With the Procession | Page 7

(though now no longer at
their brightest) convinced you that his sight was competent to cover the
field of vision to which he had elected to restrict himself. He seemed
completely serious, to have been so always, to have been born half
grown up, to have been dowered at the start with too keen a
consciousness of the burdens and responsibilities of life. Coltishness,
even by a retrospect of fifty years, it was impossible to attribute to him.
You imagined him as having been caught early, broken to harness at
once, and kept between the shafts ever since. It was easy to figure him
as backing into position with a sweet and reasonable docility--a docility
which saw no other course or career for a properly minded young horse,
and which looked upon the juvenile antics of others in the herd as an
unintelligible and rather reprehensible procedure. He knew what he was
for, and his way was before him.
He had acted on his knowledge, and now, at sixty, he seemed still to be
travelling over the same long straight road, blinders at his eyes, a high
wall on either side, no particular goal in the dusty distance, and an air
of patient, self-approving resignation all about him. His burden, too,
had increased with the years--just as his rut had grown deeper.
Counting his family and his poor relations, and his employés and their
families and poor relations, five or six hundred people were dependent
on him. Many of these, of course, had seats so low that they were
almost choked by the dust of the roadway; but others, more pleasantly
situated, were able to overlook the enclosing walls and to enjoy the
prospect beyond. Among these last was his younger son, who sat in the
highest place of all, and thence surveyed the universe.

The Marshall house had been built at the time of the opening of the
War, and as far "out" as seemed advisable for a residence of the better
sort. In those days no definite building-line had been established, so
that it was quite a walk from the front gate to the foot of the front steps.
Neither, at that time, was ground too valuable to make a good bit of
yard impracticable--so that the house had plenty of space on all sides. It
was a low, plain, roomy building with a sort of belvedere and a porch
or two. The belvedere was lingeringly reminiscent of the vanishing
classic, and the decorative woodwork of the porches showed some faint
traces of the romantico-lackadaisical style which filled up the years
between the ebb of the Greek and the vulgar flood-tide of
Second-empire renaissance. Taken altogether, a sedate, stable, decorous
old homestead, fit for the family within it.
In the back yard, behind a latticed screen-work, some shrubs and
bushes survived from a garden once luxuriant, but now almost vanished.
There had been a cherry-tree, too--a valiant little grower, which put
forth a cloud of white blossoms late in every May, and filled a small
pail with fruit early in every July. It was thus that Jane was enabled to
celebrate her birthday (which fell about this time of year) with a
fair-sized cherry pie; and in especially favorable seasons enough
cherries were left over to make a small tart for Rosy.
But the atmosphere had years ago become too urban for the poor
cherry-tree, which had long since disappeared from mortal ken; and the
last of the currant-bushes, too, were holding their own but poorly
against the smoke and cinders of metropolitan life. One of Jane's
earliest recollections was that of putting on her flat and taking her tin
pan and accompanying her mother out to pick currants for the annual
jelly-making. Her mother wore a flat, too, and carried a tin pan--both of
proportionate size. The flats had long since been cast aside, and the
pans had become less necessary with the dwindling of the
currant-bushes; but the jelly-making returned with every recurring July.
A great many quarts of alien currants and a great many pounds of white
sugar were fused in that hot and sticky kitchen, and then the red-stained
cloths were hung to dry upon the last remaining bushes. Jane would
sometimes reproach her parent with such a proceeding--which seemed

to her hardly less reprehensible than the seething of a kid in its mother's
milk; but Eliza Marshall had scant receptivity for any such poetical
analogies. The cloths, as seen through the lattice-work, had a somewhat
sensational aspect; they spoke of battle and murder and sudden death,
and sometimes the policeman passing by, if he was a new one, thought
for a second that he had stumbled on a "clew."
Eliza Marshall took this risk quite willingly; the idea of buying her jelly
ready-made never crossed