I will tell you the story of my life, since you ask it; for, though the
meaning of the life of any woman of my character would be the same, I
believe, the facts of mine, being sharp and compressed, may make it,
perhaps, more apparent. It will be enough for me to give you the history
of one day,--that of our first coming to Newport; for it seems to me as
if it held and spoke out plainly whatever gist and significance there
was in all the years for me. I know many people hold the theory, that
once in every life God puts the stuff of which He has made the man or
woman to the test, gives the soul a chance of a conscious fight with
that other Power to win or lose itself, once for all. I do not know: it
seems but just that one should be so left, untrammelled, to choose
between heaven and hell: but who can shake off trammels,--make
themselves naked of their birth and education? I know on that day when
the face of my fate changed, I myself was conscious of no inward
master-struggle: the great Life above and Life below pressed no closer
on me, seemed to wait on no word of mine. It was a busy, vulgar day
enough: each passing moment occupied me thoroughly. I did not look
through them for either God or Death; and as for the deed I did, I had
been drifting to that all my life: it began when I was a pampered,
thin-blooded baby, learning the alphabet from blocks on my mother's lap;
then years followed, succulent to satiety for my hungry brain and
stimulated tastes; a taint of hereditary selfishness played its part,
and so the end came. Yet I know that on that day I entered the gate
through which there is no returning: for, believe me, there are such
ways and gates in life; every day, I see more clearly how far and how
immovably the paths into those other worlds abut into this, and I know
that I, for one, have gone in, and the door is closed behind me. There
is no going back for me into that long-ago time. Only He who led me here
knows how humbly and through what pain I dared to believe this, and dare
to believe that He did lead me,--that it was by no giddy, blear-sighted
free-will of my own that I arrived where I stand to-day.
It was about eighteen months after my marriage that we came to Newport.
But let me go back a few weeks to one evening when my husband first told
me of the failure of the house in which his property was invested; for
it was then, I think, that the terror and the temptation which had beset
my married life first took a definite shape and hold on me.
It was a cool September evening, I remember: a saffronish umber stain
behind the low Hudson hills all that was left of the day's fresh and
harvest-scented heat; the trails of black smoke from the boats against
the sky, the close-shut cottages on the other shore, the very red cows
coming slowly up from the meadow-pool, looking lonesome and cold in the
sharp, blue air. In the library, however, there was a glow of warmth and
light, as usual where Doctor Manning sat. He had been opening the
evening's mail, and laid the last letter on the table, taking off his
glasses in his slow, deliberate way.
"It is as we feared," turning to me. "It's quite gone, Hester, quite.
I'll have to begin at the beginning again. It would have been better I
had not trusted the whole to Knopps,--yes."
I said nothing: the news was not altogether unexpected. He took off his
wig, and rubbed his head slowly, his eyes fixed on my face with some
anxious, steady inquiry, which his tones did not express.
"I'll go back to Newport. Rob's there. I'll get a school again. You did
not know I taught there when I was a young man?"
"No."
I knew nothing of my husband's youth. Miss Monchard, his ward, who was
in the room, did, however; and after waiting for me a moment to go on,
she said, cheerfully,--
"The boys will be men now, Sir. Friends ready waiting. And different
sort of friends from any we have here, eh?"
He laughed.
"Yes, Jacky, you're right. Yes. They've all turned out well, even those
Arndts. Jim Arndt used to trot you on his knee on the school-house
steps, when you were a baby. But he _was_ a wild chap. He's in the
sugar-trade, Rob writes me. But they'll always be boys to me,
Jacky,--boys."
His head dropped, with a smile still on his mouth, and he began
fingering his scanty beard, as was his habit in his fits of silent
musing. Jacqueline looked at him satisfied, then turned to me. I do not
know what she saw upon my face, but she turned hastily away.
"It's a town with a real character of its own, Newport, Mrs.
Manning,"--trying to make her coarse bass voice gentle. "You'll
understand it better than I. New-York houses, now, even these on the
Hudson, hint at nothing but a satisfied animal necessity. But there,
with the queer dead streets, like a bit of the old-time world, and the
big salt sea"----She began to stammer, as usual, and grow confused.
"It's like looking out of some far-gone, drowsy old day of the Colonies,
and yet feeling life and eternity fresh and near to you."
I only smiled civilly, by way of answer. Jacqueline always tried me. She
was Western-born, I a New-Englander; and every trait about her, from the
freedom with which she hurled out her opinions to the very setting-down
of her broad foot, jarred on me as a something boorish and reckless. Her
face grew red now.
"I don't say what I want exactly," she hesitated. "I only hoped you'd
like the town, that it would reconcile----There's crabs there,"
desperately turning to Teddy, who was playing a furtive game of marbles
under the table, and grabbing him by the foot. "Come here till I tell
you about the crabs."
I remember that I got up and went out of the low window on to the porch,
looking down at the quiet dun shadows and the slope of yellowed grass
leading to the river, while Jacky and the boy kept up a hurly-burly
conversation about soldier-crabs that tore each other's legs off, and
purple and pink sea-roses that ate raw meat, and sea-spiders like specks
of blood in the rocks. My husband laughed once or twice, helping Jacky
out with her natural history. I think it was the sound of that cheery,
mellow laugh of his that fermented every bitter drop in my heart, and
brought clearly before me for the first time the idea of the course
which I afterwards followed. I thrust it back then, as if it had been a
sneer of the Devil's at all I held good and pure. What was there in the
world good and pure for me but the man sitting yonder, and the thought
that I was his wife? And yet----I had an unquiet brain, of moderate
power, perhaps, but which had been forced and harried and dragged into
exertion every moment of my life, according to the custom with women in
the States from which I came. Every meanest hint of a talent in me had
been nursed, every taste purged, by the rules of my father's clique of
friends. The chance of this was all over,--had been escaping since my
marriage-day. Now I clearly saw the life opening before me. What would
taste or talent be worth in the coarse struggle we were about to begin
for bread and butter? "Surely, we have lost something beyond money," I
thought, looking behind into the room, where my husband was quietly
going back to the Arndts in quest of food for reflection, and Jacky
prosed on about sea-anemones. I caught a glimpse of my sallow face in
the mirror: it was full of a fierce disgust. Was their indifference to
this loss a mere torpid ignorance of the actual brain- and soul-wants it
would bring on us, or did they really look at life and accept its hard
circumstances from some strange standing-ground of which I knew nothing?
I had not become acclimated to the atmosphere of my husband's family in
the year and a half that I had been his wife. He had been married
before; there were five children, beginning at Robert, the young
preacher at Newport, and ending with Teddy, beating the drum with his
fists yonder on the table; all of them, like their father, Western-born,
with big, square-built frames, and grave, downright-looking faces;
simple-hearted, and much given, the whole party, to bursts of hearty
laughter, and a habit of perpetually joking with each other. There might
be more in them than this, but I had not found it: I doubted much if it
were worth the finding. I came from a town in Massachusetts, where, as
in most New-England villages, there was more mental power than was
needed for the work that was to be done, and which reacted constantly on
itself in a way which my husband called unwholesome; it was no wonder,
therefore, that these people seemed to me but clogs of flesh, the mere
hands by which the manual work of the world's progress was to be
accomplished. I had hinted this to Doctor Manning one day, but he only
replied by the dry, sad smile with which it had become his habit of late
to listen to my speculations. It had cost me no pain thus to label and
set aside his children: but for himself it was different; he was my
husband. He was the only thing in the world which I had never weighed
and valued to estimate how much it was worth to me: some feeling I could
not define had kept me from it until now. But I did it that evening: I
remember how the cool river-air blew in the window-curtain, and I held
it back, looking steadily in at the thick-set, middle-aged figure of the
man sitting there, in the lamp-light, dressed in rough gray: peering at
the leather-colored skin, the nervous features of the square face, at
the scanty fringe of iron-gray whisker, and the curly wig which he had
bought after we were married, thinking to please me, at the brown eyes,
with the gentle reticent look in them belonging to a man or beast who is
thorough "game"; taking the whole countenance as the metre of the man;
going sharply over the salient points of our life together, measuring
myself by him, as if to know--what? to know what it would cost me to
lose him. God be merciful to me, what thought was this? Oh, the wrench
in heart and brain that came then! A man who has done a murder may feel
as I did while I stood for the next half-hour looking at the red lights
of the boats going up and down the Hudson, in the darkening fog.
After a while Teddy came waddling out on the porch, in his usual uncouth
fashion, and began pulling at my cape.
"You're getting cold, mother. Come in. Come!"
I remember how I choked as I tried to answer him, and, patting his
gilt-buttoned coat, took the fat chapped little hands in mine, kissing
them at last. I was so hungry for affection that night! I would have
clung to a dog that had been kind to me. I thought of the first day
Doctor Manning had brought him to me, in this same comical little
jacket, by the way, and the strangely tender tone in which he had
said,--"This is your mother, boy. He's as rough as a bear, Hetty, but he
won't give you trouble or pain. Nothing shall give you pain, if
I"----Then he stopped. I never heard that man make a promise. If he had
come out instead of Teddy on the porch that night, and had spoken once
in the old tone, calling me "Hetty," God knows how different all that
came after would have been. The motherless boy, holding himself up by my
knees, was more sturdy than I that night, and self-reliant: never could
have known, in his most helpless baby-days, the need with which I, an
adult woman, craved a cheering word, and a little petting.
Jacqueline came behind me and pinned a woollen shawl around my neck,
patting my shoulders in her cozy, comfortable fashion.
"None of your dark river-fogs at Newport," she laughed. "The sea-air has
the sweep of half the world to gather cold and freshness in, and it
makes even your bones alive. Your very sleep is twice as much sleep
there as anywhere else."
Jacky's rough voice was like the cuckoo's: it always prophesied pleasant
weather. She went in again now, and sat down on her little sewing-chair.
The low, rolling fogs outside, and the sharp September wind rattling the
bare branches of the orchard-trees and the bushes on the lawn, only made
the solid home-look of comfort within warmer and brighter. There was a
wood-fire kindled on the library-hearth, and its glow picked out red
flushes of light on the heavy brown curtains, and the white bust of
Psyche, and a chubby plaster angel looking down. Jacky, rocking and
sewing, her red mouth pursed up, half whistling, suited the picture,
somehow, I could not but feel, mere lump and matter though she might be.
There was something fresh and spicy about her. I never had been
impressed so justly by her as on that night. Rough, perhaps, but it was
a pure roughness: everything about the girl had been clean since she was
born, you felt, from the paint of the house where she lived to the
prayer her nurse had taught her. Her skin was white and ruddy, her blue
eyes clear and full of honesty, her brown curls crisp and unoiled. She
could not reason, maybe; but she was straightforward and comfortable:
every bone in her roly-poly little figure forgot to be a bone, and went
into easy cushions of dimpled flesh. If ever Jacky died and went into a
more spiritual world, she would be sure to take with her much of the
warmth and spring and vigor of this. She had drawn her chair close to
Doctor Manning's, where the flickering light touched the soft woollen
folds of her dress and the bit of crimson ribbon at her throat. He liked
bright colors, like most men of his age. It was a pretty picture.
I turned and looked down at the river again, shivering,--trying to think
of the place and all we were leaving. I did not wonder that it cost the
others little to give up the house: it meant but little to them. Doctor
Manning had bought it just before we were married, being then a square
chocolate-colored farm-house, and we had worked our own whims on it to
make it into a home, thrusting out a stout-pillared big porch at one
side, and one or two snug little bay-windows from my sewing-room. There
was a sunny slope of clover down to the river, a dusky old apple and
plum orchard at the left, and Mary's kitchen-garden on the right, with a
purblind old peacock strutting through the paths, showing its green and
gold. Not much in all this: nothing to please Jacky's artist and poet
sense, if she had any. But----I held on to the porch-railings now,
drumming with my fingers, as I thought of it. It was all the childhood
_I_ ever had known. He brought me there the day we were married, and
until August--six months--we had been there alone. I could hear his old
nag Tinder neighing now, in the stable where we used to go every evening
to feed and rub him down: for I went with Daniel, as I called him, then,
everywhere, even to consult his mason or farm-hands. He used to stand
joking with them a minute after the business was over, in an unwonted
fashion for him, and then scramble into the buggy beside me, and drive
off, his fresh, bright eye turned to the landscape as if enjoying it for
the first time.
"God bless you, Hetty!" he used to say, "this is putting new blood into
my veins."
Generally, in those long rides, I used to succeed in coaxing him
imperceptibly back to talk of his life in South America,--not only that
I liked to hear this new phase of wild adventuring life, but my own
blood would glow and freshen to see the fierce dare-devil look come back
into the eye, and the shut teeth of the grave, laconic old Doctor.
People did not know the man I had married,--no; and I would draw in
closer to his shaggy coat, and spur him on to his years of trading in
the West, and later in this State. He had a curious epigrammatic way of
talking that I have noticed in a less degree in many Western men: coming
at the marrow and meaning of a scene or person in his narration with a
sheer subtilized common-sense, a tough appreciation of fact beyond
theory, and of its deeper, juster significance, and a dramatic aptness
for expression. Added to all this, my husband's life had been compacted,
crowded with incident; it had saddened and silenced his nature
abnormally; this was the first break: a going back to what he might have
been, such as his children were now.
"I never talked to any one before, Hetty," he said thoughtfully once, as
we were driving along, after a few moments' silence. "I feel as if I had
got breath, this late in the day, that I never expected, for whatever
thought was in me,--and--whatever love."
He turned away his face, crimson at this. He was as strangely reticent
and tender on some points as a woman. So seldom he put his love into
words! That time I remember how the tears suddenly blinded me, when I
heard him, and my fingers grew unsteady, holding the reins. I was so
happy and proud. But I said nothing: he would not have liked it.
Of one time in his life Doctor Manning had never talked to me: of his
earlier youth; when he was married before. He was not a man of whom you
could ask questions; yet I had hinted an inquiry once or twice in his
presence, but only by a change of color and a strange vague restlessness
had he shown that he understood my drift of meaning. Soon after that,
his eldest son, Robert, came to see his father's new wife, and stayed
with us a day or two. He was a short, thickly built young man, with
heavy jaws and black hair and eyes,--keen eyes, I soon felt, that were
weighing and analyzing me as justly, but more shrewdly than ever his
father had done. The night before he went away he came up to the
porch-step where I sat, and said abruptly,--
"I am satisfied, and happy to go now."
"I am glad of that," I said earnestly; for the tenderness of the son to
the father had touched me.
"Yes. You cannot know the dread I had of seeing you. I knew the risk he
ran in laying his happiness in any woman's hands at his hour of life.
But it was hard he never should know a home and love like other
men,"--his voice unsteady, and with an appealing look.
"He never shall need it," I said, quietly.
"You think not?"--his eyes on the ground. "At all events,"--after a
pause,--"he is resting like a child now: it will not be easy to startle
him to any harsh reality, and," looking up, "I hope God may deal with
you, Mrs. Manning, as you deal with my father. Forgive me," as I began
to speak, "you do not know what this is to me. It makes me rough, I
know. I never yet have forgiven the woman that"----His mother? He caught
the look, stopped, pushed his hair back, caught his breath. "One thing
let me say," after a moment's silence. "You do not know my father. If he
wakens to find his wife is not what he thinks her, it will be too late
for me to warn you then. He has been hurt sore and deeply in his life.
Your chance is but once."
I did not reply to Robert Manning, nor was I offended: there was too
much solemnity in his coarseness. The man's affection for his father was
as part of his life-blood, I believed.
My husband came to me when he saw Robert go, and loosened my hands from
my face. I clung to him as I never did before.
"What is this hurt he talks of in your life, Daniel? Will I be enough to
take it out? Will I?"
He laughed, a low, constrained laugh, holding my shoulders as if I were
a bit of a child.
"God knows you are enough, Hetty. I never thought He'd send me this. Rob
has been talking to you? He"----
"He is bitter."
"He loves me,--poor Rob!"
"Tell me of those people that hurt you, as he says."
It was a prurient, morbid curiosity that had seized me. A sort of shiver
ran over his frame.
"Eh, what, Hetty?"--in a low voice. "Let that go, let that
go,"--standing silent a moment, looking down. "Why would we bring them
back, and hack over the old dead faults? Had _she_ no pain to bear? We
couldn't find that out to speak for her. But God knows it."
I might have known how my question would have ended; for, always, he
covered over the ill-doing of others with a nervous haste, with the
charity of a man himself sharply sensitive to pain.
"It is healthful to go back to past pain," I said, half dissatisfied.
"Is it so?"--doubtfully, as he turned away with me. "I don't know,
child. Now and then He has to punish us, or cut out a cancer maybe. But
for going back to gloat over the cure or the whip-lash----No; it will
keep us busy enough to find good air and food, every minute for itself";
and, with a ruddy, genial smile, he had stooped and kissed my forehead.
A year had passed since that night. I was standing on the same porch,
but I was alone now. My husband sat a few feet from me in his old
easy-chair, but no gulf could have parted us so wide and deeply. Robert
Manning had said I would have but one chance. Well, I had had it, and it
was gone. So I stood there, looking quietly at him and Jacky and the
boy. The child had pushed his father's wig off, and his bare head with
its thin iron-gray hair fell forward on his breast, resting on Teddy's
sleeping cheek. I saw now how broad and sad the forehead was,--the quiet
dignity on the whole face. Yet it had been such a simple-hearted thing
to do,--to buy that wig to please me! One of those little follies the
like of which would never come again.
I went in and sat down as usual, apart, throwing aside from my neck the
shawl which Jacky had pinned there, loathing anything she had touched,
so real and sharp was the thought about her become, as if the evening's
fog and cold had lent it a venomous life. They had made a quiet cozy
picture before, which had bitterly brought back our first married days,
but it was broken up now. The Doctor's three boys came lumbering in,
with muddy shoes, game-bags, and the usual fiery faces and loud jokes
after their day's sport. Jacky threw down her sewing, and went out to
see the squirrels drawn, and the Doctor smoothed Teddy's hair, looking
after them with a pleased smile. One of the rarest sparkles of our daily
life! It was a year since Doctor Manning had brought his children home.
They filled the house. Musing on the past now, and trying to look at
that year calmly, while I sat by the fire, my husband would fade back in
the picture into an unmeaning lay-figure. Was this my fault? Could I
help it, if God had made me with a different, clearer insight into life
and its uses than these people with their sound beef and muscle, their
uncouth rejoicing in being alive? There was work enough in them: a
broad-fisted grappling with the day's task or obstacle, a drinking of
its pain or success into their slow brains, but nowhere the metre to
note the soul's changes, nor the eye to speculate on them. "No," my
husband had said to me one day, "we Western people have the mass of this
country's appointed work to do, so we are content that God should
underlie the hypotheses. We waste no strength in guesses at the reason
why."
I remember how intolerably the days of that year dragged even in memory,
as I sat there trying to judge them fairly,--how other years of my life
thrust them aside, persistently, as foreign, alien to me. These others
were to me home,--the thoughts that had held me nearest the divine life:
I went back to them, my eyes wet, and my heart sick under my weak lungs.
The little village of Concord, away up yonder, where I was born,--I was
glad to have been born there: thinking how man not only had learned
there to stand self-poised and found himself God, but Nature herself
seemed there to stop and reflect on her own beauty, and so root deeper
in the inner centre. The slow-dropping river, the thoughtful hills, the
very dust-colored fern that covers its fields, which might grow in
Hades, so breathless and crisp it is, came back to me with a glamour of
quiet that night. The soul had space to grow there! remembering how its
doors of thought stood wider open to welcome truth than anywhere
else on earth. "The only object in life is to grow." It was my
father's,--Margaret Fuller's motto. I had been nursed on it, I might
say. There had been a time when I had dreamed of attaining Margaret's
stature; and as I thought of that, some old subtile flame stirred in me
with a keen delight. New to me, almost; for, since my baby was born, my
soul as well as my body had been weak and nauseated. It had been so
sharp a disappointment! I had intended my child should be reared in New
England: what I had lacked in gifts and opportunities he should possess:
there was not a step of his progress which I had not mapped out. But the
child was a girl, a weazen-faced little mortal, crying night and day
like any other animal. It was an animal, wearing out in me the strength
needed by-and-by for its mental training. I sent it to a nurse in the
country. Her father had met the woman carrying it out to the wagon, and
took it in his arms. "Eh? eh? is it so, little lass?" I heard him say.
For days after that he looked paler, and his face had a quiet, settled
look, as if he had tested the world and was done with it. The days of
Tinder and the paddock and the drives were long gone then. I do not
remember that after this he ever called me Hetty. But he was cheerful as
ever with the boys, and, the week after, Jacky came.
Why did I think of all this now? Some latent, unconscious jar of thought
brought suddenly before me a scene of many years before, a damp spring
morning in Paris, when I had gone to Rosa Bonheur's studio, just out of
the city, to see her "Horse-Fair": the moist smell of jonquils; the
drifting light clouds above the Seine, like patches of wool; but most,
the peculiar life that seemed to impregnate the place itself, holding
her, as it were, to her own precise niche and work in the world,--the
sharply managed lights, the skins, trappings, her disguises on the
walls, the stables outside, and the finished work before us, instinct
with vigor and an observation as patient as keen. I remembered how some
one had quoted her as saying, "Any woman can be a wife or mother, but
this is my work alone."
I, too, had my gift: but one. But again the quick shiver of ecstasy ran
through me;--it was my power, my wand with which to touch the world, my
"_Vollmachtsbrief zum Gluecke_": was I to give it unused back to God? I
could sing: not that only; I could compose music,--the highest
soul-utterance. I remember clutching my hands up to my throat, as if
holding safe the power that should release me, suffer me to grow again,
and looking across the oil-lamp on the table at my husband. I _had_ been
called, then,--set apart to a mission; it was a true atom of the
creative power that had fired my brain; my birth had placed me on a
fitting plane of self-development, and I had thrust it all aside--for
what? A mess of weakest pottage,--a little love, silly rides behind
Tinker, petting and paltering such as other women's souls grew imbecile
without. It was the consciousness of this that had grown slowly on me in
the year just gone; I had put my husband from me day by day because of
it; it had reached its intolerable climax to-night. Well, it was fact:
no fancy. My nature was differently built from others: I could look now
at my husband, and see the naked truth about us both. Two middle-aged
people, with inharmonious intellects: tastes and habits jarring at every
step, clenched together only by faith in a vague whim or fever of the
blood called love. Better apart: we were too old for fevers. If I
remained with Doctor Manning, my _role_ was outlined plain to the end:
years of cooking, stitching, scraping together of cents: it was the fate
of thousands of married women without means, to grovel every year nearer
the animal life, to grow niggardly and common. Better apart.
As I thought that, he laid Teddy down, and came towards me,--the usual
uncertain, anxious half-smile on his face with which he regarded me.
"I am sure they will all like my old home, now, lads and all. I'm glad
of that. Sure of all but you, Hester. But you say nothing."
"The loss is great."
I shut my lips firmly, and leaned back, for he had put his hard hand
gently on my shoulder. It made me turn faint, with some weakness that
must have come down to me from my infant days, so meaningless was it. I
did not hear his answer; for with the same passionate feebleness I
caught the sleeve of his dressing-gown in my fingers, and began
smoothing it. It was the first thing I had ever made for him. I
remembered how proud I was the evening he put it on. He was looking down
steadily at me with his grave, reasonable eyes, and speaking when I
looked up.
"I have been knocked up and down so perpetually in my own life: that may
be the reason the change did not trouble me as it ought. It makes one
feel as if outside matters were but just the tithes of mint and
cumin,--a hurly-burly like that which I've lived in. I am sorry. I
thought you would grieve least of all, Hester. You are stronger-brained
than we Mannings, eh? I was sure the life meant so much more to you than
food or raiment."
"What do you mean by the life? Have I found it here, Daniel?"
"No, Hester?"
"I want work fit for me," I said, almost fiercely. "God made me for a
good, high purpose."
"I know," cheerfully. "We'll find it, dear: no man's work is kept back
from him. We'll find it together."
But under the cheerfulness there was a sad quiet, as of one who has lost
something forever, and tries to hide the loss from himself. There was a
moment's silence, then I got up, and pushed him down into my chair. I
took the gray head in my arms, leaned it on my shoulder, held the thin
bits of hair in my hand.
"Why, why, child!"
"Call me Hetty, Daniel. I'd like to think that name belonged to me yet."
"Surely, dear. Why! but--this is just the old times again, Hetty! You'll
be bringing me my slippers again."
"Yes, I will."
I went to the cupboard, and brought them, sitting down on the floor as
he put them on. Another of the old foolish tricks gone long ago. There
was a look on his face which had not been there this many a day. He had
such a credulous heart, so easy to waken into happiness. I took his
wrist in my bony hands, to raise myself; the muscles were like steel,
the cording veins throbbing with health; there was an indescribable rest
in the touch.
"Daniel," I said, looking him full in the face, "I'd like to have no
mission in God's world. I'd like to give up my soul, and forget
everything but you."
He did not answer. I think now that he understood me then and before far
better than I dreamed. He only put his hand on mine with an unutterable
tenderness. I could read nothing on his face but a grave common-sense.
Presently he unbuttoned my sleeves and the close collar about my throat
to let the cool damp blow on me.
"Yes," I said, "it's a fever, Daniel. In the blood. That is all,--with
me. I decided that long ago. It will not last long." And I laughed.
"Come," he said, quietly. "I am going to write to Rob now, about our
plans. You can help me."
I followed him, and sat down by the table. "There is something in the
man stronger than the woman," I thought, doggedly, "inside of blood and
muscle." Yet the very galling of that consciousness set me more firmly
in the mind to be again free.
A month after that we came to Newport. It was not an idle month. Jacky
had proposed a review of my husband's and his sons' clothes, and day
after day I had sat by the window looking out on the sluggish Hudson, a
hank of patent thread about my neck, stitching patches on the stiff,
half-worn trousers. "It becomes us to take care of the pence now," she
would say, and go on with her everlasting whistling, La-la. It rasped on
my brain like the chirp of the partridge outside in the cedar-hedge.
When she would go out of the room sometimes, I would hold my hand to my
head, and wonder if it was for this in reality God had made me.
Yet I had my own secret. The work of my life, before I was married, had
been the score of an opera. I got it out now by stealth, at night,
putting my pen to it here and there, with the controlled fever with
which a man might lay his hand on a dear dead face, if he knew the touch
would bring it back to life. Was there any waking that dead life of
mine? At that time, in New York, M. Vaux was trying the experiment of an
English opera in one of the minor theatres. I sent the score to him. It
did not trouble me, that, if produced, its first effect would be tried
on an uncultured caste of hearers: if the leaven was pure, what matter
where it began to work? and no poet or artist was ever more sincere in
the belief that the divine power spoke through Him than I. I thought,
that, if I remained with Doctor Manning as his wife, this venture
mattered little: if I shook myself free, and, taking up my mission, came
before the public as a singer, it would open the way for me. For my plan
had grown defined and practical to me now.
M. Vaux had left his family at Newport after the season was over. I was
to meet him there when we went down, and hear his decision on the score.
I met him one day on Broadway, and hinted my vague desire of making my
voice also available.
"To sing? did you say sing, Mrs. Manning? go on the stage?"--pawing his
chin with one hand.
He was a short, puffy little man, with a bullet head at half-cock in the
air, producing a general effect of nostrils on you.
"Sing, eh?" he mumbled, once or twice.
Before this I had been Mrs. Manning, throwing off an opera-score as a
careless whim, one of the class to whom he and his like presented arms:
he surveyed me now with the eye of a stock-raiser buying a new mule, and
set the next evening as the time when I should "drop in at his house
and give him a trill or two.--Keeping dark before the old man yet, eh?"
with a wink. I went in the next day, but he declined to pronounce
judgment until we came to Newport.
I remember my husband met me at the gate when I returned, and lifted me
from the little pony-carriage.
"I'm so glad my girl is taking her drives again,"--his face in a
glow,--"coming back with the old red cheeks, too. They're a sort of hint
of all the good years coming. We're far off from being old people yet,
Hetty." And so went beside me slowly up the garden-walk, his hands
clasped behind him, stopping to look now and then at his favorite purple
and crimson hollyhocks.
I looked at him askance, as we went through the evening shadows. There
was something grand in the quiet of the face, growing old with the depth
of sadness and endurance subdued in it: the kindly smile over all. I had
brought the smile there. But it would not be for long: and I remember
how the stalk of gillyflower I held snapped in my hand, and its spicy
odor made me throw it down. I have loathed it ever since. Was my life to
be wasted in calling a smile to an old man's face? My husband and M.
Vaux were different men; but, on the other side, they were gates to me
of different lives: here, a sordid slavery of work; there,--something in
me glowed warm and triumphant,--fame and an accomplished deed in life!
Surely these mawkish home-ties were fast loosing their hold on me, I
thought, as we went in. I asked no questions as to my husband's plans;
no one spoke to me of them. In the few days before our departure I roped
up chairs, packed china in straw, sorted clothes into trunks, working
harder than the others, and then creeping off alone would hum an air
from the score, thanking God for giving me this thoroughly pure, holy
message to utter in the world. It was the redemption of my soul from
these vulgar taints: it was a sort of mortgage I held on the eternal
truth and life. Yet, when no one told me of their plans, when I saw they
all held some secret back from me, watching me constantly and furtively,
when Jacky buzzed about my husband all day, whispering, laughing,
cooking his favorite omelet for breakfast, bringing his slippers at
night,--it was like so many sharp stings through stupor. "It's the
woman's flesh of me!" I used to say bitterly, when I would have been
glad to meanly creep after them, to cuddle Teddy up in my arms, or to
lean my head on his father's knees. "I can live it down. I have 'a manly
soul.'" For it was part of my creed that Nature was something given us
to be lived down in fulfilling our mission.
We went by the evening's boat to Newport. I saw M. Vaux in the outer
cabin, as we passed through: he nodded familiarly when Doctor Manning's
back was turned, without removing his cigar.
It was stifling below, with the smell of frying meat and numerous
breaths. We went on deck, my husband drawing a bench around to shelter
me from the keen wind across the bow, and wrapping my flannel hood
closer to my throat when we drifted out within scent of salt water. It
was a night that waited and listened: the sea silent and threatening, a
few yellow, dogged, low breakers running in at long intervals; now and
then a rasping gurgle of wind from shore, as of one who held his breath;
some thin, brown clouds ragged along the edges of the cold sky, ready
for flight.
I sat there thinking how well the meaning of the sea suited my soul that
night. It was no work of God's praising Him continually: it was the
eternal protest and outcry against Fate,--chained, helpless,
unappealing. Let the mountains and the sunshine and the green fields
chant an anthem, if they would; but for this solitary sea, with its
inarticulate cry, surely all the pain and impatience of the world's six
thousand years had gone down and found a voice in that. Having thus
cleared to myself the significance of the sea in Nature, I was trying to
define its exact effect upon my own temperament, (a favorite mental
exercise of my father's,) when my husband touched my shoulder.
"I'll go down and smoke a bit, Hetty dear, and leave you with Jacky.
She's as good guard as a troop of horse."
Jacky nodded vehemently once or twice from where she stood, followed him
with her eyes as he went down the steps, anxiously, and then stood
gravely silent. She was but a lump of "woman's flesh," that was clear,
and I doubted if there was any soul inside to live it down. Her face was
red and her eyes shining with the sea-wind. She had been at the stern
with the boys, making a riot about the porpoises rolling under the boat;
in the engine-room with Teddy; had tried to drag me to the deck-railing
to watch the unsteady shimmer of some pale-blue sea-weed under the
water, which the wheel threw up in silver flashes, or to see how, before
the sun went down, we floated over almost motionless stretches of pale
tea-colored water, holding, it seemed, little curdling pools of light
far below in their depths on depths of shivering brown and dull red
mosses.
"Ach-h! I'm glad I'm alive to-night!" she had said, gritting her teeth
in her Dutch fashion.
But some new demon had possession of her brain now: she stood working
with her shawl uncertainly, a trifle pale, watching me. She came to me
at last, and stood balancing herself first on her heels and then her
toes, biting her lip as if doubtful how to begin.
"I wish we had the baby along!" came with a gruff burst, finally. "God
bless its little soul! I went out to see it on Saturday. It would do
Uncle Daniel good. He needs something fresh and hearty,
bread-and-butter-like, or a baby. You did not notice him this evening
particularly, Mrs. Manning, eh?" anxiously.
"No."
"Nothing----Well, no matter. I'm fanciful, maybe. There's an old saying
in the family about him, some Doctor's prophecy, and it makes me
over-watchful, likely."
She waited for a question. I asked none. There was a dull throb of pain
in my heart, but I thrust it down. The girl waited a few moments,
debating with herself: I could read the struggle on her face: then she
looked up straight into my eyes, her small white teeth showing
determined as a steel-trap.
"It's quiet here, Mrs. Manning, and will be for a bit, and there's a
story I'd like to tell you. It would do me good, if it were off my mind.
Perhaps you, too," with a sharp glance.
"Go on."
She put her hand into her pocket and pulled out a broken morocco case.
"Look here. This tells the whole of the story, almost,"--holding it
where the light from the cabin-window fell on it.
It was the daguerreotype of a woman: one of those faces that grow out of
a torpid, cunning, sensual life; apparently marked, too, by some strange
disease, the skin white, and hanging loose from the flesh. I pushed it
away. Jacqueline polished it with her palm.
"She was an opium-eater, you see? The eyes have that rigid staring,
like Death looking into life. You pushed it from you, Mrs.
Manning?"--shutting it. "Yet I know a man who cherished that living face
tenderly in his bosom for fifteen long years, and never opened his lips
to say to God once that it was hard to bear: faugh!" and she flung the
case into the water. "I only kept it to show you. She, the foul vampire,
sucked his youth away. I think it was but the husk of life that was left
him when she died;--and we are making that mean and poor enough,"--in a
lower voice. "Yet that man"--more firmly--"has a stronger brain and
fresher heart than you or I are fit to comprehend, Mrs. Manning. One
would think God meant that the last of his life, after that gone, should
be a warm Indian-summer day, opening broad and happily into the life He
is keeping for him,--would you not?"
"Who is the man?"--my lips growing cold.
"Your husband."
"I thought so. You did well to tell me that story."
She looked from me, her color coming and going.
"It was hard to do it. You are an older woman than I. But I thought it
was needed."
I looked up at the hard-set, chubby little face, beyond at the far
yellow night-line of sea, listened to the low choke, choke, of the water
in the wheels.
"I wish you would leave me. Let me be alone awhile."
She went to the other end of the deck, where she could keep me in sight.
It was so dull, that throb of the water, playing some old tune that
would not vary! The sea stretched out in such blank, featureless
reaches!
To nestle down into this man's heart and life! To make his last years
that warm Indian-summer day! I could do it! I! What utter rest there
were in that!
Yet was this power within me to rot and waste? My nature, all the habit
and teaching of the years gone, dragged me back, held up my Self before
me, bade me look at that. A whiff of tobacco-scented breathing made me
look up. M. Vaux was leaning on the deck-railing, his legs crossed,
surveying me critically through his half-shut eyes.
"Well, 'm, glad of the chance t' tell you. Henz and Doctor Howe thought
so well of that little thing of yours that we've put it in
rehearsal,--bring it out Monday week. 'N' 've concluded you can try the
part of Marian in it. Not much in that,--one aria you can make something
of, but begin easy, hey?"
"I have concluded to give up that scheme, Monsieur."
"Tut! tut! No such thing. Why, you've a master-talent,--that is, with
cultivation, cultivation. A fine gift, Madam. Belongs to the public.
Why," tapping his yellow teeth with his cane-head, "it's shutting up a
bird in a cage, to smother a voice like yours. Must have training,--yes,
yes, 'll see to that; 'n' there are tricks and bits of stage-effect; but
you'll catch 'em,--soon enough. There's other little matters," with a
furtive glance at my square shoulders and bony figure, "necessary to
success. But you'll understand."
I saw how anxious the man was that I should accede to the proposal. I
had not overrated my genius, then?
"If the thing's to be done, let it be done quickly. I'm going to run
back to town to-morrow night, and you'd best go with me, and go in
rehearsal at once. You can break it to your people to-morrow. I'll meet
you in the boat,--that is," with an unwilling hesitation, "if you decide
to go."
Jacky approached us.
"I will let you know," I said; and as he walked away, the water began
its dull throb, throb, again, that lasted all night long.
All night long! Other people may approach the crisis of their fate with
senses and faculties all on guard and alert; but with me, although I
knew the next day would witness my choice for life, I believe that heavy
thud of the water was the most real thought, trying my brain beyond
endurance. I tried to reason coolly in the night about M. Vaux and his
scheme: both vulgar, degrading in outside appearance,--I felt that, to
the quick, keenly enough; but inside lay a career, utterance for
myself,--and I had been dumb and choking so long!
A beam of light from the cabin-chandelier struck just then sharply
across Doctor Manning's face, where he lay asleep in his berth. There
was an unusual look in it, as Jacky had said, now that I looked closely:
a blueness about the mouth, and a contraction of the nostrils. Was it a
hint of any secret disease, that she had looked so terrified, and even
the boys had kept such a sidelong scrutiny over him all day? I sat up.
If I could go to him, put my hands about his head, cling to him, let my
young strength and life ooze into his to atone for all he had lost in
those old days! There was passion and power of love under my
stiff-muscled fingers and hard calculating brain, such as these people
with their hot blood knew nothing of. It _was_ passion, a weak fever of
the flesh. I drew the sheet over me, and lay down again.
The morning was stiflingly hot. I remember the crowd of porters, drays,
etc., jostling on the wharf: the narrow street: Monsieur passing me, as
we turned into it, and muttering, "By six this afternoon I must know
your decision": Robert's grave, inquiring face, when he first met his
father, and saw his changed look. The rooms he had taken for us were but
partially furnished, carpetless, the sun staring in through dirty
windows, blue and yellow paper on the walls. He went out with Dr.
Manning for a walk; the boys scattered off noisily to the sea-side. I
went to work making a sort of lounge for Teddy to sleep on, out of some
blocks of wood and staves of an old barrel, and so passed the time until
noon. Then I sat down to mend the weekly heap of boys' socks,
half-washed and leather-stained. Out of the window where I sat I looked
down into the muddy back-yard of the boarding-house, where an Irishwoman
was washing and gossiping with the cook cleaning fish over the ash-heap.
_This_ was what Life held for me now, was it? When the door was opened,
a strong whiff of dinner filled the room. Two o'clock came.
"I will not go down to dinner," I said to Jacqueline, when the cracked
bell rang. "I will go out and find Doctor Manning on the cliffs. I may
have something to say to him."
But when she was gone, I darned on at the unclean socks. Somehow the
future faced me in my work and surroundings. But I did not think of it
as a whole. The actual dignity and beauty of life, God's truth itself,
may have grown dim to me, behind a faint body and tired fingers; but let
the hard-worked woman who is without that sin throw the first stone at
me. I got up at last, folded the stockings, and put them away; then
pinned on my bonnet and shawl. Teddy was sitting on the stairs, half
asleep. I stopped to kiss him.
"You'll be back soon, mother?"--hugging me close about the neck.
"Good bye, Bud! Bring your father his pipe to-night, as he likes you to
do,--and every night."
I strained him close to my breast again; he had a warm, honest little
heart of his own; he would be such a man as his father. I gasped, set
him down: I dared not kiss him after I thought of that: and went out of
the hall, stumbling over the boarders' hats and greasy oil-cloth.
Without, the air had that yellow stirless calm peculiar to Newport,
which gives to the sea and landscape the effect of those French pictures
glassed in tinted crystal. There were but few passengers on the street.
I wondered if any of them held his fate in his hand as I did mine that
day. Before I reached the cliffs the afternoon was passing away rapidly;
the heated pavements under my feet growing cooler, and barred with long
gray shadows; a sea-breeze blowing tattered sand-colored clouds inland;
the bell of the steamer rang out sharply down at the quiet little wharf.
In half an hour she would sail. M. Vaux was on board, awaiting me. I had
but little time to spare.
I turned and crept slowly along the road to where the grassy street
opened on the cliffs, and sat down on the brown rocks. I could see my
husband on the sands with Robert, pacing to and fro; the scent of their
cigars almost reached me where I sat. I must see him once more. The bell
of the boat rang again; but I sat still, breaking off bits of the salt
crust from the rock, hardly looking up to see if her steam was up. I was
going. I knew she would not sail until I was on board. And I must see
him again; he would call me Hetty, maybe: that would be something to
remember. It was very quiet. The bare, ghastly cliffs formed a sort of
crescent, on which I sat; far below, the sea rolled in, over the white
sand, in heavy ashen sweeps: in one horn of the crescent the quaint old
town nestled, its smoky breath sleepily giving good-night to the clear
pink air; in the other stood the sullen fort, the flag flapping sharply
against the sky. The picture cut itself vividly on my brain. The two
black figures came slowly towards me, across the sands, seeing me at
last. I would not tell him I was going: I could write from New York: I
thought, my courage giving way. What a hard, just face Robert Manning
had! What money I made should go to the support of my child: Robert
should not think me derelict in every duty. Then I tried to get up to
meet them, but leaned back more heavily on the rocks, twisting my
fingers in a tuft of salt hay that grew there.
I heard Robert say something about "jaded" and "overworked," as he
looked at me, throwing away his cigar; his father answered in a whisper,
which made the young man's face soften, and when they came near, he
called me "mother," for the first time. Into the face of the man beside
him I did not look: I thought I never could look again. There was a
small rip in the sleeve of his great-coat: I remember I saw it, and
wondered feebly if Jacky would attend to it,--if my child, when she was
a woman, would be careful and tender with her father. Meantime my
husband was talking in his cheerfullest, heartiest voice.
"Coming here makes me feel as if the old boy-time had come back, Hetty.
Rob and I have been planning out our new life, and the sea and the fresh
air and the very houses seemed to join in the talk, and help me on as
they used to do then. I'll begin all new: just as then. Only now"----
He put his hand on my shawl with a motion that had infinite meaning and
affection in it. The little steamer at the wharf swayed and rocked. Her
freight was nearly all on deck: I had but a few moments more,--that is,
if I meant to be free.
"We are going down to the hotel for a few minutes,--business, Hetty," he
said. "Will you wait for us here? or are you afraid to be alone?
"No, I'm not afraid to be alone. It is better for me."
"Good bye, then. Come, Rob."
I did not say good-bye. Even then, I think I did not know what I had
resolved. I thrust my fingers deeper into the wet tuft of grass, heard
the long dash of the breakers on the beach, looked at the square black
figure of Robert Manning as it went slowly up the sandy road into the
street. At the other, taller and more bent, beside it, I did not once
look. I wiped the clammy moisture off my face and throat.
"It's the woman's flesh of me," I said. "There is better stuff in me
than that. I will go now, and fulfil my calling."
On the wharf, as I went creeping along, I met Monsieur. He offered me
his fat little arm, with smiles and congratulations, and handed me
hurriedly over the plank on to the deck. In a moment the steamer was
puffing out of harbor.
* * * * *
I was to play Marian in my own opera. God had given me a power of
head-work, skill for a certain mission, and I was going to perform it.
The vast, vague substance on which I was to act was brought before me
to-night, palpable,--the world, posterity, time; how did I call it? But,
somehow, it was not what I had dreamed of since my babyhood up yonder in
Concord. Nothing was vast or vague. I was looking into a little glass in
a black-painted frame, and saw the same Mrs. Manning, with the same high
cheekbones, the yellow mole on the upper lip, the sorrowful brown eyes:
dressed in tulle now, though, the angular arms and shoulders bare, and
coated with chalk, a pat of rouge laid on each cheek: under the
tulle-body the same old half-sickness; the same throbbing back-tooth
threatening to ache. The room was small, triangular: a striped, reddish
cotton carpet on the floor, a door with a brass handle, my bandbox open
on a chair, a basin with soapy water, soiled towels, two dripping
tallow-candles: in short, a dressing-room in a theatre. Outside, wheels,
pulleys, pasteboard castles, trees, chairs, more bony women, more
chalk, more tulle. Monsieur in a greasy green dressing-gown odorous of
tobacco, swearing at a boy with blear eyes,--a scene-shifter. The
orchestra tuning beyond the foot-lights: how vilely the first violin
slurred over that second passage! "Life's Prophecy," I called it; and
that "Vision of Heaven," the trombonist came in always false on the
bass, because, as Monsieur said, he had always two brandy-slings too
much. Beyond was "the world," passive, to be acted upon; the
parquet,--ranged seats of young men with the flash-stamp on them
from their thick noses to the broad-checked trousers; the
dress-circle,--young girls with their eyes and brains full-facing their
attendant sweethearts, and a side-giggle for the stage; crude faces in
the gallery, tamed faces lower down; gray and red and black and
tow-colored heads full of myriad teeming thoughts of business, work,
pleasure, outside of this: treble and tenor notes wandering through
them, dying almost ere born; touching what soul behind the dress and
brain-work? and touching it how? Ah, well! "I am going to fulfil my
mission." I said that, again and again, as I stood waiting. "Now. This
is it. I take it up." But my blood would not be made to thrill.
"This wart must be covered," said a walking-lady in red paper-muslin,
touching the mole on my lip with Meen Fun. M. Vaux tapped at the
door,--a sly, oily smile on his mouth.
"We are honored to-night. Be prepared, my dear Madam, for surprises in
your audience. Your husband is in the house,--and his son, Robert
Manning."
I put up my hands in the vain effort to cover the bare neck and
shoulders,--then, going back into the dressing-room, sat down, without a
word. I remember how the two tallow-candles flared and sputtered, as I
sat staring at them; how on the other side of the brass-handled door the
play went on, the pulleys creaked, and the trombones grated, and the
other women in tulle and chalk capered and sang, and that at last the
stuffy voice of the call-boy outside cried, "Marian, on," and it was my
time to fulfil my mission. I remember how broad a gap the green floor of
the stage made to the shining tin foot-lights; how the thousand brassy,
mocking eyes were centred on the lean figure that moved forward; how I
heard a weak quaver going up, and knew it to be my own voice: I remember
nothing more until the scene was ended: the test and last scene of the
opera it had been: and as the curtain fell, it was stopped by a faint,
dismal hiss that grew slowly louder and more venomous, was mingled with
laughs and jeers from the gallery, and the play was damned. I stood with
my white gauze and bony body and rouge behind a pasteboard flower-vase,
and looked out at the laughing mob of faces. This was the world; I had
done my best head-work for it, and even these plebeian brains had found
it unfit for use, and tossed it aside. I waited there a moment, and then
passing Monsieur, whose puffy face was purple with disappointment and
rage, went into the dressing-room.
"What wonder?" I heard him demand in French. "It was so coarse a theft!
But I hoped the catch-dresses would pass it off."
I wrapped a flannel cloak over my airy robes, and went out, down the
crooked back-stairs into the street. I had no money; if I went back to
the hotel where I had been stopping, it would be as a beggar.
I waited outside of the theatre by an old woman's candy-stand for the
crowd to hustle past, holding myself up by her chair-back. She was
nodding, for it was past midnight, but opened her red eyes to lift a
little child on her knees who had been asleep at her feet.
"Come, Puss, the play's out, it's time for you an' Granny to be snug at
home."
I laughed. Why, there was not one of these women or men crowding by, the
very black beggar holding your horse, who had not a home, a child to
touch, to love them,--not one. And I--I had my Self. I had developed
that.
I pulled the cloak closer about me and went down the pavement. The
street was thronged with street-cars stopping for the play-goers, hacks,
and omnibuses; the gas flamed in red and green letters over the
house-fronts; the crowd laughed and swayed and hummed snatches of songs,
as they went by. I saw one or two husbands drawing the wrappings tighter
about their wives' throats, for the air was sharp. My husband had seen
my shoulders to-night,--so had they all, covered with chalk. There were
children, too, cuddling close to their mothers' sides in the carriages.
I wondered if my child would ever know it had a mother. So I went slowly
down the street. I never saw the sky so dark and steely a blue as it was
that night: if there had been one star in it, I think it would have
looked softer, more pitying, somehow, when I looked up. Knowing all that
I had done, I yet cannot but feel a pity for the wretch I was that
night. If the home I had desolated, the man and child I had abandoned,
had chosen their revenge, they could not have asked that the woman's
flesh and soul should rise in me with a hunger so mad as this.
At the corner of the street, a group from the crowd had stopped at the
door of a drug-shop; they were anxious, curious, whispering back to
those behind them. Some woman fainting, perhaps, or some one ill. I
could not pass the lock of carriages at the crossing, and stopped,
looking into the green light of the window-bottles. In a moment I caught
my own name, "Manning," from a policeman who came out, and a word or two
added. The crowd drew back with a sudden breath of horror; but I passed
them, and went in. It was a large shop: the lustres, marble
soda-fountains, and glittering shelves of bottles dazzled me at first,
but I saw presently two or three men, from whom the crowd had shrunk
away, standing at the far end of the shop. Something lay on the counter
among them,--a large, black figure, the arm hanging down, the feet
crossed. It did not move. I do not know how long I stood there, it might
be hours, or minutes, and it did not move. But I knew, the first moment
I looked at it, that it never would move again. They worked with him,
the three men, not speaking a word. The waistcoat and shirt were open;
there was a single drop of blood on the neck, where they had tried to
open a vein. After a while the physician drew back, and put his hand
gently on the shoulder of the shorter, stouter of the other two men.
"My friend," he said, compassionately.
Robert Manning did not seem to hear him. He had knelt on the floor and
hid his face in the hand that hung down still and cold. The druggist, a
pale, little person, drew the doctor aside.
"What is it, now? Apoplexy?" his face full of pity.
"No. Brought on by nervous excitement,--heart, you know. Threatened a
long time, his son says. His wife, the woman who"----
The policeman had been eying my dress under the cloak for some time.
"Hi! _You_'d best move on," he whispered. "This a'n't no place for the
likes of you."
I stood still a moment looking at the brawny black figure lying on the
counter. The old days of Tinder and the paddock,--I don't know why I
thought of them. It did not move: it never would move again. Dead. I had
murdered him. I! I got my fingers in my oily hair, and pulled at it.
"Hetty, Hetty Manning," I said, "good bye! Good bye, Daniel!" I remember
hearing myself laugh as I left the shop-door; then I went down the
street.
When I was far down the Bowery, an old thought came feebly up in my
brain. It was how the water had choked, choked, all that night long in
the wheel of the boat. When I thought of that, I waited to think. Then I
turned and went to the bay, beyond Castle Garden.
* * * * *
The rain, drip, dripping on a cottage-roof: on branches, too, near at
hand, that rustled and struck now and then against the little
window-shutters, in a fashion just dreary enough to make one nestle
closer into the warm bed, and peep out into the shadowy chamber, with
the cozy little fire burning hotly in the grate. Patter, patter:
gurgling down the spouts: slacking for a minute, threatening to stop and
let you sleep in a usual, soundless, vulgar way, as on other nights:
then at it again, drip, drip, more monotonous, cheerfuller in its
dreariness than ever. Thunder, too: growling off in the hills, where the
night and rain found no snug little bed-room to make brighter by their
besieging: greenish-white jets of lightning in the cracks of the
shutters, making the night-lamp on the toilet-table and the fire
suddenly go out and kindle up fiercely again.
This for a long time: hours or not, why should one try to know? A little
bed, with crimson curtains, cool white pillows: a soft bed, where the
aching limbs rested afresh with every turn. After a while, a
comfortable, dumpling little figure in a loose wrapper, popping out of
some great chair's depths by the fire and stirring some posset on the
hearth: smelling at a medicine-bottle: coming to the bed-side, putting a
fat hand on one's forehead: a start, a nervous kiss, a shaky little
laugh or two, as she fumbles about, saying, "Hush-h!" and a sudden
disappearing behind the curtains. A grave, pale face looking steadily
down, as if afraid to believe, until the dear eyes fill with tears, and
the head, with its old wig, is dropped, and I and God only know what his
soul is saying.
"My husband!"
"Hetty!"
"Is it you?--Daniel?"
He lifted me in his arms farther up on the pillow, smoothing the
blankets about me, trying to speak, but only choking, in a ridiculous
fashion.
"And the opera, and the drug-shop, and"----