Читать книгу: «The Mettle of the Pasture», страница 5

"You should have seen the other hapless wretches there to-night! Pining for a smile! Moths begging the candle to scorch them! And the candle was as cold as the north star and as distant."

Barbee rose and took a turn across the room and returning to his chair stood before it.

"If Marguerite had only waited, had concealed herself a little longer! Why did she not keep me in doubt until I had won some great case! Think of a scene like this: a crowded court room some afternoon; people outside the doors and windows craning their necks to see and hear me; the judge nervous and excited; the members of the bar beside themselves with jealousy as I arise and confront the criminal and jury. Marguerite is seated just behind the jury; I know why she chose that seat: she wished to study me to the best advantage. I try to catch her eye; she will not look at me. For three hours my eloquence storms. The judge acknowledges to a tear, the jurors reach for their handkerchiefs, the people in the court room sob like the skies of autumn. As I finish, the accused arises and addresses the court: 'May it please your honor, in the face of such a masterly prosecution, I can no longer pretend to be innocent. Sir (addressing me), I congratulate you upon your magnificent service to the commonwealth. Gentlemen of the jury, you need not retire to bring in any verdict: I bring it in myself, I am guilty, and my only wish is to be hanged. I suggest that you have it done at once in order that nothing may mar the success of this occasion!' That night Marguerite sends for me: that would have been the time for declaration! I have a notion that if I can extricate myself without wounding this poor little innocent, to forswear matrimony and march on to fame."

"March on to bed."

"Marguerite is going to give a ball, uncle, a brilliant ball merely to celebrate this irrepressible efflux and panorama of her emotions. Watch me at that ball, uncle! Mark the rising Romeo of the firm when Marguerite, the youthful Juliet of this town—"

A hand waved him quietly toward his bedroom.

"Well, good night, sir, good night. When the lark sings at heaven's gate I'll greet thee, uncle. My poor Marguerite!—Good night, uncle, good night."

He was only nineteen.

The Judge returned to his thoughts.

He must have thought a long time: the clock not far away struck twelve. He took off his glasses, putting them negligently on the edge of the ash tray which tipped over beneath their weight and fell to the floor: he picked up his glasses, but let the ashes lie. Then he stooped down to take off his shoes, not without sounds of bodily discomfort.

Aroused by these sounds or for other reasons not to be discovered, there emerged from under a table on which was piled "The Lives of the Chief Justices" a bulldog, cylindrical and rigid with years. Having reached a decorous position before the Judge, by the slow action of the necessary machinery he lowered the posterior end of the cylinder to the floor and watched him.

"Well, did I get them off about right?"

The dog with a private glance of sympathy up into the Judge's face returned to his black goatskin rug under the Chief Justices; and the Judge, turning off the burners in the chandelier and striking a match, groped his way in his sock feet to his bedroom—to the bed with its one pillow.

V

Out in the country next morning it was not yet break of dawn. The stars, thickly flung about, were flashing low and yellow as at midnight, but on the horizon the great change had begun. Not with colors of rose or pearl but as the mysterious foreknowledge of the morning, when a vast swift herald rushes up from the east and sweeps onward across high space, bidding the earth be in readiness for the drama of the sun.

The land, heavy with life, lay wrapped in silence, steeped in rest. Not a bird in wet hedge or evergreen had drawn nimble head from nimble wing. In meadow and pasture fold and herd had sunk down satisfied. A black brook brawling through a distant wood sounded loud in the stillness. Under the forest trees around the home of the Merediths only drops of dew might have been heard splashing downward from leaf to leaf. In the house all slept. The mind, wakefullest of happy or of suffering things, had lost consciousness of joy and care save as these had been crowded down into the chamber which lies beneath our sleep, whence they made themselves audible through the thin flooring as the noise of dreams.

Among the parts of the day during which man may match the elements of the world within him to the world without—his songs with its sunrises, toil with noontide, prayer with nightfall, slumber with dark—there is one to stir within him the greatest sense of responsibility: the hour of dawn.

If he awaken then and be alone, he is earliest to enter the silent empty theatre of the earth where the human drama is soon to recommence. Not a mummer has stalked forth; not an auditor sits waiting. He himself, as one of the characters in this ancient miracle play of nature, pauses at the point of separation between all that he has enacted and all that he will enact. Yesterday he was in the thick of action. Between then and now lies the night, stretching like a bar of verdure across wearying sands. In that verdure he has rested; he has drunk forgetfulness and self-renewal from those deep wells of sleep. Soon the play will be ordered on again and he must take his place for parts that are new and confusing to all. The servitors of the morning have entered and hung wall and ceiling with gorgeous draperies; the dust has been sprinkled; fresh airs are blowing; and there is music, the living orchestra of the living earth. Well for the waker then if he can look back upon the role he has played with a quiet conscience, and as naturally as the earth greets the sun step forth upon the stage to continue or to end his brief part in the long drama of destiny.

The horizon had hardly begun to turn red when a young man, stretched on his bed by an open window, awoke from troubled sleep. He lay for a few moments without moving, then he sat up on the edge of the bed. His hands rested listlessly on his kneecaps and his eyes were fixed on the sky-line crimsoning above his distant woods.

After a while he went over and sat at one of the windows, his eyes still fixed on the path of the coming sun; and a great tragedy of men sat there within him: the tragedy that has wandered long and that wanders ever, showing its face in all lands, retaining its youth in all ages; the tragedy of love that heeds not law, and the tragedy of law forever punishing heedless love.

Gradually the sounds of life began. From the shrubs under his window, from the orchard and the wet weeds of fence corners, the birds reentered upon their lives. Far off in the meadows the cattle rose from their warm dry places, stretched themselves and awoke the echoes of the wide rolling land with peaceful lowing. A brood mare in a grazing lot sent forth her quick nostril call to the foal capering too wildly about her, and nozzled it with rebuking affection. On the rosy hillsides white lambs were leaping and bleating, or running down out of sight under the white sea-fog of the valleys. A milk cart rattled along the turnpike toward the town.

It had become broad day.

He started up and crossed the hall to the bedroom opposite, and stood looking down at his younger brother. How quiet Dent's sleep was; how clear the current of his life had run and would run always! No tragedy would ever separate him and the woman he loved.

When he went downstairs the perfect orderliness of his mother's housekeeping had been before him. Doors and windows had been opened to the morning freshness, sweeping and dusting had been done, not a servant was in sight. His setters lay waiting on the porch and as he stepped out they hurried up with glistening eyes and soft barkings and followed him as he passed around to the barn. Work was in progress there: the play of currycombs, the whirl of the cutting-box, the noise of the mangers, the bellowing of calves, the rich streamy sounds of the milking. He called his men to him one after another, laying out the work of the day.

When he returned to the house he saw his mother walking on the front pavement; she held flowers freshly plucked for the breakfast table: a woman of large mould, grave, proud, noble; an ideal of her place and time.

"Is the lord of the manor ready for his breakfast?" she asked as she came forward, smiling.

"I am ready, mother," he replied without smiling, touching his lips to her cheek.

She linked her arm in his as they ascended the steps. At the top she drew him gently around until they faced the landscape rolling wide before them.

"It is so beautiful!" she exclaimed with a deep narrow love of her land. "I never see it without thinking of it as it will be years hence. I can see you riding over it then and your children playing around the house and some one sitting here where we stand, watching them at their play and watching you in the distance at your work. But I have been waiting a long time for her to take my place—and to take her own," and she leaned heavily on his arm as a sign of her dependence but out of weakness also (for she did not tell him all). "I am impatient to hear the voice of your children, Rowan. Do you never wish to hear them yourself?"

As they stood silent, footsteps approached through the hall and turning they saw Dent with a book in his hand.

"Are you grand people never coming to breakfast?" he asked, frowning with pretended impatience, "so that a laboring man may go to his work?"

He was of short but well-knit figure. Spectacles and a thoughtful face of great refinement gave him the student's stamp. His undergraduate course at college would end in a few weeks. Postgraduate work was to begin during the summer. An assistant professorship, then a full professorship—these were successive stations already marked by him on the clear track of life; and he was now moving toward them with straight and steady aim. Sometimes we encounter personalities which seem to move through the discords of this life as though guided by laws of harmony; they know neither outward check nor inward swerving, and are endowed with that peaceful passion for toil which does the world's work and is one of the marks of genius.

He was one of these—a growth of the new time not comprehended by his mother. She could neither understand it nor him. The pain which this had given him at first he had soon outgrown; and what might have been a tragedy to another nature melted away in the steady sunlight of his entire reasonableness. Perhaps he realized that the scientific son can never be the idol of a household until he is born of scientific parents.

As mother and elder son now turned to greet him, the mother was not herself aware that she still leaned upon the arm of Rowan and that Dent walked into the breakfast room alone.

Less than usual was said during the meal. They were a reserved household, inclined to the small nobilities of silence. (It is questionable whether talkative families ever have much to say.) This morning each had especial reason for self-communing.

When they had finished breakfast and came out into the hall. Dent paused at one of the parlor doors.

"Mother" he said simply, "come into the parlor a moment, will you?

And Rowan, I should like to see you also."

They followed him with surprise and all seated themselves.

"Mother," he said, addressing Her with a clear beautiful light in his gray eyes, yet not without the reserve which he always felt and always inspired, "I wish to tell you that I am engaged to Pansy Vaughan. And to tell you also, Rowan. You know that I finish college this year; she does also. We came to an understanding yesterday afternoon and I wish you both to know it at once. We expect to be married in the autumn as soon as I am of age and a man in my own right. Mother, Pansy is coming to see you; and Rowan, I hope you will go to see Pansy. Both of you will like her and be proud of her when you know her."

He rose as though he had rounded his communication to a perfect shape. "Now I must get to my work. Good morning," and with a smile for each he walked quietly out of the room. He knew that he could not expect their congratulations at that moment and that further conference would be awkward for all. He could merely tell them the truth and leave the rest to the argument of time.

"But I cannot believe it, Rowan! I cannot!"

Mrs. Meredith sat regarding' her elder son with incredulity and distress. The shock of the news was for certain reasons even greater to him; so that he could not yet command himself sufficiently to comfort her. After a few moments she resumed: "I did not know that Dent had begun to think about girls. He never said so. He has never cared for society. He has seemed absorbed in his studies. And now—Dent in love. Dent engaged, Dent to be married in the autumn—why, Rowan, am I dreaming, am I in my senses? And to this girl! She has entrapped him—poor, innocent, unsuspecting Dent! My poor, little, short-sighted bookworm." Tears sprang to her eyes, but she laughed also. She had a mother's hope that this trouble would turn to comedy. She went on quickly: "Did you know anything about this? Has he ever spoken to you about it?"

"No, I am just as much surprised. But then Dent never speaks in advance."

She looked at him a little timidly: "I thought perhaps it was this that has been troubling you. You have been trying to hide it from me."

He dropped his eyes quickly and made no reply.

"And do you suppose he is in earnest, Rowan?"

"He would never jest on such a subject."

"I mean, do you think he knows his own mind?"

"He always does."

"But would he marry against my wishes?"

"He takes it for granted that you will be pleased: he said so."

"But how can he think I'll be pleased? I have never spoken to this girl in my life. I have never seen her except when we have passed them on the turnpike. I never spoke to her father but once and that was years ago when he came here one cold winter afternoon to buy a shock of fodder from your father."

She was a white character; but even the whiteness of ermine gains by being necked with blackness. "How can he treat me with so little consideration? It is just as if he had said: 'Good morning, mother. I am going to disgrace the family by my marriage, but I know you will be delighted–good morning.'"

"You forget that Dent does not think he will disgrace the family.

He said you would be proud of her."

"Well, when the day comes for me to be proud of this, there will not be much left to be ashamed of. Rowan, for once I shall interfere."

"How can you interfere?"

"Then you must: you are his guardian."

"I shall not be his guardian by the autumn. Dent has arranged this perfectly, mother, as he always arranges everything."

She returned to her point. "But he must be kept from making such a mistake! Talk to him as a man. Advise him, show him that he will tie a millstone around his neck, ruin his whole life. I am willing to leave myself out and to forget what is due me, what is due you, what is due the memory of his father and of my father: for his own sake he must not marry this girl."

He shook his head slowly. "It is settled, mother," he added consolingly, "and I have so much confidence in Dent that I believe what he says: we shall be proud of her when we know her."

She sat awhile in despair. Then she said with fresh access of conviction: "This is what comes of so much science: it always tends to make a man common in his social tastes. You need not smile at me in that pitying way, for it is true: it destroys aristocratic feeling; and there is more need of aristocratic feeling in a democracy than anywhere else: because it is the only thing that can be aristocratic. That is what science has done for Dent! And this girl I—the public school has tried to make her uncommon, and the Girl's College has attempted, to make her more uncommon; and now I suppose she actually thinks she is uncommon: otherwise she would never have imagined that she could marry a son of mine. Smile on, I know I amuse you! You think I am not abreast of the times. I am glad I am not. I prefer my own. Dent should have studied for the church—with his love of books, and his splendid mind, and his grave, beautiful character. Then he would never have thought of marrying beneath him socially; he would have realized that if he did, he could never rise. Once in the church and with the right kind of wife, he might some day have become a bishop: I have always wanted a bishop in the family. But he set his heart upon a professorship, and I suppose a professor does not have to be particular about whom he marries."

"A professor has to be particular only to please himself—and the woman. His choice is not regulated by salaries and congregations."

She returned to her point: "You breed fine cattle and fine sheep, and you try to improve the strain of your setters. You know how you do it. What right has Dent to injure his children in the race for life by giving them an inferior mother? Are not children to be as much regarded in their rights of descent as rams and poodles?"

"You forget that the first families in all civilizations have kept themselves alive and at the summit by intermarriage with good, clean, rich blood of people whom they have considered beneath them."

"But certainly my family is not among these. It is certainly alive and it is certainly not dying out. I cannot discuss the subject with you, if you once begin that argument. Are you going to call on her?"

"Certainly. It was Dent's wish and it is right that I should."

"Then I think I shall go with you, Rowan. Dent said she was coming to see me; but I think I should rather go to see her. Whenever I wished to leave, I could get away, but if she came here, I couldn't."

"When should you like to go?"

"Oh, don't hurry me! I shall need time—a great deal of time! Do you suppose they have a parlor? I am afraid I shall not shine in the kitchen in comparison with the tins."

She had a wry face; then her brow cleared and she added with relief:

"But I must put this whole trouble out of my mind at present! It is too close to me, I cannot even see it. I shall call on the girl with you and then I shall talk quietly with Dent. Until then I must try to forget it. Besides, I got up this morning with something else on my mind. It is not Dent's unwisdom that distresses me."

Her tone indicated that she had passed to a more important topic. If any one had told her that her sons were not equally dear, the wound of such injustice would never have healed. In all that she could do for both there had never been maternal discrimination; but the heart of a woman cannot help feeling things that the heart of a mother does not; and she discriminated as a woman. This was evident now as she waived her young son's affairs.

"It is not Dent that I have been thinking of this morning," she repeated. "Why is it not you that come to tell me of your engagement? Why have you not set Dent an example as to the kind of woman he ought to marry? How many more years must he and I wait?"

They were seated opposite each other. He was ready for riding out on the farm, his hat on his crossed knees, gloves and whip in hand. Her heart yearned over him as he pulled at his gloves, his head dropped forward so that his face was hidden.

"Now that the subject has come up in this unexpected way, I want to tell you how long I have wished to see you married. I have never spoken because my idea is that a mother should not advise unless she believes it necessary. And in your case it has not been necessary. I have known your choice, and long before it became yours, it became mine. She is my ideal among them all. I know women, Rowan, and I know she is worthy of you and I could not say more. She is-high-minded and that quality is so rare in either sex. Without it what is any wife worth to a high-minded man? And I have watched her. With all her pride and modesty I have discovered her secret—she loves you. Then why have you waited? Why do you still wait?"

He did not answer and she continued with deeper feeling:

"Life is so uncertain to all of us and of course to me! I want to see you wedded to her, see her brought here as mistress of this house, and live to hear the laughter of your children." She finished with solemn emotion: "It has been my prayer, Rowan."

She became silent with her recollections of her own early life for a moment and then resumed:

"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 God."

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 space; 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 passion always for dealing in justice and dealing out justice, human or heavenly; most of all, gratified when in theological seminaries, when they could assert 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 passages on Hell 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, hoarsest 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 illustrious 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 asserted itself by drawing him away from the tyrannical interpretation of God 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 passed, 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 shining upon the silvery mists swathing the trees outside, upon the wet and many-colored leaves; a little frost on the dark grass 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 God-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, fishing, hunting, sailing, seeing more of his country. His father's consent was more ready than her own. The second session passed 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?"