RECOMPENSE.
That night, Marion Kent was fifty miles off, in the great, mixed-up,
manufacturing town of Loweburg.
She had three platform dresses now,--the earnings of some half-dozen
"evenings." The sea-green silk would not do forever, in place after
place; they would call her the mermaid. She must have a quiet,
elegant black one, and one the color of her hair, like that she had
seen the pretty actress, Alice Craike, so bewitching in. She could
deepen it with chestnut trimmings, all toning up together to one
rich, bright harmony. Her hair was "_blond cendré_,"--not the
red-golden of Alice Craike's; but the same subtle rule of art was
available; "_café-au-lait_" was her shade; and the darker velvet
just deepened and emphasized the effect.
She was putting this dress on to-night, with some brown and golden
leaves in the high, massed braids of her hair. She certainly knew
how to make a picture of herself; she was just made to make a
picture of.
The hotel waitress who had brought up her tea on a tray, had gone
down with a report that Miss Kent was "stunning;" and two or three
housemaids and a number of little boys were vibrating and loitering
about the hall and doorway below, watching for her to come down to
her carriage. It was just as good, so far as these things went, as
if she had been Mrs. Kemble, or Christine Nilsson, or anybody.
And Marion, poor child, had really got no farther than "these
things," yet. She reached, for herself, to just what she had been
able to appreciate in others. She had taken in the housemaid and
small-boy view of famousness, and she was having her shallow little
day of living it. She had not found out, yet, how short a time that
would last. "Verily," it was said for us all long ago, "ye shall
have each your reward," such as ye look and labor for.
One great boy was waiting for her, _ex officio_, and without
disguise,--the President of the Lyceum Club, before which she was to
read to-night.
He sat serenely in the reception-room, ready to hand her to her
carriage, and accompany her to the hall.
The little boys observed him with exasperation. The housemaids
dropped their lower jaws with wonder, when she swept down the
staircase; her _café-au-lait_ silk rolling and glittering behind
her, as if the breakfast for all Loweburg were pouring down the
Phoenix Hotel stairs.
The President of the People's Lyceum Club heard the rustle of
elegance, and met her at the stair-foot with bowing head and bended
arm.
That was a beautiful, triumphant moment, in which she crossed the
space between the staircase and the door, and went down over the
sidewalk to the hack. What would you have? There could not have been
more of it, in her mind, though all Loweburg were standing by. She
was Miss Kent, going out to give her Reading. What more could Fanny
Kemble do?
Around the hall doors, when they arrived, other great boys were
gathered. She was passed in quickly, to the left, through some
passages and committee rooms, to the other end of the building,
whence she would enter, in full glory, upon the platform.
She came in gracefully; a little breezy she could not help being;
it was the one movement of the universe to her at that moment, her
ten steps across the platform,--her little half bow, half droop,
before the applauding audience,--the taking up of the bouquet laid
upon her table,--her smile, with a scarcely visible inclination
again,--and the sitting down among those waves of amber that rose up
shining in the gas-light, about her, as she subsided among her
silken draperies.
She was imitative; she had learned the little outsides of her art
well; but you see the art was not high.
It was the same with her reading. She had had drill enough to make
her elocution passable; her voice was clear and sweet; she had a
natural knack, as we have seen, for speaking to the galleries. When
there was a sensational, dramatic point to make, she could make it
after her external fashion, strongly. The deep magnetism--the
electric thrill of soul-reality--these she had nothing to do with.
Yet she read some things that thrilled of themselves; the very words
of which, uttered almost anyhow, were fit to bring men to their feet
and women to tears, with sublimity and pathos. Somebody had helped
her choose effectively, and things very cunningly adaptive to
herself.
The last selection for the first part of her reading to-night was
Mrs. Browning's "Court Lady."
"Wear your fawn-colored silk when you read this," Virginia Levering
had counseled.
Her self-consciousness made the first lines telling.
"Her hair was tawny with gold,--her eyes with purple were dark;
Her cheeks pale opal burned with a red and restless spark."
Her head, bright with its golden-dusty waves and braids, leaned
forward under the light as she uttered the words; her great,
gray-blue eyes, deepening with excitement to black, lifted
themselves and looked the crowd in the face; the color mounted like
a crimson spark; she glowed all over. Yes, over; not up, nor
through; but some things catch from the outside. A flush and rustle
ran over the faces, and the benches; she felt that every eye was
upon her, lit up with an admiring eagerness, that answered to her
eagerness to be admired.
O, this was living! There was a pulse and a rush in this! Marion
Kent _was_ living, with all her nature that had yet waked up, at
that bewildering and superficial moment.
But she has got to live deeper. The Lord, who gave her life, will
not let her off so. It will come. It is coming.
We know not the day nor the hour; though we go on as if we knew all
things and were sure.
At this very instant, there is close upon you, Marion Kent, one of
those lightning shafts that run continually quivering to and fro
about the earth, with their net-work of fire, in this storm of life
under which we of to-day are born. All the air is tremulous with
quick, converging nerves; concentrating events, bringing each soul,
as it were, into a possible focus continually, under the forces that
are forging to bear down upon it. There are no delays,--no respites
of ignorance. Right into the midst of our most careless or most
selfish doing, comes the summons that arrests us in the Name of the
King.
"She rose to her feet with a spring.
_That_ was a Piedmontese! And this is the Court of the King!"
She was upon her feet, as if the impulse of the words had lifted
her; she had learned by rote and practice when and how to do it; she
had been poised for the action through the reading of all those last
stanzas.
She did it well. One hand rested by the finger-tips upon the open
volume before her; her glistening robes fell back as she gained her
full height,--she swayed forward toward the assembly that leaned
itself toward her; the left hand threw itself back with a noble
gesture of generous declaring; the fingers curving from the open
palm as it might have been toward the pallet of the dead soldier at
her side. She was utterly motionless for an instant; then, as the
applause broke down the silence, she turned, and grandly passed out
along the stage, and disappeared.
Within the door of the anteroom stood a messenger from the hotel. He
had a telegraph envelope in his hand; he put it into hers.
She tore it open,--not thinking, scarcely noticing; the excitement
of the instant just past moved her nerves,--no apprehension of what
this might be.
Then the lightning reached her: struck her through and through.
"Your ma's dying: come back: no money."
Those last words were a mistake; the whole dispatch, in its absurd
homeliness and its pitiless directness, was the work of old Mrs.
Knoxwell, the blacksmith's wife, used to hammers and nails, and
believing in good, forceful, honest ways of doing things; feeling
also a righteous and neighborly indignation against this child,
negligent of her worn and lonely mother; "skitin' about the country,
makin' believe big and famous. She would let her know the truth,
right out plain; it would be good for her."
What she had meant to write at the end was "Pneumonia;" but spelling
it "Numoney," it had got transmitted as we have seen.
It struck Marion through and through; but she did not feel it at
first. It met the tide of her triumph and elation full in her
throbbing veins; and the two keen currents turned to a mere
stillness for a moment.
Then she dropped down where she was, all into the golden mass and
shine of her bright raiment, with her hands before her eyes, the
paper crumpled in the clinch of one of them.
The President of the People's Lyceum Club made a little speech, and
dismissed the audience. "Miss Kent had received by telegraph most
painful intelligence from her family; was utterly unable to appear
again."
The audience behaved as an American People's Club knows so well how
to behave; dispersed quietly, without a grumble, or a recollection
of the half value of the tickets lost. Miss Kent's carriage drove
rapidly from a side door. In two hours, she was on board the night
train down from Vermont.
That was on Friday night.
On Sunday morning Frank Sunderline came in on the service train, and
went up to Pilgrim Street.
"Mrs. Kent is dead," he told Kay. "Marion is in awful trouble. Can't
you come out to her?"
Ray was just leaving the house to go to church. Instead, she went
with Frank to the horse-railroad station, catching the eleven
o'clock car. She had been expecting him in the afternoon, to take
her to drink tea with his mother, who was not able to come in to see
her.
In an hour, she went in at Mrs. Kent's white gate,--Frank leaving
her there. They both felt, without saying, that it would not be kind
to appear together. Marion had that news, though, as she had had the
other; from her Job's comforter, Mrs. Knoxwell, who was persistently
"sitting with her."
"There's Frank Sunderline and Ray Ingraham at the gate. She's
coming in. They're engaged. It's just out."
"What _do_ I care?" cried Marion, fiercely, turning upon her, and
astounding Mrs. Knoxwell by the sudden burst of angry words; for she
had not spoken for more than an hour, in which the blacksmith's wife
had administered occasional appropriate sentences of stinging
condolence and well-meant retrospection. "I wish you would go home!"
Every monosyllable was uttered with a desperate, wrathful
deliberateness and flinging away of all pretense and politeness.
"Well--'f I _never_!" gasped Mrs. Knoxwell, with a sound in her
voice as if she had received a blow in the pit of her stomach.
"Jest as you please, Marion--'f I ain't no more use!" And the
aggrieved matron, who had, as she said afterward in recounting it,
"done _everything_," left the scene of her labors and her
animadversions, with a face perfectly emptied of all expression by
her inability to "realize what she _did_ feel."
Ray Ingraham came in, went straight up to Marion, and took her into
her arms without a word. And Marion put her head down on Ray's
shoulder, and cried her very heart out.
"You needn't try to comfort me. I can't be comforted like anybody
else. It's the day of judgment come down into my life. I've sold my
birthright: I've nobody belonging to me any more. I wanted the
world--to be free in it; and I'm turned out into it now; and home's
gone--and mother.
"I never thought of her dying. I expected one of these days to do
for her, and not let her work any more. I meant to, Ray--I did,
truly! But she's dead--and I let her die!"
With sentences like these, Marion broke out now and again, putting
aside all Ray's consolations; going back continually to her
self-upbraidings, after every pause in which Ray had let her rest or
cry quietly; after every word with which she tried to prevail
against her despair and soothe her with some hope or promise.
"They are none of them for me!" she cried. "It would have been
better if I had never been born. Ray!" she said suddenly, in a
strained, hollow voice, grasping Rachel's arm and looking with wild,
swollen eyes into hers,--"I was just as bad by little Sue. I was
only fourteen then, but it was the same evil, unsuitable vanity and
selfishness. I was busy, while she was sick, making a white muslin
burnouse to wear to a fair. I had teased mother for it. It was a
silly thing for a girl like me to wear; it had a blue ribbon run in
the hem of the hood, and a bow and long blue ends behind. Poor
little Sue was just down with the fever. Mother had to go out, and
left me to tend her. She wanted some water--Oh!"
Marion broke down, and sobbed, with her head bowed to her knees as
she sat.
Ray sat perfectly still. She longed to beg her not to think about
it, not to say any more; but she knew she would feel better if she
did.
"I told her I'd go presently; and she waited--the patient little
thing! And I was making my blue bow, and fixing it on, and fussing
with the running, and I forgot! And she couldn't bear to bother me,
and didn't say a word, but waited till she dropped to sleep without
it; and her lips were so red and dry. It was a whole hour that I
let her lie so. She never knew anything after that.
"She waked up all in a rave of light-headedness!
"I thought I should never get over it, Ray. And I never did, way
down in my heart; but I got back into the same wretched nonsense,
and now--here's _mother_!
"It's no use to tell me. I've done it. I've lost my right. It'll
_never_ be given back to me."
"Marion--I wish you could have Mr. Vireo to talk to you; or
Luclarion Grapp. Won't you come home with me, and let them come to
see you? They _know_ about these things, dear."
"Would you take me home?" asked Marion, slowly, looking her in the
face.
"Yes, indeed. Will you come?"
"O, do take me and hide me away, and let me cry!"
She dropped herself, as it were passively, into Rachel Ingraham's
hands. She could not stay among the neighbors, she said. She could
not stay in that house alone, one day.
Ray stayed with her, until after the funeral.
Marion would not go to the church. She had let them decide
everything just as they pleased, thinking only that she could not
think about any of it. Mrs. Kent had been a faithful, humble
church-member for forty years, and the minister and her
fellow-members wanted her to be brought there. There was no room in
the little half-house, where she had lived, for neighbors and
friends to gather, and for the services properly to take place.
So it was decided.
But when the time came, and it was too late to change, Marion
said,--"She belonged to them, and they have done by her. They can
all go, but I can't. To sit up in the front pew as a mourner, and be
looked at, and prayed for, as if I had been a real child, and had
only _lost_ my mother! You know I can't, Ray. I will stay here, and
bear my punishment. May be if I bear it _all_ now--do you believe it
might make any difference?"
Ray stayed with her through the whole.
While all was still in the church, not ten rods off, a carriage came
for them to the little white gate. With the silken blinds down, and
the windows open behind them, it was driven to the cemetery, and in
beneath the sheltering trees, to a stopping place just upon a little
side turn, near the newly opened grave. No one, of those who
alighted from the vehicles of the short procession, knew exactly
when or how it had come.
The words of the prayer beside the grave,--most tenderly framed by
the good old minister, for the ear he knew they would reach--came in
soft and clear upon the pleasant air.
"And we know, Lord, as we lay these friends away, one after another,
that we give them into Thy hands,--into Thy heart; that we give into
Thy heart, also, all our love and our sorrow, and our penitence for
whatever more we might have been or done toward them; that through
Thee, our thought of them can reach them forever. We pray Thee to
forgive us, as we know we do forgive each other; to keep alive and
true in us the love by which we hold each other; and finally to
bring us face to face in Thy glory, which is Thy loving presence
among us all. We ask Thee to do this, by the pity and grace that are
in Thy Christ, our Saviour."
After that, they were driven straight in, over the long Avenue, to
the city, and to the quiet house in Pilgrim Street.
Ray herself, only, led Marion to the little room up-stairs which
had been made ready for her; Ray brought her up some tea, and made
her drink it; she saw her in bed for the night, and sat by her till
she fell asleep.