Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/666

614 nothing would do but he must carry it. So I let him; but it fell out of the little pocket, and we had to go back half the way for it. He didn't cry that time. His lips quivered, but he held them tight."

Old John came out of the barn and advanced to the veranda rail. He spoke to Madam Burton, but he looked at Constance.

"Maybe I'd better have old Hornblende up from the pastur' to-morrer," he said. Maybe she'd like to see him."

"Yes," said Madam Burton, "have him up."

"Horse he rode constant, last year he was to home," John explained, rather chokingly. "Horse seemed to understand every word was said to him. I'll have him up."

Constance rose and leaned upon the Tail. She spoke eagerly.

"No," said she. "Let me go down. I want to see the brook where the spear-mint grows. I've got to drink out of the spring."

John's face grew fuller with the moving Hood. "There!" said he to Madam Burton, and she nodded at him. "We'll go down 'long about ten," he said to Constance, and turned away toward the stable again, shaking his head and carrying on a commendatory dialogue with himself. At once Constance felt that the young master's house had accepted her. But instead of settling down into its peace, she had still her task to do, and she broke into it with the haste sprung from enforced delay.

"Have you read what the papers say of him?" she asked, abruptly.

The older woman inclined her head. "Some of them," she answered. "Yes, a good many. You know he subscribed to quite a number of foreign ones for me."

Constance dared her plunge. "They say he failed," she said, with a note of bitterness.

"Yes," returned the mother, gently. "I know."

The young wife's mind supplied the counter-question, "And don't you care?" But she did not put it. Instead, she began her prearranged defence with one of the commonplaces that she had thought might serve her.

"I don't know whether you were prepared for it?"

"My dear," said the other woman, still with that compliant dignity, "when people are as old as I am, they don't prepare. They take things as they come." Then, answering the baffled look on the young wife's face, she continued, as if she refrained from directing the talk into ways it was not meant to take: "He worked quite hard these last years?"

It was a question, and Constance returned hotly: "It was not so much work. It was a fight. You know, dear—" She paused, and remembering she had lost her own mother too early to make the transference of the word a disloyalty, wondered if she might adventure it.

"I wish you would," said Madam Burton.

Constance thanked her with a look. "I don't believe you guessed how he changed; how the whole bent of his mind altered up there in the last years. His letters didn't tell you. They were too personal. Don't you know how he used to fill them with every-day gossip,—what we were doing, how the latest patient behaved, and those marginal drawings, enough to make a mummy laugh?"

"They were good letters," said the mother.

"Yes; but you had to find the intimate part of him in his work. And his work was scattered, in America, in England, everywhere. He besieged the journals with poems, essays; but what he wrote was too unpopular ever to be collected. So no one can sit down to turn his pages, volume after volume, and say, 'He was this or that.' We can't prove anything about him. They won't let us." Her face kindled with heat engendered by her fighting spirit.

"What do you want to prove, my dear?" asked the other woman.

"I want to prove that he was not a man of one book, but many,—not judging by quantity, mind you. No! By actual achievement. Just think! This was what he did. He went to Italy and wrote those color sketches. If he had pinned himself down to that kind of work, nobody would have had enough of him. There would have been sets of him in boxes, and people would be babbling about his style. But no! he went up there into the mountains and began to live. He dealt with nations then, not