For the first few months after Mercy went away, Stephen seemed to himself
to be like an automaton, which had been wound up to go through certain
movements for a certain length of time, and could by no possibility stop.
He did not suffer as he had expected. Sometimes it seemed to him that he
did not suffer at all; and he was terrified at this very absence of
suffering. Then again he had hours and days of a dull despair, which was
worse than any more active form of suffering. Now he understood, he
thought, how in the olden time men had often withdrawn themselves from the
world after some great grief, and had lived long, stagnant lives in
deserts and caves. He had thought it would kill him to lose Mercy out of
his life. Now he felt sure that he should live to be a hundred years old;
should live by very help of the apathy into which he had sunk. Externally,
he seemed very little changed,--a trifle quieter, perhaps, and gentler.
His mother sometimes said to herself,--
"Steve is really getting old very fast for so young a man;" but she was
content with the change. It seemed to bring them nearer together, and made
her feel more at ease as to the possibility of his falling in love. Her
old suspicions and jealousies of Mercy had died out root and branch,
within three months after her departure. Stephen's unhesitating assurance
to her that he did not expect to write to Mercy had settled the question
in her mind once for all. If she had known that at the very moment when he
uttered these words he had one long letter from Mercy and another to her
lying in his pocket, the shock might well-nigh have killed her; for never
once in Mrs. White's most jealous and ill-natured hours had the thought
crossed her mind that her son would tell her a deliberate lie. He told it,
however, unflinchingly, in as gentle and even a tone and with as unruffled
a brow as he would have bade her good-morning. He had thought the whole
matter over, and deliberately resolved to do it. He did it to save her
from pain; and he had no more compunction about it than he would have had
about closing a blind, to shut out a sunlight too strong for her eyes.
What a terrible thing is the power which human beings have of deceiving
each other! Woe to any soul which trusts itself to any thing less than an
organic integrity of nature, to which a lie is impossible!
Mercy's letters disappointed Stephen. They were loving; but they were
concise, sensible, sometimes merry, and always cheerful. Her life was
constantly broadening; friends crowded around her; and her art was
becoming more and more to her every day. Her name was beginning to be
known, and her influence felt. Her verses were simple, and went to
people's hearts. They were also of a fine and subtle flavor, and gave
pleasure to the intellect. Strangers began to write words of
encouragement to her,--sometimes a word of gratitude for help, sometimes a
word of hearty praise. She began to feel that she had her own circle of
listeners, unknown friends, who were always ready to hear her when she
spoke. This consciousness is a most exquisite happiness to a true artist:
it is a better stimulus than all the flattering criticism in the world can
give.
She was often touched to tears by the tributes she received from these
unknown friends. They had a wide range, coming sometimes from her
fellow-artists in literature, sometimes from lowly and uncultured people.
Once there came to her by mail, on a sheet of coarse paper, two faded
roses, fragrant,--for they were cinnamon roses, whose fragrance never
dies,--but yellow and crumpled, for they had journeyed many days to reach
her. They were tied together by a bit of blue yarn; and on the paper was
written, in ill-spelt words, "I wanted to send you something; and these
were all I had. I am an old woman, and very poor. You've helped me ever so
much."
Another gift was a moss basket filled with arbutus blossoms. Hid away in
the leaves was a tiny paper, on which were written some graceful verses,
evidently by a not unpractised hand. The signature was in initials unknown
to Mercy; but she hazarded a guess as to the authorship, and sent the
following verses in reply:--
TO E.B.
At night, the stream came to the sea.
"Long leagues," it cried, "this drop I bring,
O beauteous, boundless sea!
What is the meagre, paltry thing
In thine abundance unto thee?
No ripple, in thy smallest wave, of me
Will know! No thirst its suffering
Shall better slake for my surrendering
My life! O sea, in vain
My leagues of toil and pain!"
At night, wayfarers reached the sea.
"Long weary leagues we came," they cried,
"O beauteous, boundless sea!
The swelling waves of thy swift tide
Break on the shores where souls are free:
Through lonely wildernesses, unto thee
One tiny stream has been our guide,
And in the desert we had died,
If its oases sweet
Had not refreshed our feet."
O tiny stream, lost in the sea,
Close symbol of a lifetime's speech!
O beauteous, boundless sea,
Close fitting symbol of the reach,
Of measureless Eternity!
Be glad, O stream, O sea, blest equally!
And thou whose words have helped to teach
Me this,--my unknown friend,--for each
Kind thought, warm thanks.
Only the stream can know
How at such words the long leagues lighter grow.
All these new interests and occupations, while they did not in the least
weaken her loyalty to Stephen, filled her thoughts healthfully and
absorbingly, and left her no room for any such passionate longing and
brooding as Stephen poured out to her in his letters. He looked in vain
for any response to these expressions. Sometimes, unable to bear the
omission any longer, he would ask her pathetically why she did not say
that she longed to see him. Her reply was characteristic:--
"You ask me, dear, why I do not say that I long to see you. I am not sure
that I ever do long, in the sense in which you use the word. I know that I
cannot see you till next winter, just as I used to know every morning that
I could not see you until night; and the months between now and then seem
to me one solid interval of time to be filled up and made the most of,
just as the interval of the daytime between your going away in the morning
and coming home at night used to seem to me. I do not think, dear Stephen,
there is a moment of any day when I have not an under current of
consciousness of you; but it is not a longing for the sight of you. Are
you sure, darling, that the love which takes perpetual shape in such
longings is the strongest love?"
Little by little, phrases like this sank into Stephen's mind, and
gradually crystallized into a firm conviction that Mercy was being weaned
from him. It was not so. It was only that separation and its surer tests
were adjusting to a truer level the relation between them. She did not
love him one whit less; but she was taking the position which belonged to
her stronger and finer organization. If she had ever lived by his side as
his wife, the same change would have come; but her never-failing
tenderness would have effectually covered it from his recognition, and hid
it from her own, so long as he looked into her eyes with pleading love,
and she answered with woman's fondness. No realization of inequality could
ever have come. It is, after all, the flesh and blood of the loved one
which we idealize. There is in love's sacraments a "real presence," which
handling cannot make us doubt. It is when we go apart and reflect that our
reason asks questions. Mercy did not in the least know that she was
outgrowing Stephen White. She did not in the least suspect that her
affection and her loyalty were centring around an ideal personality, to
which she gave his name, but which had in reality never existed. She
believed honestly that she was living for and in Stephen all this time;
that she was his, as he was hers, inalienably and for ever. If it had been
suggested to her that it was unnatural that she should be so content in a
daily life which he did not share, so busy and glad in occupations and
plans and aspirations into which he did not enter, she would have been
astonished. She would have said, "How foolish of me to do otherwise! We
have our lives to lead, our work to do. It would be a sin to waste one's
life, to leave one's work undone, because of the mere lack of seeing any
one human being, however dear." Stephen knew love better than this: he
knew that life without the daily sight of Mercy was a blank drudgery;
that, day by day, month by month, he was growing duller and duller, and
more and more lifeless, as if his very blood were being impoverished by
lack of nourishment. Surely it was a hard fate which inflicted on this
man, already so overburdened, the perpetual pain of a love denied,
thwarted, unhappy. Surely it was a brave thing in him to bear the double
load uncomplainingly, to make no effort to throw it off, and never by a
word or a look to visit his own sufferings on the head of the helpless
creature, who seemed to be the cause of them all. If there were any change
in his manner toward his mother during these months, it was that he grew
tenderer and more demonstrative to her. There were even times when he
kissed her, solely from the yearning need he felt to kiss something human,
he so longed for one touch of Mercy's hand. He would sometimes ask her
wistfully, "Do I make you happy, mother?" And she would be won upon and
softened by the words; when in reality they were only the outcry of the
famished heart which needed some reassurance that its sacrifices had not
been all in vain.
Month after month went on, and no tenants came for the "wing." Stephen
even humiliated himself so far as to offer it to Jane Barker's husband at
a lowered rent; but his offer was surlily rejected, and he repented having
made it. Very bitterly he meditated on the strange isolation into which he
and his mother were forced. His sympathies were not broad and general
enough to comprehend it. He did not know how quickly all people feel an
atmosphere of withdrawal, an air of indifference. If Stephen had been rich
and powerful, the world would have forgiven him these traits, or have
smothered its dislike of them; but in a poor man, and an obscure one, such
"airs" were not to be tolerated. Nobody would live in the "wing." And so
it came to pass that one day Stephen wrote to Mercy the following
letter:--
"You will be sorry to hear that I have had to foreclose the mortgage on
this house. It was impossible to get a tenant for the other half of it,
and there was nothing else to be done. The house must be sold, but I doubt
if it brings the full amount of the loan. I should have done this three
months ago, except for your strong feeling against it. I am very sorry for
old Mrs. Jacobs; but it is her misfortune, not my fault. I have my mother
to provide for, and my first duty is to her. Of course, Mrs. Jacobs will
now have to go to the alms-house but I am not at all sure that she will
not be more comfortable there than she has made herself in the cottage.
She has starved herself all these years. Some people say she must have a
hoard of money there somewhere, that she cannot have spent even the little
she has received.
"I shall move out of the house at once, into the little cottage you liked
so much, farther up on the hill. That is for rent, only fifty dollars a
year. I shall put this house into good repair, run a piazza around it as
you suggested, and paint it; and then I think I shall be sure of finding a
purchaser. It can be made a very pretty house by expending a little money
on it; and I can sell it for enough more to repay me. I am sure nobody
would buy it as it is."
Mercy replied very briefly to this part of Stephen's letter. She had
discussed the question with him often before, and she knew the strict
justice of his claim; but her heart ached for the poor friendless old
woman, who was thus to lose her last dollar. If it had been possible for
Mercy to have continued to pay the rent of the wing herself, she would
gladly have done so; but, at her suggestion of such a thing, Stephen had
been so angry that she had been almost frightened.
"I am not so poor yet, Mercy," he had exclaimed, "as to take charity from
you! I think I should go to the alms-house myself first. I don't see why
old Granny Jacobs is so much to you, any way."
"Only because she is so absolutely friendless, Stephen," Mercy had replied
gently. "I never before knew of anybody who had not a relative or a friend
in the world; and I am afraid they are cruel to the poor people at the
alms-house. They all look so starved and wretched!"
"Well, it will be no more than she deserves," said Stephen; "for she was
cruel to her husband's brother's wife. I used to hear horrid stories, when
I was a boy, about how she drove them out of the house; and she was cruel
to her son too, and drove him away from home. Of course, I am sorry to be
the instrument of punishing her, and I do have a certain pity for the old
woman; but it is really her own fault. She might be living now in comfort
with her son, perhaps, if she had treated him well."
"We can't go by such 'ifs' in this world, Steve," said Mercy, earnestly.
"We have to take things as they are. I don't want to be judged way back in
my life. Only God knows all the 'ifs.'" Such conversations as these had
prepared Mercy for the news which Stephen now wrote her; but they had in
no wise changed her feeling in regard to it. She believed in the bottom of
her heart that Stephen might have secured a tenant, if he had tried. He
had once, in speaking of the matter, dropped a sentence which had shocked
her so that she could never forget it.
"It would be a great deal better for me," he had said, "to have the money
invested in some other way. If the house does fall into my hands, I shall
sell it; and, even if I don't get the full amount of what father loaned, I
shall make it bring us in a good deal more than it does this way."
This sentence rang in Mercy's ears, as she read in Stephen's letter all
his plans for improving the house; but the thing was done, and it was not
Mercy's habit to waste effort or speech over things which could not be
altered.
"I am very sorry," she wrote, "that you have been obliged to take the
house. You know how I always felt for poor old Granny Jacobs. Perhaps we
can do something to make her more comfortable in the alms-house. I think
Lizzy could manage that for us."
And in her own mind Mercy resolved that the old woman should never lack
for food and fire, however unwilling the overseers might be to permit her
to have unusual comforts.
Stephen's next letter opened with these words: "O Mercy, I have such a
strange thing to tell you. I am so excited I can hardly find words. I have
found a lot of money in your old fireplace. Just think of our having sat
there so quietly night after night, within hands' reach of it, all last
winter! And how lucky that I found it, instead of any of the workmen!
They'd have pocketed it, and never said a word."
"To be sure they would," thought Mercy, "and poor old Granny Jacobs would
have been"--she was about to think, "cheated out of her rights again,"
but with a pang she changed the phrase into "none the better off for it.
Oh, how glad I am for the poor old thing! People always said her husband
must have hid money away somewhere."
Mercy read on. "I was in such a hurry to get the house done before the
snow came that I took hold myself, and worked every night and morning
before the workmen came; and, after they had gone, I found this last
night, and I declare, Mercy, I haven't shut my eyes all night long. It
seems to me too good to be true. I think there must be as much as three
thousand dollars, all in solid gold. Some of the coins I don't know the
value of; but the greater proportion of them are English sovereigns. Of
course rich people wouldn't think this such a very big sum, but you and I
know how far a little can go for poor people."
"Yes, indeed," thought Mercy. "Why, it will make the poor old woman
perfectly comfortable all her life: it will give her more than she had
from the house." And Mercy laid the letter in her lap and fell into a
reverie, thinking how strange it was that this good fortune should have
come about by means of an act which had seemed to her cruel on Stephen's
part.
She took the letter up again. It continued: "O Mercy, my darling, do you
suppose you can realize what this sudden lift is to me? All my life I have
found our poverty so hard to bear, and these latter years I have bitterly
felt the hardship of being unable to go out into the world and make my
fortune as other men do, as I think I might, if I were free. But this sum,
small as it is, will be a nucleus, I feel sure it will, of a competency at
least. I know of several openings where I can place it most
advantageously. O Mercy! dear, dear Mercy! what hopes spring up in my
heart! The time may yet come when we shall build up a lovely home
together. Bless old Jacobs's miserliness! How little he knew what he was
hoarding up his gold for!"
At this point, Mercy dropped the letter,--dropped it as if it had been a
viper that stung her. She was conscious of but two things: a strange,
creeping cold which seemed to be chilling her to the very marrow of her
bones; and a vague but terrible sense of horror, mentally. The letter fell
to the floor. She did not observe it. A half-hour passed, and she did not
know that it had been a moment. Gradually, her brain began to rouse into
activity again, and strove confusedly with the thoughts which crowded on
it.
"That would be stealing. He can't mean it. Stephen can't be a thief."
Half-formed, incoherent sentences like these floated in her mind, seemed
to be floating in the air, pronounced by hissing voices.
She pressed her hands to her temples, and sprang to her feet. The letter
rustled on the floor, as her gown swept over it. She turned and looked at
it, as if it were a living thing she would kill. She stooped to pick it
up, and then recoiled from it. She shrank from the very paper. All the
vehemence of her nature was roused. As in the moment of drowning people
are said to review in one swift flash of consciousness their whole lives,
so now in this moment did Mercy look back over the months of her life with
Stephen. Her sense of the baseness of his action now was like a lightning
illuming every corner of the past: every equivocation, every concealment,
every subterfuge he had practised, stood out before her, bare, stripped of
every shred of apology or excuse. "He lies; he has always lied. Why should
he not steal?" she exclaimed. "It is only another form of the same thing.
He stole me, too; and he made me steal him. He is dishonest to the very
core. How did I ever love such a man? What blinded me to his real nature?"
Then a great revulsion of feeling, of tenderness toward Stephen, would
sweep over her, and drown all these thoughts. "O my poor, brave, patient
darling! He never meant to do any thing wrong in his life. He does not see
things as I do: no human soul could see clearly, standing where he stands.
There is a moral warp in his nature, for which he is no more responsible
than a tree is responsible for having grown into a crooked shape when it
was broken down by heavy stones while it was a sapling. Oh, how unjust I
am to him! I will never think such thoughts of him again. My darling, my
darling! He did not stop to think in his excitement that the money was
not his. I daresay he has already seen it differently."
Like waves breaking on a beach, and rolling back again to meet higher
waves and be swallowed up in them, these opposing thoughts and emotions
struggled with each other in Mercy's bosom. Her heart and her judgment
were at variance, and the antagonism was irreconcilable. She could not
believe that her lover was dishonest. She could not but call his act a
theft. The night came and went, and no lull had come to the storm by which
her soul was tossed. She could not sleep. As the morning dawned, she rose
with haggard and weary eyes, and prepared to write to Stephen. In some of
her calmer intervals, she had read the remainder of his letter. It was
chiefly filled with the details of the manner in which the gold had been
hidden. A second fireplace had been built inside the first, leaving a
space of several inches between the two brick walls. On each side two
bricks had been so left that they could be easily taken out and replaced;
and the bags of gold hung upon iron stanchions in the outer wall. What a
strange picture it must have been in the silent night hours,--the old
miser bending above the embers of the dying fire on the hearth, and
reaching down the crevice to his treasures! The bags were of leather,
curiously embossed; they were almost charred by the heat, and the gold was
dull and brown.
"I wonder which old fellow put it there?" said Stephen, at the end of his
letter. "Captain John would have been more likely to have foreign gold;
but why should he hide it in his brother's fireplace? At any rate, to
whichever of them I am indebted for it, I am most profoundly grateful. If
ever I meet him in any world, I'll thank him."
Suddenly the thought occurred to Mercy, "Perhaps old Mrs. Jacobs is dead.
Then there would be nobody who had any right to the money. But no: Stephen
would have told me if she had been."
Still she clung to this straw of a hope; and, when she sat down to write
to Stephen, these words came first to her pen:--
"Is Mrs. Jacobs dead, Stephen? You do not say any thing about her; but I
cannot imagine your thinking for a moment of keeping that money for
yourself, unless she is dead. If she is alive, the money is hers. Nobody
but her husband or his brother could have put it there. Nobody else has
lived in the house, except very poor people. Forgive me, dear, but perhaps
you had not thought of this when you first wrote: it has very likely
occurred to you since then, and I may be making a very superfluous
suggestion." So hard did she cling to the semblance of a trust that all
would yet prove to be well with her love and her lover.
Stephen's reply came by the very next mail. It was short: it ran thus:--
"DEAR DARLING,--I do not know what to make of your letter. Your sentence,
'I cannot imagine your thinking for a moment of keeping that money for
yourself,' is a most extraordinary one. What do you mean by 'keeping it
for myself'? It is mine: the house was mine and all that was in it. Old
Mrs. Jacobs is alive still, at least she was last week; but she has no
more claim on that money than any other old woman in town. I can't suppose
you would think me a thief, Mercy; but your letter strikes me as a very
strange one. Suppose I were to discover that there is a gold mine in the
orchard,--stranger things than that have happened,--would you say that
that also belonged to Mrs. Jacobs and not to me? The cases are precisely
parallel. You have allowed your impulsive feeling to run away with your
judgment; and, as I so often tell you, whenever you do that, you are
wrong. I never thought, however, it would carry you so far as to make you
suspect me of a dishonorable act."
Stephen was deeply wounded. Mercy's attempted reticence in her letter had
not blinded him. He felt what had underlain the words, and it was a hard
blow to him. His conscience was as free from any shadow of guilt in the
matter of that money as if it had been his by direct inheritance from his
own father. Feeling this, he had naturally the keenest sense of outrage at
Mercy's implied accusation.
Before Stephen's second letter came, Mercy had grown calm. The more she
thought the thing over, the more she felt sure that Mrs. Jacobs must be
dead, and that Stephen in his great excitement had forgotten to mention
the fact. Therefore the second letter was even a greater blow to her than
the first: it was a second and a deeper thrust into a wound which had
hardly begun to heal. There was also a tone of confident, almost
arrogant, assumption in the letter, it seemed to Mercy, which irritated
her. She did not perceive that it was the inevitable confidence of a
person so sure he is right that he cannot comprehend any doubt in
another's mind on the subject. There was in Mercy's nature a vein of
intolerance, which was capable of the most terrible severity. She was as
blinded, to Stephen's true position in the matter as he was to hers. The
final moment of divergence had come: its seeds were planted in her nature
and in Stephen's when they were born. Nothing could have hindered their
growth, nothing could have forestalled their ultimate result. It was only
a question of time and of occasion, when the two forces would be arrayed
against each other, and would be found equally strong.
Mercy took counsel with herself now, and delayed answering this second
letter. She was resolved to be just to Stephen.
"I will think this thing over and over," she said to herself, "till I am
sure past all doubt that I am right, before I say another word."
But her long thinking did not help Stephen. Each day her conviction grew
deeper, her perception clearer, her sense of alienation from Stephen
profounder. If a moral antagonism had grown up between them in any other
shape, it would have been less fatal to her love. There were many species
of wrong-doing which would have been less hateful in her sight. It seemed
to her sometimes that there could be no crime in the world which would
appear to her so odious as this. Her imagination dwelt on the picture of
the lonely old woman in the alms-house. She had been several times to see
Mrs. Jacobs, and had been much moved by a certain grim stoicism which gave
almost dignity to her squalor and wretchedness.
"She always had the bearing of a person who knew she was suffering
wrongly, but was too proud to complain," thought Mercy. "I wonder if she
did not all along believe there was something wrong about the mortgage?"
and Mercy's suspicious thoughts and conjectures ran far back into the
past, fastening on the beginnings of all this trouble. She recollected old
Mr. Wheeler's warnings about Stephen, in the first weeks of her stay in
Penfield. She recollected Parson Dorrance's expression, when he found out
that she had paid her rent in advance. She tortured herself by reviewing
minutely every little manoeuvre she had known of Stephen's practising to
conceal his relation with her.
Let Mercy once distrust a person in one particular, and she distrusted him
in all. Let one act of his life be wrong, and she believed that his every
act was wrong in motive, or in relation to others, however specious and
fair it might be made to appear. All the old excuses and apologies she had
been in the habit of making for Stephen's insincerities to his mother and
to the world seemed to her now less than nothing; and she wondered how she
ever could have held them as sufficient. In vain her heart pleaded. In
vain tender memories thrilled her, by their vivid recalling of hours, of
moments, of looks and words. It was with a certain sense of remorse that
she dwelt on them, of shame that she was conscious of clinging to them
still. "I shall always love him, I am afraid," she said to herself; "but I
shall never trust him again,--never!"
And hour by hour Stephen was waiting and looking for his letter.