Chapter 17

"I think I shall He down now," she said, "so I shall say good night to you here, Rowan. Fix the tray for me yourself, pour me out some tea, and butter me a roll." They stood looking into each other's eyes. She saw things in his which caused her suddenly to draw his forehead over and press her lips to one and then to the other, again and again.

The sun streamed through the windows, level and red, lighting up the darkened hall, lighting up the head and shoulders of his mother.

An hour later he sat at the head of his table alone--a table arranged for two instead of three. At the back of his chair waited the aged servitor of the household, gray-haired, discreet, knowing many things about earlier days on which rested the seal of incorruptible silence. A younger servant performed the duties.

He sat at the head of his table and excused the absence of his mother and forced himself with the pride and dignity of his race to give no sign of what had passed that day. His mother's maid entered, bringing him in a crystal vase a dark red flower for his coat. She had always given him that same dark red flower after he had turned into manhood. "It is your kind," she said; "I understand."

He arranged the tray for her, pouring out her tea, buttering the rolls. Then he forced himself to eat his supper as usual. From old candlesticks on the table a silver radiance was shed on the massive silver, on the gem-like glass. Candelabra on the mantelpiece and the sideboard lighted up the browned oak of the walls.

He left the table at last, giving and hearing a good night. The servants efficiently ended their duties and put out the lights. In the front hall lamps were left burning; there were lamps and candles in the library. He went off to a room on the ground floor in one ell of the house; it was his sitting room, smoking room, the lounging place of his friends. In one corner stood a large desk, holding old family papers; here also were articles that he himself had lately been engaged on--topics relating to scientific agriculture, soils, and stock-raising. It was the road by which some of the country gentlemen who had been his forefathers passed into a larger life of practical affairs--going into the Legislature of the state or into the Senate; and he had thought of this as a future for himself. For an hour or two he looked through family papers.

Then he put them aside and squarely faced the meaning of the day. His thoughts traversed the whole track of Dent's life--one straight track upward. No deviations, no pitfalls there, no rising and falling. And now early marriage and safety from so many problems; with work and honors and wifely love and children: work and rest and duty to the end. Dent had called him into his room that morning after he was dressed for his wedding and had started to thank him for his love and care and guardianship and then had broken down and they had locked their arms around each other, trying not to say what could not be said.

He lived again through that long afternoon with his mother. What had the whole day been to her and how she had risen to meet with nobility all its sadnesses! Her smile lived before him; and her eyes, shining with increasing brightness as she dwelt upon things that meant fading sunlight: she fondling the playthings of his infancy, keeping some of them to be folded away with her at last; touching her bridal dress and speaking her reliance on her sons for sons and daughters; at the close of the long trying day standing at the foot of the staircase white with weariness and pain, but so brave, so sweet, so unconquerable. He knew that she was not sleeping now, that she was thinking of him, that she had borne everything and would bear everything not only because it was due to herself, but because it was due to him.

He turned out the lights and sat at a window opening upon the night. The voices of the land came in to him, the voices of the vanished life of its strong men.

He remembered the kind of day it was when he first saw through its autumn trees the scattered buildings of his university. What impressions it had made upon him as it awaited him there, gray with stateliness, hoary with its honors, pervaded with the very breath and spirit of his country. He recalled his meeting with his professors, the choosing of his studies, the selection of a place in which to live. Then had followed what had been the great spectacle and experience of his life--the assembling of picked young men, all eager like greyhounds at the slips to show what was in them, of what stuff they were made, what strength and hardihood and robust virtues, and gifts and grace for manly intercourse. He had been caught up and swept off his feet by that influence. Looking back as he did to that great plateau which was his home, for the first time he had felt that he was not only a youth of an American commonwealth, but a youth of his whole country. They were all American youths there, as opposed to English youths and German youths and Russian youths. There flamed up in him the fierce passion, which he believed to be burning in them all, to show his mettle--the mettle of his state, the mettle of his nation. To him, newly come into this camp of young men, it lay around the walls of the university like a white spiritual host, chosen youths to be made into chosen men. And he remembered how little he then knew that about this white host hung the red host of those camp-followers, who beleaguer in outer darkness every army of men.

Then had followed warfare, double warfare: the ardent attack on work and study; athletic play, good fellowship, visits late at night to the chambers of new friends--chambers rich in furniture and pictures, friends richer in old names and fine manners and beautiful boyish gallant ways; his club and his secret society, and the whole bewildering maddening enchantment of student life, where work and duty and lights and wine and poverty and want and flesh and spirit strive together each for its own. At this point he put these memories away, locked them from himself in their long silence.

Near midnight he made his way quietly back into the main hall. He turned out the lamps and lighted his bedroom candle and started toward the stairway, holding it in front of him a little above his head, a low-moving star through the gloom. As he passed between two portraits, he paused with sudden impulse and, going over to one, held his candle up before the face and studied it once more. A man, black-browed, black-robed, black-bearded, looked down into his eyes as one who had authority to speak. He looked far down upon his offspring, and he said to him: "You may be one of those who through the flesh are chosen to be damned. But if He chooses to damn you, then be damned, but do not question His mercy or His justice: it is not for you to alter the fixed and the eternal."

He crossed with his candle to the opposite wall and held it up before another face: a man full of red blood out to the skin; full-lipped, red-lipped; audacious about the forehead and brows, and beautiful over his thick careless hair through which a girl's fingers seemed lately to have wandered. He looked level out at his offspring as though he still stood throbbing on the earth and he spoke to him: "I am not alive to speak to you with my voice, but I have spoken to you through my blood. When the cup of life is filled, drain it deep. Why does nature fill it if not to have you empty it?"

He blew his candle out in the eyes of that passionate face, and holding it in his hand, a smoking torch, walked slowly backward and forward in the darkness of the hall with only a little pale moonlight struggling in through a window here and there.

Then with a second impulse he went over and stood close to the dark image who had descended into him through the mysteries of nature. "You," he said, "who helped to make me what I am, you had the conscience and not the temptation. And you," he said, turning to the hidden face across the hall, "who helped to make me what I am, you had the temptation and not the conscience. What does either of you know of me who had both?

"And what do I know about either of you," he went on, taking up again the lonely vigil of his walk and questioning; "you who preached against the Scarlet Woman, how do I know you were not the scarlet man? I may have derived both from you--both conscience and sin--without hypocrisy. All those years during which your face was hardening, your one sincere prayer to God may have been that He would send you to your appointed place before you were found out by men on earth. And you with your fresh red face, you may have lain down beside the wife of your youth, and have lived with her all your years, as chaste as she."

He resumed his walk, back and forth, back and forth; and his thoughts changed:

"What right have I to question them, or judge them, or bring them forward in my life as being responsible for my nature? If I roll back the responsibility to them, had they not fathers? and had not their fathers fathers? and if a man rolls back his deeds upon those who are his past, then where will responsibility be found at all, and of what poor cowardly stuff is each of us?"

How silent the night was, how silent the great house! Only his slow footsteps sounded there like the beating of a heavy heart resolved not to fail.

At last they died away from the front of the house, passing inward down a long hallway and growing more muffled; then the sound of them ceased altogether: he stood noiselessly before his mother's door.

He stood there, listening if he might hear in the intense stillness a sleeper's breathing. "Disappointed mother," he said as silently as a spirit might speak to a spirit.

Then he came back and slowly began to mount the staircase.

"Is it then wrong for a man to do right? Is it ever right to do wrong?" he said finally. "Should I have had my fling and never have cared and never have spoken? Is there a true place for deception in the world? May our hypocrisy with each other be a virtue? If you have done evil, shall you live the whited sepulchre? Ah, Isabel, how easily I could have deceived you! Does a woman care what a man may have done, if he be not found out? Is not her highest ideal for him a profitable reputation, not a spotless character? No, I will not wrong you by these thoughts. It was you who said to me that you once loved all that you saw in me, and believed that you saw everything. All that you asked of me was truthfulness that had no sorrow."

He reached the top of the stairs and began to feel his way toward his room.

"To have one chance in life, in eternity, for a white name, and to lose it!"

VIII

Autumn and winter had passed. Another spring was nearly gone. One Monday morning of that May, the month of new growths and of old growths with new starting-points on them, Ambrose Webb was walking to and fro across the fresh oilcloth in his short hall; the front door and the back door stood wide open, as though to indicate the receptivity of his nature in opposite directions; all the windows were wide open, as though to bring out of doors into his house: he was much more used to the former; during married life the open had been more friendly than the interior. But he was now also master of the interior and had been for nearly a year.

Some men succeed best as partial automata, as dogs for instance that can be highly trained to pull little domestic carts. Ambrose had grown used to pulling his cart: he had expected to pull it for the rest of his days; and now the cart had suddenly broken down behind him and he was left standing in the middle of the long life-road. But liberty was too large a destiny for a mind of that order; the rod of empire does not fit such hands; it was intolerable to Ambrose that he was in a world where he could do as he pleased.

On this courageous Monday, therefore,--whatsoever he was to do during the week he always decided on Mondays,--after months of irresolution he finally determined to make a second dash for slavery. But he meant to be canny; this time he would choose a woman who, if she ruled him, would not misrule him; what he could stand was a sovereign, not a despot, and he believed that he had found this exceptionally gifted and exceptionally moderated being: it was Miss Anna Hardage.

From the day of Miss Anna's discovery that Ambrose had a dominating consort, she had been, she had declared she should be, much kinder to him. When his wife died, Miss Anna had been kinder still. Affliction present, affliction past, her sympathy had not failed him.

He had fallen into the habit of lingering a little whenever he took his dairy products around to the side porch. Every true man yearns for the eyes of some woman; and Ambrose developed the feeling that he should like to live with Miss Anna's. He had no gift for judging human conduct except by common human standards; and so at bottom he believed that Miss Anna in her own way had been telling him that if the time ever came, she could be counted on to do the right thing by him.

So Ambrose paced the sticky oilcloth this morning as a man who has reached the hill of decision. He had bought him a new buggy and new harness. Hitched to the one and wearing the other was his favorite roan mare with a Roman nose and a white eye, now dozing at the stiles in the front yard. He had curried her and had combed her mane and tail and had had her newly shod, and altogether she may have felt too comfortable to keep awake. He himself seemed to have received a coating of the same varnish as his buggy. Had you pinned a young beetle in the back of his coat or on either leg of his trousers, as a mere study in shades of blackness, it must have been lost to view at the distance of a few yards through sheer harmony with its background. Under his Adam's apple there was a green tie--the bough to the fruit. His eyes sparkled as though they had lately been reset and polished by a jeweller.

What now delayed and excited him at this last moment before setting out was uncertainty as to the offering he should bear Miss Anna. Fundamental instincts vaguely warned him that love's altar must be approached with gifts. He knew that some brought fortune, some warlike deeds, some fame, some the beauty of their strength and youth. He had none of these to offer; but he was a plain farmer, and he could give her what he had so often sold her--a pound of butter.

He had awaited the result of the morning churning; but the butter had tasted of turnips, and Ambrose did not think that the taste of turnips represented the flavor of his emotion. Nevertheless, there was one thing that she preferred even to butter; he would ensnare her in her own weakness, catch her in her own net: he would take her a jar of cream.

Miss Anna was in her usual high spirits that morning. She was trying a new recipe for some dinner comfort for Professor Hardage, when her old cook, who also answered the doorbell, returned to the kitchen with word that Mr. Webb was in the parlor.

"Why, I paid him for his milk," exclaimed Miss Anna, without ceasing to beat and stir. "And what is he doing in the parlor? Why didn't he come around to the side door? I'll be back in a moment." She took off her apron from an old habit of doing so whenever she entered the parlor.

She gave her dairyman the customary hearty greeting, hurried back to get him a glass of water, inquired dispassionately about grass, inundated him with a bounteous overflow of her impersonal humanity. But he did not state his business, and she grew impatient to return to her confection.

"Do I owe you for anything, Mr. Webb?" she suddenly asked, groping for some clew to this lengthening labyrinthine visit.

He rose and going to the piano raked heavily off of the top of it a glass jar and brought it over to her and resumed his seat with a speaking countenance.

"Cream!" cried Miss Anna, delighted, running her practised eye downward along the bottle to discover where the contents usually began to get blue: it was yellow to the bottom. "How much is it? I'm afraid we are too poor to buy so much cream all at once."

"It has no price; it is above price."

"How much is it, Mr. Webb?" she insisted with impatience.

"It is a free gift."

"Oh, what a beautiful present!" exclaimed Miss Anna, holding it up to the light admiringly. "How can I ever thank you."

"Don't thank me: you could have the dairy! You could have the cows, the farm."

"O dear, no!" cried Miss Anna, "that would be altogether too much! One bottle goes far beyond all that I ever hoped for."

"I wish ail women were like you."

"O dear, no! that would not do at all! I am an old maid, and women must marry, must, must! What would become of the world?"

"You need not be an old maid unless you wish."

"Now, I had never thought of that!" observed Miss Anna, in a very peculiar tone. "But we'll not talk about myself; let us talk about yourself. You are looking extremely well--now aren't you?"

"No one has a better right. It is due you to let you know this. There's good timber in me yet."

"Due _me_! I am not interested in timber."

"Anna," he said, throwing his arms around one of his knees, "our hour has come--we need not wait any longer."

"Wait for _what_?" inquired Miss Anna, bending toward him with the scrutiny of a near-sighted person trying to make out some looming horror.

"Our marriage."

Miss Anna rose as by an inward explosion.

"Go, _buzzard_!"

He kept his seat and stared at her with a dropped jaw. Habit was powerful in him; and there was something in her anger, in that complete sweeping of him out other way, that recalled the domestic usages of former years and brought to his lips an involuntary time-worn expression:

"I meant nothing offensive."

"I do not know what you meant, and I do not care: go!"

He rose and stood before her, and with a flash of sincere anger he spoke his honest mind: "It was you who put the notion in my head. You encouraged me, encouraged me systematically; and now you are pretending. You are a bad woman."

"I think I am a bad woman after what has happened to me this morning," said Miss Anna, dazed and ready to break down.

He hesitated when he reached the door, smarting with his honest hurt; and he paused there and made a request.

"At least I hope that you will never mention this; it might injure me." He did not explain how, but he seemed to know.

"Do you suppose I'd tell my Maker if He did not already know it?" She swept past him into the kitchen.

"As soon as you have done your work, go clean the parlor," she said to the cook. "Give it a good airing. And throw that cream away, throw the bottle away."

A few moments later she hurried with her bowl into the pantry; there she left it unfinished and crept noiselessly up the backstairs to her room.

That evening as Professor Hardage sat opposite to her, reading, while she was doing some needlework, he laid his book down with the idea of asking her some question. But he caught sight of her expression and studied it a few moments. It was so ludicrous a commingling of mortification and rage that he laughed outright.

"Why, Anna, what on earth is the matter?"

At the first sound of his voice she burst into hysterical sobs.

He came over and tried to draw her fingers away from her eyes. "Tell me all about it."

She shook her head frantically.

"Yes, tell me," he urged. "Is there anything in all these years that you have not told me?"

"I cannot," she sobbed excitedly. "I am disgraced."

He laughed. "What has disgraced you?"

"A man."

"Good heavens!" he cried, "has somebody been making love to you?"

"Yes."

His face flushed. "Come," he said seriously, "what is the meaning of this, Anna?"

She told him.

"Why aren't you angry with him?" she complained, drying her eyes. "You sit there and don't say a word!"

"Do you expect me to be angry with any soul for loving you and wishing to be loved by you? He cast his mite into the treasury, Anna."

"I didn't mind the mite," she replied. "But he said I encouraged him, that I encouraged him _systematically_."

"Did you expect him to be a philosopher?"

"I did not expect him to be a--" She hesitated at the harsh word.

"I'm afraid you expected him to be a philosopher. Haven't you been kind to him?"

"Why, of course."

"Systematically kind?"

"Why, of course."

"Did you have any motive?"

"You know I had no motive--aren't you ashamed!"

"But did you expect him to be genius enough to understand that? Did you suppose that he could understand such a thing as kindness without a motive? Don't be harsh with him, Anna, don't be hard on him: he is an ordinary man and judged you by the ordinary standard. You broke your alabaster box at his feet, and he secretly suspected that you were working for something more valuable than the box of ointment. The world is full of people who are kind without a motive; but few of those to whom they are kind believe this."

Before Miss Anna fell asleep that night, she had resolved to tell Harriet. Every proposal of marriage is known at least to three people. The distinction in Miss Anna's conduct was not in telling, but in not telling until she had actually been asked.

Two mornings later Ambrose was again walking through his hall. There is one compensation for us all in the large miseries of life--we no longer feel the little ones. His experience in his suit for Miss Anna's hand already seemed a trifle to Ambrose, who had grown used to bearing worse things from womankind. Miss Anna was not the only woman in the world, he averred, by way of swift indemnification. Indeed, in the very act of deciding upon her, he had been thinking of some one else. The road of life had divided equally before him: he had chosen Miss Anna as a traveller chooses the right fork; the left fork remained and he was now preparing to follow that: it led to Miss Harriet Crane.

As Ambrose now paced his hallway, revolving certain details connected with his next venture and adventure, the noise of an approaching carriage fell upon his ear, and going to the front door he recognized the brougham of Mrs. Conyers. But it was Miss Harriet Crane who leaned forward at the window and bowed smilingly to him as he hurried out.

"How do you do, Mr. Webb?" she said, putting out her hand and shaking his cordially, at the same time giving him a glance of new-born interest. "You know I have been threatening to come out for a long time. I must owe you an enormous bill for pasturage," she picked up her purse as she spoke, "and I have come to pay my debts. And then I wish to see my calf," and she looked into his eyes very pleasantly.

"You don't owe me anything," replied Ambrose. "What is grass? What do I care for grass? My mind is set on other things."

He noticed gratefully how gentle and mild she looked; there was such a beautiful softness about her and he had had hardness enough. He liked her ringlets: they were a novelty; and there hung around her, in the interior of the carriage, a perfume that was unusual to his sense and that impressed him as a reminder of her high social position. But Ambrose reasoned that if a daughter of his neighbor could wed a Meredith, surely he ought to be able to marry a Crane.

"If you want to see the calf," he said, but very reluctantly, "I'll saddle my horse and we'll go over to the back pasture."

"Don't saddle your horse," objected Harriet, opening the carriage door and moving over to the far cushion, "ride with me."

He had never ridden in a brougham, and as he got in very nervously and awkwardly, he reversed his figure and tried to sit on the little front seat on which lay Harriet's handkerchief and parasol.