The Mettle of the Pasture

by James Lane Allen

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.