It Is Never Too Late to Mend Part 15

Meadows, by a great histrionic effort, brightened up, too, and poured out a flood of really interesting facts and anecdotes about this marvelous land.

Then, in the middle of a narrative, which enchained both his hearers, he suddenly looked at his watch, and putting on a fict.i.tious look of dismay and annoyance, started up with many excuses and went home--not, however, till Susan had made him promise to come again next market-day.

As he rode home in the moonlight Susan's face seemed still before him.

The bright look of interest she had given him, the grateful smiles with which she had thanked him for his narration--all this had been so sweet at the moment, so bitter upon the least reflection. His mind was in a whirl. At last he grasped at one idea, and held it as with a vise.

"I shall be always welcome to her if I can bring myself to talk about that detestable country. Well, I will grind my tongue down to it. She shall not be able to do without my chat; that shall be the beginning; the middle shall be different; the end shall be just the opposite. The sea is between him and her. I am here with opportunity, resolution and money. I _will_ have her!"

The next morning his mother said to him:

"John, do you think to go to-day?"

"Where, mother?"

"The journey you spoke of."

"What journey?"

"Among the mines."

"Not I."

"You have changed your mind, then?"

"What, didn't you see I was joking?"

"No!" (very dryly.)

Soon after this little dialogue Dame Meadows proposed to end her visit and return home. Her son yielded a cheerful a.s.sent. She went gravely and quietly back to her little cottage.

Meadows had determined to make himself necessary to Susan Merton. He brought a woman's cunning to bear against a woman's; for the artifice to which his strong will bent his supple talent is one that many women have had the tact and temporary self-denial to carry out, but not one man in a hundred.

Men try to beat an absent rival by sneering at him, etc. By which means the a.s.ses make their absent foe present to her mind and enlist the whole woman in his defense.

But Meadows was no ordinary man. Susan had given his quick intelligence a glimpse of a way to please her. He looked at the end, and crushed his will down to the th.o.r.n.y means.

Twice a week he called on the Mertons, and much of his talk was Australia. Susan was grateful. To hear of the place where George would soon be was the nearest approach she could make to hearing of George.

As for Meadows, he gained a great point, but he went through tortures on the way. He could not hide from himself why he was so welcome; and many a time as he rode home from the Mertons he resolved never to return there, but he took no more oaths; it had cost him so much to keep the last; and that befell which might have been expected, after a while, the pleasure of being near the woman he loved, of being distinguished by her and greeted with pleasure however slight, grew into a habit and a need.

Achilles was a man of steel, but he had a vulnerable part; and iron natures like John Meadows have often one spot in their souls where they are far tenderer than the universal dove-eyed, and weaker than the omnipotent. He never spoke a word of love to Susan, he knew it would spoil all; and she, occupied with another's image, and looking upon herself as confessedly belonging to another, never suspected the deep pa.s.sion that filled this man's heart. But if an observer of nature had accompanied John Meadows on market-day he might have seen--diagnostics.

All the morning his eye was cold and quick; his mouth, when silent, close, firm, and unreadable; his voice clear, decided, and occasionally loud. But when he got to old Merton's fireside he mellowed and softened like the sun toward evening. There his forehead unknit itself; his voice, pitched in quite a different key from his key of business, turned also low and gentle, and soothed and secretly won the hearer by its deep, rich and pleasant modulation and variety; and his eye turned deeper in color, and, losing its keenness and restlessness, dwelt calmly and pensively for minutes at a time upon some little household object close to Susan; seldom, unless quite un.o.bserved, upon Susan herself.

But the surrounding rustics suspected nothing, so calm and deep ran Meadows.

"Dear heart," said Susan to her father, "who would have thought Mr.

Meadows would come a mile out of his way twice a week to talk to me about Geo--about the country where my heart is--and the folk say he thinks of nothing but money and won't move a step without making it."

"The folk are envious of him, girl--that is all. John Meadows is too clever for fools, and too industrious for the lazy ones; he is a good friend of mine, Susan; if I wanted to borrow a thousand pounds I have only to draw on Meadows; he has told me so half a dozen times."

"We don't want his money, father," replied Susan, "nor anybody's; but I think a great deal of his kindness, and George shall thank him when he comes home--if ever he comes home to Susan again." These last words brought many tears with them, which the old farmer pretended not to notice, for he was getting tired of his daughter's tears. They were always flowing now at the least word, "and she used to be so good-humored and cheerful-like."

Poor Susan! she was very unhappy. If any one had said to her, "to-morrow you die," she would have smiled on her own account, and only sighed at the pain the news would cause poor George. Her George was gone, her mother had been dead this two years. Her life, which had been full of innocent pleasures, was now utterly tasteless, except in its hours of bitterness when sorrow overcame her like a flood. She had a pretty flower-garden in which she used to work. When George was at home what pleasure it had been to plant them with her lover's help, to watch them expand, to water them in the summer evening, to smell their grat.i.tude for the artificial shower after a sultry day, and then to have George in, and set him admiring them with such threadbare enthusiasm, simply because they were hers, not in the least because they were Nature's.

I will go back, like the epic writers, and sketch one of their little garden scenes.

One evening, after watering them all, she sat down on a seat at the bottom of the garden, and casting her eyes over her whole domain, said, "Well, now, I do admire flowers; don't you, George?"

"That I do," replied George, taking another seat, and coolly turning his back on the parterre, and gazing mildly into Susan's eyes.

"Why, he is not even looking at them!" cried Susan, and she clapped her hands and laughed gleefully.

"Oh, yes, he is; leastways he is looking at one of them, and the brightest of the lot to my fancy."

Susan colored with pleasure. In the country compliments don't drip constantly on beauty even from the lips of love. Then, suppressing her satisfaction, she said, "You will look for a flower in return for that, young man; come and let us see whether there is one good enough for you." So then they took hands, and Susan drew him demurely about the garden. Presently she stopped with a little start of hypocritical admiration; at their feet shone a marigold. Susan culled the gaudy flower and placed it affectionately in George's b.u.t.tonhole. He received it proudly, and shaking hands with her, for it was time to part, turned away slowly. She let him take a step or two, then called him back. "He was really going off with that nasty thing." She took it out of his b.u.t.tonhole, rubbed it against his nose with well-feigned anger and then threw it away.

"You are all behind in flowers, George," said Susan; "here, this is good enough for you," and she brought out from under her ap.r.o.n, where she had carried the furtively culled treasure, a lovely clove-pink. Pretty soul, she had nursed and watered and cherished this choice flower this three weeks past for George, and this was her way of giving it him at last; so a true woman gives--(her life, if need be). George took it and smelled it, and lingered a moment at the garden gate, and moralized on it.

"Well, Susan, dear, now I'm not so deep in flowers as you, but I like this a deal better than the marigold, and I'll tell you for why; it is more like you, Susan."

"Ay! why?"

"I see flowers that are pretty, but have no smell, and I see women that have good looks, but no great wisdom nor goodness when you come nearer to them. Now the marigold is like those la.s.ses; but this pink is good as well as pretty, so then it will stand for you, when we are apart, as we mostly are--worse luck for me."

"Oh, George," said Susan, dropping her quizzing manner, "I am a long way behind the marigold or any flower in comeliness and innocence, but at least I wish I was better."

"I don't."

"Ay, but I do, ten times better, for--for--"

"For why, Susan?"

Susan closed the garden gate and took a step toward the house.

Then, turning her head over her shoulder, with an ineffable look of tenderness, tipped with one tint of lingering archness, she let fall, "For your sake, George," in the direction of George's feet, and glided across the garden into the house.

George stood watching her. He did not at first take up all she had bestowed on him, for her s.e.x has peculiar mastery over language, being diabolically angelically subtle in the art of saying something that expresses 1 oz. and implies 1 cwt.; but when he did comprehend, his heart exulted. He strode home as if he trod on air and often kissed the little flower he had taken from the beloved hand, "and with it words of so sweet breath composed, as made the thing more rich;" and as he marched past the house kissing the flower, need I tell my reader that so innocent a girl as Susan was too high-minded to watch the effect of her proceedings from behind the curtains? I hope not, it would surely be superfluous to relate what none would be green enough to believe.

These were Susan's happy days. Now all was changed. She hated to water her flowers now. She bade one of the farm-servants look to the garden.

He accepted the charge, and her flowers' drooping heads told how n.o.bly he had fulfilled it. Susan was charitable. Every day it had been her custom to visit more than one poor person; she carried meal to one, soup to another, linen to another, meat and bread to another, money to another--to all words and looks of sympathy. This practice she did not even now give up, for it came under the head of her religious duties; but she relaxed it. She often sent to places where she used to go. Until George went she had never thought of herself; and so the selfishness of those she relieved had not struck her. Now it made her bitter to see that none of those she pitied, pitied her. The moment she came into their houses it was, "_My_ poor head, Miss Merton; _my_ old bones do ache so."

"I think a bit of your nice bacon would do ME good. I'M a poor sufferer, Miss Merton. _My_ boy is 'listed. I thought as how you'd forgotten _me_ altogether. But 'tis hard for poor folk to keep a friend." "You see, miss, _my_ bedroom window is broken in one or two places. John, he stopped it up with paper the best way he could, but la, bless you, paper baint like gla.s.s. It is very dull for _me_. You see, miss, I can't get about now as I used to could, and I never was no great reader. I often wish as some one would step in and knock me on the head, for I be no use, I baint, neer a mossel." No one of them looked up in her face and said, "Lauks, how pale _you_ ha got to look, miss; I hopes as how nothing amiss haven't happened to _you_, that have been so kind to us this many a day." Yet suffering of some sort was plainly stamped on the face and in the manner of this relieving angel. When they poured out their vulgar woes, Susan made an effort to forget her own and to cheer as well as relieve them. But she had to compress her own heart hard to do it; and this suppression of feeling makes people more or less bitter.

She had better have out with it, and scolded them well for talking as if they alone were unhappy; but her woman's nature would not let her. They kept asking her for pity, and she still gulped down her own heart and gave it them, till at last she began to take a spite against her pets; so then she sent to most of them instead of going. She sent rather larger slices of beef and bacon, and rather more yards of flannel than when she used to carry the like to them herself. Susan had one or two young friends, daughters of farmers in the neighborhood, with whom she was a favorite, though the gayer ones sometimes quizzed her for her religious tendencies, and her lamentable indifference to flirtation.

But then she was so good and so good-humored, and so tolerant of other people's tastes. The prattle of these young ladies became now intolerable to Susan, and when she saw them coming to call on her she used to s.n.a.t.c.h up her bonnet and fly and lock herself up in a closet at the top of the house, and read some good book as quiet as a mouse, till the servants had hunted for her and told them she must be out. She was not in a frame of mind to sustain tarlatans, barege, the history of the last hop, and the prophecies of the next; the wounded deer shrunk from its gamboling a.s.sociates, and indeed from all strangers, except John Meadows. "He talks to me about something worth talking about," said Susan Merton. It happened one day, while Susan was in this sad and I may say dangerous state of mind, that the servant came up to her, and told her a gentleman was on his horse at the door, and wanted to see Mr.

Merton.

"Father is at market, Jane."

"Yes, miss, but I told the gentleman you were at home."