THE MESSENGERS
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THE MESSENGERS
By Richard Harding Davis
THE MESSENGERS
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When Ainsley first moved to Lone Lake Farm all of his friends asked
him the same question. They wanted to know, if the farmer who sold it
to him had abandoned it as worthless, how one of the idle rich, who could
not distinguish a plough from a harrow, hoped to make it pay? His
answer was that he had not purchased the farm as a means of getting richer
by honest toil, but as a retreat from the world and as a test of true
friendship. He argued that the people he knew accepted his hospitality at
Sherry's because, in any event, they themselves would be dining within a
taxicab fare of the same place. But if to see him they travelled all the
way to Lone Lake Farm, he might feel assured that they were friends
indeed.
Lone Lake Farm was spread over many acres of rocky ravine and
forest, at a point where Connecticut approaches New York, and between it
and the nearest railroad station stretched six miles of an execrable wood
road. In this wilderness, directly upon the lonely lake, and at a spot
equally distant from each of his boundary lines, Ainsley built himself a red
brick house. Here, in solitude, he exiled himself; ostensibly to become a
gentleman farmer; in reality to wait until Polly Kirkland had made up her
mind to marry him.
Lone Lake, which gave the farm its name, was a pond hardly larger
than a city block. It was fed by hidden springs, and fringed about with
reeds and cat-tails, stunted willows and shivering birch. From its surface
jutted points of the same rock that had made farming unremunerative, and
to these miniature promontories and islands Ainsley, in keeping with a
fancied resemblance, gave such names as the Needles, St. Helena, the Isle
of Pines. From the edge of the pond that was farther from the house rose
a high hill, heavily wooded. At its base, oak and chestnut trees spread
their branches over the water, and when the air was still were so clearly
reflected in the pond that the leaves seemed to float upon the surface. To
THE MESSENGERS
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the smiling expanse of the farm the lake was what the eye is to the human
countenance. The oaks were its eyebrows, the fringe of reeds its lashes,
and, in changing mood, it flashed with happiness or brooded in sombre
melancholy. For Ainsley it held a deep attraction. Through the summer
evenings, as the sun set, he would sit on the brick terrace and watch the
fish leaping, and listen to the venerable bull-frogs croaking false alarms of
rain. Indeed, after he met Polly Kirkland, staring moodily at the lake
became his favorite form of exercise. With a number of other men,
Ainsley was very much in love with Miss Kirkland, and unprejudiced
friends thought that if she were to choose any of her devotees, Ainsley
should be that one. Ainsley heartily agreed in this opinion, but in
persuading Miss Kirkland to share it he had not been successful. This
was partly his own fault; for when he dared to compare what she meant to
him with what he had to offer her he became a mass of sodden humility.
Could he have known how much Polly Kirkland envied and admired his
depth of feeling, entirely apart from the fact that she herself inspired that
feeling, how greatly she wished to care for him in the way he cared for her,
life, even alone in the silences of Lone Lake, would have been a beautiful
and blessed thing. But he was so sure she was the most charming and
most wonderful girl in all the world, and he an unworthy and despicable
being, that when the lady demurred, he faltered, and his pleading, at least
to his own ears, carried no conviction.
"When one thinks of being married," said Polly Kirkland gently, "it
isn't a question of the man you can live with, but the man you can't live
without. And I am sorry, but I've not found that man."
"I suppose," returned Ainsley gloomily, "that my not being able to live
without you doesn't affect the question in the least?"
"You HAVE lived without me," Miss Kirkland pointed out
reproachfully, "for thirty years."
"Lived!" almost shouted Ainsley. "Do you call THAT living? What
was I before I met you? I was an ignorant beast of the field. I knew as
much about living as one of the cows on my farm. I could sleep twelve
hours at a stretch, or, if I was in New York, I NEVER slept. I was a Day
THE MESSENGERS
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and Night Bank of health and happiness, a great, big, useless puppy. And
now I can't sleep, can't eat, can't think--except of you. I dream about you
all night, think about you all day, go through the woods calling your name,
cutting your initials in tree trunks, doing all the fool things a man does
when he's in love, and I am the most miserable man in the world--and the
happiest!"
He finally succeeded in making Miss Kirkland so miserable also that
she decided to run away. Friends had planned to spend the early spring
on the Nile and were eager that she should accompany them. To her the
separation seemed to offer an excellent method of discovering whether or
not Ainsley was the man she could not "live without."
Ainsley saw in it only an act of torture, devised with devilish cruelty.
"What will happen to me," he announced firmly, "is that I will plain
DIE! As long as I can see you, as long as I have the chance to try and
make you understand that no one can possibly love you as I do, and as
long as I know I am worrying you to death, and no one else is, I still hope.
I've no right to hope, still I do. And that one little chance keeps me alive.
But Egypt! If you escape to Egypt, what hold will I have on you? You
might as well be in the moon. Can you imagine me writing love-letters
to a woman in the moon? Can I send American Beauty roses to the ruins
of Karnak? Here I can telephone you; not that I ever have anything to say
that you want to hear, but because I want to listen to your voice, and to
have you ask, 'Oh! is that YOU?' as though you were glad it WAS me.
But Egypt! Can I call up Egypt on the long-distance? If you leave me
now, you'll leave me forever, for I'll drown myself in Lone Lake."
The day she sailed away he went to the steamer, and, separating her
from her friends and family, drew her to the side of the ship farther from
the wharf, and which for the moment, was deserted. Directly below a pile-
driver, with rattling of chains and shrieks from her donkey-engine, was
smashing great logs; on the deck above, the ship's band was braying forth
fictitious gayety, and from every side they were assailed by the raucous
whistles of ferry-boats. The surroundings were not conducive to sentiment,
but for the first time Polly Kirkland seemed a little uncertain, a little
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frightened; almost on the verge of tears, almost persuaded to surrender.
For the first time she laid her hand on Ainsley's arm, and the shock sent
the blood to his heart and held him breathless. When the girl looked at
him there was something in her eyes that neither he nor any other man had
ever seen there.
"The last thing I tell you," she said, "the thing I want you to remember,
is this, that, though I do not care--I WANT to care.
Ainsley caught at her hand and, to the delight of the crew of a passing
tug-boat, kissed it rapturously. His face was radiant. The fact of parting
from her had caused him real suffering, had marked his face with hard
lines. Now, hope and happiness smoothed them away and his eyes shone
with his love for her. He was trembling, laughing, jubilant.
"And if you should!" he begged. "How soon will I know? You will
cable," he commanded. "You will cable 'Come,' and the same hour I'll
start toward you. I'll go home now," he cried, "and pack!"
The girl drew away. Already she regretted the admission she had
made. In fairness and in kindness to him she tried to regain the position
she had abandoned.
"But a change like that," she pleaded, "might not come for years, may
never come!" To recover herself, to make the words she had uttered
seem less serious, she spoke quickly and lightly.
"And how could I CABLE such a thing!" she protested. "It would be
far too sacred, too precious. You should be able to FEEL that the change
has come."
"I suppose I should," assented Ainsley, doubtfully; "but it's a long way
across two oceans. It would be safer if you'd promise to use the cable.
Just one word: 'Come.'"
The girl shook her head and frowned.
"If you can't feel that the woman you love loves you, even across the
world, you cannot love her very deeply."
"I don't have to answer that!" said Ainsley.
"I will send you a sign," continued the girl, hastily; "a secret wireless
message. It shall be a test. If you love me you will read it at once.
THE MESSENGERS
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You will know the instant you see it that it comes from me. No one else
will be able to read it; but if you love me, you will know that I love you.
Whether she spoke in metaphor or in fact, whether she was "playing
for time," or whether in her heart she already intended to soon reward him
with a message of glad tidings, Ainsley could not decide. And even as he
begged her to enlighten him the last whistle blew, and a determined officer
ordered him to the ship's side.
"Just as in everything that is beautiful," he whispered eagerly, "I
always see something of you, so now in everything wonderful I will read
your message. But," he persisted, "how shall I be SURE?"
The last bag of mail had shot into the hold, the most reluctant of the
visitors were being hustled down the last remaining gangplank. Ainsley's
state was desperate.
"Will it be in symbol, or in cipher?" he demanded. "Must I read it in
the sky, or will you hide it in a letter, or--where? Help me! Give me just
a hint!"
The girl shook her head.
"You will read it--in your heart," she said.
From the end of the wharf Ainsley watched the funnels of the ship
disappear in the haze of the lower bay. His heart was sore and heavy, but
in it there was still room for righteous indignation. "Read it in my heart!"
he protested. "How the devil can I read it in my heart? I want to read it
PRINTED in a cablegram."
Because he had always understood that young men in love found
solace for their misery in solitude and in communion with nature, he at
once drove his car to Lone Lake. But his misery was quite genuine, and
the emptiness of the brick house only served to increase his loneliness.
He had built the house for her, though she had never visited it, and was
associated with it only through the somewhat indefinite medium of the
telephone box. But in New York they had been much together. And
Ainsley quickly decided that in revisiting those places where he had been
happy in her company he would derive from the recollection some
melancholy consolation. He accordingly raced back through the night to
THE MESSENGERS
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the city; nor did he halt until he was at the door of her house. She had
left it only that morning, and though it was locked in darkness, it still
spoke of her. At least it seemed to bring her nearer to him than when he
was listening to the frogs in the lake, and crushing his way through the
pines.
He was not hungry, but he went to a restaurant where, when he was
host, she had often been the honored guest, and he pretended they were at
supper together and without a chaperon. Either the illusion, or the supper
cheered him, for he was encouraged to go on to his club. There in the
library, with the aid of an atlas, he worked out where, after thirteen hours
of moving at the rate of twenty-two knots an hour, she should be at that
moment. Having determined that fact to his own satisfaction, he sent a
wireless after the ship. It read: "It is now midnight and you are in
latitude 40 degrees north, longitude 68 degrees west, and I have grown old
and gray waiting for the sign."
The next morning, and for many days after, he was surprised to find
that the city went on as though she still were in it. With unfeeling
regularity the sun rose out of the East River. On Broadway electric-light
signs flashed, street-cars pursued each other, taxicabs bumped and skidded,
women, and even men, dared to look happy, and had apparently taken
some thought to their attire. They did not respect even his widowerhood.
They smiled upon him, and asked him jocularly about the farm and his
"crops," and what he was doing in New York. He pitied them, for
obviously they were ignorant of the fact that in New York there were art
galleries, shops, restaurants of great interest, owing to the fact that Polly
Kirkland had visited them. They did not know that on upper Fifth
Avenue were houses of which she had deigned to approve, or which she
had destroyed with ridicule, and that to walk that avenue and halt before
each of these houses was an inestimable privilege.
Each day, with pathetic vigilance, Ainsley examined his heart for the
promised sign. But so far from telling him that the change he longed for
had taken place, his heart grew heavier, and as weeks went by and no sign
appeared, what little confidence he had once enjoyed passed with them.
THE MESSENGERS
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But before hope entirely died, several false alarms had thrilled him
with happiness. One was a cablegram from Gibraltar in which the only
words that were intelligible were "congratulate" and "engagement." This
lifted him into an ecstasy of joy and excitement, until, on having the cable
company repeat the message, he learned it was a request from Miss
Kirkland to congratulate two mutual friends who had just announced their
engagement, and of whose address she was uncertain. He had hardly
recovered from this disappointment than he was again thrown into a
tumult by the receipt of a mysterious package from the custom-house
containing an intaglio ring. The ring came from Italy, and her ship had
touched at Genoa. The fact that it was addressed in an unknown
handwriting did not disconcert him, for he argued that to make the test
more difficult she might disguise the handwriting. He at once carried the
intaglio to an expert at the Metropolitan Museum, and when he was told
that it represented Cupid feeding a fire upon an altar, he reserved a
stateroom on the first steamer bound for the Mediterranean. But before
his ship sailed, a letter, also from Italy, from his aunt Maria, who was
spending the winter in Rome, informed him that the ring was a Christmas
gift from her. In his rage he unjustly condemned Aunt Maria as a
meddling old busybody, and gave her ring to the cook.
After two months of pilgrimages to places sacred to the memory of
Polly Kirkland, Ainsley found that feeding his love on post-mortems was
poor fare, and, in surrender, determined to evacuate New York. Since her
departure he had received from Miss Kirkland several letters, but they
contained no hint of a change in her affections, and search them as he
might, he could find no cipher or hidden message. They were merely
frank, friendly notes of travel; at first filled with gossip of the steamer, and
later telling of excursions around Cairo. If they held any touch of feeling
they seemed to show that she was sorry for him, and as she could not
regard him in any way more calculated to increase his discouragement, he,
in utter hopelessness, retreated to the solitude of the farm. In New York
he left behind him two trunks filled with such garments as a man would
need on board a steamer and in the early spring in Egypt. They had been
THE MESSENGERS
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packed and in readiness since the day she sailed away, when she had told
him of the possible sign. But there had been no sign. Nor did he longer
believe in one. So in the baggage-room of an hotel the trunks were
abandoned, accumulating layers of dust and charges for storage.
At the farm the snow still lay in the crevices of the rocks and beneath
the branches of the evergreens, but under the wet, dead leaves little
flowers had begun to show their faces. The "backbone of the winter was
broken" and spring was in the air. But as Ainsley was certain that his
heart also was broken, the signs of spring did not console him. At each
week-end he filled the house with people, but they found him gloomy and
he found them dull. He liked better the solitude of the midweek days.
Then for hours he would tramp through the woods, pretending she was at
his side, pretending he was helping her across the streams swollen with
winter rains and melted snow. On these excursions he cut down trees
that hid a view he thought she would have liked, he cut paths over which
she might have walked. Or he sat idly in a flat- bottomed scow in the
lake and made a pretence of fishing. The loneliness of the lake and the
isolation of the boat suited his humor. He did not find it true that misery
loves company. At least to human beings he preferred his companions of
Lone Lake--the beaver building his home among the reeds, the kingfisher,
the blue heron, the wild fowl that in their flight north rested for an hour or
a day upon the peaceful waters. He looked upon them as his guests, and
when they spread their wings and left him again alone he felt he had been
hardly used.
It was while he was sunk in this state of melancholy, and some months
after Miss Kirkland had sailed to Egypt, that hope returned.
For a week-end he had invited Holden and Lowell, two former
classmates, and Nelson Mortimer and his bride. They were all old
friends of their host and well acquainted with the cause of his
discouragement. So they did not ask to be entertained, but, disregarding
him, amused themselves after their own fashion. It was late Friday
afternoon. The members of the house-party had just returned from a
tramp through the woods and had joined Ainsley on the terrace, where he
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stood watching the last rays of the sun leave the lake in darkness. All
through the day there had been sharp splashes of rain with the clouds dull
and forbidding, but now the sun was sinking in a sky of crimson, and for
the morrow a faint moon held out a promise of fair weather.
Elsie Mortimer gave a sudden exclamation, and pointed to the east.
"Look!" she said.
The men turned and followed the direction of her hand. In the fading
light, against a background of sombre clouds that the sun could not reach,
they saw, moving slowly toward them and descending as they moved, six
great white birds. When they were above the tops of the trees that edged
the lake, the birds halted and hovered uncertainly, their wings lifting and
falling, their bodies slanting and sweeping slowly, in short circles.
The suddenness of their approach, their presence so far inland,
something unfamiliar and foreign in the way they had winged their
progress, for a moment held the group upon the terrace silent.
"They are gulls from the Sound," said Lowell.
"They are too large for gulls," returned Mortimer. "They might be
wild geese, but," he answered himself, in a puzzled voice, "it is too late;
and wild geese follow a leader."
As though they feared the birds might hear them and take alarm, the
men, unconsciously, had spoken in low tones.
"They move as though they were very tired," whispered Elsie
Mortimer.
"I think," said Ainsley, "they have lost their way."
But even as he spoke, the birds, as though they had reached their goal,
spread their wings to the full length and sank to the shallow water at the
farthest margin of the lake.
As they fell the sun struck full upon them, turning their great pinions
into flashing white and silver.
"Oh!" cried the girl, "but they are beautiful!"
Between the house and the lake there was a ridge of rock higher than
the head of a man, and to this Ainsley and his guests ran for cover. On
hands and knees, like hunters stalking game, they scrambled up the face of
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the rock and peered cautiously into the pond. Below them, less than one
hundred yards away, on a tiny promontory, the six white birds stood
motionless. They showed no sign of fear. They could no
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