No; we have not painted her as anxious in respect to any of these things. Yet I beg the reader will not accuse me of drawing a monstrosity of a girl, one destitute of the common instincts of her sex. Far from it. She, very likely, trusting implicitly to her intuitions (as women will), felt too confident as to these possibilities of her future to give them a second thought. Besides, was she not desperately in love? And we all know (or, at least, I believe, which amounts to the same thing, so far as this book is concerned) that there are women who, if but deeply enamoured, would scorn such thoughts, as a degradation to true love. At any rate, the fact was as I have stated it. Mary, while seemingly careless (though that may have been due to confidence) as to the mere details of her destiny in this world, was morbidly solicitous touching her lover’s views as to the next.
Laugh not, gentle reader. True, I am a humoristic Bushwhacker by trade; but I would not have you smile out of order. And as for thee, my great-to-the-tenth-power-grandson, brush the wrinkles from thy yellow brow, lest thou crack, not this nut, but thine addled pate, instead.
Know, then, all men (and by all men I mean, of course, all women and clergymen, who, alone, in these busy days, have leisure to read symphonic monographs)—
Know, all women and clergymen, of this and more or less future generations, that the story I am telling has very narrow limitations, as well in time as in space. It is of Virginia[[1]] alone that I am writing. Of Virginia not in the fourth quarter, but Virginia in the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century. Strolling through this narrow field, at this particular harvest-time, I have selected three sheaves wherewith to fashion such rural picture as my hand should have cunning to form.
Lucy, I chose, originally, as symbolizing the purity and simplicity of the womanhood of our old Virginia life. But of her I am conscious that I have given the merest outline; and I find that I cannot fill in the picture adequately, and at the same time maintain the rigidly monographic type of my work. Let her stand, therefore, just outside of our central group (where the full light falls), illumining the half-shadow with her gentle, St. Cecilia look. Is that a smile that lights her eye, or is it the glancing of a tear?
Our Alice illustrates for us, as I have said elsewhere, the careless freedom of those old days, and shows how our democratic-aristocratic Virginia girls could be gay without being indiscreet, joyous yet not loud, unconventional yet full of real dignity; how, in the hundreds of years that separate them from the mother-country, they have shaken off English stiffness, while clinging fast to English love of liberty. But she is fully capable of speaking for herself; and we pass on to Mary Rolfe.
The reader has already, I hope, a tolerably clear conception of this young person. Stature below the average, eyes full of soul, a manner painfully shy with strangers, childlike and confiding with intimates; a mind admirably stored, considering her years, with all that can adorn; often silent, and preferring to hear rather than to be heard, but murmuring, when, forgetting her reserve, she does speak, like a brook, and in a voice of such surpassing sweetness that one could have wished that, like the brook, she would go on forever. Eloquent rather than witty. And I fear few would have called her wise. For the rest, full of high imaginings, and a born hero-worshipper.
Such was Mary Rolfe in herself; and to know her as such has sufficed for the reader, so far. But a crisis is approaching in Mary’s life; and to foretell how people are going to act in crises, it is not enough to know what they are in themselves, merely. What they are is something; the where and the when are more. Do you see that pleasant, genial-looking man walking along the streets of a Southern city? Could anything be gentler than his look, kinder than his eye? Yet it was but the other day that he went out, deliberately, to a secluded spot called the Field of Honor, and sent a ball through the person of an excellent gentleman, who at the same time was addressing a bullet to his care. These worthy persons were no worse than other people (true, they were editors), but they lived in the South. That was the trouble. In the North the same man would have simply said, you’re another, and called the account square. And I, for one, applaud the North, and say she is right and the South wrong.
No; if you would forecast the actions of men, you must be acquainted with their environment, as Herbert Spencer would call it. To use an illustration that this leader of modern scientific thought would not object to; you strike that white ball with your cue. The table being smooth, it would seem that it would maintain its initial direction till the initial force was exhausted, or at least till it struck the opposite cushion; but, lo! it strikes a light red ball that lies in its path, and off it flies at a tangent. If Mr. Spencer held the cue and were conducting the experiment in person, our illustration would now be at an end (for I am told that he is the worst billiard-player in all England); but let us suppose that that cue-thrust was delivered by one of those solid-headed young men (in shirt-sleeves) who delight in what they humorously call the scientific game. The white strikes the light red and darts away; but click! and off it speeds along a different track. It has carromed on the dark red.
And are we not, we mortals, so many billiard-balls, launched forth upon our little arena by we know not what force, and rolling we know not whither? It may be a little wider or a trifle narrower, perhaps, the stage on which we play our several parts; but all the same, around it rise the unscalable barriers of human life, the adamantine limitations of human endeavor. And we, embracing within our little selves (as did the tusk whence that ball was cut) countless conflicting forces, the inextricably intermingled traits, that is, of numberless ancestors,—fashioned, too, by the loving hands of father, mother, brother, sister, teacher; we spin forth on the journey of life. And a seemly roll of it we may have, and a safe, perhaps, if we be but smooth and round and mediocre (not bulging on this side, say, with big thoughts, or jagged on that with untamable conscience). There stands the goal, and making for it, merrily we spin forth,—but, click! click! and where are we? Nay, may not a pinch of cigar-ashes wrest victory from an expert? And hath not, sometime, a mere rumpled thread sufficed to bring triumph to a tyro? Surely it is not a great matter to stoop and pick up a pin; but was it not enough, once, as we are told, to make a beggar a millionaire? And who shall say that the merest casual fly, alighting on the intent nose of some gunner in beleaguered Toulon, might not have so warped the parabola of a shell as to have rendered needless the slaughter of Waterloo?