"And you think a girl ought to be left to follow the noble example of
the mother!"
"Oh no, no!" I cried out. "Anything is better than that."
"That is what must happen unless you take the poor thing," he said in a
voice which, though it was hard, seemed somehow to have a quiver in it.
"But would she give the baby up?" I asked. "She's its mother."
"Jule? She'll be only too glad to get rid of it. Anyway she'd do what I
told her to."
I tried to think clearly and quickly. To have the baby left to follow in
the steps of its mother was a thing too terrible to be endured, and yet
I shrank selfishly from taking upon my shoulders the responsibility of
training the child. Whatever Tom decided about the marriage, however, I
felt that he should not have to resolve under pressure. If he were doing
it for the sake of the baby's future, I could clear his way of that
complication. I could not bear the thought of having Tom marry Julia.
This would be a bond on his whole life; and yet I could not feel that he
had a right to shirk it now. If I agreed to take the child, that would
leave him free to decide without being pushed on by fear about the baby.
My mind seemed to me wonderfully clear. I see now it was all in a whirl,
and that the only thing I was sure of was that if it would help him for
me to take the baby there was nothing else for me to do.
"Tom," I said, "I do not, and I will not, decide for you; and I will not
have anything to do with conditions. If she will give me the baby, I
will take it, and you may decide the rest without any reference to that
at all."
He took a step forward so quickly and so fiercely that he startled me,
and put out his hand as if he meant to take me by the arm. Then he
dropped it.
"Do you think," he said, "that I would have an illegitimate brat near
you? It is bad enough as it is, but you shall not have the reproach of
that."
My cheeks grew hot, but the whole talk was so strange and so painful
that I let this pass with the rest. I cannot tell how I felt, but I know
the remembrance of it makes my eyes swim so that I cannot write without
stopping continually; and I am writing here half the night because I
cannot sleep. I could not answer Tom; I only stood dully silent until he
spoke again.
"I know I can't have you, Ruth," he said, "and I know you were right.
I'm not good enough for you."
"I never said that," I interrupted. "I never thought that."
"Never mind. It's true; but I'd have been a man if you'd have given me a
chance."
"Oh, Tom," I broke in, "don't! It is not fair to make me responsible!"
"No," he acknowledged, with the shake of his shoulders I have known ever
since we were children; "you are not to blame. It's only my infernal,
sneaking self!"
I could not bear this, either. Everything that was said hurt me; and it
seemed to me that I had borne all that I could endure.
"Will you go away now, Tom," I begged him. "I--I can't talk any more
to-night. Shall I tell Julia you have come?"
He gave a start at the name, and swore under his breath.
"It is damnable for you to be here with that girl," he burst out
bitterly; "and I brought it on you! It isn't your place, though. Where
are all the Christians and church members? I suppose all the pious are
too good to come. They might get their righteousness smudged. Oh, how I
hate hypocrisy!"
"Don't, Tom," I interrupted. "Go away, please."
My voice was shaky; and indeed I was fast getting to the place where I
should have broken down in hysterical weeping.
"I'll go," he responded quickly. "I'll come in the morning with a
minister. Will eight o'clock do? I'd like to get it over with."
The bitterness of his tone was too much for me. I caught one of his
hands in both of mine.
"Oh, Tom," I said, "are you quite sure this is what you ought to do?"
"Do you tell me not to marry her?" he demanded fiercely.
I was completely unnerved; I could only drop his hand and press my own
on my bosom, as if this would help me to breathe easier.
"Oh no, no," I cried, half sobbing. "I can't, I can't. I haven't the
right to say anything; but I do think it is the thing you ought to do.
Only you are so noble to do it!"
He made a sound as if he would answer, and then he turned away suddenly,
and dashed off with great strides. I could not go back into the house,
but came home without saying good-night, or letting Miss Dyer know. I
must be ready to go back as soon as it is light.
April 12. It seems so far back to this morning that I might have had
time to change into a different person; and yet most of the day I have
simply been longing to get home and think quietly. I wanted to adjust
myself to the new condition of things. Last night the idea that Tom
should marry the girl was so strange and unreal that it could make very
little impression on me. Now it is done it is more appallingly real than
anything else in the world.
I went down to the red house almost before light, but even as early as I
came I found Tom already there. The nurse had objected to letting him
in, and even when I came she was evidently uncertain whether she had
done right in admitting him; but Tom has generally a way of getting what
he is determined on, and before I reached the house everything had been
arranged with Julia.
"I wanted to come before folks were about to see me," Tom said to me.
"There'll be talk enough later, and I'd rather be out of the way. I've
arranged it with her."
"Does she understand"--I began; but he interrupted.
"She understands all there is to understand; all that she could
understand, anyway. She knows I'm marrying her for the sake of the
child, and that you're to have it."
The Munson boy that I have hired to sleep in the house now Mrs. Bagley
is gone, in order that Miss Dyer may have somebody within call, appeared
at this minute with a pail of water, and we were interrupted. The boy
stared with all his eyes, and I was half tempted to ask him not to speak
of Tom's being here; but I reflected with a sick feeling that it was of
no use to try to hide what was to be done. If Tom's act was to have any
significance it must be known. I turned away with tears in my eyes, and
went to Julia.
Julia I found with her eyes shining with excitement, and I could see
that despite Tom's idea that she did not care about the marriage, she
was greatly moved by it.
"Oh, Miss Privet," she cried out at once, "ain't he good! He's truly
goin' to marry me after all! I never 'sposed he'd do that."
"You must have thought"--I began; and then, with a sinking consciousness
of the difference between her world and mine, I stopped.
"And he says you want the baby," she went on, not noticing; "though I
dunno what you want of it. It'll be a pesky bother for yer."
"Mr. Webbe wanted me to take it and bring it up."
"Well," Julia remarked with feeble dispassionateness, "I wouldn't 'f I
was you."
"Are you willing I should have it?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm willing anything he wants," was her answer. "He's awful good to
marry me. He never said he would. He's real white, he is."
She was quiet a moment, and then she broke out in a burst of joy.
"I never 'sposed I'd marry a real gentleman!" she cried.
Her shallow delight in marrying above her station was too pathetic to be
offensive. I was somehow so moved by it that I turned away to hide my
face from her; but she caught my hand and drew me back. Then she peered
at me closely.
"You don't like it," she said excitedly. "You won't try to stop him?"
"No," I answered. "I think he ought to do it for the sake of his child."
She dropped her hold, and a curious look came into her face.
"That's what he said. Yer don't either of yer seem to count me for
much."
I was silent, convicted to the soul that I had not counted her for
much. I had accepted Tom's decision as right, not for the sake of this
broken girl-mother, this castaway doomed to shame from her cradle, but
for the sake purely of the baby that I was to take. It came over me how
I might have been influenced too much by the selfish thought that it
would be intolerable for me to have the child unless it had been as far
as might be legitimatized by this marriage. I flushed with shame, and
without knowing exactly what I was doing I bent over and kissed her.
"It is you he marries," I said.
Her tears sprang instantly, tears, I believe, of pure happiness.
"You're real good," she murmured, and then closed her eyes, whether from
weakness or to conceal her emotion I could not be sure.
It was nearly eight before Mr. Thurston came. Tom has never been on good
terms with Mr. Saychase, and it must have been easier for him to have a
clergyman with whom he had never, I suppose, exchanged a word, than one
who knew him and his people. I took the precaution to say at once to Mr.
Thurston that Julia was too ill to bear much, and that he must not say a
word more than was necessary.
"I will only offer prayer," he returned.
I know Mr. Thurston's prayers. I have heard them at funerals when I have
been wickedly tempted to wonder whether he were not attempting to fill
the interval between us and the return of the lost at the Resurrection.
"I am afraid it will not do," I told him. "You do not realize how feeble
she is."
"Then I will only give them the blessing. Perhaps I might talk with Mr.
Webbe afterward, or pray with him."
I knew that if this proposition were made to Tom he would say something
which would wound the clergyman's feelings.
"Mr. Thurston," I urged, "if you'll pardon me, I wouldn't try to say
anything to him just now. He is doing a plucky thing, and a thing that's
noble, but it must be terribly hard. I don't think he could endure to
have anybody talk to him. He'll have to be left to fight it out for
himself."
It was not easy to convince Mr. Thurston, for when once a narrow man
gets an idea of duty he can see nothing else; but I managed in the end
to save Tom at least the irritation of having to fight off religious
appeals. The ceremony was as brief as possible. It was touching to see
how humble and yet how proud Julia was. She seemed to feel that Tom was
a sort of god in his goodness in marrying her,--and after all perhaps
she was partly right. His coldness only made her deprecatory. I wondered
how far she was conscious of his evident shrinking from her. He seemed
to hate even to touch her fingers. I cannot understand--
April 15. I have had many things to do in the last two days, and I find
myself so tired with the stress of it all that I have not felt like
writing. It is perhaps as much from a sort of feverish uneasiness as
from anything else I have got out my diary to-night. The truth is, that
I suffer from the almost intolerable suspense of waiting for Julia to
die. Dr. Wentworth and Miss Dyer both are sure there is no chance
whatever of her getting well, and I cannot think that it would be
better for her, or for Tom, or for her baby--who is to be my baby!--if
she should live. We are all a little afraid to say, or even to think,
that it is better for a life of this sort to end, and I seem to myself
inhuman in putting it down in plain words; but we cannot be rational
without knowing that it is better certain persons should be out of the
way, for their own sakes as well as for the good of the community, and
the more quickly the better. Julia is a weed, poor thing, and the sooner
she is pulled up the better for the garden. And yet I pity her so! I can
understand religion easily when I think of lives like hers. It is so
hard to see the justice of having the weed destroyed for the good of the
flowers that men have to invent excuses for the Eternal. Somebody has
defined theology as man's justification of a deity found wanting by
human standards, and now I realize what this means. Human mercy could
not bear to make a Julia, and a power which allows the possibility of
such beings has to be excused to human reason. The gods that men invent
always turn to Frankensteins on their hands. If there is a conscious
power that directs, He must pity the gropings of our race, although I
suppose seeing what it is all for and what it all leads to must make it
possible to bear the sight of human weakness.
The baby is growing wonderfully attractive now she is so well fed and
attended to. I am ashamed to think how little the poor wee morsel
attracted me at first. She was so associated with dreadful thoughts, and
with things which I hated to know and did not wish to remember, that I
shrank from her. Perhaps now the fact that she is to be mine inclines me
to look at her with different eyes, but she is really a dear little
thing, pretty and sweet. Oh, I will try hard to make her life lovely!
April 16. Aunt Naomi came in last night almost as soon as I was at home.
She should not have been out in the night air, I think, for her cold is
really severe, and has kept her shut up in the house for a fortnight.
She was so eager for news, however, that she could not rest until she
had seen me, and I am away all day.
"Well," was her greeting, "I am glad to see you at home once more. I've
begun to feel as if you lived down in that little red house."
I said I had pretty nearly lived there for the last two weeks, but that
since Miss Dyer came I had been able to get home at night most of the
time.
"How do you like going out nursing?" she asked, thrusting her tongue
into her cheek in that queer way she has.
I told her I certainly shouldn't think of choosing it as a profession,
at least unless I could go to cleaner places.
"I hear you had Hannah clean up," she remarked with a chuckle.
"How did you hear that?" I asked her. "I thought you had been housed
with a cold."
Aunt Naomi's smile was broad, and she swung her foot joyously.
"I've had all my faculties," she answered.
"So I should think. You must keep a troop of paid spies."
"I don't need spies. I just keep my eyes and ears open."
I wondered in my heart whether she had heard of the marriage, and as if
she read the question in my mind, she answered it.
"I thought I'd like to know one thing, though," she observed with the
air of one who candidly concedes that he is not infallible. "I'd like to
know how the new Mrs. Webbe takes his marrying her."
"Aunt Naomi," I burst out in astonishment, "you are a witch, and ought
to be looked after by the witch-finders."
Aunt Naomi laughed, and her eyes twinkled at the agreeable compliment I
paid to her cleverness. Then she suddenly became grave.
"I am not sure, Ruth," she said, "that I should be willing to have your
responsibility in making him marry such a girl."
I disclaimed the responsibility entirely, and declared I had not even
suggested the marriage. I told her he had done it for the sake of the
child, and that the proposition was his, and his only.
She sniffed contemptuously, with an air which seemed to cast doubts on
my sanity.
"Very likely he did, and I don't suppose you did suggest it in words;
but it's your doing all the same."
"I will not have the responsibility put on me," I protested. "It isn't
for me to determine what Tom Webbe shall do."
"You can't help it," was her uncompromising answer. "You can make him do
anything you want to."
"Then I wish I were wise enough to know what he ought to do," I could
not help crying out. "Oh, Aunt Naomi, I do so want to help him!"
She looked at me with her keen old eyes, to which age has only imparted
more sharpness. I should hate to be a criminal brought before her as my
judge; her eyes would bring out my guilty secret from the cunningest
hiding-place in my soul, and she would sentence me with the utmost rigor
of the law. After the sentence had been executed, though, she would come
with sharp tongue and gentle hands, and bind up my wounds. Now she did
not answer my remark directly, but went on to question me about the
Brownrig girl and the details of her illness; only when she went away
she stopped to turn at the door and say,--
"The best thing you can do for Tom Webbe is to believe in him. He isn't
worth your pity, but your caring what happens to him will do him more
good than anything else."
I have been wondering ever since she went how much truth there is in
what she said. Tom cannot care so much for me as that, although placed
as he is the faith of any woman ought to help him. I know, of course, he
is fond of me, and that he was always desperate over my engagement; but
I cannot believe the motive power of his life is so closely connected
with my opinions as Aunt Naomi seems to think. If it were he would never
have been involved at all in this dreadful business. But I do so pity
him, and I so wish I might really help him!
April 18. Julia is very low. I have been sitting alone with her this
afternoon, almost seeing life fade away from her. Only once was she at
all like her old self. I had given her some wine, and she lay for a
moment with her great black eyes gleaming out from the hollows into
which they have sunk. She seemed to have something on her mind, and at
last she put it feebly into words.
"Don't tell her any bad of me," she said.
For an instant I did not understand, and I suppose that my face showed
this. She half turned her heavy head on her pillow, so that her glance
might go toward the place where the baby slept in the broken
clothes-basket. The sadness of it came over me so suddenly and so
strongly that tears blinded me. It was the most womanly touch that I
have ever known in Julia; and for the moment I was so moved that I could
not speak. I leaned over and kissed her, and promised that from me her
child should never know harm of its mother.
"She'd be more likely to go to the devil if she knew," Julia explained
gaspingly. "Now she'll have some sort of a chance."
The words were coarse, but as they were said they were so pathetic that
they pierced me. Poor little baby, born to a tainted heritage! I must
save her clean little soul somehow. Poor Julia, she certainly never had
any sort of a chance.
April 24. She is in her grave at last, poor girl, and it is sad to think
that nobody alive regrets her. Tom cannot, and even her dreadful mother
showed no sorrow to-day. Somehow the vulgarity of the mother and her
behavior took away half the sadness of the tragedy. When I think about
it the very coarseness of it all makes the situation more pathetic, but
this is an afterthought that can be felt only when I have beaten down my
disgust. When one considers how Julia grew up with this woman, and how
she had no way of learning the decencies of life except from a mother
who had no conception of them, it makes the heart ache; and yet when
Mrs. Brownrig broke in upon us at the graveyard this morning, disgust
was the strongest feeling of which I was conscious. The violation of
conventionalities always shocks a woman, I suppose, and when it comes to
anything so solemn as services over the dead, the lack of decency is
shocking and exasperating together, with a little suggestion besides of
sacrilege.
Miss Charlotte surprised me by coming over just after breakfast to go to
the funeral with me.
"I don't like to have you go alone," she said, "and I knew you would
go."
I asked her in some surprise how in the world she knew when the funeral
was to be, for we thought that we had kept it entirely quiet.
"Aunt Naomi told me last night," she answered. "I suppose she heard it
from some familiar spirit or other,--a black cat, or a toad, or
something of the kind."
I could only say that I was completely puzzled to see how Aunt Naomi had
discovered the hour in any other way, and I thanked Miss Charlotte for
coming, though I told the dear she should not have taken so much
trouble.
"I wanted to do it, my dear," she returned cheerfully. "I am getting to
be an old thing, and I find funerals rather lively and amusing. Don't
you remember Maria Harmon used to say that to a pious soul a funeral was
a heavenly picnic?"
Whatever a "heavenly picnic" may be, the funeral this morning was one of
the most ghastly things imaginable. Tom and Mr. Thurston were in one
carriage and Miss Charlotte and I in another. We went to the graveyard
at the Rim, where Julia's father and brother were buried, a place half
overgrown with wild-rose and alder bushes. In summer it must be a
picturesque tangle of wild shrubs and blossoms, but now it is only
chill, and barren, and neglected. The spring has reddened and yellowed
the tips of the twigs, but not enough to make the bushes look really
alive yet. The heap of clay by the grave, too, was of a hideous ochre
tint, and horribly sodden and oozy.
Just as the coffin was being lowered a wild figure suddenly appeared
from somewhere behind the thickets of alders and low spruces which skirt
the fence on one side. It proved to be old Mrs. Brownrig, who with rags
and tags, and even her disheveled gray hair fluttering as she moved,
half ran down the path toward us. She must have been hiding in the woods
waiting, and I found afterward that she had been seen lurking about
yesterday, though for some reason she had not been to her house. Now she
had evidently been drinking, and she was a dreadful thing to look at.
I wonder why it is that nature, which makes almost any other ruin
picturesque, never succeeds in making the wreck of humanity anything but
hideous? An old tower, an old tree, even an old house, has somehow a
quality that is prepossessing; but an old man is apt to look
unattractive, and an old woman who has given up taking care of herself
is repulsive. Perhaps we cannot see humanity with the impartial eyes
with which we regard nature, but I do not think this is the whole of it.
Somehow and for some reason an inanimate ruin is generally attractive,
while a human ruin is ugly.
Mrs. Brownrig seemed to me an incarnation of the repulsive. She made me
shudder with some sort of a feeling that she was wicked through and
through. Even the pity she made me feel could not prevent my sense that
she was vicious. I wanted to wash my hands just for having seen her. I
was ashamed to be so uncharitable, and of course it was because she was
so hideous to look at; but I do not think I could have borne to have her
touch me.
"Stop!" she called out. "I'm the mother of the corpse. Don't you dare to
bury her till I get there!"
I glanced at Tom in spite of myself. He had been stern and pale all the
morning, not saying a word more than was necessary, but now the color
came into his face all at once. I could not bear to see him, and tried
to look at the mother, but repulsion and pity made me choke. She was
panting with haste and intoxication by the time she reached us, and
stumbled over something in the path. She caught at Tom's arm to save
herself, and there she hung, leering up into his face.
"You didn't mean for me to come, did you?" she broke out, half
whimpering and half chuckling. "She was mine before she was yours. You
killed her, too."
Tom kept himself still, though it must have been terribly hard. He must
have been in agony, and I could have sobbed to think how he suffered. He
grew white as I have never seen him, but he did not look at the old
woman. She was perhaps too distracted with drink and I hope with grief
to know what she was doing. She turned suddenly, and looked at the
coffin, which rested on the edge of the grave.
"My handsome Jule!" she wailed. "Oh, my handsome Jule! They're all dead
now! What did you put on her? Did you make a shroud or put on a dress?"
"She has a white shroud," I said quickly. "I saw to everything myself."
She turned to me with a fawning air, and let go her clasp on Tom's arm.
"I'm grateful, Miss Privet," she said. "We Brownrigs ain't much, but
we're grateful. I hope you won't let 'em bury my handsome gel till I've
seen her," she went on, with a manner pitifully wheedling. "She was my
gel before she was anybody else's, and it ain't goin' to hurt nobody for
me to see her. I'd like to see that shroud."
How much natural grief, how much vanity, how much maudlin excitement was
in her wish, I cannot tell; but manifestly there was nothing to do but
to have the coffin opened. When the face of the dead woman had once more
been uncovered to the light, the dreadful mother hung over it raving and
chuckling. Now she shrieked for her handsome Jule, and wailed in a way
that pierced to the marrow; then she would fall to imbecile laughter
over the shroud, "just like a lady's,--but then Jule was a lady after
she was married." Miss Charlotte, Tom, and I stood apart, while Mr.
Thurston tried to get the excited creature away; and the grave-diggers
looked on with open curiosity. I could not help thinking how they would
tell the story, and of how Tom's name would be bandied about in
connection with it. Sometimes I feel as if it were harder to bear the
vulgarities of life than actual sorrows. Father used to say that pain is
personal, but vulgarity a violation of general principles. This is one
of his sayings which I do not feel that I understand entirely, and yet I
have some sense of what he meant. A thing which is vulgar seems to fly
in the face of all that should be, and outrages our sense of the fitness
of things.
Well, somehow we got through it all. It is over, and Julia is in her
grave. I cannot but think that it is better if she does not remember; if
she has gone out like an ill-burning candle. Nothing is left now but to
consider what can be done for the lives that we can reach. I am afraid
that the mother is beyond me, but for Tom I can, perhaps, do something.
For baby I should do much.
April 25. It is so strange to have a child in the house. I feel queer
and disconcerted when I think of it, although things seem to go easily
enough. The responsibility of taking charge of a helpless life
overwhelms me, and I do not dare to let my thoughts go when they begin
to picture possibilities in the future. I wonder that I ever dared to
undertake to have baby; and yet her surroundings will be so much better
here than with the dreadful Brownrig grandmother that she must surely be
better for them. In any case I had to help Tom.
I proposed a permanent nurse for baby, but Hannah and Rosa took up arms
at once, and all but upbraided me with having cast doubts on their
ability and faithfulness. Surely we three women among us should be able
to take care of one morsel, although none of us ever had babies of our
own.
April 29. Nothing could be more absurd than the way in which the entire
household now revolves about baby. All of us are completely slaves
already, although the way in which we show it is naturally different.
Rosa has surrendered frankly and without reservations. She sniffed and
pouted at the idea of having the child "of that Brownrig creature" in
the house. She did not venture to say this to me directly, of course;
but she relieved her mind by making remarks to Hannah when I could not
help hearing. From the moment baby came, however, Rosa succumbed without
a struggle. It is evident she is born with the full maternal instinct,
and I see if she does not marry her Dennis, or some more eligible lover,
and take herself away before baby is old enough to be much affected, the
child will be spoiled to an unlimited extent. As for Hannah, her method
of showing her affection is to exhibit the greatest solicitude for
baby's spiritual welfare, mingled with the keenest jealousy of Rosa's
claims on baby's love. I foresee that I shall have pretty hard work to
protect my little daughter from Hannah's well-meant but not very wise
theology; and how to do this without hurting the good old soul's
feelings may prove no easy problem.
As for myself--of course I love the little, helpless, pink thing; the
waif from some outside unknown brought here into a world where
everything is made so hard to her from the start. She woke this
afternoon, and looked up at me with Tom Webbe's eyes, lying there as
sweet and happy as possible, so that I had to kiss and cuddle her, and
love her all at once. It is wonderful how a baby comes out of the most
dreadful surroundings as a seedling comes out of the mud, so clean and
fresh. I said this to Aunt Naomi yesterday, and she sniffed cynically.
"Yes," she answered, "but a weed grows into a weed, no matter how it
looks when it is little."
The thought is dreadful to me. I will not believe that because a human
being is born out of weakness and wickedness there is no chance for it.
The difference, it seems to me, is that every human being has at least
the germs of good as well as of bad, and one may be developed as well as
the other. Baby must have much that is good and fine from her father,
and the thing I have to do is to see to it that the best of her grows,
and the worse part dies for want of nourishment. Surely we can do a
great deal to aid nature. Perhaps my baby cannot help herself much, at
least not for years and years; but if she is kept in an atmosphere which
is completely wholesome, whatever is best in her nature must grow strong
and crowd down everything less noble.
V