Now that I have come to the love part of my story, I am suddenly
conscious of dingy common colors on the palette with which I have been
painting. I wish I had some brilliant dyes. I wish, with all my
heart, I could take you back to that "Once upon a time" in which the
souls of our grandmothers delighted,--the time which Dr. Johnson sat up
all night to read about in "Evelina,"--the time when all the celestial
virtues, all the earthly graces were revealed in a condensed state to
man through the blue eyes and sumptuous linens of some Belinda Portman
or Lord Mortimer. None of your good-hearted, sorely-tempted villains
then! It made your hair stand on end only to read of them,--going
about perpetually seeking innocent maidens and unsophisticated old men
to devour. That was the time for holding up virtue and vice; no trouble
then in seeing which were sheep and which were goats! A person could
write a story with a moral to it, then, I should hope! People that were
born in those days had no fancy for going through the world with
half-and-half characters, such as we put up with; so Nature turned out
complete specimens of each class, with all the appendages of dress,
fortune, et cetera, chording decently. The heroine glides into life
full-charged with rank, virtues, a name three-syllabled, and a white
dress that never needs washing, ready to sail through dangers dire into
a triumphant haven of matrimony;--all the aristocrats have high
foreheads and cold blue eyes; all the peasants are old women,
miraculously grateful, in neat check aprons, or sullen-browed
insurgents planning revolts in caves.
Of course, I do not mean that these times are gone: they are alive (in
a modern fashion) in many places in the world; some of my friends have
described them in prose and verse. I only mean to say that I never was
there; I was born unlucky. I am willing to do my best, but I live in
the commonplace. Once or twice I have rashly tried my hand at dark
conspiracies, and women rare and radiant in Italian bowers; but I have
a friend who is sure to say, "Try and tell us about the butcher next
door, my dear." If I look up from my paper now, I shall be just as apt
to see our dog and his kennel as the white sky stained with blood and
Tyrian purple. I never saw a full-blooded saint or sinner in my life.
The coldest villain I ever knew was the only son of his mother, and she
a widow,--and a kinder son never lived. Doubtless there are people
capable of a love terrible in its strength; but I never knew such a
case that some one did not consider its expediency as "a match" in the
light of dollars and cents. As for heroines, of course I have seen
beautiful women, and good as fair. The most beautiful is delicate and
pure enough for a type of the Madonna, and has a heart almost as warm
and holy. (Very pure blood is in her veins, too, if you care about
blood.) But at home they call her Tode for a nickname; all we can do,
she will sing, and sing through her nose; and on washing-days she often
cooks the dinner, and scolds wholesomely, if the tea-napkins are not in
order. Now, what is anybody to do with a heroine like that? I have
known old maids in abundance, with pathos and sunshine in their lives;
but the old maid of novels I never have met, who abandoned her soul to
gossip,--nor yet the other type, a life-long martyr of unselfishness.
They are mixed generally, and not unlike their married sisters, so far
as I can see. Then as to men, certainly I know heroes. One man, I
knew, as high a chevalier in heart as any Bayard of them all; one of
those souls simple and gentle as a woman, tender in knightly honour.
He was an old man, with a rusty brown coat and rustier wig, who spent
his life in a dingy village office. You poets would have laughed at
him. Well, well, his history never will be written. The kind, sad,
blue eyes are shut now. There is a little farm-graveyard overgrown
with privet and wild grape-vines, and a flattened grave where he was
laid to rest; and only a few who knew him when they were children care
to go there, and think of what he was to them. But it was not in the
far days of Chivalry alone, I think, that true and proud souls have
stood in the world unwelcome, and, hurt to the quick, have turned away
and dumbly died. Let it be. Their lives are not lost, thank God!
I meant only to ask you, How can I help it, if the people in my story
seem coarse to you,--if the hero, unlike all other heroes, stopped to
count the cost before he fell in love,--if it made his fingers thrill
with pleasure to touch a full pocket-book as well as his mistress's
hand,--not being withal, this Stephen Holmes, a man to be despised? A
hero, rather, of a peculiar type,--a man, more than other men: the very
mould of man, doubt it who will, that women love longest and most
madly. Of course, if I could, I would have blotted out every meanness
before I showed him to you; I would have told you Margret was an
impetuous, whole-souled woman, glad to throw her life down for her
father, without one bitter thought of the wife and mother she might
have been; I would have painted her mother tender, (as she was,)
forgetting how pettish she grew on busy days: but what can I do? I
must show you men and women as they are in that especial State of the
Union where I live. In all the others, of course, it is very
different. Now, being prepared for disappointment, will you see my
hero?
He had sauntered out from the city for a morning walk,--not through the
hills, as Margret went, going home, but on the other side, to the
river, over which you could see the Prairie. We are in Indiana,
remember. The sunlight was pure that morning, powerful, tintless, the
true wine of life for body or spirit. Stephen Holmes knew that, being a
man of delicate animal instincts, and so used it, just as he had used
the dumb-bells in the morning. All things were made for man, weren't
they? He was leaning against the door of the school-house,--a red,
flaunting house, the daub on the landscape: but, having his back to it,
he could not see it, so through his half-shut eyes he suffered the
beauty of the scene to act on him. Suffered: in a man, according to
his creed, the will being dominant, and all influences, such as beauty,
pain, religion, permitted to act under orders. Of course.
It was a peculiar landscape,--like the man who looked at it, of a
thoroughly American type. A range of sharp, dark hills, with a sombre
depth of green shadow in the clefts, and on the sides massed forests of
scarlet and flame and crimson. Above, the sharp peaks of stone rose
into the wan blue, wan and pale themselves, and wearing a certain air
of fixed calm, the type of an eternal quiet. At the base of the hills
lay the city, a dirty mass of bricks and smoke and dust, and at its far
edge flowed the river,--deep here, tinted with green, writhing and
gurgling and curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and
mud-covered rock. Beyond it yawned the opening to the great West,--the
Prairies. Not the dreary deadness here, as farther west. A plain,
dark russet in hue,--for the grass was sun-scorched,--stretching away
into the vague distance, intolerable, silent, broken by hillocks and
puny streams that only made the vastness and silence more wide and
heavy. Its limitless torpor weighed on the brain; the eyes ached,
stretching to find some break before the dull russet faded into the
amber of the horizon and was lost. An American landscape: of few
features, simple, grand in outline as a face of one of the early gods.
It lay utterly motionless before him, not a fleck of cloud in the pure
blue above, even where the mist rose from the river; it only had
glorified the clear blue into clearer violet.
Holmes stood quietly looking; he could have created a picture like
this, if he never had seen one; therefore he was able to recognize it,
accepted it into his soul, and let it do what it would there.
Suddenly a low wind from the far Pacific coast struck from the amber
line where the sun went down. A faint tremble passed over the great
hills, the broad sweeps of colour darkened from base to summit, then
flashed again,--while below, the prairie rose and fell like a dun sea,
and rolled in long, slow, solemn waves.
The wind struck so broad and fiercely in Holmes's face that he caught
his breath. It was a savage freedom, he thought, in the West there,
whose breath blew on him,--the freedom of the primitive man, the
untamed animal man, self-reliant and self-assertant, having conquered
Nature. Well, this fierce, masterful freedom was good for the soul,
sometimes, doubtless. It was old Knowles's vital air. He wondered if
the old man would succeed in his hobby, if he could make the slavish
beggars and thieves in the alleys yonder comprehend this fierce
freedom. They craved leave to live on sufferance now, not knowing their
possible divinity. It was a desperate remedy, this sense of unchecked
liberty; but their disease was desperate. As for himself, he did not
need it; that element was not lacking. In a mere bodily sense, to be
sure. He felt his arm. Yes, the cold rigor of this new life had
already worn off much of the clogging weight of flesh, strengthened the
muscles. Six months more in the West would toughen the fibres to iron.
He raised an iron weight that lay on the steps, carelessly testing
them. For the rest, he was going back here; something of the cold,
loose freshness got into his brain, he believed. In the two years of
absence his power of concentration had been stronger, his perceptions
more free from prejudice, gaining every day delicate point, acuteness
of analysis. He drew a long breath of the icy air, coarse with the
wild perfume of the prairie. No, his temperament needed a subtiler
atmosphere than this, rarer essence than mere brutal freedom The East,
the Old World, was his proper sphere for self-development. He would go
as soon as he could command the means, leaving all clogs behind. ALL?
His idle thought balked here, suddenly; the sallow forehead contracted
sharply, and his gray eyes grew in an instant shallow, careless,
formal, as a man who holds back his thought. There was a fierce
warring in his brain for a moment. Then he brushed his Kossuth hat
with his arm, and put it on, looking out at the landscape again.
Somehow its meaning was dulled to him. Just then a muddy terrier came
up, and rubbed itself against his knee. "Why, Tige, old boy!" he said,
stooping to pat it kindly. The hard, shallow look faded out; he half
smiled, looking in the dog's eyes. A curious smile, unspeakably tender
and sad. It was the idiosyncrasy of the man's face, rarely seen there.
He might have looked with it at a criminal, condemning him to death.
But he would have condemned him, and, if no hangman could be found,
would have put the rope on with his own hands, and then most probably
would have sat down pale and trembling, and analyzed his sensations on
paper,--being sincere in all.
He sat down on the school-house step, which the boys had hacked and
whittled rough, and waited; for he was there by appointment, to meet
Dr. Knowles.
Knowles had gone out early in the morning to look at the ground he was
going to buy for his Phalanstery, or whatever he chose to call it. He
was to bring the deed of sale of the mill out with him for Holmes. The
next day it was to be signed. Holmes saw him at last lumbering across
the prairie, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. Summer or
winter, he contrived to be always hot. There was a cart drawn by an
old donkey coming along beside him. Knowles was talking to the driver.
The old man clapped his hands as stage-coachmen do, and drew in long
draughts of air, as if there were keen life and promise in every
breath. They came up at last, the cart empty, and drying for the day's
work after its morning's scrubbing, Lois's pock-marked face all in a
glow with trying to keep Barney awake. She grew quite red with
pleasure at seeing Holmes, but went on quickly as the men began to
talk. Tige followed her, of course; but when she had gone a little way
across the prairie, they saw her stop, and presently the dog came back
with something in his mouth, which he laid down beside his master, and
bolted off. It was only a rough wicker-basket which she had filled
with damp plushy moss, and half-buried in it clusters of plumy fern,
delicate brown and ashen lichens, masses of forest-leaves all shaded
green with a few crimson tints. It had a clear woody smell, like
far-off myrrh. The Doctor laughed as Holmes took it up.
"An artist's gift, if it is from a mulatto," he said. "A born
colourist."
The men were not at ease,--for some reason; they seized on every trifle
to keep off the subject which had brought them together.
"That girl's artist-sense is pure, and her religion, down under the
perversion and ignorance of her brain. Curious, eh?"
"Look at the top of her head, when you see her," said Holmes. "It is
necessity for such brains to worship. They let the fire lick their
blood, if they happen to be born Parsees. This girl, if she had been a
Jew when Christ was born, would have known him as Simeon did."
Knowles said nothing,--only glanced at the massive head of the speaker,
with its overhanging brow, square development at the sides, and lowered
crown, and smiled significantly.
"Exactly," laughed Holmes, putting his hand on his head. "Crippled
there by my Yorkshire blood,--my mother. Never mind; outside of this
life, blood or circumstance matters nothing."
They walked on slowly towards town. Surely there was nothing in the
bill-of-sale which the old man had in his pocket but a mere matter of
business; yet they were strangely silent about it, as if it brought
shame to some one. There was an embarrassed pause. The Doctor went
back to Lois for relief.
"I think it is the pain and want of such as she that makes them
susceptible to religion. The self in them is so starved and humbled
that it cannot obscure their eyes; they see God clearly."
"Say rather," said Holmes, "that the soul is so starved and blind that
it cannot recognize itself as God."
The Doctor's intolerant eye kindled.
"Humph! So that's your creed! Not Pantheism. Ego sum. Of course you
go on with the conjugation: I have been, I shall be. I,--that covers
the whole ground, creation, redemption, and commands the hereafter?"
"It does so," said Holmes, coolly.
"And this wretched huckster carries her deity about her,--her
self-existent soul? How, in God's name, is her life to set it free?"
Holmes said nothing. The coarse sneer could not be answered. Men with
pale faces and heavy jaws like his do not carry their religion on their
tongue's end; their creeds leave them only in the slow oozing
life-blood, false as the creeds may be.
Knowles went on hotly, half to himself, seizing on the new idea
fiercely, as men and women do who are yet groping for the truth of life.
"What is it your Novalis says? 'The true Shechinah is man.' You know
no higher God? Pooh! the idea is old enough; it began with Eve. It
works slowly, Holmes. In six thousand years, taking humanity as one,
this self-existent soul should have clothed itself with a freer,
royaller garment than poor Lois's body,--or mine," he added, bitterly.
"It works slowly," said the other, quietly. "Faster soon, in America.
There are yet many ills of life for the divinity within to conquer."
"And Lois and the swarming mass yonder in those dens? It is late for
them to begin the fight?"
"Endurance is enough for them here, and their religions teach them
that. They could not bear the truth. One does not put a weapon into
the hands of a man dying of the fetor and hunger of the siege."
"But what will this life, or the lives to come, give to you, champions
who know the truth?"
"Nothing but victory," he said, in a low tone, looking away.
Knowles looked at the pale strength of the iron face.
"God help you, Stephen!" he broke out, his shallow jeering falling off.
"For there IS a God higher than we. The ills of life you mean to
conquer will teach it to you, Holmes. You'll find the Something above
yourself, if it's only to curse Him and die."
Holmes did not smile at the old man's heat,--walked gravely, steadily.
There was a short silence. Knowles put his hand gently on the other's
arm.
"Stephen," he hesitated, "you're a stronger man than I. I know what
you are; I've watched you from a boy. But you're wrong here. I'm an
old man. There's not much I know in life,--enough to madden me. But I
do know there's something stronger,--some God outside of the mean devil
they call 'Me.' You'll learn it, boy. There's an old story of a man
like you and the rest of your sect, and of the vile, mean, crawling
things that God sent to bring him down. There are such things yet.
Mean passions in your divine soul, low, selfish things, that will get
the better of you, show you what you are. You'll do all that man can
do. But they are coming, Stephen Holmes! they're coming!"
He stopped, startled. For Holmes had turned abruptly, glancing over at
the city with a strange wistfulness. It was over in a moment. He
resumed the slow, controlling walk beside him. They went on in silence
into town, and when they did speak, it was on indifferent subjects, not
referring to the last. The Doctor's heat, as it usually did, boiled
out in spasms on trifles. Once he stumped his toe, and, I am sorry to
say, swore roundly about it, just as he would have done in the new
Arcadia, if one of the jail-birds comprising that colony had been
ungrateful for his advantages. Philanthropists, for some curious
reason, are not the most amiable members of small families.
He gave Holmes the roll of parchment he had in his pocket, looking
keenly at him, as he did so, but only saying, that, if he meant to sign
it, it would be done to-morrow. As Holmes took it, they stopped at the
great door of the factory. He went in alone, Knowles going down the
street. One trifle, strange in its way, he remembered afterwards.
Holding the roll of paper in his hand that would make the mill his, he
went, in his slow, grave way, down the long passage to the loom-rooms.
There was a crowd of porters and firemen there, as usual, and he
thought one of them hastily passed him in the dark passage, hiding
behind an engine. As the shadow fell on him, his teeth chattered with a
chilly shudder. He smiled, thinking how superstitious people would say
that some one trod on his grave just then, or that Death looked at him,
and went on. Afterwards he thought of it. Going through the office,
the fat old book-keeper, Huff, stopped him with a story he had been
keeping for him all day. He liked to tell a story to Holmes; he could
see into a joke; it did a man good to hear a fellow laugh like that.
Holmes did laugh, for the story was a good one, and stood a moment,
then went in, leaving the old fellow chuckling over his desk. Huff did
not know how, lately, after every laugh, this man felt a vague scorn of
himself, as if jokes and laughter belonged to a self that ought to have
been dead long ago. Perhaps, if the fat old book-keeper had known it,
he would have said that the man was better than he knew. But
then,--poor Huff! He passed slowly through the alleys between the
great looms. Overhead the ceiling looked like a heavy maze of iron
cylinders and black swinging bars and wheels, all in swift, ponderous
motion. It was enough to make a brain dizzy with the clanging thunder
of the engines, the whizzing spindles of red and yellow, and the hot
daylight glaring over all. The looms were watched by women, most of
them bold, tawdry girls of fifteen or sixteen, or lean-jawed women from
the hills, wives of the coal-diggers. There was a breathless odour of
copperas. As he went from one room to another up through the ascending
stories, he had a vague sensation of being followed. Some shadow
lurked at times behind the engines, or stole after him in the dark
entries. Were there ghosts, then, in mills in broad daylight? None
but the ghosts of Want and Hunger and Crime, he might have known, that
do not wait for night to walk our streets: the ghosts that poor old
Knowles hoped to lay forever.
Holmes had a room fitted up in the mill, where he slept. He went up to
it slowly, holding the paper tightly in one hand, glancing at the
operatives, the work, through his furtive half-shut eye. Nothing
escaped him. Passing the windows, he did not once look out at the
prophetic dream of beauty he had left without. In the mill he was of
the mill. Yet he went slowly, as if he shrank from the task waiting
for him. Why should he? It was a simple matter of business, this
transfer of Knowles's share in the mill to himself; to-day he was to
decide whether he would conclude the bargain. If any dark history of
wrong lay underneath, if this simple decision of his was to be the
struggle for life and death with him, his cold, firm face told nothing
of it. Let us be just to him, stand by him, if we can, in the midst of
his desolate home and desolate life, and look through his cold,
sorrowful eyes at the deed he was going to do. Dreary enough he
looked, going through the great mill, despite the power in his quiet
face. A man who had strength for solitude; yet, I think, with all his
strength, his mother could not have borne to look back from the dead
that day, to see her boy so utterly alone. The day was the crisis of
his life, looked forward to for years; he held in his hand a sure
passport to fortune. Yet he thrust the hour off, perversely, trifling
with idle fancies, pushing from him the one question which all the
years past and to come had left for this day to decide.
Some such idle fancy it may have been that made the man turn from the
usual way down a narrow passage into which opened doors from small
offices. Margret Howth, he had learned to-day, was in the first one.
He hesitated before he did it, his sallow face turning a trifle paler;
then he went on in his hard, grave way, wondering dimly if she
remembered his step, if she cared to see him now. She used to know
it,--she was the only one in the world who ever had cared to know
it,--silly child! Doubtless she was wiser now. He remembered he used
to think, that, when this woman loved, it would be as he himself would,
with a simple trust which the wrong of years could not touch. And once
he had thought---- Well, well, he was mistaken. Poor Margret! Better
as it was. They were nothing to each other. She had put him from her,
and he had suffered himself to be put away. Why, he would have given
up every prospect of life, if he had done otherwise! Yet he wondered
bitterly if she had thought him selfish,--if she thought it was money
he cared for, as the others did. It mattered nothing what they
thought, but it wounded him intolerably that she should wrong him.
Yet, with all this, whenever he looked forward to death, it was with
the certainty that he should find her there beyond. There would be no
secrets then; she would know then how he had loved her always. Loved
her? Yes; he need not hide it from himself, surely.
He was now by the door of the office;--she was within. Little Margret,
poor little Margret! struggling there day after day for the old father
and mother. What a pale, cold little child she used to be! such a
child! yet kindling at his look or touch, as if her veins were filled
with subtile flame. Her soul was--like his own, he thought. He knew
what it was,--he only. Even now he glowed with a man's triumph to know
he held the secret life of this woman bare in his hand. No other human
power could ever come near her; he was secure in possession. She had
put him from her;--it was better for both, perhaps. Their paths were
separate here; for she had some unreal notions of duty, and he had too
much to do in the world to clog himself with cares, or to idle an hour
in the rare ecstasy of even love like this.
He passed the office, not pausing in his slow step. Some sudden
impulse made him put his hand on the door as he brushed against it:
just a quick, light touch; but it had all the fierce passion of a
caress. He drew it back as quickly, and went on, wiping a clammy sweat
from his face.
The room he had fitted up for himself was whitewashed and barely
furnished; it made one's bones ache to look at the iron bedstead and
chairs. Holmes's natural taste was more glowing, however smothered,
than that of any saffron-robed Sybarite. It needed correction, he
knew; here was discipline. Besides, he had set apart the coming three
or four years of his life to make money in, enough for the time to
come. He would devote his whole strength to that work, and so be
sooner done with it. Money, or place, or even power, was nothing but a
means to him: other men valued them because of their influence on
others. As his work in the world was only the development of himself,
it was different, of course. What would it matter to his soul the day
after death, if millions called his name aloud in blame or praise?
Would he hear or answer then? What would it matter to him then, if he
had starved with them, or ruled over them? People talked of
benevolence. What would it matter to him then, the misery or happiness
of those yet working in this paltry life of ours? In so far as the
exercise of kindly emotions or self-denial developed the higher part of
his nature, it was to be commended; as for its effect on others, that
he had nothing to do with. He practised self-denial constantly to
strengthen the benevolent instincts. That very morning he had given
his last dollar to Joe Byers, a half-starved cripple. "Chucked it at
me," Joe said, "like as he'd give a bone to a dog, and be damned to
him! Who thanks him?" To tell the truth, you will find no fairer
exponent than this Stephen Holmes of the great idea of American
sociology,--that the object of life is TO GROW. Circumstances had
forced it on him, partly. Sitting now in his room, where he was
counting the cost of becoming a merchant prince, he could look back to
the time of a boyhood passed in the depths of ignorance and vice. He
knew what this Self within him was; he knew how it had forced him to
grope his way up, to give this hungry, insatiate soul air and freedom
and knowledge. All men around him were doing the same,--thrusting and
jostling and struggling, up, up. It was the American motto, Go ahead;
mothers taught it to their children; the whole system was a scale of
glittering prizes. He at least saw the higher meaning of the truth; he
had no low ambitions. To lift this self up into a higher range of
being when it had done with the uses of this,--that was his work.
Self-salvation, self-elevation,--the ideas that give birth to, and
destroy half of our Christianity, half of our philanthropy! Sometimes,
sleeping instincts in the man struggled up to assert a divinity more
terrible than this growing self-existent soul that he purified and
analyzed day by day: a depth of tender pity for outer pain; a fierce
longing for rest, on something, in something, he cared not what. He
stifled such rebellious promptings,--called them morbid. He called it
morbid, too, the passion now that chilled his strong blood, and wrung
out these clammy drops on his forehead, at the mere thought of this
girl below.
He shut the door of his room tightly: he had no time to-day for
lounging visitors. For Holmes, quiet and steady, was sought for, if
not popular, even in the free-and-easy West; one of those men who are
unwillingly masters among men. Just and mild, always; with a peculiar
gift that made men talk their best thoughts to him, knowing they would
be understood; if any core of eternal flint lay under the simple,
truthful manner of the man, nobody saw it.
He laid the bill of sale on the table; it was an altogether practical
matter on which he sat in judgment, but he was going to do nothing
rashly. A plain business document: he took Dr. Knowles's share in the
factory; the payments made with short intervals; John Herne was to be
his endorser: it needed only the names to make it valid. Plain enough;
no hint there of the tacit understanding that the purchase-money was a
wedding dowry; even between Herne and himself it never was openly put
into words. If he did not marry Miss Herne, the mill was her father's;
that of course must be spoken of, arranged to-morrow. If he took it,
then? if he married her? Holmes had been poor, was miserably poor yet,
with the position and habits of a man, of refinement. God knows it was
not to gratify those tastes that he clutched at this money. All the
slow years of work trailed up before him, that were gone,--of hard,
wearing work for daily bread, when his brain had been starving for
knowledge, and his soul dulled, debased with sordid trading. Was this
to be always? Were these few golden moments of life to be traded for
the bread and meat he ate? To eat and drink,--was that what he was
here for?
As he paced the floor mechanically, some vague recollection crossed his
brain of a childish story of the man standing where the two great roads
of life parted. They were open before him now. Money, money,--he took
the word into his heart as a miser might do. With it, he was free from
these carking cares that were making his mind foul and muddy. If he
had money! Slow, cool visions of triumphs rose before him outlined on
the years to come, practical, if Utopian. Slow and sure successes of
science and art, where his brain could work, helpful and growing. Far
off, yet surely to come,--surely for him,--a day when a pure social
system should be universal, should have thrust out its fibres of light,
knitting into one the nations of the earth, when the lowest slave
should find its true place and rightful work, and stand up, knowing
itself divine. "To insure to every man the freest development of his
faculties:" he said over the hackneyed dogma again and again, while the
heavy, hateful years of poverty rose before him that had trampled him
down. "To insure to him the freest development," he did not need to
wait for St. Simon, or the golden year, he thought with a dreary gibe;
money was enough, and--Miss Herne.
It was curious, that, when this woman, whom he saw every day, came up
in his mind, it was always in one posture, one costume. You have
noticed that peculiarity in your remembrance of some persons? Perhaps
you would find, if you looked closely, that in that look or indelible
gesture which your memory has caught there lies some subtile hint of
the tie between your soul and theirs. Now, when Holmes had resolved
coolly to weigh this woman, brain, heart, and flesh, to know how much
of a hindrance she would be, he could only see her, with his artist's
sense, as delicate a bloom of colouring as eye could crave, in one
immovable posture,--as he had seen her once in some masquerade or
tableau vivant. June, I think it was, she chose to represent that
evening,--and with her usual success; for no woman ever knew more
thoroughly her material of shape or colour, or how to work it up. Not
an ill-chosen fancy, either, that of the moist, warm month. Some
tranced summer's day might have drowsed down into such a human form by
a dank pool, or on the thick grass-crusted meadows. There was the full
contour of the limbs hid under warm green folds, the white flesh that
glowed when you touched it as if some smothered heat lay beneath, the
snaring eyes, the sleeping face, the amber hair uncoiled in a languid
quiet, while yellow jasmines deepened its hue into molten sunshine, and
a great tiger-lily laid its sultry head on her breast. June? Could
June become incarnate with higher poetic meaning than that which this
woman gave it? Mr. Kitts, the artist I told you of, thought not, and
fell in love with June and her on the spot, which passion became quite
unbearable after she had graciously permitted him to sketch her,--for
the benefit of Art. Three medical students and one attorney, Miss
Herne numbered as having been driven into a state of dogged despair on
that triumphal occasion. Mr. Holmes may have quarrelled with the
rendering, doubting to himself if her lip were not too thick, her eye
too brassy and pale a blue for the queen of months; though I do not
believe he thought at all about it. Yet the picture clung to his
memory.
As he slowly paced the room to-day, thinking of this woman as his wife,
light blue eyes and yellow hair and the unclean sweetness of
jasmine-flowers mixed with the hot sunshine and smells of the mill. He
could think of her in no other light. He might have done so; for the
poor girl had her other sides for view. She had one of those sharp,
tawdry intellects whose possessors are always reckoned "brilliant
women, fine talkers." She was (aside from the necessary sarcasm to
keep up this reputation) a good-humoured soul enough,--when no one
stood in her way. But if her shallow virtues or vices were palpable at
all to him, they became one with the torpid beauty of the oppressive
summer day, and weighed on him alike with a vague disgust. The woman
luxuriated in perfume; some heavy odour always hung about her. Holmes,
thinking of her now, fancied he felt it stifling the air, and opened
the window for breath. Patchouli or copperas,--what was the
difference? The mill and his future wife came to him together; it was
scarcely his fault, if he thought of them as one, or muttered,
"Damnable clog!" as he sat down to write, his cold eye growing colder.
But he did not argue the question any longer; decision had come keenly
in one moment, fixed, unalterable.
If, through the long day, the starved heart of the man called feebly
for its natural food, he called it a paltry weakness; or if the old
thought of the quiet, pure little girl in the office below came back to
him, he--he wished her well, he hoped she might succeed in her work, he
would always be ready to lend her a helping hand. So many years (he
was ashamed to think how many) he had built the thought of this girl as
his wife into the future, put his soul's strength into the hope, as if
love and the homely duties of husband and father were what life was
given for! A boyish fancy, he thought. He had not learned then that
all dreams must yield to self-reverence and self-growth. As for taking
up this life of poverty and soul-starvation for the sake of a little
love, it would be an ignoble martyrdom, the sacrifice of a grand
unmeasured life to a shallow pleasure. He was no longer a young man
now; he had no time to waste. Poor Margret! he wondered if it hurt her?
He signed the deed, and left it in the slow, quiet way natural to him,
and after a while stooped to pat the dog softly, who was trying to
lick his hand,--with the hard fingers shaking a little, and a smothered
fierceness in the half-closed eye, like a man who is tortured and alone.
There is a miserable drama acted in other homes than the Tuileries,
when men have found a woman's heart in their way to success, and
trampled it down under an iron heel. Men like Napoleon must live out
the law of their natures, I suppose,--on a throne, or in a mill.
So many trifles that day roused the undercurrent of old thoughts and
old hopes that taunted him,--trifles, too, that he would not have
heeded at another time. Pike came in on business, a bunch of bills in
his hand. A wily, keen eye he had, looking over them,--a lean face,
emphasized only by cunning. No wonder Dr. Knowles cursed him for a
"slippery customer," and was cheated by him the next hour. While he
and Holmes were counting out the bills, a little white-headed girl
crept shyly in at the door, and came up to the table,--oddly dressed,
in a frock fastened with great horn buttons, and with an old-fashioned
anxious pair of eyes, the color of blue Delft. Holmes smoothed her
hair, as she stood beside them; for he never could help caressing
children or dogs. Pike looked up sharply,--then half smiled, as he
went on counting.
"Ninety, ninety-five, AND one hundred, all right,"--tying a bit of tape
about the papers. "My Sophy, Mr. Holmes. Good girl, Sophy is. Bring
her up to the mill sometimes," he said, apologetically, "on 'count of
not leaving her alone. She gets lonesome at th' house."
Holmes glanced at Pike's felt hat lying on the table: there was a rusty
strip of crape on it.
"Yes," said Pike, in a lower tone, "I'm father and mother, both, to
Sophy now."
"I had not heard," said Holmes, kindly. "How about the boys, now?"
"Pete and John 's both gone West," the man said, his eyes kindling
eagerly. "'S fine boys as ever turned out of Indiana. Good eddications
I give 'em both. I've felt the want of that all my life.. Good
eddications. Says I, 'Now, boys, you've got your fortunes, nothing to
hinder your bein' President. Let's see what stuff 's in ye,' says I.
So they're doin' well. Wrote fur me to come out in the fall. But I'd
rather scratch on, and gather up a little for Sophy here, before I stop
work."
He patted Sophy's tanned little hand on the table, as if beating some
soft tune. Holmes folded up the bills. Even this man could spare time
out of his hard, stingy life to love, and be loved, and to be generous!
But then he had no higher aim, knew nothing better.
"Well," said Pike, rising, "in case you take th' mill, Mr. Holmes, I
hope we'll be agreeable. I'll strive to do my best,"--in the old
fawning manner, to which Holmes nodded a curt reply.
The man stopped for Sophy to gather up her bits of broken "chayney"
with which she was making a tea-party on the table, and went
down-stairs.
Towards evening Holmes went out,--not going through the narrow passage
that led to the offices, but avoiding it by a circuitous route. If it
cost him any pain to think why he did it, he showed none in his calm,
observant face. Buttoning up his coat as he went: the October sunset
looked as if it ought to be warm, but he was deathly cold. On the
street the young doctor beset him again with bows and news: Cox was his
name, I believe; the one, you remember, who had such a Talleyrand nose
for ferreting out successful men. He had to bear with him but for a
few moments, however. They met a crowd of workmen at the corner, one
of whom, an old man freshly washed, with honest eyes looking out of
horn spectacles, waited for them by a fire-plug. It was Polston, the
coal-digger,--an acquaintance, a far-off kinsman of Holmes, in fact.
"Curious person making signs to you, yonder," said Cox; "hand, I
presume."
"My cousin Polston. If you do not know him, you'll excuse me?"
Cox sniffed the air down the street, and twirled his rattan, as he
went. The coal-digger was abrupt and distant in his greeting, going
straight to business.
"I will keep yoh only a minute, Mr. Holmes"----
"Stephen," corrected Holmes.
The old man's face warmed.
"Stephen, then," holding out his hand, "sence old times dawn't shame
yoh, Stephen. That's hearty, now. It's only a wured I want, but it's
immediate. Concernin' Joe Yare,--Lois's father, yoh know? He's back."
"Back? I saw him to-day, following me in the mill. His hair is gray?
I think it was he."
"No doubt. Yes, he's aged fast, down in the lock-up; goin' fast to the
end. Feeble, pore-like. It's a bad life, Joe Yare's; I wish 'n' 't
would be better to the end"----
He stopped with a wistful look at Holmes, who stood outwardly
attentive, but with little thought to waste on Joe Yare. The old
coal-digger drummed on the fire-plug uneasily.
"Myself, 't was for Lois's sake I thowt on it. To speak plain,--yoh'll
mind that Stokes affair, th' note Yare forged? Yes? Ther' 's none
knows o' that but yoh an' me. He's safe, Yare is, only fur yoh an' me.
Yoh speak the wured an' back he goes to the lock-up. Fur life. D' yoh
see?"
"I see."
"He's tryin' to do right, Yare is."
The old man went on, trying not to be eager, and watching Holmes's face.
"He's tryin'. Sendin' him back--yoh know how THAT'll end. Seems like
as we'd his soul in our hands. S'pose,--what d' yoh think, if we give
him a chance? It's yoh he fears. I see him a-watchin' yoh; what d'
yoh think, if we give him a chance?" catching Holmes's sleeve. "He's
old, an' he's tryin'. Heh?"
Holmes smiled.
"We didn't make the law he broke. Justice before mercy. Haven't I
heard you talk to Sam in that way, long ago?"
The old man loosened his hold of Holmes's arm, looked up and down the
street, uncertain, disappointed.
"The law. Yes. That's right! Yoh're just man, Stephen Holmes."
"And yet?"----
"Yes. I dun'no'. Law's right, but Yare's had a bad chance, an' he's
tryin'. An' we're sendin' him to hell. Somethin' 's wrong. But I
think yoh're a just man," looking keenly in Holmes's face.
"A hard one, people say," said Holmes, after a pause, as they walked on.
He had spoken half to himself, and received no answer. Some blacker
shadow troubled him than old Yare's fate.
"My mother was a hard woman,--you knew her?" he said, abruptly.
"She was just, like yoh. She was one o' th' elect, she said. Mercy's
fur them,--an' outside, justice. It's a narrer showin', I'm thinkin'."
"My father was outside," said Holmes, some old bitterness rising up in
his tone, his gray eye lighting with some unrevenged wrong.
Polston did not speak for a moment.
"Dunnot bear malice agin her. They're dead, now. It wasn't left fur
her to judge him out yonder. Yoh've yer father's Stephen, 'times.
Hungry, pitiful, like women's. His got desper't' 't th' last. Drunk
hard,--died of 't, yoh know. But SHE killed him,--th' sin was writ
down fur her. Never was a boy I loved like him, when we was boys."
There was a short silence.
"Yoh're like yer mother," said Polston, striving for a lighter tone.
"Here,"--motioning to the heavy iron jaws. "She never--let go.
Somehow, too, she'd the law on her side in outward showin', an' th'
right. But I hated religion, knowin' her. Well, ther' 's a day of
makin' things clear, comin'."
They had reached the corner now, and Polston turned down the lane.
"Yoh 'll think o' Yare's case?" he said.
"Yes. But how can I help it," Holmes said, lightly, "if I am like my
mother, here?"--putting his hand to his mouth.
"God help us, how can yoh? It's hard to think father and mother leave
their souls fightin' in their childern, cos th' love was wantin' to
make them one here."
Something glittered along the street as he spoke: the silver mountings
of a low-hung phaeton drawn by a pair of Mexican ponies. One or two
gentlemen on horseback were alongside, attendant on a lady within, Miss
Herne. She turned her fair face, and pale, greedy eyes, as she passed,
and lifted her hand languidly in recognition of Holmes. Polston's face
coloured.
"I've heered," he said, holding out his grimy hand. "I wish yoh well,
Stephen, boy. So'll the old 'oman. Yoh'll come an' see us, soon?
Ye'r' lookin' fagged, an' yer eyes is gettin' more like yer father's.
I'm glad things is takin' a good turn with yoh; an' yoh'll never be
like him, starvin' fur th' kind wured, an' havin' to die without it.
I'm glad yoh've got true love. She'd a fair face, I think. I wish yoh
well, Stephen."
Holmes shook the grimy hand, and then stood a moment looking back to
the mill, from which the hands were just coming, and then down at the
phaeton moving idly down the road. How cold it was growing! People
passing by had a sickly look, as if they were struck by the plague. He
pushed the damp hair back, wiping his forehead, with another glance at
the mill-women coming out of the gate, and then followed the phaeton
down the hill.