This was before Margery went to Boston to try to develop her gift for
making pretty sketches. Her father and mother and her brother strained
every nerve to earn and save the money to cover her expenses. She went
away full of innocent, joyous hope in the month of May. She boarded in a
plain, quiet house, and had two rooms. One was her workroom and studio.
She worked under a good-natured artist, who thought her a rather gifted
little creature and used to take her to look at any pictures that were on
exhibition. Taking into consideration her youth and limited advantages,
she made such progress as led him to say that she had a future before
her.
She had never deserted Sue Chapman after that first morning in which she
had gone to her rescue. Janway's Mills was bewildered when it found that
the Reverend Lucien Latimer's sister went to see Jack Williams' deserted
sweetheart, and did not disdain to befriend her in her disgrace. The
church-going element, with the Nottingham lace curtains in its parlour
windows, would have been shocked, but that it was admitted that "the
Latimers has always been a well-thought-of family, an' all of 'em is
members in good standin'. They're greatly respected in Willowfield; even
the old fam'lies speak to 'em when they meet 'em in the street or at
Church.
"Not that I'd be willin' for my Elma Ann to 'sociate with a girl that's
gone wrong. Maybe it's sorter different with a minister's sister.
Ministers' families has to 'sociate out o' charity an' religion; go to
pray with 'em, an' that, an' read the Scripture to make 'em sense their
sinfulness an' the danger they're in."
But Margery did not pray with Susan Chapman, or read the Bible to her.
The girl held obstinately to her statement of unbelief in a God, and
Margery did not feel that her mood was one to which reading the Gospel
would appeal. If she could have explained to her the justice of the
difference between Jack Williams' lot and her own, she felt they might
have advanced perhaps, but she could not. She used to go to see her and
try to alleviate her physical discomfort and miserable poverty. She saved
her from hunger and cold when she could no longer work at all, and she
taught her to feel that she was not utterly without a friend.
"What I'd have done without you, God knows--or what ought to be God," Sue
said. "He didn't care, but you did. If there _is_ one, He's got a lot to
learn from some of the people He's made Himself. 'After His own image
created He them'--that's what the Bible says; but I don't believe it. If
He was as good and kind-hearted as the best of us, He wouldn't sit upon
His throne with angels singing round an' playin' on harps, an' Him too
much interested to see how everything sufferin' down below. What did He
make us for, if He couldn't look after us? I wouldn't make a thing I
wouldn't do my best by--an' I ain't nothin' but a factory girl.
This--this poor thing that's goin' to be born an' hain't no right to,
I'll do my level best by it--I will. It sha'n't suffer, if I can help
it"--her lips jerking.
Sometimes Margery would talk to her a little about Jack Williams--or,
rather, she would listen while Susan talked. Then Susan would cry, large,
slow-rolling tears slipping down her cheeks.
"I don't know how--how it happened like this," she would say. "It seems
like a kind o' awful dream. I don't know nothin'. He was common--just
like I am--an' he didn't know much; but it didn't seem like he was a bad
feller--an' I do b'lieve he liked me. _Seemed_ like he did, anyways. They
say he's got a splendid job in Chicago. He won't never know nothin' about
what happens."
Margery did not leave her unprovided for when she went to Boston. It cost
very little to keep her for a few months in her small room. The people of
the house promised to be decently kind to her. Margery had only been away
from home two weeks when the child was born. The hysterical paroxysms and
violent outbreaks of grief its mother had passed through, her convulsive
writhings and clutchings and beating of her head against the walls had
distorted and exhausted the little creature. The women who were with her
said its body looked as if it were bruised in spots all over, and there
was a purple mark on its temple. It breathed a few times and died.
"Good thing, too!" said the women. "There's too many in the world that's
got a right here. It'd hev' had to go to ruin."
"Good thing for _it_," said Susan, weakly but sullenly, from her bed;
"but if it's God as makes 'em, how did He come to go to the trouble of
making this one an' sendin' it out, if it hadn't no right to come? He
_does_ make 'em all, doesn't he? You wouldn't darst to say He
didn't--you, Mrs. Hopp, that's a church member!" And her white face
actually drew itself into a ghastly, dreary grin. "Lawsy! He's kept
pretty busy!"
When she was able to stand on her feet she went back to the mill. She was
a good worker, and hands were needed. The girls and women fought shy of
her, and she had no chance of enjoying any young pleasures or comforts,
even if she had not been too much broken on the rack of the misery of the
last year to have energy to desire them. No young man wanted to be seen
talking to her, no young woman cared to walk with her in the streets. She
always went home to her room alone, and sat alone, and thought of what
had happened to her, trying to explain to herself how it had happened and
why it had turned out that she was worse than any other girl. She had
never felt like a bad girl. No one had ever called her one before this
last year.
Three months after the child was born and died, Margery came back to
Willowfield to spend a week at home. She came to see Susan, and they sat
together in the tragic little bare room and talked. Though the girl had
been so delicately pretty before she left home, Susan saw that she had
become much prettier. She was dressed in light, softly tinted summer
stuffs, and there was something about her which was curiously
flower-like. Her long-lashed, harebell blue eyes seemed to have widened
and grown lovelier in their innocent look. A more subtle mind than Susan
Chapman's might have said that she seemed to be looking farther into
Life's spaces, and that she was trembling upon the verge of something
unknown and beautiful.
She talked about Boston and the happiness of her life there, and of her
work and her guileless girlish hopes and ambitions.
"I am doing my very best," she said, a spot of pink flickering on her
cheek; "I work as hard as I can, but you see I am so ignorant. I could
not have learned anything about art in Willowfield. But people are so
good to me--people who know a great deal. There is one gentleman who
comes sometimes to see Mr. Barnard at the studio. He is so wonderful, it
seems to me. He has travelled, and knows all about the great galleries
and the pictures in them. He talks so beautifully that everyone listens
when he comes in. Nobody can bear to go on with work for fear of missing
something. You would think he would not notice a plain little Willowfield
girl, but he has been _lovely_ to me, Susan. He has even looked at my
work and criticised it for me, and talked to me. He nearly always talks
to me a little when he comes in, and once I met him in the Gardens, and
he stopped and talked there, and walked about looking at the flowers with
me. They had been planting out the spring things, and it was like being
in fairyland to walk about among them and hear the things he said about
pictures. It taught me so much."
She referred to this friend two or three times, and once mentioned his
name, but Susan forgot it. She was such a beautiful, happy little thing,
and seemed so exquisite an expression of spring-like, radiant youth and
its innocent joy in living that the desolate and stranded creature she
had befriended could think of nothing but her own awkward worship and the
fascination of the flower-like charm. She used to sit and stare at her.
"Seems so queer to see anyone as happy an' pretty as you," she broke out
once. "Oh, Lawsy, I hope nothing won't ever come to spoil it. It hadn't
ought to be spoiled."
A month or so later Margery paid a visit to her home again. She stayed a
longer time, but Susan only saw her once. She had come home from Boston
with a cold and had been put to bed for a day or two.
One morning Susan was in Willowfield and met her walking in a quiet
street. She was walking slowly and looking down as she went, as if some
thought was abstracting her. When Susan stopped before her, she looked up
with a start. It was a start which revealed that she had been brought
back suddenly from a distance, as it were a great distance.
"Oh, Susan!" she said. "Oh, Susan!"
She held out her hand in her pretty, affectionate way, but she was
actually a little out of breath.
"I'm sorry I came on you so sudden," Susan said, "I startled you."
"Yes," she answered, "I was--I was thinking of things that seem so far
off. When I'm in Willowfield it seems as if--as if they can't be true.
Does anything ever seem like that to you, Susan?"
"Yes," said Susan. One of her hopeless looks leaped into her eyes. She
did not say what the things were, but she stared at Margery in a
helpless, vacant way for a moment.
"Are you well, Susan, and have you got work?" asked Margery. "I am coming
to see you to-morrow."
They spoke of common things for a few minutes, and then went their
separate ways.
Why it was that when she paid the promised visit the next day and they
sat together in their old way and talked, Susan felt a kind of misery
creeping slowly upon her, she could not in the least have explained. She
was not sufficiently developed mentally to have been capable of saying to
herself that there was a difference between this visit and the last,
between this Margery and the one who had sat with her before. Her dull
thoughts were too slow to travel to a point so definite in so short a
length of time as one afternoon afforded.
"Your cold was a pretty bad one, wasn't it?" she asked, vaguely, once.
"Yes," was the answer. "It made me feel weak. But it has gone now. I am
quite well again."
After that Susan saw her but once again. As time went on she heard a
vague rumour that the Latimers were anxious about Margery's health. Just
at that time the mill hands gossiped a good deal about Willowfield,
because the Reverend John Baird was said to be going to Europe. That led
to talk on the subject of other Willowfield people, and the Latimers
among them. In the rare, brief letters Margery wrote to her _protegee_,
she did not say she was ill. Once she said her brother Lucien had quite
suddenly come to Boston to see how she was, because her mother imagined
she must have taken cold.
She had been in Boston about a year then. One afternoon Susan was in her
room, standing by her bed forlornly, and, in a vacant, reasonless mood,
turning over the few coarse little garments she had been able to prepare
for her child--a few common little shirts and nightgowns and gray
flannels--no more. She heard someone at the door. The handle turned and
the door opened as if the person who came in had forgotten the ceremony
of knocking. Susan laid down on the bed the ugly little night-dress she
had been looking at; it lay there stiff with its coarseness, its short
arms stretched out. She turned about and faced Margery Latimer, who had
crossed the threshold and stood before her.
Susan uttered a low, frightened cry before she could speak a word.
The girl looked like a ghost. It was a ghost Susan thought of this time,
and not a flower. The pure little face was white and drawn, the features
were sharpened, the harebell-coloured eyes had almost a look of wildness;
it was as if they had been looking at something frightening for a long
time, until they could not lose the habit of expressing fear.
"Susan," she said, in a strange, uncertain voice, "you didn't expect to
see me."
Susan ran to her.
"No, no," she said, "I didn't know you was here. I thought you was in
Boston. What's the matter? Oh, Lawsy, Margery, what's happened to make
you look like this?"
"Nobody knows," answered Margery. "They say it's the cold. They are
frightened about me. I'm come to say good-bye to you, Susan."
She sank into a chair and sat there, panting a little.
"Lucien's going to take me to Europe," she said, her voice all at once
seeming to sound monotonous, as if she was reciting a lesson
mechanically. "I always wanted to go there--to visit the picture
galleries and study. They think the climate will be good for me. I've
been coughing in the mornings--and I can't eat."
"Do they think you might be going into--a consumption?" Susan faltered.
"Mother's frightened," said Margery. "She and the doctor don't know what
to think. Lucien's going to take me to Europe. It's expensive, but--but
he has managed to get the money. He sold a little farm he owned."
"He's a good brother," said Susan.
Suddenly Margery began to cry as if she could not help it.
"Oh," she exclaimed. "No one knows what a good brother he is--nobody but
myself. He is willing to give up everything to--to save me--and to save
poor mother from awful trouble. Sometimes I think he is something like
Christ--even like Christ! He is willing to suffer for other people--for
their pain--and weakness--and sin."
It was so evident that the change which had taken place in her was a
woeful one. Her bright loveliness was gone--her simple, lovable
happiness. Her nerves seemed all unstrung. But it was the piteous,
strained look in her childlike eyes which stirred poor Susan's breast to
tumult.
"Margery," she said, almost trembling, "if--if--if you was to go in a
consumption and die--you're not like me--you needn't be afraid."
The next moment she was sorry she had said the crude thing. Margery burst
into a passion of weeping. Susan flew to her and caught her in her arms,
kneeling down by her.
"I oughtn't to have said it," she cried. "You're too ill to be made to
think of such things. I was a fool not to see--Margery, Margery, don't!"
But Margery was too weak to be able to control her sobbing.
"They say that--that God forgives people," she wept. "I've prayed and
prayed to be forgiven for--for my sins. I've never meant to be wicked. I
don't know--I don't know how----"
"Hush!" said Susan, soothing and patting her trembling shoulder. "Hush,
hush! If there _is_ a God, Margery, He's a heap sight better than we give
Him credit for. He don't make people a' purpose, so they can't help
things somehow--an' don't know--an' then send 'em to burning hell for
_bein'_ the way He made 'em. _We_ wouldn't do it, an' He won't. You
hain't no reason to be afraid of dyin'."
Margery stayed with her about half an hour. There was a curious element
in their conversation. They spoke as if their interview was a final one.
Neither of them actually expressed the thought in words, but a listener
would have felt vaguely that they never expected to meet each other again
on earth. They made no references to the future; it was as if no future
could be counted upon. Afterwards, when she was alone, Susan realised
that she had never once said "when you come back from Europe."
As she was leaving the room, Margery passed the bed on which the small,
coarse garments lay. The little nightgown, with its short sleeves stiffly
outstretched, seemed to arrest her attention specially. She caught at
Susan's dress as if she was unaware that she made the movement or of the
sharp shudder which followed it.
"Those--are its things, aren't they, Susan?" she said.
"Yes," Susan answered, her sullen look of pain coming back to her face.
"I--don't know--how people _bear_ it!" exclaimed Margery. It was an
exclamation, and her hand went quickly up to her mouth almost as if to
press it back.
"They don't _bear_ it," said Susan, stonily. "They have to go through
it--that's all. If you was standin' on the gallows with the rope round
your neck and the trap-door under your feet, you wouldn't be bearin' it,
but the trap-door would drop all the same, an' down you'd plunge--into
the blackness."
It was on this morning, on her way through the streets, that Margery
dropped in a dead faint upon the pavement, and Miss Amory Starkweather,
passing in her carriage, picked her up and carried her home.
Susan Chapman never saw her again. Some months afterwards came the rumour
that she had died of consumption in Italy.