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Hagar

by Mary Johnston · English · Gutenberg #49772 · 614,493 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Hagar

Author: Mary Johnston


        
Release date: August 24, 2015 [eBook #49772]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAGAR ***

HAGAR




  HAGAR

  BY
  MARY JOHNSTON

  [Illustration]

  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  The Riverside Press Cambridge
  1913




COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY MARY JOHNSTON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1913_




CONTENTS


       I. THE PACKET-BOAT            1
      II. GILEAD BALM                8
     III. THE DESCENT OF MAN        19
      IV. THE CONVICT               30
       V. MARIA                     45
      VI. EGLANTINE                 57
     VII. MR. LAYDON                70
    VIII. HAGAR AND LAYDON          82
      IX. ROMEO AND JULIET          92
       X. GILEAD BALM              104
      XI. THE LETTERS              116
     XII. A MEETING                132
    XIII. THE NEW SPRINGS          143
     XIV. NEW YORK                 154
      XV. LOOKING FOR THOMASINE    170
     XVI. THE MAINES               184
    XVII. THE SOCIALIST MEETING    194
   XVIII. A TELEGRAM               208
     XIX. ALEXANDRIA               221
      XX. MEDWAY                   231
     XXI. AT ROGER MICHAEL'S       244
    XXII. HAGAR IN LONDON          257
   XXIII. BY THE SEA               266
    XXIV. DENNY GAYDE              275
     XXV. HAGAR AND DENNY          284
    XXVI. GILEAD BALM              300
   XXVII. A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION  313
  XXVIII. NEW YORK AGAIN           323
    XXIX. ROSE DARRAGH             332
     XXX. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE      341
    XXXI. JOHN FAY                 351
   XXXII. RALPH                    360
  XXXIII. GILEAD BALM              372
   XXXIV. BRITTANY                 382




HAGAR




HAGAR




CHAPTER I

THE PACKET-BOAT


"_Low Braidge!_"

The people on deck bent over, some until heads touched knees, others,
more exactly calculating, just sufficiently to clear the beams. The
canal-boat passed beneath the bridge, and all straightened themselves
on their camp-stools. The gentlemen who were smoking put their cigars
again between their lips. The two or three ladies resumed book or
knitting. The sun was low, and the sycamores and willows fringing the
banks cast long shadows across the canal. The northern bank was not so
clothed with foliage, and one saw an expanse of bottom land, meadows
and cornfields, and beyond, low mountains, purple in the evening light.
The boat slipped from a stripe of gold into a stripe of shadow, and
from a stripe of shadow into a stripe of gold. The negro and the mule
on the towpath were now but a bit of dusk in motion, and now were lit
and, so to speak, powdered with gold-dust. Now the rope between boat
and towpath showed an arm-thick golden serpent, and now it did not show
at all. Now a little cloud of gnats and flies, accompanying the boat,
shone in burnished armour and now they put on a mantle of shade.

A dark little girl, of twelve years, dark and thin, sitting aft on the
deck floor, her long, white-stockinged legs folded decorously under
her, her blue gingham skirt spread out, and her Leghorn hat upon her
knees, appealed to one of the reading ladies. "Aunt Serena, what is
'evolution'?"

Miss Serena Ashendyne laid down her book. "'Evolution,'" she said
blankly, "'what is evolution?'"

"I heard grandfather say it just now. He said, 'That man Darwin and his
evolution'--"

"Oh!" said Miss Serena. "He meant a very wicked and irreligious
Englishman who wrote a dreadful book."

"Was it named 'Evolution'?"

"No. I forget just what it is called. 'Beginning'--No! 'Origin of
Species.' That was it."

"Have we got it in the library at Gilead Balm?"

"Heavens! No!"

"Why?"

"Your grandfather wouldn't let it come into the house. No lady would
read it."

"Oh!"

Miss Serena returned to her novel. She sat very elegantly on the
camp-stool, a graceful, long-lined, drooping form in a greenish-grey
delaine picked out with tiny daisies. It was made polonaise. Miss
Serena, alone of the people at Gilead Balm, kept up with the fashions.

At the other end of the long, narrow deck a knot of country gentlemen
were telling war stories. All had fought in the war--the war that had
been over now for twenty years and more. There were an empty sleeve and
a wooden leg in the group and other marks of bullet and sabre. They
told good stories, the country gentlemen, and they indulged in mellow
laughter. Blue rings of tobacco-smoke rose and mingled and made a haze
about that end of the boat.

"How the gentlemen are enjoying themselves!" said placidly one of the
knitting ladies.

The dark little girl continued to ponder the omission from the library.
"Aunt Serena--"

"Yes, Hagar."

"Is it like 'Tom Jones'?"

"'Tom Jones'! What do you know about 'Tom Jones'?"

"Grandfather was reading it one day and laughing, and after he had done
with it I got it down from the top shelf and asked him if I might read
it, and he said, 'No, certainly not! it isn't a book for ladies.'"

"Your grandfather was quite right. You read entirely too much anyway.
Dr. Bude told your mother so."

The little girl turned large, alarmed eyes upon her. "I don't read half
as much as I used to. I don't read except just a little time in the
morning and evening and after supper. It would _kill_ me if I couldn't
read--"

"Well, well," said Miss Serena, "I suppose we shall continue to spoil
you!"

She said it in a very sweet voice, and she patted the child's arm
and then she went back to "The Wooing O't." She was fond of reading
novels herself, though she liked better to do macramé work and to paint
porcelain placques.

The packet-boat glided on. It was almost the last packet-boat in the
state and upon almost its last journey. Presently there would go away
forever the long, musical winding of the packet-boat horn. It would
never echo any more among the purple hills, but the locomotive would
shriek here as it shrieked elsewhere. Beyond the willows and sycamores,
across the river whose reaches were seen at intervals, gangs of
convicts with keepers and guards and overseers were at work upon the
railroad.

The boat passing through a lock, the dark little girl stared,
fascinated, at one of these convicts, a "trusty," a young white man
who was there at the lock-keeper's on some errand and who now stood
speaking to the stout old man on the coping of masonry. As the water
in the lock fell and the boat was steadily lowered and the stone walls
on either hand grew higher and higher, the figure of the convict came
to stand far above all on deck. Dressed hideously, in broad stripes of
black and white, it stood against the calm evening sky, with a sense
of something withdrawn and yet gigantic. The face was only once turned
toward the boat with its freight of people who dressed as they pleased.
It was not at all a bad face, and it was boyishly young. The boat
slipped from the lock and went on down the canal, between green banks.
The negro on the towpath was singing and his rich voice floated across--

  "For everywhere I went ter pray,
  I met all hell right on my way."

The country gentlemen were laughing again, wrapped in the blue and
fragrant smoke. The captain of the packet-boat came up the companionway
and passed from group to group like a benevolent patriarch. Down below,
supper was cooking; one smelled the coffee. The sun was slipping lower,
in the green bottoms the frogs were choiring. Standing in the prow of
the boat a negro winded the long packet-boat horn. It echoed and echoed
from the purple hills.

The dark little girl was still staring at the dwindling lock. The
black-and-white figure, striped like a zebra, was there yet, though it
had come down out of the sky and had now only the green of the country
about and behind it. It grew smaller and smaller until it was no larger
than a black-and-white woodpecker--it was gone.

She appealed again to Miss Serena. "Aunt Serena, what do you suppose he
did?"

Miss Serena, who prided herself upon her patience, put down her book
for the tenth time. "Of whom are you speaking, Hagar?"

"That man back there--the convict."

"I didn't notice him. But if he is a convict, he probably did something
very wicked."

Hagar sighed. "I don't think _anybody_ ought to be made to dress like
that. It--it smudged my soul just to look at it."

"Convicts," said Miss Serena, "are not usually people of fine feelings.
And you ought to take warning by him never to do anything wicked."

A silence while the trees and the flowering blackberry bushes went by;
then, "Aunt Serena--"

"Yes?"

"The woman over there with the baby--she says her husband got hurt in
an accident--and she's got to get to him--and she hasn't got any money.
The stout man gave her something, and I _think_ the captain wouldn't
let her pay. Can't I--wouldn't you--can't I--give her just a little?"

"The trouble is," said Miss Serena, "that you never know whether or not
those people are telling the truth. And we aren't rich, as you know,
Hagar. But if you want to, you can go ask your grandfather if he will
give you something to give."

The dark little girl undoubled her white-stockinged legs, got up,
smoothed down her blue gingham dress, and went forward until the
tobacco-smoke wrapped her in a fragrant fog. Out of it came, genially,
the Colonel's voice, rich as old madeira, shot like shot silk with
curious electric tensions and strains and agreements, a voice at once
mellifluous and capable of revealments demanding other adjectives, a
voice that was the Colonel's and spoke the Colonel from head to heel.
It went with his beauty, intact yet at fifty-eight, with the greying
amber of his hair, mustache, and imperial; with his eyes, not large but
finely shaped and coloured; with his slightly aquiline nose; with the
height and easy swing of his body that was neither too spare nor too
full. It went with him from head to foot, and, though it was certainly
not a loud voice nor a too-much-used one, it quite usually dominated
whatever group for the moment enclosed the Colonel. He was speaking now
in a kind of energetic, golden drawl. "So he came up to me and said,
'Dash it, Ashendyne! if gentlemen can't be allowed in this degenerate
age to rule their own households and arrange their own duels--'" He
became aware of the child standing by him, and put out a well-formed,
nervous hand. "Yes, Gipsy? What is it you want now?"

Hagar explained sedately.

"Her husband hurt and can't get to him to nurse him?" said the Colonel.
"Well, well! That's pretty bad! I suppose we must take up a collection.
Pass the hat, Gipsy!"

Hagar went to each of the country gentlemen, not with the suggested
hat, but with her small palm held out, cupped. One by one they dropped
into it quarter or dime, and each, as his coin tinkled down, had for
the collector of bounty a drawling, caressing, humorous word. She
thanked each gentleman as his bit of silver touched her hand and
thanked with a sedate little manner of perfection. Manners at Gilead
Balm were notoriously of a perfection.

Hagar took the money to the woman with the baby and gave it to her
shyly, with a red spot in each cheek. She was careful to explain, when
the woman began to stammer thanks, that it was from her grandfather
and the other gentlemen and that they were anxious to help. She was a
very honest little girl, with an honest wish to place credit where it
belonged.

Back beside Miss Serena she sat and studied the moving green banks.
The sun was almost down; there were wonderful golden clouds above the
mountains. Willow and sycamore, on the river side of the canal, fell
away. Across an emerald, marshy strip, you saw the bright, larger
stream, mirror for the bright sky, and across it in turn you saw
limestone cliffs topped with shaggy woods, and you heard the sound of
picks against rock and saw another band of convicts, white and black,
making the railroad. The packet-boat horn was blown again,--long,
musical, somewhat mournfully echoing. The negro on the towpath, riding
sideways on his mule, was singing still.

"Aunt Serena--"

"Yes, Hagar."

"Why is it that women don't have any money?"

Miss Serena closed her book. She glanced at the fields and the
sky-line. "We shall be at Gilead Balm in ten minutes.--You ask too many
questions, Hagar! It is a very bad habit to be always interrogating. It
is quite distinctly unladylike."




CHAPTER II

GILEAD BALM


At the Gilead Balm landing waited Captain Bob with a negro man to
carry up to the house the Colonel's portmanteau and Miss Serena's
small leather trunk. The packet-boat came in sight, white and slow as
a deliberate swan, drew reflectively down the shining reach of water,
and sidled to the landing. The Colonel shook hands with all the country
gentlemen and bowed to the ladies, and the country gentlemen bowed to
Miss Serena, who in turn bent her head and smiled, and the captain said
good-bye, and the Colonel gave the attendant darky a quarter, and the
woman with the baby came to that side of the boat and held for a moment
the hand of the dark little girl, and then the gangplank was placed and
the three Ashendynes passed over to the Colonel's land. The horn blew
again, long, melodious; the negro on the towpath said, "Get up!" to the
mule. Amid a waving of hands and a chorus of slow, agreeable voices the
packet-boat glided from the landing and proceeded down the pink water
between the willows and sycamores.

Captain Bob, with his hound Luna at his heels, greeted the returning
members of the family: "Well, Serena, did you have a pleasant visit?
Hey, Gipsy, you've grown a week! Well, Colonel?"

The Colonel shook hands with his brother. "Very pleasant time, Bob!
Good old-time people, too good for this damned new-fangled world!
But--" he breathed deep. "I am glad to get home. I am always glad to
get home. Well? Everything all right?"

"Right as a trivet! The Bishop's here, and Mrs. LeGrand. Came on the
stage yesterday."

"That's good news," said the Colonel. "The Bishop's always welcome, and
Mrs. LeGrand is most welcome."

The four began to walk toward the house, half a mile away, just visible
among great trees. The dark little girl walked beside the hound, but
the hound kept her nose in Captain Bob's palm. She was fond of Hagar,
but Captain Bob was her god. As for Captain Bob himself, he walked like
a curious, unfinished, somewhat flawed and shortened suggestion of
his brother. He was shorter than the Colonel and broader; hair, nose,
eyes, mouth were nothing like so fine; carriage and port were quite
different; he lacked the _cachet_, he lacked the _grand air_. For all
that, the fact that they were brothers was evident enough. Captain Bob
loved dogs and hunting, and read the county newspaper and the sporting
almanac. He was not complex. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred he
acted from instinct and habit, and the puzzling hundredth time he beat
about for tradition and precedent. He was good-natured and spendthrift,
with brains enough for not too distant purposes. Emotionally, he was
strongest in family affection. "Missed you all!" he now observed
cheerfully. "Gilead Balm's been like a graveyard."

"How is mother?" asked Miss Serena. She was picking her way delicately
through the green lane, between the evening primroses, the grey-green
delaine held just right. "She wrote me that she burned her hand trying
the strawberry preserves."

"It's all right now. Never saw Old Miss looking better!"

The dark little girl turned her dark eyes on Captain Bob. "How is my
mother?"

"Maria? Well, I should say that she was all right, too. I haven't heard
her complain."

"Gad! I wish she would complain," ejaculated the Colonel. "Then one
could tell her there was nothing to complain about. I hate these women
who go through life with a smile on their lips and an indictment in
their eyes--when there's only the usual up and down of living to
indict. I had rather they would whine--though I hate them to whine,
too. But women are all cowards. No woman knows how to take the world."

The dark little girl, who had been walking between the Colonel and
Captain Bob, began to tremble. "Whoever else's a coward, my mother's
not--"

"I don't think, father, you ought--"

Captain Bob was stronger yet. He was fond of Gipsy, and he thought
that sometimes the family bore too hardly on Maria. Now and then he
did a small bit of cloudy thinking, and when he did it he always
brought forth the result with a certain curious clearing of the throat
and nodding of the head, as though the birth of an idea was attended
with considerable physical strain. "No, Colonel," now he said, "you
oughtn't! Damn it, where'd we be but for women anyhow? As for Maria--I
think you're too hard on Maria. The chief trouble with Maria is that
she isn't herself an Ashendyne. Of course, she can't help that, but I
think it is a pity. Always did think that men ought to marry at least
fifth or sixth cousins. Bring women in without blood and traditions of
people they've got to live with--of course, there's trouble adapting.
Seen it a score of times. Maria's just like the rest when they're not
cousins. Ought somehow to be cousins."

"Bob, you are a perfect fool," remarked the Colonel.

He walked on, between the primroses, his hands behind him, tall and
easy in his black, wide-skirted coat and his soft black hat. The earth
was in shadow, but the sky glowed carnation. Against it stood out the
long, low red-brick house of Gilead Balm. At either gable end rose
pyramidal cedars, high and dark against the vivid sky. In the lane
there was the smell of dewy grass, and on either hand, back from the
vine-draped rail fences, rolled the violet fields. Somewhere in the
distance sounded the tinkling of cow bells. The ardent sky began to
pale; the swallows were circling above the chimneys of Gilead Balm, and
now the silver Venus came out clear.

The little girl named Hagar lagged a little going up the low hill on
which the house stood. She was growing fast, and all journeys were
exciting, and she was taking iron because she wasn't very strong,
and she had had a week of change and had been thinking hard and was
tired. She wanted to see her mother, and indeed she wanted to see all
at Gilead Balm, for, unlike her mother, she loved Gilead Balm, but
going up the hill she lagged a little. Partly it was to look at the
star and to listen to the distant bells. She was not aware that she
observed that which we call Nature with a deep passion and curiosity,
that beauty was the breath of her nostrils, and that she hungered
and thirsted after the righteousness of knowledge. She only came
slowly, after many years, into that much knowledge of herself. To-day
she was but an undeveloped child, her mind a nebula just beginning
to spiral. In conversation she would have applied the word "pretty"
indiscriminately to the flushed sky, the star, the wheeling swallows,
the yellow primroses. But within, already, the primroses struck one
note, and the wheeling swallows another, and the sky another, and the
star another, and, combined, they made a chord that was like no other
chord. Already her moments were distinguished, and each time she saw
Gilead Balm she saw, and dimly knew that she saw, a different Gilead
Balm.

She climbed the hill a little stumblingly, a dark, thin child with
braided, dusky hair. She was so tired that things went into a kind
of mist--the house and the packet-boat and the lock and the convict
and the piping frogs and the cat-tails in a marsh and the word
"evolution."... And then, up on the low hilltop, Dilsey and Plutus lit
the lamps, and the house had a row of topaz eyes;--and here was the
cedar at the little gate, and the smell of box--box smell was always of
a very especial character, dark in hue, cool in temperature, and quite
unfathomably old. The four passed through the house gate and went up
the winding path between the box and the old, old blush roses--and here
was the old house dog Roger fawning on the Colonel--and the topaz eyes
were growing bigger, bigger....

"I am glad to get home," said Miss Serena, in front. "It's curious how,
every time you go from home, something happens to cure you of a roving
disposition."

Captain Bob laughed. "Never knew you had a roving disposition, Serena!
Luna here, now,--Luna's got a roving disposition--haven't you, old
girl?"

"Luna," replied Miss Serena with some asperity, "Luna makes no effort
to alter her disposition. I do. Everybody's got tendencies and notions
that it is their bounden duty to suppress. If they don't, it leads to
all kind of changes and upheavals.--And that is what I criticize in
Maria. She makes no effort, either. It's most unfortunate."

The Colonel, in front of them all, moved on with a fine serenity. He
had taken off his hat, and in the yet warm glow the grey-amber of his
hair seemed fairly luminous. As he walked he looked appreciatively
up at the evening star. He read poetry with a fine, discriminating,
masculine taste, and now, with a gesture toward the star, he repeated
a line of Byron. Maria and her idiosyncrasies troubled him only when
they stood actually athwart his path; certainly he had never brooded
upon them, nor turned them over in his hand and looked at them. She
was his son's wife--more, he was inclined to think, the pity! She
was, therefore, Ashendyne, and she was housed at Gilead Balm. He was
inclined to be fond of the child Hagar. As for his son--the Colonel, in
his cooler moments, supposed, damn it! that he and Medway were too much
alike to get on together. At any rate, whatever the reason, they did
not get on together. Gilead Balm had not seen the younger Ashendyne for
some years. He was in Europe, whence he wrote, at very long intervals,
an amiable traveller's letter. Neither had he and Maria gotten on well
together.

The house grew large, filling all the foreground. The topaz eyes
changed to a wide, soft, diffused light, pouring from windows and
the open hall door. In it now appeared the figures of the elder Mrs.
Ashendyne, of the Bishop, and Mrs. LeGrand, coming out upon the porch
to welcome the travellers.

Hagar took her grandmother's kiss and Mrs. LeGrand's kiss and the
Bishop's kiss, and then, after a few moments of standing still in the
hall while the agreeable, southern voices rose and fell, she stole
away, went up the shallow, worn stairway, turned to the left, and
opened the door of her mother's room. She opened it softly. "Uncle
Plutus says you've got a headache."

Maria's voice came from the sofa in the window. "Yes, I have. Shut the
door softly, and don't let us have any light. But I don't mind your
sitting by me."

The couch was deep and heaped with pillows. Maria's slight, small
form was drawn up in a corner, her head high, her hands twisted and
locked about her knees. She wore a soft white wrapper, tied beneath her
breast with a purple ribbon. She had beautiful hair. Thick and long
and dusky, it was now loosened and spread until it made a covering
for the pillows. Out from its waves looked her small face, still and
exhausted. The headache, after having lasted all day, was going away
now at twilight. She just turned her dark eyes upon her daughter. "I
don't mind your lying down beside me," she said. "There's room. Only
don't jar my head--" Hagar lay carefully down upon the couch, her head
in the hollow of her mother's arm. "Did you have a good time?"

"Yes.... Pretty good."

"What did you do?"

"There was another little girl named Sylvie. We played in the hayloft,
and we made willow baskets, and we cut paper dolls out of a 'Godey's
Lady's Book.' I named mine Lucy Ashton and Diana Vernon and Rebecca,
and she didn't know any good names, so I named hers for her. We named
them Rosalind and Cordelia and Vashti. Then there was a lady who played
backgammon with me, and I read two books."

"What were they?"

"One was 'Gulliver's Travels.' I didn't like it altogether, though I
liked some of it. The other was Shelley's 'Shorter Poems.' Oh"--Hagar
rose to a sitting posture--"I liked that better than anything I've
_ever_ read--"

"You are young to be reading Shelley," said her mother. She spoke with
her lips only, her young, pain-stilled face high upon the pillows.
"What did you like best?"

Hagar pondered it. "I liked the 'Cloud,' and I liked the 'West Wind,'
and I liked the 'Spirit of Night'--"

Some one tapped at the door, and then without waiting for an answer
opened it. The elder Mrs. Ashendyne entered. Hagar slipped from the
sofa and Maria changed her position, though very slightly. "Come in,"
she said, though Mrs. Ashendyne was already in.

"Old Miss," as the major part of Gilead Balm called her, Old Miss
crossed the room with a stately tread and took the winged chair. She
intended tarrying but a moment, but she was a woman who never stood
to talk. She always sat down like a regent, and the standing was
done by others. She was a large woman, tall rather than otherwise,
of a distinct comeliness, and authoritative--oh, authoritative from
her black lace cap on her still brown, smoothly parted hair, to her
low-heeled list shoes, black against her white stockings! Now she
folded her hands upon her black stuff skirt and regarded Maria. "Are
you better?"

"Yes, thank you."

"If you would take my advice," said Mrs. Ashendyne, "and put
horseradish leaves steeped in hot water to your forehead and the back
of your neck, you would find it a great relief."

"I had some lavender water," said Maria.

"The horseradish would have been far better. Are you coming to supper?"

"No, I think not. I do not care for anything. I am not hungry."

"I will have Phoebe fetch you a little thin chipped beef and a beaten
biscuit and a cup of coffee. You must eat.--If you gave way less it
would be better for you."

Maria looked at her with sombre eyes. At once the fingers slipped to
other and deeper notes. "If I gave way less.... Well, yes, I do give
way. I have never seen how not to. I suppose if I were cleverer and
braver, I should see--"

"What I mean," said Old Miss with dignity, "is that the Lord,
for his own good purposes,--and it is _sinful_ to question his
purposes,--regulated society as it is regulated, and placed women where
they are placed. No one claims--certainly I don't claim--that women
as women do not see a great deal of hardship. The Bible gives us to
understand that it is their punishment. Then I say take your punishment
with meekness. It is possible that by doing so you may help earn
remission for all."

"There was always," said Maria, "something frightful to me in the old
notion of whipping-boys for kings and princes. How very bad to be the
whipping-boy, and how infinitely worse to be the king or prince whose
whipping-boy you were!"

A red came into Mrs. Ashendyne's face. "You are at times positively
blasphemous!" she said. "I do not at all see of what, personally, you
have to complain. If Medway is estranged from you, you have probably
only yourself to thank--"

"I never wish," said Maria, "to see Medway again."

Medway's mother rose with stateliness from the winged chair. "When it
comes to statements like that from a wife, it is time for old-fashioned
people like myself to take our leave.--Phoebe shall bring you your
supper. Hagar, you had better come with me."

"Leave Hagar here," said the other.

"The bell will ring in ten minutes. Come, child!"

"Stay where you are, Hagar. When the bell rings, she shall come."

The elder Mrs. Ashendyne's voice deepened. "It is hard for me to see
the mind of my son's child perverted, filled with all manner of foolish
queries and rebellions."

"Your son's child," answered Maria from among her pillows, "happens to
be also my child. His family has just had her for a solid week. Now,
pray let me have her for an hour." Her eyes, dark and large in her
thin, young face, narrowed until the lashes met. "I am perfectly aware
of how deplorable is the whole situation. If I were wiser and stronger
and more heroic, I suppose I should break through it. I suppose I
should go away with Hagar. I suppose I should learn to work. I suppose
I should somehow keep us both. I suppose I might live again. I suppose
I might ... even ... get a divorce--"

Her mother-in-law towered. "The Bishop shall talk to you the first
thing in the morning--"




CHAPTER III

THE DESCENT OF MAN


A pool of June sunlight lay on the library floor. It made a veritable
Pool of Siloam, with all around a brown, bank-like duskiness. The room
was by no means book-lined, but there were four tall mahogany cases,
one against each wall, well filled for the most part with mellow calf.
Flanking each case hung Ashendyne portraits, in oval, very old gilt
frames. Beneath three of these were fixed silhouettes of Revolutionary
Ashendynes; beneath the others, war photographs, _cartes de visite_, a
dozen in one frame. There was a mahogany escritoire and mahogany chairs
and a mahogany table, and, before the fireplace, a fire-screen done in
cross-stitch by a colonial Ashendyne. The curtains were down for the
summer, and the dark, polished floor was bare. The room was large, and
there presided a pleasant sense of unencumbered space and coolness.

In the parlour, across the hall, Miss Serena had been allowed full
power. Here there was a crocheted macramé lambrequin across the
mantel-shelf, and a plush table-scarf worked with chenille, and
fine thread tidies for the chairs, and a green-and-white worsted
"water-lily" mat for the lamp, and embroidery on the piano cover. Here
were pelargoniums and azaleas painted on porcelain placques, and a
painted screen--gladioli and calla lilies,--and autumn leaves mounted
on the top of a small table, and a gilded milking stool, and gilded
cat-tails in decalcomania jars. But the Colonel had barred off the
library. "Embroider petticoat-world to the top of your bent--but don't
embroider books!"

The Colonel was not in the library. He had mounted his horse and
ridden off down the river to see a brother-in-law about some piece
of business. Ashendynes and Coltsworths fairly divided the county
between them. Blood kin and marriage connections,--all counted to the
seventeenth degree,--traditional old friendships, old acquaintances,
clients, tenants, neighbours, the coloured people sometime their
servants, folk generally, from Judge to blacksmith,--the two families
and their allies ramified over several hundred square miles, and when
you said "the county," what you saw were Ashendynes and Coltsworths.
They lived in brick houses set among green acres and in frame houses
facing village streets. None were in the least rich, a frightful,
impoverishing war being no great time behind them, and many were
poor--but one and all they had "quality."

The Colonel was gone down the river to Hawk Nest. Captain Bob was in
the stable yard. Muffled, from the parlour, the doors being carefully
closed, came the notes of "Silvery Waves." Miss Serena was practising.
It was raspberry-jam time of year. In the brick kitchen out in the
yard Old Miss spent the morning with her knitting, superintending
operations. A great copper kettle sat on the stove. Between it and the
window had been placed a barrel and here perched a half-grown negro
boy, in his hands a pole with a paddle-like cross-piece at the further
end. With this he slowly stirred, round and round, the bubbling,
viscous mass in the copper kettle. Kitchen doors and windows were wide,
and in came the hum of bees and the fresh June air, and out floated
delectable odours of raspberry jam. Old Miss sat in an ample low chair
in the doorway, knitting white cotton socks for the Colonel.

The Bishop--who was a bishop from another state--was writing letters.
Mrs. LeGrand had taken her novel out to the hammock beneath the cedars.
Upstairs, in her own room, in a big four-poster bed, lay Maria, ill
with a low fever. Dr. Bude came every other day, and he said that he
hoped it was nothing much but that he couldn't tell yet: Mrs. Ashendyne
must lie quiet and take the draught he left, and her room must be kept
still and cool, and he would suggest that Phoebe, whom she seemed to
like to have about her, should nurse her, and he would suggest, too,
that there be no disturbing conversation, and that, indeed, she be
left in the greatest quiet. It seemed nervous largely--"Yes, yes,
that's true! We all ought to fight more than we do. But the nervous
system isn't the imaginary thing people think! She isn't very strong,
and--wrongly, of course--she dashes herself against conditions and
environment like a bird against glass. I don't suppose," said Dr. Bude,
"that it would be possible for her to travel?"

Maria lay in the four-poster bed, making images of the light and shadow
in the room. Sometimes she asked for Hagar, and sometimes for hours she
seemed to forget that Hagar existed. Old Miss, coming into the room
at one of these times, and seeing her push the child from her with a
frightened air and a stammering "I don't know you"--Old Miss, later in
the day, took Hagar into her own room, set her in a chair beside her,
taught her a new knitting-stitch, and explained that it would be kinder
to remain out of her mother's room, seeing that her presence there
evidently troubled her mother.

"It troubles her sometimes," said Hagar, "but it doesn't trouble her
most times. Most times she likes me there."

"I do not think you can judge of that," said her grandmother. "At any
rate, I think it best that you should stay out of the room. You can,
of course, go in to say good-morning and good-night.--Throw the thread
over your finger like that. Mimy is making sugar-cakes this morning,
and if you want to you can help her cut them out."

"Grandmother, please let me go _four_ times a day--"

"No. I do not consider it best for either of you. You heard the doctor
say that your mother must not be agitated, and you saw yourself, a
while ago, that she did not seem to want you. I will tell Phoebe. Be
a good, obedient child!--Bring me the bag yonder, and let's see if we
can't find enough pink worsted for a doll's afghan."

That had been two days ago. Hagar went, morning and evening, to her
mother's room, and sometimes Maria knew her and held her hands and
played with her hair, and sometimes she did not seem to know her and
ignored her or talked to her as a stranger. Her grandmother told her to
pray for her mother's recovery. She did not need the telling; she loved
her mother, and her petitions were frequent. Sometimes she got down on
her knees to make them; sometimes she just made them walking around.
"O God, save my mother. For Jesus' sake. Amen."--"O God, let my mother
get well. For Jesus' sake. Amen."--She had finished the pink afghan,
and she had done the dusting and errands her grandmother appointed her.
This morning they had let her arrange the flowers in the bowls and
vases. She always liked to do that, and she had been happy for almost
an hour--but then the feeling came back....

The bright pool on the library floor did not reach to the bookcases.
They were all in the gold-dust powdered umber of the rest of the room.
Hagar standing before one of them, first on a hassock, and then, for
the upper shelves, on a chair, hunted something to read. "Ministering
Children"--she had read it. "Stepping Heavenward"--she had read it.
"Home Influence" and "Mother's Recompense"--she had read them. Mrs.
Sherwood--she had read Mrs. Sherwood--many volumes of Mrs. Sherwood.
In after life it was only by a violent effort that she dismissed,
in favour of any other India, the spectre of Mrs. Sherwood's India.
"Parent's Assistant and Moral Tales"--she knew Simple Susan and
Rosamond and all of them by heart. "Rasselas"--she had read it.
"Scottish Chiefs"--she had read it. The forms of Wallace and Helen
and Murray and Edwin flitted through her mind--she half put out her
hand to the book, then withdrew it. She wasn't at all happy, and she
wanted novelty. Miss Mühlbach--"Prince Eugene and His Times"--"Napoleon
and Marie Louise"--she had read those, too. "The Draytons and the
Davenants"--she half thought she would read about Olive and Roger
again, but at last she passed them by also. There wasn't anything on
that shelf she wanted. She called it the blue and green and red shelf,
because the books were bound in those colours. Miss Serena's name was
in most of these volumes.

The shelf that she undertook next had another air. To Hagar each case
had its own air, and each shelf its own air, and each book its own
air. "Blair's Rhetoric"--she had read some of that, but she didn't
want it to-day. "Pilgrim's Progress"--she knew that by heart. "Burke's
Speeches"--"Junius"--she had read "Junius," as she had read many
another thing simply because it was there, and a book was a book. She
had read it without much understanding, but she liked the language.
Milton--she knew a great part of Milton, but to-day she didn't want
poetry. Poetry was for when you were happy. Scott--on another day Scott
might have sufficed, but to-day she wanted something new--so new and so
interesting that it would make the hard, unhappy feeling go away. She
stepped from the hassock upon the chair and began to study the titles
of the books on almost the top shelf.... There was one in the corner,
quite out of sight unless you were on a chair, right up here, face to
face with the shelf. The book was even pushed back as though it had
retired--or had been retired--behind its fellows so as to be out of
danger, or, perhaps, out of the way of being dangerous. Hagar put in
her slender, sun-browned hand and drew it forward until she could read
the legend on the back--"The Descent of Man." She drew it quite forth,
and bringing both hands into play opened it. "By Charles Darwin."
She turned the leaves. There were woodcuts--cuts that exercised a
fascination. She glanced at the first page: "He who wishes to decide
whether man is the modified descendant of some preëxisting form--"

Hagar turned upon the chair and looked about her. The room was a desert
for solitude and balmy quiet. Distantly, through the closed parlour
doors, came Miss Serena's rendering of "Monastery Bells." She knew
that her grandfather was down the river, and that her grandmother was
making raspberry jam. She knew that the Bishop was in his room, and
that Mrs. LeGrand was out under the cedars. Uncle Bob did not count
anyway--he rarely asked embarrassing questions. She may have hesitated
one moment, but no more. She got down from the chair, put it back
against the wall, closed the bookcase door, and taking the "Descent
of Man" with her went over to the old, worn horsehair sofa and curled
herself up at the end in a cool and slippery hollow. A gold-dust shaft,
slipping through the window, lit her hair, the printed page, and the
slim, long-fingered hand that clasped it.

Hagar knew quite well what she was doing. She was going to read a book
which, if her course were known, she would be forbidden to read. It had
happened before now that she had read books under the ban of Gilead
Balm. But heretofore she had always been able to say that she had not
known that they were so, had not known she was doing wrong. That could
not be said in this case. Aunt Serena had distinctly told her that
Charles Darwin was a wicked and irreligious man, and that no lady would
read his books.... But then Aunt Serena had unsparingly condemned other
books which Hagar's mind yet refused to condemn. She had condemned "The
Scarlet Letter." When Gilead Balm discovered Hagar at the last page of
that book, there had ensued a family discussion. Miss Serena said that
she blushed when she thought of the things that Hagar was learning.
The Colonel had not blushed, but he said that such books unsettled all
received notions, and while he supported her he wasn't going to have
Medway's child imbibing damned anarchical sentiments of any type.
Old Miss said a number of things, most of which tended toward Maria.
The latter had defended her daughter, but afterwards she told Hagar
that in this world, even if you didn't think you were doing wrong, it
made for all the happiness there seemed to be not to do what other
people thought you ought not to do.... But Hagar didn't believe yet
that there was anything wrong in reading "The Scarlet Letter." She had
been passionately sorry for Hester, and she had felt--she did not know
why--a kind of terrified pity for Mr. Dimmesdale, and she had loved
little Pearl. She had intended asking her mother what the red-cloth
letter that Hester Prynne wore meant, but it had gone out of her mind.
The chapter she liked best was the one with little Pearl playing in the
wood.... Perhaps Aunt Serena, having been mistaken about that book, was
mistaken, too, about Charles Darwin.

Neither now nor later did she in any wise love the feel of wrong-doing.
Forbidden fruit did not appeal to her merely because it was forbidden.
But if there was no inner forbidding, if she truly doubted the justice
or authority or abstract rightness of the restraining hand, she was
capable of attaining the fruit whether forbidden or no. There was
always the check of great native kindliness. If what she wanted to do
was going--no matter how senselessly--to trouble or hurt other people's
feelings, on the whole she wouldn't do it. In the case of this June
day and the "Descent of Man" the library was empty. She only wanted to
look at the pictures and to run over the reading enough to see what it
was about--then she would put it back on the top shelf. She was not by
nature indirect or secretive. She preferred to go straightforwardly,
to act in the open. But if the wall of not-agreed-in objection stood
too high and thick before her, she was capable of stealing forth in the
dusk and seeking a way around it. Coiled now in the cool hollow of the
sofa, half in and half out of the shaft of sunshine, she began to read.

The broad band of gold-dust shifted place. Miss Serena, arrived at
the last ten minutes of her hour and a half at the piano, began to
play "Pearls and Roses." Out in the brick kitchen Old Miss dropped a
tablespoonful of raspberry jam into a saucer, let it cool, tasted, and
pronounced it done. The negro boy and Mimy between them lifted the
copper kettle from the stove. Upstairs in Gilead Balm's best room the
Bishop folded and slipped into an addressed envelope the last letter he
was going to write that morning. Out under the cedars Mrs. LeGrand came
to a dull stretch in her novel. She yawned, closed the book, and leaned
back against the pillows in the hammock.

Mrs. LeGrand was fair and forty, but only pleasantly plump. She had
a creamy skin, moderately large, hazel eyes, moderately far apart, a
small, straight nose, a yielding mouth, and a chin that indubitably
would presently be double. She was a widow and an orphan. Married at
nineteen, her husband, the stars of a brigadier-general upon his grey
collar, had within the year fallen upon some one of the blood-soaked
battle-grounds of the state. Her father, the important bearer of an
old, important name, had served the Confederacy well in a high civil
capacity. When the long horror of the war was over, and the longer,
miserable torture of the Reconstruction was passing, and a comparative
ease and pale dawn of prosperity rose over the state, Mrs. LeGrand
looked about her from the remnant of an old plantation on the edge of
a tidewater town. The house was dilapidated, but large. The grounds had
Old Neglect for gardener, but they, too, were large, and only needed
Good-Care-at-Last for complete rehabilitation. Mrs. LeGrand had a kind
of smooth, continuous, low-pressure energy, but no money. "A girls'
school," she murmured to herself.

When she wrote, here and there over the state, it was at once seen by
her correspondents that this was just the thing for the daughter of a
public man and the widow of a gallant officer. It was both ladylike
and possible.... That was some years ago. Mrs. LeGrand's School for
Young Ladies was now an established fact. The house was repaired, the
grounds were trim, there was a corps of six teachers, with prospects
of expansion, there were day pupils and boarding pupils. Mrs LeGrand
saw in her mind's eye long wing-like extensions to the main house where
more boarding pupils might be accommodated.... She was successful, and
success agreed with her. The coat grew sleek, the cream rose to the
top, every angle disappeared; she was warmly optimistic, and smooth,
indolent good company. In the summer-time she left Eglantine and from
late June to September shared her time between the Springs and the
country homes of kindred, family connections, or girlhood friends. She
nearly always came for a fortnight or more to Gilead Balm.

Now, leaning back in the hammock, the novel shut, her eyes closed, she
was going pleasantly over to herself the additions and improvements
to be carried out at Eglantine. From this her mind slipped to her
correspondence with a French teacher who promised well, and thence
to certain letters received that week from patrons with daughters.
One of these, from a state farther south, spoke in highest praise of
Mrs. LeGrand's guardianship of the young female mind, of the safe and
elegant paths into which she guided it, and of her gift generally for
preserving dew and bloom and ignorance of evil in her interesting
charges. Every one likes praise and no one is so churlish as to refuse
a proffered bouquet or to doubt the judgment of the donor. Mrs. LeGrand
experienced from head to foot a soft and amiable glow.

For ten minutes longer she lay in an atmosphere of balm, then she
opened her eyes, drew her watch from her white-ribbon belt, and
glancing at it surmised that by now the Bishop might have finished his
letters. Upon this thought she rose, and paced across the bright June
grass to the house. "Pearls and Roses" floated from the parlour. Her
hand on the doorknob, Mrs. LeGrand paused irresolutely for a moment,
then lightly took it away and crossed the hall to the library. A minute
later the Bishop, portly and fine, letters in his hand, came down the
stairs, and turned toward this room. The mail-bag always hung, he
remembered, by the library escritoire. Though he was a large man, he
moved with great lightness; he was at once ponderous and easy. Miss
Serena at the piano could hardly have heard him pass the door, so
something occult, perhaps, made her ignore the _da capo_ over the bar
of "Pearls and Roses" which she had now reached. She struck a final
chord, rose, closed the piano, and left the parlour.




CHAPTER IV

THE CONVICT


"My dear Bishop!" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand; "won't you come here and talk
to this little girl?"

"To Hagar?" answered the Bishop. "What is the trouble with Hagar?
Have you broken your doll, poor dear?" He came easily across to the
horsehair sofa, a good man, by definition, as ever was. "What's
grieving you, little girl?"

"I think that it is Hagar who may come to grieve others," said Mrs.
LeGrand. "I do not suppose it is my business to interfere,--as I should
interfere were she in my charge at Eglantine,--but I cannot but see in
my daily task how difficult it is to eradicate from a youthful mind the
stain that has been left by an improper book--"

"An improper book! What are you doing, Hagar, with an improper book?"

The Bishop put out his hand and took it. He looked at the title and at
the author's name beneath, turned over a dozen pages, closed the book,
and put it from him on the cold, bare mahogany table. "It was not for
this that I christened you," he said.

Miss Serena joined the group.

"Serena," appealed Mrs. LeGrand, "_do_ you think Hagar ought to be
allowed to contaminate her mind by a book like that?"

Miss Serena looked. "That child!--She's been reading Darwin!"

A slow colour came into her cheeks. The book was shocking, but the
truly shocking thing was how absolutely Hagar had disobeyed. Miss
Serena's soul was soft as wax, pliant as a reed to the authorities her
world ranged before her. By an inevitable reaction stiffness showed
in the few cases where she herself held the orb of authority. To be
disobeyed was very grievous to her. Where it was only negligence in
regard to some command of her own,--direction to a servant, commands
in her Sunday-School class,--she had often to put up with it, though
always with a swelling sense of injury. But when things combined,
when disobedience to Serena Ashendyne was also disobedience to the
constituted authorities, Miss Serena became adamant.

Now she looked at Hagar with a little gasp, and then, seeing through
the open door the elder Mrs. Ashendyne entering from the kitchen, she
called to her. "Mother, come here a moment!"...

"If she had said that she was sorry," pronounced the Bishop, "you might
forgive her, I think, this time. But if she is going to harden her
heart like that, you had best let her see that all sin, in whatever
degree, brings suffering. And I should suit, I think, the punishment
to the offence. Hagar told me only yesterday that she had rather read
a book than gather cherries or play with dolls, or go visiting, or
anything. I think I should forbid her to open any book at all for a
week."

Behind Gilead Balm, beyond the orchard and a strip of meadow, sprang
a ridge of earth, something more than a hill, something less than
a low mountain. It was safe, dry, warm, and sandy, too cut-over
and traversed to be popular with snakes, too within a stone's throw
of the overseer's house and the overseer's dogs to be subject to
tramps or squirrel-hunting boys, just wooded enough and furrowed with
shallow ravines to make it to children a romantic, sprite-inhabited
region. When children came to Gilead Balm, as sometimes, in the slow,
continuous procession through the houses of a people who traditionally
kept "open house," they did come, Hagar and they always played
freely and alone on the home-ward-facing side of the ridge. When the
overseer's grandchildren, too, came to visit him, they and Hagar played
here, and sometimes Mary Magazine, Isham and Car'line's ten-year-old
at the Ferry, was allowed to spend the day, and she and Hagar played
together on the ridge. Hagar was very fond of Mary Magazine.

One day, having completed her circle of flower dolls before her
companion's was done, she leaned back against the apple tree beneath
which the two were seated and thoughtfully regarded the other's
down-bent brown face and "wrapped" hair. "Mary Magazine, you couldn't
have been named 'Mary Magazine.' You were named Mary Magdalene."

"No'm," said Mary Magazine, a pink morning-glory in one hand and a
blue one in the other. "No'm. I'm named Mary Magazine. My mammy done
named me for de lady what took her cologne bottle somebody give her
Christmas, an' poured it on her han' an' rubbed Jesus' feet."

When Mary Magazine didn't come to Gilead Balm and no children were
staying in the house, and the overseer's grandchildren were at their
home on the other side of the county, Hagar might--provided always she
let some one know where she was going--Hagar might play alone on the
ridge. To-day, having asked the Colonel if she might, she was playing
there alone.

"Playing" was the accepted word. They always talked of her as
"playing," and she herself repeated the word.

"May I go play awhile on the ridge?"

"I reckon so, Gipsy. Wear your sunbonnet and don't get into any
mischief."

At the overseer's house she stopped to talk with Mrs. Green, picking
pease in the garden. "Mahnin', Hagar," said Mrs. Green. "How's yo' ma
this mahnin'?"

"I think she's better, Mrs. Green. She laughed a little this morning.
Grandmother let me stay a whole half-hour, and mother talked about
_her_ grandmother, and about picking up shells on the beach, and about
a little boat that she used to go out to sea in. She said that all last
night she felt that boat beneath her. She laughed and said it felt like
going home.--Only"--Hagar looked at Mrs. Green with large, wistful
eyes--"only home's really Gilead Balm."

"Of course it is," said Mrs. Green cheerfully. She sat down on an
overturned bucket between the green rows of pease, and pushed back
her sunbonnet from her kind, old wrinkled face. "I remember when yo'
ma came here jest as well. She was jest the loveliest thing!--But of
course all her own people were a good long way off, and she was a
seafarer herself, and she couldn't somehow get used to the hills. I've
heard her say they jest shut her in like a prison.... But then, after
a while, you came, an' I reckon, though she says things sometimes,
wherever you are she feels to be home. When it comes to being a woman,
the good Lord has to get in com-pensation somewhere, or I don't reckon
none of us could stand it.--I'm glad she's better."

"_I'm_ glad," said Hagar. "Can I help you pick the pease, Mrs. Green?"

"Thank you, child, but I've about picked the mess. You goin' to play
on the ridge? I wish Thomasine and Maggie and Corker were here to play
with you."

"I wish they were," said Hagar. Her eyes filled. "It's a very lonesome
day. Yesterday was lonesome and to-morrow's going to be lonesome--"

"Haven't you got a good book? I never see such a child for books."

Two tears came out of Hagar's eyes. "I was reading a book Aunt Serena
told me not to read.--And now I'm not to read _anything_ for a whole
week."

"Sho!" exclaimed Mrs. Green. "What did you do that for? Don't you know
that little girls ought to mind?"

Hagar sighed. "Yes, I suppose they ought.... I wish I had now.... It's
so lonesome not to read when your mother's sick and grandmother won't
let me go into the room only just a little while morning and evening."

"Haven't you got any pretty patchwork nor nothin'?"

Hagar standing among the blush roses, looked at her with sombre eyes.
"Mrs. Green, I hate to sew."

"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Green. "That's an awful thing to say!"

She sat on the overturned bucket, between the pale-green, shiny-podded
peavines, her friendly old face, knobbed and wrinkled like a Japanese
carving, gleaming from between the faded blue slats of her sunbonnet,
and she regarded the child before her with real concern. "I wonder
now," she said, "if you're goin' to grow up a rebel? Look-a-here,
honey, there ain't a mite of ease and comfort on that road."

"That's what the Yankees called us all," said Hagar. 'Rebels.'"

"Ah, I don't mean 'rebel' that-er-way," said Mrs. Green. "There's
lonelier and deeper ways of rebellin'. You don't get killed with an
army cheerin' you, and newspapers goin' into black, and a state full
of people, that were 'rebels' too, keepin' your memory green,--what
happens, happens just to you, by yourself without any company, and no
wreaths of flowers and farewell speeches. They just open the door and
put you out."

"Out where?"

"Out by yourself. Out of this earth's favour. And, though we mayn't
think it," said Mrs. Green, "this earth's favour is our sunshine. It's
right hard to go where there isn't any sunshine.... I don't know why
I'm talking like this to you--but you're a strange child and always
were, and I reckon you come by it honest!" She rose from among the
peavines. "Well, I've been baking apple turnovers, and they ain't bad
to picnic on! Suppose you take a couple up on the ridge with you."

There grew, on the very top of the ridge, a cucumber tree that
Hagar loved. Underneath was a little fine, sparse grass and enough
pennyroyal to make the place aromatic when the sunshine drew out all
its essence, as was the case to-day. Over the light soil, between the
sprigs of pennyroyal, went a line of ants carrying grains of some
pale, amber-clear substance. Hagar watched them to their hill. When,
one by one, they had entered, a second line of foragers emerged and
went off to the right through the grass. In a little time these, too,
reappeared, each carrying before her a tiny bead of the amber stuff.
Hagar watched, elbows on ground and chin on hands. She had a feeling
that they were people, and she tried giving them names, but they were
so bewilderingly alike that in a moment she could not tell which was
"Brownie" and which "Pixie" and which "Slim." She turned upon her back
and lying in the grass and pennyroyal saw above her only blue sky and
blue sky. She stared into it. "If the angels were sailing like the
birds up there and looking down--and looking down--we people might
seem all alike to them--all alike and not doing things that were very
different--all alike.... Only there are our clothes. Pink ones and blue
ones and white ones and black ones and plaid ones and striped ones--"
She stared at the blue until she seemed to see step after step of blue,
a great ladder leading up, and then she turned on her side and gazed at
Gilead Balm and, a mile away, the canal and the shining river.

She could see many windows, but not her mother's window. She had to
imagine that. Lonesomeness and ennui, that had gone away for a bit in
the interest of watching the ants, returned full force. She stood up
and cast about for something to break the spell.

The apple turnovers wrapped in a turkey-red, fringed napkin, rested in
a small willow basket upon the grass. Hagar was not hungry, but she
considered that she might as well eat a turnover, and then that she
might as well have a party and ask a dozen flower dolls. Her twelve
years were as a moving plateau--one side a misty looming landscape of
the mind, older and higher than her age would forecast; on the other,
green, hollow, daisy-starred meadows of sheer childhood. Her attention
passed from side to side, and now it settled in the meadows.

She considered the grass beneath the cucumber tree for a dining-room,
and then she grew aware that she was thirsty, and so came to the
conclusion that she would descend the back side of the ridge to the
spring and have the party there. Crossing the hand's breadth of level
ground she began to climb down the long shady slope toward a stream
that trickled through a bit of wood and a thicket, and a small,
ice-cold spring in a ferny hollow. The sun-bathed landscape, river and
canal and fields and red-brick Gilead Balm with its cedars, and the
garden and orchard, and the overseer's house sank from view. There was
only the broad-leaved cucumber tree against the deep blue sky. The
trunk of the cucumber tree disappeared, and then the greater branches,
and then the lesser branches toward the top, and then the bushy green
top itself. When Hagar and the other children played on the ridge, they
followed her lead and called this side "the far country." To them--or
perhaps only to Hagar--it had a clime, an atmosphere quite different
from the homeward-facing side.

When she came to the spring at the foot of the ridge she was very
thirsty. She knelt on a great sunken rock, and, taking off her
sunbonnet, leaned forward between the fern and mint, made a cup of
her hands and drank the sparkling water. When she had had all she
wished, she settled back and regarded the green, flowering thicket.
It came close to the spring, filling the space between the water
and the wood, and it was a wild, luxuriant tangle. Hagar's fancy
began to play with it. Now it was a fairy wood for Thumbelina--now
Titania and Oberon danced there in the moonlight--now her mind gave it
height and hugeness, and it was the wood around the Sleeping Beauty.
The light-winged minutes went by and then she remembered the apple
turnovers.... Here was the slab of rock for the table. She spread the
turkey-red napkin for cloth, and she laid blackberry leaves for plates,
and put the apple turnovers grandly in the middle. Then she moved about
the hollow and gathered her guests. Wild rose, ox-eye daisy, Black-eyed
Susan, elder, white clover, and columbine--quite a good party.... She
set each with due ceremony on the flat rock, before a blackberry-leaf
plate, and then she took her own place facing the thicket, and after
a polite little pause, folded her hands and closed her eyes. "We will
say," she said, "a silent Grace."

When she opened her eyes, she opened them full upon other
eyes--haggard, wolfishly hungry eyes, looking at her from out the
thicket, behind them a body striped like a wasp....

"I didn't mean to scare you," said the boy, "but if you ever went most
of two days and a night without anything to eat, you'd know how it
felt."

"I never did," said Hagar. "But I can imagine it. I wish I had asked
Mrs. Green for _five_ apple turnovers." As she spoke, she pushed the
red fringed napkin with the second turnover toward him. "Eat that one,
too. I truly don't want any, and the flowers are never hungry."

He bit into the second turnover. "It seems mean to eat up your
tea-party, but I'm 'most dead, and that's the truth--"

Hagar, sitting on the great stone with her hands folded in her lap
and her sunbonnet back on her shoulders, watched her suddenly acquired
guest. He would not come clear out of the thicket; the tangled growth
held him all but head and shoulders. "I believe I've seen you before,"
she said at last. "About two weeks ago grandfather and Aunt Serena and
I were on the packet-boat. Weren't you at the lock up the river? The
boat went down and down until you were standing 'way up, just against
the sky. I am almost sure it was you."

He reddened. "Yes, it was me." Then, dropping the arm that held the yet
uneaten bit of turnover, he broke out. "I didn't run away while I was a
trusty! I wouldn't have done it! One of the men lied about me and said
dirty words about my people, and I jumped on him and knocked his head
against a stone until he didn't come to for half an hour! Then they did
things to me, and did what they called degrading me. 'No more trustying
for you!' said the boss. So I run away--three days ago." He wiped his
forehead with his sleeve. "It seems more like three years. I reckon
they've got the dogs out."

"What have they got the dogs out for?"

"Why, to hunt me. I--I--"

His voice sunk. Terror came back, and will-breaking fear, a chill
nausea and swooning of the soul. He groaned and half rose from the
thicket. "I was lying here till night, but I reckon I'd better be
going--" His eyes fell upon his body and he sank back. "O God! I reckon
in hell we'll wear these clothes."

Hagar stared at him, faint reflecting lines of anxiety and unhappiness
on her brow, quiverings about her lips. "Ought you to have run away?
Was it right to run away?" The colour flooded her face. It was always
hard for her to tell of her errors, but she felt that she and the boy
were in somewhat the same case, and that she ought to do it. "I did
something my aunt had told me not to do. It was reading a book that
she said was wicked. I can't see yet that it was wicked. It was very
interesting. But the Bishop said that he didn't christen me for that,
and that it was a sin. And now, for a whole week, grandmother says that
I'm not to read any book at all--which is very hard. What I mean is,"
said Hagar, "though I don't feel yet that there was anything wicked in
that book (I didn't read much of it), I feel perfectly certain that I
ought to obey grandmother. The Bible tells you so, and I believe in the
Bible." Her brow puckered again. "At least, I believe that I believe
in the Bible. And if there wasn't anybody in the house, and the most
interesting books were lying around, I wouldn't--at least I think I
wouldn't--touch one till the week is over." She tried earnestly to
explain her position. "I mean that if I really did wrong--and I reckon
I'll have to say that I oughtn't to have disobeyed Aunt Serena, though
the Bible doesn't say anything about aunts--I'll take the hard things
that come after. Of course"--she ended politely--"your folks may have
been mistaken, and you may not have done anything wrong at all--"

The boy bloomed at her. "I'll tell you what I did. I live 'way out in
the mountains, the other end of nowhere. Well, Christmas there was a
dance in the Cove, and I went, but Nancy Horn, that had promised to go
with me, broke her word and went with Dave Windless. There was a lot of
apple jack around, and I took more'n I usually take. And then, when
we were dancing the reel, somebody--and I'll swear still it was Dave,
though he swore in the court-room it wasn't--Dave Windless put out his
foot and tripped me up! Well, Nancy, she laughed.... I don't remember
anything clear after that, and I thought that the man who was shooting
up the room was some other person, though I did think it was funny the
pistol was in my hand.... Anyhow, Dave got a ball through his hip, and
old Daddy Jake Willy, that I was awful fond of and wouldn't have hurt
not for a still of my own and the best horse on the mountain, he got
his bow arm broken, and one of the women was frightened into fits, and
next week when her baby was born and had a harelip she said I'd done
it.... Anyhow the sheriff came and took me--it was about dawn, 'way up
on the mountain-side, and I still thought it was another man going away
toward Catamount Gap and the next county where there wasn't any Nancy
Horn--I thought so clear till I fired at the sheriff and broke his
elbow and the deputy came up behind and twisted the pistol away, and
somebody else threw a gourd of water from the spring over me ... and I
come to and found it had been me all the time.... That's what I did,
and I got four years."

"Four years?" said Hagar. "Four years in--in jail?"

"In the penitentiary," said the boy. "It's a worse word than jail....
I know what's right and wrong. Liquor's wrong, and the Judge said
carrying concealed weapons was wrong, and I reckon it is, though there
isn't much concealment when everybody knows you're wearing them....
Yes, liquor's wrong, and quarrels might go off just with some words
and using your fists if powder and shot weren't right under your hand,
tempting you. Yes, drinking's wrong and quarreling's wrong, and after I
come to my senses it didn't need no preacher like those that come round
Sundays to tell me that. But I tell you what's the whole floor space of
hell wronger than most of the things men do and that's the place the
lawyers and the judges and the juries send men to!"

"Do you mean that they oughtn't to--to do anything to you? You _did_ do
wrong."

"No, I don't mean that," said the boy. "I've got good sense. If I
didn't see it at first, old Daddy Jake Willy came to the county jail
three or four times, and he made me see it. The Judge and the lawyer
couldn't ha' made me see it, but _he_ did. And at last I was willing
to go." His face worked. "The day before I was to go I was in that
cell I'd stayed in then two months and I looked right out into the
sunshine. You could see Old Rocky Knob between two bars, and Bear's
Den between two, and Lonely River running down into the valley between
the other two, and the sun shining over everything--shining just like
it's shining to-day. Well, I stood there, looking out, and made a
good resolution. I was going to take what was coming to me because I
deserved it, having broken the peace and lamed men and hurt a woman,
and broken Daddy Jake's arm and fired at the sheriff. I hadn't meant
to do all that, but still I had done it. So I said, 'I'll take it. And
I won't give any trouble. And I'll keep the rules. If it's a place to
make men better in, I'll come out a better man. I'll work just as hard
as any man, and if there's books to study I'll study, and I'll keep the
rules and try to help other people, and when I come out, I'll be young
still and a better man.'" He rose to his full height in the thicket,
the upper half of his striped body showing like a swimmer's above the
matted green. He sent out his young arms in a wide gesture at once
mocking and despairing, but whether addressed to earth or heaven was
not apparent. "You see, I didn't know any more about that place than a
baby unborn!"

With that he dropped like a stone back into the thicket and lay dumb
and close, with agonized eyes. Around the base of the ridge out of the
wood came the dogs; behind them three men with guns.

...One of the men was a jolly, fatherly kind of person. He tried to
explain to Hagar that they weren't really going to hurt the convict at
all--she saw for herself that the dogs hadn't hurt him, not a mite!
The handcuffs didn't hurt him either--they were loose and comfortable.
No; they weren't going to do anything to him, they were just going
to take him back.--He hadn't hurt her, had he? hadn't said anything
disagreeable to her or done anything but eat up her tea-party?--Then
that was all right, and the fatherly person would go himself with her
to the house and tell the Colonel about it. Of course he knew the
Colonel, everybody knew the Colonel! And "Stop crying, little lady!
That boy ain't worth it."

The Colonel's dictum was that the country was getting so damned
unsettled that Hagar must not again be let to play on the ridge alone.

Old Miss, who had had that morning a somewhat longish talk with Dr.
Bude, stated that she would tell Mary Green to send for Thomasine and
Maggie and Corker. "Dr. Bude thinks the child broods too much, and it
may be better to have healthy diversion for her in case--"

"In case--!" exclaimed Miss Serena. "Does he really think, mother, that
it's serious?"

"I don't think he knows," answered her mother. "I don't think it is,
myself. But Maria was never like anybody else--"

"Dear Maria!" said Mrs. LeGrand. "She should have made such a
brilliant, lovely woman! If only there was a little more compliance,
more feminine sweetness, more--if I may say so--unselfishness--"

"Where," asked the Bishop, "is Medway?"

Mrs. Ashendyne's needles clicked. "My son was in Spain, the last we
heard: studying the painter Murillo."




CHAPTER V

MARIA


Thomasine and Maggie and Corker arrived and filled the overseer's house
with noise. They were a blatantly healthful, boisterous set, only
Thomasine showing gleams of quiet. They wanted at once to play on the
ridge, but now Hagar wouldn't play on the ridge. She said she didn't
like it any more. As she spoke, her thin shoulders drew together, and
her eyes also, and two vertical lines appeared between these. "What you
shakin' for?" asked Corker. "Got a chill?"

So they played down by the branch where the willows grew, or in the
old, disused tobacco-house, or in the orchard, or about a haystack on a
hillside. Corker wanted always to play robbers or going to sea. Maggie
liked to jump from the haystack or to swing, swing, swing, holding to
the long, pendant green withes of the weeping willow, or to climb the
apple trees. Thomasine liked to make dams across the streamlet below
the tobacco-house. She liked to shape wet clay, and she saved every
pebble or bit of bright china, or broken blue or green glass with which
to decorate a small grotto they were making. She also liked to play
ring-around-a-rosy, and to hunt for four-leaved clovers. Hagar liked to
play going to sea, but she did not care for robbers. She liked to swing
from the willows and to climb a particular apple tree which she loved,
but she did not want to jump from the haystack, nor to climb all trees.
She liked almost everything that Thomasine liked, but she was not
so terribly fond of ring-around-a-rosy. In her own likings she found
herself somewhat lonely. None of the three, though Thomasine more than
the others, cared much for a book. They would rather have a sugar-cake
any day. When it came to lying on the hillside without speaking and
watching the clouds and the tree-tops, they did not care for that at
all. However, when they were tired, and everything else failed, they
did like Hagar to tell them a story. "Aladdin" they liked--sitting in
the shadow of the haystack, their chins on their hands, Thomasine's
eyes still unconsciously alert for four-leaved clovers, Corker with a
June apple, trying to determine whether he would bite into it now or
wait until Aladdin's mother had uncovered the jewels before the Sultan.
They liked "Aladdin" and "Queen Gulnare and Prince Beder" and "Snow
White and Rose Red."

And then came the day that they went after raspberries. That morning
Hagar, turning the doorknob of her mother's room, found the door softly
opened from within and Phoebe on the threshold. Phoebe came out,
closing the door gently behind her, beckoned to Hagar, and the two
crossed the hall to the deep window. "I wouldn't go in this mahnin' ef
I were you, honey," said Phoebe. "Miss Maria done hab a bad night. She
couldn't sleep an' her heart mos' give out. Oh, hit's all right now,
an' she's been lyin' still an' peaceful since de dawn come up. But we
wants her to sleep an' we don' want her to talk. An' Old Miss thinks
an' Phoebe thinks too, honey, dat you'd better not go in this mahnin'.
Nex' time Old Miss 'll let you stay twice as long to make up for it."

Hagar looked at her large-eyed, "Is my mother going to die, Aunt
Phoebe?"

But old Phoebe put her arms around her and the wrinkles came out all
over her brown face as they did when she laughed. Phoebe was a good
woman, wise and old and tender and a strong liar. "Law, no, chile--What
put dat notion in yo' po' little haid? No, indeedy! We gwine pull Miss
Maria through, jes' as easy! Dr. Bude he say he gwine do hit, and what
Dr. Bude say goes for sho! Phoebe done see him raise de mos' dead.
Law, no, don' you worry 'bout Miss Maria! An' de nex' time you goes in
de room, you kin stay jes' ez long ez you like. You kin sit by her er
whole hour an' won't nobody say you nay."

Downstairs Captain Bob was sitting on the sunny step of the sunny back
porch, getting a thorn out of Luna's paw. "Hi, Gipsy," he said, when
Hagar came and stood by him; "what's the matter with breakfast this
morning?"

"I don't know," said Hagar. "I haven't seen grandmother to-day. Uncle
Bob--"

"Well, chicken?"

"They'd tell you, wouldn't they, if my mother was going to die?"

Captain Bob, having relieved Luna of the thorn, gave his attention
fully to his great-niece. He was slow and kindly and unexacting and
incurious and unimaginative, and the unusual never occurred to him
before it happened. "Maria going to die? That's damned nonsense,
partridge! Haven't heard a breath of it--isn't anything to hear. Nobody
dies at Gilead Balm--hasn't been a death here since the War. Besides,
Medway's away.--Mustn't get notions in your head--makes you unhappy,
and things go on just the same as ever." He pulled her down on the step
beside him. "Look at Luna, now! She ain't notionate--are you, Luna?
Luna and I are going over the hills this morning to find Old Miss's
guineas for her. Don't you want to go along?"

"I don't believe I do, thank you, Uncle Bob."

Mrs. LeGrand came out upon the porch, fresh and charming in a figured
dimity with a blue ribbon. "Mrs. Ashendyne and Serena are talking to
Dr. Bude, and as you men must be famished, Captain Bob, I am going to
ring for breakfast and pour out your coffee for you--"

In the hall Hagar appealed to her. "Mrs. LeGrand, can't I go into
grandmother's room and hear what Dr. Bude says about my mother?" But
Mrs. LeGrand smiled and shook her head and laid hands on her. "No,
indeed, dear child! Your mother's all right. You come with me, and have
your breakfast."

The Bishop appearing at the stair foot, she turned to greet him. Hagar,
slipping from her touch, stole down the hall to Old Miss's chamber and
tried the door. It gave and let her in. Old Miss was seated in the big
chair, Dr. Bude and the Colonel were standing on either side of the
hearth, and Miss Serena was between them and the door.

"Hagar!" exclaimed Miss Serena. "Don't come in now, dear. Grandmother
and I will be out to breakfast in a moment."

But Hagar had the courage of unhappiness and groping and fear for the
most loved. She fled straight to Dr. Bude. "Dr. Bude--oh, Dr. Bude--is
my mother going to die?"

"No, Bude," said the Colonel from the other side of the hearth.

Dr. Bude, an able country doctor, loved and honoured, devoted and
fatherly and wise, made a "Tchk!" with his tongue against the roof of
his mouth.

Old Miss, leaving the big chair, came and took Hagar and drew her back
with her into the deep chintz hollows. No one might doubt that Old Miss
loved her granddaughter. Now her clasp was as stately as ever, but her
voice was quite gentle, though of course authoritative--else it could
not have belonged to Old Miss. "Your mother had a bad night, dear, and
so, to make her quiet and comfortable, we sent early for Dr. Bude. She
is going to sleep now, and to-morrow you shall go in and see her. But
you can only go if you are a good, obedient child. Yes, I am telling
you the truth. I think Maria will get well. I have never thought
anything else.--Now, run away and get your breakfast, and to-day you
and Thomasine and Maggie and Corker shall go raspberrying."

Dr. Bude spoke from the braided rug. "No one knows, Hagar, what's
going to happen in this old world, do they? But Nature has a way of
taking care of people quite regardless and without waiting to consult
the doctors. I've watched Nature right closely, and I never give up
anything. Your mother's right ill, my dear, but so have a lot of other
people been right ill and gotten well. You go pick your raspberries,
and maybe to-morrow you can see her--"

"Can't I see her to-night?"

"Well, maybe--maybe--" said the doctor.

The raspberry patches were almost two miles away, past a number of
shaggy hills and dales. A wood road led that way, and Hagar and
Thomasine and Maggie and Corker, with Jinnie, a coloured woman, to take
care of them, felt the damp leaf mould under their feet. A breeze,
coming through oak and pine, tossed their hair and fluttered the girls'
skirts and the broad collar of Corker's voluminous shirt. The sky was
bright blue, with two or three large clouds like sailing vessels with
all sail on. A cat-bird sang to split its throat. They saw a black
snake, and a rabbit showed a white tip of tail, and a lightning-blasted
pine with a large empty bird-nest in the topmost crotch, ineffably
lonely and deserted against the deep sky, engaged their attention. They
had various adventures. Each of the children carried a tin bucket for
berries, and Jinnie carried a white-oak split basket with dinner in
it--sandwiches and rusks and a jar with milk and snowball cakes. They
were going to stay all day. That was what usually they loved. It was so
adventurous.

Corker strode along whistling. Maggie whistled, too, as well as a boy,
though he looked disdain at her and said, "Huh! Girls can't whistle!"

"Dar's a piece of poetry I done heard," said Jinnie,--

  "'Er whistlin' woman an' er crowin' hen,
  Dey ain' gwine come ter no good end.'"

Thomasine hummed as she walked. She had filled her bucket with various
matters as she went along, and now she was engaged in fashioning out
of the green burrs of the burdock a basket with an elaborate handle.
"Don't you want some burrs?" she asked Hagar, walking beside her.
Thomasine was always considerate and would give away almost anything
she had.

Hagar took the burrs and began also to make a basket. She was being
good. And, indeed, as the moments passed, the heavy, painful feeling
about her heart went away. The doctor had said and grandmother had
said, and Uncle Bob and Phoebe and every one.... The raspberries.
She instantly visualized one of the blue willow saucers filled with
raspberries, carried in by herself to her mother, at supper-time.
Yarrow was in bloom and Black-eyed Susans and the tall white Jerusalem
candles. Coming back she would gather a big bouquet for the grey jar
on her mother's table. She grew light-hearted. A bronze butterfly
fluttered before her, the heavy odour of the pine filled her nostrils,
the sky was so blue, the air so sweet--there was a pearly cloud like
a castle and another like a little boat--a little boat. Off went her
fancy, lizard-quick, feather-light.

  "Swing low, sweet chariot--"

sang Jinnie as she walked.

The raspberry patches were in sunny hollows. There was a span-wide
stream, running pure over a gravel bed, and a grazed-over hillside,
green and short-piled as velvet, and deep woods closing in, shutting
out. Summer sunshine bathed every grass blade and berry leaf, summer
winds cooled the air, bees and grasshoppers and birds, squirrels in the
woods, rippling water, wind in the leaves made summer sounds. It was
a happy day. Sometimes Hagar, Thomasine, Maggie, Corker, and Jinnie
picked purply-red berries from the same bush; sometimes they scattered
and combined in twos and threes. Sometimes each established a corner
and picked in an elfin solitude. Sometimes they conversed or bubbled
over with laughter, sometimes they kept a serious silence. It was a
matter of rivalry as to whose bucket should first be filled. Hagar
strayed off at last to an angle of an old rail fence. The berries, as
she found, were very fine here. She called the news to the others, but
they said they had fine bushes, too, and so she picked on with a world
of her own about her. The June-bugs droned and droned, her fingers
moved slower and slower. At last she stopped picking, and, lying down
on a sunken rock by the fence, fell to dreaming. Her dreams were
already shot with thought, and she was apt, when she seemed most idle,
to be silently, inwardly growing. Now she was thinking about Heaven
and about God. She was a great committer of poetry to memory, and now,
while she lay filtering sand through her hands as through an hourglass,
she said over a stanza hard to learn, which yet she had learned some
days ago.

  "Trailing clouds of glory do we come
    From God, who is our home--"

When she had repeated it dreamily, in an inward whisper, the problem of
why, in that case, she was so far from home engaged her attention. The
"here" and the "there--" God away, away off on a throne with angels,
and Hagar Ashendyne, in a blue sunbonnet here by a Virginia rail fence,
with raspberry stain on her hands. _Home_ was where you lived. God was
everywhere; then, was God right here, too? But Hagar Ashendyne couldn't
see the throne and the gold steps and floor and the angels. She could
make a picture of them, just as she could of Solomon's throne, or
Pharaoh's throne, or Queen Victoria's throne, but the picture didn't
stir anything at her heart. She wasn't homesick for the court. She was
homesick to be a good woman when she grew up, and to learn all the time
and to know beautiful things, but she wasn't homesick for Heaven where
God lived. Then was she wicked? Hagar wondered and wondered. The yellow
sand dropped from between her palms.... God in the sand, God in me, God
here and now.... Then God also is trying to grow more God.... Hagar
drew a great sigh, and for the moment gave it up.

Before her on the grey rail was a slender, burnished insect, all
gold-and-green armour. Around the lock of the fence came, like a
gold-and-green moving stiletto, a lizard which took and devoured the
gold-and-green insect.... God in the lizard, God in the insect, God
devouring God, making Himself feed Himself, growing so.... The sun
suddenly left the grass and the raspberry bushes. A cloud had hidden
it. Other cloud masses, here pearly white, here somewhat dark, were
boiling up from the horizon.

Jinnie called the children together. "What we gwine do? Look like er
storm. Reckon we better light out fer home!"

Protests arose. "Ho!" cried Corker, "it ain't going to be a storm. I
haven't got my bucket more'n half full and we haven't had a picnic
neither! Let's stay!"

"Let's stay," echoed Maggie. "Who's afraid of a little bit of storm
anyhow?"

"It's lots better for it to catch us here in the open," argued
Thomasine. "They're all tall trees in the wood. But _I_ think the
clouds are getting smaller--there's the sun again!"

The sunshine fell, strong and golden. "We's gwine stay den," said
Jinnie. "But ef hit rains an' you all gets wet an' teks cold, I's
gwine tell Old Miss I jus' couldn't mek you come erway!--Dar's de old
cow-house at de end of de field. I reckon we kin refugee dar ef de
worst comes to de worst."

While they were eating the snowball cakes, a large cloud came up and
determinedly covered the sun. By the time they had eaten the last
crumb, lightnings were playing. "Dar now, I done tol' you!" cried
Jinnie. "I never see such children anyhow! Old Miss an' Mrs. Green jus'
ought-ter whip you all! Now you gwine git soppin' wet an' maybe de
lightning'll strike you, too!"

"No, it won't!" cried Corker. "The cow-house's my castle, an' we've
been robbing a freight train an' the constable an' old Captain Towney
and the army are after us--I'm going to get to the cow-house first!"

Maggie scrambled to her feet. "No, you ain't! I'm going to--"

The cow-house was dark and somewhat dirty, but they found a tolerable
square yard or two of earthen floor and they all sat close together
for warmth--the air having grown quite cold--and for company, a
thunderstorm, after all, being a thing that made even train robbers and
castled barons feel rather small and helpless. For an hour lightnings
flashed and thunders rolled and the rain fell in leaden lines. Then
the lightnings grew less frequent and vivid, and the thunder travelled
farther away, but the rain still fell. "Oh, it's so stupid and dark in
here!" said Corker. "Let's tell stories. Hagar, you tell a story, and
Jinnie, you tell a story!"

Hagar told about the Snow Queen and Kay and Gerda, and they liked that
very well. All the cow-house was dark as the little robber girl's hut
in the night-time when all were asleep save Gerda and the little
robber girl and the reindeer. When they came to the reindeer, Corker
said he heard him moving behind them in a corner, and Maggie said she
heard him, too, and Jinnie called out, "Whoa, dere, Mr. Reindeer! You
des er stay still till we's ready fer you!"--and they all drew closer
together with a shudder of delight.

The clouds were breaking--the lines of rain were silver instead
of leaden. Even the cow-house was lighter inside. There was no
reindeer, after all; there were only brown logs and trampled earth and
mud-daubers' nests and a big spider's web. "Now, Jinnie," said Corker,
"you tell a ghost story."

Thomasine objected. "I don't like ghost stories. Hagar doesn't either."

"I don't mind them much," said Hagar. "I don't have to believe them."

But Jinnie chose to become indignant. "You jes' hab to believe dem.
Dey're true! My lan'! Goin' ter church an' readin' de Bible an' den
doubtin' erbout ghosts! I'se gwine tell you er story you's got ter
believe, 'cause hit's done happen! Hit's gwine ter scare you, too! Dey
tell me hit scare a young girl down in de Hollow inter fits. Hit's
gwine ter mek yo' flesh crawl. Sayin' ghos' stories ain't true, when
everybody knows dey's true!"

The piece of ancient African imagination, traveller of ten thousand
years through heated forests, was fearsome enough. "Ugh!" said the
children and shivered and stared.--It took the sun, indeed, to drive
the creeping, mistlike thoughts away.

Going home through the rain-soaked woodland, Hagar began to gather
flowers. Her bucket of berries on her arm, she stepped aside for this
bloom and that, gathering with long stems, making a sheaf of blossoms.
"What you doin' dat for?" queried Jinnie. "Dey's all wet. You'll jes'
ruin dat gingham dress!" But Hagar kept on plucking Black-eyed Susans,
and cardinal flowers, and purple clover and lady's-lace.

They came, in the afternoon glow, in sight of Gilead Balm. They came
closer until the house was large, standing between its dark, funereal
cedars, with a rosy cloud behind.

"All the blinds are closed as though we'd gone away!" said Hagar. "I
never saw it that way before."

Mrs. Green was at the lower gate, waiting for them. Her old, kind,
wrinkled face was pale between the slats of her sunbonnet, but her
eyelids were reddened as though she had been weeping. "Yes, yes,
children, I'm glad you got a lot of berries!--Corker and Maggie and
Thomasine, you go with Jinnie. Mind me and go.--Hagar, child, you and
me are goin' to come on behind.... You and me are goin' to sit here
a bit on the summer-house step.... The Colonel said I was the best
one after all to do it, and I'm going to do it, but I'd rather take a
killing! ... Yes, sit right here, with my arm about you. Hagar, child,
I've got something to tell you, honey."

Hagar looked at her with large, dark eyes. "Mrs. Green, why are all the
shutters closed?"




CHAPTER VI

EGLANTINE


No one could be so cross-grained as to deny that Eglantine was a sweet
place. It lay sweetly on just the right, softly swelling hill. The old
grey-stucco main house had a sweet porch, with wistaria growing sweetly
over it; the long, added grey-stucco wings had pink and white roses
growing sweetly on trellises between the windows. There were silver
maples and heavily blooming locust trees and three fine magnolias.
There were thickets of weigelia and spiræa and forsythia, and winding
walks, and an arbour, and the whole twenty acres or so was enclosed
by a thorny, osage-orange hedge, almost, though not quite so high as
the hedge around the Sleeping Beauty's palace. It was a sweet place.
Everyone said so--parents and guardians, the town that neighboured
Eglantine, tourists that drove by, visitors to the Commencement
exercises--everybody! The girls themselves said so. It was praised of
all--almost all. The place was sweet. M. Morel, the French teacher, who
was always improving his English, and so on the hunt for synonyms, once
said in company that it was saccharine.

Miss Carlisle, who taught ancient and modern history and, in the
interstices, astronomy and a blue-penciled physiology, gently corrected
him. "Oh, M. Morel! We never use that word in this sense! If you wish
to vary the term you might use 'charming,' or 'refined,' or 'elegant.'
Besides"--she gazed across the lawn--"it isn't so sweet, I always
think, in November as it is in April or May."

"The sweetest time, I think," said Miss Bedford, who taught
mathematics, geography, and Latin, "is when the lilac is in bloom."

"And when the robins nest again," sighed a pensive, widowed Mrs. Lane,
who taught the little girls.

"It is 'refined' always," said M. Morel. "November or April, what is ze
difference? It has ze atmosphere. It is sugary."

"Here," remarked Miss Gage, who taught philosophy--"here is Mrs.
LeGrand."

All rose to greet the mistress of Eglantine as she came out from the
hall upon the broad porch. Mrs. LeGrand's graciously ample form was
wrapped in black cashmere and black lace. Her face was unwrinkled,
but her hair had rapidly whitened. It was piled upon her head after
an agreeable fashion and crowned by a graceful small cap of lace.
She was ample and creamy and refinedly despotic. With her came her
god-daughter, Sylvie Maine. It was early November, and the sycamores
were yet bronze, the maples aflame. It was late Friday afternoon, and
the occasion the arrival and entertainment overnight of an English
writer of note, a woman visiting America with a book in mind.

Mrs. LeGrand said that she had thought she heard the carriage wheels.
Mr. Pollock, the music-master, said, No; it was the wind down the
avenue. Mrs. LeGrand, pleasantly, just condescending enough and not too
condescending, glanced from one to the other of the group. "M. Morel
and Mr. Pollock and you, Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford, will, I hope,
take supper with our guest and me? Sylvie, here, will keep her usual
place. I can't do without Sylvie. She spoils me and I spoil her! And we
will have besides, I think, the girl that has stood highest this month
in her classes. Who will it be, Miss Gage?"

"Hagar Ashendyne, Mrs. LeGrand."

Mrs. LeGrand had a humorous smile. "Then, Sylvie, see that Hagar's
dress is all right and try to get her to do her hair differently. I
like Eglantine girls to look their birth and place."

"Dear Cousin Olivia," said Sylvie, who was extremely pretty, "for all
her plainness, Hagar's got distinction."

But Mrs. LeGrand shrugged her shoulders. She couldn't see it. A little
wind arising, all the place became a whirl of coloured leaves. And now
the carriage wheels were surely heard.

Half an hour later Sylvie went up to Hagar's room. It was what was
called the "tower room"--small and high up--too small for anything
but a single bed and one inmate. It wasn't a popular room with the
Eglantine girls--a room without a roommate was bad enough, and then,
when it was upon another floor, quite away from every one--! Language
failed. But Hagar Ashendyne liked it, and it had been hers for three
years. She had been at Eglantine for three years, going home to Gilead
Balm each summer. She was eighteen--old for her age, and young for her
age.

Sylvie found her curled in the window-seat, and spoke twice before she
made her hear. "Hagar! come back to earth!"

Hagar unfolded her long limbs and pushed her hair away from her eyes.
"I was travelling," she said. "I was crossing the Desert of Sahara with
a caravan."

"You are," remarked Sylvie, "too funny for words!--You and I are to
take supper with 'Roger Michael'!"

A red came into Hagar's cheek. "Are we? Did Mrs. LeGrand say so?"

"Yes--"

Hagar lit the lamp. "'Roger Michael'--'Roger Michael'--Sylvie, wouldn't
you rather use your own name if you wrote?"

"Oh, I don't know!" answered Sylvie vaguely. "What dress are you going
to wear?"

"I haven't any but the green."

"Then wear your deep lace collar with it. Cousin Olivia wants you to
look as nice as possible. Don't you want me to do your hair?"

Hagar placed the lamp upon the wooden slab of a small, old-time
dressing-table. That done, she stood and looked at herself with a
curious, wistful puckering of the lips. "Sylvie, prinking and fixing up
doesn't suit me."

"Don't you like people to like you?"

"Yes, I do. I like it so much it must be a sin. Only not very many
people do.... And I don't think prinking helps."

"Yes, it does. If you look pretty, how can people help liking you? It's
three fourths the battle."

Hagar fell to considering it. "Is it?... But then we don't all think
the same thing pretty or ugly." The red showed again like wine beneath
her smooth, dark skin, "Sylvie, I'd _like_ to be beautiful. I'd like
to be as beautiful as Beatrix Esmond. I'd like to be as beautiful
as Helen of Troy. But everybody at Eglantine thinks I am ugly, and I
suppose I am." She looked wistfully at Sylvie.

Now in the back of Sylvie's head there was certainly the thought
that Hagar ought to have said, "I'd like to be as beautiful as you,
Sylvie." But Sylvie had a sweet temper and she was not unmagnanimous.
"I shouldn't call you ugly," she said judicially. "You aren't pretty,
and I don't believe any one would ever call you so, but you aren't at
all disagreeably plain. You've got something that makes people ask who
you are. I wouldn't worry."

"Oh, I wasn't worrying!" said Hagar. "I was only _preferring_.--I'll
wear the lace collar." She took it out of a black Japanned box, and
with it the topaz brooch that had been her mother's.

The visitor from England found the large, square Eglantine parlour
an interesting room. The pier-glasses, framed in sallow gilt, the
many-prismed chandelier, the old velvet carpet strewn with large soft
roses, the claw-foot furniture, the two or three portraits of powdered
Colonial gentlemen, the bits of old china, the framed letters bearing
signatures that seemed to float to her from out her old United States
History--all came to her like a vague fragrance from some unusual
old garden. And then, curiously superimposed upon all this, appeared
memorials of four catastrophic years. Soldiers and statesmen of
the Confederacy had found no time in which to have their portraits
painted. But Mrs. LeGrand had much of family piety and, in addition,
daguerreotypes and _cartes de visite_ of the dead and gone. With her
first glow of prosperity she had a local artist paint her father from
a daguerreotype. Stalwart, with a high Roman face, he looked forth
in black broadcloth with a roll of parchment in his hand. The next
year she had had her husband painted in his grey brigadier's uniform.
Her two brothers followed, and then a famous kinsman--all dead and
gone, all slain in battle. The portraits were not masterpieces, but
there they were, in the pathos of the grey, underneath each a little
gilt plate. "Killed at Sharpsburg."--"Killed Leading a Charge in the
Wilderness."--"Killed at Cold Harbour." Upon the wall, against the
pale, century-old paper, hung crossed swords and cavalry pistols,
and there were framed commissions and battle orders, and an empty
shell propped open the wide white-panelled door. The English visitor
found it all strange and interesting. It was as though a fragrance
of dried rose-leaves contended with a whiff of gunpowder. The small
dining-room into which presently she was carried had fascinating
prints--"Pocahontas Baptized," and "Pocahontas Married," and a group of
women with children and several negroes gathered about an open grave,
one woman standing out, reading the burial service.--Roger Michael was
so interested that she would have liked not to talk at all, just to sit
and look at the prints and mark the negro servants passing about the
table. But Mrs. LeGrand's agreeable voice was asking about the health
of the Queen--she bestirred herself to be an acceptable guest.

The small dining-room was separated only by an archway from the large
dining-room, and into the latter, in orderly files, came the Eglantine
pupils, wound about to their several tables and seated themselves with
demureness. M. Morel was speaking of the friendship of France and
England. Roger Michael, while she appeared to listen, studied these
American girls, these Southern girls. She found many of them pretty,
even lovely,--not, emphatically, with the English beauty of skin,
not with the colour of New England girls, among whom, recently, she
had been,--not with the stronger frame that was coming in with this
generation of admission to out-of-door exercise, the certain boyish
alertness and poise that more and more she was seeing exhibited,--but
pretty or lovely, with delicacy and a certain languor, a dim sweetness
of expression, and, precious trove in America! voices that pleased.
She noted exceptions to type, small, swarthy girls and large overgrown
ones, girls that were manifestly robust, girls that were alert, girls
that were daring, girls that were timid or stupid, or simply anæmic,
girls that approached the English type and girls that were at the
very antipodes--but the general impression was of Farther South than
she had as yet gone in America, of more grace and slowness, manner
and sweetness. Their clothes interested her; they were so much more
"dressed" than they would have been in England. Evidently, in deference
to the smaller room, there was to-night an added control of speech;
there sounded no more than a pleasant hum, a soft, indistinguishable
murmur of young voices.

"They are so excited over the prospect of your speaking to them after
supper," said Mrs. LeGrand, her hand upon the coffee urn.--"Cream and
sugar?"

"They do not seem excited," thought Roger Michael.--"Sugar, thank you;
no cream. Of what shall I talk to them? In what are they especially
interested?"

"In your charming books, I should say," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "In how
you write them, and in the authors you must know. And then your sweet
English life--Stratford and Canterbury and Devonshire--"

"We have been reading 'Lorna Doone' aloud this month," said Miss
Carlisle. "And the girls very cleverly arranged a little play....
Sylvie here played Lorna beautifully."

Roger Michael smiled across at Hagar, two or three places down, on the
other side of the table. "I should like to have seen it," she said in
her good, deep English voice.

"Oh," said Hagar, "I'm not Sylvie. I played Lizzie."

"This is my little cousin and god-daughter, Sylvie Maine," said Mrs.
LeGrand. "And this is Hagar Ashendyne, the granddaughter of an old
friend and connection of my family."

"_Hagar Ashendyne_," said Roger Michael. "I remember meeting once in
the south of France a Southerner--a Mr. Medway Ashendyne."

"Indeed?" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand. "Then you have met Hagar's father.
Medway Ashendyne! He is a great traveller--we do not see as much of him
as we should like to see, do we, Hagar?"

"I have not seen him," said Hagar, "since I was a little girl."

Her voice, though low, was strange and vibrant. "What's here?" thought
Roger Michael, but what she said was only, "He was a very pleasant
gentleman, very handsome, very cultivated. My friends and I were thrown
with him during a day at Carcassonne. A month afterwards we met him at
Aigues-Mortes. He was sketching--quite wonderfully."

Mrs. LeGrand inwardly deplored Medway Ashendyne's daughter's lack
of _savoir-faire_. "To give herself away like that! Just the kind
of thing her mother used to do!" Aloud she said, "Medway's a great
wanderer, but one of these days he will come home and settle down and
we'll all be happy together. I remember him as a young man--a perfectly
fascinating young man.--Dinah, bring more waffles!--Yes, if you will
tell our girls something of your charming English life. We are all so
interested--"

Miss Carlisle's voice came in, a sweet treble like a canary's. "The
Princess of Wales keeps her beauty, does she not?"

The study hall was a long, red room, well enough lighted, with a
dais holding desk and chairs. Roger Michael, seated in one of these,
watched, while her hostess made a little speech of introduction,
the bright parterre of young faces. Sitting so, she excercised a
discrimination that had not been possible in the dining-room. Of the
faces before her each was different, after all, from the other. There
were keen faces as well as languorous ones; brows that promised as
well as those that did not; behind the prevailing "sweet" expression,
something sometimes that showed as by heat lightning, something that
had depth. "Here as elsewhere," thought Roger Michael. "The same life!"

Mrs. LeGrand was closing, was turning toward her. She rose, bowed
toward the mistress of Eglantine, then, standing square, with her good,
English figure and her sensibly shod, English feet, she began to talk
to these girls.

She did not, however, speak to them as, even after she rose, she meant
to speak. She did not talk letters in England, nor English landscape.
She spoke quite differently. She spoke of industrial and social unrest,
of conditions among the toilers of the world. "I am what is called a
Fabian," she said, and went on as though that explained. She spoke
of certain movements in thought, of breakings-away toward larger
horizons. She spoke of various heresies, political, social, and other.
"Of course I don't call them heresies; I call them 'the enlarging
vision.'" She gave instances, incidents; she spoke of the dawn coming
over the mountains, and of the trumpet call of "the coming time." She
said that the dying nineteenth century heard the stronger voice of
the twentieth century, and that it was a voice with a great promise.
She spoke of women, of the rapidly changing status of women, of what
machinery had done for women, of what education had done. She spoke of
the great needs of women, of their learning to organize, of the need
for unity among women. She used the words "false position" thrice.
"Woman's immemorially false position."--"Society has so falsely placed
her."--"Until what is false is done away with."--She said that women
were beginning to see. She said that the next quarter-century would
witness a revolution. "You young people before me will see it; some of
you will take part in it. I congratulate you on living when you will
live." She talked for nearly an hour, and just as she was closing it
came to her, with a certain effect of startling, that much of the time
she had been speaking to just one countenance there. She was speaking
directly to the girl called Hagar Ashendyne, sitting halfway down the
hall. When she took her seat there followed a deep little moment of
silence broken at last by applause. Roger Michael marked the girl in
green. She didn't applaud; she sat looking very far away. Mrs. LeGrand
was saying something smoothly perfunctory, beflowered with personal
compliments; the girls all stood; the Eglantine hostess and guest,
with the teachers who had been at table, passed from the platform, and
turned, after a space of hallway, into the rose-carpeted big parlour.

Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford brought up the rear. "Didn't you think,"
murmured the latter, "that that was a very curious speech? Now and
then I felt so uneasy.--It was as though in a moment she was going to
say something indelicate! Dear Mrs. LeGrand ought to have told her how
careful we are with our girls."

The wind rose that night and swept around the tower room, and then,
between eleven and twelve, died away and left a calm that by contrast
was achingly still. Hagar was not yet asleep. She lay straight and
still in the narrow bed, her arms behind her head. She was rarely in
a hurry to go to sleep. This hour and a half was her dreaming-awake
time, her time for romance building, her time for floating here and
there, as in a Witch of Atlas boat in her own No-woman's land. She had
in the stalls of her mind half a dozen vague and floating romances,
silver and tenuous as mist; one night she drove one afield, another
night another. All took place in a kind of other space, in countries
that were not on any map. She brought imagined physical features into a
strange juxtaposition. When the Himalayas haunted her she ranged them,
snow-clad, by a West Indian sea. Ætna and Chimborazo rose over against
each other, and a favourite haunt was a palm-fringed, flower-starred
lawn reached only through crashing leagues of icebergs. She took
over localities that other minds had made; when she wished to she
pushed aside a curtain of vine and entered the Forest of Arden; she
knew how the moonlight fell in the wood outside Athens; she entered
the pilotless boat and drove toward the sunset gate of the Domain of
Arnheim. Usually speaking, people out of books made the population of
these places, and here, too, there were strange juxtapositions. She
looped and folded Time like a ribbon. Mark Antony and Robin Hood were
contemporaries; Pericles and Philip Sidney; Ruth and Naomi came up
abreast, with Joan of Arc, and all three with Grace Darling; the Round
Table and the Girondins were acquainted. All manner of historic and
fictive folk wandered in the glades of her imagination, any kind of
rendezvous was possible. Much went on in that inner world--doubts and
dreams and dim hypotheses, romance run wild, Fata Morganas, Castles
in Spain, passion for dead shapes, worship of heroes, strange, dumb
stirrings toward self-immolation, dreams of martyrdom, mind drenched
now with this poem, now with that, dream life, dream adventures, dream
princes, religions, world cataclysms, passionings over a colour, a
tone, a line of verse--much utter spring and burgeoning. Eighteen
years--a fluid unimprisoned mind--and no confidante but herself; of how
recapitulatory were these hours, of how youth of all the ages surged,
pulsed, vibrated through her slender frame, she had, of course, no
adequate notion. She would simply have said that she couldn't sleep,
and that she liked to tell herself stories. As she lay here now, she
was not thinking of Roger Michael's talk, though she had thought of
it for the first twenty minutes after she had put out the lamp. It
had been very interesting, and it had stirred her while it was in the
saying, but the grappling hook had not finally held; she was not ready
for it. She had let it slip from her mind in favour of the rose and
purple and deep violin humming of one of her romances. She had lain
for an hour in a great wood, like a wood in Xanadu, beneath trees that
touched the sky, and like an elfin stream had gone by knights and
ladies.... The great clock down in the hall struck twelve. She turned
her slender body, and the bed being pushed against the window, laid her
outstretched hands upon the window-sill, and looked up, between the
spectral sycamore boughs, to where Sirius blazed. Dream wood and dream
shapes took flight. She lay with parted lips, her mind quiet, her soul
awake. Minutes passed; a cloud drove behind the sycamore branches and
hid the star. First blankness came and then again unrest. She sat up in
bed, pushing her two heavy braids of hair back over her shoulders. The
small clock upon the mantel ticked and ticked. The little room looked
cold in the watery moonlight. Hagar was not dreaming or imagining
now; she was thinking back. She sat very still for five minutes,
tears slowly gathering in her eyes. At last she turned and lay face
down upon the bed, her outstretched hands against the wooden frame.
Her tears wet the sleeve of her gown. "_Carcassonne--Aigues-Mortes.
Carcassonne--Aigues-Mortes_...."




CHAPTER VII

MR. LAYDON


The winter was so open, so mild and warm, that a few pale roses clung
to their stems through half of December. Christmas proved a green
Christmas; neither snow nor ice, but soft, Indian summer weather.
Eglantine always gave two weeks' holiday at Christmas. It was a great
place for holidays. Right and left went the girls. Those whose own
homes were too far away went with roommates or bosom friends to theirs;
hardly a pupil was left to mope in the rooms that grew so still. Most
of the teachers went away. The scattering was general.

But Hagar remained at Eglantine. Gilead Balm was a good long way off.
She had gone home last Christmas and the Christmas before, but this
year--she hardly knew how--she had missed it. In the most recently
received of his rare letters her grandfather had explicitly stated
that, though he was prepared to pay for her schooling and to support
her until she married, she must, on her side, get along with as little
money as possible. It was criminal that he had so little nowadays, but
such was the melancholy fact. The whole world was going to the dogs. He
sometimes felt a cold doubt as to whether he could hold Gilead Balm.
He wished to die there, at any rate. Hagar had been very unhappy over
that letter, and it set her to wondering more strongly than ever about
money, and to longing to make it. In her return letters he suggested
that she stay at Eglantine this Christmas, and so save travelling
expenses. And in order that Gilead Balm might not feel that she would
be too dreadfully disappointed, she said that it was very pleasant
at Eglantine, and that several of the girls were going to stay, and
that she would be quite happy and wouldn't mind it much, though of
course she wanted to see them all at Gilead Balm. The plan was of her
suggesting, but she had not realized that they might fall in with it.
When her grandmother answered at length, explaining losses that the
Colonel had sustained, and agreeing that this year it might be best for
her to stay at Eglantine, she tried not to feel desperately hurt and
despondent. She loved Gilead Balm, loved it as much as her mother had
hated it. Old Miss's letter had shown her own disappointment, but--"You
are getting to be a woman and must consider the family. Ashendyne and
Coltsworth women, I am glad to say, have always known their duty to the
family and have lived up to it." The last half of the letter had a good
deal to say of Ralph Coltsworth who was at the University.

Hagar was here at Eglantine, and it was two days before Christmas, and
most of the girls were gone. Sylvie was gone. The teacher whom she
liked best--Miss Gage--was gone. Mrs. LeGrand, who liked holidays, too,
was going. Mrs. Lane and Miss Bedford and the housekeeper were not
going, and they and the servants would look after Eglantine. Besides
these there would be left the books in the book-room, and Hagar would
have leave to be out of doors, in the winding walks and beneath the
trees, alone and whenever she pleased. The weather was dreamy still;
everywhere a warm amethyst haze.

This morning had come a box from Gilead Balm. Her grandmother had
filled it with good things to eat and the Colonel sent his love and
a small gold-piece. There was a pretty belt from Captain Bob and a
hand-painted plate and a soft pink wool, shell-pattern, crocheted
"fascinator" from Miss Serena. Mrs. Green sent a hemstitched
handkerchief, and the servants sent a Christmas card. Through the box
were scattered little sprays from the Gilead Balm cedars, and there was
a bunch of white and red and button chrysanthemums. Hagar, sitting on
the hearth-rug, unpacked everything; then went off into a brown study,
the chrysanthemums in her lap.

Later in the morning she arranged upon the hand-painted plate some
pieces of home-made candy, several slices of fruitcake, three or four
lady apples, and a number of Old Miss's exquisitely thin and crisp
wafers, and with it in her hand went downstairs to Mrs. LeGrand's room,
knocked at the door, and was bidden to enter. Mrs. LeGrand half-raised
herself from a flowery couch near the fire, put the novel that she
was reading behind her pillow, and stretched out her hand. "Ah,
Hagar!--Goodies from Gilead Balm? How nice! Thank you, my dear!" She
took a piece of cocoanut candy, then waved the hand-painted plate to
the round table. "Put it there, dear child! Now sit down for a minute
and keep me company."

Hagar took the straight chair on the other side of the hearth. The
bright, leaping flame was between the two. It made a kind of softer
daylight, and full in the heart of it showed Mrs. LeGrand's handsome,
not yet elderly countenance, the ripe fullness of her bust, covered
by a figured silk dressing-sacque, and her smooth, well-shaped,
carefully tended hands. Hagar conceived that it was her duty to think
well and highly of Mrs. LeGrand, who was such an old friend of the
family, and who, she knew, out of these same friendly considerations,
was keeping her at Eglantine on the easiest of terms. Yes, it was
certainly her duty to love and admire Mrs. LeGrand. That she did not
do so caused her qualms of conscience. Many of the girls raved about
Mrs. LeGrand, and so did Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford. Hagar supposed
with a sigh that there was something wrong with her own heart. To-day,
as she sat in the straight chair, her hands folded in her lap, she
experienced a resurgence of an old childhood dislike. She saw again
the Gilead Balm library, and the pool of sunlight on the floor and the
"Descent of Man," and heard again Mrs. LeGrand telling the Bishop that
she--Hagar--was reading an improper book. Time between then and now
simply took itself away like a painted drop-scene. Six years rolled
themselves up as with a spring, and that hour seamlessly adjoined this
hour.

"I'm afraid," said Mrs. LeGrand, "that you'll be a little lonely, dear
child, but it won't be for long. Time flies so!"

"I don't exactly get lonely," said Hagar gravely. "You are going down
the river, aren't you?"

"Yes, for ten days. My dear friends at Idlewood won't hear of my not
coming. They were my dear husband's dearest cousins. Mrs. Lane and Miss
Bedford, together with Mrs. Brown, will take, I am sure, the best of
care of things here."

"Yes, of course. We'll get on beautifully," said Hagar. "Mr. Laydon is
not going away either. His mother is ill and he will not leave her. He
says that if we like to listen, he will come over in the evenings and
read aloud to us."

Mr. Laydon was teacher of Belles-Lettres at Eglantine, a well-looking
young gentleman, with a good voice, and apparently a sincere devotion
to the best literature. Eglantine and Mr. Laydon alike believed in
the future of Mr. Laydon. It was understood that his acceptance of a
position here was of the nature of a makeshift, a mere pot-boiler on
his road to high places. He and his mother were domiciled with a cousin
from whose doorstep you might toss a pebble into the Eglantine grounds.
In the past few years the neighbouring town had begun to grow; it had
thrown out a street which all but touched the osage-orange hedge.

Mrs. LeGrand made a slight motion with her hand on which was her
wedding-ring, with an old pearl ring for guard. "I shall tell Mrs. Lane
not to let him do that too often. I have a great esteem for Mr. Laydon,
but Eglantine cannot be too careful. No one with girls in their charge
can be too careful!--What is the Gilead Balm news?"

"The letter was from grandmother. She is well, and so is grandfather.
They have had a great deal of company. Uncle Bob has had rheumatism,
but he goes hunting just the same. The Hawk Nest Coltsworths are coming
for Christmas--all except Ralph. He is going home with a classmate.
Grandmother says he is the handsomest man at the University, and that
if I hear tales of his wildness I am not to believe them. She says
all men are a little wild at first. Aunt Serena is learning how to
illuminate texts. Mrs. Green has gone to see her daughter, who has
something the matter with her spine. Thomasine's uncle in New York is
going to have her visit him, and grandmother thinks he means to get
Thomasine a place in a store. Grandmother says no girl ought to work
in a store, but Thomasine's people are very poor, and I don't see what
she can do. She's got to live. Corker has a place, but he isn't doing
very well. Car'line and Isham have put a porch to their cabin, and Mary
Magazine has gotten religion."

"Girls of Thomasine's station," said Mrs. LeGrand, "are beginning
more and more, I'm sorry to see, to leave home to work for pay. It's
spreading, too; it's not confined to girls of her class. Only yesterday
I heard that a bright, pretty girl that I used to know at the White had
gone to Philadelphia to study to be a nurse, and there's Nellie Wynne
trying to be a journalist! A journalist! There isn't the least excuse
for either of those cases. One of those girls has a brother and the
other a father quite able to support them."

"But if there really isn't any one?" said Hagar wistfully. "And if you
feel that you are costing a lot--" Her dreams at night were beginning
to be shot with a vague but insistent "If I could write--if I could
paint or teach--if I could earn money--"

"There is almost always some one," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "And if a
girl knows how to make the best of herself, there inevitably arrives
her own establishment and the right man to take care of her. If"--she
shrugged--"if she doesn't know how to make the best of herself, she
might as well go work in a store. No one would especially object. That
is, they would not object except that when that kind of thing creeps
up higher in the scale of society, and girls who can perfectly well be
supported at home go out and work for pay, it makes an unfortunate kind
of precedent and reacts and reflects upon those who do know how to
make the best of themselves."

Hagar spoke diffidently. "But a lot of women had to work after the war.
Mrs. Lane and General ----'s daughters, and you yourself--"

"That is quite different," said Mrs. LeGrand. "Gentlewomen in reduced
circumstances may have to battle alone with the world, but they do not
like it, and it is only hard fate that has put them in that position.
It's an unnatural one, and they feel it as such. What I am talking
of is that nowadays you see women--young women--actually choosing to
stand alone, actually declining support, and--er--refusing generally to
make the best of themselves. It's part of the degeneracy of the times
that you begin to see women--women of breeding--in all kinds of public
places, working for their living. It's positively shocking! It opens
the gate to all kinds of things."

"Wrong things?"

"Ideas, notions. Roger Michael's ideas, for instance,--which I must
say are extremely wrong-headed. I regretted that I had asked her here.
She was hardly feminine." Mrs. LeGrand stretched herself, rubbed her
plump, firm arms, from which the figured silk had fallen back, and rose
from the couch. "I hope that Eglantine girls will always think of these
things as ladies should. And now, my dear, will you tell Mrs. Lane that
I want to see her?"

Mrs. LeGrand went away from Eglantine for ten days. Of the women
teachers living in the house, all went but Mrs. Lane and Miss Bedford.
All the girls went but three, and they were, first, Hagar Ashendyne;
second, a pale thin girl from the Far South, a martyr to sick
headaches; and third, Francie Smythe, a girl apparently without many
home people. Francie was sweetly dull, with small eyes and a perpetual
smile.

How quiet seemed the great house with its many rooms! They closed the
large dining-room and used the small room where Roger Michael had
supped. They shut the classrooms and the study-hall and the book-room,
and sat in the evenings in the bowery, flowery parlour. Here, the very
first evening, and the second, came Mr. Laydon with Browning in one
pocket and Tennyson in the other.

Mrs. Lane was knitting an afghan of a complicated pattern. Her lips
moved softly, continuously, counting. Mr. Laydon, making an eloquent
pause midway of "Tithonous" caught this _One--two--three--four_--and
had a fleeting expression of pain. Mrs. Lane saw the depth to which she
had sunk in his esteem and flushed over her delicate, pensive face. For
the remainder of the hour she sat with her knitting in her lap. But
really the afghan must be finished, and so, the second evening, she
placed her chair so as to face not the reader but a shadowy corner, and
so knit and counted in peace. Miss Bedford neither knit nor counted;
she said that she adored poetry and sighed rapturously where something
seemed to be indicated. She also adored conversation and argumentation
as to this or that nice point. What did Mr. Laydon think Browning
really meant in "Childe Roland," and was Porphyria's lover really mad?
Was Amy really to blame in "Locksley Hall"? Miss Bedford made play with
her rather fine eyes and teased the fringe of the table-cover. The pale
girl from the Far South--Lily was her name--sat by the fire and now
rubbed her forehead with a menthol pencil and now stroked Tipsy Parson,
Mrs. LeGrand's big black cat. Francie Smythe had a muslin apron full
of coloured silks and was embroidering a centre-piece--yellow roses
with leaves and thorns. Francie was a great embroiderer. Hagar sat
upon a low stool by the hearth, over against Lily, close to the slowly
burning logs. She was a Fire-Worshipper. The flames were better to her
than jewels, and the glowing alleys and caverns below were treasure
caves and temples. She sat listening in the rosy light, her chin in her
hands. She thought that Mr. Laydon read very well--very well, indeed.

  "'Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
              Miles and miles,
  On the solitary pastures--'"

Midway of the poem she turned a little so that she could see the reader.

He sat in the circle of lamplight, a presentable man, well-formed,
dark-eyed, and enthusiastic; fairly presentable within, too, very
fairly clean, a good son, filled with not unhonourable ambitions; good,
average, human stuff with an individual touch of impressionability
and a strong desire to be liked, as he expressed it, "for himself";
young still, with the momentum and emanation of youth. The lamp had
a rose and amber shade. It threw a softened, coloured, dreamy light.
Everything within its range was subtly altered and enriched.

  "'And I knew--while thus the quiet-coloured eve
              Smiles to leave
  To their folding, all our many tinkling fleece
              In such peace,
  And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey
              Melt away--'"

Hagar sat in her corner, upon the low stool, in the firelight, as
motionless as though she were in a trance. Her eyes, large, of a
marvellous hazel, beneath straight, well-pencilled brows of deepest
brown, were fixed steadily upon the man reading. Slowly, tentatively,
something rich and delicate seemed to rise within her, something that
clung to soul and body, something strange, sweet and painful, something
that, spreading and deepening with great swiftness, suffused her being
and made her heart at once ecstatic and sorrowful. She blushed deeply,
felt the crimsoning, and wished to drop her head upon her arms and
be alone in a balmy darkness. It was as though she were in a strange
dream, or in one of her long romances come real.

  "'In one year they sent a million fighters forth,
              South and North,--
  And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
              As the sky-- ...
  ... Love is best.'"

Laydon put the book down upon the table. While he read, one of the
maids, Zinia, had brought a note to Miss Bedford, and that lady had
gone away to answer it. Mrs. Lane knitted on, her lips moving, her
back to the table and the hearth. Francie Smythe was sorting silks.
"That was a lovely piece," she said unemotionally, and went on
dividing orange from lemon. The girl with the menthol pencil was more
appreciative. "Once, when I was a little girl I went with my father
and mother to Rome. We went out on the Campagna. I remember now how it
was all green and flat and wide as the sea and still, and there were
great arches running away--away--and a mist that they said was fever."
Her voice sank. She sighed and rubbed her forehead with the menthol.
Her eyes closed.

Edgar Laydon rose and came into the circle of firelight. He was moved
by his own reading, shaken with the impulse and rhythm of the poem. He
stood by the mantel and faced Hagar. She was one of his pupils, she
recited well; of the essays, the "compositions," which were produced
under his direction, hers were the best; he had told her more than once
that her work was good; in short, he was kindly disposed toward her. To
this instant that was all; he was scrupulously correct in his attitude
toward the young ladies whom he taught. He had for his work a kind of
unnecessary scorn; he felt that he ought to be teaching men, or at
the very least should hold a chair in some actual college for women.
Eglantine was nothing but a Young Ladies' Seminary. He felt quite an
enormous gulf between himself and those around him, and, as a weakness
will sometimes quaintly do, this feeling kept him steady. Until this
moment he was as indifferent to Hagar Ashendyne, as to any one of the
fifty whom he taught, and he was indifferent to them all. He had a
picture in his mind of the woman whom some day he meant to find and
woo, but she wasn't in the least like any one at Eglantine.

Now, in an instant, came a change. Hagar's eyes, very quiet and limpid,
were upon him. Perhaps, deep down, far distant from her conscious self,
she willed and exercised an ancient power of her sex and charmed him
to her; perhaps--in his lifted mood, the great, sensuous swing of the
verse still with him, the written cry of passion faintly drumming
within his veins--he would have suddenly linked that diffused emotion
to whatever presence, young and far from unpleasing, might have risen
at this moment to confront him. However that may be, Laydon's eyes and
those of Hagar met. Each gaze held the other for a breathless moment,
then the lids fell, the heart beat violently, a colour surged over
the face and receded, leaving each face pale. A log, burned through,
parted, striking the hearth with a sound like the click of a closing
trap.

Mrs. Lane, having come to an easy part in the pattern, turned her face
to the rest of the room. "Aren't we going to have some more poetry?
Read us some more, Mr. Laydon."

The girl with the menthol pencil spoke dreamily. "Isn't there another
piece about the Campagna? I can see it plain--green like the sea and
arches and tombs and a mist hanging over it, and a road going on--a
road going on--a road going on."




CHAPTER VIII

HAGAR AND LAYDON


This is what they did. The next day was soft as balm. To Hagar, sitting
in the sun on the step of the west porch, came the sound of steps
over the fallen leaves of what was called at Eglantine the Syringa
Alley--sycamore boughs above and syringa bushes thickly planted and
grown tall, making winding walls for a winding path. The red surged
over Hagar, her eyes, dark-ringed, half-closed. Laydon, emerging
from the alley, came straight toward her, over a space of gravel and
wind-brought leaves. It was mid-morning, the place open and sunny, to
be viewed from more windows than one, with the servants, moreover,
going to and fro on their morning business, apt to pass this gable end.
Aunt Dorinda, for instance, the old, turbaned cook, passed, but she saw
nothing but one of the teachers stopping to say, "Merry Christmas!" to
Miss Hagar. All the servants liked Miss Hagar.

What Laydon said was not "Merry Christmas!" but, "Hagar, Hagar! that
was Love came to us last night! I have not slept. I have been like a
madman all night! I did not know there was such a force in the world."

"I did not sleep either," answered Hagar. "I did not sleep at all."

"Every one can see us here. Let us walk toward the gate, through the
alley."

She rose from the step and went with him. Well in the shelter of the
syringa, hidden from the house, he stopped, and laid his hands lightly
upon her shoulders, then, as she did not resist, drew her to him. They
kissed, they clung together in a long embrace, they uttered love's
immemorial words, smothering each with each, then they fell apart; and
Hagar first buried her face in her hands, then, uncovering it, broke
into tremulous laughter, laughter that had a sobbing note.

"What will they say at Gilead Balm--oh, what will they say at Gilead
Balm?"

"Say!" answered Laydon. "They'll say that they wish your happiness!
Hagar, how old are you?"

"I'm nearly eighteen."

"And old for your years. And I--I am twenty-eight, and young for my
years." Laydon laughed, too. He was giddy with happiness. "Gilead Balm!
What a strange name for a place--and you've lived there always--"

"Always."

They were moving now down the alley toward a gate that gave upon the
highroad. Near by lay an open field seized upon, at Christmas, by a mob
of small boys with squibs and torpedoes and cannon crackers. They had
a bonfire, and the wood smoke drifted across, together with the odour
of burning powder. The boys were shouting like Liliputian soldiery, and
the squibs and giant crackers shook the air as with a continuous elfin
bombardment. The nearest church was ringing its bells. Laydon and Hagar
came to the gate--not the main but a lesser entrance to Eglantine. No
one was in view; hand in hand they leaned against the wooden palings.
Before them stretched the road, an old, country pike going on and on
between cedar and locust and thorn until it dropped into the violet
distance.

"I wish we were out upon it," said Hagar; "I wish we were out upon it,
going on and on through the world, travelling like gipsies!"

"You look like a gipsy," he said. "Have you got gipsy blood in you?"

"No.... Yes. Just to go on and on. The open road--and a clear fire at
night--and to see all things--"

"Hagar--Why did they call you Hagar?"

"I don't know. My mother named me."

"Hagar, we've got to think a little.... It took us so by surprise....
We had best, I think, just quietly say nothing to anybody for a
while.... Don't you think so?"

"I had not thought about it, but I will," said Hagar. She gazed
down the road, her brows knit. The Christmas cannonading went on, a
continuous miniature tearing and shaking of the air, with a dwarf
shouting and laughing, and small coalescing clouds of powder smoke. The
road ran, a quiet, sunny streak, past this small bedlam, into the still
distance. "I won't tell any one at Eglantine," she said at last, "until
Mrs. LeGrand comes back. She will be back in a week. But I'll write to
grandmother to-night."

Laydon measured the gate with his hand. "I had rather not tell my
mother at once. She is very delicate and nervous, and perhaps she has
grown a little selfish in her love for me. Besides, she had set her
heart on--" He threw that matter aside, it being a young and attractive
kinswoman with money. "I had rather not tell her just now. Then, as
to Mrs. LeGrand.... Of course, I suppose, as I am a teacher here, and
you are a pupil ... but there, too, had we not best delay a little? It
will make a confusion--things will be said--my position will become
an embarrassing one. And you, too, Hagar,--it won't be pleasant for
you either. Isn't it better just to keep our own concerns to ourselves
for a while? And your people up the river--why not _not_ tell them
until summer-time? Then, when you go home,--and when I have finished
my engagement here, for I don't propose to come back to Eglantine next
year,--then you can tell them, and so much better than you could write
it! I could follow you to Gilead Balm--we could tell them together.
Then we could discuss matters and our future intelligently--and that
is impossible at the moment. Let us just quietly keep our happiness to
ourselves for a while! Why should the world pry into it?" He seized her
hands and pressed his face against them. "Let us be happy and silent."

She looked at him with her candid eyes. "No, we shouldn't be happy that
way. I'll write to grandmother to-night."

They gazed at each other, the gate between them. The strong
enchantment held, but a momentary perplexity crossed it, and the
never long-laid dust of pain was stirred. "I am not asking anything
wrong," said Laydon, a hurt note in his voice. "I only see certain
embarrassments--difficulties that may arise. But, darling, darling! it
shall be just as you please! 'I'd crowns resign to call you mine'--and
so I reckon I can face mother and Mrs. LeGrand and Colonel Ashendyne!"
A flush came into his cheek. "I've been so foolish, too, as to--as to
pay a little attention to Miss Bedford. But she is too sensible a
woman to think that I meant anything seriously--"

"Did you?"

"Not in the least," said Laydon truthfully. "A man gets lonely, and
he craves affection and understanding, and he's in a muddle before he
knows it. There isn't anything else there, and I never said a word of
_love_ to her. Darling, darling! I never loved any one until last night
by the fire, and you looked up at me with those wonderful eyes, and I
looked down, and our eyes met and held, and it was like a fine flame
all over--and now I'm yours till death--and I'll run any gauntlet you
tell me to run! If you write to your people to-night, so will I. I'll
write to Colonel Ashendyne."

They left the gate and again pursued the syringa alley. The sound of
the Christmas bombardment drifted away. When they reached the shadow of
the great bushes, he kissed her again. All the air was blue and hazy
and the church bells were ringing, ringing. "I haven't any money," said
Laydon. "Mother has a very little, but I've never been able, somehow,
to lay by. I'll begin now, though, and then, as I told you, I expect
next year to have a much better situation. Dr. ---- at ---- thinks he
may get me in there. It would be delightful--a real field at last,
the best of surroundings and a tolerable salary. If I were fortunate
there, we could marry very soon, darling, darling! But as it is--It is
wretched that Eglantine pays so little, and that there is so little
recognition here of ability--no career--no opportunity! But just you
wait and see--you one bright spot here!"

Hagar gazed at the winding path, strewn with bronze leaves, and at
the syringa bushes, later to be laden with fragrant bloom, and at the
great white sycamore boughs against the pallid blue, and at the roof
and chimneys of Eglantine, now apparent behind the fretwork of trees.
The inner eye saw the house within, the three-years-familiar rooms,
her "tower room"--and all the human life, the girls, the teachers, the
servants. Bright drops came to her eyes. "I've been unhappy here, too,
sometimes. But I couldn't stay three years in a place and not love
something about it."

"That is because you are a woman," said the lover. "With a man it is
different. If a place isn't right, it isn't right.--If I had but five
thousand dollars! Then we might marry in a month's time. As it is,
we'll have to wait and wait and wait--"

"I am going to work, too," said Hagar. "I am going to try somehow to
make money."

He laughed. "You dear gipsy! You just keep your beautiful, large eyes,
and those dusky warm waves of hair, and your long slim fingers, and the
way you hold yourself, and let 'trying to earn money' go hang! That's
my part. Too many women are trying to earn money, anyhow--competing
with us.--You've got just to be your beautiful self, and keep on loving
me." He drew a long breath. "Jove! I can see you now, in a parlour
that's our own at ----, receiving guests--famous guests, maybe, after
a while; people who will come distances to see me! For I don't mean to
remain unknown. I know I've got ability."

Before they left the alley they settled that both should write that
night to Gilead Balm. Laydon found the idea distasteful enough;
older and more worldly-wise than the other, he knew that there
would probably ensue a tempest, and he was constitutionally averse
to tempests. He was well enough in family, but no great things;
he had a good education, but so had others; he could give a good
character--already he was running over in mind a list of clergymen,
educators, prominent citizens, and Confederate veterans to whom
he could refer Colonel Ashendyne. He had some doubt, however, as
to whether comparative spotlessness of character would have with
Colonel Ashendyne the predominant and overweening value that it
should have. Money--he had no means; position--he had as yet an
uncertain foothold in the world, and no powerful relatives to push
him. Unbounded confidence he had in himself, but the point was to
create that confidence in Hagar's people. Of course, they would say
that she was too young, and that he had taken advantage. His skirts
were clear there; both had truthfully been taken prisoners, fallen
into an ambuscade of ancient instinct; there hadn't been the slightest
premeditation. But how to convey that fact to the old Bourbon up the
river? Laydon had once been introduced to Colonel Ashendyne upon one of
the latter's rare visits to the neighbouring city and to Eglantine. He
remembered stingingly the Colonel's calm and gentlemanly willingness
immediately to forget the existence of a teacher of Belles-Lettres
in a Young Ladies' School. The letter to Gilead Balm. He didn't want
to write it, but he was going to--oh! he was going to.... Women were
curiously selfish about some things.... Mrs. LeGrand, too; he thought
that he would write about it to Mrs. LeGrand. He could imagine what she
would say, and he didn't want to hear it. He was in love, and he was
going to do the honourable thing, of course; he had no idea otherwise.
But he certainly entertained the wish that Hagar could see how entirely
honourable, as well as discreet, would be silence for a while.

Hagar never thought of it in terms of "honour." She had no adequate
idea of his reluctance. It might be said that she knew already the
arching of Mrs. LeGrand's brows and the lightning and thunder that
might issue from Gilead Balm. Grandfather and grandmother, Aunt Serena
and Uncle Bob looked upon her as nothing but a child. She wasn't a
child; she was eighteen. She felt no need to vindicate herself, nor to
apologize. She was moving through what was still almost pure bliss,
moving with a dreamlike tolerance of difficulties. What did it matter,
all those things? They were so little. The air was wine and velvet,
colours were at once soft and clear, sound was golden. In the general
transfiguration the man by her side appeared much like a demigod. Her
wings were fairly caught and held by the honey. It was natural for her
to act straightforwardly, and when she must propose that she act so
still, it was simply a putting forward, an unveiling of the mass of her
nature. She showed herself thus and so, and then went on in her happy
dream. Had he been able to make her realize his great magnanimity in
giving up his point of view to hers, perhaps she might have striven
for magnanimity, too, and acquiesced in a temporary secrecy, perhaps
not--on the whole, perhaps not. Had she deeply felt the secrecy to be
necessary, had they paced the earth in another time and amid actual
dangers, wild beasts could not have torn from her a relation of their
case.

But Laydon thought that she was thinking in terms of "honour." Pure
women were naturally up in arms at the suggestion of secrecy. Their
delicate minds had at once a vision of deception, desertion, all kinds
of horrors. He acknowledged that men had given them reason for the
vision; they could not be blamed if they saw it even when an entirely
honourable and devoted man was at their feet. He smiled at what he
supposed Hagar thought; his warm sense of natural supremacy became
rich and deep; he felt like an Eastern king unfolding a generous and
noble nature to some suppliant who had reason to doubt those qualities
in Eastern kings at large--he experienced a sumptuous, Oriental,
Ahasuerus-and-Esther feeling. Poor little girl! If she had any absurd
fear like that--He began to be eager to get to the letter to Colonel
Ashendyne. He could see his own strong black handwriting on a large
sheet of bond paper. _My dear Colonel Ashendyne:--You will doubtless be
surprised at the nature and contents of this letter, but I beg of you
to_--

The syringa alley ended, and the west wing of the house, beyond which
stretched the offices, opened upon them. Zinia, the mulatto maid, and
old Daniel, the gardener, watched them from a doorway. "My Lord!" said
Zinia. "Dey's walkin' right far apart, but I knows a co'tin' air when
I sees it! Miss Sarah better come back here!"

Daniel frowned. He had been born on the Eglantine place and the majesty
and honour and glory of Eglantine were his. "Shet yo' mouf, gal! Don't
no co'tin' occur at Eglantine. Hit's Christmas an' everybody looks
good an' shinin' lak de angels. Dey two jes' been listenin' to de
'lumination an' talkin' jography an' Greek!"

As the two stepped upon the west porch, the door opened and Miss
Bedford came out--Miss Bedford in a very pretty red hood and a
Connemara cloak. Miss Bedford had a sharp look. "Where did you two find
each other?" she asked; then, without waiting for an answer, "Hagar!
Mrs. Lane has been looking for you. She wants you to help her do up
parcels for her mission children. I've been tying up things until I am
tired, and now I am going to walk down the avenue for a breath of air.
Hurry in, dear; she needs you.--Oh, Mr. Laydon! there's a passage in
'The Ring and the Book' that I've been wanting to ask you to explain--"

Hagar went in and tied up parcels in coloured tissue paper. The day
went by as in a dream. There was a Christmas dinner, with holly on the
table, and little red candles, and in the afternoon she went with Mrs.
Lane to a Christmas tree for poor children in the Sunday-School room of
a neighbouring church. The tree blazed with an unearthly splendour, the
star in the top seemed effulgent, the "Ohs!" and "Ahs!" and laughter
of the circling children, fell into a rhythm like sweet, low, distant
thunder.

That night she wrote both to her grandmother and her grandfather.
When she had made an end of doing so, she kneeled upon the braided
rug before the fire in her tower room, loosed her dark hair,
shook it around her, and sat as in a tent, her arms clasping her
knees, her head bowed upon them. "_Carcassonne--Aigues-Mortes.
Carcassonne--Aigues-Mortes._ I can't send a letter to father, for I
don't know where to address it. Mother--mother--mother! I can't send a
letter to you either...."




CHAPTER IX

ROMEO AND JULIET


That week a noted actress played Juliet several evenings in succession
at the theatre in the neighbouring town. The ladies left adrift
at Eglantine read in the morning paper a glowing report of the
performance. Miss Bedford said she was going; she never missed an
opportunity to see "Romeo and Juliet."

Mr. Laydon, walking in at that moment--they were all in the small
book-room--caught the statement. "Why shouldn't you all go? I have seen
her play it once, but I'd like to see it again." He laughed. "I feel
reckless and I'm going to get up a theatre-party! Mrs. Lane, won't you
go?"

Mrs. Lane shook her head. "My theatre days are over," she said in her
gentle, plaintive voice. "Thank you just the same, Mr. Laydon. But the
others might like to go."

"Miss Bedford--"

"We ought," said Miss Bedford, "by rights to have Mrs. Lane to chaperon
us, but it's Christmas, isn't it?--and everybody's a little mad! Thank
you, Mr. Laydon."

Laydon looked at Francie. "Miss Smythe, won't you come, too?" He had
made a rapid calculation. Yes, it would cost only so much,--they would
go in of course on the street car,--and in order to ask one he would
have to ask all.

Yes, Francie would go, though she was sorry that it was Shakespeare,
and just caught herself in time from saying so. "It will be lovely,"
she said, instead, unemotionally.

Miss Bedford supplied the lacking enthusiasm. "It will be the treat
of the winter! Oh, the Balcony Scene, and where she drinks the
sleeping-draught, and the tomb--" She moved nearer Laydon as she
spoke and managed to convey to him, _sotto voce_, "You mustn't be
extravagant, you generous man! Don't think that you have to ask these
girls just because they are in the room." But she was too late; Laydon
was already asking.

"Miss Goldwell, won't you come, too, to see 'Romeo and Juliet'?"

If she didn't have a headache, Miss Goldwell would be glad to,--"Thank
you, Mr. Laydon."

"Miss Ashendyne, won't you?"

"Yes, thank you."

"I will go at once," said Laydon, "and get the tickets."

In the end, Lily Goldwell went, and Francie Smythe did not. Francie
developed a sore throat that put Mrs. Lane in terror of tonsillitis.
Nothing must go wrong--nobody must get ill while dear Mrs. LeGrand was
away!--it would be madness for Francie to go out. Where "what Mrs.
LeGrand might think" came into it, Mrs. Lane was adamant. Francie
sullenly stayed at home. Lily, for a marvel, didn't have a headache,
and she said she would take her menthol pencil, in case the music
should bring on one.

The four walked down the avenue, beneath the whispering trees. There
was no moon, but the stars shone bright, and it was not cold. Mr.
Laydon and Miss Bedford went a little in front, and Lily and Hagar
followed. They passed through the big gate and, walking down the road
a little way, came to where the road became a street, and, at ten
minutes' interval, a street-car jingled up, reversed, and jingled back
to town again.

On the street-car Miss Bedford and Mr. Laydon were again together, and
Lily and Hagar. Between the two pairs stretched a row of men, several
with the evening newspaper. It was too warm in the car, and Lily,
murmuring something, took out her menthol pencil. Hagar studied the
score of occupants, and the row of advertisements, and the dark night
without the windows. The man next her had a newspaper, and now he began
to talk to an older man beside him.

"The country's doing pretty well, seems to me."

The other grunted. "Isn't anything doing pretty well. I'm getting to be
a Populist."

"Oh, go away! Are you going to the World's Fair?"

"No. There's going to be the biggest panic yet in this country about
one year from now."

"Oh, cheer up! You've been living on Homestead."

"If I have, it's poor living."

Across the aisle a woman was talking about the famine in Russia. "We
are going to try to get up a bazaar and make a little money to send to
get food with. Tolstoy--"

The horse-car jingled, jingled through the night. All the windows
were down; it grew hot and close and crowded. The black night without
pressed alongside, peered through the clouded glass. Within were a
muddy glare and swaying and the mingled breath of people.

Lily sighed. "Don't you ever wish for just a clear Nothing? No pain,
no feeling, no people, no light, no sound, no anything?"

The street-car turned a corner and swayed and jingled into a lighted,
business street, where were Christmas windows and upon the pavement a
Christmas throng. A drug store--a wine and liquor store--a grocery--a
clothing store--a wine and liquor store--a drug store; amber and
crimson, green and blue, broken and restless arrived the lights through
the filmy glass. Laughter and voices of the crowd came with a distant
humming, through which clanged the street-car bell. The car stopped
for passengers, then creaked on again. A workman entered, stood for a
couple of minutes, touching Hagar's skirt, then, a man opposite rising
and leaving the car, sank into the vacant place. Hagar's eyes swept
him dreamily; then, she knew not why, she fell to observing him with
a puzzled, stealthy gaze. He was certainly young, and yet he did not
look so. The lower part of his face was covered by a short soft, dark
beard; he had a battered slouch hat pulled down low; the eyes beneath
were sombre and the face lined. There was a dinner pail at his feet.
He, too, had an evening paper; Hagar saw the headlines of the piece he
was reading: "HOMESTEAD"; and underneath, "STRONG HAND OF THE LAW."
Outside, topaz and ruby and emerald drifted by the windows of a wine
and liquor store.

She knit her brows. Some current in the shoreless sea of mind had
been started, but she could not trace its beginning nor where it led.
Another minute and the car stopped before the theatre.

Within, Laydon manoeuvred, and the end was that if he had Miss Bedford
upon his right, yet he had Hagar upon his left. The orchestra had not
yet begun; the house was dim, people entering, those seated having to
stand up to let the others pass. Once, when this happened, he leaned
toward her until their shoulders touched, until his breath was upon her
cheek. He dared so much as to whisper, "If only we were here, just you
and I, together!"

Every one was seated now, and she looked at the people with their
festal, Christmas air. There was a girl in a box who was like Sylvie,
and nearer yet a grey-haired gentleman with a certain vague resemblance
to her grandfather. Her thought flashed across the dark country, up
the winding, amber-hued river to Gilead Balm. They would have had her
letter yesterday. The shimmer and murmur of the filled theatre were all
about her, but so was Gilead Balm--she tried to hear what they would
be saying there to-night. The music began, and in a moment she was in
a colourful dream. The curtain went up, and here was the hot, sunshiny
street of Verona and all the heady wine of youth and love.

When the curtain fell and the lights brightened, Miss Bedford, after
frantically applauding, claimed Laydon for her own. She had raptures
to impart, criticisms to exchange, knowledge to imbibe. Minutes passed
ere, during a momentary lapse into her programme, Laydon could bend
toward the lady on his left. Did she like it? What did she think of
Juliet?--What did she think of Romeo?--Was it not well-staged?

Hagar did not know whether it were well staged or not. She was eighteen
years old; she had been very seldom to the theatre; she was moving
through a dreamy paradise. She wanted just to sit still and bring it
all back before the inner eye. Despite the fact that he was her lover,
she was not sorry when Laydon must turn to the lady on his right. When
Lily spoke to her, she said, "Don't let's talk. Let's sit still and see
it all again." Lily agreed. She was no chatterbox herself. The music
played; the lights in the house were lowered; up, slowly, gently, went
the curtain; here was the orchard of the Capulets.

The great concave of the theatre was dim. Laydon's hand sought
Hagar's, found it in the semi-darkness, held it throughout the act.
She acquiesced; and yet--and yet--She did not wish him to fondle her
hand, nor yet, as once or twice he did, to whisper to her. She wished
to listen, listen. She was in Verona, not here.

The act closed. The lights went up, Laydon softly withdrew his hand. He
applauded loudly, all the house applauded. Hagar hated the clapping,
not experienced enough to know how breath-of-life it was to the people
behind the curtain. Already the curtain was rising for Juliet to come
forth and bow, and then for Juliet to bring forth Romeo, and both to
bow. Had she known, she would have applauded, too; she was a kindly
child. The curtain was down now, the house rustling. All around was
talking; people seemed never to wish to be quiet. Laydon was talking,
too, answering Miss Bedford's artful-artless queries, embarking on a
commentary upon act and actors. He talked with a conscious brilliance
as became a professor of Belles-Lettres, more especially for Hagar's
delight, but aware also that the people directly in front and behind
were listening. Was Hagar delighted? Very slowly and insidiously, like
a slender serpent stealing into some Happy Valley, there came into her
heart a distaste for commentaries. As the valley might be ignorant of
the serpent, so neither did she know what was the matter; she was only
not so mystically happy as she had been before.

The orchestra came back, there was a murmur of expectation, Laydon
ceased to discourse of Bandello, and of Dante's reference to Montague
and Capulet. Lily, on the other side of Hagar, complained of the heat
and the music. "I like stringed instruments, but those great brass
horns make the back of my head hurt so."

Hagar touched her cold, little hand. "Poor Lily! I wish you didn't feel
badly all the time! I wish you liked the horns."

The curtain rose, the play rolled on. Mercutio was slain,--Mercutio and
Tybalt,--Romeo was banished. The scene changed, and here was the great
window of Juliet's room--the rope ladder--the envious East.

  "_Night's candles are burned out and jocund day
  Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops;
  I must be gone and live, or stay and die_--"

Hagar sat, bent forward, her eyes dark and wide, the wine-red in her
cheeks. When the curtain went down she did not move; Laydon, under
cover of the loud applause, spoke to her twice before she attended. Her
eyes came back from a long way off, her mind turned with difficulty.
"Yes? What is it?" Laydon was easily aggrieved. "You are thinking more
of this wretched play," he whispered, "than you are of me!"

On rolled the swift events, gorgeous and swift as shadows. The
curtain fell, the curtain rose. The potion was drunk--the wailing
was made--Balthasar rode to warn Romeo. There came the last act: the
poison--County Paris--the Tomb--

  "_Here will I set up my everlasting rest_--"

It was over.... She helped Lily with her red evening cloak, she found
Miss Bedford's striped silk bag that Laydon could not find; they all
passed out of the house of enchantments. Here was the night, and the
night wind, and broken lights and carriages, and a clamour of voices,
and at last the clanging street-car with a great freight of talking
people. She wanted to sit still and dream it over--and fortunately
Laydon was again occupied with Miss Bedford.

"You liked it, didn't you?" asked Lily. "I think that you like things
that you imagine better than you like things that you do."

Hagar looked at her with eyes that were yet wide and fixed. "I don't
know. If you could be and do all that you can imagine--but you
can't--you can't--" she smiled and rubbed her hand across her eyes--
"and it's a tragedy."

When they left the street-car and walked toward the Eglantine gates,
it was drawing toward midnight. Laydon and Hagar now moved side by
side through the darkness. Lily--who said that her head had ached very
little, thank you!--exchanged comments on the play with Miss Bedford.

Laydon held the gate open; then, closing it, fell a few feet behind
with Hagar. "You enjoyed it?"

"Oh--"

He was again in love. "The plays we'll see together, darling, darling!
'Two souls with but a single thought--'"

"There is no need to walk so fast," said Miss Bedford. "Oh, Mr. Laydon,
a briar has caught my skirt--Will you--? Oh, thank you!"

The house showed before them. "The parlour windows are lighted," said
Lily. "Mrs. Lane must have company."

Mrs. Lane did have company. She herself opened the front door to them.
Mrs. Lane's eyes were red, and she looked frightened. "Wait," she said,
and got between the little group and the parlour door. "Lily, you had
best go straight upstairs, my dear! Miss Bedford, will you please wait
here with me just a minute? Mr. Laydon, Mrs. LeGrand says will you come
into the parlour? Hagar, you are to go, too. Your grandfather is here."

Colonel Ashendyne stood between the table and the fire. Mrs. LeGrand
was seated upon the sofa, which meant that she sat in state. Mrs. Lane,
who came presently stealing in again, sat back from the centre in a
meek, small chair, and at intervals wiped her eyes. The culprits stood.

Colonel Argall Ashendyne never lacked words with which to express his
meaning--words that bit. Now his well-cut lips opened, and out there
came like a scimitar his part of the ensuing conversation.

"Hagar, your letter was read yesterday evening. I immediately
telegraphed to Mrs. LeGrand at Idlewood, and she obligingly took this
morning's boat. I myself came down on the afternoon train, and got here
two hours ago. Now, sir--" he turned on Laydon--"what have you got to
say for yourself?"

"I--I--" began Laydon. He drew a breath and his spine stiffened. "I
have to say, sir, that I love your granddaughter, and that I have asked
her to marry me."

Mrs. LeGrand, while the colonel's hawk eye dwelt witheringly, spoke
from the sofa. "I have no words, Mr. Laydon, in which to express
my disapproval of your action, or my disappointment in one whom I
had supposed a gentleman. In my absence you have chosen to abuse my
confidence and to do a most dishonourable and ungentlemanly thing--a
thing which, were it known, might easily bring disrepute upon
Eglantine. You will understand, of course, that it terminates your
connection with this school--"

"Mrs. LeGrand," said Laydon, "I have done nothing dishonourable."

"You have taken advantage of my absence, sir, to make love to one of my
pupils--"

"To an inexperienced child, sir," said the Colonel;--"too young to know
better or to tell pinchbeck when she sees it! You should be caned."

"Colonel Ashendyne, if you were a younger man--"

"Bah!" said the Colonel. "I am younger now and more real than
you!--Hagar!"

"Yes, grandfather."

"Come here!"

Hagar came. The Colonel laid his hands upon her shoulders, a little
roughly, but not too roughly. The two looked each other in the eyes.
He was tall and she but of medium height, she was young and he was her
elder, he was ancestor and she descendant, he was her supporter and she
his dependant, he was grandfather and she was grandchild. Gilead Balm
had always inculcated reverence for dominant kin and family authority.
It had been Gilead Balm's grievance, long ago, against her mother
that she recognized that so poorly.... But Hagar had always seemed to
recognize it. "Gipsy," said the Colonel now, "I am not going to be
hard upon you. It's the nature of the young to be foolish, and a young
girl may be pardoned anything short of the irrecoverable. All that I
want you to do is to see that you have been very foolish and to say as
much to this--this gentleman. Simply turn round and say to him 'Mr.--'
What's his name?--Layton?"

"I wrote to you day before yesterday, Colonel Ashendyne," said Laydon.
"You saw my name there--"

"I never got your letter, sir! I got hers.--Hagar! say after me to this
gentleman, 'Sir, I was mistaken in my sentiment toward you, and I here
and now release you from any fancied engagement between us.'--Say it!"

As he spoke, he wheeled her so that she faced Laydon. She stood, a
scarlet in her cheeks, her eyes dark, deep, and angry. "Hagar!" cried
Laydon, maddened, too, "are you going to say that?"

"No," answered Hagar. "No, I am not going to say it! I have done
nothing wrong nor underhand, and neither have you! Mrs. LeGrand knew
that you were coming here, in the evening, to read to us. Why shouldn't
you come? Well, one evening you were reading and I was listening, and
I was not thinking of you and you were not thinking of me. And then,
suddenly, something--Love--came into this room and took us prisoner. We
did not ask him here, we did not know anything.... But when it happened
we knew it, and next morning, out in the open air, we told each other
about it. Nothing could have kept us from doing that, and nothing had
a right to keep us from it! Nothing!--And that very night I wrote to
you, grandfather--and he wrote.... If I am mistaken I am mistaken, but
I will find it out for myself!" She twisted herself in the Colonel's
grasp until she faced him. "You say that you are real--Well, I am real
too! I am as real as you are!"

The Colonel's fine, bony hands closed upon her shoulders until she
caught her breath with the pain. The water rushed to her eyes, but
she kept it from over-brimming. "Don't cry!" said a voice within her.
"Whatever you do, don't cry!" It was like her mother's voice, and she
answered instantly. Colonel Ashendyne, his lips white beneath his grey
mustache, shook her violently, so violently that, pushed from her
footing, she stumbled and sank to her knee.

Laydon came up with clenched fists and the colour gone from his face.
"Let her go, damn you!--"

Mrs. Lane uttered a faint cry and Mrs. LeGrand rose from the sofa.




CHAPTER X

GILEAD BALM


The March winds shook the rusty cedars and tossed the pink peach
branches, and carried a fleet of clouds swiftly overhead through the
blue aërial sea. They rattled the windows of Gilead Balm and bent the
chimney smoke aslant like streamers. The winds were rough but not cold.
Now and again they sank into the sunniest of calms, little periods of
stillness, small doldrums punctuating the stormiest sentences. Then
with a whistle, shriller and shriller, they mounted again, tremendously
exhilarated, sweeping earth and sky.

On the ridge back of Gilead Balm the buds of the cucumber tree were
swelling, the grass beneath was growing green, the ants were out in the
sunshine. Up in the branches a bluebird was exploring building-sites.

Hagar came wandering over the ridge. The wind wrapped her old brown
dress about her limbs and blew her dark hair into locks and tendrils.
Luna followed her, but Luna in no frolicsome mood. Luna was old, old,
and to-day dispirited because Captain Bob had gone to a meeting of
Democrats in the neighbouring town and had left her behind. Depression
was writ in every line of Luna's body, and an old, experienced
weariness and disillusionment in the eye with which she looked askance
at a brand-new white butterfly on a brand-new dandelion.

Hagar stood with her back to the cucumber tree and surveyed the scene.
The hills, scurried over by the shadows of the driven clouds, the
river--the river winding down to the sea, and the ditch where used to
be the canal; and away, away, the white plume of a passenger train. She
was mad for travel, for wandering, for the open road; all the world
sung to her as with a thousand tongues in the books she read. Pictures,
cathedrals, statues, cities, snow on mountains, the ocean, deserts,
torrid lands, France, Spain, Italy, England--oh, to go, to go! She
would have liked to fling herself on the blowing wind and go with it
over land and sea.

She looked with hot, sombre eyes at Gilead Balm. It was the home she
had always known and she loved it; it was home,--yes, it was home; but
it was not so pleasant at home just now. March--and the Colonel had
withdrawn her from Eglantine, ordered her home, the first of January!
January, February, a part of March--and her grandfather still eaten
with a cold anger every time he looked at her, and her grandmother,
outraged at her suddenly manifested likeness to Maria and Maria's
"ways," almost as bad! Aunt Serena gave her no sympathy; Aunt Serena
had become almost violent on the subject. If you were going to rebel
and disobey, Aunt Serena told her, if you were going to be forward and
almost fast, and rebel and disobey, you needn't look for any sympathy
from her! Colonel Ashendyne had been explicit enough back in January.
"When you send about his business that second-rate person you've chosen
to entangle yourself with, then and not till then will you be 'Gipsy'
again to me!"

Hagar put out her arms to the wind. "I want to go away! I want to go
away! I'm tired of it all--tired of living here--"

The wind blew past her with its long cry; then it suddenly sank, and
there came almost a half-hour of bright calm, warm stillness, astral
gold. Hagar sat down between the roots of the cucumber tree and
took her head within her arms. By degrees, in the sunshine, emotion
subsided; she began to think and dream. Her mind sent the shuttle
far and fast, it touched here and touched there, and in the course
of its weaving it touched Eglantine, touched and quit and touched
again. Laydon was still at Eglantine. He had been a very satisfactory
Professor of Belles-Lettres; Mrs. LeGrand really did not know where,
in mid-season, to find such another. He had behaved wretchedly, but
the mischief was done, and there was--on consideration--no need to
tell the world about it, no especial need, indeed, of proclaiming
it at Eglantine or to Eglantine patrons at large. He was not--Mrs.
LeGrand did him that justice--he was not at all a "fast" man or likely
to give further trouble upon this line. And he was a good teacher, a
good talker, in demand for lectures on cultural subjects before local
literary societies, popular and pleasing, a creditable figure among
the Eglantine faculty. Much of this matter was probably Hagar's fault.
She had made eyes at him, little fool! When the Colonel declared his
determination,--with no reflections on Eglantine, my dear friend!--to
bring to an end his granddaughter's formal education, and to take her
back to Gilead Balm where this infatuation would soon disappear,--Mrs.
LeGrand saw daylight. She had an interview with Colonel Ashendyne.
He was profoundly contemptuous of what Mr. Laydon did for a living
or where he did it, of whom he taught or what he taught, so long as
there was distance between him and an Ashendyne. "You know--you know,
my dear friend, that I have always had in mind Ralph Coltsworth!" She
had an interview--concert pitch--with Laydon. She had a smooth, quiet
talk with her teachers. She mentioned casually, to one after another
of the girls, that Mrs. Ashendyne at Gilead Balm was not as young
as she had been, nor as strong, and that Colonel Ashendyne thought
that Hagar should be at home with her grandmother. She, Mrs. LeGrand,
regretted it, but every girl's duty to her family was paramount. They
would miss Hagar sadly,--she was a dear girl and a clever girl,--but
it seemed right that she should go. Hagar went and Laydon stayed,
and without a word from any principal in the affair, every girl at
Eglantine knew that Mr. Laydon had kissed Hagar, and that Hagar had
said that she would love him forever, and that Colonel Ashendyne was
very angry, and was probably keeping Hagar on bread and water at that
instant, and that it was all very romantic.... And then at Eglantine
examinations came on, and dreams of Easter holiday, and after that of
Commencement, and Mr. Laydon taught with an entire correctness and an
impassive attitude toward all young ladies; and Miss Bedford, who had
been very bitter at first and had said things, grew amiable again and
reopened her Browning. The ripple smoothed out as all things smoothed
out at Eglantine. The place resumed its pristine "sweetness." It was
believed among the girls that Mr. Laydon and Hagar "corresponded," but
it was not certainly known. Mr. Laydon wrapped himself in dignity as in
a mantle. As for Hagar, she had always been rather far away.

Up on the ridge to-day, Hagar's mind dwelt somewhat on Eglantine, but
not overmuch. It was not precisely Eglantine that she was missing. Was
she missing Laydon? Certainly, at this period, she would have answered
that she was--though, to be perfectly truthful, she might have added,
"But I do not think of that all the time--not nearly all the time."
She was unhappy, and on occasions her fancy brooded over that night
in the Eglantine parlour when he read of love, and the flames became
jewelled and alive, and she saw the turret on the plain, "by the caper
overrooted, by the gourd overscored," and suddenly a warmth and light
wrapped them both. The warmth and light certainly still dwelt over that
scene and that moment. To a lesser extent it abided over and around
the next morning, the west porch, the syringa alley. Very strangely,
as she was dimly aware, it stretched only thinly over the following
days, over even the night of "Romeo and Juliet." There was there a
mixed and wavering light, changing, for the hour that immediately
followed,--the hour when she faced her grandfather, and he spoke with
knives as he was able to do, when he laid his hands upon her and said
untrue and unjust things to Laydon,--into an angry glow. That hour was
bright and hot like a ruby. How much was love, and how much outraged
pride and a burning sense of wrong, she was not skilled to know, nor
how much was actual chivalric defence of her partner in iniquity....
The parting interview, when she and Laydon, having stood upon their
rights, obtained a strange half-hour in the Eglantine parlour--strange
and stiff, with "Of course, if I love you, I'll be faithful," repeated
on her part some five times, with, on his part, Byronic fervour,
volcanic utterances. Had he not gone over them to himself afterwards,
in his homely, cheerfully commonplace room in the brown cottage outside
the Eglantine grounds? They had been fine; from the point of view of
Belles-Lettres they could not have been bettered. He felt a glow as he
recognized that fact, followed by a mental shot at the great Seat of
Learning where he wished to be. "By George! that's the place I'm fitted
for! The man they've got isn't in the same class--".... The parting
interview--to the girl on the ridge a cloud seemed to hang over that,
a cloud that was here and there rose-flushed, but just as often fading
into grey. Hagar drove her thoughts back to the first evening and
the jewelled fire; that was a clear, fair memory, innocent, rich and
sincere. The others had, so strangely, a certain pain and dulness.

She had a sturdy power of reaction against the melancholy and
the painful, and as to-day she could not, somehow, fix her mind
unswervingly upon the one clear hour, and the others perplexed and
hurt, her mind at last turned with decision from any contemplation
whatsoever of the round of events which lay behind her presence here,
in March, upon the ridge behind Gilead Balm. Rising, she left the
cucumber tree and walked along the crest of the ridge. The wind was
not blowing now, the sunshine was very golden, the little leaves were
springing. She crossed the ribbon-like plateau to its northern edge,
and stood, looking down that slope. It was somewhat heavily wooded,
and in shadow. It fell steeply to a handsbreadth of sward, a purling
streamlet, sunken boulders, a wide thicket and a wood beyond. Hagar,
leaning against a young beech, gazed down the shadowed stillness. Her
eyebrows lifted at their inner ends, lines came into her forehead,
wistful markings about her lips. Sometimes when she knew that she was
quite alone she spoke aloud to her self. She did this now. "I haven't
been here since that day it happened.... Six years.... I wonder if he
ran away again, or if he stayed there to the end. I wonder where he is
now. Six years...."

The wind rose and blew fiercely, rattling in the thicket and
bending every tree; then it sank again. Hagar leaned against the
trunk of the beech and thought and thought. As a child she had been
speculative, everywhere and all the time; with youth had come dreams
and imaginations, pushing the older intense querying aside. Now of
a sudden a leaf was turned. She dreamed and imagined still, but the
thinker within her rose a step, gained a foot on the infinite, mounting
stair. Hagar began to brood upon the state of the world. "Black and
white stripes like a zebra.... How petty to clothe a man--a boy he was
then--like that, mark him and brand him, until through life he sees
himself striped black and white like a zebra--on his dying bed, maybe,
sees himself like that! Vindictive. And the world sees him, too, like
that, grotesque and mean and awful, and it cannot cleanse his image in
its mind. It is foolish."

The wind roared again up and down the ridge. Hagar shivered and began
to move toward the warmer side; then halted, turned, and came back
to the beech. "I'll not go away until the sun comes from under that
cloud and the wind drops. It's like leaving him alone in the thicket
down there, in the cold and shadow." She waited until the sun came out
and the wind dropped, then took her hand from the beech tree and went
away. Leaving the ridge, she came to the overseer's house, hesitated
a moment, then went and knocked at the kitchen door.

"Come in!" called Mrs. Green, who was sitting by the kitchen table,
in the patch of sunlight before the window, sewing together strips of
bright cloth and winding them into balls for a rag carpet. "You, Hagar?
Come right in! Well, March is surely going out like a lion!"

"It's so windy that the clouds are running like sheep," said Hagar. She
took a small, split-bottom rocking-chair, drew it near Mrs. Green, and
began to wind carpet rags. "Red and blue and grey--it's going to be a
beautiful carpet! Have you heard from Thomasine?"

Mrs. Green rose and took a letter from behind the clock. "Read it.
She's been to a theatre and the Eden Musée and Brooklyn Bridge, and
she's going to visit the Statue of Liberty."

Hagar read five pages of lined notepaper, all covered with Thomasine's
pretty, precise writing. "She's having a good time.... I wish I were
there, too. I've never seen New York."

"Never mind! You will one day," said Mrs. Green. "Yes, Thomasine's
having a good time. Jim was born generous."

"Is she really going to work if he can get her a place?"

"Yes, child, she is. Times seems to me to be gettin' harder right along
instead of easier. Girls have got to go out in the world and work
nowadays, just the same as boys. I don't know as it will hurt them;
anyway, they've got to do it. Food an' clothes don't ask which sect you
belong to."

"Thomasine ought to have gone to school. Girls can go to college now,
and Thomasine and I both ought to have gone to college."

"Landsake!" said Mrs. Green. "Ain't you been to college for going on
three years?"

But Hagar shook her head. "No. Eglantine wasn't exactly a college. I
ought to have gone to a different kind of place. Thomasine likes books,
too."

"Yes, she likes them, but she don't like them nothing like as much as
you do. But Thomasine's a good child and mighty refined. I hope Jim'll
take pains to get her a place where they are nice people. He means all
right, but there! men don't never quite understand."

"I wish I could earn money," said Hagar. "I wish I could."

Mrs. Green regarded her over her spectacles. "A lot of women have
wished that, child. A lot of women have wished it, and then again a lot
of women haven't wished it. Some would rather do for themselves an' for
others an' some would rather be did for, and that's the world. I've
noticed it in men, too."

"It's in my head all the time. I think mother put it there--"

"Yes, I know," said Mrs. Green. "A lot of us have felt that way. But
it ain't so easy for women to make money. There's more ways they can't
than they can. It's what they call 'Sentiment' fights them. Sentiment
don't mind their being industrious, but it draws the line at their
getting money for it. It says it ought to be a free gift. It don't
grudge--at least it don't grudge much--a little egg and butter money,
but anything more--Lord!" She sewed together two strips of blue
flannel. "No, it ain't easy. And a woman kind of gets discouraged.
She's put her ambition to sleep so often that now with most of them it
seems asleep for keeps. Them that's industrious don't expect to rise or
anything to come of it, and them that's lazy gets lazier. It's a funny
world--for women.--There's a lot of brown strips in the basket there."

"I'm going to tell you what I've done," said Hagar, winding a red ball.
"I've written a fairy story--but I don't suppose it will be taken."

"I always knew you could write," said Mrs. Green. "A fairy story!
What's it about?"

"About fairies and a boy and a girl, and a lovely land they found by
going neither north nor south nor east nor west, and what they did
there. It seemed to me right good," said Hagar wistfully; "but I sent
it off a month ago, and I've never heard a word about it."

"Where did you send it? I never did know," said Mrs. Green, "how what
people writes gets printed and bound. It don't do it just of itself."

Hagar leaned forward in her rocking-chair. Her cheeks were carmine
and her eyes soft and bright. "The 'Young People's Home Magazine'
offered three prizes for the three best stories--stories that it could
publish. And I thought, 'Why not I as well as another?'--and so I wrote
a fairy story and sent it. The first prize is two hundred dollars,
and the second prize is one hundred dollars, and the third is fifty
dollars.--If I could get even the third prize, I would be happy."

"I should think you would!" exclaimed Mrs. Green. "Fifty dollars! I
don't know as I ever saw fifty dollars all in one lump--exceptin' war
money. When are you going to hear?"

"I don't know. I'm afraid I won't ever hear. I'm afraid it wasn't
good enough--not even good enough for them to write to me and say it
wouldn't do and tell me why."

"Well, I wouldn't give up hope," said Mrs. Green. "It's my motto to
carry hope right spang through the grave." She rose, fed the fire, and
filled the tea-kettle, then returned to her rag carpet. "You're lookin'
a little thin, child. Don't let them worry you up at the house."

"I'm not," answered Hagar sombrely. The light went out of her eyes. She
stitched slowly, drawing her thread through with deliberation.

Mrs. Green again looked over her spectacles. "They're mighty fine folk,
the Ashendynes," she said at last. "They've got old blood and pride
for a dozen, and the settest heads! Ain't nothin' daunts them, neither
Satan nor the Lord. They're goin' to run their own race.--You're more
like your mother, but I wouldn't say you didn't have something of your
grandfather in you at times. You've got a dash of Coltsworth, too."

"Haven't I anything of my father at all?"

Mrs. Green, leaning forward into the sunlight, threaded her needle. "I
wouldn't be bitter about my father, if I were you. People can be born
without a sense of obligation and responsibility just as they can be
born without other senses. I suppose it's there somewhere, only, so
many other things are atop, it ain't hardly ever stirred. Your father's
right rich in other things."

"He's so poor he couldn't either truly love my mother or truly let her
go.--But I didn't mean to talk about him," said Hagar. She laid the
ball she had been winding in the basket with the other balls and stood
up, stretching her young arms above her head. "Listen to the wind! I
wish it would blow me away, neither north nor south nor east nor west!"

"Yes, you are like your mother," said Mrs. Green. "Have you got to go?
Then will you take your grandmother's big knitting-needles back to her
for me? And don't you want a winesap?--there's a basket of them behind
the door."




CHAPTER XI

THE LETTERS


Miss Serena was playing "Silvery Waves." Hagar, kneeling on the
hearth-rug, warmed her hands at the fire and studied the illuminated
text over the mantel. "Silvery Waves" came to an end, and Miss Serena
opened the green music-book at "Santa Anna's March."

"Has Isham gone for the mail?" asked Hagar.

"Yes. He went an hour ago.--You're hoping, I suppose, for a letter from
that dreadful man?"

"You know as well as I do," said Hagar, "that I gave my word and he
gave his to write only once a month. And he isn't a dreadful man. He's
just like everybody else."

"Ha!" said Miss Serena, and brought her hands down upon the opening
chord. Hagar, her elbows on her knees, hid her eyes in her hands.
Within her consciousness Juliet was speaking as she had spoken that
night upon the stage--spoken in the book--spoken in immortal life,
youth, love. Not so, she knew with a suddenness and clangour as of
a falling city, not so could Juliet have spoken! "Like everybody
else"--Was Laydon, then, truly, like everybody else?--A horror of
weakness and fickleness came over her. Was there something direfully
wrong with her nature, or was it possible for people simply to be
mistaken in such a matter? Her head grew tired; she was so unhappy that
she wished to creep away and weep and weep.... Miss Serena, having
marched with Santa Anna, turned a dozen pages and began "The Mocking
Bird. With Variations."

Old Miss's step was heard in the hall, very firm and authoritative. In
a moment she entered the room, portly, not perceptibly aged, her hair,
beneath her cap, hardly more than powdered with grey, still wearing
black stuff gowns and white aprons and heelless low shoes over white
stockings. Hagar rose from the rug and pushed the big chair toward the
fire.

Old Miss dropped into it--no, not "dropped"--lowered herself with
dignity. "Has Isham brought the mail?"

"No, not yet."

"I dreamed last night that there was a letter from Medway. Serena!"

"Yes, mother?"

"The next text you paint I want you to do one for me. _Honour thy
father and mother that thy days may be long_--"

Miss Serena turned on the piano-stool. "I'll do it right away, mother.
It would be lovely in blue and gold.... You can't say that I haven't
honoured father and mother."

Old Miss had drawn out her knitting and now her needles clicked. "No
one honours them as they used to be honoured. No one obeys them as they
used to obey. To-day children think that they are wiser than their
fathers. They set up to use their own judgment until it's a scandal....
It's true you've been better than most, Serena. Taking you year in and
year out, you've obeyed the commandment. It's more than many daughters
and grand-daughters that I know have done." Her needles clicked again.
"Yes, Serena, you haven't given us much trouble. You were easy to make
mind from the beginning." She gave the due praise, but her tone was
not without acerbity. It might almost have seemed that such forthright
ductility and keeping of the commandment as had been Miss Serena's had
its side of annoyance and satiety.

Hagar spoke from the window where she stood, her forehead pressed
against the glass. "I see Isham down the road, by the Half-Mile Cedar."

Old Miss turned the heel of the Colonel's sock she was knitting.
"Things that from the newspaper and my personal observation happen now
in the world could not possibly have occurred when I was young. People
defying their betters, women deserting their natural sphere, atheists
denying hell and saying that the world wasn't made in six days, young
girls talking about independence and their own lives--their own lives!
Ha!"

Miss Serena began to play "The Sea in the Shell." "We all know how
Hagar came by her disposition, but I must say it is an unfortunate one!
When I was her age, no money could have made me act as she has done."

"No money could have made me, either," spoke Hagar at the window.

"Money has nothing to do with it!" said Old Miss. "At least as far as
Hagar is concerned, nothing! But fitness, propriety, meekness, and
modesty, consultation with those to whom she owes duty, and bowing to
what they say--all those have something to do with it! But what could
you expect? It was bound to come out some day. From a bush with thorns
will come a bush with thorns."

"Here is Isham," said Hagar. "If you've said enough for to-day,
grandmother, shall I get the mail?"

She brought the bag to her grandmother. When the Colonel was at
home, no one else opened the small leather pouch and distributed its
contents; when he was away Old Miss performed the ceremony. To-day he
had mounted Selim and ridden to the meeting in the neighbouring town.
Mrs. Ashendyne opened the bag and sorted the mail. There was no great
amount of it, but--"I said so! I dreamed it. My dreams often come true.
There it is!" "It" was a square letter, quite thick, addressed in a
rather striking hand and bearing a foreign stamp and postmark. It was
addressed to the Colonel, and Mrs. Ashendyne never opened the Colonel's
letters--not even when they were from Medway. They were not from him
very often. The last, and that thin between the fingers, had been in
September. This one was so much thicker than that one! Old Miss gazed
at it with greedy eyes.

Miss Serena, too, leaving the piano-stool, came to her mother's side
and fingered the letter. "He must have had a lot to write about. From
Paris.... I used to want to go to Paris so much!"

"Put it on the mantelpiece," said Old Miss. "It can't be long before
the Colonel's home." Even when it was on the mantel-shelf she still sat
looking at it with devouring eyes. "I dreamed it was coming--and there
it is!" The remainder of the mail waited under her wrinkled hand.

Miss Serena grew mildly impatient. "What else is there, mother? I'm
looking for a letter about those embroidery silks. There it is now,
I think!" She drew from her mother's lap an envelope with a printed
return address in the upper left-hand corner. "No, it isn't it. 'Young
People's Home Magazine.' Some advertisement or other--people pay a lot
to tell people about things they don't want! _Miss Hagar Ashendyne._
Here, Hagar! It evidently doesn't know that you are grown up--or think
you are! There's my letter, mother,--under the 'Dispatch.'"

Hagar went away with the communication from the "Young People's Home
Magazine" in her hand. She went upstairs to her own room. It had been
her mother's room. She slept in the four-poster bed on which Maria
had died, and she curled herself with a book in the corner of the
flowered chintz sofa as Maria had done before her. She curled herself
here to-day, though with the letter, not with a book. The letter lay
upon her knees. She looked at it with a fixed countenance, hardly
breathing. She had thought herself out of a deal of the conventional
and materialized religious ideas of her world--not out of religion but
out of conventional religion. She did not often pray now for rewards or
benefits, or hiatuses in the common law, or for a salvation external to
her own being. But at this moment the past reasserted itself. Her lips
moved. "O God, let it have been taken! O God, let it have been taken!
Let me have won the fifty dollars! Let me have won the third prize. O
God, let it have been taken!"

At last, her courage at the sticking-point, she opened the envelope,
and unfolded the letter within. The typewritten words swam before
her eyes, the "Dear Madam," the page or two that followed, the "With
Congratulations, we are faithfully yours." There was an enclosure--a
cheque. She touched it with trembling fingers. It said: "Pay to Miss
Hagar Ashendyne the Sum of Two Hundred Dollars."

An hour later, the dinner-bell sounding, she went downstairs. The
Colonel and Captain Bob were yet at the meeting of Democrats. There
was to be a public dinner; they would not be home before dusk. The
three women ate alone, Dilsey waiting. Old Miss was preoccupied; the
letter on the parlour mantelpiece filled her mind. "From Paris. In
September he was at a place called Dinard." Miss Serena had her mind
upon a panel--calla lilies and mignonette--which she was painting for
the rectory parlour. As for Hagar, she did not talk much, nowadays,
at Gilead Balm. If she were more silent than usual to-day, it passed
without notice.

Only once Old Miss remarked upon her appearance. "Hagar, you've got a
dazed look about the eyes. Are you feeling badly?"

"No, grandmother."

"You're not to get ill, child. I shall make a bottle of tansy bitters
to-morrow morning. We've trouble enough in this family without your
losing colour and getting circles round your eyes."

That was love and kindness from Old Miss. The water came into Hagar's
eyes. She felt a desire to tell her grandmother and Aunt Serena about
the letter, but in another moment it was gone. Her whole inner life was
by now secret from them, and this seemed of the inner life. Presently,
of course, she would deliberately tell them all; she had thought it out
and determined that it would be after supper, before Uncle Bob went
to bed and grandfather told her to get the chess-table. It seemed so
wonderful a thing to her; she was so awed by it that she could not help
the feeling that it would be wonderful to them, too.

In the afternoon she put a cape around her, left the home hill and
went down the lane, skirted a ploughed field, and, crossing the river
road, came immediately to the fringe of sycamores and willows upon the
river bank. It was warmer and stiller than it had been in the morning,
for the voice of the wind there sounded now the voice of the river;
the many boughs above were still against the sky. She made for a great
sycamore that she had known from childhood; it had a vast protuberant
curving root in whose embrace you could sit as in an armchair. She
sat there now and looked at the river that went so swiftly by. It
was swollen with the spring rains; it made a deep noise, going by to
the distant sea. To Hagar its voice to-day was at once solemn and
jubilant, strong and stirred from depth to surface. She had with her
the letter; how many times she had read it she could not have told.
She could have said it by heart, but still she wanted to read it,
to touch it, to become aware of meaning under meaning.... She could
write, she could tell stories, she could write books.... She could earn
money. It was one of the moments of her life: the moment when she knew
of her mother's death--the moment when she changed Gilead Balm for
Eglantine--the moment by the fire, Christmas eve--this moment. She was
but eighteen; the right-angled turns in her road of this life had not
been many; this was one and a main one. Suddenly, to herself, her life
achieved purpose, direction. It was as though a rudderless boat had
been suddenly mended, or a bewildered helmsman had seen the pole star.

She sat in the embrace of the sycamore, her feet lightly resting on
the spring earth, her shoulders just touching the pale bark of the
tree, her arms folded, her eyes level; poised, recollected as a young
Brahman, conscious of an expanded space, a deeper time. How long she
sat there she did not know; the sun slipped lower, touched her knees
with gold. She sighed at last, raised her hands and turned her body.

What, perhaps, had roused her was the sound of a horse's hoofs upon the
river road. At any rate, she now marked a black horse coming in the
distance, down the road, by the speckled sycamores. It came on with a
gay sound upon the wind-dried earth, and in its rider she presently
recognized her cousin, Ralph Coltsworth.

"What are you doing here?" she asked when he reined in the black horse
beside her. "Why aren't you at the University with Blackstone under
your arm?"

He dismounted, fastened his horse, and came across to the sycamore
root. "It's big enough for two, isn't it?" he asked, and sat down
facing her. "You mentioned the University? The University, bless its
old heart! doesn't appreciate me."

"Ralph! Have you been expelled?"

"Suspended." Hands behind head, he regarded first the blue sky behind
the interlaced bare branches, then the tall and great gnarled trunk,
then the brown-clad figure of his cousin, enthroned before him. "The
suspense," he said, "is exquisite."

"What did you do?"

He grimaced. "I don't remember. Why talk about it? It wasn't much.
Cakes and ale--_joie de vivre_--chimes at midnight--same old song." He
laughed. "I gather that you've been rusticated, too."

Hagar winced. "Don't!... Let's laugh about other things. You'll break
your family's hearts at Hawk Nest."

"Old Miss said in a letter which mother showed me that you were
breaking hers. What kind of a fellow is he, Hagar?--Like me?"

Hagar looked at him gravely. "Not in the least. How long are you going
to stay at Hawk Nest?"

"Oh, a month! I'm coming to see you every other day."

"Are you?"

"I am. If I could draw I'd like to draw you just as you look now--half
marquise, half dryad--sitting before your own front door!"

"Well, you can't draw," said Hagar. "And it's getting cold, and the
dryad is going home."

"All right," said Ralph. "I'm going, too. I've come to spend the night."

Leading his horse, he walked beside her. In the green lane, a wintry
sunset glory over every slope and distant wood, the house between its
black cedars rising before them, he halted a moment. "I haven't seen
you since August when I rode over to tell Gilead Balm good-bye. You've
changed. You've 'done growed.'"

"That may be. I've grown to-day."

"Since I came?"

"No. Before you came. For the first time I suppose in your life,
grandmother is going to be sorry to see you. She worships you."

"She was sorry to see you, too, wasn't she? It's rather nice to be
companions out of favour."

"Oh!" cried Hagar. "You are and always were the most provoking twister
of the truth! I want to say to you that I do not consider that ours
are similar cases! And now, if you please, that is the last word I am
going to say to you on such a matter."

"All right!" said Ralph. "I was curious, of course. But I acknowledge
your right to shut me up."

They passed through the home gate,--where a boy took his horse,--and
went up the hill together. Dilsey was lighting the lamps. As they
entered the hall Miss Serena came out of the library--Miss Serena
looking curiously agitated. "Dilsey, hasn't Miss Hagar come in yet?...
Oh, Hagar! I've been searching the place for you--Why, Ralph! Where on
earth did you come from? Has the University burned down? Have you got
a holiday?"

The library door was ajar. The Colonel's voice made itself heard from
within. "Serena! Is that Hagar? Tell her to come here."

The three entered the room together. There was a slight clamour of
surprise and greeting from its occupants for Ralph, but it died down in
the face, as it were, of things of greater importance.

"What's the matter?" he asked, bringing up at last by Captain Bob in
the background.

"A letter from Medway," answered the other. "_Shh!_"

The evenings falling cold, there was a fire upon the hearth. The
reading-lamp was lit; all the room was in a glow that caressed the
stiff portraits, the old mahogany and horsehair furniture, the
bookcases and the books within. In the smaller of the two great chairs
by the hearth sat Old Miss, preternaturally straight, her hands folded
on the black silk apron which she donned in the evening, her still
comely face and head rising from the narrow, very fine embroidered
collar fastened by an oval brooch in which, in a complicated pattern,
was wrought the hair of dead Coltsworths and Hardens. Her face wore
a look at once softened and fixed. Across from her, in the big chair
by the leaf-table, sat Colonel Ashendyne, a little greyer, a little
more hawklike of nose, a little sparer in frame as the years went
by, but emphatically not a person to whom could be applied the term
"old." There breathed from him still an insolent, determined prime, a
timelessness, a pictorial quality as of some gallery masterpiece. With
the greyish-amber of his yet plentiful hair, his mustache and imperial,
the racer set of his head, his well-shaped jaw and long nervous hands,
his fine, long, spare figure and his eye in which a certain bladelike
keenness and cynicism warred with native sensuousness, he stayed in
the memory like such a canvas. His mood always showed through him,
though somewhat cloudily like light through a Venetian glass. That it
was a mixed and curious mood to-night, Hagar felt the moment she was
in the room. She did not always like her grandfather, but she usually
understood him. She saw the letter that had rested on the mantelpiece,
the letter from Paris, in his hand, and at once there came over her a
curious foreboding, she did not know whether of good or evil.

"Sit down," said the Colonel. "I have something to read to you."

For two months and more he had not looked at her without anger in his
eyes. To-night the cloud seemed at least partly to have gone by. There
was even in the Colonel's tone a touch of blandness, of enjoyment of
the situation. She sat down, wondering, her eyes upon the letter.
On occasion, when she searched her heart through, she found but a
shrivelled love for her father. Except that he had had half-share in
giving her life, she really did not know what she had to love him for.
Now, however, what power of growth there was in the winter-wrapped root
broke the soil. She began to tremble. "What is the matter? Is father
ill? Is he coming home?"

"Not immediately," said the Colonel. "No, he is not ill. He appears
to be in his usual health and to exhibit his usual good spirits. Your
grandmother and I were fortunate in having a son of a disposition so
happy that he left all clouds and difficulties, including his own, to
other people. At the proper moment he has always been able to find
a burden-bearer. No, Medway is well, and apparently happy. He has
remarried."

"Remarried!..."

It was the Colonel's intention to read her the letter--indeed, it
carried an inclosure for her--as he had already read it, twice, with
varying comment, to the others assembled. But he chose to make first,
his own introduction. "You've heard of the cat that always falls on
its feet? Well, that's your father, Gipsy!"--Even in the whirl of the
moment Hagar could not but note that he called her "Gipsy."--"That's
Medway! Here's a careless, ungrateful, disobedient son, utterly
reckless of his obligations. Is he hanged or struck by lightning? Not
he! He goes happily along--Master Lucky-Dog! He makes a disastrous
marriage with a penniless remnant of a broken-down family on some lost
coast or other and brings her home, and presently there's a child.
Does he undertake to support them, stay by his bargain, however poor
a one? Not he! He's got a tiny income in his own right, left him by
his maternal grandfather--just enough, with care, for one! Off he goes
with that in his pocket and a wealthy friend and, from that day to
this, we haven't laid eyes on Prince Fortunatus! Well, what happens?
Does he come to eating husks with the swine and so at last slink back!
Not he! He enjoys life; he's free and footloose; he's put his burden
on other folk's backs! Death comes along and unmakes his marriage. His
doting mother and his weak father apparently are prepared to charge
themselves with the maintenance of his child. Why should he trouble?
He doesn't--not in the least! He's got just enough in his own right to
let him wander, _en garçon_, over creation. If he took the least care
of another he couldn't wander, and he likes to wander. Ah, I understand
Medway, from hair to heel!--What comes of it all? We used to believe in
Nemesis, but that, like other beliefs, is going by the board. Isn't he
going to suffer? Not at all! He 

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