Margret Howth, a Story of To-day Part 6

"Mad as a March hare," contemptuously muttered the doctor.

His reverend friend gave him a look,--after which he was silent.

"I wish to the Lord some one would persuade him out of it," persisted the wool-man, earnestly looking at the attentive face of his listener.

"We can't spare old Knowles's brain or heart while he ruins himself.

It's something of a Communist fraternity: I don't know the name, but I know the thing."

Very hard common-sense shone out of his eyes just then at the clergyman, whom he suspected of being one of Knowles's abettors.

"There's two ways for 'em to end. If they're made out of the top of society, they get so refined, so idealized, that every particle flies off on its own special path to the sun, and the Community 's broke; and if they're made of the lower mud, they keep going down, down together,--they live to drink and eat, and make themselves as near the brutes as they can. It isn't easy to believe, Sir, but it's true. I have seen it. I've seen every one of them the United States can produce. It's FACTS, Sir; and facts, as Lord Bacon says, 'are the basis of every sound speculation.'"

The last sentence was slowly brought out, as quotations were not exactly his forte, but, as he said afterwards,--"You see, that nailed the parson."

The parson nodded gravely.

"You'll find no such experiment in the Bible," threw in the young doctor, alluding to "serious things" as a peace-offering to his reverend friend.

"One, I believe," dryly.

"Well," broke in the farmer, folding up his wool, "that's neither here nor there. This experiment of Knowles's is like nothing known since the Creation. Plan of his own. He spends his days now hunting out the gallows-birds out of the dens in town here, and they're all to be transported into the country to start a new Arcadia. A few men and women like himself, but the bulk is from the dens, I tell you. All start fair, level ground, perpetual celibacy, mutual trust, honour, rise according to the stuff that's in them,--pah! it makes me sick!"

"Knowles's inclination to that sort of people is easily explained,"

spitefully lisped the doctor. "Blood, Sir. His mother was a half-breed Creek, with all the propensities of the redskins to fire-water and 'itching palms.' Blood will out."

"Here he is," maliciously whispered the woolman. "No, it's Holmes," he added, after the doctor had started into a more respectful posture, and glanced around frightened.

He, the doctor, rose to meet Holmes's coming footstep,--"a low fellah, but always sure to be the upper dog in the fight, goin' to marry the best catch," etc., etc. The others, on the contrary, put on their hats and sauntered away into the street.

The day broadened hotly; the shadows of the Lombardy poplars curdling up into a sluggish pool of black at their roots along the dry gutters.

The old school-master in the shade of the great horse-chestnuts (brought from the homestead in the Piedmont country, every one) husked corn for his wife, composing, meanwhile, a page of his essay on the "Sirventes de Bertrand de Born." Joel, up in the barn by himself, worked through the long day in the old fas.h.i.+on,--pondering gravely (being of a religious turn) upon a sermon by the Reverend Mr. Clinche, reported in the "Gazette;" wherein that disciple of the meek Teacher invoked, as he did once a week, the curses of the law upon slaveholders, praying the Lord to sweep them immediately from the face of the earth. Which rendering of Christian doctrine was so much relished by Joel, and the other leading members of Mr. Clinche's church, that they hinted to him it might be as well to continue choosing his texts from Moses and the Prophets until the excitement of the day was over. The New Testament was,--well,--hardly suited for the--emergency; did not, somehow, chime in with the lesson of the hour.

I may remark, in pa.s.sing, that this course of conduct so disgusted the High Church rector of the parish, that he not only ignored all new devils, (as Mr. Carlyle might have called them,) but talked as if the millennium were un fait accompli, and he had leisure to go and hammer at the poor dead old troubles of Luther's time. One thing, though, about Joel: while he was joining in Mr. Clinche's pet.i.tion for the "wiping out" of some few thousands, he was using up all the fragments of the hot day in fixing a stall for a half-dead old horse he had found by the road-side.

Perhaps, even if the listening angel did not grant the prayer, he marked down the stall at least, as a something done for eternity.

Margret, through the stifling air, worked steadily alone in the dusty office, her face bent over the books, never changing but once. It was a trifle then; yet, when she looked back afterwards, the trifle was all that gave the day a name. The room shook, as I said, with the thunderous, incessant sound of the engines and the looms; she scarcely heard it, being used to it. Once, however, another sound came between,--an iron tread, pa.s.sing through the long wooden corridor,--so firm and measured that it sounded like the monotonous beatings of a clock. She heard it through the noise in the far distance; it came slowly nearer, up to the door without,--pa.s.sed it, going down the echoing plank walk. The girl sat quietly, looking out at the dead brick wall. The slow step fell on her brain like the sceptre of her master; if Knowles had looked in her face then, he would have seen bared the secret of her life. Holmes had gone by, unconscious of who was within the door. She had not seen him; it was nothing but a step she heard. Yet a power, the power of the girl's life, shook off all outward masks, all surface cloudy fancies, and stood up in her with a terrible pa.s.sion at the sound; her blood burned fiercely; her soul looked out, her soul as it was, as G.o.d knew it,--G.o.d and this man. No longer a cold, clear face; you would have thought, looking at it, what a strong spirit the soul of this woman would be, if set free in heaven or in h.e.l.l. The man who held it in his grasp went on carelessly, not knowing that the mere sound of his step had raised it as from the dead.

She, and her right, and her pain, were nothing to him now, she remembered, staring out at the taunting hot sky. Yet so vacant was the sudden life opened before her when he was gone, that, in the desperation of her weakness, her mad longing to see him but once again, she would have thrown herself at his feet, and let the cold, heavy step crush her life out,--as he would have done, she thought, choking down the icy smother in her throat, if it had served his purpose, though it cost his own heart's life to do it. He would trample her down, if she kept him back from his end; but be false to her, false to himself, that he would never be!

The red bricks, the dusty desk covered with wool, the miserable chicken peering out, grew sharper and more real. Life was no morbid nightmare now; her weak woman's heart found it near, cruel. There was not a pain nor a want, from the dumb question in the dog's eyes that pa.s.sed her on the street, to her father's hopeless fancies, that did not touch her sharply through her own loss, with a keen pity, a wild wish to help to do something to save others with this poor life left in her hands.

So the day wore on in the town and country; the old sun glaring down like some fierce old judge, intolerant of weakness or shams,--baking the hard earth in the streets harder for the horses' feet, drying up the bits of gra.s.s that grew between the boulders of the gutter, scaling off the paint from the brazen faces of the interminable brick houses.

He looked down in that city as in every American town, as in these where you and I live, on the same countless maze of human faces going day by day through the same monotonous routine. Knowles, pa.s.sing through the restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange meanings by this common light of the sun,--meanings such as you and I might read, if our eyes were clear as his,--or morbid, it may be, you think? A commonplace crowd like this in the street without: women with cold, fastidious faces, heavy-brained, bilious men, dapper 'prentices, draymen, prize-fighters, negroes. Knowles looked about him as into a seething caldron, in which the people I tell you of were atoms, where the blood of uncounted races was fused, but not mingled,--where creeds, philosophies, centuries old, grappled hand to hand in their death-struggle,--where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers of intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred together, struggling for victory.

Vulgar American life? He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before. People called him a fanatic. It may be that he was one: yet the uncouth old man, sick in soul from some pain that I dare not tell you of; in his own life, looked into the depths of human loss with a mad desire to set it right. On the very faces of those who sneered at him he found some trace of failure, something that his heart carried up to G.o.d with a loud and exceeding bitter cry. The voice of the world, he thought, went up to heaven a discord, unintelligible, hopeless,--the great blind world, astray since the first ages! Was there no hope, no help?

The sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it shone on open problems in the lives of these men and women, of these dogs and horses who walked the streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye could read. There were places where it did not s.h.i.+ne: down in the fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of life lay there he dared not think of. G.o.d knows how the man groped for the light,--for any voice to make earth and heaven clear to him.

There was another light by which the world was seen that day, rarer than the suns.h.i.+ne, and purer. It fell on the dense crowds,--upon the just and the unjust. It went into the fogs of the fetid dens from which the coa.r.s.er light was barred, into the deepest mires of body where a soul could wallow, and made them clear. It lighted the depths of the hearts whose outer pain and pa.s.sion men were keen to read in the unpitying suns.h.i.+ne, and bared in those depths the feeble gropings for the right, the loving hope, the unuttered prayer. No kind thought, no pure desire, no weakest faith in a G.o.d and heaven somewhere, could be so smothered under guilt that this subtile light did not search it out, glow about it, s.h.i.+ne under it, hold it up in full view of G.o.d and the angels,--lighting the world other than the sun had done for six thousand years. I have no name for the light: it has a name,--yonder.

Not many eyes were clear to see its--s.h.i.+ning that day; and if they did, it was as through a gla.s.s, darkly. Yet it belonged to us also, in the old time, the time when men could "hear the voice of the Lord G.o.d in the garden in the cool of the day." It is G.o.d's light now alone.

Yet Lois caught faint glimpses, I think, sometimes, of its heavenly clearness. I think it was this light that made the burning of Christmas fires warmer for her than for others, that showed her all the love and outspoken honesty and hearty frolic which her eyes saw perpetually in the old warm-hearted world. That evening, as she sat on the step of her frame-shanty, knitting at a great blue stocking, her scarred face and misshapen body very pitiful to the pa.s.sers-by, it was this that gave to her face its homely, cheery smile. It made her eyes quick to know the message in the depths of colour in the evening sky, or even the flickering tints of the green creeper on the wall with its crimson cornucopias filled with hot s.h.i.+ning. She liked clear, vital colours, this girl,--the crimsons and blues. They answered her, somehow. They could speak. There were things in the world that like herself were marred,--did not understand,--were hungry to know: the gray sky, the mud streets, the tawny lichens. She cried sometimes, looking at them, hardly knowing why: she could not help it, with a vague sense of loss. It seemed at those times so dreary for them to be alive,--or for her. Other things her eyes were quicker to see than ours: delicate or grand lines, which she perpetually sought for unconsciously,--in the homeliest things, the very soft curling of the woollen yarn in her fingers, as in the eternal sculpture of the mountains. Was it the disease of her injured brain that made all things alive to her,--that made her watch, in her ignorant way, the grave hills, the flas.h.i.+ng, victorious rivers, look pitifully into the face of some starved hound, or dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before it scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to know what they would say to us? Was it weakness and ignorance that made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you or me? She never got used to living as other people do; these sights and sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed. Why, sometimes, out in the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer noons, she had knelt by the shaded pools, and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of water-lilies, her blood curdling in a feverish languor, a pa.s.sioned trance, from which she roused herself, weak and tired.

She had no self-poised artist sense, this Lois,--knew nothing of Nature's laws, as you do. Yet sometimes, watching the dun sea of the prairie rise and fall in the crimson light of early morning, or, in the farms, breathing the blue air trembling up to heaven exultant with the life of bird and forest, she forgot the poor vile thing she was, some coa.r.s.e weight fell off, and something within, not the sickly Lois of the mill, went out, free, like an exile dreaming of home.

You tell me, that, doubtless, in the wreck of the creature's brain, there were fragments of some artistic insight that made her thus rise above the level of her daily life, drunk with the mere beauty of form and colour. I do not know,--not knowing how sham or real a thing you mean by artistic insight. But I do know that the clear light I told you of shone for this girl dimly through this beauty of form and colour; alive. The Life, rather; and ignorant, with no words for her thoughts, she believed in it as the Highest that she knew. I think it came to her thus in imperfect language, (not an outward show of tints and lines, as to artists,)--a language, the same that Moses heard when he stood alone, with nothing between his naked soul and G.o.d, but the desert and the mountain and the bush that burned with fire. I think the weak soul of the girl staggered from its dungeon, and groped through these heavy-browed hills, these colour-dreams, through the faces of dog or man upon the street, to find the G.o.d that lay behind.

So she saw the world, and its beauty and warmth being divine as near to her, the warmth and beauty became real in her, found their homely reflection in her daily life. So she knew, too, the Master in whom she believed, saw Him in everything that lived, more real than all beside.

The waiting earth, the prophetic sky, the very worm in the gutter was but a part of this man, something come to tell her of Him,--she dimly felt; though, as I said, she had no words for such a thought. Yet even more real than this. There was no pain nor temptation down in those dark cellars where she went that He had not borne,--not one. Nor was there the least pleasure came to her or the others, not even a cheerful fire, or kind words, or a warm, hearty laugh, that she did not know He sent it and was glad to do it. She knew that well! So it was that He took part in her humble daily life, and became more real to her day by day. Very homely shadows her life gave of His light, for it was His: homely, because of her poor way of living, and of the depth to which the heavy foot of the world had crushed her. Yet they were there all the time, in her cheery patience, if nothing more. To-night, for instance, how differently the surging crowd seemed to her from what it did to Knowles! She looked down on it from her high wood-steps with an eager interest, ready with her weak, timid laugh to answer every friendly call from below. She had no power to see them as types of great cla.s.ses; they were just so many living people, whom she knew, and who, most of them, had been kind to her. Whatever good there was in the vilest face, (and there was always something,) she was sure to see it. The light made her poor eyes strong for that.

She liked to sit there in the evenings, being alone, yet never growing lonesome; there was so much that was pleasant to watch and listen to, as the cool brown twilight came on. If, as Knowles thought, the world was a dreary discord, she knew nothing of it. People were going from their work now,--they had time to talk and joke by the way,--stopping, or walking slowly down the cool shadows of the pavement; while here and there a lingering red sunbeam burnished a window, or struck athwart the gray boulder-paved street. From the houses near you could catch a faint smell of supper: very friendly people those were in these houses; she knew them all well. The children came out with their faces washed, to play, now the sun was down: the oldest of them generally came to sit with her and hear a story.

After it grew darker, you would see the girls in their neat blue calicoes go sauntering down the street with their sweethearts for a walk. There was old Polston and his son Sam coming home from the coal-pits, as black as ink, with their little tin lanterns on their caps. After a while Sam would come out in his suit of Kentucky jean, his face s.h.i.+ning with the soap, and go sheepishly down to Jenny Ball's, and the old man would bring his pipe and chair out on the pavement, and his wife would sit on the steps. Most likely they would call Lois down, or come over themselves, for they were the most sociable, cosiest old couple you ever knew. There was a great stopping at Lois's door, as the girls walked past, for a bunch of the flowers she brought from the country, or posies, as they called them, (Sam never would take any to Jenny but "old man" and pinks,) and she always had them ready in broken jugs inside. They were good, kind girls, every one of them,--had taken it in turn to sit up with Lois last winter all the time she had the rheumatism. She never forgot that time,--never once.

Later in the evening you would see a man coming along, close by the wall, with his head down, the same Margret had seen in the mill,--a dark man, with gray, thin hair,--Joe Yare, Lois's old father. No one spoke to him,--people always were looking away as he pa.s.sed; and if old Mr. or Mrs. Polston were on the steps when he came up, they would say, "Good-evening, Mr. Yare," very formally, and go away presently. It hurt Lois more than anything else they could have done. But she bustled about noisily, so that he would not notice it. If they saw the marks of the ill life he had lived on his old face, she did not; his sad, uncertain eyes may have been dishonest to them, but they were nothing but kind to the misshapen little soul that he kissed so warmly with a "Why, Lo, my little girl!" n.o.body else in the world ever called her by a pet name.

Sometimes he was gloomy and silent, but generally he told her of all that had happened in the mill, particularly any little word of notice or praise he might have received, watching her anxiously until she laughed at it, and then rubbing his hands cheerfully. He need not have doubted Lois's faith in him. Whatever the rest did, she believed in him; she always had believed in him, through all the dark years, when he was at home, and in the penitentiary. They were gone now, never to come back. It had come right. If the others wronged him, and it hurt her bitterly that they did, that would come right some day too, she would think, as she looked at the tired, sullen face of the old man bent to the window-pane, afraid to go out. But they had very cheerful little suppers there by themselves in the odd, bare little room, as homely and clean as Lois herself.

Sometimes, late at night, when he had gone to bed, she sat alone in the door, while the moonlight fell in broad patches over the square, and the great poplars stood like giants whispering together. Still the far sounds of the town came up cheerfully, while she folded up her knitting, it being dark, thinking how happy an ending this was to a happy day. When it grew quiet, she could hear the solemn whisper of the poplars, and sometimes broken strains of music from the cathedral in the city floated through the cold and moonlight past her, far off into the blue beyond the hills. All the keen pleasure of the day, the warm, bright sights and sounds, coa.r.s.e and homely though they were, seemed to fade into the deep music, and make a part of it.

Yet, sitting there, looking out into the listening night, the poor child's face grew slowly pale as she heard it. It humbled her. It made her meanness, her low, weak life so plain to her! There was no pain nor hunger she had known that did not find a voice in its articulate cry. SHE! what was she? The pain and wants of the world must be going up to G.o.d in that sound, she thought. There was something more in it,--an unknown meaning of a great content that her shattered brain struggled to grasp. She could not. Her heart ached with a wild, restless longing. She had no words for the vague, insatiate hunger to understand. It was because she was ignorant and low, perhaps; others could know. She thought her Master was speaking.

She thought that unknown Joy linked all earth and heaven together, and made it plain. So she hid her face in her hands, and listened, while the low harmony s.h.i.+vered through the air, unheeded by others, with the message of G.o.d to man. Not comprehending, it may be,--the poor girl,--hungry still to know. Yet, when she looked up, there were warm tears in her eyes, and her scarred face was bright with a sad, deep content and love.

So the hot, long day was over for them all,--pa.s.sed as thousands of days have done for us, gone down, forgotten: as that long, hot day we call life will be over some time, and go down into the gray and cold.

Surely, whatever of sorrow or pain may have made darkness in that day for you or me, there were countless openings where we might have seen glimpses of that other light than suns.h.i.+ne: the light of that great To-Morrow, of the land where all wrongs shall be righted. If we had but chosen to see it,--if we only had chosen!

CHAPTER V.

Now that I have come to the love part of my story, I am suddenly conscious of dingy common colors on the palette with which I have been painting. I wish I had some brilliant dyes. I wish, with all my heart, I could take you back to that "Once upon a time" in which the souls of our grandmothers delighted,--the time which Dr. Johnson sat up all night to read about in "Evelina,"--the time when all the celestial virtues, all the earthly graces were revealed in a condensed state to man through the blue eyes and sumptuous linens of some Belinda Portman or Lord Mortimer. None of your good-hearted, sorely-tempted villains then! It made your hair stand on end only to read of them,--going about perpetually seeking innocent maidens and unsophisticated old men to devour. That was the time for holding up virtue and vice; no trouble then in seeing which were sheep and which were goats! A person could write a story with a moral to it, then, I should hope! People that were born in those days had no fancy for going through the world with half-and-half characters, such as we put up with; so Nature turned out complete specimens of each cla.s.s, with all the appendages of dress, fortune, et cetera, chording decently. The heroine glides into life full-charged with rank, virtues, a name three-syllabled, and a white dress that never needs was.h.i.+ng, ready to sail through dangers dire into a triumphant haven of matrimony;--all the aristocrats have high foreheads and cold blue eyes; all the peasants are old women, miraculously grateful, in neat check ap.r.o.ns, or sullen-browed insurgents planning revolts in caves.

Of course, I do not mean that these times are gone: they are alive (in a modern fas.h.i.+on) in many places in the world; some of my friends have described them in prose and verse. I only mean to say that I never was there; I was born unlucky. I am willing to do my best, but I live in the commonplace. Once or twice I have rashly tried my hand at dark conspiracies, and women rare and radiant in Italian bowers; but I have a friend who is sure to say, "Try and tell us about the butcher next door, my dear." If I look up from my paper now, I shall be just as apt to see our dog and his kennel as the white sky stained with blood and Tyrian purple. I never saw a full-blooded saint or sinner in my life.

The coldest villain I ever knew was the only son of his mother, and she a widow,--and a kinder son never lived. Doubtless there are people capable of a love terrible in its strength; but I never knew such a case that some one did not consider its expediency as "a match" in the light of dollars and cents. As for heroines, of course I have seen beautiful women, and good as fair. The most beautiful is delicate and pure enough for a type of the Madonna, and has a heart almost as warm and holy. (Very pure blood is in her veins, too, if you care about blood.) But at home they call her Tode for a nickname; all we can do, she will sing, and sing through her nose; and on was.h.i.+ng-days she often cooks the dinner, and scolds wholesomely, if the tea-napkins are not in order. Now, what is anybody to do with a heroine like that? I have known old maids in abundance, with pathos and suns.h.i.+ne in their lives; but the old maid of novels I never have met, who abandoned her soul to gossip,--nor yet the other type, a life-long martyr of unselfishness.

They are mixed generally, and not unlike their married sisters, so far as I can see. Then as to men, certainly I know heroes. One man, I knew, as high a chevalier in heart as any Bayard of them all; one of those souls simple and gentle as a woman, tender in knightly honour.

He was an old man, with a rusty brown coat and rustier wig, who spent his life in a dingy village office. You poets would have laughed at him. Well, well, his history never will be written. The kind, sad, blue eyes are shut now. There is a little farm-graveyard overgrown with privet and wild grape-vines, and a flattened grave where he was laid to rest; and only a few who knew him when they were children care to go there, and think of what he was to them. But it was not in the far days of Chivalry alone, I think, that true and proud souls have stood in the world unwelcome, and, hurt to the quick, have turned away and dumbly died. Let it be. Their lives are not lost, thank G.o.d!

I meant only to ask you, How can I help it, if the people in my story seem coa.r.s.e to you,--if the hero, unlike all other heroes, stopped to count the cost before he fell in love,--if it made his fingers thrill with pleasure to touch a full pocket-book as well as his mistress's hand,--not being withal, this Stephen Holmes, a man to be despised? A hero, rather, of a peculiar type,--a man, more than other men: the very mould of man, doubt it who will, that women love longest and most madly. Of course, if I could, I would have blotted out every meanness before I showed him to you; I would have told you Margret was an impetuous, whole-souled woman, glad to throw her life down for her father, without one bitter thought of the wife and mother she might have been; I would have painted her mother tender, (as she was,) forgetting how pettish she grew on busy days: but what can I do? I must show you men and women as they are in that especial State of the Union where I live. In all the others, of course, it is very different. Now, being prepared for disappointment, will you see my hero?

He had sauntered out from the city for a morning walk,--not through the hills, as Margret went, going home, but on the other side, to the river, over which you could see the Prairie. We are in Indiana, remember. The sunlight was pure that morning, powerful, tintless, the true wine of life for body or spirit. Stephen Holmes knew that, being a man of delicate animal instincts, and so used it, just as he had used the dumb-bells in the morning. All things were made for man, weren't they? He was leaning against the door of the school-house,--a red, flaunting house, the daub on the landscape: but, having his back to it, he could not see it, so through his half-shut eyes he suffered the beauty of the scene to act on him. Suffered: in a man, according to his creed, the will being dominant, and all influences, such as beauty, pain, religion, permitted to act under orders. Of course.

It was a peculiar landscape,--like the man who looked at it, of a thoroughly American type. A range of sharp, dark hills, with a sombre depth of green shadow in the clefts, and on the sides ma.s.sed forests of scarlet and flame and crimson. Above, the sharp peaks of stone rose into the wan blue, wan and pale themselves, and wearing a certain air of fixed calm, the type of an eternal quiet. At the base of the hills lay the city, a dirty ma.s.s of bricks and smoke and dust, and at its far edge flowed the river,--deep here, tinted with green, writhing and gurgling and curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and mud-covered rock. Beyond it yawned the opening to the great West,--the Prairies. Not the dreary deadness here, as farther west. A plain, dark russet in hue,--for the gra.s.s was sun-scorched,--stretching away into the vague distance, intolerable, silent, broken by hillocks and puny streams that only made the vastness and silence more wide and heavy. Its limitless torpor weighed on the brain; the eyes ached, stretching to find some break before the dull russet faded into the amber of the horizon and was lost. An American landscape: of few features, simple, grand in outline as a face of one of the early G.o.ds.

It lay utterly motionless before him, not a fleck of cloud in the pure blue above, even where the mist rose from the river; it only had glorified the clear blue into clearer violet.

Holmes stood quietly looking; he could have created a picture like this, if he never had seen one; therefore he was able to recognize it, accepted it into his soul, and let it do what it would there.

Suddenly a low wind from the far Pacific coast struck from the amber line where the sun went down. A faint tremble pa.s.sed over the great hills, the broad sweeps of colour darkened from base to summit, then flashed again,--while below, the prairie rose and fell like a dun sea, and rolled in long, slow, solemn waves.

The wind struck so broad and fiercely in Holmes's face that he caught his breath. It was a savage freedom, he thought, in the West there, whose breath blew on him,--the freedom of the primitive man, the untamed animal man, self-reliant and self-a.s.sertant, having conquered Nature. Well, this fierce, masterful freedom was good for the soul, sometimes, doubtless. It was old Knowles's vital air. He wondered if the old man would succeed in his hobby, if he could make the slavish beggars and thieves in the alleys yonder comprehend this fierce freedom. They craved leave to live on sufferance now, not knowing their possible divinity. It was a desperate remedy, this sense of unchecked liberty; but their disease was desperate. As for himself, he did not need it; that element was not lacking. In a mere bodily sense, to be sure. He felt his arm. Yes, the cold rigor of this new life had already worn off much of the clogging weight of flesh, strengthened the muscles. Six months more in the West would toughen the fibres to iron.

He raised an iron weight that lay on the steps, carelessly testing them. For the rest, he was going back here; something of the cold, loose freshness got into his brain, he believed. In the two years of absence his power of concentration had been stronger, his perceptions more free from prejudice, gaining every day delicate point, acuteness of a.n.a.lysis. He drew a long breath of the icy air, coa.r.s.e with the wild perfume of the prairie. No, his temperament needed a subtiler atmosphere than this, rarer essence than mere brutal freedom The East, the Old World, was his proper sphere for self-development. He would go as soon as he could command the means, leaving all clogs behind. ALL?

His idle thought balked here, suddenly; the sallow forehead contracted sharply, and his gray eyes grew in an instant shallow, careless, formal, as a man who holds back his thought. There was a fierce warring in his brain for a moment. Then he brushed his Kossuth hat with his arm, and put it on, looking out at the landscape again.

Somehow its meaning was dulled to him. Just then a muddy terrier came up, and rubbed itself against his knee. "Why, Tige, old boy!" he said, stooping to pat it kindly. The hard, shallow look faded out; he half smiled, looking in the dog's eyes. A curious smile, unspeakably tender and sad. It was the idiosyncrasy of the man's face, rarely seen there.