Rose O\' the River by Kate Douglas Wiggin
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7 Rose O' the River by Kate Douglas Wiggin
This etext was prepared by Shanti Day (sday@childinc.org)
Rose O' the River
by Kate Douglas Wiggin
Table of Contents
THE PINE AND THE ROSE
"OLD KENNEBEC"
THE EDGEWOOD "DRIVE"
"BLASPHEMIOUS SWEARIN'"
THE GAME OF JACKSTRAWS
HEARTS AND OTHER HEARTS
THE LITTLE HOUSE
THE GARDEN OF EDEN
THE SERPENT
THE TURQUOISE RING
ROSE SEES THE WORLD
GOLD AND PINCHBECK
A COUNTRY CHEVALIER
HOUSEBREAKING
THE DREAM ROOM
THE PINE AND THE ROSE
It was not long after sunrise, and Stephen Waterman, fresh from
his dip in the river, had scrambled up the hillside from the hut
in the alder-bushes where he had made his morning toilet.
An early ablution of his sort was not the custom of the farmers
along the banks of the Saco, but the Waterman house was hardly a
stone's throw from the water, and there was a clear, deep
swimming-hole in the Willow Cove that would have tempted the
busiest man, or the least cleanly, in York County. Then, too,
Stephen was a child of the river, born, reared, schooled on its
very brink, never happy unless he were on it, or in it, or beside
it, or at least within sight or sound of it.
The immensity of the sea had always silenced and overawed him,
left him cold in feeling. The river wooed him, caressed him, won
his heart. It was just big enough to love. It was full of
charms and changes, of varying moods and sudden surprises. Its
voice stole in upon his ear with a melody far sweeter and more
subtle than the boom of the ocean. Yet it was not without
strength, and when it was swollen with the freshets of the spring
and brimming with the bounty of its sister streams, it could dash
and roar, boom and crash, with the best of them.
Stephen stood on the side porch, drinking in the glory of the
sunrise, with the Saco winding like a silver ribbon through the
sweet loveliness of the summer landscape.
And the river rolled on toward the sea, singing its morning song,
creating and nourishing beauty at every step of its onward path.
Cradled in the heart of a great mountain-range, it pursued its
gleaming way, here lying silent in glassy lakes, there rushing
into tinkling little falls, foaming great falls, and thundering
cataracts. Scores of bridges spanned its width, but no steamers
flurried its crystal depths. Here and there a rough little
rowboat, tethered to a willow, rocked to and fro in some quiet
bend of the shore. Here the silver gleam of a rising perch,
chub, or trout caught the eye; there a pickerel lay rigid in the
clear water, a fish carved in stone: here eels coiled in the
muddy bottom of some pool; and there, under the deep shadows of
the rocks, lay fat, sleepy bass, old, and incredibly wise, quite
untempted by, and wholly superior to, the rural fisherman's worm.
The river lapped the shores of peaceful meadows; it flowed along
banks green with maple, beech, sycamore, and birch; it fell
tempestuously over darns and fought its way between rocky cliffs
crowned with stately firs. It rolled past forests of pine and
hemlock and spruce, now gentle, now terrible; for there is said
to be an Indian curse upon the Saco, whereby, with every great
sun, the child of a paleface shall be drawn into its cruel
depths. Lashed into fury by the stony reefs that impeded its
progress, the river looked now sapphire, now gold, now white, now
leaden gray; but always it was hurrying, hurrying on its
appointed way to the sea.
After feasting his eyes and filling his heart with a morning
draught of beauty, Stephen went in from the porch and, pausing at
the stairway, called in stentorian tones: "Get up and eat your
breakfast, Rufus! The boys will be picking the side jams today,
and I'm going down to work on the logs. If you come along, bring
your own pick-pole and peavey." Then, going to the kitchen
pantry, he collected, from the various shelves, a pitcher of
milk, a loaf of bread, half an apple-pie, and a bowl of
blueberries, and, with the easy methods of a household unswayed
by feminine rule, moved toward a seat under an apple-tree and
took his morning meal in great apparent content. Having
finished, and washed his dishes with much more thoroughness than
is common to unsuperintended man, and having given Rufus the
second call to breakfast with the vigor and acrimony that usually
marks that unpleasant performance, he strode to a high point on
the river-bank and, shading his eyes with his hand, gazed
steadily down stream.
Patches of green fodder and blossoming potatoes melted into soft
fields that had been lately mown, and there were glimpses of
tasseling corn rising high to catch the sun. Far, far down on
the opposite bank of the river was the hint of a brown roof, and
the tip of a chimney that sent a slender wisp of smoke into the
clear air. Beyond this, and farther back from the water, the
trees apparently hid a cluster of other chimneys, for thin
spirals of smoke ascended here and there. The little brown roof
could never have revealed itself to any but a lover's eye; and
that discerned something even smaller, something like a pinkish
speck, that moved hither and thither on a piece of greensward
that sloped to the waterside.
"She's up!" Stephen exclaimed under his breath, his eyes shining,
his lips smiling. His voice had a note of hushed exaltation
about it, as if "she," whoever she might be, had, in
condescending to rise, conferred a priceless boon upon a waiting
universe. If she were indeed a "up" (so his tone implied), then
the day, somewhat falsely heralded by the sunrise, had really
begun, and the human race might pursue its appointed tasks,
inspired and uplifted by the consciousness of her existence. It
might properly be grateful for the fact of her birth; that she
had grown to woman's estate; and, above all, that, in common with
the sun, the lark, the morning-glory, and other beautiful things
of the early day, she was up and about her lovely, cheery,
heart-warming business.
The handful of chimneys and the smoke spirals rising here and
there among the trees on the river-bank belonged to what was
known as the Brier Neighborhood. There were only a few houses in
all, scattered along a side road leading from the river up to
Liberty Centre. There were no great signs of thrift or
prosperity, but the Wiley cottage, the only one near the water,
was neat and well cared for, and Nature had done her best to
conceal man's indolence, poverty, or neglect.
Bushes of sweetbrier grew in fragrant little forests as tall as
the fences. Clumps of wild roses sprang up at every turn, and
over all the stone walls, as well as on every heap of rocks by
the wayside, prickly blackberry vines ran and clambered and
clung, yielding fruit and thorns impartially to the neighborhood
children.
The pinkish speck that Stephen Waterman had spied from his side
of the river was Rose Wiley of the Brier Neighborhood on the
Edgewood side. As there was another of her name on Brigadier
Hill, the Edgewood minister called one of them the climbing Rose
and the other the brier Rose, or sometimes Rose of the river.
She was well named, the pinkish speck. She had not only some of
the sweetest attributes of the wild rose, but the parallel might
have been extended as far as the thorns, for she had wounded her
scores,--hearts, be it understood, not hands. The wounding was,
on the whole, very innocently done; and if fault could be imputed
anywhere, it might rightly have been laid at the door of the kind
powers who had made her what she was, since the smile that
blesses a single heart is always destined to break many more.
She had not a single silk gown, but she had what is far better, a
figure to show off a cotton one. Not a brooch nor a pair of
earrings was numbered among her possessions, but any ordinary
gems would have looked rather dull and trivial when compelled to
undergo comparison with her bright eyes. As to her hair, the
local milliner declared it impossible for Rose Wiley to get an
unbecoming hat; that on one occasion, being in a frolicsome mood,
Rose had tried on all the headgear in the village emporium,--
children's gingham "Shakers," mourning bonnets for aged dames,
men's haying hats and visored caps,--and she proved superior to
every test, looking as pretty as a pink in the best ones and
simply ravishing in the worst. In fact, she had been so
fashioned and finished by Nature that, had she been set on a
revolving pedestal in a show-window, the bystanders would have
exclaimed, as each new charm came into view: "Look at her
waist!" "See her shoulders!" "And her neck and chin!" "And
her hair!" While the children, gazing with raptured admiration,
would have shrieked, in unison, "I choose her for mine."
All this is as much as to say that Rose of the river was a
beauty, yet it quite fails to explain, nevertheless, the secret
of her power. When she looked her worst the spell was as potent
as when she looked her best. Hidden away somewhere was a vital
spark which warmed every one who came in contact with it. Her
lovely little person was a trifle below medium height, and it
might as well be confessed that her soul, on the morning when
Stephen Waterman saw her hanging out the clothes on the river
bank, was not large enough to be at all out of proportion; but
when eyes and dimples, lips and cheeks, enslave the onlooker, the
soul is seldom subjected to a close or critical scrutiny.
Besides, Rose Wiley was a nice girl, neat as wax, energetic,
merry, amiable, economical. She was a dutiful granddaughter to
two of the most irritating old people in the county; she never
patronized her pug-nosed, pasty-faced girl friends; she made
wonderful pies and doughnuts; and besides, small souls, if they
are of the right sort, sometimes have a way of growing, to the
discomfiture of cynics and the gratification of the angels.
So, on one bank of the river grew the brier rose, a fragile
thing, swaying on a slender stalk and looking at its pretty
reflection in the water; and on the other a sturdy pine tree,
well rooted against wind and storm. And the sturdy pine yearned
for the wild rose; and the rose, so far as it knew, yearned for
nothing at all, certainly not for rugged pine trees standing tall
and grim in rocky soil. If, in its present stage of development,
it gravitated toward anything in particular, it would have been a
well-dressed white birch growing on an irreproachable lawn.
And the river, now deep, now shallow, now smooth, now tumultuous,
now sparkling in sunshine, now gloomy under clouds, rolled on to
the engulfing sea. It could not stop to concern itself with the
petty comedies and tragedies that were being enacted along its
shores, else it would never have reached its destination. Only
last night, under a full moon, there had been pairs of lovers
leaning over the rails of all the bridges along its course; but
that was a common sight, like that of the ardent couples sitting
on its shady banks these summer days, looking only into each
other's eyes, but exclaiming about the beauty of the water.
Lovers would come and go, sometimes reappearing with successive
installments of loves in a way wholly mysterious to the river.
Meantime it had its own work to do and must be about it, for the
side jams were to be broken and the boom "let out" at the
Edgewood bridge.
OLD KENNEBEC
It was just seven o'clock that same morning when Rose Wiley
smoothed the last wrinkle from her dimity counterpane, picked up
a shred of corn-husk from the spotless floor under the bed,
slapped a mosquito on the window-sill, removed all signs of
murder with a moist towel, and before running down to breakfast
cast a frowning look at her pincushion. Almira, otherwise
"Mite," Shapley had been in her room the afternoon before and
disturbed with her careless hand the pattern of Rose's pins.
They were kept religiously in the form of a Maltese cross; and
if, while she was extricating one from her clothing, there had
been an alarm of fire, Rose would have stuck the pin in its
appointed place in the design, at the risk of losing her life.
Entering the kitchen with her light step, she brought the morning
sunshine with her. The old people had already engaged in
differences of opinion, but they commonly suspended open warfare
in her presence. There were the usual last things to be done for
breakfast, offices that belonged to her as her grandmother's
assistant. She took yesterday's soda biscuits out of the steamer
where they were warming and softening; brought an apple pie and a
plate of seed cakes from the pantry; settled the coffee with a
piece of dried fish skin and an egg shell; and transferred some
fried potatoes from the spider to a covered dish.
"Did you remember the meat, grandpa? We're all out," she said, as
she began buttoning a stiff collar around his reluctant neck.
"Remember? Land, yes! I wish't I ever could forgit anything!
The butcher says he's 'bout tired o' travelin' over the country
lookin' for critters to kill, but if he finds anything he'll be
up along in the course of a week. He ain't a real smart butcher,
Cyse Higgins ain't.--Land, Rose, don't button that dickey
clean through my epperdummis! I have to sport starched collars
in this life on account o' you and your gran'mother bein' so
chock full o' style; but I hope to the Lord I shan't have to wear
'em in another world!"
"You won't," his wife responded with the snap of a dish towel, "or if you do,
they'll wilt with the heat."
Rose smiled, but the soft hand with which she tied the neck-cloth
about the old man's withered neck pacified his spirit, and he
smiled knowingly back at her as she took her seat at the
breakfast table spread near the open kitchen door. She was a
dazzling Rose, and, it is to be feared, a wasted one, for there
was no one present to observe her clean pink calico and the still
more subtle note struck in the green ribbon which was tied round
her throat,--the ribbon that formed a sort of calyx, out of
which sprang the flower of her face, as fresh and radiant as if
it had bloomed that morning.
"Give me my coffee turrible quick," said Mr. Wiley; "I must be
down the bridge 'fore they start dog-warpin' the side jam."
"I notice you're always due at the bridge on churnin' days,"
remarked his spouse, testily.
"'Taint me as app'ints drivin' dates at Edgewood," replied the
old man. "The boys'll hev a turrible job this year. The logs air
ricked up jest like Rose's jackstraws; I never see'em so turrible
ricked up in all my exper'ence; an' Lije Dennett don' know no
more 'bout pickin' a jam than Cooper's cow. Turrible sot in his
ways, too; can't take a mite of advice. I was tellin' him how to
go to work on that bung that's formed between the gre't gray rock
an' the shore,--the awfullest place to bung that there is
between this an' Biddeford,--and says he: 'Look here, I've
be'n boss on this river for twelve year, an' I'll be doggoned if
I'm goin' to be taught my business by any man!' 'This ain't no
river,' says I, 'as you'd know,' says I, 'if you'd ever lived on
the Kennebec.' 'Pity you hedn't stayed on it,' says he. 'I wish
to the land I hed,'says I. An' then I come away, for my
tongue's so turrible spry an' sarcustic that I knew if I stopped
any longer I should stir up strife. There's some folks that'll
set on addled aigs year in an' year out, as if there wan't good
fresh ones bein' laid every day; an' Lije Dennett's one of 'em,
when it comes to river drivin'."
"There's lots o' folks as have made a good livin' by mindin'
their own business," observed the still sententious Mrs. Wiley,
as she speared a soda-biscuit with her fork.
"Mindin' your own business is a turrible selfish trade," responded
her husband loftily. "If your neighbor is more ignorant than what
you are,--partic'larly if he's as ignorant as Cooper's cow,--you'd
ought, as a Kennebec man an' a Christian, to set him on the right
track, though it's always a turrible risky thing to do."
Rose's grandfather was called, by the irreverent younger
generation, sometimes "Turrible Wiley" and sometimes "Old
Kennebec," because of the frequency with which these words
appeared in his conversation. There were not wanting those of
late who dubbed him Uncle Ananias, for reasons too obvious to
mention. After a long, indolent, tolerably truthful, and useless
life, he had, at seventy-five, lost sight of the dividing line
between fact and fancy, and drew on his imagination to such an
extent that he almost staggered himself when he began to indulge
in reminiscence. He was a feature of the Edgewood "drive," being
always present during the five or six days that it was in
progress, sometimes sitting on the river-bank, sometimes leaning
over the bridge, sometimes reclining against the butt-end of a
huge log, but always chewing tobacco and expectorating to
incredible distances as he criticized and damned impartially all
the expedients in use at the particular moment.
"I want to stay down by the river this afternoon," said Rose.
"Ever so many of the girls will be there, and all my sewing is
done up. If grandpa will leave the horse for me, I'll take the
drivers' lunch to them at noon, and bring the dishes back in time
to wash them before supper."
"I suppose you can go, if the rest do," said her grandmother,
"though it's an awful lazy way of spendin' an afternoon. When I
was a girl there was no such dawdlin' goin' on, I can tell you.
Nobody thought o' lookin' at the river in them days; there wasn't
time."
"But it's such fun to watch the logs!" Rose exclaimed. "Next to
dancing, the greatest fun in the world."
"'Specially as all the young men in town will be there, watchin',
too," was the grandmother's reply. "Eben Brooks an' Richard Bean
got home yesterday with their doctors' diplomas in their pockets.
Mrs. Brooks says Eben stood forty-nine in a class o' fifty-five,
an' seemed consid'able proud of him; an' I guess it is the first
time he ever stood anywheres but at the foot. I tell you when
these fifty-five new doctors git scattered over the country
there'll be consid'able many folks keepin' house under ground.
Dick Bean's goin' to stop a spell with Rufe an' Steve Waterman.
That'll make one more to play in the river."
"Rufus ain't hardly got his workin' legs on yit," allowed
Mr.Wiley, "but Steve's all right. He's a turrible smart driver,
an' turrible reckless, too. He'll take all the chances there is,
though to a man that's lived on the Kennebec there ain't what can
rightly be called any turrible chances on the Saco."
"He'd better be 'tendin' to his farm," objected Mrs. Wiley.
"His hay is all in," Rose spoke up quickly, "and he only helps
on the river when the farm work isn't pressing. Besides, though
it's all play to him, he earns his two dollars and a half a day."
"He don't keer about the two and a half," said her grandfather.
"He jest can't keep away from the logs. There's some that can't.
When I first moved here from Gard'ner, where the climate never
suited me"--
"The climate of any place where you hev regular work never did
an' never will suit you," remarked the old man's wife; but the
interruption received no comment: such mistaken views of his
character were too frequent to make any impression.
"As I was sayin', Rose," he continued, "when we first moved here
from Gard'ner, we lived neighbor to the Watermans. Steve an'
Rufus was little boys then, always playin' with a couple o' wild
cousins o' theirn, consid'able older. Steve would scare his
mother pretty nigh to death stealin' away to the mill to ride on
the 'carriage,''side o' the log that was bein' sawed, hitchin'
clean out over the river an' then jerkin' back 'most into the
jaws o' the machinery."
"He never hed any common sense to spare, even when he was a young
one," remarked Mrs. Wiley; " and I don't see as all the 'cademy
education his father throwed away on him has changed him much."
And with this observation she rose from the table and went to the
sink.
"Steve ain't nobody's fool," dissented the old man; "but he's
kind o' daft about the river. When he was little he was allers
buildin' dams in the brook, an' sailin' chips, an' runnin' on the
logs; allers choppin' up stickins an' raftin' 'em together in the
pond. I cal'late Mis' Waterman died consid'able afore her time,
jest from fright, lookin' out the winders and seein' her boys
slippin' between the logs an' gittin' their daily dousin'. She
could n't understand it, an' there's a heap o' things women-folks
never do an' never can understand,--jest because they air
women-folks."
"One o' the things is men, I s'pose," interrupted Mrs. Wiley.
"Men in general, but more partic'larly husbands," assented Old
Kennebec; "howsomever, there's another thing they don't an' can't
never take in, an' that's sport. Steve does river drivin' as he
would horseracin' or tiger-shootin' or tight-rope dancin'; an' he
always did from a boy. When he was about twelve or fifteen, he
used to help the river-drivers spring and fall, reg'lar. He
couldn't do nothin' but shin up an' down the rocks after hammers
an' hatchets an' ropes, but he was turrible pleased with his job.
'Stepanfetchit,' they used to call him them days,
--Stephanfetchit Waterman."
"Good name for him yet," came in acid tones from the sink. "He's
still steppin' an' fetchin', only it's Rose that's doin' the
drivin' now."
"I'm not driving anybody, that I know of," answered Rose, with
heightened color, but with no loss of her habitual self-command.
"Then, when he graduated from errants," went on the crafty old
man, who knew that when breakfast ceased, churning must begin,
"Steve used to get seventy-five cents a day helpin' clear up the
river--if you can call this here silv'ry streamlet a river.
He'd pick off a log here an' there an' send it afloat, an' dig
out them that hed got ketched in the rocks, and tidy up the banks
jest like spring house-cleanin'. If he'd hed any kind of a boss,
an' hed be'n trained on the Kennebec, he'd 'a' made a turrible
smart driver, Steve would."
"He'll be drownded, that's what'll become o' him," prophesied
Mrs. Wiley; "'specially if Rose encourages him in such silly
foolishness as ridin' logs from his house down to ourn, dark
nights."
"Seein' as how Steve built ye a nice pig pen last month, 'pears
to me you might have a good word for him now an' then, mother,"
remarked Old Kennebec, reaching for his second piece of pie.
"I wa'n't a mite deceived by that pig pen, no more'n I was by Jed
Towle's hen coop, nor Ivory Dunn's well-curb, nor Pitt Packard's
shed-steps. If you hed ever kep' up your buildin's yourself,
Rose's beaux wouldn't hev to do their courtin' with carpenters'
tools."
"It's the pigpen an' the hencoop you want to keep your eye on,
mother, not the motives of them as made 'em. It's turrible
onsettlin' to inspeck folks' motives too turrible close."
"Riding a log is no more to Steve than riding a horse, so he
says," interposed Rose, to change the subject; "but I tell him
that a horse doesn't revolve under you, and go sideways at the
same time that it is going forwards."
"Log-ridin' ain't no trick at all to a man of sperit," said Mr.
Wiley. "There's a few places in the Kennebec where the water's
too shaller to let the logs float, so we used to build a flume,
an' the logs would whiz down like arrers shot from a bow. The
boys used to collect by the side o' that there flume to see me
ride a log down, an' I've watched 'em drop in a dead faint when I
spun by the crowd; but land! you can't drownd some folks, not
without you tie nail-kegs to their head an' feet an' drop 'em in
the falls; I 've rid logs down the b'ilin'est rapids o' the
Kennebec an' never lost my head. I remember well the year o' the
gre't freshet, I rid a log from"--
"There, there, father, that'll do," said Mrs. Wiley, decisively.
"I'll put the cream in the churn, an' you jest work off some o'
your steam by bringin' the butter for us afore you start for the
bridge. It don't do no good to brag afore your own womenfolks;
work goes consid'able better'n stories at every place 'cept the
loafers' bench at the tavern."
And the baffled raconteur, who had never done a piece of work
cheerfully in his life, dragged himself reluctantly to the shed,
where, before long, one could hear him moving the dasher up and
down sedately to his favorite "churning tune" of--
Broad is the road that leads to death,
And thousands walk together there;
But Wisdom shows a narrow path,
With here and there a traveler.
THE EDGEWOOD "DRIVE"
Just where the bridge knits together the two little villages of
Pleasant River and Edgewood, the glassy mirror of the Saco
broadens suddenly, sweeping over the dam in a luminous torrent.
Gushes of pure amber mark the middle of the dam, with crystal and
silver at the sides, and from the seething vortex beneath the
golden cascade the white spray dashes up in fountains. In the
crevices and hollows of the rocks the mad water churns itself
into snowy froth, while the foam-decked torrent, deep, strong,
and troubled to its heart, sweeps majestically under the bridge,
then dashes between wooded shores piled high with steep masses of
rock, or torn and riven by great gorges.
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