Frances Hodgson Burnett

“ Rupert took her face between his hands and looked into it adoringly.
“Don’t be frightened, Sheba,” he said; “don’t be unhappy. Lovely darling, I will take care of you.”
She pressed her soft cheek against his hand.
“I know you will,” she said, “and of Uncle Tom, too. I couldn’t be unhappy—we all three love each other so. I do not believe we shall be unhappy, even if we are poor enough to be hungry.”
So their moment of dismay ended in smiles. They were passing through a phase of life in which it is not easy to be unhappy. Somehow things always brightened when they drew near each other. ”

“ Big Tom gave him a long, steady look.
“Good Lord, man!” he said, after it, “am I the man to judge another? I’ve made nothing of life.”
“You have done no creature a wrong,” Baird said. “And you have helped some to happiness.”
“Well,” admitted Big Tom, “perhaps that’s true. But I’ve been a lumbering failure myself. I’ve just judgment enough now to know that there’s nothing a man can say about a thing like this—nothing—and just sense enough not to try to say it.”
“If you go back to North Carolina,” asked Baird, “may I come to see you—and to see her? She need never know.” ”

“ To the simple and ardent idealist its white stateliness must always suggest something symbolic, and, after all, it is the ardent and simple idealist whose dreams and symbols paint to prosaic human minds the beautiful impossibilities whose unattainable loveliness so allures as to force even the unexalted world into the endeavour to create such reproductions of their forms as crude living will allow.
Tom leaned against the side of the car window and watched the great dome with an air of curious reflection. Sheba and Rupert leaned forward and gazed at it with dreaming eyes. ”

“ Sometimes, after a day in which Judge Rutherford had been encouraged or Tom had had a talk with a friendly member who had listened to the story of the claim with signs of interest, they felt their star of hope rising; it never sinks far below the horizon when one’s teens are scarcely of the past—and Sheba and Rupert spent a wonderful evening making plans for a future of ease and fortune. ”

“ As central figures of a government claim, the pair were exquisitely incongruous. Their youth was so radiant and untried, their bright good looks so bloomed, that the man looking at them felt—with a realising sense of humour as well as fanciful sentiment—as if a spring wind wafted through a wood close grown with wild daffodils had swept into a heated manufactory where machinery whirred and ill-clad workers bent over their toil.
“Uncle Tom will be very glad to see you,” said Sheba, as they went into the house. “Judge Rutherford says you will tell us what to do.” ”

“ Big Tom De Willoughby, in two wooden rooms behind a cross-roads store, in a small frame house kept in order by a negro woman, and in the genteel poverty of Miss Burford’s second floor, had surrounded himself with the comforts and pleasures of the affections. It was not possible to enter the place without feeling their warmth, and Baird found himself nourished by it. He saw that Rupert, too, was nourished by it. His young good looks and manhood were developing under its influence day by day. He seemed to grow taller and stronger. ”

“ He owed Tom a bitter grudge in a mild way. His bitterness was the bitterness of a little rat baulked of cheese.
He had kept safely what he had found in the deserted cabin, but, as the years passed, he lost something of the hopes he had at first cherished. When he had seen Sheba growing into a tall beauty he had calculated that her market value was increasing. A handsome young woman who might marry well, might be willing to pay something to keep a secret quiet—if any practical person knew the secret and it was unpleasant. Well-to-do husbands did not want to hear their wives talked about. ”

“ Judge Rutherford was striding up and down the sitting-room, but it was Sheba who was deputed to tell the news.
She did it in a little scene which reminded him of her childhood. She drew him to a chair and sat down on his knee, clasping both slim, tender arms round his neck, tears suddenly rushing into her eyes.
“You and Rupert are rich men, Uncle Tom, darling,” she said. “The claim has passed. You are rich. You need never be troubled about mortgages again.”
He was conscious of a tremendous shock of relief. He folded her in his arms as if she had been a baby. ”

“ She had made a wreath of white narcissus and laid it on her hair, and she had twisted together a sort of long garland of the same blossoms and cast it loosely round her waist.
“She never did that before,” Tom said, as he watched her. “Good Lord! what a picture she is, standing there with her face lifted. I wonder what she’s thinking of.”
“Uncle Tom,” she said, when she sauntered back to him, “does the moonlight make you feel sad without being unhappy at all? That is what it does to me.”
“It’s the spring, Sheba,” he said, as he had said it in the morning; “it’s the spring.” ”

“ The further from romance the world drifts, the fairer 297 it becomes in its fagged eyes. So few stories unfold themselves sweetly from beginning to end that a first chapter is always more or less alluring, and as he marked the youth and beauty of those two and saw how their young eyes and smiles met in question and response at every thought, to Farquhar, who still retained the fragments of an imagination not wholly blighted by the House of Representatives, it seemed rather as if he had wandered into a world where young Cupid and Psyche still moved and breathed in human guise. ”

“ She had always found an interest in John Baird. When he had come to Willowfield she had seen in him that element which her whole long life had lacked. His emotional potentialities had wakened her imagination. If she had been a young woman she knew that she might have fallen tragically and hopelessly in love with him; as an old woman she found it well worth her while to watch him and speculate upon him. When he had become engaged to Agnes Stornaway, she had watched him and secretly wondered how the engagement would end ”

“ Tom answered, “but you may come. We shall go back, and I intend to let those two young ones set up a Garden of Eden of their own. It will be a good thing to look on at. Yes, you may come.”
“That is mercifulness,” said Baird, and this time when he put out his hand he did not withdraw it, and Tom gave it a strong, sober clasp which expressed more than one emotion.
When Tom returned to the little house near Dupont Circle, Uncle Matt wore a rigidly repressed air as he opened the door, and Miss Burford stood in the hall as if waiting for something. Her ringlets were shaken by a light tremor. ”

“ The rapturous first scents of the year were there, drawn by the sun and blown by vagrant puffs of wind from hyacinths and jonquils, white narcissus and blue violets. Sheba walked among the beds, every few minutes kneeling down upon the grass to bury her face in pink and yellow and white clusters, inhaling the breath of flowers and the pungent freshness of the sweet brown earth at the same time. She had lived among leaves and growing things until she felt herself in some unexplainable way a part of the world they belonged to. The world beyond the mountains she knew nothing of ”

“ It was the emotional aspect of the situation which delighted and disturbed him, the dramatic picturesqueness of it. Here was Tom—good old Tom—all Hamlin knew Tom and his virtues and witticisms—Lord! there wasn’t a man in the county who didn’t love him—yes, love him. And here was Sheba that Tom had been a father to. And what a handsome little creature she’d grown into—and, but for Tom, the Lord knew what would have become of her. ”

“ The flare of an occasional street-lamp falling on Latimer’s face revealed all its story to his companion, though it might not have so revealed itself to another. Baird himself was wondering how they should each bear themselves throughout the meeting. She would be so wholly unconscious—this girl who had always been happy and knew nothing of the past. To her they would be but a middle-aged popular lecturer and his unattractive-looking friend—while each to himself was a man concealing from her a secret. They must eliminate it from their looks, their voices, their air. ”

“ No young man wanted to be seen talking to her, no young woman cared to walk with her in the streets. She always went home to her room alone, and sat alone, and thought of what had happened to her, trying to explain to herself how it had happened and why it had turned out that she was worse than any other girl. She had never felt like a bad girl. No one had ever called her one before this last year.
Three months after the child was born and died, Margery came back to Willowfield to spend a week at home. She came to see Susan, and they sat together in the tragic little bare room and talked. ”

“ The changes time and the tide of war had made were bringing Tom face to face with a difficulty his hopeful, easy-going nature had never contemplated with any realising sense—the want of money, even the moderate amount the requirements of their simple lives made necessary.
“It’s the taxes that a man can’t stand up against,” Tom said. “You may cut off all you like, and wear your old clothes, but there’s a liveliness about taxes that takes the sand out of you. Talk about the green bay-tree flourishing and increasing, all a tax wants is to be let alone a few years. ”

“ Each moved involuntarily, and Tom turned aside, ostensibly, to pick up a sheet of wrapping paper. The only words exchanged were those relating to the courtesies and the brief remarks heard by the loungers outside. After this the stranger rode away and Tom lounged back to his chair. He made no reply to Stamps’s explanatory aside, and no comment upon the remarks of the company whose curiosity had naturally received a new impetus which spurred them on to gossip a little in the usual vague manner. He gave himself up to speculation. The mere tone of a man’s voice had set his mind to work. ”

“ In the days when old Judge De Willoughby had walked through the streets of Delisleville, ostracized and almost hooted as he passed among those who had once been his friends, it would not have been difficult to prove that he was loyal to the detested Government, but in these later times, when the old man lay quiet in what his few remaining contemporaries still chose to consider a dishonoured grave, undeniable proof of a loyalty which now would tend to the honour and advantage of those who were of his blood was not easy to produce. ”

“ She was the one brightness of my life when I was a boy and you were its one brightness when I was a man. You gave me a reason for living. I am not the kind of man to be my own reason. I needn’t tell you what you have been to me. You were the one man on earth I dared to confess to. I knew you would understand and that you knew what pity was.”
Baird groaned aloud. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief as he listened.
“I knew you were the one man I could trust. I could trust you. I could confide in you, and talk to you about Margery. ”

“ Sheba looked back and saw Mornin showing her teeth and panting for breath, while Molly Hollister waved the last baby’s sunbonnet, holding its denuded owner in her arms. The drive was a long one, but the travellers enjoyed it from first to last. Tom found his companion’s conversation quite sufficient entertainment to while away the time, and when at intervals she refreshed herself from Mornin’s basket and fell asleep, he enjoyed driving along quietly while he held her small, peacefully relaxed body on his knee, quite as much as another man might have enjoyed a much more exciting occupation. ”

“ Latimer flung back his shock of uneven black locks. His hollow eyes flashed daringly.
“What doth it profit a man,” he cried, “if he save his own soul and lose the whole world, caring nothing for its agony, making no struggle to help it in its woe and grieving? A Man once gave His life for the world. Has any man ever given his soul?”
“You go far—you go far!” exclaimed Baird, drawing a short, sharp breath. ”

“ It is a monumental thing at this crisis of affairs—a huge, unpopular claim on a resenting government carried through by persons impelled solely by the most purely primitive and disinterested of motives. An ingenuous county politician, fresh from his native wilds, works for it through sheer prehistoric affection and neighbourliness; an old black man—out of a story-book—forges a powerful link of evidence for mere faithful love’s sake ”

“ It ought all to have been as much nature as the rain falling and the corn ripening in the sun. If we had met when we were young things—on the very brink of it all—and smiled into each other’s eyes and taken each other’s hands, and kissed each other’s lips, we might have ripened together like the corn. What is it that’s gone wrong?” All the warm normal affections of manhood, which might have remained undeveloped and been cast away, had been lavished on the child Sheba. ”

“ It’s not often treated well. People have got into the way of expecting trouble and tragedy to come out of it. We are always hearing of its unhappiness in books. Poets write about it that way.”
“I suppose it is often unhappy,” said Rupert; “but just now it seems as if it could not be.”
“What I’ve been wanting to see,” said Tom, “is young love come up like a flower and be given its dew and sun and rain—and bloom and bloom its best.”
He drew a big sigh.
“That poor child who lies on the hillside under the pines,” he went on, “Sheba’s mother—hers was young love—and it brought tragedy and death. ”