I RECEIVE A PROPOSAL--AND ACCEPT
Dogs and cats get more credit, I feel sure, for being animals of fine
feeling and intelligence, than in justice they are entitled to; because
they have so many ways of showing forth what they feel. A dog can growl
or bark in several ways, and show his teeth in at least two, to tell how
he feels. He can wag his tail, or let it droop, or curl it over his
back, or stick it straight out like a flag, or hold it in a bowed shape
with the curve upward, and frisk about, and run in circles, or sit up
silently or with howls; or stand with one foot lifted; or cock his head
on one side: and as for his eyes and his ears, he can almost talk
with them.
As for a cat, she has no such rich language as a dog; but see what she
can do: purring, rubbing against things, arching her back, glaring out
of her eyes, setting her hair on end, swelling out her tail, sticking
out her claws and scratching at posts, sneaking along as if ready to
pounce, pouncing either in earnest or in fun, mewing in many voices,
catching at things with nails drawn back or just a little protruded, or
drawing the blood with them, laying back her ears, looking up pleadingly
and asking for milk--why a cat can say almost anything she wants to say.
Now contrast these domestic animals with a much more necessary and
useful one, the cow. Any stockman knows that a cow is a beast of very
high nervous organization, but she has no very large number of ways of
telling us how she feels: just a few tones to her lowing, a few changes
of expression to her eye, a small number of shades of uneasiness, a
little manner with her eyes, showing the whites when troubled or letting
the lids droop in satisfaction--these things exhausted, and poor bossy's
tale is told. You can get nothing more out of her, except in some spasm
of madness. She is driven to extremes by her dumbness.
I am brought to this sermon by two things: what happened to me when
Rowena Fewkes came over to see me in the early summer of 1859, a year
almost to a day from the time when Magnus and I left Blue-grass Manor
after our spell of work there: and what our best cow, Spot, did
yesterday.
We were trying to lead Spot behind a wagon, and she did not like it. She
had no way of telling us how much she hated it, and how panicky she was,
as a dog or a cat could have done; and so she just hung back and acted
dumb and stubborn for a minute or two, and then she gave an awful
bellow, ran against the wagon as if she wanted to upset it, and when she
found she could not affect it, in as pathetic a despair and mental agony
as any man ever felt who has killed himself, she thrust one horn into
the ground, broke it off flush with her head, and threw herself down
with her neck doubled under her shoulder, as if trying to commit
suicide, as I verily believe she was. And yet dogs and cats get credit
for being creatures of finer feelings than cows, merely because cows
have no tricks of barking, purring, and the like.
It is the same as between other people and a Dutchman. He has the same
poverty of expression that cows are cursed with. To wear his feelings
like an overcoat where everybody can see them is for him impossible. He
is the bovine of the human species. This is the reason why I used to
have such fearful crises once in a while in my dumb life, as when I was
treated so kindly by Captain Sproule just after my stepfather whipped
me; or when I nearly killed Ace, my fellow-driver, on the canal in my
first and successful rebellion; or when I used to grow white, and cry
like a baby in my fights with rival drivers. I am thought by my
children, I guess, an unfeeling person, because the surface of my nature
is ice, and does not ripple in every breeze; but when ice breaks up, it
rips and tears--and the thicker the ice, the worse the ravage. The only
reason for saying anything about this is that I am an old man, and I
have always wanted to say it: and there are some things I have said, and
some I shall now have to say, that will seem inconsistent unless the
truths just stated are taken into account.
But there are some things to be told about before this crisis can be
understood. Life dragged along for all of us from one year to another in
the slow movement of a new country in hard times: only I was at bottom
better off than most of my neighbors because I had cattle, though I
could not see how they then did me much good. They grew in numbers, and
keeping them was just a matter of labor. My stock was the only thing I
had except land which was almost worthless; for I could use the land of
others for pasture and hay without paying rent.
Town life went backward in most ways. My interest in it centered in
Virginia and through her in Elder Thorndyke's family; but of this family
I saw little except for my visits from Grandma Thorndyke. She came out
and red up the house as often as she could catch a ride, and I kept up
my now well-known secret policy of supplying the Thorndyke family with
my farm, dairy and poultry surplus. Why not? I lay in bed of nights
thinking that Virginia had been that day fed on what I grew, and in the
morning would eat buckwheat cakes from grain that I worked to grow,
flour from my wheat that I had taken to mill, spread with butter which I
had made with my own hands, from the cows she used to pet and that had
hauled her in my wagon back along the Ridge Road, and with nice sorghum
molasses from cane that I had grown and hauled to the sorghum mill. That
she would have meat that I had prepared for her, with eggs from the
descendants of the very hens to which she had fed our table scraps when
we were together. That maybe she would think of me when she made bread
for Grandma Thorndyke from my flour. It was sometimes almost like being
married to Virginia, this feeling of standing between her and hunger.
The very roses in her cheeks, and the curves in her developing form,
seemed of my making. But she never came with grandma to help red up.
2
Grandma often told me that now I was getting pretty nearly old enough to
be married, or would be when I was twenty-one, which would be in
July--"Though," she always said, "I don't believe in folks's being
married under the spell of puppy love. Thirty is soon enough; but yet,
you might do well to marry when you are a little younger, because you
need a wife to keep you clean and tidy, and you can support a wife." She
began bringing girls with her to help fix my house up; and she would
always show them the castor and my other things.
"Dat bane for Christina," said Magnus one time, when she was showing my
castor and a nice white china dinner set, to Kittie Fleming or Dose
Roebuck, both of whom were among her samples of girls shown me. "An' dat
patent churn--dat bane for Christina, too, eh, Yake?"
"Christina who?" asked Grandma Thorndyke sharply.
"Christina Quale," said Magnus, "my cousin in Norvay."
This was nuts and apples for Grandma Thorndyke and the girls who came.
Magnus showed them Christina's picture, and told them that I had a copy
of it, and all about what a nice girl Christina was. Now grandma made a
serious thing of this and soon I had the reputation of being engaged to
Magnus's cousin, who was the daughter of a rich farmer, and could write
English; and even that I had received a letter from her. This seemed
unjust to me, though I was a little mite proud of it; for the letter was
only one page written in English in one of Magnus's. All the time
grandma was bringing girls with her to help, and making me work with
them when I helped. They were nice girls, too--Kittie, and Dose, Lizzie
Finster, and Zeruiah Strickler, and Amy Smith--all farmer girls. Grandma
was always talking about the wisdom of my marrying a farmer girl.
"The best thing about Christina," said she, "is that she is the daughter
of a farmer."
I struggled with this Christina idea, and tried to make it clear that
she was nothing to me, that it was just a joke. Grandma
Thorndyke smiled.
"Of course you'd say that," said she.
But the Christina myth grew wonderfully, and it made me more interesting
to the other girls.
"You look too high
For things close by,
And slight the things around you!"
So sang Zeruiah Strickler as she scrubbed my kitchen, and in pauses of
her cheerful and encouraging song told of the helplessness of men
without their women. I really believed her, in spite of my success in
getting along by myself.
"Why don't you bring Virginia out some day?" I asked on one of these
occasions, when it seemed to me that Grandma Thorndyke was making
herself just a little too frequent a visitor at my place.
"Miss Royall," said she, as if she had been speaking of the Queen of
Sheba, "is busy with her own circle of friends. She is now visiting at
Governor Wade's. She is almost a member of the family there. And her law
matters take up a good deal of her time, too. Mr. Gowdy says he thinks
he may be able to get her property for her soon. She can hardly be
expected to come out for this."
And grandma swept her hands about to cast down into nothingness my
house, my affairs, and me. This plunged me into the depths of misery.
So, when I furnished the cream for the donation picnic at Crabapple
Grove in strawberry time, I went prepared to see myself discarded by my
love. She was there, and I had not overestimated her coldness toward
me. Buck Gowdy came for only a few minutes, and these he spent eating
ice-cream with Elder Thorndyke, with Virginia across the table from him,
looking at her in that old way of his. Before he left, she went over and
sat with Bob Wade and Kittie Fleming; but he joined them pretty soon,
and I saw him bending down in that intimate way of his, first speaking
to Kittie, and then for a longer time, to Virginia--and I thought of the
time when she would not even speak his name!
Once she walked off by herself in the trees, and looked back at me as
she went; but I was done with her, I said to myself, and hung back. She
soon returned to the company, and began flirting with Matthias Trickey,
who was no older than I, and just as much of a country bumpkin. I found
out afterward that right off after that, Matthias began going to see
her, with his pockets full of candy with mottoes on it. I called this
sparking, and the sun of my hopes set in a black bank of clouds. I do
not remember that I was ever so unhappy, not even when John Rucker was
in power over me and my mother, not even when I was seeking my mother up
and down the canal and the Lakes, not even when I found that she had
gone away on her last long journey that bleak winter day in Madison. I
now devoted myself to the memory of my old dreams for my mother, and
blamed myself for treason to her memory, getting out that old letter and
the poor work-worn shoe, and weeping over them in my lonely nights in
the cabin on the prairie. I can not now think of this without pity for
myself; and though Grandma Thorndyke was one of the best women that ever
lived on this footstool, and was much to me in my after life, I can not
think of her happiness at my despair without blaming her memory a
little. But she meant well. She had better plans, as she thought, for
Virginia, than any which she thought I could have.
3
It was not more than a week after this donation picnic, when I came home
for my nooning one day, and found a covered wagon in the yard, and two
strange horses in the stable. When I went to the house, there were Old
Man Fewkes and Mrs. Fewkes, and Surajah Dowlah and Celebrate Fourth. I
welcomed them heartily. I was so lonesome that I would have welcomed a
stray dog, and that is pretty nearly what I was doing.
"I guess," ventured the old man, after we had finished our dinner, "that
you are wondering where we're goin', Jake."
"A long ways," I said, "by the looks of your rig."
"You see us now," he went on, "takin' steps that I've wanted to take
ever sen' I found out what a den of inikerty we throwed ourselves into
when we went out yon'," pointing in the general direction of the
Blue-grass Manor.
"What steps are you takin'?" I asked.
"We are makin'," said he, "our big move for riches. Gold! Gold! Jake,
you must go with us! We are goin' out to the Speak."
I had never heard of any place called the Speak, but I finally got it
through my head that he meant Pike's Peak. We were in the midst of the
Pike's Peak excitement for two or three years; and this was the earliest
sign of it that I had seen, though I had heard Pike's Peak mentioned.
"Jake," said Old Man Fewkes, "it's a richer spot than the Arabian
Knights ever discovered. The streams are rollin' gold sand. Come along
of us to the Speak, an' we'll make you rich. Eh, ma?"
"I have been drailed around," said ma, as she saw me looking at her,
"about as much as I expect to be; but this is like goin' home. It's the
last move; and as pa has said ag'in an' ag'in, it ain't but six or eight
hundred mile from Omaha, an' with the team an' wagin we've got, that's
nothin' if we find the gold, an' I calculate there ain't no doubt of
that. The Speak looks like the best place we ever started fur, and we
all hope you'll leave this Land o' Desolation, an' come with us. We like
you, an' we want you to be rich with us."
"Where's Rowena?" I asked.
Silence for quite a while. Then Ma Fewkes spoke.
"Rowena," she said, her voice trembling, "Rowena ain't goin' with us."
"Why," I said, "last summer, she seemed to want to start for Texas. She
ain't goin' with you? I want to know!"
"She ain't no longer," said Old Man Fewkes, "a member o' my family. I
shall will my proputty away from her. I've made up my mind, Jake: an'
now le's talk about the Speak. Our plans was never better laid.
Celebrate, tell Jake how we make our money a-goin', and you, Surrager,
denote to him your machine f'r gittin' out the gold."
I was too absorbed in thinking about Rowena to take in what Surajah and
Celebrate said. I have a dim recollection that Celebrate's plan for
making money was to fill the wagon box with white beans which were
scarce in Denver City, as we then called Denver, and could be sold for
big money when they got there. I have no remembrance of Surajah Dowlah's
plan for mining. I declined to go with them, and they went away toward
Monterey Centre, saying that they would stay there a few days, "to kind
of recuperate up," and they hoped I would join them.
What about Rowena? They had been so mysterious about her, that I had a
new subject of thought now, and, for I was very fond of the poor girl,
of anxiety. Not that she would be the worse for losing her family. In
fact, she would be the better for it, one might think. Her older
brothers and sisters, I remembered, had been bound out back east, and
this seemed to show a lack of family affection; but the tremor in Ma
Fewkes's voice, and the agitation in which Old Man Fewkes had delivered
what in books would be his parental curse, led me to think that they
were in deep trouble on account of their breach with Rowena. Poor girl!
After all, they were her parents and brothers, and as long as she was
with them, she had not been quite alone in the world. My idea of what
had taken place may be judged by the fact that when I next saw Magnus I
asked him if he knew that Rowena and her people had had a fuss. I looked
upon the case as that of a family fuss, and that only. Magnus looked
very solemn, and said that he had seen none of the family since we had
finished our work for Gowdy--a year ago.
"What said the old man, Yake?" he asked anxiously.
"He said he was going to will his property away from her!" I replied,
laughing heartily at the idea: but Magnus did not laugh. "He said that
she ain't no longer a member of his family, Magnus. Don't that
beat you!"
"Yes," said Magnus gravely, "dat beat me, Yake."
He bowed his head in thought for a while, and then looked up.
"Ay can't go to her, Yake. Ay can't go to her. But you go, Yake; you go.
An' you tal her--dat Magnus Thorkelson--Norsky Thorkelson--bane ready to
do what he can for her. All he can do. Tal her Magnus ready to live or
die for her. You tal her dat, Yake!"
I had to think over this a few days before I could begin to guess what
it meant; and three days after, she came to see me. It was a Sunday
right after harvest. I had put on my new clothes thinking to go to hear
Elder Thorndyke preach, but when I thought that I had no longer any
pleasure in the thought of Virginia, no chance ever to have her for my
wife, no dreams of her for the future even, I sat in a sort of stupor
until it was too late to go, and then I walked out to look at things.
The upland phlox, we called them pinks, were gone; the roses had fallen
and were represented by green haws, turning to red; the upland scarlet
lilies were vanished; but the tall lilies of the moist places were
flaming like yellow stars over the tall grass, each with its six dusty
anthers whirling like little windmills about its red stigma; and beside
these lilies, with their spotted petals turned back to their roots,
stood the clumps of purple marsh phlox; while towering over them all
were the tall rosin-weeds with their yellow blossoms like sunflowers,
and the Indian medicine plant waving purple plumes. There was a sense of
autumn in the air. Far off across the marsh I saw that the settlers had
their wheat in symmetrical beehive-shaped stacks while mine stood in the
shock, my sloping hillside slanting down to the marsh freckled with the
shocks until it looked dark--the almost sure sign of a bountiful crop.
And as I looked at this scene of plenty, I sickened at it. What use to
me were wheat in the shock, hay in the stack, cattle on the prairie,
corn already hiding the ground? Nothing! Less than nothing: for I had
lost the thing for which I had worked--lost it before I had claimed it.
I sat down and saw the opposite side of the marsh swim in my tears.
4
And then Rowena came into my view as she passed the house. I hastily
dried my eyes, and went to meet her, astonished, for she was alone. She
was riding one of Gowdy's horses, and had that badge of distinction in
those days, a side-saddle and a riding habit. She looked very
distinguished, as she rode slowly toward me, her long skirt hanging
below her feet, one knee crooked about the saddle horn, the other in the
stirrup. I had not seen a woman riding thus since the time I had watched
them sweeping along in all their style in Albany or Buffalo. She came up
to me and stopped, looking at me without a word.
"Why of all things!" I said. "Rowena, is this you!"
"What's left of me," said she.
I stood looking at her for a minute, thinking of what her father and
mother had said, and finally trying to figure out what seemed to be a
great change in her. There was something new in her voice, and her
manner of looking at me as she spoke; and something strange in the way
she looked out of her eyes. Her face was a little paler than it used to
be, as if she had been indoors more; but there was a pink flush in her
cheeks that made her look prettier than I had ever seen her. Her eyes
were bright as if with tears just trembling to fall, rather than with
the old glint of defiance or high spirits; but she smiled and laughed
more than ever I had seen her do. She acted as if she was in high
spirits, as I have seen even very quiet girls in the height of the fun
and frolic of a dance or sleigh-ride. When she was silent for a moment,
though, her mouth drooped as if in some sort of misery; and it was not
until our eyes met that the laughing expression came over her face, as
if she was gay only when she knew she was watched. She seemed
older--much older.
Somehow, all at once there came into my mind the memory of the woman
away back there in Buffalo, who had taken me, a sleepy, lonely,
neglected little boy, to her room, put me to bed, and been driven from
the fearful place in which she lived, because of it. I have finally
thought of the word to describe what I felt in both these
cases--desperation; desperation, and the feeling of pursuit and flight.
I did not even feel all this as I stood looking at Rowena, sitting on
her horse so prettily that summer day at my farm; I only felt puzzled
and a little pitiful for her--all the more, I guess, because of her nice
clothes and her side-saddle.
"Well, Mr. Vandemark," said she, finally, "I don't hear the perprietor
of the estate say anything about lighting and stayin' a while.' Help me
down, Jake!"
I swung her from the saddle and tied her horse. I stopped to put a
halter on him, unsaddle him, and give him hay. I wanted time to think;
but I do not remember that I had done much if any thinking when I got
back to the house, and found that she had taken off her long skirt and
was sitting on the little stoop in front of my door. She wore the old
apron, and as I came up to her, she spread it out with her hands to call
my attention to it.
"You see, Jake, I've come to work. Show me the morning's dishes, an'
I'll wash 'em. Or maybe you want bread baked? It wouldn't be breakin'
the Sabbath to mix up a bakin' for a poor ol' bach like you, would it?
I'm huntin' work. Show it to me."
I showed her how clean everything was, taking pride in my housekeeping;
and when she seemed not over-pleased with this, I had in all honesty to
tell her how much I was indebted to Mrs. Thorndyke for it.
"The preacher's wife?" she asked sharply. "An' that adopted daughter o'
theirn, Buck Gowdy's sister-in-law, eh?"
I wished I could have admitted this; but I had to explain that Virginia
had not been there. For some reason she seemed in better spirits when
she learned this. When it came time for dinner, which on Sunday was at
one o'clock, she insisted on getting the meal; and seemed to be terribly
anxious for fear everything might not be good. It was a delicious meal,
and to see her preparing it, and then clearing up the table and washing
the dishes gave me quite a thrill. It was so much like what I had seen
in my visions--and so different.
"Now," said she, coming and sitting down by me, and laying her hand on
mine, "ain't this more like it? Don't that beat doing everything
yourself? If you'd only try havin' me here a week, nobody could hire you
to go back to bachin' it ag'in. Think how nice it would be jest to go
out an' do your chores in the morning, an' when you come in with the
milk, find a nice breakfast all ready to set down to. Wouldn't that be
more like livin'?"
"Yes," I said, "it--it would."
"That come hard," said she, squeezing my hand, "like makin' a little boy
own up he likes a girl. I guess I won't ask you the next thing."
"What was the next thing, Rowena?"
"W'y, if it wouldn't be kind o' nice to have some one around, even if
she wa'n't very pretty, and was ignorant, if she was willin' to learn,
an' would always be good to you, to have things kind o' cheerful at
night--your supper ready; a light lit; dry boots warmed by the stove;
your bed made up nice, and maybe warmed when it was cold: even if she
happened to be wearin' an old apern like this--if you knowed she was
thinkin' in her thankful heart of the bashful boy that give it to her
back along the road when she was ragged and ashamed of herself every
time a stranger looked at her!"
Dumbhead as I was I sat mute, and looked as blank as an idiot. In all
this description of hers I was struck by the resemblance between her
vision and mine; but I was dreaming of some one else. She looked at me a
moment, and took her hand away. She seemed hurt, and I thought I saw her
wiping her eyes. I could not believe that she was almost asking me to
marry her, it seemed so beyond belief--and I was joked so much about the
girls, and about getting me a wife that it seemed this must be just
banter, too. And yet, there was something a little pitiful in it,
especially when she spoke again about my little gift to her so long ago.
"I never looked your place over," said she at last. "That's what I come
over fur. Show it to me, Jacob?"
This delighted me. We looked first at the wheat, and the corn, and some
of my cattle were near enough so that we went and looked at them, too. I
told her where I had got every one of them. We looked at the chickens
and the ducks; and the first brood of young turkeys I ever had. I showed
her all my elms, maples, basswoods, and other forest trees which I had
brought from the timber, and even the two pines I had made live, then
not over a foot high.
I just now came in from looking at them, and find them forty feet high
as I write this, with their branches resting on the ground in a great
brown ring carpeted with needles as they are in the pineries.
We sat down on the blue-grass under what is now the big cottonwood in
front of the house. I had stuck this in the sod a little twig not two
feet long, and now it was ten or twelve feet high, and made a very
little shade, to be sure, but wasn't I proud of my own shade trees! Oh,
you can't understand it; for you can not realize the beauty of shade on
that great sun-bathed prairie, or the promise in the changing shadows
under that little tree!
Rowena leaned back against the gray-green trunk, and patted the turf
beside her for me to be seated.
Every circumstance of this strange day comes back to me as I think of
it, and of what followed. I remember just how the poor girl looked as
she sat leaning against the tree, her cheeks flushed by the heat of the
summer afternoon, that look of distress in her eyes as she looked around
so brightly and with so gay an air over my little kingdom. As she sat
there she loosened her belt and took a long breath as if relieved in
her weariness at the long ramble we had taken.
"I never have had a home," she said. "I never had no idee how folk that
have got things lived--till I went over--over to that--that hell-hole
there!" And she waved her hand over toward Blue-grass Manor. I was
startled at her fierce manner and words.
"Your folks come along here the other day," I said, to turn the subject,
I guess.
"Did they?" she asked, with a little gasp. "What did they say?"
"They said they were headed for Pike's Peak."
"The old story," she said. "Huntin' f'r the place where the hawgs run
around ready baked, with knives an' forks stuck in 'em. I wish to God I
was with 'em!"
Here she stopped for a while and sat with her hands twisted together in
her lap. Finally, "Did they say anything about me, Jacob?"
"I thought," said I, "that they talked as if you'd had a fuss."
"Yes," she said. "They're all I've got. They hain't much, I reckon, but
they're as good as I be, I s'pose. Yes, a lot better. They're my father
an' my mother, an' my brothers. In their way--in our way--they was
always as good to me as they knowed how. I remember when ma used to
kiss me, and pa held me on his lap. Do you remember he's got one finger
off? I used to play with his fingers, an' try to build 'em up into a
house, while he set an' told about new places he was goin' to to git
rich. I wonder if the time'll ever come ag'in when I can set on any
one's lap an' be kissed without any harm in it!"
There was no false gaiety in her face now, as she sat and looked off
over the marsh from the brow of the hill-slope. A feeling of coming evil
swept over me as I looked at her, like that which goes through the
nerves of the cattle when a tornado is coming. I remembered now the
silence of her brothers when her father and mother had said that she was
no longer a member of their family, and was not going with them to
"the Speak."
The comical threat of the old man that he would will his property away
from her did not sound so funny now; for there must have been something
more than an ordinary family disagreement to have made them feel thus. I
recalled the pained look in Ma Fewkes's face, as she sat with her
shoulder-blades drawn together and cast Rowena out from the strange
family circle. What could it be? I turned my back to her as I sat on the
ground; and she took me by the shoulders, pulled me down so that my head
was lying in her lap, and began smoothing my hair back from my forehead
with a very caressing touch.
"Well," said she, "we wun't spoil our day by talkin' of my troubles.
This place here is heaven, to me, so quiet, so clean, so good! Le's not
spoil it."
And before I knew what she meant to do, she stooped down and kissed me
on the lips--kissed me several times. I can not claim that I was
offended, she was so pretty, so rosy, so young and attractive; but at
the same time, I was a little scared. I wanted to end this situation;
so, pretty soon, I proposed that we go down to see where I kept my milk.
I felt like calling her attention to the fact that it was getting well
along in the afternoon, and that she would be late home if she did not
start soon; but that would not be very friendly, and I did not want to
hurt her feelings. So we went down to the spring at the foot of the
hill, where the secret lay of my nice, firm, sweet butter. She did not
seem very much interested, even when I showed her the tank in which the
pans of milk stood in the cool water. She soon went over to a big
granite boulder left there by the glaciers ages ago when the hill was
made by the melting ice dropping its earth and gravel, and sat down as
if to rest. So I went and sat beside her.
"Jacob," said she, with a sort of gasp, "you wonder why I kissed you up
there, don't you?"
I should not have confessed this when I was young, for it is not the
man's part I played; but I blushed, and turned my face away.
"I love you, Jacob!" she took my hand as she said this, and with her
other hand turned my face toward her. "I want you to marry me. Will you,
Jacob? I--I--I need you. I'll be good to you, Jake. Don't say no! Don't
say no, for God's sake!"
Then the tragic truth seemed to dawn on me, or rather it came like a
flash; and I turned and looked at her as I had not done before. I am
slow, or I should have known when her father and mother had spoken as
they did; but now I could see. I could see why she needed me. As an
unsophisticated boy, I had been blind in my failure to see something new
and unexpected to me in human relations; but once it came to me, it was
plain. I was a stockman, as well as a boy; and my life was closely
related to the mysterious processes by which the world is filled with
successive generations of living beings. I was like a family physician
to my animals; and wise in their days and generations. Rowena was
explained to me in a flash of lightning by my every-day experiences;
she was swept within the current of my knowledge.
"Rowena," said I, "you are in trouble."
She knew what I meant.
I hope never again to see any one in such agony. Her face flamed, and
then turned as white as a sheet. She looked at me with that distressful
expression in her eyes, rose as if to go away, and then came back and
sitting down again on the stone, she buried her head on my breast and
wept so terribly that I was afraid. I tried to dry her tears, but they
burst out afresh whenever I looked in her face. The poor thing was
ashamed to look in my eyes; but she clung to me, sobbing, and crying
out, and then drawing long quivering breaths which seemed to be worse
than sobs. When she spoke, it was in short, broken sentences, sometimes
unfinished, as her agony returned upon her and would not let her go on.
I could not feel any scorn or contempt for her; I could as soon have
looked down on a martyr burning at the stake for an act in which I did
not believe. She was like a dumb beast tied in a burning stall, only
able to moan and cry out and endure.
I have often thought that to any one who had not seen and heard it, the
first thing she said might seem comic.
"Jacob," she said, with her face buried in my breast, "they've got it
worked around so--I'm goin' to have a baby!"
But when you think of the circumstances; the poor, pretty, inexperienced
girl; of that poor slack-twisted family; of her defenselessness in that
great house; of the experienced and practised and conscienceless
seducer into whose hands she had fallen--when you think of all this, I
do not see how you can fail to see how the words were wrung from her as
a statement of the truth. "They" meant all the forces which had been too
strong for her, not the least, her own weakness--for weakness is one of
the most powerful forces in our affairs. "They had got it worked
around"--as if the very stars in their courses had conspired to destroy
her. I had no impulse to laugh at her strange way of stating it, as if
she had had nothing to do with it herself: instead, I felt the tears of
sympathy roll down my face upon her hair of rich brown.
"That's why my folks have throwed me off," she went on. "But I ain't
bad, Jacob. I ain't bad. Take me, and save me! I'll always be good to
you, Jake; I'll wash your feet with my hair! I'll kiss them! I'll eat
the crusts from the table an' be glad, for I love you, Jacob. I've loved
you ever since I saw you. If I have been untrue to you, it was because I
was overcome, and you never looked twice at me, and I thought I was to
be a great lady. Now I'll be mud, trod on by every beast that walks, an'
rooted over by the hawgs, unless you save me. I'll work my fingers to
the bone f'r you, Jacob, to the bone. You're my only hope. For Christ's
sake let me hope a little longer!"
The thought that she was coming to me to save her from the results of
her own sin never came into my mind. I only saw her as a lost woman,
cast off even by her miserable family, whose only claim to
respectability was their having kept themselves from the one depth into
which she had fallen. I thought again of that wretch who had been kind
to me in Buffalo, and of poor Rowena, in poverty and want, stripped of
every defense against wrongs piled on wrongs, rooted over, as she said,
by the very swine, until she should come to some end so dreadful that I
could not imagine it; and not of her alone. There would be another life
to be thought of. I knew that Buckner Gowdy, for she had told me of his
blame in the matter, of her appeal to him, of his light-hearted cruelty
to her, of how now at last, after months of losing rivalry between her
and that other of his victims, the wife of Mobley the overseer, she had
come to me in desperation--I knew there was nothing in that cold heart
to which Rowena could make any appeal that had not been made
unsuccessfully by others in the same desperate case.
I had no feeling that she should have told me all in the first place,
instead of trying to win me in my ignorance: for I felt that she was
driven by a thousand whips to things which might not be honest, but were
as free from blame as the doublings of a hunted deer. I felt no blame
for her then, and I have never felt any. I passed that by, and tried to
look in the face what I should have to give up if I took this girl for
my wife. That sacrifice rolled over me like a black cloud, as clear as
if I had had a month in which to realize it.
I pushed her hands from my shoulders, and rose to my feet; and she knelt
down and clasped her arms around my knees.
"I must think!" I said. "Let me be! Let me think!"
I took a step backward, and as I turned I saw her kneeling there, her
hair all about her face, with her hands stretched out to me: and then I
walked blindly away into the long grass of the marsh.
I finally found myself running as if to get away from the whole thing,
with the tall grass tangling about my feet. All my plans for my life
with Virginia came back to me: I lived over again every one of those
beautiful days I had spent with her. I remembered how she had come back
to bid me good-by when I left her at Waterloo, and turned her over again
to Grandma Thorndyke; but especially, I lived over again our days in the
grove. I remembered that for months, now, she had seemed lost to me, and
that all the hope I had had appeared to be that of living alone and
dreaming of her. I was not asked by poor Rowena to give up much; and yet
how much it was to me! But how little for me to lose to save her from
the fate in store for her!
I can not hope to make clear to any one the tearing and rending in my
breast as these things passed through my mind while I went on and on,
through water and mud, blindly stumbling, dazed by the sufferings I
endured. I caught my feet in the long grass, fell--and it did not seem
worth while to rise again.
The sun went down, and the dusk came on as I lay there with my hands
twisted in the grass which drooped over me. Then I thought of Rowena,
and I got upon my feet and started in search of her, but soon forgot her
in my thoughts of the life I should live if I did what she wanted of me.
I was in such a daze that I went within a rod of her as she sat on the
stone, without seeing her, though the summer twilight was still a
filtered radiance, when suddenly all went dark before my eyes, and I
fell again. Rowena saw me fall, and came to me.
"Jacob," she cried, as she helped me to my feet, "Jacob, what's the
matter!"
"Rowena," said I, trying to stand alone, "I've made up my mind. I had
other plans--but I'll do what you want me to!"