The Mettle of the Pasture Part 10

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

He sprang up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope at the helm and Pleasure at the prow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the last of the first Rowan,--youth at the threshold of manhood. Now off for college, to his university in New England.

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

It was toward the close of the first session, after she had learned the one kind of letter he always wrote, that his letters changed.

She could not have explained how they were changed, could not have held the pages up to the inspection of any one else and have said, "See! it is here." But she knew it was there, and it stayed there.

She waited for his father to notice it; but if he ever noticed it, he never told her: nor did she ever confide her discovery to him.

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

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

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

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

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

For more than a year after his return he had kept aloof from society--going into town only when business demanded, and accepting no invitations to the gayeties of the neighborhood. He liked rather to have his friends come out to stay with him: sometimes he was off with them for days during the fis.h.i.+ng and hunting seasons.

Care of the farm and its stock occupied a good deal of his leisure, and there were times when he worked hard in the fields--she thought so unnecessarily. Incessant activity of some kind had become his craving--the only ease.

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

The intimacy between these ladies was susceptible of exact a.n.a.lysis; every element comprising it could have been valued as upon a quant.i.tative scale. It did not involve any of those incalculable forces which const.i.tute friends.h.i.+p--a n.o.ble mystery remaining forever beyond unravelling.

They found the first basis of their intimacy in a common wish for the union of their offsprings. This subject had never been mentioned between them. Mrs. Conyers would have discussed it had she dared; but she knew at least the att.i.tude of the other.

Furthermore, Mrs. Meredith brought to this a.s.sociation a beautiful weakness: she was endowed with all but preternatural insight into what is fine in human nature, but had slight power of discovering what is base; she seemed endowed with far-sightedness in high, clear, luminous atmospheres, but was short-sighted in moral twilights. She was, therefore, no judge of the character of her intimate. As for that lady's reputation, this was well known to her; but she screened herself against this reputation behind what she believed to be her own personal discovery of unsuspected virtues in the misjudged. She probably experienced as much pride in publicly declaring the misjudged a better woman than she was reputed, as that lady would have felt in secretly declaring her to be a worse one.

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

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

Her conversations were even more a.s.siduously tinged and fas.h.i.+oned by the needs of accommodation. Sometimes she sat in Mrs.

Meredith's parlors as a soul sick of the world's vanities, an urban spirit that hungered for country righteousness. During a walk one day through the gardens she paused under the boughs of a weeping willow and recited, "Cromwell, I charge thee fling away ambition--"

She uniformly imparted to Mrs. Meredith the a.s.surance that with her alone she could lay aside all disguises.

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

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

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

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

"Isabel regretted that she could not come."