Ever after

Chapter One

Candace Ware stood on the veranda enjoying the sense of finished work. It was the first morning in months that had given her leisure to stand in the sun with her arms folded, and all her square, strong figure, relaxed against a pillar, showed her satisfaction in the moment. Candace's slow, closelipped smile curled up at the corners, and her little brown eyes took the same curl when she was pleased, giving the hardy, boyish face an impersonal sort of charm, a promise of good fellowship and of a massive, almost an immoral, tolerance. But for this mellow quality, she showed the undated youthfulness of mind and body that the modern woman of forty has so suddenly and remarkably acquired. Candace's mother, at her age, had worn caps and considered it more graceful and fitting not to dress in the immediate fashion. Her daughter, trimly shirt waisted, with three good inches of daylight above her mannish Oxfords, could still be seriously referred to as a girl.

The old farmhouse stood on a great, rounded knob of land that thrust it well up into a sky of noble breadth. It was sky that one saw there before anything else, vasty deeps of cloud-billowed sky, an azure immensity that overwhelmed the little world of farms and woods, reducing it to a pebble lying under a mighty palm. Clear green meadow rolled away from the house indefinitely in front, but on the sides and back it broke against jutting capes and islands of compact woodland. Well down the slopes, four pine shacks, rough but charming, each with a high window to the north to explain its calling, hid from one another behind shoulders and curves of hill : to the east, where the tangled sumach merged into the woods, another roof might be made out, and from the deeper growth to the west came the faint notes of a piano, implying a sixth cabin. In this hidden retreat a theme was being tried, over and over, with minute variations. Presently the experimenting fingers found what they wanted, and the strain, after many repetitions, rippled into joyous certainty and ended in a triumphant chord. A few moments later a young man came out into the open. Candace's smile deepened as she watched his approach. Dana Malone, like his cabin, was part of her work.

There were broad streaks of gray in his heavy black hair: his eyes, deep set and darkly earnest, seemed to have looked on many things, and the irregular, cleft chin had the thrust of one who had needed all his determination; and yet he was a boy. Some magic preservative — the West in his blood, or the streak of genius — had kept his spirit at nineteen while his years were at twenty-nine. He carried an air of unsnubbed good will, suggestive of frank, new civilizations, and his speech came tumbling out on a note of excited discovery the moment it could be heard.

"You can always do it if you want to!" he declared. "It's only a matter of wanting to enough and sitting. I tell you, Candy, if you sit faithfully, you can do anything on earth." He dropped down on the step with a slight gasp for breath.

"I've got a pupil who has been sitting for thirty years, and she can't paint yet," said Candace.

"Oh, well, if she hasn't got it in her — that's different. But if it's there, I mean. This going round waiting for it to come to you is all nonsense. You must sit it out. That's the way you train it to come, by jinks! It's the way I do, anyway." He looked off over the rolling land, then stretched his long arms above his head. "I'm so happy, I'm so happy," he chanted.

She smiled her understanding. "Life hasn't spoiled us very much, has it?" she observed.

He answered with an emphatic, "Not so that you would notice it;" then reconsidered. "I don't know. I've got a good deal."

"Inside you," she assented. "I believe I am coming to the age when I like a little something outside, myself."

Again he burst into song, chanting on a high key: "I have escaped the subway, I am done with the elevated, I have hills and fields and a great sky over all, and a pi-a-no — Praised by Thy Name!" The solemn invocation was followed by a shout, evidently a necessity to his dangerously expanded heart.

"You're a queer child, Dana." She was looking down at him with never-ending amusement at the contrast between his simple, boyish personality and the delicate subtlety of his music. "I don't understand your talent; I am not sure you have a right to it."

"It's California," he explained gravely. "She puts a gift into your cradle as a matter of course — lovely, big, brown thing!" His rugged face turned hungrily toward the west. "Oh, I'm homesick; I want to go back — don't you?"

" Calif ornians are always homesick;" her tone was cheerfully practical. "I want to make this school a success now. The first pupil comes this afternoon."

"Can she paint?" without much interest.

Candace considered. "If she weren't ten generations or so of straight New England she might; she has talent of a sort — she sees. But she can't let go. She's too careful, some way, ever to get very far."

"But what will the poor girl do?" he asked worriedly. She laughed at him.

"Lucy Cuyler won't starve," she said drily. "She isn't entirely dependent on her painting."

"That's so: people here do have incomes," he admitted. "I'm always forgetting it. No one at home ever seemed to have a cent — except the millionaires, of course."

"But they all had had it twenty years before," she reminded him. "It is our fine, free-handed, damn-the-expense attitude that has done for us, my boy. A little New England carefulness "

" W'f ! " he burst in. "Not much. Money meanness is the ugliest sin on earth."

"Don't you find penury rather ugly, too?"

Dana ignored that. "I've seen fellows who parted with a dollar as they would with a tooth," he declaimed. "Fellows who always let the other person pay, don't you know? and who lie awake nights if they think they have been overcharged ten cents. I am poor enough, God knows, but I would chuck fifty dollars in the gutter before I'd haggle over it!"

"You are a survival, Dana," she derided him. "You belong to the days when they threw down a bag of gold dust to pay for a drink, and no gentleman would stoop to take change."

"Well, that is better than counting your nickels. I tell you, Candy, money meanness is a big, black sin. It can make people do more cruel, ugly things than any vice I know."

"Oh, nonsense. I could show you delightful people who will give anything except money. It's an idiosyncrasy, not a vice."

His headshake was violent. "Don't go back on your Western blood, Candy."

"One starts out like that," she admitted; "but — I don't know. Money's money."

"Then why do you spend a large part of yours on other people?"

She laughed. "Bad habit. I can't seem to believe my own experience." Dana frowned.

"What's the sense of always talking like a pirate when you always act like a guardian angel? It doesn't fool any one."

"Then where's the harm?" she asked.

"The trouble with you, Candy," he began with the assurance of old acquaintance, but she cut in with a good humoured,

"The trouble with you, Dana Malone, is that you haven't found yourself out." She stretched her tired arms, then let them drop, and turned to the open door behind them. "Come and see how nice the house looks. Everthing is ready."

Candace had scooped out the first floor of the farmhouse like a hallo we'en pumpkin. The old entry, parlour and sitting-room were now one long, generous apartment, broadside to the south, while kitchen, buttery, and best bedchamber had been turned into an equally long room to the north. The latter was bare but for easels, camp chairs, and a small platform, but to the other had been added every homely charm compatible with its uses. It gave a sunny impression of buttercup yellow and clear white; there was a sober gleam of pewter, the blond shine of deep willow chairs, and rag rugs lay like blurred rainbows on the brown floor. A narrow dinner table of dark oak ran half its length, and against the west wall stood an aged sideboard laden with china, primitive but richly green: the other end was given up to fireplace and bookshelves. The rooms upstairs, including the space over the new kitchen addition, had been multiplied into many small, fresh, white bedrooms. Dana was profoundly impressed. He was always a satisfactory audience for achievements, having an endless capacity for astonishment. "Well, what do you think of that!" was his constant comment as Candace showed him her various devices for neatness, space, and charm.

"Why, your fortune's made. You can't help it," he exclaimed, as they came downstairs again. "Pupils will fall over each other to come. You will have to add on more "

"But only the land is mine, you know," she interrupted. "That and the idea. My angel backer won't take interest, but I mean to pay her the principal before I do any more building, let me tell you."

"And the cabins for us poor devils — that was your idea, too, wasn't it?"

Candace smiled shrewdly. "That's the way I got her interested. That is the philanthropy part, don't you see? My summer school is just an incident— to her."

"Well, God bless the old lady and keep her prosperous," said Dana solemnly. A laugh escaped Candace, but she did not explain.

Although the lunch gong could not be expected for half an hour yet, the "poor devils" of the cabins were already coming hopefully back from wood and field, some with canvases and camp-stools under their arms. Serious but struggling talent and the ability to pay a modest sum for board were the only stated requirements for admission to Sky Farm; and admission meant three months' right to a delicious pine cabin and the freedom of a region still half wild and rich in beauty. If there were other requirements, Candace did not mention them; but a noticeable sobriety marked these first tenants, and one of them, who had brought a prim and somewhat hungry looking wife, had been given a marked concession in his board rate. Candace realized that, with her summer school open, she was approaching fire to gunpowder, but she felt an amused adequacy to the situation — especially when she reviewed her cottagers. Dana Malone was the only one who suggested combustible properties, and she had no misgiving about her ability to deal with him. The fact that they had both been born in Oakland seemed to give her an elder-sisterly authority, and his struggle, as well as his talent, was appealingly genuine.

At the first clang of the iron triangle hung on the porch they came hurrying up the green slopes, Dabney, with his wife's hand under his arm, well in advance. The struggle was ending for these two, for the poetic quality, the elusive delicacy and mystery, of Dabney's etchings was at last being discovered; but it was ending too late for anything but relief. About their patient mouths lay ineffaceable grooves of weariness, the shadow of lost children. They walked with their heads bent toward each other, but did not talk. Behind them, streaming conversation, came Palmer Jacks, large, blooming, handsome, a big gray moustache sweeping the seasoned ruddiness of his cheeks, carrying his thin old serge suit with an easy air of having bought it in London, wearing a Panama of fifteen years back as though he had chosen it in aristocratic preference over twenty new ones. After half a lifetime of cheerful failure in business, Palmer Jacks had suddenly entered on a middle age of cheerful success as a painter. His landscapes were not of a high order, but they made a naive appeal to the romantic and the young in heart. From the very first people had stopped to look; now they were actually beginning to buy.

"But do we want you encouraged?" Candace had objected when he begged admission. "Why a battered old worldling like you should paint nooks and grottos and dingles, I don't see! Your nature always looks as if it were meant to flirt in. In another year you'll be painting best sellers."

"Well, for God's sake, let me get a square meal this year," he had persisted with his subterranean chuckle.

"You ought to do kittens coming out of slippers and little girls giving doll tea-parties," Candace had grumbled, but she had let him in. Ludlam was with him, a complacent young fellow with a pointed blond beard, who looked out from under his eyelids like a girl when he conversed, and who was becoming known as a painter of skies, great, bold, sweeping skies in every mood, the land beneath being little more than a purple shadow or a watery gleam. Near them, yet apart, Adamovitch, a fragile young Russian Jew, followed with bent head. Adamovitch had been forbidden his violin for the present, but the cabin in the sumach bushes occasionally found its voice and cried out its master's secrets — the eternal secrets of youth, of the alien, of the mounting spirit held down by the lagging body — to the placid June dusk. A lame decorator named Willing came hobbling in on a crutch after the rest were seated. Willing was also forbidden to work, but his cabin, in its vocal moments, gave out only a cheerful whistle. "Just my luck," in his vocabulary, meant a special brand of good fortune. He was an ageless little man, somewhere between a withered thirty and a juvenile fifty, and Palmer Jacks cherished a theory that his brain was under some pressure and had not grown up.

"Gad! Wouldn't it be fun to trepan him, and see him wake up to what rotten luck he's really got," he had exclaimed to Candace the first night. "His is the kind of cheerfulness that drives strong men to drink. You haven't any beer, have you?"

"Now look here, Palmer, if he drives you to beer in twelve hours, what will it be at the end of twelve weeks?"

"I'd hate to tell you," with a sigh. "If you could only publish Willing, what a ten-cent magazine he'd make! He'd have a circulation of a million and a quarter in two weeks. He's just what the public wants."

Willing dropped into his place with a hopeful glance toward the long stretch of empty table.

"School opens to-morrow, doesn't it, Miss Ware?" he began happily.

"It does." Candace's tone had a good-humoured finality before which Willing looked ingenuously abashed.

"In other words, what's that to us?" interpreted Palmer Jacks.

"I might as well tell you now about meals," Candace went on, ignoring him. "You people will have to breakfast and lunch a quarter of an hour later; that will give us time to have the school meals over and cleared away before you come up. Dinner will be at the usual time, but the girls will want the room afterward, so I can't urge you to linger in the evenings."

"I am sure we never do. We always go straight to our cabin," Mrs. Dabney hurriedly put in. Palmer Jacks's eyes were twinkling.

"Aren't we to see these houris at all?" he demanded.

"You will meet them at dinner," was the firm answer. "They are coming here for hard work, and they don't want interruptions."

"Gad! I never worked so hard I wasn't glad to be interrupted," muttered Jacks.

"I don't see how you can say that," Dana Malone broke in. "When I'm working in earnest, a knock on the door feels like a blow in the face."

Dana had not been there twenty-four hours, but already he objected to Jacks as only the young and reverential can object to him whom they term a scoffer.

"Ah, I probably have not your secret of working in earnest," Palmer returned with mischievous humility. He was well aware of Dana's irritation, and rather liked him for it. "I was a solemn young ass myself once," he admitted to Candace, later. "Teach him to laugh and he'll be all right. There's a good job for your missionary instincts this summer."

She shook her head. "He doesn't need to laugh yet; he's perfectly happy," she explained.

Lucy Cuyler stepped down from the train with the hard-won ease of a shy person who has been early forced into social responsibility. It was evident that seeing her trunk put off and finding her vehicle would have worried her painfully if she had not had to do it so often; and, even as it was, her mouth looked a little too responsible over the business, her eyes too earnest. A trunk seemed to her a thing of fearsome weight. She had an air of strained muscles as the station master received hers into brawny arms, disdaining a truck.

"It is far too heavy," she murmured, with a faint gasp for his effort. He smiled down paternally at the disturbed face. Its mature gravity was amusingly tempered by the curves of childhood that still lingered in the rounded cheeks, and people were apt to smile at it when it was most responsible. Very old ladies were fond of telling Lucy that she was like her Great Aunt Betty, whose spirit had left an aroma that still lingered in old corners of her native town. She had the same soft colourings — blue and brown and rose — as the portrait in the Museum, but was saved from its picture-book prettiness by the look of race, of inherited meaning, that the artist had thought best to soften in Great Aunt Betty's thoughtful brow and dignified little nose.

"Ho! That's nothing." The man gave the trunk an extra twirl, to reassure her. "If you're one of them art students, she told Jim Lee to have a rig here for you," he added. "That's him, with the white horse. I'll bring this."

Jim Lee, roused from contemplation of the sky line, looked the questioner well over before answering that the fare would be a dollar and a half. Jim always looked a stranger over before answering, and a dollar and a half was the regular rate; but his deliberation suggested a calculated extortion, based on appearances, and Lucy's lips straightened, obliterating the youthful softness of the moment before and bringing out a faint suggestion of her Grandfather Cuyler. Old Adrian Cuyler, by his shrewdness and his minute caution, had lifted his large family from affluence to wealth, but money was not the only thing that he had handed down to his descendants.

"That is too much," said Lucy, timid but stern. "It is only three miles."

"It's uphill all the way, lady. Can't take you for less." Then, seeing another wagon edging up, Jim relented a little. "Tell you what," he confided; "I won't charge you nothing extra for your trunk."

That sounded reasonable, and Grandfather Cuyler, having no means of knowing that the trunk always went for nothing, felt free to withdraw his influence, leaving Lucy to climb happily into the back seat of the battered surrey. She had another distressed moment wondering whether she should fee the paternal station master, and watched him uneasily, a furtive quarter in her hand, as he swung her trunk into Jim Lee's languid grasp. He paused for a remark on the weather, his hand resting on the wheel in friendly equality, and, seeing by his straight American glance that a tip would be offensive, she responded with the radiance of deep relief. Offering gratuities was always misery to her, a misery compounded of a subtle shame for the other person and a great dread of wounding. And, then, a quarter was a quarter! She dropped it into her purse with unconscious satisfaction as they drove off.

The divided influences of Lucy Cuyler's inheritance were quaintly reflected in her appearance. With a suit that was the perfection of tailoring, a plain serge of plutocratic distinction, she wore a pleasant, flowered hat that any modest shopgirl might have chosen. Her gloves were fresh and extravagantly delicate, her little tan shoes shabby and unpolished, with worn heels, while against her aristocratic pigskin bag leaned a not-quite-silk umbrella with a bunch of artificial cherries on the handle. But, if her belongings were undiscriminated, her love and knowledge of natural things were evidently strong and discerning. As they wound up the great, broad-backed green hills, she sat forward in her eagerness, studying every gracious curve and dip of the land with vivid satisfaction, lifting her face to the sunny odours of the fields and the cool breath of the woods. Two thirds of the journey had been made in absorbed happiness when her glance happened to fall on the horse, and so brought her joy to an end; for she saw that he was limping. She bent forward for a better look.

"Your horse is lame," she exclaimed, troubled and reproachful.

"Oh, he's just kind of footsore," Jim Lee explained, as though that made it all right. "Too much road work, that's all."

"Couldn't you turn him out for a rest?"

"No, lady; not at this time of year."

She watched the old fellow trot wincingly down a slope, then attack the next hill with a deep sigh inflating his slatted sides. "I'll walk up this," she said suddenly, and was on the ground before the carriage could be stopped. "Couldn't you walk, too?" she added diffidently.

"Well, you see, it's like this, lady;" Jim Lee, sprawled in his corner, turned a languid head to explain. "You're likely to meet an automobile any time on these roads. He don't mind them if you've got him in hand; but down on the ground you couldn't do nothing at all."

The steep-pitched, rutted road did not suggest frequent motors, but Lucy was too polite to say so, and followed in clouded silence. The unprotesting, painful tugging of the aged beast wrung her. She would gladly have carried her trunk to ease his load. That being impossible, she pulled off her gloves, put her two small hands on back of the surrey and began to push.

It was so that Dana Malone, coming out on a high bank over the road, first saw them — the limping horse, the lolling man half dozing on the front seat, the girl, flushed and lovely with compassion, pushing with all her touching little might. And Dana, whose heart broke over dumb suffering and flamed up for a generous act — Dana, who could cry any day over newspaper heroics, and never heard the national anthem without a swelling desire to die for his country, and believed that man was created to serve, protect and cherish woman — Dana Malone was not one to see the absurdity of the group.

"Well, what do you think of that!" he muttered. A moment later he had scrambled down the bank to meet them.

"You mustn't do that! Let me," he exclaimed, so authoritatively that Lucy yielded up her place in startled docility.

"The driver couldn't get out because we might meet a motor," she explained, kindly anxious that not even Jim Lee should make too poor an appearance. A skeptical "H'h! " and a push that surprised the horse relieved Dana's overcharged feelings.

"Please get in again. You won't make any difference," he urged, but she would not.

"I like to walk," she insisted, still a little short of breath. "We must be nearly there."

Dana, pushing lustily, his face turned toward her, could have wished the distance indefinite; the weight on his arms felt chivalrously good. It did not occur to him to make conversation or to explain himself. Shyness was to him an unknown state, and, with all his generous youth still vibrating from that first glimpse of her, he could not descend to the trivialities of convention and treat her like an unintroduced young lady. So he simply looked at her out of darkly lit eyes and rejoiced. Not having the key to his mood, Lucy grew shy, then uncomfortable. Her stolen glances could not explain this rough figure with his shabby clothes and perfect ease of bearing, his look of youth and the streaks of gray in his black hair. Her lips moved uneasily, and her face turned more and more to the sun-flecked beech trunks and the deep beds of bracken beside the road. The June green that nearly met above their heads was still frail and young in this high world, the day's warmth had a vivid freshness, and the ardour of spring stirred in unseen wings and bubbling throats. Under pretence of a second look for a hidden songster, Lucy fell a few steps behind; and so roused Dana to speech.

"When I'm rich," he declared, looking back with his air of intent discovery, "you know what I'm going to do?" No other beginning could have so interested and reassured her. She came closer. "I'm going to buy up every poor old beast I come across and either kill or cure him. Just to get him off my mind. Wouldn't that be great? "

It was hard for Lucy to enter into conversation; but she was ruled by a very earnest desire to be "big," and she had long ago decided that it was little to admit human intercourse only through the front door. So she met the advance with a conscientious effort to match his directness and simplicity.

"But won't that be rather individual, just to help the ones you see?" she objected, out of her modern training. "Shouldn't you find a way to help them all?"

That was a new idea to Dana. " I suppose so," he admitted reluctantly. "Well, I'd do that, too. But it's the one I saw that I'd get my fun out of! Shouldn't you?"

The question troubled her. "I hadn't thought of either as fun, exactly," she admitted. "It is all such a — such a terrible worry."

"Oh, every good feeling is fun," he explained largely. "Why, the best fun I ever had in my life was hauling a half-drowned pup out of the East River. I wish you could have seen the love feast! He was so grateful, and so glad to be alive, it just broke your heart. Nice pup," he added with a reminiscent shake of his head.

Lucy was rapidly coming to a real ease before his almost primeval unconsciousness.

"Yes, that was fun," she said with the smile that had made Great Aunt Betty famous. Dana's stare deepened: he thought he had never in his life seen anything so lovely as that generous lighting, the shine of a pitying and loving spirit through the delicate mask of shy reserve. For a moment the traces of Jim Lee's horse hung slack, though the hill was at its steepest. Then they paused on an artificial restingplace, and Lucy saw how heavily her knight-errant was breathing.

"You are doing too much," she said distressfully. "We ought to be there by this time. Do you know Miss Ware's farm?"

The knowledge of who she was flashed into Dana's consciousness before his unpractical mind had reached the question, and startled him into joyous exclamation.

"Oh! Why, of course! Why, you are the first pupil — you're Miss Cuyler! I'm staying there, in one of the cabins."

"You are?" It was a vivid response, yet even vanity could not have taken it personally, and Dana

had none. "Tell me " she paused, hesitating

over the question.

"I came yesterday," he volunteered. "You know, there are six cabins, put up by some old lady, a friend of Miss Ware's; and any poor artist can have one free for the summer. I'm a musician myself, and so there's a piano in mine. Did you ever hear of anything like that?"

She was suddenly constrained. "So you like it here?" she asked, her face averted.

"Like it?" They were emerging from the woods, and he looked out over the rolling land with the deep breath of an expanding spirit. "Like it? Now look here, Miss Cuyler! Suppose you lodged in the Black Hole of Calcutta, and dined in a cellar, and took your outing in a subway; and then suppose an angel out of heaven handed you all this free and threw in a piano — do you think 'like it' would be the word?" She flushed, so deeply that he thought his vehemence had been too aggressive, and hastened to soften it. "I have just come, so I'm half cracked," he apologized. "Please don't mind if I rave. See, there is the house now."

They had rounded the hilltop, and only a brief dip lay between them and the last climb up to the spreading old farmhouse set in an immensity of sky. Lucy gave it a quick look, then stopped the carriage.

"I will get in now," she said. "Thank you for helping." Her nod of dismissal was so oblivious of him that Dana turned into a side path with a surprising consciousness of hurt feelings. Lucy, meanwhile, had turned to Jim Lee and nervously opened negotiations. When they pulled up at the door, she had bought the old white horse for thirty dollars.

Candace showed the house to the new pupil before she had taken off her hat, pointing out the cabins to her from the upstairs windows.

"Well, what do you think of your job?" she asked, cheerfully confident, as they came to the end in Lucy's room.