The Mettle of the Pasture

The Judge turned and looked at Barbee in simple silence.

Barbee sprang to his feet: "It is a damned shame!" he cried. "Damn the French! damn such a civilization."

"Why damn the French code? In our own country the same thing goes on, not as part of our system of jurisprudence, but as part of our system of—well, we'll say—morals. In this country any man's secret personal enemy, his so-called religious enemy for instance, may fabricate any accusation against him. He does not drop it into the dark crevice of a dead wall, but into the blacker hole of a living ear. A perfectly innocent man by such anonymous or untraceable slander can be as grossly injured in reputation, in business, in his family, out of a prison in this country as in a prison in France. Slander may circulate about him and he will never even know what it is, never be confronted by his accuser, never have power of redress.

"Now what I wish you to remember is this: that in the very nature of the case a man is often unable to prove his innocence. All over the world useful careers come to nothing and lives are wrecked, because men may be ignorantly or malignantly accused of things of which they cannot stand up and prove that they are innocent. Never forget that it is impossible for a man finally to demonstrate his possession of a single great virtue. A man cannot so prove his bravery. He cannot so prove his honesty or his benevolence or his sobriety or his chastity, or anything else. As to courage, all that he can prove is that in a given case or in all tested cases he was not a coward. As to honesty, all that he can prove is that in any alleged instance he was not a thief. A man cannot even directly prove his health, mental or physical: all that he can prove is that he shows no unmistakable evidences of disease. But an enemy may secretly circulate the charge that these evidences exist; and all the evidences to the contrary that the man himself may furnish will never disperse that impression. It is so for every great virtue. His final possession of a single virtue can be proved by no man.

"This was another reason why I was sometimes unwilling to prosecute a fellow-creature; it might be a case in which he alone would actually know whether he were innocent, but his simple word would not be taken, and his simple word would be the only proof that he could give. I ask you, as you care for my memory, never to take advantage of the truth that the man before you, as the accused, may in the nature of things be unable to prove his innocence. Some day you are going to be a judge. Remember you are always a judge; and remember that a greater Judge than you will ever be gave you the rule: 'Judge as you would be judged.' The great root of the matter is this: that all human conduct is judged; but a very small part of human conduct is ever brought to trial."

He had many visitors at his office during these idle summer days. He belonged to a generation of men who loved conversation—when they conversed. All the lawyers dropped in. The report of his failing strength brought these and many others.

He saw a great deal of Professor Hardage. One morning as the two met, he said with more feeling than he usually allowed himself to show: "Hardage, I am a lonesome old man; don't you want me to come and see you every Sunday evening? I always try to get home by ten o'clock, so that you couldn't get tired of me; and as I never fall asleep before that time, you wouldn't have to put me to bed. I want to hear you talk, Hardage. My time is limited; and you have no right to shut out from me so much that you know—your learning, your wisdom, yourself. And I know a few things that I have picked up in a lifetime. Surely we ought to have something to say to each other."

But when he came, Professor Hardage was glad to let him find relief in his monologues—fragments of self-revelation. This last phase of their friendship had this added significance: that the Judge no longer spent his Sunday evenings with Mrs. Conyers. The last social link binding him to womankind had been broken. It was a final loosening and he felt it, felt the desolation in which it left him. His cup of life had indeed been drained, and he turned away from the dregs.

One afternoon Professor Hardage found him sitting with his familiar Shakespeare on his knees. As he looked up, he stretched out his hand in eager welcome and said: "Listen once more;" and he read the great kindling speech of King Henry to his English yeomen on the eve of battle.

He laid the book aside.

"Of course you have noticed how Shakespeare likes this word 'mettle,' how he likes the thing. The word can be seen from afar over the vast territory of his plays like the same battle-flag set up in different parts of a field. It is conspicuous in the heroic English plays, and in the Roman and in the Greek; it waves alike over comedy and tragedy as a rallying signal to human nature. I imagine I can see his face as he writes of the mettle of children—the mettle of a boy—the quick mettle of a schoolboy—a lad of mettle—the mettle of a gentleman—the mettle of the sex—the mettle of a woman, Lady Macbeth—the mettle of a king—the mettle of a speech—even the mettle of a rascal—mettle in death. I love to think of him, a man who had known trouble, writing the words: 'The insuppressive mettle of our spirits.'

"But this particular phrase—the mettle of the pasture—belongs rather to our century than to his, more to Darwin than to the theatre of that time. What most men are thinking of now, if they think at all, is of our earth, a small grass-grown planet hung in space. And, unaccountably making his appearance on it, is man, a pasturing animal, deriving his mettle from his pasture. The old question comes newly up to us: Is anything ever added to him? Is anything ever lost to him? Evolution—is it anything more than change? Civilizations—are they anything but different arrangements of the elements of man's nature with reference to the preeminence of some elements and the subsidence of others?

"Suppose you take the great passions: what new one has been added, what old one has been lost? Take all the passions you find in Greek literature, in the Roman. Have you not seen them reappear in American life in your own generation? I believe I have met them in my office. You may think I have not seen Paris and Helen, but I have. And I have seen Orestes and Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Oedipus. Do you suppose I have not met Tarquin and Virginia and Lucretia and Shylock—to come down to nearer times—and seen Lear and studied Macbeth in the flesh? I knew Juliet once, and behind locked doors I have talked with Romeo. They are all here in any American commonwealth at the close of our century: the great tragedies are numbered—the oldest are the newest. So that sometimes I fix my eyes only on the old. I see merely the planet with its middle green belt of pasture and its poles of snow and ice; and wandering over that green belt for a little while man the pasturing animal—with the mystery of his ever being there and the mystery of his dust—with nothing ever added to him, nothing ever lost out of him—his only power being but the power to vary the uses of his powers.

"Then there is the other side, the side of the new. I like to think of the marvels that the pasturing animal has accomplished in our own country. He has had new thoughts, he has done things never seen elsewhere or before. But after all the question remains, what is our characteristic mettle? What is the mettle of the American? He has had new ideas; but has he developed a new virtue or carried any old virtue forward to characteristic development? Has he added to the civilizations of Europe the spectacle of a single virtue transcendently exercised? We are not braver than other brave people, we are not more polite, we are not more honest or more truthful or more sincere or kind. I wish to God that some virtue, say the virtue of truthfulness, could be known throughout the world as the unfailing mark of the American—the mettle of his pasture. Not to lie in business, not to lie in love, not to lie in religion—to be honest with one's fellow-men, with women, with God—suppose the rest of mankind would agree that this virtue constituted the characteristic of the American! That would be fame for ages.

"I believe that we shall sometime become celebrated for preeminence in some virtue. Why, I have known young fellows in my office that I have believed unmatched for some fine trait or noble quality. You have met them in your classes."

He broke off abruptly and remained silent for a while.

"Have you seen Rowan lately?" he asked, with frank uneasiness: and receiving the reply which he dreaded, he soon afterward arose and passed brokenly down the street.

For some weeks now he had been missing Rowan; and this was the second cause of his restlessness and increasing loneliness. The failure of Rowan's love affair was a blow to him: it had so linked him to the life of the young—was the last link. And since then he had looked for Rowan in vain; he had waited for him of mornings at his office, had searched for him on the streets, scanning all young men on horseback or in buggies; had tried to find him in the library, at the livery stable, at the bank where he was a depositor and director. There was no ground for actual uneasiness concerning Rowan's health, for Rowan's neighbors assured him in response to his inquiries that he was well and at work on the farm.

"If he is in trouble, why does he not come and tell me? Am I not worth coming to see? Has he not yet understood what he is to me? But how can he know, how can the young ever know how the old love them? And the old are too proud to tell." He wrote letters and tore them up.

As we stand on the rear platform of a train and see the mountains away from which we are rushing rise and impend as if to overwhelm us, so in moving farther from his past very rapidly now, it seemed to follow him as a landscape growing always nearer and clearer. His mind dwelt more on the years when hatred had so ruined him, costing him the only woman he had ever asked to be his wife, costing him a fuller life, greater honors, children to leave behind.

He was sitting alone in his rear office the middle of one afternoon, alone among his books. He had outspread before him several that are full of youth. Barbee was away, the street was very quiet. No one dropped in—perhaps all were tired of hearing him talk. It was not yet the hour for Professor Hardage to walk in. A watering-cart creaked slowly past the door and the gush of the drops of water sounded like a shower and the smell of the dust was strong. Far away in some direction were heard the cries of school children at play in the street. A bell was tolling; a green fly, entering through the rear door, sang loud on the dusty window-panes and then flew out and alighted on a plant of nightshade springing up rank at the doorstep.

He was not reading and his thoughts were the same old thoughts. At length on the quiet air, coming nearer, were heard the easy roll of wheels and the slow measured step of carriage horses. The sound caught his ear and he listened with quick eagerness. Then he rose trembling and waited. The carriage had stopped at the door; a moment later there was a soft low knock on the lintel and Mrs. Meredith entered. He met her but she said: "May I go in there?" and entered the private office.

She brought with her such grace and sweetness of full womanly years that as she seated herself opposite him and lifted her veil away from the purity of her face, it was like the revelation of a shrine and the office became as a place of worship. She lifted the veil from the dignity and seclusion of her life. She did not speak at once but looked about her. Many years had passed since she had entered that office, for it had long ago seemed best to each of them that they should never meet. He had gone back to his seat at the desk with the opened books lying about him as though he had been searching one after another for the lost fountain of youth. He sat there looking at her, his white hair falling over his leonine head and neck, over his clear mournful eyes. The sweetness of his face, the kindness of it, the shy, embarrassed, almost guilty look on it from the old pain of being misunderstood—the terrible pathos of it all, she saw these; but whatever her emotions, she was not a woman to betray them at such a moment, in such a place.

"I do not come on business," she said. "All the business seems to have been attended to; life seems very easy, too easy: I have so little to do. But I am here, Ravenel, and I suppose I must try to say what brought me."

She waited for some time, unable to speak.

"Ravenel," she said at length, "I cannot go on any longer without telling you that my great sorrow in life has been the wrong I did you."

He closed his eyes quickly and stretched out his hand against her, as though to shut out the vision of things that rose before him—as though to stop words that would unman him.

"But I was a young girl! And what does a young girl understand about her duty in things like that? I know it changed your whole life; you will never know what it has meant in mine."

"Caroline," he said, and he looked at her with brimming eyes, "if you had married me, I'd have been a great man. I was not great enough to be great without you. The single road led the wrong way—to the wrong things!"

"I know," she said, "I know it all. And I know that tears do not efface mistakes, and that our prayers do not atone for our wrongs."

She suddenly dropped her veil and rose,

"Do not come out to help me," she said as he struggled up also.

He did not wish to go, and he held out his hand and she folded her soft pure hands about it; then her large noble figure moved to the side of his and through her veil—her love and sorrow hidden from him—she lifted her face and kissed him.

V

And during these days when Judge Morris was speaking his mind about old tragedies that never change, and new virtues—about scandal and guilt and innocence—it was during these days that the scandal started and spread and did its work on the boy he loved—and no one had told him.

The summer was drawing to an end. During the last days of it Kate wrote to Isabel:

"I could not have believed, dearest friend, that so long a time would pass without my writing. Since you went away it has been eternity. And many things have occurred which no one foresaw or imagined. I cannot tell you how often I have resisted the impulse to write. Perhaps I should resist now; but there are some matters which you ought to understand; and I do not believe that any one else has told you or will tell you. If I, your closest friend, have shrunk, how could any one else be expected to perform the duty?

"A week or two after you left I understood why you went away mysteriously, and why during that last visit to me you were unlike yourself. I did not know then that your gayety was assumed, and that you were broken-hearted beneath your brave disguises. But I remember your saying that some day I should know. The whole truth has come out as to why you broke your engagement with Rowan, and why you left home. You can form no idea what a sensation the news produced. For a while nothing else was talked of, and I am glad for your sake that you were not here.

"I say the truth came out; but even now the town is full of different stories, and different people believe different things. But every friend of yours feels perfectly sure that Rowan was unworthy of you, and that you did right in discarding him. It is safe to say that he has few friends left among yours. He seldom comes to town, and I hear that he works on the farm like a common hand as he should. One day not long after you left I met him on the street. He was coming straight up to speak to me as usual. But I had the pleasure of staring him in the eyes and of walking deliberately past him as though he were a stranger—except that I gave him one explaining look. I shall never speak to him.

"His mother has the greatest sympathy of every one. They say that no one has told her the truth: how could any one tell her such things about her own son? Of course she must know that you dropped him and that we have all dropped him. They say that she is greatly saddened and that her health seems to be giving way.

"I do not know whether you have heard the other sensation regarding the Meredith family. You refused Rowan; and now Dent is going to marry a common girl in the neighborhood. Of course Dent Meredith was always noted for being a quiet little bookworm, near-sighted, and without any knowledge of girls. So it doesn't seem very unnatural for him to have collected the first specimen that he came across as he walked about over the country. This marriage which is to take place in the autumn is the second shock to his mother.

"You will want to hear of other people. And this reminds me that a few of your friends have turned against you and insist that these stories about Rowan are false, and even accuse you of starting them. This brings me to Marguerite.

"Soon after her ball she had typhoid fever. In her delirium of whom do you suppose she incessantly and pitifully talked? Every one had supposed that she and Barbee were sweethearts—and had been for years. But Barbee's name was never on her lips. It was all Rowan, Rowan, Rowan. Poor child, she chided him for being so cold to her; and she talked to him about the river of life and about his starting on the long voyage from the house of his fathers; and begged to be taken with him, and said that in their family the women never loved but once. When she grew convalescent, there was a consultation of the grandmother and the mother and the doctors: one passion now seemed to constitute all that was left of Marguerite's life; and that was like a flame burning her strength away.

"They did as the doctor said had to be done. Mrs. Meredith had been very kind during her illness, had often been to the house. They kept from her of course all knowledge of what Marguerite had disclosed in her delirium. So when Marguerite by imperceptible degrees grew stronger, Mrs. Meredith begged that she might be moved out to the country for the change and the coolness and the quiet; and the doctors availed themselves of this plan as a solution of their difficulty—to lessen Marguerite's consuming desire by gratifying it. So she and her mother went out to the Merediths'. The change proved beneficial. I have not been driving myself, although the summer has been so long and hot; and during the afternoons I have so longed to see the cool green lanes with the sun setting over the fields. But of course people drive a great deal and they often meet Mrs. Meredith with Marguerite in the carriage beside her. At first it was Marguerite's mother and Marguerite. Then it was Mrs. Meredith and Marguerite; and now it is Rowan and Marguerite. They drive alone and she sits with her face turned toward him—in open idolatry. She is to stay out there until she is quite well. How curiously things work around! If he ever proposes, scandal will make no difference to Marguerite.

"How my letter wanders! But so do my thoughts wander. If you only knew, while I write these things, how I am really thinking of other things. But I must go on in my round-about way. What I started out to say was that when the scandals, I mean the truth, spread over the town about Rowan, the three Marguerites stood by him. You could never have believed that the child had such fire and strength and devotion in her nature. I called on them one day and was coldly treated simply because I am your closest friend. Marguerite pointedly expressed her opinion of a woman who deserts a man because he has his faults. Think of this child's sitting in moral condemnation upon you!

"The Hardages also—of course you have no stancher friends than they are—have stood up stubbornly for Rowan. Professor Hardage became very active in trying to bring the truth out of what he believes to be gossip and misunderstanding. And Miss Anna has also remained loyal to him, and in her sunny, common-sense way flouts the idea of there being any truth in these reports.

"I must not forget to tell you that Judge Morris now spends his Sunday evenings with Professor Hardage. No one has told him: they have spared him. Of course every one knows that he was once engaged to Rowan's mother and that scandal broke the engagement and separated them for life. Only in his case it was long afterward found out that the tales were not true.

"I have forgotten Barbee. He and Marguerite had quarrelled before her illness—no one knows why, unless she was already under the influence of her fatal infatuation for Rowan. Barbee has gone to work. A few weeks ago he won his first serious case in court and attracted attention. They say his speech was so full of dignity and unnecessary rage that some one declared he was simply trying to recover his self-esteem for Marguerite's having called him trivial and not yet altogether grown up.

"Of course you must have had letters of your own, telling you of the arrival of the Fieldings—Victor's mother and sisters; and the house is continually gay with suppers and parties.

"How my letter wanders! It is a sick letter, Isabel, a dead letter. I must not close without going back to the Merediths once more. People have been driving out to see the little farm and the curious little house of Dent Meredith's bride elect—a girl called Pansy Something. It lies near enough to the turnpike to be in full view—too full view. They say it is like a poultry farm and that the bride is a kind of American goose girl: it will be a marriage between geology and the geese. The geese will have the best of it.

"Dearest friend, what shall I tell you of my own life—of my nights, of the mornings when I wake, of these long, lonesome, summer afternoons? Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing! I should rather write to you how, my thoughts go back to the years of our girlhood together when we were so happy, Isabel, so happy, so happy! What ideals we formed as to our marriages and our futures!

"KATE.

"P.S.—I meant to tell you that of course I shall do everything in my power to break up the old friendship between George and Rowan. Indeed, I have already done it."

VI

This letter brought Isabel home at once through three days of continuous travel. From the station she had herself driven straight to Mrs. Osborn's house, and she held the letter in her hand as she went.

Her visit lasted for some time and it was not pleasant. When Mrs. Osborn hastened down, surprised at Isabel's return and prepared to greet her with the old warmth, her greeting was repelled and she herself recoiled, hurt and disposed to demand an explanation.

"Isabel," she said reproachfully, "is this the way you come back to me?"

Isabel did not heed but spoke: "As soon as I received this letter, I determined to come home. I wished to know at once what these things are that are being said about Rowan. What are they?"

Mrs. Osborn hesitated: "I should rather not tell you."

"But you must tell me: my name has been brought into this, and I must know."

While she listened her eyes flashed and when she spoke her voice trembled with excitement and anger. "These things are not true," she said. "Only Rowan and I know what passed between us. I told no one, he told no one, and it is no one's right to know. A great wrong has been done him and a great wrong has been done me; and I shall stay here until these wrongs are righted."

"And is it your feeling that you must begin with me?" said Mrs. Osborn, bitterly.

"Yes, Kate; you should not have believed these things. You remember our once saying to each other that we would try never to believe slander or speak slander or think slander? It is unworthy of you to have done so now."

"Do you realize to whom you are speaking, and that what I have done has been through friendship for you?"

Isabel shook her head resolvedly. "Your friendship for me cannot exact of you that you should be untrue to yourself and false to others. You say that you refuse to speak to Rowan on the street. You say that you have broken up the friendship between Mr. Osborn and him. Rowan is the truest friend Mr. Osborn has ever had; you know this. But in breaking off that friendship, you have done more than you have realized: you have ended my friendship with you."

"And this is gratitude for my devotion to you and my willingness to fight your battles!" said Mrs. Osborn, rising.