THE PAGAN
I
I never knew him, myself. That is, in the ordinary way of acquaintance. It was not that I avoided him. It was, rather, that I was young, and shyer than I might have admitted, and too self-conscious on the point of quid pro quo. Time has happily made me less squeamish about standing to people in that relation which is not rare in this complicated world, of finding them more interesting than they do me. Even then, though, making people out was for me the chief business of life. Whereas he seemed to live in a world by himself. At any rate he was far more fiercely individual than I, who am Jesuit enough to get on with anybody. Another point, however, was that I went to Marshbury those three times only, for short periods and at long intervals. The wonder was that he had made for me so complete a picture as he did. But I think I never saw anyone else so well through the eyes of others. That is probably why I have never been back. There was something final about that slab of grey granite.
Mary Bennett was my principal source of information. Everyone in the village had his quota to contribute, for that matter. But as Mary was Marvin’s “help,” and as I boarded with Mary’s mother, I enjoyed exceptional opportunities. Yet now that I say it, I realise how indirectly it is true—how little Mary ever told me in so many words. She was a solid young person of seventeen when I first knew her, really not bad to look at, and much better than gold, but of a—what shall I call it? Indeed, I myself was taken in at first. I used to wonder how much help the girl could be. I was slower then to see how factitious a part speech plays in the economy of life. However, when I heard of the strange being to whom Mary ministered, I prepared to be bored. I expected the conventional ogre of the country village.
How he got that way—to dip into the dictionary of the place—nobody knew. He was born and brought up in the village, like his fathers before him for two hundred years. Moreover most of them had been divines, as the phrase pleasantly goes, and had passed down the thunders of Sinai from one quaking generation to the next. He certainly had enjoyed every advantage. But as for Marvin, he would none of them. It was an insoluble mystery. Mary was the first to suggest that a circumstance of his early youth might be connected with it—and a stepmother. I rather balked at that. I have my own ideas concerning stepmothers. But when I heard about this one—! Marvin had come home from school one afternoon when he was fourteen or so, it seemed, and to his astonishment had found the house empty. The only thing in it was his little trunk, neatly packed and corded, standing near the door. There was also a note, on the trunk. Reminding him that he was now a man and had a man’s part to play in the world, this missive assured him that whom the Lord loved he chastened, urged him to gird up his loins accordingly, and concluded by announcing that, for reasons too sad and too numerous to mention, the time had come for stepmother and stepson to part. That, opined Mary, was in itself sufficient to harden a lad’s heart—particularly in view of certain adventures which were known to have succeeded the abandonment. Mrs. Bennett, however, did not countenance her daughter’s weakness. “Sary Marvin,” contended that matron, “certainly don’ her share—pore onfort’nit critter—toward bringin’ up Matthew’s boy.” And the way he had got on in the world ought not only to have vindicated the justice of his stepmother’s confidence in him, but to have convinced him beyond all shadow of doubt that the Lord did provide.
Be that as it might, Matthew’s boy was certainly provided for. It was but another discredit, however, in the eyes of his contemporaries. To live without toil was as open an invitation to Satan as it was an unseemly example to the community. And, beyond a mere exhibition of sinful pride, it was positively a manner of bearing false witness. For there were many and many that had more than he, and were not above earning their daily bread. To be sure, there was no infallible means of knowing just how much Matthew’s boy had. He who was the opposite of his neighbours in so many respects perversely robbed the local bank of a considerable business, and kept his money in Boston—where it made no difference to anybody. And his cheques were so irregular, and to such varying amounts, that the village financiers had never made up their minds whether Henry Marvin had ten thousand dollars or ten million.
But there were ways, I learned, by which you could tell. For instance, Henry, he didn’t take the newspapers and magazines. And everybody that was half-way respectable subscribed to the Marshbury Messenger. Henry didn’t seem to care much about reading, except a few musty old things of his own that were better left unread, most likely. Nor did he avail himself of the other means of culture which were open to the village. He didn’t even patronise the lecture course. Such attractions as they had, too—Dr. Waterman, the great Baptist minister from York State, who lectured on “Oceans of Pearls,” so beautifully that you’d never know he was a Baptist; and the Orpheus Male Quartette; and the Ladies’ Band, from Germany; and all sorts of things! Altogether Henry didn’t spend much that anybody could see, and he probably had less then he’d like to make out, with that proud way of his of doing nothing. And nobody knew, hinted my hostess darkly, how he came by what he had, either.
I am a scandalous gossip myself, and always encourage other people in it. If one may put it without circumlocution, there are few more precious sources of copy. I must say, however, that the Bennetts did not at first profoundly interest me with their revelations. I did not even experience any unusual sensation when I was told of Marvin’s prime enormity, that he did not go to church. It was perhaps that in a slightly wider orbit I had happened to hear of such cases before. I had discovered that it by no means argues an original spirit to discontinue that for which one has no inclination. And the mere doing or not doing what everybody else does will rarely suffice to portray a man. The traits of life lie deeper than that. The only thing about it that struck me was that Mrs. Bennett called Marvin, in consequence of his delinquencies, “a perfect pagan.” And I put it down in my notebook as another instance of the common use in New England of the most unexpected words.
But I did prick up my ears at last. It was one day when I expressed wonder—a purely conversational wonder, let me confess in passing—that Marvin should continue to live in a community with which he no longer had any tie of blood or sympathy. Mrs. Bennett thereupon informed me that Mary had more than once asked him that very question—so far as I could make out, she enjoyed strangely unconscious terms of familiarity with him—and that he always told her it was because of the brook. He lived, it seemed, on the farm of his fathers, down near the Poorhouse; and a brook ran through the place, inconveniently cutting off a piece of the orchard just behind the house. The noise of it would drive you silly, said Mrs. Bennett—especially in the spring. It never could make too much noise for Marvin, though. He always made out that there was some girl in it, singing to him.
That brook, and that singing girl, caught me! The rest of it might have belonged to any retiring old gentleman who was afraid of or bored by his neighbours—not that Marvin was so old, though, I came to find out. But this was of a distinguishing quality. And it started me off on trails of curiosity which rather indecently made up for my previous indifference. I would have given a good deal to meet the man. There was no one, however, through whom the thing could be brought about in the ordinary way of the world, and to approach him directly was more than I dared. It was not merely that he was older than I. He suddenly gave me an impression of being more genuine; and I was ashamed to go to him with no better excuse than a summer boarder’s inquisitiveness. So I had to content myself with getting at him through other people’s versions.
It grew into quite a little game just to make out the deviation of each particular compass, and then to chart the probable course. In the general opinion, I quickly found, Marvin was mad. It was all that saved him from open persecution. Could a person be regarded as responsible who insisted that he heard voices in running water, and who told the minister to his face that there was more religion in an apple orchard than in a church? And there were things queerer still, intimated Mrs. Bennett. Mary could tell about them.
What Mary could tell, what Mary did tell, most of all what Mary did not tell, would make a story by itself! It was such a case of the unconscious diversity between character and opinions. I gathered that among the reasons why the girl was allowed to serve one so manifestly in league with evil was the hope that her influence might be edifying. Certainly it was for me, during the daily catechisms which she underwent at the hands of her family. These, I was informed in private, were intended to lay bare any incipient work of contamination. Marvin’s money was a welcome addition to the family exchequer, but of course it could not be accepted if the girl were coming to any harm. There was special danger, said Mrs. Bennett, that Mary might contract habits of intemperance. Marvin himself drank, and there was no telling but what he would attempt as well the corruption of his handmaid. He was as odd about his drinking as he was about everything else, it seemed. A particular upon which my informant dwelt was that Marvin, instead of patronising the drug-store like those who had legitimate uses for strong waters, obtained his supply from Boston, as he did his money. But there was something odder still. The man had actually set up a regular bar in his house, in a small entry between the sitting-room and dining-room. He kept it stocked with liquids of strange colours, and he had counters which he could let down across the doorways.
“An’ he’ll be in the settin’-room,” went on Mrs. Bennett, “an’ he’ll suddenly get up an’ say, ‘Good-evenin’, Jack; can you fix me up a nice dry Martini?’—or somethin’ or other like that. Mary’s heard him lots o’ times. He don’t mind her bein’ ’round. An’ then he’ll walk around outside, through the hall, into the dinin’-room, an’ so to the other door of the entry. An’ he’ll say, same as if he was answerin’ himself, ‘Sure, Cap! I guess we can to-night.’ An’ then he’ll pour out his liquor, an’ put it down on the counter, an’ walk around outside to the settin’-room again. An’ then he’ll take up the stuff he left on the counter, and taste it, an’ say, ‘That’s a good one you made me to-night, Jack,’ an’ he’ll drink it up just as if he was in company. He never seems to get real drunk, though, so far as anybody can make out. An’ he never tries to make Mary take any. He just tells her he’d agree to do all the drinkin’ if she’d only do the mixin’ for him, an’ that she’d save him a power o’ steps if she’d only help him play his game.
“She’s don’ her best to stop it, but it ain’t no use. She just stood up to him one day an’ quoted Scriptur’. Wine is a mocker, she said; strong drink is ragin’, said she, an’ whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. An’ there’s a whole lot more in Proverbs about they that tarry long at the wine, an’ look upon it when it is red, an’ what not. But Henry, he took her right up. ‘Yes,’ he pops out, ‘an’ what else does it say? Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more!’ Did you ever hear the likes of that?”
I had to admit, on the whole, that I never did.
II
It is strange how small a residue will be left by how large a volume of life. Experiences that run through weeks and months can be summed up at last in an epigram. Not that I am one, let me say in passing, who is given to that form of expression. The thing done has for me no such interest as the thing doing—to dip again into that dictionary. Yet the rest of my summer in Marshbury added very little to the picture which I have begun to sketch. I had had my impression. I merely spent my time turning it over, taking it in. And the most curious thing was that, savouring the impression as much as I did, I could go away and think no more about it. I went away, and I stayed away three years. The attractions of Italy for the time outweighed all others. But after my “beaker full of the warm South,” I had a whim to go back to Marshbury. To speak in homely terms, I suppose it was on the same principle that one likes a cold shower after a hot scrub. At any rate, I am never so fond of the North as after a prolonged sojourn in the South, or of America as after Europe. And the picture of my pagan came to me again more strikingly than ever—that picture which would have been so impossible in the country from which I returned, which was so of the soil of that to which I went back. To Marshbury, therefore, I proceeded; and, of course, for old times’ sake, I put up at Mrs. Bennett’s. Indeed I could not put up anywhere else. They were all so a part of the impression.
As for that, however—! I was not in the least prepared for the changes it had undergone. I must even confess that I was at first a little disappointed. I somehow felt that Marshbury had not honourably kept its tryst with me. So does one insist on opposing one’s childish singleness of idea to the richness of life! The background, to be sure, was exactly as I remembered it. The hills looked just as they had from the time of the Flood. So, I felt certain, did the houses and the people. By whom I mean the lay figures, the supernumeraries. And Mrs. Bennett herself, who was no supernumerary, was good enough to spare a shock to my sensibilities. But that only made Mary seem the more unnatural. She had suffered one of those metamorphoses to which the young are so peculiarly susceptible—and which, apparently, no amount of experience can ever teach their absent elders to foresee. The curious thing about it was that I could trace, after the event, how impossible it would have been for her to turn out otherwise. Even through her solidest days she had always been prettier than she could help. It was only natural that she should have grown up into a handsome dignity that barely fell short of beauty and stateliness. And while she was little freer of words than she ever had been, she no longer gave one the feeling that she stood in want of them. Altogether she distinctly left me staring.
And she by no means put an end to it when, in response to my inquiry as to whether she still went to Mr. Marvin’s, she replied:
“Yes. He’s got a girl now. He says she’s the one who used to sing to him in the brook.”
This statement surprised but did not enlighten me. I did not know whether to understand that the Pagan employed a maid or was somehow in possession of a daughter. It appeared, however, that the latter was the case. And it furthermore appeared—at least to my subliminal consciousness—that in Mary a tacit forbearance with her master’s failings, as being more of the head than of the heart, was less unquestioning than it had been. It may have been that I saw more than there was. I generally do. At any rate, when it occurred to me to ask whether Marvin still kept up his bar, I certainly touched something. I could see it in the way Mary told me that everything had changed since the girl came. I felt for her. I felt, that is, as if some bungler had got hold of my rather original little sketch and had finished it off in the conventional old fashion.
Marvin had a child. That was the bare fact. But the full story I did not get then. Nor, for that matter, do I suppose I ever shall. I did pick up one thing and another, though, and the result of my pickings I shall now attempt to set forth. It will take less time if I do it in my own way. Particularly as I have no love for the dialect in which my information came to me. If Truth lie within that pale, let me forever go without!
The affair must have caused a good deal of scandal at the time. Marshbury took even less pride in the possession of a Potter’s Field than in its lack of tenants. And when a strange woman turned up from somewhere, and had the ill grace to die in the Poorhouse, people felt that their good intentions had been imposed upon. Although they did grant that it was the best thing the woman had ever done.... But the worst of it was that a shock-headed little girl of nine or ten was left on the Overseers’ hands—a small imp into whom her mother’s devil had returned with seven wickeder than himself. It took no time at all for the matron of the Poorhouse to shake her head and sigh: “Blood will tell!” Indeed, she openly expressed surprise that the Most High in his mercy had neglected to take the child unto himself at the same time as the mother. It certainly would have saved Mrs. Lovejoy an infinity of trouble. The mischief that child was not up to! She was as unmanageable as quicksilver. Her worst trick though, was running away; and she had a passion for playing in the brook of which no amount of whipping could cure her. Time and again the countryside was beaten by night, the brook dragged from one end to the other, only to have her turn up safe and sound and very hungry, without any idea where she had been or what anxiety she had caused. Nothing ever happened to her, either. It was so notorious that Mrs. Lovejoy would often have been glad to let her go, just to have the child off her mind.
It did not take this inquiring young lady long to discover Marvin. Two causes operated powerfully toward that effect. The first of them was that she had been warned against him, as being the nearest and most dangerous of her neighbours. The second was that her brook ran through his orchard. Accordingly she waded singing upon him one day as he sat with his book under an apple-tree.
“Well!” he exclaimed, as the childish voice suddenly stopped and he looked up to find a bare-legged little apparition holding scant skirts in both hands above the water. “Who are you?”
“I’m Sassy,” she answered, taking him in with big black eyes. “That ain’t my real name, though. The old woman says it ain’t Christian. My real name’s Daphne.”
“Well, well!” ejaculated Marvin. “Mary!” he called to that young woman, who happened to be out at the pump, “here’s the naiad of the brook come to pay me a visit!” And to the child, who balanced herself on a smooth stone while she splashed an overhanging branch with her foot: “What old woman is that?”
“Mis’ Lovejoy,” answered she of the unruly hair.
“Lovejoy,” repeated Marvin. “Love-Joy. That’s a nice name.” He was a little at a loss for something to say. “Is she your mother?”
“Huh!” cried the child. “It may be a nice name, but it’s all that’s nice about her. She’s just as horrid as she can be. I hate her. She ain’t my mother a bit. It ’most seems as if I never had any.” And she began to visit upon the water a series of spiteful kicks that spattered even Marvin’s page.
“Oh!” said he.
The two then looked at each other for a minute. But it was the child who spoke first.
“What do you do?”
“What do I do?” queried Marvin, puzzled. “I don’t do much of anything that I know of.”
“I mean what do you do that’s bad?” promptly returned the child. “They told me I mustn’t ever speak to you, because you’re bad. I’m bad too. That’s why I came.”
“Oh!” laughed Marvin. “Supposing you tell me what you do.”
“Lots of things—tear my clothes, and muddy my shoes, and sit in the grass, and climb trees, and slap, and kick, and run away whenever I get a chance. Most of all, though, I play in the brook. Are you as bad as that?”
Marvin held out his hand.
“Just about!” he told her. “But don’t run away from here yet a while, Daphne—or turn into a laurel. We have too many things to talk about, you and I.”
So it was that Daphne and the Pagan first cemented the bonds of friendship. In the eyes of the unappreciative community that harboured them, however, it was but another point against them both. If Marvin had known what pangs his small ally was compelled to endure in his behalf, he would long before have done what he did. For, as Mrs. Lovejoy had ever been one to live up to her word, Daphne spent an increasing portion of her days in cupboards. She likewise became an expert on the elastic properties of different domestic woods, and subsisted chiefly on bread and water. But when not otherwise engaged she spent all her time at Marvin’s, to the despair and dismay of all in authority above her. “Birds of a feather!” they ominously whispered. Until at last things got too serious for whispers, and Mrs. Lovejoy took matters into her own hands.
It must have been quite a scene. The rumour of it still filled Marshbury at the time of my second visit. Mary Bennett had been washing windows in the kitchen, and I got the most authentic details. It seemed that Mrs. Lovejoy swooped down like the wolf on the fold, one afternoon when Daphne was missing, and discovered the two, as she expected, in earnest colloquy. She did not wait for preliminaries. I must say I rather admire it, too—that trait which will seek the point at any cost, without fear or favour.
“I don’t know what you find in that child,” she said to Marvin—“born of a common woman of the street that’s buried in the Potter’s Field, and as full of Satan as an onion is of smell! But when we’re trying to do our best for her, it seems too bad that you should come along with your heathenish notions and just undo everything. I’ll thank you to keep them to yourself. Sassy, you come along with me.”
“I won’t!” declared the child, roundly. And she ran for refuge into Marvin’s arms.
Well, she stayed there. Of course there was a tremendous row. Mrs. Lovejoy stormed, and Daphne cried, and Marvin manœuvred rather helplessly between. And the upshot of it was that Mrs. Lovejoy retired ignominiously from the field, leaving her adversary the somewhat astonished possessor of an infant. Not that his title was uncontested. Mrs. Lovejoy’s last word had been that she would put the matter before the Overseers, and she did. If she was a harsh woman, she was, according to her lights, a just one. She did what she thought best in circumstances which she was not subtle enough to understand. Sassy was an intolerable incubus to her, but for the good of Sassy’s immortal soul she thought the waif should be saved from Marvin. After much parleying, however, it was concluded to let the child stay. She had been given her chance. The community had done its duty. And its representative, in the person of Mrs. Lovejoy, realised that, after all, there was a limit to the endurance of flesh and blood. It would therefore perhaps be allowable to let the orphan go into hands that were ready to care for her. The community promised itself that, under this provision for the material aspect of the case, it would keep a watchful eye on the child’s moral welfare.
I am not sure that the community did not envy for Marvin a little moral discipline in the contract which he so unexpectedly undertook. Certainly there were distinct elements of humour in the situation. To drop an incorrigible youngster into the arms of a man who knew no more about children than he did about the fourth dimension, and who had risen in the morning without the faintest notion of adopting one, might suggest very dubious results. But the brilliant success of the experiment only served to let in a little light on the ignorance of bachelors and the incorrigibility of waifs. The pair entered upon a life which became no less amazing to themselves than to the community at large. People could not imagine where the two discovered the secrets of virtue and good humour with which they suddenly blossomed forth. It amounted to another proof of their innate perversity.
At all events, for the first time in many days both of them were happy. They paddled unmolested in their brook. They invented solemn mysteries about their relation to it. They climbed their apple-trees. They dug their garden. They kept house—without a bar. They told stories. They explored the countryside for leagues around. Altogether they used to make me wish, when I came to meet them on the hills, that I could be a pagan too.
III
That opportunity, however, did not come to me. The same train of circumstances which forced me to leave Marshbury sooner than I expected kept me away from it for the next seven or eight years. But even though the impression which I have been recording had lost a little of its early piquancy in becoming more human, there was something about that quiet corner of New England which always stayed with me. In crowded streets I thought of its open valley. Through the chatter of drawing rooms I heard its running water. Among people sophisticated to the vanishing point I remembered Mrs. Bennett and Mary.
So, when the propitious moment arrived, I went back to them. There was, I fear, a touch of the practical even in my sentiment. I had started to scribble a New England novel and I wanted to be quiet. I therefore thought to kill the most birds with one stone by returning to Marshbury. Be that as it may, when I drove in toward the town it was with an unaffected thrill that I suddenly recognised the old feeling of the river road. I scarcely know how to express it. There are indefinable states of emotion, as distinct in their quality as odours or colours. And only the surroundings which awakened them first can, if ever, awaken them again. This, I suppose, is the ground of that principle of conservatism in man which can never reconcile itself with the flux of the world.
My last visit ought to have prepared me for changes. The drive, however, upset the inner counsels with which I had fortified myself—and Mrs. Bennett. She, immortal woman, was identically the same being whom I had known eleven years earlier. Even Mary had not changed so much between twenty and twenty-eight as she had between seventeen and twenty—although it was curious to me that the effect of time should be so much more visible in the one better able to resist it! The strong colour of her girlhood had softened into that delicate bloom which few but nuns can wear. And there was something about her eyes that intrigued me. But I did not wonder long. I had other sensations to take account of. For in my ointment of happiness at getting back I suddenly discovered a very large and buzzing fly.
Not that the Reverend James Wentworth could precisely be compared to that humble creature. I had come, though, to look upon the Bennetts as my private property, upon their paradise as open to myself alone. And to find it invaded by the new minister put my nose distinctly out of joint. Particularly as I perceived that my hostess fancied herself and me greatly honoured by such fellowship. Of course I could not be nasty about it. In other circumstances, in fact, I might have appreciated it as much as anybody. For I have an odd sympathy for young clergymen. Without knowing very well how much they deserve it, I always look upon them as among the few really romantic people of the world—the people who follow an inner light, regardless of rival luminaries. But the Reverend James, alas, was of those who carry the theory to its logical conclusion. He was inalienably assured that his own inner light was the sole reflection of Truth, and that all men else—with whom he happened to differ—pursued false fires.
It was a tremendous disillusionment, this unexpected change of milieu. I had two ideas of leaving on the spot. The new atmosphere, charged with latent argument, was the medium in which I breathe least easily. Being, however, more or less of a Jesuit, as I have intimated, I merely fumed within—and took copious notes. I promised myself that the Reverend James should one day affront a wider audience in the panoply of fiction. It was doubtless a lame enough compromise. I have always envied those single temperaments that can identify themselves with one side of a cause. For myself, I am unable to do it. I suppose I do not take things seriously enough, or people. They come to me as cases rather than as questions. I have no sense of responsibility about them. At any rate, the case of the Reverend James I proceeded to accept as an element of my Marshbury impression. Little did I foresee how sharply it was to throw into relief the other case with which I had so long been occupied!
That had evidently grown more crucial with the years—Marvin’s case. For Daphne was dead. She had been dead almost four years, it seemed. And in circumstances—One could not expect anything but scandal where such people were concerned, Mrs. Bennett told me. The only decent thing about it was that she and the child had died together. Anybody might have known that she would go wrong. It was what she was born to. She had done it before one could turn around, and just for a good-for-nothing young scamp she hardly had time to get acquainted with. Old Marvin, however, had refused to turn his face from her. He had only kept her the more carefully, and had been inconsolable since. Mary had never known him so queer. But—
Yes, it was evident that there was a “but.” There were things of another, a darker, kind: things which were not so easy to put into words. Between Mary’s eyes and her mother’s mysterious shrugs it was much as ever that I succeeded in getting at what the business was about. If it had not been for the plain-spoken Mr. Wentworth—! There was a strangeness to the thing, though, when I got it. There was a strangeness which I never dreamed eleven years before. It was only the stranger for the apparently conventional touches which my impression had in the meantime received. But as I write of it I realise Mrs. Bennett’s difficulty in speaking to me. It was not a thing that you could say in so many words and then go out of the room. You had to know the place, the people, the circumstances. It was so largely an effect of relativities, and of relativities different for each person whom they touched.
It all began with Daphne’s death. Then Marvin, who for seven years had been as much like other people as he could be, said Mrs. Bennett, suddenly turned more eccentric than ever. He refused to let the girl be buried like a Christian, in the cemetery. Of course she wasn’t one; but it was queer that he should be the first to say so. He said the place for her was between him and the water, and he made them dig a grave in his own orchard—on a sort of little mound there was beside the brook. If it had been anybody else, the Selectmen would have stopped him. But seeing it was that girl—! And instead of getting her a proper tombstone, which he could well afford and which everybody supposed he would do, considering the store he set by her, he just planted on her grave a sprig of lambkill.
That was natural enough in a way, opined Mrs. Bennett. People like to put flowers on graves. But lambkill! Laurel, he called it. He said that was Daphne’s tree. It was all a part of some heathenish business they had had between them. Mary thought he got it out of his books. Anyway, he spent all his time taking care of it. Of course it’s right to keep graves looking tidy. But you don’t build little green-houses over the flowers in winter. Neither do you get up in thunder-storms, in the middle of the night, to go out and attend to them. If the Lord intends things to be taken care of, he takes care of them, in spite of thunder-storms.
The strangest part of it, though, was something more unnatural still—something almost supernatural. The laurel sprig had followed for a time the ordinary course of cuttings; had by sheer force of tenderness been kept alive, and had at last developed into a healthy little plant that could live alone. But then of a sudden it received a new and secret impulse. It began to grow as no laurel had ever grown before. There was nothing like it in the whole country. It outdistanced at a bound the humble shrubs from which it sprang, and bade fair to rival even the great mountain laurel of the woods. And such flowers as it bore—such deep and burning clusters as never would have passed for cousins, even, to the faint-flushed wax of the lambkill!
The thing was unnatural enough in itself, Heaven knew. But Marvin made it a scandal. It hardly needed Mrs. Bennett to make it plain. He insisted that Daphne had turned into a laurel, after all. He called the bush by her name. He spent all his time listening to the growing whisper of its leaves. He said the strangest things to Mary about it—things stranger than any he had told her in the days when he used to say that there was a girl singing to him in the brook. A cult so extraordinary was not one to pass unnoticed. Even if Mr. Wentworth had not been in the village to formulate the moral issues of the case, the miraculous laurel waved there on its mound, more indecently conspicuous every day to those who passed on the road. An uneasiness spread among them. It was a reproach to Church and State alike that such things should go on in their midst. It corrupted youth and was an offence to age. Something should be done.
Mr. Wentworth, accordingly, did it. He, like Mrs. Lovejoy of old, went straight to Marvin. And again I could not help admiring the simplicity of that attack. I almost wished, too, that I might have been present at the encounter. It must have been such a contrast of types as one does not often witness in this half-way world. But it was not difficult to gather what happened. It was wonderful how little Mary said, and how much she expressed! Almost as wonderful were the volubility, the excitement, with which Wentworth came back from his interview.
“He is an enemy of God!” cried the minister. “He professes to believe in God; but ‘he that is not with me is against me.’ He has faith neither in heaven nor hell. He denies the sacredness of Scripture. He says a soul is nothing but a word—that there is as much soul in a ruby or a rose as there is in himself! And the kind of immortality he looks forward to is worse than none. He is a perfect pagan!”
The table rang with it for days. Of course it was Mary who supplied the necessary additions to the story. Incidentally, albeit unconsciously, she likewise supplied additions to her own story of which I had begun to feel a certain lack. Marvin had received his caller courteously, it seemed; had even consented, with a new quietness that had come upon him, to listen to Wentworth’s exhortations. But the poor zealous young man finally lost his head and allowed himself to say that they both knew where Daphne had gone, and it wasn’t heaven either. Well, the minister departed rather suddenly, and Marvin went out to his laurel tree.
With all this going on at the table, I found it hard to keep up my Jesuitism. I was more than ever caught by the case of this pagan who was the legitimate child of a New England village. It was such a strange example of the protean perversity of things to melt into one another. Then the poetry of it simply undid me. I sat there smugly writing New England novels, but I could never have imagined anything like this. And the trains it started off—! Had that little tree indeed despoiled the secrets of the grave? Had some taproot, blindly groping through the dark soil, become a channel whereby was made manifest the alchemy of the earth? Was the laurel literally a transfiguration? Might it be proof of the infinite resource of life that that unhappy heart which life had broken should at once forget its pain and dishonour and be transmuted into beauty?
To me more than ever the wind and the waters spoke mysteriously. For me more than ever was there a kinship between crystal and plant and creature transcending the jealous immortality of man. There was neither superiority nor inferiority. It was all part of the unceasing life of the earth—of that deathless ebb and flow which draws the ancient elements again and again into new combinations, which always has wrought with the same ones and always must, in changing forms of beauty and wonder.
And I came the nearest ever to seeking Marvin’s acquaintance. He made me think of what Pater says of Leonardo, who “seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice silent for other men.” I was interested to the verge of indiscretion. I even went so far, I must confess, as to walk oftener than elsewhere on the Poorhouse road—whence could be seen the sacred laurel above its little stream. It was indeed a prodigy. Such blossoms I never saw in my life. It turned one’s head to see them there, aflame among their glossy green, with the brook skirling below. Mary told me that Marvin would never pick them. Indeed he never picked any flowers now, she said. It began the spring after Daphne died, when the trailing arbutus came out. She had brought him some, one day, thinking to please him. But he asked her not to do it again. It hurt them, he said. And they were Daphne’s cousins, the arbutus....
I do not know how far I might have gone. But there came a day when all hope of acquaintance was suddenly cut off. There came a day! I shall never forget it. I had been on a long walk in the country. My book was stuck, and I knew of old that the only way to unstick a book is to let it alone. So I walked miles and miles in one of those delicious New England afternoons of early summer when the air is an elixir of eternity. It made me think of the Pagan and it quickened in me a growing sense that the earth existed as a whole and endured as a whole; that men were but one phase of its immense secret energy whose so-called consciousness had unbalanced them a little, was merely another mode of an energy more astounding still, as light and heat are but two modes of vibrations which possess others undreamed. It was for this reason, perhaps, that I came home by the Poorhouse road.
As I rounded the turn by the orchard I looked as usual toward the laurel tree. To my surprise, I saw figures moving on the mound; and there was a cart tied at the gate. It was so out of the ordinary that I stopped in spite of myself. Then I suddenly discovered that the laurel was gone! I could not believe my eyes. The thing was too inconceivable. It was to me as if I had stumbled upon a scene of murder. In the first horror of it, in the certainty that something terrible had happened, I forgot my habit of taking no personal part in that village drama. My unuttered feeling for Marvin caught me like a hand and led me, choking, toward the mound.
All I had eyes for at first was the laurel. It lay inert on the ground, that a few hours before had waved so royally aloft; and already the magic flowers looked a little wilted in their green. Beside it crouched Marvin. He said nothing; but the inarticulate sounds that came from him were the most piteous I ever heard. And the way he caressed his stricken beauty was more than one could bear to see. No lover could more tenderly, more passionately, address the limbs of his dead. He straightened out contorted twigs. He lifted petals from their contact with the ground. Now and again he put his hand to the poor sawn trunk, whence a little pale moisture was oozing, as if to stanch a mortal flow. And all the while he kept by him the severed knot of the root, with its one thick stem that had been broken off deep in the ground.
After the first instant the indecency of looking at such a spectacle overwhelmed me. I turned away. I noticed Mary then for the first time. Two men whom I recognised as farm-hands of the Bennetts were also there, and another whom I did not know. And Wentworth. Wentworth! All the shock of the moment suddenly flared into my long latent dislike of the man.
“Are you responsible for this?” I almost shouted at him.
I could have killed him, and he knew it. Yet that certainty of right and wrong which is the power of his type did not desert him. I had a sub-conscious appreciation of it, so keen is my accursed sense of such things, even in my fury.
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “I am!” Oh, he was not afraid or ashamed! He was of the stuff that has kindled fires and fed them since the world began. And he went on as if he had been in his pulpit—or at the stake: “I have wished that this parish should administer both rebuke and reparation. I have long regretted that heathen rites should be tolerated in a Christian community—as also that a proper charity should not be shown to all, irrespective of creed. I therefore took steps, after asking counsel of God, to attain both ends. I cut down this tree because it was a public scandal, an occasion of stumbling to Christians and sinners alike. The very children of our village were beginning to be infected by its heresy. And I shall adorn the house of God with these spoils, thus to expiate a sin and to consecrate anew a work of God which has been devoted to unholy uses. But I have not wished to be hasty in the matter, to be needlessly harsh and wounding. Furthermore, it has been my desire to make good a neglect which has rested too long on the Christian conscience of this community. I have accordingly taken steps to mark with fitness the last resting-place of an unfortunate young woman who apparently from her birth was more sinned against than sinning.”
He pointed behind him. Where the laurel had been I saw now a slab of grey granite. And cut into it I read these words:
DAPHNE MARVIN
1894-1911
“He that is without sin among you,
let him first cast a stone at her.”