A Day of Fate Part 14

"I think that's a very nice way of getting acquainted. Won't you let me kiss you good-night when you get sleepy."

She looked at me with a doubtful smile, and said, "I'm afraid thy mustache will tickle me."

The birds were singing in the orchard near, but there was not a note that to my ear was more musical than Miss Warren's laugh. I stooped down before the little girl as I said:

"Suppose we see if a kiss tickles you now, and if it don't now, you won't mind it then, you know."

She came hesitatingly to me, and gave the coveted salute with a delicious mingling of maidenly shyness and childish innocence and frankness.

"Ah!" I exclaimed, "Eden itself contained nothing better than that. To think that I should have been so honored--I who have written the records of enough crimes to sink a world!"

"Perhaps if you had committed some of them she wouldn't have kissed you."

"If I had to live in a ninety-nine story tenement-house, as so many do, I think I would have committed them all. Well, I may come to it. Life is a risky battle to such as I, but I'm in heaven now."

"You do seem very happy," she said, looking at me wistfully.

"I am very happy. I have given myself up wholly to the influences of this day, letting them sway me, lead me whithersoever they will. If this is a day of destiny, no stupid mulishness of mine shall thwart the happy combination of the stars. That the Fates are propitious I have singular reason to hope. Yesterday I was a broken and dispirited man.

This evening I feel the influence of all this glad June life. Good Mrs.

Yocomb has taken me in hand. I'm to study topography with a teacher who has several other b.u.mps besides that of locality, and Zillah is going to show us the garden of Eden."

"Is this like the garden of Eden?" the little girl asked, looking up at me in surprise.

"Well, I'm not sure that it's just like it, but I'm more than content with this garden. In one respect I think it's better--there are no snakes here. Now, Zillah, lead where you please, I'm in the following mood. Do you know where any of these birds live? Do you think any of them are at home on their nests? If so, we'll call and pay our respects. When I was a horrid boy I robbed a bird's nest, and I often have a twinge of remorse for it." "Do you want to see a robin's nest?"

asked Zillah excitedly.

"Yes, indeed."

"Then come and walk softly when I do. There's one in that lilac-bush there. If we don't make a noise, perhaps we can see mother robin on the nest. Sh--, sh--, very softly; now lift me up as father did--there, don't you see her?"

I did for a moment, and then the bird flew away on a swift, silent wing, but from a neighboring tree the paternal robin clamored loudly against our intrusion. Nevertheless, Zillah and I peeped in.

"Oh, the queer little things!" she said, "they seem all mouth and swallow."

"Mrs. Robin undoubtedly thinks them lovely. Miss Warren, you are not quite tall enough, and since I can't hold you up like Zillah, I'll get a box from the tool-house. Isn't this the jolliest housekeeping you ever saw? A father, mother, and six children, with a house six inches across and open to the sky. Compare that with a Fifth Avenue mansion!"

"I think it compares very favorably with many mansions on the Avenue,"

she said, after I returned with a box and she had peered for a moment into the roofless home.

"I thought you always spoke the truth," I remarked, a.s.suming a look of blank amazement.

"Well, prove that I don't."

"Do you mean to say that you think that a simple house, of which this nest is the type, compares favorably with a Fifth Avenue mansion?"

"I do."

"What do you know about such mansions?"

"I have pupils in some of the best of them."

"I hear the voices of many birds, but you are the _rara avis_ of them all," I said, looking very incredulous.

"Not at all; I am simply matter-of-fact. Which is worth the more, a furnished house or the growing children in it?"

"The children ought to be."

"Well, many a woman has so much house and furniture to look after that she has no time for her children. The little brown mother we have frightened away can give nearly all her time to her children; and, by the way, they may take cold unless we depart and let her shelter them again with her warm feathers. Besides, the protesting paterfamilias on the pear-tree there is not aware of our good-will toward him and his, and is naturally very anxious as to what we human monsters intend. The mother bird keeps quiet, but she is watching us from some leafy cover with tenfold his anxiety."

"You will admit, however, that the man bird is doing the best he can."

"Oh, yes, I have a broad charity for all of his kind."

"Well, I am one of his kind, and so shall take heart and bask in your general good-will. Stop your noise, old fellow, and go and tell your wife that she may come home to the children. I differ from you, Miss Warren, as I foresee I often shall. You are not matter-of-fact at all.

You are unconventional, unique--" "Why not say queer, and give your meaning in good plain English?"

"Because that is not my meaning. I fear you are worse--that you are romantic. Moreover, I am told that girls who dote on love in a cottage all marry rich men if the chance comes." She bit her lip, colored, and seemed annoyed, but said, after a moment's hesitation, "Well, why shouldn't they, if the rich men are the right men?"

"Oh, I think such a course eminently proper and thrifty. I'm not finding fault with it in the least. They who do this are a little inconsistent, however, in shunning so carefully that ideal cottage, over which, as young ladies, they had mild and poetic raptures. Now, I can't a.s.sociate this kind of thing with you. If you had 'drawings or leadings,' as Mrs. Yocomb would say, toward a Fifth Avenue mansion, you would say so in effect. I fear you are romantic, and are under the delusion that love in a cottage means happiness. You have a very honest face, and you looked into that nest as if you liked it."

"Mr. Morton," she said, frowning and laughing at the same time, "I'm not going to be argued out of self-consciousness. If we don't know what we know, we don't know anything. I insist upon it that I am utterly matter-of-fact in my opinions on this question. State the subject briefly in prose. Does a family exist for the sake of a home, or a home for the sake of a family? I know of many instances in which the former of these suppositions is true. The father toils and wears himself out, often gambles--speculating, some call it--and not unfrequently cheats and steals outright in order to keep up his establishment. The mother works and worries, smooths her wrinkled brow to curious visitors, burdens her soul with innumerable deceits, and enslaves herself that her house and its belongings may be as good or a little better than her neighbor's. The children soon catch the same spirit, and their souls become absorbed in wearing apparel. They are complacently ignorant concerning topics of general interest and essential culture, but would be mortified to death if suspected of being a little off on 'good form'

and society's latest whims in mode. It is a dreary thraldom to mere things in which the soul becomes as material, narrow, and hard as the objects which absorb it. There is no time for that which gives ideality and breadth."

"Do you realize that your philosophy would stop half the industries of the world? Do you not believe in large and sumptuously furnished houses?"

"Yes, for those who have large incomes. One may live in a palace, and yet not be a slave to the palace. Our home should be as beautiful as our taste and means can make it; but, like the nest yonder, it should simply serve its purpose, leaving us the time and means to get all the good out of the world at large that we can."

A sudden cloud of sadness overcast her face as she continued, after a moment, half in soliloquy:

"The robins will soon take wing and leave the nest; so must we. How many have gone already!"

"But the robins follow the sun in their flight," I said gently, "and thus they find skies more genial than those they left."

She gave me a quick, appreciative smile as she said:

"That's a pleasant thought."

"Your home must be an ideal one," I remarked unthinkingly.

She colored slightly, and laughed as she answered:

"I'm something like a snail; I carry my home, if not my house, around with me. A music-teacher can afford neither a palace nor a cottage."

I looked at her with eager eyes as I said, "Pardon me if I am unduly frank; but on this day I'm inclined to follow every impulse, and say just what I think, regardless of the consequences. You make upon me a decided impression of what we men call comrades.h.i.+p. I feel as if I had known you weeks and months instead of hours. Could we not have been robins ourselves in some previous state of existence, and have flown on a journey together?"

"Mrs. Yocomb had better take you in hand, and teach you sobriety."

"Yes, this June air, laden with the odors of these sweet old-style roses and grape-blossoms, intoxicates me. These mountains lift me up.

These birds set my nerves tingling like one of Beethoven's symphonies, played by Thomas's orchestra. In neither case do I know what the music means, but I recognize a divine harmony. Never before have I been conscious of such a rare and fine exhilaration. My mood is the product of an exceptional combination of causes, and they have culminated in this old garden. You know, too, that I am a creature of the night, and my faculties are always at their best as darkness comes on. I may seem to you obtuseness itself, but I feel as if I had been endowed with a spiritual and almost unerring discernment. In my sensitive and highly wrought condition, I know that the least incongruity or discord in sight or sound would jar painfully. Yes, laugh at me if you will, but nevertheless I'm going to speak my thoughts with no more restraint than these birds are under. I'm going back for a moment to the primitive condition of society, when there were no disguises. You are the mystery of this garden--you who come from New York, where you seem to have lived without the shelter of home life, to have obtained your livelihood among conventional and artificial people, and to whom the false, complicated world must be well known, and yet you make no more discord in this garden than the first woman would have made. You are in harmony with every leaf, with every flower, and every sound; with that child playing here and there; with the daisies in the orchard; with the little brown mother, whose children you feared might take cold. Hus.h.!.+"