I
The home of the Merediths lay in a region of fertile lands adapted
alike to tillage and to pasturage. The immediate neighborhood was
old, as civilization reckons age in the United States, and was well
conserved, It held in high esteem its traditions of itself,
approved its own customs, was proud of its prides: a characteristic
community of country gentlemen at the side of each of whom a
characteristic lady lived and had her peculiar being.
The ownership of the soil had long since passed into the hands of
capable families--with this exception, that here and there between
the borders of large estates little farms were to be found
representing all that remained from slow processes of partition and
absorption. These scant freeholds had thus their pathos, marking
as they did the losing fight of successive holders against more
fortunate, more powerful neighbors. Nothing in its way records
more surely the clash and struggle and ranking of men than the
boundaries of land. There you see extinction and survival, the
perpetual going under of the weak, the perpetual overriding of the
strong.
Two such fragmentary farms lay on opposite sides of the Meredith
estate. One was the property of Ambrose Webb, a married but
childless man who, thus exempt from necessity of raking the earth
for swarming progeny, had sown nearly all his land in grass and
rented it as pasturage: no crops of children, no crops of grain.
The other farm was of less importance. Had you ridden from the
front door of the Merediths northward for nearly a mile, you would
have reached the summit of a slope sweeping a wide horizon.
Standing on this summit any one of these bright summer days, you
could have seen at the foot of the slope, less than a quarter of a
mile away on the steep opposite side, a rectangle of land covering
some fifty acres. It lay crumpled into a rough depression in the
landscape. A rivulet of clear water by virtue of indomitable crook
and turn made its way across this valley; a woodland stood in one
corner, nearly all its timber felled; there were a few patches of
grain so small that they made you think of the variegated peasant
strips of agricultural France; and a few lots smaller still around
a stable. The buildings huddled confusedly into this valley seemed
to have backed toward each other like a flock of sheep, encompassed
by peril and making a last stand in futile defence of their right
to exist at all.
What held the preeminence of castle in the collection of structures
was a small brick house with one upper bedroom. The front entrance
had no porch; and beneath the door, as stepping-stones of entrance,
lay two circular slabs of wood resembling sausage blocks, one half
superposed. Over the door was a trellis of gourd vines now
profusely, blooming and bee-visited. Grouped around this castle in
still lower feudal and vital dependence was a log cabin of one room
and of many more gourd vines, an ice-house, a house for fowls, a
stable, a rick for hay, and a sagging shed for farm implements.
If the appearance of the place suggested the struggles of a family
on the verge of extinction, this idea was further borne out by what
looked like its determination to stand a long final siege at least
in the matter of rations, for it swarmed with life. In the quiet
crystalline air from dawn till after sunset the sounds arising from
it were the clamor of a sincere, outspoken multitude of what man
calls the dumb creatures. Evidently some mind, full of energy and
forethought, had made its appearance late in the history of these
failing generations and had begun a fight to reverse failure and
turn back the tide of aggression. As the first step in
self-recovery this rugged island of poverty must be made
self-sustaining. Therefore it had been made to teem with animal
and vegetable plenty.
On one side of the house lay an orderly garden of vegetables and
berry-bearing shrubs; the yard itself was in reality an orchard of
fruit trees, some warmed by the very walls; under the shed there
were beegums alive with the nectar builders; along the garden walks
were frames for freighted grape-vines. The work of regeneration
had been pushed beyond the limits of utilitarianism over into a
certain crude domain of aesthetics. On one front window-sill what
had been the annual Christmas box of raisins had been turned into a
little hot-bed of flowering plants; and under the panes of glass a
dense forest of them, sun-drawn, looked like a harvest field swept
by a storm. On the opposite window ledge an empty drum of figs was
now topped with hardy jump-up-johnnies. It bore some resemblance
to an enormous yellow muffin stuffed with blueberries. In the
garden big-headed peonies here and there fell over upon the young
onions. The entire demesne lay white and green with tidiness under
yellow sun and azure sky; for fences and outhouses, even the trunks
of trees several feet up from the ground, glistened with whitewash.
So that everywhere was seen the impress and guidance of a spirit
evoking abundance, order, even beauty, out of what could so easily
have been squalor and despondent wretchedness.
This was the home of Pansy Vaughan; and Pansy was the explanation
of everything beautiful and fruitful, the peaceful Joan of Arc of
that valley, seeing rapt visions of the glory of her people.
In the plain upper room of the plain brick house, on her hard white
bed with her hard white thoughts, lay Pansy--sleepless throughout
the night of Marguerite's ball. The youngest of the children slept
beside her; two others lay in a trundle-bed across the room; and
the three were getting out of sleep all that there is in it for
tired, healthy children. In the room below, her father and the
eldest boy were resting; and through the rafters of the flooring
she could hear them both: her father a large, fluent, well-seasoned,
self-comforting bassoon; and her brother a sappy, inexperienced
bassoon trying to imitate it. Wakefulness was a novel state for
Pansy herself, who was always tired when bedtime came and as full
of wild vitality as one of her young guineas in the summer wheat;
so that she sank into slumber as a rock sinks into the sea,
descending till it reaches the unstirred bottom.
What kept her awake to-night was mortification that she had not
been invited to the ball. She knew perfectly well that she was not
entitled to an invitation, since the three Marguerites had never
heard of her. She had never been to a fashionable party even in
the country. But her engagement to Dent Meredith already linked
her to him socially and she felt the tugging of those links: what
were soon to become her rights had begun to be her rights already.
Another little thing troubled her: she had no flower to send him
for his button-hole, to accompany her note wishing him a pleasant
evening. She could not bear to give him anything common; and
Pansy believed that no one was needed to tell her what a common
thing is.
For a third reason slumber refused to descend and weigh down her
eyelids: on the morrow she was to call upon Dent's mother, and the
thought of this call preoccupied her with terror. She was one of
the bravest of souls; but the terror which shook her was the terror
that shakes them all--terror lest they be not loved.
All her life she had looked with awe upward out of her valley
toward that great house. Its lawns with stately clumps of
evergreens, its many servants, its distant lights often seen
twinkling in the windows at night, the tales that reached her of
wonderful music and faery dancing; the flashing family carriages
which had so often whirled past her on the turnpike with scornful
footman and driver--all these recollections revisited her to-night.
In the morning she was to cross the boundary of this inaccessible
world as one who was to hold a high position in it.
How pictures came crowding back! One of the earliest recollections
of childhood was hearing the scream of the Meredith peacocks as
they drew their gorgeous plumage across the silent summer lawns; at
home they had nothing better than fussing guineas. She had never
come nearer to one of those proud birds than handling a set of tail
feathers which Mrs. Meredith had presented to her mother for a
family fly brush. Pansy had good reason to remember because she
had often been required to stand beside the table and, one little
bare foot set alternately on the other little bare foot, wield the
brush over the dishes till arms and eyelids ached.
Another of those dim recollections was pressing her face against
the window-panes when the first snow began to fall on the scraggy
cedars in the yard; and as she began to sing softly to herself one
of the ancient ditties of the children of the poor, "Old Woman,
picking Geese," she would dream of the magical flowers which they
told her bloomed all winter in a glass house at the Merediths'
while there was ice on the pines outside. Big red roses and
icicles separated only by a thin glass--she could hardly believe
it; and she would cast her eye toward their own garden where a few
black withered stalks marked the early death-beds of the pinks and
jonquils.
But even in those young years Pansy had little time to look out of
windows and to dream of anything. She must help, she must work;
for she was the oldest of five children, and the others followed so
closely that they pushed her out of her garments. A hardy,
self-helpful child life, bravened by necessities, never undermined
by luxuries. For very dolls Pansy used small dried gourds, taking
the big round end of the gourd for the head of the doll and all the
rest of the gourd for all the rest of the body.
One morning when she was fourteen, the other children were clinging
with tears to her in a poor, darkened room--she to be little mother
to them henceforth: they never clung in vain.
That same autumn when woods were turning red and wild grapes
turning black and corn turning yellow, a cherished rockaway drawn
by a venerated horse, that tried to stop for conversation on the
highroad whenever he passed a neighbor's vehicle, rattled out on
the turnpike with five children in it and headed for town: Pansy
driving, taking herself and the rest to the public school. For
years thereafter, through dark and bright days, she conveyed that
nest of hungry fledglings back and forth over bitter and weary
miles, getting their ravenous minds fed at one end of the route,
and their ravenous bodies fed at the other. If the harness broke,
Pansy got out with a string. If the horse dropped a shoe, or
dropped himself, Pansy picked up what she could. In town she drove
to the blacksmith shop and to all other shops whither business
called her. Her friends were the blacksmith and the tollgate
keeper, her teachers--all who knew her and they were few: she had
no time for friendships. At home the only frequent visitor was
Ambrose Webb, and Pansy did not care for Ambrose. The first time
she remembered seeing him at dinner, she--a very little girl--had
watched his throat with gloomy fascination. Afterward her mother
told her he had an Adam's apple; and Pansy, working obscurely at
some problem of theology, had secretly taken down the Bible and
read the story of Adam and the fearful fruit. Ambrose became
associated in her mind with the Fall of Man; she disliked the
proximity.
No time for friendships. Besides the labors at school, there was
the nightly care of her father on her return, the mending of his
clothes; there was the lonely burning of her candle far into the
night as she toiled over lessons. When she had learned all that
could be taught her at the school, she left the younger children
there and victoriously transferred herself for a finishing course
to a seminary of the town, where she was now proceeding to graduate.
This was Pansy, child of plain, poor, farmer folk, immemorially
dwelling close to the soil; unlettered, unambitious, long-lived,
abounding in children, without physical beauty, but marking the
track of their generations by a path lustrous with right-doing.
For more than a hundred years on this spot the land had lessened
around them; but the soil had worked upward into their veins, as
into the stalks of plants, the trunks of trees; and that clean,
thrilling sap of the earth, that vitality of the exhaustless mother
which never goes for nothing, had produced one heavenly flower at
last--shooting forth with irrepressible energy a soul unspoiled and
morally sublime. When the top decays, as it always does in the
lapse of time, whence shall come regeneration if not from below?
It is the plain people who are the eternal breeding grounds of high
destinies.
In the long economy of nature, this, perhaps, was the meaning and
the mission of this lofty child who now lay sleepless, shaken to
the core with thoughts of the splendid world over into which she
was to journey to-morrow.
At ten o'clock next morning she set out.
It had been a question with her whether she should go straight
across the fields and climb the fences, or walk around by the
turnpike and open the gates. Her preference was for fields and
fences, because that was the short and direct way, and Pansy was
used to the short and direct way of getting to the end of her
desires. But, as has been said, she had already fallen into the
habit of considering what was due her and becoming to her as a
young Mrs. Meredith; and it struck her that this lady would not
climb field fences, at least by preference and with facility.
Therefore she chose the highroad, gates, dust, and dignity.
It could scarcely be said that she was becomingly raimented. Pansy
made her own dresses, and the dresses declared the handiwork of
their maker. The one she wore this morning was chiefly
characterized by a pair of sleeves designed by herself; from the
elbow to the wrist there hung green pouches that looked like long
pea-pods not well filled. Her only ornament was a large oval pin
at her throat which had somewhat the relation to a cameo as that
borne by Wedgwood china. It represented a white horse drinking at
a white roadside well; beside the shoulder of the horse stood a
white angel, many times taller, with an arm thrown caressingly
around the horse's neck; while a stunted forest tree extended a
solitary branch over the horse's tail.
She had been oppressed with dread that she should not arrive in
time. No time had been set, no one knew that she was coming, and
the forenoons were long. Nevertheless impatience consumed her to
encounter Mrs. Meredith; and once on the way, inasmuch as Pansy
usually walked as though she had been told to go for the doctor,
but not to run, she was not long in arriving.
When she reached the top of the drive in front of the Meredith
homestead, her face, naturally colorless, was a consistent red; and
her heart, of whose existence she had never in her life been
reminded, was beating audibly. Although she said to herself that
it was bad manners, she shook out her handkerchief, which she had
herself starched and ironed with much care; and gathering her
skirts aside, first to the right and then to the left, dusted her
shoes, lifting each a little into the air, and she pulled some
grass from around the buttons. With the other half of her
handkerchief she wiped her brow; but a fresh bead of perspiration
instantly appeared; a few drops even stood on her dilated
nostrils--raindrops on the eaves. Even had the day been cool she
must have been warm, for she wore more layers of clothing than
usual, having deposited some fresh strata in honor of her wealthy
mother-in-law.
As Pansy stepped from behind the pines, with one long, quivering
breath of final self-adjustment, she suddenly stood still, arrested
by the vision of so glorious a hue and shape that, for the moment,
everything else was forgotten. On the pavement just before her, as
though to intercept her should she attempt to cross the Meredith
threshold, stood a peacock, expanding to the utmost its great fan
of pride and love. It confronted her with its high-born composure
and insolent grace, all its jewelled feathers flashing in the sun;
then with a little backward movement of its royal head and
convulsion of its breast, it threw out its cry,--the cry she had
heard in the distance through dreaming years,--warning all who
heard that she was there, the intruder. Then lowering its tail and
drawing its plumage in fastidiously against the body, it crossed
her path in an evasive circle and disappeared behind the pines.
"Oh, Dent, why did you ever ask me to marry you!" thought Pansy, in
a moment of soul failure.
Mrs. Meredith was sitting on the veranda and was partly concealed
by a running rose. She was not expecting visitors; she had much to
think of this morning, and she rose wonderingly and reluctantly as
Pansy came forward: she did not know who it was, and she did not
advance.
Pansy ascended the steps and paused, looking with wistful eyes at
the great lady who was to be her mother, but who did not even greet
her.
"Good morning, Mrs. Meredith," she said, in a shrill treble,
holding herself somewhat in the attitude of a wooden soldier, "I
suppose I shall have to introduce myself: it is Pansy."
The surprise faded from Mrs. Meredith's face, the reserve melted.
With outstretched hands she advanced smiling.
"How do you do. Pansy," she said with motherly gentleness; "it is
very kind of you to come and see me, and I am very glad to know
you. Shall we go in where it is cooler?"
They entered the long hall. Near the door stood a marble bust:
each wall was lined with portraits. She passed between Dent's
ancestors into the large darkened parlors.
"Sit here, won't you?" said Mrs. Meredith, and she even pushed
gently forward the most luxurious chair within her reach. To Pansy
it seemed large enough to hold all the children. At home she was
used to chairs that were not only small, but hard. Wherever the
bottom of a chair seemed to be in that household, there it was--if
it was anywhere. Actuated now by this lifelong faith in literal
furniture, she sat down with the utmost determination where she was
bid; but the bottom offered no resistance to her descending weight
and she sank. She threw out her hands and her hat tilted over her
eyes. It seemed to her that she was enclosed up to her neck in
what might have been a large morocco bath-tub--which came to an end
at her knees. She pushed back her hat, crimson.
"That was a surprise," she said, frankly admitting the fault, "but
there'll never be another such."
"I am afraid you found it warm walking, Pansy," said Mrs. Meredith,
opening her fan and handing it to her.
"Oh, no, Mrs. Meredith, I never fan!" said Pansy, declining
breathlessly. "I have too much use for my hands. I'd rather
suffer and do something else. Besides, you know I am used to
walking in the sun. I am very fond of botany, and I am out of
doors for hours at a time when I can find the chance."
Mrs. Meredith was delighted at the opportunity to make easy vague
comment on a harmless subject.
"What a beautiful study it must be," she said with authority.
"Must be!" exclaimed Pansy; "why, Mrs. Meredith, don't you _know_?
Don't you understand botany?"
Pansy had an idea that in Dent's home botany was as familiarly
apprehended as peas and turnips in hers.
"I am afraid not," replied Mrs. Meredith, a little coolly. Her
mission had been to adorn and people the earth, not to study it.
And among persons of her acquaintance it was the prime duty of each
not to lay bare the others' ignorance, but to make a little
knowledge appear as great as possible. It was discomfiting to have
Pansy charge upon what after all was only a vacant spot in her
mind. She added, as defensively intimating that the subject had
another dangerous side:
"When I was a girl, young ladies at school did not learn much
botany; but they paid a great deal of attention to their manners."
"Why did not they learn it after they had left school and after
they had learned manners?" inquired Pansy, with ruthless
enthusiasm. "It is such a mistake to stop learning everything
simply because you have stopped school. Don't you think so?"
"When a girl marries, my dear, she soon has other studies to take
up. She has a house and husband. The girls of my day, I am
afraid, gave up their botanies for their duties: it may be
different now."
"No matter how many children I may have," said Pansy, positively,
"I shall never--give--up--botany! Besides, you know, Mrs.
Meredith, that we study botany only during the summer months, and I
do hope--" she broke off suddenly.
Mrs. Meredith smoothed her dress nervously and sought to find her
chair comfortable.
"Your mother named you Pansy," she remarked, taking a gloomy view of
the present moment and of the whole future of this acquaintanceship.
That this should be the name of a woman was to her a mistake, a
crime. Her sense of fitness demanded that names should be given to
infants with reference to their adult characters and eventual
positions in life. She liked her own name "Caroline"; and she
liked "Margaret" and all such womanly, motherly, dignified, stately
appellatives. As for "Pansy," it had been the name of one of her
husband's shorthorns, a premium animal at the county fairs; the
silver cup was on the sideboard in the dining room now.
"Yes, Mrs. Meredith," replied Pansy, "that was the name my mother
gave me. I think she must have had a great love of flowers. She
named me for the best she had. I hope I shall never forget that,"
and Pansy looked at Mrs. Meredith with a face of such gravity and
pride that silence lasted in the parlors for a while.
Buried in Pansy's heart was one secret, one sorrow: that her mother
had been poor. Her father wore his yoke ungalled; he loved rough
work, drew his religion from privations, accepted hardship as the
chastening that insures reward. But that her mother's hands should
have been folded and have returned to universal clay without ever
having fondled the finer things of life--this to Pansy was
remembrance to start tears on the brightest day.
"I think she named you beautifully," said Mrs. Meredith, breaking
that silence, "and I am glad you told me, Pansy." She lingered with
quick approval on the name.
But she turned the conversation at once to less personal channels.
The beauty of the country at this season seemed to offer her an
inoffensive escape. She felt that she could handle it at least
with tolerable discretion. She realized that she was not deep on
the subject, but she did feel fluent.
"I suppose you take the same pride that we all do in such a
beautiful country."
Sunlight instantly shone out on Pansy's face. Dent was a
geologist; and since she conceived herself to be on trial before
Mrs. Meredith this morning, it was of the first importance that she
demonstrate her sympathy and intelligent appreciation of his field
of work.
"Indeed I do feel the greatest pride in it, Mrs. Meredith," she
replied. "I study it a great deal. But of course you know
perfectly the whole formation of this region."
Mrs. Meredith coughed with frank discouragement.
"I do not know it," she admitted dryly. "I suppose I ought to know
it, but I do not. I believe school-teachers understand these
things. I am afraid I am a very ignorant woman. No one of my
acquaintances is very learned. We are not used to scholarship."
"I know all the strata," said Pansy. "I tell the children stories
of how the Mastodon once virtually lived in our stable, and that
millions of years ago there were Pterodactyls under their bed."
"I think it a misfortune for a young woman to have much to say to
children about Pterodactyls under their bed--is that the name?
Such things never seem to have troubled Solomon, and I believe he
was reputed wise." She did not care for the old-fashioned
reference herself, but she thought it would affect Pansy.
"The children in the public schools know things that Solomon never
heard of," said Pansy, contemptuously.
"I do not doubt it in the least, my dear. I believe it was not his
knowledge that made him rather celebrated, but his wisdom. But I
am not up in Solomon!" she admitted hastily, retreating from the
subject in new dismay.
The time had arrived for Pansy to depart; but she reclined in her
morocco alcove with somewhat the stiffness of a tilted bottle and
somewhat the contour. She felt extreme dissatisfaction with her
visit and reluctance to terminate it.
Her idea of the difference between people in society and other
people was that it hinged ornamentally upon inexhaustible and
scanty knowledge. If Mrs. Meredith was a social leader, and she
herself had no social standing at all, it was mainly because that
lady was publicly recognized as a learned woman, and the world had
not yet found out that she herself was anything but ignorant.
Being ignorant was to her mind the quintessence of being common;
and as she had undertaken this morning to prove to Dent's mother
that she was not common, she had only to prove that she was
learned. For days she had prepared for this interview with that
conception of its meaning. She had converted her mind into a kind
of rapid-firing gun; she had condensed her knowledge into
conversational cartridges. No sooner had she taken up a mental
position before Mrs. Meredith than the parlors resounded with
light, rapid detonations of information. That lady had but to
release the poorest, most lifeless, little clay pigeon of a remark
and Pansy shattered it in mid air and refixed suspicious eyes on
the trap.
But the pigeons soon began to fly less frequently. And finally
they gave out. And now she must take nearly all her cartridges
home! Mrs. Meredith would think her ignorant, therefore she would
think her common. If Pansy had only known what divine dulness,
what ambrosial stupidity, often reclines on those Olympian heights
called society!
As last she rose. Neither had mentioned Dent's name, though each
had been thinking of him all the time. Not a word had been spoken
to indicate the recognition of a relationship which one of them so
desired and the other so dreaded. Pansy might merely have hurried
over to ask Mrs. Meredith for the loan of an ice-cream freezer or
for a setting of eggs. On the mother's part this silence was
kindly meant: she did not think it right to take for granted what
might never come to pass. Uppermost in her mind was the cruelty of
accepting Pansy as her daughter-in-law this morning with the
possibility of rejecting her afterward.
As Pansy walked reluctantly out into the hall, she stopped with a
deep wish in her candid eyes.
"Oh, Mrs. Meredith, I should so much like to see the portrait of
Dent's father: he has often spoken to me about It."
Mrs. Meredith led her away in silence to where the portrait hung,
and the two stood looking at it side by side. She resisted a
slight impulse to put her arm around the child. When they returned
to the front of the house, Pansy turned:
"Do you think you will ever love me?"
The carriage was at the door. "You must not walk," said Mrs.
Meredith, "the sun is too hot now."
As Pansy stepped into the carriage, she cast a suspicious glance at
the cushions: Meredith upholstery was not to be trusted, and she
seated herself warily.
Mrs. Meredith put her hand through the window: "You must come to
see me soon again, Pansy. I am a poor visitor, but I shall try to
call on you in a few days."
She went back to her seat on the veranda.
It has been said that her insight into goodness was her strength;
she usually had a way of knowing at once, as regards the character
of people, what she was ever to know at all. Her impressions of
Pansy unrolled themselves disconnectedly:
"She makes mistakes, but she does not know how to do wrong. Guile
is not in her. She is so innocent that she does not realize
sometimes the peril of her own words. She is proud--a great deal
prouder than Dent. To her, life means work and duty; more than
that, it means love. She is ambitious, and ambition, in her case,
would be indispensable. She did not claim Dent: I appreciate that.
She is a perfectly brave girl, and it is cowardice that makes so
many women hypocrites. She will improve--she improved while she
was here. But oh, everything else! No figure, no beauty, no
grace, no tact, no voice, no hands, no anything that is so much
needed! Dent says there are cold bodies which he calls planets
without atmosphere: he has found one to revolve about him. If she
only had some clouds! A mist here and there, so that everything
would not be so plain, so exposed, so terribly open! But neither
has _he_ any clouds, any mists, any atmosphere. And if she only
would not so try to expose other people! If she had not so
trampled upon me in my ignorance; and with such a sense of triumph!
I was never so educated in my life by a visitor. The amount of
information she imparted in half an hour--how many months it would
have served the purpose of a well-bred woman! And her pride in her
family--were there ever such little brothers and sisters outside a
royal family! And her devotion to her father, and remembrance of
her mother. I shall go to see her, and be received, I suppose,
somewhere between the griddle and the churn."
As Pansy was driven home, feeling under herself for the first time
the elasticity of a perfect carriage, she experimented with her
posture. "This carriage is not to be sat in in the usual way," she
said. And indeed it was not. In the family rockaway there was
constant need of muscular adjustment to different shocks at
successive moments; here muscular surrender was required: a
comfortable collapse--and there you were!
Trouble awaited her at home. Owing to preoccupation with her visit
she had, before setting out, neglected much of her morning work.
She had especially forgotten the hungry multitude of her
dependants. The children, taking advantage of her absence, had fed
only themselves. As a consequence, the trustful lives around the
house had suffered a great wrong, and they were attempting to
describe it to each other. The instant Pansy descended from the
carriage the ducks, massed around the doorsteps, discovered her,
and with frantic outcry and outstretched necks ran to find out what
it all meant. The signal was taken up by other species and genera.
In the stable lot the calves responded as the French horn end of
the orchestra; and the youngest of her little brothers, who had
climbed into a fruit tree as a lookout for her return, in
scrambling hurriedly down, dropped to the earth with the boneless
thud of an opossum.
Pansy walked straight up to her room, heeding nothing, leaving a
wailing wake. She locked herself in. It was an hour before dinner
and she needed all those moments for herself.
She sat on the edge of her bed and new light brought new
wretchedness. It was not, after all, quantity of information that
made the chief difference between herself and Dent's mother. The
other things, all the other things--would she ever, ever acquire
them! Finally the picture rose before her of how the footman had
looked as he had held the carriage door open for her, and the ducks
had sprawled over his feet; and she threw herself on the bed, hat
and all, and burst out crying with rage and grief and mortification.
"She will think I am common," she moaned, "and I am not common!
Why did I say such things? It is not my way of talking. Why did I
criticise the way the portrait was hung? And she will think this
is what I really am, and it is not what I am! She will think I do
not even know how to sit in a chair, and she will tell Dent, and
Dent will believe her, and what will become of me?"
"Pansy," said Dent next afternoon, as they were in the woods
together, "you have won my mother's heart."
"Oh, Dent," she exclaimed, tears starting, "I was afraid she would
not like me. How could she like me, knowing me no better?"
"She doesn't yet know that she likes you," he replied, with his
honest thinking and his honest speech, "but I can see that she
trusts you and respects you; and with my mother everything else
follows in time."
"I was embarrassed. I did myself such injustice."
"It is something you never did any one else."
He had been at work in his quarry on the vestiges of creation; the
quarry lay at an outcrop of that northern hill overlooking the
valley in which she lived. Near by was a woodland, and she had
come out for some work of her own in which he guided her. They lay
on the grass now side by side.
"I am working on the plan of our house, Pansy. I expect to begin
to build in the autumn. I have chosen this spot for the site. How
do you like it?"
"I like it very well. For one reason, I can always see the old
place from it."
"My father left his estate to be equally divided between Rowan and
me. Of course he could not divide the house; that goes to Rowan:
it is a good custom for this country as it was a good custom for
our forefathers in England. But I get an equivalent and am to
build for myself on this part of the land: my portion is over here.
You see we have always been divided only by a few fences and they
do not divide at all."
"The same plants grow on each side, Dent."
"There is one thing I have to tell you. If you are coming into our
family, you ought to know it beforehand. There is a shadow over
our house. It grows deeper every year and we do not know what it
means. That is, my mother and I do not know. It is some secret in
Rowan's life. He has never offered to tell us, and of course we
have never asked him, and in fact mother and I have never even
spoken to each other on the subject."
It was the first time she had even seen sadness in his eyes; and
she impulsively clasped his hand. He returned the pressure and
then their palms separated. No franker sign of their love had ever
passed between them.
He went on very gravely: "Rowan was the most open nature I ever saw
when he was a boy. I remember this now. I did not think of it
then. I believe he was the happiest. You know we are all
pantheists of some kind nowadays. I could never see much
difference between a living thing that stands rooted in the earth
like a tree and a living thing whose destiny it is to move the foot
perpetually over the earth, as man. The union is as close in one
case as in the other. Do you remember the blind man of the New
Testament who saw men as trees walking? Rowan seemed to me, as I
recall him now, to have risen out of the earth through my father
and mother--a growth of wild nature, with the seasons in his face,
with the blood of the planet rising into his veins as intimately as
it pours into a spring oak or into an autumn grape-vine. I often
heard Professor Hardage call him the earth-born. He never called
any one else that. He was wild with happiness until he went to
college. He came back all changed; and life has been uphill with
him ever since. Lately things have grown worse. The other day I
was working on the plan of our house; he came in and looked over my
shoulder: 'Don't build, Dent,' he said, 'bring your wife here,' and
he walked quickly out of the room. I knew what that meant: he has
been unfortunate in his love affair and is ready to throw up the
whole idea of marrying. This is our trouble, Pansy. It may
explain anything that may have been lacking in my mother's
treatment of you; she is not herself at all." He spoke with great
tenderness and he looked disturbed.
"Can I do anything?" What had she been all her life but
burden-bearer, sorrow-sharer?
"Nothing."
"If I ever can, will you tell me?"
"This is the only secret I have kept from you, Pansy. I am sure
you have kept none from me. I believe that if I could read
everything in you, I should find nothing I did not wish to know."
She did not reply for a while. Then she said solemnly: "I have one
secret. There is something I try to hide from every human being
and I always shall. It is not a bad secret, Dent. But I do not
wish to tell you what it is, and I feel sure you will never ask me."
He turned his eyes to her clear with unshakable confidence: "I
never will."
Pansy was thinking of her mother's poverty.
They sat awhile in silence.
He had pulled some stems of seeding grass and drew them slowly
across his palm, pondering Life. Then he began to talk to her in
the way that made them so much at home with one another.
"Pansy, men used to speak of the secrets of Nature: there is not
the slightest evidence that Nature has a secret. They used to
speak of the mysteries of the Creator. I am not one of those who
claim to be authorities on the traits of the Creator. Some of my
ancestors considered themselves such. But I do say that men are
coming more and more to think of Him as having no mysteries. We
have no evidence, as the old hymn declares, that He loves to move
in a mysterious way. The entire openness of Nature and of the
Creator--these are the new ways of thinking. They will be the only
ways of thinking in the future unless civilization sinks again into
darkness. What we call secrets and mysteries of the universe are
the limitations of our powers and our knowledge. The little that
we actually do know about Nature, how open it is, how unsecretive!
There is nowhere a sign that the Creator wishes to hide from us
even what is Life. If we ever discover what Life is, no doubt we
shall then realize that it contained no mystery."
She loved to listen, feeling that he was drawing her to his way of
thinking for the coming years.
"It was the folly and the crime of all ancient religions that their
priesthoods veiled them; whenever the veil was rent, like the veil
of Isis, it was not God that men found behind it: it was nothing.
The religions of the future will have no veils. As far as they can
set before their worshippers truth at all, it will be truth as open
as the day. The Great Teacher in the New Testament--what an
eternal lesson on light itself: that is the beauty of his Gospel.
And his Apostles--where do you find him saying to them, 'Preach my
word to all men as the secrets of a priesthood and the mysteries of
the Father'?
"It is the tragedy of man alone that he has his secrets. No doubt
the time will come when I shall have mine and when I shall have to
hide things from you, Pansy, as Rowan has his and hides things from
us. Life is full of things that we cannot tell because they would
injure us; and of things that we cannot tell because they would
injure others. But surely we should all like to live in a time
when a man's private life will be his only life."
After a silence he came back to her with a quiet laugh: "Here I am
talking about the future of the human race, and we have never
agreed upon our marriage ceremony! What a lover!"
"I want the most beautiful ceremony in the world."
"The ceremony of your church?" he asked with great respect, though
wincing.
"My church has no ceremony: every minister in it has his own; and
rather than have one of them write mine, I think I should rather
write it myself: shouldn't you?"
"I think I should," he said, laughing.
He drew a little book out of his breast pocket: "Perhaps you will
like this: a great many people have been married by it."
"I want the same ceremony that is used for kings and queens, for
the greatest and the best people of the earth. I will marry you by
no other!"
"A good many of them have used this," and he read to her the
ceremony of his church.
When he finished neither spoke.
It was a clear summer afternoon. Under them was the strength of
rocks; around them the noiseless growth of needful things; above
them the upward-drawing light: two working children of the New
World, two pieces of Nature's quietism.