Green Valley | Page 6

that had she been a man it would have swept her round the globe. But she has never crossed the State line. She has big sons and daughters who all somehow have inherited their father's stay-at-home nature. Her youngest boy, Peter, however, is only seventeen and on him she has built her last hopes. He, like herself, has a gipsy song in his heart and she often dreams of the places they will visit together.
And while she is waiting for Peter to grow up she travels about and around Green Valley. She wanders far up the Glen Road into the deep fairy woods between Green Valley and Spring Road. Here she strays alone for hours, searching for ferns and adventure.
Once a week she rides away to the city where she spends the morning in the gay and crowded stores and the afternoon in the Art Institute. She never wearies of seeing pictures. She never, if she can help it, misses an exhibition, and whenever the day's doings have not tired her too much this little old lady will steal off to the edge of the great lake and dream of what lies in the world beyond its rim. She often wishes she could paint the restless stretch of water but though she knows its every mood and though she is a wonderful judge of pictures she can not reproduce except in words the lovely nooks and beauty spots of her little world.
Perhaps it is this knowledge of her limitations that causes that little strain of wistful sadness to creep into her voice sometimes and that sends her very often out beyond the town, south along Park Lane to the little Green Valley cemetery.
She loves to read on the mossy stones the unchanging little histories, so brief but so eloquent, some of them. The stone that interests her most and that each time seems like a freshly new adventure is the simple shaft that bears no name, no date, just the tenderly sweet and pathetic little message:
"I miss Thee so."
Mrs. Jerry Dustin knows very well for whom that low green bed was made and who has had that little message of lonely love cut into stone. But she longs to know the rest of the story.
Sometimes she has a real adventure. It was here at the cemetery one day that she met Bernard Rollins, the artist. He was out sketching the fields that lie everywhere about, rounding and rolling off toward the horizon with the roofs of homesteads and barns just showing above the swells, with crows circling about the solitary clusters of trees, and men and horses plodding along the furrows.
No artist could have passed Mrs. Jerry Dustin by, for in her face and about her was the beauty that she had for years fed her soul. So Rollins spoke to her that summer day and they are friends now, great friends. She visits his studio frequently and he tells her all about France or Venice or wherever he has spent his busy summer. And she sits and listens happily.
Rollins bought out what used to be in Chicago's young days an old tavern and half-way house. It was a dilapidated old ruin, crumbling away in a shaggy old orchard full of gnarled and ancient apple trees, satin-skinned cherry trunks, some plums and peaches, and tangled shrubs of all kinds.
With the aid of his wife Elizabeth, some dollars and much work, Rollins transformed the old ruin into the sort of a country place that one reads about and imagines only millionaires may have. They say that when Old Skinflint Holden saw the transformation he stood stock-still, then tied his team to the artistic hitching post under the old elms and went in search of Rollins. He found him in the orchard in the laziest of hammocks literally worshipping the flowering trees all about him. Old Skinflint Holden was awed.
"Jehohasaphat! Bern, how did you do it?"
"Oh," smiled the artist, "we cleaned and patched it, put on a new bit here and there and sort of nursed it into shape. Doc Philipps gave us bulbs and seeds and loads of advice and then Elizabeth, I guess, sort of loved it into a home."
"Well--I guess," mused Skinflint Holden. "Must have cost you a pretty penny?"
"Why, no, it didn't. I'm telling you it wasn't a matter of dollars so much as love. If you use plenty of that you can economize on the money somewhat. Of course, it means work but love always means service, you know."
Old Skinflint Holden couldn't understand that sort of talk. It was said that love was one of the things he knew nothing about. His great star was money. He had had a chance to buy the old tavern but had seen no possibilities in it of any kind. So