More than thirty years before the day of this biography, a
blue-eyed girl sat in her brother’s home in Beacon Street, weighing
the problem which even then had begun to shake the social world
every year at crocus time, Where shall we spend the summer?
When Mary Worcester’s gentle mind, wavering between the hills and
the shore with the pleasant agitation of a girl who has never known
any compulsion severer than her own young choice upon her fate,
turned in the direction of the mountain village which her mother
used to fancy, it seemed the least important of acts or facts,
and was so regarded by her brother; for Hermon Worcester was a
preoccupied young man, more absorbed in adding to his fortune,
inherited in wool, than in studying the natural history of an
attractive orphaned younger sister, left, obviously, by Providence
upon his hands.
So, properly chaperoned and luxuriously outfitted, to the hills
went Mary Worcester that conclusive summer of her life; and the
village of Bethlehem--a handful then, a hamlet, if one should
compare it with the luxurious and important place of resort known
to our own day--received, as unconsciously as she gave, the
presence of this young visitor whose lot was destined to become so
fair a leaf bound in with the village history.
They are not usually the decisions to which we give the most
thought that most control our lives, but those to which we give
the least; and this city girl glided into her country holiday as
unaware as the rest of us are when we cross the little misty space
that separates freedom from fate.
She was not an extraordinary girl; unless we should consider
extraordinary a certain kind of moral beauty to which the delicacy
of her face and form gave marked expression. Such beauty she
assuredly possessed. Her head had a certain poise never to be
found except in women to whom we may apply the beautiful adjective
“high-minded.” Her eyes and the curve of her lip bore this out; and
she had the quality of voice no more to be copied by a woman of the
world than a pure heart is to be imitated by a schemer.
She was not an intellectual woman in our modern sense of the word.
She was a bright, gentle girl; more devout than her mates who rode
with her on picnics from the hotel, but as ready to be happy as
the rest; she had a certain sweet merriment, or merry sweetness,
peculiar to herself, and of which life and trouble never entirely
robbed her. If we add to this that she had the angelic obstinacy
sometimes to be found in unobtrusive and amiable people, her story,
so far as it concerns us, need not be the enigma that it always
remained to many of those who knew her best. In this summer of
which we speak, when Miss Worcester had been for a couple of weeks
among the hills, it befell that her party, for some cause not
important enough to trace, moved into lodgings across the road from
the hotel, where they commanded a cottage otherwise occupied only
by the proprietor or tenant of the house. The cottage, after the
fashion of its kind, was white of surface, green of blinds, and
calm of demeanor. Its low front windows swept the great horizon of
Bethlehem without obstruction, and when one drew the green-paper
shade of the upper chamber in the rear, a tall pine--one of
fourscore, the picket of a rich and sombre grove--brushed into
one’s face, and eyed one like a grave, superior rustic who knew his
worth and one’s own, and was not to be distanced.
Mary Worcester, in a white, thin dress, was sitting by this window
one July day, looking down on the long fingers of the pine bough,
when she was disturbed by a sudden agitation in the green heart
of the tree. The boughs shook and parted, and the branch that lay
over upon her window-sill trembled, yielded, started, gave a smart,
stinging blow upon her bending cheek, and swept aside. She sprang
back to save her eyes, and, in doing so, perceived the top round of
a ladder rising from the tree.
She was startled for the instant; but observing that the ladder
continued to rise steadily, and had evidently higher aspirations
than her window-sill, she remained where she was. At this moment
a voice from below delicately suggested that if any of the ladies
were upstairs they might like to draw the shade, as some repairs
were necessary upon the roof. The speaker was sorry to incommode
anybody, and would withdraw as soon as possible.
Owing, perhaps, to that kind of modesty which feels an
embarrassment at being recognized, the young girl did not draw
her shade, but moved into the adjoining room while the carpenter
climbed the ladder. The doors and windows were open through, and
she stood for a moment uncertain, her light dress swaying in the
draught. Then, turning, she looked back at the mechanic. At that
moment his face and shoulders were on a level with her window. To
her surprise, she recognized the man as their host, the owner of
the cottage.
In a few moments a stout arm struck the roof over her head, and
resounding blows shook the cottage sturdily, while a few old
shingles flew past her window and troubled the pine-tree, which,
shivering at the indignity, cast them to the moss below.
To escape the clamor, Miss Worcester tossed on her straw hat and
fled below stairs. Her friends were all out and the house was
empty. She wandered about such of the lower rooms as she had the
right to enter, for a few moments, and then strolled out aimlessly
into the grove. She flung herself down on the pine needles in
the idle reverie of youth and ease and health; no graver purpose
in life than to escape the noise of a shingler’s hammer appeared
to her. When the blows upon the roof had ceased she rose and
went back. At the foot of the pine-tree, with his ladder on his
shoulder, unexpectedly stood the man.
He was a well-built man, young and attractive to the eye. He did
not look as rugged as his class, and showed, proportionately, more
refinement. His eyes were dark and large, and had the sadness of a
misunderstood dog. He raised them in one swift look to the young
girl. She drifted by in her white dress with her straw hat on her
arm; her hair was tumbled and bright; a little spot on one cheek,
where she had rested it upon her arm, burned red. She smiled and
said something, she did not know what. The mechanic lifted his old
straw hat: the little act had the ease of town-bred gentlemen;
something about it surprised the young lady, and she lingered a
moment.
“And so you mend the roof for us?” she said, with her merry
sweetness. “We thank you, sir.”
“It is my business,” replied the mechanic a little coldly. But his
eyes were not cold, and they regarded her with deferent though
daring steadiness.
“You are then the carpenter. Are you sure?” she persisted
audaciously.
“That,” replied her host, after a silence in which she heard her
own heart leap, “is for you to determine.” He bowed, shouldered the
ladder which he had let drop, and passed on into the shed with it.
His lodger, with burning cheeks, fled to her room, and drew down
the green-paper shade.
The following day was Sunday, and the city lodgers in a party
attended the village church. Mary Worcester, daintily dressed and
devoutly inclined, sat with her head bowed upon the rail of the
pew before her. When the village choir recited the opening fugue
she did not move; but when the minister’s voice broke the pleasant
silence that followed, and the invocatory prayer filled the
meeting-house, she lifted her eyes to the pulpit, and behold, he
who had shingled the cottage yesterday was the preacher of to-day.
The services took their usual course. The scent of lilacs came in
at the open windows of the country church. The rustic choir sang.
The minister had an educated voice and agreeable manner. He did
not preach a great sermon, but he spoke in a manly fashion, read
the Bible without affectation, and prayed like a believer. It was
not until the close of the service that he suffered his glance to
rest upon the pew occupied by his lodgers, and thus he perceived
the deepened color and the gentle agitation of her face. Their eyes
met, and the fate of their lives was sealed.
At first they read their idyl with terror in their joy. She by her
experience of the world, he by his inexperience thereof, knew what
it meant for them to plight their troth. But Almighty Love had laid
its hand upon them: not the false god, nor the sorcerer, nor the
worldling, nor the mathematician, that steal the name,--none of
these masqueraders moved them.
* * * * *
Mary Worcester and Joseph Bayard sat under the pine-trees of the
grove behind the minister’s cottage and faced their fate.
“I am a country parson,” said the young man proudly, “and a
carpenter, as your brother will remind you. I learned the trade to
put myself through college,--a fresh-water college up in Vermont.
Never mind the name. I doubt if he has ever heard of it. My father
was the schoolmaster of our village. He was poor. My mother was an
invalid for twenty years. It cost us a good deal to take care of
her. After he died, you see it fell to me. I did the best I could
for her. She died this spring. I never could go very far away from
her. She liked to see me often, and it cost a good deal to get
suitable nurses. She needed other things, of course. I was in debt,
too, for my education. I’ve been paying that off by degrees. Take
it all, I’ve got run down, somehow. Mother used to say I had her
constitution. The people here called me to supply awhile, but they
said I had too poor health to settle without trial. I don’t wonder.
They don’t want a minister to die of consumption on their hands.”
He stopped abruptly, and cast a bitter look at the young girl’s
drooping face to see how these blows struck that gentle surface.
She did not lift it, but by the space of a breath she seemed to
stir and tremble toward him.
“I love you,” said the young man, flinging his thin hands out as if
he thrust her from him. “A carpenter-parson, without a dollar or a
pulpit he can call his own, and some day doomed to be a sick man at
that! Go! I will never ask you to be my wife. Beacon Street! Do you
think there is a man in Beacon Street who will ever love you as I
do? Try it. Go and try. Go back to your brother. Tell him I scorned
to ask you to marry me--for your sake, oh my Love!”
His voice fell into the whisper of unutterable passion and
sacrifice, and he covered his face and groaned. Then Mary Worcester
lifted her unworldly eyes and looked upon him as a woman looks but
once in life, and upon but one.
“But if,” she said, “_I_ should ask _you_?”
He gasped, and sprang to his feet. Then he saw how she trembled
before him. And she stretched up her arms. So he took her to his
heart; and before the snow fell upon the hills of Bethlehem she had
become his wife.
Life dealt with them as the coldest head on Beacon Street might
have predicted. Her brother fell at first into burning anger, and
then into a frozen rage. When the thing became inevitable, he
treated her civilly, for he was a gentleman; more than that she
never sought from him, and did not receive. She married her country
parson intelligently, deliberately, and joyously, and shared his
lot without an outcry. She knew one year of blessedness, and
treasured it as a proof of paradise to come. She knew one such year
as the saddest of us would die to know, and the gladdest could not
look upon without a pang of divine envy. She knew what love, elect,
supreme, and unspotted from the world, as the old words say, can
give a woman, and can do for her. And then she reached the chapter
where the plot turns in the beautiful, delirious story, and she
read the sequel through,--a brave, proud woman, calling herself
blessed to the end.
The minister’s health failed, as was to be foreseen. He could
not keep his parish, “as she might have known,” said Hermon
Worcester to the lady (her name was Rollins, by the way) who had
chaperoned that summer party, and whom the brother had never
succeeded in forgiving. Joseph Bayard descended from his pulpit
to his carpenter’s bench, and his high-born wife did not protest.
“A man must feel that he is at work,” she said. She mentioned the
circumstance to her brother proudly when she acknowledged the last
check; for she received her mother’s inheritance duly, and spent
it rapidly. She supplied the ailing man with such comforts as
Bethlehem had never seen. She lavished all the attainable luxuries
familiar to her youth upon the invalid in the frozen mountain
home. Nothing and no one could restrain her. It was her way, and
love’s. That divine compassion which takes possession of a woman’s
soul when passion subsides from it swept a torrent of pity and
tenderness about the enfeebled man. She persuaded him at last out
of the mountain cottage which had watched their courtship and known
their honeymoon, and carried him to Italy, where she played the
last desperate chances in the game of life and love and death that
thousands of women have staked and lost before her.
In the midst of this experiment the two returned abruptly to
America, and hid themselves in the Bethlehem cottage; and there, in
the late and bitter mountain spring, their boy was born.
The baby was a year old when his father died. Mary Bayard looked at
the frozen hills across the freezing grave. In all the world only
the mountains seemed to understand her. Her brother came up to the
funeral, and politely buried the carpenter, whose widow was civilly
invited to return to the home of her youth; but she thanked him,
and shook her head.
“I will stay here among our people. They love me, some of them.
They all loved him. I have friends here. There is no kindness
kinder than that in the hearts of country neighbors. I’ve found
that out. Beacon Street has forgotten me long ago, Hermon. There is
nothing left in common between us now.”
“At least there is your birth and training!” exclaimed her brother,
flushing hotly. “I should think,” glancing around the white
cottage, crowded with little luxuries that love and ingenuity could
hardly convert into comforts (by his standard of comfort) in that
place and climate,--“I should think you would like to come back to
a good Magee furnace and a trained maid!”
“There have been times”--she began slowly, but checked herself.
“Those are gone by now. This is the place where I have been a happy
woman.”
“There is something in that,” replied the man of business in a
softer tone. He looked at her a trifle wistfully.
A certain tenderness for her returned in his heart after that. He
cared for her as he could, sometimes taking the chilly journey
to see her in winter, and spending a part of every summer in the
Bethlehem cottage.
Thus he came to discover in himself a root of interest in the boy.
When the child was three years old, he induced his sister to come
to Boston to consult a famous physician.
“She is dying of no disease,” he told the doctor irritably. “She
had fine health. That ailing fellow wore it all out. He was a heavy
burden. She carried everything--for years. She spent almost all her
property on him: it was not trusteed; it is nearly gone; I couldn’t
help it. She has spent herself in the same way. She is that kind of
woman.”
“I have seen such,” replied the physician gently, “but not too many
of them. I may as well tell you at the outset that I can probably
do nothing for her.”
Nor could he. She lingered, smiling and quiet, in her brother’s
house for a few months; then begged to be taken home. Fires were
kindled in the mountain cottage, and the affectionate villagers
brought in their house-plants to welcome her; and there, on the
morning after her return, they found her with her cheek turned upon
the soft curls of the child’s head. The boy was asleep. But he
waked when he was spoken to. It was his uncle who took him from his
mother’s arms.
They buried her beside her husband; and her husband’s people wept
about her grave, for they had loved this strange and gentle lady;
and they cut their white geraniums and heliotrope to bring to the
funeral, and sighed when they saw the cottage under the pine grove
stripped and closed. For the boy was taken to the home of his
mother’s girlhood, and reared there as she had been; delicately,
and as became a lad of gentle birth, who will do what is expected
of him, and live like the rest of his world.