Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 April 1895 — Silence [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Silence

By Miss Mulock

CHAPTER, X—Continued. He slept an hour, and then saw his Wife standing beside him with her grave little face and a “memorandum" In her hand, wherein their incomings and outgoings were set down with scrupulous neatness and as much accuracy as was attainable under the circumstances. “How clever you are!” Roderick cried, enthusiastically, until he discovered the sad deficit, which must be met somehow. How? “Perhaps the people would wait; Richerden tradesmen often do.” “If they could, we could not,” Silence answered, gravely. “They must be paid.” 1 ! “How? Not by asking my mother; it is impossible,” added he, abruptly. “And otherwise what can I do? *1 can inot dig; to beg I am ashamed.’ ” Roderick spoke with great Bitterness. His wife made no answer, but went into her bedroom and brought out a large jeweler’s case—necklet, bracelet, brooch.

“It was very good of you, dear, to give me these. I know what they cost, for I have found the receipted bill; still, if we had, not jewels, but the money——” Roderick drew himself up with exceeding pride. “Am I come to such a pass that I require to sell my wife’s ornaments? It is a little hard.” Then bursting out hotly, as she had never before seen him do — “No, Silence, you are only a girl; you don’t understand the world, or you would never have suggested such a thing. Not that; anything but that” “There is nothing but that, so far as I see,” she answered gently, but firmly. “It is true I am a girl; but I am not quite ignorant of the world—at least of its troubles. Mamma and I were often very poor—so poor that we did not always have enough to eat; but we held our heads high, because we owed no one anything. She used to say, ‘My ychild, what we can not pay for we will go without.’ I always obeyed her. I must do so still. You must never ask me to wear these jewels.” He was so astonished that his sudden wrath melted away in a moment. The gentle creature whom he could have ruled with a word! Yet by the way she quietly put the ornaments back and laid the case aside, he knew she meant what she said, and that nothing would ever move her to act against her conscience. “Do you not care for them, the gifts I gave you?” said Roderick, tenderly. “Care for them? Do I not? But I care for you still more. I would rather never wear jewels to the day of my death than see my husband look as he has looked this day.” “But to sell your ornaments! even if I can do it, which I doubt? My poorchild! what w’ould Richerden people say?” “Would Richerden think it more discreditable that you should sell my ornaments than that your tradespeople should go without their money? Then I think the sooner we leave Richerden the better,” “Have We quarreled?” “I don’t know,” said she, half smiling. Roderick paused a minute, and then held out his arms. “You are right; I will do it.” “Not you, dear; these things are so much easier to women than to men. Let me go to the jeweler and say ” “That you do not like them?” “No, for that would not be true. I like them very much—as I like all pretty things. But I like other things better—honor, peace, and a quiet mind. We will set ourselves right now, and after that we will be careful—very careful. You must earn the money, and, like Macbeth, ‘leave all the rest to me;’ then this will never happen again, I being so ‘clever’ as you say.” The laugh in her voice, but the tears in her eyes—who could withstand either? Not Roderick, certainly. Besides, he had the sense to see, what not all men can see, that there are things which a woman can do better than a man, in which a woman is often wise and a man foolish. It is not a question of superiority or inferiority, but merely difference. “I perceive,” he said, “I must give you the reins and sink into my right place in the household chariot Well, perhaps it is best; far better than turning into a domestic phaeton and setting the world on fire. Seriously, my darling, this shall not happen again, if you will help me.” So ended their first quarrel, which Silence persisted was not a quarrel, but only a slight variety in opinion’ And she did help him from that time forward; in many things that might otherwise have been very painful to a proud man, very wearisome to a busy man. But she had a way of doing them all, even the most humiliating, which took the sting out of them entirely. And when the money was obtained, everybody paid, and the preparations completed for their next day’s journey to Blackball, young Mrs. Jardine sat on her boxes, which she had packed with her own hands, looking pale and tired certainly, but with the cheerfulest of countenances. Her husband, too, went whistling, “Oh, Nannie, wilt thou gang wi’ me?” in which song, sung under his instruction as to accent, she had created quite a furbr at several dinner parties. “Evidently you do not wish to leave the .flaunting town, and are anything but disgusted with the ‘lowly cot and russet gown’ to which I am dooming you,” said he laughing. “So, give me the song, even though our piano is gone, and our parlor looks anything but that ‘bower of roses by Bendejneer’s stream,’ to which you are so

often calling my attention. Sing, my bird!” She sat down and sung, clear as a bell and gay as a lark, the lovely old ditty. Her voice was her one perfectly beautiful possession, “except,” as Roderick sometimes said, “except her soul,” of which it was the exponent He listened to it with all his heart in his eyes. “Do you remember, Silence, that first night at the Reyniers’, when you sung ‘My Queen?’ And again—no, you could not remember that—the first Sunday when I heard you singing behind me, unseen, in Neuchatel cathedral? It sounded like the voice of an angel—my good angel. And now I have her in my home, my own home, forever! And she is—only a woman, and has got no wings.” “Nor has mine either! He is—only a man; and I find out a new—shall I call it peculiarity?—in him every day. And worse, he cannot sing at all; he can only whistle; but ” And then, being a weak-minded woman at best, and also exceedingly tired, she stopped laughing and began crying, clinging passionately to her husband’s breast “Oh, take care of me and I will take care of you as well as I can. We are very young, very foolish; but we may help one another. Only love me, and then No, whether you love me or not, I shall always love you.” “My darling!” “But”—with the sun breaking brightly through the summer shower—“since you love me all will go well. We will fight the world together, and not be afraid. No”—tossing back her light curls (they were terribly unfashionable, and she had been urged to abolish them, but Roderick objected, and they remained)—“noF’—and a gleam that might have come from some Highland ancestress of both, fearless till death, and faithful till death, shone in Silence’s eyes—“l am afraid of nothing so long as I have you.”

CHAPTER XI. They were standing together, the young husband and wife, “at their ain door,” in the long northern twilight, the midsummer twilight, beautiful as I have never seen it anywhere but in Scotland; cold, gloomy, rainy Scotland. But, as if Nature herself wished to be kind to the souls that loved her, and unto whom the world was just a little unkind, from the day they reached Blackball there had set in an extraordinarily long spell of fair weather. Already both were a <good deal changed; the mysterious change which marriage makes to all, but to none so much as those who marry early. Already they had learned to forget themselves each in the other, with the hope of a long future in which to rub down opposing angles, striving to become “heirs together of the kingdom of heaven” —that kingdom Of heaven which begins on earth. “How quiet everything is!” she said; “how plainly we can hear the burn singing down below—hear and not see —so that you cannot complain of the mill which has spoiled it so, nor grumble at the sins of your—our—misguided great-great-grandfather!” This was an impecunious Jardine of the last century, who had sold two acres of land, half a mile below the house, on which was built a cottonmill, now owned by Mr. Black, the factor, their only near neighbor, and the only person who had yet called upon young Mrs. Jardine. He was an old bachelor—there was no Mrs. Black to call—which fact, remembering Mrs. Maclagan, was a great consolation to Roderick, who betrayed sometimes a lurking dislike both of the mill and its master.

“Yes, Blackball is very quiet,” he answered, “especially after Richerden, though you are ‘no longer dressed in—’ How does the line run?” Silence sung out into the clear still night—no fear of listeners!—the verse—“No longer dressed in silken sheen, No longer decked wi’ jewels rare, Dost thou regret the courtly scene Where thou wert fairest of the fair?” “Those ‘jewels rare’ about which I got so angry with you, my darling; and yet which purchased for us so much peace of mind, to say nothing of Mr. Maclagan’s declaration ‘that he had not met for years a lady he so much respected as young Mrs. Jardine!’ Good, honest man! He never said so, but I tbjnk my poor opals will appear on Mrs. Maclagan’s fat neck next winter.”

“Never mind; they will make her happy; and I—my happiness does not lie in ornaments.” “What does it lie in, then?” “Love.” He knew the whispered answer, without need of her giving it Still, as he presed his wife closer to him, he liked to hear it “Love is not everything, perhaps. I mean—as our good friend Maclagan suggested when we bade him goodby— “Will the flame that you’re so rich in light a fire in the kitchen, Or the little God of Love turn the spit, spit, spit? We must be prudent. And we shall be, now the wife is Chancellor of the Exchequer. Still, we may have a good deal to fight against, which even love will not shield us from. But after all, ‘Lo.ve is best!’ ” “Is it?. Do you really think so? For me it is; but you—” she stopped. “We are just ourselves—our own two selves,” — said Roderick, answering his wife’s words, and perhaps the unspoken thoughts of both. “We shall have to fight the world together, and alone; but we will do It, never fear. You shall help me, and I will help you—if I can. By the way—if one dare name such a thing in the face of those glorious hills—did your new kitchen-range work well to-day?” She laughed merrily. “Yes, everything is beginning to work well, after a good deal of trouble.”

“I know that, my darling. Anybody less happy-minded than you would' have made a mountain of misery out of the chaos I have brought you into. Poor Cousin Silence! it could not have been so In her lifetime: she was very dainty

and orderly, I believe;- but she ha* been dead more than a year now.” “Dear Cousin Silence!”—with a sudden pathos in her voice which struck her husband. “I think a good deal of Cousin Silence. It seems so strange that we should be here —and so happy —we two. Did you know, Roderick, that this was her favorite walk—this terrace —hers and Cousin Henry’s?” “Cousin Henry—that must have been my father.” “Yes, my father always called him so. He used to speak of him sometimes, nob-wry often. I have never told you”—here her voice fell into the tenderest whisper—“but I have sometimes thought, if they all knew it, they would be very glad that we two were married. Because, as I found out by some letters I had to look over after mamma died. Cousin Silence ought to have married Cousin Henry, if my father had not come between them In some cruel way. He was very sorry afterward—poor papa! but It was too late, I suppose. And they are all dead now, and we are here. Is it not strange?” “Very strange. Poor Cousin Silence!” Then with a sudden and inexplicable revulsion of feeling Roderick added: “We will not talk of this any more. You see, lam my mother’s son. She loved him dearly, and he was the kindest of husbands to her—my poor father!” “And so was papa to mamma. But, oh, Roderick!” —and dinging to hiin with a sudden passionate impulse, she burst into tears —“love is best —love is best! Oh, my God, I thank Thee! Take what Thou wilt from me, but leave me this: let me never live to hear my husband say that love was not best!” Very soon “young Mrs. Jardine," as he was fond of caling her, put on her wise face again, and both it and her words often had a curious wisdom—not worldly wisdom, but that wisdom ■which has, been characterized as coming “from God”—“first pure, and then peaceable.”

“There is a saying, Roderick —you read it out of the Bible this very morning at prayers—‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might’ That means, as it seems to me, at least, do not go beating about the bush, and vexing yourself with trying after a hundred things that you cannot do, but do something which you can do. I have been thinking of you a great deal, my husband, and one thing has occurred to me. You aye very clever; you know you gave me a', whole heap of MSS.—prose and poetry—which you wrote at college.” “When I was so foolish as to think I should be an author some day. “Well, why not? All other professions cost oceans of money, and years of labor. Authorship costs nothing but pen, ink and paper.” “And a few brains, which you think I have, my wife, but—query?” (To be continued.)