The Stornaway parlours were very brilliant that evening in a Willowfield sense. Not a Burton, a Larkin, or a Downing was missing, even Miss Amory Starkweather being present. Miss Amory Starkweather was greatly respected by the Stornaways, the Downings, the Larkins, and the Burtons, the Starkweathers having landed upon Plymouth Rock so early and with such a distinguished sense of their own importance as to lead to the impression in weak minds that they had not only founded that monumental corner-stone of ancestry, but were personally responsible for the Mayflower. This gentlewoman represented to the humorous something more of the element of comedy than she represented to herself. She had been born into a world too narrow and provincial for the development of the powers born with her. She had been an ugly girl and an ugly woman, marked by the hopeless ugliness of a long, ill-proportioned face, small eyes, and a nose too large and high—that ugliness which even love’s eyes can scarcely ameliorate into good drawing.
The temperament attached to these painful disabilities had been warm and strongly womanly. Born a century or so earlier, in a French Court, or any great world vivid with picturesque living, she would in all probability have been a remarkable personage, her ugliness a sort of distinction; but she had been born in Willowfield, and had lived its life and been bound by its limits. She had been comfortably well off—she had a large square house with a garden, an income sufficient to provide for extremely respectable existence in Willowfield, but not large enough to allow of experiments with the outside world. She had never met a man whom she could have loved, who would have loved her, and she was essentially—though Willowfield would never have dreamed it—a woman who should have loved and mated. A lifetime of narrow, unstimulating years and thwarted instincts had made age treat her ill. She was a thin woman with burning eyes, and a personality people were afraid of.
She had always found an interest in John Baird. When he had come to Willowfield she had seen in him that element which her whole long life had lacked. His emotional potentialities had wakened her imagination. If she had been a young woman she knew that she might have fallen tragically and hopelessly in love with him; as an old woman she found it well worth her while to watch him and speculate upon him. When he had become engaged to Agnes Stornaway, she had watched him and secretly wondered how the engagement would end; when it had ended in marriage she had not wondered, but she had seen many things other people did not see. “He is not in love with her,” had been her mental decision, “but he is emotional, and he is in love with her being in love with him. There is no foretelling what will come of it.”
Baird had found himself attracted by Miss Amory. He did not know that if she had been young she would, despite her ugliness, have had a powerful feminine effect on him. He used to go and talk to her, and he was not conscious that he went when he was made restless by a lack of something in the mental atmosphere about him. He could talk to her as he could not talk to the rest of Willowfield. She read and thought and argued with herself, and as a product of a provincial dogmatic New England town was a curious development.
“Were you once a brilliant, wicked, feminine mover of things in some old French court?” he said to her once.
They had been plunging deep into the solving of unsolvable problems, and she turned her burning old eyes on him as she answered.
“God knows what I was,” she said, “but it was nothing like this—nothing like this—and I was not wicked.”
“No,” Baird replied, “you were not wicked; but you broke laws.”
“Yes, I broke laws,” she agreed; “but they were hideous laws—better broken than kept.”
She had been puzzled by the fact that after his wife left him he had had a restless period and had seemed to pass through a miserable phase, such as a man suffering from love and longing might endure.
“Has he fallen in love with her because she has gone away?” she wondered; “men are capable of it at times.”
But later she decided mentally that this was not his special case. She saw, however, that he was passing through some mental crisis which was a dangerous struggle. He was restless and often away from Willowfield for two or three days at a time.
“To provide the place with orthodox doctrine once a week is more than he can bear, and to be bored to extinction into the bargain makes him feel morbid,” she said to herself. “I hope he won’t begin to be lured by things which might produce catastrophe.”
Once he came and spent a long, hot summer evening with her, and when he went away she had arrived at another decision, and it made her wretched.
“He is lured,” she thought. “I cannot help him, and God knows Willowfield could not. After this—perhaps the Deluge.”
She saw but little of him for two months, and then he was called across the Atlantic by his wife’s illness and left the place.
“Write to me now and then,” he said, when he came to bid her good-bye.
“What can I write about from Willowfield to a man in Paris?” she asked.
“About Willowfield,” he answered, holding her hand and laughing a little gruesomely. “There will be a thrill in it when one is three thousand miles away. Tell me about the church—about the people—who comes, who goes—your own points of view will make it all worth while. Will you?” almost as if a shade anxiously.
She felt the implied flattery just enough to be vaguely pleased by it.
“Yes, I will,” she answered.
She kept her word, and the letters were worth reading. It was, as he had said, her points of view which gave interest to the facts that unexciting people had died, married, or been born. Her sketch of the trying position of the unpopular man who filled his pulpit and was unfavourably compared with him every Sunday morning was full of astute analysis and wit; her little picture of the gloomy young theological student, Latimer, his efforts for his sister, and her innocent, pathetic death in a foreign land had a wonderful realism of touch. She had by pure accident made the child’s acquaintance and had been strongly touched and moved. She did not write often, but he read her letters many times over.
Upon this evening of his home-coming she thought he had sometimes the look of a man who felt that he walked in a dream. More than once she saw him involuntarily pass his hand with a swift movement over his eyes as if his own touch might waken him. It was true he did not greatly enjoy the festivities. His occasional views of Mrs. Stornaway as she rambled among her guests, talking to them about him in audible tones, were trying. She dispensed him with her hospitalities, as it were, and was diffuse upon the extent of his travels and the attention paid him, to each member of the company in turn. He knew when she was speaking of himself and when of her daughter, and the alternate decorous sentiment and triumphant pleasure marked on her broad face rasped him to the extent of making him fear lest he might lose his temper.
“She is a stupid woman,” he found himself saying half aloud once; “the most stupid woman I think I ever met.”
Towards the end of the evening, as he entered the room, he found himself obliged to pass her. She stood near the door, engaged in animated conversation with Mrs. Downing. She had hit upon a new and absorbing topic, which had the additional charge of savouring of local gossip.
“Why,” he heard her say, “I mean to ask him. He can tell us, I guess. I haven’t a doubt but he heard the whole story. You know he has a way of drawing people out. He’s so much tact and sympathy. I used to tell Agnes he was all tact and sympathy.”
Feeling quite sure that it was himself who was “all tact and sympathy,” Baird endeavoured to move by unobserved, but she caught sight of him and checked his progress.
“Mr. Baird,” she said, “we’re just talking about you.”
“Don’t talk about me,” he said, lightly; “I am not half so culpable as I look.”
He often found small change of this order could be made useful with Mrs. Stornaway, and he bestowed this upon her with an easy air which she felt to be very delightful.
“He’s so ready,” she observed, enraptured; “I often used to say to Agnes——”
But Mrs. Downing was not to be defrauded.
“We were talking about those people on Bank Street,” she said, “the Latimers. Mrs. Stornaway says you crossed the Atlantic with the son, who has just come back. Do tell us something about him.”
“I am afraid I cannot make him as interesting to you as he was to me,” answered Baird, with his light air again.
“He does not look very interesting,” said Mrs. Stornaway. “I never saw anyone so sallow; I can’t understand Annie liking him.”
“He is interesting,” responded Baird. “Annie took one of her fancies to him, and I took something more than a fancy. We shall be good friends, I think.”
“Well, I’m sure it’s very kind of you to take such an interest,” proclaimed Mrs. Stornaway. “You are always finding something good in people.”
“I wish people were always finding something good in me,” said John Baird. “It was not difficult to find good in this man. He is of the stuff they made saints and martyrs of in the olden times.”
“What did the girl die of?” asked Mrs. Downing.
“What?” repeated Baird. “The girl? I don’t know.”
“And where did she die?” added Mrs. Downing.
“I was just saying,” put in Mrs. Stornaway, “that you had such a sympathetic way of drawing people out that I was sure he had told you the whole story.”
“There was not much story,” Baird answered, “and it was too sad to talk over. The poor child went abroad and died in some little place in Italy—of consumption, I think.”
“I suppose she was sick when they went,” commented Mrs. Downing. “I heard so. It was a queer thing for them to go to Europe, as inexperienced as they were and everything. But the father and mother were more inexperienced still, I guess. They were perfectly foolish about the girl—and so was the brother. She went to some studio in Boston to study art, and they had an idea her bits of pictures were wonderful.”
“I never saw her myself,” said Mrs. Stornaway. “No one seems to have seen anything of her but Miss Amory Starkweather.”
“Miss Starkweather!” exclaimed Baird. “Oh, yes—in her letters she mentioned having met her.”
“Well, it was a queer thing,” said Mrs. Downing, “but it was like Miss Amory. They say the girl fainted in the street as Miss Amory was driving by, and she stopped her carriage and took her in and carried her home. She took quite a fancy to her and saw her every day or so until she went away.”
It was not unnatural that at this juncture John Baird’s eyes should wander across the room to where Miss Amory Starkweather sat, but it was a coincidence that as his eye fell upon her she should meet it with a gesture which called him to her side.
“It seems that Miss Amory wishes to speak to me,” he said to his companions.
“He’ll make himself just as interesting to her as he has made himself to us,” said Mrs. Stornaway, with heavy sprightliness, as he left them. “He never spares himself trouble.”
He went across the room to Miss Amory.
“Can you sit down by me?” she said. “I want to talk to you about Lucien Latimer.”
“What is there in the atmosphere which suggests Latimer?” he inquired. “We have been talking about him at the other side of the room. Do you know him?”
“I never saw him,” she replied, “but I knew her.”
“Her!” he repeated.
“The little sister.” She leaned forward a little. “What were the details of her death?” she asked. “I want to know—I want to know.”
Somehow the words sounded nervously eager.
“I did not ask him,” he answered; “I thought he preferred to be silent. He is a silent man.”
She sat upright again, and for a moment seemed to forget herself. She said something two or three times softly to herself. Baird thought it was “Poor child! Poor child!”
“She was young to die,” he said, in a low voice. “Poor child, indeed.”
Miss Amory came back to him, as it were.
“The younger, the better,” she said. “Look at me!” Her burning eyes were troubling and suggestive. Baird found himself trying to gather himself together. He assumed the natural air of kindly remonstrance.
“Oh, come,” he said. “Don’t take that tone. It is unfair to all of us.”
Her reply was certainly rather a startling one.
“Very well then,” she responded. “Look at yourself. If you had died as young as she did——”
He looked at her, conscious of a little coldness creeping over his body. She was usually lighter when they were not entirely alone. Just now, in the midst of this commonplace, exceedingly middle-class evening party, with the Larkins, the Downings, and the Burtons chattering, warm, diffuse, and elate, about him, she stirred him with a little horror—not horror of herself, but of something in her mood.
“Do you think I am such a bad fellow?” he said.
“No,” she answered. “Worse, poor thing. It is not the bad fellows who produce the crudest results. But I did not call you here to tell you that you were bad or good. I called you to speak about Lucien Latimer. When you go to him—you are going to him?”
“To-morrow.”
“Then tell him to come and see me.”
“I will tell him anything you wish,” said Baird. “Is there anything else?”
“Tell him I knew her,” she answered, “Margery—Margery!”
“Margery,” Baird said slowly, as if the sound touched him. “What a pretty, simple name!”
“She was a pretty, simple creature,” said Miss Amory.
“Tell me—” he said, “tell me something more about her.”
“There is nothing more to tell,” she replied. “She was dying when I met her. I saw it—in her eyes. She could not have lived. She went away and died. She—I——”
John Baird heard a slight sharp choking sound in her throat.
“There!” she said presently, “I don’t like to talk about it. I am too emotional for my years. Go to Mrs. Stornaway. She is looking for you.”
He got up and turned and left her without speaking, and a few minutes later, when Mrs. Stornaway wanted him to give an account of his interview with the Pope, she was surprised to see him approaching her from the door as if he had been out of the room.
His story of the interview with the Pope was very interesting, and he was more “brilliant” than ever during the remainder of the evening, but when the last guest had departed, followed by Mrs. Stornaway to the threshold, that lady, on her return to the parlour, found him standing by the mantel looking at the fire with so profoundly wearied an air, that she uttered an exclamation.
“Why,” she said, “you look tired, I must say. But everything went off splendidly and I never saw you so brilliant.”
“Thank you,” he answered.
“I’ve just been saying,” with renewed spirit of admiration, “that your crossing with that Latimer has quite brought him into notice. It will be a good thing for him. I heard several people speak of him to-night and say how kind it was of you to take him up.”
Baird stirred uneasily.
“I should not like to have that tone taken,” he said. “Why should I patronise him? We shall be friends—if he will allow it.” He spoke with so much heat and impatience that Mrs. Stornaway listened with a discomfited stare.
“But nobody knows anything about them,” she said. “They’re quite ordinary people. They live in Bank Street.”
“That may settle the matter for Willowfield,” said Baird, “but it does not settle it for me. We are to be friends, and Willowfield must understand that.”
And such was the decision of his tone that Mrs. Stornaway did not recover herself and was still staring after him in a bewildered fashion when he went upstairs.
“But it’s just like him,” she remarked, rather weakly to the room’s emptiness. “That’s always the way with people of genius and—and—mind. They’re always humble.”
She had renewed opportunity for remarking upon the generous humility the next morning when he left the house with the intention of paying his visit to Bank Street.
“He’s actually going,” she said. “Well, I must say again it’s just like him. There are very few men in his position who would think it worth while, but he treats everybody with just as much consideration as if—as if he was nobody.”
The house on Bank Street was just what he had expected to find it—small, unornamental, painted white, and modestly putting forth a few vines as if with a desire to clothe itself, which had not been encouraged by Nature. The vines had not flourished and they, as well as the few flowers in the yard, were dropping their scant foliage, which turned brown and rustled in the autumn wind.
Before ringing the bell, Baird stood for a few moments upon the threshold. As he looked up and down the street, he was pale and felt chilly, so chilly that he buttoned his light overcoat over his breast and his hands even shook slightly as he did it. Then he turned and rang the bell.
It was answered by a little woman with a girlish figure and gray hair. For a moment John Baird paused before speaking to her, as he had paused before ringing the bell, and in the pause, during which he found himself looking into her soft, childishly blue eyes, he felt even chillier than at first.
“Mrs. Latimer. I think,” he said, baring his head.
“Yes,” she answered, “and you are Mr. Baird and have come to see Lucien, I’m sure.”
She gave him her small hand with a smile.
“I am very glad to see you,” she said, “and Lucien will be glad, too. Come in, please.”
She led the way into the little parlour, talking in a voice as soft and kindly as her eyes. Lucien had been out, but had just come in, she fancied, and was probably upstairs. She would go and tell him.
So, having taken him into the room, she went, leaving him alone. When she was gone, Baird stood for a moment listening to her footsteps upon the stairs. Then he crossed the room and stood before the hearth looking up at a picture which hung over the mantel.
He was still standing before it when she returned with her son. He turned slowly to confront them, holding out his hand to Latimer with something less of alert and sympathetic readiness than was usual with him. There was in his manner an element which corresponded with the lack of colour and warmth in his face.
“I’ve been looking at this portrait of your—of——” he began.
“Of Margery,” put in the little mother. “Everyone looks at Margery when they come in. It seems as if the child somehow filled the room.” And though her soft voice had a sigh in it, she did not speak in entire sadness.
John Baird looked at the picture again. It was the portrait of a slight small girl with wistful eyes and an innocent face.
“I felt sure that it was she,” he said in a lowered voice, “and you are quite right in saying that she seems to fill the room.”
The mother put her hand upon her son’s arm. He had turned his face towards the window. It seemed to Baird that her light touch was at once an appeal and a consolation.
“She filled the whole house when she was here,” she said; “and yet she was only a quiet little thing. She had a bright way with her quietness and was so happy and busy. It is my comfort now to remember that she was always happy—happy to the last, Lucien tells me.”
She looked up at her son’s averted face as if expecting him to speak, and he responded at once, though in his usual mechanical way.
“To the last,” he said; “she had no fear and suffered no pain.”
The little woman watched him with tender, wistful eyes; two large tears welled up and slipped down her cheeks, but she smiled softly as they fell.
“She had so wanted to go to Italy,” she said; “and was so happy to be there. And at the last it was such a lovely day, and she enjoyed it so and was propped up on a sofa near the window, and looked out at the blue sky and the mountains, and made a little sketch. Tell him, Lucien,” and she touched his arm again.
“I shall be glad to hear,” said Baird, “but you must not tire yourself by standing,” and he took her hand gently and led her to a chair and sat down beside her, still holding her hand.
But Latimer remained standing, resting his elbow upon the mantel and looking down at the floor as he spoke.
“She was not well in England,” the little mother put in, “but in Italy he thought she was better even to the very last.”
“She was weak,” Latimer went on, without raising his eyes, “but she was always bright and—and happy. She used to lie on the sofa by the window and look out and try to make sketches. She could see the Apennines, and it was the chestnut harvest and the peasants used to pass along the road on their way to the forests, and she liked to watch them. She used to try to sketch them too, but she was too weak; and when I wrote home for her, she made me describe them——”
“In her bright way!” said his mother. “I read the letters over and over again and they seemed like pictures—like her little pictures. It scarcely seems as if Lucien could have written them at all.”
“The last day,” said Latimer, “I had written home to say that she was better. She was so well in the morning that she talked of trying to take a drive, but in the afternoon she was a little tired——”
“But only a little,” interrupted the mother eagerly, “and quite happy.”
“Only a little—and quite happy,” said Latimer. “There was a beautiful sunset and I drew her sofa to the windows and she lay and looked at it—and talked; and just as the sun went down——”
“All in a lovely golden glory, as if the gates of heaven were open,” the gentle voice added.
Latimer paused for an instant. His sallow face had become paler. He drew out his handkerchief and touched his forehead with it and his lips.
“All in a glow of gold,” he went on a little more hoarsely, “just as it went down, she turned on her pillow and began to speak to me. She said ‘How beautiful it all is, and how glad—,’ and her voice died away. I thought she was looking at the sky again. She had lifted her eyes to it and was smiling: the smile was on her face when I—bent over her—a few moments after—and found that all was over.”
“It was not like death at all,” said his mother with a soft breathlessness. “She never even knew.” And though tears streamed down her cheeks, she smiled.
Baird rose suddenly and went to Latimer’s side. He wore the pale and bewildered face of a man walking in a dream. He laid his hand on his shoulder.
“No, it was not like death,” he said; “try and remember that.”
“I do remember it,” was the answer.
“She escaped both death and life,” said John Baird, “both death and life.”
The little mother sat wiping her eyes gently.
“It was all so bright to her,” she said. “I can scarcely think of it as a grief that we have lost her—for a little while. Her little room upstairs never seems empty. I could fancy that she might come in at any moment smiling as she used to. If she had ever suffered or been sad in it, I might feel as if the pain and sadness were left there; but when I open the door it seems as if her pretty smile met me, or the sound of her voice singing as she used to when she painted.”
She rose and went to her son’s side again, laying her hand on his arm with a world of tenderness in her touch.
“Try to think of that, Lucien, dear,” she said; “try to think that her face was never any sadder or older than we see it in her pretty picture there. She might have lived to be tired of living, and she was saved from it.”
“Try to help him,” she said, turning to Baird, “perhaps you can. He has not learned to bear it yet. They were very near to each other, and perhaps he is too young to think of it as we do. Grief is always heavier to young people, I think. Try to help him.”
She went out of the room quietly, leaving them together.
When she was gone, John Baird found himself trying, with a helpless feeling of desperation, to spur himself up to saying something; but neither words nor thoughts would come. For the moment his mind seemed a perfect blank, and the silence of the room was terrible.
It was Latimer who spoke first, stiffly, and as if with difficulty.
“I should be more resigned,” he said, “I should be resigned. But it has been a heavy blow.”
Baird moistened his dry lips but found no words.
“She had a bright nature,” the lagging voice went on, “a bright nature—and gifts—which I had not. God gave me no gifts, and it is natural to me to see that life is dark and that I can only do poorly the work which falls to me. I was a gloomy, unhappy boy when she was born. I had learned to know the lack in myself early, and I saw in her what I longed for. I know the feeling is a sin against God and that His judgment will fall upon me—but I have no power against it.”
“It is a very natural feeling,” said Baird, hoarsely. “We cannot resign ourselves at once under a great sorrow.”
“A just God who punishes rebellion demands it of His servants.”
“Don’t say that!” Baird interrupted, with a shudder; “we need a God of Mercy, not a God who condemns.”
“Need!” the dark face almost livid in its pallor, “We need! It is not He who was made for our needs, but we for His. For His servants there is only submission to the anguish chosen for us.”
“That is a harsh creed,” said Baird, “and a dark one. Try a brighter one, man!”
“There is no brighter one for me,” was the answer. “She had a brighter one, poor child—and mine was a heavy trouble to her. Why should we deceive ourselves? What are we in His sight—in the sight of Immutable, Eternal God? We can only do His will and await the end. We have reason which we may not use; we can only believe and suffer. There is agony on every side of us which, if it were His will, He might relieve, but does not. It is His will, and what is the impotent rebellion of Nature against that? What help have we against Him?”
His harsh voice had risen until it was almost a cry, the lank locks which fell over his sallow forehead were damp with sweat. He put them back with a desperate gesture.
“Such words of themselves are sin,” he said, “and it is my curse and punishment that I should bear in my breast every hour the crime of such rebellion. What is there left for me? Is there any labour or any pang borne for others that will wipe out the stain from my soul?”
John Baird looked at him as he had looked before. His usual ready flow of speech, his rapidity of thought, his knowledge of men and their necessities seemed all to have deserted him.
“I—” he stammered, “I am not—fit—not fit——”
He had not known what he was going to say when he began, and he did not know how he intended to end. He heard with a passionate sense of relief that the door behind them opened, and turned to find that Mrs. Latimer stood upon the threshold as if in hesitancy.
“Lucien,” she said, “it is that poor girl from Janway’s Mills. The one Margery was so sorry for—Susan Chapman. She wants to see you. I think the poor child wants to ask about Margery.”
Latimer made a movement forward, but checked himself.
“Tell her to come in,” he said.
Mrs. Latimer went to the front door, and in a few seconds returned. The girl was with her and entered the room slowly. She was very pale and her eyes were dilated and she breathed fast as if frightened. She glanced at John Baird and stopped.
“I didn’t know anyone else was here,” she said.
“I will go away, if you wish it,” said Baird, the sympathetic tone returning to his voice.
“No,” said Latimer, “you can do her more good than I can. This gentleman,” he added to the girl, “is my friend, and a Minister of God as well as myself. He is the Rev. John Baird.”
There was in his eyes, as he addressed her, a look which was like an expression of dread—as if he saw in her young yet faded face and figure something which repelled him almost beyond self-control.
Perhaps the girl saw, while she did not comprehend it. She regarded him helplessly.
“I—I don’t know—hardly—why I came,” she faltered, twisting the corner of her shawl.
She had been rather pretty, but the colour and freshness were gone from her face and there were premature lines of pain and misery marking it here and there.
“Sit down,” he said. “Have you walked all the way from Janway’s Mills?”
She started a little and gave him a look, half wonder, half relief, and then fell to twisting the fringe of her poor shawl again.
“Yes, I walked,” she answered; “but I can’t set down. I h’ain’t but a minute to stay.”
Her clothes, which had been shabby at their best, were at their worst now, and, altogether, she was a figure neither attractive nor picturesque.
But Baird saw pathos in her. It was said that one of his most charming qualities was his readiness to discover the pathetic under any guise.
“You came to ask Mr. Latimer some questions, perhaps?” he said.
She suddenly burst into tears.
“Yes,” she answered, “I—I couldn’t help it.”
She checked herself and wiped her tears away with the shawl corner almost immediately.
“I wanted to know something about her,” she said. “Nobody seemed to know nothin’, only that she was dead. When they said you’d come home, it seemed like I couldn’t rest until I’d heard something.”
“What do you want to hear?” said Latimer.
It struck Baird that the girl’s manner was a curious one. It was a manner which seemed to conceal beneath its shamefaced awkwardness some secret fear or anxiety. She gave Latimer a hurried, stealthy look, and then her eyes fell. It was as if she would have read in his gloomy face what she did not dare to ask.
“I’d be afraid to die myself,” she stammered. “I can’t bear to think of it. I’m afraid. Was she?”
“No,” Latimer answered.
The girl gave him another dull, stealthy look.
“I’m glad of that,” she said; “she can’t have minded so much if she wasn’t afraid. I’d like to think she didn’t mind it so much—or suffer.”
“She did not suffer,” said Latimer.
“I never saw nothin’ of her after the last day she came to Janway’s Mills,” the girl began.
Latimer lifted his eyes suddenly.
“She went to the Mills?” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” she answered, her voice shaking. “I guess she never told. After that first night she stood by me. No one else did. Seemed like other folks thought I’d poison ’em. She’d come an’ see me an’—help me. She was sick the last day she came, and when she was going home she fainted in the street, I heard folks say, I never saw her after that.”
She brushed a tear from her face with the shawl again.
“So as she didn’t mind much, or suffer,” she said, “t’ain’t so bad to think of. She wasn’t one to be able to stand up against things. She’d have died if she’d been me. I’d be glad enough to die myself, if I wasn’t afraid. She’d cry over me when I wasn’t crying over myself. I’ve been beat about till I don’t mind, like I used. They’re a hard lot down at the Mills.”
“And you,” said Latimer, “what sort of a life have you been leading?”
His voice was harsh and his manner repellant only because Nature had served him the cruel turn of making them so. He was bitterly conscious as he spoke of having chosen the wrong words and uttered them with an appearance of relentless rigour which he would have made any effort to soften.
Baird made a quick movement towards the girl.
“Have you any work?” he asked. “Do you need help? Don’t mind telling us. My friend is to take charge of your church at the Mills.”
The girl interrupted him. She had turned miserably pale under Latimer’s question.
“’Tain’t no church of mine!” she said, passionately; “I h’ain’t nothin’ to do with it. I never belonged to no church anyhow, an’ I’m leadin’ the kind o’ life any girl’d lead that hadn’t nothin’ nor nobody. I don’t mean,” with a strangled sob, “to even myself with her; but what’ud she ha’ done if she’d ha’ slipped like I did—an’ then had nothin’ nor—nor nobody?”
“Don’t speak of her!” cried Latimer, almost fiercely.
“’Twon’t hurt her,” said the girl, struggling with a sob again; “she’s past bein’ hurt even by such as me—an’ I’m glad of it. She’s well out of it all!”
She turned as if she would have gone away, but Baird checked her.
“Wait a moment,” he said; “perhaps I can be of some service to you.”
“You can’t do nothin’,” she interrupted. “Nobody can’t!”
“Let me try,” he said; “take a note to Miss Starkweather from me and wait at the house for a few minutes. Come, that isn’t much, is it? You’ll do that much, I’m sure.”
She looked down at the floor a few seconds and then up at him. It had always been considered one of his recommendations that he was so unprofessional in his appearance.
“Yes,” she said, slowly, “I can do that, I suppose.”
He drew a note-book from his breast-pocket and, having written a few words on a leaf of it, tore it out and handed it to her.
“Take that to Miss Starkweather’s house and say I sent you with it.”
When she was gone, he turned to Latimer again.
“Before I go,” he said, “I want to say a few words to you—to ask you to make me a promise.”
“What is the promise?” said Latimer.
“It is that we shall be friends—friends.”
Baird laid his hand on the man’s gaunt shoulder with a nervous grasp as he spoke, and his voice was unsteady.
“I have never had a friend,” answered Latimer, monotonously; “I should scarcely know what to do with one.”
“Then it is time you had one,” Baird replied. “And I may have something to offer you. There may be something in—in my feeling which may be worth your having.”
He held out his hand.
Latimer looked at it for a second, then at him, his sallow face flushing darkly.
“You are offering me a good deal,” he said, “I scarcely know why—myself.”
“But you don’t take my hand, Latimer,” Baird said; and the words were spoken with a faint loss of colour.
Latimer took it, flushing more darkly still.
“What have I to offer in return?” he said. “I have nothing. You had better think again. I should only be a kind of shadow on your life.”
“I want nothing in return—nothing,” Baird said. “I don’t even ask feeling from you. Be a shadow on my life, if you will. Why should I have no shadows? Why should all go smoothly with me, while others——” He paused, checking his vehemence as if he had suddenly recognised it. “Let us be friends,” he said.
The respectable portion of the population of Janway’s Mills believed in church-going and on Sunday-school attendance—in fact, the most entirely respectable believed that such persons as neglected these duties were preparing themselves for damnation. They were a quiet, simple, and unintellectual people. Such of them as occasionally read books knew nothing of any literature which was not religious. The stories they had followed through certain inexpensive periodicals were of the order which describes the gradual elevation of the worldly-minded or depraved to the plane of church-going and Sunday-school. Their few novels made it their motif to prove that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Any hero or heroine of wealth who found peace of mind and married happily, only attained these objects through the assistance of some noble though humble unsecular person whose example and instruction led them to adopt unsecular views. The point of view of Janway’s Mills was narrow and far from charitable when it was respectable; its point of view, when it was not respectable, was desperate. Even sinners, at Janway’s Mills, were primitive and limited in outlook. They did not excuse themselves with specious argument for their crimes of neglecting church-going, using bad language, hanging about bar-rooms, and loose living. They were not brilliant wrongdoers and made no attempt at defending themselves or pretending that they did not know they were going to perdition. The New England mind is not broad or versatile, and, having begun life in a Puritan atmosphere, it is not quick to escape its influence. Society at the Mills recognised no social distinction which was not founded upon the respectability of church-going and the observance of social laws made by church-goers; it recognised none because it absolutely knew of none. The great world was not far from Janway’s Mills, but they did not touch each other. Willowfield was near, Boston and New York themselves were not far distant, but the curious fact being that millions of human minds may work and grow and struggle as if they were the minds of dwellers upon another planet, though less than a hundred miles may separate them, the actual lives, principles, and significances of the larger places did not seem to touch the smaller one. The smaller one was a village of a few streets of small houses which had grown up about the Mills themselves. The Mills gave employment to a village full of hands, so the village gradually evolved itself. It was populated by the uneducated labouring class; some were respectable, some were dissolute and lived low and gross lives, but all were uneducated in any sense which implies more than the power to read, write, and make a few necessary calculations. Most of them took some newspaper. They read of the multi-millionaires who lived in New York and Chicago and California, they read of the politicians in Washington, they found described to them the great entertainments given by millionaires’ wives and daughters, the marvellous dresses they wore, the multifarious ways in which they amused themselves, but what they read seemed so totally unlike anything they had ever seen, so far apart from their own lives, that though they were not aware of the fact, the truth was that they believed in them with about the same degree of realisation with which they believed in what they heard in the pulpit of the glories of the New Jerusalem. No human being exists without an ambition, and the ambition of Janway’s Millers of the high-class was to possess a neat frame-house with clean Nottingham lace curtains at the windows, fresh oilcloth on the floor of the front hall, furniture covered with green or red reps in the parlour, a tapestry Brussels carpet, and a few lithographs upon the walls. It was also the desire of the owners of such possessions that everyone should know that they attended one of the churches, that their house-cleaning was done regularly, that no member of the family frequented bar-rooms, and that they were respectable people. It was an ambition which was according to their lights, and could be despised by no honest human being, however dull it might appear to him. It resulted oftener than not in the making of excellent narrow lives which brought harm to no one. The lives which went wrong on the street-corners and in the bar-rooms often did harm. They produced discomfort, unhappiness, and disorder; but as it is also quite certain that no human being produces these things without working out his own punishment for himself while he lives on earth, the ends of justice were doubtless attained.
If a female creature at the Mills broke the great social law, there was no leaning towards the weakness of pity for her, Janway’s was not sufficiently developed, mentally, to deal with gradations or analysis of causes and impelling powers. The girl who brought forth a child without the pale of orthodox marriage was an outcast and a disgraced creature, and nobody flinched from pronouncing her both.
“It’s disgustin’, that’s what I call it,” it was the custom for respectable wives and mothers to say. “It’s disgustin’! A nice thing she’s done for herself. I h’ain’t no patience with girls like her, with no fear o’ God or religion in them an’ no modesty and decency. She deserves whatever comes to her!”
Usually every tragedy befell her which could befall a woman. If her child lived, it lived the life of wretchedness and was an outcast also. The outcome of its existence was determined by the order of woman its mother chanced to be. If the maternal instinct was warm and strong within her and she loved it, there were a few chances that it might fight through its early years of struggle and expand into a human being who counted as one at least among the world’s millions. Usually the mother died in the gutter or the hospital, but there had been women who survived, and when they did so it was often because they made a battle for their children. Sometimes it was because they were made of the material which is not easily beaten, and then they learned as the years went by that the human soul and will may be even stronger than that which may seem at the outset overwhelming fate.
When the girl Susan Chapman fell into misfortune and disgrace, her path was not made easy for her. There were a few months when the young mill hand who brought disaster upon her, made love to her, and hung about her small home, sometimes leaning upon the rickety gate to talk and laugh with her, sometimes loitering with her in the streets or taking her to cheap picnics or on rather rowdy excursions. She wore the excited and highly pleased air seen in young women of her class when the masculine creature is paying court. She spent her wages in personal decoration, she bought cheap feathers and artificial flowers and remnants on “bargain days,” and decked herself with them. Her cheap, good looks reached their highest point because she felt the glow of a promotive triumph and her spirits were exhilarated. She was nearer happiness than she had ever been before. The other girls, who were mill hands like herself, were full of the usual rather envious jokes about her possible marriage. To be married was to achieve a desirable distinction and to work at home instead of at the Mills. The young man was not an absolute villain, he was merely an ignorant, foolish young animal. At first he had had inchoate beliefs in a domestic future with the girl. But the time came when equally inchoate ideas of his own manhood led him to grow cool. The New England atmosphere which had not influenced him in all points, influenced him in the matter of feeling that the woman a man married must have kept herself respectable. The fact that he himself had caused her fall from the plane of decency was of comparatively small moment.
A man who married a woman who had not managed to keep straight, put himself into a sort of ridiculous position. He lost masculine distinction. This one ceased to lean on the gate and talk at night, and went to fewer picnics. He was in less high spirits, and so was the girl. She often looked pale and as if she had been crying. Then Jack Williams gave up his place at the Mill and left the village. He did not tell his sweetheart. The morning after he left, Susan came to her work and found the girls about her wearing a mysterious and interested air.
“What are you whispering about?” she asked. “What’s the secret?”
“’Tain’t no secret,” was the answer. “Most everybody’s heard it, and I guess it ain’t no secret to you. I guess he told you when he made up his mind to go.”
“Who?” she asked.
“Jack Williams. He’s gone out to Chicago to work somewhere there. He kept it pretty dark from us, but when he went off on the late train last night, Joe Evans saw him, and he said he’d had the offer of a first-rate job and was going to it. How you stare, Sue! Your eyes look as if they’d pop out o’ yer head.”
She was staring and her skin had turned blue-white. She broke into a short hysteric laugh and fell down. Then she was very sick and fainted and had to be taken home trembling so that she could scarcely crawl as she walked, with great tears dropping down her cold face. Janway’s Mills knew well enough after this that Jack Williams had deserted her, and had no hesitation in suggesting a reason for his defection.
The months which followed were filled with the torments of a squalid Inferno. Girls who had regarded her with envy, began to refuse to speak to her or to be seen in her company. Jack Williams’s companions were either impudent or disdainful, the married women stared at her and commented on her as she passed; there were no more picnics or excursions for her; her feathers became draggled and hung broken in her hat. She had no relatives in the village, having come from a country place. She was thankful that she had not a family of aunts on the spot, because she knew they would have despised her and talked her over more than the rest. She lived in a bare little room which she rented from a poor couple, and she used to sit alone in it, huddled up in a heap by the window, crying for hours in the evening as she watched the other girls go by laughing and joking with their sweethearts.
One night when there was a sociable in the little frame Methodist church opposite, and she saw it lighted up and the people going in dressed in their best clothes and excited at meeting each other, the girls giggling at the sight of their favourite young men—just as she had giggled six months before—her slow tears began to drip faster and the sobs came one upon another until she was choked by them and she began to make a noise. She sobbed and cried more convulsively, until she began to scream and went into something like hysterics. She dropped down on her face and rolled over and over, clutching at her breast and her sides and throwing out her arms. The people of the house had gone to the sociable and she was alone, so no one heard or came near her. She shrieked and sobbed and rolled over and over, clutching at her flesh, trying to gasp out words that choked her.
“O, Lord!” she gasped, wild with the insensate agony of a poor, hysteria torn, untaught, uncontrolled thing, “I don’t know what I’ve done! I don’t! ’Tain’t fair! I didn’t go to! I can’t bear it! He h’ain’t got nothin’ to bear, he ain’t! O, Lord God, look down on me!”
She was the poor, helpless outcome of the commonest phase of life, but her garret saw a ghastly tragedy as she choked through her hysterics. Who is to blame for and who to prevent such tragedies, let deep thinkers strive to tell.
The day after this was the one on which little Margery Latimer came into her life. It was in the early spring, just before the child had gone to Boston to begin her art lessons. She had come to Janway’s Mills to see a poor woman who had worked for her mother. The woman lived in the house in which Susan had her bare room. She began to talk about the girl half fretfully, half contemptuously.
“She’s the one Jack Williams got into trouble and then left to get out of it by herself as well as she could,” she said. “She might ha’ known it. Gals is fools. She can’t work at the Mills any more, an’ last night when we was all at the Sosherble, she seems to’ve had a spasm o’ some kind; she can’t get out o’ bed this mornin’ and lies there lookin’ like death an’ moanin’. I can’t ’tend to her, I’ve got work o’ my own to do. Lansy! how she was moanin’ when I passed her door! Seemed like she’d kill herself!”
“Oh, poor thing!” cried Margery; “let me go up to her.”
She was a sensitive creature, and the colour had ebbed out of her pretty face.
“Lor, no!” the woman cried; “she ain’t the kind o’ gal you’d oughter be doing things for, she was allus right down common, an’ she’s sunk down ’bout as low as a gal can.”
But Margery went up to the room where the moaning was going on. She stood outside the door on the landing for a few moments, her heart trembling in her side before she went in. Her life had been a simple, happy, bright one up to this time. She had not seen the monster life close at hand. She had large, childish eyes which were the colour of harebells and exquisitely sympathetic and sweet. There were tears in them when she gently opened the door and stood timidly on the threshold.
“Let me, please let me come in,” she said. “Don’t say I mayn’t.”
The moaning and low choking sobs went on, and in a very few moments they so wrought upon her, that she pushed the door farther open and entered the room. What she saw was a barren, common little place, and on the bed a girl lying utterly prostrated by an hysteric tempest which had lasted hours. Her face was white and swollen and covered with red marks, as if she had clutched and torn it with her fingers, her dress was torn open at the bosom, and her hair tumbled, torn, and loose about the pillow; there was a discoloured place upon her forehead which was settling into a bruise. Her eyes were puffed with crying until they were almost closed. Her breast rose with short, exhausted, but still convulsive sobs. Margery felt as if she was drawn into a vortex of agony. She could not resist it. She went to the bed, stood still a second, trembling, and then sank upon her knees and put her face down upon the wretched hand nearest and kissed it with piteous impulsive sympathy.
“Oh! don’t cry like that,” she said, crying herself. “Oh, don’t! Oh, don’t! I’m so sorry for you—I’m so sorry for you.”
She did not know the girl at all, she had never even heard of her before, but she kissed her hand and cried over it and fondled it against her breast. She was one of those human things created by Nature to suffer with others, and for them, and through them.
She did not know how long it was before the girl became sufficiently, articulate to speak to her. She herself was scarcely articulate for some time. She could only try to find words to meet a need so far beyond her ken. She had never come in contact with a woman in this strait before.
But at last Susan was lying in the bed instead of on its tossed and tumbled outside. Margery had done the nearest, simple things for her. She had helped her to bathe her face with cold water, to undress and put on her nightgown; she had prepared her narrow bed for her decently, and smoothed and wound up her hair. Then she had gone downstairs, got her a cup of tea, and sat by her and made her drink it. Then she set the room in order and opened the window to air it.
“There is a bruise on your forehead,” she had said, as she was arranging the torn hair. “You must have struck it against something when you were ill last night.”
“I struck it against the wall,” Susan answered, in a monotonous voice. “I did it on purpose. I banged my head against the wall until I fell down and was sick.”
Margery’s face quivered again.
“Don’t think about it,” she said. “You ought not to have been alone. Some—some friend ought to have been with you.”
“I haven’t got any friends,” Susan answered. “I don’t know why you came up to me. I don’t guess you know what’s the matter with me.”
“Yes, I do,” said Margery. “You are in great trouble.”
“It’s the worst kind o’ trouble a woman can get into,” said Susan, the muscles of her face beginning to be drawn again. “I don’t see why—why Jack Williams can skip off to Chicago to a new, big job that’s a stroke o’ luck—an’ me left lie here to bear everything—an’ be picked at, an’ made fun of, an’ druv mad with the way I’m kicked in the gutter. I don’t see no right in it. There ain’t no right in it; I don’t believe there’s no God anyhow; I won’t never believe it again. No one can’t make me. If I’ve done what gives folks a right to cast me off, so’s Jack Williams.”
“You haven’t pretended to love a person and then run away and left them to—to suffer,” said little Margery, on the verge of sobs again.
“No, I haven’t!” said the girl, her tears beginning to stream anew. “I’m not your kind. I’m not educated. I’m only a common mill hand, but I did love Jack Williams all I knew how. He had such a nice way with him—kind of affectionate, an’—an’ he was real good-lookin’ too when he was fixed up. If I’d been married to him, no one would have said nothin’, an’—an’ ’tain’t nothin’ but a minister readin’ somethin’ anyhow—marryin’ ain’t.”