Stephen took Mercy's letter from the post-office at night. It was one week
past the time at which it would have reached him, if it had been written
immediately on the receipt of his. Only too well he knew what the delay
meant. He turned the letter over and over in his hand, and noted without
surprise it was very light. The superscription was written with unusual
care. Mercy's handwriting was free and bold, but illegible, unless she
made a special effort to write with care; and she never made that effort
in writing to Stephen. How many times he had said to her: "Never mind how
you write to me, dear. I read your sentences by another sense than the
sense of sight." This formally and neatly written, superscription smote
him, as a formal bow and a chilling glance from Mercy would, if he had
passed her on the street.
He carried the letter home unopened. All through the evening it lay like a
leaden weight in his bosom, as he sat by his mother's side. He dared not
read it until he was sure of being able to be alone for hours. At last he
was free. As he went upstairs to his room, he thought to himself, "This is
the hour at which I used to fly to her, and find such welcome. A year ago
to-night how happy we were!" With a strange disposition to put off the
opening of the letter, he moved about his room, rearranged the books,
lighted an extra lamp, and finally sat down in an arm-chair, and leaning
both his arms on the table looked at the letter lying there so white, so
still. He felt a preternatural consciousness of what was in it; and he
shrank from looking at the words, as a condemned prisoner might shrink
from reading his own death-warrant. The room was bitterly cold. Fires in
bed-rooms were a luxury Stephen had never known. As he sat there, his body
and heart seemed to be growing numb together. At last he said, "I may as
well read it," and took the letter up. As he opened it and read the first
words, "My darling Stephen," his heart gave a great bound. She loved him
still. What a reprieve in that! He had yet to learn that love can be
crueller than any friendship, than any indifference, than any hate:
nothing is so exacting, so inexorable, as love. The letter was full of
love; but it was, nevertheless, hard and pitiless in its tone. Stephen
read it again and again: then he held it in the flame of the lamp, and let
it slowly burn, until only a few scorched fragments remained. These he
folded in a small paper, and put into his pocket-book. Why he did this, he
could not tell, and wondered at himself for doing it. Then he walked the
room for an hour or two, revolving in his mind what he should say to
Mercy. His ideas arranged themselves concisely and clearly. He had been
stung by Mercy's letter into a frame of feeling hardly less inexorable
than her own. He said to himself, "She never truly loved me, or nothing
under heaven could make her believe me capable of a dishonesty;" and, in
midst of all his pain at this thought, he had an indignant resentment, as
if Mercy herself had been in some way actively responsible for all this
misery.
His letter was shorter than Mercy's. They were sad, strange letters to
have passed between lovers. Mercy's ran as follows:--
"MY DARLING STEPHEN,--Your letters have shocked me so deeply that I find
myself at a loss for words in which to reply. I cannot understand your
present position at all. I have waited all these days, hoping that some
new light would come to me, that I could see the whole thing differently;
but I cannot. On the contrary, each hour that I think of it (and I have
thought of nothing else since your second letter came) only makes my
conviction stronger. Darling, that money is Mrs. Jacobs's money, by every
moral right. You may be correct in your statement as to the legal rights
of the case. I take it for granted that you are. At any rate, I know
nothing about that; and I rest no argument upon it at all. But it is clear
as daylight to me that morally you are bound to give her the money.
Suppose you had had permission from her to make those changes in the
house, while you were still her tenant, and had found the money, then you
would have handed it to her unhesitatingly. Why? Because you would have
said, 'This woman's husband built this house. No one except his brother
who could possibly have deposited this money here has lived in the house.
One of those two men was the owner of that gold. In either case, she is
the only heir, and it is hers. I am sure you would have felt this, had we
chanced to discover the money on one of those winter nights you refer to.
Now in what has the moral obligation been changed by the fact that the
house has come into your hands? Not by ordinary sale, either; but simply
by foreclosure of a mortgage, under conditions which were certainly very
hard for Mrs. Jacobs, inasmuch as one-half the interest has always been
paid. This money which you have found would have paid nearly the whole of
the original loan. It was hers, only she did not know where it lay. O
Stephen, my darling, I do implore you not to do this great wrong. You will
certainly come to see, sooner or later, that it was a dishonest act; and
then it will be too late to undo it. If I thought that by talking with you
I could make you see it as I do, I would come to you at once. But I keep
clinging to the hope that you will see it of yourself, that a sudden
realization of it will burst upon you like a great light. Don't speak so
angrily to me of calling you a thief. I never used the word. I never
could. I know the act looks to you right, or you would not commit it. But
it is terrible to me that it should look so to you. I feel, darling, as if
you were color-blind, and I saw you about to pick a most deadly fruit,
whose color ought to warn every one from touching it; but you, not seeing
the color, did not know the danger; and I must save you at all hazards, at
all costs. Oh, what shall I say, what shall I say! How can I make you see
the truth? God help us if I do not; for such an act as this on your part
would put an impassable gulf between our souls for ever. Your loving,
"MERCY."
Stephen's letter was in curter phrase. Writing was not to him a natural
form of expression. Even of joyous or loving words he was chary, and much
more so of their opposites. His life-long habit of repression of all signs
of annoyance, all complaints, all traces of suffering, told still more on
his written words than on his daily speech and life. His letter sounded
harder than it need for this reason; seemed to have been written in
antagonism rather than in grief, and so did injustice to his feeling.
"MY DEAR MERCY,--It is always a mistake for people to try to impose their
own standards of right and wrong on others. It gives me very great pain to
wound you in any way, you know that; and to wound you in such a way as
this gives me the greatest possible pain. But I cannot make your
conscience mine. If this money had not seemed to me to be justly my own, I
should never have thought of taking it. As it does seem to me to be justly
my own, your believing it to be another's ought not to change my action.
If I had only my own future to consider, I might give it up, for the sake
of your peace of mind. But it is not so. I have a helpless invalid
dependent on me; and one of the hardest things in my life to bear has
always been the fear that I might lose my health, and be unable to earn
even the poor living we now have. This sum, small as it is, will remove
that fear, will enable me to insure for my mother a reasonable amount of
comfort as long as she lives; and I cannot give it up. I do not suppose,
either, that it would make any difference in your feeling if I gave it up
solely to please you, and not because I thought it wrong to keep it. How
any act which I honestly believe to be right, and which you know I
honestly believe to be right, can put 'an impassable gulf between our
souls for ever,' I do not understand. But, if' it seems so to you, I can
only submit; and I will try to forget that you ever said to me, 'I shall
trust you till I die!' O Mercy, Mercy, ask yourself if you are just!
"STEPHEN."
Mercy grasped eagerly at the intimation in this letter that Stephen might
possibly give the money up because she desired it.
"Oh, if he will only not keep it, I don't care on what grounds he gives it
up!" she exclaimed. "I can bear his thinking it was his, if only the money
goes where it belongs. He will see afterwards that I was right." And she
sat down instantly, and wrote Stephen a long letter, imploring him to do
as he had suggested.
"Darling," she said, "this last letter of yours has given me great
comfort." As Stephen read this sentence, he uttered an ejaculation of
surprise. What possible comfort there could have been in the words he
remembered to have written he failed to see; but it was soon made clear to
him.
"You say," she continued, "that you might possibly give the money up for
sake of my peace of mind, if it were not for the fear that your mother
might suffer. O Stephen, then give it up! give it up! Trust to the
future's being at least as kind as the past. I will not say another word
about the right or wrong of the thing. Think that my feeling is all morbid
and overstrained about it, if you will. I do not care what you think of
me, so that I do not have to think of you as using money which is not your
own. And, darling, do not be anxious about the future: if any thing
happens to you, I will take care of your mother. It is surely my right
next to yours. I only wish you would let me help you in it even now. I am
earning more and more money. I have more than I need. Oh, if you would
only take some of it, darling! Why should you not? I would take it from
you, if you had it and I had not. I could give you in a very few years as
much as this you have found and never miss it. Do let me atone to you in
this way for your giving up what you think is your right in the matter of
this ill-fated money. O Stephen, I could be almost happy again, if you
would do this! You say it would make no difference in my feeling about it,
if you gave the money up only to please me, and not because you thought it
wrong to keep it. No, indeed! that is not so. I would be happier, if you
saw it as I do, of course; but, if you cannot, then the next best thing,
the only thing left for my happiness, is to have you yield to my wish.
Why, Stephen, I have even felt so strongly about it as this: that
sometimes, in thinking it over, I have had a wild impulse to tell you that
if you did not give the money to Mrs. Jacobs I would inform the
authorities that you had it, and so test the question whether you had the
right to keep it or not. Any thing, even your humiliation, has at times
seemed to me better than that you should go on living in the possession of
stolen money. You can see from this how deeply I felt about the thing. I
suppose I really never could have done this. At the last moment, I should
have found it impossible to array myself against you in any such public
way; but, oh, my darling, I should always have felt as if I helped steal
the money, if I kept quiet about it. You see I use a past tense already, I
feel so certain that you will give it up now. Dear, dear Stephen, you will
never be sorry: as soon as it is done, you will be glad. I wish that gold
had been all sunk in the sea, and never seen light again, the sight of it
has cost us so dear. Darling, I can't tell you what a load has rolled off
my heart. Oh, if you could know what it has been to me to have this cloud
over my thoughts of you! I have always been so proud of you,
Stephen,--your patience, your bravery. In my thought, you have stood
always for my ideal of the beautiful alliance of gentleness and strength.
Darling, we owe something to those who love us: we owe it to them not to
disappoint them. If I were to be tempted to do some dishonorable thing, I
should say to myself: 'No, for I must be what Stephen believes me. It is
not only that I will not grieve him: still more, I will not disappoint
him.'"
Mercy wrote on and on. The reaction from the pent-up grief, the prolonged
strain, was great. In her first joy at any, even the least, alleviation of
the horror she had felt at the thought of Stephen's dishonesty, she
over-estimated the extent of the relief she would feel from his
surrendering the money at her request. She wrote as buoyantly, as
confidently, as if his doing that would do away with the whole wrong from
the beginning. In her overflowing, impetuosity, also, she did not consider
what severe and cutting things were implied as well as said in some of her
sentences. She closed the letter without rereading it, hastened to send it
by the first mail, and then began to count the days which must pass before
Stephen's answer could reach her.
Alas for Mercy! this was a sad preparation for the result which was to
follow her hastily written words. It seems sometimes as if fate delighted
in lifting us up only to cast us down, in taking us up into a high
mountain to show us bright and goodly lands, only to make our speedy
imprisonment in the dark valley the harder to bear.
Stephen read this last letter of Mercy's with an ever-increasing sense of
resentment to the very end. For the time being it seemed to actually
obliterate every trace of his love for her. He read the words as
wrathfully as if they had been written by a mere acquaintance.
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed. "'Stolen money! Inform the authorities!'
Let her do it if she likes and see how she would come out at the end of
that.' And Stephen wrote Mercy very much such a letter as he would have
written to a man under the same circumstances. Luckily, he kept it a day,
and, rereading it in a cooler moment was shocked at its tone, destroyed
it, and wrote another. But the second one was no less hard, only more
courteous, than the first. It ran thus:--
"MERCY,--I am sorry that any thing in my last letter should have led you
to suppose that under the existing circumstances you could control my
actions. All I said was that I might, for the sake of your peace of mind,
give up this money, if it were not for my obligations to my mother. It was
a foolish thing to say, since those obligations could not be done away
with. I ought to have known that in your overwrought frame of mind you
would snatch at the suggestion, and make it the basis of a fresh appeal.
"Now let me say, once for all, that my mind is firmly made up on this
subject, and that it must be dropped between us. The money is mine, and I
shall keep it. If you think it your duty to 'inform the authorities,' as
you say, you must do so; and I would not say one word to hinder you. I
would never, as you do in this case, attempt to make my own conscience the
regulator of another's conduct. If you do regard me as the possessor of
'stolen money,' it is undoubtedly your duty to inform against me. I can
only warn you that all you would gain by it would be a most disagreeable
exposure of your own and my private affairs, and much mortification to
both of us. The money is mine beyond all question. I shall not reply to
any more letters from you on this subject. There is nothing more to be
said; and all prolonging of the discussion is a needless pain, and is
endangering the very foundations of our affection for each other. I want
to say one thing more, however; and I hope it will impress you as it
ought. Never forget that the strongest proof that my conscience was
perfectly clear in regard to that money is that I at once told you of its
discovery. It would have been perfectly easy for me to have accounted to
you in a dozen different ways for my having come into possession of a
little money, or even to have concealed from you the fact that I had done
so; and, if I had felt myself a thief, I should certainly have taken good
care that you did not know it.
"I must also thank you for your expressions of willingness to take care of
my mother, in case of any thing's happening to me. Until these last
letters of yours, I had often thought, with a sense of relief, that, if I
died, you would never see my mother suffer; but now any such thought is
inseparably associated with bitter memories. And my mother will not, in
any event, need your help; for the money I shall have from the sale of the
house, together with this which I have found, will give her all she will
require.
"You must forgive me if this letter sounds hard, Mercy. I have not your
faculty of mingling endearing epithets with sharp accusations and
reproaches. I cannot be lover and culprit at once, as you are able to be
lover and accuser, or judge. I love you, I think, as deeply and tenderly
as ever; but you yourself have made all expression of it impossible.
STEPHEN."
This letter roused in Mercy most conflicting emotions. Wounded feeling at
its coldness, a certain admiration for its tone of immovable resolution,
anger at what seemed to her Stephen's unjustifiable resentment of her
effort to influence his action,--all these blended in one great pain which
was well-nigh unbearable. For the time being, her distress in regard to
the money seemed cast into shadow and removed by all this suffering in her
personal relation with Stephen; but the personal suffering had not so deep
a foundation as the other. Gradually, all sense of her own individual
hurts in Stephen's words, in his acts, in the weakening of the bond which
held them together, died out, and left behind it only a sense of
bereavement and loss; while the first horror of Stephen's wrong-doing, of
the hopeless lack in his moral nature, came back with twofold intensity.
This had its basis in convictions,--in convictions which were as strong as
the foundations of the earth: the other had its basis in emotions, in
sensibilities which might pass away or be dulled.
Spite of Stephen's having forbidden all reference to the subject, Mercy
wrote letter after letter upon it, pleading sometimes humbly, sometimes
vehemently. It seemed to her that she was fighting for Stephen's very
life, and she could not give way. To all these out-pourings Stephen made
no reply. He answered the letters punctually, but made no reference to the
question of the money, save by a few short words at the end of his letter,
or in a postscript: such as, "It grieves me to see that you still dwell on
that matter of which I said we must speak no more;" or, "Pray, dear Mercy,
do not prolong that painful discussion. I have nothing more to say to you
about it."
For the rest, his letters were faithful transcripts of the little events
of his uneventful life, warm comments on any of Mercy's writings which he
read, and gentle assurances of his continued affection. The old longings,
broodings, and passionate yearnings, which he used to pour out, ceased.
Stephen was wounded to the very quick; and the wound did not heal. Yet he
felt no withdrawal from Mercy: probably nothing she could do would ever
drive him from her. He would die, if worst came to worst, lying by her
side and looking up in her eyes, like a dog at the feet of its master who
had shot him.
Mercy was much moved by this tone of patience in his letters: it touched
her, as the look of patient endurance on his face used to touch her. It
also irritated her, it was so foreign to her own nature.
"How can he help answering these things I say?" she would exclaim. "He has
no right to refuse to talk with me about such a vital matter." If any one
had said to Mercy, "He has as much right to refuse to discuss the question
as you have to force it upon him," she could not have seen the point
fairly.
But all Stephen's patience, gentleness, and firmness did not abate one jot
or tittle of Mercy's conviction that he was doing a dishonest thing. Oh
the contrary, his quiet appeared to her more and more like a callous
satisfaction; and his occasional cheerfulness, like an exultation over his
ill-gotten gains. Slowly there crept into her feeling towards him a
certain something which was akin to scorn,--the most fatal of deaths to
love. The hateful word "thief" seemed to be perpetually ringing in her
ears. When she read accounts of robberies, of defalcations, of breaches of
trust, she found herself always drawing parallels between the conduct of
these criminals and Stephen's. The secrecy, the unassailable safety of his
crime, seemed to her to make it inexpressibly more odious.
"I do believe," she thought to herself again and again, "that if he had
been driven by his poverty to knocking men down on the highway, and
robbing them of their pocket-books, I should not have so loathed it!"
As the weeks went on, Mercy's unhappiness increased rather than
diminished. There seemed an irreconcilible conflict between her love and
every other emotion in her soul. She seemed to herself to be, as it were,
playing the hypocrite to her own heart in thinking thus of a man and
loving him still; for that she still loved Stephen, she did not once
doubt. At this time, she printed a little poem, which set many of her
friends to vondering from what experience of hers it could possibly have
been drawn. Mercy's poems were so largely subjective in tone that it was
hard for her readers to believe that they were not all drawn from her own
individual experience.
A WOMAN'S BATTLE.
Dear foe, I know thou'lt win the fight;
I know thou hast the stronger bark,
And thou art sailing in the light,
While I am creeping in the dark.
Thou dost not dream that I am crying,
As I come up with colors flying.
I clear away my wounded, slain,
With strength like frenzy strong and swift;
I do not feel the tug and strain,
Though dead are heavy, hard to lift.
If I looked on their faces dying,
I could not keep my colors flying.
Dear foe, it will be short,--our fight,--
Though lazily thou train'st thy guns:
Fate steers us,--me to deeper night,
And thee to brighter seas and suns;
But thou'lt not dream that I am dying,
As I sail by with colors flying!
There was great injustice to Stephen in this poem. When he read it, he
groaned, and exclaimed aloud, "O Mercy! O Mercy!" Then, as he read it over
again, he said, "Surely she could not have meant herself in this: it is
only dramatic. She could never call me her foe." Mercy had often said to
him of some of her most intense poems, "Oh, it was purely dramatic. I just
fancied how anybody would feel under such circumstances;" and he clung to
the hope that it was true in this case. But it was not. Already Mercy had
a sense of antagonism, of warfare, with Stephen, or rather with her love
for him. Already her pride was beginning to array itself in reticence, in
withdrawal, in suppression. More than once she had said to herself "I can
live without him! I could bear that pain better than this." More than once
she had asked herself with a kind of terror, "Do I really wish ever to see
Stephen again?" and had been forced to own in her secret thought that she
shrank from meeting him. She began even to consider the possibility of
deferring the visit to Lizzy Hunter, which she had promised to make in the
spring. As the time drew nearer, her unwillingness to go increased, and
she would no doubt have discovered some way of escape; but one day early
in March a telegram came to her, which left her no longer any room for
choice.
It ran:--
"Uncle Dorrance is not expected to live. He wishes to see you. He is at my
house. Come immediately.
"LIZZY HUNTER."