No plummet ever sank so deep as Jamie sank the thoughts of those few
months. No oblivion more vast than where he buried it. No human will
so strong as that he bent upon it, bound it down with. No sin absolved
was ever so forgotten. One wonders if Jamie, at the day of judgment
even, will remember it. Perhaps 'twill then be no more the sin he
thought it. For Jamie's nature, like that of spiny plants, was
sensitive, delicate within, as his outer side was bent and rough; and
he fancied it, first, a selfishness; then, as his lonely fancy got to
brooding on it, an actual sin. James Bowdoin's unlucky laugh had
taught him how it seemed to others; and was not inordinate affection,
to the manifest injury of the object loved, a sin? Jamie felt it so;
and he had the Prayer Book's authority therefor. "Inordinate and
sinful affections,"--that is the phrase; both are condemned.
But he kept it all the closer from Mercedes. It did not grow less; he
had no heart to cease loving. Manlike, he was willing to face his God
with the sin, but not her. He sought to change the nature of his love;
perhaps, in time, succeeded. But all love has a mystic triple root;
you cannot unravel the web, on earth at least. Religious, sexual,
spiritual,--all are intertwined.
Jamie and Mercedes lived on in the little brick house, as he had
promised. Only one thing the Bowdoins noticed: he now dressed and
talked and acted like a man grown very old. His coats were different
again; his manner was more eccentric than ever. His hair helped him a
little, for it really grew quite white. He asked Mercedes now to call
him father.
"Jamie is posing as a patriarch," said Mr. Bowdoin; he smiled, and
then he sighed.
Old Mr. Bowdoin did not forget his promise to have his granddaughters
call upon Mercedes. Now and then they sent her tickets for church
fairs. But it takes more love than most women have for each other to
give the tact, the self-abnegation, that such unequal relations, to
be permanent, require. The momentary gush of sympathy that the Bowdoin
girls felt, upon their grandfather's account of Sadie's loneliness,
was chilled at the first haughty word Mercedes gave them. It takes an
older nature, more humbled by living than is an American young lady's,
to meet the poor in money without patronizing, and the proud at heart
without seeming rude. So this attempted intimacy faded.
Jamie gave his life to her. His manner at the office altered: he
became proud and reserved. More wonderful still, he shortened his time
of attendance; not that he was inattentive while there, but he no
longer observed unnecessary hours, as he had been wont to do, after
the bank closed; as soon as Mr. James Bowdoin left, he would lock up
the office and go himself. His life was but waiting upon Mercedes.
When he was in the office he would sit twiddling his thumbs. The
pretense at bookkeeping, unreal bookkeeping, he abandoned. The last
old ship, the Maine Lady, had served him in good stead for many years;
he had double-entered, ledgered, and balanced her simple debits and
credits like a stage procession. But now he made no fiction about the
vanished business.
It was characteristic of Jamie that still he did not hanker for more
money. He recognized his adopted daughter's need for sympathy, for
emotions, even for love, if you will; but yet it did not occur to him
that he might earn more money. His salary was ample, and out of it he
had made some savings. And Mercedes had that impatience of details,
that _ennui_ of money matters, that even worldly women show, who care
for results, not processes.
It had always been the custom of the McMurtagh family to pass the
summers, like the winters, in the little house on Salem Street; but
this year Jamie rented a cottage at Nantasket. He told the Bowdoins
nothing of this move until they asked him about it, observing that he
regularly took the boat. To Jamie it was the next thing to Nahant,
which was of course out of the question. But the queer old clerk was
not fitted to shine in any society, and Mercedes found it hard to make
her way alone. They wandered about the beach, and occasionally to the
great hotel when there was a hop, of evenings, and listened to the
bands; but Mercedes' beauty was too striking and her manners were too
independent to inspire quick confidence in the Nantasket matrons;
while Jamie missed his pipe and shirt-sleeves after supper. He had
asked, and been forbidden, to invite John Hughson down to stay. Still
less would Sadie have her girl acquaintances; and all Salem Street's
kindliest feelings were soured in consequence. There was an invitation
from Nahant that summer, but it seemed, to Mercedes' quick sense,
formal, and she would not go.
She had had her piano moved down "to the beach," at much expense; and
for a week she played in the afternoons. But even this accomplishment
brought her no notice. People would look at her in passing, and then,
more curiously, at her foster-father: that was all. Mercedes, in her
youth, could not realize how social confidence is a plant of slow
growth. The young girls of the place were content with saying she "was
not in their set;" the young men who desired her acquaintance must
seek it surreptitiously, and this Mercedes would not have. The people
of the great hotel were a more mixed set, and among them our couple
was much discussed. Something got to be known of Jamie,--that he was
confidential clerk to the well-known firm of Boston's older
ship-owners, and that she was his adopted daughter. Soon the rumor
grew that he was miserly and rich.
Poor Jamie! He thought more of all these things than Mercedes ever
supposed. What could he do to give her friends of her own age? What
could he do to find her lovers, a husband? McMurtagh slept not nights
for thinking on these things. John Hughson he now saw to be
impossible; Harley Bowdoin was out of the question; but were there not
still genteel youths, clerks like himself, but younger, some class of
life for his petted little lady? Jamie had half-thoughts of training
some nice lad to be fit for her,--Jamie earned money amply; of
training him, too, to take his place and earn his salary. Every
discontented look in Mercedes' lovely face went to Jamie's
heartstrings.
One day, going home by the usual boat, he saw his dear girl waiting
for him on the wharf. It always lightened Jamie's heart when she did
this, and he hurried down to the gangplank, to be among the first
ashore and save her waiting. But as he stepped upon it he saw that she
was talking to a gentleman. There was a little heightened color in her
cheeks; she was not watching the passengers in the boat. Jamie turned
aside through the crowd to walk up the road alone. He looked over his
shoulder, and saw that they were following. When nearly at their
cottage, he turned about irresolutely and met them. Mercedes, with a
word of reproach for walking home alone (at which Jamie's old eyes
opened), introduced him: "Mr. David St. Clair--my father."
"I made Miss McMurtagh's acquaintance at the Rockland House last
night,--she plays so beautifully." Then Jamie remembered that he had
gone out to smoke his pipe upon the piazza.
He looked at the newcomer. St. Clair was dressed expensively, in what
Jamie thought the highest fashion. He wore kid gloves and a high silk
hat; he had a white waistcoat and a very black mustache. Mercedes had
blushed again when she presented him, and suddenly there was a burst
of envy in poor Jamie's heart.