The winter set in before its time, and with almost unprecedented severity.
Early in the last week in November, the whole country was white with snow,
the streams were frozen solid, and the cold was intense. Week after week
the mercury ranged from zero to ten, fifteen, and even twenty below, and
fierce winds howled night and day. It was a terrible winter for old
people. They dropped on all sides, like leaves swept off of trees in
autumn gales. It was startling to read the death records in the
newspapers, so large a proportion of them were of men and women past
sixty. Mrs. Carr had been steadily growing feebler all summer; but the
change had seemed to Mercy to be more mental than physical, and she had
been in a measure blinded to her mother's real condition. With the
increase of childishness and loss of memory had come an increased
gentleness and love of quiet, which partially disguised the loss of
strength. She would sit in her chair from morning till night, looking out
of the window or watching the movements of those around her, with an
expression of perfect placidity on her face. When she was spoken to, she
smiled, but did not often speak. The smile was meaningless and yet
infinitely pathetic: it was an infant's smile on an aged face; the
infant's heart and infant's brain had come back. All the weariness, all
the perplexity, all the sorrow, had gone from life, had slipped away from
memory. This state had come on so gradually that even Mercy hardly
realized the extent of it. The silent smile or the gentle, simple
ejaculations with which her mother habitually replied meant more to her
than they did to others. She did not comprehend how little they really
proved a full consciousness on her mother's part; and she was unutterably
shocked, when, on going to her bedside one morning, she found her unable
to move, and evidently without clear recognition of any one's face. The
end had begun; the paralysis which had so slowly been putting the mind to
rest had prostrated the body also. It was now only a question of length of
siege, of how much vital force the system had hoarded up. Lying helpless
in bed, the poor old woman was as placid and gentle as before. She never
murmured nor even stirred impatiently. She seemed unconscious of any
weariness. The only emotion she showed was when Mercy left the room; then
she would cry silently till Mercy returned. Her eyes followed Mercy
constantly, as a little babe's follow its mother; and she would not take a
mouthful of food from any other hand.
It was the very hardest form of illness for Mercy to bear. A violent and
distressing disease, taxing her strength, her ingenuity to their utmost
every moment, would have been comparatively nothing to her. To sit day
after day, night after night, gazing into the senseless yet appealing eyes
of this motionless being, who had literally no needs except a helpless
animal's needs of food and drink; who clung to her with the irrational
clinging of an infant, yet would never know even her name again,--it was
worse than the chaining of life to death. As the days wore on, a species
of terror took possession of Mercy. It seemed to her that this silent
watchful, motionless creature never had been her mother,--never had been a
human being like other human beings. As the old face grew more and more
haggard, and the old hands more and more skinny and claw-like, and the
traces of intellect and thought more and more faded away from the
features, the horror deepened, until Mercy feared that her own brain must
be giving way. She revolted from the very thought of herself for having
such a feeling towards her mother. Every instinct of loyalty in her deeply
loyal nature rose up indignantly against her. She would reiterate to
herself the word, "Mother! mother! mother!" as she sat gazing with a
species of horror-stricken fascination into the meaningless face. But she
could not shake off the feeling. Her nerves were fast giving way under the
strain, and no one could help her. If she left the room or the house, the
consciousness that the helpless creature was lying silently weeping for
lack of the sight of her pursued her like a presence. She saw the piteous
old face on the pillow, and the slow tears trickling down the cheeks, just
as distinctly as if she were sitting by the bed. On the whole, the torture
of staying was less than the torture of being away; and for weeks
together she did not leave the house. Sometimes a dull sense of relief
came to her in the thought that by this strange confinement she was
escaping many things which would have been hard. She rarely saw Stephen
except for a few moments late in the evening. He had ventured into Mrs.
Carr's room once or twice; but his presence seemed to disturb her, the
only presence that had done so. She looked distressed, made agonizing
efforts to speak, and with the hand she could lift made a gesture to repel
him when he drew near the bed. In Mercy's overwrought state, this seemed
to her like an omen. She shuddered, and drew Stephen away.
"O Stephen," she said, "she knows now that I have deceived her about you.
Don't come near her again."
"You never deceived her, darling. Do not distress yourself so," whispered
Stephen. They were standing on the threshold of the room. A slight
rustling in the bed made them turn: Mrs. Carr had half-lifted her head
from the pillow, her lower jaw had fallen to its utmost extent in her
effort to articulate, and she was pointing the forefinger of her left hand
at the door. It was a frightful sight. Even Stephen turned pale, and
sprang hastily away.
"You see," said Mercy, in a ghastly whisper, "sometimes she certainly does
know things; but she never looks like that except at you. You must never
come in again."
"No," said Stephen, almost as horror-stricken as Mercy. "It is very
strange though, for she always used to seem so fond of me."
"She was very childish and patient," said Mercy. "And I think she thought
that you were slowly getting to care about me; but now, wherever her soul
is,--I think it has left her body,--she knows that we deceived her."
Stephen made no answer, but turned to go. The expression of resolved
endurance on his face pierced Mercy to the quick, as it always did. She
sprang after him, and clasped both her hands on his arm. "O Stephen,
darling,--precious, brave, strong darling! do forgive me. I ought to be
killed for even saying one word to give you pain. How I can, I don't see,
when I long so to make you happy always."
"You do give me great, unutterable happiness, Mercy," he replied. "I never
think of the pain: I only think of the joy," and he laid her hand on his
lips. "All the pain that you could possibly give me in a lifetime could
not outweigh the joy of one such moment as this, when you say that you
love me."
These days were unspeakably hard for Stephen. He had grown during the past
year to so live on the sight and in the blessedness of Mercy that to be
shut away from them was simply a sort of dying. There was no going back
for him to the calm routine of the old life before she came. He was
restless and wretched: he walked up and down in front of the house every
night, watching the shadow of her figure on the curtains of her mother's
room. He made all manner of excuses, true and false, reasonable and
unreasonable, to speak to her for a moment at the door in the morning. He
carried the few verses in his pocket-book she had given him; and, although
he knew them nearly by heart, he spent long hours in his office turning
the little papers over and over. Some of them were so joyous that they
stirred in him almost a bitter incredulity as he read them in these days
of loss and pain. One was a sonnet which she had written during a two
days' absence of his,--his only absence from his mother's house for six
years. Mercy had been astonished at her sense of loneliness in these two
days. "O Stephen," she had said, when he came back, "I am honestly ashamed
of having missed you so much. Just the knowing that you wouldn't be here
to come in, in the evenings, made the days seem a thousand years long, and
this is what came of it."
And she gave him this sonnet:--
TO AN ABSENT LOVER.
That so much change should come when them dost go,
Is mystery that I cannot ravel quite.
The very house seems dark as when the light
Of lamps goes out. Each wonted thing doth grow
So altered, that I wander to and fro,
Bewildered by the most familiar sight,
And feel like one who rouses in the night
From dream of ecstasy, and cannot know
At first if he be sleeping or awake,
My foolish heart so foolish for thy sake
Hath grown, dear one!
Teach me to be more wise.
I blush for all my foolishness doth lack;
I fear to seem a coward in thine eyes.
Teach me, dear one,--but first thou must come back!
Another was a little poem, which she laughingly called his and not hers.
One morning, when they had bade each other "good-by," and she had kissed
him,--a rare thing for Mercy to do, he had exclaimed, "That kiss will go
floating before me all day in the air, Mercy. I shall see every thing in a
light as rosy as your lips."
At night she gave him this little poem, saying,--
"This is your poem, not mine, darling. I should never have thought of any
thing so absurd myself."
"COULEUR DE ROSE."
All things to-day "Couleur de rose,"
I see,--oh, why?
I know, and my dear love she knows,
Why, oh, why!
On both my eyes her lips she set,
All red and warm and dewy wet,
As she passed by.
The kiss did not my eyelids close,
But like a rosy vapor goes,
Where'er I sit, where'er I lie,
Before my every glance, and shows
All things to-day "Couleur de rose."
Would it last thus? Alas, who knows?
Men ask and sigh:
They say it fades, "Couleur de rose."
Why, oh, why?
Without swift joy and sweet surprise,
Surely those lips upon my eyes
Could never lie,
Though both our heads were white as snows,
And though the bitterest storm that blows,
Of trouble and adversity,
Had bent us low: all life still shows
To eyes that love "Couleur de rose."
This sonnet, also, she persisted in calling Stephen's, and not her own,
because he had asked her the question which had suggested it:--
LOVERS' THOUGHTS.
"How feels the earth when, breaking from the night,
The sweet and sudden Dawn impatient spills
Her rosy colors all along the hills?
How feels the sea, as it turns sudden white,
And shines like molten silver in the light
Which pours from eastward when the full moon fills
Her time to rise?"
"I know not, love, what thrills
The earth, the sea, may feel. How should I know?
Except I guess by this,--the joy I feel
When sudden on my silence or my gloom
Thy presence bursts and lights the very room?
Then on my face doth not glad color steal
Like shining waves, or hill-tops' sunrise glow?"
One of the others was the poem of which I spoke once before, the poem
which had been suggested to her by her desolate sense of homelessness on
the first night of her arrival in Penfield. This poem had been widely
copied after its first appearance in one of the magazines; and it had been
more than once said of it, "Surely no one but a genuine outcast could have
written such a poem as this." It was hard for Mercy's friends to
associate the words with her. When she was asked how it happened that she
wrote them, she exclaimed, "I did not write that poem, I lived it one
night,--the night when I came to Penfield, and drove through these streets
in the rain with mother. No vagabond in the world ever felt more forlorn
than I did then."
THE OUTCAST.
O sharp, cold wind, thou art my friend!
And thou, fierce rain, I need not dread
Thy wonted touch upon my head!
On, loving brothers! Wreak and spend
Your force on all these dwellings. Rend
These doors so pitilessly locked,
To keep the friendless out! Strike dead
The fires whose glow hath only mocked
By muffled rays the night where I,
The lonely outcast, freezing lie!
Ha! If upon those doors to-night
I knocked, how well I know the stare,
The questioning, the mingled air
Of scorn and pity at the sight,
The wonder if it would be right
To give me alms of meat and bread!
And if I, reckless, standing there,
For once the truth imploring said,
That not for bread or meat I longed,
That such an alms my real need wronged,
That I would fain come in, and sit
Beside their fire, and hear the voice
Of children; yea, and if my choice
Were free, and I dared mention it,
And some sweet child should think me fit
To hold a child upon my knee
One moment, would my soul rejoice,
More than to banquet royally,
And I the pulses of its wrist
Would kiss, as men the cross have kissed.
Ha! Well the haughty stare I know
With which they'd say, "The man is mad!"
"What an impostor's face he had!"
"How insolent these beggars grow!"
Go to, ye happy people! Go!
My yearning is as fierce as hate.
Must my heart break, that yours be glad?
Will your turn come at last, though late?
I will not knock, I will pass by;
My comrades wait,--the wind, the rain.
Comrades, we'll run a race to-night!
The stakes may not seem much to gain:
The goal is not marked plain in sight;
But, comrades, understand,--if I
Drop dead, 't will be a victory!
These poems and many others Stephen carried with him wherever he went. To
read them over was next to seeing Mercy. The poet was hardly less dear to
him than the woman. He felt at times so removed from her by the great gulf
which her genius all unconsciously seemed to create between herself and
him that he doubted his own memories of her love, and needed to be
reassured by gazing into her eyes, touching her hand, and listening to her
voice. It seemed to him that, if this separation lasted much longer, he
should lose all faith in the fact of their relation. Very impatient
thoughts of poor old Mrs. Carr filled Stephen's thoughts in these days.
Heretofore she had been no barrier to his happiness; her still and
childlike presence was no restraint upon him; he had come to disregard it
as he would the presence of an infant in a cradle. Therefore, he had, or
thought he had, the kindest of feelings towards her; but now that her
helpless paralyzed hands had the power to shut him away from Mercy, he
hated her, as he had always hated every thing which stood between him and
delight. Yet, had it been his duty to minister to her, he would have done
it as gently, as faithfully, as Mercy herself. He would have spoken to her
in the mildest and tenderest of tones, while in his heart he wished her
dead. So far can a fine fastidiousness, allied to a sentiment of
compassion, go towards making a man a consummate hypocrite.
Parson Dorrance came often to see Mercy, but always with Lizzy Hunter. By
the subtle instinct of love, he knew that to see him thus, and see him
often, would soonest win back for him his old place in Mercy's life. The
one great desire he had left now was to regain that,--to see her again
look up in his face with the frank, free, loving look which she always had
had until that sad morning.
A strange incident happened to Mercy in these first weeks of her mother's
illness. She was called to the door one morning by the message that a
stranger wished to speak to her. She found standing there an elderly
woman, with a sweet but care-worn face, who said eagerly, as soon as she
appeared,--
"Are you Mrs. Philbrick?"
"Yes," said Mercy. "Did you wish to see me?"
The woman hesitated a moment, as if trying to phrase her sentence, and
then burst out impetuously, with a flood of tears,--
"Won't you come and help me make my husband come home. He is so sick, and
I believe he will die in that wretched old garret."
Mercy looked at her in blank astonishment, and her first thought was that
she must be insane; but the woman continued,--
"I'm Mrs. Wheeler. You never saw me before, but my husband's talked about
you ever since he first saw you on the street, that day. You're the only
human being I've ever known him take a fancy to; and I do believe, if
anybody could do any thing with him, you could."
It seemed that, in addition to all his other eccentricities, "Old Man
Wheeler" had the habit of disappearing from his home at intervals, leaving
no clew behind him. He had attacks of a morbid unwillingness to see a
human face: during tkese attacks, he would hide himself, sometimes in one
place, sometimes in another. He had old warehouses, old deserted mills and
factories, and uninhabited rooms and houses in all the towns in the
vicinity. There was hardly any article of merchandise which he had not at
one time or another had a depot for, or a manufactory of. He had
especially a hobby for attempting to make articles which were not made in
this country. It was only necessary for some one to go to him, and say,
"Mr. Wheeler, do you know how much this country pays every year for
importing such or such an article?" to throw him into a rage.
"Damned nonsense! Damned nonsense, sir. Just as well make it here. I'll
make it myself." And up would start a new manufacture, just as soon as he
could get men to work at it.
At one time it was ink, at another time brushes, then chintz, and then
pocket-books; in fact, nobody pretended to remember all the schemes which
the old man had failed in. He would stop them as instantaneously as he
began them, dismiss the workmen, shut up the shops or the mills, turn the
key on them just as they stood, very possibly filled full of material in
the rough. He did not care. The hobby was over: he had proved that the
thing could be made in America, and he was content. It was usually in some
one of these disused buildings that he set up his hermitage in these
absences from home. He would sally out once a day and buy bread, just a
pittance, hardly enough to keep him alive, and then bury himself again in
darkness and solitude. If the absence did not last more than three or four
days, his wife and sons gave themselves no concern about him. He usually
returned a saner and healthier man than he went away. When the absences
were longer, they went in search of him, and could usually prevail on him
to return home with them. But this last absence had been much longer than
usual before they found him. He was as cunning and artful as a fugitive
from justice in concealing his haunt. At last he was discovered in the old
garret store-room over the Brick Row. The marvel was that he had not died
of cold there. He was not far from it, however; for he was so ill that at
times he was delirious. He lay curled up in the old stack of comforters in
the corner, with only a jug of water and some crumbs of bread by his side,
when they found him. He had been so ill when he last crawled up the stairs
that he had forgotten to take the key out of the keyhole, but left it on
the outside, and by that they found him. At the bare suggestion of his
going home, he became so furious that it seemed unsafe to urge it. His
wife and eldest son had stayed there with him now for two days; but he had
grown steadily worse, and it was plain that he must die unless he could be
properly cared for.
"At last I thought of you," said the poor woman. "He's always said so much
about you; and once, when I was riding with him, he pointed you out to me
on the street, and said he, 'That's the very nicest girl in America.' And
he told me about his giving you the clock; and I never knew him give any
thing away before in his whole life. Not but what he has always been very
good to me, in his way. He'd never give me a cent o' money; but he'd
always pay bills,--that is, that was any way reasonable. But I said to
'Siah this morning, 'If there's anybody on earth can coax your father to
let us take him home, it's that Mrs. Philbrick; and I'm going to find
her.' 'Siah didn't want me to. The boys are so ashamed about it; but I
don't see any shame in it. It's just a kind of queer way Mr. Wheeler's
always had; and everybody's got something queer about 'em, first or last;
and this way of Mr. Wheeler's of going off don't hurt anybody but himself.
I got used to 't long ago. Now, won't you come, and try and see if you
can't persuade him? It won't do any harm to try."
"Why, yes, indeed, Mrs. Wheeler, I'll come; but I don't believe I can do
any thing," said Mercy, much touched by the appeal to her. "I have
wondered very much what had become of Mr. Wheeler. I had not seen him for
a long time."
When they went into the garret, the old man was half-lying, half-sitting,
propped on his left elbow. In his right hand he held his cane, with which
he continually tapped the floor, as he poured out a volley of angry
reproaches to his son "'Siah," a young man of eighteen or twenty years
old, who sat on a roll of leather at a safe distance from his father's
lair. As the door opened, and he saw Mercy entering with his wife, the old
man's face underwent the most extraordinary change. Surprise, shame,
perplexity, bravado,--all struggled together there.
"God bless my soul! God bless my soul!" he exclaimed, trying to draw the
comforters more closely about him.
Mercy went up to him, and, sitting down by his side, began to talk to him
in a perfectly natural tone, as if she were making an ordinary call on an
invalid in his own home. She said nothing to suggest that he had done any
thing unnatural in hiding himself, and spoke of his severe cold as being
merely what every one else had been suffering from for some time. Then she
told him how ill her mother was, and succeeded in really arousing his
interest in that. Finally, she said,--
"But I must go now. I can't be away from my mother long. I will come and
see you again to-morrow. Shall I find you here or at your home?"
"Well, I was thinking I 'd better move home to-day," said he.
His wife and son involuntarily exchanged glances. This was more than they
had dared to hope.
"Yes, I would, if I were you," replied Mercy, still in a perfectly natural
tone. "It would be so much better for you to be in a room with a fire in
it for a few days. There isn't any way of warming this room, is there?"
said she, looking all about, as if to see if it might not be possible
still to put up a stove there. "'Siah" turned his head away to hide a
smile, so amused was he by the tact of the remark. "No, I see there is no
stovepipe-hole here," she went on, "so you'd much better move home. I'm
going by the stable. Let me send Seth right up with the carriage, won't
you?"
"No, no! Bless my soul! Thinks I'm made of money, don't she! No, no! I can
walk." And the old half-crazy glare came into his eyes.
Mercy went nearer to him, and laid her hand gently on his.
"Mr. Wheeler," said she, "you did something very kind for me once: now
won't you do something once more,--just once? I want you to go home in the
carriage. It is a terribly cold day, and the streets are very icy. I
nearly fell several times myself coming over here. You will certainly
take a terrible cold, if you walk this morning. Please say I may get the
carriage."
"Bless my soul! Bless my soul, child! Go get it then, if you care so much;
but tell him I'll only pay a quarter,--only a quarter, remember. They'd
take every cent I've got. They are all wolves, wolves, wolves!"
"Yes, I'll tell him only a quarter. I'll have him here in a few minutes!"
exclaimed Mercy, and ran out of the room hastily before the old man could
change his mind.
As good luck would have it, Seth and his "kerridge" were in sight when
Mercy reached the foot of the staircase. So in less than five minutes she
returned to the garret, exclaiming,--
"Here is Seth now, Mr. Wheeler. It is so fortunate I met him. Now I can
see you off." The old man was so weak that his son had to carry him down
the stairs; and his face, seen in the broad daylight, was ghastly. As they
placed him in the carriage, he called out to his wife and son, sharply,--
"Don't you get in! You can walk, you can walk. Mind, he's to have but a
quarter, tell him." And, as Seth whipped up his horses and drove off, the
words, "wolves, wolves, wolves," were heard coming in muffled tones
through the door.
"He'd never have gone, if you hadn't come back,--never," said Mrs.
Wheeler, as she turned to Mercy. "I never can thank you enough. It'll save
his life, getting him out of that garret."
Mercy did not say, but she thought that it was too late. A mortal
sickness had fastened upon the old man; and so it proved. When she went to
his home the next day, he was in a high fever and delirious; and he lived
only a few days. He had intervals of partial consciousness, and in those
he seemed to be much touched by the patient care which his two sons were
giving to him. He had always been a hard father; had compelled his sons
very early to earn their own living, and had refused to give them money,
which he could so easily have spared, to establish themselves in business.
Now, that it was too late, he repented.
"Good boys, good boys, good boys after all," he would mutter to himself,
as they bent over him, and nursed him tenderly in his helplessness. "Might
have left them more money, might have left them more. Mistake, mistake!"
Once he roused, and with great vehemence asked to have his lawyer sent for
immediately. But, when the lawyer came, the delirium had returned again:
it was too late; and the old man died without repairing the injustice he
had done. The last intelligible words he spoke were, "Mistake! mistake!"
And he had indeed made a mistake. When his will was opened, it was found
that the whole bulk of his large estate had been left to trustees, to be
held as a fund for assisting poor young men to a certain amount of capital
to go into business with,--the very thing which he had never done for his
own children. The trust was burdened with such preposterous conditions,
however, that it never could have amounted to any thing, even if the
courts had not come to the rescue, and mercifully broken the will,
dividing the property where it rightfully belonged, between the wife and
children.
Early in February Mrs. Carr died. It was more like a going to sleep than
like a death. She lay for two days in a dozing state, smiling whenever
Mercy spoke to her, and making great efforts to swallow food whenever
Mercy offered it to her. At last she closed her eyes, turned her head on
one side, as if for a sounder sleep, and never moved again.
However we may think we are longing for the release from suffering to come
to one we love, when it does come, it is a blow, is a shock. Hundreds of
times Mercy had said to herself in the course of the winter, "Oh, if God
would only take my mother to heaven! Her death would be easier to bear
than this." But now she would have called her back, if she could. The
silent house, the empty room, still more terrible the long empty hours in
which nobody needed her help, all wrung Mercy's heart. It was her first
experience of being alone. She had often pictured to herself, or rather
she thought she had, what it would be; but no human imagination can ever
sound the depths of that word: only the heart can feel it. It is a marvel
that hearts do not break under it oftener than they do. The silence which
is like that darkness which could be felt; the sudden awakening in the
night with a wonder what it means that the loved one is not there; the
pitiless morning light which fills the empty house, room after room; and
harder than all else to forget, to rise above--the perpetual sense of no
future: even the little near futures of the next hour, the next day, all
cut off, all closed, to the human being left utterly alone. The mockery of
the instincts of hunger and need of rest seems cruel. What a useless
routine, for one left alone, to be fed, to sleep, and to rise up to eat
and sleep again!
Mercy bore all this in a sort of dumb bewilderment for a few days. All
Stephen's love and sympathy did not help her. He was unutterably tender
and sympathizing now that poor old Mrs. Carr was fairly out of his way. It
surprised even himself to see what a sort of respectful affection he felt
for her in her grave. Any misgiving that this new quiet and undisturbed
possession of Mercy might not continue did not cross his mind; and when
Mercy said to him suddenly, one evening about ten days after her mother's
death, "Stephen, I must go away, I can't live in this house another week,"
it was almost as sudden a shock to him as if he had gone in and found her
dead.
"Go away! Leave me!" he gasped, rather than said. "Mercy, you can't mean
it!" and the distress in his face smote Mercy bitterly. But she persisted.
"Yes, I do mean it," she said. "You must not ask me to stay. I should lose
my senses or fall ill. You can't think how terrible it is to me to be all
alone in these rooms. Perhaps in new rooms I should not feel it so much. I
have always looked forward to being left alone at some time, and have
thought I would still have my home; but I did not think it could feel like
this. I simply cannot bear it,--at any rate, not till I am stronger. And
besides, Stephen," and Mercy's face flushed red, "there is another thing
you have not thought of: it would never do for me to live here alone in
this house with you, as we have been living. You couldn't come to see me
so much now mother is not here."
Poor Mrs. Carr! avenged at last, by Stephen's own heart. How gladly would
he have called her to life now! Mercy's words carried instantaneous
conviction to his mind. It was strange he had never thought of this
before; but he had not. He groaned aloud.
"O Mercy! O Mercy!" he exclaimed, "I never once thought of that, we have
been living so so long. You are right: you cannot stay here. Oh, what
shall I do without you, my darling, my darling?"
"I do not think you can ever be so lonely as I," said Mercy; "for you have
still your work left you to do. If I had any human being to need me, I
could bear being separated from you."
"Where will you go, Mercy?" asked Stephen, in a tone of dull, hopeless
misery.
"I do not know. I have not thought yet. Back to my old home for a visit, I
think, and then to some city to study and work. That is the best life for
me."
"O Mercy, Mercy, I am going to lose you,--lose you utterly!" exclaimed
Stephen.
Mercy looked at him with a pained and perplexed expression. "Stephen," she
said earnestly, "I can't understand you. You bear your hard life so
uncomplainingly, so bravely, that it seems as if you could not have a
vestige of selfishness in you; and yet"--Mercy halted; she could not put
her thought in words. Stephen finished it for her.
"And yet," he said, "I am selfish about you, you think. Selfish! Good God!
do you call it selfishness in a man who is drowning, to try to swim, in a
man who is starving, to clutch a morsel of bread? What else have I that
one could call life except you? Tell me, Mercy! You are my life: that is
the whole of it. All that a man has he will give for his life. Is it
selfishness?" Stephen locked his hands tight together, and looked at Mercy
almost angrily. She was writhing under his words. She had always an
unspeakable dread of being unjust to him. Love made her infinitely tender,
and pity made her yearn over him. But neither her own love and pity nor
his passionate words could wholly blind her now; and there was a sadness
in the tones in which she replied,--
"No, Stephen, I did not mean to call you selfish; but I can't understand
why you are not as brave and patient about all hard things as you are
about the one hardest thing of all."
"Mercy, would you marry me now, if I asked you?" said Stephen. He did not
realize the equivocal form of his question. An indignant look swept over
Mercy's face for a moment, but only for a moment. She knew Stephen's love
too well.
"No, Stephen," she said, "I would not. If you had asked me at first, I
should have done it. I thought then that it would be best," she said, with
hot blushes mounting high on her cheeks; "but I have seen since that it
would not."
Stephen sighed. "I am glad you see that," he said. Then in a lower tone,
"You know you are free, Mercy,--utterly free. I would never be so base as
to hold you by a word."
Mercy smiled half-bitterly, as she replied,--
"Words never hold people, and you know very well it is only an empty form
of words to say that I am free. I do not want to be free, darling," she
added, in a burst of tenderness toward him. "You could not set me free, if
you tried."
When Mercy told Parson Dorrance her intention of going away, his face
changed as if some fierce spasm wrung him; but it was over in a second,
and he said,--
"You are quite right, my child,--quite right. It will be a great deal
better for you in every way. This is no place for you now. You must have
at least a year or two of travel and entire change."
In her heart, Mercy contrasted the replies of her two lovers. She could
not banish the feeling that one was the voice of a truer love than the
other. She fought against the feeling as against a treason; but the truth
was strongest. In her heart, she knew that the man she did not love was
manlier than the man she loved.