PART SECOND
I
The home of the Merediths lay in a region of fertile lands adapted alike to tillage and to pasturage. The immediate neighborhood was old, as civilization reckons age in the United States, and was well conserved, It held in high esteem its traditions of itself, approved its own customs, was proud of its prides: a characteristic community of country gentlemen at the side of each of whom a characteristic lady lived and had her peculiar being.
The ownership of the soil had long since passed into the hands of capable families—with this exception, that here and there between the borders of large estates little farms were to be found representing all that remained from slow processes of partition and absorption. These scant freeholds had thus their pathos, marking as they did the losing fight of successive holders against more fortunate, more powerful neighbors. Nothing in its way records more surely the clash and struggle and ranking of men than the boundaries of land. There you see extinction and survival, the perpetual going under of the weak, the perpetual overriding of the strong.
Two such fragmentary farms lay on opposite sides of the Meredith estate. One was the property of Ambrose Webb, a married but childless man who, thus exempt from necessity of raking the earth for swarming progeny, had sown nearly all his land in grass and rented it as pasturage: no crops of children, no crops of grain.
The other farm was of less importance. Had you ridden from the front door of the Merediths northward for nearly a mile, you would have reached the summit of a slope sweeping a wide horizon. Standing on this summit any one of these bright summer days, you could have seen at the foot of the slope, less than a quarter of a mile away on the steep opposite side, a rectangle of land covering some fifty acres. It lay crumpled into a rough depression in the landscape. A rivulet of clear water by virtue of indomitable crook and turn made its way across this valley; a woodland stood in one corner, nearly all its timber felled; there were a few patches of grain so small that they made you think of the variegated peasant strips of agricultural France; and a few lots smaller still around a stable. The buildings huddled confusedly into this valley seemed to have backed toward each other like a flock of sheep, encompassed by peril and making a last stand in futile defence of their right to exist at all.
What held the preeminence of castle in the collection of structures was a small brick house with one upper bedroom. The front entrance had no porch; and beneath the door, as stepping-stones of entrance, lay two circular slabs of wood resembling sausage blocks, one half superposed. Over the door was a trellis of gourd vines now profusely, blooming and bee-visited. Grouped around this castle in still lower feudal and vital dependence was a log cabin of one room and of many more gourd vines, an ice-house, a house for fowls, a stable, a rick for hay, and a sagging shed for farm implements.
If the appearance of the place suggested the struggles of a family on the verge of extinction, this idea was further borne out by what looked like its determination to stand a long final siege at least in the matter of rations, for it swarmed with life. In the quiet crystalline air from dawn till after sunset the sounds arising from it were the clamor of a sincere, outspoken multitude of what man calls the dumb creatures. Evidently some mind, full of energy and forethought, had made its appearance late in the history of these failing generations and had begun a fight to reverse failure and turn back the tide of aggression. As the first step in self-recovery this rugged island of poverty must be made self-sustaining. Therefore it had been made to teem with animal and vegetable plenty.
On one side of the house lay an orderly garden of vegetables and berry-bearing shrubs; the yard itself was in reality an orchard of fruit trees, some warmed by the very walls; under the shed there were beegums alive with the nectar builders; along the garden walks were frames for freighted grape-vines. The work of regeneration had been pushed beyond the limits of utilitarianism over into a certain crude domain of aesthetics. On one front window-sill what had been the annual Christmas box of raisins had been turned into a little hot-bed of flowering plants; and under the panes of glass a dense forest of them, sun-drawn, looked like a harvest field swept by a storm. On the opposite window ledge an empty drum of figs was now topped with hardy jump-up-johnnies. It bore some resemblance to an enormous yellow muffin stuffed with blueberries. In the garden big-headed peonies here and there fell over upon the young onions. The entire demesne lay white and green with tidiness under yellow sun and azure sky; for fences and outhouses, even the trunks of trees several feet up from the ground, glistened with whitewash. So that everywhere was seen the impress and guidance of a spirit evoking abundance, order, even beauty, out of what could so easily have been squalor and despondent wretchedness.
This was the home of Pansy Vaughan; and Pansy was the explanation of everything beautiful and fruitful, the peaceful Joan of Arc of that valley, seeing rapt visions of the glory of her people.
In the plain upper room of the plain brick house, on her hard white bed with her hard white thoughts, lay Pansy—sleepless throughout the night of Marguerite's ball. The youngest of the children slept beside her; two others lay in a trundle-bed across the room; and the three were getting out of sleep all that there is in it for tired, healthy children. In the room below, her father and the eldest boy were resting; and through the rafters of the flooring she could hear them both: her father a large, fluent, well-seasoned, self-comforting bassoon; and her brother a sappy, inexperienced bassoon trying to imitate it. Wakefulness was a novel state for Pansy herself, who was always tired when bedtime came and as full of wild vitality as one of her young guineas in the summer wheat; so that she sank into slumber as a rock sinks into the sea, descending till it reaches the unstirred bottom.
What kept her awake to-night was mortification that she had not been invited to the ball. She knew perfectly well that she was not entitled to an invitation, since the three Marguerites had never heard of her. She had never been to a fashionable party even in the country. But her engagement to Dent Meredith already linked her to him socially and she felt the tugging of those links: what were soon to become her rights had begun to be her rights already. Another little thing troubled her: she had no flower to send him for his button-hole, to accompany her note wishing him a pleasant evening. She could not bear to give him anything common; and Pansy believed that no one was needed to tell her what a common thing is.
For a third reason slumber refused to descend and weigh down her eyelids: on the morrow she was to call upon Dent's mother, and the thought of this call preoccupied her with terror. She was one of the bravest of souls; but the terror which shook her was the terror that shakes them all—terror lest they be not loved.
All her life she had looked with awe upward out of her valley toward that great house. Its lawns with stately clumps of evergreens, its many servants, its distant lights often seen twinkling in the windows at night, the tales that reached her of wonderful music and faery dancing; the flashing family carriages which had so often whirled past her on the turnpike with scornful footman and driver—all these recollections revisited her to-night. In the morning she was to cross the boundary of this inaccessible world as one who was to hold a high position in it.
How pictures came crowding back! One of the earliest recollections of childhood was hearing the scream of the Meredith peacocks as they drew their gorgeous plumage across the silent summer lawns; at home they had nothing better than fussing guineas. She had never come nearer to one of those proud birds than handling a set of tail feathers which Mrs. Meredith had presented to her mother for a family fly brush. Pansy had good reason to remember because she had often been required to stand beside the table and, one little bare foot set alternately on the other little bare foot, wield the brush over the dishes till arms and eyelids ached.
Another of those dim recollections was pressing her face against the window-panes when the first snow began to fall on the scraggy cedars in the yard; and as she began to sing softly to herself one of the ancient ditties of the children of the poor, "Old Woman, picking Geese," she would dream of the magical flowers which they told her bloomed all winter in a glass house at the Merediths' while there was ice on the pines outside. Big red roses and icicles separated only by a thin glass—she could hardly believe it; and she would cast her eye toward their own garden where a few black withered stalks marked the early death-beds of the pinks and jonquils.
But even in those young years Pansy had little time to look out of windows and to dream of anything. She must help, she must work; for she was the oldest of five children, and the others followed so closely that they pushed her out of her garments. A hardy, self-helpful child life, bravened by necessities, never undermined by luxuries. For very dolls Pansy used small dried gourds, taking the big round end of the gourd for the head of the doll and all the rest of the gourd for all the rest of the body.
One morning when she was fourteen, the other children were clinging with tears to her in a poor, darkened room—she to be little mother to them henceforth: they never clung in vain.
That same autumn when woods were turning red and wild grapes turning black and corn turning yellow, a cherished rockaway drawn by a venerated horse, that tried to stop for conversation on the highroad whenever he passed a neighbor's vehicle, rattled out on the turnpike with five children in it and headed for town: Pansy driving, taking herself and the rest to the public school. For years thereafter, through dark and bright days, she conveyed that nest of hungry fledglings back and forth over bitter and weary miles, getting their ravenous minds fed at one end of the route, and their ravenous bodies fed at the other. If the harness broke, Pansy got out with a string. If the horse dropped a shoe, or dropped himself, Pansy picked up what she could. In town she drove to the blacksmith shop and to all other shops whither business called her. Her friends were the blacksmith and the tollgate keeper, her teachers—all who knew her and they were few: she had no time for friendships. At home the only frequent visitor was Ambrose Webb, and Pansy did not care for Ambrose. The first time she remembered seeing him at dinner, she—a very little girl—had watched his throat with gloomy fascination. Afterward her mother told her he had an Adam's apple; and Pansy, working obscurely at some problem of theology, had secretly taken down the Bible and read the story of Adam and the fearful fruit. Ambrose became associated in her mind with the Fall of Man; she disliked the proximity.
No time for friendships. Besides the labors at school, there was the nightly care of her father on her return, the mending of his clothes; there was the lonely burning of her candle far into the night as she toiled over lessons. When she had learned all that could be taught her at the school, she left the younger children there and victoriously transferred herself for a finishing course to a seminary of the town, where she was now proceeding to graduate.
This was Pansy, child of plain, poor, farmer folk, immemorially dwelling close to the soil; unlettered, unambitious, long-lived, abounding in children, without physical beauty, but marking the track of their generations by a path lustrous with right-doing. For more than a hundred years on this spot the land had lessened around them; but the soil had worked upward into their veins, as into the stalks of plants, the trunks of trees; and that clean, thrilling sap of the earth, that vitality of the exhaustless mother which never goes for nothing, had produced one heavenly flower at last—shooting forth with irrepressible energy a soul unspoiled and morally sublime. When the top decays, as it always does in the lapse of time, whence shall come regeneration if not from below? It is the plain people who are the eternal breeding grounds of high destinies.
In the long economy of nature, this, perhaps, was the meaning and the mission of this lofty child who now lay sleepless, shaken to the core with thoughts of the splendid world over into which she was to journey to-morrow.
At ten o'clock next morning she set out.
It had been a question with her whether she should go straight across the fields and climb the fences, or walk around by the turnpike and open the gates. Her preference was for fields and fences, because that was the short and direct way, and Pansy was used to the short and direct way of getting to the end of her desires. But, as has been said, she had already fallen into the habit of considering what was due her and becoming to her as a young Mrs. Meredith; and it struck her that this lady would not climb field fences, at least by preference and with facility. Therefore she chose the highroad, gates, dust, and dignity.
It could scarcely be said that she was becomingly raimented. Pansy made her own dresses, and the dresses declared the handiwork of their maker. The one she wore this morning was chiefly characterized by a pair of sleeves designed by herself; from the elbow to the wrist there hung green pouches that looked like long pea-pods not well filled. Her only ornament was a large oval pin at her throat which had somewhat the relation to a cameo as that borne by Wedgwood china. It represented a white horse drinking at a white roadside well; beside the shoulder of the horse stood a white angel, many times taller, with an arm thrown caressingly around the horse's neck; while a stunted forest tree extended a solitary branch over the horse's tail.
She had been oppressed with dread that she should not arrive in time. No time had been set, no one knew that she was coming, and the forenoons were long. Nevertheless impatience consumed her to encounter Mrs. Meredith; and once on the way, inasmuch as Pansy usually walked as though she had been told to go for the doctor, but not to run, she was not long in arriving.
When she reached the top of the drive in front of the Meredith homestead, her face, naturally colorless, was a consistent red; and her heart, of whose existence she had never in her life been reminded, was beating audibly. Although she said to herself that it was bad manners, she shook out her handkerchief, which she had herself starched and ironed with much care; and gathering her skirts aside, first to the right and then to the left, dusted her shoes, lifting each a little into the air, and she pulled some grass from around the buttons. With the other half of her handkerchief she wiped her brow; but a fresh bead of perspiration instantly appeared; a few drops even stood on her dilated nostrils—raindrops on the eaves. Even had the day been cool she must have been warm, for she wore more layers of clothing than usual, having deposited some fresh strata in honor of her wealthy mother-in-law.
As Pansy stepped from behind the pines, with one long, quivering breath of final self-adjustment, she suddenly stood still, arrested by the vision of so glorious a hue and shape that, for the moment, everything else was forgotten. On the pavement just before her, as though to intercept her should she attempt to cross the Meredith threshold, stood a peacock, expanding to the utmost its great fan of pride and love. It confronted her with its high-born composure and insolent grace, all its jewelled feathers flashing in the sun; then with a little backward movement of its royal head and convulsion of its breast, it threw out its cry,—the cry she had heard in the distance through dreaming years,—warning all who heard that she was there, the intruder. Then lowering its tail and drawing its plumage in fastidiously against the body, it crossed her path in an evasive circle and disappeared behind the pines.
"Oh, Dent, why did you ever ask me to marry you!" thought Pansy, in a moment of soul failure.
Mrs. Meredith was sitting on the veranda and was partly concealed by a running rose. She was not expecting visitors; she had much to think of this morning, and she rose wonderingly and reluctantly as Pansy came forward: she did not know who it was, and she did not advance.
Pansy ascended the steps and paused, looking with wistful eyes at the great lady who was to be her mother, but who did not even greet her.
"Good morning, Mrs. Meredith," she said, in a shrill treble, holding herself somewhat in the attitude of a wooden soldier, "I suppose I shall have to introduce myself: it is Pansy."
The surprise faded from Mrs. Meredith's face, the reserve melted.
With outstretched hands she advanced smiling.
"How do you do. Pansy," she said with motherly gentleness; "it is very kind of you to come and see me, and I am very glad to know you. Shall we go in where it is cooler?"
They entered the long hall. Near the door stood a marble bust: each wall was lined with portraits. She passed between Dent's ancestors into the large darkened parlors.
"Sit here, won't you?" said Mrs. Meredith, and she even pushed gently forward the most luxurious chair within her reach. To Pansy it seemed large enough to hold all the children. At home she was used to chairs that were not only small, but hard. Wherever the bottom of a chair seemed to be in that household, there it was—if it was anywhere. Actuated now by this lifelong faith in literal furniture, she sat down with the utmost determination where she was bid; but the bottom offered no resistance to her descending weight and she sank. She threw out her hands and her hat tilted over her eyes. It seemed to her that she was enclosed up to her neck in what might have been a large morocco bath-tub—which came to an end at her knees. She pushed back her hat, crimson.
"That was a surprise," she said, frankly admitting the fault, "but there'll never be another such."
"I am afraid you found it warm walking, Pansy," said Mrs. Meredith, opening her fan and handing it to her.
"Oh, no, Mrs. Meredith, I never fan!" said Pansy, declining breathlessly. "I have too much use for my hands. I'd rather suffer and do something else. Besides, you know I am used to walking in the sun. I am very fond of botany, and I am out of doors for hours at a time when I can find the chance."
Mrs. Meredith was delighted at the opportunity to make easy vague comment on a harmless subject.
"What a beautiful study it must be," she said with authority.
"Must be!" exclaimed Pansy; "why, Mrs. Meredith, don't you know?
Don't you understand botany?"
Pansy had an idea that in Dent's home botany was as familiarly apprehended as peas and turnips in hers.
"I am afraid not," replied Mrs. Meredith, a little coolly. Her mission had been to adorn and people the earth, not to study it. And among persons of her acquaintance it was the prime duty of each not to lay bare the others' ignorance, but to make a little knowledge appear as great as possible. It was discomfiting to have Pansy charge upon what after all was only a vacant spot in her mind. She added, as defensively intimating that the subject had another dangerous side:
"When I was a girl, young ladies at school did not learn much botany; but they paid a great deal of attention to their manners."
"Why did not they learn it after they had left school and after they had learned manners?" inquired Pansy, with ruthless enthusiasm. "It is such a mistake to stop learning everything simply because you have stopped school. Don't you think so?"
"When a girl marries, my dear, she soon has other studies to take up. She has a house and husband. The girls of my day, I am afraid, gave up their botanies for their duties: it may be different now."
"No matter how many children I may have," said Pansy, positively,
"I shall never—give—up—botany! Besides, you know, Mrs.
Meredith, that we study botany only during the summer months, and I
do hope—" she broke off suddenly.
Mrs. Meredith smoothed her dress nervously and sought to find her chair comfortable.
"Your mother named you Pansy," she remarked, taking a gloomy view of the present moment and of the whole future of this acquaintanceship.
That this should be the name of a woman was to her a mistake, a crime. Her sense of fitness demanded that names should be given to infants with reference to their adult characters and eventual positions in life. She liked her own name "Caroline"; and she liked "Margaret" and all such womanly, motherly, dignified, stately appellatives. As for "Pansy," it had been the name of one of her husband's shorthorns, a premium animal at the county fairs; the silver cup was on the sideboard in the dining room now.
"Yes, Mrs. Meredith," replied Pansy, "that was the name my mother gave me. I think she must have had a great love of flowers. She named me for the best she had. I hope I shall never forget that," and Pansy looked at Mrs. Meredith with a face of such gravity and pride that silence lasted in the parlors for a while.
Buried in Pansy's heart was one secret, one sorrow: that her mother had been poor. Her father wore his yoke ungalled; he loved rough work, drew his religion from privations, accepted hardship as the chastening that insures reward. But that her mother's hands should have been folded and have returned to universal clay without ever having fondled the finer things of life—this to Pansy was remembrance to start tears on the brightest day.
"I think she named you beautifully," said Mrs. Meredith, breaking that silence, "and I am glad you told me, Pansy." She lingered with quick approval on the name.
But she turned the conversation at once to less personal channels. The beauty of the country at this season seemed to offer her an inoffensive escape. She felt that she could handle it at least with tolerable discretion. She realized that she was not deep on the subject, but she did feel fluent.
"I suppose you take the same pride that we all do in such a beautiful country."
Sunlight instantly shone out on Pansy's face. Dent was a geologist; and since she conceived herself to be on trial before Mrs. Meredith this morning, it was of the first importance that she demonstrate her sympathy and intelligent appreciation of his field of work.
"Indeed I do feel the greatest pride in it, Mrs. Meredith," she replied. "I study it a great deal. But of course you know perfectly the whole formation of this region."
Mrs. Meredith coughed with frank discouragement.
"I do not know it," she admitted dryly. "I suppose I ought to know it, but I do not. I believe school-teachers understand these things. I am afraid I am a very ignorant woman. No one of my acquaintances is very learned. We are not used to scholarship."
"I know all the strata," said Pansy. "I tell the children stories of how the Mastodon once virtually lived in our stable, and that millions of years ago there were Pterodactyls under their bed."
"I think it a misfortune for a young woman to have much to say to children about Pterodactyls under their bed—is that the name? Such things never seem to have troubled Solomon, and I believe he was reputed wise." She did not care for the old-fashioned reference herself, but she thought it would affect Pansy.
"The children in the public schools know things that Solomon never heard of," said Pansy, contemptuously.
"I do not doubt it in the least, my dear. I believe it was not his knowledge that made him rather celebrated, but his wisdom. But I am not up in Solomon!" she admitted hastily, retreating from the subject in new dismay.
The time had arrived for Pansy to depart; but she reclined in her morocco alcove with somewhat the stiffness of a tilted bottle and somewhat the contour. She felt extreme dissatisfaction with her visit and reluctance to terminate it.
Her idea of the difference between people in society and other people was that it hinged ornamentally upon inexhaustible and scanty knowledge. If Mrs. Meredith was a social leader, and she herself had no social standing at all, it was mainly because that lady was publicly recognized as a learned woman, and the world had not yet found out that she herself was anything but ignorant. Being ignorant was to her mind the quintessence of being common; and as she had undertaken this morning to prove to Dent's mother that she was not common, she had only to prove that she was learned. For days she had prepared for this interview with that conception of its meaning. She had converted her mind into a kind of rapid-firing gun; she had condensed her knowledge into conversational cartridges. No sooner had she taken up a mental position before Mrs. Meredith than the parlors resounded with light, rapid detonations of information. That lady had but to release the poorest, most lifeless, little clay pigeon of a remark and Pansy shattered it in mid air and refixed suspicious eyes on the trap.
But the pigeons soon began to fly less frequently. And finally they gave out. And now she must take nearly all her cartridges home! Mrs. Meredith would think her ignorant, therefore she would think her common. If Pansy had only known what divine dulness, what ambrosial stupidity, often reclines on those Olympian heights called society!
As last she rose. Neither had mentioned Dent's name, though each had been thinking of him all the time. Not a word had been spoken to indicate the recognition of a relationship which one of them so desired and the other so dreaded. Pansy might merely have hurried over to ask Mrs. Meredith for the loan of an ice-cream freezer or for a setting of eggs. On the mother's part this silence was kindly meant: she did not think it right to take for granted what might never come to pass. Uppermost in her mind was the cruelty of accepting Pansy as her daughter-in-law this morning with the possibility of rejecting her afterward.
As Pansy walked reluctantly out into the hall, she stopped with a deep wish in her candid eyes.
"Oh, Mrs. Meredith, I should so much like to see the portrait of
Dent's father: he has often spoken to me about It."
Mrs. Meredith led her away in silence to where the portrait hung, and the two stood looking at it side by side. She resisted a slight impulse to put her arm around the child. When they returned to the front of the house, Pansy turned:
"Do you think you will ever love me?"
The carriage was at the door. "You must not walk," said Mrs.
Meredith, "the sun is too hot now."
As Pansy stepped into the carriage, she cast a suspicious glance at the cushions: Meredith upholstery was not to be trusted, and she seated herself warily.
Mrs. Meredith put her hand through the window: "You must come to see me soon again, Pansy. I am a poor visitor, but I shall try to call on you in a few days."
She went back to her seat on the veranda.
It has been said that her insight into goodness was her strength; she usually had a way of knowing at once, as regards the character of people, what she was ever to know at all. Her impressions of Pansy unrolled themselves disconnectedly:
"She makes mistakes, but she does not know how to do wrong. Guile is not in her. She is so innocent that she does not realize sometimes the peril of her own words. She is proud—a great deal prouder than Dent. To her, life means work and duty; more than that, it means love. She is ambitious, and ambition, in her case, would be indispensable. She did not claim Dent: I appreciate that. She is a perfectly brave girl, and it is cowardice that makes so many women hypocrites. She will improve—she improved while she was here. But oh, everything else! No figure, no beauty, no grace, no tact, no voice, no hands, no anything that is so much needed! Dent says there are cold bodies which he calls planets without atmosphere: he has found one to revolve about him. If she only had some clouds! A mist here and there, so that everything would not be so plain, so exposed, so terribly open! But neither has he any clouds, any mists, any atmosphere. And if she only would not so try to expose other people! If she had not so trampled upon me in my ignorance; and with such a sense of triumph! I was never so educated in my life by a visitor. The amount of information she imparted in half an hour—how many months it would have served the purpose of a well-bred woman! And her pride in her family—were there ever such little brothers and sisters outside a royal family! And her devotion to her father, and remembrance of her mother. I shall go to see her, and be received, I suppose, somewhere between the griddle and the churn."
As Pansy was driven home, feeling under herself for the first time the elasticity of a perfect carriage, she experimented with her posture. "This carriage is not to be sat in in the usual way," she said. And indeed it was not. In the family rockaway there was constant need of muscular adjustment to different shocks at successive moments; here muscular surrender was required: a comfortable collapse—and there you were!
Trouble awaited her at home. Owing to preoccupation with her visit she had, before setting out, neglected much of her morning work. She had especially forgotten the hungry multitude of her dependants. The children, taking advantage of her absence, had fed only themselves. As a consequence, the trustful lives around the house had suffered a great wrong, and they were attempting to describe it to each other. The instant Pansy descended from the carriage the ducks, massed around the doorsteps, discovered her, and with frantic outcry and outstretched necks ran to find out what it all meant. The signal was taken up by other species and genera. In the stable lot the calves responded as the French horn end of the orchestra; and the youngest of her little brothers, who had climbed into a fruit tree as a lookout for her return, in scrambling hurriedly down, dropped to the earth with the boneless thud of an opossum.
Pansy walked straight up to her room, heeding nothing, leaving a wailing wake. She locked herself in. It was an hour before dinner and she needed all those moments for herself.
She sat on the edge of her bed and new light brought new wretchedness. It was not, after all, quantity of information that made the chief difference between herself and Dent's mother. The other things, all the other things—would she ever, ever acquire them! Finally the picture rose before her of how the footman had looked as he had held the carriage door open for her, and the ducks had sprawled over his feet; and she threw herself on the bed, hat and all, and burst out crying with rage and grief and mortification.
"She will think I am common," she moaned, "and I am not common! Why did I say such things? It is not my way of talking. Why did I criticise the way the portrait was hung? And she will think this is what I really am, and it is not what I am! She will think I do not even know how to sit in a chair, and she will tell Dent, and Dent will believe her, and what will become of me?"
"Pansy," said Dent next afternoon, as they were in the woods together, "you have won my mother's heart."
"Oh, Dent," she exclaimed, tears starting, "I was afraid she would not like me. How could she like me, knowing me no better?"
"She doesn't yet know that she likes you," he replied, with his honest thinking and his honest speech, "but I can see that she trusts you and respects you; and with my mother everything else follows in time."
"I was embarrassed. I did myself such injustice."
"It is something you never did any one else."
He had been at work in his quarry on the vestiges of creation; the quarry lay at an outcrop of that northern hill overlooking the valley in which she lived. Near by was a woodland, and she had come out for some work of her own in which he guided her. They lay on the grass now side by side.
"I am working on the plan of our house, Pansy. I expect to begin to build in the autumn. I have chosen this spot for the site. How do you like it?"
"I like it very well. For one reason, I can always see the old place from it."
"My father left his estate to be equally divided between Rowan and me. Of course he could not divide the house; that goes to Rowan: it is a good custom for this country as it was a good custom for our forefathers in England. But I get an equivalent and am to build for myself on this part of the land: my portion is over here. You see we have always been divided only by a few fences and they do not divide at all."
"The same plants grow on each side, Dent."
"There is one thing I have to tell you. If you are coming into our family, you ought to know it beforehand. There is a shadow over our house. It grows deeper every year and we do not know what it means. That is, my mother and I do not know. It is some secret in Rowan's life. He has never offered to tell us, and of course we have never asked him, and in fact mother and I have never even spoken to each other on the subject."
It was the first time she had even seen sadness in his eyes; and she impulsively clasped his hand. He returned the pressure and then their palms separated. No franker sign of their love had ever passed between them.
He went on very gravely: "Rowan was the most open nature I ever saw when he was a boy. I remember this now. I did not think of it then. I believe he was the happiest. You know we are all pantheists of some kind nowadays. I could never see much difference between a living thing that stands rooted in the earth like a tree and a living thing whose destiny it is to move the foot perpetually over the earth, as man. The union is as close in one case as in the other. Do you remember the blind man of the New Testament who saw men as trees walking? Rowan seemed to me, as I recall him now, to have risen out of the earth through my father and mother—a growth of wild nature, with the seasons in his face, with the blood of the planet rising into his veins as intimately as it pours into a spring oak or into an autumn grape-vine. I often heard Professor Hardage call him the earth-born. He never called any one else that. He was wild with happiness until he went to college. He came back all changed; and life has been uphill with him ever since. Lately things have grown worse. The other day I was working on the plan of our house; he came in and looked over my shoulder: 'Don't build, Dent,' he said, 'bring your wife here,' and he walked quickly out of the room. I knew what that meant: he has been unfortunate in his love affair and is ready to throw up the whole idea of marrying. This is our trouble, Pansy. It may explain anything that may have been lacking in my mother's treatment of you; she is not herself at all." He spoke with great tenderness and he looked disturbed.
"Can I do anything?" What had she been all her life but burden-bearer, sorrow-sharer?
"Nothing."
"If I ever can, will you tell me?"
"This is the only secret I have kept from you, Pansy. I am sure you have kept none from me. I believe that if I could read everything in you, I should find nothing I did not wish to know."
She did not reply for a while. Then she said solemnly: "I have one secret. There is something I try to hide from every human being and I always shall. It is not a bad secret, Dent. But I do not wish to tell you what it is, and I feel sure you will never ask me."
He turned his eyes to her clear with unshakable confidence: "I never will."
Pansy was thinking of her mother's poverty.
They sat awhile in silence.
He had pulled some stems of seeding grass and drew them slowly across his palm, pondering Life. Then he began to talk to her in the way that made them so much at home with one another.
"Pansy, men used to speak of the secrets of Nature: there is not the slightest evidence that Nature has a secret. They used to speak of the mysteries of the Creator. I am not one of those who claim to be authorities on the traits of the Creator. Some of my ancestors considered themselves such. But I do say that men are coming more and more to think of Him as having no mysteries. We have no evidence, as the old hymn declares, that He loves to move in a mysterious way. The entire openness of Nature and of the Creator—these are the new ways of thinking. They will be the only ways of thinking in the future unless civilization sinks again into darkness. What we call secrets and mysteries of the universe are the limitations of our powers and our knowledge. The little that we actually do know about Nature, how open it is, how unsecretive! There is nowhere a sign that the Creator wishes to hide from us even what is Life. If we ever discover what Life is, no doubt we shall then realize that it contained no mystery."
She loved to listen, feeling that he was drawing her to his way of thinking for the coming years.
"It was the folly and the crime of all ancient religions that their priesthoods veiled them; whenever the veil was rent, like the veil of Isis, it was not God that men found behind it: it was nothing. The religions of the future will have no veils. As far as they can set before their worshippers truth at all, it will be truth as open as the day. The Great Teacher in the New Testament—what an eternal lesson on light itself: that is the beauty of his Gospel. And his Apostles—where do you find him saying to them, 'Preach my word to all men as the secrets of a priesthood and the mysteries of the Father'?
"It is the tragedy of man alone that he has his secrets. No doubt the time will come when I shall have mine and when I shall have to hide things from you, Pansy, as Rowan has his and hides things from us. Life is full of things that we cannot tell because they would injure us; and of things that we cannot tell because they would injure others. But surely we should all like to live in a time when a man's private life will be his only life."
After a silence he came back to her with a quiet laugh: "Here I am talking about the future of the human race, and we have never agreed upon our marriage ceremony! What a lover!"
"I want the most beautiful ceremony in the world."
"The ceremony of your church?" he asked with great respect, though wincing.
"My church has no ceremony: every minister in it has his own; and rather than have one of them write mine, I think I should rather write it myself: shouldn't you?"
"I think I should," he said, laughing.
He drew a little book out of his breast pocket: "Perhaps you will like this: a great many people have been married by it."
"I want the same ceremony that is used for kings and queens, for the greatest and the best people of the earth. I will marry you by no other!"
"A good many of them have used this," and he read to her the ceremony of his church.
When he finished neither spoke.
It was a clear summer afternoon. Under them was the strength of rocks; around them the noiseless growth of needful things; above them the upward-drawing light: two working children of the New World, two pieces of Nature's quietism.