“If he could stay where he is for the night,” said Mrs. Woodward, “he could have Mrs. Burroughs’s room to-morrow; she’s going to the seaside and won’t want it any more.”
This matter-of-fact proposal seemed so reasonable that it united the faltering opposition, and Mrs. Farrell had to give way. In their hearts, no doubt, all the women sighed over the situation’s loss of ideality. At parting, Mrs. Gilbert took Mrs. Farrell’s hand and went so far as to kiss her. “I don’t think you need be anxious,” the older woman said. “The doctor says he needs nothing but care and quiet, and he’ll be well again in a few days. Even now I can’t help congratulating you. I didn’t know matters had gone so far—so soon. My dear,” she added, after a little hesitation, “I’m afraid I haven’t quite done you justice. I thought—excuse my saying it now—I thought perhaps youwere amusing yourself. I beg your pardon in all humbleness.”
“Oh don’t,don’t, Mrs. Gilbert!” cried Mrs. Farrell, and cast her arms about her neck, and sobbed there. She went to Rachel’s room, and changed her dress for a charming gown in which she could just lie down and jump up in an instant. She bound her hair in a simple knot, and when she came back to her own room with her lamp held high and shaded with one hand, she looked like a stylish Florence Nightingale with a dash of Lady Macbeth.
Gilbert was sitting there in the dark, beside a table on which the light revealed a curious store of medicines and restoratives, the contribution of all the boarders: five or six flagons of cologne and one of bay rum; a case bottle of brandy; a bottle of Bourbon whisky; a pint of Bass’s pale ale; the medicines left by the doctor; some phials of homœopathic pellets from Mrs. Stevenson, who used the high-potency medicines; a tiny bottle of liquid nux from Mrs. Gilbert, who preferred the appreciable doses, and despised all who did not; a lemon; three oranges; a box of guava jelly—from one of the young girls. Mrs. Farrell’s tragic gaze met Gilbert’s lowering eyes and wandered with them to this array; they both smiled, but she was the first to frown. She beckoned him from the room, and “Here is your lamp,” she said. “Don’t turn it down or it will smoke, but set it where it won’t shine in his eyes. I’m going to be there in that room.” She pointed down the passageway toward Rachel’s door. “If he needs the least thing you’reto call me.” Her severity would have admonished any levity that lingered in Gilbert’s heavy heart, as she put the lamp in his hand.
“Let me light you back to your room,” he said, with moody humility.
“No, I can find the way perfectly well in the dark,” she answered. “Or—yes, you had better come, so as to make sure of the right door in case you need me. You think I tried to make you quarrel!” she said in a swift undertone, as they passed down the hall; “but I never meant it, and youknowthat, whatever you think. Oh, I have been punished, punished! But I’m glad you held out against me about the room,” she added. “He would have been as true to you; and if you had let me do anything to make him seem silly, I should have hated you!”
He saw with a man’s helplessness the tremor of her lips, and then she had opened and closed the door, and he stood blankly staring at it.
In the morning Easton was well enough to sit up in an easy-chair, and was fretfully eager to return to his hotel. It was clear that he was intensely vexed at having caused the sensation of the day before, and that the fear of giving further trouble galled him with the keenest shame. They were only too glad to release him from the fond imprisonment to which Mrs. Farrell would have sentenced him, on condition that he would consent to occupy the room vacated by Mrs. Burroughs for a few days, and be cared for better than he could be at the hotel, until he was quite well again.
But in a few days he was not quite so well. He fell from his dull languor into a low fever, and from feebly lounging about his room and drowsing in an easy-chair it came to his not rising one morning at all.
Thus his hold upon the happiness so fiercely pursued, and now within his grasp, relaxed, and a vast vagueness encompassed him, in which he strove with one colossal task: to make Gilbert see a certain matter as he saw it, which was not at all the matter of their quarrel, but some strange abstraction, he never could make out what, though their agreement upon it was a vital necessity. He was never delirious, but he was never sure of anything; a veil was drawn between his soul and all experience; he could not tell, when he had been asleep, that he had slept; his waking was a dream; the world moved round him in elusive shadow.
He was what one of the ladies called comfortably sick. It was not thought from the first that he was in danger, and as it turned out he was not. But if he had lain for a month at the point of death, he could not have been more precious to that houseful of women, who enjoyed every instant of the poetic situation; maid and matron, those tender hearts were alike glad of the occasion to renew in this fortunate reality their faith in romance, and they turned fondly to Mrs. Farrell for a fulfillment of their ideal of devotion. It looked on the face of things rather like expecting devotion from a Pompeian fresco, so little did her signal beauty seem related to the exigency, so far should sickness andsorrow have been from her world. But here Mrs. Farrell most disappointed those who most feared her picturesque inadequacy. She threw herself into her part with inspiration; rising far above the merely capable woman, she made her care of Easton a work of genius, and not only divined his wants and ministered to his comfort with a success that surprised all experience, but dealt so cunningly with his moods that he was at last flattered into submission if not resignation. In the beginning he was indeed a most refractory object of devotion; he chafed so bitterly against his helpless lapse into the fever, he was in such a continual revolt against his hospitable detention at the farmhouse, and was so weighed down, through all the hazy distance in which his life ebbed from actual events, with the shame of being a burden, that no magic less than hers could have consoled him. But she overcame his scruples and reconciled him to fate, so that it did not seem an unfair advantage to inflict the kindness against which he could not struggle; and she had her way with him, even to excess. Since she was not allowed to give up her room to him, she devoted herself in the moments of her leisure to the decoration of his chamber. She upholstered it almost anew with contributions from the ladies of scraps of chintz, mosquito-netting, and dotted muslin; she shut out the garish light with soft curtains; she put on the plain mirror and toilet table what Gilbert called a French cap and overskirt, and she furbelowed the mantelpiece. She took Mrs. Woodward’s ivies and trained them up the corners,and she had a great vase on the table, often renewed with autumnal wild flowers, ferns, and the firstlings of the reddening sumac leaves. As a final offering she brought in her spinning-wheel—the mania was then just beginning—and set it by the hearth. It must be owned that when all was done the place had a certain spectacularity; the furniture and ornaments wore somehow the air of properties; on the window seats, which she had contrived for greater coziness of effect, it was not quite safe to sit down. But her friends—and all the ladies were her friends now—easily forgave this to her real efficiency and her unsparing self-sacrifice; the two young girls worshiped the carpets she trod upon, and the whole sympathetic household sighed in despair at the perfection with which she, as one may say, costumed the part. She had ordinarily indulged a taste for those strong hues that went best with her Southern beauty, but now her robes were of the softest color and texture; she moved in slippers that made no sound; in emblem of devotion to the sick-room she denied herself every ornament; at first she even left off her Etruscan ear-rings, and kept only a limp scarf of dark red silk, tied at her throat in a sentiment of passionate neglect. In behalf of Easton’s peaceful dreams she banished the Japanese fans, with their nightmare figures, and as she sat fanning him with a quaint, old-fashioned fan of white feathers, which she had skillfully mounted on a long handle, her partisans declared, some that she looked like an Eastern queen, other some, like an Egyptian slave. They rememberedher afterward in this effect, and also how she used to look as she stood at dusk lighting the little tapers which she had found at a queer country store in an out-of-the-way village of the neighborhood, and setting them afloat in a vase of oil, to illumine the chamber during the night. She realized the character as thoroughly in other respects; she met the friendliness all round her with gentle appreciation, availed herself of it little or nothing, and for the most part quietly withdrew from it. Her defiant airs were all laid aside; her prevailing mood was serious; she often spoke earnestly of matters which certainly had not commanded her open reverence before; there was a great change in her in every way, and some, who had always longed to like her, liked her now with thankful hearts for the opportunity. Among these Mrs. Gilbert made her advances like one who has an atonement to offer; Mrs. Farrell frankly accepted the tacit regret, and visited a good deal in her room.
But as the sick man’s disorder slowly ran its course, and the days took him further and further from any joy in her, Mrs. Farrell seemed to lose her hold of the situation, and another change came over her, in which she fell from her high activities into a kind of dull and listless patience, and dragged out the time, uncheered by the inspiration that had hitherto upheld her. She seemed not to know what to do. The spring was gone, the impulse exhausted, in that strange nature, which knew itself perhaps as little as others knew it. Those were the days when she surrendered her authority to Rachel,and served under her about Easton, who had also fallen largely to the care of Gilbert and Ben Woodward. Few young ladies would not willingly assume the task of nursing a young man through a low fever in a romance, but the reality is different. If it had been something short and sharp, a matter of a week’s supreme self-devotion, it would doubtless have been otherwise with her; she was capable of great things, but a long trial of her endurance must finally lose its meaning. She had times of melancholy in which she sat behind her closed doors for hours, or when she went lonely walks through the woods or fields. She withdrew herself more and more from the society that sought her, and got a habit of consorting with poor old Nehemiah as he dug his potatoes or gathered his beans, and seemed to find him a relief and shelter. Heaven knows what they talked of. Doubtless, as she followed him from one potato hill to another, and listened to his discourse, he admired her taste for serious conversation, and was obscurely touched that such resplendent beauty should be so meekly contented with his company. She no longer teased Ben Woodward, whose open secret of a passion for her she used to recognize so freely; she was the boy’s very humble servant in manner; and to Rachel’s efficiency and constancy she was the stricken thrall. It was touching to see how willingly subservient she was to the girl, and how glad she was to be of any use that Rachel could think of. One night, after they had sat a long time silent by the taper’s glimmer while Easton slept, she suddenly caughtRachel by the arm and whispered, “Why don’t you say it? How can you keep thinking it and thinking it, and never say it? For pity’s sake, speak this once, and tell me that you know I did it all, and that you despise me!”
“I don’t judge you,” said Rachel; “and I have no right to despise anyone. You know, yourself, whether you are to blame for anything.”
“Do you think I acted heartlessly that day when I made fun of him—there in the schoolhouse?”
“Ididthink so, then.”
“Do you now? Do you believe I’m sorry?”
“How can I tell? You seemed unfeeling then, but I don’t believe you were; and you seem sorry now—”
“And you don’t believe I am! Oh me, I wonder if I am! Rachel, you do believe I know how to feel, don’t you?”
“How can you ask such a thing as that?” returned the girl in a startled accent.
“I wonder if I do! It seems to me that I know how to feel, but that I never feel. It seems to me that I am always acting out the thing I ought to be or want to be, and never being it. Don’t trust me, Rachel—not even now; I think that I’m very remorseful and sorry, but who knows if I am? I keep asking myself what I should do if he were to die—what would become of me. I try to scare myself about it; but my soul seems to be in a perfect torpor; I can’t stir it. Rachel, Rachel! Ididtry to make him in love with me—all I could. There was such a deadly charm in it—his perfect faith inme, whatever I said or did. But it frightened me at last, too; and I didn’t know what to do; and that day when I behaved so about him, I was frantic; if I hadn’t made fun of him, the thought of what I had done would have killed me. But I honored him all the time. Oh, he was my true, true lover; and when I thought how recklessly I had gone on, it almost drove me wild. Rachel, do you know what I did?” She poured out the whole story, and then she said, “But now I seem not to be able to care any more. It’s all like a dream: it’s some one running and running after me, and I am laughing and beckoning him on, and all of a sudden there he lies without help or motion; it can’t give him any pleasure to see me, now; I can’t do anything for him that some one else can’t do better, or that he won’t be as glad of from another. It’s as if he were in prison, and I sat at the door outside, waiting in this horrible lethargy. When he comes out, what will he say to me? I think that I should die if he upbraided me; but if he didn’t I should go mad. No, no! That’s what some other woman would do. Rachel, isn’t it awful to bring all these things home to yourself, and yet not suffer from them? Oh, but I care—I care because I can’t care. My heart lies like a stone in my breast, and I’m furious because I can’t break it, or hurt it. Rachel, if you give way before me I don’t know where I shall end. You must never yield to me, no matter what mood I’m in, or else I shall lose the one real friend I have in the world—the only one I can be myself to, if there is really anything of me.”
As she ceased to speak, Gilbert came in to take his place for the night. He asked Rachel in a low voice what was next to be done, but he took no notice of Mrs. Farrell save to give her a slight nod.
No one else treated her with coldness now; but in his manner toward her there still lingered a trace of resentment. It had a tone of irony, to which she submitted meekly, like one resolved to bear a just penalty; and if there were times when he forgot to be severe and she forgot to be sad, then afterward he was the more satirical and she the more patient. It began to be said by some of the ladies that Mr. Gilbert had rather a capricious temper; but he had his defenders, who maintained that he was merely run down with worry and confinement over his friend.
One day he came into Mrs. Gilbert’s room, and found Mrs. Farrell with her. He offered to go away if he had burst upon a confidential interview, seeing that they fell silent at his coming, but Mrs. Farrell said that they had just finished their talk, and that now she was going.
Gilbert did not sit down after he had closed the door upon her, but took two or three lounging turns about the room. “It’s very pleasant to see you and Mrs. Farrell such friends, Susan,” he said, at last. “It’s really millennial. But which is the wolf and which is the lamb?”
He laughed his short laugh, and Mrs. Gilbert answered, nervously, “You know very well I told you, the first time we talked of her, that I liked her.”
“You said she fascinated you. The spell seemsto have deepened. You used to find some little imperfections in her.”
“Well, and who pretends that I don’t see them now?”
“Oh, not I. But I’m affected to see you so lenient to them of late. Did you know that she was a person of strong religious convictions?”
“Whatdoyou mean, William?”
“Nothing. She has found out that Easton and I are in a sort of suspense about such matters, and she says it is terrible. She can only account for our being able to endure it by supposing that men are different, more self-centered, not so dependent as women. She considers the Woodwards a high example of the efficacy of a religious training in the formation of character. She says she is not like Rachel; that she has an undisciplined nature, and was too irregularly trained, first in her father’s belief and then in a convent. What was her father’s belief? I suppose some sort of marine Methodism of the speaking-trumpet pitch. She wants my advice as to a course of reading in the modern philosophy; she thinks every Christian ought to know how his faith is being assailed.”
Gilbert stopped in his walk and looked gravely at his sister-in-law, who gave a troubled sigh.
“What right have you to suppose she isn’t perfectly in earnest now, William?”
“None; I think she thinks she is.”
“She has shown so much more character, so much more heart, than I ever supposed she had, in this affair, that I’m glad to believe we were mistaken about her in several essential ways. The fact is, I always did have a sort of sneaking fondness for her, and now I’m determined to indulge it; so you needn’t come to laugh about her inmysleeve, William. I’m an ardent Farrellite, and have been ever since I found out that she was in love with your friend. Don’t you think she’s very devoted to him?”
“Oh, I dare say. He’s not in a state for devotion to tell upon, exactly.”
Mrs. Gilbert looked baffled. Presently she asked, “Are she and Rachel Woodward as good friends as ever?”
“How do I know?” returned Gilbert, resuming his walk. “That’sa curious girl, Susan. One meets enough good women in the world; I’ve always been able to believe in them,” he said, stopping at Mrs. Gilbert’s side to take her hand and kiss it; “in fact, the worst women seem pretty good, if one will only compare them with oneself; but I don’t think I’ve understood, before, just the sort of feminine goodness that the unbroken tradition of your New England religiousness produces. Puritanism has fairly died out of the belief—I don’t care what people profess to believe—but in such a girl as Rachel Woodward, all that was good in it seems to survive in the life. She’s more like Easton than any other human being I know; they’re both unerringly sincere; they’re both faithful through thick and thin to what they think is right; only you can’t help feeling that there’s something Quixotic in Easton’s noblest moods, and that he has anarrogant scorn of meaner morals than his own. But her purity doesn’t seem to judge anything but itself, and her goodness and veracity always seem to refer themselves to something outside of her. You can see before she speaks how she is considering her phrase, and choosing just the words that shall give her mind with scriptural scruple against superfluity; if you know the facts, you know what she will say, for she’s almost divinely without variableness or shadow of turning where the truth is concerned. It’s awful; it makes me hang my head for shame, to watch the working of that vestal soul of hers. And with all this inflexibility—you might call it angularity—of rectitude, she has a singular charm, a distinctly feminine charm.”
“Oh, indeed! And what is her charm?”
“Poh, Susan!” said Gilbert, looking askance at her. “Don’t make me think you can be guilty of bad taste.”
“Oh, well; I won’t, I won’t, my dear boy! I didn’t mean to,” cried Mrs. Gilbert. “Itwasrather foolish in me to interrupt you.”
“I can’t call it an interruption, exactly; I had got to the end of my say.”
He went off to Easton’s room, where he found Rachel Woodward putting things in order for the evening, and he smiled to see with what conscientious regard she preserved Mrs. Farrell’s arrangements, as matters having a sacred claim to which no reforms of her own could have pretended, and yet managed somehow to imbue all that picturesqueness with a quality of homelike comfort.He nodded to her, and said he was going out for a short walk.
On the road he overtook Mrs. Farrell, who was moving rather sadly along by herself. Her face brightened as she turned and saw him, but she waited for him to speak.
“Where are your inseparable comrades?” he asked.
“Oh!” said she. “Jenny Alden isn’t very well, this afternoon, and Miss Jewett has gone over with Mrs. Stevenson to Quopsaug.”
“Quop—what?” asked Gilbert, stopping short.
“Quopsaug,” repeated Mrs. Farrell, simply. “Did you never hear of it?”
“No, I never heard of Quopsaug. Is it—vegetable or mineral?”
“It’s vegetable, I believe. At least it vegetates. It’s a place—a huddle of unpainted wooden houses in a little hollow at the foot of Scatticong, on the east side. It has a Folly and it has a Bazar. But I wonder Quopsaug hasn’t come up long ago in our poverty-stricken conversation. I suppose everyone must have thought everybody else had talked you to death about it.”
“No,” said Gilbert. “What do people go to Quopsaug for?”
“To see the Folly—that’s the storekeeper’s mansion; and to buy things out of the Bazar—that’s his store. And to wheedle the inhabitants generally out of their spinning-wheels; at least that’s what Mrs. Stevenson’s gone for to-day.”
“And is Quopsaug a nickname?”
“No; it’s one of those musical Indian names we’re so fond of in New England. The people adopted it thirty or forty years ago, when they started a cotton mill—which failed—there. The place used to be called East Leander, but they rechristened it Quopsaug, after a chief who scalped the first settler, and then became a praying Indian, and lies over there in the Quopsaug graveyard, under a Latin epitaph. You ought to go to Quopsaug.”
“I must,” said Gilbert, absently; the talk dropped, and they walked on in silence till they came to a rise in the road overlooking a swampy meadow. In the midst of this stood a slim, consumptive young maple in a hectic of premature autumnal tints, and with that conscious air which the first colored trees have.
“I suppose you would like a branch of that,” said Gilbert, “for your vase.”
“Why, yes,” assented Mrs. Farrell. When he brought it to her, she had turned about and was facing homeward. “An olive branch?” she asked, with a tentative little burlesque.
“If you like,” said Gilbert, with a laugh that was not gay. “It isn’t quite the color; but it’s olive branch enough for all the peace you probably mean, and it’s sufficiently angry-looking for war when you happen to feel like making trouble again.”
The leaves were mainly of a pallid yellow, but their keen points and edges were red as if dipped in blood. She flung the bough away and started forward, dashing the back of her hand passionately across her eyes.
It was as though he had struck her. He made haste to come up with her. “Mrs. Farrell,” he faltered, dismayed at the words that had escaped him, “I’ve been atrociously rude.”
“Oh, not unusually so!” she said, darting a look upon him from gleaming eyes, while her lips quivered. “You seem to feel authorized to give me pain whenever you like. You needn’t do so much to make me know the difference between yourself and Mr. Easton.”
Gilbert’s face darkened. “Upon my word,” he said, “I think the less you say about that the better.”
“Why?” she retorted, trembling all over with excitement. “You force me every moment to remember his magnanimity and generosity; all your words and acts teach me how friendless I am without him. He never could believe so ill of a woman as you do; but if the case were changed, I don’t think he would choose the part of my torturer. And you are hisfriend!” She broke, and the tears fell down her face.
Gilbert walked speechless beside her. “It’s true,” he said at last, “Easton is a better man than I; he’s a manlier man, if you like—or if you mean that.”
She did not speak, but she slightly slackened her fierce pace, and seemed to be waiting for him to speak again.
“But I didn’t know that I had been giving you so much pain. I’m sorry—I’m ashamed—with all my heart. I ask your pardon.”
“Yes, yes! I know how you say all that. Oh, I know the superior stand you take! I know how you say to yourself, ‘It’s my business to treat her handsomely for Easton’s sake, whatever I think of her. Come, I’ll do the right thing, at any rate!’ You ask my pardon. Thanks, thanks; I give it in all meekness. Yes, let there be a truce between us. I can’t choose but be glad to be let alone. Will you walk on and leave me now, Mr. Gilbert, or let me leave you?”
“No, I can’t part from you so. Let it be peace, not a truce. I make no such reservations as you imagine. I beseech you to pardon my brutality and to forget my rudeness.”
She halted, and impulsively stretched out her hand toward him, and then suddenly withdrew it before he could take it. “Wait,” she said, seriously. “I can’t be friends with you yet, till I know whether you really think me worthy. If you don’t, you shall have no forgiveness of mine. You must be more than sorry that you hurt my feelings.”
“I will be as much sorry, and about as many things, as you like.”
“Oh, don’t try to turn it into a joke! You know what I mean. Did Mr. Easton tell you what I told him to say about the trouble between you? Did he lay the whole blame upon me? Did he say that I did it willfully and recklessly, because your friendship piqued me, and because—because—though I never thought of that before!—I was jealous of it?”
Gilbert did not smile at the slight confusion of ideas, but answered, gravely, “Easton was not theman to lay blame upon you—he would like it too well himself. Besides, I was unfair with him, and gave him no chance to speak in your defense.”
“Oh, how could you be so cruel as that? He was so true to you! I should think you never could forgive yourself for that. You ought to have heard him praise you. He told me everything. Yes, you did act grandly. But he could have done as much for you, and more, or he never would have suffered your self-sacrifice.”
“There is only one Easton in the world,” said Gilbert, gloomily; and he went on to talk of Easton’s character, his noble eccentricities, his beneficent life, and his heroic ideals. He spoke with a certain effect of self-compulsion very different from the light-hearted liking with which he had once before talked with her of Easton, but she listened reverently, and at the end she said with a sigh: “No, I see that I didn’t know him. Why, I hadn’t even imagined it! Whyshouldhe care forme?”
Gilbert did not undertake to answer the question, and she said, “But I am so glad you have told me so much about him. How proud I shall be to surprise him with it all!”
Gilbert made no sign of sharing her rapture, but she seemed not to heed him.
They were very near the house, now, and she turned on him an upward, sidelong look, as her lower stature obliged, and asked, “And you really think me worthy to be sorry?”
“Yes,” said Gilbert, with a heavy breath.
“Then I’ll forget your cruelty,” she said; “but don’t do it any more.” She dropped him a little nod, and went into the house without him. He stood there watching the black doorway through which she had vanished, but it was as if he had followed her, so wholly had all sense fled after her out of his face. He stirred painfully from his posture, and cast his eye upward at Easton’s room. The cold window met his glance with a gleam from which he shrank, with a sudden shock at the heart, as though he had caught Easton’s eye, and he turned and walked away into the nightfall.
EASTON began to show signs of decided convalescence. Day by day he became more susceptible of the kindnesses which his sympathizers yearned to lavish upon him, all the more ardently for being so long held aloof by the certainty that the best thing they could do was to let him alone; the ladies got out their recipes for sick-room delicacies again, and broths and broils were debated. One day he sat up in a chair to have his bed made, and then a great wave of rejoicing ran through the house. Mrs. Farrell created a wine jelly which, when it was turned out of the mold upon a plate, was as worshipfully admired as if it had been the successful casting in bronze of some great work of art.
Her spirits had begun to rise; that day she moved as if on air, and as he grew better and better she put off the moral and material tokens of her lingering bondage to fear. For some time she had suffered herself to wear those great hoops of Etruscan gold in her ears; now she replaced her penitential slippers and sober shoes with worldly boots; she blossomed again in the rich colors that became her; on the following Sunday she celebrated her release in a silk that insulted her past captivity, and sangfor joy as she swooped through the house in it. On Monday she bought out the small stock of worsteds at the West Pekin store, and sat matching them in her lap when Gilbert came out upon the piazza. He stopped to look at her, and she asked him if he had any taste in colors. “Men have, a great deal oftener than women will allow,” she said. “At least they are quite apt to have inspirations in color.”
“I don’t believe I have,” answered Gilbert, still looking at her radiance and not at the worsteds. “I lived long and happily without knowing some colors from others by name.”
Mrs. Farrell laughed. “Oh, I didn’t mean the names. Women are glibber than men with those. But you’d have been able to criticize the effect, wouldn’t you? You’d have known that blue wouldn’t do for a brunette, if you’d seen it on her?”
“I’m not so sure,” said Gilbert.
“Why, look!” cried Mrs. Farrell, taking up a delicate shade of blue and holding it against one cheek, while she fixed her eyes upon his with businesslike preoccupation. “There! don’t you see how we take the life out of each other? Don’t you see that it perfectly kills me?”
“Well, I don’t know. I should say that the worsted was getting the worst of it.”
“Worsted and worsted; a pun or an opinion?” demanded Mrs. Farrell, still holding the color to her cheek, and her eyes on his.
“Oh, either; one’s as good as the other.”
“I don’t believe you meant either. I’m sorryyou can’t help me about matching these wools, and I’ve a great mind to make use of you in another way. But I don’t suppose you would do it,” she said, glancing up at him as she straightened the skeins of yarn by slipping them over her two hands.
“What do you wish to do?”
“Why, I wish to wind these skeins into little balls, and—”
“Me to hold them, as you’re doing, whilst you wind? I don’t mind that.”
“Really? I think it’s the silliest position in the world for a man; and I can’t let you. No, no; you shall not.”
“Yes, but I will. Come. I wish to show you that my manly dignity can rise superior to holding worsteds.”
He took up a skein and stretched it on his hands; she loosened a thread and began to wind; both with gloomy brows. When she had half done, she flung down the ball, and burst into a laugh. “No, no; you can’t face it out. You look silly in spite of that noble frown. How do you suppose you appear to those ladies down there under the trees, with your hands raised in that gesture of stage-supplication? You look as if you were imploring me for your life—or something; and here I am making all these cabalistic motions,” she resumed her winding, “as if I were weaving a spell around you! Do let us stop it! And I’ll get Miss Jewett to help me.
“No, go on,” said Gilbert. “If you offer to stop, I shall clasp my hands!”
“Oh, oh!” shouted Mrs. Farrell. “Don’t, for pity’s sake! Was ever a poor sorceress so at her victim’s mercy before? This skein is nearly done. Will you put down your hands, you cruel object of my unhallowed arts?”
“I will, if you’ll let me put them up again, and help finish the other skeins. If you don’t consent, I’ll keep holding them so.”
“Well, then I’ll leave you in that interesting attitude.”
“If you dare to rise, I’ll follow you all about in it.”
“Oh dear me! I really believe you would. There, take up another skein.”
“No, you must put it on, yourself; I’ve just got my hands in the right places.”
“But you said you’d put them down if I’d let you put them up again,” lamented Mrs. Farrell.
“I’ve changed my mind. I said that before I perceived that I had you in my power. If you don’t hurry, I’ll exaggerate the attitude. Quick!”
She was laughing so that she could hardly arrange the yarn upon the framework so rigidly presented to her.
“Don’t hold your thumbs like sticks,” she besought him. “Have a little flexibility, if you have no pity. It’s some satisfaction to think youdolook foolish.”
“I have the consolation of suspecting that youfeelso. I’m quite willing to do the looking.”
Mrs. Farrell said nothing, but swiftly wound the yarn upon the ball, and, “Don’t hurry!” commanded Gilbert. “I’m not going to put my hands down till I like, anyway. So you may as well take your time.”
“Oh, Mr. Gilbert,” pleaded Mrs. Farrell. “How can you threaten me, when I’m so meekly letting you have your own way! I never should have supposed you were that kind of man.”
“Neither should I,” said Gilbert. “This is the first opportunity I’ve had to play the tyrant to one of your amiable sex, and I’m determined to abuse it.”
“Oh, that’s a likely story! With that conceited air of yours, when you are so good as to address a woman! Don’t be a humbug, if youarea faithless despot.”
“And don’t you employ harsh language in addressing me, Mrs. Farrell, or I’ll sit here all day with my hands outstretched to you.”
“All day? Oh—happy thought! Wind very slowly and tire him out!”
“Do! I could stop here until I changed into a mere figure in a bas-relief—a profile and the back of a lifted hand; and you a classic shape intent upon the flying thread—”
“That’s not fair, Mr. Gilbert. To make remarks upon me when you know I can’t help myself.”
“Don’t you like to have remarks made upon you?”
“Not when I can’t help myself.”
“Why not? I haven’t forbidden you to answer back.”
“But you would, if my answers didn’t suit you.How is it, if you don’t know anything about colors, that you dress in such very tolerable taste?”
“Do I? Mrs. Farrell, don’t take advantage of my helplessness to flatter me! I suppose it’s my tailor’s taste—which I always go against. And then, it’s New York.”
“Yes, New Yorkiswell dressed,” sighed Mrs. Farrell. “Oh dear me! Thestyleof some New York girls that I’ve seen! I suppose men can’t feel it aswedo.”
“Don’t be so sure of that. We can’t give any but the elementary names of things that a woman has on, but I don’t believe the subtlest effect of a dress is ever lost upon men; and I believe the soul of any man of imagination is as much taken with style in dressing as with beauty. Americans all adore it—perhaps because it’s so characteristic of American women that they seem almost to have invented it. It’s a curious thing—something different from beauty, something different from grace, something more charming than either, and as various as both. I should say it was the expression of personal character, and that American women have more style than any other women because they have more freedom, and utter themselves in dry-goods more fearlessly.”
Mrs. Farrell stopped winding the yarn a moment, and instinctively cast down her eyes over her draperies. He smiled.
“For shame!” she cried, indignantly, while her eyes dimmed with mortification at her self-betrayal. But she boldly grappled with the situation. “Didyou think I was thinking you thoughtmestylish? I know I am so; I had no need to think that. I was thinking that if ever you left the law and followed the true bent of your genius, New York ladies needn’t go to Worth for their dresses.”
“Isn’t that an unnecessarily elaborate bit of insult, considering that I hadn’t said a word to provoke it?”
“You smiled.”
“Why, you’ve been laughing all the time.”
“But I wasn’t laughing at you.”
“Whom were you laughing at?”
“I was laughing at myself.”
“Well, I merely smiled at you.”
But Mrs. Farrell was plainly hurt past jesting for the present. She wound furiously at the worsted, and they both kept silence.
At last Gilbert asked, “What is all this yarn for?”
“To knit a smoking-cap for Mr. Easton,” she said, coldly, and then neither spoke again. Presently she caught a half-finished skein from his hand, tossed the balls and skeins together in her lap, and, gathering them up, swept indoors, leaving him planted where he had sat confronting her.
In spite of the careless gayety of his banter, Gilbert had worn a look that was neither easy nor joyous. He did not seem much irritated by her excessive retaliation, but presently rose and walked listlessly up to the village to get his letters, and when he came back he went to his sister-in-law’s room with a letter which he showed her.
“Shall you go?” she asked, eagerly.
“I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m not on fire to go, but I don’t happen to be so. There’s a day or two for thinking it over. If it were not for Easton—”
“He’s a long while getting well,” said Mrs. Gilbert with an impatient sigh; “I don’t see why he’s so slow about it.”
“Well, Susan,” languidly reasoned Gilbert, “you’ve been about fifteen years yourself getting well, and you haven’t quite finished yet. You can’t consistently complain of a few weeks, more or less, in Easton. I dare say he would be well at once, if he could; but it isn’t a matter that he can hurry, exactly.”
“No,” said Mrs. Gilbert. “But aren’t you losing a great deal of time here, William? You came for two weeks, and you’ve stayed nearly six. Don’t you think Easton could get on without you, now?”
“Why, considering that Easton came here because he thought I’d like to have him, when I was merely a little under the weather, I don’t think it would be quite the thing for me to go off now, and leave him before he’s fairly on his legs.”
“That’s true,” sighed Mrs. Gilbert. “And I’m glad to have you so faithful to your friend, William. I’m sure you never could forgive yourself if you were recreant to him in the slightest thing. Your friendship has sacred claims upon you both. I have sometimes thought it was a little too romantic, but it’s a great thing to have the higheststandard in such matters, and you could never let your fidelity be less than Easton’s.”
Gilbert looked at her and pulled his mustache uneasily, but Mrs. Gilbert kept her eyes upon the sewing she had in hand. “Youand Mrs. Farrell seem to be friends at present. I have heard of your holding worsted for her to wind, just now. The ladies who saw you at a little distance thought it a very picturesque group, and seemed grateful for the topic you had given them. They talked about it a good deal. I suppose itwaspicturesque—at least her part of it. I don’t think manly grace is at its best under such circumstances, though I dare say you weren’t posing for spectators.”
“I had no quarrel with Mrs. Farrell,” said Gilbert, choosing to ignore the other points.
“No? I thought there seemed to be a little coldness at one time.”
“Perhaps the shyness of comparative strangers, Mrs. Gilbert.”
“William,” said Mrs. Gilbert, “I wish you would talk seriously with me a moment.”
“Then you must start a serious subject. You can’t expect me to be very earnest about genteel comedy, or even melodrama.”
“Do you mean that she’s always playing a part? Why, don’t you believe—”
“Excuse me, Susan,” said Gilbert, “I haven’t formulated any creed on that subject, and I’d rather you’d make your conversation a little less Socratic, this morning, if it’s quite the same to you.”
“I beg your pardon, William; I know that withyour notions to loyalty to your friend, you wouldn’t allow yourself to speculate about the nature of the woman he hoped to make his wife, and I honor you for your delicacy, though she’s only another woman to me. Easton would deal the same with himself, if the case were yours.”
Gilbert listened with a stolid but rather a haggard air, and his sister-in-law continued:
“I suppose she must make it difficult to treat her at times with the lofty respect that you’d like to use, and that you have to keephimin mind pretty constantly. And yet, I don’t know, after all. It seems to me that if you interpret her behavior generously”—Gilbert winced a little at the words, used almost as Easton had once used them—“and make due allowance for his histrionic temperament, it can’t be so very hard for an honorable man.”
“The clemency of your sentiments in regard to Mrs. Farrell is a continual surprise to me, Susan, when I remember what an outfit you gave her the time we first talked of her,” said Gilbert.
“Oh, you can easily convict me of inconsistency on any point,” answered his sister-in-law. “But why shouldn’t I see a change for the better in her? Why shouldn’t I sincerely believe her capable of nobler things than I once did?”
“You have all the reasons in the world; and if you had none, still, optimism is amiable. But really, do you know this is getting very tiresome? Am I to spend all my leisure moments with you in philosophizing Mrs. Farrell? I’m willing to takeany version of her that you give me. How can I doubt her devotion to Easton when I see her getting ready to knit him a smoking-cap? I know she’s sorry for having made that misunderstanding between him and me, for she said she was. Who wouldn’t believe a handsome young woman when she says she’s sorry? Perhaps another handsome young woman. Not I.”
“Now you’re talking in a very silly, cynical way, William, and you’d better say good morning, and come again when you’re in a different mood.”
“I’m willing enough to say good morning,” returned Gilbert, and went.
He went by an attraction which he could not resist to Easton’s room, and experienced again that heartquake with which he now always met his friend’s eye, and which he was always struggling to prevent or avert. It was a thing which his nerves might be reasoned out of, with due thought, and it did not come, when he was once in Easton’s presence and confronted him from time to time. But in the morning, when their eyes first met, or after any little absence, the shock was inevitable; and he knew, though he would not own it to himself, that he had been trying somehow to shun the encounter. The bitterest rage he had felt against his friend was bliss to this fear of the trust he saw in Easton’s face. He could best endure it when he could meet him in Mrs. Farrell’s presence. In the gay talk which he held with them together he could persuade himself that the harmless pleasure of the moment was all. He found a like respite when alone with her. Hedid not pretend to himself that he tried to avoid her; he knew that he sought her with feverish eagerness; now and then in the pauses of her voice a haggard consciousness blotted his joy in her charm, but when he parted from her he was sensible of a stupid and craven apprehension, as if the fascination of her presence were also a safeguard beyond which he could not hope for mercy from himself. At such times it was torture to meet Rachel Woodward, and the shy friendship which had sprung up between them died of this pain. His haunting inward blame seemed to look at him again from her clear eyes; he accused himself in the tones of her voice; she confronted him like an outer conscience, even when her regard seemed explicitly to refuse intelligence of what was in his heart.
At dinner, that day, Mrs. Farrell was very bright-eyed and rather subdued; she looked like a woman who had been having a cry. She talked amiably with everybody, as was now her wont, and when she found herself, late in the afternoon, again on the piazza with Gilbert, she said, “You’re sorry, I suppose.”
“Not the least,” he answered, with nervous abruptness. “Why should I be sorry? Because you made an outrageous speech to me?”
“You are rather a vindictive person, aren’t you?” she asked, beginning again.
“No—I don’t think so,” returned Gilbert. “Do you?”
“You cherished a grudge against me a good while, and if you hadn’t happened to overdo it you’d be still bearing malice, I suppose.”
“And because you overdid it this morning you’re able to pardon me now. I see the process of your reasoning. Well, hereafter I shall not offend you by smiling; I’m going to frown at everything you do.”
“No, don’t do that! I want you to be very kind to me.”
“Yes? How is a gentleman to be kind to a lady?”
“Everything depends upon character and circumstance. If she isn’t the wisest of her sex—so few of us are—and has been used to doing and saying quite what she pleased, without regard to consequences, and she finds herself in a position where circumspection is her duty, he ought to look about for her and guard her.”
“From what?”
“Oh—hawks, and lynxes, and—cats. They’re everywhere.”
Mrs. Farrell sat down on the benching and drew from her pocket the balls of worsted which she had loosely rolled in a handkerchief, together with some knitting already begun, and went on with the work, while Gilbert stood before her, looking down at her.
“You oughtn’t to have helped me with these this morning,” she said, pushing the little balls about and sorting them for the right colors.
“You asked me to do it!”
“But you ought to have refused. It was because I thought you were trying to embarrass me, and take advantage of my foolishness, that I got angry and was rude to you.”
Gilbert said nothing, and after a little more comparison of the worsteds Mrs. Farrell made her decision, and took her knitting in her hand.
“Help me, don’t hinder me!” she went on in a low voice. “Don’t be amused at me; let me alone; keep away from me; don’t make me talked about!”
“Shall I go now?” asked Gilbert, huskily.
Mrs. Farrell looked up at him in astonishment that dispersed all other emotions. “Oh, good gracious!” she cried, “they’re all alike, after all! No, you poor—man, you! You must stay, now, till some one comes up; and don’t run off the instant they do come! And you must keep on talking,now. Come, let us converse of various matters—