The Whirligig of Time Part 63

She was downstairs long before the train was due to arrive. The weather had cleared during the night and the morning was sunny and cool, a true autumn day. She tried waiting on the verandah, but the wind was so sharp that she soon returned to the warm lobby. She could watch the road equally well from the front windows; there was a long open ascent from the station. At last she saw the hotel wagon appear round a curve. There was only one pa.s.senger in it. He, of course. She could recognize the set of his head and shoulders even at that distance. She hoped he had a warm enough overcoat.

The wagon reached the steepest part of the incline, and he was out, walking briskly along beside it. Before it, very soon; he went so much faster. How like James, and how unnecessary! He the only pa.s.senger, and what were horses made for, anyway? Still perhaps it was better, if he were not warmly dressed....

The ascent grew steeper before him and his pace visibly decreased. But the wagon merely crawled, far behind him! He was a furious walker. That hill was enough to phase any one....

Presently the sight of him plodding painfully up toward her while she waited calmly at the top grew perfectly intolerable. She could bear it no longer; hatless and coatless she rushed out of the hotel and down the road toward him. After a while he raised his face and their eyes met. Nearer and nearer they came, gazing fixedly into each other's eyes and discovering new things there, new lives, new worlds....

They did not even kiss. She, looking beyond him, saw the driver of the station wagon peering up at them, and he caught sight over her shoulder of the staring windows of the hotel. They stopped with some embarra.s.sment and immediately began walking up together.

"It's nice to see you, James; did you have a good journey?"

"Yes, very, thanks. You comfortable here?"

On they walked, in silence. Gradually their embarra.s.sment left them and gave place to a sort of awe. Something was going to happen, something great and wonderful; they no longer doubted it nor felt any fear.

But--all in good time!

It must be coming soon, though, to judge by the way it kept pressing down on them. Good time? Heavens, there never was any time but the present moment, never would be any....

"Beatrice," said James, staring hard at the ground in front of him, "I know now how wicked I've been. Do you think you can ever forgive me?"

"Why, James," said Beatrice gently, "dear James, there's nothing to forgive."

Then he looked up and saw there were tears on her cheeks....

Yes, right there in the open road!

CHAPTER XVI

REINSTATEMENT OF A SCHoNE SEELE

The sunlight of a golden October afternoon poured down on a little brick terrace running along one side of the farmhouse in the Berks.h.i.+res Harry had bought and reformed into a summer house. It was not the princ.i.p.al open-air extension of the place; the official verandah was on the other side, commanding a wide view to the east and south. This was just a little private terrace, designed especially for use on afternoons like the present, when for the moment autumn went back on all its promises and in a moment of carelessness poured over a dying landscape the breath of May. The only view to be had from it was up a gra.s.sy slope to the west, on the summit of which, according to all standards except those of the New England farmer of one hundred years ago, the house ought to have been built. Not that either Madge or Harry cared particularly. They were fond of pointing out that Tom Ball, or West Stockbridge Mountain, or whatever it was, shut out the view to the west anyway, and that they were lucky enough to find a farmhouse with any view from it at all.

On the terrace sat James and Beatrice, who were spending a week-end with their relatives. Madge was with them. Presumably there was current in her mind a polite fiction that she was entertaining her guests, but she did not take her duties of hostess-s.h.i.+p too seriously. It was not even necessary to keep up a conversation; they all got along far too well together for that. They simply sat and enjoyed the fleeting suns.h.i.+ne, making pleasant and unnecessary remarks whenever they felt moved to do so. Probably they also thought, from time to time. Of the general extraordinariness of things, and so forth. If they all spent a little time in admiring the adroitness with which the hands of fate had shuffled them, with the absent member of the pack, into their present satisfactory positions, we should not be at all surprised. But of course none of them made any allusion to it.

Harry suddenly burst through the gla.s.s door leading from the house and flopped into a chair. His appearance was informal. The others turned toward him with curious nostrils.

"I know, I know," he sighed. "The only thing is for us all to smoke. You too, Beatrice. Because if you don't you'll smell me, and if you smell me I'll have to go up and wash, and if I go up and wash now I shall miss this last hour of suns.h.i.+ne and that will make you all very, very unhappy."

"I am smoking," said Beatrice calmly, "because I want to, and for no other reason."

"And I," observed Madge, "because Harry doesn't want me to."

"If you want to know what I've been doing since lunch," said Harry, disregarding the insult, "I don't mind telling you that I've mended a wire fence, covered the asparagus bed, conducted several successful bonfires and filled all the grease-cups on the Ford. I have also turned--"

"Yes," said James, "we've guessed that."

"And now only a few trifles such as feeding fowls and swine--or as Madge prefers to put it, chickabiddies and piggywigs--stand between me and a well-deserved repose. Heavens! I don't see how farmers can keep such late hours. Harker, I believe, frequently stays up till nearly nine. I feel as if it ought to be midnight now; nothing but the thought of the piggywigs keeps me out of bed."

"Can't Harker feed the piggywigs?" inquired Beatrice.

"Oh, yes," said Madge, "just as he can do all the other things Harry does a great deal better than he. But it keeps him busy and happy, so we let him go on."

"Just as if you didn't cry every night to feed your old pigs!" retorted her husband.

Madge laughed. "Yes, I am rather a fool about the poor things, even if they aren't so attractive as they were in June. You should have seen them, so pink and tiny and sweet, standing up on their hind legs and wiggling their noses at you! No one could help wanting to feed them, they were so helpless and confident of receiving a shower of manna from above. I know just how the Almighty felt when he fed the Israelites."

"Better manna than manners," murmured Harry, and for a while there was a profound silence.

"What about a stroll before tea?" presently suggested the happy farmer.

"I should like to," said James. "We'll have to make it short, though."

"Very well. What about the others--the fair swine-herd?"

"I think not," answered the person referred to, smiling up at him. "I took quite a long walk before lunch, you know."

"Oh, yes," said Harry, blus.h.i.+ng for no apparent reason. "Beatrice?"

Beatrice preferred to stay with Madge.

"You see," said Harry when the two had gone a little way; "you see, the fact is, Madge--hm. Madge--"

"You mean," said James, smiling, "there is hope of a new generation of our ill.u.s.trious house?"

"Yes! I only learned this morning. If it's a boy we're going to call it James, and if it's a girl we're going to call it Jaqueline."

"I wonder," mused James, "how many times you have named it since you first heard."

"There have been several suggestions," admitted Harry, laughing. "I really think it will end by that, though."

"Jaqueline--quite a pretty name. Much prettier than James--I rather hope it will be a girl."

"Yes, I do too," said Harry. And both knew that they would not have troubled to express that wish if they had not really hoped the direct opposite....

They walked slowly up the hill and presently turned and stopped to admire the view that the foolish prudence of a dead farmer had prevented them from enjoying from the house. It was a very lovely view, with its tumbled stretches of hills and fields and occasional sheets of blue water bathed in the mellow light of the sun that hung low over the dark mountain wall to the west. Possibly it was its sheer beauty, or the impression it gave of distance from human strife and sordidness, or perhaps the subject last mentioned imparted to their thoughts and impulse away from the trivial and familiar; at any rate when Harry next spoke his words fell neither on James' ears nor his own with the sound of fatuity that they might have held at another time.

"James," he said, "we're getting on, aren't we? I don't mean in years, though that's a most extraordinary feeling in itself, but in--in life, in the business of living. If you ask me what I mean by that high-sounding phrase I can only say it's something like coming out of every experience a little better qualified to meet whatever new experience lies in store for you. Of course we've heard about life being a game and all that facile rot ever since we were old enough to speak, but it's quite different when you come to _feel_ it. It's a sensation all by itself, isn't it?"

James drew a deep breath. "Yes, it is quite by itself," he agreed. "And I'm glad to be able to say that at last I have some idea of what the actual feeling is like. It was atrophied long enough in me, Heaven knows! It's still very slight, very timid and tentative; just a sort of glimmering at times--"

"That's all it ever is," said Harry. "Just an occasional glimmering. The true feeling, that is. If it's anything more, it isn't really that at all, but just a sort of stuckupness, an idea that I am equal to the worst life can do to Me! I know people that seem to have that att.i.tude--insufferable! Only life is pretty apt to punish them by giving them a great deal more than they bargained for."

James was silent a moment, as with a sort of confessional silence. But he knew Harry would not understand its confessional quality, so he said quietly: "That's exactly what happened to me, of course."