Time of the Singing of Birds Read online

  After a while, maybe not today, but someday pretty soon, when he could bear it, he would go and sit where she had sat and look through all those papers, and perhaps read some of her last thoughts through them. But not now, not just this first morning. He did not want to brush aside the veil of make-believe and definitely feel that she was really gone forever—not right away. He would wait a few hours perhaps, or it might be a day or so, until he felt strong enough to stand it. But just now it was enough to sit here quietly, as if he were waiting for her to come in and talk with him. That was blessed, at least for the moment. And since he had been in the hospital he found that he had to take things of the heart slowly, adjust his mind and thoughts to the new order, and take it like a man. And that was the reason that he was so glad that Roxy was willing he should keep quietly out of sight for a little until he was used to the new way of his broken world. So he read an old book that he had loved in the past, and now and again he closed his eyes and prayed in his heart for strength to go on into the future that was before him.

  His choice of course, after his resting time was done and when he felt fit again, would be to go back into war and do his part until the whole job was finished up and Right established once more in this seething world. Until Evil was vanquished, and the world safe for everybody. But that was dependent upon how quickly his strength came back, and what the doctors said. Well, he must take it a day at a time, and be ready for whatever was planned ahead for him of course. His mother had taught him that, and his war experience had taught him, too. But the waiting was not an easy thing to do when his impatient soul was daily growing more eager to be back and into the great fray again. Just to lie by, and be an invalid, that was never an easy role for Barney Vance to play.

  So as he reclined in the old easy chair and tried to read a book he used to love, these thoughts drifted in a background across his mind to reassure him. This was the important thing to do first. Just let the atmosphere of home and the past saturate his weary spirit, and hearten him, before he must meet life again and go on.

  Into this quiet brooding atmosphere breezed Roxy, with her kindly smile and a brimming glass of milk.

  “It’s time you had a sip of milk, laddie,” she said, “and a cookie or two? You used to like them for a snack when you were a child.”

  “Oh, Roxy, you’re going to spoil me completely. I can see I’ll have to get away from here in a hurry or I’ll not be fit to get back into war when I’m called again.”

  “Oh, but we’ll not talk about that now,” said the old nurse. “Time enough for that when the call comes. Meantime it’s good to see you sit there like you used to do. The fire on one side and your mommy’s desk on the other.”

  Roxy dropped down on a straight chair for a minute watching the soldier boy drink the milk, so evidently enjoying it.

  “Have you been over to her desk?” she asked, after a minute. “I’ve kept it just as she left it. I thought you would enjoy going through it. Indeed, I think she thought you would want to do that, too. For the very last time she was downstairs she sat at her desk working away at the papers, and writing a line here and there. She sat there far too long that last day, I thought, for her own good, and when I urged her to let me help her back to her bed she would shake her head, and say, ‘No, Roxy, I must finish here. You know I may not be well enough to come down again perhaps, and I want to get it all in order for my boy, if he comes home after I’m gone.’ So I thought you might feel it was something she left for you to go through. She might even have written a few words on something just for you, you know.”

  The young man caught his breath, and turned his face away toward the desk, that she might not see the mist in his eyes.

  “I must go through it,” he said. “I was working up to that, but I wasn’t sure I was up to bearing it yet.” His voice was husky, and he tried to give a pitiful little grin for Roxy’s sake.

  Wise Roxy rose, with no sign that she saw how much he was stirred by her words, and true to her old habit of keeping cheerful in an issue, put on a matter-of-fact tone: “That’s good, of course. You don’t want to get yourself all worked up. She wouldn’t have wanted that. She just wanted you to be comforted. And now, don’t you think you’ve been up long enough and you ought to get back to your bed and take another long sleep? Tomorrow or the next day will be time enough for you to look into any business papers. She said they were not important, but you would want to look them over sometime, and so she got them ready for you. Now, you get upstairs and take your nap, and after a while I’ll be bringing your tray up. A bit of chicken cooked the way you used to like it. With dumplings? How is that?”

  “Sounds swell,” he said, slowly getting up from his chair and putting down his book on the table. “But you needn’t bring it up. I can come down.” Then after a minute, wistfully, “And will there be applesauce?”

  “Oh, yes, surely,” said Roxy, smiling and winking back a recalcitrant tear of her own.

  So she shooed him off to his rest and went out to see how the chicken was getting on, and prepare her dumplings.

  Barney did not get back to the library until late the next afternoon, though the thought of that precious desk was hovering in his mind. His heart cried out to go through it at once, but he wanted to do it alone. He did not want even Roxy watching him, not even her cheery voice commenting upon whatever he might find. The contents of that desk were too sacred for others to intrude upon him while he examined it.

  So he slept late, waking only to hear the morning matins of the birds among the apple blossoms, and then drifting off to sleep again, taking the real rest that the doctor had hoped he would get when he once reached home.

  He came down to the kitchen while Roxy was preparing lunch and talked with her, asking about some of his mother’s old friends, discovering that some had moved away and a few had died, but quite a number were still living in their old homes, and often asked after him.

  There had not been the sweet piercing whistle that morning to turn his thoughts toward his young friend Sunny, and perhaps a feeling of self-consciousness prevented his speaking of her again. At least she was not mentioned.

  Barney ate heartily of the delightful homemade soup of meat and vegetables with plenty of light fluffy potatoes generously floating among the carrots and onions. He said how good it tasted. Told her that nobody else knew how to make soup like that, took a second helping, and then equally praised the apple and nut salad that came after, and declared that nobody could cook like Roxy, anyway.

  He helped to dry the dishes and when the kitchen and dining room were in spic-and-span order he drifted into the library again and took some time selecting a book to read, waiting until Roxy should go upstairs for her afternoon nap.

  But Roxy sensed that he wanted to be entirely alone for a little, and so she put her head in at the door and said, “Would you mind if I just run out for a wee while? I promised old lady Sanborne I would run over and write a bit of a letter for her to her daughter. She can’t see so good anymore, and she finds it hard to write. You won’t feel lonesome, will you?”

  “No, of course not. I’ll be all right. It’s very restful here, you know, Roxy. I’m just luxuriating the quiet. Stay as long as you like. There are plenty of books around for me to enjoy.”

  So Roxy took off her apron and put on her wrap and hurried away down the road, promising to be back soon. And Barney laid down his book where he could easily reach it again if need be, and went to the window, watching her walk down the road until she turned off toward the Sanborne cottage. Then with a sigh of relief he went quickly over to his mother’s desk and sat down, as if he were keeping a rendezvous with her.

  Tenderly he looked over the whole front of the familiar desk. It seemed so much as usual. Dear Mother! Yet he sensed that it was in more than its accustomed tidy order. His mother had prepared it for him to go over.

  And so he began at the right-hand cubby hole, and went slowly, steadily through them all. Neat packets of letters from fr
iends and distant relatives, some since now dead, but letters that were notably friendly and newsy. Barney found himself imagining that his mother had retained these thinking he might enjoy reading them. A few from a favorite and ancient great-aunt who had a keen sense of humor and could make the simplest remarks in droll and original language, with pen sketches illustrating her news. He read them through, and had a feeling that his mother was there, enjoying them with him. What a beautiful thing it was for her to have done, to arrange this little getting-together with her for his homecoming! More than once this thought brought tender tears to his eyes, as slowly he read on from one neat packet to the next, folding them back when he had read them, into their bands as he had found them.

  Then he came to more recent letters, showing sympathy for her in her illness, cheering her up, speaking of her boy who was fighting overseas. He hurried through those. It wasn’t pleasant to him to realize how hard his mother’s lonely part had been in this terrible war, sickness and pain, and anxiety for her beloved son!

  Then there was a compartment of business letters, clear statements of transactions made since he had left, receipts in full of all bills, so that he might understand what she had done.

  He found that she had put all her business into a joint account of herself and her son, so that he would have no trouble, and there would be no delay in his taking over when he came back. It seemed that she had thought of everything. There was even a little book of notes, telling where certain important papers and keys would be found and just what had been put into the safe-deposit box in the bank.

  He went rapidly through all these business matters, knowing that their time would come in later when he felt strong enough to go into everything with his mother’s lawyer, and finally he came to a single letter, bearing his name, his mother’s handwriting, a letter from the dead!

  With a quick sore break of a sigh, almost like a sob, he drew it out and began to read:

  My precious Barney: This is probably the last letter I will write to you on this earth—

  His eyes were blurred with tears so that the precious words were almost dimmed by them, and he had to brush them away before he could go on reading. And then he sat back and looked at those words again as if there were glimpses of her beloved face in the written lines. His dear mother, gone from him, but thinking of him at the last minute and leaving him a message—!

  Then suddenly there was a sound at the side door, rushing noisy feet, sharp heels clicking across the linoleum of the hall, coming straight and inexorably toward his hiding place. Who could it be? Not Roxy. No! Some intruder!

  Instinctively he gripped the precious letter and stared toward the door, which he had taken the precaution to close before he sat down at the desk, but now it was suddenly burst open, tempestuously, as if the intruder would brook no resistance, and a girl with black hair, dark bold eyes, and a painted face flung herself arrogantly into the room. A girl with sharp red fingernails like claws on her lily white fingers, and a number of noisy clattery rings and bracelets jingling as she moved.

  “Well, there you are at last, Barney Vance! I knew I could find you in spite of that old hag of a nurse of yours. I knew she was lying when she wouldn’t tell me when you were coming. So I went to the postmaster and found out you were getting letters in the mail, so I just watched my chance when your keeper was out and stole a march on her. And here you are! Darling, you look grand! And I’ve come to drag you out of your shell and help you to have some good times and make you forget war. But say, you look wonderful in your uniform! And won’t I put it all over the other girls to think I’ve seen you first! Look up and smile, can’t you? I’m Hortense. Your old friend. Your almost fiancée. We were almost engaged before you left, weren’t we, Barney? And if it hadn’t been for a snooping prowler of a nurse, and a prissy mother, we probably would have been married before you left, too, wouldn’t we, dolling?”

  And Barney Vance sat there by his mother’s desk, with her precious last letter, still unread, gripped fiercely in his fingers, and his knees shaking like any girl’s—was it with weakness or anger?—and glared sternly at the unwelcome visitor.

  Chapter 5

  There was a long moment of silence while the two took stock of each other, and the young man’s glare did not change. The girl was almost taken aback at his silence.

  “What’s the matter with you, Barney Vance, don’t you know me? I haven’t changed so much, have I? You needn’t put on that faraway, superior army air. You and I were practically engaged, you know, before you went away to war.”

  “We were what?” asked the young soldier fiercely, hastily wrapping his long fingers protectively around the letter he held, slowly, carefully laying it in its original folds, placing it in an inner pocket, as if he would shield it from contact with the very air this arrogant person breathed.

  “Why, engaged. Or practically so, don’t you know? We would have been openly engaged if you hadn’t been so much afraid of your fussy old mother. In fact, I think we would have been married before you left if she hadn’t interfered with her puritanical ideas, so I went away. It seems funny, doesn’t it, that we let people with such funny, old-fashioned ideas manage us that way? Sometimes it is easy to see why we needed a war, to wake us up and make us understand that we didn’t have to be tied down by such fantastic obedience to our elders. My word! I sometimes wonder how we existed in those days. You certainly must have enjoyed the freedom when you got away from home and in the army among real men, didn’t you? But you certainly remember we were practically engaged once.”

  Barney lifted a haughty chin. The weakness in his knees was beginning to go away now, and anger was surging over him. What right had this girl to barge in here without being asked, as if she belonged, and insult his mother and the way he had been brought up? He roused to answer coldly.

  “Not that I remember,” he said brusquely.

  “Now, Barney, don’t be so obtuse.”

  “It certainly never entered my head that we were anything more than schoolmates. You and I were practically only kids when we last saw each other, too young to give even a thought to engagement or marriage. You must have got your memories mixed.” He ended with a distant grin that practically put the whole idea out of the running.

  “Now, Barney, you horrid thing! What are you trying to do? Take all the romance out of our friendship? And here I’ve been missing you all this long time, and trying my best to forget you, and I just couldn’t do it. I keep thinking back to the time when we were playing games in your dining room and hall and you caught me under the stairs and almost kissed me once, only your snooping old mother came along and stopped you just in time.”

  The young man rose suddenly, haughtily. “You will leave my mother out of the conversation, Hortense. She is too precious to me to allow you to insult her.”

  “But I wasn’t insulting her,” laughed the young woman. “I talk the same way about my mother. They couldn’t help it that they were born in the Victorian age. But I’m glad I’m out from under, and free to do as I please. And your mother is gone now, and you are free to act yourself. I don’t see why you want to be so stuffy about it.”

  To do Hortense justice, she had been to a luncheon and then a tea that afternoon and had partaken of altogether too many cocktails to be quite her normal self, and by this time Barney had begun to recognize that fact and take the situation in hand.

  “Suppose we go out to the porch,” he suggested stiffly. “It seems close in here.” And he led the way to the side door.

  “By the way, how did you say you knew I was in town?” he asked in a formal tone as they went out. “I came at night, and I didn’t know anybody knew I was here yet. You see, I’m supposed to be under orders to keep very quiet for a while and not see people.”

  “Oh really? Now, Barney, that sounds ridiculous! You look just as well as ever, and everybody knows that what a returned soldier needs is a lot of company and a lot of cheering up. That’s what I came for, to cheer you up.�
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  “You don’t say so!” said the young man with a sardonic grin, though there was still an angry note in his voice. “Well, if you did, please lay off that bunk about our being engaged, for it wasn’t true and you know it. Now, come out and see my apple trees in blossom. They’re a lovely sight. And don’t let’s talk about me anymore. Tell me about yourself. What have you been doing?”

  Barney drew a long breath as the out-of-doors air, sweet with the breath of blossoms, reached him. This was a healthier atmosphere. Somehow it didn’t seem as if she could quite be so unpleasant out here.

  He drew out one of the big rockers tidily tied with white linen covers in Roxy’s best style.

  “Sit down,” he said politely. “Now, tell me about yourself. What has happened to you? You know I haven’t been home long enough to get any of the gossip. What are you doing with yourself? You’re not in uniform, so I judge you didn’t join any of the army organizations. I suppose you must be doing defense work of some sort.”

  Barney was struggling for his best polite manner, in order to awe this terrible girl. If she got interested in talking about herself she might forget to insult his mother, or to claim an undue intimacy for their past. She must be a little drunk or she would never go to such lengths. She was grown up now, and surely she would not insult his mother who had often given her hospitality in the days that were gone.

  He drew up another chair, not too near, and settled back wearily, dropping his eyelids down for just an instant and taking a deep breath.

  “You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t talk much,” he said. “I’ve been in the hospital for a number of weeks, and I’m just home after a long, hard journey, you know. You do the talking. What are you? A defense worker, or a nurse?”