Elia Wilkinson Peattie

“ Well, have you any other friend who goes up to her bedroom by means of an outside pair of stairs and who sleeps in a loft, with a tame bat for company? You have not, Carin Carson, and you know it. And, Oh, how I love it! Shall I ever have another room I love so well? The soft noises of the night come purling down into it like a stream. The stars of the northern sky shine into it. The mountain-side is like a green curtain hanging before it. When I get up in that little room, my doors and windows wide to old Mount Tennyson’s whispering side, I seem to find my real self. ”

“ They scorned—but the heart of the haughty is cold;
They grieved—but no wail from their slumbers will come;
They joyed—but the tongue of their gladness is dumb.
They died—ah! they died—we, things that are now,
That walk on the turf that lies over their brow,
And make in their dwelling a transient abode,
Meet the things that they met on their pilgrimage road.
Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,
Are mingled together in sunshine and rain,
And the smile and the tear, and the song and the dirge,
Still follow each other like surge upon surge. ”

“ The temperature lowered every moment. Henderson instinctively felt that this was but the beginning of the storm. He picked himself up without useless regrets for his pony, and made his way on.
The saffron hue turned to blackness, and then out of the murk shot a living green ball of fire, and ploughed into the earth. Then sheets of water, that seemed to come simultaneously from earth and sky, swept the prairie, and in the midst of it struggled Henderson, weak as a little child, half bereft of sense by the strange numbness of head and dullness of eye. ”

“ On it stood Karl Wander, not as she had seen him last, impatient, racked with mental pain, and torn with pride and eager love. He was haggard, but he had arrived at peace. He was master over himself and no longer the creature of futile torments. To such a man a woman might well capitulate if capitulation was her intent. With such a chieftain might one well treat if one had a mind to maintain the suzerainty of one's soul.
The wind assailed Kate violently, and she caught at a spur of rock and clung, while her traveling-veil, escaped from bounds, flung out like a "home-going" pennant of a ship. ”

“ The room is fetid; the coffee steams eternally on the stove; and from her chair in the warmest corner Urda speaks out to the listening men, who shake their heads with joy as they hear the pure old Icelandic flow in sweet rhythm from between her lips. Among the many, many tales she tells is that of the dead weaver, and she tells it in the simplest language in all the world—language so simple that even great scholars could find no simpler, and the children crawling on the floor can understand. ”

“ Her heart was big with pity--pity for that disheartened man whose buoyancy and self-love had been so deeply wounded, pity for those wandering, angry, aimless men and women who might have rested secure in his guardianship; pity for all the hot, misguided hearts of men and women. Pity, too, for the man with the most impetuous heart of them all, who wandered in some foreign land with a woman whose beauty had been his lure and his undoing. Yes, she had been given grace in those days, when she seemed to stand face to face with death, to pity even David and Mary! ”

“ On that shore, dimly seen thro’ the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream;
’Tis the star spangled banner, O, long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more? ”

“ And she plays a waltz, and what with the music and the warmth of the room and the perfume of the roses, a something nameless and mystical steals over the poor clerk, and swathes him about like the fumes of opium. They are alone. The silence is made deeper by that rhythmic unswelling of sound. As the painter flushes the bare wall into splendor, these emotions illuminated his soul, and gave to it that high courage that comes when men or women suddenly realize that each life has its significance,-their own lives no less than the lives of others. ”

“ Death had, at last, seemed the only happiness for her, and Azalea loved to think of her as safe and at rest in that much-cared-for lowly bed of hers beneath the Pride of India tree beside Ma McBirney’s door.
And, oh, the long red road! How it wound up the hills and over them. What valleys it glimpsed, what rivers, amber brown beneath the trees, what spots of quietude and peace beneath the pines, what sunny openings, where succulent odors of grass, freshly sprung, came to the travelers! ”

“ So, softly, and like a thief, I opened the door communicating with the little dressing-room in which Julie's cradle stood. The curtain had been drawn and it was almost dark, but I found my way to Julie's bassinet. I could not quite see her, but the delicate odour of her breath came up to me, and I found her little hand and slipped my finger in it. It was gripped in a baby pressure, and I stood there enraptured, feeling as if a flower had caressed me. I was thrilled through and through with happiness, and with love for this little creature, whom my selfishness might have destroyed. ”

“ Honora always had wakened first in the morning, Kate knew, and now she guessed at the memories that wrung that great, self-obliterating creature, writhing there under her torment. How often she must have raised herself on her arm and looked over at her man, so handsome, so strong, so completely, as she supposed, her own, and called to him, summoning him to another day's work at the great task they had undertaken for themselves. She had planned to be a wife upon an heroic model, and he had wanted mere blitheness, mere feminine allure. ”

“ When shall the sandy bar be crost? When shall we find the bay?
The broadening flood swells slowly out o’er cattle dotted plains;
The stream is strong and turbulent, and dark with heavy rains;
The laborer looks up to see our shallop speed away.
When shall the sandy bar be crost? When shall we find the bay?
Now are the clouds like fiery shrouds; the sun, superbly large,
Slow as an oak to woodman’s stroke, sinks flaming at their marge;
The waves are bright with mirror’d light as jacinths on our way.
When shall the sandy bar be crost? When shall we find the bay? ”

“ I’ll tell you this, my Carin: Next to a well-loved human face, a well-loved road is the best thing. The sight of a familiar clump of grass can be as dear as a threshold. Twists of tree trunks, odd embankments, colors of the road, above all, the turns of a road, get to be like a part of one’s life. The little smells that come up from earth and grass and flower, rising over and over again from the same place, affect one almost like the voices of “home folk.” Even the wind on the face, though the wind is so wild and strange a thing, makes one feel at ease in one’s world ”

“ What is it you see with those wise and pellucid eyes? Why is it that everybody loves you?”
Elsbeth was my little godchild, and I knew her better than I knew any other child in the world. But still I could not truthfully say that I was familiar with her, for to me her spirit was like a fair and fragrant road in the midst of which I might walk in peace and joy, but where I was continually to discover something new. ”

“ Though he had always been an unusual worker, he worked now more like a man who was fighting off fate, than a mere toiler for bread.
The corn came up beautifully, and far as the eye could reach around their home it tossed its broad green leaves with an oceanlike swelling of sibilant sound. Jim loved it with a sort of passion. Annie loved it, too. Sometimes, at night, when her fatigue was unbearable, and her irritation wearing out both body and soul, she took her little one in her arms and walked among the corn, letting its rustling soothe the baby to sleep. ”

“ So the three girls grew browner and brighter-eyed each day, and the heart in each of them—even Annie Laurie’s—was light as down.
But not a hint did they have of the Disbrows. Though they plunged deeper and deeper into the mountains, getting far beyond the towns, they saw nothing of them. They went so far that they came at last upon the lonely, sad-eyed people whom Miss Borrow had described. In their miserable cabins, which were far from weatherproof, they lived their curious, solitary lives. Their faces were vacant and mournful; their voices like the soughing of wind in the trees. ”

“ Her voice straggled off into a curious, shameless sob with a sound in it like the bleating of a lamb.
"Stop that!" said Kate, sharply. "Pull yourself together, woman. Don't be a fool."
"Go away," sobbed Honora. "Don't stay here to watch me. My heart is broken, that's all. Can't you let me alone?"
"No, I can't--I won't. Stand up and fight, woman. You can be magnificent, if you want to. It can't be that you'd grovel, Honora."
"You know very little of what you're talking about," cried Honora, whipped into wholesome anger at last. "I've been a fool from the beginning. ”

“ For there in the solitude an understanding of deep things came to him. He who thought never to have a wife grew to know what the joy of it must be. He perceived all the subtle rapture of wedded souls. He learned what the love of children was, the pride of home, the unselfish ambition for success that spurs men on. All the emotions passed in procession at night before him, tricked out in palpable forms.
A burst of girlish tears would dissipate whatever lingering pity Zoe felt for him. How often he said that! With her sensitiveness she would be sure to hate a man who had mortified her. ”

“ The heart of the stepmother was cold as ice, yet she could not move to waken her husband at her side, for her hands were as fixed as if they were crossed on her dead breast. The voice in her was silent, and her tongue stood to the roof of her mouth.
“After a time the wraith of the dead mother moved toward her—the wraith of the weaver moved her way—and round and about her body was wound the shining cloth. Wherever it touched the body of the stepmother, it was as hateful to her as the touch of a monster out of sea-slime, so that her flesh crept away from it, and her senses swooned. ”

“ Many a banner spread
Flutters above your head,
Many a crest that is famous in story.
Mount and make ready then,
Sons of the mountain glen,
Fight for the queen and our old Scottish glory.
Come from the hills where your hirsels are grazing,
Come from the glen of the buck and the roe;
Come to the crag where the beacon is blazing,
Come with the buckler, the lance, and the bow.
Trumpets are sounding,
War steeds are bounding;
Stand to your arms, then, and march in good order,
England shall many a day
Tell of the bloody fray,
When the Blue Bonnets came over the Border. ”

“ A very narrow, appallingly deep gorge split the mountain at this point, each path skirting a side of this crevasse.
"I choose the right path," said Kate aloud.
Her heart and lungs were again rebelling at the altitude and the exertion, and she was forced to lie flat for a long time. She lay with her face to the sky watching the roll of the murky clouds. Above her towered the crest of the mountain, below her stretched the abyss. It was a place where one might draw apart from all the world and contemplate the little thing that men call Life. ”

“ The long red clay road, winding down from the cabin where the McBirneys lived on their high shelf of Tennyson mountain, was frosted delicately with white, and by the roadside the curious frost flowers lifted their heads, as airy-fine as fern. From the half-hidden cabins all around the semicircle of mountains that skirted the valley of Lee, shafts of smoke arose, showing that the people were about the business of the day. ”

“ They told him all the chat, of course, and, among other things, mentioned the great sensation of the year,—the coming of the woman with her mystery, the purchase of the sunny upland, the planting it with clover and with mignonette, the building of the house of logs, the keeping of the bees, the barren rooms, the busy, silent life, the charities, the never-ending wonder of it all. And then the woman—kind, yet different from the rest, with the foreign trick of tongue, the slow, proud walk, the delicate, slight hands, the beautiful, beautiful smile, the air as of a creature from another world. ”

“ Honora's amazement at her cousin's hedonism gave way to contempt for it.
"Oh," she groaned, "to have had the power to destroy a great man and to have no knowledge of what you've done! To have lived through all that you have, and to have got no soul, after all!"
She had stepped back as if to measure the luscious opulence of Mary's form with an eye of passionate depreciation.
"Stop her, Miss Barrington," cried Mary, seizing Kate's arm. "There's no use in all this, and people will overhear. Can't you take her away?" ”

“ Annie Laurie felt her heart leaping in her, and the black care that had been hanging over her of late lifted like mist before the sun. Looking up, she could see where Azalea’s house was perched fairly upon the edge of the mountain ledge. There it hung, like an eagle’s great nest, daringly near the long slope of old Mount Tennyson.
“Isn’t she a dear—that Azalea girl?” asked Carin enthusiastically. “Never was there such a friend! Why, just having her believe in me the way she does, makes me long to do things. ”

“ Dare I face that mystic, inner ME and say: 'I choose my man, I give him all my life, and I resign my birthright of labor. For this personal joy I refuse to be the Sister of the World; I let the dream perish; I hinder a great work'? Oh, Honora, I want him, I want him! But am I for that reason to be false to my destiny?"
"You want celebrity!" said Honora with sudden bitterness. "You want to go to Washington, to have your name numbered among the leading ones of the nation; you are not willing to spend your days in the solitude of Williston Ranch as wife to its master." ”

“ Kate dreamed of Italian gardens--the gardens she never had seen; Von Shierbrand thought of dark German forests; Honora, of a moonlit glade. These three confessed so much. The others did not tell their visions, but obviously they had them. Blue-eyed Mary was one of those women who inspire others. She was the quintessence of femininity, and she distilled upon the air something delicately intoxicating, like the odor of lotus-blossoms. ”

“ There's nothing perfect about me! The whole truth is that you don't know whether you'll change or not!"
"Well, say that I change! Say that I pass from shimmering moonlight to common sunlight love! Say that we walk a heavy road and carry burdens and that our throats are so parched we forget to turn our eyes toward each other. Still we shall be side by side, and in the end the dust of us shall mingle in one earth. As for our spirits--if they have triumphed together, where is the logic in supposing that they will know separation?"
"You will give me love," said Kate, "changing, faulty, human love! ”

“ If everything is adjusted to such a nicety, what will they be able to sacrifice for each other?"
"Lovers," smiled Kate, "will always be able to make their own paradise, and a jewelled sacrifice will be the keystone of each window in their house of love. But there are only a few lovers in the world compared with those who have come down through the realm of little morning clouds and are bearing the heat and burden of the day." ”

“ Had her dread of him been fortuitous, his tyranny a mere sham? Had he really liked her all the time, and had she been a sensitive fool? She would have thought so, indeed, but for the memory of the perplexed and distracted face of her mother, the cringing and broken spirit of her who missed truth through an obsession of love. No, no, a tyrant he had been, one of a countless army of them!
But now he leaned back on his seat very sad of eye, inert of gesture, without curiosity or much expectancy. He let her do everything for him. She felt her heart warming as she served him. ”

“ Ray found the courage at length to peer above the heads of the others in that miserable, crowded room. The dark faces of weary men and women, heavy with Old-World, inherited woe, showed in the gloom. The short, shaking man on the chair, dully contrite for his spasm of rage, was cringing before Kate, who stood there, amazingly tall among these low-statured beings. Never had she looked to Ray so like an eagle, so keen, so fierce, so fit for braving either sun or tenebrous cavern. ”

“ They said of Marna afterward that she was like a spirit. She seemed less and more than a woman, an evanescent essence of feminine delight. Her laughter, her tears, her swift emotions were all as something held for a moment before the eye and snatched away, to leave but the wavering eidolon of their loveliness. She sang with a young Italian who responded exquisitely to the swift, bright, unsubstantial beauty of her acting, and whom she seemed fairly to bathe in the amber loveliness of her voice. ”

“ So in drawers and chests and boxes she had packed her pathetic loot--odds and ends of embroidery, of dress goods, of passementerie, of chair coverings; dozens of spools of thread and crochet cotton; odd dishes; jars of cold cream; flotsam and jetsam of the shops, a mere wreckage of material. Kate remembered it with vicarious shame and the blood that flowed to her face swept on into her brain. She flamed with loyalty to that little dead, bewildered woman, whose feet had walked so falteringly in her search for the roses of life. ”

“ The truth was, she was grateful for whatever absorbed her and kept her from dwelling upon that dehumanized house at Silvertree. Her busy days enabled her to fight her sorrow very well, but in the night, like a wailing child, her longing for her mother awoke, and she nursed it, treasuring it as those freshly bereaved often do. The memory of that little frustrated soul made her tender of all women, and too prone, perhaps, to lay to some man the blame of their shortcomings. She had no realization that she had set herself in this subtle and subconscious way against men. ”

“ Were all women who became good wives asked to falsify themselves? Was furtive diplomacy, or, at least, spiritual compromise, the miserable duty of woman? Was it her business to placate her mate, and, by exercising the cunning of the weak, to keep out from under his heel?
There was no one in all Silvertree whom the discriminating would so quickly have mentioned as the ideal wife as Mrs. Barrington. She herself, no doubt, so Kate concluded with her merciless young psychology, regarded herself as noble. But the people in Silvertree had a passion for thinking of themselves as noble. ”

“ Honora walked as somnambulists walk, seeing nothing. But she found her way to the door of the laboratory. The white glare of the chemical lights was over everything--over all the significant, familiar litter of the place. The workmanlike room was alive and palpitating with the personality which had gone out from it--the flaming personality of David Fulham.
The woman who had sold her birthright of charm and seduction for his sake sat down to eat her mess of pottage. ”

“ It was amazing to Kate to see light come to dull eyes--eyes which had hitherto been lit only with the fires of hate. As she walked the gray streets in the performance of her tasks, weary and bewildered though she often was, she was sustained by the new discovery of that ancient truth that nothing human can be foreign to the person of good will. ”