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VIII

Autumn and winter had passed. Another spring was nearly gone. One Monday morning of that May, the month of new growths and of old growths with new starting-points on them, Ambrose Webb was walking to and fro across the fresh oilcloth in his short hall; the front door and the back door stood wide open, as though to indicate the receptivity of his nature in opposite directions; all the windows were wide open, as though to bring out of doors into his house: he was much more used to the former; during married life the open had been more friendly than the interior. But he was now also master of the interior and had been for nearly a year.

Some men succeed best as partial automata, as dogs for instance that can be highly trained to pull little domestic carts. Ambrose had grown used to pulling his cart: he had expected to pull it for the rest of his days; and now the cart had suddenly broken down behind him and he was left standing in the middle of the long life-road. But liberty was too large a destiny for a mind of that order; the rod of empire does not fit such hands; it was intolerable to Ambrose that he was in a world where he could do as he pleased.

On this courageous Monday, therefore,—whatsoever he was to do during the week he always decided on Mondays,—after months of irresolution he finally determined to make a second dash for slavery. But he meant to be canny; this time he would choose a woman who, if she ruled him, would not misrule him; what he could stand was a sovereign, not a despot, and he believed that he had found this exceptionally gifted and exceptionally moderated being: it was Miss Anna Hardage.

From the day of Miss Anna's discovery that Ambrose had a dominating consort, she had been, she had declared she should be, much kinder to him. When his wife died, Miss Anna had been kinder still. Affliction present, affliction past, her sympathy had not failed him.

He had fallen into the habit of lingering a little whenever he took his dairy products around to the side porch. Every true man yearns for the eyes of some woman; and Ambrose developed the feeling that he should like to live with Miss Anna's. He had no gift for judging human conduct except by common human standards; and so at bottom he believed that Miss Anna in her own way had been telling him that if the time ever came, she could be counted on to do the right thing by him.

So Ambrose paced the sticky oilcloth this morning as a man who has reached the hill of decision. He had bought him a new buggy and new harness. Hitched to the one and wearing the other was his favorite roan mare with a Roman nose and a white eye, now dozing at the stiles in the front yard. He had curried her and had combed her mane and tail and had had her newly shod, and altogether she may have felt too comfortable to keep awake. He himself seemed to have received a coating of the same varnish as his buggy. Had you pinned a young beetle in the back of his coat or on either leg of his trousers, as a mere study in shades of blackness, it must have been lost to view at the distance of a few yards through sheer harmony with its background. Under his Adam's apple there was a green tie—the bough to the fruit. His eyes sparkled as though they had lately been reset and polished by a jeweller.

What now delayed and excited him at this last moment before setting out was uncertainty as to the offering he should bear Miss Anna. Fundamental instincts vaguely warned him that love's altar must be approached with gifts. He knew that some brought fortune, some warlike deeds, some fame, some the beauty of their strength and youth. He had none of these to offer; but he was a plain farmer, and he could give her what he had so often sold her—a pound of butter.

He had awaited the result of the morning churning; but the butter had tasted of turnips, and Ambrose did not think that the taste of turnips represented the flavor of his emotion. Nevertheless, there was one thing that she preferred even to butter; he would ensnare her in her own weakness, catch her in her own net: he would take her a jar of cream.

Miss Anna was in her usual high spirits that morning. She was trying a new recipe for some dinner comfort for Professor Hardage, when her old cook, who also answered the doorbell, returned to the kitchen with word that Mr. Webb was in the parlor.

"Why, I paid him for his milk," exclaimed Miss Anna, without ceasing to beat and stir. "And what is he doing in the parlor? Why didn't he come around to the side door? I'll be back in a moment." She took off her apron from an old habit of doing so whenever she entered the parlor.

She gave her dairyman the customary hearty greeting, hurried back to get him a glass of water, inquired dispassionately about grass, inundated him with a bounteous overflow of her impersonal humanity. But he did not state his business, and she grew impatient to return to her confection.

"Do I owe you for anything, Mr. Webb?" she suddenly asked, groping for some clew to this lengthening labyrinthine visit.

He rose and going to the piano raked heavily off of the top of it a glass jar and brought it over to her and resumed his seat with a speaking countenance.

"Cream!" cried Miss Anna, delighted, running her practised eye downward along the bottle to discover where the contents usually began to get blue: it was yellow to the bottom. "How much is it? I'm afraid we are too poor to buy so much cream all at once."

"It has no price; it is above price."

"How much is it, Mr. Webb?" she insisted with impatience.

"It is a free gift."

"Oh, what a beautiful present!" exclaimed Miss Anna, holding it up to the light admiringly. "How can I ever thank you."

"Don't thank me: you could have the dairy! You could have the cows, the farm."

"O dear, no!" cried Miss Anna, "that would be altogether too much!

One bottle goes far beyond all that I ever hoped for."

"I wish ail women were like you."

"O dear, no! that would not do at all! I am an old maid, and women must marry, must, must! What would become of the world?"

"You need not be an old maid unless you wish."

"Now, I had never thought of that!" observed Miss Anna, in a very peculiar tone. "But we'll not talk about myself; let us talk about yourself. You are looking extremely well—now aren't you?"

"No one has a better right. It is due you to let you know this.

There's good timber in me yet."

"Due me! I am not interested in timber."

"Anna," he said, throwing his arms around one of his knees, "our hour has come—we need not wait any longer."

"Wait for what?" inquired Miss Anna, bending toward him with the scrutiny of a near-sighted person trying to make out some looming horror.

"Our marriage."

Miss Anna rose as by an inward explosion.

"Go, buzzard!"

He kept his seat and stared at her with a dropped jaw. Habit was powerful in him; and there was something in her anger, in that complete sweeping of him out other way, that recalled the domestic usages of former years and brought to his lips an involuntary time-worn expression:

"I meant nothing offensive."

"I do not know what you meant, and I do not care: go!"

He rose and stood before her, and with a flash of sincere anger he spoke his honest mind: "It was you who put the notion in my head. You encouraged me, encouraged me systematically; and now you are pretending. You are a bad woman."

"I think I am a bad woman after what has happened to me this morning," said Miss Anna, dazed and ready to break down.

He hesitated when he reached the door, smarting with his honest hurt; and he paused there and made a request.

"At least I hope that you will never mention this; it might injure me." He did not explain how, but he seemed to know.

"Do you suppose I'd tell my Maker if He did not already know it?"

She swept past him into the kitchen.

"As soon as you have done your work, go clean the parlor," she said to the cook. "Give it a good airing. And throw that cream away, throw the bottle away."

A few moments later she hurried with her bowl into the pantry; there she left it unfinished and crept noiselessly up the backstairs to her room.

That evening as Professor Hardage sat opposite to her, reading, while she was doing some needlework, he laid his book down with the idea of asking her some question. But he caught sight of her expression and studied it a few moments. It was so ludicrous a commingling of mortification and rage that he laughed outright.

"Why, Anna, what on earth is the matter?"

At the first sound of his voice she burst into hysterical sobs.

He came over and tried to draw her fingers away from her eyes.

"Tell me all about it."

She shook her head frantically.

"Yes, tell me," he urged. "Is there anything in all these years that you have not told me?"

"I cannot," she sobbed excitedly. "I am disgraced."

He laughed. "What has disgraced you?"

"A man."

"Good heavens!" he cried, "has somebody been making love to you?"

"Yes."

His face flushed. "Come," he said seriously, "what is the meaning of this, Anna?"

She told him.

"Why aren't you angry with him?" she complained, drying her eyes.

"You sit there and don't say a word!"

"Do you expect me to be angry with any soul for loving you and wishing to be loved by you? He cast his mite into the treasury, Anna."

"I didn't mind the mite," she replied. "But he said I encouraged him, that I encouraged him systematically."

"Did you expect him to be a philosopher?"

"I did not expect him to be a—" She hesitated at the harsh word.

"I'm afraid you expected him to be a philosopher. Haven't you been kind to him?"

"Why, of course."

"Systematically kind?"

"Why, of course."

"Did you have any motive?"

"You know I had no motive—aren't you ashamed!"

"But did you expect him to be genius enough to understand that? Did you suppose that he could understand such a thing as kindness without a motive? Don't be harsh with him, Anna, don't be hard on him: he is an ordinary man and judged you by the ordinary standard. You broke your alabaster box at his feet, and he secretly suspected that you were working for something more valuable than the box of ointment. The world is full of people who are kind without a motive; but few of those to whom they are kind believe this."

Before Miss Anna fell asleep that night, she had resolved to tell Harriet. Every proposal of marriage is known at least to three people. The distinction in Miss Anna's conduct was not in telling, but in not telling until she had actually been asked.

Two mornings later Ambrose was again walking through his hall. There is one compensation for us all in the large miseries of life—we no longer feel the little ones. His experience in his suit for Miss Anna's hand already seemed a trifle to Ambrose, who had grown used to bearing worse things from womankind. Miss Anna was not the only woman in the world, he averred, by way of swift indemnification. Indeed, in the very act of deciding upon her, he had been thinking of some one else. The road of life had divided equally before him: he had chosen Miss Anna as a traveller chooses the right fork; the left fork remained and he was now preparing to follow that: it led to Miss Harriet Crane.

As Ambrose now paced his hallway, revolving certain details connected with his next venture and adventure, the noise of an approaching carriage fell upon his ear, and going to the front door he recognized the brougham of Mrs. Conyers. But it was Miss Harriet Crane who leaned forward at the window and bowed smilingly to him as he hurried out.

"How do you do, Mr. Webb?" she said, putting out her hand and shaking his cordially, at the same time giving him a glance of new-born interest. "You know I have been threatening to come out for a long time. I must owe you an enormous bill for pasturage," she picked up her purse as she spoke, "and I have come to pay my debts. And then I wish to see my calf," and she looked into his eyes very pleasantly.

"You don't owe me anything," replied Ambrose. "What is grass?

What do I care for grass? My mind is set on other things."

He noticed gratefully how gentle and mild she looked; there was such a beautiful softness about her and he had had hardness enough. He liked her ringlets: they were a novelty; and there hung around her, in the interior of the carriage, a perfume that was unusual to his sense and that impressed him as a reminder of her high social position. But Ambrose reasoned that if a daughter of his neighbor could wed a Meredith, surely he ought to be able to marry a Crane.

"If you want to see the calf," he said, but very reluctantly, "I'll saddle my horse and we'll go over to the back pasture."

"Don't saddle your horse," objected Harriet, opening the carriage door and moving over to the far cushion, "ride with me."

He had never ridden in a brougham, and as he got in very nervously and awkwardly, he reversed his figure and tried to sit on the little front seat on which lay Harriet's handkerchief and parasol.

"Don't ride backwards, Mr. Webb," suggested Harriet. "Unless you are used to it, you are apt to have a headache," and she tapped the cushion beside her as an invitation to him. "Now tell me about my calf," she said after they were seated side by side.

As she introduced this subject, Ambrose suddenly looked out of the window. She caught sight of his uneasy profile.

"Now, don't tell me that there's any bad hews about it!" she cried.

"It is the only pet I have."

"Miss Harriet," he said, turning his face farther away, "you forget how long your calf has been out here; it isn't a calf any longer: it has had a calf."

He spoke so sternly that Harriet, who all her life had winced before sternness, felt herself in some wise to be blamed. And coolness was settling down upon them when she desired only a melting and radiant warmth.

"Well," she objected apologetically, "isn't it customary? What's the trouble? What's the objection? This is a free country! Whatever is natural is right! Why are you so displeased?"

About the same hour the next Monday morning Ambrose was again pacing his hallway and thinking of Harriet. At least she was no tyrant: the image of her softness rose before him again. "I make no mistake this time."

His uncertainty at the present moment was concerned solely with the problem of what his offering should be in this case: under what image should love present itself? The right thought came to him by and by; and taking from his storeroom an ornamental basket with a top to it, he went out to his pigeon house and selected two blue squabs. They were tender and soft and round; without harshness, cruelty, or deception. Whatever they seemed to be, that they were; and all that they were was good.

But as Ambrose walked back to the house, he lifted the top of the basket and could but admit that they did look bare. Might they not, as a love token, be—unrefined? He crossed to a flower bed, and, pulling a few rose-geranium leaves, tucked them here and there about the youngsters.

It was not his intention to present these to Harriet in person: he had accompanied the cream—he would follow the birds; they should precede him twenty-four hours and the amative poison would have a chance to work.

During that forenoon his shining buggy drawn by his roan mare, herself symbolic of softness, drew up before the entrance of the Conyers homestead. Ambrose alighted; he lifted the top of the basket—all was well.

"These pets are for your Miss Harriet," he said to the maid who answered his ring.

As the maid took the basket through the hall after having watched him drive away, incredulous as to her senses, she met Mrs. Conyers, who had entered the hall from a rear veranda.

"Who rang?" she asked; "and what is that?"

The maid delivered her instructions. Mrs. Conyers took the basket and looked in.

"Have them broiled for my supper," she said with a little click of the teeth, and handing the basket to the maid, passed 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 sex 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, noble 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 coarse 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-shirt—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, coarse, 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 lustre for lustrous 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 passions 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 assured him how increasingly she needed his friendship. 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 friendship 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 passing 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 passing 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, passing 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 ships 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 gods 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 worshipped their gods or their God, 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."

"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."