concrete with you as with her? Surely culture, and all that it
implies, need not be forced to defend itself with concrete examples?"
"I'm afraid that I agree with Ann," said the soft voice in the shadow.
"I'm afraid that so far as I am concerned, culture needs just that
defence."
She tried to smile the superior smile she had mustered for Ann,
kneeling in her checked sunbonnet, but this was difficult, with a woman
so obviously of her own class and kind. Still the woman was clearly
unreasonable, and she was able, at least, to speak forcibly as she
replied,
"Aren't you rather severe on the enormous majority of us, in that case?
We can't all be great philosophers or productive artists, you know, and
yet between us and Ann's preserved strawberries and Hester's scrubbing
there's a wide gulf--you must admit that!"
The stranger rose lightly from her chair and walked, with a swaying
motion like a long-stemmed wild flower, toward the home-made
window-door. At the sill she paused and fixed her great eyes on the
stronger woman--stronger, plainly, for the frail white hand on the
china knob supported her while she stood, and she seemed to cling to
the woodwork and press against it as she sank into the shadow of the
eaves.
"A wide gulf, indeed," she said slowly, in her soft, breathless voice,
with an intonation almost like a foreigner's, her listener decided
suddenly, "a gulf so wide that unless you can cross it with some bridge
of honest accomplishment, it will swallow you all very soon--you women
of culture!"
She slipped across the sill and presently Hester's clear, firm voice
was heard in the narrow hall,
"Yes, yes, I'm coming!" and the balcony was drowned in the dusk, and
the woman on it yielded consciously to the great desire for sleep that
possessed her. But before she drifted off, not afraid, this time, of
night under the sky, it occurred to her dimly that Hester's other
patient must come through her own room whenever she used the little
_loggia_.
"What is she--an anarchist? a socialist?" she thought. "I must surely
ask Hester about her. 'You women of culture,' indeed! What does she
call herself, I wonder?"
That next morning as she waited idly for bath and breakfast, the
stranger possessed her thoughts more and more. Only in such an
absolutely unconventional place, she told herself, could a completely
unknown woman appear (in her own apartments, really) and discuss with
her so nonchalantly such strange questions. In many ways this delicate
creature's words seemed to echo Dr. Stanchon's, and this seemed all the
more natural, now, since she was so obviously still his patient.
Hester had said that he sent many there--this one was perhaps too frail
ever to leave them, and felt so much at home that no one thought to
speak of her.
A healthy hunger checked these musings, and more amused than irritated
at such unusual desertion, she bathed and dressed unaided and went down
to the kitchen.
"They will soon see by the way I keep my temper, now," she thought,
"and my strength, that I am quite able to go back. I really must see
how the children are getting on."
Following the ways of her last journey through the house she found the
kitchen, where an oven-door ajar and a half-dozen small, fragrant
loaves in the opening showed her that though empty, the room was
deserted only for a housewife's rapid moment. She sat down therefore
beneath the patient old clock, and waited. Soon she heard a quick,
bustling step, unlike Hester's lithe quietness or the heavier stride of
Ann, and knew that the little old lady who entered, fresh and tidy as a
clean withered apple, was their mother. She had a pan of new-picked
peas in one arm and a saucer of milk balanced in the other hand,
plainly the breakfast for the sleek black cat that bounded in beside
her. This she set carefully on a flagstone corner before she noticed
her visitor, it seemed, and yet she did not appear startled at company,
and showed all of the younger women's untroubled ease as she explained
that a message from Dr. Stanchon had called them both away suddenly,
very early.
"It was perhaps some other patient in the house?" the guest suggested
curiously, with a vivid memory of the grey lady's frail white hand and
breathless voice.
"Perhaps," said the old woman equably, and tied a checked apron over
the white one, the better to attack the peas.
From the shining pan she tossed the fairy green globes into the rich
yellow bowl of earthenware at her side, with the quick ease of those
veined, old hands that outwork the young ones, and her guest watched
her in silence for a few minutes, hypnotised, almost, by the steady
pit-pat of the little green balls against the bowl.
"And when do you expect them back?" she asked finally.
"I don't know," said the old lady, "but they'll be back as soon as the
work is over, you may depend--they don't lag, my girls, neither of 'em."
"I am sure of that," she assented quickly. "They are the hardest
workers I ever saw: I wonder that they never rest, and tell them so."
"Time enough for resting when all's done," said the old lady briskly.
"That was my mother's word before me and I've handed it down to Ann and
Hester."
"But then, at that rate, none of us would ever rest, would we?" she
protested humourously.
"This side o' green grave?" the old lady shot out. "Maybe so. But
podding peas is a kind of rest--after picking 'em!"
"And have you really picked all these--and in the sun, too?" she said,
surprised. "I trust not for me--I could get along perfectly..."
The old lady jumped briskly after her loaves, tapped the bottoms
knowingly, then stood each one on its inverted pan in a fragrant row on
the dresser.
"Peas or beans or corn--it makes no odds, my dear," she cried
cheerfully. "It's all to be done, one way or another, you see."
An inspiration came to the idler by the window, and before she had
quite caught at the humour of it, she spoke.
"Why should you get my breakfast--for I am sure you are going to?" she
said. "Why shouldn't I--if you think I could--for I don't like to sit
here and have you do it all!"
"Why not, indeed?" the old woman replied, with a shrewd smile at her.
"Hester judged you might offer, and left the tray ready set."
"Hester judged?" she repeated wonderingly. "Why, how could she,
possibly? How could she know I would come down, even?"
"She judged so," the mother nodded imperturbably. "The kettle's on the
boil, now, and I've two of the rusks you relished yesterday on the
pantry shelf. Just dip 'em in that bowl of milk in the window and slip
'em in the oven--it makes a tasty crust. She keeps some chocolate
grated in a little blue dish in the corner and the butter's in a crock
in the well. The brown hen will show you her own egg, I'll warrant
that."
Amused, she followed all these directions, and poured herself a cup of
steaming chocolate, the first meal of her own preparing since childish
banquets filched from an indulgent cook. And then, the breakfast over,
she would have left the kitchen, empty just then, for the mistress of
it had pottered out on one of her endless little errands, had not a
sudden thought sent a flush to her forehead, so that she turned
abruptly at the threshold and walking swiftly to the water spigot, sent
a stream into a tiny brass-bound tub she took from the deep window
seats, frothed it with Hester's herb-scented soap, and rinsed and
dipped and dried each dish and cup of her own using before the old
woman returned.
"It is surprising how--how _satisfactory_ it makes one feel, really,"
she began hastily at the housewife's friendly returning nod, "to deal
with this sort of work. One seems to have accomplished something
that--that had to be done... I don't know whether you see what I mean,
exactly...."
"Bless you, my dear, and why shouldn't I see?" cried the other,
scrubbing the coats of a lapful of brown jacketed potatoes at the
spigot. "Every woman knows that feeling, surely?"
"I never did," she said, simply. "I thought it was greasy, thankless
work, and felt very sorry for those who did it."
"Did they look sad?" asked the old worker.
In a flash of memory they passed before her, those white-aproned,
bare-elbowed girls she had watched idly in many countries and at many
seasons; from the nurse that bathed and combed her own children,
singing, to the laundry-maids whose laughter and ringing talk had waked
her from more than one uneasy afternoon sleep.
"Why, no, I can't say that they did," she answered slowly, "but to do
it steadily, I should think..."
"It's the steady work that puts the taste into the holiday, my mother
used to say," said the old woman shortly. "Where's the change, else?"
"But of course there are many different forms of work," she began,
slowly, as though she were once for all making the matter clear to
herself, and not at all explaining obvious distinctions to an
uneducated old woman, "and brain workers need rest and change as much,
yes, more, than mere labourers."
"So they tell me," said Hester's mother respectfully, "though of course
I know next to nothing of it myself. Ann says it's that makes it so
dangerous for women folks to worry at their brains too much, for she's
taken notice, she says, that mostly they're sickly or cranky that works
too much that way. Hard to get on with, she says they are, the best of
'em."
"Indeed!" she cried indignantly, "and I suppose to be 'easy to get on
with' is the main business of women, then!"
"Why, Lord above us, child!" answered the old woman briskly, dropping
her white potatoes into a brown dish of fresh-drawn water, "if the
women are not to be easy got on with, who's to be looked to for it,
then; the children--or the men?"
She gathered up the brown peelings and bagged them carefully with the
pea pods.
"For the blacksmith's pig," she said. "We don't keep one and he gives
us a ham every year.... Not that it's not a different matter with you,
of course," she added politely. "There's some, of course, that's
needed by the world, for books and music and the like o' that--I don't
need Hester to tell me so. There's never an evening in winter, when
all's swept and the lamp trimmed and a bowl of apples out, and Ann and
I sit with our bit of sewing, that I don't thank God for the books
Hester reads out to us. One was written by a woman writer that the
doctor sent us here for a long, long time--poor dear, but she was
feeble!
"She worked with the girls at everything they did, that she could, by
doctor's orders, and it put a little peace into her, she told me.
You've a look in the eyes like her--there were thousands read her
books."
The guest rose abruptly.
"I never wrote a book--or did anything," she said briefly, and turned
to the door.
"You don't tell me!" the old mother stammered. "Why, I made sure by
your look--what made ye so mortal tired, then, deary?"
"I must find that out," she said, slowly, her hand on the knob.
"I--must--find--that--out!"
And on the balcony she paced and thought for an hour, but there was no
calmness in her forehead till the afternoon, when alone with Hester's
mother, for the daughters did not return all that day, she worked with
pressed lips at their tasks, picking Ann's evening salad, sprinkling
cool drops over Hester's fresh-dried linen, brought in by armfuls from
the currant-bushes, spreading the supper-table, pressing out the
ivory-moulded cottage cheese and ringing its dish with grape-leaves
gathered from the well-house.
So intent was she at these tasks, that she heard no footsteps along the
grass, and only as she put the fifth chair at the white-spread table
(for the old mother had been mysteriously firm in her certainty that
they should need it) did she turn to look into the keen brown eyes of
the wise physician who had left her weeks ago in the bed above them.
He gave her a long, piercing look. Then,
"I thought so," he said quietly. "We will go back to-morrow, you and
I--I need your bedroom."
Through the open door she caught a quick glimpse of Ann and Hester half
supporting, half carrying up the stairs a woman heavily veiled in black
crepe; Hester did not join them till late in the meal, and went through
the room with a glass of milk afterward. No one spoke further of her
presence among them; no one thanked her for her services; all was
assumed and she blessed them for it.
The doctor passed the evening with his new patient, and when she
mounted the stairs for her last night she found her simple luggage in
the room next hers: there was no question of helping her to bed, and
she undressed thoughtfully alone. The house was very still.
Her window was a deep dormer, and as she leaned out of it, for a breath
of the stars, she saw Dr. Stanchon stretched in her chair on the
balcony, his face white and tired in the moonlight. In the chair near
her, so near that she could touch it, lay the frail creature in the
grey dress, black now at night.
"It is his old patient!" she thought contentedly, remembering with
vexation that she had absolutely forgotten to ask the house-mother
about her and why she had not appeared; and she began to speak, when
the other raised her hand warningly, and she saw that Dr. Stanchon
slept.
Why she began to whisper she did not know, but she remembered afterward
that their conversation, below breath as it was, was the longest they
had yet had, though she could recall only the veriest scraps of it.
For instance:
"But Mary and Martha?" she had urged, "surely there is a deep meaning
in that, too? It was Martha who was reproved...."
"One would imagine that every woman to-day judged herself a Mary--and
that is a dangerous judgment to form, one's self," the other whispered.
"But to deliberately assume these tasks--simple because they clear my
life and keep me balanced--when I have no need to do them, seems to me
an affectation, absurd!"
"How can a thing be absurd if it brings you ease?"
"But I don't need to do them, really, for myself."
"For some one else, then?"
It was then that another veil dropped from before her.
"Then is that why, do you think, people devote themselves to those low,
common things--great saints and those that give up their own lives?"
"I think so, yes."
"It is a real relief to them?"
"Why not? ..."
She fell asleep on the broad window-seat, her head on her arms, and
when she woke and groped for her bed in the dark, the balcony was empty.
There was no bustle of departure: a grave hand-shaking from the
daughters, a kiss on the mother's withered, rosy cheek.
"Come back again, do," said the old woman and the doctor commented upon
this as they sat in the train.
"That is a great compliment," he said. "I never knew her to say that
except to a long-time patient of mine that stayed a long time (more's
the pity!) with them. 'Come back,' said Mother to her. 'Come soon,
deary, for the house will miss your grey dress so soft on the floor.'
They would have cured her if anybody could."
"Then you don't consider her cured?" she said with a shock of
disappointment. "I am so sorry. But it is surely a wonderful
place--one can't talk about it, but I see you know."
"Oh, yes, I know," he said briefly. "I saw you would pull through in
great shape there. This patient I spoke of used to tell me that the
duty of her life, here and through Eternity, ought by rights to be the
preaching of the gospel she learned there. Well--maybe it is, for all
we know. If I could have cured her, she would have been a great--a
really great novelist, I think."
"If you could have--" she gasped, seizing his arm, "you mean----"
"I mean that I couldn't," he answered simply. "She died there. I
dreamed of her last night."
THE GYPSY
Very early in the last century, while Napoleon still reigned over
Europe and the people went journeys in post-chaises through England,
John Appleyard, the only son of a thriving Sussex farmer, met, while
walking across one of his father's fields, a troup of gypsies camping
under a hedge. Among them was a dark young woman, very lovely, with
straight, heavy brows and a yard of thick blue-black hair, which she
was drying in the wind at the moment, having washed it in the brook.
John looked at her hard, walked by, turned, looked again, and stood
staring so long that a surly gypsy father slipped a fowling-piece into
his elbow and approached him menacingly.
"My daughter, young sir," he said shortly, "may sleep in a wagon and
not eat off chayny plates as the like o' you do, but I'll have none
eying her like that, be who he may, for she's a good girl, she is, and
the best man that walks is none too good to be her husband!"
"Am I good enough?" says John Appleyard, quietly.
And as a matter of fact he married her in the parish church in three
weeks' time, and his mother cried herself sick.
It was no use trying to live at the farm, after that, for the
neighbours smiled and pointed, and the old farmer was scandalised at
his new relatives, and though he had nothing against his handsome
daughter-in-law personally, felt himself a marked man and counted the
spoons every night. So John, who had never loved farming, compounded
for half the outlying land, which he sold very shrewdly, left his only
sister the farm, shook hands all 'round and sailed with Lilda, his
wife, for the United States of America.
On the voyage he made friends with the captain, who took a great liking
to him (and had no dislike, the passengers said, for Mistress Lilda),
and put him in the way of business with a thriving grain-merchant of
Boston, Massachusetts, whom, after twenty prosperous years, he bought
out, and founded the house of Appleyard. He had fondly hoped that this
house should outlast the century, but his only son was no merchant, and
all for the sea and its constant change and chance, and John was too
sensible to blame the lad's roving soul to any one but Nature. So with
a sigh and a thrill of how his old father must have felt, he bought a
fine trading-packet for young John and established his daughter's
husband (she was a steady, prudent girl) as his partner and heir.
John II did wonderfully well and found himself at fifty the owner of
the most flourishing packet line in the States, with his only son
prize-man at Harvard University and a daughter who nearly whitened his
hair by her mad plan for acting in public on the stage. The son went
early into buying and selling on 'Change, and was a weighty bank
president by the time his daughter had finished her schooling.
This was a trifle more elaborate and thorough-going than most girls of
twenty could boast at that time, and for three reasons. First, because
she had a brilliant mind and great powers of concentration; next,
because John III was not a little vain, in a quiet way, of all his
Greek and Latin and historical research; and had plenty of leisure for
imparting them; last, because his son--and only other child--had been a
disappointment to him in that line, not only failing to repeat his
father's brilliant college record, but proving actually slow at his
books and decidedly averse to study, though a steady, competent
accountant and investor.
So Lilda, named for her great-grandmother by John III's lady (who,
being of Knickerbocker descent, laid great stress on family names),
added to the somewhat doubtful accomplishments of a fashionable
finishing school a great part of what her own daughter, years later,
learned at the then popular woman's college. Nor was other and more
practical lore neglected, for her maternal grandmother, a notable
_hausfrau_ of the old school, taught her, in two long summers at her
great country estate on the Hudson River, all the household arts and
duties that girls of her own age were beginning to despise. So that
when, after a brilliant debut in New York and a winter season there in
which her wit and beauty, to say nothing of her horsemanship and
exquisite dancing had made her the belle of that critical metropolis
(not too large, then, for one reigning toast), she married one of the
country's most prominent young lawyers, already suggested for high
posts abroad, it was felt that America would honour both herself and
whatever Court should receive these two young fortunates from her hands.
There is a picture of her in the Court dress in which she made her bow
to Queen Victoria, standing at the foot of a Roman stairway of
yellowish marble, near a fountain, her baby boy clinging to her hand.
Under the blue-black of her heavy hair, her cheeks are tinted like
wall-ripened peaches; her strong, curved figure is just the Flora and
Juno of the ancient city's statuary.
There is still whispered, in a few old New York houses that have kept
their white marble and black walnut, the audacious story of Lilda
Appleyard's falling-in-love. It was at the Philadelphia Centennial of
'76, whither her father had taken her for a long visit, for its
educational influences. He used to say that women had little chance of
acquiring practical information of the large and comprehensive order,
and that no one would ever know without a trial what of all that sort
their brains could or could not take in. The progress of the world, he
said, was no greater than the progress of its homes, "and that," he
used to wind up, "is no more nor less than the progress of their women."
So Miss Lilda studied the progress of all three at the Centennial, and
took sage notes in a little red morocco book, and the proud banker read
them in private for years afterward to his friends. But she was not
engaged in this interesting occupation by night as well as day, you may
rest assured. Many a ball and high tea did Philadelphia's ladies offer
their visiting friends, and there was not one of any consequence that
failed to beg the honour of Miss Lilda Appleyard's company. And her
luggage was by no means limited to the little red morocco book!
A party from New York had come in a special train to Philadelphia for
three days at the Centennial, and the occasion was seized by the wife
of an army officer to give a large ball in her great house in
Germantown. All visiting Knickerbockers who might expect to be asked
anywhere were asked to attend this ball, and Lilda's maid assured the
hotel chambermaid that she never had known her young lady so hard to
suit. And finally, after three different trials, to pick out that
strange black mousseline-de-soie! She looked like pictures of
foreigners, to tell you the truth, her young lady did! Of course, her
grandmamma's pearls would make anything dressy, and there's no denying
the black made her arms and neck look like ivory--but to snatch up that
flame-coloured scarf her grandpapa had brought from India, and knot it
over her shoulder at the last minute! It was downright outlandish.
Mrs. Appleyard would never have liked it.
She had a high, staglike carriage of the head, and as she was rather
tall, she looked over most of her girl companions. Halfway through the
dance she raised this dark head a little higher and stared.
"Who is that man?" she asked abruptly.
"Elliot Lestrange," the girls told her, "but he doesn't care for women.
He's very proud."
"I should like to meet him," she said simply.
They tittered and teased her, but after all, she was a belle, and Mr.
Lestrange was sent for. The young dancing man who undertook the
message told freely how Lestrange had said,
"Oh, hang it all, I'm not dancing to-night!"
"But she's Miss Appleyard, of Boston and New York--she's a beauty!"
"Then she must have plenty of beaux, Clarke, without me!"
So young Mr. Clarke took his little revenge (for after all, he had used
his dance with the dark beauty for this stupid errand and resented it),
and in presenting the chilly hero, said maliciously,
"Here is Mr. Lestrange, Miss Appleyard--but he says you must have
plenty of beaux without him!"
"That is just it," returned the calm Lilda, looking straight at the
grey eyes that faced her under the thick honey-coloured hair
(Lestrange, though of Huguenot descent, was curiously blonde). "I have
_not_ enough beaux--without Mr. Lestrange! Will you have the next
waltz, Mr. Lestrange--Mr. Clarke's, I believe it is?"
"Thank you, yes, and this schottische, too, if I may," says Lestrange.
The young people standing about said that they never took their eyes
off each other from the moment she spoke to him, and that they swung
into the dance like automatons, leaving her lawful squire, a young
Philadelphian, irate and ridiculous.