“THE DECISION MARCIA REACHED”
When Marcia and the little milliner finished compiling the bill for the
length of time that Marcia had boarded and cared for Jason, they did not
know what to do with it. They were in doubt as to whether they should
present it at once or wait until the Morelands made their move and then
use the bill to counteract it. They discussed every phase of the
situation repeatedly. They waited what seemed to them a long time, and
at last it was Marcia who reached a decision for both of them.
“I simply refuse to live in this uncertainty any longer,” she said to
Nancy. “I’m going to take this bill to Ashwater. Albert Rich is the best
lawyer there. In the old days I did a great deal of work for Mrs. Rich.
I believe that he is a considerate man. I know that he has no cause to
love Martin Moreland. I’m going to tell him what I think is necessary.
I’m going to ask his opinion. I’m tired shivering and shaking and being
tortured with fear. I realize that Martin Moreland’s hand is heavy, but
after all, there are two things that are stronger than he—one is public
opinion and the other is God. Both of them would be against him if the
truth were known.”
Nancy thought deeply.
“You are right,” she said. “It isn’t fair that he should keep us
shivering and shaking and make our days unhappy and our nights a terror.
Go to Ashwater. Tell this Albert Rich what you think is necessary. I
can’t see that you need to go into full detail. Make him understand only
what is essential.”
“All right,” said Marcia, “I’m going.”
Nancy put the kettle to boil and brewed a cup of strong tea while Marcia
was dressing, for it could be seen that she was labouring under heavy
mental strain. Nancy followed her to the corner where Marcia took the
daily omnibus that ran between the two towns. She kissed her good-bye
and clung to her hands with a reassuring grip. After she had gone back
to the shop, she condemned herself that she had allowed Marcia to go
alone. She felt niggardly. Why did people let their fear of losing a few
pennies intervene when matters concerning their hearts and their souls
were at stake? What was money that it should make such dreadful things
of men and women? After all, men had made money; it was an emanation of
their brain. It was not one of the things that God had made. It was an
invention by which man, himself, had put upon his soul such shackles as
the Almighty never would have imposed. She wondered why she had not
locked the door and let people think what they would. Was there any
woman in Bluffport who needed a hat so badly that she could not have
waited one day while Nancy sat beside Marcia and gave her the comfort of
the grip of her hand, the sound of her voice, the chance to say a word
here and there that might have distracted her mind from its burden?
Nancy sat trying to think how she would feel if her soul were stained
with the red secret that she realized never ceased to burn and to eat
into the consciousness of her friend. And because she was her friend,
and because she had learned to love Marcia as she loved no one else, the
big tears rolled down her cheeks and several times that day she sewed
their stains under deftly folded velvet.
When Marcia stepped from the omnibus at the courthouse corner in
Ashwater, she realized that some disaster had overtaken the town. Here
and there she saw women weeping and wringing their hands. Little
children scuttled past with terrified faces. Half-grown boys went
running in one direction, their faces small mirrors of their elders’,
their arms loaded with sticks, with bricks, with stones. Men hurried
past, some of them carrying antiquated firearms on their shoulders,
flintlocks, and old army muskets; some of them with guns of modern make,
with revolvers; and there were men in that crowd who carried a grubbing
hoe, the blade of a scythe, a hickory “knockmaul,” or an axe.
She had difficulty in finding any one who would stop long enough to tell
her about the brain-storm that was sweeping Ashwater, but soon she had
the essentials of what had occurred from people with whom she talked
upon the street. She struggled for self-control, but in spite of herself
she grew terribly excited over the recitation of the tragedy that the
Morelands had worked in the lives of Rebecca Sampson, of Mahala, of
Jason, of hundreds of other people.
She had known Rebecca all the years of her residence in Ashwater. She at
once understood that Martin Moreland had lured her, Marcia, from her
home in an adjoining county to the little house in which she had lived
for so many years, for the sole purpose of using her as his tool in
taking care of Jason. He had made love to her in the most alluring
manner possible to him, and hers had been a nature that gave without
question and without fear. For him she had sacrificed relatives and
friends and gone with him willingly. Both the questioning and the fear
she now knew came later, and in an intensified form. What she realized
was, that, through all the best years of her life, under cover of a
menial task, she had been merely a servant for Martin Moreland. It was
not true that he was bound in an unhappy marriage from which he was
vainly striving to free himself, as he had told her in the beginning. He
had never meant to free himself. He had never intended to offer her
marriage and an honourable position. He had planned to take everything
she had to give; to have her take care of the boy, for whom she had
always struggled to keep from forming an attachment, because the threat
had hung over her that any minute he chose Martin Moreland would take
him away.
Her mind was milling over her own problem; there then came the problem
of Rebecca Sampson, and she saw, that even before he had determined on
the wreck of her life, Rebecca had gone down; yet these people were
saying that he had admitted that he was legally married to her. Rebecca
had been weak, a clinging thing, a tender, delicate girl; yet she had a
spirit and a resistance that he could not break; so he had been forced
to marry her. No one on the streets knew from where she had come or who
her people were. They remembered that a young thing lacking mentality
was sheltered by a little house in the outskirts. The few who had tried
to make friends with her in the beginning had been repulsed with insane
spasms so menacing that they had allowed her to go her way, as people in
that day were permitted to go, even though it was known that they lacked
balanced mentality.
Finally, in her mental milling, Marcia reached Mahala, and her soul
sickened over the things that people on the street were saying. By the
hour she had handled Mahala’s little undergarments and wash dresses. She
had mended the delicate laces and the embroideries that Elizabeth
Spellman’s fingers had fashioned. Through the papers and Bluffport
gossip, she had heard of the tragedy that had overtaken her. She had
talked it over with Nancy, and she had said to her: “To save my life, I
cannot believe that Mahala Spellman ever laid her fingers upon anything
that did not belong to her. There must have been some reason, there must
have been some plan on the part of the Morelands to ruin her. If there
was property they could get by doing it, the wreck of a woman’s life
would not stop them.”
Now the motive was furnished. Albert Rich had not hesitated, when the
crisis came, to tell people why Junior wanted to do anything that would
hurt and humiliate Mahala.
Finally, she reached Jason. She found herself saying aloud: “Jason was a
good boy. If I had been permitted, I could have made life different for
him.”
Not knowing what the outcome of the trouble in Ashwater would be, Marcia
felt that since the Morelands had come into the open and were doing
terrible things to other people, her time would soon come. They would
crush her as they had crushed Rebecca, Mahala and her mother, Mr.
Spellman and the other men who had fallen into their power in a
financial way—these other men who were raging up and down before the
courthouse block in the main business square of the town, like
blood-thirsty hyenas.
It seemed to Marcia that in order to collect her thoughts, she must get
away from people, she must go where her mind would not be diverted by
what she was seeing and hearing on the streets. She had thought that she
might find refuge in the office of Albert Rich, and she had gone there,
but it was locked and when she inquired for him, she had been told that
he was in the bank. No one knew what was happening there or when he
could be seen. Then Marcia followed an impulse she could not define, did
not realize that she was following. Her face turned to a familiar
direction; her feet carried her on a well-known path. She went straight
to the house in the outskirts where she and Jason had spent so many
years together. The whole place had been changed. It was now
comfortable. It was gay with paint; there was grass in the dooryard;
there were flowers blooming in small round and square beds and lining
the inside of the new fence. There was a carefully tended garden, but
she could see no one and hear no one as she paced up and down before it.
She thought that the people, who evidently were living happily there,
must have been drawn down town by the excitement.
Being very tired, Marcia went slowly up the walk. She sat on a chair on
the veranda shaded by the big, widely branching maple tree, and there
she tried to think. It was quiet and a robin was singing in the
branches, but she found that her brain, her heart and her blood, were in
such turmoil that she was unable to sit still. So she left the veranda,
and following the street to where it reached the country, she took up a
foot path across a meadow and at last she entered the wood behind the
house where Jason had taken refuge as a child.
Tired out at last, she sat on a log in the stillness of the deep wood,
and there she tried again to think. But she found that instead of
thinking, she was seeing things. As she looked at the dark floor of the
forest with the great trees, the thickness of the bushes, she began to
see a vision of the night of horror that a terrified boy must have spent
there when he fled before the wrath of Martin Moreland. As if she really
had shared that night with him she saw the things that had tortured him.
She visioned his return to the deserted house and his grief and
loneliness when he had found himself abandoned. She remembered what she
had been told of the success that he had made of life, of how he had
prospered in partnership with Peter Potter, and how his love of land had
culminated in his efforts for Mahala and himself.
Into her vision there came the pathetic figure of Rebecca, hiding the
bloom and the beauty of her young face, proclaiming herself everywhere
she went with her self-imposed emblem of purity, trying to convey to
others the belief that possessed her that her soul was white even as she
suffered torments in the fear that it was scarlet. Marcia thought of the
long path over which Rebecca had journeyed. She even tried a mental
estimate of the hundreds of miles that one woman’s feet had travelled,
driven in insane unrest from point to point. She recalled having been
told that in three different states the white flag had been seen, a
voice had been bravely lifted exhorting every one to acknowledge the
love of the Saviour, His power to heal. Marcia, in imagination, saw
Rebecca’s waving banner gleaming in the light, her tireless eyes always
searching from side to side, looking at the arms of every person
carrying a child, peering into the little buggies in which women dragged
after them the babies they had brought into life through love, and were
permitted to keep. She thought of Rebecca a long time and wondered who
her people might have been and where her home might be; she thought of
the price that she had paid to protect her honour, and very slowly a
resolve began forming in Marcia’s heart.
Into her vision Mahala came flying down the village street, her feet
scattering the gold and red leaves of the maples of autumn, her broad
hat hanging across her throat by its ties, her pretty, wide skirts blown
around her, as she dexterously rolled a gay hoop before her. She thought
of the girl’s youth and her beauty, and of how she had been stripped of
her parents, her home, her friends, and worse than all that, of her
honour.
Then Marcia saw a woman coming toward her through the forest, a woman of
her own height and form, a woman of her own face, but she wore a long,
trailing robe of scarlet, and she was lost. Her outstretched hands
seemed to be feeling their way, her eyes were not efficient; they were
looking up, but they were not helping her feet to find the path.
Sometimes as Marcia saw her in a shaft of sunlight, there was the hope
in her heart that the stumbling creature might find the way; sometimes
she saw her standing lost in deep darkness, but always one hand was
covering her heart, and always she was stumbling over the scarlet robe
that trailed around her and seemed to creep up to her arms and her
shoulders like the hot scorching of a flame.
Finally, the figures of the two Morelands came through the forest. They
were like giants that had broken into the wood. They did not seem to be
made of flesh and blood; they did not seem to be men like Mahlon
Spellman and Albert Rich and Doctor Grayson and the Presbyterian
minister; they seemed to be made of bronze or iron, while their hands
were huge, without hesitation crushing little children, frail women, and
weaker men; they reached out and wrested from people their homes, their
most precious possessions, and with heavy feet they trampled upon
everything that came in their path.
Then she saw the son leave the father and advance toward her, his
unsparing hands outstretched, his feet ready to trample, on his face the
sneer that had been there when he had entered her place of business and
found enjoyment in dealing the blow that had struck the light from her
eyes and hope from her heart.
Suddenly, Marcia arose and slipped through the wood in the dark,
inconspicuous dress she had selected to wear. When she came to the open,
she was amazed to find that it was night. Fully half the day she had
struggled alone in the forest. She came from it with one determination
fixed in her mind. She went to the business part of the town, being
unnoticed among the throngs that still crowded the streets, until she
reached the bank. She was familiar with the back part of it. She watched
her chance, slipped down the alley, climbed the back stairs, and tried
the door. It was locked, but she easily climbed through the open window
into the room that bore Junior’s name above the side stairs.
The flares of light on the street lit the office intermittently. She
walked around the room. She went to Junior’s big desk; she sat down in
his chair in front of it. She looked over the books and the litter of
papers that were piled on it. She moved slowly and deliberately. Then
she began opening the drawers in front of her. In the top right-hand one
lay a big revolver. It seemed to fascinate her. She picked it up and
fitted it to her hand. She laid her fingers upon the trigger. Then she
heard a rush of footsteps coming up the inside stairway from the private
room of Martin Moreland. Snatching up the revolver, she shoved the
drawer shut, and running across the room, entered a closet the door of
which was standing slightly ajar.