as they went. On her doorstep she said, "Now, in the morning----"
"How soon may I come?" he asked.
"Immediately after chapel."
LXXII.
MY GOOD GRACIOUS, MISS BARB
"Good-by," said Fair, with an ardent last look.
"Good-by," softly echoed Barbara, with eyelids down, and passed in.
According to a habit contracted since coming to college she took a brief
glimpse of the hat-rack to see if it held any other than girls' hats.
Not that she expected any visitor of the sort that can't wear that kind,
but--you know how it is--the unexpected does sometimes call. Besides,
Mr. Fair had told her whom he was to meet in Springfield next day. But
the hat-rack said no. Nevertheless she glanced also into the tiny
parlor. The widow sat there alone, reading the _Congregationalist_. She
looked up with sweet surprise, and Barbara, not giving her time to
speak, said:
"The woods are so per-fect-ly fas-ci-nat-ing I'm neg-lect-ing my
cor-re-spond-ence."
She dangled her hat at her knee and slowly mounted to her room, humming
a dance, but longing, as some sick wild thing, for a seclusion she had
no hope to find.
The two college mates who had driven with her in the morning were
lolling on her bed. They recognized the earliness of her return by a
mischievous sparkle of eyes which only gathered emphasis from the
absence of any open comment.
"Barbara," said one, as she doubled a pillow under her neck and took on
the Southern drawl, "par-don my in-quis-i-tive-ness, but if it isn't an
im-per-ti-nent ques-tion--or even if it is--how man-y but-ter-cups did
you pro-cure, and alas! where are they now?"
"Heaow?" softly asked Barbara. But the other school-fellow cried:
"Barbara, dear, don't you notice that girl, she's bad. I'll give you a
nice, easy question. I ask merely for information. Of course you're not
bound to answer unless you choose----"
"I want to know!" murmured Miss Garnet.
"Of course you do; you don't want to criminate yourself when you haven't
got to.
"And now, Miss Garnet--if that is still your name----"
"Don't call me Miss Garnet," said Barbara, with her chin in her hands,
"call me honey."
"Honey," came the response, "where's our 'Herrick'?"
Barbara sprang to her feet with a gasp and vacancy of eye that filled
the room with the laughter of her companions, and the next moment was
speeding down the stairs and across the doorstep, crowding her hat on
with one hand and stabbing it with the other as she went. Down from the
streets into the wood she hastened, gained the path, ran up it, walked
by three or four pretty loiterers, ran again, and on the stone by the
water-side found the volume as she had left it.
Then she lingered. As she leaned against the rock and gazed into the
shaded depths of the mill-stream her problem came again, and the
beautiful solitude whispered a welcome to her to revolve and weigh and
solve it here. But when she essayed to do so it would no more be
revolved or weighed by her alone than this huge bowlder at her side. Her
baffled mind drifted into fantasy, and the hoary question, Whether it is
wiser for a maiden to love first, hoping to be chosen accordingly, or to
be chosen first and hope to love accordingly, became itself an age-worn
relic from woman's earlier and harder lot, left by its glaciers as they
had melted in the warmth of more modern suns.
She murmured a word of impatience at such dreaming and looked around to
see if she was overheard; but the only near presence was two girls
sitting behind and high above her, one writing, the other reading, under
the pines. They seemed not to have heard, but she sauntered beyond their
sight up the path, wondering if they were the kind in whom to love was
the necessity it was in her, and, if so, what they would do in her case.
What they would advise _her_ to do depended mainly, she fancied, on
whether they were in their teens or their twenties. As for married
women, she shrank from the very thought of their counsel, whichever way
it might tend, and mused on Fannie Ravenel, who, with eyes wide open,
had chosen rather to be made unhappy by the one her love had lighted on
than to take any other chance for happiness. She stopped her listless
walk and found her wrists crossed and her hands knit, remembering one
whom Fannie could have chosen and would not.
Burning with resentment against herself for the thought, she turned
aside and sat down on the river's brink in a shade of hemlocks. "Come,"
her actions seemed to say, "I will think of Henry Fair; gentle, noble
Henry Fair, and what he is and will and might be; of how I love his
mother and all his kindred; of how tenderly I admire him; and of his
trembling words, 'I love you consumingly!'"
Her heart quickened gratefully, as though he spoke again; but as she
gazed down at the bubbles that floated by from a dipping bough she
presently fell to musing anew on Fannie, without that inward shudder
which the recollection of Fannie's course and fate commonly brought. "At
least," she thought to herself, "it's heroic!" Yet before she could find
a moment's comfort in the reflection it was gone, and she started up and
moved on again, knowing that, whatever it may be for man, for true
womanhood the better heroism is not to give a passionate love its unwise
way at heroic cost, but dispassionately to master love in all its
greatness and help it grow to passion in wise ways.
"If I take this step," she began to say to herself audibly as she
followed the old road out into a neglected meadow, "I satisfy my father;
I delight my friends; I rid myself at once and forever of this dreadful
dependence on him." She bit her lip and shut her eyes against these
politic considerations. "He tells me to weigh the matter well. How shall
I, when there's nothing to weigh against it? Fannie could choose between
the one who loved her and the one she loved. I have no choice; this is
the most--most likely it is all--that will ever be offered me. There's
just the one simple sane question before me--Shill I or shall I?" She
smiled. "We make too much of it all!" she thought on. "A man's life
depends upon the man he is, not on the girl he gets; why shouldn't it be
so with us?" She smiled still more, and, glancing round the open view,
murmured, "Silly little country girls! We begin life as a poem, we can't
find our rhyme, we tell our mothers--if we have any--they say yes, it
was the same with our aunts; so we decide with them that good prose will
do very well; they kiss us--that means they won't tell--and--O Heaven!
is that our best?" She dropped upon a bank and wept till she shook.
But that would never do! She dried her tears and lay toying with her
book and sadly putting into thought a thing she had never more than felt
before: that whatever she might wisely or unwisely do with it, she held
in her nature a sacred gift of passion; that life, her life, could never
bloom in full joy and glory shut out from wifehood and motherhood, and
that the idlest self-deceit she could attempt would be to say she need
not marry. Suddenly she started and then lay stiller than before. She
had found the long-sought explanation of her mother's tardy
marriage--neither a controlling nor a controlled passion, but the
reasoning despair of famishing affections. Barbara let her face sink
into the grass and wept again for the dear lost one with a new reverence
and compassion. She was pressing her brow hard against the earth when
there came from the far end of the meadow two clear, glad notes of
nature's voice, that entered her soul like a call from the pastures of
Rosemont; a missing rhyme sent to make good the failing poetry of love's
declining day. She sprang to the top of the rise with her open hand to
her hat-brim, the dew still in her lashes, her lips parted fondly, and
her ear waiting to hear again the whistle of the quail. Many a day in
those sunny springtimes when she still ran wild with Johanna had she
held taunting parley with those two crystal love-notes, and now she
straightened to her best height, pursed her lips, whistled back the
brave octave, and listened again. A distant cowbell tinkled from some
willows in another meadow across the river, a breeze moved audibly by,
and then the answer came. "Bob--Bob White?" it inquired from the top of
a pine-covered bluff, round which the stream swept down in
boulder-strewn rapids to its smoother course between the two meadows. It
may be the name was not just that, but it was certainly two
monosyllables! The listener stepped quickly to the nearest bush,
answered again, and began to move warily from cover to cover in the
direction of the call. Once she delayed her response. A man and wife
with three or four children, loitering down the river bank, passed so
close to her as to be startled when at last they saw her, although she
was merely sitting at the roots of a great tree deeply absorbed in a
book. A few steps farther put a slight ridge and a clump of bushes
between the couple and the student; and the man, glancing back, had just
noticed it, when--
"Hear that quail!" he exclaimed, and stopped his wife with a touch.
"What of it?" asked the helpmate, who was stoop-shouldered.
"Why, we must have passed in a few feet of it! It's right there where we
saw that girl!"
The woman's voice took on an added dreariness as she replied: "We might
'a' seen it if you hadn't been so taken up with the girl. James, come
back! you know 'tain't that bird you're peekin' after. O land o' love!
men _air_ sich fools!"
The man found neither girl nor quail; the grassy seat beneath the tree
was empty. But just as he was rejoining his partner--"Hark!" he said;
"there he is again, farther up the river. Now if we listen like's not
we'll hear another fellow answer him. Many's the time I've lain in the
grass and called one of them right up. There! that was the answering
challenge, away off yonder between here and that hill with the pines on
it. There's going to be a beautiful little fight when those two birds
meet, and that college girl's going to see it. I wish I--There's the
other one again; they get closer each time! Didn't you hear it?"
The wife replied, mainly to herself, that she did not; that if he had
her backache he wouldn't hear a brass band, and that her next walk would
be by herself.
The partner did not venture to look back after that, but as they
sauntered on, rarely speaking except when the mother rebuked the
children, he listened eagerly, and after a silence of unaccountable
length, finally heard the two calls once more, up near the rapids and
very close to each other. He dared not prick his ears, but while he
agreed with his wife that if they were ever going home at all it was
time they were about it, he could not but think the outcome of a man's
life depends largely on the sort of girl he gets.
At the upper end of the meadow, meantime, Barbara Garnet, with "Herrick"
in one hand and her hat pressed against the back of her skirts in the
other, was bending and peering round the trunk of an elm draped to the
ground in flounces of its own green. The last response to her whistle
had seemed to come from a spot so close in front of her that she feared
to risk another step, and yet, peep and pry as she might, she could
neither spy out nor nearer decoy the cunning challenger. In a sense of
delinquency she noted the sky showing yellow and red through the
hill-top pines, and seeing she must make short end of her play, prepared
to rush out upon the rogue and have an old-time laugh at his pretty
panic. So!--one for the money, two for the show, three to make ready,
and four for to--"Ha, ha, ha!"--
"Good gracious alive!" exclaimed the quail, leaping from his back to his
feet, and standing a fathom tall before the gasping, half-sinking girl.
"Good gra'--why--why, my good gracious, Miss Barb! why--why, my good
gracious!" insisted John March.
LXXIII.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER CHAPEL
There was a great deal of pleasure in the house of the three sisters
that evening. The widow asked March to stay to tea, and when he opened
his mouth to decline, the wrong word fell out and he accepted. He
confided to Barbara his fear that in so doing he had blundered, but she
softly scouted the idea, and with a delicious reproachfulness in her
murmur, "wondered if he supposed they"--etc.
At table he sat next to her, in the seat the sisters had intended for
Henry Fair. Neither Miss Garnet nor Mr. March gave the other's proximity
more than its due recognition; they talked with almost everyone about
almost everything, and as far as they knew said and did nothing to
betray the fact that they were as happy as Psyche in a swing with Cupid
to push and run under.
Nobody went to evening service. They sang hymns at the piano, selecting
oftenest those which made best display of Miss Garnet's and Mr. March's
voices. Hers was only mezzo-soprano and not brilliant, but Mr. March and
a very short college girl, conversing for a moment aside, agreed that it
was "singularly winsome." Another college girl, very tall, whispered to
Barbara that his was a "superb barrytone!" The young man entered deeper
and deeper every moment into the esteem of the household, and they into
his. The very best of the evening came last, when, at the widow's
request, the two Southerners sang, without the instrument, a hymn or two
of the Dixie mountaineers: "To play on the golden harp" and "Where
there's no more stormy clouds arising." Being further urged for a negro
hymn, John began "Bow low a little bit longer," which Barbara, with a
thrill of recollection and an involuntary gesture of pain, said she
couldn't sing, and they gave another instead, one of the best, and
presently had the whole company joining in the clarion refrain of "O
Canaan! bright Canaan!" Barbara heard her college mates still singing it
in their rooms on either side of her after she had said her prayers with
her cheek on John March's photograph.
To her painful surprise when she awoke next day she found herself in a
downcast mood. She could not even account for the blissful frame in
which she had gone to bed. She had not forgotten one word or tone of all
John March had said to her while carried away from his fine resolution
by the wave of ecstasy which followed their unexpected meeting, but the
sunset light, their thrilling significances, were totally gone from
them. Across each utterance some qualifying word or clause, quite
overlooked till now, cast its morning shadow. Not so much as one fond
ejaculation of his impulsive lips last evening but she could explain
away this morning, and she felt a dull, half-guilty distress in the fear
that her blissful silences had embarrassed him into letting several
things imply more than he intended. Before she was quite dressed one of
her fellow-students came in with an anguished face to show what a fatal
error she had made in the purchase of some ribbons.
Barbara held them first in one light and then in another, and at length
shook her head over them in piteous despair and asked:
"How _could_ you so utterly mistake both color and quality?"
"Why, my dear, I bought them by lamplight! and, besides, it was an
auction and I was excited."
"Yes," said Barbara, and took a long breath. "I know how that is."
* * * * *
Down in town two commercial travelers, one of whom we have met before,
took an after-breakfast saunter.
"She was coming," said the one we remember, "to New England. I didn't
know where or for what, and I don't know yet; but when my house said,
'Old boy, we'd like to promote you, just say what you want!' says I,
'Let the salary stand as it is, only change my district; gimme New
England!'"
"That's the college," he continued, as they came up into Elm Street.
"Those are the students, just coming out of the chapel: 'sweet girl
graduates,' as Shakespeare calls them."
He clutched his companion's arm. Their eyes rested on one of the
dispersing throng, who came last and alone, with a slow step and
manifestly under some burdensome preoccupation, through the high iron
gateway of the campus. She passed them with drooping eyelashes and
walked in the same tardy pace before them. Presently she turned from the
sidewalk, crossed a small grassplot, and stood on the doorstep with her
hand on the latch while they went by.
"Her?" said the one who thought he had quoted Shakespeare, "of course
it's her; who else could it be? Ah, hmm! 'so near and yet so far!' Tom,
I believe in heaven when I look at that girl--heaven and holiness! I
read Taylor's 'Holy Living' when a boy!"
Presently they returned and passed again. She was still standing at the
door. A few steps away the speaker looked over his shoulder and moaned:
"Not a glimpse of me does she get! There, she's gone in; but sure's you
live she didn't want to!" They walked on. In front of their hotel he
clutched his companion again. A young man of commanding figure stood
near, deeply immersed in a telegram. The drummer whispered an oath of
surprise.
"That's him now! the young millionaire she rejected on the trip we all
made together! What's he here for?--George! he looks as worried as her!"
"How do you know she rejected him?"
"How do--Now, look here! If I didn't know it do you s'pose I'd say so?
Well, then! Come, I'll introduce you to him--O he's all right! he's just
as white and modest as either of us; come on!" March proved himself both
modest and white, and as he walked away,
"This's a stra-a-ange world!" moralized the commercial man. "'Tain't him
I'm thinking of, it's her! She's in trouble, Tom; in trouble. And who
knows but what, for some mysterious reason, _I_ may be the only one on
earth who can--O Lord!--Look here; I'm not goin' to do any business
to-day; I'm not goin' to be fit; you needn't be surprised if you hear
to-night that I've gone off on a drunk."
Meantime Barbara had lifted the latch and gone in. No hat was on the
rack, but when she turned into the parlor a sickness came to her heart
as she smiled and said good-morning to Henry Fair. He, too, smiled, but
she fancied he was pale.
They mentioned the weather, which was quite pleasant enough. Fair said
the factories that used water-power would be glad of rain, and Barbara
seemed interested, but when he paused she asked, in the measured tone he
liked so well:
"Who do you think took us all by surprise and spent last evening with
us?"
Fair's reply came tardily and was disguised as a playful guess.
"Mister--"
"Yes--"
He sobered. "March!" he softly exclaimed, and let his gaze rest long on
the floor. "I thought--really I thought Mr. March was in New York."
"So did we all," was the response, and both laughed, without knowing
just why.
"He ought to have had a delightful time," said Fair.
Barbara meditated pleasedly. "Mr. March always lets one know what kind
of time he's having, and I never saw him more per-fect-ly sat-is-fied,"
she said, and allowed her silence to continue so long and with such
manifest significance that at length the suitor's low voice asked:
"Am I to understand that that visit alters my case?"
"No," responded Barbara, but without even a look of surprise. "I'm
afraid, Mr. Fair, that you'll think me a rather daring girl, but I want
you to be assured that I know of no one whose visit can alter--that."
She lifted her eyes bravely to his, but they filled. "As for Mr. March,"
she continued, and the same amusement gleamed in them which so often
attended her mention of him, "there's always been a perfect
understanding between us. We're the very best of friends, but no one
knows better than he does that we can never be more, though I don't see
why we need ever be less."
"I should call that hard terms, for myself," said Fair; "I hope--" And
there he stopped.
"Mr. Fair," the girl began, was still, and then--"O Mr. Fair, I know
what to say, but I don't know how to say it! I admit everything. All the
good reasons are on your side. And yet if I am to answer you now--" She
ceased. Her voice had not faltered, but her head drooped and he saw one
tear follow quickly after another and fall upon her hands.
"Why, you need not answer now," he tenderly said. "I told you I would
wait."
"O Mr. Fair, no, no! You have every right to be answered now, and I have
no right to delay beyond your wish. Only, I believe also that, matters
standing as they do, you have a perfect right to wait for a later answer
from me if you choose. I can only beg you will not. O you who are so
rational and brave and strong with yourself, you who know so well that a
man's whole fate cannot be wrapped up in one girl unless he weakly
chooses it so, take your answer now! I don't believe I can ever look
upon you--your offer--differently. Mr. Fair, there's one thing it lacks
which I think even you overlook."
"What is that?"
"It--I--I don't know any one word to describe it, unless it is
turn-out-well-a-bil-i-ty."
Fair started with astonishment, and the tears leaped again to her eyes
as she laughed, and with new distress said: "It isn't--it--O Mr. Fair,
don't you know what I mean? It doesn't make good poetry! As you would
say, it's not good art. You may think me 'fresh,' as the girls say, and
fantastical, but I can't help believing that in a matter like this
there's something wrong--some essential wanting--in whatever's not
good--good----"
"Romance?" asked Fair; "do you think the fact that a thing is good
romance----"
"No! O no, no, no! I don't say being good romance is enough to commend
it; but I do think not being good romance is enough to condemn it! Is
that so very foolish?"
The lover answered wistfully. "No. No." Then very softly: "Barbara "--he
waited till she looked up--"if this thing should ever seem to you to
have become good poetry, might not your answer be different?"
Barbara hesitated. "I--you--O--I only know how it seems now!"
"Never mind," said Fair, very gently. They rose and he took her hand,
speaking again in the same tone. "You really believe I have the right to
wait for a later answer?"
Her head drooped. "The right?" she murmured, "yes--the right----"
"So also do I. I shall wait. Good-by."
She raised her glance, her voice failed to a whisper. "Good-by."
Gaze to gaze, one stood, and the other, with reluctant step, backed
away; and at the last moment, with his foot leaving the threshold, lover
and maiden said again, still gaze to gaze:
"Good-by."
"Good-by."
LXXIV.
COMPLETE COLLAPSE OF A PERFECT UNDERSTANDING
The door closed and Barbara noiselessly mounted the stairs. At its top
an elm-shaded window allowed a view of some fifty yards or more down the
street, and as she reached it now the pleasantness of the outer day
furnished impulse enough, if there had been no other, for her to glance
out. She stopped sharply, with her eyes fixed where they had fallen. For
there stood John March and Henry Fair in the first bright elation of
their encounter busily exchanging their manly acknowledgments and
explanations. Lost to herself she stayed, an arm bent high and a knuckle
at her parted teeth, comparing the two men and noting the matchless
bearing of her Southerner. In it she read again for the hundredth time
all the energy and intrepidity which in her knowledge it stood for; his
boyish openness and simplicity, his tender belief in his mother, his
high-hearted devotion to the fulfilment of his father's aspirations, and
the impetuous force and native skill with which at mortal risks and in
so short a time he had ranked himself among the masters of public
fortune. She recalled, as she was prone to do, what Charlie Champion had
once meditatively said to her on seeing him approach: "Here comes the
only man in Dixie Jeff-Jack Ravenel's afraid of."
After an instant the manner of the two young men became more serious,
and March showed a yellow paper--"a telegram," thought their on-looker.
"He's coming here, no doubt; possibly to tell me its news; more likely
just to say good-by again; but certainly with nothing--nothing--O
nothing! to ask." For a moment her hand pressed hard against her lips,
and then her maiden self-regard quietly but strenuously definitely
rebelled.
The telegram seemed to bring its readers grave disappointment. March
made indignant gestures in obvious allusion to distant absentees. Now
they began to move apart; Fair stepped farther away, March drew nearer
the house, still making gestures as if he might be saying--Barbara
resentfully guessed----
"You might walk slow; I shan't stop more than a minute!"
She left the window with silent speed, saying, in her heart, "You
needn't! You shan't!"