The Mettle of the Pasture Part 24

II

It was the second morning after Marguerite's ball.

Marguerite, to herself a girl no longer, lay in the middle of a great, fragrant, drowsy bed of carved walnut, once her grandmother's. She had been dreaming; she had just awakened. The sun, long since risen above the trees of the yard, was slanting through the leaves and roses that formed an outside lattice to her window-blinds.

These blinds were very old. They had been her grandmother's when she was Marguerite's age; and one day, not long before this, Marguerite, pillaging the attic, had found them and brought them down, with adoring eyes, and put them up before her own windows.

They were of thin muslin, and on them were painted scenes representing the River of Life, with hills and castles, valleys and streams, in a long series; at the end there was a faint vision of a crystal dome in the air--the Celestial City--nearly washed away.

You looked at these scenes through the arches of a ruined castle.

A young man (on one blind) has just said farewell to his parents on the steps of the castle and is rowing away down the River of Life.

At the prow of his boat is the figurehead of a winged woman holding an hour-gla.s.s.

Marguerite lay on her side, sleepily contemplating the whole scene between her thick, bosky lashes. She liked everything but the winged woman holding the hour-gla.s.s. Had she been that woman, she would have dropped the hour-gla.s.s into the blue, burying water, and have reached up her hand for the young man to draw her into the boat with him. And she would have taken off her wings and cast them away upon the hurrying river. To have been alone with him, no hour-gla.s.s, no wings, rowing away on Life's long voyage, past castles and valleys, and never ending woods and streams! As to the Celestial City, she would have liked her blinds better if the rains of her grandmother's youth had washed it away altogether. It was not the desirable end of such a journey: she did not care to land _there_.

Marguerite slipped drowsily over to the edge of the bed in order to be nearer the blinds; and she began to study what was left of the face of the young man just starting on his adventures from the house of his fathers. Who was he? Of whom did he cause her to think? She sat up in bed and propped her face in the palms of her hands--the April face with its October eyes--and lapsed into what had been her dreams of the night. The laces of her nightgown dropped from her wrists to her elbows; the ma.s.ses of her hair, like sunlit autumn maize, fell down over her neck and shoulders into the purity of the bed.

Until the evening of her party the world had been to Marguerite something that arranged all her happiness and never interfered with it. Only soundness and loveliness of nature, inborn, undestroyable, could have withstood such luxury, indulgence, surfeit as she had always known.

On that night which was designed to end for her the life of childhood, she had, for the first time, beheld the symbol of the world's diviner beauty--a cross. All her guests had individually greeted her as though each were happier in her happiness. Except one--he did not care. He had spoken to her upon entering with the manner of one who wished himself elsewhere, he alone brought no tribute to her of any kind, in his eyes, by his smile, through the pressure of his hand.

The slight wounded her at the moment; she had not expected to have a guest to whom she would be nothing and to whom it would seem no unkindness to let her know this. The slight left its trail of pain as the evening wore on and he did not come near her. Several times, while standing close to him, she had looked her surprise, had shadowed her face with coldness for him to see. For the first time in her life she felt herself rejected, suffered the fascination of that pain. Afterward she had intentionally pressed so close to him in the throng of her guests that her arm brushed his sleeve. At last she had disengaged herself from all others and had even gone to him with the inquiries of a hostess; and he had forced himself to smile at her and had forgotten her while he spoke to her--as though she were a child. All her nature was exquisitely loosened that night, and quivering; it was not a time to be so wounded and to forget.

She did not forget as she sat in her room after all had gone. She took the kindnesses and caresses, the congratulations and triumphs, of those full-fruited hours, pressed them together and derived merely one clear drop of bitterness--the languorous poison of one haunting desire. It followed her into her sleep and through the next day; and not until night came again and she had pa.s.sed through the gateway of dreams was she happy: for in those dreams it was he who was setting out from the house of his fathers on a voyage down the River of Life; and he had paused and turned and called her to come to him and be with him always.

Marguerite lifted her face from her palms, as she finished her revery. She slipped to the floor out of the big walnut bed, and crossing to the blinds laid her fingers on the young man's shoulder. It was the movement with which one says: "I have come."

With a sigh she drew one of the blinds aside and looked out upon the leaves and roses of her yard and at the dazzling sunlight.

Within a few feet of her a bird was singing. "How can you?" she said. "If you loved, you would be silent. Your wings would droop.

You could neither sing nor fly." She turned dreamily back into her room and wandered over to a little table on which her violin lay in its box. She lifted the top and thrummed the strings. "How could I ever have loved you?"

She dressed absent-mindedly. How should she spend the forenoon?

Some of her friends would be coming to talk over the party; there would be callers; there was the summer-house, her hammock, her phaeton; there were nooks and seats, cool, fragrant; there were her mother and grandmother to prattle to and caress. "No," she said, "not any of them. One person only. I must see _him_."

She thought of the places where she could probably see him if he should be in town that day. There was only one--the library.

Often, when there, she had seen him pa.s.s in and out. He had no need to come for books or periodicals, all these he could have at home; but she had heard the librarian and him at work; over the files of old papers containing accounts of early agricultural affairs and the first cattle-shows of the state. She resolved to go to the library: what desire had she ever known that she had not gratified?

When Marguerite, about eleven o'clock, approached the library a little fearfully, she saw Barbee pacing to and fro on the sidewalk before the steps. She felt inclined to turn back; he was the last person she cared to meet this morning. Play with him had suddenly ended as a picnic in a spring grove is interrupted by a tempest.

"I ought to tell him at once," she said; and she went forward.

He came to meet her--with a countenance dissatisfied and reproachful. It struck her that his thin large ears looked yellowish instead of red and that his freckles had apparently spread and thickened. She asked herself why she had never before realized how boyish he was.

"Marguerite," he said at once, as though the matter were to be taken firmly in hand, "you treated me shabbily the night of your party. It was unworthy of you. And I will not stand it. You ought not be such a child!"

Her breath was taken away. She blanched and her eyes dilated as she looked at him: the lash of words had never been laid on her.

"Are you calling me to account?" she asked. "Then I shall call you to an account. When you came up to speak to grandmother and to mamma and me, you spoke to us as though you were an indifferent suitor of mine--as though I were a suitor of yours. As soon as you were gone, mamma said to me: 'What have you been doing, Marguerite, that he should think you are in love with him--that he should treat us as though we all wished to catch him?'"

"That was a mistake of your mother's. But after what had pa.s.sed between us--"

"No matter what had pa.s.sed between us, I do not think that a _man_ would virtually tell a girl's mother on her: a boy might."

He grew ashen; and he took his hand out of his pockets and straightened himself from his slouchy lounging posture, and stood before her, his head in the air on his long neck like a young stag affronted and enraged.

"It is true, I have sometimes been too much like a boy with you,"

he said. "Have you made it possible for me to be anything else?"

"Then I'll make it possible for you now: to begin, I am too old to be called to account for my actions--except by those who have the right."

"You mean, that I have no right--after what has pa.s.sed--"

"Nothing has pa.s.sed between us!"

"Marguerite," he said, "do you mean that you do not love me?"

"Can you not see?"

She was standing on the steps above him. The many-fluted parasol with its long silken fringes rested on one shoulder. Her face in the dazzling sunlight, under her hat, had lost its gayety. Her eyes rested upon his with perfect quietness.

"I do not believe that you yourself know whether you love me," he said, laughing pitifully. His big mouth twitched and his love had come back into his eyes quickly enough.

"Let me tell you how I know," she said, with more kindness. "If I loved you, I could not stand here and speak of it to you in this way. I could not tell you you are not a man. Everything in me would go down before you. You could do with my life what you pleased. No one in comparison with you would mean anything to me--not even mamma. As long as I was with you, I should never wish to sleep; if you were away from me, I should never wish to waken.

If you were poor, if you were in trouble, you would be all the dearer to me--if you only loved me, only loved me!"

Who is it that can mark down the moment when we ceased to be children? Gazing backward in after years, we sometimes attempt dimly to fix the time. "It probably occurred on that day," we declare; "it may have taken place during that night. It coincided with that hardship, or with that mastery of life." But a child can suffer and can triumph as a man or a woman, yet remain a child.

Like man and woman it can hate, envy, malign, cheat, lie, tyrannize; or bless, cheer, defend, drop its pitying tears, pour out its heroic spirit. Love alone among the pa.s.sions parts the two eternities of a lifetime. The instant it is born, the child which was its parent is dead.

As Marguerite suddenly ceased speaking, frightened by the secret import of her own words, her skin, which had the satinlike fineness and sheen of white poppy leaves, became dyed from brow to breast with a surging flame of rose. She turned partly away from Barbee, and she waited for him to go.

He looked at her a moment with torment in his eyes; then, lifting his hat without a word, he turned and walked proudly down the street toward his office.

Marguerite did not send a glance after him. What can make us so cruel to those who vainly love us as our vain love of some one else? What do we care for their suffering? We see it in their faces, hear it in their speech, feel it as the tragedy of their lives. But we turn away from them unmoved and cry out at the heartlessness of those whom our own faces and words and sorrow do not touch.

She lowered her parasol, and pressing her palm against one cheek and then the other, to force back the betraying blood, hurried agitated and elated into the library. A new kind of excitement filled her: she had confessed her secret, had proved her fidelity to him she loved by turning off the playmate of childhood. Who does not know the relief of confessing to some one who does not understand?

The interior of the library was an immense rectangular room. Book shelves projected from each side toward the middle, forming alcoves. Seated in one of these alcoves, you could be seen only by persons who should chance to pa.s.s. The library was never crowded and it was nearly empty now. Marguerite lingered to speak with the librarian, meantime looking carefully around the room; and then moved on toward the shelves where she remembered having once seen a certain book of which she was now thinking. It had not interested her then; she had heard it spoken of since, but it had not interested her since. Only to-day something new within herself drew her toward it.

No one was in the alcove she entered. After a while she found her book and seated herself in a nook of the walls with her face turned in the one direction from which she could be discovered by any one pa.s.sing. While she read, she wished to watch: might he not pa.s.s?

It was a very old volume, thumbed by generations of readers. Pages were gone, the halves of pages worn away or tattered. It was printed in an old style of uncertain spelling so that the period of its authorship could in this way be but doubtfully indicated.

Ostensibly it came down from the ruder, plainer speech of old English times, which may have found leisure for such "A Booke of Folly."

Marguerite's eyes settled first on the complete t.i.tle: "Lady Bluefields' First Principles of Courting for Ye Use of Ye Ladies; but Plainly Set Down for Ye Good of Ye Beginners."

"I am not a beginner," thought Marguerite, who had been in love three days; and she began to read: