Bele, helping the white haired Margot, sitting proudly at the head of the table smiling across at a black eyed old gentleman who muttered and fumbled peevishly at his food or quite forgot to eat at all until she coaxed him. She always smiled at dinner; one should smile at dinner even though one feels very, very sad. And after dinner one must make an attempt to give a querulous old man his game of chess. And let his cold lips caress one's hand when Bele comes to put him to bed.
But after that, especially if it was spring, she would wander restlessly in her garden or pace back and forth in her high ceilinged bed chamber. And sometimes she would kneel beside her window and murmur a little prayer--she didn't know it was a prayer, it was just a scrap of something she remembered--
"'I can't get out--I can't get out!' cried the starling," which isn't in any prayer book of course, save the prayer book of a woman's imprisoned heart.
She was in the kitchen garden one morning just beside the gatehouse showing Bele for the thousandth time how to trench the peas without burying them, when a crumpled old man in a rough cap with a basket under his arm, limped through the gate.
"I want to see Major Trenton--" he said firmly.
Felicia turned. No one ever came to see the Major any more. Not even Certain Legal Matters since the time of the Major's fall. Felicia had signed many papers at his last visit some three years before and since then no one had bothered the Major.
"You'll have to see me," answered Felicia, coolly, "Bele, not--so-- deep! You're smothering them--what is your business?"
The man took off his cap, he put down his basket and knelt to open it and out popped the littlest, drollest fluff of a spaniel that ever frisked.
"Oh, oh!" cried Felicia softly and dropped to her knees. "Oh, oh, it's a little Babiche! Oh Zeb! Zeb! To think I didn't see who you were--"
And they walked across the paved door-yard with the tears in their eyes and Felicia took him in to Margot and brought him soup and fed the wee doggie and fluttered about like a wild young thing instead of a sedate person of twenty-seven.
"I want to ask you a thousand million things! I want to ask Marthy a thousand million things--"
Zeb closed his eyes and shook his head.
Felicia patted his shoulder.
"Has she gone away, like Maman?" she asked softly. "I know how hard it is when folks go away, Zeb."
"But that's not the matter o' my comin'--" Zeb pushed his bowl away and stood respectfully, "That matter o' my comin' was as I must see the Major. On your going away, Miss Felicia, he promised me rent free for my lifetime and he gave me all the breedin' stock they was and left me the business for what I could make, so's to speak. Which isn't what it were, with new-fangled big dogs getting in style now. And with Marthy gone and all. But now with Mr. Burrel skipped out like he did, things is awful--just awful--and It seemed like I'd got to tell the Major--"
Margot pulled out a chair for Felicia.
"Sit down, Cherie," she murmured, "Margot will get it out--have you seen Mr. Burrel?" she questioned eagerly, "We've no sign of him this long time--"
"He's skipped out--" repeated Zeb dully, "Things is awful--Come last Thursday they pasted 'Auction, April 10 for Unpaid Taxes' over everything. So's when I was packing my things I come on some writing Miss Octavia left Marthy. As to how to get here, and I come."
He was weary and spent with his journey; he was stupider than ever, poor old Zeb. Not even the round faced doctor, whom Margot and Felicia called for advice, could learn anything more from his disconnected story, save that there were "heathen, dirty filthy heathen" living in the old house.
Felicia cuddled the new Babiche thoughtfully.
"Do you think," she asked, "that the Major would miss me, Doctor, if I went away a little while to find out about these things?"
The doctor shook his head.
"He wouldn't," he answered, "But, Miss Day, you couldn't go!"
She smiled.
"Couldn't I just!" she breathed. She was quite calm about the details. Her perfect poise awed both Margot and the doctor into thinking her quite capable. "Zeb could stay here with Margot, the doctor could take me to the station, Zeb says he didn't come on a boat, just a train. And you know, Margot, when I get to Brooklyn, I'll go right to Temple Bar. There was a man, as I told you, another lawyer. When I was young he told me to go to him if anything happened. Maman had him come. He will know what to do."
Nothing they could say would dissuade her. The touch of imperiousness with which she silenced their objections made the blundering well- meaning doctor want to shake her. He waited impatiently while Margot made Felicia ready for the hasty journey. He saw nothing absurd about the slender figure that came down the stairway toward him wrapped in the very same traveling coat in which she had first journeyed to the House in the Woods. She was wearing one of Louisa's ugliest bonnets with the strings tied primly under her chin and she was fearfully pale.
The Major was sitting by his fire, dozing gently. He did not notice her at all. He roused himself for the doctor's perfunctorily cheerful farewell. It was then that he noted Felicia's coat and bonnet.
"What are you pretending?" he asked.
"I'm pretending I'm going on a journey," she answered cheerfully. "Don't you think I look like going on a journey, Grandy?"
"I think you look very charming, my dear," he murmured automatically, his thin hand on the top of his cane. He shivered slightly. "But I forbid you to go to Paris--bad business--it's a bad business, Louisa!"
At the gateway, just as the doctor was clucking briskly to his horse, Felicia put out her hand and stopped him. Zeb and Margot and Bele stood respectfully beside the gatehouse, respectfully but very troubled.
"It's silly," faltered Felicia, "but I think--I--can't go alone--Zeb, you bring me my new Babiche, I can carry her under my arm."
Zeb handed the dog up proudly, patting her professionally. He scratched his head perplexedly as he stepped back from the wheel.
"Hey, wait!" he addressed the doctor as he started a second time. He fumbled in an inner pocket of his rough coat. "I was forgetting, Miss Felicia, a matter of a letter for you I found in Marthy's things--she sent it off at you this long time ago but it came back at her--"
He handed it up, thin, much creased and much bestamped and postmarked.
Miss F. Day
New York.
Or return to
M. Z. Smather
2 Montrose Lane, Brooklyn, N. Y.
Pretend you were the doctor if you like, the tired country doctor, mildly sorry for the little old maid granddaughter of your apoplectic patient--that queer patient who lives in that stone mansion some of those French refugees built over there across the Pine Plains. That's an easy enough thing to pretend, but a tiresome enough thing, too, for then you'll have to make believe you're urging your tired horse over those heavy roads to the railway station so you can get the old maid there in time for her train. She's quiet enough, in her seedy bonnet and shabby coat, a nice sensible body usually, only very self-willed. You know perfectly well she's going off on a wild goose chase and that she shouldn't be taking that fool puppy with her.
But oh, I hope you're good at pretending! For then you can pretend you're Felicia Day! Felicia Day sitting in a lumbering local train, quite unmindful of the atrocious rocking roadbed or the blurred spring forests that whirl past your smoke-glazed window; quite oblivious of all the terrors and discomforts of journeys past or journeys still to come!
For then you can pretend that you've just slowly pulled away the envelope that was so useless because of poor old Marthy's undecipherable handwriting and that you've kissed the inner wrapping that reads "Please send this to Miss Trenton (if that's her name). At once." And then--oh then, you can pretend you are reading the first letter you ever had in all this world and that it says,
Dear Felice:
You see I've found out your first name even if I'm not sure of the rest. Anyhow I know Major Trenton is your grandfather. He wouldn't let me see you this morning when I went to your house and this afternoon you'd gone away. The old woman says you've gone to a house in the woods. Please, please tell me you'll let me come to see you. Please tell me where it is. She doesn't seem to know exactly. The doctor says your foot will be all right but, oh, I can't forgive myself that I let you fall. I wish I had never, never let go of you at all--
Oh, girl, please write in a hurry where you are. I want to tell you so many things. I want to ask you a lot of things. You can send a letter to my house, it's 18 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn. I know you know my name because you called it when you were falling. It was so wonderful to have you know my name--
Oh, Felice, please write me very soon. I can't wait until I get your letter.
Your DUDLEY HAMILT. _