able to retain enough of her "nostalgia" to comfort her Southern
conscience. She had arrived in March and caught Dame Nature in the midst
of her spring cleaning, scolding her patient children; and at any rate
her loyalty to Dixie forbade her to be quite satisfied with these tardy
blandishments. Let the cold Connecticut turn as blue as heaven, by so
much the more was it not the green Swanee? She had made more than one
warm friendship among her fellow-students, but the well-trimmed lamp of
her home feeling waxed not dim. It only smoked a trifle even in Boston,
that maze of allurements into which no Southerner of her father's
generation ever sent his brother, no Southerness her sister, without
some fear of apostasy.
Barbara had made three visits to that city, where Mrs. Fair, the ladies
said, "did a great deal for her." Yet when Mrs. Fair said, with kind
elation, "My dear, you have met Boston, and it is yours!" the smiling
exile, as she put her hand into both hands of her hostess, remembered
older friends and silently apologized to herself for having so lost her
heart to this new one.
At that point came in one who was at least an older acquaintance--the
son. Thoroughly as Barbara had always liked Henry Fair, he seemed to her
to have saved his best attractiveness until now, and with a gentleness
as masculine as it was refined, fitted into his beautiful home, his
city, the whole environing country, indeed, and shone from them, in her
enlivened fancy, like an ancestor's portrait from its frame. He came to
take her to an exhibition of paintings, and thence to the railway
station, where a fellow-student was to rejoin her for the trip back to
college. Mrs. Fair had to attend a meeting of the society for something
or other, of which she was president.
"These people make every minute count," wrote Barbara to Fannie; "and
yet they're far from being always at work. I'm learning the art of
recreation from them. Even the men have a knack for it that our Southern
men know nothing about."
"You might endorse that 'Fair _versus_ March,'" replied Ravenel to his
wife, one evening, as he lingered a moment at tea. She had playfully
shown him the passage as a timorous hint at better self-care; but he
smilingly rose and went out. She kept a bright face, and as she sat
alone re-reading the letter, said, laughingly, "Poor John!" and a full
minute afterward, without knowing it, sighed.
This may have been due, in part at least, to the fact that Barbara's
long but tardy letter was the first one Fannie had received from her. It
told how a full correspondence between the writer's father and his
fellow college president had made it perfectly comfortable for her to
appear at the institution for the first time quite unescorted, having
within the hour parted from Mr. and Mrs. Fair, who, though less than
three hours' run from their own home, would have gone with her if she
could have consented. She had known that the dormitories were full and
that like many other students she would have to make her home with a
private family, and had found it with three very lovable sisters, two
spinsters and a widow, who turned out to be old friends--former
intimates--of the Fairs. And now this intimacy had been revived; Mrs.
Fair had already been to see them once, although to do so she had come
up from Boston alone. How she had gone back the letter did not say.
Fannie felt the omission.
"I didn't think Barb would do me that way," she mused; and was no better
pleased when she recalled a recent word of Jeff-Jack's: that few small
things so sting a woman as to disappoint her fondness and her curiosity
at the same time. Now with men--However! All Barbara had omitted was
that Mrs. Fair had gone back with her son, who on his way homeward from
a trip to New York had been "only too glad" to join her here, and spend
two or three hours under spring skies and shingle roof with the three
pleasant sisters.
This was in the third of those six weeks during which Barbara had been
at college. About half of the two or three hours was spent in a stroll
along the windings of a small woodland river. The widow and Mrs. Fair
led the van, the two spinsters were the main body, and Henry and Barbara
straggled in the rear stooping side by side among white and blue
violets, making perilous ventures for cowslips and maple blossoms, and
commercing in sweet word-lore and dainty likes and dislikes.
When the procession turned, the two stragglers took seats on a great
bowlder round which the stream broke in rapids, Barbara gravely
confessing to the spinsters, as they lingeringly passed, that she had
never done so much walking in her life before as now and here in a place
where an unprotected girl could hire four hacks for a dollar.
The widow and Mrs. Fair left the others behind. They had once been
room-mates at school, and this walk brought back something of that old
relation. They talked about the young man at their back, and paused to
smile across the stream at some children in daring colors on a green
hillside getting sprouts of dandelion.
"Do you think," asked the widow, "it's really been this serious with him
all along?"
"Yes, I do. Henry's always been such a pattern of prudence and
moderation that no one ever suspects the whole depth of his feelings. He
realizes she's very young, and he may have held back until her mind--her
whole nature--should ripen; although, like him, as you see, she's ripe
beyond her years. But above all he's a dutiful son, and I believe he's
simply been waiting till he could see her effect on us and ours on her.
Tell me frankly, dear, how do you like her?"
The Yankee widow had bright black eyes and they twinkled with restrained
enthusiasm as she murmured, "I hope she'll get him!"
"Ah!" Mrs. Fair smiled gratefully, made a pretty mouth and ended with a
wise gesture and a dubious toss, as who should say, "I admit he's
priceless, but I hope he may get her."
Whereupon the widow ventured one question more, and Mrs. Fair told her
of John March. "Yes," she said at the end, "he happened to be in Boston
for his company last Saturday when Miss Garnet was with us, and Henry
brought him to the house. I wasn't half glad, though I like him, quite.
He's a big, handsome, swinging fellow that everybody invites to
everything. He makes good speeches before the clubs and flaunts his
Southern politics just enough to please our Yankee fondness for being
politely _sassed_."
"Why, dear, isn't that a rather good trait in us? It's zest for the
overlooked fact, isn't it?"
"O!--it has its uses. It certainly furnishes a larger feeling of
superiority to both sides at once than anything else I know of."
"You say Henry brought him to the house while Miss Garnet was with
you----"
"Yes; and, my dear, I wish you might have seen those two Southerners
meet! They didn't leave us any feeling of superiority then; at least
_he_ didn't. Except that they're both so Southern, they're not alike.
She moved right in among us without the smallest misstep. He made a
dozen delicious blunders. It was lovely to see how sweetly she and Henry
helped him up and brushed him off, and the boyish manfulness with which
he always took it. I couldn't tell, sometimes, which of the three to
like best."
Those behind called them to hearken to the notes of a woodlark, and when
Mrs. Fair asked her son the hour it was time to get to the station.
Barbara would not say just when she could be in Boston again; but the
classmate she liked best was a Boston girl, and by the time this college
life had lasted six weeks her visits to the city had been three, as
aforesaid. In every instance, with an unobtrusiveness all his own, Henry
Fair had made her pleasure his business. On the second visit she had
expected to meet Mr. March again--a matter wholly of his contriving--but
had only got his telegram from New York at the last moment of her stay,
stating that he was unavoidably detained by business, and leaving space
for six words unused. The main purpose of her third visit had been to
attend with Mrs. Fair a reception given by that lady's club. It had
ended with dancing; but Mr. Fair had not danced to suit her and Mr.
March had not danced at all, but had allowed himself to betray
dejection, and had torn her dress. Back at college she had told the
favorite classmate how she had chided Mr. March for certain trivial
oversights and feared she had been severe; and when the classmate
insisted she had not been nearly severe enough she said good-night and
went to her room to mend the torn dress; and as she sewed she gnawed her
lip, wished she had never left Suez, and salted her needle with slow
tears.
Thus ended the sixth week--stop! I was about to forget the thing for
which I began the chapter--and, anyhow, this was not Saturday, it was
Friday! While Barbara was so employed, John March, writing to Henry Fair
from somewhere among the Rhode Island cotton-spinners, said:
"To-night I go to New York, where I have an important appointment
to-morrow noon, but I can leave there Monday morning at five and be in
Springfield at ten-twenty-five. If you will get there half an hour later
by the train that leaves Boston at seven, I will telegraph the
Springfield men to meet us in the bank at eleven. They assure me that if
you confirm my answers to their questions they will do all I've asked.
Please telegraph your reply, if favorable, to my New York address."
About three o'clock of Saturday March was relieved of much anxiety by
receipt of Fair's telegram. It was a long time before Monday morning,
but in a sudden elation he strapped his valise and said to the
porter--"Grand Central Depot."
"Back to Boston again?"
"Not much! But I'm not going to get up at four o'clock Monday morning
either."
In Boston that evening a servant of the Fairs told one of their familiar
friends who happened to drop in, that Mr. Fair, senior, was in, but that
Mr. Henry had gone to spend Sunday at some Connecticut River town, he
was not sure which, but--near Springfield.
LXX.
ACROSS THE MEADOWS
Next morning, John March, for the first time in his life, saw and heard
the bobolink.
"Ah! you turncoat scoundrel!" he laughed in a sort of fond dejection,
"you've come North to be a lover too, have you? You were songless enough
down South!"
But the quivering gallant went singing across the fields, too drunk with
the joy of loving to notice accusers.
On the previous evening March had come up by rail some fifteen miles
beyond the brisk inland city just mentioned and stopped at a certain
"Mount"--no matter what--known to him only through casual allusions in
one or two letters of--a friend. Here he had crossed a hand-ferry,
climbed a noted hill, put up at its solitary mountain house--being tired
of walls and pavements, as he had more than once needlessly
explained--and at his chamber window sat looking down, until most of
them had vanished, upon a cluster of soft lights on the other side of
the valley, shining among the trees of the embowered town where one who
now was never absent from his thoughts was at school.
The knowledge that he loved her was not of yesterday only. He could
count its age in weeks and a fraction, beginning with the evening when
"those two Southerners" had met in Mrs. Fair's drawing-room. Since then
the dear trouble of it had ever been with him, deep, silent, dark--like
this night on the mountain--shot with meteors of brief exultation, and
starlighted with recollections of her every motion, glance, and word.
At sunrise, looking again, he saw the town's five or six spires, and
heard one tell the hour and the college bell confirm it. Care was on his
brow, but you could see it was a care that came of new freedom. He was
again a lover, still tremorous with the wonder of unsought deliverance
from his dungeon of not-loving. And now the stern yet inspiring
necessity was not to let his delivering angel find it out; to be a
lover, but not a suitor. Hence his presence up here instead of down in
the town beyond the meadows and across the river. He would make it very
plain to her and her friends that he had not come, ahead of his business
appointment, to thrust himself upon her, but to get a breath of heaven's
own air--being very tired of walls and pavements--and to--to discover
the bobolink!
Of course, being so near, he should call. He must anyhow go to church,
and if only he could keep himself from starting too early, there was no
reason why he should not combine the two duties and make them one
pleasure. Should he ride or drive? He ordered the concern's best
saddle-horse, walked mournfully half round him, and said, "I reckon--I
reckon I'll drive. Sorry to trouble you, but----"
"Put him in the shafts, Dave," said the stable-keeper, and then to the
guest, "No trouble, sir; if a man doesn't feel safe in a saddle he'd
better not monkey with it."
"I dare say," sedately responded John. "I suppose a man oughtn't to try
to learn to ride without somebody to go along with him."
The boy had just finished harnessing the animal, when March started with
a new thought. He steadied himself, turned away, drew something from his
pocket, consulted and returned it--it was neither a watch nor a
weapon--and rejoining the stable-keeper said, with a sweet smile and a
red face:
"See here, it's only three miles over there. If you'll let me change my
mind----"
"You'll walk it--O all right! If you change your mind again you can let
us know on your return."
John took a way that went by a bridge. It was longer than the other, by
way of a ferry, but time, for the moment, was a burden and either way
was beautiful. The Sabbath was all smiles. On the Hampshire hills and
along the far meanderings of the Connecticut a hundred tints of perfect
springtide beguiled the heart to forget that winter had ever been. Above
a balmy warmth of sunshine and breeze in which the mellowed call of
church-bells floated through the wide valley from one to another of half
a dozen towns and villages, silvery clouds rolled and unrolled as if in
stately play, swung, careened, and fell melting through the marvellous
blue, or soared and sunk and soared again. Keeping his eyes much on such
a heaven, our inexperienced walker thought little of close-fitting boots
until he had to sit down, screened from the public road by a hillock,
and, with a smile of amusement but hardly of complacency, smooth a cruel
wrinkle from one of his very striped socks. Just then a buckboard
rumbled by, filled with pretty girls, from the college, he guessed,
driving over to that other college town, seven miles across the valley,
where a noted Boston clergyman was to preach to-day; but the
foot-passenger only made himself a bit smaller and chuckled at the lucky
privacy of his position. As they got by he stole a peep at their
well-dressed young backs, and the best dressed and shapeliest was
Barbara Garnet's. The driver was Henry Fair. It was then that the
bobolink, for the first time in his life, saw and heard John March.
LXXI.
IN THE WOODS
The sun mounted on to noon and nature fell into a reverent stillness;
but in certain leafy aisles under the wooded bluffs and along that
narrow stream where Mrs. Fair some three weeks earlier had walked with
the widow, the Sabbath afternoon was scarcely half spent before the air
began to be crossed and cleft with the vesper hymns and serenades of
plumed worshippers and lovers.
It was a place to quicken the heart and tongue of any wooer. The breezes
moved pensively and without a sound. On the middle surface of the water
the sunshine lay in wide bands, liquid-bordered under over-hanging
boughs by glimmering shadows that wove lace in their sleep. Between the
stream and the steep ground ran an abandoned road fringed with ferns,
its brown pine-fallings flecked with a sunlight that fell through the
twined arms and myriad green fingers of all-namable sorts of great and
lesser trees. You would have said the forest's every knight and lady,
dwarf, page, and elf--for in this magical seclusion all the world's
times were tangled into one--had come to the noiseless dance of some
fairy's bridal; chestnut and hemlock, hazel and witch-hazel, walnut and
willow, birches white and yellow, poplar and ash in feathery bloom, the
lusty oaks in the scarred harness of their winter wars under new tabards
of pink and silver-green, and the slim service-bush, white with blooms
and writhing in maiden shame of her too transparent gown. In each
tangled ravine Flora's little pious mortals of the May--anemone, yellow
violet, blood-root, mustard, liverwort, and their yet humbler neighbors
and kin--heard mass, or held meeting--whichever it was--and slept for
blissful lack of brain while Jack-in-the-pulpit preached to them, under
Solomon's seal, and oriole, tanager, warbler, thrush, up in the
choir-loft, made love between the hymns, ate tidbits, and dropped crumbs
upon wake-robin, baby-toes, and the nodding columbine.
Was it so? Or was it but fantasy in the mind of Henry Fair alone,
reflected from the mood of the girl at whose side he walked here, and
whose "Herrick" he vainly tried to beguile from her in hope that so she
might better heed his words? It may be. The joy of spring was in her
feet, the colors of the trees were answered in her robes. Moreover, the
flush of the orchards and breath of the meadows through which they had
gone and come again were on her cheek and in her parted lips, the
red-brown depths of the stream were in her hair and lashes, and above
them a cunningly disordered thing of fine straw and loose ribbons
matched the head and face it shaded, as though all were parts together
of some flower unspoiled by the garden's captivity and escaped again
into the woods.
To Barbara's ear Fair's speech had always been melodious and low. Its
well-tempered pitch had her approval especially here, where not only was
there the wild life of grove and thicket to look and listen for, but a
subdued ripple of other girls' voices and the stir of other draperies
came more than once along the path and through the bushes. But there are
degrees and degrees, and in this walk his tones had gradually sunk to
such pure wooing that "Herrick" was no protection and she could reply
only with irrelevant pleasantries.
At length he halted, and with a lover's distress showing beneath his
smile, asked:
"Why cannot you be serious with me--Barbara?"
In make-believe aimlessness she swept the wood with a reconnoitring
glance, and then with eyes of maidenly desperation fixed on him, said,
tremblingly:
"Because, Mr. Fair, I know what you want to say, and I don't want you to
say it."
He turned their slow step toward a low rock in an open space near the
water's edge, where no one could come near them unseen. "Would you let
me say it if we were down in Dixie?" he asked. "Is it because you are so
far from home?"
"No, Mr. Fair, I told you I really have no home. I'm sorry I did; I'm
afraid it's led you to this, when everything I said--about taking myself
into my own care and all--was said to keep you from it."
The lover shook his head. "You cannot. You must not. To be that kind is
to be unkind. Sit here. You do not know exactly what I have to say; sit
here, will you not? and while I stand beside you let me do both of us
the simple honor to seal with right words what I have so long said in
behavior."
Barbara hesitated. "O Mr. Fair, what need is there? Your behavior's
always borne the seal of its own perfection. How could I answer you? If
you only wanted any other answer but just the one you want, I could give
it--the kindest answer in the world, the most unbounded praise--O I
could give it with my whole heart and soul! Why, Mr. Fair"--as she sadly
smiled she let him gaze into the furthest depth of her eyes--"as far as
I can see, you seem to me to be ab-so-lute-ly fault-less."
The young man caught his breath as if for some word of fond passion, but
the unfaltering eyes prevented him. As she began again to speak,
however, they fell.
"And that's not because I can't see men's faults. I see them so plainly,
and show so plainly I see them, that sometimes I wonder--" She left the
wonder implied while she pinched lichens from the stone. He began in a
tender monotone to say:
"All the more let me speak. I cannot see you put away unconsidered----"
She lifted her eyes again. "O! I know what I'm putting away from me; a
life! a life wider, richer than I ever hoped to live. Mr. Fair, it's as
if a beautiful, great, strong ship were waiting to carry me across a
summer sea, and I couldn't go, just for want of the right passport--the
right heart! If I had that it might be ever so different. I have no
other ship ever to come in. I say all this only to save you from
speaking. The only thing lacking is lacking in me." She smiled a
compassionate despair. "It's not you nor your conditions--you know it's
none of those dear ones who love you so at home--it's only I that can't
qualify."
They looked at each other in reverent silence. Fair turned, plucked a
flower, and as if to it, said, "I know the passion of love is a true and
sacred thing. But love should never be all, or chiefly, a passion. The
love of a mother for her child, of brother and sister for each other,
however passionate, springs first from relationship and rises into
passion as a plant springs from its root into bloom. Why should not all
love do so? Why should only this, the most perilous kind, be made an
exception?"
"Because," softly interrupted Barbara, glad of a moment's refuge in
abstractions, "it belongs to the only relationship that comes by
choice!"
"Are passions ever the best choosers?" asked the gentle suitor. "Has
history told us so, or science, or scripture, or anybody but lovers and
romancers--and--Americans? Life--living and loving--is the greatest of
the arts, and the passions should be our tools, not our guides."
"I believe life _is_ an art to you, Mr. Fair; but to me it's a dreadful
battle." The speaker sank upon the stone, half rose again, and then sat
still.
"It hasn't scarred you badly," responded the lover. Then gravely: "Do
you not think we may find it worth the fight if we make passions our
chariot horses and never our charioteers?"
No answer came, though he waited. He picked another flower and asked:
"If you had a brother, have you the faintest doubt that you would love
him?"
"No," said Barbara, "I couldn't help but love him." She thrust away the
recollection of a certain railway journey talk, and then thought of her
father.
Fair dropped his voice. "If I did not know that I should not be here
to-day. Barbara, kinship is the only true root of all abiding love. We
cannot feel sure even of God's love until we call ourselves his
children. Neither church, state, nor society requires lovers to swear
that they love passionately, but that they will love persistently by
virtue of a kinship made permanent in law."
Law! At that word Barbara inwardly winced, but Fair pressed on.
"These marriages on the American plan, of which we are so vain, are they
the only happy ones, and are they all happy? When they are, is it
because love began as a passion, or has it not been because the choice
was fortunate, and love, whether from a large or small beginning, has
grown, like that of Isaac and Rebecca, out of a union made stronger than
the ties of blood, by troth and oath? Barbara, do you not know in your
heart of hearts that if you were the wife of a husband, wisely but
dispassionately chosen, you would love him with a wife's full love as
long as he loved you? You do. You would."
Barbara was slow to reply, but presently she began, "Unless I could
commit my fate to one who already loved me consumingly----" She gave a
start of protestation as he exclaimed:
"I love you consumingly! O Barbara, Barbara Garnet, let that serve for
us both! Words could not tell my joy, if I could find in you this day a
like passion for me. But the seed and soil of it are here to my sight in
what I find you to be, and all I ask is that you will let reason fix the
only relationship that can truly feed the flame which I know--I
_know_--my love will kindle."
"O Mr. Fair, I begged you not to ask!"
"Do not answer! Not now; to-morrow morning. If you can't answer
then----"
"I can answer now, Mr. Fair. Why should I keep you in suspense?"
Such agitation came into the young man's face as Barbara had never
thought to see. His low voice quivered. "No! No! I beseech you not to
answer yet! Wait! Wait and weigh! O Barbara! weigh well and I will wait
well! Wait! O wait until you have weighed all things well--my fortune,
love, life, and the love of all who love me--O weigh them all well,
beloved! beloved one!"
Without warning, a grosbeak--the one whose breast is stained with the
blood of the rose--began his soft, sweet song so close overhead that
Barbara started up, and he flew. She waited to catch the strain again,
and as it drifted back her glance met her lover's. She smiled tenderly,
but was grave the next moment and said, "Let us go back."