The Mettle of the Pasture

by James Lane Allen

These blinds were very old. They had been her grandmother's when she was Marguerite's age; and one day, not long before this, Marguerite, pillaging the attic, had found them and brought them down, with adoring eyes, and put them up before her own windows. They were of thin muslin, and on them were painted scenes representing the River of Life, with hills and castles, valleys and streams, in a long series; at the end there was a faint vision of a crystal dome in the air—the Celestial City—nearly washed away. You looked at these scenes through the arches of a ruined castle. A young man (on one blind) has just said farewell to his parents on the steps of the castle and is rowing away down the River of Life. At the prow of his boat is the figurehead of a winged woman holding an hour-glass.

Marguerite lay on her side, sleepily contemplating the whole scene between her thick, bosky lashes. She liked everything but the winged woman holding the hour-glass. Had she been that woman, she would have dropped the hour-glass into the blue, burying water, and have reached up her hand for the young man to draw her into the boat with him. And she would have taken off her wings and cast them away upon the hurrying river. To have been alone with him, no hour-glass, no wings, rowing away on Life's long voyage, past castles and valleys, and never ending woods and streams! As to the Celestial City, she would have liked her blinds better if the rains of her grandmother's youth had washed it away altogether. It was not the desirable end of such a journey: she did not care to land there.

Marguerite slipped drowsily over to the edge of the bed in order to be nearer the blinds; and she began to study what was left of the face of the young man just starting on his adventures from the house of his fathers. Who was he? Of whom did he cause her to think? She sat up in bed and propped her face in the palms of her hands—the April face with its October eyes—and lapsed into what had been her dreams of the night. The laces of her nightgown dropped from her wrists to her elbows; the masses of her hair, like sunlit autumn maize, fell down over her neck and shoulders into the purity of the bed.

Until the evening of her party the world had been to Marguerite something that arranged all her happiness and never interfered with it. Only soundness and loveliness of nature, inborn, undestroyable, could have withstood such luxury, indulgence, surfeit as she had always known.

On that night which was designed to end for her the life of childhood, she had, for the first time, beheld the symbol of the world's diviner beauty—a cross. All her guests had individually greeted her as though each were happier in her happiness. Except one—he did not care. He had spoken to her upon entering with the manner of one who wished himself elsewhere, he alone brought no tribute to her of any kind, in his eyes, by his smile, through the pressure of his hand.

The slight wounded her at the moment; she had not expected to have a guest to whom she would be nothing and to whom it would seem no unkindness to let her know this. The slight left its trail of pain as the evening wore on and he did not come near her. Several times, while standing close to him, she had looked her surprise, had shadowed her face with coldness for him to see. For the first time in her life she felt herself rejected, suffered the fascination of that pain. Afterward she had intentionally pressed so close to him in the throng of her guests that her arm brushed his sleeve. At last she had disengaged herself from all others and had even gone to him with the inquiries of a hostess; and he had forced himself to smile at her and had forgotten her while he spoke to her—as though she were a child. All her nature was exquisitely loosened that night, and quivering; it was not a time to be so wounded and to forget.

She did not forget as she sat in her room after all had gone. She took the kindnesses and caresses, the congratulations and triumphs, of those full-fruited hours, pressed them together and derived merely one clear drop of bitterness—the languorous poison of one haunting desire. It followed her into her sleep and through the next day; and not until night came again and she had passed through the gateway of dreams was she happy: for in those dreams it was he who was setting out from the house of his fathers on a voyage down the River of Life; and he had paused and turned and called her to come to him and be with him always.

Marguerite lifted her face from her palms, as she finished her revery. She slipped to the floor out of the big walnut bed, and crossing to the blinds laid her fingers on the young man's shoulder. It was the movement with which one says: "I have come."

With a sigh she drew one of the blinds aside and looked out upon the leaves and roses of her yard and at the dazzling sunlight. Within a few feet of her a bird was singing. "How can you?" she said. "If you loved, you would be silent. Your wings would droop. You could neither sing nor fly." She turned dreamily back into her room and wandered over to a little table on which her violin lay in its box. She lifted the top and thrummed the strings. "How could I ever have loved you?"

She dressed absent-mindedly. How should she spend the forenoon? Some of her friends would be coming to talk over the party; there would be callers; there was the summer-house, her hammock, her phaeton; there were nooks and seats, cool, fragrant; there were her mother and grandmother to prattle to and caress. "No," she said, "not any of them. One person only. I must see him."