IX

A SERIOUS MATTER

If ever woman had a tender heart, that heart was Dove's. I used to say, to her confusion, that a South Sea cannibal might find confessional in her gentle ear, were his voice but low enough; that she might draw back, shuddering at his tales of the bones he had picked, but if only his tears were real ones, I could imagine her, when he had done, putting her hand upon his swarthy shoulder and saying, earnestly:

"I know just how you feel!"

Such was the woman Let.i.tia confided in, now that her tongue was loosened and the mystery solved, for her soul was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with those new visions--dreams so roseate as she painted them that my wife listened with their wonder mirrored in her round brown eyes, and dumb before that eloquence. Dove loved Let.i.tia as a greater woman than herself, she said, worshipped her for her wider knowledge and more fluent speech, just as she wondered at it ruefully as a girl on Sun Dial listening to Let.i.tia's tales of dryads and their spells. In return for all this rapt attention and modest reverence, Let.i.tia formerly had been grace itself.

It was a tender tyranny she had exercised; but now?--how should my simple, earthly Dove, mother and housewife, confide any longer her favorite cares, her gentle fears, her innocent regrets? With what balm of sympathy and cheer would the new Let.i.tia heal those wounds? Would not their very existence be denied; or worse, be held as evidence of sin?--iniquity in my poor girl's soul, hidden there like a worm i' the bud, and to be chastened in no wise save by taking invisible white wings of thought, and soaring--G.o.d knows where?

The new Let.i.tia was not unamiable, nor yet unkind, knowingly, for she smiled consistently upon all about her--a strange, aloof, unloving smile though, at which we sighed. We should have liked her to be heart and soul again in our old-time common pleasures, even to have joined us now and then in a fault or two--to have looked less icily, for example, upon our occasional petty gossip of our neighbors, or to have added one wrathful word to our little rages at the way the world was straying from the golden mist we had seen it turn in, in our youth. As we watched her, wondering, laughing sometimes, sometimes half-angry at this new and awful guise she had a.s.sumed, it would come to us, not so much how sadly earthen we must seem to her, nor yet how strange and daft and airy her new views seemed to us in our duller sight--but how the old Let.i.tia whom we had loved was gone forever.

"Bertram," said my wife one evening as we sat together by the lamp, "what do you think Let.i.tia says?"

"I am prepared for anything, my dear."

Dove, who was sewing, laid down her work and said, gravely:

"She does not believe in marriage any more."

I raised my eyebrows. There was really nothing to be said.

"At least," my wife went on, resuming her sewing, "she says that the time will come when the race will have"--Dove paused thoughtfully--"risen above such things, I think she said. I really don't remember the words she used, but I believe--yes, there _will_ be marriage--in a way--that is"--Dove knitted her brows--"a union of kindred souls, if I understand her."

"Ah!" I replied. "I see. But what about the perpetuation--"

My wife shook her head.

"Oh, all that will be done away with, I believe," she said, gravely.

"Done away with!" I cried.

"At least," Dove explained, "it will not be necessary."

My face, I suppose, may have looked incredulous.

"I don't quite comprehend what Let.i.tia says sometimes," my wife explained, "but today she was telling me--"

Dove laughed quaintly.

"Oh, I forget what comes next," she said, "but Let.i.tia told me all about it this morning."

I returned to my quarterly. Presently my wife resumed:

"She has four books about it."

"Only four!" I said. "I should think one would need a dozen at least to explain such mysteries."

"She says herself she is only at the beginning," Dove replied. "She's now in the first circle--or cycle, I've forgotten which--but the more she reads and the more she thinks about it, the more wonderful it grows.

Oh, there was something else--what was it now she called it?--something about the--cosmos, I think she said, but I didn't quite grasp the thing at all."

"I'm surprised," I replied. "It's very simple."

"I suppose it is," Dove answered, quickly, and so humbly that I laughed, but she looked up at me with such a quivering smile, I checked myself.

"I suppose it _is_ simple," she replied. "I guess my mind--is not very strong, Bertram. I--I find it so hard to understand some--"

I saw the tears were coming.

"Don't trouble yourself about such things, my dear," I said, cheerfully.

"It's a bonny mind you have, you take my word for it."

Dove wiped her eyes.

"No," she said; "when I listen to Let.i.tia, I feel like a--"

"There, there, my dear," I said, "you have things a thousand times more vital and useful and beautiful than this cosmos Let.i.tia talks about.

It's only another word for the universe, my love, if I remember rightly--I'm not quite sure myself, but it doesn't matter. It's easy to p.r.o.nounce, and it may mean something, or it may mean nothing, but we needn't trouble ourselves about it, little one. You have work to do. You must remember Let.i.tia has no such ties to bind her to the simple things, which are enough for most of us to battle with. I am tired of theories myself, dear heart. Work--everyday, humble, loving service is all that keeps life normal and people pleasant to have about. I see so much of this other side, it is always good to come home to you."

I went back to my medical journal--I forgot to say I had come around to my wife's side of our reading-table in settling this perplexing matter; I went back to my work, and she to hers, and we finished the evening very quietly, and in as good health and unruffled spirits as the cosmos itself must enjoy, I think, judging from the easy way it has run on, year after year, age after age, since the dark beginning.

PART III

_Rosemary_

I

THE HOME-KEEPER

The years slip by so quietly in Gra.s.sy Ford that men and women born here find themselves old, they scarce know how, for are they not still within sound of the brooks they fished in, and in the shadow of the very hill-sides they climbed for b.u.t.ternuts, when they were young? The brooks run on so gayly as before, and why not they as well?

"b.u.t.ters," Shears used to grumble, "never could learn that he was old enough to stop his jawing and meddling around the town, till they dug his grave for him; then he shut up fast enough."

"Well, then," said Caleb Kane, another character, "we'll sure enough have to send for the s.e.xton."

Colonel Shears eyed Caleb with suspicion.

"What for?" he asked.

"Why, to get a word in edgewise, Sam'l," Caleb replied, and the Colonel rose, shifted his cigar, and sauntered homeward.

"Mostly comedies," said the one we call Johnny Keats, when I urged him to write the stories of his native town; yet, as I told him, there are tragedies a-plenty too in Gra.s.sy Fordshire, though the dagger in them is a slower torture than the short swift stab men die of in a literary way.

Our heroic deaths are done by inches, as a rule, so imperceptibly, so often with jests and smiles in lieu of fine soliloquies, that our own neighbors do not always know how rare a play the curtain falls on sometimes among our hills.