The Mettle of the Pasture Part 12

"I never have to be reminded of my birthday," remarked Harriet, reflectively. "Anna, do you know that I have lived about one-eighth of the time since Columbus discovered America: doesn't that sound awful!"

"Ah, but you don't look it," said Miss Anna, artistically, "and that's the main object."

"Oh, I don't feel it," retorted Harriet, "and that's the main object too. I'm as young as I ever was when I'm away from home; but I declare, Anna, there are times when my mother can make me feel I'm about the oldest thing alive."

"Oh, come now! you mustn't begin to talk that way, or I'll have to give you more of the antidote. You are threatened with a relapse."

"No more," ordered Harriet with a forbidding hand, "and I repeat what I said. Of course you know I never gossip, Anna; but when I talk to you, I do not feel as though I were talking to anybody."

"Why, of course not," said Miss Anna, trying to make the most of the compliment, "I am n.o.body at all, just a mere nonent.i.ty, Harriet."

"Anna," said Harriet, after a pause of unusual length, "if it had not been for my mother, I should have been married long ago.

Thousands of worse-looking women, and of actually worse women, marry every year in this world and marry reasonably well. It was because she tried to marry me off: that was the bottom of the deviltry--the men saw through her."

"I am afraid they did," admitted Miss Anna, affably, looking down into a hole.

"Of course I know I am not brilliant," conceded Harriet, "but then I am never commonplace."

"I should like to catch any one saying such a thing."

"Even if I were, commonplace women always make the best wives: do they not?"

"Oh, don't ask that question in this porch," exclaimed Miss Anna a little resentfully. "What do I know about it!"

"My mother thinks I am a weak woman," continued Harriet, musingly.

"If my day ever comes, she will know that I am, strong, Anna, _strong_."

"Ah, now, you must forgive your mother," cried Miss Anna, having reached a familiar turn in this familiar dialogue. "Whatever she did, she did for the best. Certainly it was no fault of yours.

But you could get married to-morrow if you wished and you know it, Harriet." (Miss Anna offered up the usual little prayer to be forgiven.)

The balm of those words worked through Harriet's veins like a poison of joy. So long as a single human being expresses faith in us, what matters an unbelieving world? Harriet regularly visited Miss Anna to hear these maddening syllables. She called for them as for the refilling of a prescription, which she preferred to get fresh every time rather than take home once for all and use as directed.

Among a primitive folk who seemed to have more moral troubles than any other and to feel greater need of dismissing them by artificial means, there grew up the custom of using a curious expedient. They chose a beast of the field and upon its head symbolically piled all the moral hard-headedness of the several tribes; after which the unoffending brute was banished to the wilderness and the guilty mult.i.tude felt relieved. However crude that ancient method of transferring mental and moral burdens, it had at least this redeeming feature: the early Hebrews heaped their sins upon a creature which they did not care for and sent it away. In modern times we pile our burdens upon our dearest fellow-creatures and keep them permanently near us for further use. What human being but has some other upon whom he nightly hangs his troubles as he hangs his different garments upon hooks and nails in the walls around him? Have we ever suspected that when once the habit of transferring our troubles has become pleasant to us, we thereafter hunt for troubles in order that we may have them to transfer, that we magnify the little ones in order to win the credit of having large ones, and that we are wonderfully refreshed by making other people despondent about us? Mercifully those upon whom the burdens are hung often become the better for their loads; they may not live so long, but they are more useful. Thus in turn the weak develop the strong.

For years Miss Anna had sacrificially demeaned herself in the service of Harriet, who would now have felt herself a recreant friend unless she had promptly detailed every annoyance of her life. She would go home, having left behind her the infinite little swarm of stinging things--having transferred them to the head of Miss Anna, around which they buzzed until they died.

There was this further peculiarity in Harriet's visits: that the most important moments were the last; Just as a doctor, after he has listened to the old story of his patient's symptoms, and has prescribed and bandaged and patted and soothed, and has reached the door, turns, and noting a light in the patient's eye hears him make a remark which shows that all the time he has really been thinking about something else.

Harriet now showed what was at the bottom of her own mind this morning:

"What I came to tell you about, Anna, is that for a week life at home has been unendurable. There is some trouble, some terrible trouble; and no matter what goes wrong, my mother always holds me responsible. Positively there are times when I wonder whether I, without my knowing it, may not be the Origin of Evil."

Miss Anna made no comment, having closed the personal subject, and Harriet continued:

"It has scarcely been possible for me to stay in the house.

Fortunately mother has been there very little herself. She goes and goes and drives and drives. Strange things have been happening. You know that Judge Morris has not missed coming on Sunday evening for years. Last night mother sat on the veranda waiting for him and he did not come. I know, for I watched. What have I to do but watch other people's affairs?--I have none of my own. I believe the trouble is all between Isabel and Rowan."

Miss Anna dropped her work and looked at Harriet with sudden gravity.

"I can give you no idea of the real situation because it is very dramatic; and you know, Anna, I am not dramatic: I am merely historical: I tell my little tales. But at any rate Rowan has not been at the house for a week. He called last Sunday afternoon and Isabel refused to see him. I know; because what have I to do but to interest myself in people who have affairs of interest? Then Isabel had his picture in her room: it has been taken down. She had some of his books: they are gone. The house has virtually been closed to company. Isabel has excused herself to callers. Mother was to give a tea; the invitations were cancelled. At table Isabel and mother barely speak; but when I am not near, they talk a great deal to each other. And Isabel walks and walks and walks--in the garden, in her rooms. I have waked up two or three times at night and have seen her sitting at her window. She has always been very kind to me, Anna," Harriet's voice faltered, "she and you: and I cannot bear to see her so unhappy. You would never believe that a few days would make such a change in her. The other morning I went up to her room with a little bunch of violets which I had gathered for her myself. When she opened the door, I saw that she was packing her trunks. And the dress she had ordered for Marguerite's ball was lying on the bed ready to be put in. As I gave her the flowers she stood looking at them a long time; then she kissed me without a word and quickly closed the door."

When Harriet had gone. Miss Anna sat awhile in her porch with a troubled face. Then she went softly into the library, the windows of which opened out upon the porch. Professor Hardage was standing on a short step-ladder before a bookcase, having just completed the arrangement of the top shelf.

"Are you never going to get down?" she asked, looking up at him fondly.

He closed the book with a snap and a sigh and descended. Her anxious look recalled his attention,

"Did I not hear Harriet harrowing you up again with her troubles?"

he asked. "You poor, kind soul that try to bear everybody's!"

"Never mind about what I bear! What can you bear for dinner?"

"It is an outrage, Anna! What right has she to make herself happier by making you miserable, lengthening her life by shortening yours? For these worries always clip the thread of life at the end: that is where all the small debts are collected as one."

"Now you must not be down on Harriet! It makes her happier; and as to the end of my life, I shall be there to attend to that."

"Suppose I moved away with you to some other college entirely out of her reach?"

"I shall not suppose it because you will never do it. If you did, Harriet would simply find somebody else to confide in; she _must_ tell _everything_ to _somebody_. But if she told any one else, a good many of these stories would be all over town. She tells me and they get no further."

"What right have you to listen to scandal in order to suppress it?"

"I don't even listen always: I merely stop the stream at its source."

"I object to your offering your mind as the banks to such a stream.

Still I'm glad that I live near the banks," and he kissed his hand to her.

"When one woman tells another anything and the other woman does not tell, remember it is not scandal--it is confidence."

"Then there is no such thing as confidence," he replied, laughing.

He turned toward his shelves.

"Now do rest," she pleaded, "you look worn out."

She had a secret notion that books instead of putting life into people took it out of them. At best they performed the function of grindstones: they made you sharper, but they made you thinner--gave you more edge and left you less substance.

"I wish every one of those books had a lock and I had the bunch of keys."

"Each has a lock and key; but the key cannot be put into your pocket, Anna, my dear; it is the unlocking mind. And you are not to speak of books as a collection of locks and keys; they make up the living tree of knowledge, though of course there is very little of the tree in this particular bookcase."

"I don't see any of it," she remarked with wholesome literalness.

"Well, here at the bottom are lexicons--think of them as roots and soil. Above them lie maps and atlases: consider them the surface.

Then all books are history of course. But here is a great central trunk rising out of the surface which is called History in especial. On each side of that, running to the right and to the left, are main branches. Here for instance is the large limb of Philosophy--a very weighty limb indeed. Here is the branch of Criticism. Here is a bough consisting princ.i.p.ally of leaves on which live unnamed venomous little insects that poison them and die on them: their appointed place in creation."

"And so there is no positive fruit anywhere," she insisted with her practical taste for the substantial.