CHAPTER XXVIII
THE PATH TO ARCADY
October that year gathered up all the spilled sunshine of the
summer and clad herself in it as in a garment. The Story Girl had
asked us to try to make the last month together beautiful, and
Nature seconded our efforts, giving us that most beautiful of
beautiful things--a gracious and perfect moon of falling leaves.
There was not in all that vanished October one day that did not
come in with auroral splendour and go out attended by a fair
galaxy of evening stars--not a day when there were not golden
lights in the wide pastures and purple hazes in the ripened
distances. Never was anything so gorgeous as the maple trees that
year. Maples are trees that have primeval fire in their souls.
It glows out a little in their early youth, before the leaves
open, in the redness and rosy-yellowness of their blossoms, but in
summer it is carefully hidden under a demure, silver-lined
greenness. Then when autumn comes, the maples give up trying to
be sober and flame out in all the barbaric splendour and
gorgeousness of their real nature, making of the hills things out
of an Arabian Nights dream in the golden prime of good Haroun
Alraschid.
You may never know what scarlet and crimson really are until you
see them in their perfection on an October hillside, under the
unfathomable blue of an autumn sky. All the glow and radiance and
joy at earth's heart seem to have broken loose in a splendid
determination to express itself for once before the frost of
winter chills her beating pulses. It is the year's carnival ere
the dull Lenten days of leafless valleys and penitential mists
come.
The time of apple-picking had come around once more and we worked
joyously. Uncle Blair picked apples with us, and between him and
the Story Girl it was an October never to be forgotten.
"Will you go far afield for a walk with me to-day?" he said to her
and me, one idle afternoon of opal skies, pied meadows and misty hills.
It was Saturday and Peter had gone home; Felix and Dan were
helping Uncle Alec top turnips; Cecily and Felicity were making
cookies for Sunday, so the Story Girl and I were alone in Uncle
Stephen's Walk.
We liked to be alone together that last month, to think the long,
long thoughts of youth and talk about our futures. There had
grown up between us that summer a bond of sympathy that did not
exist between us and the others. We were older than they--the
Story Girl was fifteen and I was nearly that; and all at once it
seemed as if we were immeasurably older than the rest, and
possessed of dreams and visions and forward-reaching hopes which
they could not possibly share or understand. At times we were
still children, still interested in childish things. But there
came hours when we seemed to our two selves very grown up and old,
and in those hours we talked our dreams and visions and hopes,
vague and splendid, as all such are, over together, and so began
to build up, out of the rainbow fragments of our childhood's
companionship, that rare and beautiful friendship which was to
last all our lives, enriching and enstarring them. For there is
no bond more lasting than that formed by the mutual confidences of
that magic time when youth is slipping from the sheath of
childhood and beginning to wonder what lies for it beyond those
misty hills that bound the golden road.
"Where are you going?" asked the Story Girl.
"To 'the woods that belt the gray hillside'--ay, and overflow
beyond it into many a valley purple-folded in immemorial peace,"
answered Uncle Blair. "I have a fancy for one more ramble in
Prince Edward Island woods before I leave Canada again. But I
would not go alone. So come, you two gay youthful things to whom
all life is yet fair and good, and we will seek the path to
Arcady. There will be many little things along our way to make us
glad. Joyful sounds will 'come ringing down the wind;' a wealth
of gypsy gold will be ours for the gathering; we will learn the
potent, unutterable charm of a dim spruce wood and the grace of
flexile mountain ashes fringing a lonely glen; we will tryst with
the folk of fur and feather; we'll hearken to the music of gray
old firs. Come, and you'll have a ramble and an afternoon that
you will both remember all your lives."
We did have it; never has its remembrance faded; that idyllic
afternoon of roving in the old Carlisle woods with the Story Girl
and Uncle Blair gleams in my book of years, a page of living
beauty. Yet it was but a few hours of simplest pleasure; we
wandered pathlessly through the sylvan calm of those dear places
which seemed that day to be full of a great friendliness; Uncle
Blair sauntered along behind us, whistling softly; sometimes he
talked to himself; we delighted in those brief reveries of his;
Uncle Blair was the only man I have ever known who could, when he
so willed, "talk like a book," and do it without seeming
ridiculous; perhaps it was because he had the knack of choosing
"fit audience, though few," and the proper time to appeal to that
audience.
We went across the fields, intending to skirt the woods at the
back of Uncle Alec's farm and find a lane that cut through Uncle
Roger's woods; but before we came to it we stumbled on a sly,
winding little path quite by accident--if, indeed, there can be
such a thing as accident in the woods, where I am tempted to think
we are led by the Good People along such of their fairy ways as
they have a mind for us to walk in.
"Go to, let us explore this," said Uncle Blair. "It always drags
terribly at my heart to go past a wood lane if I can make any
excuse at all for traversing it: for it is the by-ways that lead
to the heart of the woods and we must follow them if we would know
the forest and be known of it. When we can really feel its wild
heart beating against ours its subtle life will steal into our
veins and make us its own for ever, so that no matter where we go
or how wide we wander in the noisy ways of cities or over the lone
ways of the sea, we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find
our most enduring kinship."
"I always feel so SATISFIED in the woods," said the Story Girl
dreamily, as we turned in under the low-swinging fir boughs.
"Trees seem such friendly things."
"They are the most friendly things in God's good creation," said
Uncle Blair emphatically. "And it is so easy to live with them.
To hold converse with pines, to whisper secrets with the poplars,
to listen to the tales of old romance that beeches have to tell,
to walk in eloquent silence with self-contained firs, is to learn
what real companionship is. Besides, trees are the same all over
the world. A beech tree on the slopes of the Pyrenees is just
what a beech tree here in these Carlisle woods is; and there used
to be an old pine hereabouts whose twin brother I was well
acquainted with in a dell among the Apennines. Listen to those
squirrels, will you, chattering over yonder. Did you ever hear
such a fuss over nothing? Squirrels are the gossips and busybodies
of the woods; they haven't learned the fine reserve of its other
denizens. But after all, there is a certain shrill friendliness
in their greeting."
"They seem to be scolding us," I said, laughing.
"Oh, they are not half such scolds as they sound," answered Uncle
Blair gaily. "If they would but 'tak a thought and mend ' their
shrew-like ways they would be dear, lovable creatures enough."
"If I had to be an animal I think I'd like to be a squirrel," said
the Story Girl. "It must be next best thing to flying."
"Just see what a spring that fellow gave," laughed Uncle Blair.
"And now listen to his song of triumph! I suppose that chasm he
cleared seemed as wide and deep to him as Niagara Gorge would to
us if we leaped over it. Well, the wood people are a happy folk
and very well satisfied with themselves."
Those who have followed a dim, winding, balsamic path to the
unexpected hollow where a wood-spring lies have found the rarest
secret the forest can reveal. Such was our good fortune that day.
At the end of our path we found it, under the pines, a crystal-
clear thing with lips unkissed by so much as a stray sunbeam.
"It is easy to dream that this is one of the haunted springs of
old romance," said Uncle Blair. "'Tis an enchanted spot this, I
am very sure, and we should go softly, speaking low, lest we
disturb the rest of a white, wet naiad, or break some spell that
has cost long years of mystic weaving."
"It's so easy to believe things in the woods," said the Story
Girl, shaping a cup from a bit of golden-brown birch bark and
filling it at the spring.
"Drink a toast in that water, Sara," said Uncle Blair. "There's
not a doubt that it has some potent quality of magic in it and the
wish you wish over it will come true."
The Story Girl lifted her golden-hued flagon to her red lips. Her
hazel eyes laughed at us over the brim.
"Here's to our futures," she cried, "I wish that every day of our
lives may be better than the one that went before."
"An extravagant wish--a very wish of youth," commented Uncle
Blair, "and yet in spite of its extravagance, a wish that will
come true if you are true to yourselves. In that case, every day
WILL be better than all that went before--but there will be many
days, dear lad and lass, when you will not believe it."
We did not understand him, but we knew Uncle Blair never explained
his meaning. When asked it he was wont to answer with a smile,
"Some day you'll grow to it. Wait for that." So we addressed
ourselves to follow the brook that stole away from the spring in
its windings and doublings and tricky surprises.
"A brook," quoth Uncle Blair, "is the most changeful, bewitching,
lovable thing in the world. It is never in the same mind or mood
two minutes. Here it is sighing and murmuring as if its heart
were broken. But listen--yonder by the birches it is laughing as
if it were enjoying some capital joke all by itself."
It was indeed a changeful brook; here it would make a pool, dark
and brooding and still, where we bent to look at our mirrored
faces; then it grew communicative and gossiped shallowly over a
broken pebble bed where there was a diamond dance of sunbeams and
no troutling or minnow could glide through without being seen.
Sometimes its banks were high and steep, hung with slender ashes
and birches; again they were mere, low margins, green with
delicate mosses, shelving out of the wood. Once it came to a
little precipice and flung itself over undauntedly in an
indignation of foam, gathering itself up rather dizzily among the
mossy stones below. It was some time before it got over its
vexation; it went boiling and muttering along, fighting with the
rotten logs that lie across it, and making far more fuss than was
necessary over every root that interfered with it. We were
getting tired of its ill-humour and talked of leaving it, when it
suddenly grew sweet-tempered again, swooped around a curve--and
presto, we were in fairyland.
It was a little dell far in the heart of the woods. A row of
birches fringed the brook, and each birch seemed more exquisitely
graceful and golden than her sisters. The woods receded from it
on every hand, leaving it lying in a pool of amber sunshine. The
yellow trees were mirrored in the placid stream, with now and then
a leaf falling on the water, mayhap to drift away and be used, as
Uncle Blair suggested, by some adventurous wood sprite who had it
in mind to fare forth to some far-off, legendary region where all
the brooks ran into the sea.
"Oh, what a lovely place!" I exclaimed, looking around me with delight.
"A spell of eternity is woven over it, surely," murmured Uncle
Blair. "Winter may not touch it, or spring ever revisit it. It
should be like this for ever."
"Let us never come here again," said the Story Girl softly,
"never, no matter how often we may be in Carlisle. Then we will
never see it changed or different. We can always remember it just
as we see it now, and it will be like this for ever for us."
"I'm going to sketch it," said Uncle Blair.
While he sketched it the Story Girl and I sat on the banks of the
brook and she told me the story of the Sighing Reed. It was a
very simple little story, that of the slender brown reed which
grew by the forest pool and always was sad and sighing because it
could not utter music like the brook and the birds and the winds.
All the bright, beautiful things around it mocked it and laughed
at it for its folly. Who would ever look for music in it, a
plain, brown, unbeautiful thing? But one day a youth came through
the wood; he was as beautiful as the spring; he cut the brown reed
and fashioned it according to his liking; and then he put it to
his lips and breathed on it; and, oh, the music that floated
through the forest! It was so entrancing that everything--brooks
and birds and winds--grew silent to listen to it. Never had
anything so lovely been heard; it was the music that had for so
long been shut up in the soul of the sighing reed and was set free
at last through its pain and suffering.
I had heard the Story Girl tell many a more dramatic tale; but
that one stands out for me in memory above them all, partly,
perhaps, because of the spot in which she told it, partly because
it was the last one I was to hear her tell for many years--the
last one she was ever to tell me on the golden road.
When Uncle Blair had finished his sketch the shafts of sunshine
were turning crimson and growing more and more remote; the early
autumn twilight was falling over the woods. We left our dell,
saying good-bye to it for ever, as the Story Girl had suggested,
and we went slowly homeward through the fir woods, where a
haunting, indescribable odour stole out to meet us.
"There is magic in the scent of dying fir," Uncle Blair was saying
aloud to himself, as if forgetting he was not quite alone. "It
gets into our blood like some rare, subtly-compounded wine, and
thrills us with unutterable sweetnesses, as of recollections from
some other fairer life, lived in some happier star. Compared to
it, all other scents seem heavy and earth-born, luring to the
valleys instead of the heights. But the tang of the fir summons
onward and upward to some 'far-off, divine event'--some spiritual
peak of attainment whence we shall see with unfaltering, unclouded
vision the spires of some aerial City Beautiful, or the fulfilment
of some fair, fadeless land of promise."
He was silent for a moment, then added in a lower tone,
"Felicity, you loved the scent of dying fir. If you were here
tonight with me--Felicity--Felicity!"
Something in his voice made me suddenly sad. I was comforted when
I felt the Story Girl slip her hand into mine. So we walked out
of the woods into the autumn dusk.
We were in a little valley. Half-way up the opposite slope a
brush fire was burning clearly and steadily in a maple grove.
There was something indescribably alluring in that fire, glowing
so redly against the dark background of forest and twilit hill.
"Let us go to it," cried Uncle Blair, gaily, casting aside his
sorrowful mood and catching our hands. "A wood fire at night has
a fascination not to be resisted by those of mortal race. Hasten--
we must not lose time."
"Oh, it will burn a long time yet," I gasped, for Uncle Blair was
whisking us up the hill at a merciless rate.
"You can't be sure. It may have been lighted by some good, honest
farmer-man, bent on tidying up his sugar orchard, but it may also,
for anything we know, have been kindled by no earthly woodman as a
beacon or summons to the tribes of fairyland, and may vanish away
if we tarry."
It did not vanish and presently we found ourselves in the grove.
It was very beautiful; the fire burned with a clear, steady glow
and a soft crackle; the long arcades beneath the trees were
illuminated with a rosy radiance, beyond which lurked companies of
gray and purple shadows. Everything was very still and dreamy and
remote.
"It is impossible that out there, just over the hill, lies a
village of men, where tame household lamps are shining," said
Uncle Blair.
"I feel as if we must be thousands of miles away from everything
we've ever known," murmured the Story Girl.
"So you are!" said Uncle Blair emphatically. "You're back in the
youth of the race--back in the beguilement of the young world.
Everything is in this hour--the beauty of classic myths, the
primal charm of the silent and the open, the lure of mystery.
Why, it's a time and place when and where everything might come
true--when the men in green might creep out to join hands and
dance around the fire, or dryads steal from their trees to warm
their white limbs, grown chilly in October frosts, by the blaze.
I wouldn't be much surprised if we should see something of the
kind. Isn't that the flash of an ivory shoulder through yonder
gloom? And didn't you see a queer little elfin face peering at us
around that twisted gray trunk? But one can't be sure. Mortal
eyesight is too slow and clumsy a thing to match against the
flicker of a pixy-litten fire."
Hand in hand we wandered through that enchanted place, seeking the
folk of elf-land, "and heard their mystic voices calling, from
fairy knoll and haunted hill." Not till the fire died down into
ashes did we leave the grove. Then we found that the full moon
was gleaming lustrously from a cloudless sky across the valley.
Between us and her stretched up a tall pine, wondrously straight
and slender and branchless to its very top, where it overflowed in
a crest of dark boughs against the silvery splendour behind it.
Beyond, the hill farms were lying in a suave, white radiance.
"Doesn't it seem a long, long time to you since we left home this
afternoon?" asked the Story Girl. "And yet it is only a few hours."
Only a few hours--true; yet such hours were worth a cycle of
common years untouched by the glory and the dream.
