III And how the family did grow up!
We must have enjoyed a kind of prosperity, I suppose, for we seem always to have been planning or doing something to enlarge the house or improve its surroundings, and quite a good deal of money can be spent in that way. I think it was about the second year that for the sake of light and air we let out three dormer windows on the long roof, and I remember that in order not to make a mistake in their architecture we drove thirty miles one morning to see a house like ours which had owned its windows from the beginning. We loved our old house, you see, and did not wish to do it an injury. I think it was about the same time that we pulled off the plaster from the living-room ceiling and left the exposed beams old hewn timbers which we tinted down with a dull stain. William Deegan and I stained those beams together, and our friendship ripened during that employment. William had been with us about a year at this period not steadily, because now and then would come a day when with sadness and averted eyes he would say, "I think I'll be goin' now, for a little while," after which the effacement of William for perhaps a week, followed by his return some morning, pale, delapidated, as on the morning of his first arrival.
In the beginning I had argued,
back and close my eyes, I can catch again a little of their breath and sweetness; I can see the purpling vineyards and the poppied fields; I can drift once more with Elizabeth and our girls through the wonderland of France.
War came and brought the ruin of the world. It was late in the year when we returned to America, and it was on a winter evening that I drove our car back to its old place in the barn, after its long journeyings by land and sea. Our old house had remained faithful. A fire roaring up the chimney made it home.
We went to Westbury's, however, for the holidays. Westbury with the years had become a prosperous contractor, for Brook Ridge was no longer an abandoned land, but a place of new and beautiful homes. Westbury's prosperity, however, had not made him proud not too proud to offer us old-time Christmas hospitality at his glowing fireside.
V Was it the spirit of our garden?
The dissolving began at last one sunny June day when the Pride left us. It was the young man whom I had noticed around the house a year or two before who took her away. She seemed to prefer to go with him than to stay with us, I could not exactly make out why, but I did not think it best, or safe, to argue the question, and I drove them to the train afterward.
Then the Hope and the Joy got the notion of spending their summers in one of those camps that are so much the fashion now, and at last there came a day that the Hope, who such a little while ago was running care-free and happy-hearted in the sun, bade us good-by and sailed away sailed back across the ocean to France, an enlisted soldier, to do her part where the world's bravest were battling for the world's freedom.
For us, indeed, the world had changed; we had little need any more for the old house that on a July day twelve years before we had found and made our home. It had seen our brief generation pass; it was ready for the next. And when, one day, there came a young man and his bride, just starting on the way we had come, and seeing the beauty of the spot, just as we had seen it, wanted to own and enjoy it, just as we had owned and enjoyed it, we yielded it to them gladly, even if sorrowfully, for one must give up everything, some time or other, and it is an economy of regret to give to the right person, at the right time.
And now just here I want to record a curious thing. Earlier in these pages I have spoken of planting one year some white canterbury-bells that did not grow, or at least, so far as we could discover, did not bloom. In six seasons we never saw any sign of them, yet on the day we were leaving our house, closing it for the last time, I found on the spot where they had been planted, in full bloom, a stalk of white canterbury-bells! Had the seed germinated after all those years? Was it the spirit of our garden, sprung up there to tell us good-by? Who can answer?
Our abandoned farm is no longer ours. We, too, have abandoned it. Only the years that we spent there remain to us a tender and beautiful memory. Whatever there was of shadow or misfortune has long since passed, by. I see now all our summers there bathed in mellow sunlight, all the autumns aglow with red and gold, all the winters clean with sparkling snow, all the springs green with breaking buds and white with bloom. If those seasons were not flawless at the time, they have become so, now when they are added to the past.
And I know that they were indeed happy, for they make my heart ache remembering, and it is happiness, and not misery, that makes the heart ache when it is gone.