The Lilac Girl

Chapter XI.

June mellowed into July and July moved by in a procession of hot, languorous days and still, warm nights. Sometimes it rained, and then the leaves and flowers, adroop under the sun's ardor, quivered and swayed with delight and scented the moist air with the sweet, faint fragrance of their gratitude. Often the showers came at night, and Wade, lying in bed with doors and windows open, could hear it pattering upon the leaves and drumming musically upon the shingles. And he fancied, too, that he could hear the thankful earth drinking it in with its millions of little thirsty mouths. After such a night he awoke to find the room filled with dewy, perfumed freshness and radiant with sunshine, while out of doors amidst the sparkling leaves the birds trilled paeans to the kindly heavens.

By the middle of July Wade had settled down comfortably into the quiet life of Eden Village. Quiet it was, but far from hum-drum. On the still, mirrored surface of a pool even the dip of an insect's wing will cause commotion. So it was in Eden Village. On the placid surface of existence there the faintest zephyr became a gale that raised waves of excitement; the tiniest happening was an event. It is all a matter of proportion. Wade experienced as much agitation when a corner of the woodshed caught on fire, and he put it out with a broom, as when with forty men behind him, he had fought for hours to save the buildings at the mine two years before. Something of interest was always happening. There was the day when the serpent appeared in Eden. Appropriately enough, it was Eve who discovered it, curled up in the sun right by the gate. Her appeals for assistance brought Wade in a hurry, and the serpent, after an exciting chase through the hedges and flower beds, was finally dispatched. It proved to be an adder of blameless character, but neither Eve nor Miss Mullett had any regrets. Eve declared that a snake was a snake, no matter what any one--meaning Wade--said, and Wade was forced to acknowledge the fact. Armed with a shovel, they marched to the back garden, Wade holding the snake by its unquiet tail, and interred it there, so that Alexander the Great, the tortoise-shell cat, wouldn't eat it and be poisoned. Subsequently the affair had to be discussed in all its aspects by Eve and Wade in the shade of the cedars.

And then there was the anxious week when Zephania had a bad sore throat that looked for awhile like diphtheria, and Wade prepared his own breakfasts and lunches and dined alternately at The Cedars and with Doctor Crimmins. And, of course, there was the stirring occasion of Zephania's return to duty, Zephania being patently proud of the disturbance she had created, and full of quaint comments on life, death, and immortality, those subjects seemingly having engaged her mind largely during her illness. For several days her voice was noticeably lacking in quality and volume, and "There is a Happy Land," which was her favorite hymn during that period, was rendered so subduedly that Wade was worried, and had to have the Doctor's assurance that Zephania was not going into a decline.

These are only a few of the exciting things that transpired during Wade's first month in Eden Village. There were many others, but as I tell them they seem much less important than they really were, and I shall mention only one more. That was something other than a mere event; it savored of the stupendous; it might almost be called a phenomenon. Its fame spread abroad until folks discussed it over the tea-table or in front of the village stores in places as far distant as Stepping and Tottingham and Bursley. In Eden Village it caused such a commotion as had not disturbed the tranquillity since the weather-vane on the church steeple was regilded. As you are by this time, kind reader, in a fever of excitement and curiosity, I'll relieve your suspense.

Wade had his cottage painted, inside and out!

Not content with that, he had a new roof put on, built a porch on the south side of the house, cut a door from the sitting-room, and had the fence mended and the gate rehung! It was the consensus of Eden Village opinion that you can't beat a Westerner for extravagance and sheer audacity.

But I haven't told you all even yet. I've saved something for a final thrill. Wade had dormer windows built into the sleeping-rooms, a thing which so altered the appearance of the house that the neighbors stood aghast. Some of the older ones shook their heads and wondered what old Colonel Selden Phelps would say if he could say anything. And the spirit of progress and improvement reached even to the grounds. Zenas Third toiled with spade and pruning-knife and bundles of shrubs and plants came from Boston and were set out with lavish prodigality. In the matter of alterations to the house Eve was consulted on every possible occasion, while garden improvements were placed entirely in Miss Mullett's capable hands. That lady was in her element, and for a week or more one could not pass the cottage without spying Miss Mullett and Zenas Third hard at work somewhere about. Miss Mullett wore a wide-brimmed straw hat to keep the sun from her pink cheeks and a pair of Wade's discarded gloves to save her hands. The gloves were very, very much too large for her, and, when not actually engaged in using her trowel, Miss Mullett stood with arms held out in scarecrow style so as not to contaminate her gown with garden mold, and presented a strange and unusual appearance. Every afternoon, as regular as clockwork, the Doctor came down the street and through the gate to lavish advice, commendation, and appropriate quotations from his beloved poets. At five Zephania appeared with the tea things and the partie carree gathered in the parlor and brought their several little histories up to date, and laughed and poked fun at each other, and drew more and more together as time passed.

Perhaps you've been thinking that Wade's advent in Eden Village was the signal for calls and invitations to dinners, receptions, and bridge. If you have you don't know New England, or, at least, you don't know Eden Village. One can't dive into society in Eden Village; one has to wade in, and very cautiously. In the course of events the newcomer became thoroughly immersed, and the waters of Eden Village society enclosed him beneficently, but that was not yet. He was still undergoing his novitiate, and to raise his hat to Miss Cousins, when he encountered that austere lady on the street, was as yet the height of social triumph. Wade, however, was experiencing no yearnings for a wider social sphere. Eve and Miss Mullett and the Doctor, Zephania, and the two Zenases were sufficient for him. In fact he would have been quite satisfied with one of that number could he have chosen the one.

For Wade's deliberate effort to fall in love with Eve had proved brilliantly successful. In fact he had not been conscious of the effort at all, so simple and easy had the process proved. Of course he ought to have been delighted, but, strange to tell, after the first brief moment of self-gratulation, he began to entertain doubts as to the wisdom of his plan. Regrets succeeded doubts. Being in love with a girl who didn't care a rap whether you stayed or went wasn't the unalloyed bliss he had pictured. He would know better another time.

That was in the earlier stage. Later it dawned upon him that there never could be another time, and he didn't want that there should. This knowledge left him rather dazed. He felt a good deal like a man who, walking across a pleasant beach and enjoying the view, suddenly finds himself up to his neck in quicksand. And, like a person in such a quandary, Wade's first instinctive thought was to struggle.

The struggle lasted three days, three days during which he sedulously avoided The Cedars and tramped dozens of miles with Zenas Third in search of fish--and very frequently lost his bait because his thoughts were busy elsewhere. At the end of the three days he found himself, to return to our comparison, deeper than ever.

Then it was that he looked facts in the face. He reduced the problem to simple quantities and studied it all one evening, with the aid of an eighth of a pound of tobacco and a pile of lumber which the carpenters had left near the woodshed. The problem, as Wade viewed it, was this:

A man, with little to recommend him save money, is head over heels in love with the loveliest, dearest girl the Lord ever made, a girl a thousand times too good for the man, and who doesn't care any more for him than she does for the family cat or the family doctor. What's the answer?

Wade gave it up--the problem, not the girl. He wasn't good at problems. Out West it had been Ed Craig who had figured out the problems on paper, and Wade who had reached the same conclusions with pick and shovel and dynamite. Their methods differed, but the results attained were similar. So, as I have said, Wade abandoned the problem on paper and set to work, metaphorically, with steel and explosives.