CHAPTER XXI

Lyndsay had set his heart on a second Sunday morning on the river, with Rose and the trees. She readily gave up her proposed morning visit to Dorothy, and said the afternoon would answer. Miss Anne thought she herself was strong enough for the party, and Rose, much pleased, set about arranging her cushions in Tom’s canoe.

“We will be back to lunch, mama,” said Rose. “It is early. Will it rain? It looks hazy.”

“It is smoke, Rose. Some far-away fire. Where are the boys, Tom?”

“Up-river, sir, with the Gaspé men.”

“Who gave them leave to go?”

“You, papa,” said Rose. “I suspect they have gone after those unhappy hornets. They were up and away long ago. They asked you last night.”

“Did they?”

“Yes; you were deep in a book, and said ‘Yes, yes,’ in your dear old absent way.”

“I am sorry. Mama thinks it a naughty amusement at best, and when there is also the additional naughtiness of battle on Sunday! Well, they will be properly stung with remorse or hornet-fangs, or 266a combination. The wounded will be pardoned, I fancy. Hey, Rose?”

“Like enough.”

Mrs. Maybrook’s vivid account of Susan Colkett’s talk with Joe had made on Lyndsay at first a strong impression of disgust and annoyance. He saw in it, after cooler reflection, only one of the numberless beginnings of tragic crime which are refused the prosperity of opportunity. We have no proverbial wisdom as to what place bad intentions go to pave; but those who see much of the darker ways of man are well aware that there is much intended evil, as well as intended good, which never gets beyond the egg of theory. The crime which Susan Colkett was nursing with the devil-milk of base use of a man’s honest love grew less momentous to Lyndsay as he considered it. Once suspected, it became to him almost childlike in its foolishness. Crime-seed, like the grain of the parable, falls everywhere. There is a human climate in which, above all others, it finds swift maturity of growth.

Susan Colkett was by nature inclined to evil. She had base animal cravings, liking high colors and coarse meats. A want was with her at once a fierce hunger of desire, and made temptation dangerous to one who had in its crude fullness brute courage, and that dreadful alliance of the sensual with the destructive instincts which is more rare in woman than in man. But of Susan Colkett’s personality Lyndsay knew almost nothing. He was, however, by no means indifferent as to the matter, but had simply put off speaking of it to Carington for want of an easy chance.

267As they came opposite the Island Camp, Lyndsay said abruptly:

“Run her up onto the beach, Pierre.”

“Are you going to stop? I wish you wouldn’t stop, papa. We have a very short time to-day.”

“I shall be back in a moment. I have been putting off a little matter of—of business with Carington. I shall not be long.” Meanwhile Anne Lyndsay’s canoe also came to shore.

Rose said no more. She saw her father disappear into the tent, come out with Carington, and begin to walk to and fro on the upper slope. Very soon she began to be curious, as she saw them pause and turn and go on again.

“What are they talking about, Aunt Anne?”

Miss Lyndsay looked up from a book. “How on earth, my dear, should I know?”

“But are you not curious?”

“Yes, I am always curious—as to the good, and as to the bad, and as to everything in between.”

Rose laughed. “That covers the whole possibilities. Here they come. Now I shall know.”

“I don’t think you will.”

“A pair of gloves to a pound of bonbons.”

“Done, goosey! Whom will you ask?”

“That is my business. There was no limit of time.”

“None! But you will lose. Your father looks solemn, and Mr. Carington like a sphinx.”

“Given two men and one woman, aunty, and a thing to find out: that seems an easy equation.”

“I see the unknown quantity written clear on both faces. You won’t win.”

268Carington stood a moment in gay chat with Rose. Then Lyndsay said:

“You won’t come with us?”

“No; not to-day.” His question was settled without the thermometer. He was clear enough as to the indiscreetness of a useless morning with Rose and two others, and a meeting at Mrs. Maybrook’s in the afternoon. He would abide by the later chance and its less distracting accompaniments.

“We shall look for you both to-morrow,” said Miss Anne Lyndsay. And they poled away up the river, while Rose talked to her father, biding her time to win her little bet.

Anne, lying in her own canoe, and very comfortable, fell into amused reflection. If books were what she dearly loved and closely studied, she had a no less active fancy for that rarer occupation, the serious study of the human face. It is a difficult branch of observation, because one may not too often or too attentively examine the features of those with whom we are in immediate social contact. Like her friend, Dr. North, she preferred on the whole the critical study of women’s faces. She declared that only these repaid attention, and that the hirsute growths of men were, like the jungle, useful for the concealment of animal expressions. She remarked with interest that Carington lacked this partial mask, and said to herself, “That man has something on his mind. Is it about what Archie has been telling him? I shall ask Archie.” Then she went back to her book, which was her favorite “Reisebilder.”

In the other canoe, Rose had brought the talk 269around several sharp corners, and at last, having no better chance, said:

“You looked worried, Pardy, or so very grave, when you were talking to Mr. Carington. Has he been naughty, papa?”

“No.”

“Well, what was it? You both seemed so intent.”

“Allow me, miss, to ask if interest in me, in Mr. Carington, or in the unknown is at the thriving root of your evident curiosity?”

“In you, Marc. Aurelius.”

“That is pretty clever, miss. Permit me to reply, in the language of my namesake, ‘Mere curiosity is like a road which leads nowhere: what profits it to go that way? Also as to things it may be well, or as to those in whom we have an interest, but not as to the horde of men.’ Now, as you have expressed no interest in it as a thing unknown, and none as to Mr. Carington, or mankind, and as it concerns him chiefly, I shall forever after hold my peace. You lost your chance.”

“Give me another.”

“Not I.”

“But I made a bet with Aunt Anne.”

“Then pay it. Have you exhausted your feminine arts?”

“All—I give up; but I mean to know. I shall ask Mr. Carington.”

“I wouldn’t do that, my dear child.”

“Oh, Pardy! How you rose to that fly! Imagine it!”

“You minx! Halloa, Tom! Hold up a moment. 270drop anchor here. I want to stop.” They were near to the farther bank. “Here, Pierre, put your canoe alongside. Are you all right, Anne?”

“Perfectly.”

“I want to show you something before the sun is too high. Can you sketch here, Rose? The boat is pretty quiet?”

“I am not sure; I can try.”

“How much darker it is, Tom!”

“Yes, sir. It’s the smoke. It’s been about a bit for a day or two. Now the wind’s to south, it’s gettin’ kind of thicker. There’s a big fire somewhere.”

“How far?”

“Might be a hundred miles away. ‘Heap big smudge,’ Polycarp says.”

“Look now,” said Lyndsay. “Try to get me these water-tints. Take a bit of it.”

“I can’t. What makes these colors? They are beyond me.”

“The sun must be back of you; the water near you—that is, you must be low down. Then the stone-tints of the river-bed are caught by the many changeful mirrors of the surface. It is, as you see, pretty well wave-broken here. Also, the general color is that of this yellow-red gravel slope opposite, mixed with the green of the trees.”

“Then,” said Anne, “it gets color—surface color—from within, and also from without, like one’s personality.”

“That is it, I see,” said Rose. “But the blue in the waves is so deep—deeper than the sky. It is intense indigo. More heavenly than heaven.”

271“Yes, that is so. It is because, as we partly face the current, you look into the concavities of thousands of waves, and each condenses, so to speak, the blue of large sky spaces. Am I clear?”

“‘Each nobler soul inherits heaven’s largeness,’” quoted Anne.

“Thanks, aunty. The greenish gold of the surface is the color of the bank, made also deeper in hue because of being caught on the myriad rippling of the water.”

“Good, my dear.”

“How beautiful it is!—the flashing cupfuls of blue in among this bloom of green and gold. No one could paint it.”

“It is best at evening, Rose, but not at this point. There is a place some miles up where the general surface is silvered by a mass of white or light-gray granite, and in this you have set again the numberless wave-shells of indigo-blue—a dance of blue in silver.”

“Isn’t that smoke getting very much thicker? The colors are less brilliant now.”

“Yes, ma’am. The wind blows it up the gorges. Happen might smell it.”

“I do,” said Anne. “One can hardly see the farther hills.”

“Some men,” said Lyndsay, “fancy that it affects the fishing unfavorably; but two years ago, on the Cascapedia, the water was so saturated with smoke as to be undrinkable, and still the fish rose well. I wanted to study with you again, Rose, the purple color of the dead trees above us; but this smoke will somewhat affect it.”

272“Let us get on to the beach, papa.” And in a moment they were seated on a log, Anne lying at ease beside them.

“It gets still more dense, Rose. We must give up the water. Sketch that sprawling dead pine yonder; it seems reeling back, and the one in front looks as if it had just hit it.”

“How droll, Archie!” said Anne. “May I talk, or will it disturb the higher art?”

“No. Talk as much as you like. No one could be cruel enough to deny you the safety-valve of talk.”

“If you had said no, I should have wanted to talk. I am now perversely inclined to silence.”

“It is a self-limited disease with you, Anne.”

“Thank you! I was wondering a little whether you were right about the use of minute observation of nature by the poets. Rose told me what you had said. It was, I think, that Wordsworth was apt to be over-credited with this faculty, and that others have had it far beyond him.”

“Yes; it is the spiritual use of what he saw that is his distinctive quality. I think he carries that at times to the utmost endurable limit—even to near touch of the absurd.”

“That may be so. I think the limits of acceptance depend on one’s moods. Of course, too minute notice in verse of natural peculiarities may be possible. Now, these colors—how could one put them in verse?”

“Oh, aunty, you forget:
‘A silver plane of fretted gold,
Set thick with shells of violet blue.’”

273“That is mere description, Archie—good enough and true; but what I mean is that accurate description does not, as a rule, consist with poetry. The best of it seizes a single trait, and with it links some human emotion. You can’t catalogue in verse, as Walt Whitman does.”

“My dear old Walt!” said Lyndsay. “I am thankful for what he gives, and do not quarrel with what he does not. I am inclined to think that he will outlive some of his seeming betters. I have been more than once struck, in talking with him, by his entire unconsciousness of the fact that, while he believed himself to be the poet of the masses, he found his only readers among the most cultivated class.”

“Could I read him? You said once that I could not,” said Rose.

“He is hardly pueris et virginibusque, my dear; but his later editions are fairly expurgated of what had as well never been written. Anne will give you his great poem, ‘The Dream of Columbus,’ and ‘The Convict,’ and ‘My Captain,’ and ‘When Lilacs Bloom.’ A friend of North’s once gave Walt, through him, a check which he much needed, asking in return an autograph copy of ‘My Captain.’ He took the gift with entire simplicity, and sent two copies of that noble verse. He was the most innocently and entirely vain creature I ever knew. The perfect story of his vanity will, I fancy, never be written. It was past belief.”

“What a fine head he had a few years ago,” said Anne.

274“Yes; he was a great big child, and he looked then like the Greek busts of Jove.”

“He should always be read aloud,” returned Anne, “and read, too, with a little contribution of rhythmical flattery. If I were Mr. Ellett, I would say, ‘Now, that isn’t at all a bad remark.’”

“You appear to have said so, Aunt Anne.”

“I have. If I were a poet, I would set over my verses, ‘Read this aloud’; or, ‘Read this to yourself’; or, ‘To be read under a tree over a woman’s shoulder’; or, ‘With a pipe in autumn.’”

“What a nice idea, aunty! When you were talking just now of the use of natural descriptions, I meant to tell you what Mr. Carington said.”

“Well.”

“He said it seemed to him a fine and artful thing in Shakspere to set amidst the crime of Macbeth all that prettiness about innocent nature; the description of the martlets and the castle, you know.”

“It is true,” said Anne. “It is quite true. Does the young man talk well? I am not sure that his remark is new; but no matter. How little of one’s talk can be that!”

“I thought he talked fairly well. He did not say it was his own thought.”

“No matter. It is ben trovato.”

“I think it was his own,” said Rose.

“Oh!”

“How the smoke still thickens, papa! And the water is now a green bronze.”

“Yes, and the sun— Here is my word-sketch: ‘Eleven A. M. Sun over and back of me. Air full 275of smoke. Hills a delicate, airy blue. Sun orange-red, with a blur of yellow around it. All shadows on gray sand a faint green. Delicate opalescence on smooth, slightly rippled water. Deep purple reflections of dead trees. Sense of strangeness—of mystery.’”

“That is almost as good as a picture, Pardy.”

“At early morning here,” he went on, “the river-bed is full of mist. The combination of this with smoke gives some very weird effects. If we have a bright yellow sunset this evening, the dead trees on the hilltops will be of a pure orange tint.”

“I shall imagine the morning colors,” said Rose. “I am like the salmon. How they are rising now!”

“Yes; and so is my appetite. Shall we go? It will be lunch-time before we get back.”

“And this is our last Sunday on the river for this year,” said Rose.

“And perhaps my last for all years,” thought Anne; yet what she said was this:

“I have been trying to make out, Archie, why water is such a lovely thing. Why is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nor I. It is the one thing in nature which has moods for me,—I mean many moods. Then it is the one natural thing which has something like laughter.”

“Time writes no wrinkles, etc.,” cried Rose.

“And it has no memory or record of its works. Is that part of its seeming joyousness? And never—never is in straight lines.”

“Rather obvious that, Anne.”

“But it wasn’t obvious to me a half-hour ago. I am pleased with my discovery. Don’t tell me Ruskin 276has said it. I know he has not, or if he has, he had no business to have said it, and you can’t patent ideas.”

“But Anne—” Lyndsay began.

“Don’t, Archie. I am not to be contradicted to-day.”

“I was going to agree with you”; and he laughed. “May not a fellow even agree with you?”

“Certainly, if he agreeably agrees with me. There are—oh, there are hateful ways of agreeing with people.”

Then Rose was about to mention Mr. Carington’s use of the word agreeable, but refrained, she did not know why. She caught the words about to issue out, and put them back into a corner of silence, and did say:

“What you say, Aunt Anne, of water reminds me of what Mr. W. said about a picture, last spring, of great war-ships coming through a mist toward us. It was rather fine. But the water was set in such stiff, orderly billows that Mr. W. said, ‘Yes, Britannia certainly has been ruling the waves.’”

“I had forgotten it,” said Anne. “Now I remember that our English friend did not capture the meaning.”

“Oh, no. Really, Pardy, it sometimes makes life hard in England, this sort of inaptitude to turn with quick apprehension from grave to gay.”

“It would suit your mama. I am not sure that I like our unending tendency to see things or put things in ridiculous aspects—no, not just ridiculous,—help me to a word; not funny, either,—somewhere 277among the lost words, the verbal refuse-heaps of Old English, there must be the word I want.”

“We know what you mean,” said Anne. “I agree with you. Our newspapers are every day painfully funny for me. To deal all the time with the serious so as perpetually to make it seem trifling by putting it in comic guises is to damage one’s true sense of humor.”

“And of the serious, which is worse,” said Lyndsay.

“And, Archie, I don’t like the constant misuse of words it brings about. I don’t like to lose respect for words. I don’t like their characters taken away, so as to unfit them for their next place. Words have duties.”

“That is all true, Anne; but if we begin to abuse newspapers, we shall never get home. And they are so infallible, confound them!—an absolutely honest confession that they have told what was not true is the last thing you can get out of them. The editor who would not contradict a false paragraph as to a man’s death is a good example: he offered to put in a statement of the man’s birth! Let us go home.”

Laughing, they pushed off, and, soon lapsing into silence, slid away down the dancing rapids, under an ever dimmer sunshine, as the smoke grew more and more dense. Now and then Lyndsay saw something to remember in wood or water, and made brief note of it. He had a mind some day to make a small book about word-sketching. Probably he would never do it; but it is pleasant to pet our little enterprises, until, maturing in thought, they get too large for the mother-lap.

278Rose watched the amber waters, and then, furtively, the Island Camp, where was noontide quiet, and no man in sight.

The two canoes were held together as they ran down-stream, and only now and then a guiding paddle was used.

“You have had a nice little nap,” said Lyndsay.

“I have,” said Anne. “I am the only person I know who will admit to having slept in daylight. I slept little last night, and—isn’t it droll?—I took just now into my sleep a queer little bit of the Orient. I think it is rare to carry one’s thoughts with one unbroken into the land of dreams. But I did, and I went on dreaming of it.”

“What was it, aunty?”

“Only some stuff out of the ‘Legenda Aureata.’ It would not interest you.”

“Anne!” “Aunty!” they cried. “It used to be El Din Attar, and Hafiz. Now it is the ‘Talmud’ or the ‘Golden Legends.’ You are a horrid humbug,” added Lyndsay.

“You are a dear, sweet, altogether nice humbug,” said Rose. “What was it?”

“Then listen, children. When Adam and Eve were turned out of Eden, they could get no sleep, because of their tears—for when tears part the lids what man may slumber? Therefore all night long they complained. After awhile the birds flew up to heaven and said, ‘We have done no wrong, neither have we eaten of the tree, nor do we know good from evil. Yet these two keep us awake with their cries.’ Then the Christ came down to help them, and, coming 279to Adam, said, ‘What is there thou wilt give God for sleep?’ And Adam said, ‘We have but one thing left us: we will give love.’ And the Christ said, ‘It is enough. Forasmuch as even the kings of the earth receive no gift without returning a better, therefore for thy love thou shalt have God’s larger love and also sleep.’ So the man and the woman slept, and the birds had rest. And it was said later, ‘He giveth his beloved sleep.’”

“Isn’t it pretty, papa?”

“Rather. But, Anne—”

“I am sleepy,” she said. “By-by,” and she pushed their canoe away. “Let go, Pierre; I want to go to sleep again.”

“Was it out of some book, Pardy?”

“Gracious, Rose, how do I know?”