IV (continued 2)

"It has come at last," he announced, as though something long talked of between them could be thus referred to; and he drew out a letter which he handed in to be read; it was a call to a professorship in a Northern university. As the doctor read it and reread it (continuing to read because he did not know what to say)—as he thus read, he began to look like a man grown ill.

"You have accepted, of course," he said barely.

"I have accepted."

The friends were silent with their faces turned in the same direction across the country—their land, the land of generations of their people. This breaking up would be the end for them of the near tie of soil and tradition and boyhood friendship and the friendship of manhood.

"Well," said the doctor unsteadily, "this is what you have been working for."

"This is what I have been working for," assented Professor Ousley.

These intermediate years had wrought their changes in him also; within and without; he was grown heavy, and as an American scholar he had weight. The doctor clung for safety to his one theme:—

"You have outgrown your place here in Kentucky. A larger world has heard of you and sends for you because it needs you. Well done! But when I became a Kentucky country doctor, it was for life. No greater world for me! My only future is to try to do better the same work in the same place—always better and better if possible till it is over. You climb your mountain range; I stay in my valley."

Professor Ousley drew out another envelope:

"Read that," he said a little sadly, and sadness was rare with him: it was an advertisement for the town paper announcing for sale his house and farm.

"It is the beginning of the end," he said. "It is our farewell to Kentucky, to you, to our past, but not, I hope, to our future. Herbert and Elizabeth will have to be looked out for in the future: Elizabeth may refuse to leave the neighborhood, who knows?" He laughed with fatherly fondness and gentleness.

The doctor laughed with him: that plighting of their children!

At this moment a spring wagon came hastening on: it was the servants of the Ousley household.

"So you have left your mistress by herself," the master called out to them as they passed. They replied with their bashful hilarity that she herself had sent them away, that she was glad to be well rid of them. As the wagon regained the middle of the road and disappeared, Professor Ousley looked at the doctor with a meaning that may have been deeper than his smile:—

"She sent us away, too—me and the children. She wanted the day to herself. Of course this change, the going away, the wrenching loose from memories of life in the house there since our marriage—of course, all that no other one of us can feel as she feels it. My work marches away, I follow my work, she follows me, the children follow her. Duty heads the procession. It pulls us all up by the roots and drags us in the train of service: we are all servants, work is lord. I understood her to-day—I was glad to bring the children and to be absent from her myself: these hours of looking backward and of looking forward are sacred to her—it is her woman's right to be alone." He drew the doctor into these confidences as one not outside intimate sacred things. The doctor made no reply.

He drove on now, not aware how he drove. A few more vehicles passed, and then a mile or two farther out no more: they had ceased to come: he was entering the silent open country.

A Kentucky landscape of August afternoon—Saturday afternoon! The stillness! The dumb pathos of garnered fields—that spectacle of the great earth dutiful to its trust and now discharged of obligation! That acute pang of seeing with what loyalty the vows of the year have been kept by soil and sun, and are ended and are now no more! The first intimations also of changes soon to come—the chill of early autumn nights when the moon rises on the white frost of fences and stubble, and when outside windows glowing with kindled hearths the last roses freeze. Of all seasons, of all the days with which nature can torture us, none so wound without striking; none awaken such pain, such longing: all desire offers itself to be harvested.

There was no glare of sunlight this afternoon, nor any shape of cloud, but a haze which took away shadows from fences and bushes and wayside trees and weeds, and left the earth and things on it in a radiance between light and shadow—between day and darkness. It was a troubled brooding: and when the surfaces are quiet, then begins the calling of the deeps to the deeps.

As the doctor advanced into this stillness of the land, there reached his ear, as one last reverberation, that long lonely roar of the great animal homesick and life-sick for jungle and jungle freedom; for the right to be what nature had made it—rebellious agony!

A day to herself! She had sent them all away, husband, and children, and servants! The right to be alone with memories ... under the still surface the invitation of the deeps....

Dr. Birney's buggy was nearing the front gate of Professor Ousley's farm. When he reached it, he checked his horse and sat awhile. Then he got out and looked up the pike and down the pike: it might have been an instinct to hail any one passing—he looked dazed—like a man not altogether under self-control. Not a soul was in sight.

He drove in.

The main driveway approached the house almost straight; but a few yards inside the gate there branched from it another which led toward the sequestered portions of the grounds. It was private and for pleasure: it formed a feature of the landscape gardening of earlier times when country places were surrounded by parklike lawns and forests and stone fences. It skirted the grounds at a distance from the house, passed completely round it, and returned to the main driveway at the point where it started. Thus it lay about the house—a circle.

Slowly the doctor's buggy began to enclose the house within this circle, this coil, this arm creeping around and enclosing a form.

In spots along the drive the shrubbery was dense, and forest trees overhung. He had scarcely entered it when a bird flitted across his path: softest of all creatures that move on wings, with its long gliding flight, a silken voluptuous grace of movement—the rain-crow. It flew before him a short distance and alighted on a low overhanging bough—its breast turned, as waiting for him. Its wings during that flight resembled the floating draperies of a woman fleeing with outstretched arms; and as it now sat quiet and inviting, its throat looked like a soft throat—bared.

Once the doctor's buggy passed a flower-bed the soil of which showed signs of having been lately upturned: a woman's trowel lay on the edge of the sod: some one had been working there; perhaps some deep restlessness had ended the work. Here the atmosphere was sweet with rose geranium and heliotrope: it was the remotest part of the ground, screened from any distant view. And once the buggy curtains struck against the spray of a rosebush and the petals fell on the empty cushion beside the doctor and upon his knees. The horse moved so slowly along this forest path of beauty and privacy that no ear could have heard its approach as it passed round the house and returned to the main drive. Here the doctor sat awhile.

Then he pulled the head of the horse toward the house.

He reached the top of the drive. At the end of a short pavement stood the house. The front doors were closed—not locked. It stood there in the security of its land and of its history, and of traditions and ideals. Undefended except by these: with faith that nothing else could so well defend.

On one side of the pavement was built an old-fashioned ornament of Southern lawns—a vine-covered, rose-covered summer-house within which could be seen rugs and chairs and a worktable: some one had been at work; that same deep restlessness had perhaps terminated pastime here. Near the other end of the house two glass doors, framed like windows, opened upon a single stone step in the grass; and within these doors hung a thin white drapery of summer curtains; and under the festoon of these curtains there was visible from the doctor's buggy half the still figure of a woman—reclining.

She had bespoken a day for solitude. And now she sat there, deep in the reverie of the years.

Surely through that reverie ran the memory of a Christmas Eve when her husband had brought her home with him, and, leading her to this same bed-chamber, to a place under the chandelier from which mistletoe hung, had taken her in his arms; and as his warm breath broke against her face, his lips, hardly more than a youth's then, had uttered one haunting phrase: bride of the mistletoe.

Now had come the year for the closing scene of youth's romance in the house—a romance that already for years had been going its quiet way to extinction. The shorn group of them were soon to pass out of it into a vaster world: the young lover of the hearth had become the middle-aged lover of humanity.

And through the reverie ran thoughts of the other man who had been near during all this time—defrauded of her—his ideal; baffled in his desire; a man with a love of her that had been a long prayer and a madness: to whom she owed her life: this other man to be left behind here amid the old familiar fields—with his love of her ruining his home.

The doctor got out of his buggy noiselessly. He loosened the horse's check-rein without knowing what he did; and the surprised animal turned its head and touched him inquiringly in his side with its nose. He thrust his forefinger down inside his collar and pulled it with the gesture of a man who felt himself choking. He could not—for some reason—hear his own feet on the pavement nor on the steps as he mounted the porch. On one side in the shadow of old vines stood a settee with cushions; and at the head of it a little table with books opened and unopened: that same deep restlessness had ended reading. As he grasped the knob of the bell, it slipped from his hand and there was a loud clangor.

She stepped quickly out upon the stone before her door, and at recognition of him, with a smile and gesture of welcome, she disappeared within. The next moment the front door was opened wide; but at the sight of his face—with an instinct perhaps the oldest that the race knows and that needs never to be explained—she took one step backward. Then she recovered herself, and, unsupported, she stood there on the threshold of her home.

"Water!" His death-white lips framed the word without a sound.

He watched her pass quickly down the hall till she disappeared. Turning away, he sat down beside the small table of books in the shadow of the vines; and he fixed his blood-swollen eyes on the door, waiting for her to return. She came unwaveringly, and without a word placed the glass of water beside him, and then she passed out of sight behind him.

A long time he remained there. Close to his ear out of the depths of the honeysuckle came the twittering of a brood of nestlings as the mother went to and fro—a late brood, the first having met with tragedy, or the second love-mating of the season.

Then upon the stillness another sound broke—a plain warning to his ear. It was a scraping of the buggy wheel against the buggy, showing that his horse, finding its check-rein loosened, but being too well trained to move, had turned short to crop the grass beside the driveway.

How the homely things, the pitiable trifles reach us amid life's immensities!

This overturning of a buggy! The overturning of lives!

He started down the steps, and then midway between the house and the buggy he saw her.

She stood a few yards from him across the grass at one of the entrances of the summer house where she had been working at her needlework. She stood there, not waiting for him to come—but waiting for him to go. For years he had followed her as along a path: this was the end of the path: neither could go farther.

And now, turning at the end of the path, she meant to make him understand—understand her better and understand himself better.

And so she stood there facing him, the whole glowing picture of her wifehood and motherhood and womanhood: not in fear nor anger, nor with any reproach for him nor any stain for herself: but with the deepest understanding and sympathy in a great tragedy—and with her friendship.

Then she turned away and with quiet steps took a slender path which led to those sequestered portions of the grounds where she had left her trowel and geraniums and heliotropes. Slowly along this labyrinth of verdure, under the branches of the old forest trees, she passed. Now a shrub partly hid her: once the long bough of a rose tree touched her shoulder and dropped the petals of its blossoms behind her. Farther away, farther away, then lost down the dim glade.

The buggy crept homeward along the pike. The horse hung its head low; the reins lay on the dashboard; with its obscure sense that something was wrong it struck the gait with which it had always yielded obedience to the sadnesses of the land—and moved along the highway as behind a death.

Past farms of happy husbands and wives and children! Past fences on which, a bareheaded boy, he had once liked to come out and sit and watch people pass; or to meet his uncle as he returned home. Past the little roadside church, its doors and windows so tightly shut now during the week, where years before he had sat one morning and had shot the arrow of a boy's satire at the Commandment for men only.

Two voices for him that day—the same two that are in every man, the only two in any man: the cry of the jungle—I will—and the voice of the mountain-top—

Thou Shalt Not.