Mercy said nothing to her mother of Mrs. White's rudeness. She merely
mentioned the fact of her having met Mr. White near the house, and having
gone with him, at his request, to speak to his mother.
"What's she like, Mercy?" asked Mrs. Carr, eagerly. "Is she goin' to be
company for me?"
"I could not tell, mother," replied Mercy, indifferently; "for it was just
their tea-hour, and I did not stay a minute,--only just to say, How d'ye
do, and Good-evening. But Mr. White says she is very lonely; people don't
go to see her much: so I should think she would be very glad of somebody
her own age in the house, to come and sit with her. She looks very ill,
poor soul. She hasn't been out of her bed, except when she was lifted, for
eight years."
"Dear me! dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Carr. "Oh, I hope I'll never be that
way. What'u'd you ever do child, if I'd get to be like that?"
"No danger, mother dear, of your ever being like Mrs. White," said Mercy,
with an incautious emphasis, which, however, escaped Mrs. Carr's
recognition.
"Why, how can you be so sure I mightn't ever get into jest so bad a way,
child? There's none of us can say what diseases we're likely to hev or
not to hev. Now there's never been a case o' lung trouble in our family
afore mine, not 's fur back 's anybody kin trace it out; 'n' there's been
two cancers to my own knowledge; 'n' I allus hed a most awful dread o'
gettin' a cancer. There ain't no death like thet. There wuz my mother's
half-sister, Keziah,--she that married Elder Swift for her second husband.
She died o' cancer; an' her oldest boy by her first husband he hed it in
his face awful. But he held on ter life 's ef he couldn't say die, nohow;
and I tell yer, Mercy, it wuz a sight nobody'd ever forget, to see him
goin' round the street with one side o' his face all bound up, and his
well eye a rolling round, a-doin' the work o' two. He got so he couldn't
see at all out o' either eye afore he died, 'n' you could hear his
screeches way to our house. There wouldn't no laudalum stop the pain a
mite."
"Oh, mother! don't! don't!" exclaimed Mercy. "It is too dreadful to talk
about. I can't bear to think that any human being has ever suffered so.
Please don't ever speak of cancers again."
Mrs. Carr looked puzzled and a little vexed, as she answered, "Well, I
reckon they've got to be talked about a good deal, fust and last, 's long
's there's so many dies on 'em. But I don't know 's you 'n' I've got any
call to dwell on 'em much. You've got dreadful quick feelin's, Mercy,
ain't you? You allus was orful feelin' for everybody when you wuz little,
'n' I don't see 's you've outgrowed it a bit. But I expect it's thet makes
you sech friends with folks, an' makes you such a good gal to your poor
old mother. Kiss me, child," and Mrs. Carr lifted up her face to be
kissed, as a child lifts up its face to its mother. She did this many
times a day; and, whenever Mercy bent down to kiss her, she put her hands
on the old woman's shoulders, and said, "Dear little mother!" in a tone
which made her mother's heart warm with happiness.
It is a very beautiful thing to see just this sort of relation between an
aged parent and a child, the exact reversal of the bond, and the bond so
absolutely fulfilled. It seems to give a new and deeper sense to the word
"filial," and a new and deeper significance to the joy of motherhood or
fatherhood. Alas, that so few sons and daughters are capable of it! so few
helpless old people know the blessedness of it! No little child six years
old ever rested more entirely and confidingly in the love and kindness and
shelter and direction of its mother than did Mrs. Carr in the love and
kindness and shelter and direction of her daughter Mercy. It had begun to
be so, while Mercy was yet a little girl. Before she was fifteen years
old, she felt a responsibility for her mother's happiness, a watchfulness
over her mother's health, and even a care of her mother's clothes. With
each year, the sense of these responsibilities grew deeper; and after her
marriage, as she was denied the blessing of children, all the deep
maternal instincts of her strong nature flowed back and centred anew
around this comparatively helpless, aged child whom she called mother, and
treated with never-failing respect.
When Mrs. Carr first saw the house they were to live in, she exclaimed,--
"O Lor', Mercy! Is thet the house?" Then, stepping back a few steps,
shoving her spectacles high on her nose, and with her head well thrown
back, she took a survey of the building in silence. Then she turned slowly
around, and, facing Mercy, said in a droll, dry way, not uncommon with
her,--
"'Bijah Jenkins's barn!"
Mercy laughed outright.
"So it is, mother. I hadn't thought of it. It looks just like that old
barn of Deacon Jenkins's."
"Yes," said Mrs. Carr. "That's it, exzackly. Well, I never thought o'
offerin' to hire a barn to live in afore, but I s'pose 't'll do till we
can look about. Mebbe we can do better."
"But we've taken it for a year, mother," said Mercy, a little dismayed.
"Oh, hev we? Well, well, I daresay it's comfortable enough; so the sun
shines in mornin's, thet's the most I care for. You'll make any kind o'
house pooty to look at inside, an' I reckon we needn't roost on the fences
outside, a-lookin' at it, any more'n we choose to. It does look, for all
the world though, like 'Bijah Jenkins's old yaller barn; 'n' thet there
jog's jest the way he jined on his cow-shed. I declare it's too
redicklus." And the old lady laughed till she had to wipe her spectacles.
"It could be made very pretty, I think," said Mercy, "for all it is so
hideous now. I know just what I'd do to it, if it were mine. I'd throw
out a big bay window in that corner where the jog is, and another on the
middle of the north side, and then run a piazza across the west side, and
carry the platform round both the bay windows. I saw a picture of a house
in a book Mr. Allen had, which looked very much as this would look then.
Oh, but I'd like to do it!" Mercy's imagination was so fired with the
picture she had made to herself of the house thus altered and improved,
that she could not easily relinquish it.
"But, Mercy, you don't know the lay o' the rooms, child. You don' 'no'
where that ere jog comes. Your bay window mightn't come so's't would be of
any use. Yer wouldn't build one jest to look at, would you?" said her
mother.
"I'm not so sure I wouldn't, if I had plenty of money," replied Mercy,
laughing. "But I have no idea of building bay windows on other people's
houses. I was only amusing myself by planning it. I'd rather have that
house, old and horrid as it is, than any house in the town. I like the
situation so much, and the woods are so beautiful. Perhaps I'll earn a lot
of money some day, and buy the place, and make it just as we like it."
"You earn money, child!" said Mrs. Carr, in a tone of unqualified wonder.
"How could you earn money, I'd like to know?"
"Oh, make bonnets or gowns, dear little mother, or teach school," said
Mercy, coloring. "Mr. Allen said I was quite well enough fitted to teach
our school at home, if I liked."
"But, Mercy, child, you'd never go to do any such thing's thet, would yer
now?" said her mother, piteously. "Don't ye hev all ye want, Mercy? Ain't
there money enough for our clothes? I'm sure I don't need much; an' I
could do with a good deal less, if there was any thing you wanted, dear.
Your father he 'd never rest in his grave, ef he thought his little Mercy
was a havin' to arn money for her livin'. You didn't mean it, child, did
yer? Say yer didn't mean it, Mercy," and tears stood in the poor old
woman's eyes.
It is strange what a tenacious pride there was in the hearts of our old
sea-faring men of a half century ago. They had the same feeling that kings
and emperors might have in regard to their wives and daughters, that it
was a disgrace for them to be obliged to earn money. It would be an
interesting thing to analyze this sentiment, to trace it to its roots: it
was so universal among successful sea-faring men that it must have had its
origin in some trait distinctively peculiar to their profession. All the
other women in the town or the village might eke out the family incomes by
whatever devices they pleased; but the captains' wives were to be ladies.
They were to wear silk gowns brought from many a land; they were to have
ornaments of quaint fashion, picked up here and there; they were to have
money enough in the bank to live on in quiet comfort during the intervals
when the husbands sailed away to make more. So strong was this feeling
that it crystallized into a traditionary custom of life, which even
poverty finds it hard to overcome. You shall find to-day, in any one of
the seaport cities or towns of New England, widows and daughters of
sea-captains, living, or rather seeming to live, upon the most beggarly
incomes, but still keeping up a certain pathetic sham of appearance of
being at ease. If they are really face to face with probable starvation,
they may go to some charitable institution where fine needlework is given
out, and earn a few dollars in that way. But they will fetch and carry
their work by night, and no neighbor will ever by any chance surprise them
with it in their hands. Most beautifully is this surreptitious sewing
done; there is no work in this country like it. The tiny stitches bear the
very aroma of sad and lonely leisure in them; a certain fine pride, too,
as if the poverty-constrained lady would in no wise condescend to depart
from her own standard in the matter of a single loop or stitch, no matter
to what plebeian uses the garment might come after it should leave her
hands.
Mercy's deep blush when she replied to her mother's astonished inquiry,
how she could possibly earn any money, sprung from her consciousness of a
secret,--a secret so harmless in itself, that she was ashamed of having
any feeling of guilt in keeping it a secret; and yet, her fine and
fastidious honesty so hated even the semblance of concealment, that the
mere withholding of a fact, simply because she disliked to mention it,
seemed to her akin to a denial of it. If there is such a thing in a human
being as organic honesty,--an honesty which makes a lie not difficult, but
impossible, just as it is impossible for men to walk on ceilings like
flies, or to breathe in water like fishes,--Mercy Philbrick had it. The
least approach to an equivocation was abhorrent to her: not that she
reasoned about it, and submitting it to her conscience found it wicked,
and therefore hateful; but that she disliked it instinctively,--as
instinctively as she disliked pain. Her moral nerves shrank from it, just
as nerves of the body shrink from suffering; and she recoiled from the
suggestion of such a thing with the same involuntary quickness with which
we put up the hand to ward off a falling blow, or drop the eyelid to
protect an endangered eye. Physicians tell us that there are in men and
women such enormous differences in this matter of sensitiveness to
physical pain that one person may die of a pain which would be
comparatively slight to another; and this is a fact which has to be taken
very carefully into account, in all dealing with disease in people of the
greatest capacity for suffering. May there not be equally great
differences in souls, in the matter of sensitiveness to moral
hurt?--differences for which the soul is not responsible, any more than
the body is responsible for its skin's having been made thin or thick.
Will-power has nothing whatever to do with determining the latter
conditions. Let us be careful how far we take it to task for failing to
control the others. Perhaps we shall learn, in some other stage of
existence, that there is in this world a great deal of moral color
blindness, congenital, incurable; and that God has much more pity than we
suppose for poor things who have stumbled a good many times while they
were groping in darkness.
People who see clearly themselves are almost always intolerant of those
who do not. We often see this ludicrously exemplified, even in the trivial
matter of near-sightedness. We are almost always a little vexed, when we
point out a distant object to a friend, and hear him reply,--
"No, I do not see it at all. I am near-sighted."
"What! can't you see that far?" is the frequent retort, and in the pity is
a dash of impatience.
There is a great deal of intolerance in the world, which is closely akin
to this; and not a whit more reasonable or righteous, though it makes
great pretensions to being both. Mercy Philbrick was full of such
intolerance, on this one point of honesty. She was intolerant not only to
others, she was intolerant to herself. She had seasons of fierce and
hopeless debating with herself, on the most trivial matters, or what would
seem so to nine hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand. During
such seasons as these, her treatment of her friends and acquaintances had
odd alternations of frank friendliness and reticent coolness. A sudden
misgiving whether she might not be appearing to like her friend more than
she really did would seize her at most inopportune moments, and make her
absent-minded and irresponsive. She would leave sentences abruptly
unfinished,--invitations, perhaps, or the acceptances of invitations, the
mere words of which spring readily to one's lips, and are thoughtlessly
spoken. But, in Mercy's times of conflict with herself, even these were
exaggerated in her view to monstrous deceits. She had again and again
held long conversations with Mr. Allen on this subject, but he failed to
help her. He was a good man, of average conscientiousness and average
perception: he literally could not see many of the points which Mercy's
keener analysis ferreted out, and sharpened into weapons for her own pain.
He thought her simply morbid.
"Now, child," he would say,--for, although he was only a few years Mercy's
senior, he had taught her like a child for three years,--"now, child,
leave off worrying yourself by these fancies. There is not the least
danger of your ever being any thing but truthful. Nature and grace are
both too strong in you. There is no lie in saying to a person who has come
to see you in your own house, 'I am glad to see you,' for you are glad;
and, if not, you can make yourself glad, when you think how much pleasure
you can give the person by talking with him. You are glad, always, to give
pleasure to any human being, are you not?"
"Yes," Mercy would reply unhesitatingly.
"Very well. To the person who comes to see you, you give pleasure:
therefore, you are glad to see him."
"But, Mr. Allen," would persist poor Mercy, "that is not what the person
thinks I mean. Very often some one comes to see me, who bores me so that I
can hardly keep awake. He would not be pleased if he knew that all my
cordial welcome really meant was,--'I'm glad to see you, because I'm a
benevolent person, and am willing to make my fellow-creatures happy at any
sacrifice, even at the frightful one of entertaining such a bore as you
are!' He would never come near me again, if he knew I thought that; and
yet, if I do think so, and make him think I do not, is not that the
biggest sort of a lie? Why, Mr. Allen, many a time when I have seen
tiresome or disagreeable people coming to our house, I have run away and
hid myself, so as not to be found; not in the least because I could not
bear the being bored by them, but because I could not bear the thought of
the lies I should speak, or at least act, if I saw them."
"The interpretation a visitor chooses to put upon our kind cordiality of
manner to him is his own affair, not ours, Mercy. It is a Christian duty
to be cordial and kindly of manner to every human being: any thing less
gives pain, repels people from us, and hinders our being able to do them
good. There is no more doubt of this than of any other first principle of
Christian conduct; and I am very sorry that these morbid notions have
taken such hold of you. If you yield to them, you will make yourself soon
disliked and feared, and give a great deal of needless pain to your
neighbors."
It was hard for Mr. Allen to be severe with Mercy, for he loved her as if
she were his younger sister; but he honestly thought her to be in great
danger of falling into a chronic morbidness on this subject, and he
believed that stern words were most likely to convince her of her mistake.
It was a sort of battle, however,--this battle which Mercy was forced to
fight,--in which no human being can help another, unless he has first been
through the same battle himself. All that Mr. Allen said seemed to Mercy
specious and, to a certain extent, trivial: it failed to influence her,
simply because it did not so much as recognize the point where her
difficulty lay.
"If Mr. Allen tries till he dies, he will never convinc me that it is not
deceiving people to make them think you're glad to see them when you're
not," Mercy said to herself often, as, with flushed cheeks and tears in
her eyes, she walked home after these conversations. "He may make me think
that it is right to deceive them rather than to make them unhappy. It
almost seems as if it must be; yet, if we once admitted that, where
should we ever stop? It seems to me that would be a very dangerous
doctrine. A lie's a lie, let whoever will call it fine names, and pass it
off as a Christian duty The Bible does not say, 'Thou shalt not lie,
except when it is necessary to lie, to avoid hurting thy neighbor's
feelings,' It says, 'Thou shalt not lie.' Oh, what a horrible word 'lie'
is! It stings like a short, sharp stroke with a lash." And Mercy would
turn away from the thought with a shudder, and resolutely force hersef to
think of something else. Sometimes she would escape from the perplexity
for weeks: chance would so favor her, that no opportunity for what she
felt to be deceit would occur; but, in these intervals of relief, her
tortured conscience seemed only to renew its voices, and spring upon her
all the more fiercely on the next occasion. The effect, of all these
indecisive conflicts upon Mercy's character had not been good. They had
left her morally bruised, and therefore abnormally sensitive to the least
touch. She was in danger of becoming either a fanatic for truth, or
indifferent to it. Paradoxcal as it may seem, she was in almost as much
danger of the one as of the other. But always, when our hurts are fast
healing without help, the help comes. It is probable that there is to-day
on the earth a cure, either in herb or stone or spring, for every ill
which men's bodies can know. Ignorance and accident may hinder us long
from them, but sooner or later the race shall come to possess them all. So
with souls. There is the ready truth, the living voice, the warm hand, or
the final experience, waiting for each soul's need. We do not die till we
have found them. There were yet to enter into Mercy Philbrick's life a new
light and a new force, by the help of which she would see clearly and
stand firm.
The secret which she had now for nearly a year kept from her mother was a
very harmless one. To people of the world, it would appear so trivial a
thing, that the conscience which could feel itself wounded by reticence on
such a point would seem hardly worth a sneer. Mr. Allen, who had been
Mercy's teacher for three years, had early seen in her a strong poetic
impulse, and had fostered and stimulated it by every means in his power.
He believed that in the exercise of this talent she would find the best
possible help for her loneliness and comfort for her sorrow. He recognized
clearly that, to so exceptional a nature as Mercy's, a certain amount of
isolation was inevitable, all through her life, however fortunate she
might be in entering into new and wider relations. The loneliness of
intense individuality is the loneliest loneliness in the world,--a
loneliness which crowds only aggravate, and which even the closest and
happiest companionship can only in part cure. The creative faculty is the
most inalienable and uncontrollable of individualities. It is at once its
own reward and its own penalty: until it has conquered the freedom of its
own city, in which it must for ever dwell, more or less apart, it is only
a prisoner in the cities of others. All this Mr. Allen felt for Mercy,
recognized in Mercy. He felt and recognized it by the instinct of love,
rather than by any intellectual perception. Intellectually, he was, in
spite of his superior culture, far Mercy's inferior. He had been brave
enough and manly enough to recognize this, and also to recognize what it
took still more manliness to recognize,--that she could never love a man
of his temperament. It would have been very easy for him to love Mercy. He
was not a man of a passionate nature; but he felt himself strangely
stirred whenever he looked into her sensitive, orchid-like face. He felt
in every fibre of him that to have the whole love of such a woman would be
bewildering joy; yet never for one moment did he allow himself to think of
seeking it. "I might make her think she loved me, perhaps," he said to
himself. "She is so lonely and sad, and has seen so few men; but it would
be base. She needs a nature totally different from mine, a life unlike the
life I shall lead. I will never try to make her love me. And he never did.
He taught her and trained her, and developed her, patiently, exactingly,
and yet tenderly as if she had been his sister; but he never betrayed to
her, even by a look or tone, that he could have loved her as his wife. No
doubt his influence was greater over her for this subtle, unacknowledged
bond. It gave to their intercourse a certain strange mixture of reticence
and familiarity, which grew more and more perilous and significant month
by month. Probably a change must have come, had they lived thus closely
together a year or two longer. The change could have been in but one
direction. They loved each other too much to ever love less: they might
have loved more; and Mercy's life had been more peaceful, her heart had
known a truer content, if she had never felt any stronger emotion than
that which Harley Allen's love would have roused in her bosom. But his
resolution was inexorable. His instinct was too keen, his will too strong:
he compelled all his home-seeking, wife-loving thoughts to turn away from
Mercy; and, six months after her departure, he had loyally and lovingly
promised to be the husband of another. In Mercy's future he felt an
intense interest; he would never cease to watch over her, if she would let
him; he would guide, mould, and direct her, until the time came--he knew
it would come--when she had outgrown his help, and ascended to a plane
where he could no longer guide her. His greatest fear was lest, from her
overflowing vitality and keen sensuous delight in all the surface
activities and pleasures of life, the intellectual side of her nature
should be kept in the background and not properly nourished. He had
compelled her to study, to think, to write. Who would do this for her in
the new home? He knew enough of Stephen White's nature to fear that he,
while he might be an appreciative friend, would not be a stimulating one.
He was too dreamy and pleasure-loving himself to be a spur to others. A
vague wonder, almost like a presentiment, haunted his thoughts continually
as to the nature of the relation which would exist between Stephen and
Mercy. One day he wrote a long letter to Stephen, telling him all about
Mercy,--her history; her peculiarities, mental and moral; her great need
of mental training; her wonderful natural gifts. He closed his letter in
these words:--
"There is the making of a glorious woman and, I think, a true poet in this
girl; but whether she ever makes either will depend entirely upon the
hands she falls into. She has a capacity for involuntary adaptation of
herself to any surroundings, and for an unconscious and indomitable
loyalty to the every-day needs of every-day life, which rarely go with the
poetic temperament. She would contentedly make bread and do nothing else,
till the day of her death, if that seemed to be the nearest and most
demanded duty. She would be heartily faithful and joyous every day, in
intercourse with only common and uncultivated people, if fate sets her
among them. She seems to me sometimes to be more literally a child of God,
in the true and complete sense of the word 'child,' than any one I ever
knew. She takes every thing which comes to her just as a happy and good
little child takes every thing that is given to him, and is pleased with
all; yet she is not at all a religious person. I am often distressed by
her lack of impulse to worship. I think she has no strong sense of a
personal God; yet her conscience is in many ways morbidly sensitive. She
is a most interesting and absorbing person,--one entirely unique in my
experience. Living with her, as you will, it will be impossible for you
not to influence her strongly, one way or the other; and I want to enlist
your help to carry on the work I have begun. She owes it to herself and to
the world not to let her mind be inactive. I am very much mistaken if she
has not within her the power to write poems, which shall take place among
the work that lasts."
Mr. Allen read this letter over several times, and then, with a gesture of
impatience, tore the sheets down the middle, and threw them into the fire,
exclaiming,--
"Pshaw! as if there were any use in sending a man a portrait of a woman he
is to see every day. If Stephen is the person to amount to any thing in
her life, he will recognize her. If he is not, all my descriptions of her
will be thrown away. It is best to let things take their own course."
After some deliberation, he decided to take a step, which he would never
have taken, had Mercy not been going away from his influence,--a step
which he had again and again said to himself he would hot risk, lest the
effect might be to hinder her intellectual growth. He sent two of her
poems to a friend of his, who was the editor of one of the leading
magazines in the country. The welcome they met exceeded even his
anticipations. By the very next mail, he received a note from his friend,
enclosing a check, which to Harley Allen's inexperience of such matters
seemed disproportionately large. "Your little Cape Cod girl is a wonder,
indeed," wrote the editor. "If she can keep on writing such verse as this,
she will make a name for herself. Send us some more: we'll pay her well
for it."
Mr. Allen was perplexed. He had not once thought of the verses being paid
for. He had thought that to see her poems in print might give Mercy a new
incentive to work, might rouse in her an ambition, which would in part
take the place of the stimulus which his teachings had given her. He very
much disliked to tell her what he had done, and to give to her the money
she had unwittingly earned. He feared that she would resent it; he feared
that she would be too elated by it; he feared a dozen different things in
as many minutes, as he sat turning the check over and over in his hands.
But his fears were all unfounded. Mercy had too genuine an artistic nature
to be elated, too much simplicity to be offended. Her first emotion was
one of incredulity; her second, of unaffected and humble wonder that any
verses of hers should have been so well spoken of; and her next, of
childlike glee at the possibility of her earning any money. She had not a
trace of the false pride which had crystallized in her mother's nature
into such a barrier against the idea of a paid industry.
"O Mr. Allen!" she exclaimed, "is it really possible? Do you think the
verses were really worth it? Are you quite sure the editor did not send
the money because the verses were written by a friend of yours?"
Harley Allen laughed.
"Editors are not at all likely, Mercy," he said, "to pay any more for
things than the things are worth. I think you will some day laugh
heartily, as you look back upon the misgivings with which you received the
first money earned by your pen. If you will only work faithfully and
painstakingly, you can do work which will be much better paid than this."
Mercy's eyes flashed.
"Oh! oh! Then I can have books and pictures, and take journeys," she said
in a tone of such ecstasy that Mr. Allen was surprised.
"Why, Mercy," he replied, "I did not know you were such a discontented
girl. Have you always longed for all these things?"
"I'm not discontented, Mr. Allen," answered Mercy, a little proudly. "I
never had a discontented moment in my life. I'm not so silly. I have never
yet seen the day which did not seem to me brimful and running over with
joys and delights; that is, except when I was for a little while bowed
down by a grief nobody could bear up under," she added, with a sudden
drooping of every feature in her expressive face, as she recalled the one
sharp grief of her life. "I don't see why a distinct longing for all sorts
of beautiful things need be in the least inconsistent with absolute
content. In fact, I know it isn't; for I have both."
Mr. Allen was not enough of an idealist to understand this. He looked
puzzled, and Mercy went on,--
"Why, Mr. Allen, I should like to have our home perfectly beautiful, just
like the most beautiful houses I have read about in books. I should like
to have the walls hung full of pictures, and the rooms filled full of
books; and I should like to have great greenhouses full of all the rare
and exquisite flowers of the whole world. I'd like one house like the
house you told me of, full of all the orchids, and another full of only
palms and ferns. I should like to wear always the costliest of silks, very
plain and never of bright colors, but heavy and soft and shining; and
laces that were like fleecy clouds when they are just scattering. I should
like to be perfectly beautiful, and to have perfectly beautiful people
around me. But all this doesn't make me one bit less contented. I care
just as much for my few little, old books, and my two or three pictures,
and our beds of sweet-williams and pinks. They all give me such pleasure
that I'm just glad I'm alive every minute.--What are you thinking of, Mr.
Allen!" exclaimed Mercy, breaking off and coloring scarlet, as she became
suddenly aware that her pastor was gazing at her with a scrutinizing look
she had never seen on his face before.
"Of your future life, Mercy,--of your future life. I am wondering what it
will be, and if the dear Lord will carry you safe through all the
temptations which the world must offer to one so sensitive as you are to
all its beauties," replied Mr. Allen, sadly. Mercy was displeased. She was
always intolerant of this class of references to the Lord. Her sense of
honesty took alarm at them. In a curt and half-petulant tone, she
answered,--
"I suppose ministers have to say such things, Mr. Allen; but I wish you
wouldn't say them to me. I do not think that the Lord made the beautiful
things in this world for temptations; and I believe he expects us to keep
ourselves out of mischief, and not throw the responsibility on to him!"
"Oh, Mercy, Mercy! don't say such things! They sound irreverent: they
shock me!" exclaimed Mr. Allen, deeply pained by Mercy's tone and words.
"I am very sorry to shock you, Mr. Allen," replied Mercy, in a gentler
tone. "Pray forgive me. I do not think, however, there is half as much
real irreverence in saying that the Lord expects us to look out for
ourselves and keep out of mischief as there is in teaching that he made a
whole world full of people so weak and miserable that they couldn't look
after themselves, and had to be lifted along all the time."
Mr. Allen shook his head, and sighed. When Mercy was in this frame of
mind, it was of no use to argue with her. He returned to the subject of
her poetry.
"If you will keep on reading and studying, Mercy, and will compel yourself
to write and rewrite carefully, there is no reason why you should not have
a genuine success as a writer, and put yourself in a position to earn
money enough to buy a great many comforts and pleasures for yourself, and
your mother also," he said.
At the mention of her mother, Mercy started, and exclaimed irrelevantly,--
"Dear me! I never once thought of mother."
Mr. Allen looked, as well he might, mystified. "Never once thought of her!
What do you mean, Mercy?"
"Why, I mean I never once thought about telling her about the money. She
wouldn't like it."
"Why not? I should think she would not only like the money, but be very
proud of your being able to earn it in such a way."
"Perhaps that might make a difference," said Mercy, reflectively: "it
would seem quite different to her from taking in sewing, I suppose."
"Well, I should think so," laughed Mr. Allen. "Very different, indeed."
"But it's earning money, working for money, all the same," continued
Mercy; "and you haven't the least idea how mother feels about that. Father
must have been full of queer notions. She got it all from him. But I can't
see that there is any difference between a woman's taking money for what
she can do, and a man's taking money for what he can do. I can do sewing,
and you can preach; and of the two, if people must go without one or the
other, they could do without sermons better than without clothes,--eh, Mr.
Allen?" and Mercy laughed mischievously. "But once when I told mother I
believed I would turn dressmaker for the town, I knew I could earn ever so
much money, besides doing a philanthropy in getting some decent gowns into
the community, she was so horrified and unhappy at the bare idea that I
never have forgotten it. It is just so with ever so many women here. They
would rather half-starve than do any thing to earn money. For my part, I
think it is nonsense."
"Certainly, Mercy,--certainly it is," replied Mr. Allen, anxious lest this
new barrier should come between Mercy and her work. "It is only a
prejudice. And you need never let your mother know any thing about it.
She is so old and feeble it would not be worth while to worry her."
Mercy's eyes grew dark and stern as she fixed them on Mr. Allen. "I wonder
I believe any thing you say, Mr. Allen. How many things do you keep back
from me, or state differently from what they are, to save my feelings? or
to adapt the truth to my feebleness, which is not like the feebleness of
old age, to be sure, but is feebleness in comparison with your knowledge
and strength? I hate, hate, hate, your theories about deceiving people. I
shall certainly tell my mother, if I keep on writing, and am paid for it,"
she said impetuously.
"Very well. Of course, if you think it wrong to leave her in ignorance
about it, you must tell her. I myself see no reason for your mentioning
the fact, unless you choose to. You are a mature and independent woman:
she is old and childish. The relation between you is really reversed. You
are the mother, and she the child. Suppose she had become a writer when
you were a little girl: would it have been her duty to tell you of it?"
replied Mr. Allen.
"I don't care! I shall tell her! I never have kept the least thing from
her yet, and I don't believe I ever will," said Mercy. "You'll never make
me think it's right, Mr. Allen. What a good Jesuit you'd have made,
wouldn't you?"
Mr. Allen colored. "Oh, child, how unjust you are!" he exclaimed. "But it
must be all my stupid way of putting things. One of these days, you'll see
it all differently."
And she did. Firm as were her resolutions to tell her mother every thing,
she could not find courage to tell her about the verses and the price paid
for them. Again and again she had approached the subject, and had been
frightened back,--sometimes by her own unconquerable dislike to speaking
of her poetry; sometimes, as in the instance above, by an outbreak on her
mother's part of indignation at the bare suggestion of her earning money.
After that conversation, Mercy resolved within herself to postpone the day
of the revelation, until there should be more to tell and more to show.
"If ever I have a hundred dollars, I'll tell her then," she thought. "So
much money as that would make it seem better to her. And I will have a
good many verses by that time to read to her." And so the secret grew
bigger and heavier, and yet Mercy grew more used to carrying it, until she
herself began to doubt whether Mr. Allen were not right, after all; and if
it would not be a pity to trouble the feeble old heart with a needless
perplexity and pain.