“But you want them to get well?”
“Oh, certainly. I'm bound to do all I can for them as a physician.”
“Nothing more?”
“Yes; I'm sorry for them—for their families, if it seems to be going badly with them.”
“And—and as—as—Don't you care at all for your work as a part of what every one ought to do for others—as humanity, philan—” She stopped the offensive word.
“Well, I can't say that I've looked at it in that light exactly,” he answered. “I suspect I'm not very good at generalising my own relations to others, though I like well enough to speculate in the abstract. But don't you think Mr. Peck has overlooked one important fact in his theory? What about the people who have grown rich from being poor, as most Americans have? They have the same experiences, and why can't they sympathise with those who have remained poor?”
“I never thought of that. Why didn't I ask him that?” She lamented so sincerely that the doctor laughed again. “I think that Mr. Peck—”
“Oh no! oh no!” said the doctor, in an entreating, coaxing tone, expressive of a satiety with the subject that he might very well have felt; and he ended with another laugh, in which, after a moment of indignant self-question, she joined him.
“Isn't that delicious?” he exclaimed; and she involuntarily slowed her pace with his.
The spicy scent of sweet-currant blossoms hung in the dewy air that wrapped one of the darkened village houses. From a syringa bush before another, as they moved on, a denser perfume stole out with the wild song of a cat-bird hidden in it; the music and the odour seemed braided together. The shadows of the trees cast by the electrics on the walks were so thick and black that they looked palpable; it seemed as if she could stoop down and lift them from the ground. A broad bath of moonlight washed one of the house fronts, and the white-painted clapboards looked wet with it.
They talked of these things, of themselves, and of their own traits and peculiarities; and at her door they ended far from Mr. Peck and all the perplexities he had suggested.
She had told Dr. Morrell of some things she had brought home with her, and had said she hoped he would find time to come and see them. It would have been stiff not to do it, and she believed she had done it in a very off-hand, business-like way. But she continued to question whether she had.
Miss Northwick called upon Annie during the week, with excuses for her delay and for coming alone. She seemed to have intentions of being polite; but she constantly betrayed her want of interest in Annie, and disappointed an expectation of refinement which her physical delicacy awakened. She asked her how she ever came to take up the Social Union, and answered for her that of course it had the attraction of the theatricals, and went on to talk of her sister's part in them. The relation of the Northwick family to the coming entertainment, and an impression of frail mottled wrists and high thin cheeks, and an absence of modelling under affluent drapery, was the main effect of Miss Northwick's visit.
When Annie returned it, she met the younger sister, whom she found a great beauty. She seemed very cold, and of ahauteurwhich she subdued with difficulty; but she was more consecutively polite than her sister, and Annie watched with fascination her turns of the head, her movements of leopard swiftness and elasticity, the changing lights of her complexion, the curves of her fine lips, the fluttering of her thin nostrils.
A very new basket phaeton stood glittering at Annie's door when she got home, and Mrs. Wilmington put her head out of the open parlour window.
“How d'ye do, Annie?” she drawled, in her tender voice. “Won't you come in? You see I'm in possession. I've just got my new phaeton, and I drove up at once to crush you with it. Isn't it a beauty?”
“You're too late, Lyra,” said Annie. “I've just come from the Northwicks, and another crushing beauty has got in ahead of your phaeton.”
“Oh,poorAnnie!” Lyra began to laugh with agreeable intelligence. “Docome in and tell me about it!”
“Why is that girl going to take part in the theatricals? She doesn't care to please any one, does she?”
“I didn't know that people took part in theatricals for that, Annie. I thought they wanted to please themselves and mortify others.Ido. But then I may be different. Perhaps Miss Northwick wants to please Mr. Brandreth.”
“Do you mean it, Lyra?” demanded Annie, arrested on her threshold by the charm of this improbability.
“Well, I don't know; they're opposites. But, upon second thoughts, you needn't come in, Annie. I want you to take a drive with me, and try my new phaeton,” said Lyra, coming out.
Annie now looked at it with that irresolution of hers, and Lyra commanded: “Get right in. We'll go down to the Works. You've never met my husband yet; have you, Annie?”
“No, I haven't, Lyra. I've always just missed him somehow. He seems to have been perpetually just gone to town, or not got back.”
“Well, he's really at home now. And I don't mean at the house, which isn't home to him, but the Works. You've never seen the Works either, have you?”
“No, I haven't.”
“Well, then, we'll just go round there, and kill two birds with one stone. I ought to show off my new phaeton to Mr. Wilmington first of all; he gave it to me. It would be kind of conjugal, or filial, or something. You know Mr. Wilmington and I are not exactly contemporaries, Annie?”
“I heard he was somewhat your senior,” said Annie reluctantly.
Lyra laughed. “Well, I always say we were born in the same century,anyway.”
They came round into the region of the shops, and Lyra checked her pony in front of her husband's factory. It was not imposingly large, but, as Mrs. Wilmington caused Annie to observe, it was as big as the hat shops and as ugly as the shoe shops.
The structure trembled with the operation of its industry, and as they mounted the wooden steps to the open outside door, an inner door swung ajar for a moment, and let out a roar mingled of the hum and whirl and clash of machinery and fragments of voice, borne to them on a whiff of warm, greasy air. “Of course it doesn't smell very nice,” said Lyra.
She pushed open the door of the office, and finding its first apartment empty, led the way with Annie to the inner room, where her husband sat writing at a table.
“George, I want to introduce you to Miss Kilburn.”
“Oh yes, yes, yes,” said her husband, scrambling to his feet, and coming round to greet Annie. He was a small man, very bald, with a serious and wrinkled forehead, and rather austere brows; but his mouth had a furtive curl at one corner, which, with the habit he had of touching it there with the tip of his tongue, made Annie think of a cat that had been at the cream. “I've been hoping to call with Mrs. Wilmington to pay my respects; but I've been away a great deal this season, and—and—We're all very happy to have you home again, Miss Kilburn. I've often heard my wife speak of your old days together at Hatboro'.”
They fenced with some polite feints of interest in each other, the old man standing beside his writing-table, and staying himself with a shaking hand upon it.
Lyra interrupted them. “Well, I think now that Annie is here, we'd better not let her get away without showing her the Works.”
“Oh—oh—decidedly! I'll go with you, with great pleasure. Ah!” He bustled about, putting the things together on his table, and then reaching for the Panama hat on a hook behind it. There was something pathetic in his eagerness to do what Lyra bade him, and Annie fancied in him the uneasy consciousness which an elderly husband might feel in the presence of those who met him for the first time with his young wife. At the outer office door they encountered Jack Wilmington.
“I'll show them through,” he said to his uncle; and the old man assented with, “Well, perhaps you'd better, Jack,” and went back to his room.
The Wilmington Stocking-Mills spun their own threads, and the first room was like what Annie had seen before in cotton factories, with a faint smell of oil from the machinery, and a fine snow of fluff in the air, and catching to the white-washed walls and the foul window sashes. The tireless machines marched back and forth across the floor, and the men who watched them with suicidal intensity ran after them barefooted when they made off with a broken thread, spliced it, and then escaped from them to their stations again. In other rooms, where there was a stunning whir of spindles, girls and women were at work; they looked after Lyra and her nephew from under cotton-frowsed bangs; they all seemed to know her, and returned her easy, kindly greetings with an effect of liking. From time to time, at Lyra's bidding, the young fellow explained to Annie some curious feature of the processes; in the room where the stockings were knitted she tried to understand the machinery that wrought and seemed to live before her eyes. But her mind wandered to the men and women who were operating it, and who seemed no more a voluntary part of it than all the rest, except when Jack Wilmington curtly ordered them to do this or that in illustration of some point he was explaining. She wearied herself, as people do in such places, in expressing her wonder at the ingenuity of the machinery; it was a relief to get away from it all into the room, cool and quiet, where half a dozen neat girls were counting and stamping the stockings with different numbers. “Here's whereIused to work,” said Lyra, “and here's where I first met Mr. Wilmington. The place isfullof romantic associations. The stockings are all onesize, Annie; but people like to wear different numbers, and so we try to gratify them. Which number doyouwear? Or don't you wear the Wilmington machine-knit?Idon't. Well, they're notdreamsexactly, Annie, when all's said and done for them.”
When they left the mill she asked Annie to come home to tea with her, saying, as if from a perception of her dislike for the young fellow, that Jack was going to Boston.
They had a long evening together, after Mr. Wilmington took himself off after tea to his study, as he called it, and remained shut in there. Annie was uneasily aware of him from time to time, but Lyra had apparently no more disturbance from his absence than from his presence, which she had managed with a frank acceptance of everything it suggested. She talked freely of her marriage, not as if it were like others, but for what it was. She showed Annie over the house, and she ended with a display of the rich dresses which he was always buying her, and which she never wore, because she never went anywhere.
Annie said she thought she would at least like to go to the seaside somewhere during the summer, but “No,” Lyra said; “it would be too much trouble, and you know, Annie, I always did hatetrouble. I don't want the care of a cottage, and I don't want to be poked into a hotel, so I stay in Hatboro'.” She said that she had always been a village girl, and did not miss the interests of a larger life, as she caught glimpses of them in South Hatboro', or want the bother of them. She said she studied music a little, and confessed that she read a good deal, novels mostly, though the library was handsomely equipped with well-bound general literature.
At moments it all seemed no harm; at others, the luxury in which this life was so contentedly sunk oppressed Annie like a thick, close air. Yet she knew that Lyra was kind to many of the poor people about her, and did a great deal of good, as the phrase is, with the superfluity which it involved no self-denial to give from. But Mr. Peck had given her a point of view, and though she believed she did not agree with him, she could not escape from it.
Lyra told her much about people in Hatboro', and characterised them all so humorously, and she seemed so good-natured, in her ridicule which spared nobody.
She shrieked with laughter about Mr. Brandreth when Annie told her of his mother's doubt whether his love-making with Miss Northwick ought to be tacit or explicit in the kissing and embracing between Romeo and Juliet.
“Don't you think, Annie, we'd better refer him to Mr. Peck? Ishouldlike to hear Mr. Brandreth and Mr. Peek discussing it. I must tell Jack about it. I might get him to ask Sue Northwick, and get her ideas.”
“Has Mr. Wilmington known the Northwicks long?” Annie asked.
“He used to go to their Boston house when he was at Harvard.”
“Oh, then,” said Annie, “perhapsheaccounts for her playing Juliet; though, as Tybalt, I don't see exactly how he—”
“Oh, it's at the rehearsals, you know, that the fun is, and then it don't matter what part you have.”
Annie lay awake a long time that night. She was sure that she ought not to like Lyra if she did not approve of her, and that she ought not to have gone home to tea with her and spent the evening with her unless she fully respected her. But she had to own to herself that she did like her, and enjoyed hearing her soft drawl. She tried to think how Jack Wilmington's having gone to Boston for the evening made it somehow less censurable for her to spend it with Lyra, even if she did not approve of her. As she drowsed, this became perfectly clear.
In the process of that expansion from a New England village to an American town of which Putney spoke, Hatboro' had suffered one kind of deterioration which Annie could not help noticing. She remembered a distinctly intellectual life, which might still exist in its elements, but which certainly no longer had as definite expression. There used to be houses in which people, maiden aunts and hale grandmothers, took a keen interest in literature, and read the new books and discussed them, some time after they had ceased to be new in the publishing centres, but whilst they were still not old. But now the grandmothers had died out, and the maiden aunts had faded in, and she could not find just such houses anywhere in Hatboro'. The decay of the Unitarians as a sect perhaps had something to do with the literary lapse of the place: their highly intellectualised belief had favoured taste in a direction where the more ritualistic and emotional religions did not promote it: and it is certain that they were no longer the leading people.
It would have been hard to say just who these leading people were. The old political and juristic pre-eminence which the lawyers had once enjoyed was a tradition; the learned professions yielded in distinction to the growing wealth and plutocratic influence of the prosperous manufacturers; the situation might be summed up in the fact that Colonel Marvin of the shoe interest and Mr. Wilmington now filled the place once held by Judge Kilburn and Squire Putney. The social life in private houses had undoubtedly shrunk; but it had expanded in the direction of church sociables, and it had become much more ecclesiastical in every way, without becoming more religious. As formerly, some people were acceptable, and some were not; but it was, as everywhere else, more a question of money; there was an aristocracy and a commonalty, but there was a confusion and a more ready convertibility in the materials of each.
The social authority of such a person as Mrs. Gerrish was not the only change that bewildered Annie, and the effort to extend her relations with the village people was one from which she shrank till her consciousness had more perfectly adjusted itself to the new conditions. Meanwhile Dr. Morrell came to call the night after their tea at the Putneys', and he fell into the habit of coming several nights in the week, and staying late. Sometimes he was sent for at her house by sick people, and he must have left word at his office where he was to be found.
He had spent part of his student life in Europe, and he looked back to his travel there with a fondness that the Old World inspires less and less in Americans. This, with his derivation from one of the unliterary Boston suburbs, and his unambitious residence in a place like Hatboro', gave her a sense of provinciality in him. On his part, he apparently found it droll that a woman of her acquaintance with a larger life should be willing to live in Hatboro' at all, and he seemed incredulous about her staying after summer was over. She felt that she mystified him, and sometimes she felt the pursuit of a curiosity which was a little too like a psychical diagnosis. He had a way of sitting beside her table and playing with her paper-cutter, while he submitted with a quizzical smile to her endeavours to turn him to account. She did not mind his laughing at her eagerness (a woman is willing enough to join a man in making fun of her femininity if she believes that he respects her), and she tried to make him talk about Hatboro', and tell her how she could be of use among the working people. She would have liked very much to know whether he gave his medical service gratis among them, and whether he found it a pleasure and a privilege to do so. There was one moment when she would have liked to ask him to let her be at the charges of his more indigent patients, but with the words behind her lips she perceived that it would not do. At the best, it would be taking his opportunity from him and making it hers. She began to see that one ought to have a conscience about doing good.
She let the chance of proposing this impossibility go by; and after a little silence Dr. Morrell seemed to revert, in her interest, to the economical situation in Hatboro'.
“You know that most of the hands in the hat-shops are from the farms around; and some of them own property here in the village. I know the owner of three small houses who's always worked in the shops. You couldn't very well offer help to a landed proprietor like that?”
“No,” said Annie, abashed in view of him.
“I suppose you ought to go to a factory town like Fall River, if you really wanted to deal with overwork and squalor.”
“I'm beginning to think there's no such thing anywhere,” she said desperately.
The doctor's eyes twinkled sympathetically. “I don't know whether Benson earned his three houses altogether in the hat-shops. He 'likes a good horse,' as he says; and he likes to trade it for a better; I know that from experience. But he's a great friend of mine. Well, then, there are more women than men in the shops, and they earn more. I suppose that's rather disappointing too.”
“It is, rather.”
“But, on the other hand, the work only lasts eight months of the year, and that cuts wages down to an average of a dollar a day.”
“Ah!” cried Annie. “There's some hope inthat! What do they do when the work stops?”
“Oh, they go back to their country-seats.”
“All?”
“Perhaps not all.”
“Ithoughtso!”
“Well, you'd better look round among those that stay.”
Even among these she looked in vain for destitution; she could find that in satisfactory degree only in straggling veterans of the great army of tramps which once overran country places in the summer.
She would have preferred not to see or know the objects of her charity, and because she preferred this she forced herself to face their distasteful misery. Mrs. Bolton had orders to send no one from the door who asked for food or work, but to call Annie and let her judge the case. She knew that it was folly, and she was afraid it was worse, but she could not send the homeless creatures away as hungry or poor as they came. They filled her gentlewoman's soul with loathing; but if she kept beyond the range of the powerful corporeal odour that enveloped them, she could experience the luxury of pity for them. The filthy rags that caricatured them, their sick or sodden faces, always frowsed with a week's beard, represented typical poverty to her, and accused her comfortable state with a poignant contrast; and she consoled herself as far as she could with the superstition that in meeting them she was fulfilling a duty sacred in proportion to the disgust she felt in the encounter.
The work at the hat-shops fell off after the spring orders, and did not revive till the beginning of August. If there was less money among the hands and their families who remained than there was in time of full work, the weather made less demand upon their resources. The children lived mostly out-of-doors, and seemed to have always what they wanted of the season's fruit and vegetables. They got these too late from the decaying lots at the provision stores, and too early from the nearest orchards; and Dr. Morrell admitted that there was a good deal of sickness, especially among the little ones, from this diet. Annie wondered whether she ought not to offer herself as a nurse among them; she asked him whether she could not be of use in that way, and had to confess that she knew nothing about the prevailing disease.
“Then, I don't think you'd better undertake it,” he said. “There are too many nurses there already, such as they are. It's the dull time in most of the shops, you know, and the women have plenty of leisure. There are about five volunteer nurses for every patient, not counting the grandmothers on both sides. I think they would resent any outside aid.”
“Ah, I'm always on the outside! But can't I send—I mean carry—them anything nourishing, any little dishes—”
“Arrowroot is about all the convalescents can manage.” She made a note of it. “But jelly and chicken broth are always relished by their friends.”
“Dr. Morrell, I must ask you not to turn me into ridicule, if you please. I cannot permit it.”
“I beg your pardon—I do indeed, Miss Kilburn. I didn't mean to ridicule you. I began seriously, but I was led astray by remembering what becomes of most of the good things sent to sick people.”
“I know,” she said, breaking into a laugh. “I have eaten lots of them for my father. And is arrowroot the only thing?”
The doctor reflected gravely. “Why, no. There's a poor little life now and then that might be saved by the sea-air. Yes, if you care to send some of my patients, with a mother and a grandmother apiece, to the seaside—”
“Don't say another word, doctor,” cried Annie. “You make mesohappy! I will—I will send their whole families. And you won't, youwon'tlet a case escape, will you, doctor?” It was a break in the iron wall of uselessness which had closed her in; she behaved like a young girl with an invitation to a ball.
When the first patient came back well from the seaside her rejoicing overflowed in exultation before the friends to whom she confessed her agency in the affair. Putney pretended that he could not see what pleasure she could reasonably take in restoring the child to the sort of life it had been born to; but that was a matter she would not consider, theoretically or practically.
She began to go outside of Dr. Morrell's authority; she looked up two cases herself, and, upon advising with their grandmothers, sent them to the seaside, and she was at the station when the train came in with the young mother and the still younger aunt of one of the sick children. She did not see the baby, and the mother passed her with a stare of impassioned reproach, and fell sobbing on the neck of her husband, waiting for her on the platform. Annie felt the blood drop back upon her heart. She caught at the girlish aunt, who was looking about her with a sense of the interest which attached to herself as a party to the spectacle.
“Oh, Rebecca, where is the child?”
“Well, there, Miss Kilburn, I'mrilsorry to tell you, but I guess the sea-air didn't do it a great deal of good, if any. I tell Maria she'll see it in the right light after a while, but of course she can't, first off. Well, there!Somebody'sgot to look after it. You'll excuseme, Miss Kilburn.”
Annie saw her run off to the baggage-car, from which the baggage-man was handing out a narrow box. The ground reeled under her feet; she got the public depot carriage and drove home.
She sent for Dr. Morrell, and poured out the confession of her error upon him before he could speak. “I am a murderess,” she ended hysterically. “Don't deny it!”
“I think you can be got off on the ground of insanity, Miss Kilburn, if you go on in this way,” he answered.
Her desperation broke in tears. “Oh, what shall I do—what shall I do? I've killed the child!”
“Oh no, you haven't,” he retorted. “I know the case. The only hope for it was the sea-air; I was going to ask you to send it—”
She took down her handkerchief and gave him a piercing look. “Dr. Morrell, if you are lying to me—”
“I'm not lying, Miss Kilburn,” he answered. “You've done a very unwarrantable thing in both of the cases that you sent to the seaside on your own responsibility. One of them I certainly shouldn't have advised sending, but it's turned out well. You've no more credit for it, though, than for this that died; and you won't think I'm lying, perhaps, when I say you're equally to blame in both instances.”
“I—I beg your pardon,” she faltered, with dawning comfort in his severity. “I didn't mean—I didn't intend to say—”
“I know it,” said Dr. Morrell, allowing himself to smile. “Just remember that you blundered into doing the only thing left to be done for Mrs. Savor's child; and—don't try it again. That's all.”
He smiled once more, and at some permissive light in her face, he began even to laugh.
“You—you're horrible!”
“Oh no, I'm not,” he gasped. “All the tears in the world wouldn't help; and my laughing hurts nobody. I'm sorry for you, and I'm sorry for the mother; but I've told you the truth—I have indeed; and youmustbelieve me.”
The child's father came to see her the next night. “Rebecca she seemed to think that you felt kind of bad, may be, because Maria wouldn't speak to you when she first got off the cars yesterday, and I don't say she done exactly right, myself. The way I look at it, and the way I tell Mariashe'dought to, is like this: You done what you done for the best, and we wa'n'tobligedto take your advice anyway. But of course Maria she'd kind of set her heart on savin' it, and she can't seem to get over it right away.” He talked on much longer to the same effect, tilted back in his chair, and looking down, while he covered and uncovered one of his knees with his straw hat. He had the usual rustic difficulty in getting away, but Annie was glad to keep him, in her gratitude for his kindness. Besides, she could not let him go without satisfying a suspicion she had.
“And Dr. Morrell—have you seen him for Mrs. Savor—have you—” She stopped, for shame of her hypocrisy.
“No, 'm. We hain't seen himsence. I guess she'll get along.”
It needed this stroke to complete her humiliation before the single-hearted fellow.
“I—I suppose,” she stammered out, “that you—your wife, wouldn't like me to come to the—I can understand that; but oh! if there is anything I can do for you—flowers—or my carriage—or helping anyway—”
Mr. Savor stood up. “I'm much obliged toyou, Miss Kilburn; but we thought we hadn't better wait, well not a great while, and—the funeral was this afternoon. Well, I wish you good evening.”
She met the mother, a few days after, in the street; with an impulse to cross over to the other side she advanced straight upon her.
“Mrs. Savor! What can I say to you?”
“Oh, I don't presume but what you meant for the best, Miss Kilburn. But I guess I shall know what to do next time. I kind of felt the whole while that it was a resk. But it's all right now.”
Annie realised, in her resentment of the poor thing's uncouth sorrow, that she had spoken to her with the hope of getting, not giving, comfort.
“Yes, yes,” she confessed. “I was to blame.” The bereaved mother did not gainsay her, and she felt that, whatever was the justice of the case, she had met her present deserts.
She had to bear the discredit into which the seaside fell with the mothers of all the other sick children. She tried to bring Dr. Morrell once to the consideration of her culpability in the case of those who might have lived if the case of Mrs. Savor's baby had not frightened their mothers from sending them to the seaside; but he refused to grapple with the problem. She was obliged to believe him when he said he should not have advised sending any of the recent cases there; that the disease was changing its character, and such a course could have done no good.
“Look here, Miss Kilburn,” he said, after scanning her face sharply, “I'm going to leave you a little tonic. I think you're rather run down.”
“Well,” she said passively.
It was in her revulsion from the direct beneficence which had proved so dangerous that Annie was able to give herself to the more general interests of the Social Union. She had not the courage to test her influence for it among the workpeople whom it was to entertain and elevate, and whose co-operation Mr. Peck had thought important; but she went about among the other classes, and found a degree of favour and deference which surprised her, and an ignorance of what lay so heavy on her heart which was still more comforting. She was nowhere treated as the guilty wretch she called herself; some who knew of the facts had got them wrong; and she discovered what must always astonish the inquirer below the pretentious surface of our democracy—an indifference and an incredulity concerning the feelings of people of lower station which could not be surpassed in another civilisation. Her concern for Mrs. Savor was treated as a great trial for Miss Kilburn; but the mother's bereavement was regarded as something those people were used to, and got over more easily than one could imagine.
Annie's mission took her to the ministers of the various denominations, and she was able to overcome any scruples they might have about the theatricals by urging the excellence of their object. As a Unitarian, she was not prepared for the liberality with which the matter was considered; the Episcopalians of course were with her; but the Universalist minister himself was not more friendly than the young Methodist preacher, who volunteered to call with her on the pastor of the Baptist church, and help present the affair in the right light; she had expected a degree of narrow-mindedness, of bigotry, which her sect learned to attribute to others in the militant period before they had imbibed so much of its own tolerance.
But the recollection of what had passed with Mr. Peck remained a reproach in her mind, and nothing that she accomplished for the Social Union with the other ministers was important. In her vivid reveries she often met him, and combated his peculiar ideas, while she admitted a wrong in her own position, and made every expression of regret, and parted from him on the best terms, esteemed and complimented in high degree; in reality she saw him seldom, and still more rarely spoke to him, and then with a distance and consciousness altogether different from the effects dramatised in her fancy. Sometimes during the period of her interest in the sick children of the hands, she saw him in their houses, or coming and going outside; but she had no chance to speak with him, or else said to herself that she had none, because she was ashamed before him. She thought he avoided her; but this was probably only a phase of the impersonality which seemed characteristic of him in everything. At these times she felt a strange pathos in the lonely man whom she knew to be at odds with many of his own people, and she longed to interpret herself more sympathetically to him, but actually confronted with him she was sensible of something cold and even hard in the nimbus her compassion cast about him. Yet even this added to the mystery that piqued her, and that loosed her fancy to play, as soon as they parted, in conjecture about his past life, his marriage, and the mad wife who had left him with the child he seemed so ill-fitted to care for. Then, the next time they met she was abashed with the recollection of having unwarrantably romanced the plain, simple, homely little man, and she added an embarrassment of her own to that shyness of his which kept them apart.
Except for what she had heard Putney say, and what she learned casually from the people themselves, she could not have believed he ever did anything for them. He came and went so elusively, as far as Annie was concerned, that she knew of his presence in the houses of sickness and death usually by his little girl, whom she found playing about in the street before the door with the children of the hands. She seemed to hold her own among the others in their plays and their squabbles; if she tried to make up to her, Idella smiled, but she would not be approached, and Annie's heart went out to the little mischief in as helpless goodwill as toward the minister himself.
She used to hear his voice through the summer-open windows when he called upon the Boltons, and wondered if some accident would not bring them together, but she had to send for Mrs. Bolton at last, and bid her tell Mr. Peck that she would like to see him before he went away, one night. He came, and then she began a parrying parley of preliminary nothings before she could say that she supposed he knew the ladies were going on with their scheme for the establishment of the Social Union; he admitted vaguely that he had heard something to that effect, and she added that the invited dance and supper had been given up.
He remained apparently indifferent to the fact, and she hurried on: “And I ought to say, Mr. Peck, that nearly every one—every one whose opinion you would value—agreed with you that it would have been extremely ill-advised, and—and shocking. And I'm quite ashamed that I should not have seen it from the beginning; and I hope—I hope you will forgive me if I said things in my—my excitement that must have—I mean not only what I said to you, but what I said to others; and I assure you that I regret them, and—”
She went on and repeated herself at length, and he listened patiently, but as if the matter had not really concerned either of them personally. She had to conclude that what she had said of him had not reached him, and she ended by confessing that she had clung to the Social Union project because it seemed the only thing in which her attempts to do good were not mischievous.
Mr. Peck's thin face kindled with a friendlier interest than it had shown while the question at all related to himself, and a light of something that she took for humorous compassion came into his large, pale blue eyes. At least it was intelligence; and perhaps the woman nature craves this as much as it is supposed to crave sympathy; perhaps the two are finally one.
“I want to tell you something, Mr. Peck—an experience of mine,” she said abruptly, and without trying to connect it obviously with what had gone before, she told him the story of her ill-fated beneficence to the Savors. He listened intently, and at the end he said: “I understand. But that is sorrow you have caused, not evil; and what we intend in goodwill must not rest a burden on the conscience, no matter how it turns out. Otherwise the moral world is no better than a crazy dream, without plan or sequence. You might as well rejoice in an evil deed because good happened to come of it.”
“Oh, Ithankyou!” she gasped. “You don't know what a load you have lifted from me!”
Her words feebly expressed the sense of deliverance which overflowed her heart. Her strength failed her like that of a person suddenly relieved from some great physical stress or peril; but she felt that he had given her the truth, and she held fast by it while she went on.
“If you knew, or if any one knew, how difficult it is, what a responsibility, to do the least thing for others! And once it seemed so simple! And it seems all the more difficult, the more means you have for doing good. The poor people seem to help one another without doing any harm, but ifItry it—”
“Yes,” said the minister, “it is difficult to help others when we cease to need help ourselves. A man begins poor, or his father or grandfather before him—it doesn't matter how far back he begins—and then he is in accord and full understanding with all the other poor in the world; but as he prospers he withdraws from them and loses their point of view. Then when he offers help, it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a patron, an agent of the false state of things in which want is possible; and his help is not an impulse of the love that ought to bind us all together, but a compromise proposed by iniquitous social conditions, a peace-offering to his own guilty consciousness of his share in the wrong.”
“Yes,” said Annie, too grateful for the comfort he had given her to question words whose full purport had not perhaps reached her. “And I assure you, Mr. Peck, I feel very differently about these things since I first talked with you. And I wish to tell you, in justice to myself, that I had no idea then that—that—you were speaking from your own experience when you—you said how working people looked at things. I didn't know that you had been—that is, that—”
“Yes,” said the minister, coming to her relief, “I once worked in a cotton-mill. Then,” he continued, dismissing the personal concern, “it seems to me that I saw things in their right light, as I have never been able to see them since—”
“And how brutal,” she broke in, “how cruel and vulgar, what I said must have seemed to you!”
“I fancied,” he continued evasively, “that I had authority to set myself apart from my fellow-workmen, to be a teacher and guide to the true life. But it was a great error. The true life was the life of work, and no one ever had authority to turn from it. Christ Himself came as a labouring man.”
“That is true,” said Annie; and his words transfigured the man who spoke them, so that her heart turned reverently toward him. “But if you had been meant to work in a mill all your life,” she pursued, “would you have been given the powers you have, and that you have just used to save me from despair?”
The minister rose, and said, with a sigh: “No one was meant to work in a mill all his life. Good night.”
She would have liked to keep him longer, but she could not think how, at once. As he turned to go out through the Boltons' part of the house, “Won't you go out through my door?” she asked, with a helpless effort at hospitality.
“Oh, if you wish,” he answered submissively.
When she had closed the door upon him she went to speak with Mrs. Bolton. She was in the kitchen mixing flour to make bread, and Annie traced her by following the lamp-light through the open door. It discovered Bolton sitting in the outer doorway, his back against one jamb and his stocking-feet resting against the base of the other.
“Mrs. Bolton,” Annie began at once, making herself free of one of the hard kitchen chairs, “how is Mr. Peck getting on in Hatboro'?”
“I d'know as I know just what you mean, Miss Kilburn,” said Mrs. Bolton, on the defensive.
“I mean, is there a party against him in his church? Is he unpopular?”
Mrs. Bolton took some flour and sprinkled it on her bread-board; then she lifted the mass of dough out of the trough before her, and let it sink softly upon the board.
“I d'know as you can say he's unpoplah. He ain't poplah with some. Yes, there's a party—the Gerrish party.”
“Is it a strong one?”
“It's pretty strong.”
“Do you think it will prevail?”
“Well, most o' folks don't knowwhatthey want; and if there's some folks that know what theydon'twant, they can generally keep from havin' it.”
Bolton made a soft husky prefatory noise of protest in his throat, which seemed to stimulate his wife to a more definite assertion, and she cut in before he could speak—
“Ishould say that unless them that stood Mr. Peck's friends first off, and got him here, done something to keep him, his enemies wa'n't goin' to take up his cause.”
Annie divined a personal reproach for Bolton in the apparent abstraction.
“Oh, now, you'll see it'll all come out right in the end, Pauliny,” he mildly opposed. “There ain't any such great feelin' about Mr. Peck; nothin' but what'll work itself off perfec'ly natural, give it time. It's goin' to come out all right.”
“Yes, at the day o' jedgment,” Mrs. Bolton assented, plunging her fists into the dough, and beginning to work a contempt for her husband's optimism into it.
“Yes, an' a good deal before,” he returned. “There's always somethin' to objec' to every minister; we ain't any of us perfect, and Mr. Peck's got his failin's; he hain't built up the church quite so much as some on 'em expected but what he would; and there's some that don't like his prayers; and some of 'em thinks he ain't doctrinal enough. But I guess, take it all round, he suits pretty well. It'll come out all right, Pauliny. You'll see.”
A pause ensued, of which Annie felt the awfulness. It seemed to her that Mrs. Bolton's impatience with this intolerable hopefulness must burst violently. She hastened to interpose. “I think the trouble is that people don't fully understand Mr. Peck at first. But they do finally.”
“Yes; take time,” said Bolton.
“Take eternity, I guess, for some,” retorted his wife. “If you think William B. Gerrish is goin' to work round with time—” She stopped for want of some sufficiently rejectional phrase, and did not go on.
“The way I look at it,” said Bolton, with incorrigible courage, “is like this: When it comes to anything like askin' Mr. Peck to resign, it'll develop his strength. You can't tell how strong he is without you try to git red of him. I 'most wish it would come, once, fair and square.”
“I'm sure you're right, Mr. Bolton,” said Annie. “I don't believe that your church would let such a man go when it really came to it. Don't they all feel that he has great ability?”
“Oh, I guess they appreciate him as far forth as ability goes. Some on 'em complains that he's a littletoointellectial, if anything. But I tell 'em it's a good fault; it's a thing that can be got over in time.”
Mrs. Bolton had ceased to take part in the discussion. She finished kneading her dough, and having fitted it into two baking-pans and dusted it with flour, she laid a clean towel over both. But when Annie rose she took the lamp from the mantel-shelf, where it stood, and held it up for her to find her way back to her own door.
Annie went to bed with a spirit lightened as well as chastened, and kept saying over the words of Mr. Peck, so as to keep fast hold of the consolation they had given her. They humbled her with, a sense of his wisdom and insight; the thought of them kept her awake. She remembered the tonic that Dr. Morrell had left with her, and after questioning whether she really needed it now, she made sure by getting up and taking it.