THE GIRL SHE HAD BEEN
As they sat amid the smell of rosin on that summer day, she told him,
with a glance that said, "Now you will laugh at me," what had brought
her into Caddam Wood.
"I came to rub something out."
He reflected. "A memory?"
"Yes."
"Of me?"
She nodded.
"An unhappy memory?"
"Not to me," she replied, leaning on him. "I have no memory of you I
would rub out, no, not the unhappiest one, for it was you, and that
makes it dear. All memories, however sad, of loved ones become sweet,
don't they, when we get far enough away from them?"
"But to whom, then, is this memory painful, Grizel?"
Again she cast that glance at him. "To her," she whispered.
"'That little girl'!"
"Yes; the child I used to be. You see, she never grew up, and so they
are not distant memories to her. I try to rub them out of her mind by
giving her prettier things to think of. I go to the places where she
was most unhappy, and tell her sweet things about you. I am not
morbid, am I, in thinking of her still as some one apart from myself?
You know how it began, in the lonely days when I used to look at her
in mamma's mirror, and pity her, and fancy that she was pitying me and
entreating me to be careful. Always when I think I see her now, she
seems to be looking anxiously at me and saying, 'Oh, do be careful!'
And the sweet things I tell her about you are meant to show her how
careful I have become. Are you laughing at me for this? I sometimes
laugh at it myself."
"No, it is delicious," he answered her, speaking more lightly than he
felt. "What a numskull you make, Grizel, of any man who presumes to
write about women! I am at school again, and you are Miss Ailie
teaching me the alphabet. But I thought you lost that serious little
girl on the doleful day when she heard you say that you loved me
best."
"She came back. She has no one but me."
"And she still warns you against me?"
Grizel laughed gleefully. "I am too clever for her," she said. "I do
all the talking. I allow her to listen only. And you must not blame
her for distrusting you; I have said such things against you to her!
Oh, the things I said! On the first day I saw you, for instance, after
you came back to Thrums. It was in church. Do you remember?"
"I should like to know what you said to her about me that day."
"Would you?" Grizel asked merrily. "Well, let me see. She was not at
church--she never went there, you remember; but of course she was
curious to hear about you, and I had no sooner got home than she came
to me and said, 'Was he there?' 'Yes,' I said. 'Is he much changed?'
she asked. 'He has a beard,' I said. 'You know that is not what I
really mean,' she said, and then I said, 'I don't think he is so much
changed that it is impossible to recognize him again.'"
Tommy interrupted her: "Now what did you mean by that?"
"I meant that I thought you were a little annoyed to find the
congregation looking at Gavinia's baby more than at you!"
"Grizel, you are a wretch, but perhaps you were right. Well, what more
did the little inquisitor want to know?"
"She asked me if I felt any of my old fear of you, and I said No, and
then she clapped her hands with joy. And she asked whether you looked
at me as if you were begging me to say I still thought you a wonder,
and I said I thought you did----"
"Grizel!"
"Oh, I told her ever so many dreadful things as soon as I found them
out. I told her the whole story of your ankle, sir, for instance."
"On my word, Grizel, you seem to have omitted nothing!"
"Ah, but I did," she cried. "I never told her how much I wanted you to
be admirable; I pretended that I despised you merely, and in reality I
was wringing my hands with woe every time you did not behave like a
god."
"They will be worn away, Grizel, if you go on doing that."
"I don't think so," she replied, "nor can she think so if she believes
half of what I have told her about you since. She knows how you saved
the boy's life. I told her that in the old Lair because she had some
harsh memories of you there; and it was at the Cuttle Well that I told
her about the glove."
"And where," asked Tommy, severely, "did you tell her that you had
been mistaken in thinking me jealous of a baby and anxious to be
considered a wonder?"
She hid her face for a moment, and then looked up roguishly into his.
"I have not told her that yet!" she replied. It was so audacious of
her that he took her by the ears.
"If I were vain," Tommy said reflectively, "I would certainly shake
you now. You show a painful want of tact, Grizel, in implying that I
am not perfect. Nothing annoys men so much. We can stand anything
except that."
His merriness gladdened her. "They are only little things," she said,
"and I have grown to love them. I know they are flaws; but I love them
because----"
"Say because they are mine. You owe me that."
"No; but because they are weaknesses I don't have. I have others, but
not those, and it is sweet to me to know that you are weak in some
matters in which I am strong. It makes me feel that I can be of use to
you."
"Are you insinuating that there are more of them?" Tommy demanded,
sitting up.
"You are not very practical," she responded, "and I am."
"Go on."
"And you are--just a little--inclined to be senti----"
"Hush! I don't allow that word; but you may say, if you choose, that I
am sometimes carried away by a too generous impulse."
"And that it will be my part," said she, "to seize you by the arm and
hold you back. Oh, you will give me a great deal to do! That is one of
the things I love you for. It was one of the things I loved my dear
Dr. McQueen for." She looked up suddenly. "I have told him also about
you."
"Lately, Grizel?"
"Yes, in my parlour. It was his parlour, you know, and I had kept
nothing from him while he was alive; that is to say, he always knew
what I was thinking of, and I like to fancy that he knows still. In
the evenings he used to sit in the arm-chair by the fire, and I sat
talking or knitting at his feet, and if I ceased to do anything except
sit still, looking straight before me, he knew I was thinking the
morbid thoughts that had troubled me in the old days at Double Dykes.
Without knowing it I sometimes shuddered at those times, and he was
distressed. It reminded him of my mamma."
"I understand," Tommy said hurriedly. He meant: "Let us avoid painful
subjects."
[Illustration: "I sit still by his arm-chair and tell him what is
happening to his Grizel."]
"It is years," she went on, "since those thoughts have troubled me,
and it was he who drove them away. He was so kind! He thought so much
of my future that I still sit by his arm-chair and tell him what is
happening to his Grizel. I don't speak aloud, of course; I scarcely
say the words to myself even; and yet we seem to have long talks
together. I told him I had given you his coat."
"Well, I don't think he was pleased at that, Grizel. I have had a
feeling for some time that the coat dislikes me. It scratched my hand
the first time I put it on. My hand caught in the hook of the collar,
you will say; but no, that is not what I think. In my opinion, the
deed was maliciously done. McQueen always distrusted me, you know, and
I expect his coat was saying, 'Hands off my Grizel.'"
She took it as quite a jest. "He does not distrust you now," she said,
smiling. "I have told him what I think of you, and though he was
surprised at first, in the end his opinion was the same as mine."
"Ah, you saw to that, Grizel!"
"I had nothing to do with it. I merely told him everything, and he had
to agree with me. How could he doubt when he saw that you had made me
so happy! Even mamma does not doubt."
"You have told her! All this is rather eerie, Grizel."
"You are not sorry, are you?" she asked, looking at him anxiously.
"Dr. McQueen wanted me to forget her. He thought that would be best
for me. It was the only matter on which we differed. I gave up
speaking of her to him. You are the only person I have mentioned her
to since I became a woman; but I often think of her. I am sure there
was a time, before I was old enough to understand, when she was very
fond of me. I was her baby, and women can't help being fond of their
babies, even though they should never have had them. I think she often
hugged me tight."
"Need we speak of this, Grizel?"
"For this once," she entreated. "You must remember that mamma often
looked at me with hatred, and said I was the cause of all her woe; but
sometimes in her last months she would give me such sad looks that I
trembled, and I felt that she was picturing me growing into the kind
of woman she wished so much she had not become herself, and that she
longed to save me. That is why I have told her that a good man loves
me. She is so glad, my poor dear mamma, that I tell her again and
again, and she loves to hear it as much as I to tell it. What she
loves to hear most is that you really do want to marry me. She is so
fond of hearing that because it is what my father would never say to
her."
Tommy was so much moved that he could not speak, but in his heart he
gave thanks that what Grizel said of him to her mamma was true at
last.
"It makes her so happy," Grizel said, "that when I seem to see her now
she looks as sweet and pure as she must have been in the days when she
was an innocent girl. I think she can enter into my feelings more than
any other person could ever do. Is that because she was my mother? She
understands how I feel just as I can understand how in the end she was
willing to be bad because he wanted it so much."
"No, no, Grizel," Tommy cried passionately, "you don't understand
that!"
She rocked her arms. "Yes, I do," she said; "I do. I could never have
cared for such a man; but I can understand how mamma yielded to him,
and I have no feeling for her except pity, and I have told her so, and
it is what she loves to hear her daughter tell her best of all."
They put the subject from them, and she told him what it was that she
had come to rub out in Caddam. If you have read of Tommy's boyhood you
may remember the day it ended with his departure for the farm, and
that he and Elspeth walked through Caddam to the cart that was to take
him from her, and how, to comfort her, he swore that he loved her with
his whole heart, and Grizel not at all, and that Grizel was in the
wood and heard. And how Elspeth had promised to wave to Tommy in the
cart as long as it was visible, but broke down and went home sobbing,
and how Grizel took her place and waved, pretending to be Elspeth, so
that he might think she was bearing up bravely. Tommy had not known
what Grizel did for him that day, and when he heard it now for the
first time from her own lips, he realized afresh what a glorious girl
she was and had always been.
"You may try to rub that memory out of little Grizel's head," he
declared, looking very proudly at her, "but you shall never rub it out
of mine."
It was by his wish that they went together to the spot where she had
heard him say that he loved Elspeth only--"if you can find it," Tommy
said, "after all these years"; and she smiled at his mannish
words--she had found it so often since! There was the very clump of
whin.
And here was the boy to match. Oh, who by striving could make himself
a boy again as Tommy could! I tell you he was always irresistible
then. What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will. When
I think of him flinging off the years and whistling childhood back,
not to himself only, but to all who heard, distributing it among them
gaily, imperiously calling on them to dance, dance, for they are boys
and girls again until they stop--when to recall him in those wild
moods is to myself to grasp for a moment at the dear dead days that
were so much the best, I cannot wonder that Grizel loved him. I am his
slave myself; I see that all that was wrong with Tommy was that he
could not always be a boy.
"Hide there again, Grizel," he cried to her, little Tommy cried to
her, Stroke the Jacobite, her captain, cried to the Lady Griselda; and
he disappeared, and presently marched down the path with an imaginary
Elspeth by his side. "I love you both, Elspeth," he was going to say,
"and my love for the one does not make me love the other less"; but he
glanced at Grizel, and she was leaning forward to catch his words as
if this were no play, but life or death, and he knew what she longed
to hear him say, and he said it: "I love you very much, Elspeth, but
however much I love you, it would be idle to pretend that I don't love
Grizel more."
A stifled cry of joy came from a clump of whin hard by, and they were
man and woman again.
"Did you not know it, Grizel?"
"No, no; you never told me."
"I never dreamed it was necessary to tell you."
"Oh, if you knew how I have longed that it might be so, yes, and
sometimes hated Elspeth because I feared it could not be! I have tried
so hard to be content with second place. I have thought it all out,
and said to myself it was natural that Elspeth should be first."
"My tragic love," he said, "I can see you arguing in that way, but I
don't see you convincing yourself. My passionate Grizel is not the
girl to accept second place from anyone. If I know anything of her, I
know that."
To his surprise, she answered softly: "You are wrong. I wonder at it
myself, but I had made up my mind to be content with second place, and
to be grateful for it."
"I could not have believed it!" he cried.
"I could not have believed it myself," said she.
"Are you the Grizel----" he began.
"No," she said, "I have changed a little," and she looked pathetically
at him.
"It stabs me," he said, "to see you so humble."
"I am humbler than I was," she answered huskily, but she was looking
at him with the fondest love.
"Don't look at me so, Grizel," he implored. "I am unworthy of it. I am
the man who has made you so humble."
"Yes," she answered, and still she looked at him with the fondest
love. A film came over his eyes, and she touched them softly with her
handkerchief.
"Those eyes that but a little while ago were looking so coldly at
you!" he said.
"Dear eyes!" said she.
"Though I were to strike you----" he cried, raising his hand.
She took the hand in hers and kissed it.
"Has it come to this!" he said, and as she could not speak, she
nodded. He fell upon his knees before her.
"I am glad you are a little sorry," she said; "I am a little sorry
myself."