April 1. When a new month comes in it always seems as if something
should happen. The divisions of time do not appeal to the feelings as
simple arbitrary conveniences, but as real endings and beginnings; so
the fancy demands that the old order shall end and some better, new
fashion begin. I suppose everybody has had the vague sense of
disappointment that the new month or the new year is so like the one
before. I used to feel this very strongly as a child, though never
unhappily. It was a disappointment, but as all times were happy times,
the disappointment was not bitter. The thought is in my mind to-night
because I am troubled, and because I would so gladly leave the fret and
worry behind, to begin afresh with the new month.
The thought of Tom and his trouble weighs on me so that I have been
miserable all day. Miss Charlotte has not been here this week. Her
beloved plants need attention, and she is doing mysterious things with
clippers and trowels, selecting bulbs, sorting out seeds, making plans
for her garden beds, and working herself into a delightful fever of
excitement over the coming glories of her garden. It is really rather
early, I think, but in her impatience she cannot wait. Her flowers are
her children, and all her affection for family and kin, having nothing
nearer to cling to, is lavished on them. It is so fortunate that she
has this taste. I cannot help to-day feeling so old and lonely that I
could almost envy her her fondness for gardening. I must cultivate a
taste for something, if it is only for cats. I wonder how Peter would
like to have me set up an asylum for crippled and impoverished tabbies!
Over and over again I have asked myself what I can do to help Deacon
Webbe, but I have found no answer. One of the hardest things in life is
to see our friends bear the consequences of their mistakes. Deacon
Daniel is suffering for the way he brought Tom up, and yet he has done
as well as he was able. Father used to say what I declared was a hard
saying, and which was the harder because in my heart of hearts I could
never with any success dispute it. "You cannot wisely help anybody until
you are willing not to interfere with the discipline that life and
nature give," he said. "You would not offer to take a child's medicine
for it; why should you try to bear the brunt of a friend's suffering
when it comes from his own fault? That is nature's medicine." I remember
that once I answered I would very gladly take a child's medicine for it
if I could, and Father laughed and pinched my ear. "Don't try to be
Providence," he said. I would like to be Providence for Deacon Webbe and
Tom now,--and for the girl, too. It makes me shiver to think of her, and
if I had to see or to touch her, it would be more than I could endure.
This moralizing shows that I am low in my mind. I have been so out of
sorts that I was completely out of key to-day with George. I have had to
see him often about the estate, but he has seemed always anxious to get
away as quickly as possible. To-day he lingered almost in the old
fashion; and I somehow found him altered. He is--I cannot tell how he is
changed, but he is. He has a manner less--
It is time to stop writing when I own the trouble to be my own
wrong-headedness and then go on to set down imaginary faults in my
neighbors.
April 3. I am beset with deacons lately. Deacon Richards has been here
for an hour, and he has left me so restless that I may as well try to
write myself into calmness.
Deacon Richards never seems so big as when he stands talking with me,
looking down on the top of my head, with his great bald forehead looming
above his keen eyes like a mountain-top. I always get him seated as soon
as I can, and he likes to sit in Father's wide arm-chair. One of the
things that I like best about him is that, brusque and queer as he is,
he never takes that seat until he has been especially asked. Then as he
sits down he says always, with a little softening of his great voice,--
"This was your father's chair."
He has never been out of Tuskamuck a fortnight, I dare say; but there is
something about this simple speech, ready for it as I of course always
am, that almost brings the tears to my eyes. He is country born and
country bred, but the delicacy of the courtesy underlying his
brusqueness is pure gold. What nonsense it is for Cousin Mehitable to
insist that we are too countrified to have any gentlemen! She does not
appreciate the old New England stock.
What Deacon Daniel wanted I could not imagine, but while we were talking
of the weather and the common things of the day I could see that he was
preparing to say something. He has a wonderful smile when he chooses to
show it. It always reminds me of the picture one sees sometimes of a
genial face peering from behind a glum mask. When I teased him about the
vestry fires, he only grinned; but his grin is to his smile as the smell
of peppermint to that of a rose. He amused me by his comments of Aunt
Naomi.
"She runs after gossip," he said, "just as a kitten runs after its tail.
It doesn't mean anything, but it must do something."
"She is a shrewd creature," I answered. "It is absurd enough to compare
anybody so decorous to a kitten."
"Aunt Naomi's nobody's fool," was his response. "She sent me here
to-night."
"Sent you here?" I echoed.
His face grew suddenly grave.
"I don't know how this thing will strike you, Miss Ruth," he said
explosively. "It seems to me all wrong. The fact is," he added more
calmly, but with the air of meaning to have a disagreeable thing over,
"it's about the Brownrig girl. You know about her, and that she is very
sick."
"Yes," I said.
He stretched out his large hand toward the fire in a way that showed he
was not at ease. I could not help noticing the difference between the
hand of this Deacon Daniel and that of the other. Deacon Webbe is a
farmer, and has a farmer's hand. Deacon Richards has the white hand of a
miller.
"I don't see myself," he said grimly, looking into the coals, "that
there is likely to be anything contagious in her wickedness, but none
of the women are willing to go near her. I should think she'd serve
pretty well as a warning. The Overseers of the Poor 've sent old Marm
Bagley to nurse her, and that seems to be their part; but who's to look
out that Marm Bagley doesn't keep drunk all the time's more than I can
see."
He sniffed scornfully, as if his opinion of women was far from
flattering.
"How did you know about it?" I asked.
"Job Pearson--he's one of the Overseers--came to see if there wasn't
somebody the church could send down. I went to Aunt Naomi, but she
couldn't think of anybody. She's housed with a cold, and she wouldn't be
the one to go into a sick-room anyway."
"And she sent you here?"
He turned to me with the smile which I can never resist.
"The truth is," he answered, "that when there's nothing else to do we
all come to you, Miss Ruth."
"But what can I do?"
"That is what I came to see."
"Did you expect me to go down and nurse the girl?"
He looked at me with a shrewd twinkle in his eye, and for a moment said
nothing.
"I just expected if there was anything possible to be done you'd think
of it," he replied.
I thought for a moment, and then I told him I would write to Cousin
Mehitable to send down a trained nurse from Boston.
"The Overseers won't pay her," he commented with a grin.
"Perhaps you will," I returned, knowing perfectly that he was trying to
tease.
"It will take several days at least to get her here."
We considered for a little in silence. I do not know what passed through
his mind, but I thought with a positive sickening of soul of being under
the same roof with that girl. I knew that it must be done, though; and,
simply to be rid of the dread of it, I said as steadily as I could,--
"I will go down in the morning."
And so it has come about that I am to be nurse to the Brownrig girl and
to Tom Webbe's baby.
April 6. The last four days have been so full and so exhausting that
there has been no time for scribbling in diaries. Like Pepys I have now
to write up the interval, although I cannot bring myself to his way of
dating things as if he always wrote on the very day on which they
happened. Father used to laugh at me because I always insisted that it
was not honest of Pepys to put down one date when he really wrote on
another.
Tuesday forenoon I went down to the Brownrig house. I had promised
myself not to let the sick girl see how I shrank from her, but I had a
sensation of sickening repugnance almost physical. When I got to the red
house I was so ashamed of myself that I forgot everything else. The girl
was so sick, the place so cheerless, so dirty, so poverty-stricken; she
was so dreadful to look at, with her tangled black hair, her hot cheeks,
her fierce eyes; everything was so miserable and dreadful, that I could
have cried with pity. Julia was in a bed so dirty that it would have
driven me to distraction; the pillow-slip was ragged, and the comforter
torn in great places, as if a wild cat had clawed it. Marm Bagley was
swaying back and forth in an old broken rocking-chair, smoking a black
pipe, which perhaps she thought fumigated the foul air of the sick-room.
She had the appearance of paying very little attention to the patient
and none at all to the baby, which wailed incessantly from a shabby
clothes-basket in a corner. The whole scene was so sordid, so pitiful,
so hopeless, that I could think only of the misery, and so forget my
shrinking and dread.
A Munson boy, that the Overseers of the Poor had sent down, was chopping
wood in the yard, and I dispatched him to the house for Hannah and clean
linen, while I tried to get Marm Bagley to attend to the baby and to
help me to put things to rights a little. She smelled of spirits like
another Sairey Gamp, and her wits did not appear to be entirely steady.
After I found her holding the baby under her arm literally upside down,
while she prepared its food, I decided that unless I wished to run the
risk of being held as accessory to the murder of the infant, I had
better look after it myself.
"Can't you pick up the room a little while I feed the baby?" I asked.
"Don't see no use of clearing up none," she said. "'Tain't time for the
funeral yet."
This, I suppose, was some sort of an attempt at a rudimentary joke, but
it was a most ghastly one. I looked at the sick girl to see if she heard
and understood. It was evident that she had, but it seemed to me that
she did not care. I went to the bedside.
"I ought to have spoken to you when I came in," I said, "but your eyes
were shut, and I thought you might be asleep. I am Miss Privet, and I
have come to help Mrs. Bagley take care of you till a regular nurse can
get here from Boston."
She looked at me with a strange sparkle in her eyes.
"From Boston?" she repeated.
"Yes," I said. "I have sent to my cousin to get a regular trained
nurse."
She stared at me with her piercing eyes opened to their fullest extent.
"Do they train 'em?" she asked.
"Yes," I told her. "A trained nurse is almost as good as a doctor."
"Then I shall get well?" she demanded eagerly. "She'll get me well?"
"I hope so," I said, with as much of a smile as I could muster when I
wanted to cry. "And before she comes we must clear up a little."
I began to do what I could about the room without making too much
bustle. The girl watched me with eager eyes, and at last, as I came near
the bed, she asked suddenly,--
"Did he send you?"