The Desert and The Sown

M >> Mary Hallock Foote >> The Desert and The Sown

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All his mother's friends liked Paul and supposed him to be very clever,
but they had never taken him seriously. "Now, at last," they said, "he has
done something like other people. He is coming out." Experienced matrons
were pleased to flatter him on his choice of a bride. The daughters
studied Moya, and decided that she was "different," but "all right." She
had a careless distinction of her own. Some of her "things" were
surprisingly lovely--probably heirlooms; and army women are so clever
about clothes.

Would they spend the winter in town?

Paul replied absently: they had not decided. Probably they would not go
down till after the holidays.

What an attractive plan? What an ideal family Christmas they would have
all together in the country! Christine had not been up all summer, had
she? Here Moya came to her husband's relief, through a wife's dual
consciousness in company, and covered his want of spirits with a flood of
foolish chatter.

The smiling way in which women the most sincere can posture and prance on
the brink of dissimulation was particularly sickening to Paul at this
time. Why need they put themselves in situations where it was required?
The situations were of his mother's creation. He imagined she must suffer,
but had little sympathy with that side of her martyrdom. Moya seemed a
trifle feverish in her acceptance of these affairs of which she was
naturally the life and centre. A day of entertaining often faded into an
evening of subtle sadness.

Paul would take her out into the moonlight of that deep inland country.
The trees were dark with leaves and brooded close above them; old
water-fences and milldams cast inky shadows on the still, shallow ponds
clasped in wooded hills. No region could have offered a more striking
contrast to the empty plains. Moya felt shut in with old histories. The
very ground was but moulding sand in which generations of human lives had
been poured, and the sand swept over to be reshaped for them.

"We are not living our own life yet," Paul would say; not adding, "We are
protecting her." Here was the beginning of punishment helplessly meted out
to this proud woman whose sole desire was towards her children--to give,
and not to receive.

"But this is our Garden?" Moya would muse. "We are as nearly two alone as
any two could be."

"If you include the Snake. We can't leave out the Snake, you know."

"Snake or Seraph--I don't believe I know the difference. Paul, I cannot
have you thinking things."

"I?--what do I think?"

"You are thinking it is bad for me to be so much with her. You, as a man
and a husband, resent what she, as a woman and a wife, has dared to do.
And I, as another woman and wife, I say she could do nothing else and be
true. For, don't you see? She never loved him. The wifehood in her has
never been reached. She was a girl, then a mother, then a widow. How could
she"--

"Do you think he would have claimed her as his wife? Oh, you do not know
him;--she has never known him. If we could be brave and face our duty to
the whole truth, and leave the rest to those sequences, never dreamed of,
that wait upon great acts. Such surprises come straight from God. Now we
can never know how he would have risen to meet a nobler choice in her. He
had not far to rise! Well, we have our share of blessings, including
piazza teas; but as a family we have missed one of the greatest spiritual
opportunities,--such as come but once in a lifetime."

"Ah, if she was not ready for it, it was not _her_ opportunity. God is
very patient with us, I believe."

XXIII

RESTIVENESS

Mothers and sons are rarely very personal in their intimacy after the son
has taken to himself a wife. Apart from certain moments not appropriate to
piazza teas, Paul and his mother were perhaps as comfortable together as
the relation averages. It was much that they never talked emotionally.
Private judgments which we have refrained from putting into words may die
unfruitful and many a bitter crop be spared.

"This is Paul's apology for being happy in spite of himself--and of us!"
Moya teased, as she admired the beautifully drawn plans for the
quarrymen's club-house.

"It doesn't need any apology; it's a very good thing," said Mrs. Bogardus,
ignoring double meanings. No caps that were flying around ever fitted her
head. Paul's dreams and his mother's practical experience had met once
more on a common ground of philanthropy. This time it was a workingmen's
club in which the interests of social and mental improvement were
conjoined with facilities for outdoor sport. Up to date philanthropy is an
expensive toy. Paul, though now a landowner, was far from rich in his own
right. His mother financed this as she had many another scheme for him.
She was more openhanded than heretofore, but all was done with that
ennuyed air which she ever wore as of an older child who has outgrown the
game. It was in Moya and Moya's prospective maternity that her pride
reinstated itself. Her own history and generation she trod underfoot.
Mistakes, humiliations, whichever way she turned. Paul had never satisfied
her entirely in anything he did until he chose this girl for the mother of
his children. Now their house might come to something. Moya moved before
her eyes crowned in the light of the future. And that this noble and
innocent girl, with her perfect intuitions, should turn to _her_ now with
such impetuous affection was perhaps the sweetest pain the blighted woman
had ever known. She lay awake many a night thinking mute blessings on the
mother and the child to be. Yet she resisted that generous initiative so
dear to herself, aware with a subtle agony of the pain it gave her son.

One day she said to Paul (they were driving home together through a bit of
woodland, the horses stepping softly on the mould of fallen leaves)--"I
don't expect you to account for every dollar of mine you spend in helping
those who can be helped that way. You have a free hand."

"I understand," said Paul. "I have used your money freely--for a purpose
that I never have accounted for."

"Don't you need more?"

"No; there is no need now."

"Why is there not?"

Paul was silent. "I cannot go into particulars. It is a long story."

"Does the purpose still exist?" his mother asked sharply.

"It does; but not as a claim--for that sort of help."

"Let me know if such a claim should ever return."

"I will, mother," said Paul.

* * * * *

There came a day when mother and son reaped the reward of their mutual
forbearance. There was a night and a day when Paul became a boy again in
his mother's hands, and she took the place that was hers in Nature. She
was the priestess acquainted with mysteries. He followed her, and hung
upon her words. The expression of her face meant life and death to him.
The dreadful consciousness passed out of his eyes; tears washed it out as
he rose from his knees by Moya's bed, and his mother kissed him, and laid
his son in his arms.

The following summer saw the club-house and all its affiliations in
working order. The beneficiaries took to it most kindly, but were disposed
to manage it in their own way: not in all respects the way of the
founder's intention.

"To make a gift complete, you must keep yourself out of it," Mrs. Bogardus
advised. "You have done your part; now let them have it and run it
themselves."

Paul was not hungry for leadership, but he had hoped that his interest in
the men's amusements would bring him closer to them and equalize the
difference between the Hill and the quarry.

"You have never worked with them; how can you expect to play with them?"
was another of his mother's cool aphorisms. Alas! Paul, the son of the
poor man, had no work, and hence no play.

It was time to be making winter plans again. Mrs. Bogardus knew that her
son's young family was now complete without her presence. Moya had gained
confidence in the care of her child; she no longer brought every new
symptom to the grandmother. Yet Mrs. Bogardus put off discussing the
change, dreading to expose her own isolation, a point on which she was as
sensitive as if it were a crime. Paul was never entirely frank with her:
she knew he would not be frank in this. They never expressed their wills
or their won'ts to each other with the careless rudeness of a sound family
faith, and always she felt the burden of his unrelenting pity. She began
to take long drives alone, coming in late and excusing herself for dinner.
At such times she would send for her grandson in his nurse's arms to bid
him good-night. The mother would put off her own good-night, not to
intrude at these sessions. One evening, going up later to kiss her little
son, she found his crib empty, the nurse gone to her dinner. He was fast
asleep in his grandmother's arms, where she had held him for an hour in
front of the open fire in her bedroom. She looked up guiltily. "He was so
comfortable! And his crib is cold. Will he take cold when Ellen puts him
back?"

"I am sure he won't," Moya whispered, gathering up the rosy sleeper. But
she was disturbed by the breach of bedtime rules.

In the drawing-room a few nights later she said energetically to Paul.

"One might as well be dead as to live with a grudge."

"A good grudge?"

"There are no good grudges."

"There are some honest ones--honestly come by."

"I don't care how they are come by. Grudges 'is p'ison.'" She laughed, but
her cheeks were hot.

"Do you know that Christine has been at death's door? Your mother heard of
it--through Mrs. Bowen! Was that why you didn't show me her letter?"

"It was not in my letter from Mrs. Bowen."

"I think she has known it some time," said Moya, "and kept it to herself."

"Mrs. Bowen!"

"Your mother. Isn't it terrible? Think how Chrissy must have needed her.
They need each other so! Christine was her constant thought. How can all
that change in one year! But she cannot go to Banks Bowen's house without
an invitation. We must go to New York and make her come with us--we must
open the way."

"Yes," said Paul, "I have seen it was coming. In the end we always do the
thing we have forsworn."

"_I_ was the one. I take it back. Your work is there. I know it calls you.
Was not Mrs. Bowen's letter an appeal?"

Paul was silent.

"She must think you a deserter. And there is bigger work for you, too!
Here is a great political fight on, and my husband is not in it. Every man
must slay his dragon. There is a whole city of dragons!"

"Yes," smiled Paul; "I see. You want me to put my legs under the same
cloth with Banks and ask him about his golf score."

"If you want to fight him, have it out on public grounds; fight him in
politics."

"We are on the same side!"

Moya laughed, but she looked a little dashed.

"Banks comes of gentlemen. He inherited his opinions," said Paul.

"He may have inherited a few other things, if we could have patience with
him."

"Are you sorry for Banks?"

"I shall be sorry for him--when he meets you. He has been spared that too
long."

"Dispenser of destinies, I bow as I always do!"

"You will speak to your mother at once?"

"I will."

"And do it beautifully?"

"As well as I know how."

"Ah, you have had such practice! How good it would be if we could only
dare to quarrel in this family! You and I--of course!"

"_We_ quarrel, of course!" laughed Paul.

"I _love_ to quarrel with you!"

"You do it beautifully. You have had such practice!"

"I am so happy! It is clear to me now that we shall live down this misery.
Christine will love to see me again; I know she will. A wife is a very
different thing from a girl--a haughty girl!"

"I should think the wife of Banks Bowen might be."

"And we'll part with our ancient and honorable grudge! We are getting too
big for it. _We_ are parents!"

Paul made the proposition to his mother and she agreed to it in every
particular save the one. She would remain at Stone Ridge. It was
impossible to move her. Moya was in despair. She had cultivated an
overweening conscience in her relations with Mrs. Bogardus. It turned upon
her now and showed her the true state of her own mind at the thought of
being Two once more and alone with the child God had given them. Mrs.
Bogardus appeared to see nothing but her own interests in the matter. She
had made up her mind. And in spite of the conscientious scruples on all
sides, the hedging and pleading and explaining, all were happier in the
end for her decision. She herself was softened by it, and she yielded one
point in return. Paul had steadily opposed his mother's plan of
housekeeping, alone with one maid and a man who slept at the stables. The
Dunlops, as it happened, were childless for the winter, young Chauncey
attending a "commercial college" in a neighboring town. After many
interviews and a good deal of self-importance on Cerissa's part, the pair
were persuaded to close the old house and occupy the servants' wing on the
Hill, as a distinct family, yet at hand in case of need. It was late
autumn before all these arrangements could be made. Paul and Moya, leaving
the young scion aged nineteen months in the care of his nurse and his
grandmother, went down the river to open the New York house.

XXIV

INDIAN SUMMER

The upper fields of Stone Ridge, so the farmers said, were infested that
autumn by a shy and solitary vagrant, who never could be met with face to
face, but numbers of times had been seen across the width of a lot,
climbing the bars, or closing a gate, or vanishing up some crooked lane
that quickly shut him from view.

"I would look after that old chap if I was you, Chauncey. He'll be smoking
in your hay barns, and burn you out some o' these cold nights."

Chauncey took these neighborly warnings with good-humored indifference. "I
haven't seen no signs of his doin' any harm," he said. "Anybody's at
liberty to walk in the fields if there ain't a 'No Trespass' posted. I
rather guess he makes his bed among the corn stouks. I see prints of
someone's feet, goin' and comin'."

Mrs. Bogardus was more herself in those days than she had been at any time
since the great North-western wilderness sent her its second message of
fear. Old memories were losing their sting. She could bear to review her
decision with a certain shrinking hardihood. Had the choice been given her
to repeat, her action had been the same. In so far as she had perjured
herself for the sake of peace in the family, she owned the sacrifice was
vain; but her own personality was the true reason for what she had done.
She was free in her unimpeachable widowhood--a mother who had never been
at heart a wife. She feared no ghosts this keen autumn weather, at the
summit of her conscious powers. Her dark eye unsheathed its glance of
authority. It was an eye that went everywhere, and everywhere was met with
signs that praised its oversight. Here was an out-worn inheritance which
one woman, in less than a third of her lifetime, had developed into a
competence for her son. He could afford to dream dreams of beneficence
with his mother to make them good. Yes, he needed her still. His child was
in her keeping; and, though brief the lease, that trust was no accident.
It was the surest proof he could have given her of his vital allegiance.
In the step which Paul and Moya were taking, she saw the first promise of
that wisdom she had despaired of in her son. In the course of years he
would understand her. And Christine? She rested bitterly secure in her
daughter's inevitable physical need of her. Christine was a born parasite.
She had no true pride; she was capable merely of pique which would wear
itself out and pass into other forms of selfishness.

This woman had been governed all her life by a habit of decision, and a
strong personality rooted in the powers of nature. Therefore she was
seldom mistaken in her conclusions when they dealt with material results.
Occasionally she left out the spirit; but the spirit leaves out no one.

Her long dark skirts were sweeping the autumn grass at sunset as she paced
back and forth under the red-gold tents of the maples. It was a row of
young trees she had planted to grace a certain turf walk at the top of the
low wall that divided, by a drop of a few feet, the west lawn at Stone
Ridge from the meadow where the beautiful Alderneys were pastured. The
maples turned purple as the light faded out of their tops and struck flat
across the meadow, making the grass vivid as in spring. Two spots of color
moved across it slowly--a young woman capped and aproned, urging along a
little trotting child. Down the path of their united shadows they came,
and the shadows had reached already the dividing wall. The waiting smile
was sweet upon the grandmother's features; her face was transformed like
the meadow into a memory of spring. The child saw her, and waved to her
with something scarlet which he held in his free hand. She admired the
stride of his brown legs above their crumpled socks, the imperishable look
of health on his broad, sweet glowing face. She lifted him high in her
embrace and bore him up the hill, his dusty shoes dangling against her
silk front breadths, his knees pressed tight against her waist, and over
her shoulder he flourished the scarlet cardinal flower.

"Where have you been with him so long?" she asked the nursemaid.

"Only up in the lane, as far as the three gates, ma'am."

"Then where did he get this flower?"

"Oh," said the pretty Irish girl, half scared by her tone, and tempted to
prevaricate. "Why--he must have picked it, I guess."

"Not in the lane. It's a swamp-flower. It doesn't grow anywhere within
four miles of the lane!"

"It must have been the old man gev it him then," said the maid. "Is it
unhealthy, ma'am? I tried to get it from him, but he screamed and fussed
so."

"What old man do you mean?"

"Why, him that was passin' up the lane. I didn't see him till he was clean
by--and Middy had the flower. I don't know where in the world he could
have got it, else, for we wasn't one step out of the lane, was we, Middy!
That's the very truth."

"But where were you when strangers were giving him flowers?"

"Why, sure, ma'am, I was only just a step away be the fence, having a word
with one o' the boys. I was lookin' in the field, speakin' to him and he
was lookin' at me with me back to the lane. 'There's the old man again,'
he says, shiftin' his eye. I turned me round and there, so he was, but he
was by and walkin' on up the lane. And Middy had the flower. He wouldn't
be parted from it and squeezed it so tight I thought the juice might be
bad on his hands, and he promised he'd not put it to his mouth. I kep' my
eye on him. Ah, the nasty, na-asty flower! Give it here to Katy till I
throw it!"

"There's no harm in the flower. But there is harm in strangers making up
to him when your back is turned. Don't you know the dreadful things we
read in the papers?"

Mrs. Bogardus said no more. It was Middy's supper-time. But later she
questioned Katy particularly concerning this old man who was spoken of
quite as if his appearance were taken for granted in the heart of the
farm. Katy recalled one other day when she had seen him asleep as she
thought in a corner of the fence by the big chestnut tree when she and the
boy were nutting. They had moved away to the other side of the tree, but
while she was busy hunting for nuts Middy had strayed off a bit and
foregathered with the old man, who was not asleep at all, but stood with
his back to her pouring a handful of big fat chestnuts into the child's
little skirt, which he held up. She called to him and the old man had
stepped back, and the nuts were spilled. Middy had cried and made her pick
them up, and when that was done the stranger was gone quite out of sight.

Chauncey, too, was questioned, and testified that the old man of the
fields was no myth. But he deprecated all this exaggerated alarm. The
stranger was some simple-minded old work-house candidate putting off the
evil day. In a few weeks he would have to make for shelter in one of the
neighboring towns. Chauncey could not see what legal hold they had upon
him even if they could catch him. He hardly came under the vagrancy law,
since he had neither begged, nor helped himself appreciably to the means
of subsistence.

"That is just the point," Mrs. Bogardus insisted. "He has the means--from
somewhere--to lurk around here and make friends with that child. There may
be a gang of kidnappers behind him. He is the harmless looking decoy. I
insist that you keep a sharp lookout, Chauncey. There shall be a hold upon
him, law or no law, if we catch him on our ground."

A cold rain set in. Paul and Moya wrote of delays in the house
preparations, and hoped the grandmother was not growing tired of her
charge. On the last of the rainy days, in a burst of dubious sunshine,
came a young girl on horseback to have tea with Mrs. Bogardus. She was one
of that lady's discoverers, so she claimed, Miss Sallie Remsen, very
pretty and full of fantastic little affectations founded on her intense
appreciation of the picturesque. She called Mrs. Bogardus "Madam," and
likened her to various female personages in history more celebrated for
strength of purpose than for the Christian virtues. Mrs. Bogardus, in her
restful ignorance of such futilities, went no deeper into these allusions
than their intention, which she took to be complimentary. Miss Sallie
hugged herself with joy when the rain came down in torrents for a clear-up
shower. Her groom was sent home with a note to inform her mother that Mrs.
Bogardus wished to keep her overnight. All the mothers were flattered when
Mrs. Bogardus took notice of their daughters,--even much grander dames
than she herself could pretend to be.

They had a charming little dinner by themselves to the tune of the rain
outside, and were having their coffee by the drawing-room fire; and Miss
Sallie was thinking by what phrase one could do justice to the massive,
crass ugliness of that self-satisfied apartment, furnished in the hideous
sixties, when the word was sent in that Mrs. Dunlop wished to speak with
Mrs. Bogardus. Something of Cerissa's injured importance survived the
transmission of the message, causing Mrs. Bogardus to smile to herself as
she rose. Cerissa was waiting in the dining-room. She kept her seat as
Mrs. Bogardus entered. Her eyes did not rise higher than the lady's dress,
which she examined with a fierce intentness of comparison while she opened
her errand.

"I thought you'd like to know you've got a strange lodger down to the old
house. I don't seem to ever get moved!" she enlarged. "I'm always runnin'
down there after first one thing 'n' another we've forgot. This morning 't
was my stone batter-pot. Chauncey said he thought it was getting cold
enough for buckwheat cakes. I don't suppose you want to have stray tramps
in there in the old house, building fires in the loom-room, where, if a
spark got loose, it would blaze up them draughty stairs, and the whole
house would go in a minute." Cerissa stopped to gain breath.

"Making fires? Are you sure of that? Has any smoke been seen coming out of
that chimney?"

"Why, it's been raining so! And the trees have got so tall! But I could
show you the shucks an' shells he's left there. I know how we left it!"

"You had better speak--No; I will see Chauncey in the morning." Mrs.
Bogardus never, if she could avoid it, gave an order through a third
person.

"Well, I thought I'd just step in. Chauncey said 't was no use disturbing
you to-night, but he's just that way--so easy about everything! I thought
you wouldn't want to be harboring tramps this wet weather when most
anybody would be tempted to build a fire. I'm more concerned about what
goes on down there now we're _out_ of the house! I seem to have it on my
mind the whole time. A house is just like a child: the more you don't see
it the more you worry about it."

"I'm glad you have such a home feeling about the place," said Mrs.
Bogardus, avoiding the onset of words. "Well, good-evening, Cerissa. Thank
you for your trouble. I will see about it in the morning."

Mrs. Bogardus mentioned what she had just heard to Miss Sallie, who
remarked, with her keen sense of antithesis, what a contrast _that_
fireside must be to _this_.

"Which fireside?"

"Oh, your lodger upon the cold ground,--making his little bit of a stolen
blaze in that cavern of a chimney in the midst of the wet trees! What a
nice thing to have an unwatched place like that where a poor bird of
passage can creep in and make his nest, and not trouble any one. Think
what Jean Valjeans one might shelter"--

"Who?"

"What 'angels unawares.'"

"It will be unawares, my dear,--very much unawares,--when I shelter any
angels of that sort."

"Oh, you wouldn't turn him out, such weather as this?"

"The house is not mine, in the first place," Mrs. Bogardus explained as to
a child. "I can't entertain tramps or even angels on my son's premises,
when he's away."

"Oh, he! He would build the fires himself, and make up their beds,"
laughed Miss Sallie. "If he were here, I believe he would start down there
now, and stock the place with everything you've got in the house to eat."

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