Grace burst into the room where her mother sat; and flung her hat aside
with a desperate gesture. “Now, mother, you have got to listen to me.
Dr. Mulbridge has asked me to marry him!”
Mrs. Breen put up her spectacles on her forehead, and stared at her
daughter, while some strong expressions, out of the plebeian or rustic
past which lies only a generation or two behind most of us, rose to her
lips. I will not repeat them here; she had long denied them to herself
as an immoral self-indulgence, and it must be owned that such things
have a fearful effect, coming from old ladies. “What has got into all
the men? What in nature does he want you to marry him for?”
“Oh, for the best reasons in the world,” exclaimed the daughter. “For
reasons that will make you admire and respect him,” she added
ironically. “For great, and unselfish, and magnanimous reasons!”
“I should want to believe they were the real ones, first,” interrupted
Mrs. Breen.
“He wants to marry me because he knows that I can’t fulfil my plans of
life alone, and because we could fulfil them together. We shall not
only be husband and wife, but we shall be physicians in partnership. I
may continue a homœopath, he says, and the State Medical Association
may go to the devil.” She used his language, that would have been
shocking to her ordinary moods, without blenching, and in their common
agitation her mother accepted it as fit and becoming. “He counts upon
my accepting him because I must see it as my duty, and my conscience
won’t let me reject the only opportunity I shall have of doing some
good and being of some use in the world. What do you think I ought to
do, mother?”
“There’s reason in what he says. It is an opportunity. You _could_ be
of use, in that way, and perhaps it’s the only way. Yes,” she
continued, fascinated by the logic of the position, and its
capabilities for vicarious self-sacrifice. “I don’t see how you can get
out of it: You have spent years and years of study, and a great deal of
money, to educate yourself for a profession that you’re too weak to
practise alone. You can’t say that I ever advised your doing it. It was
your own idea, and I didn’t oppose it. But when you’ve gone so far,
you’ve formed an obligation to go on. It’s your duty not to give up, if
you know of any means to continue. That’s your duty, as plain as can
be. To say nothing of the wicked waste of your giving up now, you’re
bound to consider the effect it would have upon other women who are
trying to do something for themselves. The only thing,” she added, with
some misgiving, “is whether you believe he was in earnest and would
keep his word to you.”
“I think he was secretly laughing at me, and that he would expect to
laugh me out of his promise.”
“Well, then, you ought to take time to reflect, and you ought to be
sure that you’re right about him.”
“Is that what you really think, mother?”
“I am always governed by reason, Grace, and by right; and I have
brought you up on that plan. If you have ever departed from it, it has
not been with my consent, nor for want of my warning. I have simply
laid the matter before you.”
“Then you wish me to marry him?”
This was perhaps a point that had not occurred to Mrs. Breen in her
recognition of the strength of Dr. Mulbridge’s position. It was one
thing to trace the path of duty; another to support the aspirant in
treading it. “You ought to take time to reflect,” Mrs. Breen repeated,
with evasion that she never used in behalf of others.
“Well, mother,” answered Grace, “I didn’t take time to reflect, and I
shouldn’t care whether I was right about him or not. I refused him
because I didn’t love him. If I had loved him that would have been the
only reason I needed to marry him. But all the duty in the world
wouldn’t be enough without it. Duty? I am sick of duty! Let the other
women who are trying to do something for themselves, take care of
themselves as men would. I don’t owe them more than a man would owe
other men, and I won’t be hoodwinked into thinking I do. As for the
waste, the past is gone, at any rate; and the waste that I lament is
the years I spent in working myself up to an undertaking that I was
never fit for. I won’t continue that waste, and I won’t keep up the
delusion that because I was very unhappy I was useful, and that it was
doing good to be miserable. I like pleasure and I like dress; I like
pretty things. There is no harm in them. Why shouldn’t I have them?”
“There is harm in them for you,”—her mother began.
“Because I have tried to make my life a horror? There is no other
reason, and that is no reason. When we go into Boston this winter I
shall go to the theatre. I shall go to the opera, and I hope there will
be a ballet. And next summer, I am going to Europe; I am going to
Italy.” She whirled away toward the door as if she were setting out.
“I should think you had taken leave of your conscience!” cried her
mother.
“I hope I have, mother. I am going to consult my reason after this.”
“Your reason!”
“Well, then, my inclination. I have had enough of conscience,—of my
own, and of yours, too. That is what I told him, and that is what I
mean. There is such a thing as having too much conscience, and of
getting stupefied by it, so that you can’t really see what’s right. But
I don’t care. I believe I should like to do wrong for a while, and I
_will_ do wrong if it’s doing right to marry him.”
She had her hand on the door-knob, and now she opened the door, and
closed it after her with something very like a bang.
She naturally could not keep within doors in this explosive state, and
she went downstairs, and out upon the piazza. Mr. Maynard was there,
smoking, with his boots on top of the veranda-rail, and his person
thrown back in his chair at the angle requisite to accomplish this
elevation of the feet. He took them down, as he saw her approach, and
rose, with the respect in which he never failed for women, and threw
his cigar away.
“Mr. Maynard,” she asked abruptly, “do you know where Mr. Libby is?”
“No, I don’t, doctor, I’m sorry to say. If I did, I would send and
borrow some more cigars of him. I think that the brand our landlord
keeps must have been invented by Mr. Track, the great anti-tobacco
reformer.”
“Is he coming back? Isn’t he coming back?” she demanded breathlessly.
“Why, yes, I reckon he must be coming back. Libby generally sees his
friends through. And he’ll have some curiosity to know how Mrs. Maynard
and I have come out of it all.” He looked at her with something latent
in his eye; but what his eye expressed was merely a sympathetic regret
that he could not be more satisfactory.
“Perhaps,” she suggested, “Mr. Barlow might know something.”
“Well, now,” said Maynard, “perhaps he might, that very thing. I’ll go
round and ask him.” He went to the stable, and she waited for his
return. “Barlow says,” he reported, “that he guesses he’s somewhere
about Leyden. At any rate, his mare’s there yet, in the stable where
Barlow left her. He saw her there, yesterday.”
“Thanks. That’s all I wished to know,” said Grace. “I wished to write
to him,” she added boldly.
She shut herself in her room and spent the rest of the forenoon in
writing a letter, which when first finished was very long, but in its
ultimate phase was so short as to occupy but a small space on a square
correspondence-card. Having got it written on the card, she was
dissatisfied with it in that shape, and copied it upon a sheet of
note-paper. Then she sealed and addressed it, and put it into her
pocket; after dinner she went down to the beach, and walked a long way
upon the sands. She thought at first that she would ask Barlow to get
it to him, somehow; and then she determined to find out from Barlow the
address of the people who had Mr. Libby’s horse, and send it to them
for him by the driver of the barge. She would approach the driver with
a nonchalant, imperious air, and ask him to please have that delivered
to Mr. Libby immediately; and in case he learned from the stable-people
that he was not in Leyden, to bring the letter back to her. She saw how
the driver would take it, and then she figured Libby opening and
reading it. She sometimes figured him one way, and sometimes another.
Sometimes he rapidly scanned the lines, and then instantly ordered his
horse, and feverishly hastened the men; again he deliberately read it,
and then tore it into stall pieces, with a laugh, and flung them away.
This conception of his behavior made her heart almost stop beating; but
there was a luxury in it, too, and she recurred to it quite as often as
to the other, which led her to a dramatization of their meeting, with
all their parley minutely realized, and every most intimate look and
thought imagined. There is of course no means of proving that this sort
of mental exercise was in any degree an exercise of the reason, or that
Dr. Breen did not behave unprofessionally in giving herself up to it.
She could only have claimed in self-defence that she was no longer
aiming at a professional behavior; that she was in fact abandoning
herself to a recovered sense of girlhood and all its sweetest
irresponsibilities. Those who would excuse so weak and capricious a
character may urge, if they like, that she was behaving as wisely as a
young physician of the other sex would have done in the circumstances.
She concluded to remain on the beach, where only the children were
playing in the sand, and where she could easily escape any other
companionship that threatened. After she had walked long enough to
spend the first passion of her reverie, she sat down under the cliff,
and presently grew conscious of his boat swinging at anchor in its
wonted place, and wondered that she had not thought he must come back
for that. Then she had a mind to tear up her letter as superfluous; but
she did not. She rose from her place under the cliff, and went to look
for the dory. She found it drawn up on the sand in a little cove. It
was the same place, and the water was so shoal for twenty feet out that
no one could have rowed the dory to land; it must be dragged up. She
laughed and blushed, and then boldly amused herself by looking for
footprints; but the tide must have washed them out long ago; there were
only the light, small footprints of the children who had been playing
about the dory. She brushed away some sand they had scattered over the
seat, and got into the boat and sat down there. It was a good seat, and
commanded a view of the sail-boat in the foreground of the otherwise
empty ocean; she took out her letter, and let it lie in the open hands
which she let lie in her lap.
She was not impatient to have the time pass; it went only too soon.
Though she indulged that luxury of terror in imagining her letter torn
up and scornfully thrown away, she really rested quite safe as to the
event; but she liked this fond delay, and the soft blue afternoon might
have lasted forever to her entire content.
A little whiff of breeze stole up, and suddenly caught the letter from
her open hands, and whisked it out over the sand. With a cry she fled
after it, and when she had recaptured it, she thought to look at her
watch. It was almost time for the barge, and now she made such needless
haste, in order not to give herself chance for misgiving or retreat,
that she arrived too soon at the point where she meant to intercept the
driver on his way to the house; for in her present mutiny she had
resolved to gratify a little natural liking for manoeuvre, long starved
by the rigid discipline to which she had subjected herself. She had
always been awkward at it, but she liked it; and now it pleased her to
think that she should give her letter secretly to the driver, and on
her way to meet him she forgot that she had meant to ask Barlow for
part of the address. She did not remember this till it was too late to
go back to the hotel, and she suddenly resolved not to consult Barlow,
but to let the driver go about from one place to another with the
letter till he found the right one. She kept walking on out into the
forest through which the road wound, and she had got a mile away before
she saw the weary bowing of the horses’ heads as they tugged the barge
through the sand at a walk. She stopped involuntarily, with some
impulses to flight; and as the vehicle drew nearer, she saw the driver
turned round upon his seat, and talking to a passenger behind. She had
never counted upon his having a passenger, and the fact undid all.
She remained helpless in the middle of the road; the horses came to a
stand-still a few paces from her, and the driver ceased from the high
key of conversation, and turned to see what was the matter.
“My grief!” he shouted. “If it hadn’t been for them horses o’ mine, I
sh’d ’a’ run right over ye.”
“I wished to speak with you,” she began. “I wished to send”—
She stopped, and the passenger leaned forward to learn what was going
on. “Miss Breen!” he exclaimed, and leaped out of the back of the barge
and ran to her.
“You—you got my letter!” she gasped.
“No! What letter? Is there anything the matter?”
She did not answer. She had become conscious of the letter, which she
had never ceased to hold in the hand that she had kept in her pocket
for that purpose. She crushed it into a small wad.
Libby turned his head, and said to the driver of the barge, “Go ahead.”
“Will you take my arm?” he added to her. “It’s heavy walking in this
sand.”
“No, thank you,” she murmured, recoiling. “I’m not tired.”
“Are you well? Have you been quite well?”
“Oh, yes, perfectly. I didn’t know you were coming back.”
“Yes. I had to come back. I’m going to Europe next week, and I had to
come to look after my boat, here; and I wanted to say good-by to
Maynard. I was just going to speak to Maynard, and then sail my boat
over to Leyden.”
“It will be very pleasant,” she said, without looking at him. “It’s
moonlight now.”
“Oh, I sha’n’t have any use for the moon. I shall get over before
nightfall, if this breeze holds.”
She tried to think of something else, and to get away from this talk of
a sail to Leyden, but she fatally answered, “I saw your boat this
afternoon. I hadn’t noticed before that it was still here.”
He hesitated a moment, and then asked, “Did you happen to notice the
dory?”
“Yes, it was drawn up on the sand.”
“I suppose it’s all right—if it’s in the same place.”
“It seemed to be,” she answered faintly.
“I’m going to give the boat to Johnson.”
She did not say anything, for she could think of nothing to say, but
that she had looked for seals on the reef, but had not seen any, and
this would have been too shamelessly leading. That left the word to
him, and he asked timidly,—
“I hope my coming don’t seem intrusive, Miss Breen?”
She did not heed this, but “You are going to be gone a great while?”
she asked, in turn.
“I don’t know,” he replied, in an uncertain tone, as if troubled to
make out whether she was vexed with him or not. “I thought,” he added,
“I would go up the Nile this time. I’ve never been up the Nile, you
know.”
“No, I didn’t know that. Well,” she added to herself, “I wish you had
not come back! You had better not have come back. If you hadn’t come,
you would have got my letter. And now it can never be done! No, I can’t
go through it all again, and no one has the right to ask it. We have
missed the only chance,” she cried to herself, in such keen reproach of
him that she thought she must have spoken aloud.
“Is Mrs. Maynard all right again?” he asked.
“Yes, she is very much better,” she answered, confusedly, as if he had
heard her reproach and had ignored it.
“I hope you’re not so tired as you were.”
“No, I’m not tired now.”
“I thought you looked a little pale,” he said sympathetically, and now
she saw that he was so. It irritated her that she should be so far from
him, in all helpfulness, and she could scarcely keep down the wish that
ached in her heart.
We are never nearer doing the thing we long to do than when we have
proclaimed to ourselves that it must not and cannot be.
“Why are you so pale?” she demanded, almost angrily.
“I? I didn’t know that I was,” he answered. “I supposed I was pretty
well. I dare say I ought to be ashamed of showing it in that way. But
if you ask me, well, I will tell you; I don’t find it any easier than I
did at first.”
“You are to blame, then!” she cried. “If I were a man, I should not let
such a thing wear upon me for a moment.”
“Oh, I dare say I shall live through it,” he answered, with the
national whimsicality that comes to our aid in most emergencies.
A little pang went through her heart, but she retorted, “I wouldn’t go
to Europe to escape it, nor up the Nile. I would stay and fight it
where I was.” “Stay?” He seemed to have caught hopefully at the word.
“I thought you were stronger. If you give up in this way how can you
expect me”—She stopped; she hardly knew what she had intended to say;
she feared that he knew.
But he only said: “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to trouble you with the
sight of me. I had a plan for getting over the cliff without letting
you know, and having Maynard come down to me there.”
“And did you really mean,” she cried piteously, “to go away without
trying to see me again?”
“Yes,” he owned simply. “I thought I might catch a glimpse of you, but
I didn’t expect to speak to you.”
“Did you hate me so badly as that? What had I done to you?”
“Done?” He gave a sorrowful laugh; and added, with an absent air, “Yes,
it’s really like doing something to me! And sometimes it seems as if
you had done it purposely.”
“You _know_ I didn’t! Now, then,” she cried, “you have insulted me, and
you never did _that_ before. You were very good and noble and generous,
and wouldn’t let me blame myself for anything. I wanted always to
remember that of you; for I didn’t believe that any man could be so
magnanimous. But it seems that you don’t care to have me respect you!”
“Respect?” he repeated, in the same vague way. “No, I shouldn’t care
about that unless it was included in the other. But you know whether I
have accused you of anything, or whether I have insulted you. I won’t
excuse myself. I think that ought to be insulting to your common
sense.”
“Then why should you have wished to avoid seeing me to-day? Was it to
spare yourself?” she demanded, quite incoherently now. “Or did you
think _I_ should not be equal to the meeting?”
“I don’t know what to say to you,” answered the young man. “I think I
must be crazy.” He halted, and looked at her in complete bewilderment.
“I don’t understand you at all.”
“I wished to see you very much. I wanted your advice, as—as—a friend.”
He shook his head. “Yes! you _shall_ be my friend, in this at least. I
can claim it—demand it. You had no right to—to—make me—trust you so
much, and—and then—desert me.”
“Oh, very well,” he answered. “If any advice of mine—But I couldn’t go
through that sacrilegious farce of being near you and not”—She waited
breathlessly, a condensed eternity, for him to go on; but he stopped at
that word, and added: “How can I advise you?”
The disappointment was so cruel that the tears came into her eyes and
ran down her face, which she averted from him. When she could control
herself she said, “I have an opportunity of going on in my profession
now, in a way that makes me sure of success.”
“I am very glad on your account. You must be glad to realize”
“No, no!” she retorted wildly. “I am _not_ glad!”
“I thought you”—
“But there are conditions! He says he will go with me anywhere, and we
can practise our profession together, and I can carry out all my plans.
But first—first—he wants me to—marry him!”
“Who?”
“Don’t you know? Dr. Mulbridge!”
“That—I beg your pardon. I’ve no right to call him names.” The young
fellow halted, and looked at her downcast face. “Well, do you want me
to tell you to take him? That is too much. I didn’t know you were
cruel.”
“You make me cruel! You leave me to be cruel!”
“I _leave_ you to be cruel?”
“Oh, don’t play upon my words, if you won’t ask me what I answered!”
“How can I ask that? I have no right to know.”
“But you _shall_ know!” she cried. “I told him that I had no plans. I
have given them all up because—because I’m too weak for them, and
because I abhor him, and because—But it wasn’t enough. He would not
take what I said for answer, and he is coming again for an answer.”
“Coming _again?_”
“Yes. _He_ is a man who believes that women may change, for reason or
no reason; and”—
“You—you mean to take him when he comes back?” gasped the young man.
“Never! Not if he came a thousand times!”
“Then what is it you want me to advise you about?” he faltered.
“Nothing!” she answered, with freezing hauteur. She suddenly put up her
arms across her eyes, with the beautiful, artless action of a
shame-smitten child, and left her young figure in bewildering relief.
“Oh, don’t you see that I love _you?_”
“Couldn’t you understand,—couldn’t you _see_ what I meant?” she asked
again that night, as they lost themselves on the long stretch of the
moonlit beach. With his arm close about that lovely shape they would
have seemed but one person to the inattentive observer, as they paced
along in the white splendor.
“I couldn’t risk anything. I had spoken, once for all. I always thought
that for a man to offer himself twice was indelicate and unfair. I
could never have done it.”
“That’s very sweet in you,” she said; and perhaps she would have
praised in the same terms the precisely opposite sentiment. “It’s some
comfort,” she added, with a deep-fetched sigh, “to think I _had_ to
speak.”
He laughed. “You didn’t find it so easy to make love!”
“Oh, _nothing_ is easy that men have to do!” she answered, with
passionate earnestness.
There are moments of extreme concession, of magnanimous admission, that
come but once in a lifetime.