XXThe ant and the moth have cells for each of their young, butour little ones lie in festering heaps in homes that consumethem like graves; and night by night, from the corners ofour streets, rises up the cry of the homeless,—"I wasa stranger and ye took me not in."Ruskin.
The ant and the moth have cells for each of their young, butour little ones lie in festering heaps in homes that consumethem like graves; and night by night, from the corners ofour streets, rises up the cry of the homeless,—"I wasa stranger and ye took me not in."Ruskin.
For a time they busied themselves with different things about their little home, worked in the garden, and held a round-up of their stock that they might know the extent of their wealth; and because, in a life quite apart from human beings, animals come to take their place to a greater extent than might seem possible.
It was a very pleasant time. Everything seemed so gentle, so willing to be friends, and so certain of their good-will.
"You used to be a Kipling fiend," said Adam, one morning, when they had been salting the cattle, and were resting before going home. "Didn't he write a Jungle tale about 'HowFear Came'? He ought to be here now to write another to show how Fear might go."
"It seems to me he did," Robin answered, running her fingers through the short, curly forelock of a colt that stood placidly licking her hand. "I wonder that they don't remember longer, or perhaps they know that we think they are folks. Really, I think we ought to hold a reception, a kind of salon, once a week, so as to keep acquainted with our neighbors."
"You are an absurd child," he said, laughing; "but does that mean that you have really decided to go on living?"
"I don't know," she said. "What did we determine? By the way, which side of this question are you on?"
"Both," he said decidedly.
"Oh! then we can't do like those menCooper told about, in 'The Pioneers,' wasn't it? who argued and argued every night until at last they convinced each other, and then started in to argue it out again."
"No," he answered, "I rather think that we are answering ourselves rather than each other, anyhow. Robin, where was 'the land of Nod'?"
"That is one of the questions that I was sent to bed for asking a preacher who was visiting at our house, when I was about seven years old. They hurried me hence before he had a chance to answer, so I never found out. But I know what you are thinking of, and I have thought of it too. Perhaps there isn't any land of Nod, or any land at all. And I have thought, also, how it would be if one of us died and left the other with little children. You might take mybody and jump off the rock, but you couldn't take them too, and still less could you leave them."
"I have thought of the risk to you," he said, "and felt that not even for the sake of a child would I let you come so near death."
She laughed a little. "That is really funny," she said. "You must have been reading Michelet; I never thought of that at all. I am very well and strong, and my habits and my clothes are not such as to hamper my life nor endanger that of another. There is next to no risk, so far as that is concerned, certainly none I would not gladly take. But I have dreaded afterwards, when the child might fall ill and need help that we could not give it."
"Because there are no doctors in the world?" said Adam, with a touchof cynicism. "I don't know that we are not better off without them. The greatest of them confessed that it was guess-work. The best doctors I ever knew were always trying to make their patients live more simply, take more exercise, and give nature a chance; they never resorted to medicine until there was nothing else to do. If all the germs and microbes have gone with them, the earth can stand the loss. The main thing is to be well born, and when the body is healthy and leads a natural life, while it may know pain, it need not be a prey to disease. Very few children had a heritage worth having. It had been bartered away. No wonder we were taught to say, 'There is no health in us.'"
"Do you remember Gannett's 'Not All There'?" she asked soberly. "Iam not sure I can recall it, but it began this way:—
"Something short in the making,Something lost on the way,As the little soul was takingIts path to the break of day."Only his mood or passion,But it twitched an atom back,And she for her gods of fashionFilched from the pilgrim's pack."The father did not mean it,The mother did not know,No human eye had seen it,But the little soul needed it so."Thro' the street there passed a crippleMaimed from before its birth;On the strange face gleamed a rippleLike a half dawn on the earth."It passed, and it awed the cityAs one not alive nor dead;Eyes looked and burned with pity.'He is not all there,' they said."Not all! for part is behind it,Lying dropped on the way;That part—could two but find it,How welcome the end of day!"
For a long while neither spoke, then Robin went on. The colt had wandered back to its mother, and she sat with her hands clasped, and her eyes looking far out to sea.
"I don't blame people for dreading the responsibility, nor even for shirking it, when I think of all the conditions we had to face. Men who thought they had hedged their trades about with so much skill that they had banished competition, found that they had only succeeded in bringing into the field the machine that banished them. And everywhere there was such ghastly poverty,—poverty of body and brain and soul. We had gone back to patrons and patronesses.Men or women did not do anything of themselves any more,—they did not sing or play, or give a reading, or exhibit a painting. They starved, or they performed or exhibited 'under the auspices of.' It has always been the same. Given a pure democracy, and demos reigns sooner or later. The shiftless go to the bottom, the thrifty to the top, and then like the upper and nether millstones, they grind everything between them. That which is below cries, 'Alms!' and that which is above responds, 'Largesse,' and the voice that cries, 'Justice,' is stifled between. The stone that crushed from above and the rock that ground from below were very near, and men dreaded them, for when the grist is ground, and flint strikes upon flint, the conflagration is at hand. Do you think I am talking like a Populistcampaign book? I only know what I saw, and what the poets have said. I wouldn't dare to be as radical as Lowell, nor as bitter as Tennyson, nor as savage as Carlyle, or Ruskin, or Hugo. We had overcome the sharpness of death, but whence could we hope for deliverance from the sharpness of living?"
"We have been delivered," said Adam, slowly, "but you don't seem disposed to be the Miriam of this Israel—limited."
"Well, no," answered Robin. "I should like to believe that you and I were rewarded for our superhuman excellence by being saved when Pharaoh and his multitudes went under, but a somewhat wide acquaintance with other people forbids. On the other hand, we can't have been left on account of our superlative badness. Truly,Adam, don't you feel sometimes as if you would rather have died with the rest?"
He hesitated. The question was so unexpected, and so fraught with possibilities. She watched the struggle in his face and honored him for it. He put back a stray lock of hair and kissed her forehead before he answered.
"The streak of cowardice that we all of us have in us," he said finally, "the distrust of myself, and the doubt of all systems of life of which I know anything, prompts me to answer yes; for I think even if we had died, you and I would still be together. I think sometimes we have been, in the past, but whether we have or not, I know we shall be in the future. So while the mental part of me,—which it seems to me is the weakest and mostcontemptible part of man, because it is always reasoning him out of what his soul tells him is true,—while the mental part of me might find it easier to be dead than to know what we ought to do, everything else in me rejoices. I know that in the great plan we have a part, it seems to me a very happy and beautiful part. In all our world there is no cause for anger or hatred or sin. There is friendliness and content and gentleness and love all around us; look up, dear, and see how near heaven seems."
But though she looked up, she saw only the light in his eyes.
XXI"We're all for love," the violins said.Sidney Lanier.
"We're all for love," the violins said.Sidney Lanier.
Robin's music was a source of great delight to both of them. There was such a sense of time, infinite and unlimited, that they ceased to be the hurrying mortals of earth. The joy of life crept into their hearts, and they grew young with the new world.
One evening they watched the full moon come up over the mountains. She had been playing a few desultory airs, and looking up asked,—
"Who is it says 'music is love in search of a word'?"
"If you don't know, I'm sure I don't," answered Adam, laughing. "Do you know that you quote entirely too much?"
"Oh, yes," she said lightly. "I always knew that if I ever should break into print, the critics, supposing they ever deigned to notice me, would say, as they said of Lubbock's 'Beauties of Life,' that it wasn't a book, but a compendium of useful quotations. But do you really dislike quoting? I think it takes as much or nearly as much originality to quote well as to invent."
"Oh, no!" he interposed.
"No? Well, it seems so to me. I think the thing first myself, that is original so far as I am concerned, though it may be old as the hills, and then it comes to me afterward, in a dozen ways, perhaps, as other people have said it. I realize that in the kaleidoscope of life the pattern before my mind's eye approximates that which others have seen. We don't say a man knows too many synonyms orantonyms, and I don't see much difference."
"I have a misty memory that quotation is said to be a confession of inferiority," answered Adam.
"That's Emerson," she said, laughing; "but he also says, 'genius borrows nobly,' and I am willing to confess inferiority to a great many people; all that implies is that one should only quote well. If it wasn't that I'm not sure of the words, and that I can't verify them, I should confound you with a citation from Disraeli."
"Go on," said Adam, lazily; "I don't mind being crushed."
"It is to the effect that people think that where there is no quotation there must be great originality. Then he says, 'the greater part of our writers, in consequence, have become so original that no one cares to imitate them;and those who never quote are seldom quoted.' That's about it. Now are you answered?" She laughed gleefully. "It is delicious to disagree with you. I had almost forgotten that it was possible."
He echoed her laugh with the carefree heartiness of a boy. "I am going to make a riddle," he said. "Prepare yourself; this is the first conundrum of the new world. Why is it better to disagree than to differ?"
She made a little grimace. "It's a wonder the Sphinx does not rise from the other side of the world and eat you," she said with derision. "Anybody who loved anybody could answer such a poor little excuse for a riddle as that; besides, it sounds like an extract from somebody's 'First Easy Lessons in Rhetoric.' Don't you see that I can disagreewithyou, while I mustdifferfromyou? That is too disgracefully easy. Indeed, Adam, that riddle of yours brings back every doubt, for they say—scientists and ologists and learned people, you know—that there is hope for delinquents and defectives, but none for degenerates, and that is an awfully degenerate joke."
"Play for me," he said, "and don't call names."
She lifted the bow and drew it across the strings in a series of cadences so wildly mournful that he shuddered. She put the bow down, and laid her hand upon the strings to still them. In the old days she had been given to sudden changes of mood, but of late she had been almost serene.
"What is it?" he asked gently.
"Oh, nothing,—everything! I was thinking of another thing which thosewise ones said," she answered, with more bitterness than she had shown for many months. "It was that word 'degenerate' brought it back. You know birds are a very low order of being, a branch of the reptile family, in truth, and I have heard people say that musicians are generally lacking in something. They either have no moral or financial sense, and cannot be bound by ordinary rules. And I am musical to the very tips of my fingers. It is as if I could hear the song of the silence,—I feel its vibrations like those of a great organ."
She walked up and down, her hands back of her head, and the moonlight shining on her upturned, troubled face.
"There is another scientific fact you forget," he said.
She stopped to listen, and he went on.
"When a race has run its course, nature cries 'habet,' and nothing can alter its fate. It was not alone the merciless onslaughts of the white man that exterminated the buffalo. They died, and none came to take their places. They vanished, less on account of man's cruelty than by reason of their own sterility. Degenerates or regenerates, can't we leave the decision with a power that forever builds or destroys, in accordance with a law we do not understand, a higher law that comes from the source of all law, whatever that source may be? Don't think any more, but play for me. In spite of my lecture, I will quote too; my mother used to sing a hymn that went like this,—
'I'd soar and touch the heavenly strings,And vie with Gabriel while he sings,'—
Do you know it?"
She began the old tune, "Ariel," and then wandered on, playing many airs that brought back forgotten days. Adam threw himself down on the grass to listen, half jealously, for she seemed to forget everything. She had seated herself on a great boulder, and, leaning back against it, her eyes looking into the blue depths above her, she played on and on. The old tunes were merged in new ones, and the high sustained notes of the Cavalleria, the subtle minor of Wagner, the exquisite sweetness of Beethoven and Schubert filled the moonlit cañon, and still she played on, melodies new to Adam, intoxicating, full of a wild ecstasy, that filled his very soul, and thrilled through him till he felt all power of resistance swept away. Every other desire in the world was lost in the supreme andoverwhelming longing to gather her to his heart and hold her there forever. The very air was steeped in melody. The full majestic chords rose and melted in unison with the high, exquisitely sweet notes, and throbbed their life away. She held the bow suspended a moment, then very softly, half unconsciously, played a dreamy lullaby, and laid the violin down in her lap.
Adam took her and it into his arms.
"Be careful, put it down gently," she said faintly; "it is your soul and mine. Do you not know the secret of Antonio Stradivari, of all the great makers of violins? Ah, they solved our riddle, Love, ages ago. Do you not remember the story of Jacob Steiner, and how he spent days and days in the woods, selecting the trees for his violins, and how the spirits ofthe trees revenged themselves by telling him of their ruined lives till he went mad?"
"But there was no madness in this music," Adam answered, "except, except—"
"The supreme, sublime madness of love? Do you not know, surely you do, that every perfect violin is as much man and woman as you and I? The back of the violin is made from the timber of the female tree, the belly of the male tree. The harmony depends on their vibrations, as they clasp each other in an embrace as real—"
"As this," he cried, drawing her closer, and bending his handsome head until their lips met. "Sweet, must I envy that violin?"
He felt her heart beating wildly against his own, their arms closed around each other convulsively. Thesweetness of the music-laden, flower-scented air filled his senses.
"God! how I love you!" he said.
A frightened look came into her eyes, and she struggled, for a moment, futilely.
"Let me go!" she whispered; "let me go!"
"Do you want me to?" he answered, studying her face in the moonlight.
"No," she said. "No, never again, but, oh, Adam!"
XXIII'm weary of conjectures—this must end them.Addison.
I'm weary of conjectures—this must end them.Addison.
Adam had to go to the cane-fields across the range, and one of the calves needed Robin's ministrations, so she could not go with him. He started before the stars were set, that he might be back before night, and returned twice to kiss her before he finally got away.
Left with the long day ahead of her, restless and lonely, she gave the small house a thorough sweeping and cleaning. She had finished her dusting, and was rearranging the furniture, when she shoved back the long chest and struck the framework of the window with some little violence. It was enough to jar a rusty key from its place above the casement, and it dropped upon the chest with a kind ofominous clink as it struck the lock, and fell upon the floor. She took it up and looked at it curiously, and then, kneeling, fitted it in the lock.
"I wonder," she mused, "what I shall set free if I open this box; is it Pandora's? But there was nothing left in hers but hope, and that is all we need. How happy we could be if we dared to hope!"
She turned the key with a wrench, and the hasp shot from its place. The chest was nearly empty, there being but one parcel in it. This was done up carefully in a square of linen, pinned here and there. On the bottom of the chest were several folds of white paper. Very slowly she lifted out the parcel and opened it. The treasure was a gown; it was of a heavy, satiny weave of linen, very yellow and creased. The bodice was made without sleevesor neck, and the skirt was a kind of kilt plaited affair; the whole effect was Greek, and, simple as it was, it seemed beautiful to Robin after her year of dark, utilitarian clothing. There was white underwear, and even white stockings, and a pair of slippers.
Robin drew a long breath of delight, and laying all her finery upon the table placed the irons over the tripod that she might smooth the wrinkles out, and set about making the necessary alterations at once. She worked rapidly in spite of her excitement, but the hours slipped away.
"I must try it on," she said, "before Adam comes; there will be plenty of time, and then I will put it away until—"
Shroud or wedding-gown? She did not finish the sentence. She dressed slowly; but when she had finished shewas startled to see that the image in the glass was so much fairer than she had ever thought herself. Suddenly she discovered, with something like a pang, that there was no belt, and hurried back to the chest to look again.
As she twitched out the remaining layer of paper in her eagerness, a long white satin ribbon dropped from it, and a little heap of fine muslin lay on the floor of the chest. She caught up the ribbon with an exclamation of delight and adjusted it with trembling fingers. Her flushed cheeks and radiant eyes, the long heavy braid of hair, her round white arms and shoulders, made her a vision of delight indeed. When she had quite completed her toilet, she sat down by the chest to inspect its last secret. As she took up the pile of lace and muslin, her heartseemed to stop beating for a moment. She had forgotten. Only the hands of the prospective mother could have fashioned such dainty garments as these. Everywhere the eternal question. All her perplexities had fallen from her in the joy of dressing herself as Adam's bride should be decked, howbeit Adam saw her not, but the great problem of life confronted her still.
She put the tiny garments down on the chest, closed now, having given up its mystery, its hope of the world, and knelt by it, touching them with loving, reverent fingers till the tears blinded her, and she gathered up the clothes and kissed them as she had never kissed Adam, as she had never kissed anything in her life. After awhile the tears ceased to flow, and there stole over her a gracious calmness and then the slumber of a child.
She did not hear Adam, nor see him, until he passed the window and stood in the doorway, all the sunset glow back of him. Then she started to her feet, her arms closing instinctively over the tiny garments she had gathered to her breast, as she stepped back, her face flushing and paling all in a moment.
He stood as if he dared not move lest the vision vanish, but heart and soul looked out of his eyes.
"Eve," he said, "Eve!"
She turned, and he sprang toward her with an eager cry of joy.
"Eve," he repeated, "Eve, my love, my soul! You have decided; you are going to be my wife. Oh, do not torture yourself or me any longer with doubts that did not enter the mind of God Almighty when He made us what we are. You are my world, dearerthan life, more necessary than the air we breathe. We are only one being, separated God knows how long, but united now forever. Nothing can part us again."
He stopped and held out his arms to her. He had taken her into their shelter very often, but now he wanted her to come to him and nestle against his heart of her own will. She took a single step, stretching out her arms to him with a gesture of infinite trust and abandon. The long sheer dress fluttered down to the floor, and lay between them.
They stood as still as if frozen.
"Dare you cross it?" she said, and hid her face in her hands.
He stooped and picked it up, and looked at it as a man might look at the soul of something of which he had never seen the body. He had asense of his own strength, the glory of his manhood, and a vision of his weakness. She watched him breathlessly. He put the garment down on the table and smoothed it out gently. There was in his face the combined look of a man who sees the cradle and the coffin of his firstborn.
She went and stood beside him, touching the dress timidly. He covered her hand with his own.
"My wife," he said, "we know all there is to say, all there is to risk. We must do what is right. I am going now to set everything at liberty. It is nearly sundown; you will meet me at the rock in half an hour. If we give each other our right hands, we will fear no evil, not though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, for the love in our hearts is deathless, and though the sun sets, itis to rise upon another shore. Death is only an incident, but life is eternal."
"We could not choose differently?" And though she spoke with the upward inflection it was not a question.
"No, it would be quite impossible for either of us to desire what the other did not. And much as we love each other, we will know we have loved our race and honored God first in our decision. To live, if we live, not for ourselves alone, but for the good of our kind; to renounce love, the unspeakable gift, if need be, for the sake of what seems to us right."
"And if I give you my left hand—?"
The sudden flash of light in his eyes half blinded her. He took both her hands in his and looked deep in her beautiful unfathomable eyes.
"Then the morning stars will singtogether, and all the sons of God shall shout for joy."
The sun dropped lower and lower over the high sharp peaks at the west, covering their white summits with a flood of golden glory. The sullen roar of the ocean seemed hushed, and across its wide expanse the last beams of the setting sun made radiant pathways of crimson and gold. A lark far up in the heavens sang its few clear notes as it hastened homeward. Far away on the mountain-side the cattle lay placidly, and a mare whinnied to her colt. The air was soft and warm and drowsy with the scent of many flowers, the sounds of nestling birds, the drone of an insect here and there, the cheerful call of the crickets.
Adam stood by the rock and waited for her. She came toward him, all the light of the world seeming to fallupon her and circle her in a halo that transformed her white draperies, and glistened like a million gems in the sparse grass about her feet.
They made each other no greeting, but stood and looked into each other's eyes, grave and sweet with the exaltation of their purpose. And, standing so, they clasped hands, and the word they spoke was the same, for they by searching had found out God.