GILEAD BALM
At the Gilead Balm landing waited Captain Bob with a negro man to
carry up to the house the Colonel's portmanteau and Miss Serena's
small leather trunk. The packet-boat came in sight, white and slow as
a deliberate swan, drew reflectively down the shining reach of water,
and sidled to the landing. The Colonel shook hands with all the country
gentlemen and bowed to the ladies, and the country gentlemen bowed to
Miss Serena, who in turn bent her head and smiled, and the captain said
good-bye, and the Colonel gave the attendant darky a quarter, and the
woman with the baby came to that side of the boat and held for a moment
the hand of the dark little girl, and then the gangplank was placed and
the three Ashendynes passed over to the Colonel's land. The horn blew
again, long, melodious; the negro on the towpath said, "Get up!" to the
mule. Amid a waving of hands and a chorus of slow, agreeable voices the
packet-boat glided from the landing and proceeded down the pink water
between the willows and sycamores.
Captain Bob, with his hound Luna at his heels, greeted the returning
members of the family: "Well, Serena, did you have a pleasant visit?
Hey, Gipsy, you've grown a week! Well, Colonel?"
The Colonel shook hands with his brother. "Very pleasant time, Bob!
Good old-time people, too good for this damned new-fangled world!
But--" he breathed deep. "I am glad to get home. I am always glad to
get home. Well? Everything all right?"
"Right as a trivet! The Bishop's here, and Mrs. LeGrand. Came on the
stage yesterday."
"That's good news," said the Colonel. "The Bishop's always welcome, and
Mrs. LeGrand is most welcome."
The four began to walk toward the house, half a mile away, just visible
among great trees. The dark little girl walked beside the hound, but
the hound kept her nose in Captain Bob's palm. She was fond of Hagar,
but Captain Bob was her god. As for Captain Bob himself, he walked like
a curious, unfinished, somewhat flawed and shortened suggestion of
his brother. He was shorter than the Colonel and broader; hair, nose,
eyes, mouth were nothing like so fine; carriage and port were quite
different; he lacked the _cachet_, he lacked the _grand air_. For all
that, the fact that they were brothers was evident enough. Captain Bob
loved dogs and hunting, and read the county newspaper and the sporting
almanac. He was not complex. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred he
acted from instinct and habit, and the puzzling hundredth time he beat
about for tradition and precedent. He was good-natured and spendthrift,
with brains enough for not too distant purposes. Emotionally, he was
strongest in family affection. "Missed you all!" he now observed
cheerfully. "Gilead Balm's been like a graveyard."
"How is mother?" asked Miss Serena. She was picking her way delicately
through the green lane, between the evening primroses, the grey-green
delaine held just right. "She wrote me that she burned her hand trying
the strawberry preserves."
"It's all right now. Never saw Old Miss looking better!"
The dark little girl turned her dark eyes on Captain Bob. "How is my
mother?"
"Maria? Well, I should say that she was all right, too. I haven't heard
her complain."
"Gad! I wish she would complain," ejaculated the Colonel. "Then one
could tell her there was nothing to complain about. I hate these women
who go through life with a smile on their lips and an indictment in
their eyes--when there's only the usual up and down of living to
indict. I had rather they would whine--though I hate them to whine,
too. But women are all cowards. No woman knows how to take the world."
The dark little girl, who had been walking between the Colonel and
Captain Bob, began to tremble. "Whoever else's a coward, my mother's
not--"
"I don't think, father, you ought--"
Captain Bob was stronger yet. He was fond of Gipsy, and he thought
that sometimes the family bore too hardly on Maria. Now and then he
did a small bit of cloudy thinking, and when he did it he always
brought forth the result with a certain curious clearing of the throat
and nodding of the head, as though the birth of an idea was attended
with considerable physical strain. "No, Colonel," now he said, "you
oughtn't! Damn it, where'd we be but for women anyhow? As for Maria--I
think you're too hard on Maria. The chief trouble with Maria is that
she isn't herself an Ashendyne. Of course, she can't help that, but I
think it is a pity. Always did think that men ought to marry at least
fifth or sixth cousins. Bring women in without blood and traditions of
people they've got to live with--of course, there's trouble adapting.
Seen it a score of times. Maria's just like the rest when they're not
cousins. Ought somehow to be cousins."
"Bob, you are a perfect fool," remarked the Colonel.
He walked on, between the primroses, his hands behind him, tall and
easy in his black, wide-skirted coat and his soft black hat. The earth
was in shadow, but the sky glowed carnation. Against it stood out the
long, low red-brick house of Gilead Balm. At either gable end rose
pyramidal cedars, high and dark against the vivid sky. In the lane
there was the smell of dewy grass, and on either hand, back from the
vine-draped rail fences, rolled the violet fields. Somewhere in the
distance sounded the tinkling of cow bells. The ardent sky began to
pale; the swallows were circling above the chimneys of Gilead Balm, and
now the silver Venus came out clear.
The little girl named Hagar lagged a little going up the low hill on
which the house stood. She was growing fast, and all journeys were
exciting, and she was taking iron because she wasn't very strong,
and she had had a week of change and had been thinking hard and was
tired. She wanted to see her mother, and indeed she wanted to see all
at Gilead Balm, for, unlike her mother, she loved Gilead Balm, but
going up the hill she lagged a little. Partly it was to look at the
star and to listen to the distant bells. She was not aware that she
observed that which we call Nature with a deep passion and curiosity,
that beauty was the breath of her nostrils, and that she hungered
and thirsted after the righteousness of knowledge. She only came
slowly, after many years, into that much knowledge of herself. To-day
she was but an undeveloped child, her mind a nebula just beginning
to spiral. In conversation she would have applied the word "pretty"
indiscriminately to the flushed sky, the star, the wheeling swallows,
the yellow primroses. But within, already, the primroses struck one
note, and the wheeling swallows another, and the sky another, and the
star another, and, combined, they made a chord that was like no other
chord. Already her moments were distinguished, and each time she saw
Gilead Balm she saw, and dimly knew that she saw, a different Gilead
Balm.
She climbed the hill a little stumblingly, a dark, thin child with
braided, dusky hair. She was so tired that things went into a kind
of mist--the house and the packet-boat and the lock and the convict
and the piping frogs and the cat-tails in a marsh and the word
"evolution."... And then, up on the low hilltop, Dilsey and Plutus lit
the lamps, and the house had a row of topaz eyes;--and here was the
cedar at the little gate, and the smell of box--box smell was always of
a very especial character, dark in hue, cool in temperature, and quite
unfathomably old. The four passed through the house gate and went up
the winding path between the box and the old, old blush roses--and here
was the old house dog Roger fawning on the Colonel--and the topaz eyes
were growing bigger, bigger....
"I am glad to get home," said Miss Serena, in front. "It's curious how,
every time you go from home, something happens to cure you of a roving
disposition."
Captain Bob laughed. "Never knew you had a roving disposition, Serena!
Luna here, now,--Luna's got a roving disposition--haven't you, old
girl?"
"Luna," replied Miss Serena with some asperity, "Luna makes no effort
to alter her disposition. I do. Everybody's got tendencies and notions
that it is their bounden duty to suppress. If they don't, it leads to
all kind of changes and upheavals.--And that is what I criticize in
Maria. She makes no effort, either. It's most unfortunate."
The Colonel, in front of them all, moved on with a fine serenity. He
had taken off his hat, and in the yet warm glow the grey-amber of his
hair seemed fairly luminous. As he walked he looked appreciatively
up at the evening star. He read poetry with a fine, discriminating,
masculine taste, and now, with a gesture toward the star, he repeated
a line of Byron. Maria and her idiosyncrasies troubled him only when
they stood actually athwart his path; certainly he had never brooded
upon them, nor turned them over in his hand and looked at them. She
was his son's wife--more, he was inclined to think, the pity! She
was, therefore, Ashendyne, and she was housed at Gilead Balm. He was
inclined to be fond of the child Hagar. As for his son--the Colonel, in
his cooler moments, supposed, damn it! that he and Medway were too much
alike to get on together. At any rate, whatever the reason, they did
not get on together. Gilead Balm had not seen the younger Ashendyne for
some years. He was in Europe, whence he wrote, at very long intervals,
an amiable traveller's letter. Neither had he and Maria gotten on well
together.
The house grew large, filling all the foreground. The topaz eyes
changed to a wide, soft, diffused light, pouring from windows and
the open hall door. In it now appeared the figures of the elder Mrs.
Ashendyne, of the Bishop, and Mrs. LeGrand, coming out upon the porch
to welcome the travellers.
Hagar took her grandmother's kiss and Mrs. LeGrand's kiss and the
Bishop's kiss, and then, after a few moments of standing still in the
hall while the agreeable, southern voices rose and fell, she stole
away, went up the shallow, worn stairway, turned to the left, and
opened the door of her mother's room. She opened it softly. "Uncle
Plutus says you've got a headache."
Maria's voice came from the sofa in the window. "Yes, I have. Shut the
door softly, and don't let us have any light. But I don't mind your
sitting by me."
The couch was deep and heaped with pillows. Maria's slight, small
form was drawn up in a corner, her head high, her hands twisted and
locked about her knees. She wore a soft white wrapper, tied beneath her
breast with a purple ribbon. She had beautiful hair. Thick and long
and dusky, it was now loosened and spread until it made a covering
for the pillows. Out from its waves looked her small face, still and
exhausted. The headache, after having lasted all day, was going away
now at twilight. She just turned her dark eyes upon her daughter. "I
don't mind your lying down beside me," she said. "There's room. Only
don't jar my head--" Hagar lay carefully down upon the couch, her head
in the hollow of her mother's arm. "Did you have a good time?"
"Yes.... Pretty good."
"What did you do?"
"There was another little girl named Sylvie. We played in the hayloft,
and we made willow baskets, and we cut paper dolls out of a 'Godey's
Lady's Book.' I named mine Lucy Ashton and Diana Vernon and Rebecca,
and she didn't know any good names, so I named hers for her. We named
them Rosalind and Cordelia and Vashti. Then there was a lady who played
backgammon with me, and I read two books."
"What were they?"
"One was 'Gulliver's Travels.' I didn't like it altogether, though I
liked some of it. The other was Shelley's 'Shorter Poems.' Oh"--Hagar
rose to a sitting posture--"I liked that better than anything I've
_ever_ read--"
"You are young to be reading Shelley," said her mother. She spoke with
her lips only, her young, pain-stilled face high upon the pillows.
"What did you like best?"
Hagar pondered it. "I liked the 'Cloud,' and I liked the 'West Wind,'
and I liked the 'Spirit of Night'--"
Some one tapped at the door, and then without waiting for an answer
opened it. The elder Mrs. Ashendyne entered. Hagar slipped from the
sofa and Maria changed her position, though very slightly. "Come in,"
she said, though Mrs. Ashendyne was already in.
"Old Miss," as the major part of Gilead Balm called her, Old Miss
crossed the room with a stately tread and took the winged chair. She
intended tarrying but a moment, but she was a woman who never stood
to talk. She always sat down like a regent, and the standing was
done by others. She was a large woman, tall rather than otherwise,
of a distinct comeliness, and authoritative--oh, authoritative from
her black lace cap on her still brown, smoothly parted hair, to her
low-heeled list shoes, black against her white stockings! Now she
folded her hands upon her black stuff skirt and regarded Maria. "Are
you better?"
"Yes, thank you."
"If you would take my advice," said Mrs. Ashendyne, "and put
horseradish leaves steeped in hot water to your forehead and the back
of your neck, you would find it a great relief."
"I had some lavender water," said Maria.
"The horseradish would have been far better. Are you coming to supper?"
"No, I think not. I do not care for anything. I am not hungry."
"I will have Phoebe fetch you a little thin chipped beef and a beaten
biscuit and a cup of coffee. You must eat.--If you gave way less it
would be better for you."
Maria looked at her with sombre eyes. At once the fingers slipped to
other and deeper notes. "If I gave way less.... Well, yes, I do give
way. I have never seen how not to. I suppose if I were cleverer and
braver, I should see--"
"What I mean," said Old Miss with dignity, "is that the Lord,
for his own good purposes,--and it is _sinful_ to question his
purposes,--regulated society as it is regulated, and placed women where
they are placed. No one claims--certainly I don't claim--that women
as women do not see a great deal of hardship. The Bible gives us to
understand that it is their punishment. Then I say take your punishment
with meekness. It is possible that by doing so you may help earn
remission for all."
"There was always," said Maria, "something frightful to me in the old
notion of whipping-boys for kings and princes. How very bad to be the
whipping-boy, and how infinitely worse to be the king or prince whose
whipping-boy you were!"
A red came into Mrs. Ashendyne's face. "You are at times positively
blasphemous!" she said. "I do not at all see of what, personally, you
have to complain. If Medway is estranged from you, you have probably
only yourself to thank--"
"I never wish," said Maria, "to see Medway again."
Medway's mother rose with stateliness from the winged chair. "When it
comes to statements like that from a wife, it is time for old-fashioned
people like myself to take our leave.--Phoebe shall bring you your
supper. Hagar, you had better come with me."
"Leave Hagar here," said the other.
"The bell will ring in ten minutes. Come, child!"
"Stay where you are, Hagar. When the bell rings, she shall come."
The elder Mrs. Ashendyne's voice deepened. "It is hard for me to see
the mind of my son's child perverted, filled with all manner of foolish
queries and rebellions."
"Your son's child," answered Maria from among her pillows, "happens to
be also my child. His family has just had her for a solid week. Now,
pray let me have her for an hour." Her eyes, dark and large in her
thin, young face, narrowed until the lashes met. "I am perfectly aware
of how deplorable is the whole situation. If I were wiser and stronger
and more heroic, I suppose I should break through it. I suppose I
should go away with Hagar. I suppose I should learn to work. I suppose
I should somehow keep us both. I suppose I might live again. I suppose
I might ... even ... get a divorce--"
Her mother-in-law towered. "The Bishop shall talk to you the first
thing in the morning--"