"That is all," she replied, controlling the quiver in her voice; but then
letting herself go a little, she added with slow distinctness:
"You might remember this: some women in marrying demand all and give all:
with good men they are the happy; with base men they are the brokenhearted.
Some demand everything and give little: with weak men they are tyrants; with
strong men they are the divorced. Some demand little and give all: with
congenial souls they are already in heaven; with uncongenial they are soon
in their graves. Some give little and demand little: they are the heartless,
and they bring neither the joy of life nor the peace of death."
"And which of these is Amy?" he said, after a minute of reflection. "And
which of the men am I?"
"Don't ask her to marry you until you find out both," she answered.
She watched him as he strode away from her across the clearing, with a look
in her eyes that she knew nothing of--watched him, motionless, until his
tall, black figure passed from sight behind the green sunlit wall of the
wilderness. What undisciplined, unawakened strength there was in him! how
far such a stride as that would carry him on in life! It was like the tread
of one of his own forefathers in Cromwell's unconquer-able, hymn-singing
armies. She loved to think of him as holding his descent from a line so
pious and so grim: it served to account to her for the quality of stern,
spiritual soldiership that still seemed to be the mastering trait of his
nature. How long would it remain so, was the question that she had often
asked of herself. A fighter in the world he would always be--she felt sure
of that; nor was it necessary to look into his past to obtain this
assurance; one had but to look into his eyes. Moreover, she had little doubt
that with a temper so steadily bent on conflict, he would never suffer
defeat where his own utmost strength was all that was needed to conquer. But
as he grew older, and the world in part conquered him as it conquers so many
of us, would he go into his later battles as he had entered his earlier
ones--to the measure of a sacred chant? Beneath the sweat and wounds of all
his victories would he carry the white lustre of conscience, burning
untarnished in him to the end?
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.