The Mettle of the Pasture

"You cannot fight my battles without fighting Rowan's. My wish to marry him or not to marry him is one thing; my willingness to see him ruined is another."

Isabel drove home. She rang the bell as though she were a stranger. When her maid met her at the door, overjoyed at her return, she asked for her grandmother and passed at once into her parlors. As she did so, Mrs. Conyers came through the hall, dressed to go out. At the sound of Isabel's voice, she, who having once taken hold of a thing never let it go, dropped her parasol; and as she stooped to pick it up, the blood rushed to her face.

"I wish to speak to you," said Isabel, coming quickly out into the hall as though to prevent her grandmother's exit. Her voice was low and full of shame and indignation.

"I am at your service for a little while," said Mrs. Conyers, carelessly; "later I am compelled to go out." She entered the parlors, followed by Isabel, and, seating herself in the nearest chair, finished buttoning her glove.

Isabel sat silent a moment, shocked by her reception. She had not realized that she was no longer the idol of that household and of its central mind; and we are all loath to give up faith in our being loved still, where we have been loved ever. She was not aware that since she had left home she had been disinherited. She would not have cared had she known; but she was now facing what was involved in the disinheritance—dislike; and in the beginning of dislike there was the ending of the old awe with which the grandmother had once regarded the grandchild.

But she came quickly back to the grave matter uppermost in her mind. "Grandmother," she said, "I received a few days ago a letter from Kate Osborn. In it she told me that there were stories in circulation about Rowan. I have come home to find out what these stories are. On the way from the station I stopped at Mrs. Osborn's, and she told me. Grandmother, this is your work."

Mrs. Conyers pushed down the thumb of her glove.

"Have I denied it? But why do you attempt to deny that it is also your work?"

Isabel sat regarding her with speechless, deepening horror. She was not prepared for this revelation. Mrs. Conyers did not wait, but pressed on with a certain debonair enjoyment of her advantage.

"You refused to recognize my right to understand a matter that affected me and affected other members of the family as well as yourself. You showed no regard for the love I had cherished for you many a year. You put me aside as though I had no claim upon your confidence—I believe you said I was not worthy of it; but my memory is failing—perhaps I wrong you."

"It is true!" said Isabel, with triumphant joy in reaffirming it on present grounds. "It is true!"

"Very well," said Mrs. Conyers, "we shall let that pass. It was of consequence then; it is of no consequence now: these little personal matters are very trivial. But there was a serious matter that you left on my hands; the world always demands an explanation of what it is compelled to see and cannot understand. If no explanation is given, it creates an explanation. It was my duty to see that it did not create an explanation in this case. Whatever it may have been that took place between you and Rowan, I did not intend that the responsibility should rest upon you, even though you may have been willing that it should rest there. You discarded Rowan; I was compelled to prevent people from thinking that Rowan discarded you. Your reason for discarding him you refused to confide to me; I was compelled therefore to decide for myself what it probably was. Ordinarily when a man is dropped by a girl under such circumstances, it is for this," she tapped the tips of her fingers one by one as she went on, "or for this, or for this, or for this; you can supply the omitted words—nearly any one can—the world always does. You see, it becomes interesting. As I had not your authority for stating which one of these was the real reason, I was compelled to leave people at liberty to choose for themselves. I could only say that I myself did not know; but that certainly it was for some one of these reasons, or two of them, or for all of them."

"You have tried to ruin him!" Isabel cried, white with suffering.

"On the contrary, I received my whole idea of this from you. Nothing that I said to others about him was quite so bad as what you said to me; for you knew the real reason of your discarding him, and the reason was so bad—or so good—that you could not even confide it to me, your natural confidant. You remember saying that we must drop him from the list of our acquaintances, must not receive him at the house, or recognize him in society, or speak, to him in public. I protested that this would be very unjust to him, and that he might ask me at least the grounds for so insulting him; you assured me that he would never dare ask. And now you affect to be displeased with me for believing what you said, and trying to defend you from criticism, and trying to protect the good name of the family."

"Ah," cried Isabel, "you can give fair reasons for foul deeds. You always could. We often do, we women. The blacker our conduct, the better the names with which we cover it. If you would only glory openly in what you have done and stand by it! Not a word of what you have said is true, as you have said it. When I left home not a human being but yourself knew that there had been trouble between Rowan and me. It need never have become public, had you let the matter be as I asked you to do, and as you solemnly promised that you would. It is you who have deliberately made the trouble and scattered the gossip and spread the scandal. Why do you not avow that your motive was revenge, and that your passion was not justice, but malice. Ah, you are too deep a woman to try to seem so shallow!"

"Can I be of any further service to you?" said Mrs. Conyers with perfect politeness, rising. "I am sorry that the hour of my engagement has come. Are you to be in town long?"

"I shall be here until I have undone what you have done," cried Isabel, rising also and shaking with rage. "The decencies of life compel me to shield you still, and for that reason I shall stay in this house. I am not obliged to ask this as a privilege; it is my right."

"Then I shall have the pleasure of seeing you often."

Isabel went up to her room as usual and summoned her maid, and ordered her carriage to be ready in half an hour.

Half an hour later she came down and drove to the Hardages'. She showed no pleasure in seeing him again, and he no surprise in seeing her.

"I have been expecting you," he said; "I thought you would be brought back by all this."

"Then you have heard what they are saying about Rowan?"

"I suppose we have all heard," he replied, looking at her sorrowfully.

"You have not believed these things?"

"I have denied them as far as I could. I should have denied that anything had occurred; but you remember I could not do that after what you told me. You said something had occurred."

"Yes, I know," she said. "But you now have my authority at least to say that these things are not true. What I planned for the best has been misused and turned against him and against me. Have you seen him?"

"He has been in town, but I have not seen him."

"Then you must see him at once. Tell me one thing: have you heard it said that I am responsible for the circulation of these stories?"

"Yes."

"Do you suppose he has heard that? And could he believe it? Yet might he not believe it? But how could he, how could he!"

"You must come here and stay with us. Anna will want you." He could not tell her his reason for understanding that she would not wish to stay at home.

"No, I should like to come; but it is better for me to stay at home. But I wish Rowan to come to see me here. Judge Morris—has he done nothing?"

"He does not know. No one has told him."

Her expression showed that she did not understand.

"Years ago, when he was about Rowan's age, scandals like these were circulated about him. We know how much his life is wrapped up In Rowan. He has not been well this summer: we spared him."

"But you must tell him at once. Say that I beg him to write to Rowan to come to see him. I want Rowan to tell him everything—and to tell you everything."

All the next day Judge Morris stayed in his rooms. The end of life seemed suddenly to have been bent around until it touched the beginning. At last he understood.

"It was she then," he said. "I always suspected her; but I had no proof of her guilt; and if she had not been guilty, she could never have proved her innocence. And now for years she has smiled at me, clasped my hands, whispered into my ear, laughed in my eyes, seemed to be everything to me that was true. Well, she has been everything that is false. And now she has fallen upon the son of the woman whom she tore from me. And the vultures of scandal are tearing at his heart. And he will never be able to prove his innocence!"

He stayed in his rooms all that day. Rowan, in answer to his summons, had said that he should come about the middle of the afternoon; and it was near the middle of the afternoon now. As he counted the minutes, Judge Morris was unable to shut out from his mind the gloomier possibilities of the case.

"There is some truth behind all this," he said. "She broke her engagement with him,—at least, she severed all relations with him; and she would not do that without grave reason." He was compelled to believe that she must have learned from Rowan himself the things that had compelled her painful course. Why had Rowan never confided these things to him? His mind, while remaining the mind of a friend, almost the mind of a father toward a son, became also the mind of a lawyer, a criminal lawyer, with the old, fixed, human bloodhound passion for the scent of crime and the footsteps of guilt.

It was with both attitudes that he himself answered Rowan's ring; he opened the door half warmly and half coldly. In former years when working up his great cases involving life and death, it had been an occasional custom of his to receive his clients, if they were socially his friends, not in his private office, but in his rooms; it was part of his nature to show them at such crises his unshaken trust in their characters. He received Rowan in his rooms now. It was a clear day; the rooms had large windows; and the light streaming in took from them all the comfort which they acquired under gaslight: the carpets were faded, the rugs were worn out and lay in the wrong places. It was seen to be a desolate place for a desolated life.

"How are you, Rowan?" he said, speaking as though he had seen him the day before, and taking no note of changes in his appearance. Without further words he led the way into his sitting room and seated himself in his leather chair.

"Will you smoke?"

They had often smoked as they sat thus when business was before them, or if no business, questions to be intimately discussed about life and character and good and bad. Rowan did not heed the invitation, and the Judge lighted a cigar for himself. He was a long time in lighting it, and burned two or three matches at the end of it after it was lighted, keeping a cloud of smoke before his eyes and keeping his eyes closed. When the smoke rose and he lay back in his chair, he looked across at the young man with the eyes of an old lawyer who had drawn the truth out of the breast of many a criminal by no other command than their manly light. Rowan sat before him without an effort at composure. There was something about him that suggested a young officer out of uniform, come home with a browned face to try to get himself court-martialled. He spoke first:

"I have had Isabel's letter, and I have come to tell you."

"I need not say to you, tell me the whole truth."

"No, you need not say that to me. I should have told you long ago, if it had been a duty. But it was not a duty. You had not the right to know; there was no reason why you should know. This was a matter which concerned only the woman whom I was to marry." His manner had the firm and quiet courtesy that was his birthright.

A little after dark, Rowan emerged into the street. His carriage was waiting for him and he entered it and went home. Some minutes later, Judge Morris came down and walked to the Hardages'. He rang and asked for Professor Hardage and waited for him on the door-step. When Professor Hardage appeared, he said to him very solemnly: "Get your hat."

The two men walked away, the Judge directing their course toward the edge of the town. "Let us get to a quiet place," he said, "where we can talk without being overheard." It was a pleasant summer night and the moon was shining, and they stepped off the sidewalk and took the middle of the pike. The Judge spoke at last, looking straight ahead.

"He had a child, and when he asked Isabel to marry him he told her."

They walked on for a while without anything further being said.

When Professor Hardage spoke, his tone was reflective:

"It was this that made it impossible for her to marry him. Her love for him was everything to her; he destroyed himself for her when he destroyed himself as an ideal. Did he tell you the story?"

"Told everything."

By and by the Judge resumed: "It was a student's love affair, and he would have married her. She said that if she married him, there would never be any happiness for her in life; she was not in his social class, and, moreover, their marriage would never be understood as anything but a refuge from their shame, and neither of them would be able to deny this. She disappeared sometime after the birth of the child. More than a year later, maybe it was two years, he received a letter from her stating that she was married to a man in her own class and that her husband suspected nothing, and that she expected to live a faithful wife to him and be the mother of his children. The child had been adopted, the traces of its parentage had been wiped out, those who had adopted it could do more for its life and honor than he could. She begged him not to try to find her or ruin her by communicating the past to her husband. That's about all."

"The old tragedy—old except to them."

"Old enough. Were we not speaking the other day of how the old tragedies are the new ones? I get something new out of this; you get the old. What strikes me about it is that the man has declined to shirk—that he has felt called upon not to injure any other life by his silence. I wish I had a right to call it the mettle of a young American, his truthfulness. As he put the case to me, what he got out of it was this: Here was a girl deceiving her husband about her past—otherwise he would never have married her. As the world values such things, what it expected of Rowan was that he should go off and marry a girl and conceal his past. He said that he would not lie to a classmate in college, he would not cheat a professor; was it any better silently to lie to and cheat the woman that he loved and expected to make the mother of his children? Whatever he might have done with any one else, there was something in the nature of the girl whom he did come to love that made it impossible: she drove untruthfulness out of him as health drives away disease. He saved his honor with her, but he lost her."

"She saved her honor through giving up him. But it is high ground, it is a sad hilltop, that each has climbed to."

"Hardage, we can climb so high that we freeze."

They turned back. The Judge spoke again with a certain sad pride:

"I like their mettle, it is Shakespearean mettle, it is American mettle. We lie in business, and we lie in religion, and we lie to women. Perhaps if a man stopped lying to a woman, by and by he might begin to stop lying for money, and at last stop lying with his Maker. But this boy, what can you and I do for him? We can never tell the truth about this; and as we can try to clear him, unless we ourselves lie, we shall leave him the victim of a flock of lies."

Isabel remained at home a week.

During her first meeting with Rowan, she effaced all evidences that there had ever been a love affair between them. They resumed their social relations temporarily and for a definite purpose—this was what she made him understand at the outset and to the end. All that she said to him, all that she did, had no further significance than her general interest in his welfare and her determination to silence the scandal for which she herself was in a way innocently responsible. Their old life without reference to it was assumed to be ended; and she put all her interest into what she assumed to be his new life; this she spoke of as a certainty, keeping herself out of it as related to it in any way. She forced him to talk about his work, his plans, his ambitions; made him feel always not only that she did not wish to see him suffer, but that she expected to see him succeed.

They were seen walking together and driving together. He demurred, but she insisted. "I will not accept such a sacrifice," he said, but she overruled him by her reply: "It is not a sacrifice; it is a vindication of myself, that you cannot oppose." But he knew that there was more in it than what she called vindication of herself; there was the fighting friendship of a comrade.

During these days, Isabel met cold faces. She found herself a fresh target for criticism, a further source of misunderstanding. And there was fresh suffering, too, which no one could have foreseen. Late one twilight when she and Rowan were driving, they passed Marguerite driving also, she being still a guest at the Merediths', and getting well. Each carriage was driving slowly, and the road was not wide, and the wheels almost locked, and there was time enough for everything to be seen. And the next day, Marguerite went home from the Merediths' and passed into a second long illness.

The day came for Isabel to leave—she was going away to remain a long time, a year, two years. They had had their last drive and twilight was falling when they returned to the Hardages'. She was standing on the steps as she gave him both her hands.

"Good-by," she said, in the voice of one who had finished her work. "I hardly know what to say—I have said everything. Perhaps I ought to tell you my last feeling is, that you will make life a success, that nothing will pull you down. I suppose that the life of each of us, if it is worth while, is not made up of one great effort and of one failure or of one success, but of many efforts, many failures, partial successes. But I am afraid we all try at first to realize our dreams. Good-by!"

"Marry me," he said, tightening his grasp on her hands and speaking as though he had the right.

She stepped quickly back from him. She felt a shock, a delicate wound, and she said with a proud tear: "I did not think you would so misjudge me in all that I have been trying to do."

She went quickly in.

VII

It was a morning in the middle of October when Dent and Pansy were married.

The night before had been cool and clear after a rain and a long-speared frost had fallen. Even before the sun lifted itself above the white land, a full red rose of the sky behind the rotting barn, those early abroad foresaw what the day would be. Nature had taken personal interest in this union of her two children, who worshipped her in their work and guarded her laws in their characters, and had arranged that she herself should be present in bridal livery.

The two prim little evergreens which grew one on each side of the door-step waited at respectful attention like heavily powdered festal lackeys. The scraggy aged cedars of the yard stood about in green velvet and brocade incrusted with gems. The doorsteps themselves were softly piled with the white flowers of the frost, and the bricks of the pavement strewn with multitudinous shells and stars of dew and air. Every poor stub of grass, so economically cropped by the geese, wore something to make it shine. In the back yard a clothes-line stretched between a damson and a peach tree, and on it hung forgotten some of Pansy's father's underclothes; but Nature did what she could to make the toiler's raiment look like diamonded banners, flung bravely to the breeze in honor of his new son-in-law. Everything—the duck troughs, the roof of the stable, the cart shafts, the dry-goods box used as a kennel—had ugliness hidden away under that prodigal revelling ermine of decoration. The sun itself had not long risen before Nature even drew over that a bridal veil of silver mist, so that the whole earth was left wrapped in whiteness that became holiness.

Pansy had said that she desired a quiet wedding, so that she herself had shut up the ducks that they might not get to Mrs. Meredith. And then she had made the rounds and fed everything; and now a certain lethargy and stupor of food quieted all creatures and gave to the valley the dignity of a vocal solitude.

The botanist bride was not in the least abashed during the ceremony. Nor proud: Mrs. Meredith more gratefully noticed this. And she watched closely and discovered with relief that Pansy did not once glance at her with uneasiness or for approval. The mother looked at Dent with eyes growing dim. "She will never seem to be the wife of my son," she said, "but she will make her children look like his children."

And so it was all over and they were gone—slipped away through the hiding white mists without a doubt of themselves, without a doubt of each other, mating as naturally as the wild creatures who never know the problems of human selection, or the problems that civilization leaves to be settled after selection has been made.

Mrs. Meredith and Rowan and the clergyman were left with the father and the children, and with an unexampled wedding collation—one of Pansy's underived masterpieces. The clergyman frightened the younger children; they had never seen his like either with respect to his professional robes or his superhuman clerical voice—their imaginations balancing unsteadily between the impossibility of his being a man in a nightgown and the impossibility of his being a woman with a mustache.

After his departure their fright and apprehensions settled on Mrs. Meredith. They ranged themselves on chairs side by side against a wall, and sat confronting her like a class in the public school fated to be examined in deadly branches. None moved except when she spoke, and then all writhed together but each in a different way; the most comforting word from her produced a family spasm with individual proclivities. Rowan tried to talk with the father about crops: they were frankly embarrassed. What can a young man with two thousand acres of the best land say to an old man with fifty of the poorest?

The mother and son drove home in silence. She drew one of his hands into her lap and held it with close pressure. They did not look at each other.

As the carriage rolled easily over the curved driveway, through the noble forest trees they caught glimpses of the house now standing clear in afternoon sunshine. Each had the same thought of how empty it waited there without Dent—henceforth less than a son, yet how much more; more than brother, but how much less. How a brief ceremony can bind separated lives and tear bound ones apart!

"Rowan," she said, as they walked slowly from the carriage to the porch, she having clasped his arm more intimately, "there is something I have wanted to do and have been trying to do for a long time. It must not be put off any longer. We must go over the house this afternoon. There are a great many things that I wish to show you and speak to you about—things that have to be divided between you and Dent."

"Not to-day! not to-day!" he cried, turning to her with quick appeal. But she shook her head slowly, with brave cheerfulness.

"Yes; to-day. Now; and then we shall be over with it. Wait for me here." She passed down the long hall to her bedroom, and as she disappeared he rushed into the parlors and threw himself on a couch with his hands before his face; then he sprang up and came out into the hall again and waited with a quiet face.

When she returned, smiling, she brought with her a large bunch of keys, and she took his arm dependently as they went up the wide staircase. She led him to the upper bedrooms first—in earlier years so crowded and gay with guests, but unused during later ones. The shutters were closed, and the afternoon sun shot yellow shafts against floors and walls. There was a perfume of lavender, of rose leaves.