by Maude L. Radford and Harriett Crandall.
Originally published in Harper's Monthly Magazine (Harper and Brothers) vol.115 #689 (Oct 1907).
Dr. John Bryce told himself that it was a mere matter of business. He was responding to a call for consultation in an insignificant case back in the little town whence he had emerged, an ambitious country boy, some thirty years before. He felt perhaps a tinge of curiosity mingled with the elation that comes from patronage,—he would waive the customary fee. A slight smile curved his gray mustache, and he gazed fixedly over his paper out of the window at the slow-flying landscape. Suddenly he straightened with a start; something in the curves of the insignificant hills, the willow-marked streams, seemed familiar; something knocked upon his heart surprisingly, unreasonably. And then he knew: forgotten all these years, those hills were home; they had grown into his boy's life, they were there still, part and parcel of that life that never dies out of us. Presently he dropped his paper excitedly; there was Hickory Tree Triangle where he had gone nutting every autumn when he was a child; and there the high rusty-red barn on Hawkins' Corner where he went to his first dance.
When the train stopped he collected his bags and got out on the small weather-beaten platform. It seemed to him that time must have stood still. There was the same irregular semicircle of men and boys in faded blue jeans staring at the passengers as they had stared at him when he boarded the out-going train thirty years before. The ticket-agent, a little better dressed, leaned in the doorway of the station; behind him Bryce caught a glimpse of a rusty balloon-shaped stove. At one side stood two or three mud-spattered vehicles drawn by placid horses.
As the doctor looked about him, a fresh-faced man with a professional air, which he seemed to wear half diffidently, came quickly down the platform.
"This must be Dr. Bryce," he said, with a shy welcoming smile. "I'm Craye."
3ryce held out his hand.
"I am very glad to meet you, Dr. Craye."
"Well, it's a pleasure to us that you've come," replied Craye. "Lots of the old people about here remember you. You must have left before my time, but my wife's father knows all about you. That all your baggage? We'll go right up to the house. Mrs. Craye wouldn't hear of my letting you stay in the hotel; she knows what their kitchen's like."
Bryce hesitated. "I mustn't put you to such trouble," he began.
"Don't you believe it," said Craye, heartily; "no trouble at all, and you'll be just as free as if you were at home."
Bryce yielded; he knew the discomfort of small country hotels. Craye led the way to his neat carriage, at the back of the station.
"I've just got new rubber tires," he said, as Bryce climbed over the wheel; "guess you'll find it comfortable riding."
He jumped in beside the older man and clicked to the horse.
Bryce looked about him curiously. There was an air of slackness and sordidness about the little gray and red buildings near the station. They looked like sick creatures that had crawled hopelessly to this spot, and hopelessly had stayed. Always they had depressed him; in his boyhood days he had hated them as a symbol of the dreariness of his own life.
But presently they turned into the wide "main" street, shaded on both sides by elms drooping their branches in great sweeping lines. He had forgotten how beautiful they were; they atoned for the little, badly painted shops behind them. There were the same untidy window displays, the same lacklustre loafers.
"There is old Jim Ayres in front of his store," Bryce exclaimed, as they passed a blue-shirted humped figure sitting on a barrel in front of a grocery-store.
"Guess it's the old man's son," suggested Craye. "Town look the same?"
"Yes," said Bryce, absently.
"This here is Bryce's Lane," said Craye, as they turned down a narrow street. "Named after your folks?"
Bryce's lips curved in a bitter smile. Bryce's Lane! How often, when the children had jeered at him for his drunken father, he had taken a kind of comfort in the fact that once at least his people were respected and had had streets named after them!
There stood the old brown house in which he had been born, deserted and drooping. Long ago gone for debts, no one had cared to buy it and try to make a home of it. It had never been a home, he reflected; just a place to house people. Across a field he caught a glimpse of a green roof. He drew a quick sighing breath. Once he had worn a path over the field that lay between his house and that other.
"Little tired, aren't you?" asked Craye. "We'll soon be there."
"What is the name of the person in whose ease you have called me?" he asked, abruptly.
"Mrs. Tarrant—James Tarrant's widow. Don't remember him, hardly, do you?"
"James Tarrant," he repeated slowly; "yes, I remember him. He was the teacher in the school when I was a boy, and then, later, he became a farmer."
His voice trailed into silence. Yes, he remembered; James Tarrant had married Mary Mason, her sister—Amelia's sister. The wedding had taken place just two years before he had gone away. He remembered how pretty Amelia had looked in her white dress with cherry ribbons about her waist and neck, her little brown curls slipping out upon her forehead, one after another. Those curls were like her laugh and her hopefulness; nothing could constrain them.
"Well," said Craye, in a consciously indifferent tone, "that's my house there, the white one."
"It's very pretty," Bryce said, mechanically; "a fine porch, and a—a very pretty situation."
Craye's simple face glowed.
"Well, we like it," he replied.
The commonplace white house was fronted by a plot of grass defined by a foot-wide border of nasturtiums and petunias. In the exact centre was a plaster fountain, not in running order, representing two plump cupids under a curled-over plantain leaf.
But Bryce felt that the simplicity and kindness of the household gave it all the distinction it needed when little Mrs. Craye came forward out of the kitchen, an odor of fried chicken wafted after her. She carried a plump baby, whom she shifted to her left arm so that she might shake hands with Bryce.
"How do you do, sir? Please excuse my having baby—take her, Charlie; she wants to go to you—but she's always restless just before supper-time and has to be carried. Charlie, you show Doctor to his room, and Ill get supper on in a minute." And the white-clad figure turned towards the kitchen with the free step that means content.
"I haven't smelt anything like this in thirty years," Bryce called after her. "I warn you, Mrs. Craye, that my appetite is growing."
"That's right," she said, pausing. "The one thing my father could remember when I asked him what your folks liked to eat, was fried chicken. 'The Bryces had it in season and out,' he says; 'fried pretty brown, but not too brown.' So I fixed it myself."
"You're very good."
Bryce went up to his room with all sorts of remembrances tugging at his heart. He had forgotten how kind and simple country people are; how much trouble they are ready to take for one, and how genuinely democratic they are. This little Mrs. Craye was not thinking of him as the great city doctor come hundreds of miles to exhibit his skill in a difficult case; to her he was a guest whom she wanted to make comfortable.
When he went down-stairs she was putting the finishing touches to her table.
"I'll have to wait on you myself," she said; "I'm not going to keep a hired girl till we get the house all paid for. Now, Charlie—"
Bryee unfolded his napkin; then, aware of a pause, he looked up. They were waiting till he should have finished; of course, Craye was going to say grace.
He bent his head and listened to the simple blessing, the first he had heard in a generation. After he had been helped to fried chicken, fried potatoes, and hot biscuit, food which he had long since forbidden himself in the city, but which here seemed proper healthful fare, Mrs. Craye asked:
"Has Charlie told you all about Mrs. Tarrant?"
"He wrote me about most of the symptoms, I believe," replied Bryce.
"Oh, I don't mean that!" Mrs. Craye said; "but all that she's done for this town."
"We haven't discussed it on the human side."
"We want she should be cured," Mrs. Craye said, wistfully; "she's done so much for us all, we want her to enjoy life a little herself."
"I can't seem to make Mary see that if there isn't much chance, you can't do much," said Craye, half apologetically; "she seems to think that just because Mrs. Tarrant deserves to live and be happy, she must."
"I guess I oughtn't to be spoiling Doctor's supper talking of it," Mrs. Craye said, remorsefully; " but our baby would have died except for her, even if its Poppa is a doctor."
"That's so," agreed Craye.
"Pass Doctor the biscuits, Charlie. She's the most wonderful nurse ever was," Mrs. Craye went on; "she's born to it. Queer thing, she always seems to feel when she's needed. Charlie has never sent for her that she wasn't up and dressed and ready. Isn't that so?"
"Pretty nearly always," Craye replied.
"When I was a boy," mused Bryce, "there was always nursing going on in this town, formally and informally. Half the young women had sick or elderly relatives to take care of, to give their youth to."
"I guess it's that way yet," said Craye.
"Old people don't live so long in the city, I guess," his wife remarked. "Well, Mrs. Tarrant had enough of her own folks to nurse as well as strangers. Why, she's never gone anywhere, and always wanted to travel, too. I guess, Doctor, you just have to cure her."
"I'll do my best," Bryce returned earnestly.
He had ceased to look on Mrs. Tarrant merely as a case. He had come back to do what he could for old friends and neighbors. A sense of personal interest was strange and stimulating. After Mrs. Craye found out that he would eat no more, she said:
"Now, Doctor, we want you should feel at home, Charlie and I, and we wonder if you'd like to walk around town? You can go alone, or with Charlie, or sit here on the porch, or he'll take you for a drive, whichever you prefer."
Bryce looked from her kind little face to Craye's.
"Perhaps your husband and I can have a chat later on," he said; "but I think I should like to look about alone."
Craye's face lighted; he wanted Bryce to be free, but his simple heart could not but feel flattered at the thought of a little talk with his famous confrère.
"Oh, never mind me," he said, heartily; "you just stay out as late as you like. I'll be sitting up for you."
Bryce found his hat and passed down the cement walk. When he looked back from the gate, they were both standing in the doorway, the baby in Mrs. Craye's arms. She waved its little right hand at him, and he took off his hat and waved back.
Twilight was beginning, and as he strolled down the street he saw girls in white dresses sitting on porches, and young men turning in at the various houses or sitting on the steps. Some girl was singing a song popular in his city six months before, but the young voice made it fresh to him. He reached Bryce's Lane, and stood for some time looking at the sunken brown house which had harbored his restless boyhood. No wonder, he thought, that he had never cared to return to it.
He searched for the path across the field; it was still there; he wondered if the feet of other lovers kept it fresh. The green roof was darkening in the early twilight. Amelia had always liked the color, he recalled. She had said that if nature preferred it, that was a good precedent. He climbed the fence, and stood looking at the cottage among the trees. The porch of the house was hidden by the foliage, but young voices floated out to him. He wondered if Amelia were married; was she living here still? Just as probably she had sold the house or rented it; perhaps her father had not left it to her at all, but had willed it to James Tarrant's wife. He remembered the bent, querulous old man. Amelia had been one of those who cheerfully offered up her youth a sacrifice to age. How rarely she could be spared to go for walks with him to Lover's Lane.
Lover's Lane! He turned down the road towards it, hurrying to reach it before the darkness should quite come. Just a long narrow road of green—lilac bushes, sycamores, and oaks thick at the sides. In the spring, when the young lilacs broke into a tender lavender mist, those who were brave in love walked together there. They were above the crude teasing of their companions, and perhaps that was why no word was ever said that could disturb the sacred tenderness of those to whom Lover's Lane belonged by love's right.
The green was glooming to black when he reached the Lane. He had just time to find the white stone near the little Bubbling Spring where he and Amelia had come the night before he had gone away. He sat down heavily like a man who has been running. He was quite alone, and there was no sound in the place except the muffled ripple of thin water. He took off his hat and felt the cool moist air of spring. He picked up some cool pebbles from the brook and dropped them from one hand to the other, mechanically.
He was a successful man, but all his life he realized he had lacked something—not Amelia alone, but the right to be loved. She had said that she could not leave her old father and uncle; that she must not let herself think of love—she must not, did not love him. He had not believed her. He had thought that she did love him, but not considering herself free, she would not hurt him and herself by confessing the truth.
He remembered the impatient pain of that night of parting; but then there had been no sense of defeat, and to-night defeat had been born. Then he had had a heart of courage. He would conquer; he would return soon with money and fame and take her away with him. Success must come to his youth—success in every sort. And to-night he was rich, famous; he had conquered, but he had been defeated; for youth was gone and youth's right to love and to be loved. Even the simple Crayes had it; perhaps Amelia herself had it; but he had missed what he had never till now felt the lack of.
He could see again the slim young figure in its quaint flounced dress, the little brown curls slipping out of the prim net that confined her coils of hair. Her deep blue eyes were full of irrepressible smiles; and her laugh! Could time or care ever dull the joyousness of that laugh!
Why had he not come back? He pondered forgotten reasons. She had forbidden it, he remembered, and at first there was hurt pride, and then the insistent demands of his work, and finally indifference. No doubt if he should see her now he would wonder at the fervors of his youth. But it was not of the present Amelia that he thought. What did it matter what farmer she had married? He was mourning the irrevocable right that his youth should have won to love and to be loved. Amelia's slim figure stood among the trunks of the sycamores, and pointed him back sadly along the lost years.
No one came. He wondered if ever a sad lover walked alone in the Lane, or if some magic kept it for happy lovers who, grown into placid married people, silently cherished the memory of it, and sometime sympathetically watched their own children taking their first shy walks here. He shivered a little as he rose to go. There was no place here for one who could no longer dream.
He felt strangely lonely as he walked briskly back past the houses where the white dresses of the women showed dimly among the shadows of the porches. These people had not gone away to seek their fortunes, to conquer whatever they wanted from life; they had stayed by their own doors, and life had come to them and poured her riches in their laps.
Craye was sitting on the steps, the red disk of his cigar making a little welcoming spot of color. He hurried down the walk to meet his guest.
"You must be tired," he said, anxiously; "I guess you'd better go right up to bed."
"Perhaps I had," returned Bryce, wearily.
Craye was disappointed.
"I wouldn't keep you up for worlds," he said, regretfully.
"Perhaps you will let me stay till the afternoon train to-morrow," said Bryce; "I can drive about with you—"
"Oh, will you?" cried the young man, eagerly; "that would be great for me."
Bryce went to his room—a typical country bedroom: yellow oak furniture, white muslin curtains and hangings, and cheap lithographs on the walls; but it was clean, and in some way homelike. In the night a cry from the baby, soon hushed, woke him, and he opened his eyes on a world of radiant moonlight, turned on his pillow, and slept again.
In the morning he woke late—as alert and sure as ever he had been in his life. He willed to keep his mind away from the fact that he had come home; he was his keen professional self. Even Mrs. Craye, charming with her baby and her country breakfast, could not touch his mood. Craye felt it, and after the meal was over, and the two men were on the front porch, he plunged at once into a discussion of Mrs. Tarrant's case. He was afraid she could not live long; the question was, would an operation prolong her life sufficiently to make the risk worth taking? Bryce liked the young man's deferential way of stating his diagnosis.
"You said she would be ready for us at any time?" he asked, rising. "Shall we not go now?"
Craye responded with alacrity.
"She'll be glad to get it over, and her friends will know," he said; "'tisn't worth while driving; just three
blocks from here."
He into the house to get their cases and to tell his little wife good-by.
"I guess the neighbors are interested," he said, indicating the heads at windows and doors as they passed. "They'd all like to see Mrs. Tarrant well."
Mrs. Tarrant's was a green frame house, set back from the street and well hidden by trees.
"Looks like a place where there ought to be lots of people," Craye said, as they walked up the gravel path; "but she lives alone, except for a hired girl."
They entered without knocking, and going up the steep staircase, stopped at the door of the south room. Craye tapped.
"Come in," said a voice.
Craye entered first, his big figure blocking Bryce's view.
"Good day, Mrs. Tarrant. Here's Dr. Bryce to see you," he said cheerfully.
And then Bryce saw her. The brown hair was gray, but little thin curls still strayed away from its coils. The blue eyes were faded, but they still wore their look of hope.
"Amelia! Amelia Mason." he stammered.
"Amelia Tarrant," she corrected; "I married James some time after sister died. Hadn't you heard?"
"N-no; I got very little news from home," he answered, confusedly.
"We were more attentive to you," she said, smiling; "we've heard all about you for years—haven't we, Charlie Craye ?"
"We certainly have," Craye returned.
Bryce looked about the darkened room; the walls were soft green, the color Amelia loved, and the furniture willow. Always she tried to bring nature as close to her as she could. She followed his glance.
"Does it seem dull in here, John? The light hurt my eyes. Don't you want to get your examination over? Then we can gossip. There is so much I want to ask you about."
Bryce silent a few moments, turning over the books on her table. Then he looked up with a slight squaring of his shoulders, and an alert tension of his brows and jaw. He was again the man of impersonal science.
When it was over, with a few cheerful words to Amelia, the two men went down-stairs into her little parlor.
"Well?" asked Craye.
Bryce shook his head.
"It is just as you said; no hope, of course. Suppose we leave the question of an operation to her. Without it, she cannot live more than a year."
"Not two, you think?"
"Possibly two when one considers her indomitable hopefulness," Bryce returned. "Let us leave it to her."
"You think we had better?' hesitated Craye. "Her friends will gladly pay us for the operation—"
Bryce laughed a little drearily.
"Did you ever know Amelia Mason—Mrs. Tarrant—to let any one else manage her life for her? She would find us out, Craye."
"I didn't know she was a friend of yours," said Craye, irrelevantly. "You thought she was the first wife, didn't you! Well, she brought up all the first wife's children. I don't see that they've ever helped her much since."
'I think I shall go up again," Bryce said.
"You'll tell her, then ?"
"Yes; don't wait for me."
"All right. Come back any time you like, sir."
Craye went out, and Bryce slowly mounted the stairs to the south room.
"Well, John, you have been long enough over your silly consultation," Amelia said, gayly.
He sat down by the bed and said, gently, "Are you tired, Millie?"
The old name slipped unconsciously from his lips. She smiled.
"Nobody's called me that for twenty years," she said. "James called me 'Amelia' and the children 'Auntie.' No, I'm not tired. You'd better tell me, but I know already."
She listened as he told her painfully.
"So I'll live maybe a year if I don't have the operation, and maybe two years if I do. Dear me, John, I don't mind hearing it. Will you pull down the blind, please? You and Charlie forgot and left it up when you went down-stairs."
He obeyed and again took his seat beside her. For a little time they said nothing. He looked at her face, younger in the subdued light, and saw that it had grown grave. One white hand lay on the white coverlid, still—and Amelia's hands had always been in motion. As he looked about the darkened room with its green walls, that strange forgotten mood came back to him. The Amelia he used to know had been the cheerful woman chatting to himself and Craye; but now there was a new expression in the blue eyes that looked up searchingly at him. It was the look of a woman who had suffered and who understood. The gayety of the girl was gone; in some way he knew it was a mask that was to be taken away between them two only. He glanced at the pictures on her walls; serene beautiful pictures—pictures of fulfilment. His hand, moving restlessly on the table, swept against one or two good books. The simple people of the town knew the service of her body, but from some other source Amelia must have fed her mind and soul.
He turned back to her a face of sorrow and of pity.
"Oh, Millie; oh, Millie!" he said, and took her hand softly.
Tears rose to her eyes, and yet the look in them was not unhappy.
"A long, long road it has been, John," she said.
And they had not travelled it together!
He pressed her hand suddenly.
"Did you love him so much better than you did me, Millie? If I had come back—oh, I should have come back."
She looked at him half wonderingly.
"Ah, you don't understand, quite. I don't know, John dear. I think if I had been free I should have come to love you, but I was never really free."
He looked at her, puzzled, and she shook her head impatiently, so that some frail gray curls slipped upon her temples.
"You see, after sister died, I moved father up to James's house and took care of them all. A little more than a year later father died, and it seemed best for the children's sake to marry James."
"Oh, Millie!" he said; "and I might have come back."
"I don't know that it would have made any difference," she said, musingly. "It seemed as if the gift of love was never there for me to take. There were always—duties. James always loved sister, and not me; I knew that, always; if he woke suddenly in the night he spoke her name. I don't think it occurred to me to do anything but just go on day by day taking care of the children and James. It seemed as if I did my work in the present, but there always—in the future—"
She looked far beyond him, and he wondered what vision she saw.
"Long ago—you should have gone with me long ago," he said.
She did not seem to hear him, as she lay with a beautiful young smile on her face. He had seen such a look on the faces of girls in Lover's Lane; a smile for love rather than for the actual lover.
"I've seen a lot of sorrow and happiness going on in the lives about me, John," she said; "I was just a spectator, you know. And there's always something wrong about the lives that love has been left out of; even if it brings nothing but sorrow, every one has a right to love and to be loved."
He started; his own thought meeting him!
"I've been coming closer and closer to the other rim of my life," she said, with a little smile. "I guess I'm about through."
The dull shadows of the room seemed to pulsate with silence. At length he turned a questioning face upon her—this man who had sat by so many a death-bed; and there was a strange weight in his words.
"Tell me," he said; "you've lived so that your vision must be clear: are you sure of another life?"
She smiled at him.
"Oh, I don't think much of what we've been taught, John. It all seems just words—words. I think of all the suffering, the grief, the pain of those who have loved and have not been loved, and those that have been hurt by love, and I don't understand. But, John, here's one thing I know," and she touched his hand lightly, "God is good, and I'm sure, sure that there will be another life for those who have never loved. They'll have another chance. Oh no, I'm not afraid to die. I'm sure—sure."
Something in the man's throat hurt him, and he drew a sharp breath. She put out her other hand and clasped his fingers.
"And we haven't been unhappy, either of us," she went on.
"No, no; not so unhappy as some of those who have had love."
"Ah, but I'd have changed places," she murmured.
They fell into silence. The minutes went by for both of them in a kind of sad peace. He had a sudden irrelevant thought of the life that waited for him—letters, invitations, the strenuous work of his profession. In a few hours he would be back again in the swift old current, and she would lie here quietly waiting (for he knew without question what her choice would be), waiting with the look of indestructible hope in her eyes.
The sun went under a cloud and the room became suddenly darker. Amelia turned her head with a sigh.
"I suppose I'm tired. Stay with me, John, till I go to sleep. I don't want to see you go. I don't like partings."
She shut her eyes; presently she breathed more deeply, and her light grasp on his hand slackened. He withdrew his fingers softly, and leaning over her, smoothed the little curls that he had touched only once, long ago, in Lover's Lane.