It was raining steadily and the night was cold. Miss Anna came
hurriedly down into the library soon after supper. She had on an
old waterproof; and in one hand she carried a man's cotton
umbrella--her own--and in the other a pair of rubbers. As she sat
down and drew these over her coarse walking shoes, she talked in
the cheery tone of one who has on hand some congenial business.
"I may get back late and I may not get back at all; it depends upon
how the child is. But I wish it would not rain when poor little
children are sick at night--it is the one thing that gives me the
blues. And I wish infants could speak out and tell their symptoms.
When I see grown people getting well as soon as they can minutely
narrate to you all their ailments, my heart goes out to babies.
Think how they would crow and gurgle, if they could only say what
it is all about. But I don't see why people at large should not be
licensed to bring in a bill when their friends insist upon
describing their maladies to them: doctors do. But I must be
going. Good night."
She rose and stamped her feet into the rubbers to make them fit
securely; and then she came across to the lamp-lit table beside
which he sat watching her fondly--his book dropped the while upon
his lap. He grasped her large strong hand in his large strong
hand; and she leaned her side against his shoulder and put her arm
around his neck.
"You are getting younger, Anna," he said, looking up into her face
and drawing her closer.
"Why not?" she answered with a voice of splendid joy. "Harriet is
married; what troubles have I, then? And she patronizes--or
matronizes--me and tyrannizes over Ambrose: so the world is really
succeeding at last. But I wish her husband had not asked me
_first_; that is her thorn."
"And the thorn will grow!"
"Now, don't sit up late!" she pleaded. "I turned your bed down and
arranged the pillows wrong end out as you will have them; and I put
out your favorite night-shirt--the one with the sleeves torn off
above the elbows and the ravellings hanging down just as you
require. Aren't you tired of books yet? Are you never going to
get tired? And the same books! Why, I get fresh babies every few
years--a complete change."
"How many generations of babies do you suppose there have been
since this immortal infant was born?" he asked, laying his hand
reverently over the book on his lap as if upon the head of a divine
child.
"I don't know and I don't care," she replied. "I wish the immortal
infant would let you alone." She stooped and kissed his brow, and
wrung his hand silently, and went out into the storm. He heard her
close the street door and heard the rusty click of her cotton
umbrella as she raised it. Then he turned to the table at his
elbow and kindled his deep-bowled pipe and drew over his legs the
skirts of his long gown, coarse, austere, sombre.
He looked comfortable. A rainy night may depress a woman nursing a
sick child that is not her own--a child already fighting for its
feeble, unclaimed, repudiated life, in a world of weeping clouds;
but such a night diffuses cheer when the raindrops are heard
tapping the roof above beloved bookshelves, tapping the
window-panes; when there is low music in the gutter on the back
porch; when a student lamp, throwing its shadow over the ceiling
and the walls, reserves its exclusive lustre for lustrous
pages--pages over which men for centuries have gladly burnt out the
oil of their brief lamps, their iron and bronze, their silver and
gold and jewelled lamps--many-colored eyes of the nights of ages.
It was now middle September of another year and Professor Hardage
had entered upon the work of another session. The interval had
left no outward mark on him. The mind stays young a long time when
nourished by a body such as his; and the body stays young a long
time when mastered by such a mind. Day by day faithfully to do
one's work and to be restless for no more; without bitterness to
accept obscurity for ambition; to possess all vital passions and to
govern them; to stand on the world's thoroughfare and see the young
generations hurrying by, and to put into the hands of a youth here
and there a light which will burn long after our own personal taper
is extinguished; to look back upon the years already gone as not
without usefulness and honor, and forward to what may remain as
safe at least from failure or any form of shame, and thus for one's
self to feel the humility of the part before the greatness of the
whole of life, and yet the privileges and duties of the individual
to the race--this brings blessedness if it does not always bring
happiness, and it had brought both to him.
He sat at peace beside his lamp. The interval had brought changes
to his towns-people. As he had walked home this afternoon, he had
paused and looked across at some windows of the second story of a
familiar corner. The green shutters, tightly closed, were gray
with cobweb and with dust. One sagged from a loosened hinge and
flapped in the rising autumn wind, showing inside a window sash
also dust-covered and with a newspaper crammed through a broken
pane. Where did Ravenel Morris live now? Did he live at all?
Accustomed as he was to look through the distances of human
history, to traverse the areas of its religions and see how its
great conflicting faiths have each claimed the unique name of
revelation for itself, he could not anywhere discover what to him
was clear proof either of the separate existence of the soul or of
its immortal life hereafter. The security of that belief was
denied him. He had wished for it, had tried to make it his. But
while it never became a conviction, it remained a force. Under all
that reason could affirm or could deny, there dwelt unaccountable
confidence that the light of human life, leaping from headland to
headland,--the long transmitted radiance of thought,--was not to go
out with the inevitable physical extinction of the species on this
planet. Somewhere in the universe he expected to meet his own, all
whom he had loved, and to see this friend. Meantime, he accepted
the fact of death in the world with that uncomplaining submission
to nature which is in the strength and sanity of genius. As
acquaintances left him, one after another, memory but kindled
another lamp; hope but disclosed another white flower on its
mysterious stem.
He sat at peace. The walls of the library showed their changes.
There were valuable maps on Caesar's campaigns which had been sent
him from Berlin; there were other maps from Athens; there was
something from the city of Hannibal, and something from Tiber.
Indeed, there were not many places in Isabel's wandering from which
she had not sent home to him some proof that he was remembered.
And always she sent letters which were more than maps or books,
being in themselves charts to the movements of her spirit. They
were regular; they were frank; they assured him how increasingly
she needed his friendship. When she returned, she declared she
would settle down to be near him for the rest of life. Few names
were mentioned in these letters: never Rowan's; never Mrs.
Osborn's--that lifelong friendship having been broken; and in truth
since last March young Mrs. Osborn's eyes had been sealed to the
reading of all letters. But beneath everything else, he could
always trace the presence of one unspoken certainty--that she was
passing through the deeps without herself knowing what height or
what heath her feet would reach at last, there to abide.
As he had walked homeward this afternoon through the dust,
something else had drawn his attention: he was passing the Conyers
homestead, and already lights were beginning to twinkle in the many
windows; there was to be a ball that night, and he thought of the
unconquerable woman ruling within, apparently gaining still in
vitality and youth. "Unjailed malefactors often attain great
ages," he said to himself, as he turned away and thought of the
lives she had helped to blight and shorten.
As the night advanced, he fell under the influence of his book, was
drawn out of his poor house, away from his obscure town, his
unknown college, quitted his country and his age, passing backward
until there fell around him the glorious dawn of the race before
the sunrise of written history: the immortal still trod the earth;
the human soldier could look away from his earthly battle-field and
see, standing on a mountain crest, the figure and the authority of
his Divine Commander. Once more it was the flower-dyed plain,
blood-dyed as well; the ships drawn up by the gray, the wrinkled
sea; over on the other side, well-built Troy; and the crisis of the
long struggle was coming. Hector, of the glancing plume, had come
back to the city for the last time, mindful of his end.
He read once more through the old scene that is never old, and then
put his book aside and sat thoughtful. "_I know not if the gods
will not overthrow me. . . . I have very sore shame if, like a
coward, I shrink away from battle; moreover mine own soul
forbiddeth me. . . . Destiny . . . no man hast escaped, be he
coward or be he valiant, when once he hath been born_."
His eyes had never rested on any spot in human history, however
separated in time and place, where the force of those words did not
seem to reign. Whatsoever the names under which men have conceived
and worshipped their gods or their God, however much they have
believed that it was these or it was He who overthrew them and made
their destinies inescapable, after all, it is the high compulsion
of the soul itself, the final mystery of personal choice, that
sends us forth at last to our struggles and to our peace: "_mine
own soul forbiddeth me_"--there for each is right and wrong, the
eternal beauty of virtue.
He did not notice the sound of approaching wheels, and that the
sound ceased at his door.
A moment later and Isabel with light footsteps stood before him.
He sprang up with a cry and put his arms around her and held her.
"You shall never go away again."
"No, I am never going away again; I have come back to marry Rowan."
These were her first words to him as they sat face to face. And
she quickly went on:
"How is he?"
He shook his head reproachfully at her: "When I saw him at least he
seemed better than you seem."
"I knew he was not well--I have known it for a long time. But you
saw him--in town--on the street--with his friends--attending to
business?"
"Yes--in town--on the street--with his friends--attending to
business."
"May I stay here? I ordered my luggage to be sent here."
"Your room is ready and has always been ready and waiting since the
day you left. I think Anna has been putting fresh flowers in it
all autumn. You will find some there to-night. She has insisted
of late that you would soon be coming home."
An hour later she came down into the library again. She had
removed the traces of travel, and she had travelled slowly and was
not tired. All this enabled him to see how changed she was; and
without looking older, how strangely oldened and grown how quiet of
spirit. She had now indeed become sister for him to those images
of beauty that were always haunting him--those far, dim images of
the girlhood of her sex, with their faces turned away from the sun
and their eyes looking downward, pensive in shadow, too freighted
with thoughts of their brief fate and their immortality.
"I must have a long talk with you before I try to sleep. I must
empty my heart to you once."
He knew that she needed the relief, and that what she asked of him
during these hours would be silence.
"I have tried everything, and everything has failed. I have tried
absence, but absence has not separated me from him. I have tried
silence, but through the silence I have never ceased speaking to
him. Nothing has really ever separated us; nothing ever can. It
is more than will or purpose, it is my life. It is more than life
to me, it is love."
She spoke very quietly, and at first she seemed unable to progress
very far from the beginning. After every start, she soon came back
to that one beginning.
"It is of no use to weigh the right and the wrong of it: I tried
that at first, and I suppose that is why I made sad mistakes. You
must not think that I am acting now from a sense of duty to him or
to myself. Duty does not enter into my feeling: it is love; all
that I am forbids me to do anything else."
But after a while she went back and bared before him in a way the
history of her heart. "The morning after he told me, I went to
church. I remember the lessons of the day and the hymns, and how I
left the church before the sermon, because everything seemed to be
on his side, and no one was on mine. He had done wrong and was
guilty; and I had been wrong and was innocent; and the church
comforted him and overlooked me; and I was angry and walked out of
it.
"And do you remember the day I came to see you and you proposed
everything to me, and I rejected everything? You told me to go
away for a while, to throw myself into the pleasures of other
people; you reminded me of prayer and of the duty of forgiveness;
you told me to try to put myself in his place, and reminded me of
self-sacrifice, and then said at last that I must leave it to time,
which sooner or later settles everything. I rejected everything
that you suggested. But I have accepted everything since, and have
learned a lesson and a service from each: the meaning of prayer and
of forgiveness and of self-sacrifice; and what the lapse of time
can do to bring us to ourselves and show us what we wish. I say, I
have lived through all these, and I have gotten something out of
them all; but however much they may mean, they never constitute
love; and it is my love that brings me back to him now."
Later on she recurred to the idea of self-sacrifice: much other
deepest feeling seemed to gather about that.
"I am afraid that you do not realize what it means to a woman when
a principle like this is involved. Can any man ever know? Does he
dream what it means to us women to sacrifice ourselves as they
often require us to do? I have been travelling in old lands--so
old that the history of each goes back until we can follow it with
our eyes no longer. But as far as we can see, we see this
sorrow--the sorrow of women who have wished to be first in the love
of the men they have loved. You, who read everything! Cannot you
see them standing all through history, the sad figures of girls who
have only asked for what they gave, love in its purity and its
singleness--have only asked that there should have been no other
before them? And cannot you see what a girl feels when she
consents to accept anything less,--that she is lowered to herself
from that time on,--has lost her own ideal of herself, as well as
her ideal of the man she loves? And cannot you see how she lowers
herself in his eyes also and ceases to be his ideal, through her
willingness to live with him on a lower plane? That is our wound.
That is our trouble and our sorrow: I have found it wherever I have
gone."
Long before she said this to him, she had questioned him closely
about Rowan. He withheld from her knowledge of some things which
he thought she could better bear to learn later and by degrees.
"I knew he was not well," she said; "I feared it might be worse.
Let me tell you this: no one knows him as I do. I must speak
plainly. First, there was his trouble; that shadowed for
him one ideal in his life. Then this drove him to a kind of
self-concealment; and that wounded another ideal--his love of
candor. Then he asked me to marry him, and he told me the truth
about himself and I turned him off. Then came the scandals that
tried to take away his good name, and I suppose have taken it away.
And then, through all this, were the sufferings he was causing
others around him, and the loss of his mother. I have lived
through all these things with him while I have been away, and I
understand; they sap life. I am going up to write to him now,
and will you post the letter to-night? I wish him to come to
see me at once, and our marriage must take place as soon as
possible--here--very quietly."
Rowan came the next afternoon. She was in the library; and he
went in and shut the door, and they were left alone.
Professor Hardage and Miss Anna sat in an upper room. He had no
book and she had no work; they were thinking only of the two
downstairs. And they spoke to each other in undertones, breaking
the silence with brief sentences, as persons speak when awaiting
news from sick-rooms.
Daylight faded. Outside the lamplighter passed, torching the grimy
lamps. Miss Anna spoke almost in a whisper: "Shall I have some
light sent in?"
"No, Anna."
"Did you tell him what the doctors have said about his health?"
"No; there was bad news enough without that for one day. And then
happiness might bring back health to him. The trouble that
threatens him will have to be put down as one of the consequences
of all that has occurred to him--as part of what he is and of what
he has done. The origin of disease may lie in our troubles--our
nervous shocks, our remorses, and better strivings."
The supper hour came.
"I do not wish any supper, Anna."
"Nor I. How long they stay together!"
"They have a great deal to say to each other, Anna."
"I know, I know. Poor children!"
"I believe he is only twenty-five."
"When Isabel comes up, do you think I ought to go to her room and
see whether she wants anything?"
"No, Anna."
"And she must not know that we have been sitting up, as though we
felt sorry for them and could not go on with our own work."
"I met Marguerite and Barbee this afternoon walking together. I
suppose she will come back to him at last. But she has had her
storm, and he knows it, and he knows there will never be any storm
for him. She is another one of those girls of mine--not sad, but
with half the sun shining on them. But half a sun shining
steadily, as it will always shine on her, is a great deal."
"Hush!" said Miss Anna, in a whisper, "he is gone! Isabel is
coming up the steps."
They heard her and then they did not hear her, and then again and
then not again.
Miss Anna started up:
"She needs me!"
He held her back:
"No, Anna! Not to help is to help."
X
One afternoon late in the autumn of the following year, when a
waiting stillness lay on the land and shimmering sunlight opened up
the lonely spaces of woods and fields, the Reaper who comes to all
men and reaps what they have sown, approached the home of the
Merediths and announced his arrival to the young master of the
house: he would await his pleasure.
Rowan had been sitting up, propped by his pillows. It was the room
of his grandfather as it had been that of the man preceding; the
bed had been their bed; and the first to place it where it stood
may have had in mind a large window, through which as he woke from
his nightly sleep he might look far out upon the land, upon rolling
stately acres.
Rowan looked out now: past the evergreens just outside to the
shining lawn beyond; and farther away, upon fields of brown
shocks--guiltless harvest; then toward a pasture on the horizon.
He could see his cattle winding slowly along the edge of a russet
woodland on which the slanting sunlight fell. Against the blue sky
in the silvery air a few crows were flying: all went in the same
direction but each went without companions. He watched their wings
curiously with lonely, following eyes. Whither home passed they?
And by whose summons? And with what guidance?
A deep yearning stirred him, and he summoned his wife and the nurse
with his infant son. He greeted her; then raising himself on one
elbow and leaning over the edge of the bed, he looked a long time
at the boy slumbering on the nurse's lap.
The lesson of his brief span of years gathered into his gaze.
"Life of my life," he said, with that lesson on his lips, "sign of
my love, of what was best in me, this is my prayer for you: may you
find one to love you such as your father found; when you come to
ask her to unite her life with yours, may you be prepared to tell
her the truth about yourself, and have nothing to tell that would
break her heart and break the hearts of others. May it be said of
you that you are a better man than your father."
He had the child lifted and he kissed his forehead and his eyes.
"By the purity of your own life guard the purity of your sons for
the long honor of our manhood." Then he made a sign that the nurse
should withdraw.
When she had withdrawn, he put his face down on the edge of the
pillow where his wife knelt, her face hidden. His hair fell over
and mingled with her hair. He passed his arm around her neck and
held her close.
"All your troubles came to you because you were true to the
highest. You asked only the highest from me, and the highest was
more than I could give. But be kind to my memory. Try to forget
what is best forgotten, but remember what is worth remembering.
Judge me for what I was; but judge me also for what I wished to be.
Teach my son to honor my name; and when he is old enough to
understand, tell him the truth about his father. Tell him what it
was that saddened our lives. As he looks into his mother's face,
it will steady him."
He put both arms around her neck.
"I am tired of it all," he said. "I want rest. Love has been more
cruel to me than death."
A few days later, an afternoon of the same autumnal stillness, they
bore him across his threshold with that gentleness which so often
comes too late--slowly through his many-colored woods, some leaves
drifting down upon the sable plumes and lodging in them---along the
turnpike lined with dusty thistles--through the watching town, a
long procession, to the place of the unreturning.
They laid him along with his fathers.