The Mettle of the Pasture Part 35

"I knew he was not well--I have known it for a long time. But you saw him--in town--on the street--with his friends--attending to business?"

"Yes--in town--on the street--with his friends--attending to business."

"May I stay here? I ordered my luggage to be sent here."

"Your room is ready and has always been ready and waiting since the day you left. I think Anna has been putting fresh flowers in it all autumn. You will find some there to-night. She has insisted of late that you would soon be coming home."

An hour later she came down into the library again. She had removed the traces of travel, and she had travelled slowly and was not tired. All this enabled him to see how changed she was; and without looking older, how strangely oldened and grown how quiet of spirit. She had now indeed become sister for him to those images of beauty that were always haunting him--those far, dim images of the girlhood of her s.e.x, with their faces turned away from the sun and their eyes looking downward, pensive in shadow, too freighted with thoughts of their brief fate and their immortality.

"I must have a long talk with you before I try to sleep. I must empty my heart to you once."

He knew that she needed the relief, and that what she asked of him during these hours would be silence.

"I have tried everything, and everything has failed. I have tried absence, but absence has not separated me from him. I have tried silence, but through the silence I have never ceased speaking to him. Nothing has really ever separated us; nothing ever can. It is more than will or purpose, it is my life. It is more than life to me, it is love."

She spoke very quietly, and at first she seemed unable to progress very far from the beginning. After every start, she soon came back to that one beginning.

"It is of no use to weigh the right and the wrong of it: I tried that at first, and I suppose that is why I made sad mistakes. You must not think that I am acting now from a sense of duty to him or to myself. Duty does not enter into my feeling: it is love; all that I am forbids me to do anything else."

But after a while she went back and bared before him in a way the history of her heart. "The morning after he told me, I went to church. I remember the lessons of the day and the hymns, and how I left the church before the sermon, because everything seemed to be on his side, and no one was on mine. He had done wrong and was guilty; and I had been wrong and was innocent; and the church comforted him and overlooked me; and I was angry and walked out of it.

"And do you remember the day I came to see you and you proposed everything to me, and I rejected everything? You told me to go away for a while, to throw myself into the pleasures of other people; you reminded me of prayer and of the duty of forgiveness; you told me to try to put myself in his place, and reminded me of self-sacrifice, and then said at last that I must leave it to time, which sooner or later settles everything. I rejected everything that you suggested. But I have accepted everything since, and have learned a lesson and a service from each: the meaning of prayer and of forgiveness and of self-sacrifice; and what the lapse of time can do to bring us to ourselves and show us what we wish. I say, I have lived through all these, and I have gotten something out of them all; but however much they may mean, they never const.i.tute love; and it is my love that brings me back to him now."

Later on she recurred to the idea of self-sacrifice: much other deepest feeling seemed to gather about that.

"I am afraid that you do not realize what it means to a woman when a principle like this is involved. Can any man ever know? Does he dream what it means to us women to sacrifice ourselves as they often require us to do? I have been travelling in old lands--so old that the history of each goes back until we can follow it with our eyes no longer. But as far as we can see, we see this sorrow--the sorrow of women who have wished to be first in the love of the men they have loved. You, who read everything! Cannot you see them standing all through history, the sad figures of girls who have only asked for what they gave, love in its purity and its singleness--have only asked that there should have been no other before them? And cannot you see what a girl feels when she consents to accept anything less,--that she is lowered to herself from that time on,--has lost her own ideal of herself, as well as her ideal of the man she loves? And cannot you see how she lowers herself in his eyes also and ceases to be his ideal, through her willingness to live with him on a lower plane? That is our wound.

That is our trouble and our sorrow: I have found it wherever I have gone."

Long before she said this to him, she had questioned him closely about Rowan. He withheld from her knowledge of some things which he thought she could better bear to learn later and by degrees.

"I knew he was not well," she said; "I feared it might be worse.

Let me tell you this: no one knows him as I do. I must speak plainly. First, there was his trouble; that shadowed for him one ideal in his life. Then this drove him to a kind of self-concealment; and that wounded another ideal--his love of candor. Then he asked me to marry him, and he told me the truth about himself and I turned him off. Then came the scandals that tried to take away his good name, and I suppose have taken it away.

And then, through all this, were the sufferings he was causing others around him, and the loss of his mother. I have lived through all these things with him while I have been away, and I understand; they sap life. I am going up to write to him now, and will you post the letter to-night? I wish him to come to see me at once, and our marriage must take place as soon as possible--here--very quietly."

Rowan came the next afternoon. She was in the library; and he went in and shut the door, and they were left alone.

Professor Hardage and Miss Anna sat in an upper room. He had no book and she had no work; they were thinking only of the two downstairs. And they spoke to each other in undertones, breaking the silence with brief sentences, as persons speak when awaiting news from sick-rooms.

Daylight faded. Outside the lamplighter pa.s.sed, torching the grimy lamps. Miss Anna spoke almost in a whisper: "Shall I have some light sent in?"

"No, Anna."

"Did you tell him what the doctors have said about his health?"

"No; there was bad news enough without that for one day. And then happiness might bring back health to him. The trouble that threatens him will have to be put down as one of the consequences of all that has occurred to him--as part of what he is and of what he has done. The origin of disease may lie in our troubles--our nervous shocks, our remorses, and better strivings."

The supper hour came.

"I do not wish any supper, Anna."

"Nor I. How long they stay together!"

"They have a great deal to say to each other, Anna."

"I know, I know. Poor children!"

"I believe he is only twenty-five."

"When Isabel comes up, do you think I ought to go to her room and see whether she wants anything?"

"No, Anna."

"And she must not know that we have been sitting up, as though we felt sorry for them and could not go on with our own work."

"I met Marguerite and Barbee this afternoon walking together. I suppose she will come back to him at last. But she has had her storm, and he knows it, and he knows there will never be any storm for him. She is another one of those girls of mine--not sad, but with half the sun s.h.i.+ning on them. But half a sun s.h.i.+ning steadily, as it will always s.h.i.+ne on her, is a great deal."

"Hus.h.!.+" said Miss Anna, in a whisper, "he is gone! Isabel is coming up the steps."

They heard her and then they did not hear her, and then again and then not again.

Miss Anna started up:

"She needs me!"

He held her back:

"No, Anna! Not to help is to help."

X

One afternoon late in the autumn of the following year, when a waiting stillness lay on the land and s.h.i.+mmering sunlight opened up the lonely s.p.a.ces of woods and fields, the Reaper who comes to all men and reaps what they have sown, approached the home of the Merediths and announced his arrival to the young master of the house: he would await his pleasure.

Rowan had been sitting up, propped by his pillows. It was the room of his grandfather as it had been that of the man preceding; the bed had been their bed; and the first to place it where it stood may have had in mind a large window, through which as he woke from his nightly sleep he might look far out upon the land, upon rolling stately acres.

Rowan looked out now: past the evergreens just outside to the s.h.i.+ning lawn beyond; and farther away, upon fields of brown shocks--guiltless harvest; then toward a pasture on the horizon.

He could see his cattle winding slowly along the edge of a russet woodland on which the slanting sunlight fell. Against the blue sky in the silvery air a few crows were flying: all went in the same direction but each went without companions. He watched their wings curiously with lonely, following eyes. Whither home pa.s.sed they?

And by whose summons? And with what guidance?

A deep yearning stirred him, and he summoned his wife and the nurse with his infant son. He greeted her; then raising himself on one elbow and leaning over the edge of the bed, he looked a long time at the boy slumbering on the nurse's lap.

The lesson of his brief span of years gathered into his gaze.

"Life of my life," he said, with that lesson on his lips, "sign of my love, of what was best in me, this is my prayer for you: may you find one to love you such as your father found; when you come to ask her to unite her life with yours, may you be prepared to tell her the truth about yourself, and have nothing to tell that would break her heart and break the hearts of others. May it be said of you that you are a better man than your father."