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The Mettle of the Pasture

by James Lane Allen · English · Gutenberg #12482 · 452,553 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Mettle of the Pasture

Author: James Lane Allen


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #12482]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12482

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE METTLE OF THE PASTURE ***

THE METTLE OF THE PASTURE

BY

JAMES LANE ALLEN

Author of "The Choir Invisible," "A Kentucky Cardinal," etc., etc.

New York, 1903







To My Sister





PART FIRST

I

She did not wish any supper and she sank forgetfully back into the
stately oak chair.  One of her hands lay palm upward on her white
lap; in the other, which drooped over the arm of the chair, she
clasped a young rose dark red amid its leaves--an inverted torch of
love.

Old-fashioned glass doors behind her reached from a high ceiling to
the floor; they had been thrown open and the curtains looped apart.
Stone steps outside led downward to the turf in the rear of the
house.  This turf covered a lawn unroughened by plant or weed; but
over it at majestic intervals grew clumps of gray pines and
dim-blue, ever wintry firs.  Beyond lawn and evergreens a flower
garden bloomed; and beyond the high fence enclosing this, tree-tops
and house-tops of the town could be seen; and beyond these--away in
the west--the sky was naming now with the falling sun.

A few bars of dusty gold hung poised across the darkening spaces of
the supper room.  Ripples of the evening air, entering through the
windows, flowed over her, lifting the thick curling locks at the
nape of her neck, creeping forward over her shoulders and passing
along her round arms under the thin fabric of her sleeves.

They aroused her, these vanishing beams of the day, these arriving
breezes of the night; they became secret invitations to escape from
the house into the privacy of the garden, where she could be alone
with thoughts of her great happiness now fast approaching.

A servant entered noiselessly, bringing a silver bowl of frozen
cream.  Beside this, at the head of the table before her
grandmother, he placed scarlet strawberries gathered that morning
under white dews.  She availed herself of the slight interruption
and rose with an apology; but even when love bade her go, love also
bade her linger; she could scarce bear to be with them, but she
could scarce bear to be alone.  She paused at her grandmother's
chair to stroke the dry bronze puffs on her temples--a unique
impulse; she hesitated compassionately a moment beside her aunt,
who had never married; then, passing around to the opposite side of
the table, she took between her palms the sunburnt cheeks of a
youth, her cousin, and buried her own tingling cheek in his hair.
Instinct at that moment drew her most to him because he was young
as she was young, having life and love before him as she had; only,
for him love stayed far in the future; for her it came to-night.

When she had crossed the room and reached the hall, she paused and
glanced back, held by the tension of cords which she dreaded to
break.  She felt that nothing would ever be the same again in the
home of her childhood.  Until marriage she would remain under its
dear honored roof, and there would be no outward interruption of
its familiar routine; but for her all the bonds of life would have
become loosened from old ties and united in him alone whom this
evening she was to choose as her lot and destiny.  Under the
influence of that fresh fondness, therefore, which wells up so
strangely within us at the thought of parting from home and home
people, even though we may not greatly care for them, she now stood
gazing at the picture they formed as though she were already
calling it back through the distances of memory and the changes of
future years.

They, too, had shifted their positions and were looking at her with
one undisguised expression of pride and love; and they smiled as
she smiled radiantly back at them, waving a last adieu with her
spray of rose and turning quickly in a dread of foolish tears.

"Isabel."

It was the youthful voice of her grandmother.  She faced them again
with a little frown of feigned impatience.

"If you are going into the garden, throw something around your
shoulders."

"Thank you, grandmother; I have my lace."

Crossing the hall, she went into the front parlor, took from a
damask sofa a rare shawl of white lace and, walking to a mirror,
threw it over her head, absently noting the effect in profile.  She
lifted this off and, breaking the rose from part of its stem,
pinned that on her breast.  Then, stepping aside to one of the
large lofty windows, she stood there under the droop of the
curtains, sunk into reverie again and looking out upon the yard and
the street beyond.

Hardly a sound disturbed the twilight stillness.  A lamplighter
passed, torching the grim lamps.  A sauntering carrier threw the
evening newspaper over the gate, with his unintelligible cry.  A
dog-cart rumbled by, and later, a brougham; people were not yet
returned from driving on the country turnpikes.  Once, some belated
girls clattered past on ponies.  But already little children,
bare-armed, bare-necked, swinging lanterns, and attended by proud
young mothers, were on their way to a summer-night festival in the
park.  Up and down the street family groups were forming on the
verandas.  The red disks of cigars could be seen, and the laughter
of happy women was wafted across the dividing fences and shrubbery,
and vines.

Breaking again through her reverie, which seemed to envelop her,
wherever she went, like a beautiful cloud, she left the window and
appeared at the front door.  Palms stood on each side of the
granite steps, and these arched their tropical leaves far over
toward her quiet feet as she passed down.  Along the pavement were
set huge green boxes, in which white oleanders grew, and flaming
pomegranates, and crepe myrtle thickly roofed with pink.  She was
used to hover about them at this hour, but she strolled past,
unmindful now, the daily habit obliterated, the dumb little tie
quite broken.  The twisted newspaper lay white on the shadowed
pavement before her eyes and she did not see that.  She walked on
until she reached the gate and, folding her hands about one of the
brass globes surmounting the iron spikes, leaned over and probed
with impatient eyes the long dusk of the street; as far as he could
be seen coming she wished to see him.

It was too early.  So she filled her eyes with pictures of the
daylight fading over woods and fields far out in the country.  But
the entire flock of wistful thoughts settled at last about a large
house situated on a wooded hill some miles from town.  A lawn
sloped upward to it from the turnpike, and there was a gravelled
driveway.  She unlatched the gate, approached the house, passed
through the wide hall, ascended the stairs, stood at the door of
his room--waiting.  Why did he not come?  How could he linger?

Dreamily she turned back; and following a narrow walk, passed to
the rear of the house and thence across the lawn of turf toward the
garden.

A shower had fallen early in the day and the grass had been cut
afterwards.  Afternoon sunshine had drunk the moisture, leaving the
fragrance released and floating.  The warmth of the cooling earth
reached her foot through the sole of her slipper.  On the plume of
a pine, a bird was sending its last call after the bright hours,
while out of the firs came the tumult of plainer kinds as they
mingled for common sleep.  The heavy cry of the bullbat fell from
far above, and looking up quickly for a sight of his winnowing
wings under the vast purpling vault she beheld the earliest stars.

Thus, everywhere, under her feet, over her head, and beyond the
reach of vision, because inhabiting that realm into which the
spirit alone can send its aspiration and its prayer, was one
influence, one spell: the warmth of the good wholesome earth, its
breath of sweetness, its voices of peace and love and rest, the
majesty of its flashing dome; and holding all these safe as in the
hollow of a hand the Eternal Guardianship of the world.

As she strolled around the garden under the cloudy flush of the
evening sky dressed in white, a shawl of white lace over one arm, a
rose on her breast, she had the exquisiteness of a long past,
during which women have been chosen in marriage for health and
beauty and children and the power to charm.  The very curve of her
neck implied generations of mothers who had valued grace.
Generations of forefathers had imparted to her walk and bearing
their courage and their pride.  The precision of the eyebrow, the
chiselled perfection of the nostril, the loveliness of the short
red lip; the well-arched feet, small, but sure of themselves; the
eyes that were kind and truthful and thoughtful; the sheen of her
hair, the fineness of her skin, her nobly cast figure,--all these
were evidences of descent from a people, that had reached in her
the purity, without having lost the vigor, of one of its highest
types.

She had supposed that when he came the servant would receive him
and announce his arrival, but in a little while the sound of a step
on the gravel reached her ear; she paused and listened.  It was
familiar, but it was unnatural--she remembered this afterwards.

She began to walk away from him, her beautiful head suddenly arched
far forward, her bosom rising and falling under her clasped hands,
her eyes filling with wonderful light.  Then regaining composure
because losing consciousness of herself in the thought of him, she
turned and with divine simplicity of soul advanced to meet him.

Near the centre of the garden there was an open spot where two
pathways crossed; and it was here, emerging from the shrubbery,
that they came in sight of each other.  Neither spoke.  Neither
made in advance a sign of greeting.  When they were a few yards
apart she paused, flushing through her whiteness; and he, dropping
his hat from his hand, stepped quickly forward, gathered her hands
into his and stood looking down on her in silence.  He was very
pale and barely controlled himself.

"Isabel!" It was all he could say.

"Rowan!" she answered at length.  She spoke under her breath and
stood before him with her head drooping, her eyes on the ground.
Then he released her and she led the way at once out of the garden.

When they had reached the front of the house, sounds of
conversation on the veranda warned them that there were guests, and
without concealing their desire to be alone they passed to a rustic
bench under one of the old trees, standing between the house and
the street; they were used to sitting there; they had known each
other all their lives.

A long time they forced themselves to talk of common and trivial
things, the one great meaning of the hour being avoided by each.
Meanwhile it was growing very late.  The children had long before
returned drowsily home held by the hand, their lanterns dropped on
the way or still clung to, torn and darkened.  No groups laughed on
the verandas; but gas-jets had been lighted and turned low as
people undressed for bed.  The guests of the family had gone.  Even
Isabel's grandmother had not been able further to put away sleep
from her plotting brain in order to send out to them a final
inquisitive thought--the last reconnoitring bee of all the
In-gathered hive.  Now, at length, as absolutely as he could have
wished, he was alone with her and secure from interruption.

The moon had sunk so low that its rays fell in a silvery stream on
her white figure; only a waving bough of the tree overhead still
brushed with shadow her neck and face.  As the evening waned, she
had less to say to him, growing always more silent in new dignity,
more mute with happiness.

He pushed himself abruptly away from her side and bending over
touched his lips reverently to the back of one of her hands, as
they lay on the shawl in her lap.

"Isabel," and then he hesitated.

"Yes," she answered sweetly.  She paused likewise, requiring
nothing more; it was enough that he should speak her name.

He changed his position and sat looking ahead.  Presently he began
again, choosing his words as a man might search among terrible
weapons for the least deadly.

"When I wrote and asked you to marry me, I said I should come
to-night and receive your answer from your own lips.  If your
answer had been different, I should never have spoken to you of my
past.  It would not have been my duty.  I should not have had the
right.  I repeat, Isabel, that until you had confessed your love
for me, I should have had no right to speak to you about my past.
But now there is something you ought to be told at once."

She glanced up quickly with a rebuking smile.  How could he wander
so far from the happiness of moments too soon to end?  What was his
past to her?

He went on more guardedly.

"Ever since I have loved you, I have realized what I should have to
tell you if you ever returned my love.  Sometimes duty has seemed
one thing, sometimes another.  This is why I have waited so
long--more than two years; the way was not clear.  Isabel, it will
never be clear.  I believe now it is wrong to tell you; I believe
It is wrong not to tell you.  I have thought and thought--it is
wrong either way.  But the least wrong to you and to myself--that
is what I have always tried to see, and as I understand my duty,
now that you are willing to unite your life with mine, there is
something you must know."

He added the last words as though he had reached a difficult
position and were announcing his purpose to hold it.  But he paused
gloomily again.

She had scarcely heard him through wonderment that he could so
change at such a moment.  Her happiness began to falter and darken
like departing sunbeams.  She remained for a space uncertain of
herself, knowing neither what was needed nor what was best; then
she spoke with resolute deprecation:

"Why discuss with me your past life?  Have I not known you always?"

These were not the words of girlhood.  She spoke from the emotions
of womanhood, beginning to-night in the plighting of her troth.

"You have trusted me too much, Isabel."

Repulsed a second time, she now fixed her large eyes upon him with
surprise.  The next moment she had crossed lightly once more the
widening chasm.

"Rowan," she said more gravely and with slight reproach, "I have
not waited so long and then not known the man whom I have chosen."

"Ah," he cried, with a gesture of distress.

Thus they sat: she silent with new thoughts; he speechless with his
old ones.  Again she was the first to speak.  More deeply moved by
the sight of his increasing excitement, she took one of his hands
into both of hers, pressing it with a delicate tenderness.

"What is it that troubles you, Rowan?  Tell me!  It is my duty to
listen.  I have the right to know."

He shrank from what he had never heard in her voice
before--disappointment in him.  And it was neither girlhood nor
womanhood which had spoken now: it was comradeship which is
possible to girlhood and to womanhood through wifehood alone: she
was taking their future for granted.  He caught her hand and lifted
it again and again to his lips; then he turned away from her.

Thus shut out from him again, she sat looking out into the night.

But in a woman's complete love of a man there is something deeper
than girlhood or womanhood or wifehood: it is the maternal--that
dependence on his strength when he is well and strong, that passion
of protection and defence when he is frail or stricken.  Into her
mood and feeling toward him even the maternal had forced its way.
She would have found some expression for it but he anticipated her.

"I am thinking of you, of my duty to you, of your happiness."

She realized at last some terrible hidden import in all that he had
been trying to confess.  A shrouded mysterious Shape of Evil was
suddenly disclosed as already standing on the threshold of the
House of Life which they were about to enter together.  The night
being warm, she had not used her shawl.  Now she threw it over her
head and gathered the weblike folds tightly under her throat as
though she were growing cold.  The next instant, with a swift
movement, she tore it from her head and pushed herself as far as
possible away from him out into the moonlight; and she sat there
looking at him, wild with distrust and fear.

He caught sight of her face.

"Oh, I am doing wrong," he cried miserably.  "I must not tell you
this!"

He sprang up and hurried over to the pavement and began to walk to
and fro.  He walked to and fro a long time; and after waiting for
him to return, she came quickly and stood in his path.  But when he
drew near her he put out his hand.

"I cannot!" he repeated, shaking his head and turning away.

Still she waited, and when he approached and was turning away
again, she stepped forward and laid on his arm her quivering
finger-tips.

"You must," she said.  "You _shall_ tell me!" and if there was
anger in her voice, if there was anguish in it, there was the
authority likewise of holy and sovereign rights.  But he thrust her
all but rudely away, and going to the lower end of the pavement,
walked there backward and forward with his hat pulled low over his
eyes--walked slowly, always more slowly.  Twice he laid his hand on
the gate as though he would have passed out.  At last he stopped
and looked back to where she waited in the light, her face set
immovably, commandingly, toward him.  Then he came back and stood
before her.

The moon, now sinking low, shone full on his face, pale, sad, very
quiet; and into his eyes, mournful as she had never known any eyes
to be.  He had taken off his hat and held it in his hand, and a
light wind blew his thick hair about his forehead and temples.
She, looking at him with senses preternaturally aroused, afterwards
remembered all this.

Before he began to speak he saw rush over her face a look of final
entreaty that he would not strike her too cruel a blow.  This, when
he had ceased speaking, was succeeded by the expression of one who
has received a shock beyond all imagination.  Thus they stood
looking into each other's eyes; then she shrank back and started
toward the house.

He sprang after her.

"You are leaving me!" he cried horribly.

She walked straight on, neither quickening nor slackening her pace
nor swerving, although his body began unsteadily to intercept hers.

He kept beside her.

"Don't!  Isabel!" he prayed out of his agony.  "Don't leave me like
this--!"

She walked on and reached the steps of the veranda.  Crying out in
his longing he threw his arms around her and held her close.

"You must not! You shall not!  Do you know what you are doing,
Isabel?"

She made not the least reply, not the least effort to extricate
herself.  But she closed her eyes and shuddered and twisted her
body away from him as a bird of the air bends its neck and head as
far as possible from a repulsive captor; and like the heart of such
a bird, he could feel the throbbing of her heart.

Her mute submission to his violence stung him: he let her go.  She
spread out her arms as though in a rising flight of her nature and
the shawl, tossed backward from her shoulders, fell to the ground:
it was as if she cast off the garment he had touched.  Then she
went quickly up the steps.  Before she could reach the door he
confronted her again; he pressed his back against it.  She
stretched out her hand and rang the bell.  He stepped aside very
quickly--proudly.  She entered, closing and locking noiselessly the
door that no sound might reach the servant she had summoned.  As
she did so she heard him try the knob and call to her in an
undertone of last reproach and last entreaty:

"_Isabel!--Isabel!--Isabel_!"

Hurrying through the hall, she ran silently up the stairs to her
room and shut herself in.

Her first feeling was joy that she was there safe from him and from
every one else for the night.  Her instant need was to be alone.
It was this feeling also that caused her to go on tiptoe around the
room and draw down the blinds, as though the glimmering windows
were large eyes peering at her with intrusive wounding stare.  Then
taking her position close to a front window, she listened.  He was
walking slowly backward and forward on the pavement reluctantly,
doubtfully; finally he passed through the gate.  As it clanged
heavily behind him, Isabel pressed her hands convulsively to her
heart as though it also had gates which had closed, never to reopen.

Then she lighted the gas-jets beside the bureau and when she caught
sight of herself the thought came how unchanged she looked.  She
stood there, just as she had stood before going down to supper,
nowhere a sign of all the deep displacement and destruction that
had gone on within.

But she said to herself that what he had told her would reveal
itself in time.  It would lie in the first furrows deepening down
her cheeks; it would be the earliest frost of years upon her hair.

A long while she sat on the edge of the couch in the middle of the
room under the brilliant gaslight, her hands forgotten in her lap,
her brows arched high, her eyes on the floor.  Then her head
beginning to ache, a new sensation for her, she thought she should
bind a wet handkerchief to it as she had often done for her aunt;
but the water which the maid had placed in the room had become
warm.  She must go down to the ewer in the hall.  As she did so,
she recollected her shawl.

It was lying on the wet grass where it had fallen.  There was a
half-framed accusing thought that he might have gone for it; but
she put the thought away; the time had passed for courtesies from
him.  When she stooped for the shawl, an owl flew viciously at her,
snapping its bill close to her face and stirring the air with its
wings.  Unnerved, she ran back into the porch, but stopped there
ashamed and looking kindly toward the tree in which it made its
home.

An old vine of darkest green had wreathed itself about the pillars
of the veranda on that side; and it was at a frame-like opening in
the massive foliage of this that the upper part of her pure white
figure now stood revealed in the last low, silvery, mystical light.
The sinking of the moon was like a great death on the horizon,
leaving the pall of darkness, the void of infinite loss.

She hung upon this far spectacle of nature with sad intensity,
figuring from it some counterpart of the tragedy taking place
within her own mind.




II

Isabel slept soundly, the regular habit of healthy years being too
firmly entrenched to give way at once.  Meanwhile deep changes were
wrought out in her.

When we fall asleep, we do not lay aside the thoughts of the day,
as the hand its physical work; nor upon awakening return to the
activity of these as it to the renewal of its toil, finding them
undisturbed.  Our most piercing insight yields no deeper conception
of life than that of perpetual building and unbuilding; and during
what we call our rest, it is often most active in executing its
inscrutable will.  All along the dark chimneys of the brain,
clinging like myriads of swallows deep-buried and slumbrous in
quiet and in soot, are the countless thoughts which lately winged
the wide heaven of conscious day.  Alike through dreaming and
through dreamless hours Life moves among these, handling and
considering each of the unredeemable multitude; and when morning
light strikes the dark chimneys again and they rush forth, some
that entered young have matured; some of the old have become
infirm; many of which have dropped in singly issue as companies;
and young broods flutter forth, unaccountable nestlings of a night,
which were not in yesterday's blue at all.  Then there are the
missing--those that went in with the rest at nightfall but were
struck from the walls forever.  So all are altered, for while we
have slept we have still been subject to that on-moving energy of
the world which incessantly renews us yet transmutes us--double
mystery of our permanence and our change.

It was thus that nature dealt with Isabel on this night: hours of
swift difficult transition from her former life to that upon which
she was now to enter.  She fell asleep overwhelmed amid the ruins
of the old; she awoke already engaged with the duties of the new.
At sundown she was a girl who had never confessed her love; at
sunrise she was a woman who had discarded the man she had just
accepted.  Rising at once and dressing with despatch, she entered
upon preparations for completing her spiritual separation from
Rowan in every material way.

The books he had lent her--these she made ready to return this
morning.  Other things, also, trifles in themselves but until now
so freighted with significance.  Then his letters and notes, how
many, how many they were!  Thus ever about her rooms she moved on
this mournful occupation until the last thing had been disposed of
as either to be sent back or to be destroyed.

And then while Isabel waited for breakfast to be announced, always
she was realizing how familiar seemed Rowan's terrible confession,
already lying far from her across the fields of memory--with a path
worn deep between it and herself as though she had been traversing
the distance for years; so old can sorrow grow during a little
sleep.  When she went down they were seated as she had left them
the evening before, grandmother, aunt, cousin; and they looked up
with the same pride and fondness.  But affection has so different a
quality in the morning.  Then the full soundless rides which come
in at nightfall have receded; and in their stead is the glittering
beach with thin waves that give no rest to the ear or to the
shore--thin noisy edge of the deeps of the soul.

This fresh morning mood now ruled them; no such wholesome relief
had come to her.  So that their laughter and high spirits jarred
upon her strangely.  She had said to herself upon leaving them the
evening before that never again could they be the same to her or
she the same to them.  But then she had expected to return isolated
by incommunicable happiness; now she had returned isolated by
incommunicable grief.  Nevertheless she glided Into her seat with
feigned cheerfulness, taking a natural part in their conversation;
and she rose at last, smiling with the rest.

But she immediately quitted the house, eager to be out of doors
surrounded by things that she loved but that could not observe her
or question her in return--alone with things that know not evil.

These were the last days of May.  The rush of Summer had already
carried it far northward over the boundaries of Spring, and on this
Sunday morning it filled the grounds of Isabel's home with early
warmth.  Quickened by the heat, summoned by the blue, drenched with
showers and dews, all things which have been made repositories of
the great presence of Life were engaged in realizing the utmost
that it meant to them.

It was in the midst of this splendor of light and air, fragrance,
colors, shapes, movements, melodies and joys that Isabel, the
loftiest receptacle of life among them all, soon sat in a secluded
spot, motionless and listless with her unstanched and desperate
wound.  Everything seemed happy but herself; the very brilliancy of
the day only deepened the shadow under which she brooded.  As she
had slipped away from the house, she would soon have escaped from
the garden had there been any further retreat.

It was not necessary long to wait for one.  Borne across the brown
roofs and red chimneys of the town and exploding in the crystal air
above her head like balls of mellow music, came the sounds of the
first church bells, the bells of Christ Church.

They had never conveyed other meaning to her than that proclaimed
by the town clock: they sounded the hour.  She had been too
untroubled during her young life to understand their aged argument
and invitation.

Held In the arms of her father, when a babe, she had been duly
christened.  His death had occurred soon afterwards, then her
mother's.  Under the nurture of a grandmother to whom religion was
a convenience and social form, she had received the strictest
ceremonial but in no wise any spiritual training.  The first
conscious awakening of this beautiful unearthly sense had not taken
place until the night of her confirmation--a wet April evening when
the early green of the earth was bowed to the ground, and the
lilies-of-the-valley in the yard had chilled her fingers as she had
plucked them (chosen flower of her consecration); she and they but
rising alike into their higher lives out of the same mysterious
Mother.

That night she had knelt among the others at the chancel and the
bishop who had been a friend of her father's, having approached her
in the long line of young and old, had laid his hands the more
softly for his memories upon her brow with the impersonal prayer:

"_Defend, O Lord, this thy child with thy heavenly grace, that she
may continue thine forever, and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit
more and more, until she come unto thy Everlasting Kingdom_."

For days afterwards a steady radiance seemed to Isabel to rest upon
her wherever she went, shed straight from Eternity.  She had
avoided her grandmother, secluded herself from the closest
companions, been very thoughtful.

Years had elapsed since.  But no experience of the soul is ever
wasted or effaceable; and as the sound of the bells now reached her
across the garden, they reawoke the spiritual impulses which had
stirred within her at confirmation.  First heard whispering then,
the sacred annunciation now more eloquently urged that in her
church, the hour of real need being come, she would find refuge,
help, more than earthly counsellor.

She returned unobserved to the house and after quick simple
preparation, was on her way.

When she slipped shrinkingly into her pew, scarce any one had
arrived.  Several women in mourning were there and two or three
aged men.  It is the sorrowful and the old who head the human host
in its march toward Paradise: Youth and Happiness loiter far behind
and are satisfied with the earth.  Isabel looked around with a
poignant realization of the broken company over into which she had
so swiftly crossed.

She had never before been in the church when it was empty.  How
hushed and solemn it waited in its noonday twilight--the Divine
already there, faithful keeper of the ancient compact; the human
not yet arrived.  Here indeed was the refuge she had craved; here
the wounded eye of the soul could open unhurt and unafraid; and she
sank to her knees with a quick prayer of the heart, scarce of the
lips, for Isabel knew nothing about prayer in her own words--that
she might have peace of mind during these guarded hours: there
would be so much time afterwards in which to remember--so many
years in which to remember!

How still it was!  At first she started at every sound: the barely
audible opening and shutting of a pew door by some careful hand;
the grating of wheels on the cobblestones outside as a carriage was
driven to the entrance; the love-calls of sparrows building in the
climbing oak around the Gothic windows.

Soon, however, her ear became sealed to all outward disturbance.
She had fled to the church, driven by many young impulses, but
among them was the keen hope that her new Sorrow, which had begun
to follow her everywhere since she awoke, would wait outside when
she entered those doors: so dark a spirit would surely not stalk
behind her into the very splendor of the Spotless.  But as she now
let her eyes wander down the isle to the chancel railing where she
had knelt at confirmation, where bridal couples knelt in receiving
the benediction, Isabel felt that this new Care faced her from
there as from its appointed shrine; she even fancied that in effect
it addressed to her a solemn warning:

"Isabel, think not to escape me in this place!  It is here that
Rowan must seem to you most unworthy and most false; to have
wronged you most cruelly.  For it was here, at this altar, that you
had expected to kneel beside him and be blessed in your marriage.
In years to come, sitting where you now sit, you may live to see
him kneel here with another, making her his wife.  But for you,
Isabel, this spot must ever mean the renunciation of marriage, the
bier of love.  Then do not think to escape me here, me, who am
Remembrance."

And Isabel, as though a command had been laid upon her, with her
eyes fixed on the altar over which the lights of the stained glass
windows were joyously playing, gave herself up to memories of all
the innocent years that she had known Rowan and of the blind years
that she had loved him.

She was not herself aware that marriage was the only sacrament of
religion that had ever possessed interest for her.  Recollection
told her no story of how even as a child she had liked to go to the
crowded church with other children and watch the procession of the
brides--all mysterious under their white veils, and following one
and another so closely during springs and autumns that in truth
they were almost a procession.  Or with what excitement she had
watched each walk out, leaning on the arm of the man she had chosen
and henceforth to be called his in ail things to the end while the
loud crash of the wedding march closed their separate pasts with a
single melody.

But there were mothers in the church who, attracted by the child's
expression, would say to each other a little sadly perhaps, that
love and marriage were destined to be the one overshadowing or
overshining experience in life to this most human and poetic soul.

After she had learned of Rowan's love for her and had begun to
return his love, the altar had thenceforth become the more personal
symbol of their destined happiness.  Every marriage that she
witnessed bound her more sacredly to him.  Only a few months before
this, at the wedding of the Osborns--Kate being her closest friend,
and George Osborn being Rowan's--he and she had been the only
attendants; and she knew how many persons in the church were
thinking that they might be the next to plight their vows; with
crimsoning cheeks she had thought it herself.

Now there returned before Isabel's eyes the once radiant procession
of the brides--but how changed!  And bitter questioning she
addressed to each!  Had any such confession been made to any one of
them--either before marriage or afterwards--by the man she had
loved?  Was it for some such reason that one had been content to
fold her hands over her breast before the birth of her child?  Was
this why another lived on, sad young wife, motherless?  Was this
why in the town there were women who refused to marry at all?  So
does a little knowledge of evil move backward and darken for us
even the bright years in which it had no place.

The congregation were assembling rapidly.  Among those who passed
further down were several of the girls of Isabel's set.  How fresh
and sweet they looked as they drifted gracefully down the aisles
this summer morning!  How light-hearted!  How far away from her in
her new wretchedness!  Some, after they were seated, glanced back
with a smile.  She avoided their eyes.

A little later the Osborns entered, the bride and groom of a few
months before.  Their pew was immediately in front of hers.  Kate
wore mourning for her mother.  As she seated herself, she lifted
her veil halfway, turned and slipped a hand over the pew into
Isabel's.  The tremulous pressure of the fingers spoke of present
trouble; and as Isabel returned it with a quick response of her
own, a tear fell from the hidden eyes.

The young groom's eyes were also red and swollen, but for other
reasons; and he sat in the opposite end of the pew as far as
possible from his wife's side.  When she a few moments later leaned
toward him with timidity and hesitation, offering him an open
prayer-book, he took it coldly and laid it between them on the
cushion.  Isabel shuddered: her new knowledge of evil so cruelly
opened her eyes to the full understanding of so much.

Little rime was left for sympathy with Kate.  Nearer the pulpit was
another pew from which her thoughts had never been wholly
withdrawn.  She had watched it with the fascination of abhorrence;
and once, feeling that she could not bear to see him come in with
his mother and younger brother, she had started to leave the
church.  But just then her grandmother had bustled richly in,
followed by her aunt; and more powerful with Isabel already than
any other feeling was the wish to bury her secret--Rowan's
secret--in the deepest vault of consciousness, to seal it up
forever from the knowledge of the world.

The next moment what she so dreaded took place.  He walked quietly
down the aisle as usual, opened the pew for his mother and brother
with the same courtesy, and the three bent their heads together in
prayer.

"Grandmother," she whispered quickly, "will you let me pass!  I am
not very well, I think I shall go home."

Her grandmother, not heeding and with her eyes fixed upon the same
pew, whispered in return;

"The Merediths are here," and continued her satisfying scrutiny of
persons seated around.

Isabel herself had no sooner suffered the words to escape than she
regretted them.  Resolved to control herself from this time on, she
unclasped her prayer-book, found the appointed reading, and
directed her thoughts to the service soon to begin.

It was part of the confession of David that reached her, sounding
across how many centuries.  Wrung from him who had been a young man
himself and knew what a young man is.  With time enough afterwards
to think of this as soldier, priest, prophet, care-worn king, and
fallible judge over men--with time enough to think of what his days
of nature had been when he tended sheep grazing the pastures of
Bethlehem or abided solitary with the flock by night, lowly
despised work, under the herded stars.  Thus converting a young
man's memories into an older man's remorses.

As she began to read, the first outcry gripped and cramped her
heart like physical pain; where all her life she had been repeating
mere words, she now with eyes tragically opened discerned forbidden
meanings:

"_Thou art about my path and about my bed . . .  the darkness is no
darkness to thee. . . .  Thine eyes did see my substance being yet
imperfect . . .  look well if there be any wickedness in me; and
lead me in the way everlasting . . .  haste thee unto me . . .
when I cry unto thee.  O let not my heart be inclined to an evil
thing_."

She was startled by a general movement throughout the congregation.
The minister had advanced to the reading desk and begun to read:

"_I will arise and go to my father and will say unto him: Father, I
have sinned against heaven and before thee and am no more worthy to
be called thy son_."

Ages stretched their human wastes between these words of the New
Testament and those other words of the Old; but the parable of
Christ really finished the prayer of David: in each there was the
same young prodigal--the ever-falling youth of humanity.

Another moment and the whole congregation knelt and began the
confession.  Isabel also from long custom sank upon her knees and
started to repeat the words, "We have erred and strayed from thy
ways like lost sheep."  Then she stopped.  She declined to make
that confession with Rowan or to join in any service that he shared
and appropriated.

The Commandments now remained and for the first time she shrank
from them as being so awful and so near.  All our lives we placidly
say over to ourselves that man is mortal; but not until death
knocks at the threshold and enters do we realize the terrors of our
mortality.  All our lives we repeat with dull indifference that man
is erring; but only when the soul most loved and trusted has gone
astray, do we begin to realize the tragedy of human imperfection.
So Isabel had been used to go through the service, with bowed head
murmuring at each response, "_Lord have mercy upon us and incline
our hearts to keep this law_."

But the laws themselves had been no more to her than pious archaic
statements, as far removed as the cherubim, the candlesticks and
the cedar of Solomon's temple.  If her thoughts had been forced to
the subject, she would have perhaps admitted the necessity of these
rules for men and women ages ago.  Some one of them might have
meant much to a girl in those dim days: to Rebecca pondering who
knows what temptation at the well; to Ruth tempted who knows how in
the corn and thinking of Boaz and the barn; to Judith plotting in
the camp; to Jephtha's daughter out on the wailing mountains.

But to-day, sitting in an Episcopal church in the closing years of
the nineteenth century, holding a copy of those old laws, and
thinking of Rowan as the breaker of the greatest of them, Isabel
for the first time awoke to realization of how close they are
still--those voices from the far land of Shinar; how all the men
and women around her in that church still waged their moral battles
over those few texts of righteousness; how the sad and sublime
wandering caravans of the whole race forever pitch their nightly
tents beneath that same mountain of command.

Thick and low sounded the response of the worshippers.  She could
hear her grandmother's sonorous voice, a mingling of worldly
triumph and indifference; her aunt's plaintive and aggrieved.  She
could hear Kate's needy and wounded.  In imagination she could hear
his proud, noble mother's; his younger brother's.  Against the
sound of his responses she closed all hearing; and there low on her
knees, in the ear of Heaven itself, she recorded against him her
unforgiveness and her dismissal forever.

An organ melody followed, thrillingly sweet; and borne outward on
it the beseeching of the All-Merciful:

  "'Art thou weary, art thou languid,
    Art thou sore distressed?
  Come to me!' saith one; 'and, coming,
    Be at rest!'"

It was this hymn that brought her in a passion to her feet.

With whatsoever other feelings she had sought the church, it was at
least with the hope that it had a message for her.  She had indeed
listened to a personal message, but it was a message delivered to
the wrong person; for at every stage of the worship she, the
innocent, had been forgotten and slighted; Rowan, the guilty, had
been considered and comforted.  David had his like in mind and
besought pardon for him; the prophet of old knew of a case like his
and blessed him; the apostle centuries afterward looked on and did
not condemn; Christ himself had in a way told the multitude the
same story that Rowan had told her,--counselling forgiveness.  The
very hymns of the church were on Rowan's side--every one gone in
search of the wanderer.  For on this day Religion, universal mother
of needy souls and a minister of all comforts, was in the mood to
deal only with youth and human frailty.

She rebelled.  It was like commanding her to dishonor a woman's
strongest and purest instincts.  It called upon her to sympathize
with the evil that had blighted her life.  And Rowan himself!--in
her anger and suffering she could think of him in no other way than
as enjoying this immortal chorus of anxiety on his account; as
hearing it all with complacency and self-approval.  It had to her
distorted imagination the effect of offering a reward to him for
having sinned; he would have received no such attention had he
remained innocent.

With one act of complete revulsion she spurned it all: the moral
casuistry that beguiled him, the church that cloaked him; spurned
psalm and prophet and apostle, Christ and parable and song.

"Grandmother," she whispered, "I shall not wait for the sermon."

A moment later she issued from the church doors and took her way
slowly homeward through the deserted streets, under the lonely blue
of the unanswering sky.




III

The Conyers homestead was situated in a quiet street on the
southern edge of the town.  All the houses in that block had been
built by people of English descent near the close of the eighteenth
or at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Each was set apart
from each by lawns, yards and gardens, and further screened by
shrubs and vines in accordance with old English custom. Where they
grew had once been the heart of a wilderness; and above each house
stood a few old forest trees, indifferent guardsmen of the camping
generations.

The architects had given to the buildings good strong characters;
the family living in each for a hundred years or more had long
since imparted reputation.  Out of the windows girlish brides had
looked on reddening springs and whitening winters until they had
become silver-haired grandmothers themselves; then had looked no
more; and succeeding eyes had watched the swift pageants of the
earth, and the swifter pageants of mortal hope and passion.  Out of
the front doors, sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons had gone away
to the cotton and sugar and rice plantations of the South, to new
farm lands of the West, to the professions in cities of the North.
The mirrors within held long vistas of wavering forms and vanishing
faces; against the walls of the rooms had beaten unremembered tides
of strong and of gentle voices.  In the parlors what scenes of
lights and music, sheen of satins, flashing of gems; in the dining
rooms what feastings as in hale England, with all the robust humors
of the warm land, of the warm heart.

Near the middle of the block and shaded by forest trees, stood with
its heirlooms and treasures the home of Isabel's grandmother. Known
to be heiress to this though rich in her own right was Isabel
herself, that grandmother's idol, the only one of its beautiful
women remaining yet to be married; and to celebrate with
magnificence in this house Isabel's marriage to Rowan Meredith had
long been planned by the grandmother as the last scene of her own
splendid social drama: having achieved that, she felt she should be
willing to retire from the stage--and to play only behind the
curtain.

It was the middle of the afternoon of the same Sunday.  In the
parlors extending along the eastern side of the house there was a
single sound: the audible but healthful breathing of a sleeper
lying on a sofa in the coolest corner.  It was Isabel's grandmother
nearing the end of her customary nap.

Sometimes there are households in which two members suggest the
single canvas of a mediaeval painter, depicting scenes that
represent a higher and a lower world: above may be peaks, clouds,
sublimity, the Transfiguration; underneath, the pursuits and
passions of local worldly life--some story of loaves and fishes and
of a being possessed by a devil.  Isabel and her grandmother were
related as parts of some such painting: the grandmother was the
bottom of the canvas.

In a little while she awoke and uncoiling her figure, rolled softly
over on her back and stretched like some drowsy feline of the
jungle; then sitting up with lithe grace she looked down at the
print of her head on the pillow and deftly smoothed it out.  The
action was characteristic: she was careful to hide the traces of
her behavior, and the habit was so strong that it extended to
things innocent as slumber.  Letting her hands drop to the sofa,
she yawned and shook her head from side to side with that short
laugh by which we express amusement at our own comfort and well-
being.

Beside the sofa, toe by toe and heel by heel, sat her slippers--the
pads of this leopardess of the parlors.  She peered over and worked
her nimble feet into these.  On a little table at the end of the
sofa lay her glasses, her fan, and a small bell.  She passed her
fingers along her temples in search of small disorders in the scant
tufts of her hair, put on her glasses, and took the fan.  Then she
glided across the room to one of the front windows, sat down and
raised the blind a few inches in order to peep out: so the
well-fed, well-fanged leopardess with lowered head gazes idly
through her green leaves.

It was very hot.  With her nostrils close to the opening In the
shutters, she inhaled the heated air of the yard of drying grass.
On the white window-sill just outside, a bronze wasp was whirling
excitedly, that cautious stinger which never arrives until summer
is sure.  The oleanders in the big green tubs looked wilted though
abundantly watered that morning.

She shot a furtive glance at the doors and windows of the houses
across the street.  All were closed; and she formed her own
pictures of how people inside were sleeping, lounging, idly reading
until evening coolness should invite them again to the verandas and
the streets.

No one passed but gay strolling negroes. She was seventy years old,
but her interest in life was insatiable; and it was in part,
perhaps, the secret of her amazing vitality and youthfulness that
her surroundings never bored her; she derived instant pleasure from
the nearest spectacle, always exercising her powers humorously upon
the world, never upon herself.  For lack of other entertainment she
now fell upon these vulnerable figures, and began to criticise and
to laugh at them: she did not have to descend far to reach this
level.  Her undimmed eyes swept everything--walk, imitative
manners, imitative dress.

Suddenly she withdrew her face from the blinds; young Meredith had
entered the gate and was coming up the pavement.  If anything could
greatly have increased her happiness at this moment it would have
been the sight of him.  He had been with Isabel until late the
night before; he had attended morning service and afterward gone
home with his mother and brother (she had watched the carriage as
it rolled away down the street); he had returned at this unusual
hour.  Such eagerness had her approval; and coupling it with
Isabel's demeanor upon leaving the table the previous evening,
never before so radiant with love, she felt that she had ground for
believing the final ambition of her life near its fulfilment.

As he advanced, the worldly passions other nature--the jungle
passions--she had no others--saluted him with enthusiasm.  His head
and neck and bearing, stature and figure, family and family
history, house and lands--she inventoried them all once more and
discovered no lack.   When he had rung the bell, she leaned back;
in her chair and eavesdropped with sparkling eyes.

"Is Miss Conyers at home?"

The maid replied apologetically:

"She wished to be excused to-day, Mr. Meredith."

A short silence followed.  Then he spoke as a man long conscious of
a peculiar footing:

"Will you tell her Mr. Meredith would like to see her," and without
waiting to be invited he walked into the library across the hall.

She heard the maid go upstairs with hesitating step.

Some time passed before she came down. She brought a note and
handed it to him, saying with some embarrassment:

"She asked me to give you this note, Mr. Meredith."

Listening with sudden tenseness of attention, Mrs. Conyers heard
him draw the sheet from the envelope and a moment later crush it.

She placed her eyes against the shutters and watched him as he
walked away; then she leaned back in her chair, thoughtful and
surprised.  What was the meaning of this? The events of the day
were rapidly reviewed: that Isabel had not spoken with her after
breakfast; that she had gone to service at an unusual hour and had
left the church before the sermon; that she had effaced herself at
dinner and at once thereafter had gone up to her rooms, where she
still remained.

Returning to the sofa she lay down, having first rung her bell.
When the maid appeared, she rubbed her eyelids and sat sleepily up
as though just awakened: she remembered that she had eavesdropped,
and the maid must be persuaded that she had not.  Guilt is a bad
logician.

"Where is your Miss Isabel?"

"She is in her room, Miss Henrietta."

"Go up and tell her that I say come down into the parlors: it is
cooler down here. And ask her whether she'd like some sherbet.  And
bring me some--bring it before you go."

A few moments later the maid reentered with the sherbet.  She
lifted the cut-glass dish from the silver waiter with soft purrings
of the palate, and began to attack the minute snow mountain around
the base and up the sides with eager jabs and stabs, depositing the
spoonfuls upon a tongue as fresh as a child's.  Momentarily she
forgot even her annoyance; food instantly absorbed and placated her
as it does the carnivora.

The maid reentered.

"She says she doesn't wish any sherbet, Miss Henrietta."

"Did she say she would come down?"

"She did not say, Miss Henrietta."

"Go back and tell her I'd like to see her: ask her to come down
into the parlors." Then she hurried hack to the sherbet.  She
wanted her granddaughter, but she wanted that first.

Her thoughts ascended meantime to Isabel in the room above.  She
finished the sherbet. She waited.  Impatience darkened to
uneasiness and anger.  Still she waited; and her finger nails began
to scratch audibly at the mahogany of her chair and a light to burn
in the tawny eyes.


In the room overhead Isabel's thoughts all this time were
descending to her grandmother.  Before the message was delivered
it had been her intention to go down.  Once she had even reached
the head of the staircase; but then had faltered and shrunk
back. When the message came, it rendered her less inclined to
risk the interview. Coming at such an hour, that message was
suspicious. She, moreover, naturally had learned to dread her
grandmother's words when they looked most innocent.  Thus she,
too, waited--lacking the resolution to descend.

As she walked homeward from church she realized that she must take
steps at once to discard Rowan as the duty of her social position.
And here tangible perplexities instantly wove themselves across her
path. Conscience had promptly arraigned him at the altar of
religion.  It was easy to condemn him there.  And no one had the
right to question that arraignment and that condemnation.  But
public severance of all relations with him in her social world--how
should she accomplish that and withhold her justification?

Her own kindred would wish to understand the reason.  The branches
of these scattered far and near were prominent each in its sphere,
and all were intimately bound together by the one passion of
clannish allegiance to the family past.  She knew that Rowan's
attentions had continued so long and had been so marked, that
her grandmother had accepted marriage between them as a foregone
conclusion, and in letters had disseminated these prophecies
through the family connection.  Other letters had even come back
to Isabel, containing evidence only too plain that Rowan had
been discussed and accepted in domestic councils.  Against all
inward protests of delicacy, she had been forced to receive
congratulations that in this marriage she would preserve the
traditions of the family by bringing into it a man of good blood
and of unspotted name; the two idols of all the far separated
hearthstones.

To the pride of all these relatives she added her own pride--the
highest.  She was the last of the women in the direct line yet
unwedded, and she was sensitive that her choice should not in honor
and in worth fall short of the alliances that had preceded hers.
Involved in this sense of pride she felt that she owed a duty to
the generations who had borne her family name in this country and
to the still earlier generations who had given it distinction in
England--land of her womanly ideals.  To discard now without a word
of explanation the man whose suit she had long been understood to
favor would create wide disappointment and provoke keen question.

Further difficulties confronted her from Rowan's side.  His own
family and kindred were people strong and not to be trifled with,
proud and conservative like her own. Corresponding resentments
would be aroused among them, questions would be asked that had no
answers.  She felt that her life in its most private and sacred
relation would be publicly arraigned and have open judgment passed
upon it by conflicting interests and passions--and that the mystery
which contained her justification must also forever conceal it.

Nevertheless Rowan must be discarded; she must act quickly and for
the best.

On the very threshold one painful necessity faced her: the reserve
of years must be laid aside and her grandmother admitted to
confidence in her plans.  Anything that she might do could not
escape those watchful eyes long since grown impatient. Moreover
despite differences of character, she and her grandmother had
always lived together, and they must now stand together before
their world in regard to this step.


"Did you wish to see me about anything, grandmother?"

Mrs. Conyers had not heard Isabel's quiet entrance.  She was at the
window still: she turned softly in her chair and looked across the
darkened room to where Isabel sat facing her--a barely discernible
white figure.

From any other member other family she would roughly have demanded
the explanation she desired.  She was the mother of strong men
(they were living far from her now), and even in his manhood no one
of them had ever crossed her will without bearing away the scars of
her anger, and always of her revenge.  But before this grandchild,
whom she had reared from infancy, she felt the brute cowardice
which is often the only tribute that a debased nature can pay to
the incorruptible.  Her love must have its basis in some abject
emotion: it took its origin from fear.

An unforeseen incident, occurring when Isabel was yet a child and
all but daily putting forth new growths of nature, rendered very
clear even then the developing antagonism and prospective
relationship of these two characters.  In a company of ladies the
grandmother, drawing the conversation to herself, remarked with a
suggestive laugh that as there were no men present she would tell a
certain story.  "Grandmother," interposed Isabel, vaguely startled,
"please do not say anything that you would not say before a man;"
and for an instant, amid the hush, the child and the woman looked
at each other like two repellent intelligences, accidentally
meeting out of the heavens and the pit.

This had been the first of a long series of antagonism and recoils,
and as the child had matured, the purity and loftiness of her
nature had by this very contact grown chilled toward austerity.
Thus nature lends a gradual protective hardening to a tender
surface during abrasion with a coarser thing.  It left Isabel more
reserved with her grandmother than with any one else of all the
persons who entered into her life.

For this reason Mrs. Conyers now foresaw that this interview would
be specially difficult.  She had never enjoyed Isabel's confidence
in regard to her love affairs--and the girl had had her share of
these; every attempt to gain it had been met by rebuffs so
courteous but decisive that they had always wounded her pride and
sometimes had lashed her to secret fury.


"Did you wish to see me about anything, grandmother?"

The reply came very quickly: "I wanted to know whether you were
well."

"I am perfectly well.  Why did you think of asking?"

"You did not seem well in church."

"I had forgotten.  I was not well in church."

Mrs. Conyers bent over and drew a chair in front of her own.  She
wished to watch Isabel's face.  She had been a close student of
women's faces--and of many men's.

"Sit here.  There is a breeze through the window."

"Thank you.  I'd rather sit here."

Another pause ensued.

"Did you ever know the last of May to be so hot?"

"I cannot remember now."

"Can you imagine any one calling on such an afternoon?"

There was no reply.

"I am glad no one has been here.  While I was asleep I thought I
heard the bell."

There was no reply.

"You were wise not to stay for the sermon."  Mrs. Conyers' voice
trembled with anger as she passed on and on, seeking a penetrable
point for conversation.  "I do not believe in using the church to
teach young men that they should blame their fathers for their own
misdeeds.  If I have done any good in this world, I do not expect
my father and mother to be rewarded for it in the next; if I have
done wrong, I do not expect my children to be punished.  I shall
claim the reward and I shall stand the punishment, and that is the
end of it.  Teaching young men to blame their parents because they
are prodigals is nonsense, and injurious nonsense.  I hope you do
not imagine," she said, with a stroke of characteristic coarseness,
"that you get any of your faults from me."

"I have never held you responsible, grandmother."

Mrs. Conyers could wait no longer.

"Isabel," she asked sharply, "why did you not see Rowan when he
called a few minutes ago?"

"Grandmother, you know that I do not answer such questions."

How often in years gone by such had been Isabel's answer!  The
grandmother awaited it now.  To her surprise Isabel after some
moments of hesitation replied without resentment:

"I did not wish to see him."

There was a momentary pause; then this unexpected weakness was met
with a blow.

"You were eager enough to see him last night."

"I can only hope," murmured Isabel aloud though wholly to herself,
"that I did not make this plain to him."

"But what has happened since?"

Nothing was said for a while.  The two women had been unable to see
each other clearly.  A moment later Isabel crossed the room quickly
and taking the chair in front of her grandmother, searched that
treacherous face imploringly for something better in it than she
had ever seen there.  Could she trust the untrustworthy?  Would
falseness itself for once be true?

"Grandmother," she said, and her voice betrayed how she shrank from
her own words, "before you sent for me I was about to come down.  I
wished to speak with you about a very delicate matter, a very
serious matter.  You have often reproached me for not taking you
into my confidence.  I am going to give you my confidence now."

At any other moment the distrust and indignity contained in the
tone of this avowal would not have escaped Mrs. Conyers. But
surprise riveted her attention. Isabel gave her no time further:

"A thing has occurred in regard to which we must act together for
our own sakes--on account of the servants in the house--on account
of our friends, so that there may be no gossip, no scandal."

Nothing at times so startles us as our own words.  As the girl
uttered the word "scandal," she rose frightened as though it faced
her and began to walk excitedly backward and forward.  Scandal had
never touched her life.  She had never talked scandal; had never
thought scandal. Dwelling under the same roof with it as the master
passion of a life and forced to encounter it in so many repulsive
ways, she had needed little virtue to regard it with abhorrence.

Now she perceived that it might be perilously near herself.  When
all questions were asked and no reasons were given, would not the
seeds of gossip fly and sprout and bear their kinds about her path:
and the truth could never be told.  She must walk on through the
years, possibly misjudged, giving no sign.

After a while she returned to her seat.

"You must promise me one thing," she said with white and trembling
lips.  "I give you my confidence as far as I can; beyond that I
will not go.  And you shall not ask.  You are not to try to find
out from me or any one else more than I tell you.  You must give me
your word of honor!"

She bent forward and looked her grandmother wretchedly in the eyes.

Mrs. Conyers pushed her chair back as though a hand had struck her
rudely in the face.

"Isabel," she cried, "do you forget to whom you are speaking?"

"Ah, grandmother," exclaimed Isabel, reckless of her words by
reason of suffering, "it is too late for us to be sensitive about
our characters."

Mrs. Conyers rose with insulted pride: "Do not come to me with your
confidence until you can give it."

Isabel recrossed the room and sank into the seat she had quitted.
Mrs. Conyers remained standing a moment and furtively resumed hers.

Whatever her failings had been--one might well say her
crimes--Isabel had always treated her from the level of her own
high nature.  But Mrs. Conyers had accepted this dutiful demeanor
of the years as a tribute to her own virtues.  Now that Isabel, the
one person whose respect she most desired, had openly avowed deep
distrust of her, the shock was as real as anything life could have
dealt.

She glanced narrowly at Isabel: the girl had forgotten her.

Mrs. Conyers could shift as the wind shifts; and one of her
characteristic resources in life had been to conquer by feigning
defeat: she often scaled her mountains by seeming to take a path
which led to the valleys.  She now crossed over and sat down with a
peace-making laugh.  She attempted to take Isabel's hand, but it
was quickly withdrawn.  Fearing that this movement indicated a
receding confidence Mrs. Conyers ignored the rebuff and pressed her
inquiry in a new, entirely practical, and pleasant tone:

"What is the meaning of all this, Isabel?"

Isabel turned upon her again a silent, searching, wretched look of
appeal.

Mrs. Conyers realized that it could not be ignored: "You know that
I promise anything.  What did I ever refuse you?"

Isabel sat up but still remained silent. Mrs. Conyers noted the
indecision and shrugged her shoulders with a careless dismissal of
the whole subject:

"Let us drop the subject, then.  Do you think it will rain?"

"Grandmother, Rowan must not come here any more."  Isabel stopped
abruptly. "That is all."

. . . "I merely wanted you to understand this at once.  We must not
invite him here any more."

. . . "If we meet him at the houses of our friends, we must do what
we can not to be discourteous to them if he is their guest."

. . . "If we meet Rowan alone anywhere, we must let him know that
he is not on the list of our acquaintances any longer.  That is
all."

Isabel wrung her hands.

Mrs. Conyers had more than one of the traits of the jungle: she
knew when to lie silent and how to wait.  She waited longer now,
but Isabel had relapsed into her own thoughts.  For her the
interview was at an end; to Mrs. Conyers it was beginning. Isabel's
words and manner had revealed a situation far more serious than she
had believed to exist.  A sense of personal slights and wounds gave
way to apprehension.  The need of the moment was not passion and
resentment, but tact and coolness and apparent unconcern.

"What is the meaning of this, Isabel?" She spoke in a tone of frank
and cordial interest as though the way were clear at last for the
establishment of complete confidence between them.

"Grandmother, did you not give me your word?" said Isabel, sternly.
Mrs. Conyers grew indignant: "But remember in what a light you
place me!  I did not expect you to require me to be unreasonable
and unjust. Do you really wish me to be kept in the dark in a
matter like this?  Must I refuse to speak to Rowan and have no
reason? Close the house to him and not know why? Cut him in public
without his having offended me?  If he should ask why I treat him
in this way, what am I to tell him?"

"He will never ask," said Isabel with mournful abstraction.

"But tell _me_ why you wish me to act so strangely."

"Believe that I have reasons."

"But ought I not to know what these reasons are if I must act upon
them as though they were my own?"

Isabel saw the stirrings of a mind that brushed away honor as an
obstacle and that was not to be quieted until it had been
satisfied.  She sank back into her chair, saying very simply with
deep disappointment and with deeper sorrow:

"Ah, I might have known!"

Mrs. Conyers pressed forward with gathering determination:

"What happened last night?"

"I might have known that it was of no use," repeated Isabel.

Mrs. Conyers waited several moments and then suddenly changing her
course feigned the dismissal of the whole subject: "I shall pay no
attention to this.  I shall continue to treat Rowan as I have
always treated him."

Isabel started up: "Grandmother, if you do, you will regret it."
Her voice rang clear with hidden meaning and with hidden warning.

It fell upon the ear of the other with threatening import.  For her
there seemed to be in it indeed the ruin of a cherished plan, the
loss of years of hope and waiting. Before such a possibility tact
and coolness and apparent unconcern were swept away by passion,
brutal and unreckoning: "Do you mean that you have refused Rowan?
Or have you found out at last that he has no intention of marrying
you--has never had any?"

Isabel rose: "Excuse me," she said proudly and turned away.  She
reached the door and pausing there put out one of her hands against
the lintel as if with weakness and raised the other to her forehead
as though with bewilderment and indecision.

Then she came unsteadily back, sank upon her knees, and hid her
face in her grandmother's lap, murmuring through her fingers: "I
have been rude to you, grandmother!  Forgive me!  I do not know
what I have been saying.  But any little trouble between us is
nothing, nothing! And do as I beg you--let this be sacred and
secret!  And leave everything to me!"

She crept closer and lifting her face looked up into her
grandmother's.  She shrank back shuddering from what she saw there,
burying her face in her hands; then rising she hurried from the
room,

Mrs. Conyers sat motionless.

Was it true then that the desire and the work of years for this
marriage had come to nothing?  And was it true that this
grandchild, for whom she had planned and plotted, did not even
respect her and could tell her so to her face?

Those insulting words rang in her ears still: "_You must give me
your word of honor . . . it is too late to be sensitive about our
characters_."

She sat perfectly still: and in the parlors there might have been
heard at intervals the scratching of her sharp finger nails against
the wood of the chair.




IV

The hot day ended.  Toward sunset a thunder-shower drenched the
earth, and the night had begun cool and refreshing.

Mrs. Conyers was sitting on the front veranda, waiting for
her regular Sunday evening visitor.  She was no longer the
self-revealed woman of the afternoon, but seemingly an affable,
harmless old lady of the night on the boundary of her social world.
She was dressed with unfailing: elegance--and her taste lavished
itself especially on black silk and the richest lace.  The shade of
heliotrope satin harmonized with the yellowish folds of her hair.
Her small, warm, unwrinkled hands were without rings, being too
delicately beautiful.  In one she held a tiny fan, white and soft
like the wing of a moth; on her lap lay a handkerchief as light as
smoke or a web of gossamer.

She rocked softly.  She unfolded and folded the night-moth fan
softly.  She touched the handkerchief to her rosy youthful lips
softly.  The south wind blew in her face softly.  Everything about
her was softness, all her movements were delicate and refined.
Even the early soft beauty of her figure was not yet lost.  (When a
girl of nineteen, she had measured herself by the proportions of
the ideal Venus; and the ordeal had left her with a girdle of
golden reflections.)

But if some limner had been told the whole truth of what she was
and been requested to imagine a fitting body for such a soul, he
would never have painted Mrs. Conyers as she looked.  Nature is not
frank in her characterizations, lest we remain infants in
discernment.  She allows foul to appear fair, and bids us become
educated in the hardy virtues of insight and prudence.  Education
as yet had advanced but little; and the deepest students in the
botany of women have been able to describe so few kinds that no
man, walking through the perfumed enchanted wood, knows at what
moment he may step upon or take hold of some unknown deadly variety.

As the moments passed, she stopped rocking and peered toward the
front gate under the lamp-post, saying to herself:

"He is late."

At last the gate was gently opened and gently shut.

"Ah," she cried, leaning back in her chair smiling and satisfied.
Then she sat up rigid.  A change passed over her such as comes over
a bird of prey when it draws its feathers in flat against its body
to lessen friction in the swoop.  She unconsciously closed the
little fan, the little handkerchief disappeared somewhere.

As the gate had opened and closed, on the bricks of the pavement
was heard only the tap of his stout walking-stick; for he was gouty
and wore loose low shoes of the softest calfskin, and these made no
noise except the slurring sound of slippers.

Once he stopped, and planting his cane far out in the grass,
reached stiffly over and with undisguised ejaculations of
discomfort snipped off a piece of heliotrope in one of the tubs of
oleander.   He shook away the raindrops and drew it through his
buttonhole, and she could hear his low "Ah! ah!  ah!" as he thrust
his nose down into it.

"There's nothing like it," he said aloud as though he had
consenting listeners, "it outsmells creation."

He stopped at another tub of flowers where a humming-bird moth was
gathering honey and jabbed his stick sharply at it, taking care
that the stick did not reach perilously near.

"Get away, sir," he said; "you've had enough, sir.  Get away, sir."

Having reached a gravel walk that diverged from the pavement, he
turned off and went over to a rose-bush and walked around tapping
the roses on their heads as he counted them--cloth-of-gold roses.
"Very well done," he said, "a large family--a good sign."

Thus he loitered along his way with leisure to enjoy all the chance
trifles that gladdened it; for he was one of the old who return at
the end of life to the simple innocent things that pleased them as
children.

She had risen and advanced to the edge of the veranda.

"Did you come to see me or did you come to see my flowers?" she
called out charmingly.

"I came to see the flowers, madam," he called back.  "Most of all,
the century plant: how is she?"

She laughed delightedly: "Still harping on my age, I see."

"Still harping, but harping your praises.  Century plants are not
necessarily old: they are all young at the beginning!  I merely
meant you'd be blooming at a hundred."

"You are a sly old fox," she retorted with a spirit.  "You give a
woman a dig on her age and then try to make her think it a
compliment."

"I gave myself a dig that time: the remark had to be excavated," he
said aloud but as though confidentially to himself.  Open
disrespect marked his speech and manner with her always; and sooner
or later she exacted full punishment.

Meantime he had reached the steps.  There he stopped and taking off
his straw hat looked up and shook it reproachfully at the heavens.

"What a night, what a night!" he exclaimed.  "And what an injustice
to a man wading up to his knees in life's winters."

"How do you do," she said impatiently, always finding it hard to
put up with his lingerings and delays.  "Are you coming in?"

"Thank you, I believe I am.  But no, wait.  I'll not come in until
I have made a speech.  It never occurred to me before and it will
never again.  It's now or never.

"The life of man should last a single year.  He should have one
spring for birth and childhood, for play and growth, for the ending
of his dreams and the beginning of his love.  One summer for strife
and toil and passion.  One autumn in which to gather the fruits of
his deeds and to live upon them, be they sweet or bitter.  One
winter in which to come to an end and wrap himself with resignation
in the snows of nature.  Thus he should never know the pain of
seeing spring return when there was nothing within himself to bud
or be sown.  Summer would never rage and he have no conflicts nor
passions.  Autumn would not pass and he with idle hands neither
give nor gather.  And winter should not end without extinguishing
his tormenting fires, and leaving him the peace of eternal cold."

"Really," she cried, "I have never heard anything as fine as that
since I used to write compositions at boarding-school."

"It may be part of one of mine!" he replied.  "We forget ourselves,
you know, and then we think we are original."

"Second childhood," she suggested.  "Are you really coming in?"

"I am, madam," he replied.  "And guided by your suggestion, I come
as a second child."

When he had reached the top step, he laid his hat and cane on the
porch and took her hands in his--pressing them abstemiously.

"Excuse me if I do not press harder," he said, lowering his voice
as though he fancied they might be overheard.  "I know you are
sensitive in these little matters; but while I dislike to appear
lukewarm, really, you know it is too late to be ardent," and he
looked at her ardently.

She twisted her fingers out of his with coy shame.

"What an old fox," she repeated gayly.

"Well, you know what goes with the fox--the foxess, or the foxina."

She had placed his chair not quite beside hers yet designedly near,
where the light of the chandelier in the hall would fall out upon
him and passers could see that he was there: she liked to have him
appear devoted.  For his part he was too little devoted to care
whether he sat far or near, in front or behind.  As the light
streamed out upon him, it illumined his noble head of soft, silvery
hair, which fell over his ears and forehead, forgotten and
disordered, like a romping boy's.  His complexion was ruddy--too
ruddy with high living; his clean-shaven face beautiful with
candor, gayety, and sweetness; and his eyes, the eyes of a kind
heart--saddened.  He had on a big loose shirt collar such as men
wore in Thackeray's time and a snow-white lawn tie.  In the bosom
of his broad-pleated shirt, made glossy with paraffin starch, there
was set an old-fashioned cluster-diamond stud--so enormous that it
looked like a large family of young diamonds in a golden nest.

As he took his seat, he planted his big gold-headed ebony cane
between his knees, put his hat on the head of his cane, gave it a
twirl, and looking over sidewise at her, smiled with an equal
mixture of real liking and settled abhorrence.

For a good many years these two had been--not friends: she was
incapable of so true a passion; he was too capable to misapply it
so unerringly.  Their association had assumed the character of one
of those belated intimacies, which sometimes spring up in the lives
of aged men and women when each wants companionship but has been
left companionless.

Time was when he could not have believed that any tie whatsoever
would ever exist between them.  Her first husband had been his
first law partner; and from what he had been forced to observe
concerning his partner's fireside wretchedness during his few years
of married life, he had learned to fear and to hate her.  With his
quick temper and honest way he made no pretence of hiding his
feeling--declined her invitations--cut her openly in society--and
said why.  When his partner died, not killed indeed but
broken-spirited, he spoke his mind on the subject more publicly and
plainly still.

She brewed the poison of revenge and waited.

A year or two later when his engagement was announced her opportunity
came.  In a single day it was done--so quietly, so perfectly, that
no one knew by whom.  Scandal was set running--Scandal, which no
pursuing messengers of truth and justice can ever overtake and drag
backward along its path.  His engagement was broken; she whom he was
to wed in time married one of his friends; and for years his own life
all but went to pieces.

Time is naught, existence a span.  One evening when she was old
Mrs. Conyers, and he old Judge Morris, she sixty and he sixty-five,
they met at an evening party.  In all those years he had never
spoken to her, nurturing his original dislike and rather suspecting
that it was she who had so ruined him.  But on this night there had
been a great supper and with him a great supper was a great
weakness: there had been wine, and wine was not a weakness at all,
but a glass merely made him more than happy, more than kind.  Soon
after supper therefore he was strolling through the emptied rooms
in a rather lonesome way, his face like a red moon in a fog,
beseeching only that it might shed its rays impartially on any
approachable darkness.

Men with wives and children can well afford to turn hard cold faces
to the outside world: the warmth and tenderness of which they are
capable they can exercise within their own restricted enclosures.
No doubt some of them consciously enjoy the contrast in their two
selves--the one as seen abroad and the other as understood at home.
But a wifeless, childless man--wandering at large on the heart's
bleak common--has much the same reason to smile on all that he has
to smile on any: there is no domestic enclosure for him: his
affections must embrace humanity.

As he strolled through the rooms, then, in his appealing way,
seeking whom he could attach himself to, he came upon her seated in
a doorway connecting two rooms.  She sat alone on a short sofa,
possibly by design, her train so arranged that he must step over it
if he advanced--the only being in the world that he hated.  In the
embarrassment of turning his back upon her or of trampling her
train, he hesitated; smiling with lowered eyelids she motioned him
to a seat by her side.

"What a vivacious, agreeable old woman," he soliloquized with
enthusiasm as he was driven home that night, sitting in the middle
of the carriage cushions with one arm swung impartially through the
strap on each side.  "And she has invited me to Sunday evening
supper.  Me!--after all these years--in that house!  I'll not go."

But he went.

"I'll not go again," he declared as he reached home that night and
thought it over.  "She is a bad woman."

But the following Sunday evening he reached for his hat and cane:
"I must go somewhere," he complained resentfully.  "The saints of
my generation are enjoying the saint's rest.  Nobody is left but a
few long-lived sinners, of whom I am a great part.  They are the
best I can find, and I suppose they are the best I deserve."

Those who live long miss many.  Without exception his former
associates at the bar had been summoned to appear before the Judge
who accepts no bribe.

The ablest of the middle-aged lawyers often hurried over to consult
him in difficult cases.  All of them could occasionally listen
while he, praiser of a bygone time, recalled the great period of
practice when he was the favorite criminal lawyer of the first
families, defending their sons against the commonwealth which he
always insisted was the greater criminal.   The young men about
town knew him and were ready to chat with him on street
corners--but never very long at a time.  In his old law offices he
could spend part of every day, guiding or guying his nephew Barbee,
who had just begun to practice.  But when all his social resources
were reckoned, his days contained great voids and his nights were
lonelier still.  The society of women remained a necessity of his
life; and the only woman in town, always bright, always full of
ideas, and always glad to see him (the main difficulty) was Mrs.
Conyers.

So that for years now he had been going regularly on Sunday
evenings.  He kept up apologies to his conscience regularly also;
but it must have become clear that his conscience was not a fire to
make him boil; it was merely a few coals to keep him bubbling.

In this acceptance of her at the end of life there was of course
mournful evidence of his own deterioration.  During the years
between being a young man and being an old one he had so far
descended toward her level, that upon renewing acquaintance with
her he actually thought that she had improved.

Youth with its white-flaming ideals is the great separator; by
middle age most of us have become so shaken down, on life's rough
road, to a certain equality of bearing and forbearing, that
miscellaneous comradeship becomes easy and rather comforting; while
extremely aged people are as compatible and as miserable as
disabled old eagles, grouped with a few inches of each other's
beaks and claws on the sleek perches of a cage.

This evening therefore, as he took his seat and looked across at
her, so richly dressed, so youthful, soft, and rosy, he all but
thanked heaven out loud that she was at home.

"Madam," he cried, "you are a wonderful and bewitching old
lady"--it was on the tip of his tongue to say "beldam."

"I know it," she replied briskly, "have you been so long in finding
it out?"

"It is a fresh discovery every time I come."

"Then you forget me in the meanwhile."

"I never forget you unless I am thinking of Miss Isabel.  How is
she?"

"Not well."

"Then I'm not well! No one is well!  Everybody must suffer if she
is suffering.  The universe sympathizes."

"She is not ill.  She is in trouble."

"But she must not be in trouble!  She has done nothing to be in
trouble about.  Who troubles her?  What troubles her?"

"She will not tell."

"Ah!" he cried, checking himself gravely and dropping the subject.

She noted the decisive change of tone: it was not by this direct
route that she would be able to enter his confidence.

"What did you think of the sermon this morning?"

"The sermon on the prodigal?  Well, it is too late for such sermons
to be levelled at me; and I never listen to those aimed at other
people."

"At what other people do you suppose this one could have been
directed?"  She asked the question most carelessly, lifting her
imponderable handkerchief and letting it drop into her lap as a
sign of how little her interest weighed.

"It is not my duty to judge."

"We cannot help our thoughts, you know."

"I think we can, madam; and I also think we can hold our tongues,"
and he laughed at her very good-naturedly.  "Sometimes we can even
help to hold other people's--if they are long."

"Oh, what a rude speech to a lady!" she exclaimed gallantly.  "Did
you see the Osborns at church?  And did you notice him?  What an
unhappy marriage!  He is breaking Kate's heart.  And to think that
his character--or the lack of it--should have been discovered only
when it was too late!  How can you men so cloak yourselves before
marriage?  Why not tell women the truth then instead of leaving
them to find it out afterward?  Are he and Rowan as good friends as
ever?"  The question was asked with the air of guilelessness.

"I know nothing about that," he replied dryly.  "I never knew Rowan
to drop his friends because they had failings: it would break up
all friendships, I imagine."

"Well, I cannot help _my_ thoughts, and I think George Osborn was
the prodigal aimed at in the sermon.  Everybody thought so."

"How does she know what everybody thought?" commented the Judge to
himself.  He tapped the porch nervously with his cane, sniffed his
heliotrope and said irrelevantly:

"Ah me, what a beautiful night!  What a beautiful night!"

The implied rebuff provoked her.  Irritation winged a venomous
little shaft:

"At least no woman has ever held _you_ responsible for her
unhappiness."

"You are quite right, madam," he replied, "the only irreproachable
husband in this world is the man who has no wife."

"By the way," she continued, "in all these years you have not told
me why you never married.  Come now, confess!"

How well she knew!  How often as she had driven through the streets
and observed him sitting alone in the door of his office or walking
aimlessly about, she had leaned back and laughed.

"Madam," he replied, for he did not like the question, "neither
have you ever told me why you married three times.  Come now,
confess."

It would soon be time for him to leave; and still she had not
gained her point.

"Rowan was here this afternoon," she remarked carelessly.  He was
sitting so that the light fell sidewise on his face.  She noted how
alert it became, but he said nothing.

"Isabel refused to see him."

He wheeled round and faced her with pain and surprise.

"Refused to see him!"

"She has told me since that she never intends to see him."

"Never intends to see Rowan again!" he repeated the incredible
words, "not see Rowan again!"

"She says we are to drop him from the list of our acquaintances."

"Ah!" he cried with impetuous sadness, "they must not quarrel!
They _must_ not!"

"But they _have_ quarrelled," she replied, revealing her own
anxiety.  "Now they must be reconciled.   That is why I come to
you.  I am Isabel's guardian; you were Rowan's.  Each of us wishes
this marriage.  Isabel loves Rowan.  I know that; therefore it is
not her fault.  Therefore it is Rowan's fault.  Therefore he has
said something or he has done something to offend her deeply.
Therefore if you do not know what this Is, you must find out.  And
you must come and tell me.  May I depend upon you?"

He had become grave.  At length he said: "I shall go straight to
Rowan and ask him."

"No!" she cried, laying her hand heavily on his arm, "Isabel bound
me to secrecy.  She does not wish this to be known."

"Ah!" he exclaimed, angry at being entrapped into a broken
confidence, "then Miss Isabel binds me also: I shall honor her
wish," and he rose.

She kept her seat but yawned so that he might notice it.  "You are
not going?"

"Yes, I am going.  I have stayed too long already.  Good night!
Good night!"  He spoke curtly over his shoulders as he hurried down
the steps.

She had forgotten him before he reached the street, having no need
just then to keep him longer in mind.  She had threshed out the one
grain of wheat, the single compact little truth, that she wanted.
This was the certainty that Judge Morris, who was the old family
lawyer of the Merediths, and had been Rowan's guardian, and had
indeed known him intimately from childhood, was in ignorance of any
reason for the present trouble; otherwise he would not have said
that he should go to Rowan and ask the explanation.  She knew him
to be incapable of duplicity; in truth she rather despised him
because he had never cultivated a taste for the delights and
resources of hypocrisy.

Her next step must be to talk at once with the other person vitally
interested--Rowan's mother.  She felt no especial admiration for
that grave, earnest, and rather sombre lady; but neither did she
feel admiration for her sterling knife and fork: still she made
them serviceable for the ulterior ends of being.

Her plan then embraced a visit to Mrs. Meredith in the morning with
the view of discovering whether she was aware of the estrangement,
and if aware whether she would in any unintentional way throw light
upon the cause of it.  Moreover--and this was kept clearly in
view--there would be the chance of meeting Rowan himself, whom she
also determined to see as soon as possible: she might find him at
home, or she might encounter him on the road or riding over his
farm.  But this visit must be made without Isabel's knowledge.  It
must further be made to appear incidental to Mrs. Meredith
herself---or to Rowan.  She arranged therefore with that tortuous
and superfluous calculation of which hypocrisy is such a
master--and mistress--that she would at breakfast, in Isabel's
presence, order the carriage, and announce her intention of going
out to the farm of Ambrose Webb.  Ambrose Webb was a close neighbor
of the Merediths.  He owned a small estate, most of which was good
grass-land that was usually rented for pasture.  She had for years
kept her cows there when dry.  This arrangement furnished her the
opportunity for more trips to the farm than interest in her dairy
warranted; it made her Mrs. Meredith's most frequent incidental
visitor.

Having thus determined upon her immediate course for the prompt
unravelling of this mysterious matter, she dismissed it from her
mind, passed into her bedroom and was soon asleep: a smile played
over the sweet old face.


The Judge walked slowly across the town in the moonlight.

It was his rule to get home to his rooms by ten o'clock; and people
living on the several streets leading that way were used to hearing
him come tapping along before that hour.  If they sat in their
doorways and the night was dark, they gave him a pleasant greeting
through the darkness; if there was a moon or if he could be seen
under a lamp post, they added smiles.  No one loved him supremely,
but every one liked him a little--on the whole, a stable state for
a man.  For his part he accosted every one that he could see in a
bright cheery way and with a quick inquiring glance as though every
heart had its trouble and needed just a little kindness.  He was
reasonably sure that the old had their troubles already and that
the children would have theirs some day; so that it was merely the
difference between sympathizing with the present and sympathizing
with the future.  As he careened along night after night, then,
friendly little gusts of salutation blew the desolate drifting
figure over the homeward course.

His rooms were near the heart of the town, In a shady street well
filled with law offices: these were of red brick with green
shutters--green when not white with dust.  The fire department was
in the same block, though he himself did not need to be safeguarded
from conflagrations: the fires which had always troubled him could
not have been reached with ladder and hose.  There were two or
three livery stables also, the chairs of which he patronized
liberally, but not the vehicles.  And there was a grocery, where he
sometimes bought crystallized citron and Brazil nuts, a curious
kind of condiment of his own devising: a pound of citron to a pound
of nuts, if all were sound.  He used to keep little brown paper
bags of these locked in his drawer with legal papers and munched
them sometimes while preparing murder cases.

At the upper corner of the block, opposite each other, were a
saloon and the jail, two establishments which contributed little to
each other's support, though well inclined to do so.  The law
offices seemed of old to have started in a compact procession for
the jail, but at a certain point to have paused with the
understanding that none should seek undue advantage by greater
proximity.  Issuing from this street at one end and turning to the
left, you came to the courthouse--the bar of chancery; issuing from
it at the other end and turning to the right, you came to the
hotel--the bar of corn.  The lawyers were usually solicitors at
large and impartial practitioners at each bar.  In the court room
they sometimes tried to prove an alibi for their clients; at the
hotel they often succeeded in proving one for themselves.

These law offices were raised a foot or two above the level of the
street.  The front rooms could be used for clients who were so
important that they should be seen; the back rooms were for such as
brought business, but not necessarily fame.  Driving through this
street, the wives of the lawyers could lean forward in their
carriages and if their husbands were busy, they could smile and
bow; if their husbands were idle, they could look straight ahead.

He passed under the shadow of the old court-house where in his
prime he had fought his legal battles against the commonwealth.  He
had been a great lawyer and he knew it (if he had married he might
have been Chief Justice).  Then he turned the corner and entered
the street of jurisprudence and the gaol.  About midway he reached
the staircase opening from the sidewalk; to his rooms above.

He was not poor and he could have lived richly had he wished.  But
when a man does not marry there are so many other things that he
never espouses; and he was not wedded to luxury.  As he lighted the
chandelier over the centre-table in his sitting room, the light
revealed an establishment every article of which, if it had no
virtues, at least possessed habits: certainly everything had its
own way.  He put his hat and cane on the table, not caring to go
back to the hatrack in his little hall, and seated himself in his
olive morocco chair.  As he did so, everything in the room--the
chairs, the curtains, the rugs, the card-table, the punch-bowl, the
other walking-sticks, and the rubbers and umbrellas---seemed to say
in an affectionate chorus: "Well, now that you are in safe for the
night, we feel relieved.  So good night and pleasant dreams to you,
for we are going to sleep;" and to sleep they went.

The gas alone flared up and said, "I'll stay up with him."

He drew out and wiped his glasses and reached for the local Sunday
paper, his Sunday evening Bible.  He had read it in the morning,
but he always gleaned at night: he met so many of his friends by
reading their advertisements.  But to-night he spread it across his
knees and turning to the table lifted the top of a box of cigars,
an orderly responsive family; the paper slipped to the floor and
lay forgotten behind his heels.

He leaned back in the chair with his cigar in his mouth and his
eyes directed toward the opposite wall, where in an oval frame hung
the life-size portrait of an old bulldog.  The eyes were blue and
watery and as full of suffering as a seats; from the extremity of
the lower jaw a tooth stood up like a shoemaker's peg; and over the
entire face was stamped the majesty, the patience, and the manly
woes of a nature that had lived deeply and too long.  The Judge's
eyes rested on this comrade face.

The events of the day had left him troubled.  Any sermon on the
prodigal always touches men; even if it does not prick their
memories, it can always stir their imaginations.  Whenever he heard
one, his mind went back to the years when she who afterwards became
Rowan's mother had cast him off, so settling life for him.  For
after that experience he had put away the thought of marriage.  "To
be so treated once is enough," he had said sternly and proudly.
True, in after years she had come back to him as far as friendship
could bring her back, since she was then the wife of another; but
every year of knowing her thus had only served to deepen the sense
of his loss.  He had long since fallen into the habit of thinking
this over of Sunday evenings before going to bed, and as the end of
life closed in upon him, he dwelt upon it more and more.

These familiar thoughts swarmed back to-night, but with them were
mingled new depressing ones.  Nothing now perhaps could have caused
him such distress as the thought that Rowan and Isabel would never
marry.  All the love that he had any right to pour into any life,
he had always poured with passionate and useless yearnings into
Rowan's--son, of the only woman he had ever loved--the boy that
should have been his own.

There came an interruption.  A light quick step was heard mounting
the stairs.  A latch key was impatiently inserted in the hall door.
A bamboo cane was dropped loudly into the holder of the hat-rack; a
soft hat was thrown down carelessly somewhere--it sounded like a
wet mop flung into a corner; and there entered a young man
straight, slender, keen-faced, with red hair, a freckled skin,
large thin red ears, and a strong red mouth.  As he stepped forward
into the light, he paused, parting the haircut of his eyes and
blinking.

"Good evening, uncle," he said in a shrill key.

"Well, sir."

Barbee looked the Judge carefully over; he took the Judge's hat and
cane from the table and hung them in the hall; he walked over and
picked up the newspaper from between the Judge's legs and placed it
at his elbow; he set the ash tray near the edge of the table within
easy reach of the cigar.  Then he threw himself into a chair across
the room, lighted a cigarette, blew the smoke toward the ceiling
like the steam of a little whistle signalling to stop work.

"Well, uncle," he said in a tone in which a lawyer might announce
to his partner the settlement of a long-disputed point, "Marguerite
is in love with me!"

The Judge smoked on, his eyes resting on the wall.

"Yes, sir; in love with me.  The truth had to come out sometime,
and it came out to-night.  And now the joy of life is gone for me!
As soon as a woman falls in love with a man, his peace is at an
end.  But I am determined that it shall not interfere with my
practice."

"What practice?"

"The practice of my profession, sir!  The profession of yourself
and of the great men of the past: such places have to be filled."

"Filled, but not filled with the same thing."

"You should have seen the other hapless wretches there to-night!
Pining for a smile!  Moths begging the candle to scorch them!  And
the candle was as cold as the north star and as distant."

Barbee rose and took a turn across the room and returning to his
chair stood before it.

"If Marguerite had only waited, had concealed herself a little
longer!  Why did she not keep me in doubt until I had won some
great case!  Think of a scene like this: a crowded court room some
afternoon; people outside the doors and windows craning their necks
to see and hear me; the judge nervous and excited; the members of
the bar beside themselves with jealousy as I arise and confront the
criminal and jury.  Marguerite is seated just behind the jury; I
know why she chose that seat: she wished to study me to the best
advantage.  I try to catch her eye; she will not look at me.  For
three hours my eloquence storms.  The judge acknowledges to a tear,
the jurors reach for their handkerchiefs, the people in the court
room sob like the skies of autumn.  As I finish, the accused arises
and addresses the court: 'May it please your honor, in the face of
such a masterly prosecution, I can no longer pretend to be
innocent.  Sir (addressing me), I congratulate you upon your
magnificent service to the commonwealth.  Gentlemen of the jury,
you need not retire to bring in any verdict: I bring it in myself,
I am guilty, and my only wish is to be hanged.  I suggest that you
have it done at once in order that nothing may mar the success of
this occasion!'  That night Marguerite sends for me: that would
have been the time for declaration!  I have a notion that if I can
extricate myself without wounding this poor little innocent, to
forswear matrimony and march on to fame."

"March on to bed."

"Marguerite is going to give a ball, uncle, a brilliant ball merely
to celebrate this irrepressible efflux and panorama of her
emotions.  Watch me at that ball, uncle!  Mark the rising Romeo of
the firm when Marguerite, the youthful Juliet of this town--"

A hand waved him quietly toward his bedroom.

"Well, good night, sir, good night.  When the lark sings at
heaven's gate I'll greet thee, uncle.  My poor Marguerite!--Good
night, uncle, good night."

He was only nineteen.

The Judge returned to his thoughts.

He must have thought a long time: the clock not far away struck
twelve.  He took off his glasses, putting them negligently on the
edge of the ash tray which tipped over beneath their weight and
fell to the floor: he picked up his glasses, but let the ashes lie.
Then he stooped down to take off his shoes, not without sounds of
bodily discomfort.

Aroused by these sounds or for other reasons not to be discovered,
there emerged from under a table on which was piled "The Lives of
the Chief Justices" a bulldog, cylindrical and rigid with years.
Having reached a decorous position before the Judge, by the slow
action of the necessary machinery he lowered the posterior end of
the cylinder to the floor and watched him.

"Well, did I get them off about right?"

The dog with a private glance of sympathy up into the Judge's face
returned to his black goatskin rug under the Chief Justices; and
the Judge, turning off the burners in the chandelier and striking a
match, groped his way in his sock feet to his bedroom--to the bed
with its one pillow.




V

Out in the country next morning it was not yet break of dawn.  The
stars, thickly flung about, were flashing low and yellow as at
midnight, but on the horizon the great change had begun.  Not with
colors of rose or pearl but as the mysterious foreknowledge of the
morning, when a vast swift herald rushes up from the east and
sweeps onward across high space, bidding the earth be in readiness
for the drama of the sun.

The land, heavy with life, lay wrapped in silence, steeped in rest.
Not a bird in wet hedge or evergreen had drawn nimble head from
nimble wing.  In meadow and pasture fold and herd had sunk down
satisfied.  A black brook brawling through a distant wood sounded
loud in the stillness.  Under the forest trees around the home of
the Merediths only drops of dew might have been heard splashing
downward from leaf to leaf.  In the house all slept.  The mind,
wakefullest of happy or of suffering things, had lost consciousness
of joy and care save as these had been crowded down into the
chamber which lies beneath our sleep, whence they made themselves
audible through the thin flooring as the noise of dreams.

Among the parts of the day during which man may match the elements
of the world within him to the world without--his songs with its
sunrises, toil with noontide, prayer with nightfall, slumber with
dark--there is one to stir within him the greatest sense of
responsibility: the hour of dawn.

If he awaken then and be alone, he is earliest to enter the silent
empty theatre of the earth where the human drama is soon to
recommence.  Not a mummer has stalked forth; not an auditor sits
waiting.  He himself, as one of the characters in this ancient
miracle play of nature, pauses at the point of separation between
all that he has enacted and all that he will enact.  Yesterday he
was in the thick of action.  Between then and now lies the night,
stretching like a bar of verdure across wearying sands.  In that
verdure he has rested; he has drunk forgetfulness and self-renewal
from those deep wells of sleep.  Soon the play will be ordered on
again and he must take his place for parts that are new and
confusing to all.  The servitors of the morning have entered and
hung wall and ceiling with gorgeous draperies; the dust has been
sprinkled; fresh airs are blowing; and there is music, the living
orchestra of the living earth.  Well for the waker then if he can
look back upon the role he has played with a quiet conscience, and
as naturally as the earth greets the sun step forth upon the stage
to continue or to end his brief part in the long drama of destiny.

The horizon had hardly begun to turn red when a young man,
stretched on his bed by an open window, awoke from troubled sleep.
He lay for a few moments without moving, then he sat up on the edge
of the bed.  His hands rested listlessly on his kneecaps and his
eyes were fixed on the sky-line crimsoning above his distant woods.

After a while he went over and sat at one of the windows, his eyes
still fixed on the path of the coming sun; and a great tragedy of
men sat there within him: the tragedy that has wandered long and
that wanders ever, showing its face in all lands, retaining its
youth in all ages; the tragedy of love that heeds not law, and the
tragedy of law forever punishing heedless love.

Gradually the sounds of life began.  From the shrubs under his
window, from the orchard and the wet weeds of fence corners, the
birds reentered upon their lives.  Far off in the meadows the
cattle rose from their warm dry places, stretched themselves and
awoke the echoes of the wide rolling land with peaceful lowing.  A
brood mare in a grazing lot sent forth her quick nostril call to
the foal capering too wildly about her, and nozzled it with
rebuking affection.  On the rosy hillsides white lambs were leaping
and bleating, or running down out of sight under the white sea-fog
of the valleys.  A milk cart rattled along the turnpike toward the
town.

It had become broad day.

He started up and crossed the hall to the bedroom opposite, and
stood looking down at his younger brother.  How quiet Dent's sleep
was; how clear the current of his life had run and would run
always!  No tragedy would ever separate him and the woman he loved.

When he went downstairs the perfect orderliness of his mother's
housekeeping had been before him.  Doors and windows had been
opened to the morning freshness, sweeping and dusting had been
done, not a servant was in sight.  His setters lay waiting on the
porch and as he stepped out they hurried up with glistening eyes
and soft barkings and followed him as he passed around to the barn.
Work was in progress there: the play of currycombs, the whirl of
the cutting-box, the noise of the mangers, the bellowing of calves,
the rich streamy sounds of the milking.  He called his men to him
one after another, laying out the work of the day.

When he returned to the house he saw his mother walking on the
front pavement; she held flowers freshly plucked for the breakfast
table: a woman of large mould, grave, proud, noble; an ideal of her
place and time.

"Is the lord of the manor ready for his breakfast?" she asked as
she came forward, smiling.

"I am ready, mother," he replied without smiling, touching his lips
to her cheek.

She linked her arm in his as they ascended the steps.  At the top
she drew him gently around until they faced the landscape rolling
wide before them.

"It is so beautiful!" she exclaimed with a deep narrow love of her
land.  "I never see it without thinking of it as it will be years
hence.  I can see you riding over it then and your children playing
around the house and some one sitting here where we stand, watching
them at their play and watching you in the distance at your work.
But I have been waiting a long time for her to take my place--and
to take her own," and she leaned heavily on his arm as a sign of
her dependence but out of weakness also (for she did not tell him
all).  "I am impatient to hear the voice of your children, Rowan.
Do you never wish to hear them yourself?"

As they stood silent, footsteps approached through the hall and
turning they saw Dent with a book in his hand.

"Are you grand people never coming to breakfast?" he asked,
frowning with pretended impatience, "so that a laboring man may go
to his work?"

He was of short but well-knit figure.  Spectacles and a thoughtful
face of great refinement gave him the student's stamp.  His
undergraduate course at college would end in a few weeks.
Postgraduate work was to begin during the summer.  An assistant
professorship, then a full professorship--these were successive
stations already marked by him on the clear track of life; and he
was now moving toward them with straight and steady aim.  Sometimes
we encounter personalities which seem to move through the discords
of this life as though guided by laws of harmony; they know neither
outward check nor inward swerving, and are endowed with that
peaceful passion for toil which does the world's work and is one of
the marks of genius.

He was one of these--a growth of the new time not comprehended by
his mother.  She could neither understand it nor him.  The pain
which this had given him at first he had soon outgrown; and what
might have been a tragedy to another nature melted away in the
steady sunlight of his entire reasonableness.  Perhaps he realized
that the scientific son can never be the idol of a household until
he is born of scientific parents.

As mother and elder son now turned to greet him, the mother was not
herself aware that she still leaned upon the arm of Rowan and that
Dent walked into the breakfast room alone.

Less than usual was said during the meal.  They were a reserved
household, inclined to the small nobilities of silence.  (It is
questionable whether talkative families ever have much to say.)
This morning each had especial reason for self-communing.

When they had finished breakfast and came out into the hall.  Dent
paused at one of the parlor doors.

"Mother" he said simply, "come into the parlor a moment, will you?
And Rowan, I should like to see you also."

They followed him with surprise and all seated themselves.

"Mother," he said, addressing Her with a clear beautiful light in
his gray eyes, yet not without the reserve which he always felt and
always inspired, "I wish to tell you that I am engaged to Pansy
Vaughan.  And to tell you also, Rowan.  You know that I finish
college this year; she does also.  We came to an understanding
yesterday afternoon and I wish you both to know it at once.  We
expect to be married in the autumn as soon as I am of age and a man
in my own right.  Mother, Pansy is coming to see you; and Rowan, I
hope you will go to see Pansy.  Both of you will like her and be
proud of her when you know her."

He rose as though he had rounded his communication to a perfect
shape.  "Now I must get to my work.  Good morning," and with a
smile for each he walked quietly out of the room.  He knew that he
could not expect their congratulations at that moment and that
further conference would be awkward for all.  He could merely tell
them the truth and leave the rest to the argument of time.


"But I cannot believe it, Rowan!  I cannot!"

Mrs. Meredith sat regarding' her elder son with incredulity and
distress.  The shock of the news was for certain reasons even
greater to him; so that he could not yet command himself
sufficiently to comfort her.  After a few moments she resumed: "I
did not know that Dent had begun to think about girls.  He never
said so.  He has never cared for society.  He has seemed absorbed
in his studies.  And now--Dent in love.  Dent engaged, Dent to be
married in the autumn--why, Rowan, am I dreaming, am I in my
senses?  And to this girl!  She has entrapped him--poor, innocent,
unsuspecting Dent!  My poor, little, short-sighted bookworm."
Tears sprang to her eyes, but she laughed also.  She had a mother's
hope that this trouble would turn to comedy.  She went on quickly:
"Did you know anything about this?  Has he ever spoken to you about
it?"

"No, I am just as much surprised.  But then Dent never speaks in
advance."

She looked at him a little timidly: "I thought perhaps it was this
that has been troubling you.  You have been trying to hide it from
me."

He dropped his eyes quickly and made no reply.

"And do you suppose he is in earnest, Rowan?"

"He would never jest on such a subject."

"I mean, do you think he knows his own mind?"

"He always does."

"But would he marry against my wishes?"

"He takes it for granted that you will be pleased: he said so."

"But how can he think I'll be pleased?  I have never spoken to this
girl in my life.  I have never seen her except when we have passed
them on the turnpike.  I never spoke to her father but once and
that was years ago when he came here one cold winter afternoon to
buy a shock of fodder from your father."

She was a white character; but even the whiteness of ermine gains
by being necked with blackness.  "How can he treat me with so
little consideration?  It is just as if he had said: 'Good morning,
mother.  I am going to disgrace the family by my marriage, but I
know you will be delighted---good morning.'"

"You forget that Dent does not think he will disgrace the family.
He said you would be proud of her."

"Well, when the day comes for me to be proud of this, there will
not be much left to be ashamed of.  Rowan, for once I shall
interfere."

"How can you interfere?"

"Then you must: you are his guardian."

"I shall not be his guardian by the autumn.  Dent has arranged this
perfectly, mother, as he always arranges everything."

She returned to her point.  "But he _must_ be kept from making such
a mistake!  Talk to him as a man.  Advise him, show him that he
will tie a millstone around his neck, ruin his whole life.  I am
willing to leave myself out and to forget what is due me, what is
due you, what is due the memory of his father and of my father: for
his own sake he must not marry this girl."

He shook his head slowly.  "It is settled, mother," he added
consolingly, "and I have so much confidence in Dent that I believe
what he says: we shall be proud of her when we know her."

She sat awhile in despair.  Then she said with fresh access of
conviction: "This is what comes of so much science: it always tends
to make a man common in his social tastes.  You need not smile at
me in that pitying way, for it is true: it destroys aristocratic
feeling; and there is more need of aristocratic feeling in a
democracy than anywhere else: because it is the only thing that can
be aristocratic.  That is what science has done for Dent!  And this
girl I--the public school has tried to make her uncommon, and the
Girl's College has attempted, to make her more uncommon; and now I
suppose she actually thinks she _is_ uncommon: otherwise she would
never have imagined that she could marry a son of mine.  Smile on,
I know I amuse you!  You think I am not abreast of the times.  I am
glad I am not.  I prefer my own.  Dent should have studied for the
church--with his love of books, and his splendid mind, and his
grave, beautiful character.  Then he would never have thought of
marrying beneath him socially; he would have realized that if he
did, he could never rise.  Once in the church and with the right
kind of wife, he might some day have become a bishop: I have always
wanted a bishop in the family.  But he set his heart upon a
professorship, and I suppose a professor does not have to be
particular about whom he marries."

"A professor has to be particular only to please himself--and the
woman.  His choice is not regulated by salaries and congregations."

She returned to her point: "You breed fine cattle and fine sheep,
and you try to improve the strain of your setters.  You know how
you do it.  What right has Dent to injure his children in the race
for life by giving them an inferior mother?  Are not children to be
as much regarded in their rights of descent as rams and poodles?"

"You forget that the first families in all civilizations have kept
themselves alive and at the summit by intermarriage with good,
clean, rich blood of people whom they have considered beneath them."

"But certainly my family is not among these.  It is certainly alive
and it is certainly not dying out.  I cannot discuss the subject
with you, if you once begin that argument.  Are you going to call
on her?"

"Certainly.  It was Dent's wish and it is right that I should."

"Then I think I shall go with you, Rowan.  Dent said she was coming
to see me; but I think I should rather go to see her.  Whenever I
wished to leave, I could get away, but if she came here, I
couldn't."

"When should you like to go?"

"Oh, don't hurry me! I shall need time--a great deal of time!  Do
you suppose they have a parlor?  I am afraid I shall not shine in
the kitchen in comparison with the tins."

She had a wry face; then her brow cleared and she added with relief:

"But I must put this whole trouble out of my mind at present!  It
is too close to me, I cannot even see it.  I shall call on the girl
with you and then I shall talk quietly with Dent.  Until then I
must try to forget it.  Besides, I got up this morning with
something else on my mind.  It is not Dent's unwisdom that
distresses me."

Her tone indicated that she had passed to a more important topic.
If any one had told her that her sons were not equally dear, the
wound of such injustice would never have healed.  In all that she
could do for both there had never been maternal discrimination; but
the heart of a woman cannot help feeling things that the heart of a
mother does not; and she discriminated as a woman.  This was
evident now as she waived her young son's affairs.

"It is not Dent that I have been thinking of this morning," she
repeated.  "Why is it not you that come to tell me of your
engagement?  Why have you not set Dent an example as to the kind of
woman he ought to marry?  How many more years must he and I wait?"

They were seated opposite each other.  He was ready for riding out
on the farm, his hat on his crossed knees, gloves and whip in hand.
Her heart yearned over him as he pulled at his gloves, his head
dropped forward so that his face was hidden.

"Now that the subject has come up in this unexpected way, I want to
tell you how long I have wished to see you married.  I have never
spoken because my idea is that a mother should not advise unless
she believes it necessary.  And in your case it has not been
necessary.  I have known your choice, and long before it became
yours, it became mine.  She is my ideal among them all.  I know
women, Rowan, and I know she is worthy of you and I could not say
more.  She is-high-minded and that quality is so rare in either
sex.  Without it what is any wife worth to a high-minded man?  And
I have watched her.  With all her pride and modesty I have
discovered her secret--she loves you.  Then why have you waited?
Why do you still wait?"

He did not answer and she continued with deeper feeling:

"Life is so uncertain to all of us and of course to me!  I want to
see you wedded to her, see her brought here as mistress of this
house, and live to hear the laughter of your children."  She
finished with solemn emotion: "It has been my prayer, Rowan."

She became silent with her recollections of her own early life for
a moment and then resumed:

"Nothing ever makes up for the loss of such years--the first years
of happy marriage.  If we have had these, no matter what happens
afterward, we have not lived for nothing.  It becomes easier for us
to be kind and good afterward, to take an interest in life, to
believe in our fellow-creatures, and in God."

He sprang up.

"Mother, I cannot speak with you about this now."  He turned
quickly and stood with his back to her, looking out of doors; and
he spoke over his shoulder and his voice was broken: "You have had
one disappointment this morning: it is enough.  But do not think of
my marrying--of my ever marrying.  Dent must take my place at the
head of the house.  It is all over with me!  But I cannot speak
with you about this now," and he started quickly to leave the
parlors.  She rose and put her arm around his waist, walking beside
him.

"You do not mind my speaking to, you about this, Rowan?" she said,
sore at having touched some trouble which she felt that he had long
been hiding from her, and with full respect for the privacies of
his life.

"No, no, no!" he cried, choking with emotion.  "Ah, mother,
mother!"--and he gently disengaged himself from her arms.

She watched him as he rode out of sight.  Then she returned and sat
in the chair which he had, quitted, folding her hands in her lap.

For her it was one of the moments when we are reminded that our
lives are not in our keeping, and that whatsoever is to befall us
originates in sources beyond our power.  Our wills may indeed reach
the length of our arms or as far as our voices can penetrate space;
but without us and within us moves one universe that saves us or
ruins us only for its own purposes; and we are no more free amid
its laws than the leaves of the forest are free to decide their own
shapes and season of unfolding, to order the showers by which they
are to be nourished and the storms which shall scatter them at last.

Above every other she had cherished the wish for a marriage between
Rowan and Isabel Conyers; now for reasons unknown to her it seemed
that this desire was never to be realized.  She did not know the
meaning of what Rowan had just said to her; but she did not doubt
there was meaning behind it, grave meaning.  Her next most serious
concern would have been that in time Dent likewise should choose a
wife wisely; now he had announced to her his intention to wed
prematurely and most foolishly; she could not altogether shake off
the conviction that he would do what he had said he should.

As for Dent it was well-nigh the first anxiety that he had ever
caused her.  If her affection for him was less poignant, being
tenderness stored rather than tenderness exercised, this resulted
from the very absence of his demand for it.  He had always needed
her so little, had always needed every one so little, unfolding his
life from the first and drawing from the impersonal universe
whatever it required with the quietude and efficiency of a
prospering plant.  She lacked imagination, or she might have
thought of Dent as a filial sunflower, which turned the blossom of
its life always faithfully and beautifully toward her, but stood
rooted in the soil of knowledge that she could not supply.

What she had always believed she could see in him was the
perpetuation under a new form of his father and the men of his
father's line.

These had for generations been grave mental workers: ministers,
lawyers, professors in theological seminaries; narrow-minded,
strong-minded; upright, unbending; black-browed, black-coated; with
a passion always for dealing in justice and dealing out justice,
human or heavenly; most of all, gratified when in theological
seminaries, when they could assert themselves as inerrant
interpreters of the Most High.  The portraits of two of them hung
in the dining room now, placed there as if to watch the table and
see that grace was never left unsaid, that there be no levity at
meat nor heresy taken in with the pudding.  Other portraits were
also in other rooms--they always had themselves painted for
posterity, seldom or never their wives.

Some of the books they had written were in the library, lucid
explanations of the First Cause and of how the Judge of all the
earth should be looked at from without and from within.  Some that
they had most loved to read were likewise there: "Pollock's Course
of Time"; the slow outpourings of Young, sad sectary; Milton, with
the passages on Hell approvingly underscored--not as great poetry,
but as great doctrine; nowhere in the bookcases a sign of the
"Areopagitica," of "Comus," and "L'Allegro"; but most prominent the
writings of Jonathan Edwards, hoarsest of the whole flock of New
World theological ravens.

Her marriage into this family had caused universal surprise.  It
had followed closely upon the scandals in regard to the wild young
Ravenel Morris, the man she loved, the man she had promised to
marry.  These scandals had driven her to the opposite extreme from
her first choice by one of life's familiar reactions; and in her
wounded flight she had thrown herself into the arms of a man whom
people called irreproachable.  He was a grave lawyer, one of the
best of his kind; nevertheless he and she, when joined for the one
voyage of two human spirits, were like a funeral barge lashed to
some dancing boat, golden-oared, white-sailed, decked with flowers.
Hope at the helm and Pleasure at the prow.

For she herself had sprung from a radically different stock: from
sanguine, hot-blooded men; congressmen shaping the worldly history
of their fellow-beings and leaving the non-worldly to take care of
itself; soldiers illustrious in the army and navy; hale country
gentlemen who took the lead in the country's hardy sports and
pleasures; all sowing their wild oats early in life with hands that
no power could stay; not always living to reap, but always leaving
enough reaping to be done by the sad innocent who never sow;
fathers of large families; and even when breaking the hearts of
their wives, never losing their love; for with their large open
frailties being men without crime and cowardice, tyrannies,
meannesses.

With these two unlike hereditary strains before her she had, during
the years, slowly devised the maternal philosophy of her sons.

Out of those grave mental workers had come Dent--her student.  She
loved to believe that in the making of him her own blood asserted
itself by drawing him away from the tyrannical interpretation of
God to the neutral investigation of the earth, from black theology
to sunlit science--so leaving him at work and at peace, the
ancestral antagonisms becoming neutralized by being blended.

But Rowan! while he was yet a little fellow, and she and her young
husband would sit watching him at play, characteristics revealed
themselves which led her to shake her head rebukingly and say: "He
gets these traits from you."  At other times contradictory
characteristics appeared and the father, looking silently at her,
would in effect inquire: "Whence does he derive these?"  On both
accounts she began to look with apprehension toward this son's
maturing years.  And always, as the years passed, evidence was
forced more plainly upon her that in him the two natures he
inherited were antagonistic still; each alternately uppermost; both
in unceasing warfare; thus endowing him with a double nature which
might in time lead him to a double life.  So that even then she had
begun to take upon herself the burden of dreading lest she should
not only be the mother of his life, but the mother of his
tragedies.  She went over this again and again: "Am I to be the
mother of his tragedies?"

As she sat this young summer morning after he had left her so
strangely, all at once the world became autumn to her remembrance.

An autumn morning: the rays of the sun shining upon the silvery
mists swathing the trees outside, upon the wet and many-colored
leaves; a little frost on the dark grass here and there; the first
fires lighted within; the carriage already waiting at the door; the
breakfast hurriedly choked down--in silence; the mournful noise of
his trunk being brought downstairs--his first trunk.  Then the
going out upon the veranda and the saying good-by to him; and
then--the carriage disappearing in the silver mists, with a few red
and yellow leaves whirled high from the wheels.

That was the last of the first Rowan,--youth at the threshold of
manhood.  Now off for college, to his university in New England.
As his father and she stood side by side (he being too frail to
take that chill morning ride with his son) he waved his hand
protectingly after him, crying out: "He is a good boy."  And
she, having some wide vision of other mothers of the land who
during these same autumn days were bidding God-speed to their
idols--picked youth of the republic--she with some wide vision of
this large fact stood a proud mother among them all, feeling sure
that he would take foremost place in his college for good honest
work and for high character and gentle manners and gallant
bearing--with not a dark spot in him.

It was toward the close of the first session, after she had learned
the one kind of letter he always wrote, that his letters changed.
She could not have explained how they were changed, could not have
held the pages up to the inspection of any one else and have said,
"See! it is here."  But she knew it was there, and it stayed there.
She waited for his father to notice it; but if he ever noticed it,
he never told her: nor did she ever confide her discovery to him.

When vacation came, it brought a request from Rowan that he might
be allowed to spend the summer with college friends farther
north--camping, fishing, hunting, sailing, seeing more of his
country.  His father's consent was more ready than her own.  The
second session passed and with the second vacation the request was
renewed.  "Why does he not come home?  Why does he not wish to come
home?" she said, wandering restlessly over the house with his
letter in her hands; going up to his bedroom and sitting down in
the silence of it and looking at his bed--which seemed so strangely
white that day--looking at all the preparations she had made for
his comfort.  "Why does he not come?"

Near the close of the third session he came quickly enough,
summoned by his father's short fatal illness.

Some time passed before she observed anything in him but natural
changes after so long an absence and grief over his great loss.  He
shut himself in his room for some days, having it out alone with
himself, a young man's first solemn accounting to a father who has
become a memory.  Gradually there began to emerge his new care of
her, and tenderness, a boy's no more.  And he stepped forward
easily into his place as the head of affairs, as his brother's
guardian.  But as time wore on and she grew used to him as so much
older in mere course of nature, and as graver by his loss and his
fresh responsibilities, she made allowances for all these and
brushed them away and beheld constantly beneath them that other
change.

Often while she sat near him when they were reading, she would look
up and note that unaware a shadow had stolen out on his face.  She
studied that shadow.  And one consolation she drew: that whatsoever
the cause, it was nothing by which he felt dishonored.  At such
moments her love broke over him with intolerable longings.  She
remembered things that her mother had told her about her father;
she recalled the lives of her brothers, his uncles.  She yearned to
say: "What is it, Rowan?  You can tell me anything, anything.  I
know so much more than you believe."

But some restraint dissuaded her from bridging that reserve.  She
may have had the feeling that she spared him a good deal by her not
knowing.

For more than a year after his return he had kept aloof from
society--going into town only when business demanded, and accepting
no invitations to the gayeties of the neighborhood.  He liked
rather to have his friends come out to stay with him: sometimes he
was off with them for days during the fishing and hunting seasons.
Care of the farm and its stock occupied a good deal of his leisure,
and there were times when he worked hard in the fields--she thought
so unnecessarily.  Incessant activity of some kind had become his
craving--the only ease.

She became uneasy, she disapproved.  For a while she allowed things
to have their way, but later she interfered--though as always with
her silent strength and irresistible gentleness.  Making no comment
upon his changed habits and altered tastes, giving no sign of her
own purposes, she began the second year of his home-coming to
accept invitations for herself and formally reentered her social
world; reassumed her own leadership there; demanded him as her
escort; often filled the house with young guests; made it for his
generation what the home of her girlhood had been to her--in all
sacrificing for him the gravity and love of seclusion which had
settled over her during the solemn years, years which she knew to
be parts of a still more solemn future.

She succeeded.  She saw him again more nearly what he had been
before the college days--more nearly developing that type of life
which belonged to him and to his position.

Finally she saw him in love as she wished; and at this point she
gradually withdrew from society again, feeling that he needed her
no more.




VI

The noise of wheels on the gravel driveway of the lawn brought the
reflections of Mrs. Meredith to an abrupt close.  The sound was
extremely unpleasant to her; she did not feel in a mood to
entertain callers this morning.  Rising with regret, she looked
out.  The brougham of Mrs. Conyers, flashing in the sun, was being
driven toward the house--was being driven rapidly, as though speed
meant an urgency.

If Mrs. Meredith desired no visitor at all, she particularly
disliked the appearance of this one.  Rowan's words to her were
full of meaning that she did not understand; but they rendered it
clear at least that his love affair had been interrupted, if not
been ended.  She could not believe this due to any fault of his;
and friendly relations with the Conyers family was for her
instantly at an end with any wrong done to him.

She summoned a maid and instructed her regarding the room in which
the visitor was to be received (not in the parlors; they were too
full of solemn memories this morning).  Then she passed down the
long hall to her bedchamber.

The intimacy between these ladies was susceptible of exact
analysis; every element comprising it could have been valued as
upon a quantitative scale.  It did not involve any of those
incalculable forces which constitute friendship--a noble mystery
remaining forever beyond unravelling.

They found the first basis of their intimacy in a common wish for
the union of their offsprings.  This subject had never been
mentioned between them.  Mrs. Conyers would have discussed it had
she dared; but she knew at least the attitude of the other.
Furthermore, Mrs. Meredith brought to this association a beautiful
weakness: she was endowed with all but preternatural insight into
what is fine in human nature, but had slight power of discovering
what is base; she seemed endowed with far-sightedness in high,
clear, luminous atmospheres, but was short-sighted in moral
twilights.  She was, therefore, no judge of the character of her
intimate.  As for that lady's reputation, this was well known to
her; but she screened herself against this reputation behind what
she believed to be her own personal discovery of unsuspected
virtues in the misjudged.  She probably experienced as much pride
in publicly declaring the misjudged a better woman than she was
reputed, as that lady would have felt in secretly declaring her to
be a worse one.

On the part of Mrs. Conyers, the motives which she brought to the
association presented nothing that must be captured and brought
down from the heights, she was usually to be explained by mining
rather than mounting.  Whatever else she might not have been, she
was always ore; never rainbows.

Throughout bird and animal and insect life there runs what is
recognized as the law of protective assimilation.  It represents
the necessity under which a creature lives to pretend to be
something else as a condition of continuing to be itself.  The
rose-colored flamingo, curving its long neck in volutions that
suggest the petals of a corolla, burying its head under its wing
and lifting one leg out of sight, becomes a rank, marvellous
flower, blooming on too slight a stalk in its marshes.  An insect
turns itself into one of the dried twigs of a dead stick.  On the
margin of a shadowed pool the frog is hued like moss--greenness
beside greenness.  Mrs. Conyers availed herself of a kind of
protective assimilation when she exposed herself to the environment
of Mrs. Meredith, adopting devices by which she would be taken for
any object in nature but herself.  Two familiar devices were
applied to her habiliments and her conversations.  Mrs. Meredith
always dressed well to the natural limit of her bountiful years;
Mrs. Conyers usually dressed more than well and more than a
generation behind hers.  On occasions when she visited Rowan's
unconcealed mother, she allowed time to make regarding herself
almost an honest declaration.  Ordinarily she Was a rose nearly
ready to drop, which is bound with a thread of its own color to
look as much as possible like a bud that is nearly ready to open.

Her conversations were even more assiduously tinged and fashioned
by the needs of accommodation.  Sometimes she sat in Mrs.
Meredith's parlors as a soul sick of the world's vanities, an urban
spirit that hungered for country righteousness.  During a walk one
day through the gardens she paused under the boughs of a weeping
willow and recited, "Cromwell, I charge thee fling away ambition--"
She uniformly imparted to Mrs. Meredith the assurance that with her
alone she could lay aside all disguises.

This morning she alighted from her carriage at the end of the
pavement behind some tall evergreens.  As she walked toward the
house, though absorbed with a serious purpose, she continued to be
as observant of everything as usual.  Had an eye been observant of
her, it would have been noticed that Mrs. Conyers in all her
self-concealment did not conceal one thing--her walk.  This one
element of her conduct had its curious psychology.  She had never
been able to forget that certain scandals set going many years
before, had altered the course of Mrs. Meredith's life and of the
lives of some others.  After a lapse of so long a time she had no
fear now that she should be discovered.  Nevertheless it was
impossible for her ever to approach this house without "coming
delicately."  She "came delicately" in the same sense that Agag,
king of Amalek, walked when he was on his way to Saul, who was
about to hew him to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.

She approached the house now, observant of everything as she
tripped.  Had a shutter been hung awry; if a window shade had been
drawn too low or a pane of glass had not sparkled, or there had
been loose paper on the ground or moulted feathers on the bricks,
she would have discovered this with the victorious satisfaction of
finding fault.  But orderliness prevailed.  No; the mat at the
front door had been displaced by Rowan's foot as he had hurried
from the house.  (The impulse was irresistible: she adjusted it
with her toe and planted herself on it with a sense of triumph.)

As she took out her own and Isabel's cards, she turned and looked
out across the old estate.  This was the home she had designed for
Isabel: the land, the house, the silver, the glass, the memories,
the distinction--they must all be Isabel's.

Some time passed before Mrs. Meredith appeared.  Always a woman of
dignity and reserve, she had never before in her life perhaps worn
a demeanor so dignified and reserved.  Her nature called for peace;
but if Rowan had been wronged, then there was no peace--and a
sacred war is a cruel one.  The instant that the two ladies
confronted each other, each realized that each concealed something
from the other.  This discovery instantly made Mrs. Meredith cooler
still; it rendered Mrs. Conyers more cordial.

"Isabel regretted that she could not come."

"I am sorry."  The tone called for the dismissal of the subject.

"This is scarcely a visit to you," Mrs. Conyers went on; "I have
been paying one of my usual pastoral calls: I have been to Ambrose
Webb's to see if my cows are ready to return to town.  Strawberries
are ripe and strawberries call for more cream, and more cream calls
for more calves, and more calves call for--well, we have all heard
them!  I do not understand how a man who looks like Ambrose can so
stimulate cattle.  Of course my cows are not as fine and fat as
Rowan's--that is not to be expected.  The country is looking very
beautiful.  I never come for a drive without regretting that I live
in town."  (She would have found the country intolerable for the
same reason that causes criminals to flock to cities.)

Constraint deepened as the visit was prolonged.  Mrs. Conyers
begged Mrs. Meredith for a recipe that she knew to be bad; and when
Mrs. Meredith had left the room for it, she rose and looked eagerly
out of the windows for any sign of Rowan.  When Mrs. Meredith
returned, for the same reason she asked to be taken into the
garden, which was in its splendor of bloom.  Mrs. Meredith culled
for her a few of the most resplendent blossoms--she could not have
offered to any one anything less.  Mrs. Conyers was careful not to
pin any one of these on; she had discovered that she possessed a
peculiarity known to some florists and concealed by those women who
suffer from it--that flowers soon wilt when worn by them.

Meanwhile as they walked she talked of flowers, of housekeeping;
she discussed Marguerite's coming ball and Dent's brilliant
graduation.  She enlarged upon this, praising Dent to the
disparagement of her own grandson Victor, now in retreat from
college on account of an injury received as centre-rush in his
football team.  Victor, she protested, was above education; his
college was a kind of dormitory to athletics.

When we are most earnest ourselves, we are surest to feel the lack
of earnestness in others; sincerity stirred to the depths will
tolerate nothing less.  It thus becomes a new test of a companion.
So a weak solution may not reveal a poison when a strong one will.
Mrs. Meredith felt this morning as never before the real nature of
the woman over whom for years she had tried to throw a concealing
charity; and Mrs. Conyers saw as never before in what an impossible
soil she had tried to plant poison oak and call it castle ivy.

The ladies parted with coldness.  When she was once more seated in
her carriage, Mrs. Conyers thrust her head through the window and
told the coachman to drive slowly.  She tossed the recipe into a
pine tree and took in her head.  Then she caught hold of a brown
silk cord attached to a little brown silk curtain in the front of
the brougham opposite her face.  It sprang aside, revealing a
little toilette mirror.  On the cushion beside her lay something
under a spread newspaper.  She quickly drew off her sombre visiting
gloves; and lifting the newspaper, revealed under it a fresh pair
of gloves, pearl-colored.  She worked her tinted hands nimbly into
these.  Then she took out a rose-colored scarf or shawl as light as
a summer cloud.  This she threw round her shoulders; it added no
warmth, it added color, meaning.  There were a few other youthward
changes and additions; and then the brown silk curtain closed over
the mirror.

Another woman leaned back in a corner of the brougham.  By a trick
of the face she had juggled away a generation of her years.  The
hands were moved backward on the horologe of mortality as we move
backward the pointers on the dial of a clock: her face ticked at
the hour of two in the afternoon of life instead of half-past five.

There was still time enough left to be malicious.




VII

One morning about a week later she entered her carriage and was
driven rapidly away.  A soft-faced, middle-aged woman with gray
ringlets and nervous eyes stepped timorously upon the veranda and
watched her departure with an expression of relief--Miss Harriet
Crane, the unredeemed daughter of the household.

She had been the only fruit of her mother's first marriage and she
still remained attached to the parental stem despite the most
vigorous wavings and shakings of that stem to shed its own product.
Nearly fifty years of wintry neglect and summer scorching had not
availed to disjoin Harriet from organic dependence upon her mother.
And of all conceivable failings in a child of hers that mother
could have found none so hard to forgive as the failure to attract
a man in a world full of men nearly all bent upon being attracted.

It was by no choice of Harriet's that she was born of a woman who
valued children as a kind of social collateral, high-class
investments to mature after long periods with at least reasonable
profits for the original investors.  Nor was it by any volition of
hers that she had commended herself to her mother in the beginning
by being a beautiful and healthful child: initial pledge that she
could be relied upon to turn out lucrative in the end.  The parent
herself was secretly astounded that she had given birth to a child
of so seraphic a disposition.

Trouble and disappointment began with education, for education is
long stout resistance.  You cannot polish highly a stone that is
not hard enough to resist being highly polished.  Harriet's soft
nature gave way before the advance of the serried phalanxes of
knowledge: learning passed her by; and she like the many "passed
through school."

By this time her mother had grown alarmed and she brought Harriet
out prematurely, that she might be wedded before, so to speak, she
was discovered.  Meantime Mrs. Crane herself had married a second
and a third time, with daughters by the last husband who were
little younger than her eldest; and she laughingly protested that
nothing is more confusing to a woman than to have in the house
children by two husbands.  Hence further reason for desiring
immediate nuptials: she could remove from the parlors the trace of
bi-marital collaboration.

At first only the most brilliant matches were planned for Harriet;
these one by one unaccountably came to naught.  Later the mother
began to fall back: upon those young men who should be glad to
embrace such an opportunity; but these less desirable young men
failed to take that peculiar view of their destinies.  In the
meanwhile the Misses Conyers had come on as debutantes and were
soon bespoken.  At the marriage of the youngest, Harriet's mother
had her act as first bridesmaid and dressed her, already fading, as
though she were the very spirit of April.

The other sisters were long since gone, scattered north and south
with half-grown families; and the big house was almost empty save
when they came in troops to visit it.

Harriet's downward career as an article of human merchandise had
passed through what are perhaps not wholly unrecognizable stages.
At first she had been displayed near the entrance for immediate
purchase by the unwary.  Then she had been marked down as something
that might be secured at a reduced price; but intending buyers
preferred to pay more.  By and by even this label was taken off and
she became a remnant of stock for which there was no convenient
space--being moved from shelf to shelf, always a little more
shop-worn, a little more out of style.  What was really needed was
an auction.

Mrs. Conyers did not take much to heart the teachings of her Bible;
but it had at least defined for her one point of view: all
creatures worth saving had been saved in pairs.

Bitter as were those years for Harriet, others more humiliating
followed.  The maternal attempts having been discontinued, she,
desperate with slights and insults, had put forth some efforts of
her own.  But it was as though one had been placed in a boat
without oars and told to row for life: the little boat under the
influence of cosmic tides had merely drifted into shallows and now
lay there--forgotten.

This morning as she sat idly rocking on the veranda, she felt that
negative happiness which consists in the disappearance of a
positively disagreeable thing.  Then she began to study how she
should spend the forenoon most agreeably.  Isabel was upstairs; she
would have been perfectly satisfied to talk with her; but for
several mornings Isabel had shown unmistakable preference to be let
alone; and in the school of life Harriet had attained the highest
proficiency in one branch of knowledge at least--never to get in
anybody's way.  Victor Fielding lay under the trees with a pipe and
a book, but she never ventured near him.

So Harriet bethought herself of a certain friend of hers on the
other side of town, Miss Anna Hardage, who lived with her brother,
Professor Hardage--two people to trust.

She put on her hat which unfortunately she had chosen to trim
herself, tied a white veil across the upper part of her face and
got out her second-best pair of gloves: Harriet kept her best
gloves for her enemies.  In the front yard she pulled a handful of
white lilacs (there was some defect here or she would never have
carried white lilacs in soiled white gloves); and passed out of the
gate.  Her eyes were lighted up with anticipations, but ill must
have overtaken her in transit; for when she was seated with Miss
Anna in a little side porch looking out on the little green yard,
they were dimmed with tears.

"The same old story," she complained vehemently.  "The same
ridicule that has been dinned into my ears since I was a child."

"Ah, now, somebody has been teasing her about being an old maid,"
said Miss Anna to herself, recognizing the signs.

"This world is a very unprincipled place to live in," continued
Harriet, her rage curdling into philosophy.

"Ah, but it is the best there is just yet," maintained Miss Anna,
stoutly.  "By and by we may all be able to do better--those of us
who get the chance."

"What shall I care then?" said Harriet, scouting eternity as a
palliative of contemporary woes.

"Wait! you are tired and you have lost your temper from thirst:
children always do.  I'll bring something to cure you, fresh from
the country, fresh from Ambrose Webb's farm.  Besides, you have a
dark shade of the blues, my dear; and this remedy is capital for
the blues.  You have but to sip a glass slowly--and where are
they?"  And she hastened into the house.

She returned with two glasses of cool buttermilk.

The words and the deed were characteristic of one of the most
wholesome women that ever helped to straighten out a crooked and to
cool a feverish world.  Miss Anna's very appearance allayed
irritation and became a provocation to good health, to good sense.
Her mission in life seemed not so much to distribute honey as to
sprinkle salt, to render things salubrious, to enable them to keep
their tonic naturalness.  Not within the range of womankind could
so marked a contrast have been found for Harriet as in this maiden
lady of her own age, who was her most patient friend and who
supported her clinging nature (which still could not resist the
attempt to bloom) as an autumn cornstalk supports a frost-nipped
morning-glory.

If words of love had ever been whispered into Miss Anna's ear, no
human being knew it now: but perhaps her heart also had its under
chamber sealed with tears.  Women not even behind her back jested
at her spinsterhood; and when that is true, a miracle takes place
indeed.  No doubt Miss Anna was a miracle, not belonging to any
country, race, or age; being one of those offerings to the world
which nature now and then draws from the deeps of womanhood: a pure
gift of God.

The two old maids drained their rectifying beverage in the shady
porch.  Whether from Miss Anna's faith in it or from the simple
health-giving of her presence, Harriet passed through a process of
healing; and as she handed back the empty glass, she smiled
gratefully into Miss Anna's sparkling brown eyes.  Nature had been
merciful to her in this, that she was as easily healed as wounded.
She now returned to the subject which had so irritated her, as we
rub pleasantly a spot from which a thorn has been extracted.

"What do I care?" she said, straightening her hat as if to complete
her recovery.  "But if there is one thing that can make me angry,
Anna, it is the middle-aged, able-bodied unmarried men of this
town.  They are perfectly, _perfectly_ contemptible."

"Oh, come now!" cried Miss Anna, "I am too old to talk about such
silly things myself; but what does a woman care whether she is
married or not if she has had offers?  And you have had plenty of
good offers, my dear."

"No, I haven't!" said Harriet, who would tell the truth about this
rankling misfortune.

"Well, then, it was because the men knew you wouldn't have them."

"No, it wasn't!" said Harriet, "it was because they knew I would."

"Nonsense!" cried Miss Anna, impatiently.  "You mustn't try to palm
off so much mock modesty on me, Harriet."

"Ah, I am too old to fib about it, Anna!  I leave _that_ to my many
sisters in misfortune."

Harriet looked at her friend's work curiously: she was darning
Professor Hardage's socks.

"Why do you do that, Anna?  Socks are dirt cheap.  You might as
well go out into the country and darn sheep."

"Ah, you have never had a brother--my brother! so you cannot
understand.  I can feel his heels pressing against my stitches when
he is walking a mile away.   And I know whenever his fingers touch
the buttons I have put back.  Besides, don't you like to see people
make bad things good, and things with holes in them whole again?
Why, that is half the work of the world, Harriet!  It is not his
feet that make these holes," continued Miss Anna, nicely, "it is
his shoes, his big, coarse shoes.  And his clothes wear out so
soon.  He has a tailor who misfits him so exactly from year to year
that there is never the slightest deviation in the botch.  I know
beforehand exactly where all the creases will begin.  So I darn and
mend.  The idea of his big, soft, strong feet making holes in
anything! but, then, you have never tucked him in bed at night, my
dear, so you know nothing about his feet."

"Not I!" said Harriet, embarrassed but not shocked.

Miss Anna continued fondly in a lowered voice: "You should have
heard him the other day when he pulled open a drawer: 'Why, Anna,'
he cried, 'where on earth did I get all these new socks?  The
pair I left in here must have been alive: they've bred like
rabbits.'--'Why, you've forgotten,' I said.  'It's your birthday;
and I have made you over, so that you are as good as new--_me_!'"

"I never have to be reminded of my birthday," remarked Harriet,
reflectively.  "Anna, do you know that I have lived about
one-eighth of the time since Columbus discovered America: doesn't
that sound awful!"

"Ah, but you don't look it," said Miss Anna, artistically, "and
that's the main object."

"Oh, I don't feel it," retorted Harriet, "and that's the main
object too.  I'm as young as I ever was when I'm away from home;
but I declare, Anna, there are times when my mother can make me
feel I'm about the oldest thing alive."

"Oh, come now! you mustn't begin to talk that way, or I'll have to
give you more of the antidote.  You are threatened with a relapse."

"No more," ordered Harriet with a forbidding hand, "and I repeat
what I said.  Of course you know I never gossip, Anna; but when I
talk to you, I do not feel as though I were talking to anybody."

"Why, of course not," said Miss Anna, trying to make the most of
the compliment, "I am nobody at all, just a mere nonentity,
Harriet."

"Anna," said Harriet, after a pause of unusual length, "if it had
not been for my mother, I should have been married long ago.
Thousands of worse-looking women, and of actually worse women,
marry every year in this world and marry reasonably well.  It was
because she tried to marry me off: that was the bottom of the
deviltry--the men saw through her."

"I am afraid they did," admitted Miss Anna, affably, looking down
into a hole.

"Of course I know I am not brilliant," conceded Harriet, "but then
I am never commonplace."

"I should like to catch any one saying such a thing."

"Even if I were, commonplace women always make the best wives: do
they not?"

"Oh, don't ask that question in this porch," exclaimed Miss Anna a
little resentfully.  "What do I know about it!"

"My mother thinks I am a weak woman," continued Harriet, musingly.
"If my day ever comes, she will know that I am, strong, Anna,
_strong_."

"Ah, now, you must forgive your mother," cried Miss Anna, having
reached a familiar turn in this familiar dialogue.  "Whatever she
did, she did for the best.  Certainly it was no fault of yours.
But you could get married to-morrow if you wished and you know it,
Harriet." (Miss Anna offered up the usual little prayer to be
forgiven.)

The balm of those words worked through Harriet's veins like a
poison of joy.  So long as a single human being expresses faith in
us, what matters an unbelieving world?  Harriet regularly visited
Miss Anna to hear these maddening syllables.  She called for them
as for the refilling of a prescription, which she preferred to get
fresh every time rather than take home once for all and use as
directed.

Among a primitive folk who seemed to have more moral troubles than
any other and to feel greater need of dismissing them by artificial
means, there grew up the custom of using a curious expedient.  They
chose a beast of the field and upon its head symbolically piled all
the moral hard-headedness of the several tribes; after which the
unoffending brute was banished to the wilderness and the guilty
multitude felt relieved.  However crude that ancient method of
transferring mental and moral burdens, it had at least this
redeeming feature: the early Hebrews heaped their sins upon a
creature which they did not care for and sent it away.  In modern
times we pile our burdens upon our dearest fellow-creatures and
keep them permanently near us for further use.  What human being
but has some other upon whom he nightly hangs his troubles as he
hangs his different garments upon hooks and nails in the walls
around him?  Have we ever suspected that when once the habit of
transferring our troubles has become pleasant to us, we thereafter
hunt for troubles in order that we may have them to transfer, that
we magnify the little ones in order to win the credit of having
large ones, and that we are wonderfully refreshed by making other
people despondent about us?  Mercifully those upon whom the burdens
are hung often become the better for their loads; they may not live
so long, but they are more useful.  Thus in turn the weak develop
the strong.

For years Miss Anna had sacrificially demeaned herself in the
service of Harriet, who would now have felt herself a recreant
friend unless she had promptly detailed every annoyance of her
life.  She would go home, having left behind her the infinite
little swarm of stinging things--having transferred them to the
head of Miss Anna, around which they buzzed until they died.

There was this further peculiarity in Harriet's visits: that the
most important moments were the last; Just as a doctor, after he
has listened to the old story of his patient's symptoms, and has
prescribed and bandaged and patted and soothed, and has reached the
door, turns, and noting a light in the patient's eye hears him make
a remark which shows that all the time he has really been thinking
about something else.

Harriet now showed what was at the bottom of her own mind this
morning:

"What I came to tell you about, Anna, is that for a week life at
home has been unendurable.  There is some trouble, some terrible
trouble; and no matter what goes wrong, my mother always holds me
responsible.  Positively there are times when I wonder whether I,
without my knowing it, may not be the Origin of Evil."

Miss Anna made no comment, having closed the personal subject, and
Harriet continued:

"It has scarcely been possible for me to stay in the house.
Fortunately mother has been there very little herself.  She goes
and goes and drives and drives.  Strange things have been
happening.  You know that Judge Morris has not missed coming on
Sunday evening for years.  Last night mother sat on the veranda
waiting for him and he did not come.  I know, for I watched.  What
have I to do but watch other people's affairs?--I have none of my
own.  I believe the trouble is all between Isabel and Rowan."

Miss Anna dropped her work and looked at Harriet with sudden
gravity.

"I can give you no idea of the real situation because it is very
dramatic; and you know, Anna, I am not dramatic: I am merely
historical: I tell my little tales.  But at any rate Rowan has not
been at the house for a week.  He called last Sunday afternoon and
Isabel refused to see him.  I know; because what have I to do but
to interest myself in people who have affairs of interest?  Then
Isabel had his picture in her room: it has been taken down.  She
had some of his books: they are gone.  The house has virtually been
closed to company.  Isabel has excused herself to callers.  Mother
was to give a tea; the invitations were cancelled.  At table Isabel
and mother barely speak; but when I am not near, they talk a great
deal to each other.  And Isabel walks and walks and walks--in the
garden, in her rooms.  I have waked up two or three times at night
and have seen her sitting at her window.  She has always been very
kind to me, Anna," Harriet's voice faltered, "she and you: and I
cannot bear to see her so unhappy.  You would never believe that a
few days would make such a change in her.  The other morning I went
up to her room with a little bunch of violets which I had gathered
for her myself.  When she opened the door, I saw that she was
packing her trunks.  And the dress she had ordered for Marguerite's
ball was lying on the bed ready to be put in.  As I gave her the
flowers she stood looking at them a long time; then she kissed me
without a word and quickly closed the door."


When Harriet had gone.  Miss Anna sat awhile in her porch with a
troubled face.  Then she went softly into the library, the windows
of which opened out upon the porch.  Professor Hardage was standing
on a short step-ladder before a bookcase, having just completed the
arrangement of the top shelf.

"Are you never going to get down?" she asked, looking up at him
fondly.

He closed the book with a snap and a sigh and descended.  Her
anxious look recalled his attention,

"Did I not hear Harriet harrowing you up again with her troubles?"
he asked.  "You poor, kind soul that try to bear everybody's!"

"Never mind about what I bear!  What can you bear for dinner?"

"It is an outrage, Anna!  What right has she to make herself
happier by making you miserable, lengthening her life by shortening
yours?  For these worries always clip the thread of life at the
end: that is where all the small debts are collected as one."

"Now you must not be down on Harriet!  It makes her happier; and as
to the end of my life, I shall be there to attend to that."

"Suppose I moved away with you to some other college entirely out
of her reach?"

"I shall not suppose it because you will never do it.  If you did,
Harriet would simply find somebody else to confide in; she _must_
tell _everything_ to _somebody_.  But if she told any one else, a
good many of these stories would be all over town.  She tells me
and they get no further."

"What right have you to listen to scandal in order to suppress it?"

"I don't even listen always: I merely stop the stream at its
source."

"I object to your offering your mind as the banks to such a stream.
Still I'm glad that I live near the banks," and he kissed his hand
to her.

"When one woman tells another anything and the other woman does not
tell, remember it is not scandal--it is confidence."

"Then there is no such thing as confidence," he replied, laughing.

He turned toward his shelves.

"Now do rest," she pleaded, "you look worn out."

She had a secret notion that books instead of putting life into
people took it out of them.  At best they performed the function of
grindstones: they made you sharper, but they made you thinner--gave
you more edge and left you less substance.

"I wish every one of those books had a lock and I had the bunch of
keys."

"Each has a lock and key; but the key cannot be put into your
pocket, Anna, my dear; it is the unlocking mind.  And you are not
to speak of books as a collection of locks and keys; they make up
the living tree of knowledge, though of course there is very little
of the tree in this particular bookcase."

"I don't see any of it," she remarked with wholesome literalness.

"Well, here at the bottom are lexicons--think of them as roots and
soil.  Above them lie maps and atlases: consider them the surface.
Then all books are history of course.  But here is a great central
trunk rising out of the surface which is called History in
especial.  On each side of that, running to the right and to the
left, are main branches.  Here for instance is the large limb of
Philosophy--a very weighty limb indeed.  Here is the branch of
Criticism.  Here is a bough consisting principally of leaves on
which live unnamed venomous little insects that poison them and die
on them: their appointed place in creation."

"And so there is no positive fruit anywhere," she insisted with her
practical taste for the substantial.

"It is all food, Anna, edible and nourishing to different mouths
and stomachs.  Some very great men have lived on the roots of
knowledge, the simplest roots.  And here is poetry for dates and
wild honey; and novels for cocoanuts and mushrooms.  And here is
Religion: that is for manna."

"What is at the very top?"

His eyes rested upon the highest row of books.

"These are some of the loftiest growths, new buds of the mind
opening toward the unknown.  Each in its way shows the best that
man, the earth-animal, has been able to accomplish.  Here is a
little volume for instance which tells what he ought to be--and
never is.  This small volume deals with the noblest ideals of the
greatest civilizations.  Here is what one of the finest of the
world's teachers had to say about justice.  Aspiration is at that
end.  This little book is on the sad loveliness of Greek girls; and
the volume beside it is about the brief human chaplets that Horace
and some other Romans wore--and then trod on.  Thus the long story
of light and shadow girdles the globe.  If you were nothing but a
spirit, Anna, and could float in here some night, perhaps you would
see a mysterious radiance streaming upward from this shelf of books
like the northern lights from behind the world--starting no one
knows where, sweeping away we know not whither--search-light of the
mortal, turned on dark eternity."

She stood a little behind him and watched him in silence, hiding
her tenderness.

"If I were a book," she said thoughtlessly, "where should I be?"

He drew the fingers of one hand lingeringly across the New
Testament.

"Ah, now don't do that," she cried, "or you shall have no dinner.
Here, turn round! look at the dust! look at this cravat on one end!
look at these hands!  March upstairs."

He laid his head over against hers.

"Stand up!" she exclaimed, and ran out of the room.

Some minutes later she came back and took a seat near the door.
There was flour on her elbow; and she held a spoon in her hand.

"Now you look like yourself," she said, regarding him with approval
as he sat reading before the bookcase.  "I started to tell you what
Harriet told me."

He looked over the top of his book at her.

"I thought you said you stopped the stream at its source.  Now you
propose to let it run down to me--or up to me: how do you know it
will not run past me?"

"Now don't talk in that way," she said, "this is something you will
want to know," and she related what Harriet had chronicled.




VIII

When she had left the room, he put back into its place the volume
he was reading: its power over him was gone.  All the voices of all
his books, speaking to him from lands and ages, grew simultaneously
hushed.  He crossed the library to a front window opening upon the
narrow rocky street and sat with his elbow on the window-sill, the
large fingers of one large hand unconsciously searching his
brow--that habit of men of thoughtful years, the smoothing out of
the inner problems.

The home of Professor Hardage was not in one of the best parts of
the town.  There was no wealth here, no society as it impressively
calls itself; there were merely well-to-do human beings of ordinary
intelligence and of kindly and unkindly natures.  The houses,
constructed of frame or of brick, were crowded wall against wall
along the sidewalk; in the rear were little gardens of flowers and
of vegetables.  The street itself was well shaded; and one forest
tree, the roots of which bulged up through the mossy bricks of the
pavement, hung its boughs before his windows.  Throughout life he
had found so many companions in the world outside of mere people,
and this tree was one.  From the month of leaves to the month of no
leaves--the period of long hot vacations--when his eyes were tired
and his brain and heart a little tired also, many a time it
refreshed him by all that it was and all that it stood for--this
green tent of the woods arching itself before his treasured
shelves.  In it for him were thoughts of cool solitudes and of
far-away greenness; with tormenting visions also of old lands, the
crystal-aired, purpling mountains of which, and valleys full of
fable, he was used to trace out upon the map, but knew that he
should never see or press with responsive feet.

For travel was impossible to him.  Part of his small salary went to
the family of a brother; part disappeared each year in the buying
of books--at once his need and his passion; there were the expenses
of living; and Miss Anna always exacted appropriations.

"I know we have not much, but then my little boys and girls have
nothing; and the poor must help the poorer."

"Very well," he would reply, "but some day you will be a beggar
yourself, Anna."

"Oh, well then, if I am, I do not doubt that I shall be a thrifty
old mendicant.  And I'll beg for _you_!  So don't you be uneasy;
and give me what I want."

She always looked like a middle-aged Madonna in the garb of a
housekeeper.  Indeed, he was wont to call her the Madonna of the
Dishes; but at these times, and in truth for all deeper ways, he
thought of her as the Madonna of the Motherless.  Nevertheless he
was resolute that out of this many-portioned salary something must
yet be saved.

"The time will come," he threatened, "when some younger man will
want my professorship--and will deserve it.  I shall either be put
out or I shall go out; and then--decrepitude, uselessness, penury,
unless something has been hoarded.  So, Anna, out of the frail
uncertain little basketful of the apples of life which the college
authorities present to me once a year, we must save a few for what
may prove a long hard winter."

Professor Hardage was a man somewhat past fifty, of ordinary
stature and heavy figure, topped with an immense head.  His was not
what we call rather vaguely the American face.  In Germany had he
been seen issuing from the lecture rooms of a university, he would
have been thought at home and his general status had been assumed:
there being that about him which bespoke the scholar, one of those
quiet self-effacing minds that have long since passed with entire
humility into the service of vast themes.  In social life the
character of a noble master will in time stamp itself upon the look
and manners of a domestic; and in time the student acquires the
lofty hall-mark of what he serves.

It was this perhaps that immediately distinguished him and set him
apart in every company.  The appreciative observer said at once:
"Here is a man who may not himself be great; but he is at least
great enough to understand greatness; he is used to greatness."

As so often is the case with the strong American, he was
self-made--that glory of our boasting.  But we sometimes forget
that an early life of hardship, while it may bring out what is best
in a man, so often wastes up his strength and burns his ambition to
ashes in the fierce fight against odds too great.  So that the
powers which should have carried him far carry him only a little
distance or leave him standing exhausted where he began.

When Alfred Hardage was eighteen, he had turned his eyes toward a
professorship in one of the great universities of his country;
before he was thirty he had won a professorship in the small but
respectable college of his native town; and now, when past fifty,
he had never won anything more.  For him ambition was like the
deserted martin box in the corner of his yard: returning summers
brought no more birds.  Had his abilities been even more
extraordinary, the result could not have been far otherwise.  He
had been compelled to forego for himself as a student the highest
university training, and afterward to win such position as the
world accorded him without the prestige of study abroad.

It became his duty in his place to teach the Greek language and its
literature; sometimes were added classes in Latin.  This was the
easier problem.  The more difficult problem grew out of the demand,
that he should live intimately in a world of much littleness and
not himself become little; feel interested in trivial minds at
street corners, yet remain companion and critic of some of the
greatest intellects of human kind; contend with occasional malice
and jealousy in the college faculty, yet hold himself above these
carrion passions; retain his intellectual manhood, yet have his
courses of study narrowed and made superficial for him; be free yet
submit to be patronized by some of his fellow-citizens, because
they did him the honor to employ him for so much as a year as sage
and moral exampler to their sons.

Usually one of two fates overtakes the obscure professional scholar
in this country: either he shrinks to the dimensions of a true
villager and deserts the vastness of his library; or he repudiates
the village and becomes a cosmopolitan recluse--lonely toiler among
his books.  Few possess the breadth and equipoise which will enable
them to pass from day to day along mental paths, which have the
Forum of Augustus or the Groves of the Academy at one end and the
babbling square of a modern town at the other; remaining equally at
home amid ancient ideals and everyday realities.

It was the fate of the recluse that threatened him.  He had been
born with the scholar's temperament--this furnished the direction;
before he had reached the age of twenty-five he had lost his wife
and two sons--that furrowed the tendency.  During the years
immediately following he had tried to fill an immense void of the
heart with immense labors of the intellect.  The void remained; yet
undoubtedly compensation for loneliness had been found in the
fixing of his affections upon what can never die--the inexhaustible
delight of learning.

Thus the life of the book-worm awaited him but for an interference
excellent and salutary and irresistible.  This was the constant
companionship of a sister whose nature enabled her to find its
complete universe in the only world that she had ever known: she
walking ever broad-minded through the narrowness of her little
town; remaining white though often threading its soiling ways; and
from every life which touched hers, however crippled and confined,
extracting its significance instead of its insignificance, shy
harmonies instead of the easy discords which can so palpably be
struck by any passing hand.

It was due to her influence, therefore, that his life achieved the
twofold development which left him normal in the middle years; the
fresh pursuing scholar still but a man practically welded to the
people among whom he lived--receiving their best and giving his
best.

But we cannot send our hearts out to play at large among our kind,
without their coming to choose sooner or later playfellows to be
loved more than the rest.

Two intimacies entered into the life of Professor Hardage.  The
first of these had been formed many years before with Judge Ravenel
Morris.  They had discovered each other by drifting as lonely men
do in the world; each being without family ties, each loving
literature, each having empty hours.  The bond between them had
strengthened, until it had become to each a bond of strength
indeed, mighty and uplifting.

The other intimacy was one of those for which human speech will
never, perhaps, be called upon to body forth its describing word.
In the psychology of feeling there are states which we gladly
choose to leave unlanguaged.  Vast and deep-sounding as is the
orchestra of words, there are scores which we never fling upon such
instruments--realities that lie outside the possibility and the
desirability of utterance as there are rays of the sun that fall
outside the visible spectrum of solar light.

What description can be given in words of that bond between two,
when the woman stands near the foot of the upward slope of life,
and the man is already passing down on the sunset side, with
lengthening afternoon shadows on the gray of his temples--between
them the cold separating peaks of a generation?

Such a generation of toiling years separated Professor Hardage from
Isabel Conyers.  When, at the age of twenty, she returned after
years of absence in an eastern college--it was a tradition of her
family that its women should be brilliantly educated--he verged
upon fifty.  To his youthful desires that interval was nothing; but
to his disciplined judgment it was everything.

"Even though it could be," he said to himself, "it should not be,
and therefore it shall not."

His was an idealism that often leaves its holder poor indeed save
in the possession of its own incorruptible wealth.  No doubt also
the life-long study of the ideals of classic time came to his
guidance now with their admonitions of exquisite balance, their
moderation and essential justness.

But after he had given up all hope of her, he did not hesitate to
draw her to him in other ways; and there was that which drew her
unfathomably to him--all the more securely since in her mind there
was no thought that the bond between them would ever involve the
possibility of love and marriage.

His library became another home to her.  One winter she read Greek
with him--authors not in her college course.  Afterward he read
much more Greek to her.  Then they laid Greek aside, and he took
her through the history of its literature and through that other
noble one, its deathless twin.

When she was not actually present, he yet took her with him through
the wide regions of his studies---set her figure in old Greek
landscapes and surrounded it with dim shapes of loveliness--saw her
sometimes as the perfection that went into marble--made her a
portion of legend and story, linking her with Nausicaa and
Andromache and the lost others.  Then quitting antiquity with her
altogether, he passed downward with her into the days of chivalry,
brought her to Arthur's court, and invested her with one character
after another, trying her by the ladies of knightly ideals--reading
her between the lines in all the king's idyls.

But last and best, seeing her in the clear white light of her own
country and time--as the spirit of American girlhood, pure,
refined, faultlessly proportioned in mental and physical health,
full of kindness, full of happiness, made for love, made for
motherhood.  All this he did in his hopeless and idealizing worship
of her; and all this and more he hid away: for he too had his crypt.

So watching her and watching vainly over her, he was the first to
see that she was loved and that her nature was turning away from
him, from all that he could offer--subdued by that one other call.

"Now, Fates," he said, "by whatsoever names men have blindly prayed
to you; you that love to strike at perfection, and pass over a
multitude of the ordinary to reach the rare, stand off for a few
years!  Let them be happy together in their love, their marriage,
and their young children.  Let the threads run freely and be
joyously interwoven.  Have mercy at least for a few years!"

A carriage turned a corner of the street and was driven to the
door.  Isabel got out, and entered the hall without ringing.

He met her there and as she laid her hands in his without a word,
he held them and looked at her without a word.  He could scarcely
believe that in a few days her life could so have drooped as under
a dreadful blight.

"I have come to say good-by," and with a quiver of the lips she
turned her face aside and brushed past him, entering the library.

He drew his own chair close to hers when she had seated herself.

"I thought you and your grandmother were going later: is not this
unexpected?"

"Yes, it is very unexpected."

"But of course she is going with you?"

"No, I am going alone."

"For the summer?"

"Yes, for the summer.  I suppose for a long time."

She continued to sit with her cheek leaning against the back of the
chair, her eyes directed outward through the windows.  He asked
reluctantly:

"Is there any trouble?"

"Yes, there is trouble."

"Can you tell me what it is?"

"No, I cannot tell you what it is.  I cannot tell any one what it
is."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"No, there is nothing you can do.  There is nothing any one can do."

Silence followed for some time.  He smiled at her sadly:

"Shall I tell you what the trouble is?"

"You do not know what it is.  I believe I wish you did know.  But I
cannot tell you."

"Is it not Rowan?"

She waited awhile without change of posture and answered at length
without change of tone:

"Yes, it is Rowan."

The stillness of the room became intense and prolonged; the
rustling of the leaves about the window sounded like noise.

"Are you not going to marry him, Isabel?"

"No, I am not going to marry him.  I am never going to marry him."

She stretched out her hand helplessly to him.  He would not take it
and it fell to her side: at that moment he did not dare.  But of
what use is it to have kept faith with high ideals through trying
years if they do not reward us at last with strength in the crises
of character?  No doubt they rewarded him now: later he reached
down and took her hand and held it tenderly.

"You must not go away.  You must be reconciled, to him.  Otherwise
it will sadden your whole summer.  And it will sadden his."

"Sadden, the whole summer," she repeated, "a summer?  It will
sadden a life.  If there is eternity, it will sadden eternity."

"Is it so serious?"

"Yes, it is as serious as anything, could be."

After a while she sat up wearily and turned her face to him for the
first time.

"Cannot you help me?" she asked.  "I do not believe I can bear
this.  I do not believe I can bear it."

Perhaps it is the doctors who hear that tone oftenest--little
wonder that they are men so often with sad or with calloused faces.

"What can I do?"

"I do not know what you can do.  But cannot you do something?  You
were the only person in the world that I could go to.  I did not
think I could ever come to you; but I had to come.  Help me."

He perceived that commonplace counsel would be better than no
counsel at all.

"Isabel," he asked, "are you suffering because you have wronged
Rowan or because you think he has wronged you?"

"No, no, no," she cried, covering her face with her hands, "I have
not wronged him!  I have not wronged any one!  He has wronged me!"

"Did he ever wrong you before?"

"No, he never wronged me before.  But this covers everything--the
whole past."

"Have you ever had any great trouble before, Isabel?"

"No, I have never had any great trouble before.  At times in my
life I may have thought I had, but now I know."

"You do not need to be told that sooner or later all of us have
troubles that we think we cannot bear."

She shook her head wearily: "It does not do any good to think of
that!  It does not help me in the least!"

"But it does help if there is any one to whom we can tell our
troubles."

"I cannot tell mine."

"Cannot you tell me?"

"No, I believe I wish you knew, but I could not tell you.  No, I do
not even wish you to know."

"Have you seen Kate?"

She covered her face with her hands again: "No, no, no," she cried,
"not Kate!"  Then she looked up at him with eyes suddenly kindling:
"Have you heard what Kate's life has been since her marriage?"

"We have all heard, I suppose."

"She has never spoken a word against him--not even to me from whom
she never had a secret.  How could I go to her about Rowan?  Even
if she had confided in me, I could not tell her this."

"If you are going away, change of scene will help you to forget it."

"No, it will help me to remember."

"There is prayer, Isabel."

"I know there is prayer.  But prayer does not do any good.  It has
nothing to do with this."

"Enter as soon as possible into the pleasures of the people you are
to visit."

"I cannot!  I do not wish for pleasure,"

"Isabel," he said at last, "forgive him."

"I cannot forgive him."

"Have you tried?"

"No, I cannot try.  If I forgave him, it would only be a change in
me: it would not change him: it would not undo what he has done."

"Do you know the necessity of self-sacrifice?"

"But how can I sacrifice what is best in me without lowering
myself?  Is it a virtue in a woman to throw away what she holds to
be as highest?"

"Remember," he said, returning to the point, "that, if you forgive
him, you become changed yourself.  You no longer see what he has
done as you see it now.  That is the beauty of forgiveness: it
enables us better to understand those whom we have forgiven.
Perhaps it will enable you to put yourself in his place."

She put her hands to her eyes with a shudder: "You do not know what
you are saying," she cried, and rose.

"Then trust it all to time," he said finally, "that is best!  Time
alone solves so much.  Wait!  Do not act!  Think and feel as little
as possible.  Give time its merciful chance.  I'll come to see you."

They had moved toward the door.  She drew off her glove which she
was putting on and laid her hand once more in his.

"Time can change nothing.  I have decided."

As she was going down the steps to the carriage, she turned and
came back.

"Do not come to see me!  I shall come to you to say good-by.  It is
better for you not to come to the house just now.  I might not be
able to see you."

Isabel had the carriage driven to the Osborns'.

The house was situated in a pleasant street of delightful
residences.  It had been newly built on an old foundation as a
bridal present to Kate from her father.  She had furnished it with
a young wife's pride and delight and she had lined it throughout
with thoughts of incommunicable tenderness about the life history
just beginning.  Now, people driving past (and there were few in
town who did not know) looked at it as already a prison and a doom.

Kate was sitting in the hall with some work in her lap.  Seeing
Isabel she sprang up and met her at the door, greeting her as
though she herself were the happiest of wives.

"Do you know how long it has been since you were here?" she
exclaimed chidingly.  "I had not realized how soon young married
people can be forgotten and pushed aside."

"Forget you, dearest!  I have never thought of you so much as since
I was here last."

"Ah," thought Kate to herself, "she has heard.  She has begun to
feel sorry for me and has begun to stay away as people avoid the
unhappy."

But the two friends, each smiling into the other's eyes, their arms
around each other, passed into the parlors.

"Now that you are here at last, I shall keep you," said Kate,
rising from the seat they had taken.  "I will send the carriage
home.  George cannot be here to lunch and we shall have it all to
ourselves as we used to when we were girls together."

"No," exclaimed Isabel, drawing her down into the seat again, "I
cannot stay.  I had only a few moments and drove by just to speak
to you, just to tell you how much I love you."

Kate's face changed and she dropped her eyes.  "Is so little of me
so much nowadays?" she asked, feeling as though the friendship of a
lifetime were indeed beginning to fail her along with other things.

"No, no, no," cried Isabel.  "I wish we could never be separated."

She rose quickly and went over to the piano and began to turn over
the music.  "It seems so long since I heard any music.  What has
become of it?  Has it all gone out of life?   I feel as though
there were none any more."

Kate came over and looked at one piece of music after another
irresolutely.

"I have not touched the piano for weeks."

She sat down and her fingers wandered forcedly through a few
chords.  Isabel stepped quickly to her side and laid restraining
hands softly upon hers: "No; not to-day."

Kate rose with averted face: "No; not any music to-day!"

The friends returned to their seat, on which Kate left her work.
She took it up and for a few moments Isabel watched her in silence.

"When did you see Rowan?"

"You know he lives in the country," replied Isabel, with an air of
defensive gayety.

"And does he never come to town?"

"How should I know?"

Kate took this seriously and her head sank lower over her work:
"Ah," she thought to herself, "she will not confide in me any
longer.  She keeps her secrets from me--me who shared them all my
life."

"What is it you are making?"

Isabel stretched out her hand, but Kate with a cry threw her breast
downward upon her work.  With laughter they struggled over it; Kate
released it and Isabel rising held it up before her.  Then she
allowed it to drop to the floor.

"Isabel!" exclaimed Kate, her face grown cold and hard.  She
stooped with dignity and picked up the garment.

"Oh, forgive me," implored Isabel, throwing her arms around her
neck.  "I did not know what I was doing!" and she buried her face
on the young wife's shoulder.  "I was thinking of myself: I cannot
tell you why!"

Kate released herself gently.  Her face remained grave.  She had
felt the first wound of motherhood: it could not be healed at once.
The friends could not look at each other.  Isabel began to draw on
her gloves and Kate did not seek to keep her longer.

"I must go.  Dear friend, have you forgiven me?  I cannot tell you
what was in my heart.  Some day you will understand.  Try to
forgive till you do understand."

Kate's mouth trembled: "Isabel, why are you so changed toward me?"

"Ah, I have not changed toward you!  I shall never change toward
you!"

"Are you too happy to care for me any longer?"

"Ah, Kate, I am not too happy for anything.  Some day you will
understand."

She leaned far out and waved her hand as she drove away, and then
she threw herself back into the carriage.  "Dear injured friend!
Brave loyal woman'" she cried, "the men we loved have ruined both
our lives; and we who never had a secret from each other meet and
part as hypocrites to shield them.  Drive home," she said to the
driver.  "If any one motions to stop, pay no attention.  Drive
fast."

Mrs. Osborn watched the carriage out of sight and then walked
slowly back to her work.  She folded the soft white fabric over the
cushions and then laid her cheek against it and gave it its first
christening--the christening of tears.




IX

The court-house clock in the centre of the town clanged the hour of
ten--hammered it out lavishly and cheerily as a lusty blacksmith
strikes with prodigal arm his customary anvil.  Another clock in a
dignified church tower also struck ten, but with far greater
solemnity, as though reminding the town clock that time is not to
be measured out to man as a mere matter of business, but intoned
savingly and warningly as the chief commodity of salvation.  Then
another clock: in a more attenuated cobwebbed steeple also struck
ten, reaffirming the gloomy view of its resounding brother and
insisting that the town clock had treated the subject with sinful
levity.

Nevertheless the town clock seemed to have the best of the argument
on this particular day; for the sun was shining, cool, breezes were
blowing, and the streets were thronged with people intent on making
bargains.  Possibly the most appalling idea in most men's notions
of eternity is the dread that there will be no more bargaining
there.

A bird's-eye view of the little town as it lay outspread on its
high fertile plateau, surrounded by green woods and waving fields,
would have revealed near one edge of it a large verdurous spot
which looked like an overrun oasis.  This oasis was enclosed by a
high fence on the inside of which ran a hedge of lilacs, privet,
and osage orange.  Somewhere in it was an old one-story manor
house of rambling ells and verandas.  Elsewhere was a little
summer-house, rose-covered; still elsewhere an arbor vine-hung; at
various other places secluded nooks with seats, where the bushes
could hide you and not hear you--a virtue quite above anything
human.   Marguerite lived in this labyrinth.

As the dissenting clocks finished striking, had you been standing
outside the fence near a little side gate used by grocers' and
bakers' carts, you might have seen Marguerite herself.  There came
a soft push against the gate from within; and as it swung part of
the way open, you might have observed that the push was delivered
by the toe of a little foot.  A second push sent it still farther.
Then there was a pause and then it flew open and stayed open.  At
first there appeared what looked like an inverted snowy flagstaff
but turned out to be a long, closed white parasol; then Marguerite
herself appeared, bending her head low under the privet leaves and
holding her skirts close in, so that they might not be touched by
the whitewash on each edge.  Once outside, she straightened herself
up with the lithe grace of a young willow, released her skirts, and
balancing herself on the point of her parasol, closed the gate with
her toe: she was too dainty to touch it.

The sun shone hot and Marguerite quickly raised her parasol.  It
made you think of some silken white myriad-fluted mushroom of the
dark May woods; and Marguerite did not so much seem to have come
out of the house as out of the garden--to have slept there on its
green moss with the new moon on her eyelids--indeed to have been
born there, in some wise compounded of violets and hyacinths; and
as the finishing touch to have had squeezed into her nature a few
drops of wildwood spritishness.

She started toward the town with a movement somewhat like that of a
tall thin lily stalk swayed by zephyrs--with a lilt, a cadence, an
ever changing rhythm of joy: plain walking on the solid earth was
not for her.  At friendly houses along the way she peeped into open
windows, calling to friends; she stooped over baby carriages on the
sidewalk, noting but not measuring their mysteries; she bowed to
the right and to the left at passing carriages; and people leaned
far out to bow and smile at her.  Her passage through the town was
somewhat like that of a butterfly crossing a field.

"Will he be there?" she asked.  "I did not tell him I was coming,
but he heard me say I should be there at half-past ten o'clock.  It
is his duty to notice my least remark."

When she reached her destination, the old town library, she mounted
the lowest step and glanced rather guiltily up and down the street.
Three ladies were going up and two men were going down: no one was
coming toward Marguerite.

"Now, why is he not here?  He shall be punished for this."

She paced slowly backward and forward yet a little while.  Then she
started resolutely in the direction of a street where most of the
law offices were situated.  Turning a corner, she came full upon
Judge, Morris.

"Ah, good morning, good morning," he cried, putting his gold-headed
cane under his arm and holding out both hands.  "Where did you
sleep last night?  On rose leaves?"

"I was in grandmother's bed when I left off," said Marguerite,
looking up at the rim of her hat.

"And where were you when you began again?"

"Still in grandmother's bed.  I think I must have been there all
the time.  I know all about your old Blackstone and all that kind
of thing," she continued, glancing at a yellow book under his arm
and speaking with a threat as though he had adjudged her ignorant.

"Ah, then you will make a good lawyer's wife."

"I supposed I'd make a good wife of any kind.  Are you coming to my
ball?"

"Well, you know I am too old to make engagements far ahead.  But I
expect to be there.  If I am not, my ghost shall attend."

"How shall I recognize it?  Does it dance?  I don't want to mistake
it for Barbee."

"Barbee shall not come if I can keep him at home."

"And why, please?"

"I am afraid he is falling in love with you."

"But why shouldn't he?"

"I don't wish my nephew to be flirted."

"But how do you know I'd flirt him?"

"Ah, I knew your mother when she was young and your grandmother
when she was young: you're all alike."

"We, are so glad we are," said Marguerite, as she danced away from
him under her parasol.

Farther down the street she met Professor Hardage.

"I know all about your old Odyssey--your old Horace and all those
things," she said threateningly.  "I am not as ignorant as you
think."

"I wish Horace had known you."

"Would it have been nice?"

"He might have written an ode _Ad Margaritam_ instead of _Ad
Lalagem_."

"Then I might have been able to read it," she said.  "In school I
couldn't read the other one.  But you mustn't think that I did not
read a great deal of Latin.  The professor used to say that I read
my Latin b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l-l-y, but that I didn't get much English
out of it.  I told him I got as much English out of it as the
Romans did, and that they certainly ought to have known what it was
meant for."

"That must have taught him a lesson!"

"Oh, he said I'd do: I was called the girl

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