The Mettle of the Pasture

Some of the books they had written were in the library, lucid explanations of the First Cause and of how the Judge of all the earth should be looked at from without and from within. Some that they had most loved to read were likewise there: "Pollock's Course of Time"; the slow outpourings of Young, sad sectary; Milton, with the passages on Hell approvingly underscored—not as great poetry, but as great doctrine; nowhere in the bookcases a sign of the "Areopagitica," of "Comus," and "L'Allegro"; but most prominent the writings of Jonathan Edwards, hoarsest of the whole flock of New World theological ravens.

Her marriage into this family had caused universal surprise. It had followed closely upon the scandals in regard to the wild young Ravenel Morris, the man she loved, the man she had promised to marry. These scandals had driven her to the opposite extreme from her first choice by one of life's familiar reactions; and in her wounded flight she had thrown herself into the arms of a man whom people called irreproachable. He was a grave lawyer, one of the best of his kind; nevertheless he and she, when joined for the one voyage of two human spirits, were like a funeral barge lashed to some dancing boat, golden-oared, white-sailed, decked with flowers. Hope at the helm and Pleasure at the prow.

For she herself had sprung from a radically different stock: from sanguine, hot-blooded men; congressmen shaping the worldly history of their fellow-beings and leaving the non-worldly to take care of itself; soldiers illustrious in the army and navy; hale country gentlemen who took the lead in the country's hardy sports and pleasures; all sowing their wild oats early in life with hands that no power could stay; not always living to reap, but always leaving enough reaping to be done by the sad innocent who never sow; fathers of large families; and even when breaking the hearts of their wives, never losing their love; for with their large open frailties being men without crime and cowardice, tyrannies, meannesses.

With these two unlike hereditary strains before her she had, during the years, slowly devised the maternal philosophy of her sons.

Out of those grave mental workers had come Dent—her student. She loved to believe that in the making of him her own blood asserted itself by drawing him away from the tyrannical interpretation of God to the neutral investigation of the earth, from black theology to sunlit science—so leaving him at work and at peace, the ancestral antagonisms becoming neutralized by being blended.

But Rowan! while he was yet a little fellow, and she and her young husband would sit watching him at play, characteristics revealed themselves which led her to shake her head rebukingly and say: "He gets these traits from you." At other times contradictory characteristics appeared and the father, looking silently at her, would in effect inquire: "Whence does he derive these?" On both accounts she began to look with apprehension toward this son's maturing years. And always, as the years passed, evidence was forced more plainly upon her that in him the two natures he inherited were antagonistic still; each alternately uppermost; both in unceasing warfare; thus endowing him with a double nature which might in time lead him to a double life. So that even then she had begun to take upon herself the burden of dreading lest she should not only be the mother of his life, but the mother of his tragedies. She went over this again and again: "Am I to be the mother of his tragedies?"

As she sat this young summer morning after he had left her so strangely, all at once the world became autumn to her remembrance.

An autumn morning: the rays of the sun shining upon the silvery mists swathing the trees outside, upon the wet and many-colored leaves; a little frost on the dark grass here and there; the first fires lighted within; the carriage already waiting at the door; the breakfast hurriedly choked down—in silence; the mournful noise of his trunk being brought downstairs—his first trunk. Then the going out upon the veranda and the saying good-by to him; and then—the carriage disappearing in the silver mists, with a few red and yellow leaves whirled high from the wheels.

That was the last of the first Rowan,—youth at the threshold of manhood. Now off for college, to his university in New England. As his father and she stood side by side (he being too frail to take that chill morning ride with his son) he waved his hand protectingly after him, crying out: "He is a good boy." And she, having some wide vision of other mothers of the land who during these same autumn days were bidding God-speed to their idols—picked youth of the republic—she with some wide vision of this large fact stood a proud mother among them all, feeling sure that he would take foremost place in his college for good honest work and for high character and gentle manners and gallant bearing—with not a dark spot in him.

It was toward the close of the first session, after she had learned the one kind of letter he always wrote, that his letters changed. She could not have explained how they were changed, could not have held the pages up to the inspection of any one else and have said, "See! it is here." But she knew it was there, and it stayed there. She waited for his father to notice it; but if he ever noticed it, he never told her: nor did she ever confide her discovery to him.

When vacation came, it brought a request from Rowan that he might be allowed to spend the summer with college friends farther north—camping, fishing, hunting, sailing, seeing more of his country. His father's consent was more ready than her own. The second session passed and with the second vacation the request was renewed. "Why does he not come home? Why does he not wish to come home?" she said, wandering restlessly over the house with his letter in her hands; going up to his bedroom and sitting down in the silence of it and looking at his bed—which seemed so strangely white that day—looking at all the preparations she had made for his comfort. "Why does he not come?"

Near the close of the third session he came quickly enough, summoned by his father's short fatal illness.

Some time passed before she observed anything in him but natural changes after so long an absence and grief over his great loss. He shut himself in his room for some days, having it out alone with himself, a young man's first solemn accounting to a father who has become a memory. Gradually there began to emerge his new care of her, and tenderness, a boy's no more. And he stepped forward easily into his place as the head of affairs, as his brother's guardian. But as time wore on and she grew used to him as so much older in mere course of nature, and as graver by his loss and his fresh responsibilities, she made allowances for all these and brushed them away and beheld constantly beneath them that other change.

Often while she sat near him when they were reading, she would look up and note that unaware a shadow had stolen out on his face. She studied that shadow. And one consolation she drew: that whatsoever the cause, it was nothing by which he felt dishonored. At such moments her love broke over him with intolerable longings. She remembered things that her mother had told her about her father; she recalled the lives of her brothers, his uncles. She yearned to say: "What is it, Rowan? You can tell me anything, anything. I know so much more than you believe."

But some restraint dissuaded her from bridging that reserve. She may have had the feeling that she spared him a good deal by her not knowing.

For more than a year after his return he had kept aloof from society—going into town only when business demanded, and accepting no invitations to the gayeties of the neighborhood. He liked rather to have his friends come out to stay with him: sometimes he was off with them for days during the fishing and hunting seasons. Care of the farm and its stock occupied a good deal of his leisure, and there were times when he worked hard in the fields—she thought so unnecessarily. Incessant activity of some kind had become his craving—the only ease.

She became uneasy, she disapproved. For a while she allowed things to have their way, but later she interfered—though as always with her silent strength and irresistible gentleness. Making no comment upon his changed habits and altered tastes, giving no sign of her own purposes, she began the second year of his home-coming to accept invitations for herself and formally reentered her social world; reassumed her own leadership there; demanded him as her escort; often filled the house with young guests; made it for his generation what the home of her girlhood had been to her—in all sacrificing for him the gravity and love of seclusion which had settled over her during the solemn years, years which she knew to be parts of a still more solemn future.

She succeeded. She saw him again more nearly what he had been before the college days—more nearly developing that type of life which belonged to him and to his position.

Finally she saw him in love as she wished; and at this point she gradually withdrew from society again, feeling that he needed her no more.

VI

The noise of wheels on the gravel driveway of the lawn brought the reflections of Mrs. Meredith to an abrupt close. The sound was extremely unpleasant to her; she did not feel in a mood to entertain callers this morning. Rising with regret, she looked out. The brougham of Mrs. Conyers, flashing in the sun, was being driven toward the house—was being driven rapidly, as though speed meant an urgency.

If Mrs. Meredith desired no visitor at all, she particularly disliked the appearance of this one. Rowan's words to her were full of meaning that she did not understand; but they rendered it clear at least that his love affair had been interrupted, if not been ended. She could not believe this due to any fault of his; and friendly relations with the Conyers family was for her instantly at an end with any wrong done to him.

She summoned a maid and instructed her regarding the room in which the visitor was to be received (not in the parlors; they were too full of solemn memories this morning). Then she passed down the long hall to her bedchamber.

The intimacy between these ladies was susceptible of exact analysis; every element comprising it could have been valued as upon a quantitative scale. It did not involve any of those incalculable forces which constitute friendship—a noble mystery remaining forever beyond unravelling.

They found the first basis of their intimacy in a common wish for the union of their offsprings. This subject had never been mentioned between them. Mrs. Conyers would have discussed it had she dared; but she knew at least the attitude of the other. Furthermore, Mrs. Meredith brought to this association a beautiful weakness: she was endowed with all but preternatural insight into what is fine in human nature, but had slight power of discovering what is base; she seemed endowed with far-sightedness in high, clear, luminous atmospheres, but was short-sighted in moral twilights. She was, therefore, no judge of the character of her intimate. As for that lady's reputation, this was well known to her; but she screened herself against this reputation behind what she believed to be her own personal discovery of unsuspected virtues in the misjudged. She probably experienced as much pride in publicly declaring the misjudged a better woman than she was reputed, as that lady would have felt in secretly declaring her to be a worse one.

On the part of Mrs. Conyers, the motives which she brought to the association presented nothing that must be captured and brought down from the heights, she was usually to be explained by mining rather than mounting. Whatever else she might not have been, she was always ore; never rainbows.

Throughout bird and animal and insect life there runs what is recognized as the law of protective assimilation. It represents the necessity under which a creature lives to pretend to be something else as a condition of continuing to be itself. The rose-colored flamingo, curving its long neck in volutions that suggest the petals of a corolla, burying its head under its wing and lifting one leg out of sight, becomes a rank, marvellous flower, blooming on too slight a stalk in its marshes. An insect turns itself into one of the dried twigs of a dead stick. On the margin of a shadowed pool the frog is hued like moss—greenness beside greenness. Mrs. Conyers availed herself of a kind of protective assimilation when she exposed herself to the environment of Mrs. Meredith, adopting devices by which she would be taken for any object in nature but herself. Two familiar devices were applied to her habiliments and her conversations. Mrs. Meredith always dressed well to the natural limit of her bountiful years; Mrs. Conyers usually dressed more than well and more than a generation behind hers. On occasions when she visited Rowan's unconcealed mother, she allowed time to make regarding herself almost an honest declaration. Ordinarily she Was a rose nearly ready to drop, which is bound with a thread of its own color to look as much as possible like a bud that is nearly ready to open.

Her conversations were even more assiduously tinged and fashioned by the needs of accommodation. Sometimes she sat in Mrs. Meredith's parlors as a soul sick of the world's vanities, an urban spirit that hungered for country righteousness. During a walk one day through the gardens she paused under the boughs of a weeping willow and recited, "Cromwell, I charge thee fling away ambition—" She uniformly imparted to Mrs. Meredith the assurance that with her alone she could lay aside all disguises.

This morning she alighted from her carriage at the end of the pavement behind some tall evergreens. As she walked toward the house, though absorbed with a serious purpose, she continued to be as observant of everything as usual. Had an eye been observant of her, it would have been noticed that Mrs. Conyers in all her self-concealment did not conceal one thing—her walk. This one element of her conduct had its curious psychology. She had never been able to forget that certain scandals set going many years before, had altered the course of Mrs. Meredith's life and of the lives of some others. After a lapse of so long a time she had no fear now that she should be discovered. Nevertheless it was impossible for her ever to approach this house without "coming delicately." She "came delicately" in the same sense that Agag, king of Amalek, walked when he was on his way to Saul, who was about to hew him to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.

She approached the house now, observant of everything as she tripped. Had a shutter been hung awry; if a window shade had been drawn too low or a pane of glass had not sparkled, or there had been loose paper on the ground or moulted feathers on the bricks, she would have discovered this with the victorious satisfaction of finding fault. But orderliness prevailed. No; the mat at the front door had been displaced by Rowan's foot as he had hurried from the house. (The impulse was irresistible: she adjusted it with her toe and planted herself on it with a sense of triumph.)

As she took out her own and Isabel's cards, she turned and looked out across the old estate. This was the home she had designed for Isabel: the land, the house, the silver, the glass, the memories, the distinction—they must all be Isabel's.

Some time passed before Mrs. Meredith appeared. Always a woman of dignity and reserve, she had never before in her life perhaps worn a demeanor so dignified and reserved. Her nature called for peace; but if Rowan had been wronged, then there was no peace—and a sacred war is a cruel one. The instant that the two ladies confronted each other, each realized that each concealed something from the other. This discovery instantly made Mrs. Meredith cooler still; it rendered Mrs. Conyers more cordial.

"Isabel regretted that she could not come."

"I am sorry." The tone called for the dismissal of the subject.

"This is scarcely a visit to you," Mrs. Conyers went on; "I have been paying one of my usual pastoral calls: I have been to Ambrose Webb's to see if my cows are ready to return to town. Strawberries are ripe and strawberries call for more cream, and more cream calls for more calves, and more calves call for—well, we have all heard them! I do not understand how a man who looks like Ambrose can so stimulate cattle. Of course my cows are not as fine and fat as Rowan's—that is not to be expected. The country is looking very beautiful. I never come for a drive without regretting that I live in town." (She would have found the country intolerable for the same reason that causes criminals to flock to cities.)

Constraint deepened as the visit was prolonged. Mrs. Conyers begged Mrs. Meredith for a recipe that she knew to be bad; and when Mrs. Meredith had left the room for it, she rose and looked eagerly out of the windows for any sign of Rowan. When Mrs. Meredith returned, for the same reason she asked to be taken into the garden, which was in its splendor of bloom. Mrs. Meredith culled for her a few of the most resplendent blossoms—she could not have offered to any one anything less. Mrs. Conyers was careful not to pin any one of these on; she had discovered that she possessed a peculiarity known to some florists and concealed by those women who suffer from it—that flowers soon wilt when worn by them.

Meanwhile as they walked she talked of flowers, of housekeeping; she discussed Marguerite's coming ball and Dent's brilliant graduation. She enlarged upon this, praising Dent to the disparagement of her own grandson Victor, now in retreat from college on account of an injury received as centre-rush in his football team. Victor, she protested, was above education; his college was a kind of dormitory to athletics.

When we are most earnest ourselves, we are surest to feel the lack of earnestness in others; sincerity stirred to the depths will tolerate nothing less. It thus becomes a new test of a companion. So a weak solution may not reveal a poison when a strong one will. Mrs. Meredith felt this morning as never before the real nature of the woman over whom for years she had tried to throw a concealing charity; and Mrs. Conyers saw as never before in what an impossible soil she had tried to plant poison oak and call it castle ivy.

The ladies parted with coldness. When she was once more seated in her carriage, Mrs. Conyers thrust her head through the window and told the coachman to drive slowly. She tossed the recipe into a pine tree and took in her head. Then she caught hold of a brown silk cord attached to a little brown silk curtain in the front of the brougham opposite her face. It sprang aside, revealing a little toilette mirror. On the cushion beside her lay something under a spread newspaper. She quickly drew off her sombre visiting gloves; and lifting the newspaper, revealed under it a fresh pair of gloves, pearl-colored. She worked her tinted hands nimbly into these. Then she took out a rose-colored scarf or shawl as light as a summer cloud. This she threw round her shoulders; it added no warmth, it added color, meaning. There were a few other youthward changes and additions; and then the brown silk curtain closed over the mirror.

Another woman leaned back in a corner of the brougham. By a trick of the face she had juggled away a generation of her years. The hands were moved backward on the horologe of mortality as we move backward the pointers on the dial of a clock: her face ticked at the hour of two in the afternoon of life instead of half-past five.

There was still time enough left to be malicious.

VII

One morning about a week later she entered her carriage and was driven rapidly away. A soft-faced, middle-aged woman with gray ringlets and nervous eyes stepped timorously upon the veranda and watched her departure with an expression of relief—Miss Harriet Crane, the unredeemed daughter of the household.

She had been the only fruit of her mother's first marriage and she still remained attached to the parental stem despite the most vigorous wavings and shakings of that stem to shed its own product. Nearly fifty years of wintry neglect and summer scorching had not availed to disjoin Harriet from organic dependence upon her mother. And of all conceivable failings in a child of hers that mother could have found none so hard to forgive as the failure to attract a man in a world full of men nearly all bent upon being attracted.

It was by no choice of Harriet's that she was born of a woman who valued children as a kind of social collateral, high-class investments to mature after long periods with at least reasonable profits for the original investors. Nor was it by any volition of hers that she had commended herself to her mother in the beginning by being a beautiful and healthful child: initial pledge that she could be relied upon to turn out lucrative in the end. The parent herself was secretly astounded that she had given birth to a child of so seraphic a disposition.

Trouble and disappointment began with education, for education is long stout resistance. You cannot polish highly a stone that is not hard enough to resist being highly polished. Harriet's soft nature gave way before the advance of the serried phalanxes of knowledge: learning passed her by; and she like the many "passed through school."

By this time her mother had grown alarmed and she brought Harriet out prematurely, that she might be wedded before, so to speak, she was discovered. Meantime Mrs. Crane herself had married a second and a third time, with daughters by the last husband who were little younger than her eldest; and she laughingly protested that nothing is more confusing to a woman than to have in the house children by two husbands. Hence further reason for desiring immediate nuptials: she could remove from the parlors the trace of bi-marital collaboration.

At first only the most brilliant matches were planned for Harriet; these one by one unaccountably came to naught. Later the mother began to fall back: upon those young men who should be glad to embrace such an opportunity; but these less desirable young men failed to take that peculiar view of their destinies. In the meanwhile the Misses Conyers had come on as debutantes and were soon bespoken. At the marriage of the youngest, Harriet's mother had her act as first bridesmaid and dressed her, already fading, as though she were the very spirit of April.

The other sisters were long since gone, scattered north and south with half-grown families; and the big house was almost empty save when they came in troops to visit it.

Harriet's downward career as an article of human merchandise had passed through what are perhaps not wholly unrecognizable stages. At first she had been displayed near the entrance for immediate purchase by the unwary. Then she had been marked down as something that might be secured at a reduced price; but intending buyers preferred to pay more. By and by even this label was taken off and she became a remnant of stock for which there was no convenient space—being moved from shelf to shelf, always a little more shop-worn, a little more out of style. What was really needed was an auction.

Mrs. Conyers did not take much to heart the teachings of her Bible; but it had at least defined for her one point of view: all creatures worth saving had been saved in pairs.

Bitter as were those years for Harriet, others more humiliating followed. The maternal attempts having been discontinued, she, desperate with slights and insults, had put forth some efforts of her own. But it was as though one had been placed in a boat without oars and told to row for life: the little boat under the influence of cosmic tides had merely drifted into shallows and now lay there—forgotten.

This morning as she sat idly rocking on the veranda, she felt that negative happiness which consists in the disappearance of a positively disagreeable thing. Then she began to study how she should spend the forenoon most agreeably. Isabel was upstairs; she would have been perfectly satisfied to talk with her; but for several mornings Isabel had shown unmistakable preference to be let alone; and in the school of life Harriet had attained the highest proficiency in one branch of knowledge at least—never to get in anybody's way. Victor Fielding lay under the trees with a pipe and a book, but she never ventured near him.

So Harriet bethought herself of a certain friend of hers on the other side of town, Miss Anna Hardage, who lived with her brother, Professor Hardage—two people to trust.