Rose of Dutcher's Coolly Part 6

When she rose the next day she was changed. She moved about the house dull and languid. Never before had she failed to sleep when her head touched the pillow. She managed to be alone most of the time, and at last her mind cleared. She began to live for him, her ideal. She set him on high as a being to be wors.h.i.+ped, as a man fit to be her judge.

In the days and weeks which followed she asked herself, "Would he like me to do this?" or she thought, "I must not do that. What would he think of me if he saw me now?" And every night when she went to sleep it was with the radiant figure in blue and silver before her eyes.

When the sunset was very beautiful, she thought of him. When the stars seemed larger in the blue sky, she could see the star upon his grand breast. She knew his name; she had the bill in her little box of trinkets, and she could take it out and read, "William De Lisle, the world-famous leader in ground and lofty tumbling, in his stupendous leap over two elephants, six camels and two horses."

In all the talk of the circus which followed among her companions, she took no part because she feared she might be obliged to mention his name. When others spoke his name she could feel a hot flush surge up all over her body and she trembled for fear some one might discover her adoration of him.

She went about with Carl and Rob as before, only she no longer longed for them; they seemed good, familiar comrades, but nothing more. To them she seemed stranger every day. Her eyes had lost their clear, brave look; they were dreamy black, and her lids drooped.

Vast ambitions began in her. She determined to be a great scholar. She would be something great for his sake. She could not determine what, but she, too, would be great. At first she thought of being a circus woman, and then she determined that was impossible.

She dreamed often of being his companion and coming on hand in hand with him, bowing to the mult.i.tude, but when she was drawn to the tent-roof, she awoke in a cold sweat of fear, and so she determined to be a writer.

She would write books like Ivanhoe. Those were great days! Her mind expanded like the wings of a young eagle. She read everything; the _Ledger_, the _Weekly_, and all the dog-eared novels of impa.s.sioned and unreal type in the neighborhood.

In short, she consecrated herself to him as to a king, and seized upon every chance to educate herself to be worthy of him. Every effort was deeply pathetic, no matter how absurd to others. She took no counsel, allowed no confidants. She lived alone among her playmates.

This ideal came in her romantic and perfervid period, and it did her immeasurable good. It lifted her and developed her. It enabled her to escape the clutch of mere brute pa.s.sion which seizes so many boys and girls at that age, and leads to destructive early marriages. It kept her out of reach of the young men of the neighborhood.

She did not refuse the pleasures of the autumn and the winter, only she did not seem so hearty in her enjoyment of the rides and parties. She rode with the young fellows on moonlit nights, lying side by side with them on the straw-filled bottom of the sleigh, and her heart leaped with the songs they sang, but it all went out towards her ideal; he filled the circle of her mind. The thought of him made the night magical with meaning. As she danced with Carl it was her hero's arm she felt. At night, when Carl left her on the door-step, she looked up at the stars and the sinking moon, and lifted her face in a wild vow, inarticulate--"I will be worthy of him!" That was the pa.s.sionate resolution, but it did not reach to the definiteness of words.

As she worked about the house she took graceful att.i.tudes, and wished he might see her; he would be pleased with her. The grace and power of her arm acquired new meaning to her. Her body, she recognized, had something the same statuesque pose of his. In the secrecy of her room she walked up and down, feeling the splendid action of her nude limbs muscled almost like his. And all this was fine and pure physical joy. Her idea remained indefinite, wordless.

These were days of formless imaginings and ambitions. "I will do! I will do!" was her ceaseless cry to herself, but what could she do? What should she do?

She could be wise; that she would be. So she read. She got little out of her reading that she could make a showing of, but still it developed her. It made her dream great things, impossible things, but she had moments when she tried to live these things.

Meanwhile her manners changed. She became absent-minded, and seemed sullen and haughty to her companions at times. She never giggled like the rest of the girls. She had fine teeth, and yet her smile was infrequent. She laughed when occasion demanded, and laughed heartily, but she was not easily stirred to laughter.

Just in proportion as she ignored the young beaux, so they thronged about her. One or two of them eyed her with a look which made her angry.

She took refuge in Carl's company, and so escaped much persecution, for Carl was growing to be a powerful young man, with fists like mauls, and was respected among the athletes of the neighborhood.

She did not realize that she would need at some time to settle with Carl. She accepted his company as a matter of course. He filled social requirements for the time being.

Her teacher that winter was a plaintive sort of a little middle-aged man, a man of considerable refinement, but with little force. Rose liked him, but did not respect him as she had two or three of the men who had filled the teacher's chair. She could not go to him for advice.

As the winter wore on the figure of "William De Lisle" grew dimmer, but not less beautiful. Her love for him lost its under-current of inarticulate expectancy; it was raised into a sentiment so ethereal it would seem a breath of present pa.s.sion would scatter it like vapor, and yet it was immovable as granite. Time alone could change it. He still dominated her thought at quiet times, at dark when the stars began to s.h.i.+ne, but in the daytime he was faint as a figure in a dream.

CHAPTER VII

ROSE MEETS DR. THATCHER

The school-house in Dutcher's coule, like most country school-houses, was a squalid little den. It was as gray as a rock and as devoid of beauty as a dry goods box. It sat in the midst of the valley and had no trees, to speak of, about it, and in winter it was almost as snow-swept as the school-houses of the prairie.

Its gray clap-boarding was hacked and scarred with knife and stone, and covered with mud and foul marks. A visitor who had turned in from the sun-smit winter road paused before knocking and looked at the walls and the door with a feeling of mirth and sadness. Was there no place to escape the obscene outcome of s.e.xual pa.s.sion?

Dr. Thatcher had been a pupil here in this same school-house more than twenty years before, and the droning, shuffling sound within had a marvelous reawakening power. He was a physician in Madison now, and was in the coule on a visit.

His knock on the door brought a timid-looking man to the door.

"I'd like to come in awhile," said the Doctor.

"Certainly, certainly," replied the teacher, much embarra.s.sed by the honor.

He brought him the chair he had been sitting on, and helped his visitor remove his coat and hat.

"Now don't mind me, I want to see everything go on just as if I were not here."

"Very well, that's the way we do," the teacher replied, and returned to his desk and attempted, at least, to carry out his visitor's request.

A feeling of sadness, mingled with something wordlessly vast, came over the Doctor as he sat looking about the familiar things of the room.

He was in another world, an old, familiar world. His eyes wandered lovingly from point to point of the room, filled with whispering lips and shuffling feet and shock-heads of hair, under which shone bright eyes, animal-like in their s.h.i.+fty stare. The curtains, of a characterless shade, the battered maps, the scarred and scratched blackboards, the patched, precarious plastering, the worn floor on which the nails and knots stood like miniature mountains, the lop-sided seats, the master's hacked, unpainted pine desk, dark with dirt and polished with dirty hands, all seemed as familiar as his own face.

He sat there listening to the recitations in a dreamy impa.s.sivity. He was deep in the past, thinking of the days when to pa.s.s from his seat to the other side of the room was an event; when a visitor was a calamity--for the teacher; when the master was a tyrant and his school-room a ceaselessly rebellious kingdom.

As his eyes fell at last more closely upon the scholars; he caught the eyes of a young girl looking curiously at him, and so deep was he in the past, his heart gave a sudden movement, just as it used to leap when in those far-off days Stella Baird looked at him. He smiled at himself for it. It was really ludicrous; he thought, "I'll tell my wife of it."

The girl looked away slowly and without embarra.s.sment. She was thinking deeply, looking out of the window. His first thought was, "She has beautiful eyes." Then he noticed that she wore her hair neatly arranged, and that her dress, though plain, looked tasteful and womanly about the neck. The line of her head was magnificent. Her color was rich and dark; her mouth looked sad for one so young. Her face had the effect of being veiled by some warm, dusky color.

Was she young? Sometimes as he studied her she seemed a woman, especially as she looked away out of the window, and the profile line of her face could be seen. But she looked younger when she bent her head upon her books, and her long eye-lashes fell upon her cheek.

His persistent study brought a vivid flush into her face, but she did not nudge her companion and whisper as another would have done.

"That is no common girl," the Doctor concluded.

He sat there while the cla.s.ses were called up one after the other. He heard again these inflections, tones, perpetuated for centuries in the school-room, "The-cat-saw-a-rat."

Again the curfew failed to ring, in the same hard, monotonous, rapid, breathless sing-song, every other line with a falling inflection. The same failure to make the proper pause caused it to appear that "Bessie saw him on her brow."

Again the heavy boy read the story of the ants, and the teacher asked insinuatingly sweet questions.

"What did they do?"

"Made a tunnel."

"Yes! Now what _is_ a tunnel?"

"A hole that runs under-ground."

"Very good! It says that the ant is a voracious creature. What does that mean?"

"Dunno."