Dwellers in Arcady: The Story of an Abandoned Farm

And how the family did grow up. Why, once when they were home from school I came from the study one day to find a young man in the house – a strange young man, from somewhere in the school neighborhood. I couldn't imagine what he was doing there until I was taken aside and it was explained to me that he was there to see our eldest, the Pride. That little girl, imagine! It is true she was eighteen – I counted, up on my fingers to see – but the Pride! why, only yesterday she was bare-footed, wading in the brook. Somehow I couldn't make it seem right.

IV

And then one eventful day

I suppose it was about that time that we acquired a car – it would be likely to be about that time. 'Most everybody was getting cars, and Lord Beaconsfield, good Old Beek, was getting slower each year and could no longer keep up even with our deliberate progress. Furthermore, I learned to drive the car, in time. It is true I knocked some splinters from the barn, put a crimp in a mud-guard, and smashed another man's tail-light in the process, but nothing fatal occurred, though I found it a pretty good plan to stick fairly close to my new study on the cedar slope if I wanted to keep up with the garage and damage bills. Those bills startled me, at first, and then, like everybody else, I became callous and reckless, and we did without a good many other things in order that the car might not go unshod or climb limpingly the stiff New England hills.

And then at last, one eventful day – a day far back in that happy, halcyon age when ships sailed as freely across the ocean as ferry-boats across the North River and men roved at will among the nations of the earth – one sunny August morning, eight years after the day of our coming, we locked the old house behind us and drove away in the car to a New York pier and sailed with it (the car, I mean, not the pier) to the Mediterranean, and the shores of France. In that fair land, while the world was still at peace, we wandered for more than a year, resting where we chose, as long as we chose, all the more unhurried and happy for not knowing that we were seeing the end of the Golden Age. Oh, those lovely days when we went gipsying along the roads of Provence and Picardy and Touraine! I cannot write of them now, for in to-day's shock of battle they have already become unreal and dreamlike. I touch them and the bloom vanishes. But sometimes when I do not try to write, and only lean back and close my eyes, I can catch again a little of their breath and sweetness; I can see the purpling vineyards and the poppied fields; I can drift once more with Elizabeth and our girls through the wonderland of France.

War came and brought the ruin of the world. It was late in the year when we returned to America, and it was on a winter evening that I drove our car back to its old place in the barn, after its long journeyings by land and sea. Our old house had remained faithful. A fire roaring up the chimney made it home.

We went to Westbury's, however, for the holidays. Westbury with the years had become a prosperous contractor, for Brook Ridge was no longer an abandoned land, but a place of new and beautiful homes. Westbury's prosperity, however, had not made him proud – not too proud to offer us old-time Christmas hospitality at his glowing fireside.

V

Was it the spirit of our garden?

Summer found us back in the old house, almost as if we had not left it. Almost, but not quite. Somehow the world had changed. Perhaps it was just the war – perhaps it was because we were all older – our girls beginning to have lives of their own – because the family unit was getting ready to dissolve.

The dissolving began at last one sunny June day when the Pride left us. It was the young man whom I had noticed around the house a year or two before who took her away. She seemed to prefer to go with him than to stay with us, I could not exactly make out why, but I did not think it best, or safe, to argue the question, and I drove them to the train afterward.

Then the Hope and the Joy got the notion of spending their summers in one of those camps that are so much the fashion now, and at last there came a day that the Hope, who such a little while ago was running care-free and happy-hearted in the sun, bade us good-by and sailed away – sailed back across the ocean to France, an enlisted soldier, to do her part where the world's bravest were battling for the world's freedom.

For us, indeed, the world had changed; we had little need any more for the old house that on a July day twelve years before we had found and made our home. It had seen our brief generation pass; it was ready for the next. And when, one day, there came a young man and his bride, just starting on the way we had come, and seeing the beauty of the spot, just as we had seen it, wanted to own and enjoy it, just as we had owned and enjoyed it, we yielded it to them gladly, even if sorrowfully, for one must give up everything, some time or other, and it is an economy of regret to give to the right person, at the right time.

And now just here I want to record a curious thing. Earlier in these pages I have spoken of planting one year some white canterbury-bells that did not grow, or at least, so far as we could discover, did not bloom. In six seasons we never saw any sign of them, yet on the day we were leaving our house, closing it for the last time, I found on the spot where they had been planted, in full bloom, a stalk of white canterbury-bells! Had the seed germinated after all those years? Was it the spirit of our garden, sprung up there to tell us good-by? Who can answer?

Our abandoned farm is no longer ours. We, too, have abandoned it. Only the years that we spent there remain to us – a tender and beautiful memory. Whatever there was of shadow or misfortune has long since passed, by. I see now all our summers there bathed in mellow sunlight, all the autumns aglow with red and gold, all the winters clean with sparkling snow, all the springs green with breaking buds and white with bloom. If those seasons were not flawless at the time, they have become so, now when they are added to the past.

And I know that they were indeed happy, for they make my heart ache remembering, and it is happiness, and not misery, that makes the heart ache – when it is gone.