Rose O\' the River

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[Illustration: ROSE O' THE RIVER]

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ROSE O' THE RIVER
BY
KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

ILLUSTRATED BY
GEORGE WRIGHT

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

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COPYRIGHT 1905 BY THE CENTURY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1905 BY KATE DOUGLAS RIGGS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published September 1905_

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Pine And The Rose 1
Old Kennebec 13
The Edgewood "Drive" 28
"Blasphemious Swearin'" 40
The Game Of Jackstraws 50
Hearts And Other Hearts 67
The Little House 81
The Garden Of Eden 93
The Serpent 102
The Turquoise Ring 114
Gold And Pinchbeck 135
A Country Chevalier 145
Housebreaking 160
The 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" 20
He Had Certainly "Taken Chances" 32
In A Twinkling He Was In The Water 64
"Rose, I'll Take You Safely" 76
Hiding Her Face As He Flung It Down The River-Bank 116
She 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 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 this 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
dams 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 to-day, 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.

[Illustration: "SHE'S UP!"]

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.

[Illustration: "HE'S A TURRIBLE SMART DRIVER"]

"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 couldn'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-kags 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"--