When she had left the room, he put back into its place the volume
he was reading: its power over him was gone. All the voices of all
his books, speaking to him from lands and ages, grew simultaneously
hushed. He crossed the library to a front window opening upon the
narrow rocky street and sat with his elbow on the window-sill, the
large fingers of one large hand unconsciously searching his
brow--that habit of men of thoughtful years, the smoothing out of
the inner problems.
The home of Professor Hardage was not in one of the best parts of
the town. There was no wealth here, no society as it impressively
calls itself; there were merely well-to-do human beings of ordinary
intelligence and of kindly and unkindly natures. The houses,
constructed of frame or of brick, were crowded wall against wall
along the sidewalk; in the rear were little gardens of flowers and
of vegetables. The street itself was well shaded; and one forest
tree, the roots of which bulged up through the mossy bricks of the
pavement, hung its boughs before his windows. Throughout life he
had found so many companions in the world outside of mere people,
and this tree was one. From the month of leaves to the month of no
leaves--the period of long hot vacations--when his eyes were tired
and his brain and heart a little tired also, many a time it
refreshed him by all that it was and all that it stood for--this
green tent of the woods arching itself before his treasured
shelves. In it for him were thoughts of cool solitudes and of
far-away greenness; with tormenting visions also of old lands, the
crystal-aired, purpling mountains of which, and valleys full of
fable, he was used to trace out upon the map, but knew that he
should never see or press with responsive feet.
For travel was impossible to him. Part of his small salary went to
the family of a brother; part disappeared each year in the buying
of books--at once his need and his passion; there were the expenses
of living; and Miss Anna always exacted appropriations.
"I know we have not much, but then my little boys and girls have
nothing; and the poor must help the poorer."
"Very well," he would reply, "but some day you will be a beggar
yourself, Anna."
"Oh, well then, if I am, I do not doubt that I shall be a thrifty
old mendicant. And I'll beg for _you_! So don't you be uneasy;
and give me what I want."
She always looked like a middle-aged Madonna in the garb of a
housekeeper. Indeed, he was wont to call her the Madonna of the
Dishes; but at these times, and in truth for all deeper ways, he
thought of her as the Madonna of the Motherless. Nevertheless he
was resolute that out of this many-portioned salary something must
yet be saved.
"The time will come," he threatened, "when some younger man will
want my professorship--and will deserve it. I shall either be put
out or I shall go out; and then--decrepitude, uselessness, penury,
unless something has been hoarded. So, Anna, out of the frail
uncertain little basketful of the apples of life which the college
authorities present to me once a year, we must save a few for what
may prove a long hard winter."
Professor Hardage was a man somewhat past fifty, of ordinary
stature and heavy figure, topped with an immense head. His was not
what we call rather vaguely the American face. In Germany had he
been seen issuing from the lecture rooms of a university, he would
have been thought at home and his general status had been assumed:
there being that about him which bespoke the scholar, one of those
quiet self-effacing minds that have long since passed with entire
humility into the service of vast themes. In social life the
character of a noble master will in time stamp itself upon the look
and manners of a domestic; and in time the student acquires the
lofty hall-mark of what he serves.
It was this perhaps that immediately distinguished him and set him
apart in every company. The appreciative observer said at once:
"Here is a man who may not himself be great; but he is at least
great enough to understand greatness; he is used to greatness."
As so often is the case with the strong American, he was
self-made--that glory of our boasting. But we sometimes forget
that an early life of hardship, while it may bring out what is best
in a man, so often wastes up his strength and burns his ambition to
ashes in the fierce fight against odds too great. So that the
powers which should have carried him far carry him only a little
distance or leave him standing exhausted where he began.
When Alfred Hardage was eighteen, he had turned his eyes toward a
professorship in one of the great universities of his country;
before he was thirty he had won a professorship in the small but
respectable college of his native town; and now, when past fifty,
he had never won anything more. For him ambition was like the
deserted martin box in the corner of his yard: returning summers
brought no more birds. Had his abilities been even more
extraordinary, the result could not have been far otherwise. He
had been compelled to forego for himself as a student the highest
university training, and afterward to win such position as the
world accorded him without the prestige of study abroad.
It became his duty in his place to teach the Greek language and its
literature; sometimes were added classes in Latin. This was the
easier problem. The more difficult problem grew out of the demand,
that he should live intimately in a world of much littleness and
not himself become little; feel interested in trivial minds at
street corners, yet remain companion and critic of some of the
greatest intellects of human kind; contend with occasional malice
and jealousy in the college faculty, yet hold himself above these
carrion passions; retain his intellectual manhood, yet have his
courses of study narrowed and made superficial for him; be free yet
submit to be patronized by some of his fellow-citizens, because
they did him the honor to employ him for so much as a year as sage
and moral exampler to their sons.
Usually one of two fates overtakes the obscure professional scholar
in this country: either he shrinks to the dimensions of a true
villager and deserts the vastness of his library; or he repudiates
the village and becomes a cosmopolitan recluse--lonely toiler among
his books. Few possess the breadth and equipoise which will enable
them to pass from day to day along mental paths, which have the
Forum of Augustus or the Groves of the Academy at one end and the
babbling square of a modern town at the other; remaining equally at
home amid ancient ideals and everyday realities.
It was the fate of the recluse that threatened him. He had been
born with the scholar's temperament--this furnished the direction;
before he had reached the age of twenty-five he had lost his wife
and two sons--that furrowed the tendency. During the years
immediately following he had tried to fill an immense void of the
heart with immense labors of the intellect. The void remained; yet
undoubtedly compensation for loneliness had been found in the
fixing of his affections upon what can never die--the inexhaustible
delight of learning.
Thus the life of the book-worm awaited him but for an interference
excellent and salutary and irresistible. This was the constant
companionship of a sister whose nature enabled her to find its
complete universe in the only world that she had ever known: she
walking ever broad-minded through the narrowness of her little
town; remaining white though often threading its soiling ways; and
from every life which touched hers, however crippled and confined,
extracting its significance instead of its insignificance, shy
harmonies instead of the easy discords which can so palpably be
struck by any passing hand.
It was due to her influence, therefore, that his life achieved the
twofold development which left him normal in the middle years; the
fresh pursuing scholar still but a man practically welded to the
people among whom he lived--receiving their best and giving his
best.
But we cannot send our hearts out to play at large among our kind,
without their coming to choose sooner or later playfellows to be
loved more than the rest.
Two intimacies entered into the life of Professor Hardage. The
first of these had been formed many years before with Judge Ravenel
Morris. They had discovered each other by drifting as lonely men
do in the world; each being without family ties, each loving
literature, each having empty hours. The bond between them had
strengthened, until it had become to each a bond of strength
indeed, mighty and uplifting.
The other intimacy was one of those for which human speech will
never, perhaps, be called upon to body forth its describing word.
In the psychology of feeling there are states which we gladly
choose to leave unlanguaged. Vast and deep-sounding as is the
orchestra of words, there are scores which we never fling upon such
instruments--realities that lie outside the possibility and the
desirability of utterance as there are rays of the sun that fall
outside the visible spectrum of solar light.
What description can be given in words of that bond between two,
when the woman stands near the foot of the upward slope of life,
and the man is already passing down on the sunset side, with
lengthening afternoon shadows on the gray of his temples--between
them the cold separating peaks of a generation?
Such a generation of toiling years separated Professor Hardage from
Isabel Conyers. When, at the age of twenty, she returned after
years of absence in an eastern college--it was a tradition of her
family that its women should be brilliantly educated--he verged
upon fifty. To his youthful desires that interval was nothing; but
to his disciplined judgment it was everything.
"Even though it could be," he said to himself, "it should not be,
and therefore it shall not."
His was an idealism that often leaves its holder poor indeed save
in the possession of its own incorruptible wealth. No doubt also
the life-long study of the ideals of classic time came to his
guidance now with their admonitions of exquisite balance, their
moderation and essential justness.
But after he had given up all hope of her, he did not hesitate to
draw her to him in other ways; and there was that which drew her
unfathomably to him--all the more securely since in her mind there
was no thought that the bond between them would ever involve the
possibility of love and marriage.
His library became another home to her. One winter she read Greek
with him--authors not in her college course. Afterward he read
much more Greek to her. Then they laid Greek aside, and he took
her through the history of its literature and through that other
noble one, its deathless twin.
When she was not actually present, he yet took her with him through
the wide regions of his studies---set her figure in old Greek
landscapes and surrounded it with dim shapes of loveliness--saw her
sometimes as the perfection that went into marble--made her a
portion of legend and story, linking her with Nausicaa and
Andromache and the lost others. Then quitting antiquity with her
altogether, he passed downward with her into the days of chivalry,
brought her to Arthur's court, and invested her with one character
after another, trying her by the ladies of knightly ideals--reading
her between the lines in all the king's idyls.
But last and best, seeing her in the clear white light of her own
country and time--as the spirit of American girlhood, pure,
refined, faultlessly proportioned in mental and physical health,
full of kindness, full of happiness, made for love, made for
motherhood. All this he did in his hopeless and idealizing worship
of her; and all this and more he hid away: for he too had his crypt.
So watching her and watching vainly over her, he was the first to
see that she was loved and that her nature was turning away from
him, from all that he could offer--subdued by that one other call.
"Now, Fates," he said, "by whatsoever names men have blindly prayed
to you; you that love to strike at perfection, and pass over a
multitude of the ordinary to reach the rare, stand off for a few
years! Let them be happy together in their love, their marriage,
and their young children. Let the threads run freely and be
joyously interwoven. Have mercy at least for a few years!"
A carriage turned a corner of the street and was driven to the
door. Isabel got out, and entered the hall without ringing.
He met her there and as she laid her hands in his without a word,
he held them and looked at her without a word. He could scarcely
believe that in a few days her life could so have drooped as under
a dreadful blight.
"I have come to say good-by," and with a quiver of the lips she
turned her face aside and brushed past him, entering the library.
He drew his own chair close to hers when she had seated herself.
"I thought you and your grandmother were going later: is not this
unexpected?"
"Yes, it is very unexpected."
"But of course she is going with you?"
"No, I am going alone."
"For the summer?"
"Yes, for the summer. I suppose for a long time."
She continued to sit with her cheek leaning against the back of the
chair, her eyes directed outward through the windows. He asked
reluctantly:
"Is there any trouble?"
"Yes, there is trouble."
"Can you tell me what it is?"
"No, I cannot tell you what it is. I cannot tell any one what it
is."
"Is there anything I can do?"
"No, there is nothing you can do. There is nothing any one can do."
Silence followed for some time. He smiled at her sadly:
"Shall I tell you what the trouble is?"
"You do not know what it is. I believe I wish you did know. But I
cannot tell you."
"Is it not Rowan?"
She waited awhile without change of posture and answered at length
without change of tone:
"Yes, it is Rowan."
The stillness of the room became intense and prolonged; the
rustling of the leaves about the window sounded like noise.
"Are you not going to marry him, Isabel?"
"No, I am not going to marry him. I am never going to marry him."
She stretched out her hand helplessly to him. He would not take it
and it fell to her side: at that moment he did not dare. But of
what use is it to have kept faith with high ideals through trying
years if they do not reward us at last with strength in the crises
of character? No doubt they rewarded him now: later he reached
down and took her hand and held it tenderly.
"You must not go away. You must be reconciled, to him. Otherwise
it will sadden your whole summer. And it will sadden his."
"Sadden, the whole summer," she repeated, "a summer? It will
sadden a life. If there is eternity, it will sadden eternity."
"Is it so serious?"
"Yes, it is as serious as anything, could be."
After a while she sat up wearily and turned her face to him for the
first time.
"Cannot you help me?" she asked. "I do not believe I can bear
this. I do not believe I can bear it."
Perhaps it is the doctors who hear that tone oftenest--little
wonder that they are men so often with sad or with calloused faces.
"What can I do?"
"I do not know what you can do. But cannot you do something? You
were the only person in the world that I could go to. I did not
think I could ever come to you; but I had to come. Help me."
He perceived that commonplace counsel would be better than no
counsel at all.
"Isabel," he asked, "are you suffering because you have wronged
Rowan or because you think he has wronged you?"
"No, no, no," she cried, covering her face with her hands, "I have
not wronged him! I have not wronged any one! He has wronged me!"
"Did he ever wrong you before?"
"No, he never wronged me before. But this covers everything--the
whole past."
"Have you ever had any great trouble before, Isabel?"
"No, I have never had any great trouble before. At times in my
life I may have thought I had, but now I know."
"You do not need to be told that sooner or later all of us have
troubles that we think we cannot bear."
She shook her head wearily: "It does not do any good to think of
that! It does not help me in the least!"
"But it does help if there is any one to whom we can tell our
troubles."
"I cannot tell mine."
"Cannot you tell me?"
"No, I believe I wish you knew, but I could not tell you. No, I do
not even wish you to know."
"Have you seen Kate?"
She covered her face with her hands again: "No, no, no," she cried,
"not Kate!" Then she looked up at him with eyes suddenly kindling:
"Have you heard what Kate's life has been since her marriage?"
"We have all heard, I suppose."
"She has never spoken a word against him--not even to me from whom
she never had a secret. How could I go to her about Rowan? Even
if she had confided in me, I could not tell her this."
"If you are going away, change of scene will help you to forget it."
"No, it will help me to remember."
"There is prayer, Isabel."
"I know there is prayer. But prayer does not do any good. It has
nothing to do with this."
"Enter as soon as possible into the pleasures of the people you are
to visit."
"I cannot! I do not wish for pleasure,"
"Isabel," he said at last, "forgive him."
"I cannot forgive him."
"Have you tried?"
"No, I cannot try. If I forgave him, it would only be a change in
me: it would not change him: it would not undo what he has done."
"Do you know the necessity of self-sacrifice?"
"But how can I sacrifice what is best in me without lowering
myself? Is it a virtue in a woman to throw away what she holds to
be as highest?"
"Remember," he said, returning to the point, "that, if you forgive
him, you become changed yourself. You no longer see what he has
done as you see it now. That is the beauty of forgiveness: it
enables us better to understand those whom we have forgiven.
Perhaps it will enable you to put yourself in his place."
She put her hands to her eyes with a shudder: "You do not know what
you are saying," she cried, and rose.
"Then trust it all to time," he said finally, "that is best! Time
alone solves so much. Wait! Do not act! Think and feel as little
as possible. Give time its merciful chance. I'll come to see you."
They had moved toward the door. She drew off her glove which she
was putting on and laid her hand once more in his.
"Time can change nothing. I have decided."
As she was going down the steps to the carriage, she turned and
came back.
"Do not come to see me! I shall come to you to say good-by. It is
better for you not to come to the house just now. I might not be
able to see you."
Isabel had the carriage driven to the Osborns'.
The house was situated in a pleasant street of delightful
residences. It had been newly built on an old foundation as a
bridal present to Kate from her father. She had furnished it with
a young wife's pride and delight and she had lined it throughout
with thoughts of incommunicable tenderness about the life history
just beginning. Now, people driving past (and there were few in
town who did not know) looked at it as already a prison and a doom.
Kate was sitting in the hall with some work in her lap. Seeing
Isabel she sprang up and met her at the door, greeting her as
though she herself were the happiest of wives.
"Do you know how long it has been since you were here?" she
exclaimed chidingly. "I had not realized how soon young married
people can be forgotten and pushed aside."
"Forget you, dearest! I have never thought of you so much as since
I was here last."
"Ah," thought Kate to herself, "she has heard. She has begun to
feel sorry for me and has begun to stay away as people avoid the
unhappy."
But the two friends, each smiling into the other's eyes, their arms
around each other, passed into the parlors.
"Now that you are here at last, I shall keep you," said Kate,
rising from the seat they had taken. "I will send the carriage
home. George cannot be here to lunch and we shall have it all to
ourselves as we used to when we were girls together."
"No," exclaimed Isabel, drawing her down into the seat again, "I
cannot stay. I had only a few moments and drove by just to speak
to you, just to tell you how much I love you."
Kate's face changed and she dropped her eyes. "Is so little of me
so much nowadays?" she asked, feeling as though the friendship of a
lifetime were indeed beginning to fail her along with other things.
"No, no, no," cried Isabel. "I wish we could never be separated."
She rose quickly and went over to the piano and began to turn over
the music. "It seems so long since I heard any music. What has
become of it? Has it all gone out of life? I feel as though
there were none any more."
Kate came over and looked at one piece of music after another
irresolutely.
"I have not touched the piano for weeks."
She sat down and her fingers wandered forcedly through a few
chords. Isabel stepped quickly to her side and laid restraining
hands softly upon hers: "No; not to-day."