WEETBRIAR FARM, when I went to stay there that summer, seemed to me a crystallization of all the storied sweets of Arcadia as one reads of them in the poets and the dreamers. The house itself was some five hundred years old; it had diamond-paned windows framed in ivy; on one side where there was no ivy the gray walls were covered with clematis, and honeysuckle, and jessamine. There was a walled garden, gay with blossom; there was an orchard where the blossom fell on lush grass in which golden daffodils sprang up. At the end of the orchard ran a stream, brown and mysterious, in whose deeper pools lurked speckled trout. All about the house, and the garden, and the orchard the birds sang, for the nesting and breeding season was scarce over; and at night in a coppice close by a nightingale sang its heart out to the rising moon.
Within the old farmstead everything was as Arcadian as without. My sitting room—otherwise the best parlor—was a dream of old oak, old china, old pewter, and old pictures. It smelled always of roses and lavender—you could smoke the strongest tobacco there without offense, for the flower scent was more powerful. A dream, too, was my sleeping chamber, with its lavender-kept linen, its quaint chintz hangings, and its deep window seat, in which one could sit of a night to see the moonlight play upon garden and orchard, or of an early morning to watch the dew-starred lawn sparkle in the fresh sunlight.
And once free of the house there was the great kitchen to admire, with its mighty hearth, its old brass and pewter, its ancient grandfather clock, its flitches and hams hanging, side by side with bundles of dried herbs, from the oaken rafters; and beyond it the dairy, a cool and shadowy place, where golden butter was made out of snow-white cream; and beyond that again the deep, dungeonlike cellar, where stood the giant casks of home-brewed ale—nectar fit for the gods.
Nor were the folk who inhabited this Arcadia less interesting than the Arcadia itself. There was the old farmer, a fine specimen of an Englishman, with a face like the rising sun and an eye as blue as the cornflowers which grew in his hedgerows. There was his wife, a gay and bustling lady of sixty youthful years, who was never without a smile and a cheery word, and who, like, her good man, had but one regret, which each bore with admirable resignation that the Lord had never blessed them with children. There were the people who came and went about the farm—ruddy-faced and brown-faced men, young maidens, and old crones, children in all stages of youthfulness. And there was also John William, and there was Susan Kate.
John William Marriner—who was usually spoken of as John Willie—was the elder of the two laborers who lived in the house. He was a youth of apparently one and twenty years of age, and as straight and strong as a promising ash sapling. Whether in his Sunday suit of blue serge, or in his workaday garments of corduroy, John Willie was a picture of rustic health—his red cheeks always glowed, his blue eyes were always bright; he had a Gargantuan appetite, and when he was not smiling he was whistling or singing. Up with the lark and at work all day, he spent his evenings in the company of Susan Kate.
Susan Kate was the maid of all work at Sweetbriar Farm—a handsome, full-blown English rose of nineteen, with cherry cheeks and a pair of large, liquid, sloe-black eyes which made her white teeth all the whiter. It was an idyl in itself to see Susan Kate—whose surname was Sutton—milking the cows or feeding the calves out of a tin bucket; it was still more of an idyl to watch her and John William hanging over the orchard gate of an evening, the day's work behind them and the nightingale singing in the neighboring coppice.
It seemed to me that Mr. Marriner and Miss Sutton were certainly lovers, and that matrimony was in their view. Now and then they went to church together, Susan Kate carrying a clean handkerchief and a prayer book; John Willie carrying Susan Kate's umbrella.
Sometimes they went for walks on a Sunday afternoon. I more than once encountered them on these occasions, and curiously observed the manner of their love-making. We invariably met in shady lanes or woodland paths—Mr. Marriner in his Sunday suit, with some hedgerow flower in his buttonhole, invariably came first, bearing Miss Sutton's umbrella, with which he would occasionally switch the grass; Miss Sutton, very rosy-cheeked, followed at a distance Of two yards. They never seemed to hold any discourse one with the other, but if they looked sheepishly conscious they were undeniably happy.
Into this apparent paradise suddenly entered a serpent.