"The century had only fifteen years the start of me, and it's a long way we've travelled together. I've been sitting here, thinking how much we've lived through. Listen, boys."

It was a brief series of pictures he drew for them, against the background of his early pioneer days. They saw him, a little lad, trudging more than a mile on a winter morning to borrow a kettle of hot coals, because the fire had gone out on his own hearthstone, and it was before the days of matches. They saw him huddled with the other little ones around his mother's knee when the wolves howled in the night outside the door, and only the light of a tallow-dip flickered through the darkness of the little cabin. They saw the struggle of a strong life against the limitations of the wilderness, and realised what the battle must have been oftentimes, against sudden disease and accident and death, with the nearest doctor a three days' journey distant, and no smoke from any neighbour's chimney rising anywhere on all the wide horizon.

While he talked, a heavy freight train rumbled by outside; the wind whistled through the telegraph wires. The jingle of a telephone bell interrupted his reminiscences. The old man looked up with a smile. "See what we have come to," he said, "from such a past to a time when I can say 'h.e.l.lo,' across a continent. Cables and cross-ties and telegraph poles have annihilated distance. The century and I came in on an ox-cart; we are going out on a streak of lightning.

"But that's not the greatest thing," he said, pausing, while the listening faces grew still more thoughtful. "Think of the hospitals! The homes! The universities! The social settlements! The free libraries! The humane efforts everywhere to give humanity an uplift! When I think of all this century has accomplished, of the heroic lives it has produced, I haven't a word to say about its mistakes and failures. After all, how do we know that the things we cry out against _are_ mistakes?

"This war may be a Samson's riddle that we are not wise enough to read.

Those who shall come after us may be able to say '_Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness!_'"

Somewhere in an upper room a clock struck twelve, and deep silence fell on the little company as they waited for the solemn pa.s.sing of the century. It was no going out as of some decrepit Lear tottering from his throne. Perhaps no man there could have put it in words, but each one felt that its majestic leave-taking was like the h.o.a.ry old apostle's: "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."

Chapter IV

FOR some occult reason, the successful merchant in small towns and villages is the confidant, if not father-confessor, of a large number of his patronesses. It may be that his flattering air of personal interest, a.s.sumed for purely business purposes, loosens not only the purse-strings but the spring that works the panorama of private affairs. Or it may be an idiosyncrasy of some cla.s.ses of the mind feminine, to make no distinction between a bargain counter and a confessional. Whatever the cause, many an honest merchant can testify that it is no uncommon thing for a woman to air her domestic troubles while she buys a skirt braid, or to drag out her family skeleton with the sample of sewing silk she wishes to match.

The Cross-Roads had had its share of confidences, although as a rule the women who disposed of their b.u.t.ter and eggs in trade to Bowser were of the patient sort, grown silent under the repressing influence of secluded farm life. Still, Bowser, quick to see and keen to judge, had gained a remarkable insight into neighbourhood affairs in fifteen years'

dealings with his public. "All things come to him who waits" if he wears an air of habitual interest and has a sympathetic way of saying "Ah!

indeed!"

It was with almost the certainty of foreknowledge that Bowser counted his probable patrons as he spread out his valentines on the morning of the fourteenth of February. He had selected his comic ones with a view to the feud that existed between the Hillock and Bond families, well knowing that a heavy cross-fire of ugly caricatures and insulting rhymes would be kept up all day by the younger members of those warring households. It was with professional satisfaction he smiled over the picture of a fat man with a donkey's head, which he was as sure would be sent by Pete Hillock to old man Bond, as if he had heard Pete's penny dropping into the cash-drawer.

"Nothing like supplying the demand," he chuckled.

It was with more than professional interest that he arranged the lace-paper valentines in the show-case, for the little embossed Cupids had a strong ally in this rustic haberdasher, whose match-making propensities had helped many a little romance to a happy issue. Drawing on his fund of private information, acquired in his role of confidant to the neighbourhood gossips, he set out his stock of plump red hearts, forget-me-nots, and doves; and with each addition to the festal array he nodded his head knowingly over the particular courtship it was designed to speed, or the lovers' quarrel that he hoped might be ended thereby.

There had been two weeks of "February thaw." Melting snow had made the mud hub-deep in places. There was a velvety balminess in the touch of the warm wind, and faint, elusive odours, prophetic of spring, rose from the moist earth and sap-quickened trees.

The door of the Cross-Road store stood open, and behind it, at the post-office desk, sat Marion Holmes, the old miller's granddaughter.

Just out of college and just into society, she had come to spend Lent in the old place that had welcomed her every summer during her childhood.

The group around the stove stared covertly at the pretty girl in the tailor-made gown, failing to recognise in the tall, stylish figure any trace of the miller's "little Polly," who used to dangle her feet from the counter and munch peppermint drops, while she lisped nursery rhymes for their edification.

She had come for the letters herself, she told Bowser, because she was expecting a whole bag full, and her grandfather's rheumatism kept him at home. Installed in the post-office chair, behind the railing that enclosed the sanctum of pigeon-holes, she amused herself by watching the customers while she waited for the mail-train.

"It's like looking into a kaleidoscope," she told Bowser in one of the pauses of trade. "Every one who comes in gives me a different point of view and combination of opinions. Now, those valentines! I was thinking what old-fashioned things those little lace-paper affairs are, and wondering how anybody could possibly get up any thrills over them, when in walked Miss Anastasia Dill. Prim and gentle as ever, isn't she? Still getting her styles from _G.o.dey's Lady's Books_ of the early sixties; she must draw on their antiquated love stories for her sentiment, too, for she seemed lost in admiration of those hearts and darts. What _do_ you suppose is Miss Anastasia's idea of a lover?"

Marion rattled on with all of a debutante's reckless enthusiasm for any subject under discussion. "Wouldn't he be as odd and old-fashioned as the lace valentines themselves? She'd call him a _suitor_, wouldn't she?

I wonder if she ever had one."

Then Bowser, piecing together the fragmentary gossip of fifteen years, told Marion all he knew of Miss Anastasia's gentle romance; and Marion, idly clasping and unclasping the little Yale pin on her jacket, gained another peep into the kaleidoscope of human experiences.

"I have read of such devotion to a memory," she said when the story was done, "but I never met it in the flesh. What a pity he died while he was on such a high pedestal in her imagination. If he had lived she would have discovered that there are no such paragons, and all the other sons of Adam needn't have suffered by comparison. So she's an old maid simply because she put her ideal of a lover so high in the clouds n.o.body could live up to it! Dear old Miss Anastasia!"

Bowser pulled his beard. "Such couples make me think of these here lamps with double wicks," he said. "They hardly ever burn along together evenly. One wick is sure to flare up higher than the other; you either have to keep turning it down and get along with a half light or let it smoke the chimney--maybe crack it--and make things generally uncomfortable. But here comes somebody, Miss Marion, who's burned along pretty steady, and that through three administrations. It's her brag that she's had three husbands and treated them just alike, even to the matter of tombstones. 'Not a pound difference in the weight nor a dollar in the price,' she always says."

The newcomer was a fat, wheezy woman, spattered with mud from the hem of her skirt to the crown of her big c.r.a.pe bonnet, which had tipped on one side with the jolting of the wagon.

"Well, Jim Bowser!" she exclaimed, catching sight of the valentines. "Ef you ain't got out them silly, sentimental fol-de-rols again! My nephew, Jason Potter,--that's my second husband's sister's son, you know,--spent seventy-five cents last year to buy one of them silly things to send to his girl; and I says to him, 'Jason,' says I, 'ef _I'd_ been Lib Meadows, that would 'uv cooked your goose with _me_! Any man simple enough to waste his substance so, wouldn't make a good provider.' I ought to know--I've been a wife three times."

This, like all other of Mrs. Power's conversational roads, led back to the three tombstones, and started a flow of good-natured badinage on the subject of matrimony, which continued long after she had taken her noisy departure. "Well!" exclaimed Bud Hines, as the big c.r.a.pe bonnet went jolting down the road, "I guess there's three good men gone that could tell why heaven is heaven."

"Why?" asked Cy Akers.

"Because there's no marryin' or givin' in marriage there."

"Bud speaks feelingly!" said Cy, winking at the others. "He'd better get a job on a newspaper to write Side Talks with Henpecked Husbands."

"Shouldn't think _you'd_ want to hear any extrys or supplements,"

retorted Bud. "You get enough in your own daily editions."

"St. Valentine has been generous with my little Polly," said the old miller, looking up fondly at the tall, graceful girl, coming into his room, her face aglow and her arms full of packages.

"But what's the good of it all, grandfather?" answered Marion. "I've been looking into Cupid's kaleidoscope through other people's eyes this afternoon, and nothing is rose-coloured as I thought. Everything is horrid. 'Marriage is a failure,' and sentiment is a silly thing that people make flippant jokes about, or else break their hearts with, like Mr. Bowser's double-wick lamps, that flare up and crack their chimneys.

I've come to the conclusion that St. Valentine has outlived his generation."

She broke the string which bound one of the boxes that she had dropped on the table, and took out a great dewy bunch of sweet violets. As their fragrance filled the room, the old man looked around as if half expecting to see some familiar presence; then dropped his white head with a sigh, and gazed into the embers on the hearth, lost in a tender reverie.

Presently he said, "I wish you would hand me that box on my wardrobe shelf, little girl." As Marion opened the wardrobe door, something hanging there made her give a little start of surprise. It was an old familiar gray dress, with the creases still in the bent sleeves just as they had been left when the tired arms last slipped out of them. That was ten years ago; and Marion, standing there with a mist gathering in her eyes, recalled the day her grandfather had refused to let any one fold it away. It had hung there all those years, the tangible reminder of the strong, sweet presence that had left its imprint on every part of the household.

"It is like my life since she slipped out of it," the old man had whispered, smoothing the empty sleeve with his stiff old fingers. "Like my heart--set to her ways at every turn, and left just as she rounded it out--but now--so empty!"

He lifted an old dog-eared school-book from the box that Marion brought him, a queer little "Geography and Atlas of the Heavens," in use over fifty years ago. Inside was a tiny slip of paper, time-yellowed and worn. The ink was faded, until the words written in an unformed girlish hand were barely legible:

"True as grapes grow on a vine, I will be your Valentine."

"I had put a letter into her Murray's grammar," he explained, holding up another little book. "Here is the page, just at the conjugation of the verb 'to love.' You see I was a big, shy, overgrown boy that lost my tongue whenever I looked at her, although she wasn't fifteen then, and only reached my shoulder. This valentine was the answer that she slipped into my atlas of the heavens. I thought the sky itself had never held such a star. We walked home across the woodland together that day, never saying a word. It was the last of the February thaw, and the birds were twittering as if it were really spring. Just such a day as this. All of a sudden, right at my feet, I saw something smiling up at me, blue as the blue of my Polly's eyes. I stooped and brushed away the leaves, and there were two little violets.

"As I gave them to her I wanted to say, 'There will always be violets in my heart for you, my Polly,' but I couldn't speak a word. I know she understood, for long years after--when she was dead--I found them here.

She had pinned them on the page where my letter had lain, here on the conjugation that says, 'we love,' and she had added the word '_for ever_.'"

A tear dropped on the dead violets as the old man reverently closed the book, and sat gazing again into the dying embers. There was a tremulous smile on his face. Was it backward over the hills of their youth he was wandering, or ahead to those heights of Hope, where love shall "put on immortality?"

Marion laid her warm cheek against her violets, still fragrant with the sweetness of their fresh, unfaded youth. Then taking a cl.u.s.ter from the great dewy bunch, she fastened it at her throat with the little Yale pin.

Chapter V

TRADE was dull at the Cross-Roads. Jim Bowser, his hands thrust into his pockets and his lips puckered to a whistle, stood looking through the dingy gla.s.s of his front door. March was coming in with a snow-storm, and all he could see in any direction was a blinding fall of white flakes. There were only three men behind the stove that afternoon, and one of them was absorbed in a newspaper. Conversation flagged, and from time to time Bud Hines yawned audibly.