"Just a moment, Elizabeth. I want you to choose one of these"

(Adagio non troppo)

ILLUSTRATED BY FRANCES ROGERS Conclusion A synopsis of part one will be found at the end of this installment [Read the first installment]

VII

Molla Carlsen loved to give my aunt the worst possible account of the men she kept house for, though in talking to outsiders I think she was discreet and loyal. She was a strange woman, then about forty years old, and she had been in the Ramsay household for more than twelve years. She managed everything over there, and was paid very high wages. She was grasping, but as honest as she was heartless. The house was well conducted, though it was managed, as Valentine said, somewhat like an institution. No matter how many thousand roses were blooming in the garden, it never occurred to Molla to cut any and put them in the bare, faded parlor. The men who lived there got no coddling; they were terribly afraid of her. When a wave of red went over Molla's white skin, poor Uncle Morton's shaky hands trembled more than ever, and his far-away eyes shrank to mere pin-points. He was the one who most often angered her, because he dropped things. Once when Aunt Charlotte remonstrated with her about her severity, she replied that a woman who managed a houseful of alcoholics must be a tyrant, or the place would be a sty.

This made us all indignant. Morton, we thought, was the only one who could justly be thus defined. He was the oldest of Uncle Jonathan's sons; tall, narrow, utterly spare, with a long, thin face, a shriveled scalp with a little dry hair on it, parted in the middle, eyes that never looked at you because the pupils were always shrunk so small. Morton was awfully proud of the fact that he was a business man; he alone of that household went up on the business men's train in the morning. He went to an office in the City, climbed upon a high stool, and fastened his distant eyes upon a ledger. (It was a coal business, in which his father owned a good deal of stock, and every night an accountant went over Morton's books and corrected his mistakes.) On his way to the office, he stopped at the bar of a most respectable hotel. He stopped there again before lunch at noon, and on his way to the station in the late afternoon. He often told Uncle Harry that he never took anything during business hours. Nobody ever saw Morton thoroughly intoxicated, but nobody ever saw him quite himself. He had good manners, a kind voice, though husky, and he was usually very quiet.

Uncle Jonathan, to be sure, took a good deal of whisky during the day—but then he ate almost nothing. Whisky and tobacco were his nourishment. He was frail, but he had been so even as a young man, and he outlived all his sons except Morton—lived on until the six little girls at Fox Hill were all grown women. No, I don't think it was alcohol that preserved him; I think it was his fortunate nature, his happy form of self-esteem. He was perfectly satisfied with himself and his family—with whatever they had done and whatever they had not done. He was glad that Roland had declined the nervous strain of an artistic career, and that Morton was in business; in each generation some of the Ramsays had been business men. Uncle Jonathan had loved his wife dearly and he must have missed her, but he was pleased with the verses he had written about her since her death, verses in the manner of Tom Moore, whom he considered an absolutely satisfactory poet. He had, of course, been proud of Valentine's brilliant marriage. The divorce he certainly regretted. But whatever pill life handed out to him he managed to swallow with equanimity.

I walked alone in the garden smelling the stocks

Uncle Jonathan spent his days in the library, across the hall from the parlor, where he was writing a romance of the French and Indian wars. The room was lined with his father's old brown theological books, and everything one touched there felt dusty. There was always a scattering of tobacco crumbs over the hearth, the floor, the desk, and over Uncle Jonathan's waistcoat and whiskers. It wasn't in Molla Carlsen's contract to keep the tobacco dust off her master.

Roland Ramsay was Uncle Jonathan's much younger brother. When he was a boy of twelve and fourteen, he had been a musical prodigy, had played to large and astonished audiences in New York and Boston and Philadelphia. Later he was sent to Germany to study under Liszt and D'Albert. At twenty-eight he returned to Bonnie Brae—and he had been there ever since. He was a big, handsome man, never ill, but something had happened to his nervous system. He could not play in public, not even in his own city. Ever since Valentine was a little boy, Uncle Roland and his piano had lived upstairs at Bonnie Brae. There were several stories: that he had been broken by a love affair with a German singer; that Wagner had hurt his feelings so cruelly he could never get over it; that at his debut in Paris he had forgotten in the middle of his sonata in what key the next movement was written, and had labored through the rest of his program like a man stupefied by drugs.

At any rate, Roland had broken nerves, just as some people have a weak heart, and he lived in solitude and silence. Occasionally when some fine orchestra or a new artist played in the City up the river, Roland's waxy, frozen face was to be seen in the audience; but not often. Five or six times a year he went on a long spree. Then he would shut himself up in his room and play the piano—it couldn't be called practicing—for eight or ten hours a day. Sometimes in the evening Aunt Charlotte would put on a cloak and go out into the garden to listen to him. "Harry," she said once when she came back into the house, "I was walking under Roland's window. Really, he is playing like a god tonight."

Inert and inactive as he was, Roland kept his good physique. He used to sit all afternoon beside his window with a book; as we came up the hill we could see his fine head and shoulders there, motionless as if in a frame. I never liked to look at his face, for his strong, well-cut features never moved. His eyes were large and uncomfortable-looking, under heavy lids with deep hollows beneath—curiously like the eyes of the tired American business men whose pictures appear in the papers when they are getting a divorce.

I had heard it whispered at school that Uncle Jonathan was "in Molla Carlsen's power," because Horace, the wild son, had made vehement advances to her long ago when she first came into the house, and that his bad behavior had hastened his mother's end. However it came about, in her power the lonely men at Bonnie Brae certainly were. When Molla was dressed to go up to the View Image of Page 8 City, she walked down the front steps and got into the carriage with the air of mistress of the place. And her furs, we knew, had cost more than Aunt Charlotte's.

VIII

"Go without a newspaper because I couldn't bring myself to say good morning to the old woman and buy one"

All that winter. Valentine was tremendously busy. He was not only writing ever so many new songs, but was hunting up beautiful old ones for our sextette, and he trained us so industriously that the little girls fell behind in their lessons, and Aunt Charlotte had to limit rehearsals to three nights a week. I remember he made us an arrangement for voices of the minuet in the third movement of Brahms' second symphony, and wrote words to it.

We were not allowed to sing any of Valentine's songs in company, not even for Aunt Charlotte's old friends. He was rather proud and sulky with most of the neighbors, and wouldn't have it. When we tried out his new songs for the home circle, as he said, Uncle Morton was allowed to come over, and Uncle Jonathan in his black cape. Roland came too, and sat off in a corner by himself. Uncle Jonathan thought very well of his own judgment in music. He liked all Valentine's songs, but warned him against writing things without a sufficient "climax," mildly bidding him beware of a too modern manner.

I remember he used to repeat for his son's guidance two lines from one of his favorite poets, accenting the measure with the stogie he held in his fingers—a particularly noxious kind of cigar which he not only smoked but, on occasion, ate!

"Avoid eccentricity, Val," he would say, beaming softly at his son. "Remember this admirable rule for poets and composers:

Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."

That year the spring began early. I remember March and April as a succession of long walks and climbs with Valentine. Sometimes Aunt Charlotte went with us, but she was not a nimble walker, and Valentine liked climb and dash and short-cut. We would plunge into the wooded course of Blue Run or Powhatan Creek, and get to the top of Flint Ridge by a quicker route than any path. That long, windy ridge lay behind Blinker's Hill and Fox Hill; the top was a bare expanse, except for a few bleached boulders and twisted oaks. From there we could look off over all the great wrinkles of hills, catch glimpses of the river, and see the black pillar of cloud to the north where the City lay. This dark cloud, as evening came on, took deep rich colors from the sunset; and after the sun was gone it sent out all night an orange glow from the furnace fires that burned there. But that smoke did not come down to us; our evenings were pure and silvery—soft blue skies seen through the budding trees above us, or over the folds and folds of lavender forest below us.

"It's rather nice to sit safe and lazy on Fox Hill and dream of far-away places"

One Saturday afternoon we took Aunt Charlotte along and got to the top of Flint Ridge by the winding roadway. As we were walking upon the crest, curtains of mist began to rise from the river and from between the lines of hills. Soon the darkening sky was full of fleecy clouds, and the countryside below us disappeared into nothingness.

Suddenly, in the low cut between the hills across the river, we saw a luminousness, throbbing and phosphorescent, a ghostly brightness with mists streaming about it and enfolding it, struggling to quench it. We knew it was the moon, but we could see no form, no solid image; it was a flowing, surging, liquid gleaming; now stronger, now softer.

"The Rhinegold!" murmured Valentine and Aunt Charlotte in one breath. The little girls were silent; Betty Jane felt for my hand. They were awed, not so much by the light, as by something in the two voices that had spoken together. Presently we dropped into the dark winding road along Blue Run and got home late for dinner.

While we were at dessert, Uncle Valentine went into the music-room and began to play the Rhine music. He played on as if he would never stop; Siegmund's love song and the Valhalla music and back to the Rhine journey and the Rhine maidens. The cycle was like a plaything in his hands. Presently a shadow fell in the patch of moonlight on the floor, and looking out I saw Roland, without a hat, standing just outside the open window. He often appeared at the window or the doorway when we were singing with Valentine, but if we noticed him, or addressed him, he faded quickly away.

As Valentine stopped for a moment, his uncle tapped on the window glass.

"Going over now, Valentine? It's getting late."

"Yes, I suppose it is. I say, Charlotte, do you remember how we used to play the Ring to each other hours on end, long ago, when Damrosch first brought the German opera over? Why can't people stay young forever?"

"Maybe you will, Val," said Aunt Charlotte, musing. "What a difference Wagner made in the world, after all!"

"It's not a good thing to play Wagner at night," said the gray voice outside the window. "It brings on sleeplessness."

"I'll come along presently, Roland," the nephew called. "I'm warm now; I'll take cold if I go out."

The large figure went slowly away.

"Poor old Roland, isn't he just a coffin of a man!" Valentine got up and lit the fagots in the fireplace. "I feel shivery. I've had him on my hands a good deal this winter. He'll come drifting in through the wing and settle himself in my study and sit there half the night without opening his head."

"Doesn't he talk to you, even?" I asked.

"Hardly, though I get fidgety and talk to him. Sometimes he plays. He's always interesting at the piano. It's remarkable that he plays as well as he does, when he's so irregular."

"Does he really read? We so often see him sitting by his upstairs window with a book."

"He reads too much, German philosophy and things that aren't good for him. Did you know, Charlotte, that he keeps a diary. At least he writes often in a big ledger Morton brought him from town. Sometimes he's at it for hours. Lord, I'd like to know what he puts down in it!" Valentine plunged his head in his hands and began rumpling his hair. "Can you remember him much before he went abroad, Charlotte?"

"When I was little I was taken to hear him play in Steinway Hall, just before he went to Germany. From what I can remember, it was very brilliant. He had splendid hands, and a wonderful memory. When he came back he was much more musical, but he couldn't play in public."

"Queer! How he supports the years as they come and go…. Of course, he loves the place, just as I do; that's something. By the way, when I was home three years ago I was let into a family secret; it was Roland who was Molla Carlsen's suitor and made all the row, not poor Horace at all! Oh, shouldn't I have said that before the sextette? They'll forget it. They forget most things. What haunts me about Roland is the feeling of kinship. So often it flashes into my mind: 'Yes, I might be struck dumb some day, just like that.' Oh, don't laugh! It was like that, for months and months, while I was trying to live with Janet. My skin would get yellow, and I'd feel a perfect loathing of speech. My jaws would set together so that I couldn't open them. I'd walk along the quais in Paris and go without a newspaper because I couldn't bring myself to say good-morning to the old woman and buy one. I'd wander about awfully hungry because I couldn't bear the sound of talk in a restaurant. I dodged everybody I knew, or cut them."

There was something funny about his self-commiseration, and I wanted to hear more; but just at this point we were told that we must go instantly to bed.

"And I?" Valentine asked, "must I go too?"

"No. You may stay a little longer."

Aunt Charlotte must have thought he needed a serious talking-to, for she almost never saw him alone. Her life was hedged about by very subtle but sure conventionalities, and that was only one of many things she did not permit herself.

IX

Fox Hill was soon besieged on all sides by spring. The first attack came by way of the old apple orchard that ran irregularly behind our carriage house and Uncle Valentine's studio. The foaming, flowery trees were a beautiful sight from his doorstep. Aunt Charlotte and Morton were carrying on a hot rivalry in tulips. Uncle Jonathan now came out to sun himself on the front porch, in a broad-rimmed felt hat and a green plaid shawl which his father used to View Image of Page 9 wear on horseback trips over the hills.

Though spring first attacked us through the orchard, the great assault, for which we children waited, came on the side of the hill next the river; it was violent, blood-red, long drawn-out, and when it was over, our hill belonged to summer. The vivid event of our year was the blooming of the wall.

Along the front of Fox Hill, where the lawn ended in a steep descent, Uncle Harry had put in a stone retaining wall to keep the ground from washing out. This wall, he said, he intended to manage himself, and when he first announced that he was going to cover it with red rambler roses, his wife laughed at him and told him he would spoil the whole hill. But in the event she was converted. Nowhere in the valley did ramblers thrive so well and bloom so gorgeously. From the railway station our home-coming business men could see that crimson wall, running along high on the green hillside.

One Sunday morning when the ramblers were at their height, we all went with Uncle Harry and Valentine down the driveway to admire them. Aunt Charlotte admitted that they were very showy, very decorative, but she added under her breath that she couldn't feel much enthusiasm for scentless roses.

"But they are quite another sort of thing," Uncle Harry expostulated. "They go right about their business and bloom. I like their being without an odor; it gives them a kind of frankness and innocence."

In the bright sunlight I could see her dark skin flush a little. "Innocence?" she murmured, "I shouldn't call it just that."

I was wondering what she would call it, when our stableman Bill came up from the post office with his leather bag and emptied the contents on the grass. He always brought the Ramsays' mail with ours, and we often teased Uncle Valentine about certain bright purple letters from Paris, addressed to him in a woman's hand. Because of the curious ways of mail steamers they sometimes came in pairs, and that morning there were actually five of these purple punctuations in the pile of white letters. The children laughed immoderately. Betty Jane and Elizabeth shouted for joy as they fished them out. "Poor Uncle Val! When will you ever get time to answer them all?"

"Ah, that's it!" he said as he began stuffing them away in his pockets.

The next afternoon Aunt Charlotte and I were sewing, seated in the little covered balcony out of her room, with honeysuckle vines all about us. We saw Valentine, hatless, in his striped blazer, come around the corner of the house and seat himself at the tea-table under one of the big sycamores, just below us. We were about to call to him, when he took out those five purple envelopes and spread them on the table before him as if he were going to play a game with them. My aunt looked at me with a sparkle in her eye and put her finger to her lips to keep me quiet. Elizabeth came running across from the summerhouse with her kitten. He called to her.

"Just a moment, Elizabeth. I want you to choose one of these."

"But how? What for?" she asked, much astonished.

"Oh, just choose one, any one," he said carelessly. "Put your finger down." He took out a lead pencil. "Now, we'll mark that I. Choose again; very well, that's number 2; another, another. Thank you. Now the one that's left will necessarily be 5, won't it?"

"But, Uncle Val, aren't these the ones that came yesterday? And you haven't read them yet?"

"Hush, not so loud, dear." He took up his half-burned cigarette. "You see, when so many come at once, it's not easy to know which should be read first. But you've settled that difficulty for me." He swept them lightly into the two side pockets of his blazer and sprang up. "Where are the others? Can't we go off for a tramp somewhere? Up Blue Run, to see the wild azaleas?"

Elizabeth came into the house calling for us, and Aunt Charlotte and I went down to him.

"We're going up Blue Run to see the azaleas, Charlotte, won't you come?"

She looked wistful. "It's very hot. I'm afraid I ought not to climb, and you'll want to go the steep way."

She waited, hoping to be urged, but he said no more about it. He was sometimes quite heartless.

That evening we came home tired, and the little girls were sent to bed soon after dinner. It was the most glorious of summer nights; I couldn't think of giving it up and going to sleep. Our valley was still, breathlessly still, and full of white moonlight. The garden gave off a heavy perfume, the lawn and house were mottled with intense black and intense white, a mosaic so perplexing that I could hardly find my way along the familiar paths. There was a languorous spirit of beauty abroad—warm, sensuous, oppressive, like the pressure of a warm, clinging body. I felt vaguely afraid to be alone.

I looked for Aunt Charlotte, and found her in the little balcony off her bedroom, where we had been sitting that morning. She spoke to me impatiently, in a way that quite hurt my feelings.

"You must go to bed, Marjorie. I have a headache and I can't be with anyone tonight."

I could feel that she did not want me near her, that my intrusion was most unwelcome. I went downstairs. Uncle Harry was in his study, doing accounts.

"Fine night, isn't it?" he said cheerfully. "I'm going out to see a little of it presently. Almost done my figures." His accounts must have troubled him sometimes; his household cost a great deal of money.

I retreated to the apple orchard. Seeing that the door of Valentine's study was open, I approached cautiously and looked in. He was on his divan, which he had pulled up into the moonlight, lying on his back with his arms under his head.

"Run away, Margie, I'm busy," he muttered, not looking at me but staring past me.

I walked alone about the garden, smelling the stocks until I could smell them no more. I noticed how many moonflowers had come out on the Japanese summerhouse that stood on the line between our ground and the Ramsays'. As I drew near it I heard a groan, not loud, but long, long, as if the unhappiness of a whole lifetime were coming out in one despairing breath. I looked in through the vines. There sat Roland, his head in his hands, the moonlight on his silver hair. I stole softly away through the grass. It seemed that tonight everyone wanted to be alone with his ghost.

Going home through the garden I heard a low call; "Wait, wait a minute!" Uncle Morton came out of the darkness of the vine-covered side porch and beckoned me to follow him. He led me to the plot where his finest roses were in bloom and stopped before a bush that had a great many buds on it, but only one open flower—a great white rose, almost as big as a moonflower, its petals beautifully curled.

"Wait a minute," he whispered again. He took out his pocket knife, and with great care and considerable difficulty managed to cut the rose with a long stem. He held it out to me in his shaking hand. "There," he said proudly. "That's my best one, the Queen of Savoy. I've been waiting for someone to give it to!"

This was a bold adventure for Morton. I saw that he meant it as a high compliment, and that he was greatly pleased with himself as he wavered back along the white path and disappeared into the darkness under the honeysuckle vines.

X

The next morning Valentine went up to town with Morton on the early train, and at six o'clock that evening Morton came back without him. Aunt Charlotte, who was watching in the garden, went quickly across the Ramsays' lawn.

"Morton, where is Valentine?"

Morton stood holding his straw hat before him in both hands, telling her vaguely that Valentine was going to spend the night in town, at a hotel. "He has to be near the cable office—been sending messages all day—something very important."

Valentine remained in the City for several days. We did not see him again until he joined us one afternoon when we were having tea in the garden. He looked fresh and happy, in new white flannels and one of his gayest neckties.

"Oh, it's delightful to be back, Charlotte!" he exclaimed as he sank into a chair near her.

"We've missed you, Valentine." She, too, looked radiantly happy.

"I should hope so! Because you're probably going to have a great deal of me. Likely I'm here forever, like Roland and the oak trees. I've been staying up in the City, on neutral ground for a few days, to find out what I really want. Do you know, Betty Jane and Elizabeth, that's a sure test; the place you wish for the first moment you're awake in the morning, is the place where you most want to be. I often want to do two things at once, be in two places at once, but this time I don't think I had a moment's indecision." He did not say about what, but presently he drew off a seal ring he wore on his little finger and began playing with it.View Image of Page 10 I knew it was Louise Ireland's ring, he had told me so once. It was an intaglio, a three-masted ship under full sail, and over it, in old English letters, Telle est la Vie.

He sat playing with the ring, tossing it up into the sunlight and catching it in his palm, while he addressed my aunt.

"Ireland's leaving Paris. Off for a long tour in South Africa and Australia. She's like a sea gull or a swallow, that woman, forever crossing water. I'm sorry I can't be with her. She's the best friend I've ever had except you, Charlotte." He did not look at my aunt, but the drop in his voice was a look. "I do seem to be tied to you."

"It's the valley you're tied to. The place is necessary to you, Valentine."

"Yes, it's the place, and it's you and the children it's even Morton and Roland, God knows why!"

Aunt Charlotte was right. It was the place. The people were secondary. Indeed, I have often wondered, had he been left to his own will, how long he would have been content there. A man under thirty does not settle down to live with old men and children. But the place was vocal to him. During the year that he was with us he wrote all of the thirty-odd songs by which he lives. Some artists profit by exile. He was one of those who do not. And his country was not a continent, but a few wooded hills in a river valley, a few old houses and gardens that were home.

XI

The summer passed joyously. Valentine went on making new songs for us and we went on singing them. I expected life to be like that forever. The golden year, Aunt Charlotte called it, when I visited her at Fox Hill years afterward. September came and went, and then a cold wind blew down upon us.

Uncle Harry and Morton came home one night with disturbing news. It was said in the City that the old Wakeley estate had been sold. Miss Belle Wakeley, the sole heir, had lived in Italy for several years; her big house on the unwooded side of Blinker's Hill had been shut up, her many acres rented out or lying idle.

Very soon after Uncle Harry startled us with this news, Valentine came over to ask whether such a thing were possible. No large tract of land had changed hands in Greenacre for many years.

"I rather think it's true," said Uncle Harry. "I'm going to the agent tomorrow to find out any particulars I can. It seems to be a very guarded transaction. I suppose this means that Belle has decided to live abroad for good. I'm sorry."

"It's very wrong of her," said Aunt Charlotte, "and I think she'll regret it. If she hasn't any feeling for her property now, she will have some day. Why, her grandfather was born there!"

"Yes, I'm disappointed. I thought Belle had a great deal of sentiment underneath." Uncle Harry had always been Miss Wakeley's champion, liked her independent ways, and was amused by her brusque manners.

Valentine was standing by the fireplace, abstracted and deeply concerned.

"Just how much does the Wakeley property take in, Harry? I've never known exactly."

"A great deal. It covers the courses of both creeks, Blue Run and Powhatan Creek, and runs clear back to the top of Flint Ridge. It's our biggest estate, by long odds."

Valentine began pacing the floor. "Did you know she wanted to sell? Couldn't the neighbors have clubbed together and bought it, rather than let strangers in?"

Uncle Harry laughed and shook his head. "I'm afraid we're not rich enough, Val. It's worth a tremendous lot of money. Most of us have all the land we can take care of."

"I suppose so," he muttered. "Father's pretty well mortgaged up, isn't he?"

"Pretty well," Uncle Harry admitted. "Don't worry. I'll see what I can find out tomorrow. I can't think Belle would sell to a speculator, and let her estate be parceled out. She'd have too much consideration for the rest of us. She was the finest kind of neighbor. I wish we had her back."

"It never occurred to me, Harry, that the actual countryside could be sold; the creeks and woods and hills. That shouldn't be permitted. They ought to be kept just as they are, since they give the place its character."

Uncle Harry said he was afraid the only way of keeping a place the same, in this country, was to own it.

"But there are some things one doesn't think of in terms of money," Valentine persisted. "If I'd had bushels of money when I came home last winter, it would never have occurred to me to try to buy Blinker's Hill, any more than the sky over it. I didn't know that the Wakeleys or anybody else owned the creeks, and the forest up toward the Ridge."

Aunt Charlotte rose and went up to Uncle Harry's chair. "Is it really too late to do anything? Too late to cable Belle and ask her to give her neighbors a chance to buy it in first?"

"My dear, you never do realize much about the cost of things. But remember, Belle is a shrewd business woman. She knows well enough that no dozen of her neighbors could raise so much ready money. I understand it's a cash transaction.

Aunt Charlotte looked hurt. "Well, I can only say it was faithless of her. People have some responsibility toward the place where they were born, and toward their old friends."

Dinner was announced, and Valentine was urged to stay, but he refused.

"I don't want any dinner, I'm too nervous. I'm awfully fussed by this affair, Charlotte." He stood beside my aunt at the door for a moment, hanging his head despondently, and went away.

That evening my aunt and uncle could talk of nothing but the sale of the Wakeley property. Uncle Harry said sadly that he had never before so wished that he were a rich man. "Though even if I were, I don't know that I'd have thought of making Belle an offer. I'm as impractical as Valentine. But if I'd had money, I do believe Belle would have given me the first chance. We're her nearest neighbors, and whoever buys Blinker's Hill has to be a part of our landscape, and to come into our life more or less."

"Have you any suspicion who it may be?" She spoke very low.

Uncle Harry was standing beside her, his back to the hall fire, smoking his church-warden pipe. "The purchaser? Not the slightest. Have you?"

"Yes." She spoke lower still. "A suspicion that tortures me. It flashed into my mind the moment you told us. I don't know why."

"Then keep it to yourself, my dear," he said resolutely, as if he had all he cared to shoulder. I heard a snap, and saw that he had broken the long stem of his pipe. "There," he said, throwing it into the fire, "you and Valentine have got me worked up with your fussing. I'm as shaky as poor Morton tonight."

XII

The next day Uncle Harry telephoned my aunt from his office in town; Miss Wakeley's agent was not at liberty to disclose the purchaser's name, but assured him that the estate was not sold to a speculator, but an old resident of the City who would preserve the property very much as it was and would respect the feelings of the community.

I was sent over to Bonnie Brae with the good tidings. We all felt so much encouraged that we decided to spend the afternoon in the woods that had been restored to us. It was a yellow October day, and our country had never looked more beautiful. We had tea beside Powhatan Creek, where it curved wide and shallow through green bottom land. A plantation of sycamores grew there, their old white roots bursting out of the low banks and forking into the stream itself. The bark of those sycamores was always peculiarly white, and the sunlight played on the silvery interlacing of the great boughs. Dry ledges of slate rock stood out of the cold green water here and there, and on the up-stream side of each ledge lay a little trembling island of yellow leaves, unable to pass the barrier. The meadow in which we lingered was smooth turf, of that intense green of autumn grass that has been already a little touched by frost.

As we sat on the warm slate rocks, we looked up at the wooded side of Blinker's Hill—like a mellow old tapestry. The fiercest autumn colors had burned themselves out; the gold on the smoke-colored beeches was thin and pale, so that through their horizontal branches one could see the colored carpet of leaves on the ground. Only the young oaks held all their ruby leaves, the deepest tone in the whole scale of reds—and they would still be there, a little duller, when the snow was flying.

I remember my aunt's voice, a tone not quite natural, when she said suddenly, "Valentine, how beautiful the Tuileries gardens are on an after-noon like this—down about the second fountain. The color lasts in the sky so long after dusk comes on,—behind the Eiffel tower."

He was lying on his back. He sat up and looked at her sharply. "Oh, yes!"

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"Aren't you beginning to be a little homesick for it?" she asked bashfully.

"A little. But it's rather nice to sit safe and lazy on Fox Hill and be a trifle homesick for far-away places. Even Roland gets homesick for Bavaria in the spring, he tells me. He takes a drink or two and recovers. Are you trying to shove me off somewhere?"

She sighed. "Oh, no! No, indeed, I'm not."

But she had, in some way, broken the magical contentment of the afternoon. The little girls began to seem restless, so we gathered them up and started home.

We followed the road round the foot of Blinker's Hill, to the cleared side on which stood the old Wakeley house. There we saw a man and woman coming down the driveway from the house itself. The man stopped and hesitated, but the woman quickened her pace and came toward us. Aunt Charlotte became very pale. She had recognized them at a distance, and so had I ; Janet Oglethorpe and her second husband. I remember exactly how she looked. She was wearing a black and white check out-of-door coat and a hard black turban. Her face, always high-colored, was red and shiny from exercise. She waved to us cordially as she came up, but did not offer to shake hands. Her husband took off his hat and smiled scornfully. He stood well behind her, looking very ill at ease, with his elbows out and his chin high, and as the conversation went on his haughty smile became a nervous grin.

"How do you do, Mrs. Waterford, and how do you do, Valentine," Mrs. Towne began effusively. She spoke very fast, and her lips seemed not to keep up with her enunciation; they were heavy and soft, and made her speech slushy. Her mouth was her bad feature her teeth were too far apart, there was something crude and inelegant about them. "We are going to be neighbors, Mrs. Waterford. I don't want it noised abroad yet, but I've just bought the Wakeley place. I'm going to do the house over and live down here. I hope you won't mind our coming."

Aunt Charlotte made some reply. Valentine did not utter a sound. He took off his hat, replaced it, and stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the ground.

"I've always had my eye on this property," Mrs. Towne went on, "but it took Belle a long while to make up her mind. It's too fine a place to be left going to waste. It will be nice for Valentine's boy to grow up here where he did, and to be near his Grandfather Ramsay. I want him to know his Ramsay kin."

Valentine behaved very badly. He addressed her without lifting his eyes from the ground or taking his hands out of his pockets; merely kicked a dead leaf out of the road and said: "He's not my boy, and the less he sees of the Ramsays, the better. You've got him, it's your affair to make an Oglethorpe of him and see that he stays one. What do you want to make the kid miserable for?"

Mrs. Towne grew as much redder as it was possible to be, but she spoke indulgently. "Now, Valentine, why can't you be sensible? Certainly, on Mrs. Waterford's account—"

"Oh, yes!" he muttered. "That's the Oglethorpe notion of good manners, before people!"

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Waterford. I had no idea he would be so naughty, or I wouldn't have stopped you. But I did want you to be the first person to know." Mrs. Towne turned to my aunt with great self-command and a ready flow of speech. Her alarmingly high color and a slight swelling of the face, a puffing-up about her eyes and nose, betrayed her state of feeling.

The women talked politely for a few moments, while the two men stood sulking, each in his own way. When the conference was over, Mrs. Towne crossed the road resolutely and took the path to the station. Towne again took off his hat, looking nowhere, and followed her. Valentine did not return the salute.

As our meek band went on around the foot of the hill, he merely pulled his hat lower over his eyes and said, "She's Scotch; she couldn't let anything get away—not even me. All damned bunk about wanting to get Dickie down here. Everything about her's bunk, except her damned money. That's a fact, and it's got me—it's got me."

Aunt Charlotte's breathing was so irregular that she could scarcely speak. "Valentine, I've had a presentiment of that, from the beginning. I scarcely slept at all last night. I can't have it so. Harry must find some way out.

"No way out, Charlotte," he went along swinging his shoulders and speaking in a dull sing-song voice. "That was her creek we were playing along this afternoon; Blue Run, Powhatan Creek, the big woods, Flint Ridge, Blinker's Hill. I can't get in or out. What does it say on the rat-bane bottle; put the poison along all his runways. That's the right idea!"

He did not stop with us, but cut back through the orchard to his study. After dinner we waited for him, sitting solemnly about the fire. At last Aunt Charlotte started up as if she could bear it no longer.

"Come on, Harry," she said firmly. "We must see about Valentine."

He looked up at her pathetically. "Take Marjorie, won't you? I really don't want to see the poor chap tonight, Charlotte."

We hurried across the garden. The studio was dark, the fire had gone out. He was lying on the couch, but he did not answer us. I found a box of matches and lit a candle.

One of Uncle Jonathan's rye bottles stood half empty on the mantel-piece. He had had no dinner, had drunk off nearly a pint of whisky and dropped on the couch. He was deathly white, and his eyes were rolled up in his head.

Aunt Charlotte knelt down beside him and covered him with her cloak. "Run for your Uncle Harry, as fast as you can," she said.

XIII

The end? That was the end for us. Within the week workmen were pulling down the wing of the Wakeley house, in order to get as much work as possible done before the cold weather came on. The sound of the stone masons' tools rang out clear across the cut between the two hills; even in Valentine's study one could not escape it. We wished that Morton had carried out his happy idea of making a padded cell of it!

Valentine lingered on at Bonnie Brae for a month, though he never went off his father's place again. He did not sail until the end of November, stayed out his year with us, but he had become a different man. All of us, except Aunt Charlotte, were eager to have him go. He had tonsillitis, I remember, and lay on the couch in his study ill and feverish for two weeks. He seemed not to be working, yet he must have been, View Image of Page 12 for when he went away he left between the leaves of one of my aunt's music books the manuscript of the most beautiful and heart-breaking of all his songs:

I know a wall where red roses grow…

He deferred his departure from date to date, changed his passage several times. The night before he went we were sitting by the hall fire, and he said he wished that all the trains and all the boats in the world would stop moving, stop forever.

When his trunks had gone, and his bags were piled up ready to be put into the carriage, he took a latchkey from his pocket and gave it to Aunt Charlotte.

"That's the key to my study. Keep it for me. I don't know that I'll ever need it again, but I'd like to think that you have it."

Less than two years afterward, Valentine was accidentally killed, struck by a motor truck one night at the Pont Royal, just as he was leaving Louise Ireland's apartment on the quai.

Aunt Charlotte survived him by eleven years, but after her death we found his latchkey in her jewel box. I have it still. There is now no door for it to open. Bonnie Brae was pulled down during the war. The wave of industrial expansion swept down that valley, and roaring mills belch their black smoke up to the heights where those lovely houses used to stand. Fox Hill is gone, and our wall is gone. I know a wall where red roses grow; youngsters sing it still. The roses of song and the roses of memory, they are the only ones that last.

[THE END] Synopsis of Part I This is the story of Valentine Ramsay, musician, genius, who left the world a few perfect songs when he died at thirty. When we meet him he has just returned to his native Greenacre after some years abroad—returned to the strange household of futile male relations which make up his family. Molla Carlsen, nominally the housekeeper, is the one power that seems to keep the Ramsay men in order, for they are careless, idle and much given to drink. During his stay abroad, Valentine has, by an open scandal with Louise Ireland, managed to force his wife Janet, a domineering woman of great wealth who is successfully killing his genius, to divorce him. The household of the Waterfords, at Fox Hill next to the Ramsays', is much interested in Valentine's return. The little girls are taught part songs to sing for "Uncle" Valentine, and his coming is presaged by a continuous flutter of excitement. (The story is told by Marjorie, Charlotte Waterford's niece, who at the time was sixteen.) Valentine has always been a great friend of Aunt Charlotte's; she is one of the few people who have understood him. She is herself a musician with a fine appreciation and a catholic taste. She and Valentine speak the same language. She is older by some years, but they have known each other always and one suspects her of having been half in love with him—of being half in love with him still. Local society condemns him for his break with Janet, and Aunt Charlotte's attempts to make it accept him and him accept it are not successful. He prefers to run away from her party to his own music room—and does—to play Marjorie snatches of the strange music out of which a new composition is emerging.