I do not know which is the sweeter, your laughter or your sadness. When you laugh you make me glad, but when you are sad I want to share in your sadness and soothe it. I think I am nearer to you in your sorrowful moods.
Today I met you by accident at the turn of the lane. Nothing told me that you were coming — not even the wind, that should have known. I was sad, and then all at once I saw you, and wondered how I could have been sad. You walked past me with a smile, as if you had tossed me a rose. I stood and watched you out of sight. That meeting was the purple gift the day gave me.
Today I tried to write a poem to you, Una, but I could not find words fine enough, as a lover could find no raiment dainty enough for his bride. The old words other men have used in singing to their loves seemed too worn and common for you. I wanted only new words, crystal clear or coloured only by the iris of the light, not words that have been steeped and stained with all the hues of other men’s thoughts. So I burned the verses that were so unworthy of you.
Una, some day you will love. You will watch for him; you will blush at his coming, be sad at his going. Oh, I cannot think of it!
Today I saw you when you did not see me. I was walking on the shore, and as I came around a rock you were sitting on the other side. I drew back a little and looked at you. Your hands were clasped over your knees; your hat had fallen back, and the sea wind was ruffling your hair. Your face was lifted to the sky, your lips were parted, your eyes were full of light. You seemed to be listening to something that made you happy. I crept gently away, that I might not mar your dream. Of what were you thinking, Una?
I must leave you soon. Sometimes I think I cannot bear it. Oh, Una, how selfish it is of me to wish that you might love me! Yet I do wish it, although I have nothing to offer you but a great love and all my willing work of hand and brain. If you loved me, I fear I should be weak enough to do you the wrong of wooing you. I want you so much, dear!
The schoolmaster added the last letter to the others and locked the box. When he unlocked it again, two days later, the letters were gone.
He gazed at the empty box with dilated eyes. At first he could not realize what had happened. The letters could not be gone! He must have made a mistake, have put them in some other place! With trembling fingers he ransacked his trunk. There was no trace of the letters. With a groan he dropped his face in his hands and tried to think.
His letters were gone — those precious letters, held almost too sacred for his own eyes to read after they were written — had been stolen from him! The inmost secrets of his soul had been betrayed. Who had done this hideous thing?
He rose and went downstairs. In the farmyard he found Link tormenting his dog. Link was happy only when he was tormenting something. He never had been afraid of anything in his life before, but now absolute terror took possession of him at sight of the schoolmaster’s face. Physical strength and force had no power to frighten the sullen lad, but all the irresistible might of a fine soul roused to frenzy looked out in the young man’s blazing eyes, dilated nostrils, and tense white mouth. It cowed the boy, because it was something he could not understand. He only realized that he was in the presence of a force that was not to be trifled with.
“Link, where are my letters?” said the schoolmaster.
“I didn’t take ‘em, Master!” cried Link, crumpling up visibly in his sheer terror. “I didn’t. I never teched ‘em! It was Sis. I told her not to — I told her you’d be awful mad, but she wouldn’t tend to me. It was Sis took ‘em. Ask her, if you don’t believe me.”
The schoolmaster believed him. Nothing was too horrible to believe just then. “What has she done with them?” he said hoarsely.
“She — she sent ’em to Una Clifford,” whimpered Link. “I told her not to. She’s mad at you, cause you went to see Una and wouldn’t go with her. She thought Una would be mad at you for writing ‘em, cause the Cliffords are so proud and think themselves above everybody else. So she sent ‘em. I — I told her not to.”
The schoolmaster said not another word. He turned his back on the whining boy and went to his room. He felt sick with shame. The indecency of the whole thing revolted him. It was as if his naked heart had been torn from his breast and held up to the jeers of a vulgar world by the merciless hand of a scorned and jealous woman. He felt stunned as if by a physical blow.
After a time his fierce anger and shame died into a calm desperation. The deed was done beyond recall. It only remained for him to go to Una, tell her the truth, and implore her pardon. Then he must go from her sight and presence forever.
It was dusk when he went to her home. They told him that she was in the garden, and he found her there, standing at the curve of the box walk, among the last late-blooming flowers of the summer.
Have you thought from his letters that she was a wonderful woman of marvellous beauty? Not so. She was a sweet and slender slip of girlhood, with girlhood’s own charm and freshness. There were thousands like her in the world — thank God for it! — but only one like her in one man’s eyes.
He stood before her mute with shame, his boyish face white and haggard. She had blushed crimson all over her dainty paleness at sight of him, and laid her hand quickly on the breast of her white gown. Her eyes were downcast and her breath came shortly.
He thought her silence the silence of anger and scorn. He wished that he might fling himself in the dust at her feet.
“Una — Miss Clifford — forgive me!” he stammered miserably. “I — I did not send them. I never meant that you should see them. A shameful trick has been played upon me. Forgive me!”
“For what am I to forgive you?” she asked gravely. She did not look up, but her lips parted in the little half-smile he loved. The blush was still on her face.
“For my presumption,” he whispered. “I — I could not help loving you, Una. If you have read the letters you know all the rest.”
“I have read the letters, every word,” she answered, pressing her hand a little more closely to her breast. “Perhaps I should not have done so, for I soon discovered that they were not meant for me to read. I thought at first you had sent them, although the writing of the address on the packet did not look like yours; but even when I knew you did not I could not help reading them all. I do not know who sent them, but I am very grateful to the sender.”
“Grateful?” he said wonderingly.
“Yes. I have something to forgive you, but not — not your presumption. It is your blindness, I think — and — and your cruel resolution to go away and never tell me of your — your love for me. If it had not been for the sending of these letters I might never have known. How can I forgive you for that?”
“Una!” he said. He had been very blind, but he was beginning to see. He took a step nearer and took her hands. She threw up her head and gazed, blushingly, steadfastly, into his eyes. From the folds of her gown she drew forth the little packet of letters and kissed it.
“Your dear letters!” she said bravely. “They have given me the right to speak out. I will speak out! I love you, dear! I will be content to wait through long years until you can claim me. I — I have been so happy since your letters came!”
He put his arms around her and drew her head close to his. Their lips met.
The Story of Uncle Dick
I had two schools offered me that summer, one at Rocky Valley and one at Bayside. At first I inclined to Rocky Valley; it possessed a railway station and was nearer the centres of business and educational activity. But eventually I chose Bayside, thinking that its country quietude would be a good thing for a student who was making school-teaching the stepping-stone to a college course.
I had reason to be glad of my choice, for in Bayside I met Uncle Dick. Ever since it has seemed to me that not to have known Uncle Dick would have been to miss a great sweetness and inspiration from my life. He was one of those rare souls whose friendship is at once a pleasure and a benediction, showering light from their own crystal clearness into all the dark corner
s in the souls of others until, for the time being at least, they reflected his own simplicity and purity. Uncle Dick could no more help bringing delight into the lives of his associates than could the sunshine or the west wind or any other of the best boons of nature.
I had been in Bayside three weeks before I met him, although his farm adjoined the one where I boarded and I passed at a little distance from his house every day in my short cut across the fields to school. I even passed his garden unsuspectingly for a week, never dreaming that behind that rank of leafy, rustling poplars lay a veritable “God’s acre” of loveliness and fragrance. But one day as I went by, a whiff of something sweeter than the odours of Araby brushed my face and, following the wind that had blown it through the poplars, I went up to the white paling and found there a trellis of honeysuckle, and beyond it Uncle Dick’s garden. Thereafter I daily passed close by the fence that I might have the privilege of looking over it.
It would be hard to define the charm of that garden. It did not consist in order or system, for there was no trace of either, except, perhaps, in that prim row of poplars growing about the whole domain and shutting it away from all idle and curious eyes. For the rest, I think the real charm must have been in its unexpectedness. At every turn and in every nook you stumbled on some miracle of which you had never dreamed. Or perhaps the charm was simply that the whole garden was an expression of Uncle Dick’s personality.
In one corner a little green dory, filled with earth, overflowed in a wave of gay annuals. In the centre of the garden an old birch-bark canoe seemed sailing through a sea of blossoms, with a many-coloured freight of geraniums. Paths twisted and turned among flowering shrubs, and clumps of old-fashioned perennials were mingled with the latest fads of the floral catalogues. The mid-garden was a pool of sunshine, with finely sifted winds purring over it, but under the poplars there were shadows and growing things that loved the shadows, crowding about the old stone benches at each side. Somehow, my daily glimpse of Uncle Dick’s garden soon came to symbolize for me a meaning easier to translate into life and soul than into words. It was a power for good within me, making its influence felt in many ways.
Finally I caught Uncle Dick in his garden. On my way home one evening I found him on his knees among the rosebushes, and as soon as he saw me he sprang up and came forward with outstretched hand. He was a tall man of about fifty, with grizzled hair, but not a thread of silver yet showed itself in the ripples of his long brown beard. Later I discovered that his splendid beard was Uncle Dick’s only vanity. So fine and silky was it that it did not hide the candid, sensitive curves of his mouth, around which a mellow smile, tinged with kindly, quizzical humour, always lingered. His face was tanned even more deeply than is usual among farmers, for he had an inveterate habit of going about hatless in the most merciless sunshine; but the line of forehead under his hair was white as milk, and his eyes were darkly blue and as tender as a woman’s.
“How do you do, Master?” he said heartily. (The Bayside pedagogue was invariably addressed as “Master” by young and old.) “I’m glad to see you. Here I am, trying to save my rosebushes. There are green bugs on ‘em, Master — green bugs, and they’re worrying the life out of me.”
I smiled, for Uncle Dick looked very unlike a worrying man, even over such a serious accident as green bugs.
“Your roses don’t seem to mind, Mr. Oliver,” I said. “They are the finest I have ever seen.”
The compliment to his roses, well-deserved as it was, did not at first engage his attention. He pretended to frown at me.
“Don’t get into any bad habit of mistering me, Master,” he said. “You’d better begin by calling me Uncle Dick from the start and then you won’t have the trouble of changing. Because it would come to that — it always does. But come in, come in! There’s a gate round here. I want to get acquainted with you. I have a taste for schoolmasters. I didn’t possess it when I was a boy” (a glint of fun appeared in his blue eyes). “It’s an acquired taste.”
I accepted his invitation and went, not only into his garden but, as was proved later, into his confidence and affection. He linked his arm with mine and piloted me about to show me his pets.
“I potter about this garden considerable,” he said. “It pleases the women folks to have lots of posies.”
I laughed, for Uncle Dick was a bachelor and considered to be a hopeless one.
“Don’t laugh, Master,” he said, pressing my arm. “I’ve no woman folk of my own about me now, ’tis true. But all the girls in the district come to Uncle Dick when they want flowers for their little diversions. Besides — perhaps — sometimes—”
Uncle Dick broke off and stood in a brown study, looking at an old stump aflame with nasturtiums for fully three minutes. Later on I was to learn the significance of that pause and reverie.
I spent the whole evening with Uncle Dick. After we had explored the garden he took me into his house and into his “den.” The house was a small white one and wonderfully neat inside, considering the fact that Uncle Dick was his own housekeeper. His “den” was a comfortable place, its one window so shadowed by a huge poplar that the room had a grotto-like effect of emerald gloom. I came to know it well, for, at Uncle Dick’s invitation, I did my studying there and browsed at will among his classics. We soon became close friends. Uncle Dick had always “chummed with the masters,” as he said, but our friendship went deeper. For my own part, I preferred his company to that of any young man I knew. There was a perennial spring of youth in Uncle Dick’s soul that yet had all the fascinating flavour of ripe experience. He was clever, kindly, humorous and, withal, so crystal clear of mind and heart that an atmosphere partaking of childhood hung around him.
I knew Uncle Dick’s outward history as the Bayside people knew it. It was not a very eventful one. He had lost his father in boyhood; before that there had been some idea of Dick’s going to college. After his father’s death he seemed quietly to have put all such hopes away and settled down to look after the farm and take care of his invalid stepmother. This woman, as I learned from others, but never from Uncle Dick, had been a peevish, fretful, exacting creature, and for nearly thirty years Uncle Dick had been a very slave to her whims and caprices.
“Nobody knows what he had to put up with, for he never complained,” Mrs. Lindsay, my landlady, told me. “She was out of her mind once and she was liable to go out of it again if she was crossed in anything. He was that good and patient with her. She was dreadful fond of him too, for all she did almost worry his life out. No doubt she was the reason he never married. He couldn’t leave her and he knew no woman would go in there. Uncle Dick never courted anyone, unless it was Rose Lawrence. She was a cousin of my man’s. I’ve heard he had a kindness for her; it was years ago, before I came to Bayside. But anyway, nothing came of it. Her father’s health failed and he had to go out to California. Rose had to go with him, her mother being dead, and that was the end of Uncle Dick’s love affair.”
But that was not the end of it, as I discovered when Uncle Dick gave me his confidence. One evening I went over and, piloted by the sound of shrieks and laughter, found Uncle Dick careering about the garden, pursued by half a dozen schoolgirls who were pelting him with overblown roses. At sight of the master my pupils instantly became prim and demure and, gathering up their flowery spoil, they beat a hasty retreat down the lane.
“Those little girls are very sweet,” said Uncle Dick abruptly. “Little blossoms of life! Have you ever wondered, Master, why I haven’t some of my own blooming about the old place instead of just looking over the fence of other men’s gardens, coveting their human roses?”
“Yes, I have,” I answered frankly. “It has been a puzzle to me why you, Uncle Dick, who seem to me fitted above all men I have ever known for love and husbandhood and fatherhood, should have elected to live your life alone.”
“It has not been a matter of choice,” said Uncle Dick gently. “We can’t always order our lives as we would, Master. I loved a woman onc
e and she loved me. And we love each other still. Do you think I could bear life else? I’ve an interest in it that the Bayside folk know nothing of. It has kept youth in my heart and joy in my soul through long, lonely years. And it’s not ended yet, Master — it’s not ended yet! Some day I hope to bring a wife here to my old house — my wife, my rose of joy!”
He was silent for a space, gazing at the stars. I too kept silence, fearing to intrude into the holy places of his thought, although I was tingling with interest in this unsuspected outflowering of romance in Uncle Dick’s life.
After a time he said gently,
“Shall I tell you about it, Master? I mean, do you care to know?”
“Yes,” I answered, “I do care to know. And I shall respect your confidence, Uncle Dick.”
“I know that. I couldn’t tell you, otherwise,” he said. “I don’t want the Bayside folk to know — it would be a kind of desecration. They would laugh and joke me about it, as they tease other people, and I couldn’t bear that. Nobody in Bayside knows or suspects, unless it’s old Joe Hammond at the post office. And he has kept my secret, or what he knows of it, well. But somehow I feel that I’d like to tell you, Master.
“Twenty-five years ago I loved Rose Lawrence. The Lawrences lived where you are boarding now. There was just the father, a sickly man, and Rose, my “Rose of joy,” as I called her, for I knew my Emerson pretty well even then. She was sweet and fair, like a white rose with just a hint of pink in its cup. We loved each other, but we couldn’t marry then. My mother was an invalid, and one time, before I had learned to care for Rose, she, the mother, had asked me to promise her that I’d never marry as long as she lived. She didn’t think then that she would live long, but she lived for twenty years, Master, and she held me to my promise all the time. Yes, it was hard” — for I had given an indignant exclamation—”but you see, Master, I had promised and I had to keep my word. Rose said I was right in doing it. She said she was willing to wait for me, but she didn’t know, poor girl, how long the waiting was to be. Then her father’s health failed completely, and the doctor ordered him to another climate. They went to California. That was a hard parting, Master. But we promised each other that we would be true, and we have been. I’ve never seen my Rose of joy since then, but I’ve had a letter from her every week. When the mother died, five years ago, I wanted to move to California and marry Rose. But she wrote that her father was so poorly she couldn’t marry me yet. She has to wait on him every minute, and he’s restless, and they move here and there — a hard life for my poor girl. So I had to take a new lease of patience, Master. One learns how to wait in twenty years. But I shall have her some day, God willing. Our love will be crowned yet. So I wait, Master, and try to keep my life and soul clean and wholesome and young for her.
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 678
