Rose of Dutcher's Coolly Part 15

He was adroit. He did not see her too much, and he came always at his best. He appealed to the most imaginative side of her nature. She glorified his calling as well as his person. He was less handsome than his predecessor, but he brought an ample and flowing phraseology, and a critical knowledge of farm-life as well as of town-life. Once he took her to the court-room to hear him plead.

He took her to the socials, and once to the theater. There was his mistake! The play made a most powerful impression upon her, more powerful than anything since the circus at Tyre.

It raised new and wordless ambitions. For the first time in her life she saw society dress on the stage. The play was one which pretended, at least, to show New York and London life. Therefore men in claw-hammer coats came and went, with strange accents and with cabalistic motions of hats and gloves, and women moved about with mystic swagger.

The heroine glowed like a precious stone in each act, now sapphire, now pearl, now ruby. She spoke in a thick, throaty murmur and her white shoulders shone like silver, and her wide childish eyes were like wells of light-diffusing liquid.

Rose gazed at her with unwearying eyes. Her bosom rose and fell as if she had been running, and she said in her heart: "_I_ can do that! I could stand there and do that!"

Then the theme of the play filled her with strange new thoughts. These people lived out before her a condition which she had read about but which had never been discussed in her presence. A husband discovers his wife to have been a lover and mother in her girlhood, and in a tempest of self-righteous pa.s.sion flings her to the ground in scorn and horror.

She clings to his feet (in approved stage fashion), pleading for mercy: "I was so young!"

He would not listen. "Go!--or no, stay--I will go. I make the home over to you, but never look upon my face again."

While Rose burned with shame and indignation, the outraged woman on the stage grew white and stern.

"Who are you to condemn me so?" she asked in icy calm. "Are you the saint you profess to be? Will one offence contain your crime against me?"

"What do you mean?" thundered the man and husband.

"You know what I mean. In my weakness I was stained, ineffaceably; I admit it--but you, in your strength, have you not preyed upon weak women? The law allows you to escape disgrace--nature and law force me to suffer with mine."

Rose thought of Carl and his courtship with such a shudder as one feels in remembering a rescue from an abyss. A hundred great confusing questions floated by in her mind, like clouds in a mist of rain--formless, vast, trailing deeper shadow beneath them. The self-sufficient young lawyer beside her said as the curtain fell:

"There was nothing else for her husband to do but just fire her out."

Rose heard him but did not reply. She felt a sharp revulsion of feeling toward him for his coa.r.s.e, hard tone. When he laid his hand on her she shook it off, and when he asked a question of her she did not reply. He was annoyed also, and so they waited for the curtain to rise on the final act.

The wife was sick and dying. The dramatist had not the courage to work out his theme. He killed the wife, so that the husband should not appear to condone and take her to wife again. She died while he, magnanimously, forgave her.

As they walked home, with fatuous insistence her lover talked with Rose about the case. He took the man's side. He hinted at the reason--presuming upon their intimacy. Men outgrow such experiences, he said; women do not. They are either one thing or the other--either pure as angels or black as devils.

Rose closed her lips tight, and her eyes flamed with indignant protest, but she said nothing in reply. In her heart she knew it was a lie. A woman can set her foot above her dead self as well as a man.

When he tried to kiss her good-bye she pushed him aside and left him without a word. He, too, was a bare and broken ideal. Her heart went back again to William De Lisle, as the young eagle goes back to the sun-warmed cliff to rest and dream, with eyes to the sun.

That night put her girlhood far from her. She grew five years older in the weeks which followed. Her mind took up irresistibly one insoluble problem after another and wrestled with it in silence. Josie's chatter went on around her like the sound of the swallows in the eaves of the old barn at home.

Her mind was like a piece of inconceivably intricate machinery, full of latent and complicated motion. A word, a touch, and it set to work, and out of its working some fine inner heat and glow changed the whole mental and physical equilibrium of her nature, and she became something else, finer, more mysterious, and more alluring--though this she did not realize.

Thereafter the young man of her acquaintance did not draw her. Her eyes had been raised to higher alt.i.tudes. She fell upon her books with terrible industry, in the hope that they would throw some light on her problems and ambitions.

There was nothing she did not think of during these character-forming days. The beauty and peace of love, the physical joy of it; the problem of marriage, the terror of birth--all the things girls are supposed not to think of, and which such girls as Rose must irresistibly think of, came to her, tormenting her, shaking her to the inmost center of her nature, and through it all she seemed quite the hearty young school girl she was, for this thought was wholesome and natural, not morbid in any degree.

She was a child in the presence of the Doctor, but a woman with her suitors. The Doctor helped her very much, but in the most trying moments of her life (and no man can realize these moments) some hidden force rose up to dominate the merely animal forces within. Some organic magnificent inheritance of moral purity.

She was saved by forces within, not by laws without. Opportunities to sin always offer in every life. Virtue is not negative, it is positive; it is a decoration won by fighting, resisting. This sweet and terrible attraction of men and women towards each other is as natural and as moral as the law of gravity, and as inexorable. Its perversion produces trouble. Love must be good and fine and according to nature, else why did it give such joy and beauty?

Natural as was this thought, she hid it from her a.s.sociates. Most women die with it unacknowledged, even to their own spoken thought. She would have been helped by talk with the Doctor, or at least with his wife. But there was a growing barrier between Mrs. Thatcher and herself, and the Doctor did not seem the same good friend. She felt a change coming in the whole household.

When she went home at the close of her second year, she had a feeling that she would never again return to the old sweet companionship with Dr. Thatcher. He was too busy now, apparently, to give her the time he once seemed so glad to give. He never asked her to ride with him now.

She was troubled by it and concluded they were tired of her, and so she, too, grew cold and reserved.

The day she left, the Doctor, after he had driven Rose to the train, called his wife into the office.

"Sit down a moment, wife, I want to talk with you." He faced her bravely. "I guess we'd better arrange for Rose to go to one of the chapter-houses next year. There's no need to beat around the bush--she takes up too much of my thought, and you know it and I know it."

It drew blood to say that. It took manhood to look his wife in the eyes then, but he did it.

"It isn't her fault, and it isn't yours--it isn't mine, as a matter of justice. Rose is just what she's always been, a good, sweet girl--I wouldn't have her see anything but friendly interest in my eyes for half my heart--I'm afraid she will, so--I guess----"

He was talking through set teeth. "I wish you'd tell her we can't offer her a home; I can't do it."

He rose and went to his wife. "My dear, don't cry--you've watched this thing come on in brave silence--not every wife would have kept silence so long. It won't break up our comradeship, will it, dear? We've jogged along so peacefully these fifteen years--we ought to overlook a little thing like this!" He smiled a little, then he stooped and put his arm about her.

"Come, give me a kiss, and let's adopt no more handsome girls till I'm sixty-five."

She rose and lifted her sad face to his. "It's my fault, if I--"

He kissed her and said: "No more of that! You're my faithful wife. What helps the matter materially is this--Rose thinks of me as a sober old settler now."

This ended it so far as any outward showing ever defined his feeling, but the presence of the girl never left him. At night, as he sat at his desk at the hour which almost always used to bring Rose down from her room to discuss her lessons with him, he grew sad and lonely. "If I had a child," he said to himself, "I could bear it more easily."

When Rose returned, she went into one of the co-operative boarding-houses, and slowly drifted away from the Doctor and his family.

She never quite knew why. It puzzled her for a time, and then she forgot it--in the fashion of youth.

CHAPTER XII

THE GATES OPEN WIDE

Of what avail the attempt to chronicle those days? They were all happy, and all busy, yet never alike. When the sun shone it was beautiful, and when the wind roared in the trees and the rain slashed like falling sails, it was equally glorious. On clear, crisp, bright winter days the air grew magical with bells, and the grating snarl of the ice-boat's rudder was thrilling as a lion's cry. It was apart from the world of care and politics and revolution.

There was fun, whirlwinds of it, at the chapter-house when studies were over, and there was fun at the professedly-formal girl-banquets where the chairman arose to say, "Gentlemen, the honor--" and everybody shrieked to see her pull an imaginary chin-whisker. There was more fun on winter nights, when loads of people packed into the bob-tail mule-cars (which tinkled up the snowy street with wonderful persistency), while the pa.s.sengers trod on each other's toes and chaffed the driver. And the wonderful nights under the stars, walking home with arm fast anch.o.r.ed in a fellow's grip; or strolls in summer beside the Lake, or dreamy hours floating at sunset in a boat which lay like a lily's petal, where skies of orange and purple met water of russet-gold and steely-blue.

And there was the glory of mounting also. One by one the formidable mesas of calculations, conjugations, argumentations, fell below her feet, and Rose grew tall in intellectual grace. She had no mental timidities. Truth with her came first, or if not first, certainly she had little superst.i.tious sentiment to stand in the way. She was still the same impatient soul as when she shook her little fist at the Almighty's lightning.

It was this calm, subconscious a.s.sumption of truth's ultimate harmony with nature's first cause which she delighted in as she entered physics and astronomy. Her enthusiasm for the hopeless study of the stars developed into a pa.s.sion. They exalted her and saddened her.

She lifted her eyes to them, and the ultimate distances of their orbits swept upon her with overwhelming power.