"Which serves life's purpose best,
To enjoy or to renounce?"
A thorough American, who comprehends what America has to do, and means
to help on with it, ought to choose to be born in New England, for the
vitalized brain, finely-chorded nerves, steely self-control,--then to go
West, for more live, muscular passion, succulent manhood, naked-handed
grip of his work. But when he wants to die, by all means let him hunt
out a town in the valley of Pennsylvania or Virginia: Nature and man
there are so ineffably self-contained, content with that which is, shut
in from the outer surge, putting forth their little peculiarities, as
tranquil and glad to be alive as if they were pulseless sea-anemones,
and after a while going back to the Being whence they came, just as
tranquil and glad to be dead.
Paul Blecker had some such fancy as this, that last evening before the
regiment of which he was surgeon started for Harper's Ferry, while he
and the Captain were coming from camp by the hill-road into the village
(or burgh: there are no Villages in Pennsylvania). Nothing was lost on
Blecker; his wide, nervous eyes took all in: the age and complacent
quiet of this nook of the world, the full-blooded Nature asleep in the
yellow June sunset; why! she had been asleep there since the beginning,
he knew. The very Indians in these hills must have been a fishing,
drowsy crew; their names and graves yet dreamily haunted the farms and
creek-shores. The Covenanters who came after them never had roused
themselves enough to shake them off. Covenanters: the Doctor began
joking to himself, as he walked along, humming some tune, about how the
spirit of every sect came out, always alike, in the temperament, the
very cut of the face, or whim of accent. These descendants of the
Covenanters, now,--Presbyterian elders and their wives,--going down to
camp to bid their boys good-bye, devoted them to death with just as
stern integrity, as partial a view of the right, as their ancestors did
theirs at Naseby or Drumclog: their religion loved its friends and hated
its enemies just as bitterly as when it scowled at Monmouth; the "boys,"
no doubt, would call themselves Roundheads, as they had done in the
three months' service. Paul Blecker, who had seen a good many sides of
the world, laughed to himself: the very Captain here, good, anxious,
innocent as a baby, as he was, looked at the world exactly through
Balfour of Burley's dead eyes, was going to cure the disease of it by
the old pill of intolerance and bigotry. No wonder Paul laughed.
The sobered Quaker evening was making ready for night: the yellow warmth
overhead thinning into tintless space; the low hills drawing farther off
in the melancholy light; the sky sinking nearer; clouds, unsteady all
day, softened at last into a thoughtful purple, and couching themselves
slowly in the hollows of the horizon; the sweep of cornfields and woods
and distant farms growing dim,--daguerreotype-like; the tinkle of the
sheep-bells on the meadows, the shouts of the boys in camp yonder, the
bass drone of the frogs in the swamp dulling down into the remoteness of
sleep. The Doctor slackened his sharp, jerking stride, and fell into
the monotonous gait of his companion, glancing up to him. McKinstry, he
thought, was going out to battle to-morrow with just as cool phlegm and
childlike content as he would set out to buy his merino ewes; but he
would receive no pay,--meant to transfer it to his men. And he would be
in the thickest of the fight,--you might bet on that. Umph! his quick
eyes darting over the big, leisurely frame, the neat yellow hair,
and the blue eyes mildly peering through spectacles. Then, having
satisfactorily anatomized McKinstry, he turned to the evening again with
open senses, the sensitive pulsing of his wide nostrils telling that
even the milky scent of the full-uddered cows gave him keen enjoyment.
The cows were going home from pasture, up shady barn-lanes, into the
grayer shadows about the houses on either side of the road, in whose
windows lights were beginning to glimmer. Solid old homesteads they
were, stone or brick, never wood. Out in these Western settlements, a
hundred years ago, they built durable homes, curiously enough, more than
in the Northern States; planted oaks about them, that bore the strength
of the earth up to heaven in sturdy arms, shaming the graceful,
uncertain elm of shallower soils. Just such old farm-houses as those,
Blecker thought, would turn out such old-time moulded men as McKinstry:
houses whose orchards still held on to the Waldower and Smoke-house
apples; their gardens gay with hollyhocks and crimson prince's-feather;
on the book-shelves the "Spectator" and "Gentleman's Magazine." The
women of them kept up the old-fashioned knitting-parties, and a
donation-visit to the pastor once a year; and the men were all gone to
the war, to keep the Union as it was in their fathers' time, and would
doubtless vote the conservative ticket next election because their
fathers did, which would make the war a horrible farce. The town,
Blecker thought, had rooted itself in between the hills with as solid
a persistence as the prejudices of its builders. Obstinately steep
streets, shaded by gnarled locust-trees; houses drawn back from the
sidewalks, in surly dread of all new-comers; the very smoke, vaporing
through the sky, had defiance in it of the outer barbarous world and its
vulgar newness. Yet the town had an honest country heart in it, if it
was a bit gray and crusty with age. Blecker, knowing it as he did, did
not wonder the boys who left it named a village for it out in Kansas,
trying to fancy themselves at home,--or that one old beggar in it asked
to be buried in the middle of the street, "So's I kin hear the stages
a-comin' in, an' know if the old place is a-gittin' on."
There seemed to be a migration from it to-night: they met, every minute,
buggies, old-fashioned carriages, horsemen.
"Going out to camp," McKinstry said; "the boys all have some one to bid
them good-bye."
What a lonely, reserved voice the man had! Blecker had the curiosity of
all sensitive men to know the soul-history of people; he glanced again
keenly in McKinstry's face. Pshaw! one might as well ask their story
from the deaf and dumb. But that they were dumb,--there was hint of a
tragedy in that!
Everybody stopped to speak to the Doctor. He had been but a few
months in the place; but the old church-goers had found him out as
a passionate, free-and-easy, honorable fellow, full of joke and
anecdote,--shrewd, too. They "fellowshipped" with him heartily, and were
glad when he got the post of surgeon with their sons. If there were
anything more astringent below this, any more real self in the man, held
back, belonging to a world outside of theirs, they did not see it. They
knew him better, they thought, than they did Daniel McKinstry, who had
grown up among them, just as mild and silent when he was a tow-haired
boy as now, a man of forty-five. He touched his hat to them now, and
went on, while Blecker leaned on the carriage-doors, his brown face
aglow with fun, his uneasy fingers drumming boyishly on the panel. Not
knowing that through the changeful face, and fierce, pitiful eyes of the
boy, the man Paul Blecker looked coolly out, testing, labelling
them. The boy in him, that they saw, Nature had made; but years of a
hand-to-hand fight with starvation came after, crime, and society, whose
work is later than Nature's, and sometimes better done.
"Fine girl!" said the Doctor, touching his hat to Miss Mallard, as she
cantered past. "Got a head of her own, too. Made a deused good speech,
when she presented the flag to-day."
Miss Mallard overheard him, as he intended she should, and blushed a
visible acknowledgment. All of her character was visible, well-developed
as her body: her timidity showed itself in the unceasing dropping of her
eyelid; her arch simplicity in the pouting lips; a coy reserve--well,
that everywhere, to the very rosette on her retreating slipper; and her
patriotism was quite palpable in the color of her Balmoral. She rode
Squire Mallard's gray.
"And very well they turn out," sneered Blecker.
"She is a woman," said the Captain, blushing,--differently from the
lady, however.
"And if she is?" turning suddenly. "She has the nature of a Bowery
rough. Pah, McKinstry! Sexes stand alike with me. If a woman's flesh is
weaker-grained a bit, what of that? Whoever would earn esteem must work
for it."
The Captain said nothing, stammered a little, then, hoisting his foot on
a stump, tied his shoe nervously.
Blecker smiled, a queer, sorrowful smile, as if, oddly enough, he felt
sorry for himself.
"I'd like to think of women as you do, Mac," he said. "You never knew
many?"
"Only two, until now,--my mother and little Sarah. They're gone now."
Sarah? The Doctor was silent a moment, thinking. He had heard of a
sister of McKinstry's, sick for years with some terrible disease, whom
he had nursed until the end. She was Sarah, most likely. Well, that was
what _his_ life had been given up for, was it? There was a twitching
about McKinstry's wide mouth: Paul looked away from him a moment, and
then, glancing furtively back, began again.
"No, I never knew my mother or sister, Mac. The great discovery of this
age is woman, old fellow! I've been, knocked about too much not to have
lost all delusions about them. It did well enough for the crusading
times to hold them as angels in theory, and in practice as idiots; but
in these rough-and-tumble days we'd better give 'em their places as
flesh and blood, with exactly such wants and passions as men."
The Captain never argued.
"I don't know," he said, dryly.
After that he jogged on in silence, glancing askance at the masculine,
self-assertant figure of his companion,--at the face, acrid, unyielding,
beneath its surface-heat: ruminating mildly to himself on what a good
thing it was for him never to have known any but old-fashioned women.
This Blecker, now, had been made by intercourse with such women as those
he talked of: he came from the North. The Captain looked at him with a
vague, moony compassion: the usual Western vision of a Yankee female
in his head,--Bloomer-clad, hatchet-faced, capable of anything, from
courting a husband to commanding a ship. (It is all your fault, genuine
women of New England! Why don't you come among us, and know your
country, and let your country know you? Better learn the meaning of
Chicago than of Venice, for your own sakes, believe me.)
They were near the town now, the road crossing a railroad-track, where
the hill, chopped apart for the grade, left bare the black stratum of
coal, tinged here and there with a bloody brown and whitish shale.
"Hillo! this means iron," said the Doctor, climbing up the bank,
cat-like, to break off a bit; "and here an odd formation, Mac. Take it
in to old Gurney."
The Captain cleaned his spectacles with piece of chamois-leather, put
them on, folded the leather and replaced it in its especial place in his
pocket, before he took the bit of rock.
"All that finical ceremony he would go through in the face of the
enemy," thought Blecker, jumping down on the track.
"Give it to old Gurney, Mac. It will insure you a welcome."
"It is curious, Doctor Blecker. But you"--
"I never care to gratify anybody. Besides, the old gentleman and I
inter-despised. Our instincts cried out, ''Ware dog!' the first day You
are a friend of his, eh, Mac?"
The Captain's face grew red, like a bashful woman's. He thought Blecker
had divined his secret, would haul it out roughly in another moment.
If this slang-talking Yankee should take little Lizzy's name into his
mouth! But the Doctor was silent, even looked away until the heat on the
poor old bachelor's face had died out. He knew McKinstry's thought of
that little girl well enough, but he held the child-hearted man's secret
tenderly and charily in his hand. Paul Blecker did talk slang and assert
himself; but every impulse in him was clean, delicate, liberal. So,
Paul remaining silent, the Captain took heart of grace, going down the
street, and ventured back to the Gurney question.
"I thought I would accompany you there, Doctor Blecker. They might only
think it seemly in me to bid farewell. I"--
Blecker nodded. The man had not been able to hide an harassed frown that
day under his usual vigor of speech and look. It became more palpable
after this; his voice, when he did speak, was fretful, irritable,--his
lips compressed; he stopped at a village-well to drink, as though his
mouth were parched.
"How old is that house,--the Gurneys?" he asked, affecting carelessness,
to baffle the curious inspection of McKinstry.
"The Fort? We call it the Fort because it was used for one in Indian
times," McKinstry began, chafing his lean whiskers delightedly.
Old houses were his hobby, especially this which they approached,--a
narrow, long building of unhewn stone, facing on the street, the lintels
and doors worm-eaten, and green with moss.
"Built by Bradford, the new part,--Bradford, of the Whiskey
Insurrection, you know? Carvings on the walls brought over the
mountains, when to bring them by panels was a two-months' journey.
There's queer stories hang about these old Pennsylvania homesteads."
"Bradford? The Gurneys are a new family here, then?"
"Came here but a few years back, from a country farther up the
mountains. They're different from us."
"How, different?" with a keen, surprised glance. "_I_ see they are a
newer people than the others; but I thought the village accepted them
with shut eyes."
The Captain stammered again.
"Old Father Gurney, as we call him, taught school when they first came,
but he gave that up. This section is a good geological field, and he
wished to devote himself to that," he went on, evading the question.
"They live off of those acres at the back of the house since that. You
see? Corn, potatoes, buckwheat,--good yield."
"Who oversees the planting?" sharply.
McKinstry wondered vaguely at the little Doctor's curious interest in
the Gurneys, but went on with his torpid, slow answers.
"That eldest girl, I believe, Grey. Cow there, you see, and ducks. He's
popular, old Father Gurney. People have a liking for his queer ways,
help him collect specimens for his cabinet; the boys bring him birds to
stuff, and snakes. If it hadn't been for the troubles breaking out,
he was on the eve of a most im-por-tant discovery,--the crater of an
exhausted volcano in Virginia." McKinstry lowered his voice cautiously.
"Fact, Sir. In Mercer County. But the guerrillas interfered with his
researches."
"I think it probable. So he stuffs birds, does he?" Blecker's lips
closing tighter.
"And keeps the snakes in alcohol. There are shelves in Miss Lizzy's room
quite full of them. That lower room it was, but Joseph has taken it for
a study. She has the upper one for her flowers and her father's birds."
"And Grey, and the twins, and the four boys bedaubed with molasses, and
the dog, and the cooking?"
"Stowed away somewhere," the Captain mildly responded.
Dr. Blecker was testy.
"You know Joseph, her brother? I mean our candidate for Congress next
term?"
"Yes. Democratic. J. Schuyler Gurney,--give him his name, Mac.
Republican last winter. Joseph trims to wind and tide well. I heard
him crow like a barn-yard fowl on the Capitol-steps at Washington
when Lincoln called for the seventy-five thousand: now, he hashes up
Breckinridge's conservative speech for your hickory-backed farmers. Does
he support the family, Mac?"
"His election-expenses are heavy."
"Brandy-slings. I know his proclivities."
McKinstry colored. Dr. Blecker was coarse, an ill-bred man, he
suspected,--noting, too, the angry repression in his eyes, as he stood
leaning on the gate, looking in at the Fort, for they had reached it
by this time. The Captain looked in, too, through the dusky clumps of
altheas and plum-trees, at the old stone house, dyed tawny-gray in the
evening light, and talked on, the words falling unconscious and simple
as a stream of milk. The old plodder was no longer dumb. Blecker had
hit on the one valve of the shut-up nature, the obstinate point of
self-reliant volition in a life that had been one long drift of
circumstance. This old stone house, shaggy with vines, its bloody script
of Indian warfare hushed down and covered with modern fruit-trees and
sunflowers,--this fort, and the Gurneys within it, stood out in the bare
swamped stretch of the man's years, their solitary bit of enchantment.
They were bare years,--the forty he had known: Fate had drained them
tolerably dry before she flung them to him to accomplish duty in;--the
duty was done now. McKinstry, a mild, common-faced man, had gone through
it for nearly half a century, pleasantly,--never called it heroism. It
was done. He had time now to stretch his nerves of body and soul with
a great sigh of relief,--to see that Duty was, after all, a lean,
meagre-faced angel, that Christ sends first, but never meant should be
nearest and best. Faith, love, and so, happiness, these were words of
more pregnant meaning in the gospel the Helper left us. So McKinstry
stood straight up, for the first time in his life, and looked about him.
A man, with an adult's blood, muscles, needs; an idle soul which his
cramped creed did not fill, hungry domestic instincts, narrow and
patient habit;--he claimed work and happiness, his right. Of course it
came, and tangibly. Into every life God sends an actual messenger to
widen and lift it above itself: puerile or selfish the messenger often
is, but so straight from Him that the divine radiance clings about it,
and all that it touches. We call that _love_, you remember. A secular
affair, according to McKinstry's education, as much as marketing. So
when he found that the tawny old house and the quiet little girl in
there with the curious voice, which people came for miles to hear,
were gaining an undue weight in his life, held, to be plain, all the
fairy-land of which his childhood had been cheated, all fierce beauty,
aspiration, passionate strength to insult Fate, which his life had never
known, he kept the knowledge to himself. It was boyish weakness. He
choked it out of thought on Sundays as sacrilege: how could he talk
of the Gurney house and Lizzy to that almighty, infinite Vagueness he
worshipped? Stalking to and fro, in the outskirts of the churchyard,
he used to watch the flutter of the little girl's white dress, as she
passed by to "meeting." He could not help it that his great limbs
trembled, if the dress touched them, or that he had a mad longing to
catch the tired-looking child up to his brawny breast and hold her there
forever. But he felt guilty and ashamed that it was so; not knowing that
Christ, seeing the pure thrill in his heart, smiled just as he did long
ago when Mary brought the beloved disciple to him.
He never had told little Lizzy that he loved her,--hardly told himself.
Why, he was forty-five,--and a year or two ago she was sledding down the
street with her brothers, a mere yellow-haired baby. He remembered the
first time he had noticed her,--one Christmas eve; his mother and Sarah
were alive then. There was an Italian woman came to the village with a
broken hand-organ, a filthy, starving wretch, and Gurney's little girl
went with her from house to house in the snow, singing Christmas carols,
and handing the tambourine. Everybody said, "Why, you little tot!" and
gave her handfuls of silver. Such a wonderful voice she had even then,
and looked so chubby and pretty in her little blue cloak and hood; and
going about with the woman was such a pure-hearted thing to do. She
danced once or twice that day, striking the tambourine, he remembered;
the sound of it seemed to put her in a sort of ecstasy, laughing till
her eyes were full of tears, and her tangled hair fell all about her red
cheeks. She could not help but do it, he believed, for at other times
she was shy, terrified, if one spoke to her; but he wished he had not
seen her dance then, though she was only a child: dancing, he thought,
was as foul and effective a snare as ever came from hell. After that day
she used often to come to the farm to see his mother and Sarah.
They tried to teach her to sew, but she was a lazy little thing, he
remembered, with an indulgent smile. And he was "Uncle Dan." So now she
was grown up, quite a woman: in those years, when she had been with her
kinsfolk in New York, she had been taught to sing. Well, well! McKinstry
reckoned music as about as useful as the crackling of thorns under a
pot; so he never cared to know, what was the fact, that this youngest
daughter of Gurney's had one of the purest contralto voices in the
States. She came home, grown, but just as shy; only tired, needing care:
no one could look in Lizzy Gurney's face without wishing to comfort and
help the child. The Gurneys were so wretchedly poor, that might be the
cause of her look. She was a woman now. Well, and then? Why, nothing
then. He was Uncle Dan still, of whom she was less afraid than of any
other living creature; that was all. Thinking, as he stood with Paul
Blecker, leaning over the gate, of how she had brought him a badly-made
havelock that morning. "You're always so kind to me," she said. "So I
am kind to her," he thought, his quiet blue eyes growing duller behind
their spectacles; "so I will be."
The Doctor opened the gate, and went in, turning into the shrubbery, and
seating himself under a sycamore.
"Don't wait for me, McKinstry," he said. "I'll sit here and smoke a bit.
Here comes the aforesaid Joseph."
He did not light his cigar, however, when the other left him; took off
his hat to let the wind blow through his hair, the petulant heat dying
out of his face, giving place to a rigid settling, at last, of the
fickle features.
A flabby, red-faced man in fine broadcloth and jaunty beaver came down
the path, fumbling his seals, and met the Captain with a puffing snort
of salutation. To Blecker, whose fancy was made sultry to-night by some
passion we know nothing of, he looked like a bloated spider coming out
of the cell where his victims were. "Gorging himself, while they and the
country suffer the loss," he muttered. But Paul was a hot-brained
young man. We should only have seen a vulgar, commonplace trickster in
politics, such as the people make pets of. "Such men as Schuyler Gurney
get the fattest offices. God send us a monarchy soon!" he hissed under
his breath, as the gate closed after the politician. By which you will
perceive that Dr. Blecker, like most men fighting their way up, was too
near-sighted for any abstract theories. Liberty, he thought, was a very
poetic, Millennium-like idea for stump-speeches and college-cubs, but he
grappled with the time the States were too chaotic, untaught a mass for
self-government; he cursed secession as anarchy, and the government at
Washington for those equally anarchical, drunken whims of tyranny; he
would like to see an iron heel put on the whole concern, for wholesome
discipline. The Doctor was born in one of the Border States; men there,
it is said, have a sort of hand-to-mouth politics; their daily bread of
rights is all they care for; so Paul seldom looked into to-morrow for
anything. In other ways, too, his birth had curdled his blood into a
sensuous languor. To-night, after McKinstry had entered the house, and
he was left alone, the quaint old garden quiet, the air about him clean,
pure, unperfumed, the stars distant and lonely, his limbs bedded in the
clinging moss, he was rested for the moment, happy like a child, with
no subtile-sensed questionings why. The sounds of the village could not
penetrate there; the content, the listless hush of the night was with
him; the delicious shimmer of the trees in the starlight, the low call
of the pigeon to its mate, even the fall of the catalpa-blossoms upon
his hand, thrilled him with unreasoning pleasure: a dull consciousness
that the earth was alive and well, and he was glad to live with the
rest.
Something in Blecker's nature came into close _rapport_ with the higher
animal life. If he had been born with money, and lived here in these
stagnating hills, or down yonder on some lazy cotton-plantation, he
would have settled down before this into a genial, child-loving,
arbitrary husband and master, fond of pictures and horses, his house in
decent taste, his land pleasure-giving, his wines good. By this time he
would have been Judge Blecker, with a portly voice, flushed face, and
thick eyelids. But he had scuffled and edged his way in the thin air of
Connecticut as errand-boy, daguerreotypist, teacher, doctor;--so he came
into the Gurney garden that night, shrewd, defiant, priding himself on
detecting shams. His waistcoat and trousers were of coarser stuff than
suited his temperament; a taint of vulgarity in his talk, his whiskers
untrimmed, the meaning of his face compacted, sharpened. It was many
a year since a tear had come into his black eyes; yet tears belonged
there, as much as to a woman's.
Only for a few moments, therefore, he was contented to sit quiet in the
soft gloaming: then he puffed his cigar impatiently, watching the
house. Waiting for some one: with no fancies about the old fort, like
McKinstry. An over-full house, with an unordered, slipshod life, hungry,
clinging desperately in its poverty to an old prestige of rank, one
worker inside patiently bearing the whole selfish burden. Well, there
was the history of the anxious, struggling, middle class of America: why
need he have been goaded so intolerably by this instance? Paul's eyes
were jaundiced; he sat moodily watching the lighted window off in the
darkness, through which he could catch glimpses of the family-room
within: he called it a pitiful tragedy going on there; yet it seemed to
be a cheerful and hearty life. This girl Grey, whom he looked on as one
might on some victim from whose lungs the breath was drawn slowly, was
fresh, careless, light-hearted enough. Going to and fro in the room,
now carrying one of the children, she sang it to sleep with no doleful
ditty, such as young women fresh from boarding-school affect, but with
a ringing, cheery song. You might be sure that Baby would wake laughing
to-morrow morning after it. He could see her shadow pass and repass the
windows; she would be out presently; she was used to come out always
after the hot day's flurry,--to say her prayers, he believed; and he
chose to see her there in the dark and coolness to bid her good-bye. He
waited, not patiently.
Grey, trotting up and down, holding by the chubby legs and wriggling
arms of Master Pen, sang herself out of breath with "Roy's Wife," and
stopped short.
"I'm sure, Pen, I don't know what to do with you,"--half ready to cry.
"'Dixie,' now, Sis."
Pen was three years old, but he was the baby when his mother died; so
Sis walked him to sleep every night: all tender memories of her who
was gone clinging about the little fat lump of mischief in his white
night-gown. A wiry voice spoke out of some corner,--
"Yer 'd hev a thumpin' good warmin', Mars' Penrose, ef ole Oth hed his
will o' yer! It 'ud be a special 'pensation ob de Lord fur dat chile!"
Pen prospected his sister's face with the corner of one blue eye. There
was a line about the freckled cheeks and baby-mouth of "Sis" that
sometimes agreed with Oth on the subject of dispensations, but it was
not there to-night.
"No, no, uncle. Not the last thing before he goes to bed. I always try,
myself, to see something bright and pretty for the last thing, and then
shut my eyes, quick,--just as Pen will do now: quick! there's my sonny
boy!"
Nobody ever called Grey Gurney pretty; but Pen took an immense delight
in her now; shook and kicked her for his pony, but could not make her
step less firm or light; thrust his hands about her white throat; pulled
the fine reddish hair down; put his dumpling face to hers. A thin,
uncertain face, but Pen knew nothing of that; he did know, though, that
the skin was fresh and dewy as his own, the soft lips very ready for
kisses, and the pale hazel eyes just as straightforward-looking as a
baby's. Children and dogs believe in women like Grey Gurney. Finally,
from pure exhaustion, Pen cuddled up and went to sleep.
It was a long, narrow room where Grey and the children were, covered
with rag-carpet, (she and the boys and old Oth had made the balls for
it last winter): well lighted, for Father Gurney had his desk in
there to-night. He was working at his catalogue of Sauroidichnites in
Pennsylvania. A tall, lean man, with hook-nose, and peering, protruding,
blue eyes. Captain McKinstry sat by him, turning over Brongniart; his
brain, if one might judge from the frequency with which he blew his
nose, evidently the worse from the wear since he came in; glancing with
an irresolute awe from the book to the bony frame of the old man in his
red dressing-gown, and then to the bony carcasses of the birds on the
wall in their dusty plumage.
"Like enough each to t' other," old Oth used to mutter; "on'y dem birds
done forgot to eat, an' Mars' Gurney neber will, gorry knows dat!"
"If you could, Captain McKinstry,"--it was the old man who spoke now,
with a sort of whiffle through his teeth,--"if you could? A chip of
shale next to this you brought this evening would satisfy me. This is
evidently an original fossil foot-mark: no work of Indians. I'll go with
you,"--gathering his dressing-gown about his lank-legs.
"No," said the Captain, some sudden thought bringing gravity and
self-reliance into his face. "My little girl is going with Uncle Dan.
It's the last walk I can take with her. Go, child, and bring your
bonnet."
Little Lizzy (people generally called her that) got up from the
door-step where she sat, and ran up-stairs. She was one of those women
who look as if they ought to be ordered and taken care of. Grey put a
light shawl over her shoulders as she passed her. Grey thought of Lizzy
always very much as a piece of fine porcelain among some earthen crocks,
she being a very rough crock herself. Did not she have to make a
companion in some Ways of old Oth? When she had no potatoes for dinner,
or could get no sewing to pay for Lizzy's shoes, (Lizzy _was_ hard on
her shoes, poor thing!) she found herself talking it over with Oth. The
others did not-care for such things, and it would be mean to worry
them, but Oth liked a misery, and it was such a relief to tell things
sometimes! The old negro had been a slave of her grandfather's until he
was of age; he was quite helpless now, having a disease of the spine.
But Grey had brought him to town with them, "because, you know, uncle, I
couldn't keep house without you, at all,--I really couldn't." So he had
his chair covered with sheepskin in the sunniest corner always, and
Grey made over her father's old clothes for him on the machine. Oth had
learned to knit, and made "hisself s'ficiently independent, heelin' an'
ribbin' der boys' socks, an' keepin' der young debbils in order," he
said.
It was but a cheap machine Grey had, but a sturdy little chap; the steel
band of it, even the wheel, flashed back a jolly laugh at her as she
passed it, slowly hushing Pen, as if it would like to say, "I'll put you
through, Sis!" and looked quite contemptuously at the heaps of white
muslin piled up beside it. The boys' shirts, you know,--but wasn't it a
mercy she had made enough to buy them before muslin went up? There were
three of the boys asleep now, legs and arms adrift over the floor,
pockets gorged with half-apples, bits of twine instead of suspenders,
other surreptitious bits under their trousers for straps. There were
the twins, girls of ten, hungering for beaux, pickles, and photographic
albums. They were gone to a party in the village. "Sis" had done up
their white dresses; and such fun as they had with her, putting them on
to hide the darns! She made it so comical that they laughed more than
they did the whole evening.
Grey had saved some money to buy them ribbon for sashes, but Joseph had
taken it from her work-basket that morning to buy cigars. One of the
girls had cried, and even Grey's lips grew scarlet; her Welsh blood
maddened. This woman was neither an angel nor an idiot, Paul Blecker.
Then--it was such a trifle! Poor Joseph! he had been her mother's
favorite, was spoiled a little. So she hurried to his chamber-door with
his shaving-water, calling, "Brother!" Grey had a low, always pleasant
voice, I remember; you looked in her eyes, when you heard it, to see her
laughing. The ex-Congressman was friendly, but dignified, when he took
the water. Grey presumed on her usefulness; women seldom did know their
place.
There was yet another girl busy now, convoying the lubberly hulks of
boys to bed,--a solid, Dutch-built little clipper, Loo by name. Loo
looked upon Grey secretly as rather silly; (she did all the counting for
her; Grey hardly knew the multiplication-table;) she always, however,
kept her opinions to herself. Tugging the boys after her in the manner
of a tow-boat, she thumped past her father and "that gype, McKinstry,
colloging over their bits of rock," indignation in every twist of her
square shoulders.
"Fresh air," she said to Grey, jerking her head emphatically toward the
open door.
"I will, Looey."
"Looey! Pish!"
It was no admiring glance she bestowed on the slight figure that came
down the stairs, and stood timidly waiting for McKinstry.
"You're going, Captain?" the old man's nose and mind starting suddenly
up from his folio. "Lizzy,--eh? Here's the bit of rock. In the coal
formation, you say? Impossible, then, to be as old as the batrachian
track that"--
A sudden howl brought him back to the present era. Loo was arguing her
charge up to bed by a syllogism applied at the right time in the right
place. The old man held his hands to his ears with a patient smile,
until McKinstry was out of hearing.
"It is hard to devote the mind pure to a search for truth here, my
daughter," looking over Grey's head as usual, with pensive, benevolent
eyes. "But I do what I can,--I do what I can."
"I know, father,"--stroking his hair as she might a child's, trimming
the lamp, and bringing his slippers while he held out his feet for her
to put them on,--"I know."
Then, when he took up the pen, she went out into the cool night.
"I do what I can," said he, earnestly, looking at the catalogue, with
his head to one side.
It was Oth's time,--now or never.
"Debbil de bit yer do! Ef yer did what yer could, Mars' Si, dar 'ud be
more 'n one side o' sparerib in de cellar fur ten hungry mouths. We've
gone done eat dat pig o' Miss Grey's from head ter tail. An' pigs in
June's a disgrace ter Christians, let alone Presbyterians like us uns."
The old man glanced at him. Oth's spine gave his tongue free license.
"I'll discharge him," faintly.
"'Scharge yerself," growled Oth, under his breath.
So the old man went back to his batrachians, and Oth ribbed Pen's sock
in silence: the old fort stood at last as quiet in the moonlight as if
it were thinking over all of its long-ago Indian sieges.
Grey's step was noiseless, going down the tan-bark path. She drew long
breaths, her lungs being choked with the day's work, and threw back the
hair from her forehead and throat. There was a latent dewiness in
the air that made the clear moonlight as fresh and invigorating as a
winter's morning. Grey stretched out her arms in it, with a laugh, as
a child might. You would know, to look at her hair, that there was a
strong poetic capacity in that girl below her simple Quaker character;
as it lay in curly masses where the child had pulled it down, there was
no shine, but clear depth of color in it: her eyes the same; not soggy,
black, flashing as women's are who effuse their experience every day
for the benefit of by-standers; this girl's were pale hazel, clear,
meaningless at times, but when her soul did force itself to the light
they gave it fit utterance. Women with hair and eyes like those, with
passionate lips and strong muscles like Grey Gurney's, are children,
single-natured all their lives, until some day God's test comes: then
they live tragedies, unconscious of their deed.
The night was singularly clear, in its quiet: only a few dreamy trails
of gray mist, asleep about the moon: far off on the crest of the closing
hills, she fancied she could see the wind-stir in the trees that made a
feathered shadow about the horizon. She leaned on the stile, looking
over the sweep of silent meadows and hills, and slow--creeping
watercourses. The whole earth waited, she fancied, with newer life and
beauty than by day: going back, it might be, in the pure moonlight,
to remember that dawn when God said, "Let there be light." The girl
comprehended the meaning of the night better, perhaps, because of the
house she had left. Every night she came out there. She left the clothes
and spareribs behind her, and a Something, a Grey Gurney that might have
been, came back to her in the coolness and rest, the nearer she drew to
the pure old earth. She never went down into those mossy hollows, or
among the shivering pines, with a soiled, tawdry dress; she wore always
the clear, primitive colors, or white,--Grey: it was the girl's only bit
of self-development. This night she could see McKinstry's figure, as he
went down the path through the rye-field. He was stooping, leading Lizzy
by the hand, as a nurse might an infant. Grey thrust the currant-bushes
aside eagerly; she could catch a glimpse of the girl's face in the
colorless light. It always had a livid tinge, but she fancied it was red
now with healthy blushes; her eyes were on the ground: in the house they
looked out from under their heavy brows on their daily life with a tired
coldness that made silly Grey ashamed of her own light-heartedness. The
man's common face was ennobled with such infinite tenderness and pain,
Grey thought the help that lay therein would content her sister. It was
time for the girl's rest to come; she was sick of herself and of life.
So the tears came to Grey's eyes, though to the very bottom of her heart
she was thankful and glad.
"She has found home at last!"--she said; and, maybe, because something
in the thought clung to her as she sauntered slowly down the
garden--alleys, her lips kept moving in a childish fashion of hers. "A
home at last, at last!"--that was what she said.
Paul Blecker, too, waiting back yonder among the trees, saw McKinstry
and his companion, and read the same story that Grey did, but in a
different fashion. "The girl loves him." There were possibilities,
however, in that woman's curious traits, that Blecker, being a physician
and a little of a soul-fancier, saw: nothing in McKinstry's formal,
orthodox nature ran parallel with them; therefore he never would know
them. As they passed Blecker's outlook through the trees, his half-shut
eye ran over her,--the despondent step, the lithe, nervous limbs, the
manner in which she clung for protection to his horny hand. "Poor
child!" the Doctor thought. There was something more, in the girl's
face, that, people called gentle and shy: a weak, uncertain chin; thin
lips, never still an instant, opening and shutting like a starving
animal's; gray eyes, dead, opaque, such as Blecker had noted in the
spiritual mediums in New England.
"I'm glad it is McKinstry she loves, and not I," he said.
He turned, and forgot her, watching Grey coming nearer to him. The
garden sloped down to the borders of the creek, and she stood on its
edge now, looking at the uneasy crusting of the black water and the
pearly glint of moonlight. Thinking of Lizzy, and the strong love that
held her; feeling a little lonely, maybe, and quiet, she did not know
why; trying to wrench her thoughts back to the house, and the clothes,
and the spareribs. Why! he could read her thoughts on her face as if
it were a baby's! A homely, silly girl they called her. He thanked God
nobody had found her out before him. Look at the dewy freshness of her
skin! how pure she was! how the world would knock her about, if he did
not keep his hold on her! But he would do that; to-night he meant to lay
his hand upon her life, and never take it off, absorb it in his own. She
moved forward into the clear light: that was right. There was a broken
boll of a beech--tree covered with lichen: she should sit on that,
presently, her face in open light, he in the shadow, while he told
her. "Watching her with hot breath where she stood, then going down to
her:--
"Is Grey waiting to bid her friend good-bye?"
She put her hand in his,--her very lips trembling with the sudden heat,
her untrained eyes wandering restlessly.
"I thought you would come to me, Doctor Blecker."
"Call me Paul," roughly. "I was coarser born and bred than you. I want
to think that matters nothing to you."
She looked up proudly.
"You know it matters nothing. I am not vulgar."
"No, Grey. But--it is curious, but no one ever called me Paul, as boy or
man. It is a sign of equality; and I've always had, in the _mélée,_ the
underneath taint about me. You are not vulgar enough to care for it.
Yours is the highest and purest nature I ever knew. Yet I know it is
right for you to call me Paul. Your soul and mine stand on a plane
before God."
The childish flush left her face; the timid woman-look was in it now. He
bent nearer.
"They stand there alone, Grey."
She drew back from him, her hands nervously catching in the thick curls.
"You do not believe that?" his breath clogged and hot. "It is a fancy of
mine? not true?"
"It is true."
He caught the whisper, his face growing pale, his eyes flashing.
"Then you are mine, child! What is the meaning of these paltry
contradictions? Why do you evade me from day to day?"
"You promised me not to speak of this again,"--weakly.
"Pah! You have a man's straightforward, frank instinct, Grey; and this
is cowardly,--paltry, as I said before. I will speak of it again.
To-night is all that is left to me."
He seated her upon the beech-trunk. One could tell by the very touch
and glance of the man how the image of this woman stood solitary in his
coarser thoughts, delicate, pure: a disciple would have laid just such
reverential fingers on the robe of the Madonna. Then he stood off from
her, looking straight into her hazel eyes. Grey, with all her innocent
timidity, was the cooler, stronger, maybe, of the two: the poor Doctor's
passionate nature, buffeted from one anger and cheat to another in the
world, brought very little quiet or tact or aptitude in language for
this one hour. Yet, standing there, his man's sturdy heart throbbing
slow as an hysteric woman's, his eyeballs burning, it seemed to him that
all his life had been but the weak preface to these words he was going
to speak.
"It angers me," he muttered, abruptly, "that, when I come to you with
the thought that a man's or a woman's soul can hold but once in life,
you put me aside with the silly whims of a schoolgirl. It is not worthy
of you, Grey. You are not as other women."
What was this that he had touched? She looked up at him steadily,
her hands clasped about her knees, the childlike rose-glow and light
banished from her face.
"I am not like other women. You speak truer than you know. You call me a
silly, happy child. Maybe I am; but, Paul, once in my life God punished
me. I don't know for what,"--getting up, and stretching out her groping
arms, blindly.
There was a sudden silence. This was not the cheery, healthful Grey
Gurney of a moment before, this woman with the cold terror creeping out
in her face. He caught her hands and held them.
"I don't know for what," she moaned. "He did it. He is good."
He watched the slow change in her face: it made his hands tremble as
they held hers. No longer a child, but a woman whose soul the curse had
touched. Miriam, leprous from God's hand, might have thus looked up to
Him without the camp. Blecker drew her closer. Was she not his own? He
would defend her against even this God, for whom he cared but little.
"What has been done to you, child?"
She shook herself free, speaking in a fast, husky whisper.
"Do not touch me, Dr. Blecker. It was no school-girl's whim that kept me
from you. I am not like other women. I am not worthy of any man's love."
"I think I know what you mean," he said, gravely. "I know your story,
Grey. They made you live a foul lie once. I know it all. You were a
child then."
She had gone still farther from him, holding by the trunk of a dead
tree, her face turned towards the water. The black sough of wind from
it lifted her hair, and dampened her forehead. The man's brain grew
clearer, stronger, somehow, as he looked at her; as thought does in the
few electric moments of life when sham and conventionality crumble down
like ashes, and souls stand bare, face to face. For the every-day,
cheery, unselfish Grey of the coarse life in yonder he cared but little;
it was but the husk that held the woman whose nature grappled with his
own, that some day would take it with her to the Devil or to God. He
knew that. It was this woman that stood before him now: looking back,
out of the inbred force and purity within her, the indignant man's sense
of honor that she had, on the lie they had made her live: daring to face
the truth, that God had suffered this thing, yet clinging, like a simple
child, to her old faith in Him. That childish faith, that worked itself
out in her common life, Paul Blecker set aside, in loving her. She was
ignorant: he knew the world, and, he thought, very plainly saw that the
Power who had charge of it suffered unneeded ills, was a traitor to the
Good his own common sense and kindly feeling could conceive; which is
the honest belief of most of the half-thinkers in America.
"You were but a child," he said again. "It matters nothing to me, Grey.
It left no taint upon you."
"It did," she cried, passionately. "I carry the marks of it to my grave.
I never shall be pure again."
"Why did your God let you go down into such foulness, then?"--the words
broke from his lips irrepressibly. "It was He who put you in the hands
of a selfish woman; it was He who gave you a weak will. It is He who
suffers marriages as false as yours. Why, child! you call it crime, the
vow that bound you for that year to a man you loathed; yet the world
celebrates such vows daily in every church in Christendom."
"I know that";--her voice had gone down into its quiet sob, like a
little child's.
She sat down on the ground, now, the long shore-grass swelling up around
her, thrusting her fingers into the pools of eddying water, with a
far-off sense of quiet and justice and cold beneath there.
"I don't understand," she said. "The world's wrong somehow. I don't
think God does it. There's thousands of young girls married as I was.
Maybe, if I 'd told Him about it, it wouldn't have ended as it did. I
did not think He cared for such things."
Blecker was silent. What did he care for questions like this now? He sat
by her on the broken trunk, his elbows on his knees, his sultry eyes
devouring her face and body. What did it matter, if once she had been
sold to another man? She was free now: he was dead. He only knew that
here was the only creature in earth or heaven that he loved: there was
not a breath in her lungs, a tint of her flesh, that was not dear to
him, allied by some fierce passion to his own sense: there was that
in her soul which he needed, starved for: his life balked blank here,
demanding it,--her,--he knew not what: but that gained, a broader
freedom opened behind, unknown possibilities of honor and truth and
deed. He would take no other step, live no farther, until he gained her.
Holding, too, the sense of her youth, her rare beauty, as it seemed
to him; loving it with keener passion because he alone developed it,
drawing her soul to the light! how like a baby she was: how dainty the
dimpling white flesh of her arms, the soft limbs crouching there! So
pure, the man never came near her without a dull loathing of himself, a
sudden remembrance of places where he had been tainted, made unfit to
touch her,--rows in Bowery dance-houses, waltzes with musk-scented fine
ladies: when this girl put her cool little hand in his sometimes, he
felt tears coming to his eyes, as if the far-off God or the dead mother
had blessed him. She sat there, now, going back to that blot in her
life, her eyes turned every moment up to the Power beyond in whom she
trusted, to know why it had been. He had seen little children, struck
by their mother's hand, turn on them a look just so grieved and so
appealing.
"It was no one's fault altogether, Paul," she said. "My mother was not
selfish, more than other women. There were very many mouths to feed: it
is so in most families like ours."
"I know."
"I am very dull about books,--stupid, they say. I could not teach; and
they would not let me sew for money, because of the disgrace. These are
the only ways a woman has. If I had been a boy"--
"I understand."
"No man can understand,"--her voice growing shrill with pain. "It's not
easy to eat the bread needed for other mouths day after day, with your
hands tied, idle and helpless. A boy can go out and work, in a hundred
ways: a girl must marry; it's her only chance for a livelihood, or a
home, or anything to fill her heart with. Don't blame my mother, Paul.
She had ten of us to work for. From the time I could comprehend, I knew
her only hope was, to live long enough to see her boys educated, and
her daughters in homes of their own. It was the old story, Doctor
Blecker,"--with a shivering laugh more pitiful than a cry. "I've noticed
it since in a thousand other houses. Young girls like me in these
poor-genteel families,--there are none of God's creatures more helpless
or goaded, starving at their souls. I couldn't teach. I had no talent;
but if I had, a woman's a woman: she wants something else in her life
than dog-eared school-books and her wages year after year."
Blecker could hardly repress a smile.
"You are coming to political economy by a woman's road, Grey."
"I don't know what that is. I know what my life was then. I was only a
child; but when that man came and held out his hand to take me, I was
willing when they gave me to him,--when they sold me, Doctor Blecker. It
was like leaving some choking pit, where air was given to me from other
lungs, to go out and find it for my own. What marriage was or ought to
be I did not know; but I wanted, as every human being does want, a place
for my own feet to stand on, not to look forward to the life of an old
maid, living on sufferance, always the one too many in the house."
"That is weak and vulgar argument, child. It should not touch a true
woman, Grey. Any young girl can find work and honorable place for
herself in the world, without the defilement of a false marriage."
"I know that now. But young girls are not taught that. I was only a
child, not strong-willed. And now, when I'm free,"--a curious clearness
coming to her eye,--"I'm glad to think of it all. I never blame other
women. Because, you see,"--looking up with the flickering smile,--"a
woman's so hungry for something of her own to love, for some one to be
kind to her, for a little house and parlor and kitchen of her own; and
if she marries the first man who says he loves her, out of that first
instinct of escape from dependence, and hunger for love, she does not
know she is selling herself, until it's too late. The world's all wrong,
somehow."
She stopped, her troubled face still upturned to his.
"But you,--you are free now?"
"He is dead."
She slowly rose as she spoke, her voice hardening.
"He was my cousin, you know,--the same name as mine. Only a year he was
with me. Then he went to Cuba, where he died. He is dead. But I am not
free,"--lifting her hands fiercely, as she spoke. "Nothing can wipe the
stain of that year off of me."
"You know what man he was," said the Doctor, with a natural thrill of
pleasure that he could say it honestly. "I know, poor child! A vapid,
cruel tyrant, weak, foul. You hated him, Grey? There's a strength of
hatred in your blood. Answer me. You dare speak truth to me."
"He's dead now,"--with a long, choking breath. "We will not speak of
him."
She stood a moment, looking down the stretch of curdling black
water,--then, turning with a sudden gesture, as though she flung
something from her, looked at him with a pitiful effort to smile.
"I don't often think of that time. I cannot bear pain very well. I like
to be happy. When I'm busy now, or playing with little Pen, I hardly
believe I am the woman who was John Gurney's wife. I was so old then! I
was like a hard, tigerish soul, tried and tempted day by day. He made me
that."
She could not bear pain, he saw: remembrance of it, alone, made the
flesh about her lips blue, unsteadied her brain; the well-accented face
grew vacant, dreary; neither nerves nor will of this woman were tough.
Her family were not the stuff out of which voluntary heroes are made.
He saw, too, she was thrusting it back,--out of thought: it was her
temperament to do that.
"So, now, Grey," he said, cheerfully, "the story's told. Shall we lay
that ghost of the old life, and see what these healthful new years have
for us?"
Paul Blecker's voice was never so strong or pure: whatever of coarseness
had clung to him fell off then, as he came nearer to the weak woman
whom God had given to him to care for; whatever of latent manhood, of
chivalry, slept beneath, some day to make him an earnest husband and
father, and helpful servant of the True Man, came out in his eager face
and eye, now. He took her two hands in his: how strong his muscles were!
how the man's full pulse throbbed healthfully against her own! She
looked up with a sudden blush and smile. A minute ago she thought
herself so strong to renounce! She meant, this weak, incomplete woman,
to keep to the shame of that foul old lie of hers, accepting that as her
portion for life. There is a chance comes to some few women, once in
their lives, to escape into the full development of their natures by
contact with the one soul made in the same mould as their own. It came
to this woman to-night. Grey was no theorist about it: all that she knew
was, that, when Paul Blecker stood near her, for the first time in her
life she was not alone,--that, when he spoke, his words were but more
forcible utterances of her own thought,--that, when she thought of
leaving him, it was like drawing the soul from her living body, to leave
it pulseless, dead. Yet she would do it.
"I am not fit to be any man's wife. If you had come to me when I was a
child, it might have been,--it ought to have been,"--with an effort to
draw her hands from him.
Blecker only smiled, and seated her gently on the mossy boll of the
beech-tree.
"Stay. Listen to me," he whispered.
And Grey, being a woman and no philosopher, sat motionless, her hands
folded, nerveless, where he had let them fall, her face upturned, like
that of the dead maiden waiting the touch of infinite love to tremble
and glow back into beautiful life. He did not speak, did not touch her,
only bent nearer. It seemed to him, as the pure moonlight then held them
close in its silent bound, the great world hushed without, the light air
scarce daring to touch her fair, waiting face, the slow-heaving breast,
the kindling glow in her dark hair, that all the dead and impure years
fell from them, and in a fresh new-born life they stood alone, with the
great Power of strength and love for company. What need was there of
words? She knew it all: in the promise and question of his face waited
for her the hope and vigor the time gone had never known: her woman's
nature drooped and leaned on his, content: the languid hazel eye
followed his with such intent, one would have fancied that her soul in
that silence had found its rest and home forever.
He took her hand, and drew from it the old ring that yet bound one of
her fingers, the sign of a lie long dead, and without a word dropped it
in the current below them. The girl looked up suddenly, as it fell:
her eyes were wet: the woman whom Christ loosed from her infirmity of
eighteen years might have thanked him with such a look as Grey's that
night. Then she looked back to her earthly master.
"It is dead now, child, the past,--never to live again. Grey holds a new
life in her hands to-night." He stopped: the words came weak, paltry,
for his meaning. "Is there nothing with which she dares to fill it? no
touch that will make it dear, holy for her?"
There was a heavy silence. Nature rose impatient in the crimson blood
that dyed her lips and cheek, in the brilliance of her eye; but she
forced back the words that would have come, and sat timid and trembling.
"None, Grey? You are strong and cool. I know. The lie dead and gone
from your life, you can control the years alone, with your religion and
cheery strength. Is that what you would say?"--bitterly.
She did not answer. The color began to fade, the eyes to dim.
"You have told me your story; let me tell you mine,"--throwing himself
on the grass beside her. "Look at me, Grey. Other women have despised
me, as rough, callous, uncouth: you never have. I've had no hot-house
usage in the world; the sun and rain hardly fell on me unpaid. I've
earned every inch of this flesh and muscle, worked for it as it grew;
the knowledge that I have, scanty enough, but whatever thought I do have
of God or life, I've had to grapple and struggle for. Other men grow,
inhale their being, like yonder tree God planted and watered. I think
sometimes He forgot me,"--with a curious woman's tremor in his voice,
gone in an instant. "I scrambled up like that scraggy parasite, without
a root. Do you know now why I am sharp, wary, suspicious, doubt if there
be a God? Grey," turning fiercely, "I am tired of this. God did make me.
I want rest. I want love, peace, religion, in my life."
She said nothing. She forgot herself, her timid shyness now, and looked
into his eyes, a noble, helpful woman, sounding the depths of the turbid
soul laid bare for her.
He laid his big, ill-jointed hand on her knee.
"I thought," he said.--great drops of sweat coming out on his sallow
lips,--"God meant you to help me. There is my life, little girl. You may
do what you will with it. It does not value much to me."
And Grey, woman-like, gathered up the despised hand and life, and sobbed
a little as she pressed them to her heart. An hour after, they went
together up the old porch-steps, halting a moment where the grape-vines
clustered thickest about the shingled wall. The house was silent; even
the village slept in the moonlight: no sound of life in the great
sweep of dusky hill and valley, save the wreaths of mist over the
watercourses, foaming and drifting together silently: before morning
they would stretch from base to base of the hills like a Dead Sea, ashy
and motionless. They stood silent a moment, until the chirp of some
robin, frightened by their steps in its nest overhead, had hummed
drowsily down into sleep.
"It is not good-night, but good-bye, that I must bid you, Grey," he
said, stooping to see her face.
"I know. But you will come again. God tells me that."
"I will come. Remember, Grey, I am going to save life, not to take it.
Corrupt as I am, my hands are clean of this butchery for the sake of
interest."
Grey's eyes wandered. She knows nothing about the war, to be candid:
only that it is like a cold pain at her heart, day and night,--sorry
that the slaves are slaves, wondering if they could be worse off than
the free negroes swarming in the back-alleys yonder,--as sorry, being
unpatriotic, for the homeless women in Virginia as for the stolen horses
of Chambersburg. Grey's principles, though mixed, are sound, as far as
they go, you see. Just then thinking only of herself.
"You will come back to me?" clinging to his arm.
"Why, I must come back," cheerfully, choking back whatever stopped
his breath, pushing back the curling hair from her forehead with a
half-reverential touch. "I have so much, to do, little girl! There is
a farm over yonder I mean to earn enough to buy, where you and I shall
rest and study and grow,--stronger and healthier, more helpful every
day. We'll find our work and place in the world yet, poor child! You
shall show me what a pure, earnest life is, Grey, and above us--what
there is there," lowering his voice. "And I,--how much I have to do with
this bit of humanity here on my hands!"--playfully. "An unhewn stone,
with the beautiful statue lying _perdu_ within. Bid you know you were
that, Grey? and I the sculptor?"
She looked up bewildered.
"It is true," passing his fingers over the low, broad, curiously moulded
forehead. "My girl does not know what powers and subtile forces lie
asleep beneath this white skin? I know. I know lights and words and
dramas of meaning these childish eyes hold latent: that I will set free.
I will teach your very silent lips a new language. You never guessed how
like a prison your life has been, how unfinished you are; but I thank
God for it, Grey. You would not have loved me, if it had been different;
I can grow with you now, grow to your height, if--He helps me."
He took off his hat, and stood, looking silently into the deep blue
above,--for the first time in his life coming to his Friend with a
manly, humble look. His eyes were not clear when he spoke again, his
voice very quiet.
"Good bye, Grey! I'm going to try to be a better man than I've ever
been. You are my wife now in His eyes. I need you so: for life and for
eternity, I think. You will remember that?"
And so, holding her to his heart a moment or two, and kissing her lips
passionately once or twice, he left her, trying to smile as he went down
the path, but with a strange clogging weight in his breast, as if his
heart would not beat.
Going in, Grey found the old negro asleep over his knitting, the candle
with a flaring black crust beside him.
"He waited for me," she said; and as she stroked the skinny old hand,
the tears came at the thought of it. Everybody was so kind to her! The
world was so foil of love! God was so good to her to-night!
Oth, waking fully as she helped him to his room-door, looked anxiously
in her face.
"Er' ye well to-night, chile?" he said. "Yer look as yer did when yer
wor a little baby. Peart an' purty yer wor, dat's true. Der good Lord
loved yer, I think."
"He loves me now," she said, softly, to herself, as in her own room she
knelt down and thanked Him, and then, undressed, crept into the white
trundle-bed beside little Pen; and when he woke, and, putting his little
arms about her neck, drew her head close to his to kiss her good-night,
she cried quietly to herself, and fell asleep with the tears upon her
cheek.
Her sister, in the next room to hers, with the same new dream in her
heart, did not creep into any baby's arms for sympathy. Lizzy Gurney
never had a pet, dog or child. She sat by the window waiting, her shawl
about her head in the very folds McKinstry had wrapped it, motionless,
as was her wont. But for the convulsive movement of her lips now and
then, no gutta-percha doll could be more utterly still. As the night
wore down into the intenser sleep of the hours after midnight, her watch
grew more breathless. The moon sank far enough in the west to throw
the beams directly across her into the dark chamber behind. She was a
small-moulded woman, you could see now: her limbs, like those of a cat,
or animals of that tribe, from their power of trance-like quiet, gave
you the idea of an intense vitality: a gentle face,--pretty, the
villagers called it, from its waxy tint and faint coloring,--you wished
to do something for her, seeing it. Paul Blecker never did: the woman
never spoke to him; but he noted often the sudden relaxed droop of the
eyelids, when she sat alone, as if some nerve had grown weary: he had
seen that peculiarity in some women before, and knew all it meant. He
had nothing for her; her hunger lay out of his ken.
It grew later: the moon hung now so low that deep shadows lay heavy over
the whole valley; not a breath broke the sleep of the night; even the
long melancholy howl of the dog down in camp was hushed long since. When
the clock struck two, she got up and went noiselessly out into the open
air. There was no droop in her eyelids now; they were straight, nerved,
the eyes glowing with a light never seen by day beneath them. Down the
long path into the cornfield, slowly, pausing at some places, while her
lips moved as though she repeated words once heard there. What folly was
this? Was this woman's life so bare, so empty of its true food, that she
must needs go back and drag again into life a few poor, happy moments?
distil them slowly, to drink them again drop by drop? I have seen
children so live over in their play the one great holiday of their
lives. Down through the field to the creek-ford, where the stones lay
for crossing, slippery with moss: she could feel the strong grasp of the
hand that had led her over there that night; and so, with slow, and yet
slower step, where the path had been rocky, and she had needed cautious
help. Into the thicket of lilacs, with the old scent of the spring
blossoms yet hanging on their boughs; along the bank, where her foot had
sunk deep into plushy moss, where he had gathered a cluster of fern and
put it into her hand. Its pale feathery green was not more quaint or
pure than the delicate love in the uncouth man beside her,--not nearer
kin to Nature. Did she know that? Had it been like the breath of God
coming into her nostrils to be so loved, appreciated, called home, as
she had been to-night? Was she going back to feel that breath again?
Neither pain nor pleasure was on her face: her breath came heavy and
short, her eyes shone, that was all. Out now into the open road,
stopping and glancing around with every broken twig, being a cowardly
creature, yet never leaving the track of the footsteps in the dust,
where she had gone before. Coming at last to the old-fashioned gabled
house, where she had gone when site was a child, set in among stiff rows
of evergreens. A breathless quiet always hung about the place: a pure,
wholesome atmosphere, because pure and earnest people had acted out
their souls there, and gone home to God. He had led her through the
gate here, given her to drink of the well at the side of the house. "My
mother never would taste any water but this, do you remember, Lizzy?"
They had gone through the rooms, whispering, if they spoke, as though it
were a church. Here was the pure dead sister's face looking down from
the wall; there his mother's worn wicker work-stand. Her work was in it
still. "The needle just where she placed it, Lizzy." The strong man was
weak as a little child with the memory of the old mother who had
nursed and loved him as no other could love. He stood beside her chair
irresolute; forty years ago he had stood there, a little child bringing
all his troubles to be healed: since she died no hand had touched it.
"Will you sit there, Lizzy? You are dearer to me than she. When I come
back, will you take their place here? Only you are pure as they, and
dearer, Lizzy. We will go home to them hand in hand." She sat in the
dead woman's chair. _She_. Looking in at her own heart as she did it.
Yet her love for him would make her fit to sit there: she believed that.
He had not kissed her,--she was too sacred to the simple-hearted man for
that,--had only taken her little hand in both his, saying, "God bless
you, little Lizzy!" in an unsteady voice.
"He may never say it again," the girl said, when she crept home from
her midnight pilgrimage. "I'll come here every day and live it all
over again. It will keep me quiet until he comes. Maybe he'll never
come,"--catching her breast, and tearing it until it grew black. She was
so tired of herself, this child! She would have torn that nerve in her
heart out that sometimes made her sick, if she could. Her life was so
cramped, and selfish, too, and she knew it. Passing by the door of
Grey's room, she saw her asleep with Pen in her arms,--some other little
nightcapped heads in the larger beds. _She_ slept alone. "They tire
me so!" she said; "yet I think," her eye growing fiercer, "if I had
anything all my own, if I had a little baby to make pure and good, I'd
be a better girl. Maybe--_he_ will make me better."
Paul Blecker, heart-anatomist, laughed when this woman, with the aching
brain and the gnawing hunger at heart, seized on the single, Christ-like
love of McKinstry, a common, bigoted man, and made it her master
and helper. Her instinct was wiser than he, being drifted by God's
under-currents of eternal order. That One who knows when the sparrow is
ready for death knows well what things are needed for a tired girl's
soul.
* * * * *