Rosamond laughed.
"O yes, I suppose I am; but we don't call this scenery. It is just
pleasantness,--beauty. I don't think I quite like the word
'scenery.' It seems artificial,--got up for outside effect. And the
most beautiful things do not speak from the outside, do they? I
never travelled, Mr. Mucklegrand. I have just lived here, until I
have lived _into_ things, or they into me. I rather think it is
travelling, skimming about the world in a hurry, that makes people
talk about 'scenery.' Isn't it?"
"I dare say. I don't care for skimming, myself. But I like to go to
nice places, and stay long enough to get into them, as you say. I
mean to go to Scotland next year. I've a place there among the hills
and lochs, Miss Rosamond."
"Yes. I have heard so. I should think you would wish to go and see
it."
"I'll tell you what I wish, Miss Holabird!" he said suddenly,
letting go his moustache, and turning round with sufficient
manfulness, and facing her. "I suppose there is a more gradual and
elegant way of saying it; but I believe straightforward is as good
as any. I wish you cared for me as I care for you, and then you
would go with me."
Rosamond was utterly confounded. She had not imagined that it could
be hurled at her, this fashion; she thought she could parry and put
aside, if she saw anything coming. She was bewildered and breathless
with the shock of it; she could only blindly, and in very foolish
words, hurl it back.
"O, dear, no!" she exclaimed, her face crimson. "I mean--I don't--I
couldn't! I beg your pardon, Mr. Mucklegrand; you are very good; I
am very sorry; but I wish you hadn't said so. We had better go
back."
"No," said Archie Mucklegrand, "not yet. I've said it now. I said it
like a moon calf, but I mean it like a man. Won't you--can't you--be
my wife, Rosamond? I must know that."
"No, Mr. Mucklegrand," answered Rosamond, quite steadily now and
gently. "I could not be. We were never meant for each other. You
will think so yourself next year,--by the time you go to Scotland."
"I shall never think so."
Of course he said that; young men always do; they mean it at the
moment, and nothing can persuade them otherwise.
"I told you I had lived right here, and grown into these things, and
they into me," said Rosamond, with a sweet slow earnestness, as if
she thought out while she explained it; and so she did; for the
thought and meaning of her life dawned upon her with a new
perception, as she stood at this point and crisis of it in the
responsibility of her young womanhood. "And these, and all the
things that have influenced me, have given my life its direction;
and I can see clearly that it was never meant to be your way. I do
not know what it will be; but I know yours is different. It would be
wrenching mine to turn it so."
"But I would turn mine for you," said Archie.
"You couldn't. Lives _grow_ together. They join beforehand, if they
join at all. You like me, perhaps,--just what you see of me; but you
do not know me, nor I you. If it--this--were meant, we should."
"Should what?"
"Know. Be sure."
"I am sure of what I told you."
"And I thank you very much; but I do not--I never could--belong to
you."
What made Rosamond so wise about knowing and belonging?
She could not tell, herself; she had never thought it out before;
but she seemed to see it very clearly now. She did not belong to
Archie Mucklegrand, nor he to her; he was mistaken; their lives had
no join; to make them join would be a force, a wrenching.
Archie Mucklegrand did not care to have it put on such deep ground.
He liked Rosamond; he wanted her to like him; then they should be
married, of coarse, and go to Scotland, and have a good time; but
this quiet philosophy cooled him somewhat. As they walked up the
bank together, he wondered at himself a little that he did not feel
worse about it. If she had been coquettish, or perverse, she might
have been all the more bewitching to him. If he had thought she
liked somebody else better, he might have been furiously jealous;
but "her way of liking a fellow would be a slow kind of a way, after
all." That was the gist of his thought about it; and I believe that
to many very young men, at the age of waxed moustaches and German
dancing, that "slow kind of a way" in a girl is the best possible
insurance against any lasting damage that their own enthusiasm might
suffer.
He had not been contemptible in the offering of his love; his best
had come out at that moment; if it does not come out then,
somehow,--through face and tone, in some plain earnestness or simple
nobleness, if not in fashion of the spoken word as very well it may
not,--it must be small best that the man has in him.
Rosamond's simple saying of the truth, as it looked to her in that
moment of sure insight, was the best help she could have given him.
Truth is always the best help. He did not exactly understand the
wherefore, as she understood it; but the truth touched him
nevertheless, in the way that he could perceive. They did not
"belong" to each other.
And riding down in the late train that evening, Archie Mucklegrand
said to himself, drawing a long breath,--"It would have been an
awful tough little joke, after all, telling it to the old lady!"
"Are you too tired to walk home?" Kenneth Kincaid asked of Rosamond,
helping her put the baskets in the carriage.
Dakie Thayne had asked Ruth the same question five minutes before,
and they two had gone on already. Are girls ever too tired to walk
home after a picnic, when the best of the picnic is going to walk
home with them? Of course Rosamond was not too tired; and Mrs.
Holabird had the carryall quite to herself and her baskets.
They took the River Road, that was shady all the way, and sweet now
with the dropping scents of evening; it was a little longer, too, I
think, though that is one of the local questions that have never yet
been fully decided.
"How far does Miss Waite's ground run along the river?" asked
Kenneth, taking Rosamond's shawl over his arm.
"Not far; it only just touches; it runs back and broadens toward the
Old Turnpike. The best of it is in those woods and pastures."
"So I thought. And the pastures are pretty much run out."
"I suppose so. They are full of that lovely gray crackling moss."
"Lovely for picnics. Don't you think Miss Waite would like to sell?"
"Yes, indeed, if she could. That is her dream; what she has been
laying up for her old age: to turn the acres into dollars, and build
or buy a little cottage, and settle down safe. It is all she has in
the world, except her dressmaking."
"Mr. Geoffrey and Mr. Marchbanks want to buy. They will offer her
sixteen thousand dollars. That is the secret,--part of it."
"O, Mr. Kincaid! How glad,--how _sorry_, I can't help being, too!
Miss Waite to be so comfortable! And never to have her dear old
woods to picnic in any more! I suppose they want to make streets
and build it all up."
"Not all. I'll tell you. It is a beautiful plan. Mr. Geoffrey wants
to build a street of twenty houses,--ten on a side,--with just a
little garden plot for each, and leave the woods behind for a piece
of nature for the general good,--a real Union Park; a place for
children to play in, and grown folks to rest and walk and take tea
in, if they choose; but for nobody to change or meddle with any
further. And these twenty houses to be let to respectable persons of
small means, at rents that will give him seven per cent, for his
whole outlay. Don't you see? Young people, and people like Miss
Waite herself, who don't want _much_ house-room, but who want it
nice and comfortable, and will keep it so, and who _do_ want a
little of God's world-room to grow in, that they can't get in the
crowded town streets, where the land is selling by the foot to be
all built over with human packing-cases, and where they have to pay
as much for being shut up and smothered, as they will out here to
live and breathe. That Mr. Geoffrey is a glorious man, Rosamond! He
is doing just this same thing in the edges of three or four other
towns, buying up the land just before it gets too dear, to save for
people who could not save it for themselves. He is providing for a
class that nobody seems to have thought of,--the nice, narrow-pursed
people, and the young beginners, who get married and take the world
in the old-fashioned way."
He had no idea he had called her "Rosamond," till he saw the color
shining up so in her face verifying the name. Then it flashed out
upon him as he sent his thought back through the last few sentences
that he had spoken.
"I beg your pardon," he said, suddenly. "But I was so full of this
beautiful doing,--and I always think of you so! Is there a sin in
that?"
Rosamond colored deeper yet, and Kenneth grew more bold. He had
spoken it without plan; it had come of itself.
"I can't help it now. I shall say it again, unless you tell me not!
Rosamond! I shall have these houses to build. I am getting ever so
much to do. Could you begin the world with me, Rosamond?"
Rosamond did not say a word for a full minute. She only walked
slowly by his side, her beautiful head inclined gently, shyly; her
sweet face all one bloom, as faces never bloom but once.
Then she turned toward him and put out her hand.
"I will begin the world with you," she said.
And their world--that was begun for them before they were
born--lifted up its veil and showed itself to them, bright in the
eternal morning.
* * * * *
Desire Ledwith walked home all alone. She left Dorris at Miss
Waite's, and Helena had teased to stay with her. Mrs. Ledwith had
gone home among the first, taking a seat offered her in Mrs. Tom
Friske's carriage to East Square; she had a headache, and was tired.
Desire felt the old, miserable questions coming up, tempting her.
Why?
Why was she left out,--forgotten? Why was there nothing, very much,
in any of this, for her?
Yet underneath the doubting and accusing, something lived--stayed
by--to rebuke it; rose up above it finally, and put it down, though
with a thrust that hurt the heart in which the doubt was trampled.
Wait. Wait--with all your might!
Desire could do nothing very meekly; but she could even _wait_ with
all her might. She put her foot down with a will, at every step.
"I was put here to be Desire Ledwith," she said, relentlessly, to
herself; "not Rosamond Holabird, nor even Dolly. Well, I suppose I
can stay put, and _be_! If things would only _let_ me be!"
But they will not. Things never do, Desire.
They are coming, now, upon you. Hard things,--and all at once.