The Mettle of the Pasture Part 30

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 pa.s.sion for the scent of crime and the footsteps of guilt.

It was with both att.i.tudes 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.smate 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 a.s.sumed to be ended; and she put all her interest into what she a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 mult.i.tudinous sh.e.l.ls and stars of dew and air. Every poor stub of gra.s.s, 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 cla.s.s 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 embarra.s.sed. 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 n.o.ble 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!