Insall got up and walked to the end of the terrace, gazing at a bluebird on the edge of the lawn.
"Well, not necessarily," he said, after a while. "Did you ever find out anything about her family?"
"Oh, yes, I met the father once, he's been out two or three times, on Sunday, and came over here to thank me for what I'd done. The mother doesn't come--she has some trouble, I don't know exactly what. Brooks, I wish you could see the father, he's so typically unique--if one may use the expression. A gatekeeper at the Chipperiug Mills!"
"A gatekeeper?"
"Yes, and I'm quite sure he doesn't understand to this day how he became one, or why. He's delightfully ***** on the subject of genealogy, and I had the Bumpus family by heart before he left. That's the form his remnant of the intellectual curiosity of his ancestors takes. He was born in Dolton, which was settled by the original Bumpus, back in the Plymouth Colony days, and if he were rich he'd have a library stuffed with gritty, yellow-backed books and be a leading light in the Historical Society. He speaks with that nicety of pronunciation of the old New Englander, never slurring his syllables, and he has a really fine face, the kind of face one doesn't often see nowadays. I kept looking at it, wondering what was the matter with it, and at last I realized what it lacked--will, desire, ambition,--it was what a second-rate sculptor might have made of Bradford, for instance. But there is a remnant of fire in him. Once, when he spoke of the strike, of the foreigners, he grew quite indignant."
"He didn't tell you why his daughter had joined the strikers?" Insall asked.
"He was just as much at sea about that as you and I are. Of course I didn't ask him--he asked me if I knew. It's only another proof of her amazing reticence. And I can imagine an utter absence of sympathy between them. He accounts for her, of course; he's probably the unconscious transmitter of qualities the Puritans possessed and tried to smother. Certainly the fires are alight in her, and yet it's almost incredible that he should have conveyed them. Of course I haven't seen the mother."
"It's curious he didn't mention her having been Ditmar's stenographer,"
Insall put in. "Was that reticence?"
"I hardly think so," Augusta Maturin replied. "It may have been, but the impression I got was of an incapacity to feel the present. All his emotions are in the past, most of his conversation was about Bumpuses who are dead and buried, and his pride in Janet--for he has a pride--seems to exist because she is their representative. It's extraordinary, but he sees her present situation, her future, with extraordinary optimism; he apparently regards her coming to Silliston, even in the condition in which we found her, as a piece of deserved fortune for which she has to thank some virtue inherited from her ancestors! Well, perhaps he's right. If she were not unique, I shouldn't want to keep her here. It's pure selfishness. I told Mr. Bumpus I expected to find work for her."
Mrs. Maturin returned Insall's smile. "I suppose you're too polite to say that I'm carried away by my enthusiasms. But you will at least do me the justice to admit that they are rare and--discriminating, as a connoisseur's should be. I think even you will approve of her."
"Oh, I have approved of her--that's the trouble."
Mrs. Maturin regarded him for a moment in silence.
"I wish you could have seen her when I began to read those verses of Stevenson's. It was an inspirations your thinking of them."
"Did I think of them?"
"You know you did. You can't escape your responsibility. Well, I felt like--like a gambler, as though I were staking everything on a throw.
And, after I began, as if I were playing on some rare instrument. She lay there, listening, without uttering a word, but somehow she seemed to be interpreting them for me, giving them a meaning and a beauty I hadn't imagined. Another time I told her about Silliston, and how this little community for over a century and a half had tried to keep its standard flying, to carry on the work begun by old Andrew, and I thought of those lines, "Other little children Shall bring my boats ashore.'
That particular application just suddenly, occurred to me, but she inspired it."
"You're a born schoolma'am," Insall laughed.
"I'm much too radical for a schoohna'am," she declared. "No board of trustees would put up with me--not even Silliston's! We've kept the faith, but we do move slowly, Brooks. Even tradition grows, and sometimes our blindness here to changes, to modern, scientific facts, fairly maddens me. I read her that poem of Moody's--you know it:--`Here, where the moors stretch free In the high blue afternoon, Are the marching sun and the talking sea.' and those last lines:--`But thou, vast outbound ship of souls, What harbour town for thee?
What shapes, when thy arriving tolls, Shall crowd the banks to see?
Shall all the happy shipmates then Stand singing brotherly?
Or shall a haggard, ruthless few Warp her over and bring her to, While the many broken souls of me Fester down in the slaver's pen, And nothing to say or do?'
I was sorry afterwards, I could see that she was tremendously excited.
And she made me feel as if I, too, had been battened down in that hold and bruised and almost strangled. I often wonder whether she has got out of it into the light--whether we can rescue her." Mrs. Maturin paused.
"What do you mean?" Insall asked.
