"How about that cove with his head lopped down on his arms?" speculated
Tommy, with a businesslike air.
He had only stirred once, then put his face down again. But he was
awake, awake in every nerve; and listening, to the very curve of his
fingers. Tommy knew that; it being part of his trade to learn how to use
his eyes.
The sweet, loyal passion of the music--it would take worse playing than
Tommy's to drive the sweet, loyal passion out of Annie Laurie--grew
above the din of the train:--
"'T was there that Annie Laurie
Gave me her promise true."
She used to sing that, the man was thinking,--this other Annie of his
own. Why, she had been his own, and he had loved her once. How he had
loved her! Yes, she used to sing that when he went to see her on Sunday
nights, before they were married,--in her pink, plump, pretty days.
Annie used to be very pretty.
"Gave me her promise true,"
hummed the little fiddle.
"That's a fact," said poor Annie's husband, jerking the words out under
his hat, "and kept it too, she did."
Ah, how Annie had kept it! The whole dark picture of her married
years,--the days of work and pain, the nights of watching, the patient
voice, the quivering mouth, the tact and the planning and the trust for
to-morrow, the love that had borne all things, believed all things,
hoped all things, uncomplaining,--rose into outline to tell him how she
had kept it.
"Her face is as the fairest
That e'er the sun shone on,"
suggested the little fiddle.
That it should be darkened forever, the sweet face! and that he should
do it,--he, sitting here, with his ticket bought, bound for Colorado.
"And ne'er forget will I,"
murmured the little fiddle.
He would have knocked the man down who had told him twenty years ago
that he ever should forget; that he should be here to-night, with his
ticket bought, bound for Colorado.
But it was better for her to be free from him. He and his cursed
ill-luck were a drag on her and the children, and would always be. What
was that she had said once?
"Never mind, Jack, I can bear anything as long as I have you."
And here he was, with his ticket bought, bound for Colorado.
He wondered if it were ever too late in the day for a fellow to make a
man of himself. He wondered--
"And she's a' the world to me,
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I'd lay me down and dee,"
sang the little fiddle, triumphantly.
Harmon shook himself, and stood up. The train was slackening; the
lights of a way-station bright ahead. It was about time for supper and
his mother, so Tommy put down his fiddle and handed around his faded
cap.
The merchant threw him a penny, and returned to his tax list. The old
lady was fast asleep with her mouth open.
"Come here," growled Harmon, with his eyes very bright. Tommy shrank
back, almost afraid of him.
"Come here," softening, "I won't hurt you. I tell you, boy, you don't
know what you've done to-night."
"Done, sir?" Tommy couldn't help laughing, though there was a twinge of
pain at his stout little heart, as he fingered the solitary penny in the
faded cap. "Done? Well, I guess I've waked you up, sir, which was about
what I meant to do."
"Yes, that is it," said Harmon, very distinctly, pushing up his hat,
"you've waked me up. Here, hold your cap."
They had puffed into the station now, and stopped. He emptied his purse
into the little cap, shook it clean of paper and copper alike, was out
of the car and off the train before Tommy could have said Jack Robinson.
"My eyes!" gasped Tommy, "that chap had a ticket for New York, sure!
Methuselah! Look a here! One, two, three,--must have been crazy; that's
it, crazy."
"He'll never find out," muttered Harmon, turning away from the station
lights, and striking back through the night for the red flats and home.
"He'll never find out what he has done, nor, please God, shall she."
It was late when he came in sight of the house; it had been a long tramp
across the tracks, and hard; he being stung by a bitter wind from the
east all the way, tired with the monotonous treading of the sleepers,
and with crouching in perilous niches to let the trains go by.
She stood watching at the window, as he had known that she would stand,
her hands raised to her face, her figure cut out against the warm light
of the room.
He stood still a moment and looked at her, hidden in the shadow of the
street, thinking his own thoughts. The publican, in the old story,
hardly entered the beautiful temple with more humble step than he his
home that night.
She sprang to meet him, pale with her watching and fear.
"Worried, Annie, were you? I haven't been drinking; don't be
frightened,--no, not the theatre, either, this time. Some business,
dear; business that delayed me. I'm sorry you were worried, I am, Annie.
I've had a long walk. It is pleasant here. I believe I'm tired, Annie."
He faltered, and turned away his face.
"Dear me," said Annie, "why, you poor fellow, you are all tired out.
Sit right up here by the fire, and I will bring the coffee. I've tried
so hard not to let it boil away, you don't know, Jack, and I was so
afraid something had happened to you."
Her face, her voice, her touch, seemed more than he could bear for a
minute, perhaps. He gulped down his coffee, choking.
"Annie, look here." He put down his cup, trying to smile and make a jest
of the words. "Suppose a fellow had it in him to be a rascal, and nobody
ever knew it, eh?"
"I should rather not know it, if I were his wife," said Annie, simply.
"But you couldn't care anything more for him, you know, Annie?"
"I don't know," said Annie, shaking her head with a little perplexed
smile, "you would be just Jack, _any how_."
Jack coughed, took up his coffee-cup, set it down hard, strode once or
twice across the room, kissed the baby in the crib, kissed his wife, and
sat down again, winking at the fire.
"I wonder if He had anything to do with sending him," he said,
presently, under his breath.
"Sending whom?" asked puzzled Annie.
"Business, dear, just business. I was thinking of a boy who did a little
job for me to-night, that's all."
And that is all that she knows to this day about the man sitting in the
corner, with his hat over his eyes, bound for Colorado.
One of the Elect.
"Down, Muff! down!"
Muff obeyed; he took his paws off from his master's shoulders with an
injured look in his great mute eyes, and consoled himself by growling at
the cow. Mr. Ryck put a sudden stop to a series of gymnastic exercises
commenced between them, by throwing the creature's hay down upon her
horns; then he watered his horse, fed the sheep, took a look at the
hens, and closed all the doors tightly; for the night was cold, so cold
that he shivered, even under that great bottle-green coat of his: he was
not a young man.
"Pretty cold night, Muff!" Muff was not blest with a forgiving
disposition; he maintained a dignified silence. But his master did not
feel the slight. Something, perhaps the cold, made him careless of the
dog to-night.
The house was warm, at least; the light streamed far out of the kitchen
window, down almost to the orchard. He passed across it, showing his
figure a little stooping, and the flutter of gray hair from under his
hat; then into the house. His wife was busied about the room, a pleasant
room for a kitchen, with the cleanest of polished floors and whitened
tables; the cheeriest of fires, the home-like faces of blue and white
china peeping through the closet door; a few books upon a little shelf,
with an old Bible among them; the cosey rocking-chair that always stood
by the fire, and a plant or two in the south window. He came in,
stamping off the snow; Muff crawled behind the stove, and gave himself
up to a fit of metaphysics.
"Cold, Amos?"
"Of course. What else should I be, woman?"
His wife made no reply. His unusual impatience only saddened her eyes a
little. She was one of those women who would have borne a life-long
oppression with dumb lips. Amos Ryck was not an unkind husband, but it
was not his way to be tender; the years which had whitened his hair had
brought him stern experiences: life was to him a battle, his horizon
always that about a combatant. But he loved her.
"Most ready to sit down, Martha?" he said at last, more gently.
"In a minute, Amos."
She finished some bit of evening work, her step soft about the room.
Then she drew up the low rocking-chair with its covering of faded
crimson chintz, and sat down by her husband.
She did this without noise; she did not sit too near to him; she took
pains not to annoy him by any feminine bustle over her work; she chose
her knitting, as being always most to his fancy; then she looked up
timidly into his face. But there was a frown, slight to be sure, but
still a frown, upon it, neither did he speak. Some gloomy, perhaps some
bitter thought held the man. A reflection of it might have struck across
her, as she turned her head, fixing her eyes upon the coals.
The light on her face showed it pale; the lines on her mouth were deeper
than any time had worn for her husband; her hair as gray as his, though
he was already a man of grave, middle age, when the little wife--hardly
past her sixteenth birthday--came to the farm with him.
Perhaps it is these silent women--spiritless, timid souls, like this
one,--who have, after all, the greatest capacity for suffering. You
might have thought so, if you had watched her. Some infinite mourning
looked out of her mute brown eyes. In the very folding of her hands
there was a sort of stifled cry, as one whose abiding place is in the
Valley of the Shadow.
A monotonous sob of the wind broke at the corners of the house; in the
silence between the two, it was distinctly heard. Martha Ryck's face
paled a little.
"I wish--" She tried to laugh. "Amos, it cries just like a baby."
"Nonsense!"
Her husband rose impatiently, and walked to the window. He was not given
to fancies; all his life was ruled and squared up to a creed. Yet I
doubt if he liked the sound of that wind much better than the woman. He
thrummed upon the window-sill, then turned sharply away.
"There's a storm up, a cold one too."
"It stormed when--"
But Mrs. Ryck did not finish her sentence. Her husband, coming back to
his seat, tripped over a stool,--a little thing it was, fit only for a
child; a bit of dingy carpet covered it: once it had been bright.
"Martha, what _do_ you keep this about for? It's always in the way!"
setting it up angrily against the wall.
"I won't, if you'd rather not, Amos."
The farmer took up an almanac, and counted out the time when the
minister's salary and the butcher's bill were due; it gave occasion for
making no reply.
"Amos!" she said at last. He put down his book.
"Amos, do you remember what day it is?"
"I'm not likely to forget." His face darkened.
"Amos," again, more timidly, "do you suppose we shall ever find out?"
"How can I tell?"
"Ever know anything,--just a little?"
"We know enough, Martha."
"Amos! Amos!" her voice rising to a bitter cry, "we don't know enough!
God's the only one that knows enough. He knows whether she's alive, and
if she's dead he knows, and where she is; if there was ever any hope,
and if her mother--"
"Hope, Martha, for _her_!"
She had been looking into the fire, her attitude unchanged, her hands
wrung one into the other. She roused at that, something in her face as
if one flared a sudden light upon the dead.
"What ails you, Amos? You're her father; you loved her when she was a
little, innocent child."
When she was a child, and innocent,--yes. _That_ was long ago. He
stopped his walk across the room, and sat down, his face twitching
nervously. But he had nothing to say,--not one word to the patient woman
watching him there in the firelight, not one for love of the child who
had climbed upon his knee and kissed him in that very room, who had
played upon that little faded cricket, and wound her arms about the
mother's neck, sitting just so, as she sat now. Yet he _had_ loved her,
the pure baby. That stung him. He could not forget it, though he might
own no fathership to the wanderer.
Amos Ryck was a respectable man; he had the reputation of an honest,
pious farmer to maintain. Moreover, he was a deacon in the church. His
own life, stern in its purity, could brook no tenderness toward
offenders. His own child was as shut out from his forgiveness as he
deemed her to be from the forgiveness of his God. Yet you would have
seen, in one look at the man, that this blow with which he was smitten
had cleft his heart to its core.
This was her birthday,--hers whose name had not passed his lips for
years. Do you think he had once forgotten it since its morning? Did not
the memories it brought crowd into every moment? Did they not fill the
very prayers in which he besought a sin-hating God to avenge him of all
his enemies?
So many times the child had sat there at his feet on this day, playing
with some birthday toy,--he always managed to find her something, a doll
or a picture-book; she used to come up to thank him, pushing back her
curls, her little red lips put up for a kiss. He was very proud of
her,--he and the mother. She was all they had,--the only one. He used to
call her "God's dear blessing," softly, while his eyes grew dim; she
hardly heard him for his breaking voice.
She might have stood there and brought back all those dead birthday
nights, so did he live them over. But none could know it; for he did not
speak, and the frown knotted darkly on his forehead. Martha Ryck looked
up at last into her husband's face.
"Amos, if she _should_ ever come back!" He started, his eyes freezing.
"She won't! She--"
Would he have said "she _shall_ not?" God only knew.
"Martha, you talk nonsense! It's just like a woman. We've said enough
about this. I suppose He who's cursed us has got his own reasons for it.
We must bear it, and so must she."
He stood up, stroking his beard nervously, his eyes wandering about the
room; he did not, or he could not, look at his wife. Muff, rousing from
his slumbers, came up sleepily to be taken some notice of. She used to
love the dog,--the child; she gave him his name in a frolic one day; he
was always her playfellow; many a time they had come in and found her
asleep with Muff's black, shaggy sides for a pillow, and her little pink
arms around his neck, her face warm and bright with some happy dream.
Mr. Ryck had often thought he would sell the creature; but he never had.
If he had been a woman, he would have said he could not. Being a man, he
argued that Muff was a good watch-dog, and worth keeping.
"Always in the way, Muff!" he muttered, looking at the patient black
head rubbed against his knee. He was angry with the dog at that moment;
the next he had repented; the brute had done no wrong. He stooped and
patted him. Muff returned to his dreams content.
"Well, Martha," he said, coming up to her uneasily, "you look tired."
"Tired? No, I was only thinking, Amos."
The pallor of her face, its timid eyes and patient mouth, the whole
crushed look of the woman, struck him freshly. He stooped and kissed her
forehead, the sharp lines of his face relaxing a little.
"I didn't mean to be hard on you, Martha; we both have enough to bear
without that, but it's best not to talk of what can't be helped,--you
see."
"Yes."
"Don't think anything more about the day; it's not--it's not really good
for you; you must cheer up, little woman."
"Yes, Amos."
Perhaps his unusual tenderness gave her courage; she stood up, putting
both arms around his neck.
"If you'd only try to love her a little, after all, my husband! He would
know it; He might save her for it."
Amos Ryck choked, coughed, and said it was time for prayers. He took
down the old Bible in which his child's baby-fingers used to trace their
first lessons after his own, and read, not of her who loved much and was
forgiven, but one of the imprecatory Psalms.
When Mrs. Ryck was sure that her husband was asleep that night, she rose
softly from her bed, unlocked, with noiseless key, one of her bureau
drawers, took something from it, and then felt her way down the dark
stairs into the kitchen.
She drew a chair up to the fire, wrapped her shawl closely about her,
and untied, with trembling fingers, the knots of a soft silken
handkerchief in which her treasures were folded.
Some baby dresses of purest white; a child's little pink apron; a pair
of tiny shoes, worn through by pattering feet; and a toy or two all
broken, as some impatient little fingers had left them; she was such a
careless baby! Yet they never could scold her, she always affected such
pretty surprises, and wide blue-eyed penitence: a bit of a queen she was
at the farm.
Was it not most kindly ordered by the Infinite Tenderness which pitieth
its sorrowing ones, that into her still hours her child should come so
often only as a child, speaking pure things only, touching her mother so
like a restful hand, and stealing into a prayer?
For where was ever grief like this one? Beside this sorrow, death was
but a joy. If she might have closed her child's baby-eyes, and seen the
lips which had not uttered their first "Mother!" stilled, and laid her
away under the daisies, she would have sat there alone that night, and
thanked Him who had given and taken away.
But _this_,--a wanderer upon the face of the earth,--a mark, deeper
seared than the mark of Cain, upon the face which she had fondled and
kissed within her arms; the soul to which she had given life, accursed
of God and man,--to measure this, there is no speech nor language.
Martha Ryck rose at last, took off the covers of the stove, and made a
fresh blaze which brightened all the room, and shot its glow far into
the street. She went to the window to push the curtain carefully aside,
stood a moment looking out into the night, stole softly to the door,
unlocked it, then went upstairs to bed.
The wind, rising suddenly that night, struck sharply through the city.
It had been cold enough before, but the threatened storm foreboded that
it would be worse yet before morning. The people crowded in a warm and
brilliant church cast wandering glances from the preacher to the painted
windows, beyond which the night lay darkly, thought of the ride home in
close, cushioned carriages, and shivered.
So did a woman outside, stopping just by the door, and looking in at the
hushed and sacred shelter. Such a temperature was not the best medicine
for that cough of hers. She had just crawled out of the garret, where
she had lain sick, very sick, for weeks.
Passing the door of the Temple which reared its massive front and
glittering windows out of the darkness of the street, her ear was caught
by the faint, muffled sound of some anthem the choir were singing. She
drew the hood of her cloak over her face, turned into the shadow of the
steps, and, standing so, listened. Why, she hardly knew. Perhaps it was
the mere entreaty of the music, for her dulled ear had never grown deaf
to it; or perhaps a memory, flitting as a shadow, of other places and
other times, in which the hymns of God's church had not been strange to
her. She caught the words at last, brokenly. They were of some one who
was wounded. Wounded! she held her breath, listening curiously. The wind
shrieking past drowned the rest; only the swelling of the organ murmured
above it. She stole up the granite steps just within the entrance. No
one was there to see her, and she went on tiptoe to the muffled door,
putting her ear to it, her hair falling over her face. It was some
plaintive minor air they were hymning, as sad as a dying wail, and as
sweet as a mother's lullaby.
"But He was wounded; He was wounded for our transgression; He was
bruised for our iniquities."
Then, growing slower and more faint, a single voice took up the strain,
mournfully but clearly, with a hush in it as if one sang on Calvary.
"Yet we hid, as it were, our faces from Him. He was despised, and we
esteemed him not."
Well; He only knows what it spoke to the woman, who listened with her
guilty face hidden in her hair; how it drew her like a call to join the
throng that worshipped him.
"I'd like to hear the rest," she muttered to herself. "I wonder what it
is about."
A child came down from the gallery just then, a ragged boy, who, like
herself, had wandered in from the street.
"Hilloa, Meg!" he said, laughing, "_you_ going to meeting? That's a good
joke!" If she had heard him, she would have turned away. But her hand
was on the latch; the door had swung upon its noiseless hinges; the
pealing organ drowned his voice. She went in and sat down in an empty
slip close by the door, looking about her for the moment in a sort of
childish wonder. The church was a blaze of light and color. One
perceived a mist of gayly dressed people, a soft flutter of fans, and
faint, sweet perfumes below; the velvet-cushioned pulpit, and pale,
scholarly outlines of the preacher's face above; the warmth of
rainbow-tinted glass; the wreathed and massive carving of oaken cornice;
the glitter of gas-light from a thousand prisms, and the silence of the
dome beyond.
The brightness struck sharply against the woman sitting there alone. Her
face seemed to grow grayer and harder in it. The very hush of that
princely sanctuary seemed broken by her polluted presence. True, she
kept afar off; she did not so much as lift up her eyes to heaven; she
had but stolen in to hear the chanted words that were meant for the
acceptance and the comfort of the pure, bright worshippers,--sinners, to
be sure, in their way; but then, Christ died for _them_. This
tabernacle, to which they had brought their purple and gold and scarlet,
for his praise, was not meant for such as Meg, you know.
But she had come into it, nevertheless. If He had called her there, she
did not know it. She only sat and listened to the chanting, forgetting
what she was; forgetting to wonder if there were one of all that
reverent throng who would be willing to sit and worship beside her.
The singing ended at last, and the pale preacher began his sermon. But
Meg did not care for that; she could not understand it. She crouched
down in the corner of the pew, her hood drawn far over her face,
repeating to herself now and then, mechanically as it seemed, the words
of the chant.
"Wounded--for our transgressions; and bruised,"--muttering, after a
while,--"Yet we hid our faces." Bruised and wounded! The sound of the
words attracted her; she said them over and over. She knew who He was.
Many years ago she had heard of him; it was a great while since then;
she had almost forgotten it. Was it true? And was he perhaps,--was there
a little chance it meant, he was bruised for her,--for _her_? She began
to wonder dimly, still muttering the sorrowful words down in her corner,
where no one could hear her.
I wonder if He heard them. Do you think he did? For when the sermon was
ended, and the choir sang again,--still of him, and how he called the
heavy-laden, and how he kept his own rest for them, she said,--for was
she not very weary and heavy-laden with her sins?--still crouching down
in her corner, "That's me. I guess it is. I'll find out."
She fixed her eyes upon the preacher, thinking, in her stunted, childish
way, that he knew so much, so many things she did not understand, that
surely he could tell her,--she should like to have it to think about;
she would ask him. She rose instinctively with the audience to receive
his blessing, then waited in her hooded cloak, like some dark and evil
thing, among the brilliant crowd. The door opening, as they began to
pass out by her, swept in such a chill of air as brought back a spasm of
coughing. She stood quivering under it, her face livid with the pain.
The crowd began to look at her curiously, to nod and whisper among
themselves.
The sexton stepped up nervously; he knew who she was. "Meg, you'd better
go. What are you standing here for?"
She flung him a look out of her hard, defiant eyes; she made no answer.
A child, clinging to her mother's hand, looked up as she went by, pity
and fear in her great wondering eyes. "Mother, see that poor woman;
she's hungry or cold!"
The little one put her hand over the slip, pulling at Meg's cloak,
"What's the matter with you? Why don't you go home?"
"Bertha, child, are you crazy?" Her mother caught her quickly away.
"Don't touch that woman!"
Meg heard it.
Standing, a moment after, just at the edge of the aisle, a lady, clad in
velvet, brushed against her, then gathered her costly garments with a
hand ringed and dazzling with diamonds, shrinking as if she had touched
some accursed thing, and sweeping by.
Meg's eyes froze at that. This was the sanctuary, these the worshippers
of Him who was bruised. His message could not be for her. It would be of
no use to find out about him; of no use to tell him how she loathed
herself and her life; that she wanted to know about that Rest, and about
that heavy-laden one. His followers would not brook the very flutter of
her dress against their pure garments. They were like him; he could have
nothing to say to such as she.
She turned to go out. Through the open door she saw the night and the
storm. Within was the silent dome, and the organ-hymn still swelling up
to it.
It was still of the wounded that they sang. Meg listened, lingered,
touched the preacher on the arm as he came by.
"I want to ask you a question."
He started at the sight of her, or more perhaps at the sharpness in her
voice.
"Why, why, who are you?"
"I'm Meg. You don't know me. I ain't fit for your fine Christian people
to touch; they won't let their little children speak to me."
"Well?" he said, nervously, for she paused.
"Well? You're a preacher. I want to know about Him they've been singing
of, I came in to hear the singing. I like it."
"I--I don't quite understand you," began the minister. "You surely have
heard of Jesus Christ."
"Yes," her eyes softened, "somebody used to tell me; it was mother; we
lived in the country. I wasn't what I am now. I want to know if he can
put me back again. What if I should tell him I was going to be
different? Would he hear me, do you suppose?"
Somehow the preacher's scholarly self-possession failed him. He felt ill
at ease, standing there with the woman's fixed black eyes upon him.
"Why, yes; he always forgives a repentant sinner."
"Repentant sinner." She repeated the words musingly. "I don't understand
all these things. I've forgotten most all about it. I want to know.
Couldn't I come in some way with the children and be learnt 'em? I
wouldn't make any trouble."
There was something almost like a child in her voice just then, almost
as earnest and as pure. The preacher took out his handkerchief and wiped
his face; then he changed his hat awkwardly from hand to hand.
"Why, why, really, we have no provision in our Sabbath school for cases
like this: we have been meaning to establish an institution of a
missionary character, but the funds cannot be raised just yet. I am
sorry; I don't know but--"
"It's no matter!"
Meg turned sharply away, her hands dropping lifelessly; she moved toward
the door. They were alone now in the church, they two.
The minister's pale cheek flushed; he stepped after her.
"Young woman!"
She stopped, her face turned from him.
"I will send you to some of the city missionaries, or I will go with you
to the Penitents' Retreat. I should like to help you. I--"
He would have exhorted her to reform as kindly as he knew how; he felt
uncomfortable at letting her go so; he remembered just then who washed
the feet of his Master with her tears. But she would not listen. She
turned from him, and out into the storm, some cry on her lips,--it might
have been:--
"There ain't nobody to help me. I _was_ going to be better!"
She sank down on the snow outside, exhausted by the racking cough which
the air had again brought on.
The sexton found her there in the shadow, when he locked the church
doors.
"Meg! you here? What ails you?"
"_Dying_, I suppose!"
The sight of her touched the man, she lying there alone in the snow; he
lingered, hesitated, thought of his own warm home, looked at her again.
If a friendly hand should save the creature,--he had heard of such
things. Well? But how could he take her into his respectable home? What
would people say?--the sexton of the Temple! He had a little wife there
too, pure as the snow upon the ground to-night. Could he bring them
under the same roof?
"Meg!" he said, speaking in his nervous way, though kindly, "you _will_
die here. I'll call the police and let them take you where it's warmer."
But she crawled to her feet again.
"No you won't!"
She walked away as fast as she was able, till she found a still place
down by the water, where no one could see her. There she stood a moment
irresolute, looked up through the storm as if searching for the sky,
then sank upon her knees down in the silent shade of some timber.
Perhaps she was half-frightened at the act, for she knelt so a moment
without speaking. There she began to mutter: "Maybe He won't drive me
off; if they did, maybe he won't. I should just like to tell him,
anyway!"
So she folded her hands, as she had folded them once at her mother's
knee.
"O Lord! I'm tired of being _Meg_. I should like to be something else!"
Then she rose, crossed the bridge, and on past the thinning houses,
walking feebly through the snow that drifted against her feet.
She did not know why she was there, or where she was going. She repeated
softly to herself now and then the words uttered down in the shade of
the timber, her brain dulled by the cold, faint, floating dreams
stealing into them.
Meg! tired of being Meg! She wasn't always that. It was another name, a
pretty name she thought, with a childish smile,--Maggie. They always
call her that. She used to play about among the clover-blossoms and
buttercups then; the pure little children used to kiss her; nobody
hooted after her in the street, or drove her out of church, or left her
all alone out in the snow,--_Maggie_!
Perhaps, too, some vague thought came to her of the mournful,
unconscious prophecy of the name, as the touch of the sacred water upon
her baby-brow had sealed it,--Magdalene.
She stopped a moment, weakened by her toiling against the wind, threw
off her hood, the better to catch her laboring breath, and standing so,
looked back at the city, its lights glimmering white and pale, through
the falling snow.
Her face was a piteous sight just then. Do you think the haughtiest of
the pure, fair women in yonder treasured homes could have loathed her as
she loathed herself at that moment?
Yet it might have been a face as fair and pure as theirs; kisses of
mother and husband might have warmed those drawn and hueless lips; they
might have prayed their happy prayers, every night and morning, to God.
It _might have been_. You would almost have thought he had meant it
should be so, if you had looked into her eyes sometimes,--perhaps when
she was on her knees by the timber; or when she listened to the chant,
crouching out of sight in the church.
Well, it was only that it might have been. Life could hold no possible
blessed change for her, you know. Society had no place for it, though
she sought it carefully with tears. Who of all God's happy children that
he had kept from sin would have gone to her and said, "My sister, his
love holds room for you and me"; have touched her with her woman's hand,
held out to her her woman's help, and blessed her with her woman's
prayers and tears?
Do you not think Meg knew the answer? Had she not learned it well, in
seven wandering years? Had she not read it in every blast of this bitter
night, out into which she had come to find a helper, when all the happy
world passed by her, on the other side?
She stood there, looking at the glittering of the city, then off into
the gloom where the path lay through the snow. Some struggle was in her
face.
"Home! home and mother! She don't want me,--nobody wants me. I'd better
go back."
The storm was beating upon her. But, looking from the city to the
drifted path, and back from the lonely path to the lighted city, she did
not stir.
"I should like to see it, just to look in the window, a little,--it
wouldn't hurt 'em any. Nobody'd know."
She turned, walking slowly where the snow lay pure and untrodden. On,
out of sight of the town, where the fields were still; thinking only as
she went, that nobody would know,--nobody would know.
She would see the old home out in the dark; she could even say good-by
to it quite aloud, and they wouldn't hear her, or come and drive her
away. And then--
She looked around where the great shadows lay upon the fields, felt the
weakening of her limbs, her failing breath, and smiled. Not Meg's smile;
a very quiet smile, with a little quiver in it. She would find a still
place under the trees somewhere; the snow would cover her quite out of
sight before morning,--the pure, white snow. She would be only Maggie
then.
The road, like some familiar dream, wound at last into the village. Down
the street where her childish feet had pattered in their playing, by the
old town pump, where, coming home from school, she used to drink the
cool, clear water on summer noons, she passed,--a silent shadow. She
might have been the ghost of some dead life, so moveless was her face.
She stopped at last, looking about her.
"Where? I most forget."
Turning out from the road, she found a brook half hidden under the
branches of a dripping tree,--frozen now; only a black glare of ice,
where she pushed away the snow with her foot. It might have been a
still, green place in summer, with banks of moss, and birds singing
overhead. Some faint color flushed all her face; she did not hear the
icicles dropping from the lonely tree.
"Yes,"--she began to talk softly to herself,--"this is it. The first
time I ever saw him, he stood over there under the tree. Let me see;
wasn't I crossing the brook? Yes, I was crossing the brook; on the
stones. I had a pink dress. I looked in the glass when I went home,"
brushing her soft hair out of her eyes. "Did I look pretty? I can't
remember. It's a great while ago."
She came back into the street after that, languidly, for the snow lay
deeper. The wind, too, had chilled her more than she knew. The sleet was
frozen upon her mute, white face. She tried to draw her cloak more
closely about her, but her hands refused to hold it. She looked at them
curiously.
"Numb? How much farther, I wonder?"
It was not long before she came to it. The house stood up silently in
the night. A single light glimmered far out upon the garden. Her eye
caught it eagerly. She followed it down, across the orchard, and the
little plats where the flowers used to be so bright all summer long. She
had not forgotten them. She used to go out in the morning and pick them
for her mother,--a whole apronful, purple, and pink, and white, with
dewdrops on them. She was fit to touch them then. Her mother used to
smile when she brought them in. Her mother! Nobody ever smiled so since.
Did she know it? Did she ever wonder what had become of her,--the little
girl who used to kiss her? Did she ever want to see her? Sometimes,
when she prayed up in the old bedroom, did she remember her daughter
who had sinned, or guess that she was tired of it all, and how no one in
all the wide world would help her?
She was sleeping there now. And the father. She was afraid to see him;
he would send her away, if he knew she had come out in the snow to look
at the old home. She wondered if her mother would.
She opened the gate, and went in. The house was very still. So was the
yard, and the gleam of light that lay golden on the snow. The numbness
of her body began to steal over her brain. She thought at moments, as
she crawled up the path upon her hands and knees,--for she could no
longer walk,--that she was dreaming some pleasant dream; that the door
would open, and her mother come out to meet her. Attracted like a child
by the broad belt of light, she followed it over and through a piling
drift. It led her to the window where the curtain was pushed aside. She
managed to reach the blind, and so stand up a moment, clinging to it,
looking in, the glow from the fire sharp on her face. Then she sank down
upon the snow by the door.
Lying so, her face turned up against it, her stiffened lips kissing the
very dumb, unanswering wood, a thought came to her. She remembered the
day. For seven long years she had not thought of it.
A spasm crossed her face, her hands falling clinched. Who was it of whom
it was written, that better were it for that man if he had never been
born? Of Magdalene, more vile than Judas, what should be said?
Yet it was hard, I think, to fall so upon the very threshold,--so near
the quiet, peaceful room, with the warmth, and light, and rest; to stay
all night in the storm, with eyes turned to that dead, pitiless sky,
without one look into her mother's face, without one kiss, or gentle
touch, or blessing, and die so, looking up! No one to hold her hand and
look into her eyes, and hear her say she was sorry,--sorry for it all!
That they should find her there in the morning, when her poor, dead face
could not see if she were forgiven!
"I should like to go in," sobbing, with the first tears of many years
upon her cheek,--weak, pitiful tears, like a child's,--"just in out of
the cold!"
Some sudden strength fell on her after that. She reached up, fumbling
for the latch. It opened at her first touch; the door swung wide into
the silent house.
She crawled in then, into the kitchen where the fire was, and the
rocking-chair; the plants in the window, and the faded cricket upon the
hearth; the dog, too, roused from his nap behind the stove. He began to
growl at her, his eyes on fire.
"Muff!" she smiled weakly, stretching out her hand. He did not know
her,--he was fierce with strangers. "Muff! don't you know me? I'm
Maggie; there, there, Muff, good fellow!"
She crept up to him fearlessly, putting both her arms about his neck,
in a way she had of soothing him when she was his playfellow. The
creature's low growl died away. He submitted to her touch, doubtfully at
first, then he crouched on the floor beside her, wagging his tail,
wetting her face with his huge tongue.
"Muff, _you_ know me, you old fellow! I'm sorry, Muff, I am,--I wish we
could go out and play together again. I'm very tired, Muff."
She laid her head upon the dog, just as she used to long ago, creeping
up near the fire. A smile broke all over her face, at Muff's short,
happy bark.
"_He_ don't turn me off; he don't know; he thinks I'm nobody but
Maggie."
How long she lay so, she did not know. It might have been minutes, it
might have been hours; her eyes wandering all about the room, growing
brighter too, and clearer. They would know now that she had come back;
that she wanted to see them; that she had crawled into the old room to
die; that Muff had not forgotten her. Perhaps, _perhaps_ they would look
at her not unkindly, and cry over her just a little, for the sake of the
child they used to love.
Martha Ryck, coming in at last, found her with her long hair falling
over her face, her arms still about the dog, lying there in the
firelight.
The woman's eyelids fluttered for an instant, her lips moving dryly; but
she made no sound. She came up, knelt upon the floor, pushed Muff
gently away, and took her child's head upon her lap.
"Maggie!"
She opened her eyes and looked up.
"Mother's glad to see you, Maggie."
The girl tried to smile, her face all quivering.
"Mother, I--I wanted you. I thought I wasn't fit."
Her mother stooped and kissed her lips,--the polluted, purple lips, that
trembled so.
"I thought you would come back to me, my daughter. I've watched for you
a great while."
She smiled at that, pushing away her falling hair.
"Mother, I'm so sorry."
"Yes, Maggie."
"And oh!" she threw out her arms; "O, I'm so tired, I'm so tired!"
Her mother raised her, laying her head upon her shoulder.
"Mother'll rest you, Maggie," soothing her, as if she sang again her
first lullaby, when she came to her, the little pure baby,--her only
one.
"Mother," once more, "the door was unlocked."
"It has been unlocked every night for seven years, my child."
She closed her eyes after that, some stupor creeping over her, her
features in the firelight softening and melting, with the old child-look
coming into them. Looking up at last, she saw another face bending over
her, a face in which grief had worn stern lines; there were tears in
the eyes, and some recent struggle quivering out of it.
"Father, I didn't mean to come in,--I didn't really; but I was so cold.
Don't send me off, father! I couldn't walk so far,--I shall be out of
your way in a little while,--the cough--"
"_I_ send you away, Maggie? I--I might have done it once; God forgive
me! He sent you back, my daughter,--I thank him."
A darkness swept over both faces then; she did not even hear Muff's
whining cry at her ear.
"Mother," at last, the light of the room coming back, "there's Somebody
who was wounded. I guess I'm going to find him. Will he forget it all?"
"All, Maggie."
For what did He tell the sin-laden woman who came to him once, and dared
not look into his face? Was ever soul so foul and crimson-stained that
he could not make it pure and white? Does he not linger till his locks
are wet with the dews of night, to listen for the first, faint call of
any wanderer crying to him in the dark?
So He came to Maggie. So he called her by her name,--Magdalene, most
precious to him; whom he had bought with a great price; for whom, with
groanings that cannot be uttered, he had pleaded with his Father:
Magdalene, chosen from all eternity, to be graven in the hollow of his
hand, to stand near to him before the throne, to look with fearless
eyes into his face, to touch him with her happy tears among his sinless
ones forever.
And think you that _then_, any should scorn the woman whom the high and
lofty One, beholding, did thus love? Who could lay anything to the
charge of his elect?
Perhaps he told her all this, in the pauses of the storm, for something
in her face transfigured it.
"Mother, it's all over now. I think I shall be your little girl again."
And so, with a smile, she went to Him. The light flashed broader and
brighter about the room, and on the dead face there,--never Meg's again.
A strong man, bowed over it, was weeping. Muff moaned out his brute
sorrow where the still hand touched him.
But Martha Ryck, kneeling down beside her only child, gave thanks to
God.
What Was the Matter?
I could not have been more than seven or eight years old, when it
happened; but it might have been yesterday. Among all other childish
memories, it stands alone. To this very day it brings with it the old,
utter sinking of the heart, and the old, dull sense of mystery.
To read what I have to say, you should have known my mother. To
understand it, you should understand her. But that is quite impossible
now, for there is a quiet spot over the hill, and past the church, and
beside the little brook where the crimsoned mosses grow thick and wet
and cool, from which I cannot call her. It is all I have left of her
now. But after all, it is not of her that you will chiefly care to hear.
My object is simply to acquaint you with a few facts, which, though
interwoven with the events of her life, are quite independent of it as
objects of interest. It is, I know, only my own heart that makes these
pages a memorial,--but, you see, I cannot help it.
Yet, I confess, no glamour of any earthly love has ever entirely dazzled
me,--not even hers. Of imperfections, of mistakes, of sins, I knew she
was guilty. I know it now; even with the sanctity of those crimsoned
mosses, and the hush of the rest beneath, so close to my heart, I cannot
forget them. Yet somehow--I do not know how--the imperfections, the
mistakes, the very sins, bring her nearer to me as the years slip by,
and make her dearer.
My mother was what we call an aristocrat. I do not like the term, as the
term is used. I am sure she does not now; but I have no other word. She
was a royal-looking woman, and she had the blood of princes in her
veins. Generations back,--how we children used to reckon the thing
over!--she was cradled in a throne. A miserable race, to be sure, they
were,--the Stuarts; and the most devout genealogist might deem it
dubious honor to own them for great-grand-fathers by innumerable degrees
removed. So she used to tell us, over and over, as a damper on our
childish vanity, looking such a very queen as she spoke, in every play
of feature, and every motion of her hand, that it was the old story of
preachers who did not practise. The very baby was proud of her. The
beauty of a face, and the elegant repose of a manner, are influences by
no means more unfelt at three years than at thirty.
As insanity will hide itself away, and lie sleeping, and die out,--while
old men are gathered to their fathers scathless, and young men follow in
their footsteps safe and free,--and start into life, and claim its own
when children's children have forgotten it; as a single trait of a
single scholar in a race of clods will bury itself in day-laborers and
criminals, unto the third and fourth generation, and spring then, like a
creation from a chaos, into statesmen and poets and sculptors;--so, I
have sometimes fancied, the better and truer nature of voluptuaries and
tyrants was sifted down through the years, and purified in our little
New England home, and the essential autocracy of monarchical blood
refined and ennobled, in my mother, into royalty.
A broad and liberal culture had moulded her; she knew its worth, in
every fibre of her heart; scholarly parents had blessed her with their
legacies of scholarly mind and name. With the soul of an artist, she
quivered under every grace and every defect; and the blessing of a
beauty as rare as rich had been given to her. With every instinct of her
nature recoiling from the very shadow of crimes the world winks at, the
family record had been stainless for a generation. God had indeed
blessed her; but the very blessing was a temptation.
I knew, before she left me, what she might have been, but for the
merciful and tender watch of Him who was despised and rejected of men. I
know, for she told me, one still night when we were alone together, how
she sometimes shuddered at herself, and what those daily and hourly
struggles between her nature and her Christianity _meant_.
I think we were as near to one another as mother and daughter can be,
but yet as different. Since I have been talking in such lordly style of
those miserable Jameses and Charleses, I will take the opportunity to
confess that I have inherited my father's thorough-going
democracy,--double measure, pressed down and running over. She not only
pardoned it, but I think she loved it in me, for his sake.
It was about a year and a half, I think, after he died, that she sent
for Aunt Alice to come to Creston. "Your aunt loves me," she said, when
she told us in her quiet way, "and I am so lonely now."
They had been the only children, and they loved each other,--how much, I
afterwards knew. And how much they love each other _now_, I like to
think,--quite freely and fully, and without shadow or doubt between
them, I dare to hope.
A picture of Aunt Alice always hung in mother's room. It was taken down
years ago. I never asked her where she put it. I remember it, though,
quite well; for mother's sake I am glad I do. For it was a pleasant face
to look upon, and a young, pure, happy face,--beautiful too, though with
none of the regal beauty crowned by my mother's massive hair, and
pencilled brows. It was a timid, girlish face, with reverent eyes, and
ripe, tremulous lips,--weak lips, as I remember them. From babyhood, I
felt a want in the face. I had, of course, no capacity to define it; it
was represented to me only by the fact that it differed from my
mother's.
She was teaching school out West when mother sent for her. I saw the
letter. It was just like my mother: "Alice, I need you. You and I ought
to have but one home now. Will you come?"
I saw, too, a bit of postscript to the answer: "I'm not fit that you
should love me so, Marie."
And how mother laughed at it!
When it was all settled, and the waiting weeks became at last a single
day, I hardly knew my mother. She was so full of fitful moods, and
little fantastic jokes! such a flush on her cheeks too, as she ran to
the window every five minutes, like a child! I remember how we went all
over the house together, she and I, to see that everything looked neat,
and bright, and welcome. And how we lingered in the guest-room, to put
the little finishing touches to its stillness, and coolness, and
coseyness. The best spread was on the bed, and the white folds smoothed
as only mother's fingers could smooth them; the curtain freshly washed,
and looped with its crimson cord; the blinds drawn, cool and green; the
late afternoon sunlight slanting through, in flecks upon the floor.
There were flowers, too, upon the table. I remember they were all
white,--lilies of the valley, I think; and the vase of Parian marble,
itself a solitary lily, unfolding stainless leaves. Over the mantle she
had hung the finest picture in the house,--an "Ecce Homo," and an
exquisite engraving. It used to hang in grandmother's room in the old
house. We children wondered a little that she took it upstairs.
"I want your aunt to feel at home, and see some things," she said. "I
wish I could think of something more to make it pleasant in here."
Just as we left the room she turned and looked into it. "Pleasant, isn't
it? I am so glad, Sarah," her eyes dimming a little. "She's a very dear
sister to me."
She stepped in again to raise a stem of the lilies that had fallen from
the vase and lay like wax upon the table, then she shut the door and
came away.
That door was shut just so for years; the lonely bars of sunlight
flecked the solitude of the room, and the lilies faded on the table. We
children passed it with hushed footfall, and shrank from it at twilight,
as from a room that held the dead. But into it we never went.
Mother was tired out that afternoon; for she had been on her feet all
day, busied in her loving cares to make our simple home as pleasant and
as welcome as home could be. But yet she stopped to dress us in our
Sunday clothes,--and it was no sinecure to dress three persistently
undressable children; Winthrop was a host in himself. "Auntie must see
us look our prettiest," she said.
She was a sight for an artist when she came down. She had taken off her
widow's cap and coiled her heavy hair low in her neck, and she always
looked like a queen in that lustreless black silk. I do not know why
these little things should have made such an impression on me then.
They are priceless to me now. I remember how she looked, framed there in
the doorway, while we were watching for the coach,--the late light
ebbing in golden tides over the grass at her feet, and touching her face
now and then through the branches of trees, her head bent a little, with
eager, parted lips, and the girlish color on her cheeks, her hand
shading her eyes as they strained for a sight of the lumbering coach.
She must have been a magnificent woman when she was young,--not unlike,
I have heard it said, to that far-off ancestress whose name she bore,
and whose sorrowful story has made her sorrowful beauty immortal.
Somewhere abroad there is a reclining statue of Queen Mary, to which,
when my mother stood beside it, her resemblance was so strong that the
by-standers clustered about her, whispering curiously. "Ah, mon Dieu!"
said a little Frenchman aloud, "c'est une résurrection."
We must have tried her that afternoon, Clara and Winthrop and I; for the
spirit of her own excitement had made us completely wild. Winthrop's
scream of delight, when, stationed on the gate-post, he caught the first
sight of the old yellow coach, might have been heard a quarter of a
mile.
"Coming?" said mother, nervously, and stepped out to the gate, full in
the sunlight that crowned her like royal gold.
The coach lumbered on, and rattled up, and passed.
"Why, she hasn't come!" All the eager color died out of her face. "I am
so disappointed!"--speaking like a troubled child, and turning slowly
into the house.
Then, after a while, she drew me aside from the others,--I was the
oldest, and she was used to make a sort of confidence between us,
instinctively, as it seemed, and often quite forgetting how very few my
years were. "Sarah, I don't understand. You think she might have lost
the train? But Alice is so punctual. Alice never lost a train. And she
said she would come." And then, a while after, "I _don't_ understand."
It was not like my mother to worry. The next day the coach lumbered up
and rattled past, and did not stop,--and the next, and the next.
"We shall have a letter," mother said, her eyes saddening every
afternoon. But we had no letter. And another day went by, and another.
"She is sick," we said; and mother wrote to her, and watched for the
lumbering coach, and grew silent day by day. But to the letter there was
no answer.
Ten days passed. Mother came to me one afternoon to ask for her pen,
which I had borrowed. Something in her face troubled me vaguely.
"What are you going to do, mother?"
"Write to your aunt's boarding-place. I can't bear this any longer." She
spoke sharply. She had already grown unlike herself.
She wrote, and asked for an answer by return of mail.
It was on a Wednesday, I remember, that we looked for it. I came home
early from school. Mother was sewing at the parlor window, her eyes
wandering from her work, up the road. It was an ugly day. It had rained
drearily from eight o'clock till two, and closed in suffocating mist,
creeping and dense and chill. It gave me a childish fancy of long-closed
tombs and low-land graveyards, as I walked home in it.
I tried to keep the younger children quiet when we went in, mother was
so nervous. As the early, uncanny twilight fell, we grouped around her
timidly. A dull sense of awe and mystery clung to the night, and clung
to her watching face, and clung even then to that closed room upstairs
where the lilies were fading.
Mother sat leaning her head upon her hand, the outline of her face dim
in the dusk against the falling curtain. She was sitting so when we
heard the first rumble of the distant coach-wheels. At the sound, she
folded her hands in her lap and stirred a little, rose slowly from her
chair, and sat down again.
"Sarah."
I crept up to her. At the near sight of her face, I was so frightened I
could have cried.
"Sarah, you may go out and get the letter. I--I can't."
I went slowly out at the door and down the walk. At the gate I looked
back. The outline of her face was there against the window-pane, white
in the gathering gloom.
It seems to me that my older and less sensitive years have never known
such a night. The world was stifling in a deluge of gray, cold mists,
unstirred by a breath of air. A robin with feathers all ruffled, and
head hidden, sat on the gate-post, and chirped a little mournful chirp,
like a creature dying in a vacuum. The very daisy that nodded and
drooped in the grass at my feet seemed to be gasping for breath. The
neighbor's house, not forty paces across the street, was invisible. I
remember the sensation it gave me, as I struggled to find its outlines,
of a world washed out, like the figures I washed out on my slate. As I
trudged, half frightened, into the road, and the fog closed about me, it
seemed to my childish superstition like a horde of long-imprisoned
ghosts let loose, and angry. The distant sound of the coach, which I
could not see, added to the fancy.
The coach turned the corner presently. On a clear day I could see the
brass buttons on the driver's coat at that distance. There was nothing
visible now of the whole dark structure but the two lamps in front, like
the eyes of some evil thing, glaring and defiant, borne with swift
motion down upon me by a power utterly unseen,--it had a curious effect.
Even at this time, I confess I do not like to see a lighted carriage
driven through a fog.
I summoned all my little courage, and piped out the driver's name,
standing there in the road.
He reined up his horses with a shout,--he had nearly driven over me.
After some searching, he discovered the small object cowering down in
the mist, handed me a letter, with a muttered oath at being intercepted
on such a night, and lumbered on and out of sight in three rods.
I went slowly into the house. Mother had lighted a lamp, and stood at
the parlor door. She did not come into the hall to meet me.
She took the letter and went to the light, holding it with the seal
unbroken. She might have stood so two minutes.
"Why don't you read, mamma?" spoke up Winthrop. I hushed him.
She opened it then, read it, laid it down upon the table, and went out
of the room without a word. I had not seen her face. We heard her go
upstairs and shut the door.
She had left the letter open there before us. After a little awed
silence, Clara broke out into sobs. I went up and read the few and
simple lines.
_Aunt Alice had left for Creston on the appointed day_.
Mother spent that night in the closed room where the lilies had drooped
and died. Clara and I heard her pacing the floor till we cried ourselves
to sleep. When we woke in the morning, she was pacing it still.
Weeks wore into months, and the months became many years. More than
that we never knew. Some inquiry revealed the fact, after a while, that
a slight accident had occurred, upon the Erie Railroad, to the train
which she should have taken. There was some disabling, but no deaths,
the conductor had supposed. The car had fallen into the water. She might
not have been missed when the half-drowned passengers were all drawn
out.
So mother added a little crape to her widow's weeds, the key of the
closed room lay henceforth in her drawer, and all things went on as
before. To her children my mother was never gloomy,--it was not her way.
No shadow of household affliction was placed like a skeleton confronting
our uncomprehending joy. Of what those weeks and months and years were
to her--a widow, and quite uncomforted in their dark places by any human
love--she gave no sign. We thought her a shade paler, perhaps. We found
her often alone with her little Bible. Sometimes, on the Sabbath, we
missed her, and knew that she had gone into that closed room. But she
was just as tender with us in our little faults and sorrows, as merry
with us in our plays, as eager in our gayest plans, as she had always
been. As she had always been,--our mother.
And so the years slipped from her and from us. Winthrop went into
business in Boston; he never took to his books, and mother was too wise
to _push_ him through college; but I think she was disappointed. He was
her only boy, and she would have chosen for him the profession of his
father and grandfather. Clara and I graduated in our white dresses and
blue ribbons, like other girls, and came home to mother, crochet-work,
and Tennyson. Just about here is the proper place to begin my story.
I mean that about here our old and long-tried cook, Bathsheba, who had
been an heirloom in the family, suddenly fell in love with the older
sexton, who had rung the passing-bell for every soul who died in the
village for forty years, and took it into her head to marry him, and
desert our kitchen for his little brown house under the hill.
So it came about that we hunted the township for a handmaiden; and it
also came about that our inquiring steps led us to the poor-house. A
stout, not over-brilliant-looking girl, about twelve years of age, was
to be had for her board and clothes, and such schooling as we could give
her,--in country fashion to be "bound out" till she should be eighteen.
The economy of the arrangement decided in her favor; for, in spite of
our grand descent and grander notions, we were poor enough, after father
died, and the education of three children had made no small gap in our
little principal, and she came.
Her name was a singular one,--Selphar. It always savored too nearly of
brimstone to please me. I used to call her Sel, "for short." She was a
good, sensible, uninteresting-looking girl, with broad face, large
features, and limp, tow-colored curls. They used to hang straight down
about her eyes, and were never otherwise than perfectly smooth. She
proved to be of good temper, which is worth quite as much as brains in a
servant, as honest as the daylight, dull enough at her books, but a
good, plodding worker, if you marked out every step of the way for her
beforehand. I do not think she would ever have discovered the laws of
gravitation; but she might have jumped off a precipice to prove them, if
she had been bidden.
Until she was seventeen, she was precisely like any other rather stupid
girl; never given to novel-reading or fancies; never, frightened by the
dark or ghost-stories; proving herself warmly attached to us, after a
while, and rousing in us, in return, the kindly interest naturally felt
for a faithful servant; but she was not in any respect _un_common,
--quite far from it,--except in the circumstance that she never told a
false-hood.
At seventeen she had a violent attack of diphtheria, and her life hung
by a thread. Mother was as tender and unwearying in her care of her as
the girl's own mother might have been.
From that time, I believe, Sel was immovable in her faith in her
mistress's divinity. Under such nursing as she had, she slowly
recovered, but her old, stolid strength never came back to her. Severe
headaches became of frequent occurrence. Her stout, muscular arms grew
weak. As weeks went on, it became evident in many ways that, though the
diphtheria itself was quite out of her system, it had left her
thoroughly diseased. Strange fits of silence came over her; her
volubility had been the greatest objection we had to her hitherto. Her
face began to wear a troubled look. She was often found in places where
she had stolen away to be alone.
One morning she slept late in her little garret-chamber, and we did not
call her. The girl had gone upstairs the night before crying with the
pain in her temples, and mother, who was always thoughtful of her
servants, said it was a pity to wake her, and, as there were only three
of us, we might get our own breakfast for once. While we were at work
together in the kitchen, Clara heard her kitten mewing out in the snow,
and went to the door to let her in. The creature, possessed by some
sudden frolic, darted away behind the well-curb. Clara was always a bit
of a romp, and, with never a thought of her daintily slippered feet, she
flung her trailing dress over one arm and was off over the three-inch
snow. The cat led her a brisk chase, and she came in flushed and
panting, and pretty, her little feet drenched, and the tip of a Maltese
tail just visible above a great bundle she had made of her apron.
"Why!" said mother, "you have lost your ear-ring."
Clara dropped the kitten with unceremonious haste on the floor, felt of
her little pink ear, shook her apron, and the corners of her mouth went
down into her dimpled chin.
"They're the ones Winthrop sent, of all things in the world!"
"You'd better put on your rubbers, and have a hunt out-doors," said
mother.
We hunted out-doors,--on the steps, on the well-boards, in the
wood-shed, in the snow; Clara looked down the well till her nose and
fingers were blue, but the ear-ring was not to be found. We hunted
in-doors, under the stove and the chairs and the table, in every
possible and impossible nook, cranny, and crevice, but gave up the
search in despair. It was a pretty trinket,--a leaf of delicately
wrought gold, with a pearl dew-drop on it,--very becoming to Clara, and
the first present Winthrop had sent her from his earnings. If she had
been a little younger she would have cried. She came very near it as it
was, I suspect, for when she went after the plates she stayed in the
cupboard long enough to set two tables.
When we were half through breakfast, Selphar came down, blushing, and
frightened half out of her wits, her apologies tumbling over each other
with such skill as to render each one unintelligible, and evidently
undecided in her own mind whether she was to be hung or burnt at the
stake.
"It's no matter at all," said mother, kindly; "I knew you felt sick last
night. I should have called you if I had needed you."
Having set the girl at her ease, as only she could do, she went on with
her breakfast, and we forgot all about her. She stayed, however, in the
room to wait on the table. It was afterwards remembered that she had not
been out of our sight since she came down the garret-stairs. Also, that
her room looked out upon the opposite side of the house from that on
which the well-curb stood.
"Why, look at Sel!" said Clara, suddenly, "she has her eyes shut."
The girl was just passing the toast. Mother spoke to her. "Selphar, what
is the matter?"
"I don't know."
"Why don't you open your eyes?"
"I can't."
"Hand the salt to Miss Sarah."
She took it up and brought it round the table to me, with perfect
precision.
"Sel, how you act!" said Clara, petulantly. "Of course you saw."
"Yes'm, I saw," said the girl in a puzzled way, "but my eyes are shut,
Miss Clara."
"Tight?"
"Tight."
Whatever this freak meant, we thought best to take no notice of it. My
mother told her, somewhat gravely, that she might sit down until she was
wanted, and we returned to our conversation about the ear-ring.
"Why!" said Sel, with a little jump, "I see your ear-ring. Miss
Clara,--the one with a white drop on the leaf. It's out by the well."
The girl was sitting with her back to the window, her eyes, to all
appearance, tightly closed.
"It's on the right-hand side, under the snow, between the well and the
wood-pile. Why, don't you see?"
Clara began to look frightened, mother displeased.
"Selphar," she said, "this is nonsense. It is impossible for you to see
through the walls of two rooms and a wood-shed."
"May I go and get it?" said the girl, quietly.
"Sel," said Clara, "on your word and honor, are your eyes shut
_perfectly_ tight?"
"If they ain't, Miss Clara, then they never was."
Sel never told a lie. We looked at each other, and let her go. I
followed her out and kept my eyes on her closed lids. She did not once
raise them; nor did they tremble, as lids will tremble, if only
partially closed.
She walked without the slightest hesitation directly to the well-curb,
to the spot which she had mentioned, stooped down, and brushed away the
three-inch fall of snow. The ear-ring lay there, where it had sunk in
falling. She picked it up, carried it in, and gave it to Clara.
That Clara had the thing on when she started after her kitten, there
could be no doubt. She and I both remembered it. That Sel, asleep on
the opposite side of the house, could not have seen it drop, was also
settled. That she, with her eyes closed and her back to the window, had
seen through three walls and through three inches of snow, at a distance
of fifty feet, was an inference.
"I don't believe it!" said my mother, "it's some nonsensical mistake."
Clara looked a little pale, and I laughed.
We watched her carefully through the day. Her eyes remained tightly
closed. She understood all that was said to her, answered correctly, but
did, not seem inclined to talk. She went about her work as usual, and
performed it without a mistake. It could not be seen that she groped at
all with her hands to feel her way, as is the case with the blind. On
the contrary, she touched everything with her usual decision. It was
impossible to believe, without seeing them, that her eyes were closed.
We tied a handkerchief tightly over them; see through it or below it she
could not, if she had tried. We then sent her into the parlor, with
orders to bring from the book-case two Bibles which had been given as
prizes to Clara and me at school, when we were children. The books were
of precisely the same size, color, and texture. Our names in gilt
letters were printed upon the binding. We followed her in, and watched
her narrowly. She went directly to the book-case, laid her hands upon
the books at once, and brought them to my mother. Mother changed them
from hand to hand several times, and turned them with the gilt lettering
downwards upon her lap.
"Now, Selphar, which is Miss Sarah's?"
The girl quietly took mine up. The experiment was repeated and varied
again and again. In every case the result was the same. She made no
mistake. It was no guess-work. All this was done with the bandage
tightly drawn about her eyes. _She did not see those letters with them_.
That evening we were sitting quietly in the dining-room. Selphar sat a
little apart with her sewing, her eyes still closed. We kept her with
us, and kept her in sight. The parlor, which was a long room, was
between us and the front of the house. The distance was so great that we
had often thought, if prowlers were to come around at night, how
impossible it would be to hear them. The curtains and shutters were
closely drawn. Sel was sitting by the fire. Suddenly she turned pale,
dropped her sewing, and sprang from her chair.
"Robbers, robbers!" she cried. "Don't you see? they're getting in the
east parlor window! There's three of 'em, and a lantern. They've just
opened the window,--hurry, hurry!"
"I believe the girl is insane," said mother, decidedly. Nevertheless,
she put out the light, opened the parlor door noiselessly, and went in.
The east window was open. There was a quick vision of three men and a
dark lantern. Then Clara screamed, and it disappeared. We went to the
window, and saw the men running down the street. The snow the next
morning was found trodden down under the window, and their footprints
were traced out to the road.
When we went back to the other room, Selphar was standing in the middle
of it, a puzzled, frightened look on her face, her eyes wide open.
"Selphar," said my mother, a little suspiciously, "how did you know the
robbers were there?"
"Robbers!" said the girl, aghast.
She knew nothing of the robbers. She knew nothing of the ear-ring. She
remembered nothing that had happened since she went up the garret-stairs
to bed, the night before. And, as I said, the girl was as honest as the
sunlight. When we told her what had happened, she burst into terrified
tears.
For some time after this there was no return of the "tantrums," as
Selphar had called the condition, whatever it was. I began to get up
vague theories of a trance state. But mother said, "Nonsense!" and Clara
was too much frightened to reason at all about the matter.
One Sunday morning Sel complained of a headache. There was service that
evening, and we all went to church. Mother let Sel take the empty seat
in the carryall beside her.
It was very dark when we started to come home. But Creston was a safe
old Orthodox town, the roads were filled with returning church-goers
like ourselves, and mother drove like a man. A darker night I think I
have never seen. Literally, we could not see a hand before our eyes. We
met a carriage on a narrow road and the horses' heads touched, before
either driver had seen the other.
Selphar had been quite silent during the drive. I leaned forward, looked
closely into her face, and could dimly see through the darkness that her
eyes were closed.
"Why!" she said at last, "see those gloves!"
"Where?"
"Down in the ditch; we passed them before I spoke. I see them on a
blackberry-bush; they've got little brass buttons on the wrist."
Three rods past now, and we could not see our horse's head.
"Selphar," said my mother, quickly, "what _is_ the matter with you?"
"If you please, ma'am, I don't know," replied the girl, hanging her
head. "May I get out and bring 'em to you?"
Prince was reined up, and Sel got out. She went so far back, that,
though we strained our eyes to do it, we could not see her. In about two
minutes she came up, a pair of gentleman's gloves in her hand. They were
rolled together, were of cloth so black that on a bright night it would
never have been seen, and had small brass buttons at the wrist.
Mother took them without a word.
The story leaked out somehow, and spread all over town. It raised a
great hue and cry. Four or five antediluvian ladies declared at once
that we were nothing more nor less than a family of "them spirituous
mediums," and seriously proposed to expel mother from the
prayer-meeting. Masculine Creston did worse. It smiled a pitying smile,
and pronounced the whole thing the fancy of "scared women-folks." I
could endure with calmness any slander upon earth but that. I bore it a
number of weeks, till at last, driven by despair, I sent for Winthrop,
and stated the case to him in a condition of suppressed fury. He very
politely bit back an incredulous smile, and said he should be _very_
happy to see her perform. The answer was somewhat dubious. I accepted it
in silent suspicion.
He came on a Saturday noon. That afternoon we attended _en masse_ one of
those refined inquisitions commonly known as picnics, and Winthrop lost
his pocket-knife. Selphar, of course, kept house at home.
When we returned, Winthrop made some careless reference to his loss in
her presence, and thought no more of it. About half an hour after, we
observed that she was washing the dishes with her eyes shut. The
condition had not been upon her five minutes before she dropped the
spoon suddenly into the water, and asked permission to go out to walk.
She "saw Mr. Winthrop's knife somewhere under a stone, and wanted to get
it." It was fully two miles to the picnic grounds, and nearly dark.
Winthrop followed the girl, unknown to her, and kept her in sight. She
went rapidly, and without the slightest hesitation or search, to an
out-of-the-way gully down by the pond, where Winthrop afterwards
remembered having gone to cut some willow-twigs for the girls, parted a
thick cluster of bushes, lifted a large, loose stone under which the
knife had rolled, and picked it up. She returned it to Winthrop,
quietly, and hurried away about her work to avoid being thanked.
I observed that, after this incident, masculine Creston became more
respectful.
Of several peculiarities in this development of the girl I made at the
time careful memoranda, and the exactness of these can be relied upon.
1. She herself, so far from attempting to bring on these trance states,
or taking any pride therein, was intensely troubled and mortified by
them,--would run out of the room, if she felt them coming on in the
presence of visitors.
2. They were apt to be preceded by severe headaches, but came often
without any warning.
3. She never, in any instance, recalled anything that happened during
the trance, after it was passed.
4. She was powerfully and unpleasantly affected by electricity from a
battery, or acting in milder forms. She was also unable at any time to
put her hands and arms into hot water; the effect was to paralyze them
at once.
5. Space proved to be no impediment to her vision. She has been known to
follow the acts, words, and expressions of countenance of members of the
family hundreds of miles away, with accuracy as was afterwards proved by
comparing notes as to time.
6. The girl's eyes, after her trances became habitual, assumed, and
always retained, the most singular expression I ever saw on any face.
They were oblong and narrow, and set back in her head like the eyes of a
snake. They were not--smile if you will, O practical and incredulous
reader! but they were not--eyes. The eyes of Elsie Venner are the only
eyes I can think of as at all like them. The most horrible circumstance
about them--a circumstance that always made me shudder, familiar as I
was with it--was, that, though turned fully on you, _they never looked
at you_. Something behind them or out of them did the seeing, not they.
7. She not only saw substance, but soul. She has repeatedly told me my
thoughts when they were upon subjects to which she could not by any
possibility have had the slightest clew.