To this the New Daughter responded loyally, "I am sure I shall like your home and I know I shall love your mother."
As women of her race have done from the most immemorial times, she had left her own tribe and was about to enter the camp of her captor, but she pretended to happiness, resolute to make the best of whatever came.
Our friends in Chicago smiled when I told them where we had been. Lorado said, "A Honeymoon in the heart of the Rockies is just like you"—but I cared nothing for his gibes so long as Zulime was content, and I had but to over-hear her account of her trip to be reassured. To her it had been a noble exploration into a marvelous country.
This was the day before Thanksgiving, and with a knowledge that the old folks were counting the hours which intervened, I wrested Zulime from her friends, and hurried her to the train. "Dear old mother! I know just how she is waiting and watching for you. We must not fail her."
It was just daylight as we stepped down from the Pullman at West Salem, but father was there! Seated in our "canopy-top surrey" and holding restless ramping Black Dolly to her place, he was too busy to glance at us, but I could tell, by the set of his head, that he was emotionally intense.
"There's your new father," I said, pointing him out to Zulime, "and that is your family coach."
Father couldn't even shake hands, for Dolly was still pawing and plunging but he smiled as we approached and called out in reference to Dolly, "She'll quiet down in a minute."
While the train was pulling out I explained to Zulime that Dolly's fury was all assumed, "She'll soon be stolid as a stump."
It wasn't in the least the tender meeting I had expected to enjoy, but when at last my father was able to reach his hand down to Zulime, he said, "I'm glad to meet you, my daughter," and the tenderness in his vibrant voice touched me. "We were afraid you weren't coming," he added, and a little later I saw him wipe the tears from his eyes. The fact that he used a bandanna for this purpose, did not destroy the moving quality of his emotion.
The village looked woefully drab and desolate under that misty November sky. The elm trees, stripped of every leaf, the gardens weedy, ragged and forlorn, together with the ugly little houses suggested the sordid reality of the life to which I had brought my bride. It was all a far cry from the towering cliffs and colorful cañons of Colorado.
The Homestead shared in the general ugliness of that rain-swept dawn. Its maples were gaunt skeletons, its garden a sodden field over which the chickens were wandering in sad and aimless fashion. To my city-bred wife this home-coming must have been a cruel shock, but it was the best I could do, and whatever the girl felt, she concealed with a smile, resolute to make the best of me and mine.
Mother was waiting for us on the porch, tremulous with excitement, too eager to remain in doors, and as I took her in my arms, and kissed her, I said, "Mother, I've brought your new daughter."
For just a moment she hesitated (the grace and dignity of the tall girl awed her, confused her), then Zulime went to her, and the two women, so diverse, yet so dear to me, met in an embrace of mutual love and confidence.
Isabel Garland entered into possession of the daughter she had so long hoped for, and Zulime Taft became a member of the household of which Richard Garland was the head.
Breakfast was waiting for us, a noble meal, a sumptuous wedding breakfast, for mother and her two helpers (daughters of a neighboring farmer), had been up since five o'clock and while it was a good deal like a farmer's Sunday dinner, Zulime thanked the girls when father presented them to her, but was a bit startled when one of them took her seat at the table with us. She was not accustomed to this democratic custom of the village.
My aunt, Susan Bailey, a gentle, frail little body also joined our circle, adding one more pair of eyes to those whose scrutiny must have been somewhat trying to the bride. To meet these blunt, forthright folk at such a table without betraying amusement or surprise, required tact, but the New Daughter succeeded in winning them all, even Mary, the cook, who was decidedly difficult.
Almost immediately after taking his seat my father began: "Well now, daughter, you are the captain. Right here I abdicate. Anything you want done shall be done. What you say about things in the kitchen shall be law. I will furnish the raw materials—you and the girls must do the rest. We like to be bossed, don't we, Belle?" He ended addressing mother.
In her concise, simple fashion, she replied: "Yes, the house is yours. I turn it all over to you."
It was evident that all this had been discussed many times for they seemed in haste to get its statement off their minds, and I could not check them or turn them aside.
Zulime made light of it. "I'd rather not be captain," she laughingly protested. "I'd rather be passenger for a while."
Father was firm. "No, we need a commanding officer, and you must take charge. Now I've got a turkey out there—and cranberries—" He was off! He told just what he had laid in for the dinner, and ended by saying, "If there's anything I've forgot, you just let me know, and I'll go right up town and get it."
As he talked, the tones of his resonant voice, the motions of his hands, the poise of his head, brought back to me a boyish feeling of subordination. I laughed, but I submitted to his domination, entirely willing that he should play the part of the commander for the last time. It was amusing, but it had its pathetic side for my mother's silence was significant of her weakness. She said nothing—not a word, but with Zulime sitting beside her, she was content, so happy she could not find words in which to express her satisfaction. Her waiting was at an end!
My father made a handsome picture. His abundant white hair, his shapely beard, and his keen profile pleased me. Though a little stooped, he was still alert and graceful, and his voice rang like a trumpet as he entered upon an account of his pioneer experiences.
"I've always lived on the Border," he explained, "and I don't know much about the ways of city folks, so you must excuse me when I do the wrong thing. My will is the best in the world, and I'll do anything I can to please you."
That breakfast was the exact opposite of a "Continental Breakfast." Steak, doughnuts, buckwheat cakes, cookies, apple sauce made me groan but Zulime smiled. She understood the care which had gone into its making.
When at last she and I were alone in my study I began, "Well, how do you like West Salem and the Garlands?"
"Your mother is a dear!" she replied, and her voice was convincing—"and I like your father. He's very good looking. And the breakfast was—well it was like one of your stories—Do you always have steak and doughnuts for breakfast?"
"No," I replied, "not always, but breakfast is a real meal with us."
The sky darkened and a sleety rain set in during the forenoon, but mother did not mind the gloom outside, for within she had her daughter. Upon our return to the sitting room, she led Zulime out into the kitchen to take account of all that was going on for dinner, and while the maids, with excited faces stood about waiting for orders from their new boss, Zulime laughingly protested that she had no wish to interfere. "Go on in your own way," she said.
To me, on her return to the sitting room, she exclaimed: "You should see the food in preparation out there! Enough to feed all the Eagle's Nest campers.—How many are coming to dinner?"
"No one but the McClintocks—and only a few of them," I soberly replied. "Uncle William and Aunt Maria, Frank and Lorette—and Deborah, all old people now. I don't know of any one else." In fact, we had less than this number, for Maria was not well enough to come out in the rain.
Our circle was small, but the spirit of Thanksgiving was over it, and when I saw my stately city wife sitting among my rough-hewn relations, listening to the quaint stories of Uncle Frank, or laughing at the humorous sallies of Aunt Lorette, I wondered what they thought of her. She made a lovely picture, and all—even caustic Deborah—capitulated to her kindliness and charm. If she had failed of complete comprehension and sympathy I could not have blamed her, but to have her perfectly at home among these men
and women of the vanishing Border displayed her in a new and noble guise.
If anything was lacking—any least quality of adaptation, it was supplied when, that evening, my uncles and my father discovered that Zulime could not only read music, but that she could play all the old songs which they loved to have me sing. This accomplishment completed their conquest, for under her deft hands the piano revived the wistful melodies of Minnie Minturn, Maggie, and Nellie Wildwood, and when my mother's voice, sweet as ever, but weak and hesitant, joined with mine in singing for our guests, I was both glad and sad, glad of my young wife, sad with a realization of my mother's weakness and age.
She did not reproach me for not bringing the daughter sooner. She had but one regret. "I wish Frank was here," she said, her thought going out to her other son.
How far away, how remote, how tender that evening seems to me after more than twenty years work and travel! To Zulime it unrolled like a scene from one of my novels, to me it was the closing, fading picture of an era, the end of an epoch, the passing of a race, for the Garlands and McClintocks, warriors of the western conquest, representatives of a heroic generation were even then basking in the light of a dying camp-fire, recounting the deeds of brave days gone.
When we were again alone in my study, Zulime said, "I'm going to enjoy it here. I like your people, and I hope they liked me."
* * * * * *
It was in this humble fashion that I brought to my mother the new daughter for whom she had longed, and it was in this homely way that the Garlands and McClintocks received my wife. Amid surroundings which were without grace of art or touch of poetry, the informal and very plain ceremony took place, but the words were sincere, and the forms and features of the speakers deeply significant of the past. No matter what my mother's storms and sorrows had been, she was now at peace. With a smiling face she confronted the future.
* * *
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My Father's Inheritance
At half-past six on the morning following our arrival at the Homestead, my father opened the stairway door and shouted, just as he had been wont to do in the days when I was a boy on the farm—"Hamlin! Time to get up!" and with a wry grin I called to Zulime and explained, "In our family, breakfast is a full and regular meal at which every member of the household is expected promptly at seven."
It was not yet fully dawn and the thought of rising in a cold room at that time of night was appalling to a city woman, but with heroic resolution Zulime dressed, and followed me down the narrow stairway to the lamp-lit dining-room, where a steaming throng of dishes, containing oatmeal, potatoes, flap-jacks and sausage (supplemented by cookies, doughnuts and two kinds of jam), invited us to start the day with indigestion.
The dim yellow light of the kerosene lamp, the familiar smell of the buckwheat cakes and my father's clarion voice brought back to me very vividly and with a curious pang of mingled pleasure and regret, the corn-husking days when I habitually ate by candlelight in order to reach the field by daybreak. I recalled to my father's memory one sadly-remembered Thanksgiving Day when he forced us all to husk corn from dawn to sunset in order that we might finish the harvest before the snowstorm covered the fallen stalks. "But mother's turkey dinner saved the day," I remarked to Zulime. "Nothing can ever taste so good as that meal. As we came into the house, cold, famished and weary, the smell of the kitchen was celestial."
My mother smiled but father explained in justification, "I could feel a storm in the air and I knew that we had just time to reach the last row if we all worked, and worked hard. As a matter of fact we were all done at four o'clock."
"O, we worked!" I interpolated. "Frank and I had no vote in those days."
During the week which followed most of my relatives, and a good many of the neighbors, called on us, and as a result Zulime spent several highly educational afternoons listening to the candid comments of elderly widows and sharp-eyed old maids. Furthermore, being possessed of a most excellent digestion, she was able to accept the daily invitations to supper, at which rich cakes and home-made jams abounded. She was also called upon to examine "hand-made paintings in oil," which she did with tender care. No one could have detected in her smile anything less than kindly interest in the quaint interior decorations of the homes. Her comment to me was a different matter.
That she was an object of commiseration on the part of the women I soon learned, for Mrs. Dunlap was overheard to say, "She's altogether too good for him" (meaning me), and Mrs. McIlvane, with the candor of a life-long friendship, replied, "That's what I told Belle."
Uncle William, notwithstanding a liking for me, remarked with feeling, "She's a wonder! I don't see how you got her."
To which I replied, "Neither do I."
In setting down these derogatory comments I do not wish to imply that I was positively detested but that I was not a beloved county institution was soon evident to my wife. Delegations of school children did not call upon me, and very few of my fellow citizens pointed out my house to travelers—at that time. In truth little of New England's regard for authorship existed in the valley and my head possessed no literary aureole. The fact that I could—and did—send away bundles of manuscript and get in return perfectly good checks for them, was a miracle of doubtful virtue to my relatives as well as to my neighbors. My money came as if by magic, unasked and unwarranted, like the gold of sunset. "I don't see how you do it," my Uncle Frank said to me one day, and his tone implied that he considered my authorship a questionable kind of legerdemain, as if I were, somehow, getting money under false pretenses.
Rightly or wrongly, I had never pretended to a keen concern in the "social doings" of my village. Coming to the valley out of regard for my father and mother and not from personal choice, the only folk who engaged my attention were the men and women of the elder generation, rugged pioneer folk who brought down to me something of the humor, the poetry, and the stark heroism of the Border in the days when the Civil War was a looming cloud, and the "Pineries" a limitless wilderness on the north. Men like Sam McKinley, William Fletcher, and Wilbur Dudley retained my friendship and my respect, but the affairs of the younger generation did not greatly concern me. In short, I considered the relationship between them and myself fortuitous.
Absorbed in my writing I was seldom in the mood during my visits to entertain curious neighbors, in fact I had met few people outside my relatives. All this was very ungracious, no doubt, but such had been my attitude for seven years. I came there to work and I worked.
Even now, in the midst of my honeymoon, I wrote busily. Each morning immediately after breakfast I returned to my study, where the manuscript of a novel (Her Mountain Lover) was slowly growing into final shape, but in the afternoons Zulime and I occasionally went sleighing with Dolly and the cutter, or we worked about the house.
It was a peaceful time, with only one thought to stir the pool of my content. I began to realize that the longer we stayed, the harder it would be for my mother to let us go. She could hardly permit her New Daughter to leave the room. She wanted her to sit beside her or to be in the range of her vision all day long. So far from resenting her loss of household authority she welcomed it, luxuriating in the freedom from care which the young wife brought.
This growing reliance upon Zulime made me uneasy. "I cannot, even for mother's sake, ask my city-bred wife to spend the winter in this small snow-buried hamlet," I wrote to my brother, "and, besides, I have planned a wedding trip to Washington and New York."
In announcing to my mother the date of our departure, I said, "We won't be gone long. We'll be back early in the spring."
"See that you do," she replied, but her eyes were deep and dark with instant sadness. She had hoped with childish trust that we would stay all winter with her.
It was beautiful in Neshonoc at this time. Deep, dazzling snows blanketed the hills, and covered the fields, and frequently at sunset or later, after the old people were asleep, Zulime and I went for a swift walk far out into the silent country
, rejoicing in the crisp clear air, and in the sparkle of moonbeams on the crusted drifts. At such times the satin sheen of sled-tracks in the road, the squeal of dry flakes under my heel (united with the sound of distant sleigh bells) brought back to me sadly-sweet memories of boyish games, spelling school, and the voices of girls whose laughter had long since died away into silence.
The blurred outlines of the hills, the barking of sentinel dogs at farm-yard gates, and the light from snow-laden cottage windows filled my heart with a dull illogical ache, an emotion which was at once a pleasure and a pain.
O, witchery of the winter night,
(With broad moon shouldering to the west),
Before my feet the rustling deeps
Of untracked snows, in shimmering heaps,
Lie cold and desolate and white.
I hear glad girlish voices ring
Clear as some softly-stricken string—
(The moon is sailing toward the west),
The sleigh-bells clash in homeward flight,
With frost each horse's breast is white—
(The moon is falling toward the west)—
"Good night, Lettie!"
"Good night, Ben!"
(The moon is sinking at the west)—
"Good night, my sweetheart,"—Once again
The parting kiss, while comrades wait
Impatient at the roadside gate,
And the red moon sinks beyond the west!
Such moments as these were meeting places of the old and the new, the boy and the man. The wistful, haunting dreams of the past, contended with the warm and glowing fulfillment of the present. For the past a song, for the present the woman at my side!
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