It was bitterly cold.When night fell over Lakeville, Wisconsin, the sunset, which had flickered rather than glowed in the western sky, took upon itself a still more boreal tremulousness, until at last it seemed to fade away in cold blue shivers to the zenith.
Nothing else stirred; in the crisp still air the evening smoke of chimneys rose threadlike and vanished.The stars were early, pale, and pitiless; when the later moonlight fell, it appeared only to whiten the stiffened earth like snow, except where it made a dull, pewter-like film over the three frozen lakes which encompassed the town.
The site of the town itself was rarely beautiful, and its pioneers and founders had carried out the suggestions they had found there with loving taste and intelligence.
Themselves old voyageurs, trappers, and traders, they still loved Nature too well to exclude her from the restful homes they had achieved after years of toiling face to face with her.So a strip of primeval forest on the one side, and rolling level prairie on the other, still came up to the base of the hill, whereon they had built certain solid houses, which a second generation had beautified and improved with modern taste, but which still retained their old honesty of foundation and wholesome rustic space.These yet stood among the old trees, military squares, and broad sloping avenues of the town.Seen from the railway by day, the regularity of streets and blocks was hidden by environing trees; there remained only a picturesque lifting of rustic gardens, brown roofs, gables, spires, and cupolas above the mirroring lake: seen from the railway this bitter night, the invisible terraces and streets were now pricked out by symmetrical lines and curves of sparkling lights, which glittered through the leafless boughs and seemed to encircle the hill like a diadem.
Central in the chiefest square, and yet preserving its old lordly isolation in a wooded garden, the homestead of Enoch Lane stood with all its modern additions and improvements.Already these included not only the latest phases of decoration, but various treasures brought by the second generation from Europe, which they were wont to visit, but from which they always contentedly returned to their little provincial town.Whether there was some instinctive yearning, like the stirred sap of great forests, in their wholesome pioneer blood, or whether there was some occult fascination in the pretty town-crested hill itself, it was still certain that the richest inhabitants always preferred to live in Lakeville.Even the young, who left it to seek their fortune elsewhere, came back to enjoy their success under the sylvan vaults of this vast ancestral roof.And that was why, this 22d of December, 1870, the whole household of Gabriel Lane was awaiting the arrival from California of his brother, Sylvester Lane, at the old homestead which he had left twenty years ago.
"And you don't know how he looks?" said Kitty Lane to her father.
"I do, perfectly; rather chubby, with blue eyes, curly hair, fair skin, and blushes when you speak to him.""Papa!"
"Eh?--Oh, well, he USED to.You see that was twenty-five years ago, when he left here for boarding-school.He ran away from there, as I told you; went to sea, and finally brought up at San Francisco.""And you haven't had any picture, or photograph of him, since?""No--that is--I say!--you haven't, any of you, got a picture of Sylvester, have you?" he turned in a vague parenthetical appeal to the company of relatives and friends collected in the drawing-room after dinner.
"Cousin Jane has; she knows all about him!"But it appeared that Cousin Jane had only heard Susan Marckland say that Edward Bingham had told her that he was in California when "Uncle Sylvester" had been nearly hanged by a Vigilance Committee for protecting a horse thief or a gambler, or some such person.
This was felt to be ineffective as a personal description.
"He's sure to wear a big beard; they all do when they first come back," said Amos Gunn, with metropolitan oraculousness.
"He has a big curling mustache, long silken hair, and broad shoulders," said Marie du Page.
There was such piquant conviction in the manner of the speaker, who was also a very pretty girl, that they all turned towards her, and Kitty quickly said,--"But YOU'VE never seen him?"
"No--but--" She stopped, and, lifting one shoulder, threw her spirited head sideways, in a pretty deprecatory way, with elevated eyebrows and an expression intended to show the otherwise untranslatable character of her impression.But it showed quite as pleasantly the other fact, that she was the daughter of a foreigner, an old French military explorer, and that she had retained even in Anglo-Saxon Lakeville some of the Gallic animation.
"Well, how many of you girls are going with me to meet him at the station?" said Gabriel, dismissing with masculine promptness the lesser question."It's time to be off.""I'd like to go," said Kitty, "and so would Cousin Jane; but really, papa, you see if YOU don't know him, and WE don't either, and you've got to satisfy yourself that it's the right man, and then introduce YOURSELF and then us--and all this on the platform before everybody--it makes it rather embarrassing for us.And then, as he's your younger brother and we're supposed to be his affectionate nieces, you know, it would make HIM feel SOridiculous!"
"And if he were to KISS you," said Marie tragically, "and then turn out not to be him!""So," continued Kitty, "you'd better take Cousin John, who was more in Uncle Sylvester's time, to represent the Past of the family, and perhaps Mr.Gunn"--"To represent the future, I suppose?" interrupted Gabriel in a wicked whisper.