It was this religious purity of his nature and his life, resting upon him as a mantle visible to all eyes but invisible to him, that had, as she believed, attracted her to him so powerfully.On that uncouth border of Western civilization, to which they had both been cast, he was a little lonely in his way, she in hers; and this fact had drawn them somewhat together.He was a scholar, she a reader; that too had formed a bond.He had been much at their home as lover of her niece, and this intimacy had given her a good chance to take his wearing measure as a man.But over and above all other things, it was the effect of the unfallen in him, of the highest keeping itself above assault, of his first youth never yet brushed away as a bloom, that constituted to her his distinction among the men that she had known.It served to place him in contrast with the colonial Virginia society of her remembrance--a society in which even the minds of the clergy were not like a lawn scentless with the dew on it, but like a lawn parched by the afternoon sun and full of hot odours.It kept him aloof from the loose ways of the young backwoodsmen and aristocrats of the town, with whom otherwise he closely mingled.It gave her the right, she thought, to indulge a friendship for him such as she had never felt for any other man; and in this friendship it made it easier for her to overlook a great deal that was rude in him, headstrong, overbearing.
When, this afternoon, he had asked her what she was thinking of when he surprised her with his visit, she had not replied: she could not have avowed even to herself that she was thinking of such things as these: that having, for some years, drawn out a hard, dull life in that settlement of pathfinders, trappers, woodchoppers, hunters, Indian fighters, surveyors;having afterwards, with little interest, watched them, one by one, as the earliest types of civilization followed,--the merchant, the lawyer, the priest, the preacher of the Gospel, the soldiers and officers of the Revolution,--at last, through all the wilderness, as it now fondly seemed to her, she saw shining the white light of his long absent figure, bringing a new melody to the woods, a new meaning to her life, and putting an end to all her desire ever to return to the old society beyond the mountains.
His figure passed out of sight, and she turned and walked sorrowfully to the cabin, from the low rugged chimney of which a pale blue smoke now rose into the twilight air.She chid herself that she had confronted the declaration of his purpose to marry her niece with so little spirit, such faulty tact.
She had long known that he would ask this; she had long gotten ready what she would say; but in the struggle between their wills, she had been unaccountably embarrassed, she had blundered, and he had left rather strengthened than weakened in his determination.
But she must prevent the marriage; her mind was more resolute than ever as to that.
Slowly she reached the doorstep of the cabin, a roughly hewn log, and turning, stood there with her bonnet in her hand, her white figure outlined before the doorway, slender and still.
The sun had set.Night was rushing on over the awful land.The wolf-dog, in his kennel behind the house, rose, shook himself at his chain, and uttered a long howl that reached away to the dark woods--the darker for the vast pulsing yellow light that waved behind them in the west like a gorgeous soft aerial fan.As the echoes died out from the peach orchard came the song of a robin, calling for love and rest.
Then from another direction across the clearing another sound reached her:
the careless whistle of the major, returning from his day's work in the field.When she heard that, her face took on the expression that a woman sometimes comes to wear when she has accepted what life has brought her although it has brought her nothing for which she cares; and her lips opened with an unconscious sigh of weariness--the weariness that has been gathering weariness for years and that runs on in weariness through the future.
Later, she was kneeling before the red logs of the fireplace with one hand shielding her delicate face from the blistering heat; in the other holding the shingle on which richly made and carefully shaped was the bread of Indian maize that he liked.She did not rise until she had placed it where it would be perfectly browned; otherwise he would have been disappointed and the evening would have been spoiled.
