The Pine and the Rose

by Kate Douglas Wiggin

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

　　An early ablution of his sort was not the custom of the farmersalong the banks of the Saco, but the Waterman house was hardly astone's throw from the water, and there was a clear, deepswimming-hole in the Willow Cove that would have tempted thebusiest man, or the least cleanly, in York County. Then, too,Stephen was a child of the river, born, reared, schooled on itsvery brink, never happy unless he were on it, or in it, or besideit, 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, wonhis heart. It was just big enough to love. It was full ofcharms and changes, of varying moods and sudden surprises. Itsvoice stole in upon his ear with a melody far sweeter and moresubtle than the boom of the ocean. Yet it was not withoutstrength, and when it was swollen with the freshets of the springand brimming with the bounty of its sister streams, it could dashand roar, boom and crash, with the best of them.

　　Stephen stood on the side porch, drinking in the glory of thesunrise, with the Saco winding like a silver ribbon through thesweet 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 itsgleaming way, here lying silent in glassy lakes, there rushinginto tinkling little falls, foaming great falls, and thunderingcataracts. Scores of bridges spanned its width, but no steamersflurried its crystal depths. Here and there a rough littlerowboat, tethered to a willow, rocked to and fro in some quietbend of the shore. Here the silver gleam of a rising perch,chub, or trout caught the eye; there a pickerel lay rigid in theclear water, a fish carved in stone: here eels coiled in themuddy bottom of some pool; and there, under the deep shadows ofthe rocks, lay fat, sleepy bass, old, and incredibly wise, quiteuntempted by, and wholly superior to, the rural fisherman's worm.

　　The river lapped the shores of peaceful meadows; it flowed alongbanks green with maple, beech, sycamore, and birch; it felltempestuously over darns and fought its way between rocky cliffscrowned with stately firs. It rolled past forests of pine andhemlock and spruce, now gentle, now terrible; for there is saidto be an Indian curse upon the Saco, whereby, with every greatsun, the child of a paleface shall be drawn into its crueldepths. Lashed into fury by the stony reefs that impeded itsprogress, the river looked now sapphire, now gold, now white, nowleaden gray; but always it was hurrying, hurrying on itsappointed way to the sea.

　　After feasting his eyes and filling his heart with a morningdraught of beauty, Stephen went in from the porch and, pausing atthe stairway, called in stentorian tones: "Get up and eat yourbreakfast, Rufus! The boys will be picking the side jams today,and I'm going down to work on the logs. If you come along, bringyour own pick-pole and peavey." Then, going to the kitchenpantry, he collected, from the various shelves, a pitcher ofmilk, a loaf of bread, half an apple-pie, and a bowl ofblueberries, and, with the easy methods of a household unswayedby feminine rule, moved toward a seat under an apple-tree andtook his morning meal in great apparent content. Havingfinished, and washed his dishes with much more thoroughness thanis common to unsuperintended man, and having given Rufus thesecond call to breakfast with the vigor and acrimony that usuallymarks that unpleasant performance, he strode to a high point onthe river-bank and, shading his eyes with his hand, gazedsteadily down stream.

　　Patches of green fodder and blossoming potatoes melted into softfields that had been lately mown, and there were glimpses oftasseling corn rising high to catch the sun. Far, far down onthe opposite bank of the river was the hint of a brown roof, andthe tip of a chimney that sent a slender wisp of smoke into theclear air. Beyond this, and farther back from the water, thetrees apparently hid a cluster of other chimneys, for thinspirals of smoke ascended here and there. The little brown roofcould never have revealed itself to any but a lover's eye; andthat discerned something even smaller, something like a pinkishspeck, that moved hither and thither on a piece of greenswardthat 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 exaltationabout it, as if "she," whoever she might be, had, incondescending to rise, conferred a priceless boon upon a waitinguniverse. If she were indeed a "up" (so his tone implied), thenthe day, somewhat falsely heralded by the sunrise, had reallybegun, and the human race might pursue its appointed tasks,inspired and uplifted by the consciousness of her existence. Itmight properly be grateful for the fact of her birth; that shehad grown to woman's estate; and, above all, that, in common withthe sun, the lark, the morning-glory, and other beautiful thingsof the early day, she was up and about her lovely, cheery,heart-warming business.

　　The handful of chimneys and the smoke spirals rising here andthere among the trees on the river-bank belonged to what wasknown as the Brier Neighborhood. There were only a few houses inall, scattered along a side road leading from the river up toLiberty Centre. There were no great signs of thrift orprosperity, but the Wiley cottage, the only one near the water,was neat and well cared for, and Nature had done her best toconceal man's indolence, poverty, or neglect.

　　Bushes of sweetbrier grew in fragrant little forests as tall asthe fences. Clumps of wild roses sprang up at every turn, andover all the stone walls, as well as on every heap of rocks bythe wayside, prickly blackberry vines ran and clambered andclung, yielding fruit and thorns impartially to the neighborhoodchildren.

　　The pinkish speck that Stephen Waterman had spied from his sideof the river was Rose Wiley of the Brier Neighborhood on theEdgewood side. As there was another of her name on BrigadierHill, the Edgewood minister called one of them the climbing Roseand the other the brier Rose, or sometimes Rose of the river.She was well named, the pinkish speck. She had not only some ofthe sweetest attributes of the wild rose, but the parallel mighthave been extended as far as the thorns, for she had wounded herscores,--hearts, be it understood, not hands. The wounding was,on the whole, very innocently done; and if fault could be imputedanywhere, it might rightly have been laid at the door of the kindpowers who had made her what she was, since the smile thatblesses a single heart is always destined to break many more.

　　She had not a single silk gown, but she had what is far better, afigure to show off a cotton one. Not a brooch nor a pair ofearrings was numbered among her possessions, but any ordinarygems would have looked rather dull and trivial when compelled toundergo comparison with her bright eyes. As to her hair, thelocal milliner declared it impossible for Rose Wiley to get anunbecoming 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 toevery test, looking as pretty as a pink in the best ones andsimply ravishing in the worst. In fact, she had been sofashioned and finished by Nature that, had she been set on arevolving pedestal in a show-window, the bystanders would haveexclaimed, as each new charm came into view: "Look at herwaist!" "See her shoulders!" "And her neck and chin!" "Andher 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 abeauty, yet it quite fails to explain, nevertheless, the secretof her power. When she looked her worst the spell was as potentas when she looked her best. Hidden away somewhere was a vitalspark which warmed every one who came in contact with it. Herlovely little person was a trifle below medium height, and itmight as well be confessed that her soul, on the morning whenStephen Waterman saw her hanging out the clothes on the riverbank, was not large enough to be at all out of proportion; butwhen eyes and dimples, lips and cheeks, enslave the onlooker, thesoul 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 totwo of the most irritating old people in the county; she neverpatronized her pug-nosed, pasty-faced girl friends; she madewonderful pies and doughnuts; and besides, small souls, if theyare of the right sort, sometimes have a way of growing, to thediscomfiture of cynics and the gratification of the angels.

　　So, on one bank of the river grew the brier rose, a fragilething, swaying on a slender stalk and looking at its prettyreflection in the water; and on the other a sturdy pine tree,well rooted against wind and storm. And the sturdy pine yearnedfor the wild rose; and the rose, so far as it knew, yearned fornothing at all, certainly not for rugged pine trees standing talland grim in rocky soil. If, in its present stage of development,it gravitated toward anything in particular, it would have been awell-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 tothe engulfing sea. It could not stop to concern itself with thepetty comedies and tragedies that were being enacted along itsshores, else it would never have reached its destination. Onlylast night, under a full moon, there had been pairs of loversleaning over the rails of all the bridges along its course; butthat was a common sight, like that of the ardent couples sittingon its shady banks these summer days, looking only into eachother's eyes, but exclaiming about the beauty of the water.Lovers would come and go, sometimes reappearing with successiveinstallments of loves in a way wholly mysterious to the river.Meantime it had its own work to do and must be about it, for theside jams were to be broken and the boom "let out" at theEdgewood bridge.