The Mettle of the Pasture Part 34

"Have them broiled for my supper," she said with a little click of the teeth, and handing the basket to the maid, pa.s.sed on into her bedroom.

Harriet had been spending the day away from home. She returned late. The maid met her at the front door and a few moments of conversation followed. She hurried into the supper room; Mrs.

Conyers sat alone.

"Mother," exclaimed Harriet with horror, "have you _eaten_ my squabs?"

Mrs. Conyers stabbed at a little pile of bones on the side plate.

"This is what is left of them," she said, touching a napkin to her gustatory lips. "There are your leaves," she added, pointing to a little vase in front of Harriet's plate. "When is he going to send you some more? But tell him we have geraniums."

The next day Ambrose received a note:

"Dear Mr. Webb: I have been thinking how pleasant my visit to you was that morning. It has not been possible for me to get the carriage since or I should have been out to thank you for your beautiful present. The squabs appealed to me. A man who loves them must have tender feeling; and that is what all my life I have been saying: Give me a man with a heart! Sometime when you are in town, I may meet you on the street somewhere and then I can thank you more fully than I do now. I shall always cherish the memory of your kind deed. You must give me the chance to thank you very soon, or I shall fear that you do not care for my thanks. I take a walk about eleven o'clock.

"Sincerely yours,

"HARRIET CRANE."

Ambrose must have received the note. A few weeks later Miss Anna one morning received one herself delivered by a boy who had ridden in from the farm; the boy waited with a large basket while she read:

"Dearest Anna: It is a matter of very little importance to mention to you of course, but I am married. My husband and I were married at ------ yesterday afternoon. He met me at an appointed place and we drove quietly out of town. What I want you to do at once is, send me some clothes, for I left all the Conyers apparel where it belonged. Send me something of everything. And as soon as I am pinned in, I shall invite you out. Of course I shall now give orders for whatever I desire; and then I shall return to Mrs.

Conyers the things I used on my bridal trip.

"This is a very hurried note, and of course I have not very much to say as yet about my new life. As for my husband, I can at least declare with perfect sincerity that he is mine. I have made one discovery already, Anna: he cannot be bent except where he has already been broken. I am discovering the broken places and shall govern him accordingly.

"Do try to marry, Anna! You have no idea how a married woman feels toward one of her s.e.x who is single.

"I want you to be sure to stand at the windows about five o'clock this afternoon and see the Conyers' cows all come travelling home: they graze no more these heavenly pastures. It will be the first intimation that Mrs. Conyers receives that I am no longer the unredeemed daughter of her household. Her curiosity will, of course, bring her out here as fast as the horse can travel. But, oh, Anna, my day has come at last! At last she shall realize that I am strong, _strong_! I shall receive her with the front door locked and talk to her out of the window; and I expect to talk to her a long, _long_ time. I shall have the flowers moved from the porch to keep them from freezing during that interview.

"As soon as I am settled, as one has so much more time in the country than in town, I may, after all, take up that course of reading: would you object?

"It's a wise saying that every new experience brings some new trouble: I longed for youth before I married; but to marry after you are old--that, Anna, is sorrow indeed.

"Your devoted friend,

"HARRIET CRANE WEBB.

"P.S. Don't send any but the _plainest_ things; for I remember, n.o.ble friend, how it pains you to see me _overdressed_."

IX

It was raining steadily and the night was cold. Miss Anna came hurriedly down into the library soon after supper. She had on an old waterproof; and in one hand she carried a man's cotton umbrella--her own--and in the other a pair of rubbers. As she sat down and drew these over her coa.r.s.e walking shoes, she talked in the cheery tone of one who has on hand some congenial business.

"I may get back late and I may not get back at all; it depends upon how the child is. But I wish it would not rain when poor little children are sick at night--it is the one thing that gives me the blues. And I wish infants could speak out and tell their symptoms.

When I see grown people getting well as soon as they can minutely narrate to you all their ailments, my heart goes out to babies.

Think how they would crow and gurgle, if they could only say what it is all about. But I don't see why people at large should not be licensed to bring in a bill when their friends insist upon describing their maladies to them: doctors do. But I must be going. Good night."

She rose and stamped her feet into the rubbers to make them fit securely; and then she came across to the lamp-lit table beside which he sat watching her fondly--his book dropped the while upon his lap. He grasped her large strong hand in his large strong hand; and she leaned her side against his shoulder and put her arm around his neck.

"You are getting younger, Anna," he said, looking up into her face and drawing her closer.

"Why not?" she answered with a voice of splendid joy. "Harriet is married; what troubles have I, then? And she patronizes--or matronizes--me and tyrannizes over Ambrose: so the world is really succeeding at last. But I wish her husband had not asked me _first_; that is her thorn."

"And the thorn will grow!"

"Now, don't sit up late!" she pleaded. "I turned your bed down and arranged the pillows wrong end out as you will have them; and I put out your favorite night-s.h.i.+rt--the one with the sleeves torn off above the elbows and the ravellings hanging down just as you require. Aren't you tired of books yet? Are you never going to get tired? And the same books! Why, I get fresh babies every few years--a complete change."

"How many generations of babies do you suppose there have been since this immortal infant was born?" he asked, laying his hand reverently over the book on his lap as if upon the head of a divine child.

"I don't know and I don't care," she replied. "I wish the immortal infant would let you alone." She stooped and kissed his brow, and wrung his hand silently, and went out into the storm. He heard her close the street door and heard the rusty click of her cotton umbrella as she raised it. Then he turned to the table at his elbow and kindled his deep-bowled pipe and drew over his legs the skirts of his long gown, coa.r.s.e, austere, sombre.

He looked comfortable. A rainy night may depress a woman nursing a sick child that is not her own--a child already fighting for its feeble, unclaimed, repudiated life, in a world of weeping clouds; but such a night diffuses cheer when the raindrops are heard tapping the roof above beloved bookshelves, tapping the window-panes; when there is low music in the gutter on the back porch; when a student lamp, throwing its shadow over the ceiling and the walls, reserves its exclusive l.u.s.tre for l.u.s.trous pages--pages over which men for centuries have gladly burnt out the oil of their brief lamps, their iron and bronze, their silver and gold and jewelled lamps--many-colored eyes of the nights of ages.

It was now middle September of another year and Professor Hardage had entered upon the work of another session. The interval had left no outward mark on him. The mind stays young a long time when nourished by a body such as his; and the body stays young a long time when mastered by such a mind. Day by day faithfully to do one's work and to be restless for no more; without bitterness to accept obscurity for ambition; to possess all vital pa.s.sions and to govern them; to stand on the world's thoroughfare and see the young generations hurrying by, and to put into the hands of a youth here and there a light which will burn long after our own personal taper is extinguished; to look back upon the years already gone as not without usefulness and honor, and forward to what may remain as safe at least from failure or any form of shame, and thus for one's self to feel the humility of the part before the greatness of the whole of life, and yet the privileges and duties of the individual to the race--this brings blessedness if it does not always bring happiness, and it had brought both to him.

He sat at peace beside his lamp. The interval had brought changes to his towns-people. As he had walked home this afternoon, he had paused and looked across at some windows of the second story of a familiar corner. The green shutters, tightly closed, were gray with cobweb and with dust. One sagged from a loosened hinge and flapped in the rising autumn wind, showing inside a window sash also dust-covered and with a newspaper crammed through a broken pane. Where did Ravenel Morris live now? Did he live at all?

Accustomed as he was to look through the distances of human history, to traverse the areas of its religions and see how its great conflicting faiths have each claimed the unique name of revelation for itself, he could not anywhere discover what to him was clear proof either of the separate existence of the soul or of its immortal life hereafter. The security of that belief was denied him. He had wished for it, had tried to make it his. But while it never became a conviction, it remained a force. Under all that reason could affirm or could deny, there dwelt unaccountable confidence that the light of human life, leaping from headland to headland,--the long transmitted radiance of thought,--was not to go out with the inevitable physical extinction of the species on this planet. Somewhere in the universe he expected to meet his own, all whom he had loved, and to see this friend. Meantime, he accepted the fact of death in the world with that uncomplaining submission to nature which is in the strength and sanity of genius. As acquaintances left him, one after another, memory but kindled another lamp; hope but disclosed another white flower on its mysterious stem.

He sat at peace. The walls of the library showed their changes.

There were valuable maps on Caesar's campaigns which had been sent him from Berlin; there were other maps from Athens; there was something from the city of Hannibal, and something from Tiber.

Indeed, there were not many places in Isabel's wandering from which she had not sent home to him some proof that he was remembered.

And always she sent letters which were more than maps or books, being in themselves charts to the movements of her spirit. They were regular; they were frank; they a.s.sured him how increasingly she needed his friends.h.i.+p. When she returned, she declared she would settle down to be near him for the rest of life. Few names were mentioned in these letters: never Rowan's; never Mrs.

Osborn's--that lifelong friends.h.i.+p having been broken; and in truth since last March young Mrs. Osborn's eyes had been sealed to the reading of all letters. But beneath everything else, he could always trace the presence of one unspoken certainty--that she was pa.s.sing through the deeps without herself knowing what height or what heath her feet would reach at last, there to abide.

As he had walked homeward this afternoon through the dust, something else had drawn his attention: he was pa.s.sing the Conyers homestead, and already lights were beginning to twinkle in the many windows; there was to be a ball that night, and he thought of the unconquerable woman ruling within, apparently gaining still in vitality and youth. "Unjailed malefactors often attain great ages," he said to himself, as he turned away and thought of the lives she had helped to blight and shorten.

As the night advanced, he fell under the influence of his book, was drawn out of his poor house, away from his obscure town, his unknown college, quitted his country and his age, pa.s.sing backward until there fell around him the glorious dawn of the race before the sunrise of written history: the immortal still trod the earth; the human soldier could look away from his earthly battle-field and see, standing on a mountain crest, the figure and the authority of his Divine Commander. Once more it was the flower-dyed plain, blood-dyed as well; the s.h.i.+ps drawn up by the gray, the wrinkled sea; over on the other side, well-built Troy; and the crisis of the long struggle was coming. Hector, of the glancing plume, had come back to the city for the last time, mindful of his end.

He read once more through the old scene that is never old, and then put his book aside and sat thoughtful. "_I know not if the G.o.ds will not overthrow me... . I have very sore shame if, like a coward, I shrink away from battle; moreover mine own soul forbiddeth me... . Destiny ... no man hast escaped, be he coward or be he valiant, when once he hath been born_."

His eyes had never rested on any spot in human history, however separated in time and place, where the force of those words did not seem to reign. Whatsoever the names under which men have conceived and wors.h.i.+pped their G.o.ds or their G.o.d, however much they have believed that it was these or it was He who overthrew them and made their destinies inescapable, after all, it is the high compulsion of the soul itself, the final mystery of personal choice, that sends us forth at last to our struggles and to our peace: "_mine own soul forbiddeth me_"--there for each is right and wrong, the eternal beauty of virtue.

He did not notice the sound of approaching wheels, and that the sound ceased at his door.

A moment later and Isabel with light footsteps stood before him.

He sprang up with a cry and put his arms around her and held her.

"You shall never go away again."

"No, I am never going away again; I have come back to marry Rowan."

These were her first words to him as they sat face to face. And she quickly went on:

"How is he?"

He shook his head reproachfully at her: "When I saw him at least he seemed better than you seem."