Gay Courage

Front matter

Books by Emilie Loring

A CERTAIN CROSSROAD FAIR TOMORROW

HERE COMES THE SUN HIGH OF HEART

Chapter I

“Hi! Boy!”

As the two stoutly shod feet kicking idly on top the load—the hay of which was bulging over the sides to the exclusion of traffic from the narrow country road—ceased not one iota of their activity in response to the hail, Geoffrey Hilliard sounded a deafening, strident demand to pass with the horn of his car.

The echoing and re-echoing protest achieved immediate results. Results exceeding his most hopeful expectations. Not only did it produce a flushed face in place of the waving feet, it startled the unseen horses into a run. Their frenzied leap ahead loosened a portion of the load which slid smartly to the ground bringing with it a flash of green, glinting copper, ivory, which codrdinated into a laughing clutching passenger who landed in front of the closely following roadster with a crash and a breathless;

“Well, here we are!”

Hilliard’s face was white under its bronze as he ground on the brake. He was out of the car in an instant looking down into radiant brown eyes in a flushed, uplifted face. A face topped by ruddy chestnut hair stuck through and through with wisps of hay. A girl! He had thought he was hailing a boy. A girl and not such a young girl, either, the man appraised. Perhaps twenty-five or so. One who knew her way about, decidedly. Her lovely mouth was curved in an enchanting smile. The lines of her chin and neck were beautiful, the little hollow at the base of her throat was fashioned for a man’s lips. Good Lord, did she divine what he was thinking? A curious expression had ousted the radiance from her dark eyes. Fright? No. Dislike? Intense dislike. Why should a person whom he never before had seen dislike him? Conscious, even through his solicitation, of the faint fragrance of sandalwood about the girl, he dropped to one knee beside her and inquired;

“JT hope you’re not hurt?”

A defiant note jangled through the charming voice in which she answered;

“Hurt! Absurd. That is my usual expeditious, if unconventional method of alighting from a load of hay.”

Hilliard regained his feet with dispatch. Two tiny flames in the depths of his cool, slightly cynical grey eyes, responded to the sparks i in the brown eyes as he suggested with a hint of drawl in his voice;

“Do you usually select the moment for acrobatics when a storm like that is aproaching?” He indicated a sullen cloud spindling stealthily across the patch of blue sky above them.

With a startled exclamation the girl scrambled to her feet. Her green sweater, her short skirt of the same shade, even her stockings of the sports variety shed hay. She listened. From far ahead drifted back the clatter of wheels. She observed lightly;

“Those temperamental horses seem to have departed for Sunnyfield and points west.”

Thunder growled in the distance. Drab clouds closed in above. A big drop of rain kicked up the dust with a “Plop!” reminiscent of the sound of a bullet burying itself in a French road. The girl looked up at the sky, down at the spot of moisture and accused;

“Now see what you’ve done with your silly horn.”

“I have done nothing which can’t be speedily remedied. Jump into the car and [ll take you wherever you

were going.”

“Thank you. I prefer to walk.”

“Don’t be silly. You'll be wet through before you have gone two yards. Get in while I pull up the top.”

He was conscious of her eyes upon him as he began to unfasten the straps which held the covering. Evidently she intended to take her time about getting in. It would serve her right to get soaked, he thought wrathfully. With that innate sense of propriety so maddeningly characteristic of thunderstorms the heavens selected the moment when a hasp stuck to break wide open and pour their accumulated moisture down upon him. With pardonable exasperation he shouted above the din;

“Come and help!”

As no hands appeared in answer to the call he wriggled his head from under cover. The girl had gone.

“That’s appreciation. Just like a woman. Did she think I'd do this for myself?” Hilliard growled at the engine, but the engine remained discreetly non-committal. The top, which never before had been called into action, balked at every strategic point. Minutes passed before he pulled a raincoat from under the seat, slipped behind the wheel and started the car. He drove slowly peering into shrubs and behind such tall trees as bordered the country road. Showy trilliums, lobelias, even those sturdy ferns bent under the torrential downpour. Something disquieting in the atmosphere tautened the man’s nerves. He must find the girl. He was responsible for her fall but who in heaven’s name would suppose that in these days there could be found anywhere horses of sufficient unsophistication to bolt at sound of an automobile horn?

The sky went black. Thunder pealed. Sharp outlines blurred into foggy shadows. A length of fiery chain crackled the western sky wide open. It banged shut with a deafening crash. A copper glow shot through the darkness overhead. Lightning stabbed at the tree-tops, thrust at the cowering ferns. The world seemed uncannily still between flash and detonation. Nearer and more continuous rolled the thunder, nearer and more continuous blazed the blinding flashes. With ghoulish shrieks the wind tore at dead tree arms and wrenched them from their age-worn sockets. The rain hissed in sheets. Torrents of grey water surged along the gutters sweeping tipsy flotillas of fallen leaves on its turbulent course. Metallic rivulets dripped from twig and branch. Near-hail beat the gravel of the road into strange patterns.

As his anxizty for the girl’s safety increased Geoffrey Hilliard’s exasperation at her perversity kept step. Where the dickens was she? There hadn’t been time for her to get far. Would she know enough not to stand under a tree in a storm like this? In an instant’s lull which presaged a burst of pyrotechnics he shouted.

No answer. He shouted again. Listened. He drove at snail’s pace for fear he might miss her. Peering into an endless wilderness of rain he discerned a dark shape plodding doggedly ahead. He stepped on the accelerator. As he came alongside he stopped the car with a jerk. The green and copper and ivory of the hayrick passenger had been drenched to neutral tints. In an instant he had thrown the raincoat over the girl’s shoulders. He caught her in his arms and deposited her in the roadster with as little ceremony as he might have bestowed upon the bundle of hay which so recently had betrayed her. Before she could regain her breath which apparently had been beaten out of her by the storm, he was behind the wheel. He observed crisply as he started the car;

“People who don’t know enough to take care of themselves have to be taken care of.”

Little rivulets were cavorting down the girl’s face. She brushed a saturated lock of hair away from her eyes. Her shrug was more of a shiver as she countered;

“And who appointed you guardian of the world at large?”

Hilliard regarded her with an incredulous scowl; ;

“Look here! What’s the matter? I’ve apologized for jolting you from that load. When I saw your feet and legs kicking up there I thought you were a boy. I shouted for the driver to stop hogging the road. I’m...”

“Why is it that one feels impelled to kick on a load of hay. A point for the psychoanalysts, isn’t it?” Hilliard ignored the flippant interruption:

“I’m doing all I can to make up for the fiasco. Your voice sounds as though you’d caught me stealing sheep or deserting from the army.”

“Aren’t you a deserter?”

“A deserter! What do you mean?”

“T’m Nancy Caswell.”

The man’s dark brows met in a puzzled frown above his fine eyes. His voice was maddeningly tinged with amusement as he responded;

“It is a pleasure to have you crash into my life even in this informal way, Miss Caswell, but, your tone connotes “If you knew anything of the village which provides

your bread, butter and marmalade, said marmalade being a figure of speech for rare books, cars, boats and polo ponies... .”

“Only one pony. Interesting and stimulating as you are

I can’t permit you to exaggerate. You implied that I should know you.”

“T’m the clergyman’s daughter at Sunnyfield.”

Sunnyfield! The clergyman’s daughter! Caswell! Geoffrey Hilliard remembered a letter he had received recently signed N. Caswell. It had called his attention to his selfish neglect of his own people living next door to the writer, at Valleyview, the Hilliard estate. His face burned now at the memory of its curt frankness. Camouflaged as it had been in chilly politeness, nevertheless it had been a denunciation. He had thought after reading it; .

“Darned meddler, N. Caswell! He’s the clergyman at Sunnyfield. Lives in the parsonage. If father needed me he’d send for me, wouldn’t he? He can’t be lonely. He has Aunt Serena and Aunt Sally. Luke Small practically runs his paper mills. Of course he doesn’t miss me. If he did, why didn’t he tell me to come home when I finished the course in Business Administration? Why did he encourage me to globe-trot, air-trot, to become a connoisseur of old books?”

Mentally he threshed out the same argument as he drove through the rain with the silent girl beside him. He pulled himself up. He was indulging in self-justification. He hated it in anyone else. Why didn’t he acknowledge frankly that he had dreaded coming back to the village which had been the scene of heartbreak and bitter humiliation for him? That also he had side-stepped the possibility of stirring up Luke Small’s animosity by his return? Why didn’t he acknowledge that N. Caswell’s letter had pricked at his conscience until he had cancelled all September engagements that he might spend the month with his father and aunts at Valleyview? The remembrance of the sports, the polo, the companionship he was missing crisped his voice as he repeated;

“The clergyman’s daughter?”

“Then you are not asleep? I began to wonder if I had better take the wheel.”

“You'll never take the wheel in my car. To return to the clergyman, if the father shows the sympathetic courtesy displayed by the daughter he must be a power in the community.”

Lovely color crept to the girl’s wet hair.

“I’m not much of a credit to him, am I? He isn’t at all like me. He’s a—a saint.”

Hilliard was uncomfortably certain that a mist of tears had followed in the wake of the color. His voice warmed as he suggested;

“Let’s bury the hatchet, Miss Caswell. I don’t know why you should flourish it, but, I suppose there’s a reason. Tell me something of what’s happened in Sunnyfield. I was abroad for three years. When I landed on this side my father and aunts met me in New York. They are not letter writers. My father cables, wires, or phones. My aunts send little notes, no news, just reports, sunny reports as to the state of their health and the Squire’s. I am sure that if there are clouds you'll have the courage not to spare my feelings.”

A dirty dig, he thought, with a sting of self-contempt. But the girl after a sidelong glance above the collar of the raincoat, elected to take him literally.

“Why should your feelings be spared? You're thirtythree. I know because your father has shown me photographs of you from the cradle on. The parsonage, The Manse, is next door to Valleyview.”

“I haven’t been so long away that I’ve forgotten that. It’s a pity that you should have been afflicted to the extent of having to admire photos of me.”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t admired them. I loathe conceit. ’'ve looked at them because I adore your father. I don’t wonder that the villagers and mill workers call Peter Hilliard ‘The Squire,’ he looks the part. He’s so—so darned proud of you and for what? Collecting books doesn’t seem to me to be a full-sized job for a man of your age.”

Hilliard jammed the brake on his temper. He might have answered, “Possibly he’s proud of me because of an honor or two at college, my baseball and football letters, a citation treasured in his desk.” Instead he laughed;

“Call that burying the hatchet?”

“I haven’t agreed to bury the hatchet. It hurts unbearably to see your father holding his handsome head high and blithely explaining your ignoring of home while all the time...”

“Go on! Why hesitate? Now that you have your knife in finish the operation. All the time—what?”

“The business of the mills is falling off.”

“Off! How can it? He has gilt-edge contracts to supply newsprint besides regular customers for the finer grade paper we make.”

“He has lost one of the newsprint accounts.”

“How do you happen to know?”

“I happen to know Luke Small.”

“Why didn’t that little tin-god of a manager nail the account?”

“He tried to—he says. But, he’s had an advantageous offer to go with the Upper Mifkand ...”

“The Upper Mill! Hm-m-m!” —~ :

“Were you commenting or just growling? I didn’t mean to intimate that Luke is planning to leave your father, he was rather proud of the offer, that’s all. You can’t justly condemn him if he takes advantage of a chance to better himself, can you?”

“Considering the fact that when Luke’s father lost all he all had put into the Upper Mill and died years ago, my father gave the boy a job in our mills summers, kept him at school winters, sent him through college and then gave him a permanent position, I can condemn him, but I won’t. The rain has stopped as suddenly as it began. Better throw off that coat and get dry.”

The sun shone wanly through the breaking clouds like a child trying to smile after a storm of tears. Stealthily the thunder heads, spongey now, retreated. The sapphire blue of sky spread and spread and spread. The slanting sun blazed out at its early-September best. A soft breeze shook crystal showers from trees and shrubs. The air was fragrant with the smell of rainwashed earth and drenched wild blossoms. Birds twittered. From the green gloom of distant woods rose the song of a thrush. High. Ecstatic. Heart-breakingly sweet.

Geoffrey Hilliard drove swiftly along the red dirt road now mirrored with shining, shallow puddles looking for all the world like bits of isinglass set in a Turkish scarf. He stopped the low-slung car before the white picket gate in front of the Manse. Above the fence nodded a welter of bloom sparkling with brilliants left by the shower.

ny

Marigolds, a gold mine of them. An occasional tall spike of larkspur lingering long beyond its time as though loath to give way to its rival, purple monkshood, giant masses of it. There were patches of deepest orange. Tall pink lilies. Drifts of white cosmos, nuances of pale rose against dark greens, Gladioli in gorgeous profusion. Cloud mists of gypsophila. Brilliant color massed in the middle of the border shaded down to cool tints at the ends. Droning bees tumbled drunkenly from flower to flower, their bodies gold with pollen. A humming-bird skimmed through the scented air. It serenaded its stately sweetheart - With the rhythm of beating wings as it thrust its head, ruby throat deep, into the gold-veined chalice of an Aura~ tum lily.

A lawn, green as an emerald, soft as the transparent velvet of a woman’s frock, was flung like a choice rug between the flower border and the white cottage. There were little rabbits with upstanding ears cut in the yellow shutters. Gay orange and white awnings shaded the porches, boxes spilling over with yellow and white and purple blooms, adorned windows without, snowy muslins were visible within. As the car stopped the girl jumped out. Her damp clothing clung to her slim body, her ace hair was plastered to her head. Her voice was chilly;

“Thank you for bringing me home.”

Geoffrey Hilliard regarded the white house as he followed her from the roadster.

“Are you the miracle worker? I remember the Manse as a drab structure, in color a depressing blend of granite and clay. It had a rubber-plant perennially at the window, gobs of scarlet geraniums on a scraggly lawn.”

Nancy Caswell’s laugh was delicious;

“Scorn not the flower-grower’s best friend. Blooms may come and blooms may go but the geranium keeps on. . .”

From behind the house interrupted a rich, sonorous voice declaiming;

“There were forty craft in Avés that were both swift and stout.

All furnished well with small arms and cannons round about;

rai a thousand men in Avés made laws so fair and ree ay choose their valiant captains and obey them loy- Ver ”

A lovely light warmed the girl’s eyes.

“That’s Dad. He orates on all occasions, especially when he’s shaving. Sometime I expect to find him with an ear hanging by a thread.”

“Nan-cy!”

She waved her hand in response to the hail as a man came around the corner of the house. Coatless and hatless he was armed with rake and hoe. He dropped the tools, slipped into a coat of shabby brown velveteen which he appeared to pick from a tree, pulled off white cotton gloves and approached the two standing by the roadster. He had aquiline features, clear skin tinged with healthy tan, white hair matted in moist silky rings close to his finely shaped head, great dignity of presence. A wonderful face, Hilliard thought. He was erect, lean. On the border of sixty? Perhaps the shady border. His black eyes softened to velvet, his rich voice was solicitous as he inquired;

“Nan, where have you come from? After Sandy had landed the hay in the Valleyview barn he was stunned with amazement to discover that you were missing. He had raced home to get ahead of the storm. ‘I canna hae drapped her off,’ he kept muttering. Give an account of yourself, my dear.”

The girl re-bowed the broad, dangling ends of his near-windsor tie before she slipped her arm within his and explained;

“I did drop off. Quite unexpectedly. Dad, this is Geoffrey Hilliard. He picked me up out of the road.”

With the remembrance of that angrily ignored letter pricking at his conscience Hilliard was unprepared for the cordiality of the clergyman’s greeting. His dark eyes lighted with pleasure as he extended his hand;

“Our young neighbor! ‘The way of the gods are full of providence,’ to quote old Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. You're needed next door, boy. I’m glad you’ve come.”

“Thank you, sir. I—I apologize for not having answered your letter, but...”

“My letter? I have never written you a letter.”

“Aren’t you N. Caswell?”

“Yes. Noah Caswell.”

Geoffrey Hilliard’s eyes interrogated the girl. She made a little face at him from behind her father’s shoulder and colored pinkly. So—she had written that letter. Why? It was apparent that she disliked him cordially. Why? Was Luke Small responsible? Even from boyhood Luke had been furiously jealous of him. Would he Hy to prejudice this girl against him?

“Won’t you explain about that letter?”

Noah Caswell’s question snapped Hilliard’s attention back to the present. He hastened to admit lightly;

“Of course ’m mistaken. I mixed you up with someone else.”

Chapter II

Those “Whys?” still intrigued Geoffrey Hilliard as a few moments later he drove between the two stone lions which for fifty years or more had guarded the entrance to Valleyview, the family homestead. Was anything ever de- | signed more ugly than the house which his grandfather had built to replace the Colonial structure which had been burned, he wondered, as he looked ahead at the Mansard roof with its cupola crawling with curlycues, dotted with excrescences in the most approved, wedding-cake manner. Beds of cannas bordered with red geraniums starred, crescented and circled the plushy lawns. In the middle of one green expanse poised a white dog with black spots. Tail pointing, long ears drooping, nose sniffing, he stood as he had stood since long before the man who was regarding him had been born.

“Good old Spotty!” Geoffrey said aloud.

A wave of emotion swept him as he looked at his one-time playmate, emotion which startled him. He had thought himself coolly impervious to sentiment, except where his father was concerned, yet his blood had quickened to fever-heat at sight of a hollow in a girl’s throat and now an old iron dog had set memory tugging at his heart. Had the sights and sounds and smells of the town where he had grown up exorcised the spell which disillusion had cast upon him when he came back from France?

At the top of the porch steps he turned to look out over the valley from which the Hilliard homestead took its name. Nothing ugly about that. A meandering river, nooking, curving in shining loops, iridescent in the afternoon light, foamed in spots where the water was swift. The world was so still that plainly he could hear the dull roar of the dam above the paper mills and the nearer overtones of rush and splash and ripple of water. He could see fields yellow where the ripe grain had been cut, pastures sectored by stone walls, green hills flaming with darts of maple where a young, a very young Jack Frost had touched them with chilly fingers, in the midst of the white village the slender apex of a church spire pricking the sky. Everywhere the summer mellowing into autumn.

As he entered the house he stopped with a sense of strangeness. Changed. The black walnut hatrack with its intricate convolutions, which had adorned the wall ever since he could remember, was gone. On the floor below where it had hung stood a brass-bound chest. Who had salvaged that from the attic?

“Anyone at home?” he called.

With startling suddenness two women appeared in a doorway. Serena Hilliard, tall, gaunt, with skin as yellow as old ivory, hazel eyes set deep in Websterian hollows, high-bridged nose and delicate lips, was in marked contrast to her sister Sally. She was short, plump, freshskinned. There was an engaging twinkle in her young blue eyes; a dusting of powder of her retroussé nose, a mere suggestion of artificial color on her still girlish lips. Both women were white haired. They regarded their nephew for a stunned instant before they chorused;

“Geoffrey!”

Their incredulous delight gave a twist to the thumbscrews of self-reproach which the last hour had attached to young Hilliard’s conscience. He put an arm about the thin shoulders, an arm about the plump shoulders, and walked between the two women to the living room. He cleared an uncomfortable catch from his throat before he

inquired gaily;

“Been elected to the state legislature yet, Aunt Serena? Aunt Sally, how do you do it? You haven’t grown a minute older since last I saw you.”

They beamed upon him speechlessly. They fluttered about him until they had installed him in a wing chair in front of an open French window. He looked out upon the garden, a garden luminous with color in the afternoon sunshine. Prim gravelled paths, set like pewter patterns in an emerald rug, were bordered by phlox in all shades and varieties. Where they crossed shimmered a pool in the center of which two iron children crouched under a dripping iron umbrella. He turned to forestall Sally Hilliard as she was about to move a table.

“Let me do that. What’s the use having a big husk about if you don’t make him work?”

“Oh, Geoff! It’s so wonderful to have you here!” The plump woman’s soft voice wavered betrayingly.

The thumbscrews tightened. It would have been such an easy thing for him to week-end at home occasionally, her nephew reproached himself. He watched her spread a cloth of superfine texture.

“Does it really make a difference?”

Her laugh was like the coo of a pigeon. Two deep dimples dented her roseleaf cheeks as she teased;

“Now you're fishing, Geoff. Here comes Nora with tea. When she sees you...”

Serena Hilliard caught up the sentence;

“The Lord save the china. She...”

She was in turn interrupted by a crash. The tray the entering maid carried followed the law of gravitation as she flung up her hands in surprise;

“The Saints be praised! If it ain’t Master Geoff!”

Hilliard bent and kissed her ruddy cheek as she caught his two hands in her rough ones. She had been a maid at Valleyview when he had made his entrance into the world. She had remained scoffingly impervious to the lure of the eight-hour day and the five-day week. Her white print dress dotted with black was stiff with starch and decorously covered her ankles. Her coarse hair streaked alternately with red and grey was drawn so tightly back that her brows reared. Her little green eyes snapped continuously as she accused;

“Now, Master Geoff, ain’t thet jes’ like yer to scare a body’s if yer was a ghost?” She frowned down upon the sisters who on their knees were holding a post mortem over the tray;

“Don’t yer go to worritin,’ Ma’ms. That’s the blue teapot went broke, bad cess to it. Lucky I didn’t put old Madame Hilliard’s on. I knew Miss Nancy wouldn’t be in—she went hayin’ with Sandy—so I didn’t use the comp’ny china.”

With the dexterity of long experience in handling domestic casualties, she swept the débris into her immaculate and capacious apron, settled the tray upon the table and started for the kitchen.

“I'll be back wid more tay before yese can tell a prayer,” she encouraged and vanished. With stiff-back dignity Serena Hilliard seated herself at table. Sally hovered over it settling cups and sugaring saucers.

“Nora is such a trial,” deplored the elder woman. “We keep two village girls to help her, Sally has trained them beautifully, but she bursts into a temper if they serve tea. She considers that her prerogative. She’s been spoiled by the young people. They flock here for tea so that she may tell their fortunes from their cups.”

Sally broke a lance in the maid’s defense.

“She may be a trial but she’s a wonderful cook. When you think of the trouble the summer people have with servants who work only on schedule time you’d better go down on your knees and thank the Lord for Nora, hadn’t she, Geoff?” i

“Tl say she had.” He lifted the cover of a china beehive.

“Honey! Hot scones! Now I know that I’m at home.”

Home! He looked about. For the first time he saw the room, he had only felt it before. Changes here too. When last he had seen it, it might have been transferred bodily to the American Wing of the Metropolitan as a perfect _ example of the design-atrocities of the black walnut era. Now its contents would wring tears of envy from the eyes of a lover of antiques. He remembered the high-chest across the room as the attic receptacle for first, his butterflies, then shells, then stamps. He had been born with a collecting complex, most boys were, he suspected. The satin finish of a pie-crust table reflected the polished brasses on the hearth. There were chairs by the choice pair, a huge braided rug was on the floor. Rare Chinese vases had been transformed into charming lamps. The piano, which he remembered as closed, was open. It looked as though it were used. Restful wall spaces, had replaced a former scatter of small pictures. His great-great-grandfather’s portrait hung above the fireplace. There were two curious brass candlesticks on the mantel below it, nothing else. Only the shelves and shelves of books remained unchanged. Ponderous volumes from which emanated the faint scent of old calf-skin.

His aunts had kept pace with the changes in the room. Their gowns were silvery grey with a suggestion of modishness. Sally’s was much shorter than her sister’s. She must be at least ten years older than his father. In his boyhood he had felt nearer to her in spirit than to her sterner sister.

“You are noticing the changes, Geoffrey? You don’t mind?” Serena Hilliard inquired anxiously.

“Mind! I like them.”

“So does your father, in fact he is really responsible. We had kept the house as your grandmother left it, but he showed Nancy Caswell this old furniture in the attic and asked her what could be done with it. She was so enthusiastic about it that ...”

“We sent the black walnut upstairs and brought down this,” Miss Sally tripped into the explanation. “We do like it better. Now Nancy wants us to...”

“Does Miss Caswell run this place as well as the Manse?” her nephew interrupted in his turn. The crispness of his question made no dent in Sally Hilliard’s serenity.

“T wish that she did. I’m not the only one who'd like to have her about all the time. Luke Small...”

She stopped speaking with a significant lift of her eyebrows as Nora crackled into the room with a Canton teapot in one hand a plate of cookies, thin, crisp, goldenbrown wafers, in the other. i

“Is Mr. Geoffrey’s room ready for him?” Serena Hilliard inquired.

Having deposited her burdens with a minimum of clatter—for her—the Irish woman planted hands on hips. With rearing eyebrows twitching, green eyes snapping accompaniment she protested; ;

“Shure, Mam, ye know yerself, ’tis. Don’t we kape it always ready? An’ ain’t it yerselves what’s always sayin ter me; 5 Bh ; ;