The Mettle of the Pasture

by James Lane Allen

She spoke very quietly, and at first she seemed unable to progress very far from the beginning. After every start, she soon came back to that one beginning.

"It is of no use to weigh the right and the wrong of it: I tried that at first, and I suppose that is why I made sad mistakes. You must not think that I am acting now from a sense of duty to him or to myself. Duty does not enter into my feeling: it is love; all that I am forbids me to do anything else."

But after a while she went back and bared before him in a way the history of her heart. "The morning after he told me, I went to church. I remember the lessons of the day and the hymns, and how I left the church before the sermon, because everything seemed to be on his side, and no one was on mine. He had done wrong and was guilty; and I had been wrong and was innocent; and the church comforted him and overlooked me; and I was angry and walked out of it.

"And do you remember the day I came to see you and you proposed everything to me, and I rejected everything? You told me to go away for a while, to throw myself into the pleasures of other people; you reminded me of prayer and of the duty of forgiveness; you told me to try to put myself in his place, and reminded me of self-sacrifice, and then said at last that I must leave it to time, which sooner or later settles everything. I rejected everything that you suggested. But I have accepted everything since, and have learned a lesson and a service from each: the meaning of prayer and of forgiveness and of self-sacrifice; and what the lapse of time can do to bring us to ourselves and show us what we wish. I say, I have lived through all these, and I have gotten something out of them all; but however much they may mean, they never constitute love; and it is my love that brings me back to him now."

Later on she recurred to the idea of self-sacrifice: much other deepest feeling seemed to gather about that.

"I am afraid that you do not realize what it means to a woman when a principle like this is involved. Can any man ever know? Does he dream what it means to us women to sacrifice ourselves as they often require us to do? I have been travelling in old lands—so old that the history of each goes back until we can follow it with our eyes no longer. But as far as we can see, we see this sorrow—the sorrow of women who have wished to be first in the love of the men they have loved. You, who read everything! Cannot you see them standing all through history, the sad figures of girls who have only asked for what they gave, love in its purity and its singleness—have only asked that there should have been no other before them? And cannot you see what a girl feels when she consents to accept anything less,—that she is lowered to herself from that time on,—has lost her own ideal of herself, as well as her ideal of the man she loves? And cannot you see how she lowers herself in his eyes also and ceases to be his ideal, through her willingness to live with him on a lower plane? That is our wound. That is our trouble and our sorrow: I have found it wherever I have gone."

Long before she said this to him, she had questioned him closely about Rowan. He withheld from her knowledge of some things which he thought she could better bear to learn later and by degrees.

"I knew he was not well," she said; "I feared it might be worse. Let me tell you this: no one knows him as I do. I must speak plainly. First, there was his trouble; that shadowed for him one ideal in his life. Then this drove him to a kind of self-concealment; and that wounded another ideal—his love of candor. Then he asked me to marry him, and he told me the truth about himself and I turned him off. Then came the scandals that tried to take away his good name, and I suppose have taken it away. And then, through all this, were the sufferings he was causing others around him, and the loss of his mother. I have lived through all these things with him while I have been away, and I understand; they sap life. I am going up to write to him now, and will you post the letter to-night? I wish him to come to see me at once, and our marriage must take place as soon as possible—here—very quietly."

Rowan came the next afternoon. She was in the library; and he went in and shut the door, and they were left alone.

Professor Hardage and Miss Anna sat in an upper room. He had no book and she had no work; they were thinking only of the two downstairs. And they spoke to each other in undertones, breaking the silence with brief sentences, as persons speak when awaiting news from sick-rooms.