Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

"I am sorry, Miss Marion," he said, going to the window-sill, "but the pink balsam is dead again."

"What can you mean by 'dead again'"? said a vexed but clear voice within. "It can not be dead but once, of course."

"We have had a good many balsams," replied Bro apologetically, "and even a good many pink ones, like this; I forget sometimes."

"That is because you have no real love for flowers," said the irate young mistress from her dish-pan: she was provoked at the loss of the balsam—it was her last one.

Bro, who could not see her from where he stood, waited a moment or two, shuffled his feet to and fro on the sand, and noiselessly drummed on the sill with his long fingers; then he went slowly down to the shore, where his boat was drawn up, and rowed himself across to the saw-mill. He felt a sort of guilt about that pink balsam, as though he had not perhaps taken enough care of it; but, in truth, he had watched every hair's-breadth of its limp, reluctant growth, knew its moist veining accurately, and even the habits and opinions, as it were, of two minute green inhabitants, with six legs, of the size, taken both together, of a pin's point, who considered the stalk quite a prairie.

When she was eighteen and nineteen years old, Marion Manning had refused several suitors, giving as a reason to her mother that they were all detestable; since then, she had not been troubled with suitors to refuse. There were girls with more coloring and brighter eyes in Wilbarger, and girls with warmer hearts: so said the gossips. And, certainly, the calm reserve, the incisive words, and clear gray eyes that looked straight at you of Marion Manning were not calculated to encourage the embarrassed but at the same time decidedly favor-conferring attentions of the youths of the town. Mrs. Manning, in the course of the years they had been together, had gradually taken Bro as a humble confidant: he knew of the offers and refusals; he knew of the succeeding suitorless period which Mrs. Manning, a stanch believer in love and romance, bewailed as wasted time. "I could never have resisted young Echols," she said, "sitting there on the door-step as he used to, with the sun shining on his curly hair. But there! I always had a fancy for curls." Bro received these confidences with strict attention, as valuable items. But one peculiarity of his mind was that he never generalized; and thus, for instance, instead of taking in the fact that curly hair plays a part in winning a heart, he only understood that Mrs. Manning, for some reason or other, liked kinks and twists in the covering of the head; as some persons liked hempen shoestrings, others leathern.

"But Miss Marion is happy," he said once, when the suitorless period was two years old, and the mother lamenting.

"Yes; but we can not live our lives more than once, Bro, and these years will never come back to her. What keeps me up through all the privations I have suffered but the memory of the short but happy time of my own courtship and marriage?" Here Mrs. Manning shed tears. The memory must, indeed, have been a strong one, the unregenerated humorist would have thought, to "keep up" such a weight as hers. But Bro was not a humorist: that Mrs. Manning was fat was no more to him than that he himself was lean. He had the most implicit belief in the romance of her life, upon which she often expatiated; he knew all about the first time she saw him, and how she felt; he knew every detail of the courtship. This was only when Marion was absent, however; the mother, voluble as she was, said but little on that subject when her daughter was in the room.

"But Miss Marion is happy," again said Bro, when the suitorless period was now five years old.

"No, she is not," replied the mother this time. "She begins to feel that her life is colorless and blank; I can see she does. She is not an ordinary girl, and needlework and housekeeping do not content her. If she had an orphan asylum to manage, now, or something of that kind—But, dear me! what would suit her best, I do believe, would be drilling a regiment," added Mrs. Manning, her comfortable amplitude heaving with laughter. "She is as straight as a ramrod always, for all her delicate, small bones. What she would like best of all, I suppose, would be keeping accounts; she will do a sum now rather than any kind of embroidery, and a page of figures is fairly meat and drink to her. That Miss Drough has, I fear, done her more harm than good: you can not make life exactly even, like arithmetic, nor balance quantities, try as you may. And, whatever variety men may succeed in getting, we women have to put up with a pretty steady course of subtraction, I notice."