IV The Burgeoning
“Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow.”
—Tennyson.
Chapter I Two of a Kind
As I said at the beginning, this is my story, and the telling of it must be in my own way. It does not satisfy me to end it with our home-coming, and I hold that no story is complete unless it satisfies, first of all, him who tells it.
Why should love stories end at the altar? For there is that in life which surpasses the altar in sweetness. It is the hearth. And there is that which is greater than love making. It is the home making. And there are those in every marriage that is a marriage, of far greater worth to the world—since only through them may the world’s work go on—than the two who joined their lives at the altar, and they are the children who come of the marriage.
If my love for Eloise was great before, it is greater now, for in the sweet years that have passed have I not proved it a thousand times, as hath she, in the little things of life, the knight-errantries of love, the battle and the gauge that tests us all daily? And are not the still, calm depths in the eyes of the wife more satisfying to the soul than the merry frothy shoals that gleam so riotously in the eyes of the sweetheart?
No man has truly loved a woman until she has borne him children; not for the child alone, uplifting as is the first sight of this tiny sweet seed of the blossoming of their doubly growing souls, but as an evidence that there is nothing worth while in the world except love, since not only does it create every great, beautiful, sweet dream that has been given to the world, but even the dreamer himself!
No man has loved until he has seen the child of his love. It is not the row-boat of the calm waters that the sailor loves as his very life, but the good ship of the mid-seas that holds fast and true, even in the throes of the tempest, bringing him to port and to joy in the morning.
And so I have small respect, and a wholesome contempt for those story-tellers who make of married love a marred love; who paint its ending with the coming of children; and who would leave the wife at the last page waiting for a lover’s love lost in the husband’s love.
I did not know at first what it was that made Eloise change that first year, from the brilliant, riding, hunting, dancing Eloise of old to this thoughtful, beautiful creature who wanted always to slip off and read Keats by herself, and was slyly making what I thought were doll clothes for Little Sister; and when I was most happy with her to see now and then, through the day, little strange, unnatural flashes of sadness come into her deep, thoughtful eyes, and little, queer, unsatisfying doubts that would creep in. Unknowing, I would see her watching me; and it would end at night in our own room with her in my lap in tears and her arms around me.
“Jack! Jack!” she cried. “Oh, I am so foolish; but are you sure that you will never love anybody better than you do me, not even your own child?”
How well I remember that day of my greatest agony and blessing, and the long, long hours in which her life hung in the balance. I remember the good old doctor who came first, and then, as the day wore on, the graveness that settled in his eyes and the hurried sending to the city for another one. I walked sorrowfully among the trees, a coward, a weakling, for the first time in my life.
Aunt Lucretia was my only comforter, and a stern, unflinching, rude comforter she was. “Jack, Colonel Ballington, actually wilted, a weakling, ruined by matrimony and too much love, as I always said you’d be, if you didn’t look out. Jack, you make me tired; born on this stock farm, seeing my crop of colts and calves, my spring lambs, too, and whatnots; the finest and most high-bred matrons of my paddock, bringing in their first borns and not a fool doctor in ten miles to meddle with them and Nature and her ways! And now Eloise, the gamiest, nerviest, bravest thoroughbred of them all! You make me tired! Come, I want to make a man of you.”
She seized my arm and led me into the house. In the library she took down her huge silver goblet, an international trophy won in France, her prize for the best merino wool, and then she led me down into the cellar.
I had never been in it but once before. It was cool and damp, its sleepers lined with cobwebs. She lit a lantern and led me into the farthest, darkest, cobwebbiest corner. She stood before a small ten-gallon cask, and said with some show of grim humor, “Jack, it was fifteen years ago to-day—Did you know this was an anniversary? Well, fifteen years ago to-day I brought Eloise here, adopted her and gave her to you; and that day I told my old friend, Jack Daniel, to send me this ten-gallon cask of pure whiskey, to be put away, and to get good and mellow for just what I knew would one day happen—the first colt! And now we are going to tap it in his honor!”
“His honor, Aunt Lucretia?” I said shamedly. “I had set my heart on her being a—a—why, we are going to name her Lucretia,” I added timidly and with some confusion.
“Jack, you were always a fool; a bigger one since you married, just as I knew you’d be, all of ’em are. Why, of course he’ll be a good lusty chap; and I have already named him Andrew Jackson, and that’s what he’ll be, name and all. I am going to give his daddy a drink; he needs it, weak-kneeing around here like an old run-down selling-plater in the home stretch.”
In the dining-room she took down a cut-glass goblet and pottered around in the side-board till she had found her old-time loaf sugar. This she broke into bits, and, putting a piece in the goblet, she held it up to the light and eyed me queerly.
I knew Aunt Lucretia, and that this ceremony was her way of playing for time and a kindly way of diverting my mind from Eloise.
“Very few people, Jack,” she went on, “know how to make a toddy. Now you pour a little water over this sugar and let it melt; if you crush it with the spoon it spoils the whole thing, and then pour the whiskey in slowly, stirring it all the time. The nutmeg; ah—”
We took one each, and Aunt Lucretia smiled. “Feel better? Well, you’d better stop at that! Another one might make you see double—directly—and that would be horrible—twins! Why, Jack, I’ve known men to be driving along, single, and after taking two of these to swear they were driving a span! One more makes them think they are holding a four-in-hand! Now, that boy of yours,” she began, “why, Jack, I wouldn’t have him divided up into twins for anything.”
We stopped and looked quickly up. The old doctor was smiling at us. He had slipped into the room while we were talking.
“You have missed it, Miss Lucretia,” he said, pouring out a half-glass for himself and taking it straight. “Phew! But I need a bracer myself after all that! It’s a girl, Jack, a most beautiful, bloodlike little girl.”
“Jack!” cried my Aunt, throwing up both hands, “Jack, get out of my sight! But we’ll drink to her,” she added gamely.
And we did.
“Two of them!” cried the doctor, warmly shaking my hand. “Two beautiful little girls, Jack! My boy, I congratulate you! And the mother is doing fine, just tickled to death and begging me to let you come in at once!”
“Heaven help us!” cried my Aunt Lucretia, with feigned anger, but real exultation shining in her eyes. “Twin colts never amount to a hill of beans. We’ll go in directly, Doctor, and drown one of them; it will give the other a chance in life.”
I turned quickly. “Hand me that glass, Doctor,” I said firmly. “I am never going to be partial to my little ones. We’ve drunk to the first one, here’s to the second!”
“Yes, even in our disappointment let us be just,” said my Aunt, joining me.
And we drank to the second one, my Aunt laughing, pleased for all her seeming anger.
But my own heart was pounding under me with the same gripping in my throat that I had felt as I stood on the deck of the Indiana and, looking up, beheld Old Glory above me....
They were lying together by their mother, pink and white little creatures, with heads quite hairless, and blue eyes that were already smiling as plain as could be, twinkling, fun-loving eyes, which said, then, as they have always said, “It’s a joke on Daddy we’ve played!”
Eloise, lying smiling by them, was holding out her arms to me. “I am quite comfortable, and oh, so happy, Jack!” she whispered as I kissed her again and again. “You can’t love them both better than you do me! And please don’t inspect them too closely, Daddy,” she went on, “for you know what old Josh Billings said: ‘There is two things no man is ever prepared for—twins!’ So we’ve had to dress up one of them in Aunt Lucretia’s old flannel skirt and a crash towel, but she’s just as sweet as the other one and so like her own, sweet daddy!”
“That Jack Daniel whiskey, sweetheart,” I said, choking up sillily,—“but I am so thankful, now that you are safe—and—and—I was so proud and happy that I drank to each of their healths, till, Eloise, really are you sure, but I’ll swear I am seeing four little heads here under the cover—and if there are—of course, if it is, it’s all right with me—and—and—Eloise, aren’t they holding hands already?”
Eloise broke out into her old laugh. “Of course they are,” she cried happily, “and there aren’t but two of them, Jack; honest, just two—on my word of honor, none of them have got away; but that’s the funniest part of it all—they clasped hands as soon as they were placed together—just two sweet for anything! Such devotion to each other! Look! And oh, Jack, you must never, never show any partiality, or love one more than the other, or either of them more than me. And don’t take any more of Aunt Lucretia’s Jack Daniel, for it makes me afraid to have you see double this way! Don’t now, for if you took two more of those old drinks you might see triplets—oh,—the thought of it! Now kiss us all goodnight; we want to sleep. And here—your hands, Jack, and our little prayer.”