The Reign Of Law Part 16

Meantime, how he talked to her! Told her the school was all made up: what families were going to send, and how many children from each. They had all heard from the superintendent what a fine teacher she was (not for nothing is it said that things are handed along kindly in Kentucky)!

"Oh," murmured Gabriella to herself, "if the family are only like HIM!"

The mere way in which he called her by her first name, as though she were an old friend--a sort of old sweetheart of his whom for some reason he had failed to marry--filled her with perfect trust.

"That's my house!" he said at last, pointing with extended arm and whip (which latter he had no occasion to use) across the open country.

Gabriella followed his gesture with apprehensive eyes and beheld away off a big comfortable-looking two-story brick dwelling with white-washed fences around it and all sorts of white-washed houses on one side or the other--a plain, sweet, country, Kentucky home, G.o.d bless it! The whiteness won Gabriella at once; and with the whiteness went other things just as good: the a.s.surance everywhere of thrift, comfort. Not a weed in sight, but September bluegra.s.s, deep flowing, or fresh-ploughed fields or clean stubble. Every rail in its place on every fence; every gate well swung. Everything in sight in the way of live stock seemed to Gabriella either young or just old enough. The very stumps they pa.s.sed looked healthy.

Her conjecture had been correct: the slender slip of a woman met her at the side porch a little diffidently, with a modest smile; then kissed her on the mouth and invited her in. The supper table was already set in the middle of the room; and over in one corner was a big white bed--with a trundle bed (not visible) under it. Gabriella "took off her things" and laid them on the snowy counterpane; and the housewife told her she would let the children entertain her for a few minutes while she saw about supper.

The children accepted the agreement. They swarmed about her as about a new cake. Two or three of the youngest began to climb over her as they climbed over the ice-house, to sit on her as they sat on the stiles.

The oldest produced their geographies and arithmetics and showed her how far they had gone. (They had gone a great deal farther than Gabriella!) No one paid the least attention to any one else, or stood in awe of anything or anybody: Fear had never come to that Jungle!

But trouble must enter into the affairs of this world, and it entered that night into Gabriella.

At supper the farmer, having picked out for her the best piece of the breast of the fried chicken, inquired in a voice which implied how cordially superfluous the question was:--

"Miss Gabriella, will you have cream gravy?"

"No, thank you."

The shock to that family! Not take cream gravy! What kind of a teacher was that, now? Every small hand, old enough to use a knife or fork, held it suspended. At the foot of the table, the farmer, dropping his head a little, helped the children, calling their names one by one, more softly and in a tone meant to restore cheerfulness if possible.

The little wife at the head of the table had just put sugar into Gabriella's cup and was in the act of pouring the coffee. She hastily emptied the sugar back into the sugar-dish and asked with look of dismay:--

"Will you have sugar in your coffee?"

The situation grew worse at breakfast. In a voice to which confidence had been mysteriously restored during the night--a voice that seemed to issue from a honey-comb and to drip sweetness all the way across the table, that big fellow at the foot again inquired:--

"Miss Gabriella, will you have cream gravy--THIS MORNING?"

"No, thank you!"

The oldest boy c.o.c.ked his eye sideways at his mother, openly announcing that he had won a secret wager. The mother hastily remarked:--

"I thought you might like a little for your breakfast."

The baby, noticing the stillness and trouble everywhere, and feeling itself deeply wounded because perfectly innocent, burst into frantic crying.

Gabriella could have outcried the baby! She resolved that if they had it for dinner, she would take it though it were the dessert. A moment later she did better. Lifting her plate in both hands, she held it out, knife, fork, and all.

"I believe I'll change my mind. It looks SO tempting."

"I think you'll find it nice," remarked the housewife, conciliated, but resentful. But every child now determined to watch and see what else she didn't take. They watched in vain: she took everything. So that in a few days they recovered their faith in her and resumed their crawling. Gabriella had never herself realized how many different routes and stations she had in her own body until it had been thus travelled over: feet and ankles; knees; upper joints; trunk line; eastern and western divisions; head terminal.

There was never any more trouble for her in that household. They made only two demands: that she eat whatever was put on the table and love them. Whatever was put on the table was good; and they were all lovable. They were one live, disorderly menagerie of nothing but love.

But love is not the only essential of life; and its phenomena can be trying.

Here, then, in this remote neighborhood of plain farmers, in a little district school situated on a mud road, Gabriella began alone and without training her new life,--attempt of the Southern girl to make herself self-supporting in some one of the professions,--sign of a vast national movement among the women of her people. In her surroundings and ensuing struggles she had much use for that saving sense of humor which had been poured into her veins out of the deep clear wells of her ancestors; need also of that radiant, bountiful light which still fell upon her from the skies of the past; but more than these as staff to her young hands, cup to her lips, lamp to her feet, oil to her daily bruises, rest to her weary pillow, was reliance on Higher Help. For the years--and they seemed to her many and wide--had already driven Gabriella, as they have driven countless others of her s.e.x, out of the cold, windy world into the church: she had become a Protestant devotee.

Had she been a Romanist, she would long ere this have been a nun. She was now fitted for any of those merciful and heroic services which keep fresh on earth the records of devoted women. The inner supporting stem of her nature had never been snapped; but it had been bruised enough to give off life-fragrance. Adversity had enn.o.bled her. In truth, she had so weathered the years of a Revolution which had left her as dest.i.tute as it had left her free, that she was like Perdita's rosemary: a flower which keeps seeming and savor all the winter long. The North Wind had bolted about her in vain his whitest snows; and now the woods were turning green.

It was merely in keeping with Gabriella's nature, therefore, that as she grew to know the people among whom she had come to stay, their homes, their family histories, one household and one story should have engaged her deep interest: David's parents and David's career. As she drove about the country, visiting with the farmer's wife, there had been pointed out a melancholy remnant of a farm, desperately resisting absorption by some one of three growing estates touching it on three sides. She had been taken to call on the father and mother; had seen the poverty within doors, the half-ruined condition of the outhouses; had heard of their son, now away at the university; of how they had saved and he had struggled. A proud father it was who now told of his son's magnificent progress already at college.

"Ah," she exclaimed, thinking it over in her room that night, "this is something worth hearing! Here is the hero in life! Among these easy-going people this solitary struggler. I, too, am one now; I can understand him."

During the first year of her teaching, there had developed in her a n.o.ble desire to see David; but one long to be disappointed. He did not return home during his vacation; she went away during hers. The autumn following he was back in college; she at her school. Then the Christmas holidays and his astounding, terrible home-coming, put out of college and church. As soon as she heard of that awful downfall, Gabriella felt a desire to go straight to him. She did not reason or hesitate: she went.

And now for two months they had been seeing each other every few days.

Thus by the working out of vast forces, the lives of Gabriella and David had been jostled violently together. They were the children of two revolutions, separate yet having a common end: she produced by the social revolution of the New World, which overthrew mediaeval slavery; he by the intellectual revolution of the Old World, which began to put forth scientific law, but in doing this brought on one of the greatest ages of religious doubt. So that both were early vestiges of the same immeasurable race evolution, proceeding along converging lines. She, living on the artificial summits of a decaying social order, had farthest to fall, in its collapse, ere she reached the natural earth; he, toiling at the bottom, had farthest to rise before he could look out upon the plains of widening modern thought and man's evolving destiny. Through her fall and his rise, they had been brought to a common level. But on that level all that had befallen her had driven her as out of a blinding storm into the church, the seat and asylum of religion; all that had befallen him had driven him out of the churches as the fortifications of theology. She had been drawn to that part of wors.h.i.+p which lasts and is divine; he had been repelled by the part that pa.s.ses and is human.

XVI

Although Gabriella had joyously greeted the day, as bringing exemption from stifling hours in school, her spirits had drooped ere evening with monotony. There were no books in use among the members of that lovable household except school-books; they were too busy with the primary joys of life to notice the secondary resources of literature. She had no pleasant sewing. To escape the noise of the pent-up children, she must restrict herself to that part of the house which comprised her room. A walk out of doors was impracticable, although she ventured once into the yard to study more closely the marvels of the ice-work; and to the edge of the orchard, to ascertain how the apple trees were bearing up under those avalanches of frozen silver slipped from the clouds.

So there were empty hours for her that day; and always the emptiest are the heaviest--those unfilled baskets of time which strangely become lightest only after we have heaped them with the best we have to give.

Gabriella filled the hour-baskets this day with thoughts of David, whose field work she knew would be interrupted by the storm, and whose movements about the house she vainly tried to follow in imagination.

Two months of close a.s.sociation with him in that dull country neighborhood had wrought great changes in the simple feeling with which she had sought him at first. He had then been to her only a Prodigal who had squandered his substance, tried to feed his soul on the swinish husks of Doubt, and returning to his father's house unrepentant, had been admitted yet remained rejected: a Prodigal not of the flesh and the world but of the spirit and the Lord. But what has ever interested the heart of woman as a prodigal of some kind?

At other times he was figured by her sympathies as a young Samaritan gone travelling into a Divine country but fallen among spiritual thieves, who had stripped him of his seamless robe of Faith and left him bruised by Life's wayside: a maltreated Christ-neighbor whom it was her duty to succor if she could. But a woman's nursing of a man's wound--how often it becomes the nursing of the wounded! Moreover, Gabriella had now long been aware of what she had become to her prodigal, her Samaritan; she saw the truth and watched it growing from day to day; for he was incapable of disguises. But often what effect has such watching upon the watcher, a watcher who is alone in the world? So that while she fathomed with many feminine soundings all that she was to David, Gabriella did not dream what David had become to her.

Shortly after nightfall, when she heard his heavy tread on the porch below, the tedium of the day instantly vanished. Happiness rose in her like a clear fountain set suddenly playing--rose to her eyes--bathed her in refres.h.i.+ng vital emotions.

"I am so glad you came," she said as she entered the parlor, gave him her hand, and stood looking up into his softened rugged face, at his majestical head, which overawed her a little always. Large as was the mould in which nature had cast his body, this seemed to her dwarfed by the inner largeness of the man, whose development she could note as now going forward almost visibly from day to day: he had risen so far already and was still so young.

He did not reply to her greeting except with a look. In matters which involved his feeling for her, he was habitually hampered and ill at ease; only on general subjects did she ever see him master of his resources. Gabriella had fallen into the habit of looking into his eyes for the best answers: there he always spoke not only with ideas but emotions: a double speech much cared for by woman.

They seated themselves on opposite sides of the wide deep fire-place: a grate for soft coal had not yet destroyed that.

"Your schoolhouse is safe," he announced briefly.

"Oh, I've been wanting to know all day but had no one to send! How do YOU know?" she inquired quickly.

"It's safe. The yard will have to be cleared of brush: that's all."

She looked at him gratefully. "You are always so kind!"

"Well," observed David, with a great forward stride, "aren't you?"

Gabriella, being a woman, did not particularly prize this remark: it suggested his being kind because she had been kind; and a woman likes nothing as reward, everything as tribute.

"And now if the apple trees are only not killed!" she exclaimed joyously, changing the subject.

"Why the apple trees?"