Alwyn

“ She never remodeled her rich, draped, braided frocks no matter how the fashions of inferior women changed; and later, when Alwyn visited her home, he saw the kinship between them and its upholstery, its alcoves of taffeta and plush, and the rigid brocade with which its windows were symmetrically draped to keep out the light. ”

“ Aunt Madge was right when she told me that you were born into the world to be somebody's crutch."
"Did she say that?" and Greta's eyes had a dreamy look in them; "but I tell Alwyn that I mean to lean on him. Indeed, Olive, you must not undervalue him. Alwyn is stronger than you think. He has repented truly and deeply of all his boyish mistakes, and those who love him should utterly and for ever wipe out the record of his past. See how devotedly his father loves him; his forgiveness was absolute."
"Dear, you need not say any more;" and Olivia embraced her with tears in her eyes. ”

“ The young men spent some minutes in congratulating each other on their respective advances in life: the gentleman who had attained competence and station simply by devotion to a powerful patron, the trader who had already won repute and the prospect of wealth by ingenuity, application, and toil; and yet, to do justice, as much virtue went to Marmaduke's loyalty to Warwick as to Alwyn's capacities for making a fortune. Mutual compliments over, Alwyn said hesitatingly,—
"And dost thou find Mistress Sibyll more gently disposed to thee than when thou didst complain to me of her cruelty?" ”

“ There were daguerreotypes in cases closed by a metal clasp. or a loop of worn cord, which Alwyn opened and tried to read as if they were a library of miniature books. At the left a leaf of red satin, at the right in a mat of beaded gilt the portraits: heads and busts and family groups, pygmy men and women as if seen through a telescope the men in a daydream, the women anxious about their children, their lovers, their clothes. Mouths like bits of carved wax, nostrils of an insatiable arrogance ”

“ To become the head of his class, to rise to the first honours of his beloved city of London, had become to Nicholas Alwyn a hope and aspiration which made as much a part of his being as glory to a warrior, power to a king, a Eureka to a scholar ”

“ Alwyn said, "She lived with us when I was a child. I watched them all closely then, much too closely. . . ."
As he remembered his childhood, it seemed that much of it had been spent in the center of a carpeted floor; and all about in a circle of rocking-chairs there had been women and men—-grandparents, and their friends, and old cousins, and great-aunts, and uncles; and behind each one a life had extended into the past like a corridor—poorly lighted, long corridors winding away in every direction, through reticence and forgetfulness, to their youth ”

“ When Olive went to Mr. Gaythorne an hour later she found him looking pleased and excited. "Alwyn is a happy man," he said, "he has got a good wife. Greta has tact as well as heart. She will let him have his own way whenever it is possible, and he will not find out that he is guided. That is what Alwyn's nature needs. I have found that out by bitter experience." And the old man sighed heavily. In spite of his contentment the memory of the past was still painful, and both he and Alwyn would carry their scars to their dying day.
"I am sure you will love Greta dearly," Olivia observed. ”

“ Alwyn realized that he would not have had the courage to appreciate the comfortless glory which the pioneers and (his uncle excepted) the first generation of their children, deserved, but for this personal emancipation from their destiny, this more agreeable prospect. . . .
The morning came. His father woke, sent the dogs after the cattle, and came in to hear how the dying woman had passed the night. She was lying quietly, her head thrown back on the pillow; the breath of her nostrils alone seemed alive, like a small, rising and falling, colorless flame at one end of a burned-out log. ”

“ He tried to picture to himself his ancestors: ignorant men with delicate bodies, hoping for wealth as a reward for virtue; boys with chapped mouths hunting by the light of lanterns; fearless girls becoming sickly mothers. A company of dead or distant relatives, on a continent without much elegance, without palaces, without rest. . . . There sprang up in his mind a great number of stories and fragments of stories, in which they were gesticulating and embracing and working.
Alwyn daydreaming in Austria, a little self-consciously a poet. ”

“ If Alwyn left his collar unbuttoned, she would steal up behind him and wrap a handkerchief about his neck, murmuring, "I can't abide nakedness."
Alwyn learned from his mother that she had always kept everything of an improper nature out of sight. She had had no roosters in her flock of hens, and bought eggs for hatching from her neighbors. She had persuaded her husband to plant a great hedge of cedars far from the house, behind which the cows and bulls together had been led. She had never allowed her babies to be seen until they were a month old. ”

“ She never lost consciousness in the slightest degree; and Alwyn was certain that whenever she could sit quietly with her eyes closed, her mind was clear and patiently occupied with what had gone before, or what according to her simple faith was still to come. Sometimes, usually during the day, she was able to speak with a certain ease, in her rough, still beautiful voice; then she would ask, "What are the men doing in the fields now?" or ask one of her grandchildren if he remembered some- thing she had told him long before. ”

“ The hungry horses hung back, pushed each other out of the road, and tried to turn up every lane; they at least could not go on much longer. His father, used to finding his way in the North like an Indian, had described the turnings for him, with a schoolhouse, a tree, a hill, by which to recognize each one; and Alwyn looked forward miserably to his criticism, if they did not arrive when they were expected. But for a few hours not himself but what looked in the dark like an utter wilderness, was in control of him and of what he could do: he was willing and in awe of it ”

“ Was it not possible for men to be the gods of this world, rather than the devils they so often are? Such were a few of the questions that flitted dimly through the minds of the society-fagged fair ones that clustered round the Duchess de la Santoisie, and eagerly discussed Alwyn's personal beauty and extraordinary charm of manner. ”

“ Alwyn tells me that no man of Percy's troop did better than you, in that fight with the Welsh; save, mayhap, that big man-at-arms down there, who, he tells me, cracked the skulls of four Welshmen who were trying to stab you, besides those he disposed of on his own account."
"I owe him my life, indeed, Father. He is a man after your own heart, strong and brave and hearty, even jovial when occasion offers. He can troll out a border lay with the best, and can yet read and write as well as an abbot. His name is Roger." ”

“ Relatives and friends, one by one, coming to have a horror of her sharp tongue, her bitter disposition becoming a by-word. . . . The old man complacently watching loneliness widen around her, watching the manias of her old age increase, accumulating in his mind the pity of others for himself as a miser stores away secret treasure, sighing and pitying himself. . . . Alwyn decided at last that he sincerely thought himself a good man, a patient husband, a martyr. ”

“ And Sir Alwyn furthermore told the Blue Knight concerning tidings in the City of the Sundering Flood, and said that the King thereof was of little account before such a man as was Sir Godrick, for though he were well enough in a fray, if the sword were put into his hand and the horse were between his knees, yet was he feather-headed, stubborn in wrong, and hard-hearted. Said Sir Alwyn, that save the said King was in all things according with the best men of the City, as the Porte and the Masters of the Great Crafts, he was undone. ”

“ There was one, however, which he told on various occasions, and Alwyn could not understand why he remembered it or what it meant: "Early one morning, when I was a young fellow and going to the barnyard to milk, I saw a man leaving the strawstack and running down the road. After a time I saw him coming back again. The day was foggy—you couldn't tell about a man more'n six rods away. ”

“ Alwyn's friend looked at him sharply over the grapes and figs on the table. "A good woman. . . .But I don't understand how you found out her secrets. You know them as well as if you had been her lover. But it all took place before your father was born. She didn't tell you that story as you tell it, did she?"
"Not in so many words. . . ."
"Of course you knew them all—your grandfather and grandmother, your-great-uncle, wouldn't he be? But they were old then, very old, I should think; and old people don't tell that sort of thing. Don't be cross," he added. ”

“ He would have been less at ease in the farmhouse if he had remembered more clearly the morality and religion of his parents, or if he had understood his sister-in-law Marianne's even sterner beliefs which now ruled where he had been a boy, and there prepared her children to condemn him—though she expected them to be too courteous ever to show it. The religious atmosphere in which Alwyn grew up was inherited in large part from his grandmother Duff, though fundamentally her piety had been no more than a public attitude, assumed out of loneliness and defiance. ”

“ But Alwyn needs more. He loves society, and to be a successful artist he must mix with his fellow-workers, and rub against other minds. He must go into the world and see and be seen."
"I think you are right," returned Olivia, slowly ”

“ She had unwittingly made the intimacy and he was but a Negro, looking on every white woman as a goddess and ready to fawn at the slightest encouragement. There had been no one else here to confide in. She could not tell Miss Smith her troubles, although she knew Miss Smith must suspect. Harry Cresswell, apparently, had written nothing home of their quarrel. All the neighbors behaved as if her excuse of ill-health were sufficient to account for her return South to escape the rigors of a Northern winter. Alwyn, and Alwyn alone, really knew. ”

“ Alwyn wanted them, but his mother said it would be too expensive to have them sent from the Far West. Mary Tower, born Harris, had been brave, energetic, and virtuous; and Alwyn's grandmother, who had not seen her for half a century, loved her still, and said she was "the greatest of the pioneer women." This adventurous life embodied not all the womanly qualities of the period, but all that his grandmother admired and meant to praise. ”

“ Alwyn saw him give up every least ambition save to go on being a good man and a gentleman, and saw a series of senseless duties invented by the ladies to discipline him, as Alwyn himself, the other farmer boy in the house, was being disciplined.
The most serious family problem during Mrs. Fielding's later life was that of servants. The overfurnished mansion and its mistress both needed the attention of maids, seamstresses, coachmen, and janitors. As she grew older, she could not endure the presence of those whom her daughters could find to employ. ”

“ For Alwyn's grandfather, who was known as "the greatest talker in the country," used words which no one else understood, words which he did not understand, and words which do not exist, to swell a passionate theme, to confound his neighbors in an argument, and for their own sake. He would say, for example, "My farm was the very apocalypse of fertility, but the renter has rested on his oars till it is good for nothing," or "Manifest the bounty to pass the salt shaker in my direction." ”

“ Alwyn went straight toward the house and disappeared in the oak avenue. Still Colonel Cresswell waited but Zora waited no longer. Alwyn must be warned. She must reach Cresswell's mansion before Cresswell did and without him seeing her. This meant a long detour of the swamp to approach the Oaks from the west. She silently gathered up her skirts and walked quickly and carefully away.
She was a strong woman, lithe and vigorous, living in the open air and used to walking. Once out of hearing she threw away her hat and bending forward ran through the swamp. For a while she ran easily and swiftly. ”

“ He threaded the park trees, gazed in passing at well-known outlines which rose against the dim sky, and was soon interested in observing that lively country-people, in parties of two and three, were walking before and behind him up the interlaced avenue to the castle gateway. Knowing himself to be safe from recognition, Alwyn inquired of one of these pedestrians what was going on. ”

“ She brought a quantity of missionary magazines containing pictures of laughing, muscular savages; and the country people might have felt that they had not place in her world, being neither prominent representatives of Christian wealth and culture like those among whom it was her privilege to live, nor heathens to whom it might have been her privilege to have been sent. Alwyn and even his father wanted to talk to her about their ambitions, but she listened with disapproval to any expression of discontent. ”

“ Stronger than their fathers, because they would have less fear of God; more desperate because, lacking a God of resignation and forgiveness, failure would be even more intolerable. The future of America, if it was to be worth troubling about, depended on them.
Flattering and terrifying himself by his thought, according to his family's habit of mind, Alwyn shrank from this responsibility of being the hope of his native land. ”