Different Girls by Various

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"I will take them," she said, as he stood waiting her formal consent to
drop them from the car window. Her voice was quite as usual, but
something in her face suggested to him that this going away from her
childhood's home might be a different thing to her from what he had
conceived it to be. He caught the touch of tender vindication in her
manner as she untied the cheap red ribbon which held the flowers
together and rearranged them into two bunches so that the jarring colors
might no longer offend, and felt that the really natural thing for her
to do was to weep, and that she only restrained her tears for his sake.
Sixteen was so young! His heart grew warm and brotherly towards her
youth and inexperience; but, after all, how infinitely better that she
should have cause for this passing sorrow.

He left her alone, but not for long. He was eager to talk with her of
the plans about which he had been writing her the two years since he
himself had been a student at Vaucluse, of the future which they should
achieve together. It seemed to him only necessary for him to show her
his point of view to have her adopt it as her own; and he believed,
building on her buoyancy and responsiveness of disposition, that nothing
he might propose would be beyond the scope of her courage.

"It may be a little lonely for you at first," he told her. "There are
only a handful of women students at the college, and all of them much
older than you; but it is your studies at last that are the really
important thing, and I will help you with them all I can. Mrs. Bancroft
will have no other lodgers and there will be nothing to interrupt our
work."

"And the money, Lindsay?" she asked, a little anxiously.

"What I have will carry us through this year. Next summer we can teach
and make almost enough for the year after. The trustees are planning to
establish a fellowship in Greek, and if they do and I can secure it--and
Professor Wayland thinks I can,--that will make us safe the next two
years until you are through."

"And then?"

He straightened up buoyantly. "Then your two years at Vassar and mine at
Harvard, with some teaching thrown in along the way, of course. And then
Europe--Greece--all the great things!"

She smiled with him in his enthusiasm. "You are used to such bold
thoughts. It is too high a flight for me all at once."

"It will not be, a year from now," he declared, confidently.

A silence fell between them, and the noise of the train made a pleasant
accompaniment to his thoughts as he sketched in detail the work of the
coming months. But always as a background to his hopes was that
honorable social position which he meant eventually to achieve, the
passion for which was a part of his Southern inheritance. Little as he
had yet participated in any interests outside his daily tasks, he had
perceived in the old college town its deeply grained traditions of birth
and custom, perceived and respected them, and discounted the more their
absence in the sorry village he had left. Sometime when he should assail
it, the exclusiveness of his new environment might beat him back
cruelly, but thus far it existed for him only as a barrier to what was
ultimately precious and desirable. One day the gates would open at his
touch, and he and the sister of his heart should enter their rightful
heritage.

The afternoon waned. He pointed outside the car window. "See how
different all this is from the part of the State which we have left," he
said. "The landscape is still rural, but what mellowness it has; because
it has been enriched by a larger, more generous human life. One can
imagine what this whole section must have been in those old days, before
the coming of war and desolation. And Vaucluse was the flower, the
centre of it all!" His eye kindled. "Some day external prosperity will
return, and then Vaucluse and her ideals will be needed more than ever;
it is she who must hold in check the commercial spirit, and dominate, as
she has always done, the material with the intellectual." There was a
noble emotion in his face, reflecting itself in the younger countenance
beside his own. Poor, young, unknown, their hearts thrilled with pride
in their State, with the possibility that they also should give to her
of their best when the opportunity should be theirs.

"It is a wonderful old town," Lindsay went on again. "Even Wayland says
so,--our Greek professor, you know." His voice thrilled with the
devotion of the hero-worshipper as he spoke the name. "He is a Harvard
man, and has seen the best of everything, and even he has felt the charm
of the place; he told me so. You will feel it, too. It is just as if the
little town and the college together had preserved in amber all that was
finest in our Southern life. And now to think you and I are to share in
all its riches!"

His early consecration to such a purpose, the toil and sacrifice by
which it had been achieved, came movingly before her; yet, mingled with
her pride in him, something within her pleaded for the things which he
rated so low. "It used to be hard for you at home, Lindsay," she said,
softly.

"Yes, it was hard." His face flushed. "I never really lived till I left
there. I was like an animal caught in a net, like a man struggling for
air. You can't know what it is to me now to be with people who are
thinking of something else than of how to make a few dollars in a
miserable country store."

"But they were good people in Bowersville, Lindsay," she urged, with
gentle loyalty.

"I am sure they were, if you say so," he agreed. "But at any rate we are
done with it all now." He laid his hand over hers. "At last I am going
to take you into our own dear world."

It was, after all, a very small world as to its actual dimensions, but
to the brother it had the largeness of opportunity, and to Stella it
seemed infinitely complex. She found security at first only in following
minutely the programme which Lindsay had laid out for her. It was his
own as well, and simple enough. Study was the supreme thing; exercise
came in as a necessity, pleasure only as the rarest incident. She took
all things cheerfully, after her nature, but after two or three months
the color began to go from her cheeks, the elasticity from her step; nor
was her class standing, though creditable, quite what her brother had
expected it to be.

Wayland detained him one day in his class-room. "Do you think your
sister is quite happy here, Cowart?" he asked.

The boy thrilled, as he always did at any special evidence of interest
from such a source, but he had never put this particular question to
himself and had no reply at hand.

"I have never thought this absolute surrender to books the wisest thing
for you," Wayland went on; "but for your sister it is impossible. She
was formed for companionship, for happiness, not for the isolation of
the scholar. Why did you not put her into one of the girls' schools of
the State, where she would have had associations more suited to her
years?" he asked, bluntly.

Lindsay could scarcely believe that he was listening to the young
professor whose scholarly attainments seemed to him the sum of what was
most desirable in life. "Our girls' colleges are very superficial," he
answered; "and even if they were not, she could get no Greek in any of
them."

"My dear boy," Wayland said, "the amount of Greek which your sister
knows or doesn't know will always be a very unimportant matter; she has
things that are so infinitely more valuable to give to the world. And
deserves so much better things for herself," he added, drawing together
his texts for the next recitation.

Lindsay returned to Mrs. Bancroft's quiet, old-fashioned house in a sort
of daze. "Stella," he said, "do you think you enter enough into the
social side of our college life?"

"No," she answered. "But I think neither of us does."

"Well, leave me out of the count. If I get through my Junior year as I
ought, I am obliged to grind; and when there is any time left, I feel
that I must have it for reading in the library. But it needn't be so
with you. Didn't an invitation come to you for the reception Friday
evening?"

Her face grew wistful. "I don't care to go to things, Lindsay, unless
you will go with me," she said.

Nevertheless, he had his way, and when once she made it possible,
opportunities for social pleasures poured in upon her. As Wayland had
said, she was formed for friendship, for joy; and that which was her own
came to her unsought. She was by nature too simple and sweet to be
spoiled by the attention she received; the danger perhaps was the less
because she missed in it all the comradeship of her brother, without
which in her eyes the best things lost something of their charm. It was
not merely personal ambition which kept him at his books; the passion of
the scholar was upon him and made him count all moments lost that were
spent away from them. Sometimes Stella sought him as he pored over them
alone, and putting her arm shyly about him, would beg that he would go
with her for a walk, or a ride on the river; but almost always his
answer was the same: "I am so busy, Stella dear; if you knew how much I
have to do you would not even ask me."

There was one interruption, indeed, which the young student never
refused. Sometimes their Greek professor dropped in at Mrs. Bancroft's
to bring or to ask for a book; sometimes, with the lovely coming of the
spring, he would join them as they were leaving the college grounds, and
lead them away into some of the woodland walks, rich in wild flowers,
that environed the little town. Such hours seemed to both brother and
sister to have a flavor, a brightness, quite beyond what ordinary life
could give. Wayland, too, must have found in them his own share of
pleasure, for he made them more frequent as the months went by.

* * * * *

It was in the early spring of her second year at Vaucluse that the
accident occurred. The poor lad who had taken her out in the boat was
almost beside himself with grief and remorse.

"We had enjoyed the afternoon so much," he said, trying to tell how it
had happened. "I thought I had never seen her so happy, so gay,--but you
know she was that always. It was nearly sunset, and I remember how she
spoke of the light as we saw it through the open spaces of the woods and
as it slanted across the water. Farther down the river the yellow
jasmine was beginning to open. A beech-tree that leaned out over the
water was hung with it. She wanted some, and I guided the boat under the
branches. I meant to get it for her myself, but she was reaching up
after it almost before I knew it. The bough that had the finest blossoms
on it was just beyond her reach, and while I steadied the boat, she
pulled it towards her by one of the vines hanging from it. She must have
put too much weight on it--

"It all happened so quickly. I called to her to be careful, but while I
was saying the words the vine snapped and she fell back with such force
that the boat tipped, and in a second we were both in the water. I knew
I could not swim, but I hoped that the water so near the bank would be
shallow; and it was, but there was a deep hole under the roots of the
tree."

He could get no further. Poor lad! the wonder was that he had not been
drowned himself. A negro ploughing in the field near by saw the accident
and ran to his help, catching him as he was sinking for the third time.
Stella never rose after she went down; her clothing had been entangled
in the roots of the beech.

Sorrow for the young life cut off so untimely was deep and universal,
and sought to manifest itself in tender ministrations to the brother so
cruelly bereaved. But Lindsay shrank from all offices of sympathy, and
except for seeking now and then Wayland's silent companionship, bore his
grief alone.

The college was too poor to establish the fellowship in Greek, but the
adjunct professor in mathematics resigned, and young Cowart was elected
to his place, with the proviso that he give two months further study to
the subject in the summer school of some university. Wayland decided
which by taking him back with him to Cambridge, where he showed the boy
an admirable friendship.

Lindsay applied himself to his special studies with the utmost
diligence. It was impossible, moreover, that his new surroundings should
not appeal to his tastes in many directions; but in spite of his
response to these larger opportunities, his friend discerned that the
wound which the young man kept so carefully hidden had not, after all
these weeks, begun even slightly to heal.

Late on an August night, impelled as he often was to share the solitude
which Lindsay affected, he sought him at his lodgings, and not finding
him, followed what he knew was a favorite walk with the boy, and came
upon him half hidden under the shadows of an elm in the woods that
skirted Mount Auburn. "I thought you might be here," he said, taking the
place that Lindsay made for him on the seat. Many words were never
necessary between them.

The moon was full and the sky cloudless, and for some time they sat in
silence, yielding to the tranquil loveliness of the scene and to that
inner experience of the soul brooding over each, and more inscrutable
than the fathomless vault above them.

"I suppose we shall never get used to a midnight that is still and at
the same time lustrous, as this is to-night," Wayland said. "The sense
of its uniqueness is as fresh whenever it is spread before us as if we
had never seen it before."

It was but a part of what he meant. He was thinking how sorrow, the wide
sense of personal loss, was in some way like the pervasiveness, the
voiceless speech, of this shadowed radiance around them.

He drew a little nearer the relaxed and slender figure beside his own.
"It is of _her_ you are thinking, Lindsay," he said, gently, and
mentioning for the first time the young man's loss. "All that you see
seems saturated with her memory. I think it will always be so--scenes of
exceptional beauty, moments of high emotion, will always bring her
back."

The boy's response came with difficulty: "Perhaps so. I do not know. I
think the thought of her is always with me."

"If so, it should be for strength, for comfort," his friend pleaded.
"She herself brought only gladness wherever she came."

There was something unusual in his voice, something that for a moment
raised a vague questioning in Lindsay's mind; but absorbed as he was in
his own sadness, it eluded his feeble inquiry. To what Wayland had said
he could make no reply.

"Perhaps it is the apparent waste of a life so beautiful that seems to
you so intolerable--" He felt the strong man's impulse to arrest an
irrational grief, and groped for the assurance he desired. "Yet,
Lindsay, we know things are not wasted; not in the natural world, not in
the world of the spirit." But on the last words his voice lapsed
miserably, and he half rose to go.

Lindsay caught his arm and drew him back. "Don't go yet," he said,
brokenly. "I know you think it would help me if I would talk
about--Stella; if I should tell it all out to you. I thank you for being
willing to listen. Perhaps it will help me."

He paused, seeking for some words in which to express the sense of
poverty which scourged him. Of all who had loved his sister, he himself
was left poorest! Others had taken freely of her friendship, had
delighted themselves in her face, her words, her smile, had all these
things for memories. He had been separated from her, in part by the hard
conditions of their youth, and at the last, when they had been together,
by his own will. Oh, what had been her inner life during these last two
years, when it had gone on beside his own, while he was too busy to
attend?

But the self-reproach was too bitter for utterance to even the kindest
of friends. "I thought I could tell you," he said at last, "but I can't.
Oh, Professor Wayland," he cried, "there is an element in my grief that
is peculiar to itself, that no one else in sorrow ever had!"

"I think every mourner on earth would say that, Lindsay." Again the
younger man discerned the approach of a mystery, but again he left it
unchallenged.

The professor rose to his feet. "Good night," he said; "unless you will
go back with me. Even with such moonlight as this, one must sleep." He
had dropped to that kind level of the commonplace by which we spare
ourselves and one another.

"'Where the love light never, never dies,'"

The boy's voice ringing out blithely through the drip and dampness of
the winter evening marked his winding route across the college grounds.
Lindsay Cowart, busy at his study table, listened without definite
effort and placed the singer as the lad newly come from the country. He
could have identified any other of the Vaucluse students by connections
as slight--Marchman by his whistling, tender, elusive sounds, flute
notes sublimated, heard only when the night was late and the campus
still; others by tricks of voice, fragments of laughter, by their
footfalls, even, on the narrow brick walk below his study window. Such
the easy proficiency of affection.

Attention to the lad's singing suddenly was lifted above the
subconscious. The simple melody had entangled itself in some forgotten
association of the professor's boyhood, seeking to marshal which before
him, he received the full force of the single line sung in direct
ear-shot. Like the tune, the words also became a challenge; pricked
through the unregarded heaviness in which he was plying his familiar
task, and demanded that he should name its cause.

For him the love light of his marriage had been dead so long! No, not
dead; nothing so dignified, so tragic. Burnt down, smoldered;
suffocated by the hateful dust of the commonplace. There was a touch of
contempt in the effort with which he dismissed the matter from his mind
and turned back to his work. And yet, he stopped a moment longer to
think, for him life without the light of love fell so far below its best
achievement!

The front of his desk was covered with the papers in mathematics over
which he had spent his evenings for more than a week. Most of them had
been corrected and graded, with the somewhat full comment or elucidation
here and there which had made his progress slow. He examined a
half-dozen more, and then in sheer mental revolt against the subject,
slipped them under the rubber bands with others of their kind and
dropped the neat packages out of his sight into one of the drawers of
the desk. Wayland's book on Greece, the fruit of eighteen months'
sojourn there, had come through the mail on the same day when the
calculus papers had been handed in, and he had read it through at once,
not to be teased intolerably by its invitation. He had mastered the
text, avid through the long winter night, but he picked it up again now,
and for a little while studied the sumptuous illustrations. How long
Wayland had been away from Vaucluse, how much of enrichment had come to
him in the years since he had left! He himself might have gone also, to
larger opportunities--he had chosen to remain, held by a sentiment! The
professor closed the book with a little sigh, and taking it to a small
shelf on the opposite side of the room, stood it with a half-dozen
others worthy of such association.

Returning, he got together before him the few Greek authors habitually
in hand's reach, whether handled or not, and from a compartment of his
desk took out several sheets of manuscript, metrical translations from
favorite passages in the tragedists or the short poems of the Anthology.
Like the rest of the Vaucluse professors--a mere handful they were,--he
was straitened by the hard exactions of class-room work, and the book
which he hoped sometime to publish grew slowly. How far he was in actual
miles from the men who were getting their thoughts into print, how much
farther in environment! Things which to them were the commonplaces of a
scholar's life were to him impossible luxuries; few even of their books
found their way to his shelves. At least the original sources of
inspiration were his, and sometimes he felt that his verses were not
without spirit, flavor.

He took up a little volume of Theocritus, which opened easily at the
Seventh Idyl, and began to read aloud. Half-way through the poem the
door opened and his wife entered. He did not immediately adjust himself
to the interruption, and she remained standing a few moments in the
centre of the room.

"Thank you; I believe I will be seated," she said, the sarcasm in her
words carefully excluded from her voice.

He wondered that she should find interest in so sorry a game. "I thought
you felt enough at home in here to sit down without being asked," he
said, rising, and trying to speak lightly.

She took the rocking-chair he brought for her and leaned back in it
without speaking. Her maroon-colored evening gown suggested that whoever
planned it had been somewhat straitened by economy, but it did well by
her rich complexion and creditable figure. Her features were creditable
too, the dark hair a little too heavy, perhaps, and the expression,
defined as it is apt to be when one is thirty-five, not wholly
satisfying. In truth, the countenance, like the gown, suffered a little
from economy, a sparseness of the things one loves best in a woman's
face. Half the sensitiveness belonging to her husband's eyes and mouth
would have made her beautiful.

"It is a pity the Barkers have such a bad night for their party," Cowart
said.

"The reception is at the Fieldings';" and again he felt himself rebuked.

"I'm afraid I didn't think much about the matter after you told me the
Dillinghams were coming by for you in their carriage. Fortunately
neither family holds us college people to very strict social account."

"They have their virtues, even if they are so vulgar as to be rich."

"Why, I believe I had just been thinking, before you came in, that it is
only the rich who have any virtues at all." He managed to speak
genially, but the consciousness that she was waiting for him to make
conversation, as she had waited for the chair, stiffened upon him like
frost.

He cast about for something to say, but the one interest which he would
have preferred to keep to himself was all that presented itself to his
grasp. "I have often thought," he suggested, "that if only we were in
sight of the Gulf, our landscape in early summer might not be very
unlike that of ancient Greece." She looked at him a little blankly, and
he drew one of his books nearer and began turning its leaves.

"I thought you were correcting your mathematics papers."

"I am, or have been; but I am reading Theocritus, too."

"Well, I don't see anything in a day like this to make anybody think of
summer. The dampness goes to your very marrow."

"It isn't the day; it's the poetry. That's the good of there being
poetry."

She skipped his parenthesis. "And you keep this room as cold as a
vault." Not faultfinding, but a somewhat irritating concern for his
comfort was in the complaint.

She went to the hearth and in her efficient way shook down the ashes
from the grate and heaped it with coal. A cabinet photograph of a girl
in her early teens, which had the appearance of having just been put
there, was supported against a slender glass vase. Mrs. Cowart took it
up and examined it critically. "I don't think this picture does
Arnoldina justice," she said. "One of the eyes seems to droop a little,
and the mouth looks sad. Arnoldina never did look sad."

They were on common ground now, and he could speak without constraint.
"I hadn't observed that it looked sad. She seems somehow to have got a
good deal older since September."

"She is maturing, of course." All a mother's pride and approbation, were
in the reserve of the speech. To have put more definitely her estimate
of the sweet young face would have been a clumsy thing in comparison.

Lindsay's countenance lighted up. He arose, and standing by his wife,
looked over her shoulder as she held the photograph to the light. "Do
you know, Gertrude," he said, "there is something in her face that
reminds me of Stella?"

"I don't know that I see it," she answered, indifferently, replacing the
photograph and returning to her chair. The purpose which had brought her
to the room rose to her face. "I stopped at the warehouse this
afternoon," she said, "and had a talk with father. Jamieson really goes
to Mobile--the first of next month. The place is open to you if you want
it."

"But, Gertrude, how should I possibly want it?" he expostulated.

"You would be a member of the firm. You might as well be making money as
the rest of them."

He offered no comment.

"It is not now like it was when you were made professor. The town has
become a commercial centre and its educational interests have declined.
The professors will always have their social position, of course, but
they cannot hope for anything more."

"It is not merely Vaucluse, but the South, that is passing into this
phase. But economic independence has become a necessity. When once it is
achieved, our people will turn to higher things."

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