Little Arcady

“ Arcady of the Little Country, however, knows there is neither bitterness nor real cynicism in Solon Denney, founder, editor, and proprietor of the Little Arcady Argus; motto, "Hew to the Line, Let the Chips Fall Where they May!" Indeed, we do know Solon. Often enough has the Argus hewn inexorably to the line, when that line led straight through the heart of its guiding genius and through the hearts of us all. ”

“ It was an early morning hour, when it was easy to believe in the perfect fitness of Little Arcady's name; an hour in a time when the Potts-troubled waters had been mercifully stilled by the hand of God; an hour when the spirit of each Little Arcadian might share to its own fulness in the large serenity of the ageless world-soul.
I recalled Mrs. Potts's paper on "The Lesson of Greek Art," which had enriched two columns of the Argus after its reading to the ladies of the Literary and Home Study Club. ”

“ But a retribution subtler than mere drowning awaited the superfluous Potts; a retribution so simple of mechanism, so swift, so potent, and wrought with a talent so masterly, that the right of its instigator to the title of Boss of Little Arcady seemed to be unassailable for all future time. ”

“ In a setting less prosaic than Little Arcady, where events might be of a story-fitness, that lover would have been alive by a happy chance, estranged by the misunderstanding but splendidly faithful, and I should have been helper and interested witness to an ideal reconciliation; thereafter to play out my game with a full heart, though with an exterior placidly unconcerned. But with us events halt always a little short of true romance. They are unexcitingly usual. ”

“ And this view of the situation came also to be the desperate view of Solon himself. That he suffered a black hour each week when Mrs. Potts read the Argus to him with corrections to make it square with "One Hundred Common Errors" and with good taste, in no way lessened the feeling against him. If he sustained an injury peculiar to his calling, it seemed probable that he would the sooner be moved to action. Little Arcady did not know what he could do, but it had faith that he would do something if he were pushed hard enough. So the good people pushed and trusted and pushed. ”

“ I have said that the Potts-troubled waters of Little Arcady were for the moment stilled. By the hands of the gods had they been mercifully stilled so that not for a month had any citizen been asked to subscribe for any improving book or patented device of culture. ”

“ While our hero stalked ahead, stroking his luxuriant whiskers ever and anon, we pursued him at an interval so great that not the most alert citizen of Little Arcady could have suspected this sinister undercurrent to his simple life.
It is a long walk to the cemetery, but we reached it to find Billy seated on the steps that lead over the fence, still shielded by his hairy envelope.
"A tough case!" he whispered as we sat by him. "Our man has his spies out, and my every step is dogged both night and day." ”

“ We were obliged to confess that there were no Families in Little Arcady, in the true sense of the term, though we did not divine its true sense until she favored us with the detail that her second cousin had married a relative of the Adams family. We said honestly that we were devoid of Families in that sense. None of us had ever been able to marry an Adams. ”

“ Again, he is amazingly sensitive for one not devoid of humor. In a pleasant sense he is acutely aware of himself, and he does not dislike to know that you feel his quality. Still again, he is bound to spice his writing. Were it his lot to report events on the Day of Judgment, I believe the Argus account would be thought too highly colored by many persons of good taste.
But Little Arcady knows that Solon is loyal to its welfare—knows that he is fit to wield the mightiest lever of Civilization in its behalf on Wednesday of each week. ”

“ They are to be watched in their pretty flitting, loved only in their freedom and from afar, with no clumsy reachings. That was a good thing to know in any world.
The Argus announced my home-coming with a fine flourish of my title in Solon's best style. It said that I had come back to take up the practice of the law. Not even Solon knew that I had come back to the memory of her.
This is how it befell that I was presently engrossed to outward seeming with the affairs of Little Arcady—even to the extent of a casual Potts, and those blessed contingencies that were later to unfold from him. ”

“ Early in November an evening affair was held in her honor at the Eubanks home. The Eubankses being our leading Presbyterians, and Mrs. Potts having allied herself with that church, it was felt that they were best fitted to give the lady her initial impression of Little Arcady's society. Not only were the three Eubanks girls talented, but the mother was a social leader, Eustace was travelled, having been one of an excursion party to the Holy Land, and the family had relatives living in Philadelphia. None of the girls had married, nor had Eustace. ”

“ But Solon Denney was not the man to betray it if a doubting heart beat within his breast. To the town that now lavished admiration upon him, dubbing him "Boss" without ulterior implications, he was confidence itself, and rife with prophecies of benefit to be derived by our public from the advent of Mrs. Aurelia Potts. With a gallant show of anticipation, a sprig of geranium in his lapel, he set out for the train on that fateful morning, while Little Arcady awaited his return with a cordial curiosity. ”

“ Such clocks as there were left only honest distress in the mind of the beholder,—tall, outlandish old things in wooden cases.
It was believed that Clem had wasted money in paying freight on this stuff. Certainly no one in Little Arcady would have paid those bills to possess the furniture. As to the folly of those who had originally purchased it, the town was likewise a unit. ”

“ No one has ever denied that Denney must have employed a faultless, an incomparable tact, to bring J. Rodney Potts to this agreement. By tact alone had he achieved that which open sneers, covert insult, abuse, ridicule, contumely, and forthright threats had failed to consummate, and in the first flush of the news we all felt much as Westley Keyts said he did.
"Solon Denney is some subtler than me," said Westley, in a winning spirit of concession; "I can see that, now. He's the Boss of Little Arcady after this, all right, so far as I know." ”

“ The guise of Solon's subtlety, the touch of his iron hand in a glove of softest velvet, had been in this wise: he had pointed out to the Colonel that there were richer fields of endeavor to the west of us; newer, larger towns, fitter abodes for a man of his parts; communities which had honors and emoluments to lavish upon the worthy,—prizes which it would doubtless never be in our poor power to bestow.
Potts was stirred by all this, but he was not blinded to certain disadvantages,—"a stranger in a strange land," etc., while in Little Arcady he had already "made himself known." ”

“ I was gratified to see that she shuddered.
"I shall never learn," she pleaded; "their life is so different."
"Let them at least live it out to its natural end, such as it is," I urged.
Hereupon, confessing herself unnerved, Miss Caroline led me to the dining room, and in a glass of Madeira from a cask forwarded by Second-cousin Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey, C.S.A., she pledged herself to preserve the decencies as these had been codified in Little Arcady by the Sons and Daughters of Temperance. ”

“ And I waited no more than a hundred seconds in her presence to applaud his discernment.
I had pictured an old woman—some aged trifle of an elder day, sad, withered, devitalized, intemperately reminiscent—steeped in traditions that would leave her formidable, and impracticable as a friend to me. I had fancied her thus, from Clem's fragmentary and chance descriptions and my own knowledge of what she should be by all laws of the probable; and she was not as I had evolved her.
The day she came was one of Little Arcady's best ”

“ Lincoln was capable of wishing to repeal the Bible," was her nearest approach to asperity.
"A battered old woman!" said Solon to me later. "She looks more like a candy saint, if they make such things,—one that a child has been careless with." We agreed that she was an addition to Little Arcady.
The editor of the Argus sighed at this point, and I thought he might be wishing that all feminine newcomers could be like the latest. For Mrs. ”

“ It is a look of languishing, melting adoration, and if I face him steadily, he must always turn away as if to avoid being overcome—as if the sight of beauty so great as mine could be borne full in the eyes only for the briefest of moments. ”

“ Artifice had aided nature. Pink and white and yellow lilies dotted the stream, while at a little distance a slender, graceful stone bridge arched from shore to shore. Woodbine clustered about it and threw cool, trembling leaf-shadows against the sunlit stones. The arch framed a charming vista of the brook beyond. The canoe slipped noiselessly under the bridge and the strip of shadow rested gratefully for an instant on Ethan’s face. ”

“ If vatted wine in dark cellars turns in its bed and mutters seethingly at this time, in a mysterious, intuitive sympathy with the blossoming grape, a man free and above ground, with eyes to behold that miracle, may hardly hope to escape an answering thrill to its call. ”

“ The small, mighty, night-eyed, well-completed Miss Lansdale, with the voice of a golden jangle, had frozen it about me in lavish abundance.
I went home to play the game, until my eyes tired so that the face of king, queen, and knave leered at me in defeat or simpered sickeningly when I was able to shape their destinies. Thrice I lost interestingly and with profit to my soul, and once I won, though without elation, for we know that little skill may be needed to win when the cards fall right; whereas, to lose profitably is a mark of supreme merit. ”

“ They starred the bank that fell away from my porch to the clear-watered river, and they sang of the young spirit that lives in this old earth so deceptively, defacing it with false scars of age, and craftily permitting us to count years by the thousand, yet remaining always as fresh in itself as on the primal morning when the world was found good by that ill-fated but joyous first pair of lovers. I marvel that so many are fooled by the trick; how so few of us detect that the soul of it all is ageless—has never even wearied. ”

“ Dew-gems shimmered under the caressing breeze and the tips of the spreading, reaching branches [142] nodded and whispered together. Beyond, the little silver-voiced river laughed amongst its shallows and flashed in the sunlight. From the marshland came the happy gurgle of a flock of red-winged blackbirds, while fainter, yet sweet and clear, the light-hearted tinkle of the bobolink floated across from the rising meadows. Sleek, well-conditioned robins balanced amidst the apple-trees and sang contentedly between groomings of their red waistcoats. And louder, clearer, gladder sang Ethan’s heart. ”

“ Ethan went slowly up the winding stream with divided opinions on the subject of his own sanity. To sit in a canoe in the broiling sun on a morning like this merely to talk to a girl was rank idiocy, he told himself. Then he recalled her eyes, her tantalizing little laugh, the soft tones of her voice, the provocative ghost of a smile that so often trembled about her red lips, and owned that she was worth it. ”

“ It was Anthony on whom it was smiling now while he looked at Winifred, at her cheek a little turned from him, at the pretty curve of her arm as she held out some leaves for the old pony to nibble. As for her, she was thinking of an Arcadia for him and for another. And Frank, who had got up to the clump by this time, and could just see the two figures below him in the midst of all this peaceful greenery, thought that Arcadia had already begun for them. It looks like fairy-land to those that are shut out, and still its loveliness is not enough to satisfy us, little as we believe it. ”

“ Lady Veron never rose, the others swam for some time, but Archibald was the only one who came in to shore and he was so spent that he died two days later. I wonder the awful blow did not kill poor father. He was ill for a long while. My wife went to him then and took the child and had sufficient proof to establish the fact of the marriage, and her aunt had always been a foster mother to the boy. There must be some curious fascination about her, though I do not wonder father felt drawn to his only remaining son. Archibald's two children are girls and so are not in the entail. ”

“ Millions of miles did these energetic women travel, dressed in hats and habits never seen before by mortal eye, perched on the bed, driving the posts like mettlesome steeds, and bouncing up and down till their heads spun. Fits and fires were the pet afflictions, with a general massacre now and then by way of change. Nan was never tired of inventing fresh combinations, and Daisy followed her leader with blind admiration. Poor Teddy was a frequent victim, and was often rescued from real danger, for the excited ladies were apt to forget that he was not of the same stuff their longsuffering dolls. ”

“ Arkell," she said, with tears. "You must see how it is—how unwelcome I am; Charlotte, of course, is a lady, always was one, and I am but a poor working girl. It is natural she should wish us not to keep up too much intimacy."
"I call it very unnatural," indignantly remonstrated Mrs. Arkell.
Perhaps Betsey Travice yearned to this little baby all the more, from the fact that the youngest of the two children she had taken care of at Mrs. Dundyke's, had died a few months before. Fractious, sickly, troublesome as it had been, Betsey's fondness for it was great, and her sorrow heavy. ”