“‘Whether the sea is boiling hot,And whether pigs have wings.’
“‘Whether the sea is boiling hot,And whether pigs have wings.’
“‘Whether the sea is boiling hot,And whether pigs have wings.’
There, thank Heaven! there comes Mrs. Stevenson. Pay some attention to her. Ask her about her art, as she calls it, and try to seem interested. Mrs. Stevenson, I’m in despair over these worsteds. I can make nothing of them. Did you see any at the Bazar, the other day, when you were at Quopsaug? There ought to be crewels in that immense assortment. Where is that lavender? Where, oh, tell me where, is that little lavender gone? Perhaps it’s in my pocket! Perhaps it’s rolled under the bench. No! Then I’ve left it in my room, and I’ll have to go after it. Excuse!” She caught her worsteds against her dress, and, turning a sidelong glance upon him as she whirled past, made “Talk!” with mute lips, and left him.
When she came back, neither he nor Mrs. Stevenson was there. They had apparently dispersed each other. She sat down awhile and knitted contentedly, and then went with her work to visit Mrs. Gilbert, who had not been at dinner.
“I’m very glad to see you,” said Mrs. Gilbert, who had a flask of cologne in her hand, and moistened her forehead with it from time to time as she talked.
“Headache?” suggested Mrs. Farrell.
“Yes, only a minor headache—nothing heroic at all. It’s merely something to occupy the mind. Do you happen to know where my brother is?”
“I left him with Mrs. Stevenson on the piazza, a few moments ago—talking art, I suppose.” Mrs. Farrell adventured this. “They’re not there, now; perhaps he’s gone to look at her works.”
“That’s the smoking-cap, is it?” asked Mrs. Gilbert.
Mrs. Farrell held up at arm’s length the small circle of the crown which she had so far knitted, and, gazing at it in deep preoccupation, answered, “Yes. These are the colors,” she added. She leaned toward the other, and held them forward in both hands. “I think it’s pretty well for West Pekin.”
“I’ve no doubt it will be charming,” said Mrs. Gilbert. “I don’t approve of smoking, of course, but I hope he’ll soon be able to use his smoking-cap. I was just thinking about you, Mrs. Farrell. I want Mr. Easton to get well as soon as possible, so that you can begin to have a good, long, commonplace courtship. If you were a daughter of mine—”
“I should be a pretty old daughter for you, Mrs. Gilbert,” said Mrs. Farrell, flatteringly.
“Oh, I fancy not so very. How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-four.”
“And I’m forty-five, and look fifty. You’re still in your first youth, and I’m in my first old age. I could easily be your mother.”
“I wish you were! I should be the better for being your daughter, Mrs. Gilbert.”
“I don’t know. I shouldn’t like to promise you that. But sometimes I think I could have been a good mother, or at least that children would have made a good mother of me, for I believe that half the goodness that women get credit for is forced upon them by those little helpless troubles. Men could be just as good if they had the care and burden of children—men are so very near being very good as it is.”
“Iknowit,” sighed Mrs. Farrell. “I never knew my own mother,” she added; “if I had, I might have been a better woman. But are we to blame, I wonder, that we are not so good as we might have been—you if you’d had children, and I if I had had a mother?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I dare say we shall never be judged so harshly anywhere else as we are in this world.”
“That’s true!” said Mrs. Farrell, bitterly.
“Not that we don’t stand in need of judgment,” continued the other, “as much as we do of mercy. It’s wholesome, and I’ve never been unjustly blamed yet that I didn’t feel I deserved it all, andmore. Oh, Mrs. Farrell, if I were really to speak to you as my daughter—”
“Don’t call me Mrs. Farrell! Call me by my own name,” cried the younger woman, impulsively. “Call me—Rosabel.”
“Is that your name? I took it for granted you were Isabel. It’s a very pretty name, very sweet and quaint; but I won’t call you by it; it would make you more of a stranger to me than Mrs. Farrell does.”
“Well, no matter. You shall call me what you like. Come; you said if you were to speak to me as your daughter—”
“Oh, I’m not certain whether I can go on, after all. Perhaps what I was going to say would degenerate into a kind of lecture on love and marriage in the abstract. If I had a daughter whose love affair had been so romantic as yours, I believe I should tell her to make all the surer of her heart on account of the romance. I’m afraid that in matters of love, romance is a dangerous element. Love ought to be perfectly ordinary, regular, and every-day like.”
“Those are very heretical ideas!” said Mrs. Farrell, shaking her head.
“Yes, yes, I dare say,” answered Mrs. Gilbert; “but, as I said before, I hope for both your sakes that you and Mr. Easton will have a good stupid wooing—at least a year of it—when he gets well.”
“I shall not object to that, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Farrell, demurely.
“No, I should hope you were too much of a woman. That’s a woman’s reign, the time of courtship. Her lover is never truly subject to her again. Make it as long as you can—long enough to get the romance out of your heads. And I wish you a sound quarrel or two.”
“Oh! Now youarejoking.”
“Yes, I am. I hope you may never say an unkind word to each other. Have you a temper?”
“Not much, I believe.”
“Has he?”
“I’ve been a little afraid of him once or twice.”
“Already? Well, I think it’s a pity you haven’t a temper, too. Don’t be one of the coldly self-possessed kind when he is angry; it’s far better to be frightened.”
“I will try always to be frightened. But I’m not sure that it was any violence of his that scared me, so much as his—”
“What?”
“Well, his goodness—or somebody else’s badness. Mine, for example.”
“Ah yes! He is a good man. It’s a merit in a husband, goodness is; though I doubt very much if young people often think of that; they’re so blinded by each other’s idolatry that they have no sense of good or bad; they adore one quite as much as the other. And you must consider yourself a young person. You must have been very young when you were married, Mrs. Farrell.”
“Yes, I was very young indeed. It seems a great while ago. And afterward my life was veryunhappy—after his death—they made it so. Mrs. Gilbert,” she cried, “I know you don’t like a great many things in me; but perhaps you would like more if you knew more.”
“Yes, but don’t tell them. One must have something to disapprove of in others, or how can one respect oneself?”
“I don’t say that the fault was all theirs; I don’t pretend that I was a very meek or manageable sister, but only that I could have been better with better people. They were vulgar to the tips of their fingers. And that drove me from them at last.”
They sat some moments without saying anything, Mrs. Gilbert keeping her eyes intent upon Mrs. Farrell’s face, whose fallen eyes in turn were fixed upon her work. Then the former said with a little sigh, “So you think I don’t like some things about you! My dear, I like altogether too many. Yes,” she continued, absently, studying the beautiful face, “I supposeIshould, too.”
“Should what?” asked Mrs. Farrell.
“Make a fool of myself, if I were a man. I never could resist such a face as yours; I only wonder they don’t have more power. But recollect, my dear, that somehow, sometime, you’ll be held responsible for your power, if you abuse it, even though we poor mortals seem to ask nothing better than to be made fools of by you.”
“Was that what you were going to say?” asked Mrs. Farrell, lifting her eyes from her work and looking keenly at Mrs. Gilbert.
“No, it wasn’t. But I’m so far off the track,now, I won’t say it. After all, it might seem like a glittering generality about—”
The women relaxed their wary regard; the elder did not offer to go on, and the younger did not urge her. Mrs. Farrell knitted half a round on the smoking-cap, as if to gain a new starting point, and then dropped her work in her lap and laid her hands, one on top of the other, over it. “Did you ever try inhaling the fumes of coffee for your headaches?” she asked.
“Oh, my dear, I gave that up away back in the Dark Ages,” returned Mrs. Gilbert, resorting to the cologne.
“I suppose the cologne does you no good?”
“Not the least in the world. But one must do something.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Farrell, drawing the word in with a long breath, “one must do something.” She took up her work again and knitted awhile before she added, “I wonder if a man would go on forever doing something that he knew did him no good, as a woman does?”
“No, I suppose not. Men are very queer,” said Mrs. Gilbert, gravely. “They’re quite inert. But that gives them some of their advantages.”
“They have pretty nearly all the advantages, haven’t they?” asked Mrs. Farrell, quickly. “Even when some woman makes fools of them! At least when that happens they have all the other women on their side.” As she knitted rapidly on she had now and then a little tremulous motion of the head that shook the gold hoops in her ears against her neck.
“Well, then they have a right to our pity.”
“Oh, do you think so? It seems to me that she has a right to more.” She looked down on either side of her at the floor. “I thought I brought both balls of that ashes of roses with me.” Mrs. Gilbert looked about the carpet in her vicinity. “Don’t trouble yourself. It’s no matter. I think I won’t use it here, after all. I’ll use this brown. A woman never makes a fool of a man unless she respects him very much. Of course there must be something fascinating about him, or she wouldn’t care to have him care for her, at all; it would be disgusting.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Gilbert.
“And then,” continued Mrs. Farrell, keeping her eyes on her work and knitting faster and faster, “if she has any heart at all, it must be half broken to think of what she’s done. The falsest coquette that ever was would feel like bowing down to true love in a man; and what is she to do if ever the worst comes to the worst and she finds she’s afraid she doesn’t love him? She must know that his good faith is ten million times stronger than her looks, and that it has a claim which she must try to answer somehow. Shall she marry him out of pity, and put him to the shame of finding it out some day? That would be the worst kind of treachery. No, no; she couldn’t do that! And can she tell him how wicked she has been, and ask him never to see her face or breathe her name or hear it spoken again? That would be easy, if it were only for her! But if she did this, if she could have the courage to kill his faith in her with such a blow as that, and toblacken his life with shame for having loved her, what better would she be than a murderess?”
She grew pale as she spoke, but no tremor now shook the hoops in her ears; she only wrought the more swiftly and kept her eyes upon the flying needle, while a kind of awe began to express itself in the gaze that Mrs. Gilbert bent upon her.
“What should you thinkthenof the power of a pretty face?” asked Mrs. Farrell, flashing a curious look of self-scorn upon her. “What could the pretty face do for her, or for him? Could it help her to forgive herself, or help him to forget her? And which would have the greatest claim to the pity of the spectators?—supposing there were spectators of the tragedy, and there nearly always are. Come, imagine some such woman, Mrs. Gilbert, and imagine her your daughter—you were imaginingmeyour daughter, just now—and tell me what you would say to her. You wouldn’t know what to say, even to your own daughter? Oh! I thought you might throw some light upon such a case.” She had lifted her eyes with fierce challenge to Mrs. Gilbert’s, but now she dropped them again upon her work. “But what if the case were still worse? Can you imagine so much as its being worse?”
“Yes, I can imagine its being worse,” said Mrs. Gilbert, whose visage seemed to age suddenly with a premonition that a thing long dreaded, long expected, was now coming, in spite of all attempted disbelief.
“Oh yes, certainly! You were wondering just now that beauty didn’t have greater power! Suppose that even in all this wretchedness, this miserable daughter of yours was afraid— Ah! Mrs. Gilbert,” she cried, starting violently to her feet, “you were trying a minute ago—don’t you think I knew your drift?—to peep into my heart! How do you like to have it flung wide open to you?” She confronted Mrs. Gilbert, who had risen too, with a wild reproach, as if she had made the wrong another’s by tearing the secret of it from her own breast. Mrs. Gilbert answered her nothing, and in another instant she faltered, “Don’t blame him, don’t be harsh with him. But, oh, in the name of mercy, send him away!”
IT was already dark when Gilbert knocked at his sister-in-law’s door. She was sitting in the chair from which she had risen at parting with Mrs. Farrell, and into which she sank again at her going. Gilbert sat down before her, but did not speak.
“Have you made up your mind when you shall go, William?” she asked, gently.
“I haven’t made up my mind that I shall go at all,” he answered, in a sullen tone.
“But I think you had better,” she said as before.
“I am always glad, Susan, of advice that costs me nothing,” he returned, with an affectation of his habitual lightness.
“I have been thinking about you, William, and I want you to go to New York at once. Your friend is out of all danger, now, and it’s you who are in danger.”
“You know I never was good at conundrums, Mrs. Gilbert. May I ask what particular peril is threatening me at present?”
“A peril that an honest man runs from—the danger of doing a great wrong, of committing a cowardly breach of faith.”
“Upon my word, Susan, you are using words—”
“Oh, don’t catch at my words, my poor boy. Have you nothing to reproach yourself with? If you haven’t, I beg your pardon with all my heart, and I will be glad to take back my words, yes, take them back upon my knees!”
“What is all this coil about? What are you worrying me with these emotional mysteries for?” demanded Gilbert, angrily, yet with a note of ungenuine bluster in his voice. “What are you trying to get at?”
“Your heart, William; your conscience, your honor, your self-respect. Do you think I am blind? Do you think I have not seen it all? If you will tell me you don’t know what I mean, and make me believe it, I will never call myself unhappy again.”
“If you have suffered yourself to be made uncomfortable by any affair or condition of mine,” said Gilbert, “I advise you to console yourself by reflecting that it doesn’t really concern you. How long is it,” he demanded, savagely, “since you have felt authorized to interfere in my questions of honor and conscience?”
“Ever since a motherless boy let a childless woman love him. Oh, think that I do love you, my dear, and speak to you out of my jealousy for your stainless good faith, your sacred friendship, your unsullied life! You know what I mean. Think that she is pledged by everything that is good in her to your friend. If you believe she does not love him, let her break with him how and when she will. But don’t you be her wicked hope—wickeder a thousand times than she!—don’t be the temptation,the refuge of her falseness. Leave her to herself! You could only add your treason to hers by staying!”
“Wicked hope, temptation, treason—this is all rather theatrical for you, Susan,” said Gilbert, with an attempt to smile. He frowned instead. “And what do I owe to Easton in the way of loyalty? Do you know how little care he has had for me? Do you know—”
“No, no, no! I don’t know, Iwon’tknow! If he has wronged you in any way, you are only the more bound to be faithful to him in such a case as this. But I will never believe that Easton has wronged you willingly, and you don’t believe it, either, whatever the trouble is that she made between you—you know you don’t. You are talking away your own sense of guilt, or trying to. Well, I can’t blame you for that; but keep these things to silence your conscience with when you are alone; you will need them all. How long have you watched by your friend’s pillow with the hope of revenge in your heart?”
Mrs. Gilbert rose from her chair and walked to one of the windows, and then came and paused in front of Gilbert, where he now stood leaning against the mantelpiece. “Come,” she entreated, “youwillgo away, won’t you, William? I know you never meant him wrong. It has all been something that has stolen upon you, but you will go now, won’t you?”
“No, I will not go!”
“You will remain?”
“Till such time as I see fit. I am not a boy, to be sent hither and thither.”
“What good will you remain for?” demanded the woman, sternly. “Or do you choose to remain for evil? Every hour that you remain deepens your responsibility. Some things have been talked of already. How long will it be before the whole house sees that you are in love with the woman promised to your friend?”
“Do you suppose I care what this houseful of spying, tattling women see or say?”
“There are no spies and no tattlers; but if they were, a man who hadn’t shut his senses against his own consciencewouldcare. No one blames you as yet, but the time will soon be when you will make the blame all your own.”
“I wouldn’t ask her to share it.”
“Oh, very fine! you think your brave words will make a brave affair of a cowardly, sneaking treason!”
“Susan!”
“William! These people who are beginning to talk you over do not know what I know. They see that you are beginning to be fascinated with her, ashewas. They don’t know that you have believed her false and shallow from the first, and that if you have any hopes of her love now, they are in your belief that after all that has happened she is still too false and shallow to be true to him.Hewas taken with what was best in her, with all that he believed was good. But you have dared to love her in the hope that she had no principles and no heart.You are ready to lay your honor at her feet, to give all that makes life worth having for what would make your whole life a sorrow and a shame. If you could commit this crime against Easton and yourself and her, if you could win the heart you think so empty and so fickle, what would you do with it? If you could make her false enough to love you, how could you ever have peace again? How could you ever meet each other’s eyes without seeing the memory of your common falsehood in them? Think— Oh, my dear, dear boy, forgive me! I know that it isn’t yourfault; I take it all back, all that I have said against you; I don’t blame you for loving her—how could you help it? She is charming—yes, she charms me, too; and to a man she must make all other women seem so blank and poor and plain! But now you mustn’t love her: she cannot be yours without a wrong that when you’re away from her you must shudder at. And—and—you will go, won’t you, William?”
Gilbert’s arm dropped from the mantel where it lay, to his side. “I will go,” he said, sullenly. “But I acknowledge nothing of all that you have chosen to attribute to me, motive or fact. And you must be aware that you have said things to me that are not to be forgiven.”
He turned to go out of the room, without looking at her, but she cried after him: “Never mind forgiving me, my dear. Only go now, in time to forgive yourself, and I will gladly let you hate me all your life. Good-by, good-by; God bless you and keep you!”
He did not answer, nor turn about, but closed the door behind him and left her standing with her hands clenched, in the gesture of her final appeal. She sank into her chair, spent by the victory she had won.
Gilbert went to the room which he had been occupying since his constant attendance upon Easton had ceased to be necessary, and began to gather together the things scattered about the room. It was a great and bewildering labor, but he had succeeded in heaping many of them into his valise when Rachel Woodward appeared with his lighted lamp. Then he knew that he had been working in the dark. “Oh, thank you, thank you,” he said, in a strange voice of unconscious, formal politeness. “I—I was just going away, and it’s rather difficult getting these things together without a light.”
“You are going away?” she asked.
“Yes; I had a letter this morning recalling me to New York, but I hadn’t made up my mind to go until just now. I’m going to try to catch the express; I’ll get a man to drive me over from the hotel, and I’ll send him back from there for this bag.”
“And you are going at once?” she said, almost gladly.
“Yes,” he said; and he gave her an address, to which he asked her to have her mother send the account of her charges against him. With a little hesitation he offered her his hand, and she took it with something like a show of penitence. “Good-by,” said he, “I hope if you ever have occasion tothink of me, you’ll be lenient to my memory; and if it isn’t the thing for me to say that I feel as if I somehow owed you a debt of gratitude for being what you are, why, I hope you’ll excuse it to the confusion of the parting moment.”
Rachel’s face flushed a little, but she did not try to respond to the odd compliment, and Gilbert said he must go and take leave of Easton. He went abruptly to his friend’s room, but faltered a moment before he softly turned the door-knob. It was dark within, and the long and even breathing from the bed where Easton lay revealed that he was asleep. Gilbert stood a moment beside him, and then leaned over and peered through the darkness with his face close to the sleeper’s. Neither stirred. Gilbert waited another moment, and with a heavy sigh crept from the room. He went to his sister’s door, at which he knocked, but impatiently opened it without waiting to be bidden enter. Mrs. Gilbert looked at him without surprise.
“I came back on a small matter of business, Susan. I neglected to say, a moment ago, that I think myself an infamous wretch, totally unworthy of your pains and affection. You are right in everything. I thought I’d mention it in justice to you; we all like to have our little impressions confirmed. Good-by.”
“Oh, my dear, good boy! I knew you wouldn’t leave me so; I knew you would come back.” She took his hand between her own, and he bent over and kissed the pale fingers that clasped his with their weak, nervous stress. “You’re so good, mydear, that I’ve half a mind not to let you go; but I think you had better go. Don’t you?”
“Yes; I don’t wish to stay. Very likely I should be able to behave myself; but it would be an experiment, and I haven’t time for it. On the whole,” he said, with a smile, “I’d as lief be innocent as virtuous.”
“Oh, yes indeed,” answered Mrs. Gilbert, “it’s preferable in some cases, decidedly. You’re not so young as you were when I used to kiss you, William,” she added, “but neither am I, and I’m really going to give you a kiss now for your exemplary obedience, and for good-by.”
“You overwhelm me, Susan.Noneof the women at Woodward farm seem able to resist my fascinations. I think perhaps I had better go away onyouraccount.”
He stooped down and took the kiss she had volunteered, and then with another clasp of the hand he went.
The moon had risen, and was striking keenly through the thin foliage of the avenue of white birches which the highway became in its approach to the farmhouse, and in the leaf-broken light he saw drifting before him a figure which he knew. He stopped, and trembled from head to foot. Then, whatever may have seemed the better part for him to choose, he plunged forward again, and overtook her.
“You are going away,” she said, half turning her face upon him. “I came here so that you could not go without seeing me. I could not bearto have you go away thinking I was such a heartless woman as you do, with no care or regret for all the trouble I’ve made you.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that,” said Gilbert; “I wasn’t thinking so much of you as of a man—excuse the egotism—who has a great deal more to answer for.”
“Oh no, no!”
“Sometime, when you tell Easton about it all, as you must, I want you to excuse me to him; no one else can. Tell him—tell him that all I had to urge in my own behalf was that I loved you.”
“No, no, no! You mustn’t speak to me in that way! It’s too dreadful.”
“Oh yes, it’s dreadful. But you can excuse it if he couldn’t. How could you excuse me if I didn’t love you? Why else should we be parting? I must have loved you from the first—before I knew. What else could have made me so bitter with poor Easton about what he told you? I knew he never meant me any harm; I knew he couldn’t; he was a man to have died for me. I was mad with jealousy. Did you mean it? You managed it well! But I loved you— What a fool I am! Don’t come any farther; in Heaven’s name go back! No,” he said, perceiving that she faltered in her steps, as if she were about to sink, “don’t stop—come on.” He had caught her hand, and now he drew it through his arm, and hurried forward. “Yes, come! I have something to ask you. I want you to tell me that since you have felt yourself bound to him, you have never—I want you to tell me that I wasaltogether in a delusion about you, and that you have done nothing to make me recreant to him.”
“Oh, oh, oh!” she moaned. “How pitiless you are! How hard, how hard you make it for me!” She released her hand and pressed it against his arm in the eagerness of her entreaty. “Leave me—do leave me—the poor hope that I have seemed worse than I was!”
He threw up his arm across his forehead and started a few paces onward.
She hastened after him. “And do believe,” she implored him, “that I only wanted to meet you to-night to say—to—to—somehow to make it easier for you to go. Indeed, indeed—Don’t leave me to despair!”
He halted, and confronted her. “Was that what you came for? I thought it might have been to see if you couldn’t make me say what I have just said; I fancied you might have wished to send me away beggared in everything that makes a man able to face the past and the future, and to meet the eyes of honest men. I deserved it. But I was mistaken, was I?” he asked, with a bitter derision. “Well, good-by!”
“No, no! You shall never go, believing such a thing as that! If Ihatedyou—hated you to death—how could I wish to do that to you? Ah, youdon’tbelieve it. You—”
But he turned from her, and hurried swiftly down the lane without another look or word.
THE summer was past, but the pageant of autumn was yet undimmed. In the wet meadows of the lowlands, even in the last days of August, before the goldenrod was in its glory, the young maples lit their torches; and what might have seemed their dropping fires crept from sumac to sumac, by the vines in the grass and over the walls, till all the trees, kindling day by day, stood at last a flame of red and gold against the sky. The jay scolded among the luminous boughs; across the pale heaven the far-voiced crows swam in the mellow sunshine. The pastures took on again the green of May; the patches of corn near the farmhouses rustled dry in the soft wind; between the ranks of the stalks lolled the rounded pumpkins.
Many of the summer boarders at Woodward farm had already gone home. The two young girls had gone with each a box full of fern roots and an inordinate pasteboard case full of pressed ferns. Mrs. Stevenson had stayed later than she had meant, in order to complete a study of cat-tails with autumn foliage. It was the best thing that she had done, and really better than anybody had ever expected her to do. It sold afterward for enough money to confirm her in her belief that wifehoodwas no more the whole of womanhood than husbandhood was of manhood, and that to expect her to keep house would be the same as asking every man, no matter what his business might be, to make his own clothes and mend his own shoes.
The husbands of three of the married ladies came one final Saturday night, and departed with them by a much later train than they had ever taken before, on the Monday morning following. These ladies were going home to take up their domestic burdens again for the sake of the men who had toiled all summer long in the city for them. It was a sacrifice, but, thanks to the wonderful air of West Pekin, and to Mrs. Woodward’s excellent country fare, they were equal to it; at least they did not complain, or said they did not, which is the same thing. The driver from the station came to fetch them away with his yellow Concord stage, and the ladies got upon the outside seats with him, and waved their handkerchiefs to those left behind. The husbands tried to shout back something epigrammatic as they drove off, but these things are usually lost in the rattle of the wheels, and, even when heard, often prove merely an earnest of good will in the humorous direction, and are apt to fall flat upon the kindliest ear.
Mrs. Gilbert was among the latest who remained. Under the circumstances she might not have chosen to remain, and perhaps her prolonged stay was an offering to appearances, the fetish before which women will put themselves to any torment. Her husband was not coming for her, and she sat aloneamid her preparations for departure when Mrs. Farrell, in passing her open door, lingered half wistfully and looked in upon her. Since that day which was doubtless always in both their minds whenever they met, they had neither shunned nor sought each other, but there had been no intimacy between them.
“Won’t you come in, Mrs. Farrell?” asked the elder lady, with a glance at the jaded beauty of the other.
“You are really on the wing at last,” said Mrs. Farrell, evasively accepting the invitation. She came in, looking sad and distraught, and sat down with an impermanent air.
“Yes, I suppose one may call itwing, for want of a better word,” said Mrs. Gilbert, who indeed did not look much like flying. Presently she added, in the silence that ensued, “You are not looking very well, Mrs. Farrell.”
“No?” said Mrs. Farrell. “Why should I look well? But I don’t know that I don’t feel as well as usual in the way I suppose you mean.”
“I’m sorry you don’t feel well in every way,” said Mrs. Gilbert, responding to so much of an advance as might be made to her in Mrs. Farrell’s dispirited words; and after another little silence, she said, “Mr. Easton seems to have gained a great deal in the last week.”
“Yes, he is very much better; he is going away soon; he will not be here many days longer.”
“Mrs. Farrell,” said Mrs. Gilbert, “I wish you would let me say something to you.”
“Oh, say anything you like. Why shouldn’t you?” returned Mrs. Farrell, not resentfully, but in the same dispirited tone.
“I know you don’t trust me,” began Mrs. Gilbert.
“There isn’t much trust lost between us, is there?” asked Mrs. Farrell as before.
“But I hope you will believe,” continued Mrs. Gilbert, “that when we last spoke here together I wasn’t trying to interfere with what you might consider entirely your own affair from any mean or idle motive. If I was trying to pry into your heart, as you said then, it was because it seemed to me that it was partly my affair, too.”
“I didn’t mean to resent anything you did or said,” answered Mrs. Farrell. “It wasn’t my own affair altogether. Nothing that’s wrong can be one’s own affair, I suppose; it belongs to the whole world.” Mrs. Gilbert looked a little surprised at the wisdom of this, which had its own curious pathos, coming from whom it did, and Mrs. Farrell spoke again with sudden impetuosity, “Oh, Mrs. Gilbert, I hope you are not judging me harshly!”
“No, I am trying not to judge you at all.”
“Because,” continued Mrs. Farrell, “whatever I have done, I am not doing my own pleasure now, and my part isn’t an easy one to play.”
“I’m sorry you must play a part at all—my dear,” said Mrs. Gilbert, with impulsive kindness. “Why must you? Or, no, now itisall your affair, and I have no right to ask you anything. Don’t tell me—don’t speak to me about it!”
“But if I don’t speak to you, whom shall I speak to? And I shall go wild if I don’t speak to some one! Oh, what shall I do?”
“Do?”
“Yes, yes; it drives me to despair! Ought I to break with him now, at once, or wait and wait? Or shall I go on and marry him? I respect and honor him with my whole heart, indeed I do; and if he took me away with him—away to Europe, somewhere—for years and years, I know I should be good, and I should try hard to make him happy, and never, never let him know that I didn’t care for him as he did for me. Women often marry for money, for ambition, for mere board and lodging; you know they do; and why shouldn’t I marry him because I can’t bear to tell him I’m afraid I don’t love him?”
“That’s a question that nobody can answer for you,” said Mrs. Gilbert. “But all those marriages are abominable; and even to marry from respect seems wrong—hideous.”
“Yes, oh yes, itishideous; it would be making this wearisome deceit a lifelong burden. I know what it would be better than anyone could tell me. I feel the horror of it every minute, and it isn’t for myself that I care now; it’s the shame to him; it seems to ridicule and degrade him; it’s ghastly! And he so generous and high-minded, he never could think that I wasn’t always just as good and constant as he was. No, I’m not fit for him, and I never was. He’s whole worlds above me, and it would wear my life out trying to be what he thinksme, and even then I couldn’t be it. Oh, why did he fall in love withme, when there are so many women in the world who would have been so happy in the love of such a man? Why did he ever see me? Why did he come here? Good-by, Mrs. Gilbert, good-by! I wish I were dead!”
Mrs. Gilbert caught her in an impetuous embrace of pity and atonement. Yet, an hour after, when she finally parted from her, it was by no means with equal tenderness; it was guardedly, almost coldly.
A week later, Ben Woodward asked his mother’s leave to go visit his married sister, who lived at Rock Island, Illinois. He urged that, now her boarders were mostly gone, she did not need him so much about the house; he hung his head and kicked the chips of the woodpile by which they stood. She looked at him a moment, and, fetching a long breath, said he was a good son and she wished he should please himself.
The next morning he kissed her and Rachel, shook hands with his father, nodded to his brothers, and started off toward the village, carrying his bag. At the foot of the hill on which the village stood he met Mrs. Farrell, who was coming from the post-office with letters in one hand. With the other she held by their stems some bright autumn leaves, and she stooped from time to time and added to them from the fallen splendors about her feet. It ought to have been a poet or a painter who met Mrs. Farrell in the country road, under the tinted maples, that morning, but it was only a simple farm boy whose soul was inarticulate in its tender pain.When she saw him she put the leaves and letters together in one hand, and began to feel in her pocket with the other. His face flushed as he came up to her, where she stood waiting for him, and blanched with a foolish, hopeless pleasure in the sight of her.
“Why, Ben!” she said, sadly, yet with an eye that would gleam a little as she let it stray over the poor fellow’s uncouth best clothes, “are you going away?” She must have known that he was.
“Yes,” said Ben, uneasily.
“And did you mean to go without saying good-by to me?” she asked, with soft reproach.
“Well, I didn’t see what good it was going to do.”
“Why, we might never meet again, Ben,” she said, solemnly. And as Ben shifted his bag from his one hand to the other, she took the hand left free and tried to make its great red fingers close over something she pressed into the palm. “I want you to take this to remember me by, Ben,” she said; but the young fellow, glancing at the gold pencil she had left in his grasp, shook his head and put the gift back in her hand.
“I don’t need anything to remember you by, Mrs. Farrell,” he said, huskily, looking at her half-amused, half-daunted face. “If you can give me anything to forget you by, I’ll take it,” and Ben, as if he had made a point which he might not hope to surpass, was going to press by her, when she placed herself full in front of him and would not let him.
“Oh, Ben,” she said, “how can you talk so tome? You know I have always thought you such a friend of mine, and you know I like you and think ever so much of your good opinion. I shall never let you pass till you take back those cruel words. Will you take them back?”
“Yes,” said Ben, helpless before those still, dark eyes, “I will if you want I should.”
“And will you try to remember me—remember me kindly, and not think hardly of anything I’ve done?”
“You know well enough, Mrs. Farrell,” said the boy, with a sort of ireful pathos, “that I would do anything you asked me to, and always would. Don’t, don’t mind what I said. You know how I like you, and wouldn’t forget you if I could.”
“Oh, Ben, Ben, I’m very unhappy,” she broke out.
“Don’t mind it,” said Ben, with the egotism of love, but touchingly unselfish even in this egotism. “You needn’t be troubled about me. I always knew just as well as you that it was all foolishness, and I didn’t ever mean to let it vex you. Don’t mind it; I shall get over it, I suppose, and if I never do, I hope even when you’re a married woman it won’t be any harm for me to think you cared enough for me to be sorry that—that I was such a fool.”
She looked at him, puzzled by his misconception, but, divining it, she said instantly, “No indeed, Ben; whatever becomes of me, I shall be only too proud to think of you as my dear, dear friend. I haven’t had so many that I could spare you. I only wish I half deserved you. Ben!” cried Mrs.Farrell, abruptly, “do you know what I wish I was? I wish I was five or six years younger, so as to be a little younger than you; and I wish I was a good, simple girl, like some of these about here, and you had bought a farm out in Iowa, and you were taking me out there with you this peaceful, lovely morning.”
“Don’t, Mrs. Farrell!” implored Ben.
“I do, Ben, I do! And if I were such a girl as that, I would work for you like a slave from morning till night; and I would obey you in everything; and all that I should ask would be that you should keep me there out of sight of everybody, and never let me go anywhere, or speak to a living soul but you. And, oh, Ben, you would be very kind and patient with me, wouldn’t you? But it can’t be, it can’t be.”
She stooped down and gathered up some letters which had slipped from her hand; Ben let her; he had his bag to hold, and he was not used to offering little services to ladies. When she lifted her face again and confronted him, “Heis a good man, too; don’t you think he is, Ben?” she asked, brushing her hand across her eyes.
“Yes; there a’n’t many like him,” answered Ben, soberly.
“Do you think he’s too good for me?”
“I don’t think anybody could be that, you know well enough, Mrs. Farrell,” said Ben, with a note of indignation, as if he suspected a latent mockery in this appeal to his judgment.
“Yes, yes, that’s true, I know that,” said Mrs.Farrell, hastily. “I meant, don’t you think he’s better than—than Mr. Gilbert?”
“I never had anything against Mr. Gilbert,” answered Ben, loyally. “He took good care of his friend.”
“Oh yes! But—but—Ben,” she faltered, “there is something—something I would like to ask you. It’s a very strange thing to ask you; but there is no one else. Did you ever think—sometimes I was afraid, you know, that Mr. Gilbert—it makes me very, very unhappy—was getting to—to care for me—”
“No, I never thought so,” answered Ben.
“Oh, I’msoglad. But if he had?”
“I should say such a man ought to be shot.”
“Yes, oh yes—he ought to be shot,” she assented, hysterically. “But, Ben—butyoucared for me, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But that was a very different thing. Mr. Easton wasn’t my friend, as he was Mr. Gilbert’s, and I commenced caring for you long before he was laid there sick and helpless. He would be just as much to blame as if you was married to Mr. Easton already. I don’t see any difference. But I don’t think he could. You must have been mistaken.”
“Perhaps I was. Yes, I must have been mistaken. I’m glad to have you speak so frankly, Ben. Itistoo horrible to believe. For if he had been so, of course it could only be because he saw, or thought he saw, something in me that would let him. And you never could think anything so bad, so heartless, of me, could you, Ben?”
“No, I couldn’t, Mrs. Farrell,” answered Ben, decidedly. “What’s the use—”
“Thank you, Ben—thank you. I knew you couldn’t; it would be too monstrous. Oh yes, it’s just like some horrid dream. Such a woman as that wouldn’t deserve any mercy—not if she had allowed him to think so for one single instant. Would she?”
“Why, we can all find mercy, I suppose, if we go the right way to the right place for it,” answered Ben, seriously.
“Yes—but I don’t mean that kind. I mean, she wouldn’t deserve—Ben, if you were in Mr. Easton’s place, and the girl you were engaged to had allowed some one else—just for the excitement, you know; not because she wanted him to, or was so wicked and heartless, but just foolish—to think she might let him like her, you never would speak to her again, would you, Ben? You never would forgive her?”
“No, I don’t know as I could overlook a thing like that.”
“Of course you couldn’t! You always see things in the right light, Ben; you are so good—oh! how cruel, how perfectly unrelenting you are! That is—I don’t mean that—I mean— Oh, Ben, if you felt toward her—I oughtn’t to say it, I know; but just for instance—as you feel, as you used to feel, towardme, Ben”—she implored, while her tearful eyes dwelt on his—“could you forgive me—her, I mean?”
“I—I don’t know,” faltered Ben.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, Ben! But you oughtn’t, you oughtn’t!” she cried. “I mustn’t keep you, Ben. Good-by. And now you’ll let me give you the pencil, won’t you? It isn’t for you. It’s for some nice girl you’ll be sure to find, out there. Tell her I sent it to her; and, oh, tell her the best thing she can do is to be good! I hope you’ll have a pleasant time and get back safely; I sha’n’t be here when you come home.”
She did not shake hands with him at parting, and they went their several ways. At the turn of the road she looked back and saw him watching her. She took out her handkerchief and waved it to him; then, rounding the corner, she pressed it to her eyes, and stooped and made a little hasty toilet at the brook that ran along the roadside. When she rose she saw Easton at the head of the avenue, coming slowly down toward her. She went courageously to meet him. “Are my eyes red?” she asked. “I have just been shedding the parting tear over poor Ben. He’s a good boy, and I felt sorry for him. I’ve been his first love for several years, you know.”
“Yes,” said Easton, with the superiority that men feel toward much younger men’s passions. “That was plain enough from the beginning.”
Mrs. Farrell looked at him. He was pale and thin from his long lying in bed, but his old tone and manner were coming back, and he was growing better, though he was still far from strong. They were lingering at the farm while the fair weather lasted, that he might profit by the air as long as itcould do him good, though he had meant to go before this time.
“I’ve brought you about all the letters there were in the office, this morning,” she said. “Do you want them now?”
“I suppose they must be read. Yes; let us go back to the piazza and open them there. You’ll be glad to rest after your walk to the village.”
“Is that why you want to get at your letters? I’m not tired at all, and I’d rather walk on.”
“Well, whatever you like. You’ve unmasked my deceit about the letters. I certainly don’t care to read them. I see that I had better never try to keep anything from you.”
“Should you like me to tell you everything about myself?”
“Why, you did that once, didn’t you?”
“Oh, that was nothing. I mean everything I think and feel and do.”
“If you wished to tell me. I can’t know too much about you.”
“Don’t be so sure of that. Suppose I had something that lay very heavy on my conscience, and that I didn’t like to tell you. I ought to, oughtn’t I?”
“Why, if it didn’t concern me—”
“But if it did concern you?”
“Well, still, I’m not so sure about your obligation to tell it. If you could endure to keep it, you might have a greater right to keep it than I should have to know it. The only comfort of confession is that it seems to disown our wrong and make it a sortof public property, a part of evil in general, and lets us begin new, like people who have taken the benefit of the bankrupt law.” He spoke these truisms in a jesting tone. “I shall always be willing to adopt half of your sins. How have you been injuring me, Rosabel?” he asked, with the smile which Mrs. Farrell’s speculative seriousness was apt to call forth; the best men find it so hard to believe that a charming woman can be in earnest about anything but her good looks.
“Oh, I was supposing a case,” she answered, with a sigh. “You do think I have some faults, then?”
“Yes, I think you have; but that doesn’t make any difference.”
“But you can’t pretend you like them?”
“Let me think! Do I like your faults?”
“Don’t joke. Which do you think is the worst?” she demanded, stopping and confronting him with a look of solemnity which he found amusing.
“Upon my word,” he answered, with a laugh, “I don’t believe I could say.”
“What are any of my faults?”
“How can I tell?”
“Am I willful? Am I proud? Am I bad-tempered? What’s the thing you would find it hardest to forgive me?”
“You must give me time to think. And when I’ve forgiven you a great many times for a great variety of offenses I will tell you which I found the hardest. You must remember that I’ve had no sort of experience yet.”
“That’s because you don’t know at all howbadly I’ve treated you. What do you think of my laughing at you that day when I went off to the schoolhouse with Rachel Woodward? Don’t you consider it heartless? If I hadn’t been the worst person in the world, could I have done it?”
Easton smiled at the zeal of her self-condemnation. “I dare say there had been something very ridiculous in my behavior. If you can remember any particular points that amused you, I shouldn’t mind laughing them over with you, now.”
“How good you are!” she murmured, regarding him absently. “I should be the worst woman in the world, shouldn’t I, if I deceived you in the least thing? But I never will; no, no, I couldn’t! Your not thinking it anything would only make it the harder to bear. Don’t you know how killing it is to have people suppose you’re too good to do things when you’ve done them? It’s awful. That’s one good thing about Rachel Woodward. She thinks I’m a miserable sinner, but she likes me; and you mustn’t like me unless you think I’m a miserable sinner. Oh no, I couldn’t let you. I’ll tell you: I want you to think me perfectly reckless and fickle; I want you to believe that I’m so foolish, don’t you know, that even while you were lying sick there, if he’d let me, I should have been quite capable of flirting with—with Ben Woodward.”
Easton burst into a laugh: “That’s altogether too abominable for anybody to believe, Rosabel. Can’t you try me with something a shade less atrocious? Come, I’m willing to think ill of you, since you wish it; but do be reasonable! Won’t you?” he asked, looking round into her face, as they walked along. “Well, then, try to help me in another way. What shall I do about Rachel Woodward? I don’t know how I’m to express my gratitude fitly or acceptably for all the trouble she’s had with me in this most humiliating sickness of mine. Do you suppose she could be persuaded into accepting any sort of help? Do you think she would care to become a painter, if she had the facilities quite to her mind?”
“She would,” replied Mrs. Farrell, “if she didn’t expect sometime to get married, like other people; there’s always thatifin a woman’s aspirations. But that’s neither here nor there. If you think you can ever contrive to reward Rachel Woodward for doing what she thinks her duty, you’re very much mistaken.”
“It’s rather hard to be left so much in her debt.”
“Yes; but she doesn’t consider you indebted; that’s one comfort.”
Easton mused awhile. “Do you know,” he said, presently, “I sometimes wonder Gilbert didn’t take a fancy to our difficult little friend. They’re sufficiently unlike, and he would be just the man to feel the pale charm of her character.”
“Do you think so?” asked Mrs. Farrell, with cold evasion. “I supposed Mr. Gilbert was too worldly a man to care for a simple country girl like Rachel Woodward.”
“Oh, you’re very much mistaken. He’d be altogether unworldly in a matter of that kind. Hewould be true to himself at any cost. That was what always charmed me so in Gilbert. He had the air and talk of a light man, but he was as true as steel under it all. Every day a man has a hundred occasions to prove himself mean or great, and Gilbert, without any show of being principled this way or that, always did the manly and generous and loyal thing.”
“Shall we go back, now?” asked Mrs. Farrell. “Iamrather tired, after all.”
“Will you take my arm?” asked Easton. “It isn’t of much use yet, I’m ashamed to think, but it will be. Did you despise me when I was lying there sick?”
“Despise you?”
“Why, I think a sick man is a contemptible kind of creature. You women seem to be able to make anything gracious and appropriate, even suffering; but a sick man can only be an odious burden. We ought to be allowed to crawl away like hurt animals into holes and clefts of rocks, and take the chances, unseen, of dying or living. Were you able to pity me very much?”
“I don’t see why you ask such things,” she faltered. “Don’t you think I did?”
“Oh yes, too much. Sometimes I’m afraid that, without your knowing it, it’s been all pity from the beginning. I dare say every decently modest man wonders what a woman finds to love in him. I wanted you to love me from the first instant I saw you, but I never concealed from myself that I wasn’t worth a thought of yours. What a curiousthing it is that makes one willing to receive everything for nothing.” He laid his left hand upon her fingers where they passively clung to his right arm. “Why, how cold your hand is!” he said. “It seems incredible that it’s going to bemyhand some day! Everything else under the sun has its price; you slave for it, you risk your life for it, you buy it somehow. But the divinest thing in the world isgiven, it has no price, it’s invaluable; we can’tmerita woman’s love any more than we can merit God’s mercy. Come, take yourself from me again! I’ve never given you a fair chance to say me nay. You must acknowledge that you never had time to answer that question of mine. Before you could decide whether you could endure me or not you had to pity me so much that you were biased in my favor. I ought to set you free, and let you judge again whether you would have me!”
Her breath went and came quickly, as he spoke in this mixed jest and earnest. He tried to make her meet his eye, peering round into her face, but she would not look at him. If this was the release, the opportunity, so long and wildly desired, it found her helpless to seize it. She moved her head from side to side like one stifling. “Oh, don’t! How can you?” she gasped. “Don’t talk so any more,” she entreated. “I can’t bear it!”
She turned her face away; he tenderly pressed her arm against his side. They were near the house again, and she slipped her hand from his arm and fled indoors. He blushed with joy, and walked on down the birch avenue, where she saw him sitting,after a while, on a stone by the wayside. She went to join him, holding forward, as she drew near him, a handful of letters. “We both forgot these,” she said, with a dim smile.
“Oh yes,” he laughed. She glanced down at the stone where he sat, and up at that clump of birches through whose thin foliage the sun fell upon him, and shivered with the recognition of the spot where she had parted from Gilbert. “Sit down, Rosabel,” he said, making a place for her at his side. “This stone is large enough for both of us. I want you to help me read my letters.”
“No, no!” she faintly pleaded; “let me stand awhile. And do you—do you think it’s well for you to sit—just here?”
“Why, yes,” he returned. “It seems a sufficiently salubrious spot, and this is a most obliging rock. If you won’t share it with me—here!” he said, touching another stone in front of his own seat, “sit here! Then I can see your face whenever I look up, and that will be better even than having you at my side. Ah! Now for the letters,” he cried, when she had suffered him to arrange her as he would, and she gave them into his hand.
He ran them quickly over before opening any, and, “Why!” he exclaimed, holding up one of them, “did you know whom we have kept waiting? Gilbert! It’s too bad, poor old fellow! Didn’t you notice his letter, you incurious Fatima?”
“I never saw his handwriting. How could I know his letter?”
“Of course! That might have occurred to me ifI hadn’t known it so well myself. Never mind! We’ll keep Gilbert a little longer, since we’ve kept him so long already, and have him last of all, to take away the bad taste, if these are not pleasant reading.” He laid Gilbert’s letter aside, and opened the others and commented on them one after another; but her eyes continually wandered to the unopened letter, do what she might to keep them on the level of the page he was reading. At last he took up Gilbert’s letter; a shiver ran through her as he tore open the envelope, and she drew herself closer together.
“Why, are you cold, my dear?” he asked, glancing at her before he began to read. “Aren’t you well? Let us go up to the house, and read the letter there.”
“No, no,” she answered, steadily; “I’m not cold, I’m perfectly well. I was curious to know what he said; that was all. Do go on.”
Easton opened the sheet, and began to read to himself, as people often do with letters when they propose to read them aloud. “Oh!” he said, presently, “excuse me! I didn’t know what I was doing. Do you think you’ll be able to stand all this?” He held up the eight pages of Gilbert’s letter, and then he began faithfully with the date, and read on to the end. The first part of the letter was given to Gilbert’s regrets at not having been able to write before. He took it for granted that his sister-in-law had told Easton of his sudden call to go to South America on that business of Mitchell & Martineiro, who wished him to look after somelegal complications of their affairs in Brazil, which needed an American lawyer’s eye; and that she had made all amends she could for his going so suddenly.