GILEAD BALM
The March winds shook the rusty cedars and tossed the pink peach
branches, and carried a fleet of clouds swiftly overhead through the
blue aërial sea. They rattled the windows of Gilead Balm and bent the
chimney smoke aslant like streamers. The winds were rough but not cold.
Now and again they sank into the sunniest of calms, little periods of
stillness, small doldrums punctuating the stormiest sentences. Then
with a whistle, shriller and shriller, they mounted again, tremendously
exhilarated, sweeping earth and sky.
On the ridge back of Gilead Balm the buds of the cucumber tree were
swelling, the grass beneath was growing green, the ants were out in the
sunshine. Up in the branches a bluebird was exploring building-sites.
Hagar came wandering over the ridge. The wind wrapped her old brown
dress about her limbs and blew her dark hair into locks and tendrils.
Luna followed her, but Luna in no frolicsome mood. Luna was old, old,
and to-day dispirited because Captain Bob had gone to a meeting of
Democrats in the neighbouring town and had left her behind. Depression
was writ in every line of Luna's body, and an old, experienced
weariness and disillusionment in the eye with which she looked askance
at a brand-new white butterfly on a brand-new dandelion.
Hagar stood with her back to the cucumber tree and surveyed the scene.
The hills, scurried over by the shadows of the driven clouds, the
river--the river winding down to the sea, and the ditch where used to
be the canal; and away, away, the white plume of a passenger train. She
was mad for travel, for wandering, for the open road; all the world
sung to her as with a thousand tongues in the books she read. Pictures,
cathedrals, statues, cities, snow on mountains, the ocean, deserts,
torrid lands, France, Spain, Italy, England--oh, to go, to go! She
would have liked to fling herself on the blowing wind and go with it
over land and sea.
She looked with hot, sombre eyes at Gilead Balm. It was the home she
had always known and she loved it; it was home,--yes, it was home; but
it was not so pleasant at home just now. March--and the Colonel had
withdrawn her from Eglantine, ordered her home, the first of January!
January, February, a part of March--and her grandfather still eaten
with a cold anger every time he looked at her, and her grandmother,
outraged at her suddenly manifested likeness to Maria and Maria's
"ways," almost as bad! Aunt Serena gave her no sympathy; Aunt Serena
had become almost violent on the subject. If you were going to rebel
and disobey, Aunt Serena told her, if you were going to be forward and
almost fast, and rebel and disobey, you needn't look for any sympathy
from her! Colonel Ashendyne had been explicit enough back in January.
"When you send about his business that second-rate person you've chosen
to entangle yourself with, then and not till then will you be 'Gipsy'
again to me!"
Hagar put out her arms to the wind. "I want to go away! I want to go
away! I'm tired of it all--tired of living here--"
The wind blew past her with its long cry; then it suddenly sank, and
there came almost a half-hour of bright calm, warm stillness, astral
gold. Hagar sat down between the roots of the cucumber tree and
took her head within her arms. By degrees, in the sunshine, emotion
subsided; she began to think and dream. Her mind sent the shuttle
far and fast, it touched here and touched there, and in the course
of its weaving it touched Eglantine, touched and quit and touched
again. Laydon was still at Eglantine. He had been a very satisfactory
Professor of Belles-Lettres; Mrs. LeGrand really did not know where,
in mid-season, to find such another. He had behaved wretchedly, but
the mischief was done, and there was--on consideration--no need to
tell the world about it, no especial need, indeed, of proclaiming
it at Eglantine or to Eglantine patrons at large. He was not--Mrs.
LeGrand did him that justice--he was not at all a "fast" man or likely
to give further trouble upon this line. And he was a good teacher, a
good talker, in demand for lectures on cultural subjects before local
literary societies, popular and pleasing, a creditable figure among
the Eglantine faculty. Much of this matter was probably Hagar's fault.
She had made eyes at him, little fool! When the Colonel declared his
determination,--with no reflections on Eglantine, my dear friend!--to
bring to an end his granddaughter's formal education, and to take her
back to Gilead Balm where this infatuation would soon disappear,--Mrs.
LeGrand saw daylight. She had an interview with Colonel Ashendyne.
He was profoundly contemptuous of what Mr. Laydon did for a living
or where he did it, of whom he taught or what he taught, so long as
there was distance between him and an Ashendyne. "You know--you know,
my dear friend, that I have always had in mind Ralph Coltsworth!" She
had an interview--concert pitch--with Laydon. She had a smooth, quiet
talk with her teachers. She mentioned casually, to one after another
of the girls, that Mrs. Ashendyne at Gilead Balm was not as young
as she had been, nor as strong, and that Colonel Ashendyne thought
that Hagar should be at home with her grandmother. She, Mrs. LeGrand,
regretted it, but every girl's duty to her family was paramount. They
would miss Hagar sadly,--she was a dear girl and a clever girl,--but
it seemed right that she should go. Hagar went and Laydon stayed,
and without a word from any principal in the affair, every girl at
Eglantine knew that Mr. Laydon had kissed Hagar, and that Hagar had
said that she would love him forever, and that Colonel Ashendyne was
very angry, and was probably keeping Hagar on bread and water at that
instant, and that it was all very romantic.... And then at Eglantine
examinations came on, and dreams of Easter holiday, and after that of
Commencement, and Mr. Laydon taught with an entire correctness and an
impassive attitude toward all young ladies; and Miss Bedford, who had
been very bitter at first and had said things, grew amiable again and
reopened her Browning. The ripple smoothed out as all things smoothed
out at Eglantine. The place resumed its pristine "sweetness." It was
believed among the girls that Mr. Laydon and Hagar "corresponded," but
it was not certainly known. Mr. Laydon wrapped himself in dignity as in
a mantle. As for Hagar, she had always been rather far away.
Up on the ridge to-day, Hagar's mind dwelt somewhat on Eglantine, but
not overmuch. It was not precisely Eglantine that she was missing. Was
she missing Laydon? Certainly, at this period, she would have answered
that she was--though, to be perfectly truthful, she might have added,
"But I do not think of that all the time--not nearly all the time."
She was unhappy, and on occasions her fancy brooded over that night
in the Eglantine parlour when he read of love, and the flames became
jewelled and alive, and she saw the turret on the plain, "by the caper
overrooted, by the gourd overscored," and suddenly a warmth and light
wrapped them both. The warmth and light certainly still dwelt over that
scene and that moment. To a lesser extent it abided over and around
the next morning, the west porch, the syringa alley. Very strangely,
as she was dimly aware, it stretched only thinly over the following
days, over even the night of "Romeo and Juliet." There was there a
mixed and wavering light, changing, for the hour that immediately
followed,--the hour when she faced her grandfather, and he spoke with
knives as he was able to do, when he laid his hands upon her and said
untrue and unjust things to Laydon,--into an angry glow. That hour was
bright and hot like a ruby. How much was love, and how much outraged
pride and a burning sense of wrong, she was not skilled to know, nor
how much was actual chivalric defence of her partner in iniquity....
The parting interview, when she and Laydon, having stood upon their
rights, obtained a strange half-hour in the Eglantine parlour--strange
and stiff, with "Of course, if I love you, I'll be faithful," repeated
on her part some five times, with, on his part, Byronic fervour,
volcanic utterances. Had he not gone over them to himself afterwards,
in his homely, cheerfully commonplace room in the brown cottage outside
the Eglantine grounds? They had been fine; from the point of view of
Belles-Lettres they could not have been bettered. He felt a glow as he
recognized that fact, followed by a mental shot at the great Seat of
Learning where he wished to be. "By George! that's the place I'm fitted
for! The man they've got isn't in the same class--".... The parting
interview--to the girl on the ridge a cloud seemed to hang over that,
a cloud that was here and there rose-flushed, but just as often fading
into grey. Hagar drove her thoughts back to the first evening and
the jewelled fire; that was a clear, fair memory, innocent, rich and
sincere. The others had, so strangely, a certain pain and dulness.
She had a sturdy power of reaction against the melancholy and
the painful, and as to-day she could not, somehow, fix her mind
unswervingly upon the one clear hour, and the others perplexed and
hurt, her mind at last turned with decision from any contemplation
whatsoever of the round of events which lay behind her presence here,
in March, upon the ridge behind Gilead Balm. Rising, she left the
cucumber tree and walked along the crest of the ridge. The wind was
not blowing now, the sunshine was very golden, the little leaves were
springing. She crossed the ribbon-like plateau to its northern edge,
and stood, looking down that slope. It was somewhat heavily wooded,
and in shadow. It fell steeply to a handsbreadth of sward, a purling
streamlet, sunken boulders, a wide thicket and a wood beyond. Hagar,
leaning against a young beech, gazed down the shadowed stillness. Her
eyebrows lifted at their inner ends, lines came into her forehead,
wistful markings about her lips. Sometimes when she knew that she was
quite alone she spoke aloud to her self. She did this now. "I haven't
been here since that day it happened.... Six years.... I wonder if he
ran away again, or if he stayed there to the end. I wonder where he is
now. Six years...."
The wind rose and blew fiercely, rattling in the thicket and
bending every tree; then it sank again. Hagar leaned against the
trunk of the beech and thought and thought. As a child she had been
speculative, everywhere and all the time; with youth had come dreams
and imaginations, pushing the older intense querying aside. Now of
a sudden a leaf was turned. She dreamed and imagined still, but the
thinker within her rose a step, gained a foot on the infinite, mounting
stair. Hagar began to brood upon the state of the world. "Black and
white stripes like a zebra.... How petty to clothe a man--a boy he was
then--like that, mark him and brand him, until through life he sees
himself striped black and white like a zebra--on his dying bed, maybe,
sees himself like that! Vindictive. And the world sees him, too, like
that, grotesque and mean and awful, and it cannot cleanse his image in
its mind. It is foolish."
The wind roared again up and down the ridge. Hagar shivered and began
to move toward the warmer side; then halted, turned, and came back
to the beech. "I'll not go away until the sun comes from under that
cloud and the wind drops. It's like leaving him alone in the thicket
down there, in the cold and shadow." She waited until the sun came out
and the wind dropped, then took her hand from the beech tree and went
away. Leaving the ridge, she came to the overseer's house, hesitated
a moment, then went and knocked at the kitchen door.
"Come in!" called Mrs. Green, who was sitting by the kitchen table,
in the patch of sunlight before the window, sewing together strips of
bright cloth and winding them into balls for a rag carpet. "You, Hagar?
Come right in! Well, March is surely going out like a lion!"
"It's so windy that the clouds are running like sheep," said Hagar. She
took a small, split-bottom rocking-chair, drew it near Mrs. Green, and
began to wind carpet rags. "Red and blue and grey--it's going to be a
beautiful carpet! Have you heard from Thomasine?"
Mrs. Green rose and took a letter from behind the clock. "Read it.
She's been to a theatre and the Eden Musée and Brooklyn Bridge, and
she's going to visit the Statue of Liberty."
Hagar read five pages of lined notepaper, all covered with Thomasine's
pretty, precise writing. "She's having a good time.... I wish I were
there, too. I've never seen New York."
"Never mind! You will one day," said Mrs. Green. "Yes, Thomasine's
having a good time. Jim was born generous."
"Is she really going to work if he can get her a place?"
"Yes, child, she is. Times seems to me to be gettin' harder right along
instead of easier. Girls have got to go out in the world and work
nowadays, just the same as boys. I don't know as it will hurt them;
anyway, they've got to do it. Food an' clothes don't ask which sect you
belong to."
"Thomasine ought to have gone to school. Girls can go to college now,
and Thomasine and I both ought to have gone to college."
"Landsake!" said Mrs. Green. "Ain't you been to college for going on
three years?"
But Hagar shook her head. "No. Eglantine wasn't exactly a college. I
ought to have gone to a different kind of place. Thomasine likes books,
too."
"Yes, she likes them, but she don't like them nothing like as much as
you do. But Thomasine's a good child and mighty refined. I hope Jim'll
take pains to get her a place where they are nice people. He means all
right, but there! men don't never quite understand."
"I wish I could earn money," said Hagar. "I wish I could."
Mrs. Green regarded her over her spectacles. "A lot of women have
wished that, child. A lot of women have wished it, and then again a lot
of women haven't wished it. Some would rather do for themselves an' for
others an' some would rather be did for, and that's the world. I've
noticed it in men, too."
"It's in my head all the time. I think mother put it there--"
"Yes, I know," said Mrs. Green. "A lot of us have felt that way. But
it ain't so easy for women to make money. There's more ways they can't
than they can. It's what they call 'Sentiment' fights them. Sentiment
don't mind their being industrious, but it draws the line at their
getting money for it. It says it ought to be a free gift. It don't
grudge--at least it don't grudge much--a little egg and butter money,
but anything more--Lord!" She sewed together two strips of blue
flannel. "No, it ain't easy. And a woman kind of gets discouraged.
She's put her ambition to sleep so often that now with most of them it
seems asleep for keeps. Them that's industrious don't expect to rise or
anything to come of it, and them that's lazy gets lazier. It's a funny
world--for women.--There's a lot of brown strips in the basket there."
"I'm going to tell you what I've done," said Hagar, winding a red ball.
"I've written a fairy story--but I don't suppose it will be taken."
"I always knew you could write," said Mrs. Green. "A fairy story!
What's it about?"
"About fairies and a boy and a girl, and a lovely land they found by
going neither north nor south nor east nor west, and what they did
there. It seemed to me right good," said Hagar wistfully; "but I sent
it off a month ago, and I've never heard a word about it."
"Where did you send it? I never did know," said Mrs. Green, "how what
people writes gets printed and bound. It don't do it just of itself."
Hagar leaned forward in her rocking-chair. Her cheeks were carmine
and her eyes soft and bright. "The 'Young People's Home Magazine'
offered three prizes for the three best stories--stories that it could
publish. And I thought, 'Why not I as well as another?'--and so I wrote
a fairy story and sent it. The first prize is two hundred dollars,
and the second prize is one hundred dollars, and the third is fifty
dollars.--If I could get even the third prize, I would be happy."
"I should think you would!" exclaimed Mrs. Green. "Fifty dollars! I
don't know as I ever saw fifty dollars all in one lump--exceptin' war
money. When are you going to hear?"
"I don't know. I'm afraid I won't ever hear. I'm afraid it wasn't
good enough--not even good enough for them to write to me and say it
wouldn't do and tell me why."
"Well, I wouldn't give up hope," said Mrs. Green. "It's my motto to
carry hope right spang through the grave." She rose, fed the fire, and
filled the tea-kettle, then returned to her rag carpet. "You're lookin'
a little thin, child. Don't let them worry you up at the house."
"I'm not," answered Hagar sombrely. The light went out of her eyes. She
stitched slowly, drawing her thread through with deliberation.
Mrs. Green again looked over her spectacles. "They're mighty fine folk,
the Ashendynes," she said at last. "They've got old blood and pride
for a dozen, and the settest heads! Ain't nothin' daunts them, neither
Satan nor the Lord. They're goin' to run their own race.--You're more
like your mother, but I wouldn't say you didn't have something of your
grandfather in you at times. You've got a dash of Coltsworth, too."
"Haven't I anything of my father at all?"
Mrs. Green, leaning forward into the sunlight, threaded her needle. "I
wouldn't be bitter about my father, if I were you. People can be born
without a sense of obligation and responsibility just as they can be
born without other senses. I suppose it's there somewhere, only, so
many other things are atop, it ain't hardly ever stirred. Your father's
right rich in other things."
"He's so poor he couldn't either truly love my mother or truly let her
go.--But I didn't mean to talk about him," said Hagar. She laid the
ball she had been winding in the basket with the other balls and stood
up, stretching her young arms above her head. "Listen to the wind! I
wish it would blow me away, neither north nor south nor east nor west!"
"Yes, you are like your mother," said Mrs. Green. "Have you got to go?
Then will you take your grandmother's big knitting-needles back to her
for me? And don't you want a winesap?--there's a basket of them behind
the door."