Gilbert knelt at the side of the man who was his friend again, and
caught up his head and dashed his face from the pool, while a groan
broke from his own lips--the anguish of the sex which our race forbids
to weep. He stanched the blood with his handkerchief, and then felt in
Easton’s pocket for another to bind over the wound; and as he folded it
in his hands it emitted a fragrance that pierced him with a certain
puzzling suggestion, and added to his sorrow a keener sting of
remorseful shame.
Easton unclosed his eyes at last, and looked up at him. “Did you strike
me, Gilbert?” he asked.
“No, no--oh no! God knows I didn’t! How could I strike you, my dear old
boy?”
“I thought you did; you would have done well to kill me. I had outraged
you to the death.”
“Oh, Easton, I came here wanting to be friends with you, to make it all
right again. And now--”
“I know that. It _is_ all right. Whose blood is this? Were you hurt?
Oh--mine! Yes, I must have fainted, and cut myself in falling. I’ve felt
queer all day. This heat has been too much for me. How long ago was it?”
“How long? I don’t know. Just now.”
“I thought it was longer. It seems a great while ago.”
He closed his eyes wearily, and Gilbert stood looking ruefully down upon
him. After a little while he rose giddily to his feet. “Will you help me
home, Gilbert?” he asked, as he leaned tremulously against a rock.
“You could never walk to the hotel, Easton,” said Gilbert. Easton sat
down again, and Gilbert stared at him in perplexed silence. “By
heavens!” he broke out, “I don’t know what to do, exactly. If you were
over at the farm we could get that carryall and drive you to the hotel;
but your room would be horribly close and hot after you got there.”
“I can’t go to the farmhouse,” said Easton, with languid impatience,
“and run the chances of making a scene; I couldn’t stand _that_, you
know.”
“No; you couldn’t stand that,” assented Gilbert, gloomily. “But it would
be much the same thing at the hotel, with more women to assist. Faint?”
he asked, looking anxiously at Easton’s face.
“A little. You’d better wet my head,” answered Easton, taking off the
handkerchief that bound up his face. Gilbert did so, and then left the
dripping handkerchief on Easton’s head. “Thanks. That’s good. We’ll stay
here awhile. It’s the best place, after all. It’s cool as any,” he said,
looking refreshed.
Gilbert watched his face anxiously; but he was at his wits’ end, and
they both sat silent. He looked at his watch; it was two o’clock. He
grimly waited half an hour, exchanging a word with Easton now and then,
and freshening the handkerchief at the pool from time to time. The
opening of the glen darkened, and the steady glare on the meadow beyond
ceased. Gilbert walked down to the edge of the pasture and looked out. A
heavy cloud hid the sun. “Look here, Easton, this won’t do,” he said
when he came back. “It’s going to rain, and you’ve got to get under
shelter, somehow. We must run the gantlet to the back of the farmhouse,
and try to find some conveyance to the hotel. Do you think you could
manage to walk with my help across the meadow? The sun’s behind a cloud,
now, and I don’t think it would hurt you.”
“Oh yes,” said Easton, “I can walk very well. Just give me your arm, a
little way.”
They set out and toiled slowly up the long meadow slope, slanting their
course in the direction of the orchard behind the house. Easton hung
more heavily on his friend’s arm as they drew nearer. “Do you suppose
we’ve been seen?” he panted, as they stepped through a gap in the
orchard wall.
“No; there isn’t a woman on watch; not a solitary soul. They’re everyone
asleep--confound ’em,” said Gilbert, in the fervent irrelevancy of his
gratitude. “Now you sit here, Easton, and I’ll run up to the kitchen
door and tell one of the boys to get out his team, and we’ll have you
out of harm’s way in half a minute.”
Easton sank upon a stone, and Gilbert ran toward the house under cover
of the orchard trees. He was not out of sight when Easton heard women’s
voices behind a cluster of blackberry brambles near the wall on the
left; then, without being able to stir, he heard the sweep of dresses
over the grass toward him; he knew that in the next instant he was to be
discovered; he rose with a desperate effort and confronted Mrs. Farrell
and the two young girls, Miss Alden and Miss Jewett, who were lamenting
the heat and wondering how soon it would rain.
He felt rather than heard them stop, and he made some weak paces toward
them, essaying a ghastly smile as he lifted his eyes to Mrs. Farrell’s
face. Then he saw her blanch at his pallor, and saw her see the cut on
his temple. “I’ve had a fall, and a little scratch. It’s nothing. Don’t
mind it. Gilbert--”
A killing chagrin, such as only a man can feel who finds himself
unmanned in the presence of her he loves, was his last sensation as he
sank in the grass before her. The young girls fled backward, but she
rushed toward him with a wild cry, “Oh, he’s dead!” and in another
moment the people came running out of the house and thronged round them
with question, and injurious good will, and offers to have him taken to
their rooms. Gilbert came with them and flung up his fists in despair.
Mrs. Farrell had Easton’s head upon her knee, and was sprinkling his
face from one of many proffered flagons of cologne. “No, he shall not go
to your room,” she vehemently retorted upon the last hospitable zealot;
“he shall go to mine; he is _mine_!” she said. “Here, Rachel, Ben, Mrs.
Woodward--will you help me?”
The others fell back at her brave confession, and they all began to like
her. They meekly suffered themselves to be dispersed, and they cowered
together on the piazza while a messenger ran for the doctor. Then, while
the ladies waited his report, they talked together in low tones, though
they were separated from Mrs. Farrell’s room by the whole depth of the
house. Not a voice dissented from the praises of the heroine of a love
episode whose dramatic interest reflected luster upon them all. The
ladies were even more enthusiastic than the men, and several rebuked
their husbands, who had formerly been too forward in doing justice to
Mrs. Farrell, for coldness in responding now to their own pleasure in
her.
“George, how _can_ you smoke?” asked the youngest of the married ladies,
and reproachfully drew her husband’s newspaper away from him and sent
him into the orchard with his cigar. Another made her husband take the
children away for a walk, in order that the ladies might not be
distracted by their play while attending the verdict of the physician.
The common belief was that Easton would die, and in the meantime they
excited themselves over the question as to how, when, and where he had
fallen. The husband with the cigar was suffered to approach and say that
he had known an old fellow once who had been out in the heat a good
deal, and had gone into the woods to cool off, and had come home in the
evening with a cut in his head and a story that he had been attacked and
knocked down.
“Yes,” said one of the ladies, who had a logical mind, “but Mr. Easton
doesn’t pretend to have been knocked down, and--and he isn’t an old
fellow.”
“I was going to say,” retorted the smoker, taking a good long whiff,
with half-closed eyes, insensible to the frantically gesticulated
protest of his wife, “that this old fellow was supposed not to have been
attacked at all; he had got giddy with the heat and tumbled over and
barked his skull against a tree, and then fancied he’d been knocked
down; they often do.”
The theory seemed to have reason in it, but the language in which it was
clothed made it too repulsive for acceptance, and there was open
resentment of it by the tribunal before which it was offered. At this
moment the doctor was seen slanting down the grass toward the gate from
the side door; the ladies called after him and captured him.
“The wound is a very slight matter,” said the doctor; “but Mr. Easton
had something like a sunstroke this summer in New York, and is very
sensitive to the heat.”
“Yes, yes,” said the spokeswoman, eager for all, “but what happened to
him? How did he get hurt?”
“His friend thinks he was overcome by the heat and struck his face
against a point of rock in falling, over there in the valley by the
sugar orchard.”
“There!” said the young wife, who at heart had felt keenly injured by
the indifference to her husband’s theory, “it’s just as George said.
Oh, _George_!” She took him by the arm, joying in his wisdom, and looked
fondly into his face, while he smoked imperturbably.
“Yes, but will he get well?” tremulously demanded the spokeswoman of the
group, pursuing the doctor on his way to the gate.
“Oh, I think so,” said the doctor; “he’s got the temperature in his
favor now”; for though the threatened storm had passed without rain, it
had left the air much cooler.
The doctor mounted into his buggy and chirruped to his horse and drove
off. He came again in the evening, and said they had better not move
Easton to the hotel that night, left his prescriptions, and went away.
Mrs. Woodward and Rachel began to talk together about where they should
put Easton.
“Put him!” cried Mrs. Farrell, emerging upon them where they stood in a
dimly lighted group, with Gilbert and Mrs. Gilbert just outside the
door. She had an armful of draperies of which she had been dismantling
her closet. “He’s not to be put _any_where. I’m going to stay with
Rachel, and he’s to stay where he is till he gets perfectly well. It
would kill him to move him!” The women were impressed, and looked to see
conviction in Gilbert’s face.
“It would kill him to keep him where he is, Mrs. Farrell,” said Gilbert,
dryly. “A man can’t stand too much kindness in his sensitive state. You
must have some regard for his helplessness. He would never let you turn
out of your room for him in the world; and if you try to make him it
will simply worry him to death. It’ll be gall and wormwood to him,
anyway, to think of the trouble he’s given. You must have a little mercy
on him.”
Gilbert had to make a long fight in behalf of his friend; he ended by
painting Easton’s terrors of a scene when they were coming toward the
farmhouse from the glen.
Opinion began to veer round to his side. “Well, well,” cried Mrs.
Farrell, passionately, “take him away from me--take him where you will!
You let me do nothing for him; you think him nothing to me!”
“If he could stay where he is for the night,” said Mrs. Woodward, “he
could have Mrs. Burroughs’s room to-morrow; she’s going to the seaside
and won’t want it any more.”
This matter-of-fact proposal seemed so reasonable that it united the
faltering opposition, and Mrs. Farrell had to give way. In their hearts,
no doubt, all the women sighed over the situation’s loss of ideality. At
parting, Mrs. Gilbert took Mrs. Farrell’s hand and went so far as to
kiss her. “I don’t think you need be anxious,” the older woman said.
“The doctor says he needs nothing but care and quiet, and he’ll be well
again in a few days. Even now I can’t help congratulating you. I didn’t
know matters had gone so far--so soon. My dear,” she added, after a
little hesitation, “I’m afraid I haven’t quite done you justice. I
thought--excuse my saying it now--I thought perhaps you were amusing
yourself. I beg your pardon in all humbleness.”
“Oh don’t, _don’t_, Mrs. Gilbert!” cried Mrs. Farrell, and cast her arms
about her neck, and sobbed there. She went to Rachel’s room, and changed
her dress for a charming gown in which she could just lie down and jump
up in an instant. She bound her hair in a simple knot, and when she came
back to her own room with her lamp held high and shaded with one hand,
she looked like a stylish Florence Nightingale with a dash of Lady
Macbeth.
Gilbert was sitting there in the dark, beside a table on which the light
revealed a curious store of medicines and restoratives, the contribution
of all the boarders: five or six flagons of cologne and one of bay rum;
a case bottle of brandy; a bottle of Bourbon whisky; a pint of Bass’s
pale ale; the medicines left by the doctor; some phials of homœopathic
pellets from Mrs. Stevenson, who used the high-potency medicines; a tiny
bottle of liquid nux from Mrs. Gilbert, who preferred the appreciable
doses, and despised all who did not; a lemon; three oranges; a box of
guava jelly--from one of the young girls. Mrs. Farrell’s tragic gaze met
Gilbert’s lowering eyes and wandered with them to this array; they both
smiled, but she was the first to frown. She beckoned him from the room,
and “Here is your lamp,” she said. “Don’t turn it down or it will smoke,
but set it where it won’t shine in his eyes. I’m going to be there in
that room.” She pointed down the passageway toward Rachel’s door. “If he
needs the least thing you’re to call me.” Her severity would have
admonished any levity that lingered in Gilbert’s heavy heart, as she put
the lamp in his hand.
“Let me light you back to your room,” he said, with moody humility.
“No, I can find the way perfectly well in the dark,” she answered.
“Or--yes, you had better come, so as to make sure of the right door in
case you need me. You think I tried to make you quarrel!” she said in a
swift undertone, as they passed down the hall; “but I never meant it,
and you _know_ that, whatever you think. Oh, I have been punished,
punished! But I’m glad you held out against me about the room,” she
added. “He would have been as true to you; and if you had let me do
anything to make him seem silly, I should have hated you!”
He saw with a man’s helplessness the tremor of her lips, and then she
had opened and closed the door, and he stood blankly staring at it.
In the morning Easton was well enough to sit up in an easy-chair, and
was fretfully eager to return to his hotel. It was clear that he was
intensely vexed at having caused the sensation of the day before, and
that the fear of giving further trouble galled him with the keenest
shame. They were only too glad to release him from the fond imprisonment
to which Mrs. Farrell would have sentenced him, on condition that he
would consent to occupy the room vacated by Mrs. Burroughs for a few
days, and be cared for better than he could be at the hotel, until he
was quite well again.
But in a few days he was not quite so well. He fell from his dull
languor into a low fever, and from feebly lounging about his room and
drowsing in an easy-chair it came to his not rising one morning at all.
Thus his hold upon the happiness so fiercely pursued, and now within his
grasp, relaxed, and a vast vagueness encompassed him, in which he strove
with one colossal task: to make Gilbert see a certain matter as he saw
it, which was not at all the matter of their quarrel, but some strange
abstraction, he never could make out what, though their agreement upon
it was a vital necessity. He was never delirious, but he was never sure
of anything; a veil was drawn between his soul and all experience; he
could not tell, when he had been asleep, that he had slept; his waking
was a dream; the world moved round him in elusive shadow.
He was what one of the ladies called comfortably sick. It was not
thought from the first that he was in danger, and as it turned out he
was not. But if he had lain for a month at the point of death, he could
not have been more precious to that houseful of women, who enjoyed every
instant of the poetic situation; maid and matron, those tender hearts
were alike glad of the occasion to renew in this fortunate reality their
faith in romance, and they turned fondly to Mrs. Farrell for a
fulfillment of their ideal of devotion. It looked on the face of things
rather like expecting devotion from a Pompeian fresco, so little did her
signal beauty seem related to the exigency, so far should sickness and
sorrow have been from her world. But here Mrs. Farrell most disappointed
those who most feared her picturesque inadequacy. She threw herself into
her part with inspiration; rising far above the merely capable woman,
she made her care of Easton a work of genius, and not only divined his
wants and ministered to his comfort with a success that surprised all
experience, but dealt so cunningly with his moods that he was at last
flattered into submission if not resignation. In the beginning he was
indeed a most refractory object of devotion; he chafed so bitterly
against his helpless lapse into the fever, he was in such a continual
revolt against his hospitable detention at the farmhouse, and was so
weighed down, through all the hazy distance in which his life ebbed from
actual events, with the shame of being a burden, that no magic less than
hers could have consoled him. But she overcame his scruples and
reconciled him to fate, so that it did not seem an unfair advantage to
inflict the kindness against which he could not struggle; and she had
her way with him, even to excess. Since she was not allowed to give up
her room to him, she devoted herself in the moments of her leisure to
the decoration of his chamber. She upholstered it almost anew with
contributions from the ladies of scraps of chintz, mosquito-netting, and
dotted muslin; she shut out the garish light with soft curtains; she put
on the plain mirror and toilet table what Gilbert called a French cap
and overskirt, and she furbelowed the mantelpiece. She took Mrs.
Woodward’s ivies and trained them up the corners, and she had a great
vase on the table, often renewed with autumnal wild flowers, ferns, and
the firstlings of the reddening sumac leaves. As a final offering she
brought in her spinning-wheel--the mania was then just beginning--and
set it by the hearth. It must be owned that when all was done the place
had a certain spectacularity; the furniture and ornaments wore somehow
the air of properties; on the window seats, which she had contrived for
greater coziness of effect, it was not quite safe to sit down. But her
friends--and all the ladies were her friends now--easily forgave this to
her real efficiency and her unsparing self-sacrifice; the two young
girls worshiped the carpets she trod upon, and the whole sympathetic
household sighed in despair at the perfection with which she, as one may
say, costumed the part. She had ordinarily indulged a taste for those
strong hues that went best with her Southern beauty, but now her robes
were of the softest color and texture; she moved in slippers that made
no sound; in emblem of devotion to the sick-room she denied herself
every ornament; at first she even left off her Etruscan ear-rings, and
kept only a limp scarf of dark red silk, tied at her throat in a
sentiment of passionate neglect. In behalf of Easton’s peaceful dreams
she banished the Japanese fans, with their nightmare figures, and as she
sat fanning him with a quaint, old-fashioned fan of white feathers,
which she had skillfully mounted on a long handle, her partisans
declared, some that she looked like an Eastern queen, other some, like
an Egyptian slave. They remembered her afterward in this effect, and
also how she used to look as she stood at dusk lighting the little
tapers which she had found at a queer country store in an out-of-the-way
village of the neighborhood, and setting them afloat in a vase of oil,
to illumine the chamber during the night. She realized the character as
thoroughly in other respects; she met the friendliness all round her
with gentle appreciation, availed herself of it little or nothing, and
for the most part quietly withdrew from it. Her defiant airs were all
laid aside; her prevailing mood was serious; she often spoke earnestly
of matters which certainly had not commanded her open reverence before;
there was a great change in her in every way, and some, who had always
longed to like her, liked her now with thankful hearts for the
opportunity. Among these Mrs. Gilbert made her advances like one who has
an atonement to offer; Mrs. Farrell frankly accepted the tacit regret,
and visited a good deal in her room.
But as the sick man’s disorder slowly ran its course, and the days took
him further and further from any joy in her, Mrs. Farrell seemed to lose
her hold of the situation, and another change came over her, in which
she fell from her high activities into a kind of dull and listless
patience, and dragged out the time, uncheered by the inspiration that
had hitherto upheld her. She seemed not to know what to do. The spring
was gone, the impulse exhausted, in that strange nature, which knew
itself perhaps as little as others knew it. Those were the days when she
surrendered her authority to Rachel, and served under her about Easton,
who had also fallen largely to the care of Gilbert and Ben Woodward. Few
young ladies would not willingly assume the task of nursing a young man
through a low fever in a romance, but the reality is different. If it
had been something short and sharp, a matter of a week’s supreme
self-devotion, it would doubtless have been otherwise with her; she was
capable of great things, but a long trial of her endurance must finally
lose its meaning. She had times of melancholy in which she sat behind
her closed doors for hours, or when she went lonely walks through the
woods or fields. She withdrew herself more and more from the society
that sought her, and got a habit of consorting with poor old Nehemiah as
he dug his potatoes or gathered his beans, and seemed to find him a
relief and shelter. Heaven knows what they talked of. Doubtless, as she
followed him from one potato hill to another, and listened to his
discourse, he admired her taste for serious conversation, and was
obscurely touched that such resplendent beauty should be so meekly
contented with his company. She no longer teased Ben Woodward, whose
open secret of a passion for her she used to recognize so freely; she
was the boy’s very humble servant in manner; and to Rachel’s efficiency
and constancy she was the stricken thrall. It was touching to see how
willingly subservient she was to the girl, and how glad she was to be of
any use that Rachel could think of. One night, after they had sat a long
time silent by the taper’s glimmer while Easton slept, she suddenly
caught Rachel by the arm and whispered, “Why don’t you say it? How can
you keep thinking it and thinking it, and never say it? For pity’s sake,
speak this once, and tell me that you know I did it all, and that you
despise me!”
“I don’t judge you,” said Rachel; “and I have no right to despise
anyone. You know, yourself, whether you are to blame for anything.”
“Do you think I acted heartlessly that day when I made fun of him--there
in the schoolhouse?”
“I _did_ think so, then.”
“Do you now? Do you believe I’m sorry?”
“How can I tell? You seemed unfeeling then, but I don’t believe you
were; and you seem sorry now--”
“And you don’t believe I am! Oh me, I wonder if I am! Rachel, you do
believe I know how to feel, don’t you?”
“How can you ask such a thing as that?” returned the girl in a startled
accent.
“I wonder if I do! It seems to me that I know how to feel, but that I
never feel. It seems to me that I am always acting out the thing I ought
to be or want to be, and never being it. Don’t trust me, Rachel--not
even now; I think that I’m very remorseful and sorry, but who knows if I
am? I keep asking myself what I should do if he were to die--what would
become of me. I try to scare myself about it; but my soul seems to be in
a perfect torpor; I can’t stir it. Rachel, Rachel! I _did_ try to make
him in love with me--all I could. There was such a deadly charm in
it--his perfect faith in me, whatever I said or did. But it frightened
me at last, too; and I didn’t know what to do; and that day when I
behaved so about him, I was frantic; if I hadn’t made fun of him, the
thought of what I had done would have killed me. But I honored him all
the time. Oh, he was my true, true lover; and when I thought how
recklessly I had gone on, it almost drove me wild. Rachel, do you know
what I did?” She poured out the whole story, and then she said, “But now
I seem not to be able to care any more. It’s all like a dream: it’s some
one running and running after me, and I am laughing and beckoning him
on, and all of a sudden there he lies without help or motion; it can’t
give him any pleasure to see me, now; I can’t do anything for him that
some one else can’t do better, or that he won’t be as glad of from
another. It’s as if he were in prison, and I sat at the door outside,
waiting in this horrible lethargy. When he comes out, what will he say
to me? I think that I should die if he upbraided me; but if he didn’t I
should go mad. No, no! That’s what some other woman would do. Rachel,
isn’t it awful to bring all these things home to yourself, and yet not
suffer from them? Oh, but I care--I care because I can’t care. My heart
lies like a stone in my breast, and I’m furious because I can’t break
it, or hurt it. Rachel, if you give way before me I don’t know where I
shall end. You must never yield to me, no matter what mood I’m in, or
else I shall lose the one real friend I have in the world--the only one
I can be myself to, if there is really anything of me.”
As she ceased to speak, Gilbert came in to take his place for the night.
He asked Rachel in a low voice what was next to be done, but he took no
notice of Mrs. Farrell save to give her a slight nod.
No one else treated her with coldness now; but in his manner toward her
there still lingered a trace of resentment. It had a tone of irony, to
which she submitted meekly, like one resolved to bear a just penalty;
and if there were times when he forgot to be severe and she forgot to be
sad, then afterward he was the more satirical and she the more patient.
It began to be said by some of the ladies that Mr. Gilbert had rather a
capricious temper; but he had his defenders, who maintained that he was
merely run down with worry and confinement over his friend.
One day he came into Mrs. Gilbert’s room, and found Mrs. Farrell with
her. He offered to go away if he had burst upon a confidential
interview, seeing that they fell silent at his coming, but Mrs. Farrell
said that they had just finished their talk, and that now she was going.
Gilbert did not sit down after he had closed the door upon her, but took
two or three lounging turns about the room. “It’s very pleasant to see
you and Mrs. Farrell such friends, Susan,” he said, at last. “It’s
really millennial. But which is the wolf and which is the lamb?”
He laughed his short laugh, and Mrs. Gilbert answered, nervously, “You
know very well I told you, the first time we talked of her, that I liked
her.”
“You said she fascinated you. The spell seems to have deepened. You
used to find some little imperfections in her.”
“Well, and who pretends that I don’t see them now?”
“Oh, not I. But I’m affected to see you so lenient to them of late. Did
you know that she was a person of strong religious convictions?”
“What _do_ you mean, William?”
“Nothing. She has found out that Easton and I are in a sort of suspense
about such matters, and she says it is terrible. She can only account
for our being able to endure it by supposing that men are different,
more self-centered, not so dependent as women. She considers the
Woodwards a high example of the efficacy of a religious training in the
formation of character. She says she is not like Rachel; that she has an
undisciplined nature, and was too irregularly trained, first in her
father’s belief and then in a convent. What was her father’s belief? I
suppose some sort of marine Methodism of the speaking-trumpet pitch. She
wants my advice as to a course of reading in the modern philosophy; she
thinks every Christian ought to know how his faith is being assailed.”
Gilbert stopped in his walk and looked gravely at his sister-in-law, who
gave a troubled sigh.
“What right have you to suppose she isn’t perfectly in earnest now,
William?”
“None; I think she thinks she is.”
“She has shown so much more character, so much more heart, than I ever
supposed she had, in this affair, that I’m glad to believe we were
mistaken about her in several essential ways. The fact is, I always did
have a sort of sneaking fondness for her, and now I’m determined to
indulge it; so you needn’t come to laugh about her in _my_ sleeve,
William. I’m an ardent Farrellite, and have been ever since I found out
that she was in love with your friend. Don’t you think she’s very
devoted to him?”
“Oh, I dare say. He’s not in a state for devotion to tell upon,
exactly.”
Mrs. Gilbert looked baffled. Presently she asked, “Are she and Rachel
Woodward as good friends as ever?”
“How do I know?” returned Gilbert, resuming his walk. “_That’s_ a
curious girl, Susan. One meets enough good women in the world; I’ve
always been able to believe in them,” he said, stopping at Mrs.
Gilbert’s side to take her hand and kiss it; “in fact, the worst women
seem pretty good, if one will only compare them with oneself; but I
don’t think I’ve understood, before, just the sort of feminine goodness
that the unbroken tradition of your New England religiousness produces.
Puritanism has fairly died out of the belief--I don’t care what people
profess to believe--but in such a girl as Rachel Woodward, all that was
good in it seems to survive in the life. She’s more like Easton than any
other human being I know; they’re both unerringly sincere; they’re both
faithful through thick and thin to what they think is right; only you
can’t help feeling that there’s something Quixotic in Easton’s noblest
moods, and that he has an arrogant scorn of meaner morals than his own.
But her purity doesn’t seem to judge anything but itself, and her
goodness and veracity always seem to refer themselves to something
outside of her. You can see before she speaks how she is considering her
phrase, and choosing just the words that shall give her mind with
scriptural scruple against superfluity; if you know the facts, you know
what she will say, for she’s almost divinely without variableness or
shadow of turning where the truth is concerned. It’s awful; it makes me
hang my head for shame, to watch the working of that vestal soul of
hers. And with all this inflexibility--you might call it angularity--of
rectitude, she has a singular charm, a distinctly feminine charm.”
“Oh, indeed! And what is her charm?”
“Poh, Susan!” said Gilbert, looking askance at her. “Don’t make me think
you can be guilty of bad taste.”
“Oh, well; I won’t, I won’t, my dear boy! I didn’t mean to,” cried Mrs.
Gilbert. “It _was_ rather foolish in me to interrupt you.”
“I can’t call it an interruption, exactly; I had got to the end of my
say.”
He went off to Easton’s room, where he found Rachel Woodward putting
things in order for the evening, and he smiled to see with what
conscientious regard she preserved Mrs. Farrell’s arrangements, as
matters having a sacred claim to which no reforms of her own could have
pretended, and yet managed somehow to imbue all that picturesqueness
with a quality of homelike comfort. He nodded to her, and said he was
going out for a short walk.
On the road he overtook Mrs. Farrell, who was moving rather sadly along
by herself. Her face brightened as she turned and saw him, but she
waited for him to speak.
“Where are your inseparable comrades?” he asked.
“Oh!” said she. “Jenny Alden isn’t very well, this afternoon, and Miss
Jewett has gone over with Mrs. Stevenson to Quopsaug.”
“Quop--_what?_” asked Gilbert, stopping short.
“Quopsaug,” repeated Mrs. Farrell, simply. “Did you never hear of it?”
“No, I never heard of Quopsaug. Is it--vegetable or mineral?”
“It’s vegetable, I believe. At least it vegetates. It’s a place--a
huddle of unpainted wooden houses in a little hollow at the foot of
Scatticong, on the east side. It has a Folly and it has a Bazar. But I
wonder Quopsaug hasn’t come up long ago in our poverty-stricken
conversation. I suppose everyone must have thought everybody else had
talked you to death about it.”
“No,” said Gilbert. “What do people go to Quopsaug for?”
“To see the Folly--that’s the storekeeper’s mansion; and to buy things
out of the Bazar--that’s his store. And to wheedle the inhabitants
generally out of their spinning-wheels; at least that’s what Mrs.
Stevenson’s gone for to-day.”
“And is Quopsaug a nickname?”
“No; it’s one of those musical Indian names we’re so fond of in New
England. The people adopted it thirty or forty years ago, when they
started a cotton mill--which failed--there. The place used to be called
East Leander, but they rechristened it Quopsaug, after a chief who
scalped the first settler, and then became a praying Indian, and lies
over there in the Quopsaug graveyard, under a Latin epitaph. You ought
to go to Quopsaug.”
“I must,” said Gilbert, absently; the talk dropped, and they walked on
in silence till they came to a rise in the road overlooking a swampy
meadow. In the midst of this stood a slim, consumptive young maple in a
hectic of premature autumnal tints, and with that conscious air which
the first colored trees have.
“I suppose you would like a branch of that,” said Gilbert, “for your
vase.”
“Why, yes,” assented Mrs. Farrell. When he brought it to her, she had
turned about and was facing homeward. “An olive branch?” she asked, with
a tentative little burlesque.
“If you like,” said Gilbert, with a laugh that was not gay. “It isn’t
quite the color; but it’s olive branch enough for all the peace you
probably mean, and it’s sufficiently angry-looking for war when you
happen to feel like making trouble again.”
The leaves were mainly of a pallid yellow, but their keen points and
edges were red as if dipped in blood. She flung the bough away and
started forward, dashing the back of her hand passionately across her
eyes.
It was as though he had struck her. He made haste to come up with her.
“Mrs. Farrell,” he faltered, dismayed at the words that had escaped him,
“I’ve been atrociously rude.”
“Oh, not unusually so!” she said, darting a look upon him from gleaming
eyes, while her lips quivered. “You seem to feel authorized to give me
pain whenever you like. You needn’t do so much to make me know the
difference between yourself and Mr. Easton.”
Gilbert’s face darkened. “Upon my word,” he said, “I think the less you
say about that the better.”
“Why?” she retorted, trembling all over with excitement. “You force me
every moment to remember his magnanimity and generosity; all your words
and acts teach me how friendless I am without him. He never could
believe so ill of a woman as you do; but if the case were changed, I
don’t think he would choose the part of my torturer. And you are his
_friend_!” She broke, and the tears fell down her face.
Gilbert walked speechless beside her. “It’s true,” he said at last,
“Easton is a better man than I; he’s a manlier man, if you like--or if
you mean that.”
She did not speak, but she slightly slackened her fierce pace, and
seemed to be waiting for him to speak again.
“But I didn’t know that I had been giving you so much pain. I’m
sorry--I’m ashamed--with all my heart. I ask your pardon.”
“Yes, yes! I know how you say all that. Oh, I know the superior stand
you take! I know how you say to yourself, ‘It’s my business to treat her
handsomely for Easton’s sake, whatever I think of her. Come, I’ll do the
right thing, at any rate!’ You ask my pardon. Thanks, thanks; I give it
in all meekness. Yes, let there be a truce between us. I can’t choose
but be glad to be let alone. Will you walk on and leave me now, Mr.
Gilbert, or let me leave you?”
“No, I can’t part from you so. Let it be peace, not a truce. I make no
such reservations as you imagine. I beseech you to pardon my brutality
and to forget my rudeness.”
She halted, and impulsively stretched out her hand toward him, and then
suddenly withdrew it before he could take it. “Wait,” she said,
seriously. “I can’t be friends with you yet, till I know whether you
really think me worthy. If you don’t, you shall have no forgiveness of
mine. You must be more than sorry that you hurt my feelings.”
“I will be as much sorry, and about as many things, as you like.”
“Oh, don’t try to turn it into a joke! You know what I mean. Did Mr.
Easton tell you what I told him to say about the trouble between you?
Did he lay the whole blame upon me? Did he say that I did it willfully
and recklessly, because your friendship piqued me, and
because--because--though I never thought of that before!--I was jealous
of it?”
Gilbert did not smile at the slight confusion of ideas, but answered,
gravely, “Easton was not the man to lay blame upon you--he would like
it too well himself. Besides, I was unfair with him, and gave him no
chance to speak in your defense.”
“Oh, how could you be so cruel as that? He was so true to you! I should
think you never could forgive yourself for that. You ought to have heard
him praise you. He told me everything. Yes, you did act grandly. But he
could have done as much for you, and more, or he never would have
suffered your self-sacrifice.”
“There is only one Easton in the world,” said Gilbert, gloomily; and he
went on to talk of Easton’s character, his noble eccentricities, his
beneficent life, and his heroic ideals. He spoke with a certain effect
of self-compulsion very different from the light-hearted liking with
which he had once before talked with her of Easton, but she listened
reverently, and at the end she said with a sigh: “No, I see that I
didn’t know him. Why, I hadn’t even imagined it! Why _should_ he care
for _me_?”
Gilbert did not undertake to answer the question, and she said, “But I
am so glad you have told me so much about him. How proud I shall be to
surprise him with it all!”
Gilbert made no sign of sharing her rapture, but she seemed not to heed
him.
They were very near the house, now, and she turned on him an upward,
sidelong look, as her lower stature obliged, and asked, “And you really
think me worthy to be sorry?”
“Yes,” said Gilbert, with a heavy breath.
“Then I’ll forget your cruelty,” she said; “but don’t do it any more.”
She dropped him a little nod, and went into the house without him. He
stood there watching the black doorway through which she had vanished,
but it was as if he had followed her, so wholly had all sense fled after
her out of his face. He stirred painfully from his posture, and cast his
eye upward at Easton’s room. The cold window met his glance with a gleam
from which he shrank, with a sudden shock at the heart, as though he had
caught Easton’s eye, and he turned and walked away into the nightfall.