Mavis of Green Hill Part 1

Mavis of Green Hill.

by Faith Baldwin.

CHAPTER I

GREEN HILL, June

A new doctor has arrived in Green Hill!

Sarah told me so this morning when she brought in my breakfast. She set the tray down with an agitated thump, and after her strong arms had raised me a little higher among the pillows, she stepped back, folded her hands beneath her ap.r.o.n, and fixed me with a portentous eye.

"Now do try and relish your breakfast, Miss Mavis," she coaxed, "there's a good girl!"

An undercurrent of excitement colored her tone. I looked upon her with suspicion. But I know my Sarah. Like Fate, and the village fire-company, she is not to be hurried. Very casually, I reached for my gla.s.s of milk. Years of lying comparatively flat on a useless back tend to the development of patience as a necessity.

"What time is it?" I inquired conversationally.

"Past nine."

I set the gla.s.s aside, and bit reflectively into a crisp triangle of toast. Since I've become so clever at eating and drinking, there's a sense of adventure about these commonplace functions which no whole person could ever comprehend. Sarah, busying herself with details of window-shades and counterpanes, watching me meanwhile from the corner of her eye, waited until I had turned indifferently to my pillows again, before making the following terse but thrilling remark.

"Your pink rose-bush's come into blossom, Miss Mavis."

Here was news indeed! My unconcern took unto itself wings and flew away.

"Not really!" I cried, "Oh, Sarah, how perfectly darling of her to waken so early!"

Sarah, accustomed to my extravagant fas.h.i.+on of endowing all growing things with distinct personalities, nodded gravely. And then, with all the majesty of Jove--if one may picture that deity as female, fifty, and New England incarnate--she launched her thunderbolt of Green Hill gossip.

"That young doctor--him that was to come from the city to help Doctor McAllister with his patien's--he's here!"

There was more truth than enunciation in Sarah's neglect of that final "t" in patients. Our village doctor is long on wisdom, but short of temper. I reached out for the morning paper, lying on my bedside table, and rustled it in dismissal.

"How interesting!" I murmured, successfully concealing any concern at all.

Sarah swooped down upon my tray and bore it to the door, in a manner which carried conviction. But we can deceive each other so little, Sarah and I.

"Come last night," she volunteered, "from New York. And every girl in Green Hill is furbis.h.i.+ng up her Sunday clothes, so Sammy said."

Sammy, surnamed Simpson, the freckled-faced Mercury who delivers the milk, and is in close touch with all the divers heart-throbs of Green Hill, holds a sentimental, if unacknowledged appeal for Sarah. A century or two ago, Sammy's father, in those days a gay and unenc.u.mbered spark, courted my Sarah, so runs the story, in the public manner of Green Hill. And Sarah, difficult to believe though it be, showed him no disfavor. There was, however, an obstacle to eventual union, in the person of Sarah's invalid mother, a querulous, ninety-pound tyrant. Upon this rock the frail bark of the Simpson affections shattered. This is of history, the most ancient, but had the far-reaching result that Sarah, whose lot seems ever cast among the stricken, now waits on me heart, hand, and foot, while over the Simpson hearthstone another G.o.ddess presides, and rigidly too, if one can judge from the harra.s.sed expressions of Sammy, Sr., Sammy, Jr., and all the other innumerable Simpson olive branches.

But to return to our muttons--the palpitating girlhood of Green Hill.

"Silly geese!" I commented unkindly.

Sarah from the doorway looked as cryptic as is consistent with the features Nature had given her.

"Oh, I don't know!" she answered with spirit, and an unconscious effect of argot, "In Green Hill, Miss Mavis, men is scarce!"

Here was truth! Mentally I echoed, "They is!" and Sarah, reading ratification in my silence, achieved a disappearance of my tray, and returned to the attack.

"Sammy says--he was down to the station last night when the ten-six come in--seems like," she digressed, "he's always hanging around the station since Rosie Allan's been telegraph operator there--"

"Rosie is a very pretty girl, Sarah," I chided gently.

"Pretty is as pretty does!" said Sarah, in irrefutable self-defense.

"Limb, I call her--bold as bra.s.s! But then," she added in her most pleasant tone, "Sammy was never raised to know better." And she looked at me with that unique light in her eyes which never fails them of the mention of any Simpson delinquency, however slight.

"Sammy says," she continued, bound to pursue the subject to the bitter end, "that the new doctor is a likely-looking young fellow, and seems well off."

At this juncture, I opened my paper with an air of finality.

"If this stranger in our midst is, as you infer, young, handsome, and wealthy," I remarked, "why then, in Heaven's name, has he descended upon Green Hill, Sarah?"

I hate handsome men. They are always so much vainer than women.

Sarah, accustomed as she is to my intemperate habits of speech, regarded me with a somewhat shocked air.

"Sammy says," she quoted--and here the conversational cat leaped from the bag--"that he come down here because he is suffering from nerves!"

The door closed after her, but her contempt lingered, almost tangibly, in the room; and I smothered my laughter in the lavender-scented pillows.

But Sarah had given me something to think about. I have known so few men, young ones, that perhaps I am given to speculating about them even more than the average girl. They're such an unknown quality. And certainly the one or two who have been escorted to my presence have not shown to good advantage. The healthy man reacts unfavorably to invalid feminism. They are bored, or too sympathetic; they speak in whispers, or in too cheery tones; they shuffle their great feet; and escape, eventually, with a sigh of relief. And I am impatient of them, of their bulk and their strength, and the arrogance which is part and parcel of their s.e.x. Perhaps it is because I am handicapped, circ.u.mstantially out of the running, so as to speak, that an "eligible" male always arouses in me a feeling of antagonism. And yet with not unremarkable inconsistency, I always wish, wistfully, deep down, that I might make, sometime, a man friend of my own generation.

But I can't. Something in me shuts doors and bolts them in any strange, masculine face.

A breeze stole delicately through my open window and ruffled my hair, luring my eyes to the out-of-door world where young Summer goes walking today, clad in blue and green. Not far off, the hills which give our town its pretty name, rise mistily, like altars. Just beyond that tall tangle of oak trees, a little river comes singing from its source. In winter I miss its friendly voice, yet I am more in sympathy with it then, for ice-bound, its bright limbs fettered, its dancing stilled, it seems kin to such as I. But for me there will never dawn a springtide, with the prison keys in her green girdle and rosy hands outstretched to unlock the door.

Year in, year out, my bed is always close to the windows. All of out-doors that I may see and hear, I must have for my own. I love every glimpse and scent and sound of it. Only the aggressive shriek of the train at the distant crossing makes me shrink and shudder. That was the last thing I heard--a whistle at a crossing--before the day coach which was carrying me home from a happy visit plunged over the embankment.

Eleven years ago! It seems like many centuries. Yet I remember it as I remember yesterday--that crash before oblivion. I can remember even the thrill of twelve-year old pride in the dignity of that fifty-mile journey, made quite alone. It was the beginning of a longer journey, where the milestones are the years; a journey painful and rebellious, marked with many stations of weariness, and black tunnels of agony; a journey which, despite all the loving care that surrounds me, I must make in isolation of body and spirit. Oh, little blue diary, it is well that I may shut away my moods and my mutiny between your covers!

No one in all this house must be made sadder because of me. Not father, unfailing playmate, and tender; not Sarah, whose silent affection is like protecting arms about me. There's a great shaft of sunlight quivering across what I've just written. Incongruous, somehow. And I'm out of tune with the June weather and the birds just beyond my windows.

I must ask Sarah to bring me my first rose from my Sleeping Beauty bush. First roses are always the sweetest--like the kiss of Prince Charming.

I wonder what the nervous doctor's name is--poor Sarah!

June paid me a visit this afternoon while I slept. She was reluctant to waken me, but left me her prettiest card. The first roses from my bus.h.!.+ They have been happily translated to a vase beside me, as I write. Father brought them upstairs with him when he came in for tea.

"Did you kiss her hands and tell her how sorry I would be to miss her?" I asked him soberly.

Father looked alarmed.

"Whose hands?" he began.

"Who has called on us today?"