"I hate everything," he returned desperately; "but it wouldn't be square
to leave him now when he's so cut up on my account."
We were both of us, I am sure, too moved to have much talk, and Tom did
not stay long. He went off rather abruptly, with hardly a good-by; but I
think I understood. I am glad he has the pluck to stand by poor old
Deacon Daniel; but he must learn to be fond of baby. That will be a
comfort to him.
June 15. George seems to me to be almost beside himself. I cannot
comprehend what his wife is doing to him. She has apparently already
come to realize that she is not succeeding in Tuskamuck, and is
determined to conquer by display and showy ways of living. She cannot
know us very well if she supposes that such means will do here.
Her latest move I find it hard to forgive her. I do not understand how
George can have done it, no matter how much she urged him; but I am of
course profoundly ignorant how such a woman controls a man. I am afraid
one thing which made him attractive to me was that he was so willing to
be influenced, but we see a man in a light entirely different when it is
another woman who shapes his life. What once seemed a fine compliance
takes on a strange appearance of weakness when we are no longer the
moving force; but I think I do myself no more than justice when I feel
that at least I tried always to influence George for his own good.
Poor Miss Charlotte came over directly after breakfast this morning to
tell me. She had been brooding over it half the night, poor soul, and
her eyes looked actually withered with crying and lack of sleep.
"I know I exaggerate it," she kept saying, "and of course he didn't mean
to insult me; but to think anybody dared to ask me to sell the house,
the Kendall house that our family has lived in for four generations! It
would have killed my father if he had known I should live to come to
this!"
I tried to soothe her, and to make her believe that in offering to buy
her house George had thought only of how much he admired it, and not at
all of her feelings, which he could not understand.
"Of course he could not understand my feelings," Miss Charlotte said,
with a bitterness which I am sure was unconscious. "He never had a
family, and I ought to remember that."
She grew somewhat more calm as she unburdened her heart. She told me
George had praised the place, and said how much he had always liked it.
He confessed that it was his wife who first suggested the purchase: she
wanted a house where she could entertain and which would be of more
importance than the one in which she lived.
"He said," Miss Charlotte went on with a strange mingling of pride and
sorrow, "his wife felt that the house in itself would give any family
social standing. I don't know how pleased his wife would be if she knew
he told me, but he said it. He told me she meant to have repairs and
improvements. She must feel as if she owned it already. He said she had
an iron dog stored somewhere that she meant to put on the lawn. Think of
it, Ruth, an iron dog on our old lawn!"
Then suddenly all the sorrow of her lot seemed to overwhelm her at once,
and she broke down completely. She sobbed so unrestrainedly and with so
complete an abandonment of herself to her grief that I cried with her,
even while I was trying to stop her tears.
"It isn't just George Weston's coming to ask me to sell the place," she
said; "it is all of it: it's my being so poor I can't keep up the name,
and the family's ending with me, and none of my kin even to bury me.
It's all of the hurts I've got from life, Ruth; and it's growing so old
I've no strength any longer to bear them. Oh, it's having to keep on
living when I want to be dead!"
I threw my arms about her, and kissed the tears from her wrinkled
cheeks, though there were about as many on my own.
"Don't," I begged her, "don't, dear Miss Charlotte. You break my heart!
We are all of us your kin, and you know we love you dearly."
She returned my embrace convulsively, and tried to check her sobbing.
"I know it's cowardly," she got out brokenly. "It's cowardly and wicked.
I never broke down so before. I won't, Ruth dear. Just give me a little
time."
Dear Miss Charlotte! I made her stay with me all day; and indeed she was
in no condition to do anything else. I got her to take a nap in the
afternoon, and when she went home she was once more her own brave self.
She said good-night with one of her clumsy joking speeches.
"Good-by, my dear," she said; "the next time I come I'll try not to be
so much like the waterworks girl that had a creek in her back and a
cataract in each eye."
She is always facetious when she does not quite trust herself to be
serious. And I, who do not dare to trust myself to think about George
and his wife, had better stop writing.
June 17. Deacon Richards presented himself at twilight, and found me
sitting alone out on the doorsteps. I watched his tall figure coming up
the driveway, bent with age a little, but still massive and vigorous;
and somehow by the time he was near enough to speak, I felt that I had
caught his mood. He smiled broadly as he greeted me.
"Where's the baby?" he demanded. "I supposed I should find you giving it
its supper."
"There isn't any 'it' in this house," was my retort; "and as for baby's
supper, you are just as ignorant as a man always is. Any woman would
know that babies are put to bed long before this."
He grinned down upon me from his height.
"How should I know what time it went to bed?" he asked, with a laugh in
his voice. "I never raised a baby. I've come to talk about it, though."
"Look here, Deacon Daniel," I cried out, with affected indignation, "I
will not have my baby called 'it,' as if she were a stick or a stock!"
He laughed outright at this; then at my invitation sat down beside me.
We were silent for a time, looking at the color fading in the west, and
the single star swimming out of the purple as the sky changed into gray.
The frogs were working at their music with all the persistence of a
child strumming five-finger exercises, but their noise only made the
evening more peaceful.
"How restful it is," I said to him at last; "it almost makes one feel
there can never be any fretting again about anything."
Deacon Daniel did not answer for a moment, then he said with the
solemnity of one who seldom puts sentiment into words,--
"It is like the Twenty-third Psalm."
I simply assented, and then we were silent again, until at last he moved
as if he were waking himself, and sighed. I always wonder whether
somewhere in the past Deacon Richards has had his romance, and if so
what it may have been. If he has, a night like this might well bring it
up to his memory. I am glad if it comes to him with the peace of a
psalm.
"Have you thought, Miss Ruth," the Deacon asked at length in the
growing dark, "what a responsibility you are taking upon yourself in
having that baby?"
It was like the dear old man to have considered me and to look at the
moral side of the question. He wanted to help me, I could see; and of
course he cannot understand how entirely religious one may be without
theology. I told him I had thought of it very seriously; and it seemed
to me sometimes that it was more than I was equal to. But I added that I
could not help thinking I could do better by baby than Mrs. Webbe.
"Mrs. Webbe is no sort of a woman to bring up a child," he agreed. Then
he added, with a shrewdness that surprised me a little: "Babies have got
to be given baby-treatment as well as baby-food."
"Of course they have," was my reply. "Babies have a right to love as
well as to milk, and poor little Thomasine would get very little from
her grandmother."
Deacon Daniel gave a contemptuous snort.
"That woman couldn't really love anything," he declared; "or if she did
she'd show it by being hateful."