Young woman, if you were in Mell’s place; if you had six good reasons for not telling the man you are about to marry that you did not care a straw about him, wouldn’t you hold your peace?
Then cast no stones at Mell.
Mell was deeply moved by Rube’s words, but not deep enough to damage her future prospects. And since a woman has very poor prospects outside of matrimony, ought we not to excuse her for attending closely to business?
At all events, although Mell’s thoughts were heavy, and her soul stirred within her, and her thick breathing almost stifled in a painful sense of guilt, she did not say a word. Feeling that Rube’s eyes were fixed upon her, she raised to him her own, suffused in tears; an answer which fully satisfied her companion. From which it will appear that a woman may weep for the man she takes in—weep, and yet keep on taking him in.
And what can a man do? How could Rube tell that it was the hidden pathos of his own groundless faith, and not a feeling of sympathetic affection, which brought such softness of expression into that girl’s luminous orbs?
If the actual is the only true thing, and amounts to everything, as it really does in the school of Realism, there is still one difficulty to be encountered—to get hold of the actual. He who aspires to find out the actual, where a woman is concerned, must get himself another kind of eye, one whose vision is introspective and able to penetrate into that mysterious element in a clever woman’s nature which enables her so successfully to clothe the Not-True in the beautiful garments of Truth.
Rube Rutland felt uncertain about a good many things—his own strength under temptation, his mother’s consent to this marriage, Clara’s temper, the great sea serpent, the Pope’s infallibility, the man in the Iron Mask, and many a cock-and-bull story beside, but he never once doubted Mell Creecy’s love, the purest myth among them all.
He came, after this, every day to the little house upon the hill, and had it out “comferterble in the parler,” as old man Creecy had advised Jerome to do. He courted with the enthusiasm of an incorrigible faddist over a new fad; and no lover of those olden days of which he had spoken, when goodly knights tilted in the jousts of arms, and won fair lady’s favor with deeds of prowess, ever yet surpassed a modern mighty man with a mission. Devotion itself is paralyzed when it comes to them.
At the Bigge House, as one may suppose, there had been considerable consternation when its young master announced his intention of taking to wife old Jacob Creecy’s daughter. Consternation, but hardly surprise; for Rube had ever been one of those lawless members of well-conducted households privileged to say and do outrageous things, and expected to turn out of the beaten track on the slightest provocation.
Miss Rutland was most concerned. Said she to her brother: