A Book o' Nine Tales.

Tale the Seventh.

A SKETCH IN UMBER

Every life has its history: this is the story of Ruth Welch, the placid-faced, silver-haired woman who sat in the September twilight looking out over the moorlands one Saturday evening, and considering many things.

The house faced toward the south. It looked across a little creek which made in from the sea, and it had in its prospect only level heaths to the horizon’s edge. On the west stretched the waters of an arm of the Atlantic, and the tides came twice a day around the low cape into the inlet, and the wind blew over the moors; but in all directions one looked upon level wastes, – “the plains,” the country people called them, speaking of them sometimes as “Welch’s bogs,” or in sections as the “blueb’ry plains,” or the “cramb’ry marshes;” and people who lived outside of them regarded the moors as painfully dull.

They were not, too, without some excuse for such an opinion. The rhodora and the kalmia – the “lamb-kill” – in spring spread over sections of the waste transient sheets of glowing color, but for the most part the country was either white or brown, and to one not fond of it the effect of the monotone of hue was depressing. The shade of brown varied, changing from a grayish or even greenish brown in midsummer to a sombre, almost uniform umber in autumn, which latter tint now and then during the winter appeared in desolate patches through the flats of snow, until in March the whole plain came to light darker and more forbidding than ever.

All these long months the only break in the low monochrome of the landscape was the red cottage which still was called “Gran’sir’ Welch’s,” although the old man had been dead many a year, and the little garden before it that kept up, with old-fashioned flowers, a show of bravery until the frosts came. The tint of the old house was dull and dingy, but in so colorless a setting the hue seemed brighter, as a single event might assume undue importance in a monotonous life. If one could have supposed the builder an imaginative man or one given to refinements of sentiment, it might be easy to imagine that when he built his house thus alone in the plains, with not another dwelling in sight and without a break in the level landscape, he felt the need of giving it some color that should protest against the deadly grayness of all around and hearten its owner by its warmth of tone.

So overwhelming were the solitude and the unbroken sameness of the place, however, that an imaginative man would scarcely have chosen it as an abiding-place, although once involved in its powerful fascination he would have been held to his life’s end. By what accident Gran’sir’ Welch’s grandfather had chosen to build here, half a score of miles from the little fishing village which stood to the people of that region for the world, no one knew, and very likely no one cared. Folk thereabout concerned themselves little with reasons for anything, facts being all they found mental grasp sufficient to hold. Once established in the plains, however, there was no especial cause to suppose the family would not continue to live on there until its course was interrupted either by extinction or by the arrival of the Judgment-Day.

Extinction was not very far off now, since only this white-haired woman remained to bear the name. Her mother had died in the daughter’s infancy. Mrs. Welch had never adapted herself to the silence and loneliness of the moors, and her people over at the village declared that she had “died of the plains;” and it is possible that they were right. Ruth’s father, when she was still but a child, had been lost at sea; and the girl had been cared for by her grandfather and the old serving-woman Bethiah, who had once been supposed to be a hired girl, but had ended by being so thoroughly identified with the family that her surname was wellnigh forgotten, and she was designated, when she was spoken of at all, as Bethiah Welch.

The child grew much in the same way as grew the houseleeks in the boxes beside the southern door, very slowly and dully. Once or twice she went for a few months to stay with an aunt in the village ten miles away, it being the unanimous opinion of her relatives that as the Welches always had known how to read and write it was proper that something should be done for Ruth’s education; and the village school was the only educational means known in the region. The girl pined for home, however, and was never content away from the red house. Perhaps by a strange perversity of circumstance the home-longing of the mother was in the child transformed into a clinging fondness for the place where the former was so lonely and alien. The low, level moors were necessary to Ruth’s life; in their colorless monotony she somehow found the complement for her uneventful life. Perhaps the very dulness developed her imagination, as special organs appear in animals whose abnormal conditions of existence render them needful. If this were so, it was no less true that the moors absorbed whatever mental life they stimulated, until the girl seemed hardly less a part of them than the knolls of leathery shrubs, the scattered, shallow pools, the tufts of coarse grass, or the whispering voices of the wind which all night long and every night were hurrying to and fro, concerned with unspeakable tidings which perhaps came from the sea that forever moaned along the moorland’s edges.

Little conscious imagination had Ruth at nineteen; and it was at nineteen that the single, trifling event of her life occurred. She was a maiden by no means uncomely. She was not educated in any conventional sense of the term; but her life alone with her grandfather and old Bethiah and the great brown moors had bred in her a certain sweet gravity which was not without its charm, had there been but those to see who could appreciate it.

Along the front of the house ran a bench, where people seldom sat, since there were none to sit, but where the milk-pans dried in the sun, a gleaming row; and one sunny morning late in September the flash of their shimmer caught the eye of a skipper who in his yacht in the bay studied the horizon with his glass. He was not yet past those years when a man still finds amusement in imitating fate and nature by yielding to his impulses; the gleam suggested pleasant draughts of fresh milk; and without more ado, he headed the trig little craft in which he and a brother artist were skirting the coast of the Gulf of Maine for the little inlet upon which Gran’sir’ Welch’s red cottage stood.

In those days yachts were less common than now, and both Ruth and Bethiah left their work to watch the boat as it ran up to the low wharf, and the snowy sail fell with a musical rattle and clash of metallic rings.

The skipper, a stalwart young fellow, too handsome by half, came briskly ashore and did his errand, and while the old servant went for the milk, stood with Ruth by the open door asking idle questions, to which she replied without either shyness or boldness. His eyes were just on a level with hers as she stood on the threshold above him, and their bold, merry glance saw with full appreciation how clear were her sherry-brown orbs. He removed his cap and leaned against the door-post, letting his glance stray over the landscape. Here and there upon the brown surface his keen eye detected the flame of a scarlet leaf amid the prevailing russet, but the combined effect of all the red leaves upon the plain could not warm the sombre wastes.

“Don’t you get tired of the sameness?” he asked suddenly, as if the monotony all at once seemed to him too great to be borne.

“Oh, no,” Ruth answered, smiling faintly, “I like it.”

He brushed back his curly, golden locks with a shapely brown hand, and regarded her more closely.

“It is like a fish in the water,” was his conclusion when he spoke again. “It would drown me.”

Ruth smiled again, showing her white, even teeth a little, although she did not in the least understand what he meant; and before the conversation could go further Bethiah appeared with the milk she had been getting. Ruth put aside the stranger’s offer of pay, and with an instinct of hospitality which must have been genuine indeed to have survived so long disuse from lack of opportunity, she stepped down into the little garden-plot and picked a nosegay of the old-fashioned flowers which in the southern exposure were still unharmed by frost.

“Put a posy in my button-hole,” he requested lightly, when she gave them to him. “Pick out the prettiest.”

She had never stuck a flower in a man’s coat, but she was too utterly devoid of self-consciousness to be shy. She selected a beautiful clove pink, and smiling her grave smile, thrust the stem through the buttonhole of his yachting-jacket as he held out the lapel.

“It would be just the color of your cheeks,” he said, “if it could only get sunburned.”

A redder glow flushed up at his words, and so tempting was the innocent face before him that half involuntarily he bent forward to kiss the smooth lips. The girl drew back, in that grave, unemotional fashion of hers which was to the stranger so unaccountable at once and so fascinating, and he failed of his intent.

“Ah, well,” he said, in nowise disconcerted, “keep the kiss for your sweetheart, but thank you for the flowers.”

He laughed with a gleeful, deep-toned note, and turned down the faintly-defined path to the shore again.

Ruth looked on with interest at the hoisting of the sail; she smiled responsively as the two mariners doffed their caps to her, and then, regardless of the old superstition of the ill-luck of watching people out of sight, she kept her eyes fixed upon the pretty little craft as it skimmed over the waters, as long as it could be seen. Then she turned a comprehensive glance over all her moors, as if to to take them into confidence regarding the pleasant incident which had just happened, and returned to her interrupted domestic duties. The interview had touched her with no repinings; and even could she have known that in that brief moment all the romance of her life had been acted, she would scarcely have sighed. She smiled as she went about her homely occupations, and flushed a little with the consciousness of innocent vanity as she found herself glancing into the glass at the reflection of her softly-glowing cheeks, reddened with health and with the sun.

This September day was the single glowing spot in the slow, mellow years of Ruth’s life. She came and went, slept and waked, perhaps even dreamed. She was always in a happy, contented repose among her moors, becoming of them every day more and more completely a part. The wide plains grew green in spring with transient verdure, the purple petals of the rhodora flushed through their brief day and dropped into the shallow brown pools left by the late rains in the hollows; then all the waste turned to fawn and russet under the suns of summer, and the cycle of the year was completed by deepening browns and the wide stretches of snow. Now and again great rolling masses of mist came up from the sea and hid wold and wave alike from sight, but yet the sense of the plains was like a presence to Ruth, as with heart warm as an egg beneath the mother-bird’s breast, she went her way and lived her span of life.

She was far from being dull in her feelings. Indeed, for one in her station and surroundings, she was unusually sensitive to mood of shore and sky, to the beauty of the sunsets or of the wild flowers which sprang amid the low shrubs. She was simply content. She was so perfectly in harmony with her world that she could not be unhappy. She grew as a bluebell grows. She was not deficient in womanly sentiment. She thought sometimes of the handsome sailor lad whose bold brown eyes had looked into hers, and she smiled anew with simple pleasure that he had found her fair. She remembered the audacious gleam which crossed his face when he bent forward to kiss her, and she did not forget his words about a sweetheart. She never spoke of her memories, – she came of a reticent race, and neither Gran’sir’ Welch nor Bethiah was especially adapted to the reception of confidences, – but she speculated concerning the sweetheart she never had, and of whose coming fate gave no sign. There was never any tinge of melancholy in these reflections. She accepted life too simply to be sad, even with that vague oppression which seemed to casual observers the obvious consequence of the overpowering presence of the wastes.

As years went on, she accepted the fact that the time of dreams of love was past, and with placid content she reflected that the shadow of the ungiven kiss of the sailor would never be disturbed by the pressure of lover’s lips upon hers.

It is between twenty and thirty that the temperament of a woman becomes fixed, and all her future irrevocably made or marred. Before this her character is too flexible, after this too rigid for impressions to be lasting. During these years the peace of the wide, calm, and sombre moorlands stamped indelibly upon Ruth a sweet, grave content which nothing could destroy or shake.

There came a time when into the calm of the old house death rushed, with that dreadful precipitancy which always marks his coming, even when expected, and old Gran’sir’ Welch, long past fourscore, was, in the quaint language of the King James version, gathered to his fathers.

In the gray dawn Ruth tapped softly at the hives of the bees which stood, straw-thatched, against the eastern end of the cottage, and announced the sad news, firmly believing that unless within twelve hours the swarms were told of death they would desert their homes. Then in the sunny autumn afternoon a funeral procession of boats trailed from the red cottage to the graveyard behind the church in the village, where slept such of his forefathers as the sea had spared to die in their beds. With evenly dipping oars went first the quaintly-shaped pinky bearing the coffin between two stout fisherman, one at prow and one at stern; while after followed the dories in which were the few nearer relatives who had come to attend the services at the house.

Ruth sat beside a cousin and listened half unconsciously to the plash of the oars and the rhythmic beat of the waves against the boat, looking back with tear-dimmed eyes to the red house until it was by distance blended with the dun country as the last spark dies amid the ashes. She was sad, and she felt that oppressive terror which the presence of death brings; yet her calm was not seriously or permanently shaken.

In their relentless, even course the years moved on, and one day in spring, when the rhodora was in all its glory, and the one bush of mountain-laurel in the wide plains, which had strayed into the heath like a lamb into the wilderness, was as white in the distance as a bunch of upland maybloom, again Ruth went softly and gravely to tell the bees that death had been in the red house, and the procession of boats, like the Egyptian train over the Lake of the Dead, bore away the mortal remains of faithful old Bethiah.

Ruth’s relatives in the village tried to induce her now to come to them, and when she could not be moved to do this, urged her at least to have some one live with her. She was getting to be an old woman, they said among themselves, although in truth she was little past fifty, and since for that part of the world she was not ill-provided with worldly goods, there was no lack of those who were willing to take up their abode as her companion in the red house.

Ruth put all offers aside, – kindly, indeed, but decisively. She was pleased to live alone; not from a misanthropic dislike of her kind, but because it was so deep and inexhaustible a delight to her to brood happily among her plains. More and more she loved these umber wastes, over which cloud-shadows drifted like the darkening ripple of the wind on the sea. She knew all their ways, those mysterious paths which wind between the hillocks of deserted heaths as if worn with the constant passing of invisible feet, and she was never weary of wandering among the ragged hummocks, breathing in the salt air from the sea and noting with happy eyes all the weeds and wild flowers, the shrubs that were too inconspicuous to be singled out at a distance, but which to the careful and loving observer revealed themselves as full of beauty. She was fond of the faint, sweet scents of the opening flowers in spring, of the dying grass in fall, of the burning peat when fires broke out sometimes to smoulder until the next rain. She never thought about her feelings or phrased the matter to herself, but she loved so perfectly these wastes which seemed so desolate that they were to her as kindred and home; perhaps even the maternal instinct which is inborn in every woman’s breast found some not quite inadequate expression in her almost passionate fondness for the great heath.

Her relatives spoke of her always as “odd,” and were aggrieved that her ways should be different from theirs; but everything that continues comes in time to be accepted, and as the years went on Ruth’s method of life came to seem proper because it had so long been the same. A brawny armed fisher cousin sailed over from the village every Sunday morning to see that all was well at the red house, and to bring whatever might be needed from the village store. Sometimes in winter he found her house half buried in snow, but he never could report that she appeared either discontented or sad.

It was of the coming of this emissary that Ruth was thinking on this Saturday night in September where first this record found her. She had been reflecting much to-day about dying. In her walk about the heath she had come upon a dead bird, and the sight had suggested to her her own end. She acknowledged to herself that she was old, and for perhaps the only time in her life her thought had formulated a general truth. She had regarded the tiny corpse at her feet, and then, looking about upon the moors, it came over her how immortal is the youth of the world and how brief is man’s life. The land about her was no older than when she had looked upon it with baby eyes. For a single instant a poignant taste of bitterness seemed set to her lips; then in a moment the very wide, changeless plain that had caused her pain seemed itself somehow to assuage it.