Part 69 (1/2)
LXXII.
MY GOOD GRACIOUS, MISS BARB
”Good-by,” said Fair, with an ardent last look.
”Good-by,” softly echoed Barbara, with eyelids down, and pa.s.sed in.
According to a habit contracted since coming to college she took a brief glimpse of the hat-rack to see if it held any other than girls' hats.
Not that she expected any visitor of the sort that can't wear that kind, but--you know how it is--the unexpected does sometimes call. Besides, Mr. Fair had told her whom he was to meet in Springfield next day. But the hat-rack said no. Nevertheless she glanced also into the tiny parlor. The widow sat there alone, reading the _Congregationalist_. She looked up with sweet surprise, and Barbara, not giving her time to speak, said:
”The woods are so per-fect-ly fas-ci-nat-ing I'm neg-lect-ing my cor-re-spond-ence.”
She dangled her hat at her knee and slowly mounted to her room, humming a dance, but longing, as some sick wild thing, for a seclusion she had no hope to find.
The two college mates who had driven with her in the morning were lolling on her bed. They recognized the earliness of her return by a mischievous sparkle of eyes which only gathered emphasis from the absence of any open comment.
”Barbara,” said one, as she doubled a pillow under her neck and took on the Southern drawl, ”par-don my in-quis-i-tive-ness, but if it isn't an im-per-ti-nent ques-tion--or even if it is--how man-y but-ter-cups did you pro-cure, and alas! where are they now?”
”Heaow?” softly asked Barbara. But the other school-fellow cried:
”Barbara, dear, don't you notice that girl, she's bad. I'll give you a nice, easy question. I ask merely for information. Of course you're not bound to answer unless you choose----”
”I want to know!” murmured Miss Garnet.
”Of course you do; you don't want to criminate yourself when you haven't got to.
”And now, Miss Garnet--if that is still your name----”
”Don't call me Miss Garnet,” said Barbara, with her chin in her hands, ”call me honey.”
”Honey,” came the response, ”where's our 'Herrick'?”
Barbara sprang to her feet with a gasp and vacancy of eye that filled the room with the laughter of her companions, and the next moment was speeding down the stairs and across the doorstep, crowding her hat on with one hand and stabbing it with the other as she went. Down from the streets into the wood she hastened, gained the path, ran up it, walked by three or four pretty loiterers, ran again, and on the stone by the water-side found the volume as she had left it.
Then she lingered. As she leaned against the rock and gazed into the shaded depths of the mill-stream her problem came again, and the beautiful solitude whispered a welcome to her to revolve and weigh and solve it here. But when she essayed to do so it would no more be revolved or weighed by her alone than this huge bowlder at her side. Her baffled mind drifted into fantasy, and the h.o.a.ry question, Whether it is wiser for a maiden to love first, hoping to be chosen accordingly, or to be chosen first and hope to love accordingly, became itself an age-worn relic from woman's earlier and harder lot, left by its glaciers as they had melted in the warmth of more modern suns.
She murmured a word of impatience at such dreaming and looked around to see if she was overheard; but the only near presence was two girls sitting behind and high above her, one writing, the other reading, under the pines. They seemed not to have heard, but she sauntered beyond their sight up the path, wondering if they were the kind in whom to love was the necessity it was in her, and, if so, what they would do in her case.
What they would advise _her_ to do depended mainly, she fancied, on whether they were in their teens or their twenties. As for married women, she shrank from the very thought of their counsel, whichever way it might tend, and mused on Fannie Ravenel, who, with eyes wide open, had chosen rather to be made unhappy by the one her love had lighted on than to take any other chance for happiness. She stopped her listless walk and found her wrists crossed and her hands knit, remembering one whom Fannie could have chosen and would not.
Burning with resentment against herself for the thought, she turned aside and sat down on the river's brink in a shade of hemlocks. ”Come,”
her actions seemed to say, ”I will think of Henry Fair; gentle, n.o.ble Henry Fair, and what he is and will and might be; of how I love his mother and all his kindred; of how tenderly I admire him; and of his trembling words, 'I love you consumingly!'”
Her heart quickened gratefully, as though he spoke again; but as she gazed down at the bubbles that floated by from a dipping bough she presently fell to musing anew on Fannie, without that inward shudder which the recollection of Fannie's course and fate commonly brought. ”At least,” she thought to herself, ”it's heroic!” Yet before she could find a moment's comfort in the reflection it was gone, and she started up and moved on again, knowing that, whatever it may be for man, for true womanhood the better heroism is not to give a pa.s.sionate love its unwise way at heroic cost, but dispa.s.sionately to master love in all its greatness and help it grow to pa.s.sion in wise ways.
”If I take this step,” she began to say to herself audibly as she followed the old road out into a neglected meadow, ”I satisfy my father; I delight my friends; I rid myself at once and forever of this dreadful dependence on him.” She bit her lip and shut her eyes against these politic considerations. ”He tells me to weigh the matter well. How shall I, when there's nothing to weigh against it? Fannie could choose between the one who loved her and the one she loved. I have no choice; this is the most--most likely it is all--that will ever be offered me. There's just the one simple sane question before me--s.h.i.+ll I or shall I?” She smiled. ”We make too much of it all!” she thought on. ”A man's life depends upon the man he is, not on the girl he gets; why shouldn't it be so with us?” She smiled still more, and, glancing round the open view, murmured, ”Silly little country girls! We begin life as a poem, we can't find our rhyme, we tell our mothers--if we have any--they say yes, it was the same with our aunts; so we decide with them that good prose will do very well; they kiss us--that means they won't tell--and--O Heaven!
is that our best?” She dropped upon a bank and wept till she shook.