Rose o' the River Read online

  Produced by Shanti Day and Roger Frank

  ROSE O' THE RIVER]

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  ROSE O' THE RIVERBYKATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

  ILLUSTRATED BYGEORGE WRIGHT

  NEW YORKGROSSET & DUNLAPPUBLISHERS

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  COPYRIGHT 1905 BY THE CENTURY COMPANYCOPYRIGHT 1905 BY KATE DOUGLAS RIGGSALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  _Published September 1905_

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  The Pine And The Rose 1Old Kennebec 13The Edgewood "Drive" 28"Blasphemious Swearin'" 40The Game Of Jackstraws 50Hearts And Other Hearts 67The Little House 81The Garden Of Eden 93The Serpent 102The Turquoise Ring 114Gold And Pinchbeck 135A Country Chevalier 145Housebreaking 160The Dream Room 168

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  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Rose O' The River Frontispiece"She's Up!" 6"He's A Turrible Smart Driver" 20He Had Certainly "Taken Chances" 32In A Twinkling He Was In The Water 64"Rose, I'll Take You Safely" 76Hiding Her Face As He Flung It Down The River-Bank 116She Had Gone With Maude To Claude's Store 128"As Long As Stephen Waterman's Alive, Rose Wiley Can Have Him" 158"Don't Speak, Stephen, Till You Hear What I Have To Say" 174

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  THE PINE AND THE ROSE

  It was not long after sunrise, and Stephen Waterman, fresh from his dipin the river, had scrambled up the hillside from the hut in thealder-bushes where he had made his morning toilet.

  An early ablution of this sort was not the custom of the farmers alongthe banks of the Saco, but the Waterman house was hardly a stone's throwfrom the water, and there was a clear, deep swimming-hole in the WillowCove that would have tempted the busiest man, or the least cleanly, inYork 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 himcold in feeling. The river wooed him, caressed him, won his heart. Itwas just big enough to love. It was full of charms and changes, ofvarying moods and sudden surprises. Its voice stole in upon his ear witha melody far sweeter and more subtle than the boom of the ocean. Yet itwas not without strength, and when it was swollen with the freshets ofthe spring and brimming with the bounty of its sister streams, it coulddash 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 lovelinessof 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. Cradledin the heart of a great mountain-range, it pursued its gleaming way,here lying silent in glassy lakes, there rushing into tinkling littlefalls, foaming great falls, and thundering cataracts. Scores of bridgesspanned its width, but no steamers flurried its crystal depths. Here andthere a rough little rowboat, tethered to a willow, rocked to and fro insome 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 clearwater, a fish carved in stone: here eels coiled in the muddy bottom ofsome pool; and there, under the deep shadows of the rocks, lay fat,sleepy bass, old, and incredibly wise, quite untempted by, and whollysuperior to, the rural fisherman's worm.

  The river lapped the shores of peaceful meadows; it flowed along banksgreen with maple, beech, sycamore, and birch; it fell tempestuously overdams and fought its way between rocky cliffs crowned with stately firs.It rolled past forests of pine and hemlock and spruce, now gentle, nowterrible; for there is said to be an Indian curse upon the Saco,whereby, with every great sun, the child of a paleface shall be drawninto its cruel depths. Lashed into fury by the stony reefs that impededits progress, the river looked now sapphire, now gold, now white, nowleaden gray; but always it was hurrying, hurrying on its appointed wayto the sea.

  After feasting his eyes and filling his heart with a morning draught ofbeauty, Stephen went in from the porch and, pausing at the stairway,called in stentorian tones: "Get up and eat your breakfast, Rufus! Theboys will be picking the side jams to-day, and I'm going down to work onthe logs. If you come along, bring your own pick-pole and peavey." Then,going to the kitchen pantry, he collected, from the various shelves, apitcher of milk, a loaf of bread, half an apple-pie, and a bowl ofblueberries, and, with the easy methods of a household unswayed byfeminine rule, moved toward a seat under an apple-tree and took hismorning meal in great apparent content. Having finished, and washed hisdishes with much more thoroughness than is common to unsuperintendedman, and having given Rufus the second call to breakfast with the vigorand acrimony that usually marks that unpleasant performance, he strodeto 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 fieldsthat had been lately mown, and there were glimpses of tasseling cornrising high to catch the sun. Far, far down on the opposite bank of theriver was the hint of a brown roof, and the tip of a chimney that sent aslender wisp of smoke into the clear air. Beyond this, and farther backfrom the water, the trees apparently hid a cluster of other chimneys,for thin spirals of smoke ascended here and there. The little brown roofcould never have revealed itself to any but a lover's eye; and thatdiscerned something even smaller, something like a pinkish speck, thatmoved hither and thither on a piece of greensward that sloped to thewaterside.

  "She's up!" Stephen exclaimed under his breath, his eyes shining, hislips smiling. His voice had a note of hushed exaltation about it, as if"she," whoever she might be, had, in condescending to rise, conferred apriceless boon upon a waiting universe. If she were indeed a "up" (sohis tone implied), then the day, somewhat falsely heralded by thesunrise, had really begun, and the human race might pursue its appointedtasks, inspired and uplifted by the consciousness of her existence. Itmight properly be grateful for the fact of her birth; that she had grownto woman's estate; and, above all, that, in common with the sun, thelark, the morning-glory, and other beautiful things of the early day,she was up and about her lovely, cheery, heart-warming business.

  "SHE'S UP!"]

  The handful of chimneys and the smoke spirals rising here and thereamong the trees on the river-bank belonged to what was known as theBrier Neighborhood. There were only a few houses in all, scattered alonga side road leading from the river up to Liberty Centre. There were nogreat signs of thrift or prosperity, but the Wiley cottage, the only onenear the water, was neat and well cared for, and Nature had done herbest to conceal man's indolence, poverty, or neglect.

 
; Bushes of sweetbrier grew in fragrant little forests as tall as thefences. Clumps of wild roses sprang up at every turn, and over all thestone walls, as well as on every heap of rocks by the wayside, pricklyblackberry vines ran and clambered and clung, yielding fruit and thornsimpartially to the neighborhood children.

  The pinkish speck that Stephen Waterman had spied from his side of theriver was Rose Wiley of the Brier Neighborhood on the Edgewood side. Asthere was another of her name on Brigadier Hill, the Edgewood ministercalled one of them the climbing Rose and the other the brier Rose, orsometimes Rose of the river. She was well named, the pinkish speck. Shehad not only some of the sweetest attributes of the wild rose, but theparallel might have been extended as far as the thorns, for she hadwounded her scores,--hearts, be it understood, not hands. The woundingwas, on the whole, very innocently done; and if fault could be imputedanywhere, it might rightly have been laid at the door of the kind powerswho had made her what she was, since the smile that blesses a singleheart is always destined to break many more.

  She had not a single silk gown, but she had what is far better, a figureto show off a cotton one. Not a brooch nor a pair of earrings wasnumbered among her possessions, but any ordinary gems would have lookedrather dull and trivial when compelled to undergo comparison with herbright eyes. As to her hair, the local milliner declared it impossiblefor Rose Wiley to get an unbecoming hat; that on one occasion, being ina frolicsome mood, Rose had tried on all the headgear in the villageemporium,--children's gingham "Shakers," mourning bonnets for ageddames, men's haying hats and visored caps,--and she proved superior toevery test, looking as pretty as a pink in the best ones and simplyravishing in the worst. In fact, she had been so fashioned and finishedby Nature that, had she been set on a revolving pedestal in ashow-window, the bystanders would have exclaimed, as each new charm cameinto view: "Look at her waist!" "See her shoulders!" "And her neck andchin!" "And her hair!" While the children, gazing with rapturedadmiration, 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, yetit quite fails to explain, nevertheless, the secret of her power. Whenshe looked her worst the spell was as potent as when she looked herbest. Hidden away somewhere was a vital spark which warmed every one whocame in contact with it. Her lovely little person was a trifle belowmedium height, and it might as well be confessed that her soul, on themorning when Stephen Waterman saw her hanging out the clothes on theriver bank, was not large enough to be at all out of proportion; butwhen eyes and dimples, lips and cheeks, enslave the onlooker, the soulis seldom subjected to a close or critical scrutiny. Besides, Rose Wileywas a nice girl, neat as wax, energetic, merry, amiable, economical. Shewas a dutiful granddaughter to two of the most irritating old people inthe county; she never patronized her pug-nosed, pasty-faced girlfriends; she made wonderful pies and doughnuts; and besides, smallsouls, 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 thewater; and on the other a sturdy pine tree, well rooted against wind andstorm. And the sturdy pine yearned for the wild rose; and the rose, sofar as it knew, yearned for nothing at all, certainly not for ruggedpine trees standing tall and grim in rocky soil. If, in its presentstage of development, it gravitated toward anything in particular, itwould have been a well-dressed white birch growing on an irreproachablelawn.

  And the river, now deep, now shallow, now smooth, now tumultuous, nowsparkling in sunshine, now gloomy under clouds, rolled on to theengulfing sea. It could not stop to concern itself with the pettycomedies and tragedies that were being enacted along its shores, else itwould never have reached its destination. Only last night, under a fullmoon, there had been pairs of lovers leaning over the rails of all thebridges along its course; but that was a common sight, like that of theardent couples sitting on its shady banks these summer days, lookingonly into each other's eyes, but exclaiming about the beauty of thewater. Lovers would come and go, sometimes reappearing with successiveinstallments of loves in a way wholly mysterious to the river. Meantimeit had its own work to do and must be about it, for the side jams wereto be broken and the boom "let out" at the Edgewood bridge.