“The worst is not
So long as we can sing: _This is the worst_.”
—Shakespeare.
The two parlors were swept and dusted; Marion Kenney enjoyed the
Friday sweeping; she stood in the center of the back parlor,
cheese-cloth duster in hand, taking a satisfied survey of the two
comfortable, old-fashioned rooms.
“Well, you _are_ picturesque!” exclaimed a voice from the doorway of
the back parlor.
With all her twenty-one years, Marion Kenney was girlish enough to
give a swift, shy look the length of the rooms to the long mirror
between the windows in the front parlor. But picturesque was
only—picturesque.
“I don’t see what a girl has to dress herself in furbelows for,” he
went on, ardently, and with evident embarrassment, “when there’s
nothing more becoming than the housekeeping costume; you are as
bewitching in that red sweeping-cap as in your most fashionable
headgear.”
“I like my morning dresses, too,” she said, with a flutter of breath
and color, “perhaps because I’m nothing but a humdrum girl at home.”
“The humdrum girl is getting to be the girl of the age,” he ran on,
his words tumbling over each other in the desire to say, for once in
his life, the least harmful thing; “all her education tends to bring
her down, or up, to the humdrum, if you mean the hum of housekeeping
ways. With a sensible education, literary and musical tastes (not
talents), a sweet temper, a pretty manner, and the tact that brings
out the best in a man, if that is humdrum”—he broke off abruptly, for
he had kindled a light in her face that he had no right to see.
“Have I told you about my little cousin Judith? But I know I have.
She’s a womanly little thing—too womanly. She’s the sweetest prophecy
of a woman. Oh, I remember I promised to take you to see my Aunt
Hilda. But that’s another thing to be laid over. If I live to keep all
my promises I shall live forever.”
“Don’t say that,” she urged, “you are not just to yourself. That is
the only promise you have failed to keep to me, and there’s time
enough for that.”
“I fear not,” he answered, seriously, “she is going away, and so am
I.”
He came to her and laid the photograph in her hand.
“Oh, how sweet!” was Marion’s quick exclamation.
“It _is_ sweet; but she is better than sweet; she has courage.”
“The eyes are too sad for such a girl—how old is she?”
“Nearly thirteen. I took her to New York for a day’s outing, and we
had the picture taken. She was anxious about leaving her mother so
long; the people in the house were with Aunt Hilda, but Lottie, the
girl in the house, is a flighty thing, and Judith was not trusting
her. I saw the look, but I couldn’t hinder it. It will go about
through Europe with me. Did Roger tell you last night—I asked him
to—that I’m off for my long-talked-of tour around the world?”
“_No_,” replied Marion, startled out of her self-command.
“Perhaps he came home late. I wanted to prepare you. It is not so
sudden in my thoughts. But I always do things suddenly after years of
thinking about them. My father wanted me to do this. He said if I were
not careful, money and literary tastes would make me an idle dog. That
set of Ruskin in my room I have left for you. You have made my winter
here so home-like, so refreshingly ‘humdrum,’ that I don’t know how to
thank you. When Roger begged me to come Thanksgiving Day I feared that
I would be one too many, but you all took me in so naturally that I
feel as if I had grown up in your old house with you and Roger. It’s
awfully hard to go, now I’ve come to the point; somehow I hated my
ticket as soon as I took it into my hand. But I knew Aunt Hilda and
Judith were going to Bensalem, and I cannot be with them there.
But—you will write to me?” he asked, pausing in his rush of words.
He had vowed that he would not speak of letters, but the unconscious
appeal of her attitude, the look that he felt in the eyes that could
not lift themselves had given his heart an ache, that, the next
instant, he hated her for making him feel. What right had she to hold
him so? He was Roger’s friend. He had only been kind, and frank and
considerate toward her, and grateful, because she had touched his life
with a touch like healing—he was a better fellow than he was last
winter; he had told her one confidential Sunday twilight that he
almost wanted to be a Christian.
“When will you—come back?” she faltered, speaking her uppermost
thought.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered, roughly. “They may keep me there
years, if I do well for the paper—or I may study there—Judith and her
mother may bring me home—I have promised Aunt Hilda to take Judith for
my sister; that is a rousing responsibility for a bachelor like me. I
have been near them this winter, which was one of my reasons for
coming here. Now I think of it, perhaps it would have been better if I
had never come.”
“_I think it would._”
The slow, impressive words uttered themselves. She heard them as if
another voice had spoken them. They told the whole truth, the whole,
terrible, sorrowful truth, and he knew it.
“Good-bye,” she said, with a flash of defiance.
“Good-bye,” he said, not seeing the hand held firmly toward him.
“I will not write to you—you have no right to ask it.”
“No, I have not,” he answered humbly, “I have no right to anything;
not even to ask you to become my wife.”
She lifted her proud eyes; her lips framed the words that her tongue
refused to speak.
“I beg your pardon. I hardly know what I said.”
“It is hardly necessary to tell me that.”
“And you will not write to me?”
“No.”
“I am unhappy enough,” he blundered, “I never thought our happy winter
would end like this. I did not mean it to end like this.”
It was ended then. She herself had ended it. He would never hear the
new music she was practicing for him; they would not read together the
“Essays of Elia” he had given her last week; she could never tell him—
“I must catch the next train; Roger and I have a farewell dinner in
New York to-day. Old fellow, I’m sorry to leave him. I suppose when I
return I shall find him rusting out in Bensalem; for he’s determined
to go there against all the arguments I can bring up. Good-bye,
Marion.”
“Good-bye,” she said, again, allowing her fingers to stay a moment in
his hand.
“God bless you, dear.”
She remembered the blessing afterward; afterward, she remembered, too:
“and forgive me.” Or did she imagine that? Why should he say that? How
had he hurt her? He had only been like Roger.
She had said—what did she say that he should ask her to become his
wife when he had not once thought of it all winter—when he was going
away for years without thinking of it.
In her bewilderment she could not recall the terrible and true words
she herself had spoken, she imagined them to be beyond everything more
dreadful than she would dare think; they burned her through and
through, these words that had said themselves. Were they hurting him
every hour as they were hurting her?
Impetuous she knew herself to be; frank to a fault Roger plainly told
her that she was; often and often her outbursts were to her own
heart-breaking; but nothing before had she ever done like this; there
was no excuse for this, no healing; he would despise her as long as he
lived, and she would have no power ever to forget.
Shame that he understood, that he had all the time understood, was
burning her up like a fever; that he was gone she was unfeignedly
glad, that she might see his dear face no more, she sometimes prayed.
Still, with it all, her life went on as usual; the errands down town,
the calls, her Sunday-school class, her King’s Daughters’ meetings,
her regular hours for practice, the cake-making, the sweeping, she
even began to read one of the volumes of Ruskin she found on the table
in his chamber, with her name and his initials written in each book;
her life went on, her life with the heart gone out of it; her life
went on, but herself seemed staying behind somewhere.
It was a relief that Roger was away a part of every week, Roger, whom
nothing escaped; the others saw nothing,—she believed there was
nothing for them to see.