The mock antagonism between seniors and juniors seemed to have great meaning when Tom Harris spoke the lofty phrases she had written for him, standing outlined against the soaring fire like a silhouette of velvet, his voice rolling out with lofty suspensive power.
"Here on the spot where our fathers have dwelt for countless suns and moons we ask for peace. We call upon you to bury the hatchet. Forgive and forget; you who have scars forgive, and you who have wrongs forget. Let all evil spirits be exorcised by the pipe. Here we break the arrow. Here we tender the sacred pipe. Brothers—sisters, we have spoken!"
The fire burned low. As they sat in circles on the ground and chanted their songs, the sky grew blacker, the trees melted into the darkness, the last wailing cadence floated into silence, and then subdued, tender, they rose and vanished, in pairs and groups, into the darkness like the songs they sang. The class of 189— had entered upon its long, long trail, some to the plains of failure, some to the mountains of victory.
This quaint and suggestive custom received new strength from the oration which Rose contributed. All felt its power and beauty. To the girls the whole ceremony was a rare and delicious piece of audacity. It did them good. It gave them something to look back upon with laughter, into which a sigh and a little catching of the breath might also come.
Something elemental and primitive came to Rose amid all the laughter and song. What was she more than the swart women who had lived here and been wooed of men? Was there not something magnificent in their frank following of the trail of pure passion? They loved, and bore children, and ground at the corn mills, and died as the female bison died, and other women came after them to do like unto them, to what end?
Some such questions, vague, ever shadowy, formless, moved Rose, as she lay down to sleep that night. Outside a mandolin twanged—the boys were serenading her, but she had not the wish to see them. She did not go to the window, as the other girls did, deliciously excited, almost hysteric with the daring of being possibly seen in their night-gowns. She kept sombre silence, stirred by profounder emotions than they were capable of.
She thought of William De Lisle but seldom now. In open daylight she was a little ashamed of her idolatry, but on nights like these, when love songs and moonlight fused together, his figure came before her, not so clear a personality now, but as a type of beauty, as a center of dreams, of something wild and free and splendid—something she was to attain to some good day.
She had no thought of attaining him, but some one like unto him. Some one who was grand as her dream of heroes and loyal as her father.
It was characteristic of her that while the lovers singing without made her companions utter hysterical laughter, she was sad and wished to be alone. Their desires were on the surface, shifting, sparkling, seeking kisses. Hers was dark, and deep down, sombre, savage, prophetic. Love with her was a thing not to be uttered. She silenced all jests about it, and all familiarity on the part of her suitors she had put away.
During her first year she had allowed her lover to take her hand, as Carl used to do, because it seemed the usual thing, but after breaking off that entanglement she resolutely set to work to study, and no man had since considered himself her lover. To permit a caress now meant all the world to her. It meant change, undoing of plans, throwing away ambitions. It meant flinging herself to the immemorial sacrifice men demand of women.