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The Mettle of the Pasture

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He did not answer and she continued with deeper feeling: "Life is so uncertain to all of us and of course to me! I want to see you wedded to her, see her brought here as mistress of this house, and live to hear the laughter of your children." She finished with solemn emotion: "It has been my prayer, Rowan." She became silent with her recollections of her own early life for a moment and then resumed: "Nothing ever makes up for the loss of such years--the first years of happy marriage. If we have had these, no matter what happens afterward, we have not lived for nothing. It becomes easier for us to be kind and good afterward, to take an interest in life, to believe in our fellow-creatures, and in God." He sprang up. "Mother, I cannot speak with you about this now." He turned quickly and stood with his back to her, looking out of doors; and he spoke over his shoulder and his voice was broken: "You have had one disappointment this morning: it is enough. But do not think of my marrying--of my ever marrying. Dent must take my place at the head of the house. It is all over with me! But I cannot speak with you about this now," and he started quickly to leave the parlors. She rose and put her arm around his waist, walking beside him. "You do not mind my speaking to, you about this, Rowan?" she said, sore at having touched some trouble which she felt that he had long been hiding from her, and with full respect for the privacies of his life. "No, no, no!" he cried, choking with emotion. "Ah, mother, mother!"--and he gently disengaged himself from her arms. She watched him as he rode out of sight. Then she returned and sat in the chair which he had, quitted, folding her hands in her lap. For her it was one of the moments when we are reminded that our lives are not in our keeping, and that whatsoever is to befall us originates in sources beyond our power. Our wills may indeed reach the length of our arms or as far as our voices can penetrate space; but without us and within us moves one universe that saves us or ruins us only for its own purposes; and we are no more free amid its laws than the leaves of the forest are free to decide their own shapes and season of unfolding, to order the showers by which they are to be nourished and the storms which shall scatter them at last. Above every other she had cherished the wish for a marriage between Rowan and Isabel Conyers; now for reasons unknown to her it seemed that this desire was never to be realized. She did not know the meaning of what Rowan had just said to her; but she did not doubt there was meaning behind it, grave meaning. Her next most serious concern would have been that in time Dent likewise should choose a wife wisely; now he had announced to her his intention to wed prematurely and most foolishly; she could not altogether shake off the conviction that he would do what he had said he should. As for Dent it was well-nigh the first anxiety that he had ever caused her. If her affection for him was less poignant, being tenderness stored rather than tenderness exercised, this resulted from the very absence of his demand for it. He had always needed her so little, had always needed every one so little, unfolding his life from the first and drawing from the impersonal universe whatever it required with the quietude and efficiency of a prospering plant. She lacked imagination, or she might have thought of Dent as a filial sunflower, which turned the blossom of its life always faithfully and beautifully toward her, but stood rooted in the soil of knowledge that she could not supply. What she had always believed she could see in him was the perpetuation under a new form of his father and the men of his father's line. These had for generations been grave mental workers: ministers, lawyers, professors in theological seminaries; narrow-minded, strong-minded; upright, unbending; black-browed, black-coated; with a passion always for dealing in justice and dealing out justice, human or heavenly; most of all, gratified when in theological seminaries, when they could assert themselves as inerrant interpreters of the Most High. The portraits of two of them hung in the dining room now, placed there as if to watch the table and see that grace was never left unsaid, that there be no levity at meat nor heresy taken in with the pudding. Other portraits were also in other rooms--they always had themselves painted for posterity, seldom or never their wives. Some of the books they had written were in the library, lucid explanations of the First Cause and of how the Judge of all the earth should be looked at from without and from within. Some that they had most loved to read were likewise there: "Pollock's Course of Time"; the slow outpourings of Young, sad sectary; Milton, with the passages on Hell approvingly underscored--not as great poetry, but as great doctrine; nowhere in the bookcases a sign of the "Areopagitica," of "Comus," and "L'Allegro"; but most prominent the writings of Jonathan Edwards, hoarsest of the whole flock of New World theological ravens. Her marriage into this family had caused universal surprise. It had followed closely upon the scandals in regard to the wild young Ravenel Morris, the man she loved, the man she had promised to marry. These scandals had driven her to the opposite extreme from her first choice by one of life's familiar reactions; and in her wounded flight she had thrown herself into the arms of a man whom people called irreproachable. He was a grave lawyer, one of the best of his kind; nevertheless he and she, when joined for the one voyage of two human spirits, were like a funeral barge lashed to some dancing boat, golden-oared, white-sailed, decked with flowers. Hope at the helm and Pleasure at the prow. For she herself had sprung from a radically different stock: from sanguine, hot-blooded men; congressmen shaping the worldly history of their fellow-beings and leaving the non-worldly to take care of itself; soldiers illustrious in the army and navy; hale country gentlemen who took the lead in the country's hardy sports and pleasures; all sowing their wild oats early in life with hands that no power could stay; not always living to reap, but always leaving enough reaping to be done by the sad innocent who never sow;

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