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Alone on that bold, sea-beaten cape, so sturdy, dark, and time-worn, it looked out always with shrewd, steady little window-eyes on the great troubled ocean, across which it had watched the Pilgrim Fathers sailing away towards the new home they sought in the Western world, and many a rich argosy in days of yore go forth, never to return.
And I thought to myself that each of these glaring, gaping, new jerry-built boxes was indeed a rickety stage erected for the acting of a real miracle play; that human family that is almost the holy one, and that human death that is near to the last judgment. For some foolish reason the last house but one in that imperfect row especially haunted me with its hollow grin and empty window-eyes.
The shabby-genteel little houses of the Appian Way, in Cambridge, whose window-eyes with their blue-green lids had watched Bennie Hooker come and go, trudging back and forth to lectures and recitations, first as boy and then as man, for thirty years, must have blinked with amazement at the sight of the little professor as he started on the afterward famous Hooker Expedition to Labrador in search of the Flying Ring.
Dreaming of its own reflection, its hollow, window-eyes could see, deep down under a glass, all its own history and legends preserved forever as in a crystal casket; the story of saintly King David who built it, and of the French friars who left their own Abbey at Beauvais to people it; better still, of the wedding with the spectre guest the marriage of little French Jolette to Alexander, the last of the Celtic kings.
This hunting-lodge of the King would have been grimly ugly, were it not for its rocky throne, high above the river bed, and its background of glistening white mountains. The huge pile looked like a sleeping dragon with its hundreds of window-eyes close-lidded, and I could not imagine it an amusing place for a house party.
Shadows from the tender young leaves decorated the whiteness of the smooth village road in dainty tracery, and splashed the ribbons of rain-drenched granitoid walks with warm shadow-spray. Fran, eager for the first morning's view of her new home, stared at the half-dozen cottages across the street, standing back in picket- fenced yards with screens of trees before their window-eyes.
It looks just like a brownie, doesn't it, with its surprised window-eyes? I always call the cottage 'The Brownie, and Aunt Ada says it is a very good name for it, because it is a sort of brown." "I should call it gray," said Polly. "It is really gray, but it is a sort of brownish gray, and anyhow I like the name of Brownie for it. There is Aunt Ada on the porch watching for us."
But the thing which left the clearest picture in my brain was a sight sweet as well as sad: a charming little château, ruined by fire, yet pathetically lovely in martyrdom; the green trellis still ornamenting its stained façade, a few autumn roses peeping with child-like curiosity into gaping window-eyes; a silent old gardener raking the one patch of lawn buried under blackened tiles and tumbled bricks.
When I landed there was hardly anyone on the quay; the fisherman sat caulking his boat, a few boys were fishing in the dark green waters of the harbor everything exactly as I can still see it to-day my future dwelling-house already looked at me with familiar friendliness from out its cool, dark window-eyes; the doves cooed in the softly rustling elms; it smelled of pitch and tar and of the inevitable Dutch peat-smoke, which rose from the stove pipes of the fishing smacks lying in the harbor, where the fishermen's wives were cooking the dinner.
I was walking slowly, with burning cheek and downcast eyes, the one of conflict, the other of shame and defeat, away from the great house, which seemed to be staring after me down the avenue with all its window-eyes, when suddenly my deliverance came.
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