XV
"APRIL 10, 19...
"This morning I felt more like myself than I have for a long time. I was out for a walk over the Delectable Mountain. It was a very mild, still, misty morning with lovely pearl-grey skies and smell of spring in the air. Every turn and twist on that hill-road was an old friend to me. And everything was so young. April couldn't be old. The young spruces were so green and companionable with pearl-like beads of moisture fringing their needles.
"'You are mine,' called the sea beyond Blair Water.
"'We have a share in her,' said the hills.
"'She is my sister,' said a jolly little fir-tree.
"Looking at them the flash came... my old supernal moment that has come so sadly seldom these past dreary months. Will I lose it altogether as I grow old? Will nothing but 'the light of common day' be mine then?
"But at least it came to me this morning and I felt my immortality. After all, freedom is a matter of the soul.
'Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.'
"She has always a gift of healing for us if we come humbly to her. Corroding memories and discontents vanished. I felt suddenly that some old gladness was yet waiting for me, just around the curve of the hill.
"The frogs are singing to-night. Why is FROG such a funny, dear, charming, absurd word?"
XVI
"MAY 15, 19...
"I know that when I am dead I shall sleep peaceably enough under the grasses through the summer and autumn and winter but when spring comes my heart will throb and stir in my sleep and call wistfully to all the voices calling far and wide in the world above me. Spring and morning were laughing to each other to-day and I went out to them and made a third.
"Ilse wrote to-day... a stingy little letter as far as news went... and spoke of coming home.
"'I'm homesick,' she wrote. 'Are the wild birds still singing in the Blair Water woods and are the waves still calling beyond the dunes? I want them. And oh, to see the moon rise over the harbour as we watched it do scores of times when we were children. And I want to see you. Letters are so unsatisfactory. There are so many things I'd like to talk over with you. Do you know I felt a little OLD to-day. It was a curious sensation.'
"She never mentioned Teddy's name. But she asked 'Is it true that Perry Miller is engaged to Judge Elmsley's daughter?'
"I don't think it is. But the mere report shows where Perry has climbed to already."
Chapter XX
I
On her twenty-fourth birthday Emily opened and read the letter she had written "from herself at fourteen to herself at twenty-four." It was not the amusing performance she had once expected it to be. She sat long at her window with the letter in her hand, watching the light of yellow, sinking stars over the bush that was still called Lofty John's oftener than not, from old habit. What would pop out when she opened that letter? A ghost of first youth? Of ambition? Of vanished love? Of lost friendship? Emily felt she would rather burn the letter than read it. But that would be cowardly. One must face things... even ghosts. With a sudden quick movement she cut open the envelope and took out the letter.
A whiff of old fragrance came with it. Folded in it were some dried rose-leaves... crisp brown things that crumbled to dust under her touch. Yes, she remembered that rose... Teddy had brought it to her one evening when they had been children together and he had been so proud of that first red rose that bloomed on a little house rose-bush Dr. Burnley had given him... the only rose that ever did bloom on it, for that matter. His mother had resented his love for the little plant. One night it was accidentally knocked off the window-sill and broken. If Teddy thought or knew there was any connection between the two facts he never said so. Emily had kept the rose as long as possible in a little vase on her study table; but the night she had written her letter she had taken the limp, faded thing and folded it... with a kiss... between the sheets of paper. She had forgotten that it was there; and now it fell in her hand, faded, unbeautiful, like the rose-hopes of long ago, yet with some faint bitter-sweetness still about it. The whole letter seemed full of it... whether of sense or spirit she could hardly tell.
This letter was, she sternly told herself, a foolish, romantic affair. Something to be laughed at. Emily carefully laughed at some parts of it. How crude... how silly... how sentimental... how amusing! Had she really ever been young and callow enough to write such flowery exultant nonsense? And one would have thought, too, that fourteen regarded twenty-four as verging on venerable.
"Have you written your great book?" airily asked Fourteen in conclusion. "Have you climbed to the very top of the Alpine Path? Oh, Twenty-four, I'm envying you. It must be splendid to be YOU. Are you looking back patronizingly and pityingly to ME? You wouldn't swing on a gate now, would you? Are you a staid old married woman with several children, living in the Disappointed House with One-You-Know-Of? Only DON'T be stodgy, I implore you, dear Twenty-four. And do be dramatic. I love dramatic things and people. Are you Mrs. ... ... ... ... ... ... ? What name will fill those blanks? Oh, dear Twenty-four, I put into this letter for you a kiss... and a handful of moonshine... and the soul of a rose... and some of the green sweetness of the old hill field... and a whiff of wild violets. I hope you are happy and famous and lovely; and I hope you haven't quite forgotten
Your foolish
OLD SELF."
Emily locked the letter away.
"So much for that nonsense," she said scoffingly.
Then she sat down in her chair, and dropped her head on her desk. Little silly, dreamy, happy, ignorant Fourteen! Always thinking that something great and wonderful and beautiful lay in the years ahead. Quite sure that the "mountain purple" could be reached. Quite sure that dreams always came true. Foolish Fourteen, who yet had known how to be happy.
"I'm envying YOU," said Emily. "I wish I had never opened your letter, foolish little Fourteen. Go back to your shadowy past and don't come again... mocking me. I'm going to have a white night because of you. I'm going to lie awake all night and pity myself."
Yet already the footsteps of destiny were sound-on the stairs... though Emily thought they were only Cousin Jimmy's.
II
He had come to bring her a letter... a thin letter... and if Emily had not been too much absorbed in herself at fourteen she might have noticed that Cousin Jimmy's eyes were as bright as a cat's and that an air of ill-concealed excitement pervaded his whole being. Moreover that, when she had thanked him absently for the letter and gone back to her desk, he remained in the shadowy hall outside, watching her slyly through the half-open door. At first he thought she was not going to open the letter... she had flung it down indifferently and sat staring at it. Cousin Jimmy went nearly mad with impatience.
But after a few minutes more of absent musing Emily roused herself with a sigh and stretched out a hand for the letter.
"If I don't miss my guess, dear little Emily, you won't sigh when you read what's in that letter," thought Cousin Jimmy exultantly.
Emily looked at the return address in the upper corner, wondering what the Wareham Publishing Company were writing to her about. The big Warehams! The oldest and most important publishing house in America. A circular of some kind, probably. Then she found herself staring incredulously at the typewritten sheet... while Cousin Jimmy performed a noiseless dance on Aunt Elizabeth's braided rug out in the hall.