She took up her letter suddenly and went downstairs and out into the yard in search of her father. He was sitting by the bees, with dreamy eyes. He spent a great deal of his time there.
"Father, I want you to hitch Kitty to the buggy for me."
"Why, of course. Where are you goin", Rose?"
"I"m going to the Siding to post a letter. O, pappa John!" she cried suddenly, putting her arms round him, "I"m going to be married."
John did not instantly comprehend her pa.s.sion; he was slower to move, but he said:
"Why, Rosie! When? Who to?"
"To a man in Chicago, Mr. Warren Mason, a great editor. I"m just writing to him to come."
John began to feel the solemnity of the thought.
"Does he live in Chicago?"
"Yes." She understood his thought. "But we"ll come and see you, summers, just the same, pappa John."
"Well, I"ll take the letter down."
"No, I must take it myself," she said, smilingly, holding the letter behind her like a child.
There was something fine in carrying the letter to the office herself.
It seemed to hasten it. The horse was spirited and carried her at a steady swift trot up hill and down, and the railway track was soon in sight.
Suddenly an idea seized her; why not telegraph her answer. They might suspect him to be her lover, but what did she care now? She penned this message:
"Come up tomorrow if you can, please. Rose."
But afterward, as she approached the office, she shrank from handing it in. It seemed to her too plainly a love message. She mailed her letter and fell to calculating when it would reach him. He could not possibly come till the second day, whereas if she telegraphed he might arrive in the morning. This thought strengthened her resolution; going over to the window she placed the message firmly before the operator, who knew her and admired her deeply.
"Please send that at once, Mr. Bingham."
The operator smiled and bowed, and when he read the message he looked up at her keenly, but did not smile.
"Any answer?" he asked.
"No, probably not," she replied. "Will it go right out?"
"Immediately."
As she turned away to ride home her soul took wing. A marvelous elevation and peace came upon her. It was done. Life held more than promise now, it contained certainties. Her chosen one of Israel was coming!
CHAPTER XXVI
MASON AS A LOVER
The telegram came to Mason as he sat on the porch of the Herrick cottage. He read it, and his eyes smiled, but his feeling was not one of amus.e.m.e.nt. The significance of that impulsive message struck deep, and his blood responded to it as if it were an embrace.
It settled all doubt in his mind concerning her. She was as free and self-reliant as he thought her, and the severe terms of his proposal had not repelled her, and yet that she loved him in a right human and very pa.s.sionate way did not seem to him possible.
He had, also, other misgivings. He wished he had delineated more fully in his letter the negative side of his character. "She is young and beautiful," he thought, "and will want to see life. She will value social affairs--I am done with them. She will want words of tender protestation, flattery perhaps, which I cannot give.
"My habits are fixed. I like my silent pipe at night after dinner. I shall undoubtedly get more and more disinclined to social duties as time goes on.
"In ten years I shall be forty-eight years old, an old man, when she is just in her splendid June season. She will find the difference between our ages wider than now. She will be a wife. I can free her when she asks it, but I cannot give her back her sweet, superb girlhood. I can give her perception and comprehension of the world and of life, but I cannot make her young again. I may die after a few years, leaving her a mother with a hazardous future. Then she will be doubly cursed.
"Again, this marriage may ruin and interrupt her career. With some women marriage, especially maternity, seems to take away their power as artists, and to turn them into cooks and nurses; meritorious vocations of course, but----"
All night long he alternately mused and dozed upon the problem. He roused up at early daylight with a feeling of doom upon him. He had made a mistake. He was not fitted to be a husband--he was a poor thing, at best, who had not had energy enough to get out of a groove nor to demand adequate pay for grinding in his groove. He lacked "push," and had dreamed away the best years of his life, at least such parts of the years as he had saved from the merciless drive of his paper. He was pulp, squeezed dry.
He groaned, and a curse came upon his lips, and his forehead knit into a tangle of deep lines. His paper had used him. It had sucked the blood of his heart. The creative energy of his brain had gone into the impersonal columns of the editorial page--to what end? To the end that the Evening Star Publishing Company should be rated high in Bradstreet. Had any human being been made better by anything he had written in those columns? Politics? Good G.o.d! he had sold his soul, his blood, the grace of his limbs, the suppleness of his joints, the bloom of his enthusiasms, to put this or that d.a.m.ned party into power.
And now, when a beautiful young woman, singing her way to fame, had sent for him, he must go to her, cynical, thin-haired, stiff in joints, bent in shoulders and reeking with the smell of office life and, worst of all, worked out, his novel not yet written, and his enthusiasm turned to indifference and despair.
The problem of the age that morning made him savage. He looked out of the window at the farmhouses gleaming in the early light, at the smoke curling up into the still air, at the men going to milk the cows--
"The d.a.m.n fools!" he said in his heart. "They don"t know enough to vegetate any more than I had sense to know I was becoming a machine. Rot and rot! So we go like leaves to the muck-heap." The porter rushed in and shook him.
"Almos" to Bluff Siding, sah."
This put a little resolution into his blood, and he dressed rapidly, with little thought on anything else. Once or twice he looked out at the misty blue hills, cool and fresh with recent rains. As the porter came to get his grip a few minutes later, Mason wondered how he should meet her, with a hand-shake or a kiss? How would she meet him?
As the train slowed down he saw her at the platform. She sat in a carriage waiting for him. He had one flashing thought: "There sits my wife!" It startled him. The tremendous significance of that phrase made his brain dizzy for a moment.
She was dressed trimly, he noticed, as he came toward her, and she held her horse firmly--he liked her for that, it showed self-mastery. As for him, he felt more uncertainty of footing than ever before in his life, and tried to throw off the stoop in his shoulders.
As he came forward, she flushed, but her steady eyes met his unwaveringly. He looked into their clear obscurity of depth, wherein were purity and unworldly womanly ways.
She held out her hand, firm and strong, and he took it in his. Outwardly it was merely a friendly greeting, yet something subtler than light came from her to him. He did not speak for an instant, then he said:
"This is good of you! I did not expect this great pleasure."
Her voice trembled as she said:
"I wanted to be the first to greet you, and besides, papa wouldn"t know you."
He smiled for the first time.
"That"s true. But it"s very early--quite in the small hours."
"Oh, that"s nothing; I"m a farmer"s girl, you know. But put your valise in, we must be off."
How strong and supple she looked! and how becoming her silk waist and straw hat! She could drive, too. Some way she seemed quite another sort of person here in her own land and in her own carriage. She was so much more composed. "She has imagination," he repeated to himself.