CHAPTER II. AS IT WAS.
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THICKET STREET, at the time of my
story, boasted the foot-path, the foulness,
the twisted children, the wharves and whale-oil,
the staggering houses and shops for grog,
the impure winds and dainty sunlight, the old
women turned children, and children old women,
as well as about the same generous allowance
of inhabitants to the street and to the
tenement.
No. 19 offered very nearly its present attractions
in respect to room, air, light, privacy,
and quiet. The second front seaward corner
sustained its reputation for being “jammed, you
bet!” retained its dingy windows and muddy
view; held, with more tenacity than at the present
time, its stained wall and stained legend.
As nearly as I can judge, the only material
changes in the vicinity have been the addition
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of one concert-saloon, and the substitution of
the crinoline-mender for a little guitar-maker,
who sang over his work in his window.
That there should be a crowd about the door-ways
of No. 19 was nothing uncommon, but
the crowd collected, chiefly upon the stairs
and steps, on a September afternoon somewhat
less than thirty years ago, was not altogether
of a common kind.
It was composed principally of women, and
of old women; a few young girls hung on its
edges, and children — very young children —
stood here and there leaning against the walls,
listening intently and intelligently.
A woman with rather a clean cap, and her
skirts tucked about her bony knees, sat above
the rest upon the stairway, her chin in her
hands, and her face somewhat grave. It was
as rugged as a face could be without being positively
bad, but it was not bad. She had a
sharp mouth (all the women in Thicket Street
had sharp mouths), but it was slightly softened;
and keen eyes, but they were slightly
dim. She had evidently a story to tell, and
had told it, and was not loath to tell it again.
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Conversation was brisk, and ran like this: —
“She said so?”
“Yes.”
“She 's always sayin' oncommon things, —
Nix.”
“What did you tell her, Lize?”
“I told her if she wanted to be let alon', let
alon' she should be.”
The woman in the clean cap said this decidedly.
“It 's a poor time to be givin' of herself airs,
in my opinion; 't ain't more 'n common politeness
to the neighbors to give 'em a sight of the
baby.”
“I tell you what it is, Moll Manners!” — Lize
shook her head sternly, and jerked her sharp
knees against the wall, as if to bar the stairway,—
“I 'll be obleeged to you if you 'll keep away
from Nixy Trent. Hear, do ye?”
Moll Manners laughed a little, with a certain
change of color, which, years ago, might have
been a blush. She had bright eyes, and they
snapped. Lize punched her other knee into the
wall, breaking away the cracked plaster by the
emphasis of her touch, and rambled on: —
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“She 's too good a gal to be spoiled in a hurry,
poor creetur! sobbin' night an' day this three
months gone, and never a mother in the world to
do for her this day. She 's out of her head off
and on; talks of prison and p'lice-folks; keeps a
pleadin' and a beggin' of Jeb Smith to take her
back into the saloon. Every time the young un
cries, — it 's an ugly, squealy little thing as ever
drew breath in this world, — down goes she with
her head under the clothes — all in a heap — to
shut out the noise, likes I make it. She takes it
oncommon hard. In the course of my experience,” —
Lize attempted to lower her voice sententiously;
the effect of the effort was a bass
grumble, — “in the course of my experience, I
never see a gal take it so oncommon hard.
There 's gals an' gals, but then you know there 's
a mother or suthin', leastways an aunt, or less.
There was Ann Peters, now! I was nigh ready
to forgive old Mis' Peters beatin' of Boss to
death, for the way she up an' stood by Ann, an'
she nothin' but a fust cousin! It spoke well
for the family. Nix here hain't so much as a
cat 'at belongs to her name, — an' not turned
sixteen!”
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Lize spoke loudly, — she was never known to
speak otherwise, do the best she might, — and
apparently the little guitar-maker across the way
heard what she was saying, — in part, at least, —
for his song stopped abruptly, — he had been
singing something in French about “L'amour,
l'amour,” — and he turned his back to No. 19
with an angry jerk. He wished that the women
would let the girl alone. He was rather fond
of Nixy. It vexed him to hear her chattered
about. He twanged a cracked string discordantly,
while they whispered and nodded about
Lize and Moll. Moll, being rather quick, noticed
this, and took the trouble to laugh at him.
“What 'll become of the baby, Lize?”
“The Lord knows!”
“There 's ways of gettin' rid o't, — Nix is no
fool.”
“Nix is no brute!” retorted Lize, crossly. She
pulled her knees out from the hole they had
worked in the wall, and stretched herself powerfully,
gathering up her skirts meanwhile, to
mount the dirty stairs. Lize used to get laughed
at in No. 19 for being “fine.”
“There 's the young un again! That child
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will cry itself to death yet, and good riddance!
It worrits her into them fever spells I was tellin'
of. There 'll be the mischief to pay if we can't
keep her more peaceful-like — and a doctor too!”
(“Yes, yes!” calling up the stairs. “Never mind,
Nix! I 'll be back.”) “Well, well! It 's a sorry
piece of business, make the best ye will o't.
Good lack be praised, I never brought a woman-child
into the world!”
A little wailing cry from the second front seaward
corner floated down after Lize, and Lize,
with powerful steps, tramped up after it.
Moll Manners shrugged her shoulders. The
women, with whispers, scattered slowly. The little
guitar-maker struck up a tune, and sang: —
“Down at the bottom of the hill,
It 's lonely — lonely!
O, the wind is sharp and chill
At the bottom of the hill,
And it 's lonely — lonely!”
I presume Nix, in her corner bed, close under
the stained wall, had caught the tune (she knew
most of the guitar-maker's tunes), if not the
words, for she was sobbing when Lize came up.
She was a young thing, as Lize had said, “not
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turned sixteen,” with the expression even of a
much younger child; in fact, there were children
in the group gossiping about her down stairs with
faces older than hers. She might, in an innocent,
happy time, have been pretty, very pretty.
Now, worn with suffering and shame, she was
ghastly.
She was comparatively alone; that is to say,
there were but three people in the room besides
herself and her child, — a child sick with measles,
a woman drunk, and a woman washing;
the room was filled with unclean steam.
Her bed — I apply the term out of courtesy
to the mass of rags and straw upon which she
lay with her two-days baby — being, as I said,
in the corner, Lize had contrived to shield it a
little by a ragged calico curtain; it was one of
her own dresses which had been waiting for
patching, — that curtain; Nixy had been too
sick to find this out, which was as well, for Lize
had not many dresses, and she knew it. There
was brown paper pinned across the lower half of
the window too, — Lize's work; it was old, soiled,
and cracked in the folds; strips of pale sunlight,
narrow as a knitting-needle, pierced it, and Nixy,
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lying quite still now for some time past, had been
watching it with confused interest. There were
clothes flapping and drying out on a neighbor's
roof, and the strips of light quivered and shot
about in consequence.
Sometimes they struck Nixy in the eyes, and
hurt her. Sometimes they struck the baby, and
she wished that they would hurt him; he cried
as if they did, and she was glad of it. The baby
was so dreadful to her! Sometimes she took the
golden needles into her hands, and knit with
them — fast; socks for the child, shawls for him,
shrouds for him, — always for him, and always
fast. Sometimes the needles turned into sharp
fingers, and pointed at the red stain upon the
wall, when the spider appeared to move — the
spot seemed more like a spider to Nixy than it
did to me — and crawl over the baby, and crawl
over her.
“Hm—m—m.” Lize, coming in, kneeled,
with her finger on the girl's pulse, and her chin
set in thought.
“This won't do; this won't do! There 'll
have to be somebody that knows more nor me
to take you in hand, Nix. Hush! Ye 've cried
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enough. Doctor won't harm ye u'less it was for
his interest and adwantage, — which 't ain't likely.
There! Stop your noise!”
For Lize was rough sometimes, and was, to
tell the truth, at the end of her professional wits
with the girl.
“I 'd rather not! I 'd rather not have a doctor!”
said Nixy, weakly. “When I get well I 'll
earn enough to pay you, Lize, if you 'll be
bothered to take care of me alone, you know.
I 'll be able to walk before you know it. I could
almost walk to-day, if I tried. He 'd send me to
jail, ef you get him!”
“I don't want yer money!” growled Lize,
“and 't would n't be jails; 't would n't be worse
nor 'sylums, where the Lord knows ye mought be
best off. It 's a way he has, — yes; but it mought
be a worse way. He 's not a bad man, — Burtis.
Little pay and many patients he 's got out of
Thicket Street in my time. Hush now! or ye 'll
set the young un off again. Take yer drops and
yer naps afore dark and the men-folks comin'.”
Nixy hushed, but, much as she dreaded the
time and the noise of the “men-folks comin',”
she could not sleep. She shut her eyes to please
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the old nurse, and, in coherent and incoherent
snatches, thought.
Nixy had never done much thinking in the
course of her life.
I knew once a brave, busy, generous girl, who,
years after the bitterest affliction of her life,
used to say, “Some time, I think, I shall feel
better if I can make time to cry. I 've never
had room to cry.”
Nixy, I believe, had never had room to think.
She did not remember her childhood distinctly,
the very poor are not apt to, perhaps; present
necessities are too stern to admit of past fancies, —
and childhood resolves itself into a fancy.
Nixy was nobody's child; she could remember
as much as that.
Fragments of things came to her as she lay
there with her baby on her arm that night;
snatches of songs she used to sing in the streets,
rapping out the tune with her cold little knuckles
on a cracked tambourine for a man with an
American face and Italian name, — her uncle,
I believe, she was taught to call him; a dim
memory of the woman to whom he sold her, —
she kept boarders; of another woman who
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“adopted” her, — that was the one who got
drunk every Tuesday, and beat her with the
bottle Wednesday mornings; of the city missionary
in a green veil, who picked her up selling
matches at a corner one winter day, and lodged
her in an orphan-asylum; of ten months of little
blue-checked orphans and dog's-eared spelling-books
(the best ten months of Nixy's life, to be
sure, if she had only been “educated” enough to
know it); of her running away one dark night
because she could not do a sum in fractions; of
how sorry she had been for it in spots; of the
days after that when she wandered about with
the Thicket Street babies, hunting for apple-cores
in the mud, — the hungriest days of her life those
were; of persuading Jeb Smith to try her in his
dining-saloon at the corner at last, — of the life
in No. 19, — of the cold horror of the last few
months.
So now it was either all over or all begun; she
wondered confusedly which. At any rate, here
everything had stopped.
What next?
“Your hand, if you please; that 's right. I
want the pulse.”
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Nixy turned with a start that woke and frightened
the child. The doctor sat on the floor beside
her, with his watch in his hand.
“I don't want you,” said Nixy.
“I am sorry to intrude upon you against your
wish; but you need me, as I think you will
find.”
The physician spoke with careful courtesy. A
close observer might have thought him to be addressing
an up-town matron. It was a “way”
Dr. Dyke Burtis had; people had often remarked
it of him.
Nixy felt it, but it failed to put her at her
ease; something in it reminded her of the missionary
in the green veil; gave her visions of
blue checks and school-bells and “hours” for
things; startled her slumbering dread of “jails
and 'sylums”; indeed, she had an indistinct impression
that it was this very man who took
Ann Peters to a Magdalens' Home after old Mis'
Peters hung herself. And if ever anybody had
been a scarecrow to Nixy, it was Ann Peters.
So, because she was frightened, she was sullen.
But the physician said nothing of jails, and
did not so much as hint at 'sylums. He dealt
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with her gently, and left her soon, — for which
Nixy, in spite of her wretched, terrified self, approved
of him.
She had seen more than she appeared to
through her half-closed, heavy eyelids; had
watched the gentleman's face; had felt it — for
even people like Nixy feel such things — to be a
gentleman's face; and had concluded that she
should know it if she were to see it again.
It was a face of perhaps thirty-five years'
moulding, with nothing noticeable about it except
a very irregular, full forehead, and a streak
of gray in the middle of a black beard.
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CHAPTER III. THE SECOND FRONT SEAWARD CORNER.
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“A CIVIL-SPOKE man,” said Lize, cuddling
the baby that night, “and no fool. I take
it ye 're better for his stuff a'ready. Hey, Nix?”
“Very like,” said Nix, absently; she had forgotten
Lize and the doctor; she was dropping
miserable tears on the pillow, glad of a chance to
cry without wetting the baby. The room was
full now, and very noisy. She and Lize were
alone behind the calico curtain. The window
was raised beyond the brown-paper shades, to
give the girl a breath of something a tone fresher
than the double allowance of gin and tobacco
consequent on the return of “the men-folks.”
The guitar-maker in his window was twanging
a hymn; on practice, not on principle; it meant
nothing to him, — he was French; he had picked
it up by the way from a street-preacher. It began
like this, as Nixy made it out: —
“Depths of mercy! —”
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Then she lost it in a little tuning and a little
swearing; in the interval she stopped crying to
listen, glad enough of a change of ideas; for she
was young and easily diverted.
“Depths of mercy! —”
Something was the matter with the upper E;
the next time he had it. M. Jacques was critical
of himself always: —
“Depths of mercy! can there be
Mercy still in store for me?”
“I wonder,” said Nix, suddenly, trying to sit
up in bed.
“Wonder ef it 'll take after you?” Lize was
holding the baby up in a streak of light that fell
through the calico curtain. “Yes. Got them
big eyes o' yourn all over again, — worse for ye,
mebbe!”
“I wonder what Jacques 's about, — what it
means, you know. O, you don't know. Well!”
She fell back wearily upon the straw.
“.... can there be? — can there be?”
sang Monsieur Jacques.
Nixy, thinking it over, presently opened her
eyes.
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“I know. It means, if there 's any way out —
with that.”
She pointed at the baby with that expression,
partly of loathing, partly of fear, which always
came upon her face at the sight of it.
“Bless my soul! she 's crazed yet. Out of
what?”
Lize was losing patience.
“I don't know,” said Nixy, sadly. “Never
mind!”
She did know; she had a jumble of ideas about
“depths,” and the “bottom of the hill,” and its
being “lonely — lonely,” and that Jeb Smith might
not want the child in the saloon; but they were
not distinct enough to make Lize understand.
“I s'pose you could n't tell me what — to do —
when I get out?” she asked of her by and by,
very slowly.
“Hold your tongue!” said Lize. “Time 's in
no hurry.”
If time was in no hurry, Nixy was. It was so
hard lying there in that room! People were in
and out, and stared at her; the doctor with the
streaked beard came and went, and prescribed for
her. Lize, off and on, took care of her. Moll
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Manners, down stairs, gossiped about her. The
guitar-maker, in his window, sang at her; generally
about the “hill,” or the “depths”; sometimes
of “L'amour, l'amour”; in dull weather,
and there was much dull weather during poor
Nixy's convalescence, he practised dirges.
If Nixy had been an up-street wife, she might
have been allowed the privilege of being “depressed”
under the circumstances, I suppose.
So Dr. Burtis thought, remembering certain of
his happier patinets; one in particular, an out-of-town
lady, — Myrtle was the name, by the way,
though that is little to the point, — from whose
pink and perfumed and dolorous chamber he used
to come direct to No. 19.
Nixy, being in Thicket Street, and being only
Nixy, “had the dumps,” — so Moll said.
“She 's cried long enough,” observed Moll.
(Poor Moll!) “A week would have answered.
The world won't stop for her.”
“The child ain't to blame, Nixy Trent!” said
Lize, sternly, once when, after six hours of rain
and the Dead March from Saul, Nixy desperately
flung the wailing infant off her arm, and buried
her set face in the straw. “The child ain't at
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fault, I tell ye. Don't ye care nothin' for yer
own flesh and blood? helpless — innocent —”
“No,” interrupted Nix; she thought that Lize
was growing sentimental, which perhaps she was.
Lize had never expended much of her affection
on her own honest-born babies at the advanced
age of two weeks.
“The Lord love it, if its mother won't!”
She spoke heartily that time, and Nixy's
head — it was such a child's head! — came out
of the straw.
“Mother? I wish I had a mother. To go to
now, you know, Lize. To take me in, mebbe,
and help bear what folks say, and all that.
S'pose she 'd be ready and willin'? I wonder
if she 'd kiss me!” Lize subsided.
“S'pose your boy come now, Lize, — not the
dead one, but t' other one as shot the fellar and
ran away, you know, — would you take him in,
and help him bear what folks said?”
“Tim 's no fool either,” said Lize, gruffly, after
a silence; “he knows.”
She gathered Nixy's baby up into her brown
warm neck, and kissed it. Nixy watched her
thoughtfully, but Nixy did not want to kiss it.
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The poor child would have hated the baby if she
had known exactly how.
She used to dream, in her feverish nights, of
being at the bottom of Jacques's “hill,” and all
the foot-paths up were narrow — very; and in
every path upon which she set her foot that
baby lay. This dream pursued her till her child
was over two weeks old.
“What is to become of that poor girl?” The
gray-bearded doctor asked this of Lize one dark
night, in a whisper; and Lize, in a whisper, answered: —
“Heaven knows! For she don't. I 've come
to the end of my rope. Folks must live if they
are sorry for folks. I 'm promised up to Jeb's
day after to-morrow.”
When they came to Nixy, they found her sitting
up straight in bed, her mouth set and sulky.
The physician saw that he had been overheard.
“It 's no use, I tell you!” began Nixy,
promptly.
“What is of no use?”
“I won't go, I won't go!”
“Go where?”
“You know you 'd send me to the 'sylum if
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you could!” said Nixy, defiantly. “You know it
as well as I do! I tell you it's no use!”
“What will you do, Nixy?”
“I — don't know.”
Nixy's eyes turned black and frightened, wandered
from the doctor to the window, to the
stained wall, to Lize, like the eyes of a caged
creature.
“I will make everything easy and pleasant for
you,” said Dr. Burtis, gently. He hated to terrify
the girl; he wished he knew of a woman who
could do this business for him; he felt very much
as if he were pinching butterflies. “They will
help you to be good at the Home. They are
very kind. After a while they will find the best
way for you to —” he hesitated, gravely ending —
“to begin life over again.” (“She 's almost as
much of a child as her baby!” — under his breath
to Lize or himself, — or the Lord perhaps; for
the Lord generally heard something of Dyke
Burtis's patients.)
He might as well have talked to the tides, —
I do not mean the Lord now, but Nixy.
“I know all about your 'sylums,” persisted the
girl. “I 've been there; afore I went to Jeb's. I
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ain't going from one prison to another so easy.
Folks was well enough, — but you don't catch me
agin!” In spite of herself, Nixy sobbed. Dr.
Dyke Burtis coughed uneasily, and took up his
hat; he could eradicate tumors with more composure
than he could command against a crying
girl, — and such a helpless, miserable girl!
“Think of it till to-morrow,” he begged her,
with gentle deference, — “think of it till to-morrow,
and I will see you again.”
“Will you, though?” thought poor Nixy. “It
takes two to make that bargain.” She turned her
face to the wall to think. Lize came up soon to
go to bed; but Nixy, still with her face to the wall,
lay thinking, and Lize rolled heavily upon the
straw beside her without speaking. The thing of
which Nixy was thinking was that stain upon the
wall. She was wondering who the girl was that
lay just here, where she was lying, years ago;
what she was like; if she had a mother to help
her bear what folks said, and all that; if she did,
why she knocked out the baby's brains; if it was
easy to do, — knocking out a baby's brains; she
felt sorry for the girl; it did not occur to her for
some minutes to be sorry for the baby.
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Then she thought how much more likely Jeb
would be to take her back if she went alone. She
meant to go to Jeb's to-night, which suggested
the idea.
Then she fell to speculating a little, idly, on the
ease with which she could squeeze the baby up
against the wall; it would not be difficult to
squeeze the breath out of it altogether.
This did not strike her as a thoroughly pleasant
thing to do; but the longer she looked at the
stained wall, the more familiar the idea seemed
to grow to her, as a thing which might be done,—
as one would take a pill, for instance, to cure
a headache. She could have sworn to it, as she
looked, that the red spider was weaving a red
web all about her and about the child. She
wanted to waken Lize and ask her. Because,
as the web tightened, it drew her away from
Lize, and nearer the child, and nearer the reddened
wall. And as the web narrowed, it seemed
to her rather imperative than otherwise to squeeze
the baby, just to see how it would feel.
If she was dreaming, she must have roused
suddenly, for Lize, half awake, put her rough
hand over on the girl's hair, in a motherly and
protecting though very sleepy way.
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“Lie still, Nix, and let alon' lookin' after the
murder-stain; it 'll give ye dreams.”
The murder-stain? That struck Nixy as a
new idea.
“I 'm not that,” she said aloud. “I was only
thinking — well!” She drew nearer to Lize,
and took the child upon her arm. She felt herself
grow suddenly cold all over, but her head
was hot and clear.
“Lize!”
Lize turned sleepily.
“You 've been good to me. I sha' n't forget
yer noways.”
“Go to sleep, — go to sleep!” said Lize, unromantically
enough.
“And, Lize, look here! I 'll try to like it;
I 'll try to like the baby, because you took it all
up in your neck and kissed it, just like — just
like I wished I had a mother to take me up and
kiss me.”
The last words were spoken to herself, for Lize
was sound asleep.
So were half the men and women in the room.
It was early; but they were all hard workers or
hard drinkers in No. 19, and they slept both soon
and soundly.
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Nixy lay still for a little time, and then, with
great care and little stir, crawled with the baby
over Lize's feet, and sat down to rest upon the
floor. She was faint, at first, with the effort, but
after a while found herself able to hunt for and
crawl into her clothes, that lay in a heap at
the foot of the miserable bed.
Some of the doctor's medicine was left in a
mug upon the floor; she drained it eagerly.
Her shawl and straw hat were on a nail within
reach. These she put on, sitting still for a while
to rest. She had a dull feeling of relief that
Lize slept so soundly. This was drowned, however,
by an acute consciousness that the baby was
heavy, and that it was not as easy as it used to be
to walk across the room.
-- 031 -- p735-040
CHAPTER IV. M. JACQUES.
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NOS. 19 and 21 boasted between them an
outside stairway; this was a luxury in
Thicket Street, so great as to affect the rents.
This stairway scaled the room where Nixy lay;
a door between the eastern windows opened upon
it; the hinges were broken and creaked; a couple
of beds and several sleepers lay between her and
it; it so happened, however, that another of
those ragged curtains, such as Lize had given
her, hung between Nixy, sleepers, and door, and
the waking occupants of the room; these last
were economizing the day's earnings, thievings,
or beggings by means of dice and a little rum,
which accounted for the privacy.
Nixy, after some thought and rest, concluded
to aim for the eastern door. If detected in her
attempt, she had no fears of interruption from
any one but Lize; the rest would give themselves
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[figure description] Page 032.[end figure description]
no trouble about her; but it would take little
trouble to waken Lize.
The child stirred as she started, but she hushed
it, — more softly, it must be owned, than she had
ever hushed him before, — and Lize called her,
but it was in a dream.
She made her way with little difficulty to the
creaking door, turned for a moment to look in at
the gamblers, the sleepers, the stained wall, the
curtain behind which old Lize was lying, with a
dull pain, like that of homesickness, for it was the
only home she knew.
When she had closed the door and sat down
upon the stairs outside, it struck her that she had
never understood before that she lived in a world;
for all in a moment it had grown so large!
The stairs were damp, and she shivered with
chill and weakness. Light in the windows of 21
fell, across the low-roofed passage-way that separated
the two houses, upon her; it would have
been difficult to tell whether she looked most
haggard or most frightened.
Ann Peters used to live in 21. She thought
about Ann as she sat there, with a notion of
warming her hands in the light from the
-- 033 --
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windows; wondered how she liked it at the 'sylum;
wondered what the doctor with the streaked beard
would say to-morrow, when Lize told him that
she had gone.
This reminded her that she must be in haste,
which, in the confusion consequent on coming,
in her weak condition, from the close room to
the cold air, she had for the moment forgotten.
She got up and felt her way down the stairs;
they were very slippery, and it was a slow process.
She dreaded falling, not so much because
of herself as because of the child, for Lize would
hear it cry. The effort to make the descent successfully
excited her a little, and she crossed the
street with considerable ease.
The guitar-maker's window was shut. What
he was singing, or if he were singing, Nixy could
not make out. She passed his door, and on up
to the corner and Jeb's.
Jeb was serving late suppers yet. The door was
open; the smell of coffee and baked beans puffed
out; the lights were bright; the ragged waiter-girls
were flaunting to and fro; a new one in a
yellow dress had Nixy's tables. Jeb himself
-- 034 --
[figure description] Page 034.[end figure description]
stood behind the cigar-counter, casting accounts
on his thumb-nail.
Nixy folded her shawl closely, so that Jeb
could not see the child, and ventured in. The
girls saw her before Jeb did, and laughed. Nixy
stood still and trembled with sudden shame. It
had not occurred to her before that anybody
could laugh at a thing so miserable as she felt
herself to be. She hated the girls for it; she
did not believe that Jeb would laugh.
Jeb did not; I must say that for him. When
he saw her, looking over his thumb-nail at last,
he swore at her good-naturedly, which was far
more Christian.
But when Nixy begged him to take her back
he shook his head.
“Can't do it! What do them bills say?” —
he pointed to the door, where his bills of fare fluttered
in the dark, like the ghosts of good dinners,
Nixy thought, — “`Re-spectable fust-class
dining-saloon for ladies and gentlemen of the
cheapest kind. Meals at all hours aristocratic!'
That 's what it says. Business is business!
Won't do. Gave your place to that yellow gal
next day.”
-- 035 --
[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]
“But I must go somewhere!” pleaded Nixy.
“I must have things to eat, you know, and
clothes — and things!”
She had really expected Jeb to take her; her
voice broke into a sharp cry.
“Sorry for 't,” said Jeb; “but it 's no use.
Fact is, Mis' Smith would n't hear on it; an' it
would n't do for me to be crossin' of her wishes
and desires decided, ye see. Mis' Smith 's a partikkelar
woman when her mind is sot. Ye 'd
better go, Nix, afore the customers sees you.”
Nixy went slowly out, with all the little ghosts
of dead dinners fluttering about her head, and
the girl in yellow curiously peering under her
shawl. She seemed to be somewhat bewildered;
walked up and down in a vague way, past the
smaller concert-saloon and the tobacconist's, finally
sat down stupidly on the pavement, just where
she happened to be when the idea struck her.
“Can there be? — can there be?
Mercy still —
At the bottom of the hill —”
The little guitar-maker seemed to be practising
in her very ears; she had not known before that
she was under his windows.
-- 036 --
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“Can there be —
Mercy still?
— C'est l'amour, l'amour, l'amour,
Que fait le monde à la ronde!
— At the bottom of the hill —”
“Jacques 's drunk,” said somebody, with a
laugh, at Nixy's side. Nixy knew better;
Jacques never got drunk before Thanksgiving.
She moved indignantly away from Moll, — for it
was Moll, — and laid her hand upon the guitar-maker's
door.
“He 's only practising,” she said, absently.
She was wishing that Moll would go away.
As she did not, Nixy pushed open the guitar-shop
door, and shut it closely behind her. M.
Jacques, in the middle of his favorite dirge,
started and stared as she came into the light
from his low oil lamp.
M. Jacques was a little man, with a well-brushed
red wig, worn in spots on top, very
black boots, patched, and cleansed pink gloves;
the gloves he drew on, as he always did when
not at work, and he had laid aside his instrument
at sight of Nixy.
M. Jacques believed in three things, —
-- 037 --
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Rousseau, woman, and his guitar. His faith, like his
fancy, was a pot-pourri; the same inventive
stroke which welded odd meanings into his
splintered songs wrought from his ragged creed
a species of chrysalis Christianity, of that kind
which a man himself is the last to detect in
himself.
Nixy liked M. Jacques, partly because he was
an old man and a pure one, partly because, when
he sang to her, she forgot that she lived in Thicket
Street. M. Jacques liked Nixy because she
sat still when he played, because she was pretty,
and because he was sorry for her. He was fond
of testing a new song on her, when she dropped
in of an evening, — struck lights through her as
if she had been a transparency. When she had
gone, he prayed “the Soul of Nature,” or “the
Spirit of the Whole,” to shield the girl; though,
to be sure, he called it philosophizing, not prayer.
“I 've come to say good by,” said Nixy,
“and —” In the middle of her sentence the
baby cried.
“Let me see it,” said the old man, gravely.
Nixy unfolded the shawl, and laid the child
across the guitar-maker's patched knees. M.
-- 038 --
[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]
Jacques had spoken so gently that her startled
color fled quietly away. It was the first time
that she had touched the little thing without a
sense of shame and horror which choked her.
“Jeb would n't take me back,” she explained,
“and so we 're going away, — me and it, you
know.”
“Ma foi! Going where?”
Jacques gave the child back to her, and wiped
his eyes.
“I — don't know.” She gave the old answer,
with the old frightened look. “There must be
somewheres to go to. There must be folks that
'ud take us in. I don't think I 'm so very bad,
Jacques. There must be somewheres.”
She turned to go, wrapping the baby up in her
shawl again, for it was growing late, and it was
according to her plan to be beyond the reach
of the streaked doctor and the 'sylum, with
“hours for things,” to-morrow.
The little Frenchman, coughing acutely, detained
her, while he hunted for a moment in the
drawer behind his counter. This was rather to
command himself than to find money, for all that
he had was in his pocket. All that was in his
-- 039 --
[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]
pocket he offered her, with something of the
hesitation you might exhibit in transacting
money affairs in a drawing-room. But Nixy
took it simply enough.
“If one were guitar-maker to the Empereur,
one could double it — double it!” said M.
Jacques, meditating. “That is the consequence
of one countree without l'Empereur: there are
no guitars. And if Dahlia —”
“I know,” said Nixy. She had heard so often
about l'Empereur and the dead Dahlia —
Jacques's young wife, who died, with Jacques's
young guitar business, in the Rue Richelieu —
she knew it quite by heart.
“If it were that Dahlia were but here!”
sighed M. Jacques, “you would not find the
need to go from me in this dark — Ugh!” as
Nixy opened the door, “it is très dark! Well,
well! She was one femme très blanche; she
could well afford to cry over a little girl like
you.”
Nixy, as she wrung his pink kid glove, was
crying hard enough over herself. The little
warm shop, and the guitar, and the songs, and
the faint memory of the “femme blanche,”
-- 040 --
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seemed so safe! The dark, — it was very dark
as she first stepped outside, — and the noise of
the rising wind, sweeping up from the harbor,
gave her a certain terror of herself, which was
worse than the terror of another.
“I don't suppose I do know very much!” said
Nixy, stopping short, between the guitar-shop
and No. 19, to take a last look at their lighted
windows. An artist should have met this child
just then and there.
“That 's the truth!”
Nixy did not know that she had spoken aloud,
till she heard Moll Manners's sharp laugh. She
was vexed at meeting Moll again, but tried not
to show it; she had the feeling that she had no
right to be vexed even with Moll, — a new feeling,
which gave her the discomfort of an unquiet
dream.
Moll was standing in one of those sharp, triangular
shadows in which Thicket Street abounded;
and it seemed to Nixy, as she looked at her,
that all the drunken houses, with their roofs
tipped over their eyes, were dancing dizzily
about her.
“You 're in a hurry,” said Moll, as Nixy moved
uneasily to pass on.
-- 041 --
[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]
“Yes,” said Nixy.
“What 's up now?”
“I — don't know.”
“Worse for ye! That 's alwers the way. Nobody
knows. I did n't know.”
Nixy made no answer, and the two girls stood
for a moment in silence, looking at each other
across the sharp shadow, into which Moll had
stepped. Nixy, in the pause, noticed a little
scraggly, dank chickweed upon the wall beside
her, and upon the pavement, where Moll had
crushed it with her foot. In the pause, too, the
opposite concert-saloon flung out a burst of ugly
mirth, and the lights flashed into Nixy's young
eyes.
“Chance for ye there, mebbe,” suggested Moll,
with what she meant for real good-nature. Nixy
had thought of that; there had been good girls
known in concert-halls; one could be what one
liked; it was easy work and comfortable pay; it
looked warm behind the lights, and she was growing
much chilled from standing in the damp street.
“But I want to stay honest. There must be
somewheres else!” This she said with perplexed
alarm in her voice, and stepped away
-- 042 --
[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]
from Moll's sharp shadow, and down the street,
repeating what she had said to Jacques among
the guitars: —
“There must be somewheres! There must be
folks! There 's honest things to do, and I 'll
hunt till I find 'em!”
“Ye 'll hunt till ye die,” called Moll from her
shadow. “Might as well go to the devil one
time as another time, — for go ye must!”
Nixy shuddered. With sudden strength she
sprang away from Moll, from the shadow, from
the noise of the concert-hall; the sunken houses
reeled about her; the lights of No. 19 twinkled
away; the guitar-shop flitted out of sight; she
struck into tangled wharves and salt air suddenly,
and stopping, out of breath, sat down to collect
her strength.
Very faintly she could hear Monsieur Jacques's
guitar: —
“Down at the bottom of the hill,
It 's lonely — lonely!
O, the wind is sharp and chill
At the bottom of the hill,
And it 's lonely — lonely!”
In a few moments, for she was afraid to stay
-- 043 --
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where she was, she weakly threaded her way
out from among the oil-barrels and codfish, from
among the wharves and shipping, through streets
the like of Thicket Street, and tenements the
counterpart of No. 19, with her face set towards
the open country, and her heart in the ways of
those to whom it is promised that “they shall
see God.”
-- 044 -- p735-053
CHAPTER V. MRS. ZERVIAH MYRTLE.
[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]
NIXY, so far from thinking of God, was
crying impatiently because the baby was
heavy, and because every time that she sat
down to rest she seemed to hear Monsieur
Jacques, and the guitar, and the sorrowful song
about the hill.
She found herself obliged to rest very often;
between whiles she walked fast, now thinking
that she must put distance between herself and
the doctor's 'sylum; now, between herself and
Moll.
It was not until nearly twelve o'clock that it
occurred to her that she had nowhere to spend
the night, and that the lights in the houses were
all out.
She must have walked far when she made this
discovery, — very far for one in her feeble condition.
-- 045 --
[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]
The city burned dimly behind her, like the
embers of a huge bonfire; the cultivated suburban
country lay smooth and dark before her;
shades of houses gathered about her; shades of
trees, parks, walls, finished and elegant things,
filed past her with a shadowy hauteur. She
crept on by them, chilled and frightened, wondering
whether nobody lived in small houses without
the city, and how many tenements there might
be in such a place as that square house with the
curiously gabled roof. She ventured as far as
the pebbled drive that led to it, and looked up
and around timidly for encouragement; this she
found, or thought she found, in a bar of mellow
light which fell quivering upon the lawn from a
bay-window at the side of the house; the sash
was raised, and a warmly tinted curtain, stirred by
the wind, floated in and out. As she stood looking
up, very still there, under the trimmed trees,
in her shabby shawl, a sharp gust caught in the
bright damask that folded the sick-room (she had
concluded that it was a sick-room) from her sight,
and there flashed before her a kaleidoscope of soft
lights, tints, glasses, cushions, curtains, and there
was wafted out to her a child's cry. This
-- 046 --
[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]
frightened her, and she crept softly away; she began
to wish that she had left her child at No. 19, and
to wonder, Would anybody take her in with the
child? Then, remembering her promise to Lize,
she “tried to like it,” but succeeded only in patting
the little thing with a desperate gentleness
that woke and terrified it.
She plodded on for a while, the child crying
across her arm, and her weak limbs sinking, in
hopes of finding another lighted window; but
there were no more. Exhausted and desperate,
she crawled, at length, under the shadow of a
wooden gate, thinking that she would rest there,
or die there, as chance might be, and thinking
(as all young people think when they are tired)
that she cared little which.
The wooden gate belonged to an omnibus station;
Nixy discovered this presently, and as it
was very cold where she lay, and as, on the
whole, she might die just as well at another time,
she conceived the idea of spending the night in
an omnibus. So she pushed the baby under the
gate, which was locked; and, being so slight and
small, contrived to follow without much trouble,
and to climb into one of the silent, empty
-- 047 --
[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]
coaches. It was warm and sheltered there. She
flung herself down upon the straw, for the dirty
velvet cushions seemed too grand to sleep on,
and dropped, probably at once, into a heavy
sleep.
In the morning, when driver No. 23 of the Urban
Line, rolled out his coach, a baby rolled
against, and very nearly out of, the door.
Nixy, haggard and terrified, appeared, and
picked it up.
“Land of Liberty!” said No. 23. He was
over six feet, with fierce whiskers, and voice in
proportion.
“Yes,” said Nixy, “I 'll go right away. I
meant to go away before you came. I did n't
mean any harm. But nobody liked to take me
in, you see, — and it was past midnight. I 'll go
right away!”
“S'pose I 'd ought to report you as a vagrant,
no two sides to that!” replied 23. But he fell to
musing behind his beard.
“How old be ye now?”
“Not sixteen.”
“Got any folks?”
“No.”
-- 048 --
[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]
“Got anywheres to go?”
“No.”
“Go there, then, for all me!” thundered 23,
turning his back. “Clear out quick, and I 'll
let ye alone.”
Nixy “cleared.”
In the frost of the early morning she wandered
about for a while, till the smoke, in little
blue coils, screwed holes in a silver sky, and bare-footed
children began to group in the chilly sunlight,
and odors of crisp muffins and coffee fed
the wind.
Nixy knew better than to ask for breakfast,
with such a burden as she carried in her
arms, at the door of one of the houses whose
haughty shadows had repelled her on her midnight
tramp. Any one observing her closely
would have noticed that she selected rather
a shabby street, and, all things considered, the
shabbiest dwelling in it, for her errand. It
is one of the whims, or instincts, of the poor,
to beg favors of their kind. It is also one
of their whims, perhaps a foreign fancy which
Yankee pride has adopted, never to seem hungry
under a stranger's roof. So Nixy,
-- 049 --
[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]
knocking timidly, and, bidden by a busy young woman
in a busy voice to enter, asked leave to
warm her feet, to wash her hands, talked of
the weather, the walking, the town, saw a hot
breakfast steam before her dizzy eyes; saw the
room whirl, felt the words slip; sat up straight
and stiff, and dropped a dead weight faint upon
the floor.
When she came to herself, the busy young
woman had hot tea at her lips in a spoon.
“I never thought of Jacques's money! I can
pay you. Here!” Nixy's weak hands fumbled
in her pocket. “I suppose I was hungry!”
She saw then that some one had taken the
baby, and all her faint face flushed.
“The child is over-young to be travelling,”
said the young woman, with a keen look.
“Yes.” Poor Nixy did not know what else
to say.
“Four weeks, I should say, makin' guess-work.”
“Three, next Tuesday.”
The busy young woman exchanged glances
with the woman who held the baby. She did
not know whether to be most scandalized or
-- 050 --
[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]
most compassionate; her answer was indicative
of her state of mind.
“Humph! Travelled far?”
“I don't know. It must be some ways. I 'm
a little tired.”
She was probably a “little tired” still, when
she started, in the course of half an hour, to
go. It seemed, when the opening of the door
brought the fresh air upon her, that she would
faint again; but she shut her white lips together;
she did not mean to die — for she had
never fainted before, and supposed herself to
be dying — in anybody's house; in the open
air and under the open sky she felt as if she
might have the right to commit so rude a
blunder.
She wished, as she went out, holding dizzily by
chairs and fences, that she had dared to ask in
the house for work. The busy young woman
took money for her breakfast, for she was poor
as well as busy, and stood looking after her at
the door.
“Nothing but a child herself!” — uneasily
said. “Though, to be sure, what can one do?”
What could one do? Other busy people asked
-- 051 --
[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]
themselves the uneasy question, as Nixy wandered
about the streets, white and frightened,
through the day.
One woman beckoned her back after she had
turned her from the door, questioned her much,
and cried over her a little; but when her own
child, a little girl, bounded in from somewhere,
she sent Nixy hurriedly away.
“I would rather Clara should not see you, if
you 'll excuse me.”
“I would n't hurt her,” said Nixy, stopping
upon the steps after the door had closed. She
spoke to herself, in some perplexity, and with
perplexed eyes she walked away.
At another house, where she asked for work,
and where “they could n't think of the child,”
they compassionately offered her dinner and
rest. These she accepted — as she accepted
everything that happened — with little surprise
and few words.
“I suppose you know how wicked you 've
been,” suggested the lady of the house, anxious,
in the only way that presented itself to her vivid
invention, to “reform” the girl.
“Yes,” said Nixy, in her unhappy, unmeaning
-- 052 --
[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]
way. She was wondering where she should spend
the night.
“It is a dreadful thing, — you so young!”
“Yes.”
“Do you mean to be a better girl?”
“O yes.”
“It will be very hard, — with the child.”
“Yes.”
The lady looked at her, puzzled.
“I doubt if she understands a thing I say.”
But she was mistaken. Nixy had perfectly
understood and would remember her last remark.
She was growing very tired of the child.
At another place, to which she had been directed,
she was told at the door, and the door
was shut with the words: —
“We wanted a girl — about your size, but not
a baby.”
So, by degrees, the baby became horrible.
About dusk, after a weary afternoon, she
stopped at the dip of a little hilly street, and in
the shadow of a little dark yard that guarded a
bright little house, to rest.
The master of the house, whistling his way
home to supper, stumbled across her with the
-- 053 --
[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]
child in her arms, and her head laid stupidly
back against a tree. When he saw her he
said, —
“This is a land of liberty!” — for it was No.
23. He tried to lift her up, but dropped her as
if she had been porcelain, and thundered for
“Marthy! Marthy Ann!” — he had a voice like
the Last Trump; but the summons to “Marthy”
disturbed Nixy far more than the noise.
She had grown very much afraid of her own
kind. Men swore at her generally, discouraged
her always, but they asked no questions. Women
had held her on a slow toasting-fork of curiosity
all day.
So she said to 23 as she had said before, “I 'll
go right away!”
But Marthy Ann (she was a little woman) had
come out of the bright little house, and drawn
Nixy in from the little dark yard; she had a
warm hand and a silent tongue, and the girl
submitted to her leading.
“Lord help her!” said the little woman, when
she had got her into the light. What was quite
as much to the point, she kept her for the
night.
-- 054 --
[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]
She could not give her a bed, — the house was
far too small for that, — but she rolled her up on
a cosey lounge by the bright kitchen fire. All the
house was cosey, and all the house was bright.
There was a baby somewhere, and she could hear
Marthy Ann, in snatches, singing and fondling
this baby, and No. 23 whistling and fondling
Marthy. She thought, listening from her lounge,
that it must be a very happy house.
Something less than an idea, and more than a
notion, came for the first time to the Thicket
Street girl, of the pure loves of wife and mother.
She sat up straight upon her lounge to hear the
whole of Marthy's song.
“If I was like that,” she said, half aloud,
“mebbe I 'd like the baby without trying.”
But she was not like that; it was quite certain
that she was not like that.
She lay down again and shut her eyes. Presently
she opened them suddenly. 23 and Marthy
Ann — in bed and half asleep — were talking
of her.
“If it was n't for the child there 'd be chances.”
“Chances enough. It 's a likely girl.”
“Now there was Celia Bean. You remember
-- 055 --
[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]
Celia? The baby 's the mischief of it. I 'm so
glad I had that lounge!”
Marthy, soon asleep, forgot her words. Nixy
sat up still and straight, and pondered them in
her heart.
The baby was the mischief of it! Was there,
then, no way in which she could be the baby's
honest mother? She felt a little pity for the
child, and patted it softly. But she felt more
pity for herself, as was natural under the circumstances.
What with this pity, and the dead of night,
and weakness and misery and fear, Nixy concluded,
sitting there on Marthy's lounge, that it
was about time to be rid of the baby.
By the light of Marthy's cooking-stove, she
crept down from her lounge, and found the
kitchen door. She unlocked and unlatched it
without noise, and then, upon the threshold,
stopped. After some thought, she returned to
the fire, and, kneeling down upon the floor,
held the infant up for a moment in the dying
light. Her face exhibited no trace of grief or
love; some puzzled regret and a little compassion,
but nothing besides.
-- 056 --
[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]
“Lize was right,” she thought, — and thought
no more; “he will take after me when he 's big
enough. The poor little fellow!”
She made as though she would have kissed
him, but the inevitable sudden loathing, or something
else, prevented her. She drew the child
under her shawl again, and, closing Marthy's
door very softly behind her, went away with
him into the chilly autumn night.
Nixy had no thought of murder. She was not
old enough or melodramatic enough for that. To
be rid of the child was a simple matter; to live
without him a simpler. She knew something
of deserted children and foundling homes, — she
had not lived fifteen years in Thicket Street for
nothing. It occurred to her, as she glided along,
like an uneasy ghost, through the silent and sleeping
town, dodging police and street-lamps, to
leave her little boy in the curiously gabled house
with the wonderful room. It made very little
difference to her where she left him; there was
this house; it saved trouble, and was near at
hand. Possibly she had some dim idea, that, for
the sake of their own new baby, the people in
the happy house would take some pains to be
-- 057 --
[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]
kind to hers; for she would rather like to have
him well treated, — it was not his fault that nobody
wanted her.
At any rate, with the thought she had found
the house. She knew it easily, for the sick-lamp
was still burning in the bright room, and the
wind was tossing the curtain in and out; and
with the sight of the house, her mind settled
apathetically into the plan. The child had
grown so heavy! The world was growing so
cruel! One place was like another. Her arms
ached. Why seek farther?
We talk of “instinctive maternal affection.” I
cannot learn that Nixy, when she left her child,
with a violent pull at the door-bell, upon the
massive steps of the gabled house, experienced
any other than emotions of relief. To be sure,
when the child's little fingers fumbled feebly over
her face, she thought that his hands were soft,
thought of Marthy and her baby, wondered who
Celia Bean was, and what happened to her, and
so was reminded of 23, and of being reported as
a vagrant, and that it was quite time to be away.
With little regret she kissed her child, — for the
first time and the last. With nothing more
-- 058 --
[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]
positive either way than a dull sense of comfort, she
folded her shawl about her empty arms, and stole
off down the pebbled drive, into the wide, empty,
solitary street. She had done by her own flesh
and blood as the world had done by her. It
seemed to this poor little mother rather a fair
arrangement than otherwise.
Only, when half a mile away from the child,
she stopped and thought of Lize.
“But I kep' my promise,” she said, looking
troubled, for she did not like to break a promise
to Lize. “I kep' it. I tried to like him. But
there's nowheres, no folks. What could we do?”
She fell to sobbing, — thinking of Lize, — she
was so weak from walking, and homesick, and
alone; she wished that she were back in No. 19
upon the straw; wished that she had gone, as
Moll advised, into the concert-hall; wished that
she could see Monsieur Jacques; wished that
she had stayed among “her folks,” — meaning
Thicket Street. When one has no family, one
adopts a county, a cause, an alley, as the case
may be. It seemed to Nixy, in her desperate
mood, to be a great mistake that she had ever
undertaken this dreary attempt at “staying
-- 059 --
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honest.” Why should she be better than her kind?
In Thicket Street, at least, she was at home. In
this world of pure men and women she was bewildered,
lost.
So, gloomily thinking, she travelled the country
up and down for a couple of miserable days.
She seldom consciously missed her child, excepting
with a sense of relief; yet the weight of the
little thing, gone from her empty arms, burdened
her heart at times in a dull way. He had been
some company.
She never went back to 23 and Marthy Ann, —
not daring to without the child; she was quite out
of the region by daylight. In her confused condition,
however, she must have trodden a circle like
a lost traveller in a forest, for, on the third day,
faint and discouraged, — Jacques's money all
gone and the girl's brave heart too, — she was
seen climbing the pebbled slope to the curiously
gabled house which had attracted her twice before.
That was at dead of night; now, in fair
sunlight, and blinded by exhaustion, she did not
know the place.
“Do you know of anybody as wants a girl?”
She asked the old question stupidly, looking
-- 060 --
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for the old answer. As it happened, “Mis' Myrtle
was hard up for help,” and, to her surprise,
Nixy was bidden to enter, and sent to the mistress
of the mansion for inspection.
The lady was in her bedroom, and a little pink
cradle stood by her side. On the threshold of the
chamber Nixy stopped short. She recognized
the slow, soft curtain, the light bay-window, pictures,
pillows, and the wailing cry of the “wonderful
room.”
The frightened color rushed to her face. She
peered into corners, expecting to be confronted
by her deserted child, turned and would have
fled, but Mrs. Myrtle — Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle, by
the way, she was commonly called — detained
her sharply.
“Don't be afraid of me! I won't hurt you.
Besides, you let the air in on Baby. There, —
stand where I can see you. I suppose some one
directed you here? I 've had such a time getting
girls!”
“So I heard,” said Nixy, roused now, and
shrewd.
“I want a girl,” continued Mrs. Myrtle, raising
her head, — it was a handsome head, fresh
-- 061 --
[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]
from the crimping-irons of her maid, — “to
take steps for me, and help nurse, and all that;
to make herself useful wherever and whenever
wanted; to keep herself tidy, and not run about
evenings. I have such a time with my girls!
Why did you leave your last place?”
“Family moved West,” said Nixy, feeling her
way with care.
“You came from town?”
Nixy nodded, in no haste to commit herself
by many words. Not that she objected to telling
a lie, — why should she? — but that she preferred
to tell a good one.
The amount of it was — for when Nixy had
become convinced that there was but one child
in the room, she and her story both appeared to
advantage — that Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle engaged
her services.
“Age, under sixteen.
“Temper, amiable.
“Common-school education.
“Seen service before.
“Lost her recommendations.
“Respectable family connection.
“Widowed mother —”
-- 062 --
[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]
Mrs. Myrtle ran over the notes which she had
taken of Nixy's conversation.
“I think, on the whole, I will try you. Though
I do object to your having lost your recommendations.
Nobody ever has such a time with girls
as I! And there 's no knowing whom you may
take in. The number of tramps about is alarming.
It cannot be three days — is it, nurse? —
since Boggs picked up that baby on our steps.
It made me so nervous and depressed! I have
n't got over it yet. I am sure I thought I should
be forced to send for the doctor again, though I
don't think Doctor Burtis has the least comprehension
of NERVES! Boggs took the child to the
Burley Street Nursery, — an excellent place. But
such a thing never happened on my premises
before, — never! It was so sad and depressing!
Yes, I think, on the whole, I will try you.”
“Depressing as it is,” Mrs. Myrtle explained to
her husband, “to take an unknown girl into the
family, especially a girl with no more constitution
for housework than this one has, — I cannot
send her up stairs but she loses her breath in
a very unpleasant manner, — I wish to make a
faithful and patient trial of it. I have so few
-- 063 --
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opportunities of active usefulness, confined as I
am with the children and my nervous condition,
that I really feel it, in one sense, a duty to try
the girl. I see nothing bad about her so far, and
she is willing about taking steps, which, in my
weak state, is a great thing. I think I shall take
real comfort in giving her a comfortable home.”
Nixy remained in Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle's “comfortable
home” two weeks.
On a Sabbath morning at the end of that time,
Mrs. Myrtle went to church. The day was superb,
the carriage recushioned, her recovery complete,
her baby well, her bonnet and prayer-book new.
She patted Nixy on the head as she swept smiling
out of the door, and bade her take the air on
the lawn with one of the little girls, — she was
looking pale; and Fanny would enjoy it. Besides,
she (Nixy) had, she must say, been very
faithful since she had been with her, and she was
glad to give her a change. Perhaps she could
manage to let her out to the evening service. It
was too sweet a Sunday to be misimproved.
Nixy listened humbly. If she had not felt “at
home” in Mrs. Myrtle's service, she had at least
enjoyed the honest large work and honest small
-- 064 --
[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]
pay. Her dark attic room was palatial to a No.
19 girl; her dinner (without desserts) luxurious;
her conscience quiet; her hands full; her past
wellnigh forgotten in the novelty, and her future
of no consequence in the security.
In a certain way she was almost happy, as she
sat in the golden Sabbath sun, waiting, with
troublesome Fanny, for her mistress's return.
In the Sabbath sun, Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle rode
home from the house of God with a black brow
and a fast whip. The first thing that she saw
was Nixy, sitting under a tinted maple-tree, with
the child Fanny's arms about her neck. This
looked very affectionate, but it was in fact very
uncomfortable. It made a pretty picture, however,
for the light and color gathered richly about
Nixy's young face, which, however miserable or
pallid, was fair, because it was young. And
Mrs. Myrtle, just at that moment, would have
preferred that the girl should look ugly; it would
have been, I think, a positive moral relief to her.
For the lady had heard that morning, naturally
enough, Nixy's sorrowful story.
Nixy felt it in the air, like thunder, before
Boggs had reined up at the door.
-- 065 --
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“Fanny!” Mrs. Myrtle, perfumed and perturbed,
prayer-book in hand, and eyes on fire,
called her daughter. “Take down your arms —
at once! — from Nixy's neck, and go into the
house.”
The little girl hesitated to obey, and her mother,
with some emphasis, herself removed the offending
hands from Nixy's shoulders; in so
doing, by accident, something hit Nixy a sharp
blow upon the cheek; it proved to be the edge
of the prayer-book, — a rich one in full calf.
“What a pity!”
“You did not hurt me,” said Nixy.
The lady colored. She had been examining
the dented leather when she spoke; but upon
Nixy's “accepting the apology” so simply, she
remained silent.
She remained silent long enough to speak perhaps
more calmly than she might otherwise have
done.
“This is a dreadful story which I hear of you,
Nixy. It has really made me ill.”
Nixy folded her hands and leaned back against
the maple-tree. She did not much care what
happened next.
-- 066 --
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“I mean that you were seen, — I heard it twice
this morning, — that you were seen a fortnight
ago, in the streets of this town, with an infant in
your arms. It is of no use to deny it, so many
people saw you. I hear it upon the best of authority.
It must be true.”
“I suppose you sent it to the Burley Street
Nursery.”
To Mrs. Myrtle's exceeding surprise, Nixy
made this answer.
“Well, I must say! I am glad that you confess
it with so little trouble. But you lied to me.”
“O yes. I wanted honest work. You would n't
have taken me, ma'am, if I 'd told you the truth.”
“No,” — Mrs. Myrtle looked undecided whether
to feel rebuked or flattered, — “no, of course not.
With my family, of course not. And of course
I must dismiss you at once.”
“Of course,” repeated Nixy, languidly. She
had learned enough of the pure world now to
know that. She sat very still, with the happy
light from the maple dotting her dress and hair
in a mocking, miserable manner.
“This is so dreadful and depressing!” sighed
Mrs. Myrtle, after an uneasy silence.
-- 067 --
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“Shall I go to-night?” asked Nixy.
“Well — not to-night, perhaps; but to-morrow
early. With my family of innocent children
I cannot feel as if I ought to keep you under my
roof.”
“I 'd rather go to-night,” said Nixy. “I would
n't want to hurt the children.” She was too
much disheartened to be bitter; she spoke
quietly enough, but Mrs. Myrtle looked dully
disturbed.
“I do not wish to hurry you away — into mischief.
I suppose you can reform, and be better,
and all that. If it were n't for the children —
but how could I feel it to be right to put my
Fanny under your influence? I would consult
with Mr. Myrtle about it, if there were any
chance that we could think it best. We could
not, you see, sacrifice our own offspring to your
reformation, though it would be very Christian
and beautiful. So I do not see how I can do
more than to forgive you for your ingratitude
in so dreadfully deceiving me; which I do.”
“Thank you,” said listless Nixy.
“And to beg of you to consider that there is
hope for us all,” — Mrs. Myrtle spoke with
-- 068 --
[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]
humility, — “for us all, in the way of salvation,
which our Lord has marked out for sinners.”
If the lady had referred to a way of salvation
from the frosty night, from the hungry morning,
from the wandering week, which Nixy, sitting
under the warm maple-tree, vividly foresaw, and
from which, in her silence, she was shrinking
with a very sick young heart, the girl might, I
must own, have paid better heed to the advice.
Nixy knew little about heaven, cared less; earth
was as much as she could manage just then.
She glanced at the dented prayer-book, and wondered,
in a mixed thought of how she should
carry her clothes, and whether she should go
back to Thicket Street, if the Lord had told
Mrs. Myrtle, in his house that day, to send her
away for fear of Fanny; and if he cared so much
more for Fanny than for her. It was natural
that he should. She only wondered about it,
speculatively.
“I must do my duty, you know,” urged Mrs.
Myrtle, uneasily. “It is not want of Christian
sympathy which compels me to dismiss you. I
have always been much interested in women of
your class. When my health permits, I have
-- 069 --
[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]
gone to the Magdalen Home twice a month to
cut out work. That is a very interesting and
Christian retreat. I wonder you never thought
of going there. I could easily —”
“I should like to go away now, if you please.”
Nixy spoke and rose hurriedly, visions of
Dr. Burtis and the 'sylum passing with the old
terror before her.
“I 'd like to go now, without waiting, Mrs.
Myrtle.”
“Stay till afternoon,” urged Mrs. Myrtle, uncomfortably.
“I don't mean to be severe with
you. You make me so nervous, hurrying matters
in this manner! If it were n't for the children—”
But Nixy had stepped out from the rich
warmth of the maple's light, and was, as the
lady spoke, crossing the darker shadows of the
lawn, on her way to the kitchen door.
Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle, searching for the girl with
troubled face, immediately after her noon nap,
discovered that she had already gone.
“Nothing could give me more pleasure in my
circumscribed field of usefulness,” she confided to
Mr. Myrtle, “than to help such girls, — in their
-- 070 --
[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]
places, you know; but when it comes to receiving
them, under circumstances, too, of aggravated
deception, into one's own family, I feel that there
are domestic duties which have sacred prior
claims. I would, on reflection, have kept her until
Monday, and have done what little I could for
her; but she got vexed with me, — such girls are
always getting vexed, — and left, I believe, without
her dinner. I don't think that any one appreciates
how depressing the affair has been!”
-- 071 -- p735-080
CHAPTER VI. “STAYING HONEST. ”
[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]
“HE who has seen the suffering of men has
seen nothing, he must see the suffering of
women; he who has seen the suffering of women
has seen nothing, he must see the suffering of
children.”
Nixy united in her own experience at this
time the suffering of the child and the woman.
Not being familiar with Victor Hugo, she did
not reflect upon the fact in the Frenchman's apt
language. But she considered herself to be very
unhappy, and when a Thicket Street girl considers
herself to be unhappy, she usually means
it. The life which Nixy had led had not cultivated
in her a tendency to “the blues,” it must
be understood.
Upon leaving the service and the house of Mrs.
Zerviah Myrtle, she struck out several miles into
the open country.
-- 072 --
[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]
The country always seemed to Nixy like a long
breath. It was, to her fancy, purity, rest, renovation.
It was, in her own language, “chances.”
With a certain dogged determination not to
return hastily to Thicket Street, the concertroom,
and Moll, — a determination which I
think even Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle would not have
found “depressing” in view of Nixy's possible
“reformation,” — the girl travelled about in
the beautiful autumn weather, searching for some
one to help her to “stay honest” for seven
days.
It was wonderful weather. All the golden air
melted about her. All the trees hung out, so
she thought, Chinese lanterns for her. A few
brown butterflies lingered languidly in the sun.
A few bright birds twittered on the warm fences.
Torpid grasshoppers, roused and heated, sprung
from the fading grass. The leaves rustled, and
the nuts were sweet upon the ground.
Nixy's eyes and heart took these things in. At
times they reminded her of Lize, and of what
she said about her boy, should he come home.
At other times they recalled the song which
Marthy Ann sung; the birds sang it, the
-- 073 --
[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]
grass-hoppers hummed it, the butterflies nodded time;
Nixy, stopping to rest, listened, and felt still and
clean for a little while.
It was only for a little while. Some one, suspicious
of “tramps,” disturbed her roughly, or
questioned her curiously; she then forgot about
Marthy; she generally fell to wondering why the
world should be full of butterflies and yellow
leaves, and no place in it for a girl who never
saw either before. Generally, then, she was reminded
that she had eaten no dinner, and both
leaves and butterflies were forgotten.
Through the day, and by sunlight, the edge of
her hungry, homeless, heart-sick life was blunted
a little thus, in spots. They were the nights
which were hard. Some of them she spent out
of doors, under fences, in barns, in sheds. Some
of them she spent under suspicious or ungracious
roofs. We do not, as a people, take to stragglers
kindly; in the thickly settled regions of “Institutions”
and “Retreats,” it is not, perhaps, considered
good sense or good charity. Nothing
romantic happened to Nixy; nobody offered to
adopt or endow her, educate or marry her. People
looked curiously into her colorless face,
-- 074 --
[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]
considered her young to be travelling alone, gave
her food or advice, as the case might be, and
went about their business. Men and women
who would have wept over her at a prayer-meeting
sent her on her lonely, tempted way without
a thought.
One excellent man, who had lodged her and
prayed with her on Sabbath night, refused her
work in his factory on Monday morning; yet
no rack or stake could have extorted from that
man a deliberate wrong; and for the Lord Jesus
Christ, whose feet the sinner washed, he would
have died as calmly as he cast accounts; he
simply failed to see the links of a syllogism.
Why lay all the stupidity of good men to the
charge of Christianity?
So, years after, I used to hear Nixy say.
As I said, she suffered; she was hungry, cold,
sick, frightened, tempted. These are very simple
words; to a girl of sixteen they are very tremendous
facts.
The worst of it was that nobody wanted her.
Of this she became slowly convinced. Nobody
wanted her “honest” life; there was no room for
it in all this lighted, unspotted, golden country,
-- 075 --
[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]
as there had been none in Jeb Smith's saloon.
There was no room for it in all God's world.
What then?
Nixy had decided what then, on a certain
damp, drizzly, dreary morning which found her
on the outskirts of a little busy town, very tired
and weak.
“Pale as a peppermint,” the woman said who
gave her breakfast, and did not ask her where
she belonged, “for fear,” she explained, “of hearing
some dreadful story.”
“If nobody does want me,” thought Nixy,
“afore night, I might as well go back. I thought
there was places; I thought there was folks.”
But “nobody had wanted her” when the night
fell. It was rather a chilly night, and she
stopped, caring little where she went, in search
of a convenient place to warm her hands.
Leaning weakly and dejectedly on a fence,
partly in thought, partly in exhaustion, a young
girl, passing, saw her. There was low light in
the west, and Nixy's face turned westward.
Her hair was much tumbled, and her dress disordered.
She was perfectly pale, and her mouth
had drawn at the corners like the mouth of a
-- 076 --
[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]
person in a fever. Her hands were dropped at
her sides, like a paralytic's. There was a little
of the same kind of attraction about her which
there is about the Dying Gladiator. She would
haunt one's dreams rather than touch one's
heart. Her youth and possible beauty softened,
but did not mitigate, this impression. On
a background of Roman ruins she would have
been as effective as a rich romance; against a
Yankee fence she was simply painful.
The girl who passed her — warm, rosy, elastic,
wrapped in some kind of soft white woollen garment—
half paused, turning to see who the
straggler was. Nixy, too, turned, and their eyes
met for a moment.
“You look cold!” said the young lady, just as
she would have said good morning.
“I do well enough,” said Nixy, sullenly.
“Come into the house and get warm, Mother
would be glad to have you.”
Nixy refused shortly, and moved away. She
felt instinctively repelled from this snow-white,
safe, comfortable girl; did not wish to be under
obligations to her, — a girl no older than herself,
yet so white, so safe, so comfortable!
-- 077 --
[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]
The young lady tripped up the steps and shut
the door. Nixy heard her as she roamed defiantly
away; wondered what was inside of the
door; half wished that she had stayed to get
warm and see.
She warmed herself finally in a grocery store.
The store had a bright sign, a bright window,
a bright fire, and a bright old man, and only one,
behind the counter. The old man was singing.
Partly because he was old, and partly because
he was singing, he reminded her of Monsieur
Jacques, and she ventured in.
The old man gave her a keen look over his
spectacles.
“The world,” said he, “is upside-down, — quite.
It is like the Scotchman's favorite parson; it
`joombles the joodgment and confoonds the
sense.' I give it up! One must stand on one's
own feet. Sit down.”
Nixy, supposing herself to be so directed, had
remained standing on “her own feet” by the
fire. Much perplexed, she sat down. She
leaned her head upon her hand, and, as the
grocer offered no further remarks, she sat very
still.
-- 078 --
[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]
“She ought to be in the nursery,” said the old
gentleman, after a pause. “I give it up!”
The old gentleman appeared to be answering
an unasked conundrum, which embarrassed Nixy,
because she did not know but she was expected
to guess it. She had, indeed, half decided to ask
him; but customers came in, and she refrained.
She discovered, in a few moments, that she
was becoming the object of remark, and, thinking
that it might be unpleasant to the old gentleman
to be found sheltering her, she started to
leave the store. But he stopped her peremptorily.
“Give it up? No! If it 's anybody's business
whom I choose to have sit by my fire, the
world 's come to a pass indeed. Stay where
you are!”
The grocer nodded so furiously, and glared at
his customers so alarmingly, that Nixy, not knowing
what else to do, stayed.
“Hobbs — all over,” observed a little fellow
buying coffee, glancing at Nixy then, and whispering.
Uncomfortable at being thus discussed,
Nixy rose with a sigh of relief when the grocer's
customers, one by one, had dropped out.
“I did n't mean to make you trouble,” she said,
-- 079 --
[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]
speaking quite low. It was beginning to grow
upon her that she made a great deal of trouble in
the world.
“Trouble, indeed!” exclaimed Mr. Hobbs.
“You 'd better give that up! If Mrs. Hobbs —
well, in fact, there never was a Mrs. Hobbs (the
world is all upside-down!) or you 'd go to my
house to-night short metre. But if money —”
“I 'm not a beggar,” said Nixy; for this did
not seem to her like taking money from Monsieur
Jacques.
“One must stand on one's own feet, to be sure,”
meditated Mr. Hobbs. “Perhaps you 're right.
All I 've got to say, then, is, Don't give it up!”
But Nixy was just about ready to give it up.
Dusk deepened into dark early that night,
and heavily. Lights twinkled thickly, however,
all over the little town, and the girl seemed to
herself, on leaving the grocer's, to be walking confusedly
in a golden net. It reminded her of the
red web that the red spider had woven on the
walls of the second front seaward corner in No.
19. In the same manner it grew and brightened.
It narrowed and tightened in the same manner.
It was probably the association of the fancy, or
-- 080 --
[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]
want of supper, or the tremulous confusion caused
by Mr. Hobbs's coffee-customer, who, from a
doorstep somewhere, startled and spoke rudely to
her, which induced the conviction that she heard
Monsieur Jacques; but all the way through the
golden web she heard him: —
“Down at the bottom of the hill,
It 's lonely — lonely!”
Following the bright meshes of the web, quite
at the will of the web it seemed to her, she found
herself suddenly leaning on the fence again,
where the girl in snow-white woollen had spoken
with her. Before, she had scarcely noticed the
house. Now, the lamps being lighted, and the
curtains raised, one could not but notice it, — not
so much for any one thing, or any rich thing in
the furnishing of the house, but for a certain
fine, used, home-like air which invested the whole,
as far as Nixy could see it, to the very crickets, —
an air which even Nixy, and even then, felt, as
one feels the effect of a very intricate harmony
which one appreciates without understanding.
She unlatched the gate very softly, and crept—
still, as it seemed, in the will of the glittering
web — through the yard to the window.
-- 081 -- p735-090
CHAPTER VII. “GOD'S FOLKS. ”
[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]
MY friend Mrs. Purcell is a woman whom it
is impossible to describe.
Although I am stepping all unbidden into the
straightforward history of Eunice Trent, to attempt
her description.
If I call her a remarkable woman, I have
nothing to show for the adjective. She never
headed a “cause,” delivered a lecture, wrote a
book, had a “mission.” She darns her own
stockings, bakes her own bread, goes to the
“sewing-circle,” believes in her minister, takes
life on patience, heaven on trust.
If I call her a beautiful woman, I must dissect
my language: she has been a sick woman, and
long sick; her cheeks lack tint, her hands life;
she has worn old dresses on occasions, her own
hair always; I believe that her features are irregular,
her figure emaciated. She is also a
-- 082 --
[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]
widow, and widows — those, at least, who, like
Margaret Purcell, are “widows indeed” — are apt
to become monotonous, romance growing rusty
in them with their bombazine, all the colors of
life fading pale as their caps.
If I call her a literary woman, I shall make a
great mistake; she makes a business of a book,
not a passion; can criticise Milton, but loses
Paradise without emotion.
It is not difficult, as you see, to put Mrs. Purcell
into words, negatively. Positively, I should
say that she is intelligent, rather than literary;
fascinating, not beautiful; more sensible than remarkable, —
then I should try again.
An open wood-fire, an April day, supper-time,
Pre-Raphaelitism, autumn leaves, cologne-water,—
she has reminded me in turn of all these.
Having had my fancy and my comprehension
thus abused, I am always ready on demand, like
Mr. Hobbs, to “give her up.”
When I have added that I am speaking rather
of what she was than is, and yet seem to be
speaking none the less of what she is than was,
since she rules, like the Récamier, as royally at
seventy as at seventeen, I have, perhaps,
-- 083 --
[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]
exhausted my descriptive resources. To be economical,
then, of useless metaphors, it was upon Margaret
Purcell's parlor that Nixy, through the window,
looked; and Margaret and her daughter sat
therein alone together.
There was much color, of the shades which retain
rather than reflect light, about the room;
pale walls, pictures, a guitar, books, — these things
lay about Mrs. Purcell as naturally as the folds of
her dress. She and the young lady were sitting
as she and Christina generally sit of an evening,—
the one on a cricket at the other's feet, in the
light of a very soft porcelain-shaded lamp. Christina
still had on her little white jacket, unbuttoned
at the throat and thrown back. As Nixy
came to the window, she was sitting with her face
slightly upturned, and Margaret, as it happened,
was stroking the happy face (Christina always
has a happy face) slowly and softly — a little absently,
for they were talking — with her thin
ringed hand.
Nixy, from the dark, looked in. She thought
of Thicket Street and Moll. She wondered,
very bitterly for Nixy, for she was learning in an
immature fashion to be bitter, what that
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snowwhite girl would do, if dropped like a cloud into
No. 19. She wondered, and this was not bitter,
if the lady with the thin hands were ill,
unhappy. She thought of Lize, of Marthy Ann.
She thought of the Burley Street Nursery, and
Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle's prayer-book, — an odd
jumble of things. She wondered if Mrs. Myrtle
were more religious than Monsieur Jacques; if
the lady here with the white daughter were religious;
if it were because people were white and
religious that they all turned her from their
doors; then, abruptly, how she would look sitting
in the light of a porcelain lamp, with a white
sack on.
She had pressed her haggard young face close
to the window-glass, eager to see the young lady,
and lost in her broken, miserable musing.
She meant to go back to Thicket Street. That
was quite settled. She would beg no longer at
the doors of a better life. She remembered with
a regret as keen as if she had fallen from heaven,
not Thicket Street, her life as her life had been
a year ago; remembered her dream about the
hill, and all the paths which blocked her down.
Was her story marked upon her face, that
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nobody — nobody anywhere — should want her?
Was she scarred, stained? This puzzled her;
she did not feel exactly stained. She did not feel
like a bad girl. She had wanted to be good.
But, there being nobody to help her, “nowheres,
no folks,” there was an end.
All the “chances” closed with spring-locks
when she drew near. The hand of every man
was against her. All the world held up its
dainty skirts. All the world had hedged her
in.
These things, confusedly, came to her looking
in at Margaret Purcell's window. Another thing,
very distinctly, came to her.
It was a new respect for Moll Manners's judgment.
Moll was right about the devil: “Go you
must.”
She felt very cold, for the wind was rising.
She drew her shawl together, and, turning, would
have left the window, but it seemed to her, very
strangely and suddenly, as if the golden web had
tied her there. All the lights of the town nodded
brightly; all the trees rustled like a whisper.
Street-music, somewhere in the distance, reminded
her of the concert-saloon, and she stood still.
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It seemed to her that she would rather lie down
in the golden mist and die, than go back to
Thicket Street. Life and Thicket Street being
one, life grew so horrible! Years in Thicket
Street, “unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved,” piled
on her fancy like years in hell.
“I 'd like to know if God hain't got any folks,”
she said. God did not often occur to her.
Some one across the street — Mr. Hobbs's
rude customer, perhaps — was watching the little
straggler. This she discovered somewhat
suddenly, started, and, in starting, hit Mrs. Purcell's
window with her elbow.
So Christina, a little alarmed, turned her happy
face and saw her, wan and white, looking in.
And so, from very womanly pity, she and Margaret
went out, rashly and royally enough, and
drew the girl within the door.
When Mrs. Purcell had done this, she repented
of it, undoubtedly, for it was very imprudent. I
never knew a woman who had so much of what
Ecce Homo calls “the enthusiasm of humanity”
as Margaret Purcell; and, on the whole, I think
I never knew a woman make so few blunders on
it. Christianity, like any other business, should
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be transacted on method; like any other business,
also, it loses nothing by the courage to
speculate occasionally.
My friend at least is shrewd enough to hold
her tongue, on necessity, about her ventures.
So, having thoroughly followed her impulses,
and then thoroughly alarmed herself at having
admitted this wanderer — beggar, thief, infected,
or worse, or who knew what? — into her family,
and at night, neither her daughter nor her guest
(for poor Nixy was now her guest, according to
Margaret's code of etiquette) was permitted to
detect either her uneasiness or her regret.
“You are sick!” she said, decidedly. “Come
to the fire.”
Nixy came, staggering a little. She heard
Christina say, as the porcelain-shielded lamp
flashed light on her, — “I saw that girl to-night!
Out by the fence,” and wished that the young
lady would keep still. She wanted to hear the
other woman talk; liked the sound of her voice;
was reminded, in a stupid fashion, of Lize,
speaking of her boy, — and then, in the heat,
spread out her hands, tried to speak, failed, and
fell.
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“Right on my parlor carpet!” thought Mrs.
Purcell, as Nixy dropped, prone and wretched,
in the rich, warm room.
Nixy had not fainted. It seemed to be rather
the utter giving out of heart than body. Something
in the atmosphere of the room stunned
her. Something in Mrs. Purcell's voice (Margaret
has rather an unusual voice, combining, I
have often fancied, the elements of a battle-cry
and a cradle-song) struck her harder than blows.
She put it in her own words more emphatically
than I can in mine, when, looking up into the
lady's face, pale and suffocated, she gasped, —
“I 'm gin out!”
Mrs. Purcell's reply was equally apt: —
“Christina, open the window!”
What with air and supper, and what with rubbings
and warmings, and all manner of womanly
“fussing,” Nixy by and by revived a little.
The room, the house, the people, their touch,
words, astonished her. They did not seem “wonderful,”
like Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle's curtained
chamber. They reminded her rather, as I said,
of Lize; of Marthy and Marthy's baby; of autumn
woods and butterflies; of certain moments,
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very rare, when she had stopped on her wanderings
to rest, and sat half buried in leaves and
sunshine, warmed and weak, with her eyes shut,
and her heart so quiet that she could not remember,
if she tried, who Nixy Trent might be.
Those were the times when she had felt “still
and clean.”
She sat crouched on a cricket by Mrs. Purcell's
fire, with her hands folded, and a slight quivering,
like that of a sensitive-plant about to close,
at the corners of her mouth. She had not —
never could have had, I think — a coarse mouth.
Christina, in her little white sack, puzzled and
compassionate, sat on the other side of the grate,
and tried to be hospitable. “For we cannot turn
her out of doors to-night,” her mother had said.
“I 'm glad she is better,” said Christina, half
to her mother, half to the stranger, not knowing
what else to say. Christina had a very simple,
straightforward way of speaking; it struck Nixy,
as it strikes every one, pleasantly, and she looked,
for the first time, fully into her face. The young
lady, she thought, had eyes like a white star.
“I 'll go now, if you want me to,” she said.
“O no!” said Christina.
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“But I am better, as you said, and I am not
a beggar. I 'll put up somewheres else, where
folks is poor, and don't mind the likes of me so
much.”
Mrs. Purcell noticed then, what she often noticed
afterwards, — the curious mingling of rough
and elegant grammar in Nixy's language.
Christina turned to her mother, much disturbed,
making Nixy no answer. Mrs. Purcell
had been pacing the room. This was rather a
mannish habit for Margaret; she acquired it from
walking the house with her husband, who was a
nervous man. She had been pacing the room,
not knowing whether to be most pitiful or most
perplexed.
“Christina,” she said, after a little thought,
“will you step up stairs and put the little gray
room in order? — and, if I want you, I will call
you.”
Christina, disappointed, like any other girl,
obeyed. Margaret drew the chair which she had
vacated near to Nixy; she had not liked to question
the girl with her daughter by.
“You must have journeyed far,” she began,
hesitatingly, reluctant to seem inquisitive. “Mrs.
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Purcell is a woman of — ideas, — you know,” people
have said of her. It was one of her “ideas”
at that time, as at most times in her life, that because
you are what would be denominated “below
her” is, if any, an additional reason why you
should be treated with courtesy. The family
affairs of her butcher are as sacred from her intrusion
as Mr. Longfellow's. She will wait her
gardener's invitation to cross his threshold. I
have heard her beg her cook's pardon, and bid
good morning to her chambermaid. So she
asked this question of Nixy, with the manner in
which she would have inquired for the health of,
for instance, Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle; more deferentially,
it must be owned, than she had been
known to address that lady, when they had met,
as they occasionally had, at the meetings of the
“Magdalen Home Trustees.”
“From the city,” said Nixy. In appearance,
Nixy was examining the knick-knacks upon the
étagère, near which she sat; in fact, she was
considering whether she should tell this lady
the truth; it seemed rather a pity to cheat her,
especially as she had not been the gainer from
lying to Mrs. Myrtle.
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“Have you no friends?”
“No. One old woman as nursed me, — but I
ran away; and an old fellow with guitars, — but
he 's of no account.”
“An old woman who — you have been ill
then?”
“Sick enough.” She finished her sentence in
a whisper.
There was a pause. Mrs. Purcell thanked
fortune that she had sent Christina up stairs.
Nixy ate her hat-string, and wondered if she
would be allowed to sleep in “the little gray
room” now. Mrs. Purcell broke the silence by
saying, gently, —
“You look very young.”
“Nigh sixteen.”
“Not sixteen!”
Christina was scarcely older than that. Again
Mrs. Purcell thanked fortune that she had sent
her daughter up stairs. Again she paused, and
again she broke the pause gently, this time with
a broken voice, to say, —
“You poor little girl!”
Nixy lifted her quick eyes. For the first time
they filled, but they did not overflow; and that
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sensitive quiver to her lips increased, but she did
not cry.
“What became of the child? Do not tell me
if you object.”
“Just as lieves. I left him on her steps. Carried
him round 'long 's I could. I promised Lize
I 'd try to like him. But I could n't. Nobody 'd
have me. Nobody 'd have me anyway; folks is
all afraid I 'll hurt the children, and such. He
was an awful heavy baby for three weeks!”
“Three weeks!”
“Less 'n three when I come off. I s'pose I
got kind o' tuckered out walkin' so early; mebbe
that 's the reason I dropped on your carpet;
't ain't the first time I 've dropped on folks's carpets
comin' in and restin' sudden. I was sorry,
for it is a pretty carpet. I 'm all mud gener'lly.
She had him picked off the steps, and Boggs
took it to a Nursery. I never asked no more
questions. I did n't care much.”
“Who took it?”
“A lady as I ran steps for two weeks. Had
one of her own about as old as the other, I
reckon.”
“So you have been at work?” Mrs. Purcell
-- 094 --
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asked, encouraged by Nixy's communicativeness,
which astonished herself no more than it did Nixy.
“O yes. She turned me off, you know, when
folks told her. She thought it was her duty.
Very like. I don't know; I don't know very
much. Nobody never learned me.”
“Have you been looking for work all this
while?”
“A week since, — yes. Housework, factories,
shops, saloons. Nobody wants me. I 'm not a
beggar. I wanted to stay honest. It don't seem
to be any use. There ain't anywheres, nor there
ain't any folks. I 'm going back to-morrow.”
She spoke the last words like a person in dull
pain, a little thickly and stupidly. Mrs. Purcell
began to pace the room again.
“Going back where?”
“To Thicket Street, that 's where I come
from, — Thicket Street. 'T ain't so much matter
there, you see. I 'd — rather — not; but nobody
wants me, and I 'm tired of being a beggar.
Thank ye kindly, ma'am, for letting me set by
your fire, and I think I 'll be going. Somebody
better used to poor folks will take me in.”
Mrs. Purcell colored.
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“If you will not be unhappy to stay with me,”
she said, stopping her walk across the room suddenly,
“stay till to-morrow. I should like, perhaps,
to talk with you again. My daughter will—
no, I will show you to your room myself.”
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CHAPTER VIII. THE GRAY ROOM.
[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]
“CHRISTINA!”
Christina sat by the fire again, now that
Nixy had gone to bed. Mrs. Purcell was walking
very nervously up and down and across the
room.
“Christina, come here!”
Christina came. Her mother drew her into
the light, and held up the girl's bright face in her
two hands. She had no sooner touched the
saucy face than she dropped it, and walked the
room for a space again. Presently she came
back, and, with unusual persistency in an unusual
caress, drew her daughter's face once more into
the light, and once more, and without a smile,
examined it.
Christina sat mute and lovely; she did not
dare to be mischievous.
It was a lovely face, all dimples and color,
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[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]
very healthy, very happy, not very wise, with
lips too merry to be moulded, — they had never
been still long enough, — and eyes, as Nixy had
thought, “like a white star.” Christina, Margaret
avers, has her dead father's eyes. It was
a face for any mother to be proud of, and careful
for; for which to thank Heaven's mercy, and to
pray Heaven's protection; a face to trust, and a
face to watch.
“But snow is no whiter!” said Margaret, as
if speaking to an unseen listener. Her hand
fell, as she dropped the upturned face, on her
daughter's head, and lay there for a moment,
gently.
“Why do you bless me, mother?” asked
Christina, winking briskly. It always made
her cry to feel her mother's hand upon her
head, and she disapproved of crying for nothing.
“Go to bed, and say your prayers!” said Margaret,
bluntly. “No, — on the whole, stop a
moment. I don't know what to do with that
poor girl up stairs!”
Christina liked to be “consulted,” as she often
was, upon family affairs. Margaret, upon
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principle, took her daughter into her confidence
whenever she could. She grew at once grave
and womanly, and she came at once, shrewdly
enough, to the point.
“What do you want to do with her, mother?”
This was exactly what Mrs. Purcell did not
know.
“I think, at least, that I shall keep her for a
couple of days to rest. She is ill, and ought
not to be travelling about alone. She wants
work. It will be very little trouble to let her
stay in the corner-room for a night or two, unless
you object to having her about. She will
not want anything of you, though.”
“I wish she did,” said Christina, simply. “She
looks so forlorn!”
“She does look sick.”
“I don't wonder she could n't find work,” continued
Christina, lifting her innocent eyes. Her
mother watched them. “I could n't find work,
if I had to earn my living, unless I could make
tatting or give music-lessons. I 've been thinking
all this evening how funny that I should be
your daughter, and she should be she, you know.
How long has she been sick?”
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Mrs. Purcell was taken aback by the abruptness
of the question.
“I have not inquired very fully into particulars,”
she answered, evasively. “And if I were
you, Christina, I should not question her much.
I should rather that you would not. You do not
want to be impertinent because the girl is poor.”
“Of course not.” Christina, who was a little
lady to her fingers' ends, looked grieved at the
implication. Her mother half repented having
made it, partly because Christina did not deserve
it, partly because it was not altogether honestly
made. But it was too late to retract; and what
else could she have done, looking into the young
girl's starry eyes? They were not eyes to be
darkened by a breath of Nixy's black story.
“At least, as I said before,” she continued,
after a silence, “I will keep the girl for a couple
of days; perhaps, by looking about, I can find
something for her to do. It does not seem exactly
Christian to send her off again without
making at least an effort to help her. She has
no mother.”
Christina was very sleepy, or she would have
expressed herself upon that subject. Shutting
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the door, on her way to bed, she stopped, in
thought.
“You know it 's next week Ann goes?”
“What of that?”
“I did n't know but you might like — out of
charity, and all that — to take this sick girl in
her place. I suppose she 'd be any amount of
bother!”
“I suppose she would. I will think it over,
however.”
I can hardly explain by what mental process
Mrs. Purcell had preferred to await this very
suggestion from her daughter's lips; certain it
is, that she had been revolving it in her troubled
thought the entire evening, and that her objections
to it, which were very strong, narrowed, as
she found on careful inspection, to one word, —
Christina.
Nixy shut the door of the little corner-room
with wondering eyes. In all her life she had
never laid down and slept in a room like it. It
was small, and simply furnished, but it was soft
and gray, — gray was a color that Nixy particularly
fancied, — and there was a shade of
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silver-gray in counterpane, wood-work, carpet,
papering, curtains; a little gray statuette upon
the mantel, and a few pictures in gray frames
about the walls.
When she was left alone, and when Mrs. Purcell's
step had dropped into silence upon the
carpeted stairs, Nixy stood just in the middle of
the gray room for a few moments, almost without
motion, almost without breath.
It seemed to her like the first twilight which
she saw settle down upon the open country. It
stilled her. It folded her in. It spoke many
things to her. What they were I suppose it
would be difficult for you or me to understand if
we altogether knew. Peace and purity met together;
righteousness and judgment kissed each
other before the young girl's opening eyes. Yet
she felt nothing of what we should distinguish as
the sense of shame. At this period of her life,
Nixy scarcely felt herself to be ashamed. She
knew herself to be outcast, lonely; a creature
of miserable yesterdays and more miserable tomorrows, —
most miserable when the gray room
had yielded her up to Thicket Street. She knew
that her dress was dirty, and that there was
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mud upon her feet. She felt that the delicate
room was too fine for her. She folded away her
dingy clothes with great care, lest they should
stain the pearl-gray margins of the chair upon
which she laid them. She crept timidly into the
white bed; it seemed like creeping into a sunny
snow-drift, as if the very breath of her own lips
would melt it away from about her. She thought
of Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle's attic, and of the bundle
of straw in No. 19; wondered why Mrs. Purcell
should have put “the likes of her” in such a bed,
rather than bid her room with her servants.
Christina, at that very moment, was expending
some wonder upon that identical subject; not
suspecting, for her mother had not hinted them,
the motives which influenced the mistress of the
house in this perhaps extraordinary disposal of
the poor little straggler. Whereas Mrs. Purcell's
course of reasoning was simple enough. Ann,
if she did make sour bread, and paste her four
walls over with blessed gilt-paper Marys, was
an honest woman. Knowing what she knew of
poor Nixy, feeling as she felt herself to be the
keeper of the maid-servant who was within her
gates, Mrs. Purcell would have offered the
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[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]
outcast choice of all her pretty spare-rooms, would
have bidden her, indeed, into her very own bed,
rather than have imposed her presence upon
the Irish girl. Here again was one of Margaret's
“ideas.”
Nixy, upon creeping under the fine gray counterpane,
discovered, folded white across it, a wonderful
garment, scented and soft, and heavy with
delicate embroidery. It was, in fact, one of
Christina's night-dresses; and I am compelled to
admit that it was her best one too.
“Why, how could you?” her mother, in real
dismay, exclaimed when she found it out. To
tell the truth, — and I propose always to tell the
truth about Margaret, — Mrs. Purcell was for
the instant shocked. That girl in Christina's
clothes!
“Why not? Of course she had n't any with
her, and I thought she 'd like a pretty one while
she was about it, you know. I did n't mean to
do anything out of the way, I 'm sure.”
Christina stood with wide-open, lighted eyes.
Of such as she had, she had given, on hospitable
thought intent, to Nixy Trent, precisely as she
would to Fanny Myrtle. She was so simple and
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[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]
straightforward about it, and her mother was so
annoyed, and ashamed of herself for being annoyed
about it, that no more words passed between
them on the subject, — as was generally
the case when they differed. Only, said Mrs.
Purcell, —
“She might have had one of mine, you know!”
Nixy, on seeing the delicate thing, had laid
it away at first carefully, supposing only that
Christina had left it there by some mistake; after
a while it occurred to her that the young lady
might by possibility have intended the garment
for her use.
She unfolded, examined, refolded, placed it
carefully upon the foot of the bed.
“It 's too grand for me,” she said.
This disappointed Christina. When her mother
was “benevolent” she liked to “help,” in a pretty,
childish fashion. It was altogether a pretty
fashion, and not altogether a common one, in
which Christina at that time blended in herself
the child and the woman. As, for instance, this
little incident of Nixy and the night-dress; ten
years might have done the thing, thirty could not
have done it on more advanced and consistent
principle.
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[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]
Let us smile, if we feel like it; it may be a
comfort to ourselves, it will be a harm to nobody;
but I venture to say that the time may — I do
not assert that it will, but that it may — come
when not to offer Nixy our best night-clothes
would be as much of a departure from the ordinary
customs of Christian society as it would be
now to offer her a shroud. “Freely ye have received,
freely give,” may have been spoken even
touching embroidery and lace-work. Who knows?
Nixy, for very strangeness of comfort, lay waking
much in the gray room that night.
There was a late moon, and the light, where it
entered the room, was like the room, — all of shining
gray. She thought, between her dreams, that
she lay in a pearl and silver bath.
When she awoke in the morning, alone and
still, in the clean room, in the clean sunlight, —
“Mebbe God 's got folks, after all,” she said in
her heart. “Mebbe she 's one,” meaning, of
course, Margaret Purcell.
She felt glad to have found her, merely from a
scientific point of view, even if, when found, the
discovery must — as it must — mean nothing to
her. She felt glad to have lived to sleep a night
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[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]
in the gray room, though she went back to
Thicket Street to-morrow. She wondered — this
at intervals — what kind of a girl she, Nixy
Trent, should now be, had she lived all her
happy life in a pearly-gray room.
Christina broke upon the thought, in a morning-dress
as fresh as her eyes, with a message
from her mother, to the effect that Mrs. Purcell
would like to inquire after the health of her guest
to-day. And Nixy, scarcely hearing the message
(though she afterwards recalled it, and thought it
very odd), lifted her thoughtful eyes to the messenger,
and wondered on: —
“Would I been like that?”
Would she? Who dares to say?
Mrs. Purcell, asking herself the very question,
through the first night and day that Nixy spent
under her roof, did not dare. She looked from
one girl to the other with a restless mouth. Out
of the mouth the heart speaketh, and Margaret
was restless in heart.
She had passed a disturbed night on account
of this stranger who was beneath her roof; she
pitied her much, she dreaded her more. To have
given her lodging, food, rest, advice, money, the
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[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]
gray room, would not, or did not, satisfy the
healthy conscience of this Christian woman. To
take the trouble of providing the poor girl with
such a home or such a “Retreat” as offers to
Nixy's kind, promised to give her poor content.
These were the common humanities of life.
A cultivated infidel (with a nice eye), like Sainte-Beuve,
for instance, might far surpass them. Of
Margaret Purcell, sitting down to darn stockings
while Nixy was at breakfast, something
finer than charity, something greater than philanthropy,
it was reasonable to expect, it was —
was it, or was it not? — right to demand; for
Margaret Purcell was a Christian. The “All-Soul”
tired her, it must be admitted, very much.
“The powers of Nature, formerly called God,”
somehow or other seriously offended that measure
of common sense of which, by man's inalienable
“right to reason,” she conceived herself
to be possessed. She professed herself to
be — and she had a native and emphatic fancy for
being that which she professed — a disciple of a
very plain and a very busy Man, who stopped, it
has been said, of a certain summer night, weary
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[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]
and dusty, and faint at heart, to make of himself
a drawer of eternal water for a passing sinner's
thirst.
Mrs. Purcell, darning her stocking, mused for
a space upon this busy Man.
But had she not done already more than half
the Christian women of her acquaintance would
have done for that wretched girl? And should
she be bound under obligations to do what none
of the Christian women of her acquaintance —
at least, none of whom she could think at that
particular moment, which spoke the worse for
either her acquaintance or her memory, of
course — would do?
But Nixy's mute eyes pleaded, Give, give!
There it was! She could not deny it. The
Man who sat by the well expected more of her,
expected much of her. He was not inconsiderate
either. She had never known him unreasonable;
she had never regretted a sacrifice made
for one of his little ones.
In her simple life, with its simple burdens,
simple blessings, — for so, as she grows older,
she is fond of regarding what has often seemed
a complex history to me, — in all this life her
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allegiance to Him had returned to her what she
estimated as a hundred-fold of wealth. Thus it
had become — a very simple matter — her habit
of life, no more to question a clearly expressed
wish of his than to fight the sunlight. If he
had called her, like Abraham of old, to cut
Christina's throat, I believe she would have
done it. She might feel very wicked about it
for a week or so, before she made up her mind
to do the deed, but she would have done it.
But was poor Nixy one of his little ones?
Far be it from her to offend against Nixy then.
To the half of her kingdom — for was not her
home her kingdom? — would she offer her, if in
thus doing she felt confident that she was about
her Master's business. She said, over her stockings,
Behold thy handmaid, — and would he do
with Nixy according to his will?
After this she rolled the stockings up, and set
her wits to work to discover what his will might
be; meantime she said to Nixy, —
“Stay another day and rest.”
In the course of the day she sought the girl
out, and asked a few questions to this effect: —
“No parents, you said?”
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“No, ma'am. Never had none. There was the
organ-grinder, and the woman as got drunk, and
the woman as adopted me; then the 'sylum and
Jeb Smith, — that 's where I tended table, — Jeb's,—
and so, when I took sick, there was nobody
that minded much but Lize; and so you see there
warn't nobody to take me in and help me bear
what folks said. I always thought I 'd kinder
like to be a different girl, if I had anybody to help
me bear what folks said. It 's chances I come
up country after. You have to have chances, —
don't you see? Sometimes, when I 'm layin'
awake o' nights and thinkin' to myself, I seem
to think as I should n't have ben like as I am,
ma'am, if I 'd had chances instead. That 's what
I thinks to myself last night, — begging your
pardon for it; but it come along of the grayness
of the room.”
Mrs. Purcell made no answer. There was a
silence; Nixy stood, through it, listless and pale.
Mrs. Purcell broke it.
“You have not — I hardly know how to ask
the question, for I do not like to insult you
because you have sinned once — but —” she
stopped.
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“Ma'am!” Nixy looked puzzled, then flushed
and paled.
“I 'm not a wicked girl,” she said.
“She may or she may not be,” thought Mrs.
Purcell. For what was the word of poor Nixy
worth to a woman who knew as much as Margaret
does of Nixy's like? But what could one do?
If there were but a germ of purity in the girl, how
trample it by mistrust?
“What if this sinner strived, and none
Of you believed her strife?”
“I would rather be deceived twenty times
over,” said Margaret once to me, in speaking of
this matter, “than to doubt one soul in which
I should have confided. Cheated? Of course I
get cheated! Who does n't? But God knows it
is hard enough for a poor sinner to trust himself,
without all his fellow-sinners piling their mistrust
across his way. Never was Christian laborer
worse cheated, in the world's eyes, than our
Lord himself in Judas. You might as well put
on gloves at a cotton-loom, as to be afraid of
being cheated in the work of saving souls.
So Mrs. Purcell, after a little thought, looked
across her silence into Nixy's young, unhappy
eyes, and said, —
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“Perhaps I cannot better beg your pardon,
child, than by believing precisely what you say
to me. Do you understand?”
Nixy understood, at least, that she was trusted.
A falsehood in the light of a sin seldom presents
itself to a Thicket Street girl's most vivid
imagination. But partly from a keen sense of
policy, and partly from a real though crude sense
of honor, Nixy from that moment decided, in her
own words, to “go it honest” with Mrs. Purcell,
thinking, —
“She shall have all there is of me. 'T ain't no
great. Pity to spoil it.”
“So you would like” — Mrs. Purcell questioned—
“you say you would like to live an
honest life in an honest home?”
She had risen and stood now, taller than Nixy,
looking down from her fine pure height upon the
girl.
Said Nixy, looking up, “You bet!”
Mrs. Purcell actually started. The rough words
fell from Nixy's lips as if they had dropped from
the Mount of Transfiguration, for her face in the
moment quivered, changed, flushed all over like a
homesick child's, paled like a wasted prisoner's.
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“She is starved!” cried Margaret to herself.
“The girl is starved for the very crumbs
that fall from her Father's table!” Aloud she
said, —
“And the table is full, — full. God forgive
us all!”
“I did not ask to sit at the table, ma'am,”
said Nixy, with some pride and much wonder.
“Go away now,” Margaret made answer
gently, —she was too much moved to smile, —
“to-night again I shall like to talk a little with
you, before — that is, if —”
As she did not finish, Nixy left her.
It took her, I believe, till night to finish the
sentence.
“For there,” said the mother in her, “is Christina!”
“Here,” said the Christian in her, “is the
Lord!”
Why not go about the Lord's business, and
trust Christina to him?
But what was the Lord's business if not the
soft shielding of Christina's eyes from the stains
of the evil world?
But if Nixy were a “little one”? If, in the
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girl's mute importunity, the very eyes of the
Master pleaded to weary her? How fall upon
her knees and say, “Here, Lord! I send her
back to Thicket Street and sin. Am I my sister's
keeper?”
Again, who knew what taints of blood and
brain were lodged in the poor girl's growing
life? Neither the Lord nor Margaret Purcell
could bewilder the corrupt tree into bringing
forth of healthy fruit. What if, after all the
sacrifice, all the risk, all the possible mischief
and misery of sheltering this stained thing in
her pure home, the hidden serpent stung her in
the bosom, — the girl betrayed, disgraced, dishonored
her?
She might send her to the Home that intelligent
Christian liberality had provided for her
class. It was indeed one of the strong points
in her maturer theories of usefulness to work, so
far as might be, in the organized avenues of
charity. There being a place for Nixy, — endowed,
inspected, trusteed, prayed for, — why
not put her in her place? What business was
it of hers to turn her individual house into a
Magdalen Retreat? What then? If Nixy
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went, — and Nixy would n't, — it would be only
to await the welcome of just such a Christian
household as her own.
But she might find some “pious and intelligent”
family who would take in the girl. How?
At the gain of her own personal relief; at the
loss of her own personal chance of saving a
most miserable little woman, whom to save
would be — what would it not be of richness of
privilege, of peace that passeth understanding?
Margaret's earnest eyes filled with solemn tears.
But Margaret's practical heart went questioning
on.
Why not find the girl an honest business and
put her in it, and leave her — in a factory boarding-house,
for instance? Poor Nixy! Thicket
Street would wellnigh be as safe a shelter.
But a family without children; it was the
Christian duty of such families — old, excellent,
at the end of life, nothing else to do — to look
up the Nixys of their time.
If she had no child — or a husband; if she
had had anything that she did not have, or had
not everything that she had, Nixy would have a
claim upon her.
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But that her white little daughter and that
miserable girl — two mere children yet — should
take hands and step on into their coming womanhood
together!
Then, should Nixy be child or servant, or both?
Either was a wretched arrangement; both, intolerable.
She would make heavy cake; she would talk
bad grammar; she would eat with her knife;
she —
Margaret Purcell stopped here. She went
away into her room, and fell upon her knees,
and said, —
“For Christ's sake,” — this only, and this with
a countenance awed, as if she too stood by the
well in the dusk, and saw the thirsty woman and
saw the wearied Man.
She came down to Christina, and said,—
“We will keep the girl.”
But she gathered her daughter with a sudden
sharp motion into her arms, kissed her once,
kissed her many times.
“My daughter, do you suppose that the time
will ever come when — perhaps — you may not
tell me — everything?”
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“It never has,” said Christina, gravely.
“You are growing up so fast!” mused Mrs.
Purcell, in a disturbed voice.
She felt very vividly at that moment the fact
which dawns so slowly and so painfully upon ever
so wise a mother's comprehension, that her very
own child, her flesh and blood, her life, her heart,—
her soul, it had seemed, — is, after all, somebody
else; a creature with just as distinct a will
and way and worth, with as independent moral
risks and obligations, with as sharp a sense of
character, and as sharp a mould cast by fate for
the cooling of that character, as if she had never
borne it upon her heart and carried it in her
bosom. She felt, in the risks which she ran for
Christina in this business of the girl, that Christina
was fast coming to a point where she must
run her own risks, and that was the sting of it.
In her perplexity and pain it seemed to her that
her arms were unclasping from the growing girl,
that there was “Nothing all hers on this side
heaven!”
Christina stood smiling by, like a star-flower.
“When you were little I could command your
confidence, you know,” said her mother; “as you
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grow older I hope — that I shall be able, my
dear, to win it.”
“Why — yes,” said Christina, only half understanding.
“I am sure I would trust you, mother,
twice as soon as I would trust myself!”
So Mrs. Purcell went to Nixy. “Very well,”
said Nixy, upon hearing her errand, which she
took very quietly; “I 'll serve you, ma'am, honest.
I wanted honest work when I found the places
and the folks. I did n't come to beg. If I
thought you took me for a beggar I would rather
not stay. But then perhaps God's folks —”
“What about `God's folks'?”
“I don't know,” said Nixy, slowly; “something
as I can't get hold on. I s'pose you could get a
sight better help nor me. But you don't treat
me like a beggar, ma'am. It 's something as I
can't get hold on.”
After a long pause she looked up; she had
been sitting with her clouded eyes — it was wellnigh
impossible to brighten Nixy's eyes — bent
upon the pretty gray carpet, and said, —
“Perhaps I 'd ought to thank you?”
Why, of course she ought! So, for the moment,
Mrs. Purcell bluntly thought. Nixy had
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taken her “charity” so much as a matter of
course; had so entirely failed to appreciate her
“sacrifice”; had accepted the results of her two
days' striving with conscience and praying for
light so simply! The girl scarcely seemed to
feel under “obligations,” — assumed that she undertook
the burden of her youth and misery and
disgrace quite as a matter of individual privilege.
Now, in theory, as we have seen, this was exactly
what Mrs. Purcell did. Our theories are like our
faces; we never know what either looks like till
we see its photograph. It struck Margaret —
and Margaret was honest enough to see that it
so struck her — as extraordinary that her own
principles of conduct should return to her in such
a very active shape. Was it not now “very
odd” in “that kind of a girl” to receive her
kindness as if — As if what? As if she meant
it, nothing more.
Mrs. Purcell's good sense rebounded quickly.
She concluded, on reflection, that Nixy had rather
honored her than otherwise. What, indeed, had
the girl done but evolved “the situation,” from
her own crude conception of “God's folks”? This
thing which was finer than philanthropy, which
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was greater than charity, in which kings and
priests unto God have read dark riddles, little
Nixy Trent — for not many mighty are called!—
had put her stained finger trustfully upon.
She had paid Margaret Purcell royal tribute.
“I will put it,” said Margaret, with bowed head,
“on usury for her.”
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CHAPTER IX. A LETTER.
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“A CHRISTIANITY which cannot help
men who are struggling from the bottom
to the top of society needs another Christ to die
for it.”
I find these words written on the package of
Mrs. Purcell's letters and journals, to which, in
the collection of material for Nixy Trent's story,
I have had constant reference.
This leads me to note how naturally — indeed,
how inevitably — Christianity and Margaret Purcell
strike parallel thoughts in you. Religion
with most people — I speak advisedly — religion
with most people is an appendage to life. Margaret's
religion is nothing less than life itself. It
is not enough for her to rest in it, she “toils terribly”
in it; she does not gasp in it, she breathes
in it; she will only die in it, because that shall
have become the last thing left to do for it.
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I feel myself at times to be altogether incompetent
to carry this tale with anything approaching
to that degree of naturalness and vividness
with which the tale was brought to me; and this
is one of the times.
I have not many letters in Margaret's hand,
and so have treasured them. She takes a letter
very much as people take typhoid fever, — yearly
and thoroughly. She makes a business of it.
A letter from Margaret is an epoch in history.
There is about the difference between one of
Margaret's letters and other people's notes that
there is between Froude's England and Waterbabies.
The appended copy of one of these letters,
though not, perhaps, as characteristic as some, is
to the purpose just now, and here.
Dear Jane Briggs: —
“And how, if it were lawful, I could pray for
greater trouble, for the greater comfort's sake.”
John Bunyan provided you and me with a morning's
discussion when he said that. Do you remember?
Because I am writing to you, and
because Nixy sits studying beside me, are reasons
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sufficient why I should recall the words on this
particular occasion.
And so I made an affliction of that poor girl?
Jane, I suppose I did! In my theory she was
unbounded blessing! In my practice she was
bitter burden?
Exactly.
Before I get to heaven, I hope that the Lord
will give me time to become, not so much what I
seem to other people, — which is of small account,—
as what I seem to myself to be. “Men,” it has
been said, “judge of our hearts by our words;
God, of our words by our hearts”; “we,” it might
have been added, “of both our words and hearts
by our theories.” Jane Briggs! have a theory of
suffrage if you like, of soft soap if you prefer, but
have no theory of sin. There is one thing which
I should like to be, whatever the necessary discipline
of life thereunto required, — I should like
to be an honest Christian; and I am urging now
no higher motives than would induce me, if I had
occasion, to be an honest grocer, doctor, lawyer,—
merely the self-respect of the thing, you see.
All of which induces me to acknowledge that
while I thanked the Lord for Nixy, — and I
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belive I did thank him, — I took her at first
very hard.
To begin with, she had lung fever.
Perhaps I should ask you, Will you hear of
her? Christina will keep you informed of dentist's
and doctor's bills, of her white flannel wrappers, —
extravagant, but so pretty! and I think
it works well for both the girls that Christina
should wear white when she can just as well as
not, — of the prices of beef and bombazine, of my
new hall carpet and Dickens's “last,” of fall sewing
and Harmonicum concerts, of house-cleaning
and the minister's salary, of preserves and prayer-meetings,
of colds and chickens.
Will you have Nixy? If I had gone into the
business of daguerreotyping for the rest of my
life, the paper would have smelled of ether, and
the pen would have told of silver-baths. As I
have chosen the business of saving one wicked
little girl from Thicket Street, are you prepared
for the details of “the trade”? You demand
“internal revenue”; can you bear with Nixy?
I bore with her at the first. I scarcely know
now whether it is I who bear with her, or she
who bears with me.
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The business has become an exciting one, and
my interest therein grows. The capital was
small, and Heaven took the risks. The girl has
been under my roof a year next week, and I am
a rich woman on date.
But think of it, Jane! Lung fever! Right
there in my pretty gray room! For I had not the
time or the heart — I have forgotten which it
was — to move her.
She had kept about the house very quietly and
willingly, helping Ann, and just about half as
much in the way as we expected; she must have
kept up far beyond her strength, for she gave out
one afternoon, as Ann succinctly expressed it,
“all in a hape.” We found her crouched on the
foot of the gray bed, scarlet and shivering, picking
the counterpane with her little brown fingers.
“I tried,” she said, confusedly, “to get down
and set the table, ma'am; I got to the head of
the stairs three times, but I could n't get no
further. Haven't you got a poor-'us anywheres
near, as you could send me to be sick in? I
can't seem to get anywheres in the world that
I don't make trouble!”
Now, that did n't make it any easier that she
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should have lung fever in my gray room; but it
had the effect of mortifying me, which was something
accomplished. I own I was mortified.
For, at the moment, I had felt so aggrieved, afflicted,
cross with the girl. Instead of going
straight upon my knees to thank Heaven that it
was n't small-pox!
Through her sickness — and she was very sick—
I really think that I obtained some new conceptions
of the healing department of our Lord's
ministry. I wondered whether he never regarded
it as a waste of his fine adaptedness to
finer uses, that he should give hours, days,
weeks, to that offensive branch of medical service, —
the diseases of the poor; whether the
cripples and paralytics sickened him; and how
he bore with — fits, for instance.
I made some mention of the name of Christ,
though not in this connection exactly, to Nixy,
one day during her convalescence. I have forgotten
what it was that I said, — something simple,
for she was too sick to be exhorted, — but I
remember perfectly her answer: —
“Christ? Jesus Christ? That 's him they
sang about in the 'sylum, and him they swears
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by in Thicket Street. I always thought one
of 'em was as much gas as the other. Did n't
either of 'em make no odds to me. I never
swore and I never sang.”
“But you understood,” I said, for I really did
not know what to say, — “you understood that
Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners?”
“I 'm not religious,” said Nixy, wearily turning
in bed.
From that day to this I have never “talked
religion” to her. The only further remarks offered
upon the subject that morning were made,
after pauses, by her.
“Are you religious?”
“Perhaps you had better wait and find out for
yourself whether I am or not. That will be fair
to both of us.”
“Mrs. Myrtle was,” she said.
From which I inferred, what I have since
learned, that Nixy had been in the service of
Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle. You remember Mrs. Zerviah
Myrtle?
With all respect for Mrs. Myrtle, — and I have
considerable; she is generous with her money,
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[figure description] Page 128.[end figure description]
and useful in prominent charities, — I am glad
that the Lord saved this little woman of ours
for me.
As I believe I have given you to understand
before, I have chosen yourself only as the sharer
with me of Nixy's confidence. In this town and
this house, no one but myself shall know, if I can
prevent it, the history of the girl. In this house
and in this town the girl shall command, if I can
control it, the trust and the respect that are due
to a spotless woman. I shall assume for her a
clean place in the world through which I have
undertaken to lead her. Whether I can gain it
or not remains to be proved. When I look
backward, my heart faileth; when I look forward,
fear taketh hold upon me.
At least, I do not mean ever to trip her by
doubt of mine. What is gone is gone; let the
past bury its own for Nixy and me. Whatever is
to be, I think, when I undertook the salvation of
the girl, that I prepared myself intelligently for.
Meantime, I am awake at my post.
I am growing a little fond of this “burden”
which I took upon my shoulders, — you could
not help it yourself, Jane Briggs, — and I
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[figure description] Page 129.[end figure description]
anticipate, with much personal pain, the possibilities
of a disclosure of her history to any one
whose heart broods less tenderly or less thoughtfully
than mine over her faults and her deserts.
At present, beyond the vague opinion of my
neighbors, that it was “very imprudent” in Mrs.
Purcell to shelter the little wanderer who had
been seen about our streets, no suspicion falls on
Nixy. She troubles nobody; nobody troubles
her. Faint gossip fades about her. She walks
down street with Christina; respectable people
salute her respectfully. Gower has doubts: “Is
she adopted, — or what?” but Gower is courteous.
Gower may be confused, but Gower will
be well-bred. Heaven preserve Nixy from Gower,
if what might be should ever be!
At present her life is still, and her life is growing.
At present, as you perceive, I have hardly
evolved her relations to me and mine from a chaos
of sympathy, sickness, and self-depreciation.
For the fact is, Jane Briggs, that the more interesting
this business of Nixy grows to me, the
less interesting I am growing to myself; but of
that another time.
I should have told you that the understanding
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is exact between Nixy and myself on the subject
of Christina.
It came about in this way. I hardly knew
how to broach the subject delicately and suddenly,
and broached I was determined that the subject
should be before the girl had been twenty-four
hours a “permanency” under my roof. As
it chanced, on the very evening upon which I had
decided to take her into my family, I came across
her in the dining-room, where I had sent her to
do some light work for Ann, standing at the window
among my ivies, and looking, through the
thick green curtain that they made, upon something
in the yard below. The expression of her
face attracted my notice, and I stopped.
Christina — in her white woollen, in the dropping
dusk — was watering the geraniums below
us. I should have liked to cast her, just as she
stood, for a statue in a fancy fountain.
“You like the looks of her?” I said to Nixy.
“She 's so white!” said the girl in a whisper.
“All the world is as white to her as her own
dresses,” I made answer, as gently as I knew
how; “and I should like — that it should remain
so as long as it can.”
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“Ma'am?” said Nixy.
She lifted to me, very pale from the tinting of
the ivy greens, a thoroughly puzzled face.
“I mean that I would rather you should not
tell my daughter — while you remain in my family—
of what has happened to you.”
“Oh!”
Her face dropped slowly.
“Yes, I understand. You would rather that
she should n't know about all that. Very well.
'T ain't likely as I should have troubled the young
lady, ma'am, if you had n't bid me not.”
Christina, looking up, nodded and smiled at us
through the delicate woven curtain that the ivies
had swept between the two young girls.
Poor Nixy! To whom “all that” had been
birthright and atmosphere! What was sin to
Nixy? What was purity to Christina? Where
did things begin and end? Who should say?
How condemn or acquit? How revere or
scorn?
Of the particulars of this girl's past life,
concerning which you questioned me in your
last, I have asked little and learned less. Indeed,
there do not seem to be any particulars to
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[figure description] Page 132.[end figure description]
learn. She remembers very sketchily. She talks
in outlines, vivid but crude. She seems not so
much to have “taken life,” as we say, hard or
easily, purely or illy; it is rather that life has
taken her; she dropped into it, drifted with it,
like Constance, “all stereles, God wot.” Sometimes,
as I sit watching her overcast young face,
wondering what transpires behind its muteness,
wondering what ambuscades await its helplessness,
the refrain of the old tale rings by me: —
“She dryveth forth upon our oceän.”
God give the poor little sailor fair seas and
pleasant harboring! Who would not be cast
“stereles” upon the “see of Grece,” rather than
upon the tides of Thicket Street?
I have inquired once, and once only, of Nixy,
concerning the father of her child. The result
was such that I concluded, upon the spot, to let
the whole painful matter drop forever. The simplicity
and pathos of her story moved me much.
A few words of it I saved for you, — the only
words that I could well save.
“I saw him a little while ago. He said he was
sorry. I told him he 'd ought to thought of that
before.”
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To come back to the year's chronicle, — you
know I never stay where I belong, — it was, perhaps,
the lung fever which lost me a kitchen-maid,
and gained me — what, exactly, whether
pupil, child, friend, or all, or neither, time must
prove.
At least, she was far too feeble to set at the
wash-tub. And somehow or other, what with
her pallor and my compassion, her quiet ways
and my unquiet heart, she slipped out of bread-making
into books. As I am so well used to the
harness of teaching Christina, I have found it
little extra trouble to overlook her studies. The
result has surpassed my expectations. Nixy is
no genius, but she is no dunce. She could teach
a common school now, if it were a very common
school, as well as half the district teachers in our
neighborhood. And since I can afford, for the
present, at least, and by means of a little contrivance,
in which Christina generously joins me,—
indeed, it was she who first proposed educating
the girl, — to meet the expense of her few wants,
I am well pleased that Nixy should “reform,”
though I dislike the word, in my parlor rather
than in my kitchen, in my personal atmosphere
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[figure description] Page 134.[end figure description]
rather than Biddy's. I should like, whatever
may be the result, to be able to feel that I have
done my best by her.
Just here I must admit that Nixy herself has
surprised me in rendering my course of treatment
a practicable one. I must admit that during
the entire year, which she has spent under a
supervision far more keen than she has ever suspected,
I have not been able to lay my finger
upon a thread of coarseness in that girl. Thicket
Street and sin seem to have slipped from her
like pre-existence. I cannot see that a taint remains.
I may be making a most egregious blunder,
but, until I see it, tainted she shall not be to
me or mine. Upon this I am determined. Other
than this would seem to me like slamming the
door of heaven upon a maimed soul just crawling
in the crack.
“Go ye rather into the highways and hedges,
and” — having found the halt — “compel them in.”
She seems, as I study her from day to day,
rather to have dropped in upon us and melted
among us like a snow-drift, than like a dust-heap.
I was prepared for dust. I took hold of her
with my eyes shut, to save the smart.
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That seems now, you know, a great stupidity.
Yet I am constantly recommitting it. You know
me of old. I turn, like the sinner in the hymn-book,
“in devious paths.” I must feel my way,
if I go at all.
For instance, she has on a pink bow this morning.
Now, when one reflects upon it, there is no
reason why Nixy should not wear a pink bow.
The heart beneath it may be as white as a little
nun's, for all the pinkness. Nixy Trent has undoubtedly
the same moral right to pink ribbons
as Christina Purcell, — who blushes all over with
them this very morning, by the way, and sits in
the window with a curve like a moss rosebud to
her neck. It may be because I don't like to see
the two girls wear the same thing, for which,
again, I can plead no valid reason, but I don't
like it. It annoys me; Christina laughs at me
for it, which is not soothing. Two or three times
lately, Nixy has shown some faint awaking sense
of girlish pleasure in girlish things; has brightened
in the eyes, in the voice, in motions, moods;
chatters with Christina, runs in and out, laughs
about the house; once she tried a feather upon
her round straw hat; she was pretty in it too,
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which struck me for the moment as an impropriety,
if you will believe it.
Why should n't she be as pretty as she can?—
as pretty as my child, for instance? Why
not wear feathers and ribbons? Who should
laugh about a house if she should n't? Why
am I not as glad of it at the instant as I become
upon several hours' serious reflection?
“Go,” said He who was wise in these matters,
“and sin no more.” Nixy went, and Nixy sinned
no more, and Nixy is just sixteen. Shall I cork
up all the sparkle of her new young life? Why
is it — can you tell me? — that I should, on a
species of stupid instinct, look more confidently
for the salvation of the girl's soul if she wore
brown dresses and green veils, and were the
least bit uglier than she is?
Once, and once only, she asked me if she
might have a white jacket like Christina's. I
gave her a peremptory negative, for which I
was afterwards very much ashamed; and she
has never since alluded to the subject in any
way.
This brings me to say a word or so, in closing,
about the relation between the two girls. I have
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left it till the last thing, because it is a subject
upon which I feel some anxiety, but in regard to
which I feel myself at my wits' end.
My daughter Christina has taken an astounding
fancy to poor little Nixy Trent. I cannot
shut my eyes to the fact, if I would. I am not
at all sure that I would, — but there is the fact.
It seems to have been, throughout, the most
genuine, hearty, straightforward, natural thing;
just Christina all over.
As I told you, of Nixy's history she knows
nothing. As I told you, Nixy's conduct in this
house has been as pure as her own.
I am convinced, that, in strict obedience to
my commands, Christina has never investigated,
Nixy has never revealed, the particulars of her
life in Thicket Street.
She was a stranger, and I took her in, — that
satisfied Christina. She is a good girl, and I am
fond of her, — that is evident to Christina. She
is not a servant. She sits in the parlor. She
adds my accounts, which overpower Christina;
she reads John Milton, of whom Christina stands
very much in awe. She is very winning company,
and Christina is very much alone. You
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see? The consequence, whether inevitable or
not, arrived.
I see the two girls arm in arm, hand in hand,
in and out together, here and there, — like any
other two girls.
The first time that I saw Christina kiss that
girl, Jane Briggs, I believe I could have sent
her back to Thicket Street without a spasm of
compunction. If I had dared, I should have taken
my daughter up stairs and washed her face.
I have become used to it now; whether that
is Christianity or stupidity, I am at loss at times
to tell.
Sometimes, all that I feared for my own child,
in the experiment of saving the child of sin,
rushes over me with a sudden sense of terror that
makes me fairly sick at heart. Sometimes, all
that I hope for Nixy stands like an angel folding
in my daughter with a mighty wing. Generally,
my assurance that I have done the best
I knew how for the Lord — and therefore for
Christina and myself — keeps me still.
To be sure, if I have behaved like a fool, the
Lord is not responsible for it; but I am not as
yet convinced that I have.
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I believed, that, when Nixy entered my door,
the Master without, in the dark, cried, “Open to
Me.” Thus believing, I have “experimented.”
Still so believing, I am prepared, if necessary,
to run further risks.
One thing I should add: I told you that I had
never “talked religion” to the girl. But one
tries, you know, to live it. I fancy that Nixy has
familiarized herself with it, in a certain way,
as she has with fresh air and pictures. She
breathes and watches. It has not perhaps struck
her yet, that to be a Christian is so much an experience
as an atmosphere. The lungs may move
for years before we are conscious of possessing a
windpipe. I enrich and purify the air for her
as well as I may, and leave the Lord his own
chances. Whether his coming be in the strong
wind, or in the still, small voice, who knoweth?
Nixy drinks him in, and grows.
I think I shall not entirely forget the words
which this poor child so trustfully dropped of me,
before ever she had tested what manner of woman
I was. It would go hard with me to find that I
had marred beyond restoration her simple fancy
of the Lord's “folks.” It would be rather nature
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than grace, that she could come at him through
me, and what he has empowered me to do for
her. I would not so much deceive her as undeceive
myself; not manage her, but be guided
by her; become what she deems me, rather than
tell her what I am not. Which is why I have
found myself of late to be so uninteresting a
study, as I hinted. Which is why I am in doubt
whether it is I who bear with Nixy, or she who
bears with me.
But what would happen to us all, if the Nixys
of the world “comprehended” “God's folks” as
God's folks, — whether justifiably or not, who can
say? — fancy that they comprehend Nixy? But
whatever I am to her it is time that I should be
Yours,
Margaret Purcell.
P. S. — Have I told you that I owe the only
definite evidence of what we term “religious interest”
in Nixy, to an old infidel Frenchman in
Thicket Street? One Sunday night, Christina
and I, with the guitar, singing “Depths of Mercy,”
rather for ourselves than for her, were startled by
a low exclamation from the girl's corner, where
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she sat in the dark, listlessly listening; for she
never sings.
“I 've heard that before,” she said, with some
emotion, checking herself because Christina was
by; then gravely adding, “They are good words,
and a good man sang them. Nobody ever taught
me, but I knew they were good words. He was
an old man, and kind to me; but he was not at
all religious. I heard the song when I was — in
great trouble. It helped to get me out, — though
I was not religious either, and I see now that it
is a very religious song. I wonder if Jacques
knew that; for he was not religious, as I say.”
Ah, these blind who lead the blind!
It amazes me to see how the Lord uses us,
whether we will or no, for his own purposes;
how he plans and counterplans, economizes,
adapts, weaves the waste of one life into the
wealth of another. In his great scheme of uses,
it might be worth while that there should be an
old Frenchman in Thicket Street, for the sake
of that single strain of Christian song which
Nixy's dumb life appropriated.
It may be a very foolish fancy (unless, as Mrs.
Browning says, “Every wish is a prayer — with
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God”), but I have had the fancy more than once
to wish, when we are singing on Sabbath nights,
that old Monsieur Jacques may learn before he
dies, for Nixy's sake, to see other meanings to
the hymn than the beat of an excellent guitarwaltz.
We sing the hymn to her every Sunday. She
asks for it, but never comments upon it.
I believe, Jane Briggs, that I would rather be
the author of one good hymn than of anything
else in this world, unless it were sunshine.
There is just room left for what I had nearly
forgotten to say, — that my rheumatic afflictions
increase, to the weariness of my soul. The spirit
is willing, but the flesh is particularly weak in
view of the invalid old age which is likely to be
my destiny. One had so much rather screw out
like an astral than flicker out like a candle.
Apropos of this, we have a new physician in
this place: Burtis, by name, — from town, I believe, —
and learned in the “Latin parts” of his
profession. A good thing. There was sore
need of him. I shall feel safer about the girls.
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CHAPTER X. THE WHITE STONE.
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“BUT my dear Mrs. Purcell!”
My dear Mrs. Purcell smiled.
One well acquainted with Mrs. Purcell would
have inferred her visitor from her smile. I can
scarcely believe that any other than Mrs. Zerviah
Myrtle could receive from Margaret the benefit
of that particular smile.
That Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle should happen to be
a visitor in Gower on the summer month which
dates these notes of the fact (a date four years
older, I believe, than that of Margaret's letter)
was natural. That she should chance to be
making an afternoon call upon Mrs. Purcell
was not extraordinary. That, having been driven
by Boggs directly past the new grammar
school of Gower, to see the building, and this
at the hour of the grammar school's dismissal,
she should have met and recognized the new
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teacher, Miss Trent, was rather a logical sequence
than an accident.
That the first person with whom she should
consequently have conversed, after the occurrence
of these incidents, was Mrs. Purcell, may
have been, for the grammar teacher, not unfortunate.
So said Mrs. Myrtle, leaning back in a seriously
depressed though very graceful attitude, in
(what if she had known it!) — in Nixy's favorite
arm-chair by Nixy's favorite window, —
“My DEAR Mrs. Purcell!”
Mrs. Purcell, through her smile, called and
sent Christina to keep Nixy out of the way.
“I think,” said Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle, without
a smile, “that I was never quite so much taken
by surprise in the course of my life.”
“Very likely,” Margaret made quiet reply.
“I suppose that your surprise would not be unusual
in any one with your command of Nixy
Trent's past, and without my confidence in her
future.”
“I cannot understand how such a girl,” urged
Mrs. Myrtle, with a certain kind of gentle sadness
in her voice, such as Margaret had noticed
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that Mrs. Myrtle's voice generally acquired in
addressing “such girls” at the Home, — “I cannot
understand how you dared to receive such a
girl into your family, — and on such very peculiar,
though very Christian, terms, — and you the
mother of so innocent and lovely a child as your
Christina. I beg your pardon if I am impertinent,
Mrs. Purcell, but I am perplexed. I should
like to know, from the Christian point of view,
however beautiful and interesting a thing it was
to do, — and I envy you the opportunities, I assure
you, — how you dared.”
“I dared because Christina was `innocent and
lovely,' and because I was her mother. Perhaps,
too, partly because it was a `beautiful and Christian
thing to do!'” said Margaret, in a ringing
voice. It seemed to her like stepping from a
sanctuary into a battle-ground, to see her own
old long-dead doubts and struggles diluted in
Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle's “depressing” atmosphere.
It was so long then since poor little Nixy had
been anything other than Mrs. Purcell's trusted
friend, child, treasure, — whatever it was! She
never knew. She knew only that her visitor's
chatter struck very near a very quiet and long
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quiet heart, that had folded the erring child, a
pure woman, into its growing love and growing
need. Perhaps it was because she was becoming
“sick and old,” as people said, that she had
of late troubled herself so little about Nixy; had
feared so little for her or for herself; had so little
memory of her yesterday, so little of the old
fear for her to-morrow. Or it may have been
because Nixy had ceased to talk bad grammar;
never ate with her knife now; enticed Christina
through the “Excursion”; never wore pink
bows; had “joined the church,” and seldom,
if ever, mentioned Thicket Street. Margaret
was not stupid, but Margaret, as I said, was
sick. Little things had given her great quiet
for Nixy. A little thing — even Mrs. Zerviah
Myrtle — now alarmed and jarred upon her.
“But Christina was so very young,” urged Mrs.
Myrtle, “so near, I should fancy, the age of the
other girl, — I think she told me she was fifteen
when she was in my service, — and how could
you know —”
“I should not know much if I did not know
enough to trust my own influence over my own
daughter,” said Margaret, with compressed lips.
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She wondered at that moment if she could ever
have lain awake two nights, trying to decide
whether Nixy would injure Christina. She
would as soon think now of Christina's injuring
Nixy. She was inclined for the moment — but
the moment only, as was the way with Margaret—
to feel as if Mrs. Myrtle had insulted her
common sense. So fast we throw away the
“stepping-stones” when we have climbed up and
over “our dead selves”!
“But there are so many sacred and superior
claims,” argued Mrs. Myrtle, “that I could not
feel it to be my duty to run the risk, which you,
my dear Mrs. Purcell, ran, with this unfortunate
girl. My field of usefulness, as the mother of
my Fanny, is necessarily so very much in the —
what might be called the domestic affections. It
was a depressing circumstance that I was obliged
to dismiss the girl from my service as I did. I
took pains to keep my servants in ignorance of
the details of the affair, and, with the exception
of Mr. Myrtle and a few very particular friends,
I have been careful not to mention it. But I
little thought ever to see Nixy Trent teaching a
grammar school!”
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From which one might have inferred that if
Mrs. Myrtle had ever thought to see Nixy Trent
teaching a grammar school, she would have made
a particular effort to mention it.
“Nixy is considered, in my family and this
town, to be an unspotted woman —” began Margaret.
Mrs. Myrtle interrupted softly: —
“Does that never strike you as at all deceitful?”
“Nixy's character here,” repeated Mrs. Purcell,
with unusual brusqueness, “is as high as yours
or mine, Mrs. Myrtle!”
“You shock me, Mrs. Purcell!” said Mrs.
Myrtle. Mrs. Myrtle looked, in fact, shocked.
“Perhaps I am rude,” said Margaret, with
heightened color and quivering voice, “but I
have shielded Nixy like my own child so far, —
and gossip —”
“Mrs. Purcell,” said Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle, politely, —
very politely, — “I think you have quite
misunderstood and misappreciated me. I never
gossip. I have no wish to injure the girl. What
do you take me for? Do you suppose that my
Christian sympathies with that erring class are
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[figure description] Page 149.[end figure description]
less quick than your own? Providence threw
into your way chances of usefulness never granted
to me in my confined sphere of action.”
Mrs. Myrtle put her handkerchief to her eyes.
Her polite voice ruffled. She looked sincerely
distressed. Her bonnet-strings glittered with two
sincere tears.
“You depress me so, Mrs. Purcell!” she exclaimed,
in a broken, honest fashion, as Margaret,
silent, sat and wondered what she was expected
to say. “I cannot understand why it is. Aspirations—
I have my aspirations, Mrs. Purcell,
though it is seldom that I touch upon them in
this confidential manner — aspirations after activity
and sacrifice, and all that is Christian and
beautiful, which I find impossible to realize, you
make no more fuss over than you would over
a tea-party. You impress me as a kind — of —
military spirit, Mrs. Purcell; really quite a romantic
kind of military character. There is such
a nonchalance — esprit — daring way to you.
Now I was n't made to dare. It never would
work with Mr. Myrtle and the children. It
never would work in society. And there are
claims — I do not know how it happens, but I
find you the most depressing person I know!”
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“Then call again — do!” urged Margaret. She
did not mean to be sarcastic; intended to be
hospitable only; feeling wellnigh as uncomfortable
as her visitor. I think she was thenceforward
rather inclined to thank Heaven that Mrs.
Zerviah Myrtle had not made a protégé of Nixy,
than to consider Mrs. Myrtle as accountable to
Heaven for turning Nixy from her doors.
“I do not mean to be uncharitable,” she said,
in parting from her visitor upon the piazza.
Whether she meant it or not, Margaret felt
that she had not “borne all things, hoped all
things, suffered long,” with Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle.
It is far easier for a woman like Margaret
Purcell to apply the thirteenth chapter of I Corinthians
to the Nixy rather than to the Mrs.
Myrtle of society. The only difference in that
respect between Margaret and other people is,
that Margaret was keenly conscious of a failing,
where most of us would be blindly elevated by
a sense of particular virtue. Christian liberality
falls so much more gracefully than it irrigates
or climbs. It is so much less difficult to condescend
to an inferior than to be generous to an
equal or a superior. The ideal charity is that
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rare and large thing which is at ease and is at
work up and down and around itself. It is, in
fact, an atmosphere rather than an avenue.
“I should not wish,” said Mrs. Purcell, thoughtfully,
“to judge narrowly in this matter. Everybody
could not pick a girl up from the streets and
put her into the parlor, — if every girl could go.
It may be that you, Mrs. Myrtle, in keeping Nixy
in your kitchen, would have made more of a
Christian sacrifice than have I in dealing as I
have seen fit to deal with her. It is more likely
to be, as you observe, `best for Fanny' that
you dismissed her entirely from your house. I
pray you to understand that I climb the Judgment
Seat for nobody. I do claim, however, that
if I chose to make a crowned princess out of Nixy
Trent, it would be nobody's business but my Master's.
And I demand, for myself and for Nixy,
the respect and the assistance — I will not have
the tolerance and suspicion — of the Christian
society in which I move. I may fail to obtain
it, but I require it in the name of the Lord
Christ, — to whom, Mrs. Myrtle, the girl would
have gone from Thicket Street far more trustfully
than ever she came to you or me, — and
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you and I are women, and her sisters, and her
fellow-sinners, Heaven forgive us!”
Margaret, with feverish color and disturbed
eyes, sat in one of the piazza chairs as Mrs.
Zerviah Myrtle rode out of the yard; and the
grammar teacher — so little like Mrs. Myrtle's
quondam nursery-maid that afternoon, that
Boggs, duller than his mistress, was seen to tip
his hat as he yielded her the road — the grammar
teacher, a little pale, a little startled, perhaps,
came in.
Two or three of her scholars had been clinging
about her. The children were fond of her,—
very. She had been with them now a year,
“growing,” as Margaret had written me, “into
the idea of self-support as she grew into that
of self-respect; and since she is quite competent
for the undertaking, I should have considered it
a great mistake to discourage it; not because
she sprung from what, with a stupid sarcasm of
ourselves, we are fond of terming `the laboring
classes,' but precisely as I should encourage it
in Jane Briggs, Christina, Fanny Myrtle.”
Miss Trent, as I was saying, hurriedly dispersed
these children on meeting with Mrs.
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Myrtle's carriage, and hurriedly stepped up
the walk, and, without any remarks whatsoever,
sat down on the piazza at Mrs. Purcell's
feet.
Four years of purity and Margaret Purcell had
done something for little Nixy Trent.
A little of her old fancy about dropping Christina
“like a cloud” into Thicket Street might
have struck one of the Thicket Street girls herself,
sitting there that afternoon at Margaret's
feet. One would have liked, just for the artistic
experiment of it, to try the effect of her in No.
19, at Jeb's, at Monsieur Jacques's, in the sharp
shadow where the chickweed grew, and Moll
from the dark looked out at her.
Now, these had been four very quiet, ordinary
years, not of the kind which work wonders upon
people, not of a kind to have worked wonders
upon Nixy; and she had consequently developed
in those respects to which the culture of quiet is
especially adapted; had rested, dreamed, refined;
fused the elements of a character rather about
ready for casting than ready for finish. Poor
Nixy's life was one of those which bud so late
that a hot-house pressure may be needed to save
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it from wan, frost-bitten blossoms. And what
pretty thing is sadder than a frosty flower?
In other words, Nixy had rather grown than
matured, had not become apt in analyzing herself
or other people; had not, as we say, “put
this and that together.” Life in Thicket Street
was a hideous dream. Life in Gower was a slow,
sweet waking. If ever she reasoned far about
either, — perhaps she had, — it was in a very
sleepy or a very secret way. Margaret felt oppressed
sometimes with her, as if by electricity
in the air; it seemed as if something in her must
snap before long; as if, in some manner, the girl's
life had got upon the wrong tension. This uncertain
development was the more noticeable in
contrast with Christina, — a creature so healthy,
happy, fitted, and fine! — symmetrical as the
moon, and as conscious of being where she belonged.
“Things have always come at you,” said Nixy,
one day, vaguely feeling after this idea; “I have
always had to come at things.”
It seemed to Nixy natural enough, for Margaret
had taken pains that it should so seem,
that Mrs. Purcell should have admitted her into
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[figure description] Page 155.[end figure description]
her home; lung fever into the parlor; time into
Mrs. Purcell's heart; human nature into Christina's;
the love of God into “religion,” and Mr.
Hobbs (for it was Mr. Hobbs) into the grammar
school. Yet the growing woman was really in a
very unnatural niche in life, and Margaret scarce
knew whether she would most wish that she
should or should not find this out.
For instance, Margaret, just because she loved
Nixy, and just because she trusted her, regretted
at times that the girl seemed — as she did — so
unconscious or regardless of the fact that she
had not always been worthy of love and trust.
In anybody else, she would have said that this
argued callousness or dulness. At other times
she doubted if Nixy were either unconscious or
regardless.
She doubted somewhat when Nixy sat down
at her feet upon the piazza. She scrutinized her
keenly.
Nixy sat remarkably still. Shadows from hop-vines
on the trellis — the prettiest shadows in
the world are made by hop-vines, and Margaret
runs her doors over with them — fell upon her
hands, and her hands moved as the shadows
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[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]
moved; otherwise she was uncommonly still.
Mrs. Purcell thought, as she watched her face,
turned a little, and with the hair dropped, how
fair and fine a face it was; how womanly and
worthy; how rich in possibilities that life would
never bring to it; how unmarred by the dark
certainties that life had brought.
What is sin? she thought. For the wind passeth
over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof
shall know it no more.
Now this was not theology, but thankfulness;
and, to prove to Margaret that it will never do to
be even thankful untheologically, Nixy at that instant
lifted her eyes, — her eyes for a year past had
been like breaking clouds; sun, moon, and stars
were darkened in them just then, — and said, —
“I suppose I shall never get away from it.”
“Away from what?”
“The — sin.”
Nixy spoke very slowly and solemnly.
Margaret could not have been taken more
thoroughly off her guard if a new-born baby had
opened its mouth before her and talked of total
depravity and confessed original sin. But all
the reply that she made was, —
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“You met Christina?” — this to give herself
time.
“I went to walk with her — yes; but I had
the children, and the doctor overtook us, so I
hurried on.”
“The doctor agrees with you about the examination
business?”
“Fortunately, considering he is chairman of
the committee; but I had got through all I had
to say about that. I was not rude to him, I
believe.”
Nixy never was exactly rude to Dr. Burtis, but
she was always ill at ease with him, — always had
been since, being summoned for the first time
professionally to Mrs. Purcell's house, to manage
some slight indisposition of Christina's, he had
come suddenly upon her sitting by Christina's
sofa, with Christina's head — such a moulded,
fine young head — on the little outcast's shoulder.
They had looked each other in the face, but
neither had spoken.
“My friend, Miss Trent,” said Mrs. Purcell,
coming in.
Dr. Dyke Burtis gravely bowed to Miss Trent.
Of how near he had been to sending Miss
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[figure description] Page 158.[end figure description]
Trent to the 'sylum where he had sent Ann
Peters, he gave from that hour, in Mrs. Purcell's
family, no sign. Most men would have felt it,
perhaps, to be “a duty.” For what did Mrs.
Purcell know — how much, and how little — of
Thicket Street Nix? And what of the starryeyed
girl with her head upon Nixy's shoulder?
Dyke Burtis, after a keen look at the faces of the
three women, had concluded that all this was
none of his business, and had kept his own
counsel.
Nixy, to spare Mrs. Purcell the pain of dwelling
upon a painful matter, kept hers.
So the physician, in and out, as Margaret and
her growing invalidism fell under his frequent
care, came and went, and gravely smiled or spoke
or referred or deferred to the little castaway of
Thicket Street; and Nixy, shrinking through her
silence, suffered many things because of him.
This was not for her own, but for Christina's sake.
It cut her with a hurt that was slow in healing
to be reminded of Thicket Street with Christina
by.
Long after, when, both for her own and another's
sake, the fulness of time had come, she
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opened her lips, and the sacredness with which
Dyke Burtis had kept an outcast's confidence
was treasured among those “ways” which commanded
for the little doctor with the streaked
beard a somewhat singularly tenacious affection
or repugnance.
“Mrs. Myrtle —” began Margaret, abruptly,
when Nixy, after her allusion to the physician,
paused.
But Christina came in, flushed and lovely,
bounding up the walk; the doctor at the gate
touched his hat, and walked with ringing steps
away.
“It sounds like a march to battle!” said Christina,
pausing with bent head to listen to the doctor's
tread. She so liked healthy, happy, resolute
things! And she had such a healthy,
happy, resolute way of owning it!
Margaret, so thinking, glanced from her daughter's
pretty, pleased, expectant attitude to Nixy,
who was still extremely pale, and who had moved,
at Christina's coming, slowly and lifelessly away
into the garden-walk.
“Nixy cross?” pouted Christina, and, springing
after her, — into a shimmer of tall white lilies, —
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she put both arms about her neck and kissed her.
Margaret observed that Nixy stood still, and did
not return the caress, and that Christina, puzzled
and pained, walked back, and left her standing
alone among the bruised white flowers.
The interruption perhaps did no harm. Margaret
was prepared, when she and Nixy were at
last alone and undisturbed together, which was
not till after supper, to come at once to the point
from which she should have started. She did
this abruptly enough.
“Mrs. Myrtle will tell nothing, Nixy. She is
not bad-hearted.”
“That does n't so much matter,” said Nixy,
slowly.
“What does matter then?”
Margaret spoke more quickly than gently.
She was perplexed, and her head ached.
“I don't think I — can exactly — tell,” said
Nixy, in a low voice.
“Mrs. Myrtle has frightened you, Nixy!”
“I suppose so.”
“Not because you thought she would gossip
about you?”
“I think not.”
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“I don't understand, then, what the trouble
is.”
But she did, undoubtedly.
Nixy made no reply. Mrs. Purcell got up and
paced the room a little, after her old fashion. It
was long since she had exhibited so much disturbance
over Nixy. Nixy sat, as she had sat
upon the piazza, uncommonly still.
Margaret, pacing the room, was undecided
whether to cry over her or shake her. In the
darkening air, Nixy's dawning sense of shame
rose like a mist between the two, and chilled
her to the heart. With a curious inconsistency,
Mrs. Purcell — perhaps because her head ached—
felt now like checking the very germ for the
growth of which she had with anxiety watched.
Nixy had been wicked; Nixy ought to feel that
she had been wicked. But Nixy was good, and—
and, as nearly as she could come at it, Nixy
ought to feel too good to feel wicked. Why rake
over dead ashes for the sake of making a little
dust? There was pure fire upon the altar now,
and the steps thereto were swept and garnished.
Mrs. Purcell would have liked to send Nixy
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off to play, like a child, and bid her forget that
she had been a naughty girl.
This was partly, perhaps, cowardice, for she
was fond of Nixy; partly headache, as I observed;
wholly, whether of headache or of fondness,
conquered before she had crossed the room
half a dozen times, and had sat down in the
gathering dusk, and had bidden Nixy, by a silent
gesture, to the cricket at her feet.
Nixy was not a child. She could not be sent
to play. There was work before her. Margaret
thought how terrible was the work of escaping
even a forgiven sin. Were there never to be
play-days again for Nixy? When she looked,
through that rising mist that had chilled all
the air between them, at the young girl's contracted
face, her heart sank within her. Poor
Nixy!
She must have said “Poor Nixy!” aloud, for
Nixy turned.
“It was for you that I minded,” she drearily
said. “It came over me — all in a minute —
when I saw her — when I saw Mrs. Myrtle —
that people would know — and Christina; and
that —”
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“Tell me,” said Margaret, “what came over
you?”
“That I was n't like — you; like — Christina.
That there was something forever and forever
that people must not know! That I was forever
and forever to be — ashamed. All at
once!” said Nixy, hoarsely. “All before I had
time to bear it, — and then I did n't care for
Mrs. Myrtle or for all the world; but I understood
what I had never understood before. I
understood that I was ashamed — ashamed!”
The young girl stretched her hands out into
the dark, and wrung them bitterly.
“How can you know?” she cried out. “I
was a child. You took me and loved me. I
was good. I was happy. I forgot. Sometimes
I thought. Sometimes, when Christina kissed
me, I was cold, and I was afraid. Sometimes,
since I have taught the little children, I have
thought of — of — I have remembered that —”
She bowed her head and dryly sobbed.
“All the year I suppose it has been growing,—
coming. But all in a minute I understood!
How can you understand? You made me so
happy! You made me so safe, so good! I was
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a child, and I came from Thicket Street, — and
I tell you that they do not understand in Thicket
Street how to be ashamed!”
“I was so young — I had no mother —
God forgot me — and I fell,”
thought Margaret. Her hot tears fell on Nixy's
face. She put her arm around her; she stooped
and kissed her, she felt that she had no other
speech nor language for her.
But Nixy looked up as one who stood afar off,
and said, —
“I am ashamed — ashamed!”
“I am not ashamed of you!” cried Margaret,
impetuously; but Nixy shook her head.
“I sinned,” she said, — “and I am ashamed!”
Margaret felt as if some one had stricken down
her strong right arm. Nixy seemed in an hour
to have grown away, out of, beyond her tenderest
touch.
“God help her!” she said, and fell, by an instinct,
upon her knees.
I have been told that she broke at once into
vehement prayer. This was remarkable, not as a
fact, but because Margaret did it. She was not
one of those Christians to whom prayer in the
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presence of others is an easy, even a possible
thing. She never prayed with the sick, the
dying, the poor. Tracts, jelly, Bibles, flannels,
were distributed prayerless from her comforting
hand. Her own child had scarcely, since
she was a child, heard her lift up her voice
before the Lord. This may have been unfortunate, —
Margaret, like others of the “voiceless,”
had mourned much in secret over it, —
but so it had been.
For the little castaway, bowed to the ground
before her with shame and sorrow, the sealed
fountain broke, and Nixy — for the first time and
the last — sat hushed, in the presence of her supplicating
voice, —
“Friend of sinners!” said Margaret, weeping
much, “we are in the dark, and bewildered and
sick at heart. Sin hunts us out and chases us
about, and stares at us, and we are ashamed and
sorry; but there is no help in shame and no relief
in being sorry. We are guilty before thee,
and stained. Wherever we turn our faces or lift
our hands, we are hedged about. There is no
breath left in us, and we stifle! Be thou breath,
freedom, walking-space before us! Take the
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hand of this poor child of thine, — see, Lord! I
hold it up! It drops from mine; strength is
gone out of me. Hold it, and lead her. Surely
thou wilt not keep her sorry overmuch? She
was so young, dear Lord, and no man cared for
her soul. Dost thou not feel her young tears
upon thy bruised feet? Is there nothing in all
thy love — for thou art rich, and we are bold in
begging — to bid her smile again? Hast thou
no promise — for thy promises are many, and
we cannot afford to overlook even a little
one — for a sinner who is ashamed? Wilt
thou give her everything else and forbid her self-respect?....
“Lord! thou art here before us; and thine
answer comes. Gather the poor little girl in
thine arms and tell her — for I cannot tell her —
that she shall not be ashamed of herself, for thou
art not ashamed of her; that she shall respect
herself, for thou hast had respect unto her; that
she shall honor herself, for the Lord God Almighty
honors her, — for the sake of Christ our
Saviour.”
“I wonder,” said Margaret, as they sat in the
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dark, long silent, “I have often wondered, and
meant to ask you, about your name. Nixy must
be a corruption of something.”
She spoke idly enough, thinking only to divert
Nixy a little from the effects of a very painful
evening; but the words struck Nixy with a sharp
significance. “A corruption of something.”
Had not her whole life been a corruption of
something?
“I believe the name was Eunice,” she sadly
said.
“Eunice! A pretty name. It has a soft,
fine strain in it, like some of Mendelssohn's
songs, — Eunice. Why did I never call you
Eunice?”
“Because I was not soft and fine,” said poor
Nixy.
“`As a prince hast thou had power with God
and hast prevailed. Thy name shall be no more
Jacob, but Israel,'” Margaret made answer.
“Kiss me, Eunice!”
She smiled and patted her soft hair. Nixy
tried to smile, but the face which she lifted for
Eunice's first kiss was solemn. It seemed like a
baptismal blessing to her.
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“Soft and fine — like Mendelssohn's songs.
Eunice — Eunice!”
The poor girl said it over — and choked.
“You 'll remember — everything, and call me—
that?”
“I can remember everything, and call you all
of that,” said Margaret, grown very solemn too.
For she thought, What is one flaw on Carrara?
The hand of the artist can mend what accident
marred. There is a statue in the master's curtained
studio. There is another at the street
corner. But a block of marble will make the
two, — and there 's the marble, after all. Something
of this she said or looked.
Perhaps Eunice did not quite understand it;
but she crept away like a hushed child into the
gray room to think it over.
It was late; Christina had gone to bed, the
house was still; a tardy moon rose as it had risen
on the first night that she had spent within the
delicate gray walls. There fell, as there had
fallen before, a bath of pearly mist into the middle
of the quiet room.
The young girl, after a little hesitation, undressed,
crept into her night-clothes — fine and
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soft as Christina's now — and kneeled down in
the shining bath. She folded her hands and
her face dropped. She spoke aloud to herself, —
“Eunice — Eunice!”
She forgot, for the moment, and in the sparkle
of the silver bath, that she was ashamed.
She thought of a thing which she had read
about “a white stone, and in the stone a new
name written. Which no man knoweth” — so it
was said — “saving he that receiveth it.”
She felt for the book and the page in the half-light,
opened at the opulent, reticent words.
Commentators and theologians have peered
vaguely at their “metaphorical construction.”
Sophists and mystics have dreamed vain dreams
across them. To this young girl they shone like
the moonlight in which she knelt, and rang like
the voice which said, Go, but go in peace.
-- 170 -- p735-179
CHAPTER XI. WHICH TREATS OF A PANORAMA.
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CERTAIN marked changes fell, about this
time, upon Eunice Trent. With some of
these Margaret found herself pleased, by others
saddened, by others perplexed; all of them were
natural.
For example, she took a fancy for the wearing
of black; even her still gray school dress slipped
off from her after a while. The children asked
her once if she were in mourning.
“Yes,” she said.
“Is this best?” asked Margaret.
“I am comfortable so,” Eunice replied.
“Eunice, look there!”
A gorgeous October sun chanced at that moment
to be dropping over a certain purple hill
which peeps over Mrs. Purcell's garden grounds
into the western windows of the house. An
old burial-ground — Gower's oldest — dotted the
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slope and crowned the ascent, and, as Margaret
spoke, the ancient stones had entrapped the
wealth of the late color in broken but brilliant
masses. The headstones looked rather like
jewels than marble. Shrubs and grass and sky
were shining. The clouds rained color. There
was a shower of lights.
“God paints the graves of things,” said Margaret,
earnestly.
“Not murdered things,” said Eunice, very low.
“Do you mind? I will not wear black dresses
if you mind; but I am comfortable so.”
Margaret said nothing, and the subject dropped
there, finally, between them.
The color indeed suited Eunice, or Eunice
suited the color. Perhaps the girl was morbid,
sentimental, in the choice of it; for nothing is in
more danger of sentimentality than penitence.
The maturing woman at least cooled in it like a
mould. Those who best knew and loved Eunice
Trent have, I think, always called her in her
graver years a beautiful woman. This beauty
was of a peculiar kind; forever a prisoned, waiting,
indefinable thing, as sad as the beauty of a
dead child, as appealing too, and as holy. The
sadness grew with the holiness of it.
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The sadness grew rapidly at the time of which
I write. Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle was a little fire,
but she had kindled a great matter.
Did Eunice live in fear of her? In fear of detection?
In dread of public shame? In dread
of seeing the stars go out in Christina's eyes?
Was her mute sorrow a terror or a conviction? a
mood or a purpose? Margaret wondered much.
Eunice, as usual, surprised her. As usual, she
disturbed her before she pleased her.
“I have been thinking,” she said one day,
with great abruptness, “whether I ought not —
whether perhaps I should not go and hunt it up.”
“Hunt it up?”
“The child.”
Margaret's rocking-chair stopped sharply.
For years Eunice had not mentioned him.
She hoped — I think she hoped — that Eunice
had forgotten him.
“Of course not!” she said, quickly, — “of
course not! What induced you to think of such
a thing?”
Eunice sadly smiled.
“I have thought very much of it for a very
long time. If I had been — that is, if I had had
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no one but myself to consider, I should have
tried before this to find the little thing.”
“Eunice,” said Mrs. Purcell, “you are growing
fearfully morbid!” Eunice was silent.
“Or else,” added Margaret slowly, and after
a pause, in which her sharp rocking indicated
the sharpness of her mood, — “or else you are
growing as healthy as the Gospel of John,
and as brave; and it is I who am sick and
a coward. I wonder what Christina would
say!”
Eunice shrank.
“Christina loves me,” she said, in a scarcely
audible whisper. “Christina never knew, never
guessed. Poor Christina!”
“Are you in pain?” asked Mrs. Purcell, suddenly.
Eunice had a pinched, white look about
the mouth that alarmed her.
“No, — O no.”
She took up her sewing, and her needle flew
nervously in and out.
“Christina has never questioned you about
your former life?” asked Mrs. Purcell more
softly.
“Never once.”
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“You are quite sure that she has never — suspected?”
“She loves me!” said Eunice. “She could
never have loved me and — suspected. Poor
Christina! Poor Christina!”
“Do you love the child?” asked Mrs. Purcell,
suddenly.
“No,” said Eunice, quietly.
“You have no maternal longings for it?”
“No.”
“You have no desire to see it — fondle it?”
Eunice shrank again all over, in that peculiar
fashion of hers, like the sensitive-plant.
“The child was not to blame —” She remembered,
as she spoke, how sternly these words
had dropped from the stern lips of old Lize in
No. 19. The miserable bed, the murder-stain
upon the miserable wall, the miserable sights
and sounds that had ushered her miserable infant
into life, stood out like a stereoscopic picture
against her lightened life, and turned her
for the moment faint and sick. So perhaps —
who knows? — a soul in paradise may cower at
permitted times over permitted memories of
earth.
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“The child was not to blame,” said Eunice.
“That is all. I do not care for him, but I
presume God does. I am his mother. Nothing
can help that. I should not want to die
and be asked, Where is the baby? Should
you?”
“I do not know,” said Mrs. Purcell. She felt
that the outcast was growing beyond her guiding
hand. In moods, she felt like sitting at her feet
to learn of her.
“Let us think this through,” she said. “If it
were not for Christina —”
“If it were not for Christina, I should own
and rear my child,” Eunice, in a suppressed but
decided voice, replied. “If it were not for Christina,
I — think — that I could bear it, that the
rest of the world should know that I am the
mother of a child. I do not think people would
be very cruel to us. Do you think they would?
At least there would be good people, Christian
people, — people who could not be cruel to us —
the child and me — for Christ's sake.”
Mrs. Purcell remained silent. She did not
know how to tell her how cruel Christian people
can be.
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Her silence ended the conversation, and the
subject was not renewed for many days.
The way for its renewal was paved at last in
an unexpected manner.
It happened to Eunice, on a certain day in
frosty mid-autumn weather, to be detained at the
grammar school by a headache, — one of her
blind headaches, a frequent ailment of hers at
that time, — overwork only, Dr. Burtis thought,
unless, perhaps, some slight defect in the circulation
about the heart. The trouble, though simple,
was confusing in its effects. Christina had seen
her stagger with pain once or twice in the streets,
and was apt to call at the school-house to help
her home.
On this particular day she was late, and Eunice
sat dizzily waiting alone in the school-room,
stupidly watching for her through the window,
and stupidly following the stupid course of a
panorama company outside in a little blue cart,
about which all the children had gathered, and
were shouting. She was too sick to think much
or clearly. She sat — very lovely and very still—
with her head upon her crossed arms, and
her soft hair loosened against her cheek;
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perhaps a more delicate sight for being ill, but a
delicate, fine sight in any event, — fine as the
chasing twilight, and as mute.
She was wondering brokenly if that were
Christina at the bend of the road, and why the
little blue cart should stop so long in front of the
school-house door, and whether the panorama
were anything that the children's mothers would
rather they would not see, thinking to go and
find out, and thinking that she was quite unable
to stir, when the creaking of the door disturbed
her and a heavy step tramped up to the desk, —
“Is this the school-marm?”
Something in the powerful, monotonous tones
startled her with a vague sense of familiarity, and
she weakly turned her head.
“Is this the school-marm? I called to see —
Good Lor' love us! — Nix!”
Miss Trent was in too much pain to start; she
slowly raised her head, and slowly smiled. She
had grown extremely pale — gray; but her smile
was very sweet when she said, —
“Why, Lize!”
Whatever happened, she could not be ashamed
of old Lize; it was not in her. But she thought,
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“I hope the children will keep away,” remaining,
as Lize had found her, extremely pale.
“I 'm beat!” said Lize. “Nix a school-marm!
And I and Tim and the panoraymy comin' agin
ye in this oncommon manner — as true as I be
in my senses — Nix!”
“Tim!” said the “school-marm.”
“Yes, Tim. Come home o' Christmas last, —
Tim did. Did n't know on 't, did ye? All of a
Christmas afternoon in the sun I sits, rockin' Mis'
Jeb Smith's last — two sence you was there — at
Mis' Jeb Smith's window, when I sees the blue
cart and the panoraymy and Tim a rovin' up and
down Thicket in search o' his mother, by which
I do not mean to excuse myself of being the
mother of the panoraymy, but of Tim. And he
see me. And he knows me. All through the
window, in a flash — and I put Jeb's baby on the
floor — and am out in the middle o' the street.
“`Hulloa, Tim!' says I.
“`Hulloa, marm!' says Tim.
“`Glad to see ye, Tim,' says I.
“`Is that a fact now?' says Tim, — for I took
on awful at the time on 't about the shooting
business, and Tim warn't likely to forget it owersoon.
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“`It speaks well for ye now, I must say!' says
Tim.
“`That 's none o' your lookout,' says I.
“`See here, old lady,' says Tim, `if you ain't
ashamed of me, nor yet of the panoraymy, s'pose
you hang on?'
“`All right, my boy,' says I.
“So I goes into Jeb's and picks up my duds,
and hangs on to Tim and the panoraymy, —
which is an excellent business for seein' of the
country, and travellin' adwantages in general, —
and I 've yet to see the cause to be ashamed
neither of Tim nor yet of the panoraymy.”
“`I alwers kind o' considered as you 'd be ready
for me, marm, when I got ready and fit for you,'
says Tim. Tim 's no fool!”
“I am as glad as you are,” said Eunice, in
an honest, steady voice, listening through it, —
brokenly, — “I am glad with all my heart. You
were good to me. I never forgot you, Lize.”
“How you did clear out in the dark, poor
gal!” said Lize, loudly, “with that there heavy
young un, and you but two weeks sick! But
how the mischief come you here?”
“People have been kind to me.” Miss Trent
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spoke very low, — listening. Was not that a
step outside the door? Would Lize never, never
stop? — never go?
Lize, on the contrary, moved nearer to the
desk, — the grammar teacher spoke so very low,—
and leaned heavily upon it, towering brown
and gaunt and rough as a lifetime of Thicket
Street could make her close to Eunice's little
pinched, fine face, uplifted and listening —
“People have been very kind to me. I have
led a changed and happy life —”
“Where is the baby?” Lize interrupted, in her
loud, echoing whisper; it could have been heard
throughout the room.
“I deserted it. It was carried to the Burley
Street Nursery.”
These words had dropped with desperate distinctness
from her lips, when Eunice turned;
turned — listened — hushed — and raised her
eyes.
As she had expected, Christina stood just
within the doorway, leaning against one of the
desks. As she had expected, Christina stood
like a statue.
I think she was hardly prepared for the frozen
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horror, loathing, — whatever it was, a thing that
struck to her heart like death, — which had settled
about Christina's lips and eyes.
Her own face twitched spasmodically, and her
hands, where they lay upon the desk, wrung each
other purple.
Lize, chattering about the panoraymy, noticed
them, stopped, and took them to chafe them in
her great brown palms.
Christina, when she saw the old woman touch
Eunice, shivered all over. Lize, at the sound
of her start, turned, saw the young lady, looked
keenly from one girl to another, and took the
whole sight in.
“I 've made a bad business here.” She looked
back at the young teacher, and her old face fell,
much pained.
“I 'd rather ha' chopped my hand off than to
ha' blundered so, Nix! I 'd best clear out o' yer
way afore I 'm up to further mischief. I might
ha' known it would do ye no good to be seen
chaffering with the likes of me, — more fool
for 't!”
“You have done no harm,” said Eunice, steadily, —
“no harm at all. It was better so. I am
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[figure description] Page 182.[end figure description]
not ashamed of you, and you need not sorrow
over what you said. It was quite as well. You
were good to me, and you shall not sorrow for
fear you did me harm. It was no harm. By
and by, when my head does not ache quite so
hard, I shall not be sorry — not sorry, Lize.”
“So you 'll not come out to see the panoraymy?”
said Lize, a little regretfully, turning
as she tramped down the school-room aisle.
“Tim would take it as an honor if ye would
recommend the panoraymy to the children, of
which the admission is half-price, and the seats
preserved.”
Eunice gently refused.
“Another time, Lize. Perhaps the next time
you come through town, if —” she flushed suddenly,
burning red (Christina stood so still!)—
“if I am here the next time you come through
town.”
The door closed behind old Lize with a crash;
Eunice listened to her thumping tread upon the
steps; heard her shouting to Tim that “the
school-marm was sick and could n't be bothered”;
heard Tim shout back something very
uncomplimentary to the school-marm; heard the
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[figure description] Page 183.[end figure description]
little blue cart rattle off, and the cries of the
children faint away.
When all the noise was over, she raised her
head.
Christina stood so very still!
To her dying day, Eunice Trent remembered
just how the school-room looked that afternoon;
how Sarah Jones's slate and sponge lay upon the
third desk, second row; that Beb White's little
dinner-pail was upon the floor; that the “big
boy” had tied a string across the left-hand aisle,
and chalked a profile of Mr. Hobbs upon the
right-hand blackboard; that her own bonnet
and shawl had tumbled from their nail; how
black the corners of the room were; how fast
the dusk crept in; what a little pale streak of
light there was left away beyond her sunset window;
and how Christina, in her white sack,
shone out — so still! — where she stood leaning
against the desk beside the door.
The two — Eunice at the desk, Christina at
the door — remained for some moments as old
Lize had left them. Eunice was the first to
break the silence. She said, —
“I can get home alone. You had better go.”
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All that she had been to Christina, all that
Christina had been to her, the sacredness of one
of the simplest, sweetest loves of woman to
woman that I ever knew, seemed to Eunice to
step down in the dusky school-room between
herself and the shining figure by the door, —
like a palpable, beautiful presence; and it seemed
to her that she said to it, —
“You had better go.”
Christina automatically shook her head.
“I say you had better go,” repeated Eunice.
“There,” as the door opened timidly, “here is
somebody waiting for me. Beb? Yes, little Beb
White for her dinner-pail. This way, Beb. Beb
will wait a few minutes and walk home with me,
won't you, Beb? Miss Purcell has another errand
to-night. Go, Christina!”
She spoke with much decision, and much self-command.
Christina went.
Eunice, through the dark, watched the beautiful
palpable thing that went after her and went
with her. The door shut them both out.
“Poor Christina!” said Eunice; “poor Christina!”
She said nothing more, but her face dropped
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into her hands heavily. She must have sat in
the dusk, with her face in her hands, for some
time. The room grew perfectly dark. Little
Beb, with her little dinner-pail in her lap, sat on
the platform.
“Are you sick?” asked little Beb, growing
restless at last. Her teacher started, begged her
pardon, and took her home. Little Beb kissed
her when they parted, and stroked her face.
This was a great comfort.
-- 186 -- p735-195
CHAPTER XII. EUNICE AND CHRISTINA.
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MRS. PURCELL took tea alone that night,
and felt like boxing the ears of both the
girls.
Anybody but Margaret would have been what
we call “downright cross,” when Eunice, about
the middle of the evening, crawled, dizzy and
white, down stairs, and felt her way to her
cricket, to tell her all that had happened.
Margaret was not cross, but Margaret was
worried, and thoroughly unstrung, and she broke
into bitter self-reproaches.
“I might have known — expected it! My
poor girls! I suppose I should have told Christina
long ago, but she was so happy, — you were
so happy! My poor, poor girls, — and I meant
to do the best thing for you both. This comes
of —”
Margaret checked herself. What would she
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have said? Something far better left unsaid,
perhaps; something of the flitting annoyance
which people feel when a favorite experiment
falters or fails. What if this “experiment” of
doing one simple, Christ-like thing by the neglected
soul which chance — or Christ — had
flung across her path should now, and after all,
and for years to come, prove the reef upon which
the happiness of her home should split and wreck
itself?
“It all depends on Christina!” she said, with
some bitterness in her voice, “and we must own
it is hard for Christina. What has she said to
you?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Of course she must have been taken off her
guard, and grieved; but did she give you no
word or sign of affection — trust?”
“She gave me nothing. I asked for nothing.
I had no right to anything.”
Eunice spoke in a dull, dry way, which had
a singular and painful effect upon the ear. It
affected Mrs. Purcell with considerable physical
disquiet.
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“You are sure you 're not sick?”
“Only the headache, — no.”
“Where is Christina?”
“Up stairs.”
“I will go and call her down.”
“No.”
“I will send you up to her.”
“I should not go.”
“Christina is behaving like a school-girl!”
“Christina was deceived. Christina loved me.”
“But Christina has such excellent, straightforward
sense. I am ashamed of her!”
“That is not right. It is I of whom you
should be ashamed. It is I of whom Christina
is ashamed. It is I who have made all the
misery. I wish —” In the dull dryness of
Eunice's voice something snapped, and she faltered
into a cry most pitiful to hear.
“I wish it were right to wish to be dead! I
wish it were right to wish to be dead and out
of the way!”
All Margaret's mother's heart, touched at first
for her own child, was wrung now, in this miserable
matter, for the outcast woman. So slight
a fact is the pain of the world in face of the
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guilt of it! Christina only suffered. Eunice
had sinned.
“I have hurt you!” she said.
Eunice shook her head in a very lonely way.
“Not much. Never mind. Let me go.”
She went away up stairs again, and shut herself
into her room, — the soft gray room which
Christina called “so like Nixy,” and which, by
chance or by fancy, had always fallen to Eunice
for her solitary occupation. A few changes had
crept by degrees into it at that time. The pictures
had disappeared; the little gray statuettes
were gone; the sole ornament of the room had
become an odd one, — a cross of some species
of white wood, uncarved and bare; quite a large
cross, and “inconvenient” Christina thought, —
though I believe she never said so. Nobody
said anything about it, or interfered with the
quaint, Roman Catholic fancy of the thing. It
stood out against the plain tint of the wall, nearly
as high as Eunice's shoulder. She did not
say her prayers to it, or hang her beads upon it.
As nearly as I can learn, she never did anything
more heretical than look at it; “liked,” she said,
“to feel that it was about.”
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When, long after Margaret was asleep, long
after the house was still, Christina, that night,
came in, — for Christina came at last, — she
came upon a striking sight, — the room all in a
gray mist, for the candle had burned low; and
Eunice, in her black dress, at the foot of the
white cross.
Christina stopped upon the threshold, but
whether from reverence or from reluctance, how
should Eunice know?
Eunice neither turned nor spoke. She wished
that she could drop and die there, and never turn
or speak again, and so never, never look at the
figure standing in the door.
“Eunice!”
Eunice lifted a singular face. Whether to cry
out at the pain of it, whether to marvel at the
peace of it, Christina did not know. Eunice lifted
her face and rose, and looked the figure in the
door all over, once, twice, in silence.
Christina had on a white wrapper and held a
little lamp in her hand. She held it, having
come into the dim room so suddenly, high over
her head, to see the way; her round white arm
was bare and her hair loose; the light had a
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peculiar effect in dropping on her, and her eyes
from a soft shadow peered out a little blindly.
Something about her reminded Eunice of a
picture which she had seen of the woman hunting
for a lost piece of silver, after the house was
swept.
“You cannot find it,” she said.
“But I can!” said Christina. She put down
her lamp, and sat down quite full in the light
of it upon the edge of the bed. Eunice, exhausted,
sank again at the foot of her great cross,
and it was dark where she sat.
“Come here,” said Christina. Eunice shook
her head.
“Look at me then.” Eunice looked at her.
Christina, white all over, — white to the lips, —
sat smiling. All the stars had indeed gone out
of her eyes, but they shone, and something
sweeter than starlight was in them.
“I should like, if you will come, to kiss you,
dear.” Christina said this in a broken voice.
“I do not understand you.” Eunice spoke
with dreary quiet.
“If you will come,” repeated Christina, —
Eunice did not see that she quivered like a white
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lily which the wind had bruised, — “if you will
come, I should like to tell you how I hurt you,
wronged you, — for I had no time to think, and
I had never guessed, never dreamed! — and I
loved you, Eunice, I loved you so!”
Christina began at this to cry, and she cried
as women like her cry when their hearts are
breaking. What did she expect? Eunice sat
perfectly still.
“Why do you not speak to me?” Christina
cried, at length, breaking her sharp sobs off. “I
know that I wronged you, hurt you, but I cannot
bear this, Eunice!”
“Hush!” said Eunice, in stern surprise.
“Why do you talk of wrong and hurt? You
are compassionate, Christina, but you are unwise.”
“But I love you, Eunice. Is that compassion?
I honor you. Is that unwise?”
Eunice's drawn lip quivered a little; a slow,
warm light crept over her face.
“But I sinned,” she said.
“But I judged,” said Christina.
“I was stained, and outcast.”
“You are pure and honored.”
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“I deceived you.”
“You loved me.”
“But now you can never forget.”
“But now I will never remember.”
“But a scar is a scar forever.”
“My eyes are holden,” said Christina; “I see
no scar. Eunice, see!” — she broke from the
strained, excited mood in which she seemed to be,
into a quiet, faltering voice, — “see, this is how it
is! I was taken all in a minute off my guard —
in the school-room there; but that was no excuse
for me. I wronged you, Eunice! I am
here to beg your pardon for thoughts I have had
of you to-night. I came in to tell you — that I
loved you — loved you — loved you, dear!”
It was then for the first time that Eunice fairly
lifted her haggard face, and held up her arms.
“Come here to me,” said Christina; “I will
not lift you from the foot of that cross. I
judged you. It is you who shall come to me.
There!”
But when she was yet a great way off, Christina
ran to meet her, and fell upon her neck and
kissed her.
“Stop a moment”; Eunice held her off. “I
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shall go and find the — the child now. You will
be ashamed of me. I had rather you would not
love me than to be ashamed of me.”
“Eunice, look here!”
Eunice looked there, — straight into Christina's
spotless woman's eyes, — and it seemed to her as
if all the stars of heaven were shining in them
as the stars shine after storms.
-- 195 -- p735-204
CHAPTER XIII. UNE FEMME BLANCHE.
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MY dear Jane Briggs: —
I am crowded for time, but I write to
tell you — for I would prefer that you should
hear it from me — that we have at length identified
and brought home Eunice's child.
This was done without much difficulty. The
boy remained at the Burley Street Nursery,
whither he had been sent by Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle;
it being, as you will remember, upon Mrs.
Zerviah Myrtle's steps that Nixy left the child, at
some period previous to her entrance into Mrs.
Myrtle's service.
Mrs. Myrtle, I fancy, has kept a kind of vague
patronage over the boy; sent him bibs and
Bibles, and patted him on the head on inspectionday.
He could, of course, have been easily traced,
had we not possessed the clew of his resemblance
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to his mother. This resemblance in itself would
have been sufficient to identify the little waif.
The little boy has a pleasant face, and Eunice's
eyes. If he had her mouth I should not object
in the least to him. I confess to some secret
anxiety on that point. A baby less than five
years old has no mouth whatever. I wonder if
the poor little fellow knows how unwelcome he
is! He looks amazingly uncomfortable, it strikes
me; but that may be because his mother put
him into white aprons, and parted his hair.
Whenever I think how the future happiness of
us all — for Eunice's future, as you understand,
is now definitely and intelligently my daughter's
and mine — is dependent upon that little neglected
graft of shame and sin, I am, I own, uncomfortable.
I do not regret the step, but it is a difficult
one for us all to take. Poor Eunice I suppose
was right; I could not gainsay her quiet “God
cares for the baby, if I don't”; and what we
have undertaken we shall thoroughly perform, —
but poor Eunice is in a very narrow place.
The child has been in the house now two
days. His mother is uneasy and pale; watches
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him carefully, kindly, — never fondles him; seems
very nervous and restless, evidently perfectly
prepared for whatever cloud we are drifting
to windward of.
By my advice she remains at her post as
grammar teacher. Whatever social degradation
is in waiting for her, she shall not assume that
she can be degraded. Christianity does not
patch up a sinner, it restores him. In Christian
theory Eunice's history is as if it had not been.
Christian practice may bind her budding youth
down, hands and feet, with it; but Christian practice
shall do it in teeth of the gospel stories, and
under the very astonished eyes of Christ.
I have not bounded into this feeling about
Eunice, — you know me, Jane, — but perhaps it
is the stronger because I acquired it by such a
vacillating, jerky process. Christina, whose arrowy
intuitions failed her once for a few of the
most miserable hours that have ever darkened
our home life, accepts my judgments in this matter,
with “improvements.” I am learning rather
to lean upon than to guide my maiden child in
unfurling sail for the outcast's frowning weather.
“Whatever happens, I believe we are ready for
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it,” Christina said this morning, with compressing
lips. “It seems as if the Lord and you and I
might make a place for Eunice and the baby in
this world!”
The relations between Eunice and Christina
have grown of late singularly fitted, singularly
sweet. I take great comfort in them. Whatever
else may come, I shall rest, as I grow sick and
old, — perhaps I should say sicker and older, —
in seeing my two girls at peace together.
Eunice has crowned my life with a kind of
oriental opulence of blessing, — a gorgeous privilege.
So it seems to me in looking back. So it
grows upon me in looking on. The struggles
which she has cost me, the annoyances, doubts,
dreads, perplexities, pains, risks, were but the
ushers in the ante-room of a great, unworthy sense
of use and the highest joy in life, — the joy of
uses.
Of all the debt under which the outcast child
has laid me, the heaviest and the sweetest is her
influence over, and her affection for, Christina.
My daughter and I unite in the feeling that it
is the least which we can do for her, to take her
poor baby into our family, and help her — as
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Nixy used to say — “help her bear what folks
shall say, and all that.”
At this writing, as you see, her relations to
society are weighing in the balance. Fortunately, —
I say fortunately, for it will save the poor
girl some inevitable disquiet, — we, as a family,
go into what is called “company” very little;
Eunice, less.
I doubt if there are two cultivated Christian
families among our acquaintances who would invite
Eunice to their parlors, after she shall have
sat in my pew next Sunday with her little boy.
This may be natural, may be inevitable; it is
none the less uncomfortable.
I anticipate some assistance, much sympathy,
in what is before us all, from one Christian man
at least, — our physician, Dr. Burtis. I do not
see but that he treats Eunice with as much respect
since as before he walked in yesterday
morning and found her sitting with her child
upon her lap. Certain points in the doctor
please me, though his beard is as streaked as a
zebra. I have had flitting fancies — But nonsense!
There is the dinner-bell too.
More, on a later or less hungry occasion.
Margaret.
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The storm for which, at the dating of this note,
the three women sat holding their breath in waiting,
broke quickly and naturally.
The little Burley Street baby had been, perhaps,
four days in Mrs. Purcell's family before
all Gower was agape; five, before Gower was
aghast; six, before Gower was aggrieved; seven,
before Gower's grammar-school committee called
upon Miss Trent.
Five respectable, virtuous, pious, “prominent”
men, — fathers of respectable, virtuous, pious,
prominent families, — “three selectmen and two
gold-headed canes!” whispered Christina, trying
to make Eunice laugh. But poor Eunice did not
even try to laugh.
“I would rather they were — women,” she
said, and stood and trembled.
“It is no business for you!” said Mrs. Purcell,
with her eyes very much lighted, and pushed her
aside.
The committee were both surprised and embarrassed,
either at the lady's unexpected entrance,
or by something in her appearance after
she was there. Mrs. Purcell begged their pardon
for her intrusion, and with much courtesy, but
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much decision, excused Miss Trent in her own
name, pointedly inquiring, Could they transact
their business with her?
The spokesman coughed, deferred to a gold
cane, a cane consulted a selectman, a selectman
another selectman; the other selectman demurred,
deferred, consulted, coughed, and the
spokesman, having “swung around the circle”
(though he did not know it, it was so many years
ago), undertook the individual responsibility of
undertaking to make Mrs. Purcell undertake to
understand the peculiar delicacy — “pe-culiar
delicacy, my dear madam” — of the position in
which he, the spokesman, as spokesman, and
they, the selectmen and gold canes, as selectmen
and gold canes, were unavoidably and
most undesirably placed.
“The fact being, my dear madam, that the
guardianship of youth and the position of — of—
you might say, pickets, — pickets, madam, in
the great forces of youthful culture, are — in
fact are sacred trusts — sacred trusts!”
To this Mrs. Purcell cheerfully assented.
“And however unpleasant,” pursued the Committee,
“however unpleasant, as well as
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unfortunate and undesirable, it may oftentimes be to
perform the duties attendant upon those trusts,—
yet the future of our youth —”
“Precisely, sir,” assisted Mrs. Purcell.
“Depends!” continued the Committee, reddening, —
“depends upon the faithfulness with
which such duties, however unfortunate, are
performed. And when reflections upon the
character of a hitherto much respected and
valued instructor of youth —”
The Committee paused.
“Go on, sir,” urged Mrs. Purcell.
(“Won't help me an inch, that 's clear,”
thought the Committee.)
“When such reflections as have been this
week cast upon the character of Miss Trent
are thrust upon our attention, madam,” broke
out the Committee, bluntly, “the matter must be
looked into, that 's all! And that — begging
your pardon — is what we are here for.”
“So I supposed.”
But Mrs. Purcell supposed nothing further,
and the business was fast becoming an awkward
one, when a gold cane knocked it slowly upon
its feet, by slowly and very solemnly inquiring, —
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If - she - were - prepared - to - de - ny - the - re -
flections - cast - upon - the - char - acter - of - the -
young - lady - understood to be re - siding in her
fam - ily?
To this Mrs. Purcell replied quietly in the full
negative.
The five committee-men arched five pairs of
eyebrows, and paused again.
“Miss Trent's child, as undoubtedly you have
heard,” pursued Mrs. Purcell, in a very even
voice, “is at this time under my roof. Miss
Trent's past history has been, in some respects,
a very unfortunate one. Of Miss Trent's present
character and position in the confidence of
that society which is formed by character, there
cannot be found, in Gower, two opinions, I
think.”
“Perhaps not, madam, — perhaps not; undoubtedly
not. But our position as — as pickets
of educational interests, and the future of
our impressible youth, demand — as you must
own, madam — that something should be done
about this extra - ordinary case. Perhaps — considering
the sacred interests of youth, and the—
the blamed awkwardness of the affair!”
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exploded the spokesman, with a sudden influx of
energy, if loss of dignity, “Miss Trent might
feel inclined, for the sake of all parties, to —
that is, to resign, madam!”
The spokesman drew breath, and wiped his
forehead.
“Are you not satisfied,” queried Mrs. Purcell,
“with Miss Trent's intrinsic qualifications for
her present position?”
“Why — yes, madam, — yes — yes; on the
whole, yes. The young lady has indeed given
very particular satisfaction to the Board since
she has been at the post of duty in question, —
very particular satisfaction.”
“You have found her to be able, faithful, consistent,
an intelligent, active, pure-minded, pure-lived
lady, in all her connections with your
school?”
“Perfectly so, — perfectly; on the whole, all
that we could have desired for our purposes
in that department, which can but make the
present crisis, as you see, my dear madam, all
the more unfortunate, as the parents of several
of our youth, in demanding the young
lady's resignation from her post of responsibility
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over the tender infant heart, have already observed.”
“Since this young lady has not as yet corrupted
beyond repair the impressible infant
minds of Gower —”
Mrs. Purcell checked herself, and in a different
tone and very earnestly said: —
“Gentlemen, I presume, as you say, that you
are in a very awkward position, but it seems to
me — for I never have been a picket in the forces
of youthful culture — a very simple position to
get out of. Look at the matter! This young
girl, by your own showing, has lived without
guile among you. I give you my testimony as a
Christian lady — whatever that is worth — to the
purity of her private character. It strikes me
that it would be good sense not to be over-hasty
in superseding a trusted veteran in Gower's educational
attacks on Gower's infant mind. It
strikes me that it would be good Christianity, —
I would beg your pardon for introducing Christianity
into business, if I were not talking, as I
believe I am, to Christian men, — it strikes me
that it would be good Christianity to heal rather
than to cripple a young life like Miss Trent's.”
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The committee, somewhat ill at ease, implied
that Mrs. Purcell was well known to be an excellent
Christian woman, and quick in her Christian
sympathies, for which the committee highly
respected her; that Mrs. Purcell's remarks would
be — in, for instance, a church matter — very
much to the point of the subject, but that when it
came to the business of the week, — and the common
look of things, — and the guardianship of
the youthful mind, and responsibilities to the
State —
Mrs. Purcell interrupted here, by inquiring
concisely if she were to understand this as a
formal dismissal of Miss Trent from her position.
“Hardly that, my dear madam, — hardly that;
our chairman and one other member of the committee
being out of town, we have been as yet
unable to take formal decisive action upon the
matter, — indeed, were anxious to spare Miss
Trent as much as possible in that respect; but,
as the tide of public feeling is so strong, we
thought that perhaps a voluntary resignation —”
“You condemn your prisoner untried,” said
Mrs. Purcell, decidedly. “I should prefer, as so
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little remains now, apparently, which can be
`spared Miss Trent,' that there should be a
formal action taken on this business before we
hold any further conversation of this kind. I do
not hesitate to speak for Miss Trent without
consultation with her, since she has placed herself
entirely under my advice in a matter so
difficult and painful for a young girl to manage
personally. I should prefer that the matter be
put through whatever red-tape is necessary, and
that Miss Trent, if dismissed from her position,
be openly and formally dismissed.”
Within an hour after the departure of the
committee from Mrs. Purcell's parlor, the door-bell
pealed nervously through the house, and Mr.
Hobbs peremptorily summoned Eunice to the
door.
“Just in from the station,” panted Mr. Hobbs,
tipping his hat (poor Eunice noticed this) in
hurried respect, “and I find the whole world
upside-down! Called to tell you, young lady,
not to give it up! I can stand on my own feet
yet, and so can you. What 's the use of your
feet if you don't? Can you answer me that?
No! You shall hear from me again. Yes, yes,
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yes; you shall hear from me again — and the doctor
'll be on hand before night. There 's canes
enough in that committee, but it 's poorly off for
understanding, the committee is. I give it up
if I can't stand out against the whole of 'em!”
I have always understood that Mr. Hobbs did.
The particulars of the affair I have forgotten, if
I ever knew. The result of several agitated
meetings of the school-committee, conveyed by
Dr. Burtis, through Mrs. Purcell, to Miss Trent,
was a formal request that the grammar teacher
would, for the present, retain the position which
she had — the chairman was instructed to add—
hitherto held to the entire satisfaction of the
Board.
The conditional nature of the proposition annoyed
Miss Trent. Perhaps, left to herself, she
would, in spite of Mr. Hobbs, have “given it up”;
but Margaret and the doctor overurged her, and
the young teacher did not at that time resign.
Indeed, what could she do? With the support
of her little boy just fallen upon her, to be
thrust disgraced from her desk at school was to
be thrust disgraced from every practicable means
of earning a livelihood. Who would have
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confidence in the outcast woman whom Gower's
grammar-school committee had delighted to dishonor?
What chance was there for her in the
world, if she should step out into it with a child's
fingers dragging at her hands? The Scarlet Letter
was upon her. The little Burley Street Nursery
baby's eyes were a living advertisement of
her shame. Since she held up her brave young
head and bore it, — for Christ's sake, who had
forgiven her, — what could good men and women
do but throw their stones and pass her by? To
have concealed her story, to have cloaked her
sin, would have been quite another matter. Society
might have suspected, society might have
been assured of it, but as long as the poor girl
deserted her own, denied her flesh and blood,
society would have dealt — a little shyly with
her, perhaps, but society would not have refused
her bread and butter.
Now, less for the sin than for the acknowledgment
of sinning, — and for the sake of a single
sin, and the sin of a child, and the sin of a motherless
Thicket Street child, — the penitent, pure
woman was a branded, manacled thing.
Within a week after she brought the little boy
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home, Eunice began to comprehend this. Prepared
as she was for it, blindly prepared for anything,
when the tangible facts of the case faced
her she felt bewildered. She was so very young!
Years upon years stretched out before her — foredoomed.
Society had hedged her in on every
side.
“I am not bad!” she said, turning drearily to
Margaret, and holding up her hands as if to be
lifted. “They know I am not bad! It was so
long ago, — and I have been so sorry! And nobody
taught me, told me. Have n't I been a
good woman long enough to belong in a good
woman's place?”
“I have heard of a thing called living down,
or living out, the ghost of such a history as
yours,” said Margaret, firmly. “There are men
on that grammar-school committee who have
done it. I never knew a woman who did. If a
woman can, you shall!”
“If a woman can.” Can she? Since sin was
sin, and shame was shame, One only has made
this an easy, if indeed a possible, thing beneath
the sun. His theology preached it; his practice
pushed it. He risked his reputation for it.
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He multiplied instances to bring it into public
notice. He left it graven with a pen of iron,
and with the point of a diamond, upon the record
of his life: This Man eateth with publicans
and sinners. To him first, last, and only in his
church the sin of a woman was not eternal.
Certain of his followers have groped after this
intricate charity, — but it is a subtile thing, and
high; who can attain unto it? What if, in
some distant unearthing of graces in the Christian
standards of thought and act, it shall be
said, This was the very stone which the builders
rejected?
Margaret felt very much as if she were making
an attack upon the whole superstructure of refined
Christian custom, when she sent her daughter
and Eunice's little boy to accompany Eunice
home from school one afternoon, when gossip
was at its busiest with the young teacher's
name; and when grave, decorous parents were
gravely, decorously, and daily removing their
children from Miss Trent's charge, — for this
thing was done to an alarming extent within
a fortnight from the period of the compromise
offered by the committee between the future of
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[figure description] Page 212.[end figure description]
the infant mind and the ruin of a young girl's
good name.
“Three new vacancies to-day,” said Eunice,
sadly smiling, as she and Christina and the child
came down the school-house steps. “Are you
not ashamed to walk through the streets with
me? See, the sidewalk is full of people.”
“Do I look ashamed?”
Christina drew Eunice's trembling hand close
upon her arm, and there was something in the
firmness and tenderness of the touch which
gave Eunice a protected, comforted feeling, —
the stronger because of Christina's youth and
innocence.
All the streets of the little town were full, as
they went home together. People nodded and
passed; people stared and passed; people whispered
and passed. Certain of the school committee
touched their hats with ominous solemnity.
Sarah Jones and her father crossed the street
to avoid a meeting with the three. Little Beb
White's mother, Christina noticed, drew away her
dress where it touched in passing the poor little
fellow trudging along at Eunice's side. The
night fell fast, and the lights came out, and the
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golden web seemed to Eunice to net her in as it
had netted her in before. She felt tangled, lost.
“Leave me to get out alone,” she said.
“You are nervous, Eunice. Do not try to
talk. Hush! Do I look as if I could leave you
to get out alone? Look again! There! Give
me the boy. You are too tired to lead him.”
Christina drew the little fellow to her side, and
led him gently all the way home. Her eyes were
bright, her cheeks flushed; she carried her head
with a certain pride which, to Eunice's excited
fancy, seemed for the moment rather to widen
than to bridge the gulf between them. She almost
wished that Christina were ashamed of her.
When Christina, thinking to say a pleasant
thing, said, —
“Never mind the people, Eunice. I do not
care. What harm can they do me?” — she remembered,
with a singularly keen sense of discomfort,
a thing which Monsieur Jacques in the
guitar-shop had said of Dahlia his wife: —
“She was une femme blanche. She could well
afford to cry over a little girl like you.”
She looked across her child into Christina's
confident young eyes, and thought, with
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exceeding bitterness, how far beyond, forever beyond,
her reach was that whiteness which could
“afford” to put both shining hands into the
ditch and draw them forth unstained.
They passed some one in turning in at the
gate. Christina — her head lifted, and her arm
around Eunice's little boy — paused to see who
it was, but did not see, and hurried in.
“Did you not meet the doctor?” asked her
mother. “He has this minute left.”
It happened to Eunice on that same evening
to be called on some slight errand late to Christina's
door. Christina was up, and reading.
Eunice apologized for the disturbance.
“I believe I left the apron here that the child
must wear to-morrow”; his mother, it had been
noticed, always called him, somewhat drearily,
“the child”; shrank from naming him as
long as she could; seldom, if ever, made use of
the name which Mrs. Purcell finally fastened
upon the little fellow, — a name which meant
nothing to anybody, and nothing in itself, but all
the better for that, and at least sensible and
pleasant to the ear, — Kent.
“Come in,” said Christina, “I was only
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reading.” She closed her book — her little English
Testament — as she spoke, and with unusual
gentleness held out her arms to Eunice. Eunice
came and stood beside her for a moment, with
the little apron across her arm, and Christina
noticed that she was very thoughtful, very still.
“What is it, dear?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me, Eunice.”
“It is you, then, Christina.”
“What have I done?”
“Made of an outcast woman — in the eyes of
all the world to-day — your personal friend. I
have been thinking it over since I have been in
my room, and the child has been asleep, — he
was so long going to sleep! Perhaps I got tired
and worried. I did not mean to hurt you, Christina.”
For Christina was uncommonly silent, — sitting
with her bright head dropped.
“What have you been `thinking over' in your
room, Eunice?”
“What a different thing it would have been if
you had — condescended, you know, dear, been
forgiving, kind, all that a noble, charitable lady
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could be expected to be to me. Then, people
would all understand, admire you.”
“Do you mean that they will not understand,
admire me now?” Christina smiled.
“I do not know how to tell you” — Eunice
hesitated — “what I mean. It seems like supposing
that a breath could hurt you. And
yet —”
“`And yet,' Eunice?”
“After all,” said Eunice, slowly, “such a thing
as you are doing was never known of a lady
pure as you before.”
“Perhaps so, perhaps not, — very likely not.”
“You put me on your level; you made me
fine and good as you, when you walked with
such shining eyes home from school with me
to-day!”
“I hope I did.”
“But I could not bear it that a false word
should hit you,” said Eunice, with earnest,
troubled lips; “and how can people understand
that you may take me in this way — any other
way but this, — into your confidence and love?
How can they see me, with the child beside me,
all my life, and never say that you lost in fine
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ness, lost in — something, when you chose a
woman such as I to be your intimate, trusted
friend? And I wondered — do not blame me,
dear — if you had not better wait for heaven,
where things can be forgotten?”
Christina looked up; perhaps she had been
quicker than Eunice to think of this, — it was but
natural; her eyelashes were wet, though her
eyes were as still as a June morning. She lifted
her little Testament; it opened where she had
closed it, and she held it for a moment, with
some hesitation, in her hand.
“I was reading when you came in —”
Eunice looked over her shoulder and saw what
she had been reading; it was the story of Mary
of Bethany.
“I had forgotten,” said Christina, softly, “if I
ever knew, that it was she* who loved much and
was forgiven, — the woman in the city which was
a sinner. And that she — I feel as if I must
beg your pardon, dear, for saying it, she was so
wicked! — she became what you call `the intimate,
trusted friend' of the Lord Jesus Christ;
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perhaps, excepting John, the most intimate,
trusted friend he had. He believed in her,
loved her, and all the world knew it! What do
you suppose He had of `fineness' to `lose'?
Eunice, I am not afraid!”
eaf735n1* It should, perhaps, be noted, since Christina was ignorant
of the fact, that upon this point commentators differ.
-- 219 -- p735-228
CHAPTER XIV. A STORM OF WIND.
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DEAR JANE: —
Whatever there is to tell you this time
is the quiet close of a stormy epoch in our
family history, — rich in wrecks, like all stormy
things.
I believe it is a month to-day since the poor
unwelcome baby, for whom we have all suffered,
and through whom we have all learned so much,
was buried.
He had been with us just a year. I see, now
that we are out of it, better than I did while we
were in it, what a trying year it was to his
mother, and to us for his mother's sake. So
alarming perils grow when they are over!
Eunice, I think, was in considerable peril, not
only of direct social degradation, but of that
exceeding bitterness of spirit which only social
degradation can incite, and which, in a life so
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young as Eunice's, is a sadder thing than death.
How she stands related to the first of these
dangers is a problem as yet in process of solution,
perhaps. The second has passed her by,
and left her the serenity of a statue in inclement
weather.
As you know, she remained, by my decided
advice, at her desk in school. Christina and I
between us managed to keep the boy at home,
and happy, while she was gone.
With a courage which nothing but conscious
whiteness could have given her, the poor girl
braved for weeks the unhinged tongues of every
gossip, every anxious parent, every responsible
trustee in Gower. The retention of her position
raised a furious storm. Twice she wrote and
signed her resignation; twice and again Mr.
Hobbs (the queer little grocer, — do you remember
him?) — Mr. Hobbs and the doctor between
them over-urged, over-argued, overawed, — I do
not know which or how; but the resignation
never went in; the committee never asked for it.
The school thinned, dwindled. Gower grumbled,
growled. The poor little teacher paled and
trembled, but tied up her white face in her
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veil every day, and marched off bravely to her
post.
So far she has held it like a sentinel. At the
time of her child's death her desks were full
again, and the public knew it, and the public
went about its business, and let her alone. It
is some time since I have heard anything about
the safety of the public morals, or the future of
the infant mind. Alarmed parents have been
thrown off their guard, trustees and committees
have grown serene.
This change has been brought about on simple
business grounds.
“If you don't give it up,” said Mr. Hobbs,
“Gower will stand upon its own feet, and look
out for its p's and q's. It 's for Gower's advantage
to keep you in that grammar school, and
Gower will find it out.”
Apparently Gower found out, in Gower's own
convenient season, that, in spite of itself, the grammar-school
prospered. This seemed to be owing
primarily to Miss Trent's personal influence over
the children; and I must say this, now and
here, for Eunice, — her influence over children is
a remarkable one. This has surprised me,
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because she has exhibited so little instinctive maternal
fondness for her own child. I have sometimes
fancied that it was the conscious want of
this which has made her so studiously tender of
all children.
It is certain that her scholars have evinced,
both before and since her acknowledgment of
little Kent, an affection for her, and belief in
her, unusual both in amount and kind. She has
a rare moulding power, as nearly as I can judge,
and a patience in finish, not common to the trade;
has contrived to make herself interested in the
children from their souls to their stockings; has
become their confidante, friend; and —
“Has raised the standard of scholarship,” Dr.
Burtis adds, “forty per cent within a year.”
I have been told one other thing of Eunice,
which has not in the least surprised me, but has
given me a genuine unsanctified sense of individual
triumph over public opinion. Certain true-hearted,
clear-eyed mothers — relenting and respecting—
are whispering to each other that
the outcast girl, whom they virtuously passed
by upon the other side, has been diligent in
effecting that most intricate and delicate of
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educational “objects,” — the purity of a school
of little children.
“Beb has gone back, — yes,” said little Beb
White's mother yesterday to me. “And I
begged her teacher's pardon when I sent her,—
yes, I did. Folks may say what folks like!
I 've heard that as makes me ready — and not
ashamed of it neither — to trust my child to
Eunice Trent quick as I would to her own
mother, God bless her!”
Excitement and care together have worn upon
Eunice through the year. Her blind headaches
have increased, and she has a curious
pulse, which puzzles the doctor. Her child's
sickness found her weak, and left her weaker.
Just now she is unfit for work, and at home.
The relations between Eunice and her child
were singular; death has softened quite as much
as it has saddened them.
In every maternal duty she was faithful to
punctiliousness. Whether she blacked his shoes
or heard his prayers, she did it with an eye
single to little Kent. She taught him, caressed
him, watched him. She took extreme pains that
he should never be permitted to feel that she was
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ashamed of him; sometimes, I fancied, took him
to walk when the streets were crowded for no
other reason.
“The boy shall be as happy as he can,” she
sadly said.
The boy was, I think, happy enough; grew
just as fond of her as if he had been better loved,
poor little fellow! fondled her, trotted after her,
cried for her. Eunice never repelled, never neglected
him. Yet sometimes when he climbed up
into her lap and laid his little face against her
cheek, “to love mamma,” it made my heart ache
to see how patient, smiling, and still “mamma”
would sit; to notice the absence of all the little
silly, motherly ways and words that happy mothers
kiss into a baby's opening life.
Sometimes, when the child was asleep, she used
to sit and watch him with a certain brooding,
unloving, yet very anxious look, inexpressibly
mournful to me.
“Eunice,” I said one day, “can't we manage
to love the little fellow?”
“He shall not know it if I cannot,” she answered,
huskily. I did not know which to pity
more, the child or mother.
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He never did know it, poor baby! To the
last he clung to her, and cried for her; to the last
she watched and caressed him. When scarlet
fever of the worst type (it is supposed that
Eunice brought the infection from little Beb
White's sister, with whom she had watched)
struck the child down, his mother was all that
any mother could have been.
“Should have thought she was fond of him, if
I did n't know better,” said the doctor.
The disease was of the short, sure, malignant
kind. Dr. Burtis told us from the first that the
child would die, though he treated him with
great skill and kindness. Eunice, I think, never
believed this; expected him to live with that
dogged persistency which may indicate either
hope or fear with equal aptness. Once I found
her by his bedside upon her knees.
“For what are you praying, Eunice?” She
raised a perplexed face.
“I do not want him to die! I do not want
him to die! I was praying — I believe I was
praying that I might be able to pray for my
child's life.”
Did she? Who can say? It would be
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pleasant to think that the child took with him the
sweetness of one genuine, hearty, mother's longing
for his stay. I noticed, that, as he grew
sicker, Eunice's tenderness deepened in manifold
little ways; grew into a thing so like love that
the counterfeit, if counterfeit it were, rang like
coin.
The change — that awful thing which old
nurses call “the gray change” — struck the child
at midnight of the 21st. Eunice, exhausted with
watching, had fallen asleep upon my lounge.
I was reluctant to wake her, as she had not
slept for days and nights before; but the doctor
was imperative about it, and Christina, at his
direction, called and brought her in.
It was a bitter night, with a storm of wind that
had raged since morning, — one of those dry,
savage gales, which, as Mrs. Myrtle would say,
are “so depressing,” — just such a gale as that we
had — perhaps you remember — on the night
when Christina's father died. There has never
been a death in my house which did not occur
in a storm of wind.
I noticed that Eunice noticed it, as she came
in and looked at the child's face. She shivered
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a little, looking toward the window, drew her
shawl about her, pushed us all away, and managed
to lift the little boy upon her arm.
Upon her arm, without word, or sign, or struggle,
he died. She had pulled her loose hair down,
or it had fallen, so that it hid both the child's face
and her own.
For some moments after the doctor withdrew
his finger from the pulse, and signed to us that it
was all over, she sat motionless, hiding both
faces in her hair.
It may have come, as Nixy once said, “all
along of the grayness of the room,” or because
of the peculiar effect which that great white
cross, near which I sat, always has upon me;
but all that I could think, as we sat, the doctor,
Christina, and I, waiting for Eunice to move,
was of the tear-washed Feet which once were
wiped with a woman's hair. A Presence stronger
than death stepped in, or so I thought, between
Eunice and the little changed face upon her arm.
And I could see that she wept upon it, kissed it,
before she laid her dead child down before it, and
rose, — for her faith had saved her, — and went
her way in peace.
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She placed the little body with great gentleness
upon the pillow, and, with a mournful waste
of tenderness, covered it carefully, and tucked it
up, as if the boy had been going to sleep for the
night.
She looked round upon us all, — a little surprised
and frightened, it seemed, — went to the
window and listened for a moment to the long,
heavy, regular waves of wind that beat upon the
house. It sounded as if the tide of a mighty sea
were up about us; in the distance, where the
thick of the village broke it, there was a noise
like surf.
“It seems a dreadful night — for a baby — to
go out in,” said Eunice, under her breath.
She said nothing more. We led her away to
bed, and she slept till morning.
The wind, with daylight, went down; the
mighty tides ebbed away; the surf changed into
a little sweet sobbing, like that of a child who
cried for joy.
In the calm of the sunrise I went into little
Kent's room to see if all were well.
In some way, when we did not know it, his
mother had got in before me, and sat still and
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straight in a chair by the bed, looking the dead
child full in the face.
There was frost upon the windows, and a pink
light in the room, and the great cross, as white
as one, relieved against the other, shone out behind
her. I noticed that, by some chance, one
of Kent's little dressed had been hung upon its
arm, and that a tiny tin horse on wheels stood
upon the base of the solemn thing.
“He looks like me,” said Eunice, suddenly,
without turning her head. “Do you not think
so?”
The little still face, fine and fair with the fineness
and fairness of death, had indeed caught
something, especially about its dubious mouth,
of Eunice's delicate beauty.
“I wonder,” she went on, without waiting for
my answer, “if he will look like me in heaven.
I hope I shall be glad to see him!”
She got up and moved restlessly about the
room, went to the frosty window that the pink
light was melting, and remarked how the wind
had fallen. Coming back, she noticed the dress
and little horse, and where they were. She
stooped to remove them — her hand trembled
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— she put them back, and came and sat down
upon the bed, with quivering lips.
“My poor little baby! I might have loved it—
might have —”
There I heard her sob, and there I left her.
Jane Briggs! There is nothing in the world
to cry about; but that is no reason why one
should not cry if one wants to, I suppose?
though it is reason sufficient for not spoiling
several reams of one's best gilt-edged note-paper.
Therefore I am
Yours,
Margaret P.
P. S. — Did I tell you that we buried the child
in the old ugly churchyard — at least, I had
thought it rather ugly, till Eunice told me how
much she liked it, and how she wished that little
Kent should lie there — over on the purple hill
behind the house? M.
I find laid away with this letter, a little, sweet,
familiar song of Kingsley's. Shall I copy it as
it comes? It falls on the close of my chapter
like a chant at the end of a service of
prayers.
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“Clear and cool, clear and cool,
By laughing shallow and dreaming pool;
Cool and clear, cool and clear,
By shining shingle and foaming weir;
Under the crag where the ouzel sings,
And the ivied wall where the church-bell rings,
Undefiled, for the undefiled;
Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child!
“Dank and foul, dank and foul,
By the smoky town in its marshy cowl;
Foul and dank, foul and dank,
By wharf and sewer and slimy bank;
Darker and darker the farther I go,
Baser and baser the richer I grow;
Who dare sport with the sin-defiled?
Shrink from me, turn from me, mother and child!
“Strong and free, strong and free,
The floodgates are open away to the sea;
Free and strong, free and strong,
Cleansing my streams as I hurry along,
To the golden sands and the leaping bar,
And the taintless tide that awaits me afar,
As I lose myself in the infinite main,
Like a soul that has sinned and is pardoned again;
Undefiled for the undefiled,
Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child!”
-- 232 -- p735-241
CHAPTER XV. A PRAYER-MEETING.
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CHRISTINA was going to a prayer-meeting.
This may sound very much like a Sunday-school
book, — I spare the “cricket's eye” the
trouble of making the observation for me, — but
as long as it is a fact that Christina was going to
a prayer-meeting. I am compelled, for the sake
of history, at any cost, to make the statement. I
should add, perhaps, that it was a Sabbath night,
which may be considered as excusable of the circumstance
that Christina did go to the prayer-meeting.
When I further record that Mrs. Purcell
did not go to the prayer-meeting (being on
duty at the minister's, who had six babies, chicken-pox,
a sick wife, and the prayer-meeting on
his hands), and that Dr. Dyke Burtis did, I have
made three statements of no interest to anybody
unless I except Christina and the doctor, — and
that is no business of ours, because they were
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going to a prayer-meeting; but I have, I trust,
proved as clearly and briefly as possible, to the
most heretical mind, that, and why, Eunice, who
was too ill to go to a prayer-meeting on the
evening in question, was alone in the house.
“Not afraid?” said Christina, stooping to
kiss her, as the doctor's ring summoned her
half reluctantly away. “You look so lonely!
What is the book, — Herbert? It must be as
melancholy as — as going nutting, to read Herbert
of a winter's evening, all alone in the
house!”
Eunice smiled, but when Christina had gone,
and her laugh, tinkling as if a Swiss bell-ringer
were touching wedding music on it, had died
away from hearing, her smile faded quite. Perhaps
the reading was as “melancholy” as one
of Herbert's own “sowre-sweete dayes.” She
turned the leaf, half listening to Christina, and
when silence dropped slowly reread the poem.
“When blessed Marie wip'd her Saviour's feet,
(Whose precepts she had trampled on before)
And wore them for a jewell on her head,
Shewing his steps should be the street,
Wherein she thenceforth evermore
With pensive humblenesse would live and tread:
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“She being stain'd herself, why did she strive
To make him clean who could not be defil'd?
Why kept she not her tears for her own faults,
And not his feet? Though we could dive
In tears like seas, our sinnes are pil'd
Deeper than they, in words, and works, and thoughts.
“Deare soul, she knew who did vouchsafe and deigne
To bear her filth: and that her sinnes did dash
E'en God himself: wherefore she was not loth
As she had brought wherewith to stain,
So to bring in wherewith to wash:
And yet in washing one she washèd both.”
Eunice dropped from the Bach-like music of
the words into a strain of solemn thinking;
somewhat of her past, more of the coming
years
“Wherein she thenceforth evermore
With pensive humblenesse would live and tread.”
She was beginning of late to feel that she had
coming years of her own to live for, to be at
peace in, to take real solid human comfort in,—
the common comfort of common people; perhaps
just such content in living for life's own
sake, such consciousness of right to live and
worth in living, as if she were but one of “other
people,” after all. As if indeed the pretty poetry
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[figure description] Page 235.[end figure description]
were but prose: “We always may be what we
might have been.”
Since the death of her child, great quiet, both
from within and from without, had fallen upon
her. In place of the anxious, uneasy moods of
the half-hearted, disgraced young mother, a
solemn thankfulness that the little thing was
beyond their reach, and beyond the reach of the
world which would deal by the child as it had
dealt by her, filled and hushed her. The living
child had dishonored her, — not so much in the
eyes of the world, which was the smaller matter,
as constantly and inevitably in her own. The
little grave upon the purple hill, she felt, could
not disgrace her. Her sense of bitterness and
shame when (poor mother!) she said “my child”
was settling into a kind of pleased expectancy
because that holy thing, a dead baby, was
hers to find, in some certain, happy time, “all
over again,” she said to Christina. In fact, in a
healthy, honest way, with no attempted sentimental
grief and regretting, Eunice was glad
that her little boy had died. She never assumed
that the matter was otherwise with her;
never affected a sorrow which she could not feel,
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[figure description] Page 236.[end figure description]
had never felt. It was well with the child. It
was well with her. The Lord had remembered
them both. Why make a feint of mourning?
This evident state of mind in Eunice caused
some disapprobation in Gower. At least, Gower
would have had her wear crape and cry at the
funeral; though Gower owned that she had been
seen on still evenings climbing the purple hill to
little Kent's grave, “as bold as you please, and
never cared for nobody that saw her go.”
Yet, on the whole, the world — typified in
Gower — was beginning to be not all unkind
to Eunice Trent. Gower was no worse than
other places. “This is not so much a wicked
as a stupid world.” Christianity was not, thirty
years ago at least, “a failure.” And this woman
had lived so patient, brave, and pure a life! For
all her past she had been so sorry! For a right
to her future she had appealed with such persistent
trustfulness in the force of the Lord
Christ's example! Ever since disgrace had
taken her prisoner, she had held up such pleading
hands and such unspotted hands — to be “let
out”! Honest men and women were beginning
honestly to say, This is a good woman, after
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[figure description] Page 237.[end figure description]
all. There may be a place for her — even for
her — among us. It is a very “unusual case.”
She has had “peculiar advantages.” She has a
claim to “uncommon charity.” She has evinced
a “most penitent spirit.” Have you not observed
her great “humility”? Shall we take her in?
“I am much surprised,” wrote Mrs. Zerviah
Myrtle to friends in Gower, “to hear of the position
which little Nixy Trent is acquiring among
you. I was always much interested in the girl,
and I am rejoiced to learn that any one with
superior opportunities to mine has exerted a missionary
work upon the poor young thing. Her
case was so sad and depressing! You may be
sure that your charitable spirit will be wisely
expended and well rewarded.”
Eunice was thinking of this, wondering whether
any other than the “charitable” amenities of
society were likely ever to be offered to her, or
were indeed due to her, — wondering idly, for
she did not much care, — when some slight
noise, — the cracking of plaster, the creaking of
a door, — happening to strike her ear and her
musing, recalled her suddenly to the idea that
the house was rather “lonely — with Herbert —
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of a winter's evening,” and that she was ready
for company, and Christina.
It was not, however, at all time for Christina,
and Mrs. Purcell never got home early from the
minister's. (“I wish the minister had more salary
or fewer babies; mother will kill herself playing
his nursery-maid,” Christina used to say.) So
Eunice, with the common longing of lonely people
for light, — how many life-long sorrows have
been cured in ten minutes by kerosene! — brightened
Mrs. Purcell's astral-lamp; by which process
she covered her finger with lard-oil, and so forgot
whether she was lonely or not, and rose to rake
the coals.
As she did this, an unusual noise fell upon her
ear.
She laid down her poker, thinking that perhaps
the servants, early home, were locked out
at the back door, and stood, a lovely, listening
figure, full in the centre of the rich uncurtained
room; Margaret, for the sake of people “out
in the cold,” seldom draws her shades in the
evening.
The sound was immediately repeated; it was
just without the front window, and resembled the
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noise which a step upon the crusted snow would
make, though it was an irregular, uncertain noise,
like that of a step in a place where a step had no
business to be.
“Christina!”
Eunice called distinctly, but received no answer.
Thinking still that Christina, perhaps in a
freakish mood, was trying to look in or climb in
through the low window, or that Bridget was
drunk, and had mistaken the window for the
back door, she crossed the room with composure
to open it.
She lacked yet several feet of the window
when she stopped.
Pressed close against the glass, and looking in,
and looking at her, was the face of a man.
-- 240 -- p735-249
CHAPTER XVI. AND WHAT CAME OF IT.
[figure description] Page 240.[end figure description]
IT was a rough face.
Eunice saw as much as that, though the
man stood in the dark, and she in the lighted
room. She saw more than that, when she had
walked boldly and close to the window to get her
hand upon the lock.
She had about the courage of an average
sensible woman, — nothing more, perhaps. The
average sensible objection to an evening visit
from a burglar when one is alone in the house
was strong within her, when she saw how rough
a face it was with which she had to deal.
When she had reached the window, when her
hand was upon the lock, when she would have
drawn the shade, when she saw what face it was
with which she had to deal, a terror quite unlike
the average sensible fear struck her through, and
struck her still.
-- 241 --
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She stood so still that her ugly visitor, taking
courage, perhaps, drew close to her, with only
the glass (Eunice thought, confusedly, how thin
and shining and firm the glass was) between
them, and rapped upon it with his knuckles, —
the knuckles were very grimy.
“Well?” said the fellow, through the glass.
“Well,” said Eunice, in a dull, thick voice.
“Shall I come in, or 'll you come out?”
Eunice sprang the lock sharply.
“Hush! I will come out.” She pointed, as
she spoke, to the piazza door. The man — or
boy, for he seemed to be scarcely more than a
boy — nodded, and moved around the house,
crunching the snow heavily underfoot. It seemed
to Eunice's excited fancy that the neighbors must
hear him for half a mile away.
Eunice, instead of locking the piazza door,
opened it, shut it after her, crossed the piazza,
and stepped out upon the snow. The moon was
up, and all the night was white. The young
fellow, as he came around the corner of the house,
was sharply relieved, both in face and figure,
against the broad blue shield of snow.
He was ragged and dirty. A slouched, soiled
-- 242 --
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hat half covered very ill-kempt red hair, and
nearly shaded his face from view. He jerked
up his hat, however, partly in salutation, partly
because it obscured his sight, as he came up to
the spot where Eunice stood. His coat was out
at the elbows; his boots were out at the toes;
his hands, as I said, were grimy; an odor of ill
tobacco pervaded the air about him.
Eunice, standing with the full moonlight on
her bare head, her fine lips parted, her eyes wide
open, her slender, sick hands (Eunice always
showed physical exhaustion first in her hands)
folded and trembling, — Eunice saw, as the thief
in Paradise might have seen himself dead upon
his cross, — the father of her child.
Oddly enough, the only thing of which she
thought, for the moment, was a theological discussion
which the doctor and Mrs. Purcell had
yesterday concerning the finer distinctions between
retribution and discipline.
It did not occur to her, I think, that she had
not deserved this; she was a little puzzled as to
the metaphysical grounds on which the Lord had
decreed it.
The young man, who had been leaning against
-- 243 --
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one of the piazza pillars, waiting apparently for
her to speak, and apparently somewhat ill at ease,
broke the silence by saying, shortly, —
“Well, Nix!”
“What do you want of me, Dick?” Eunice
spoke with considerable self-command in her
sweet, even, cultivated voice. Dick listened
sharply to it, and something in it made him dully
uncomfortable.
“Ain't over-glad to see me, be ye, now?
Did n't mean no offence! Thought mebbe ye
would.”
“What do you want?” repeated Eunice, in
the same manner as before.
“Don't know as I want nothin',” said Dick,
in a disappointed, embarrassed tone. “I thought
mebbe as I had n't done very well by ye, and,
seein' as I 'm just about ready to live a decent
life and settle down, I 'd hunt ye up and marry
ye; but, by gracious, Nix!” — Dick looked across
the white light between them with a puzzled
face, and jerked his thumb in the direction of
the wonderful southern skies, where the moon
hung quite by itself, — “I 'd as soon think of
marryin' that!”
-- 244 --
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“Yes, yes,” said Eunice, mechanically, “just
as soon.”
“What with the white, and the shine of it, and
the — the distance — miles of it, you know,”
mused Dick, “and the feeling that there warn't
never a ladder in the world made high enough
to reach the thing. Never should ha' known ye
in the world, Nix, if 't had n't ben for hearin' of
your name about town, and where ye was, and
then for havin' the chance to make sure o't at my
leisure through the winder-panes, — never should!
I 've ben on the lookout for ye, too, this long
while back. Come across old Lize once, with a
blue panoraymy and Tim in tow, — tried to get
it out of her whether she 'd stumbled 'cross ye
in her travels; but the old woman shut me up
quicker 'n gunpowder. I took the notion, at the
time o't, as she knew. Where 's the child, Nix?”
The abruptness of the question startled Eunice;
she was shivering from the cold, which, in
her unprotected state, was extreme; and she was
faint from the effort to speak gently to the fellow.
Dick was as good as other Thicket Street
boys; meant her no harm, — at least if he were
not angered. Both her sense of charity and of
-- 245 --
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policy induced her to treat him with composure
and kindness.
So, feeling very weak and very much confused,
she staggered a little against the side of the
house. Dick instinctively threw out his hands to
keep her from falling. She thrust them away
with a gesture of inexpressible loathing. She
could not help it.
“I beg your pardon,” said Dick, sullenly stepping
back. “I see I 'm not fit to stand talking
here to a lady like you 're grown to be. I 'd better
go, Nix.”
“Yes, you had better go,” said Eunice, recovering
herself, — “you had better go, unless you
wish to do me a very great harm, which I do
not think you do, Dick.”
“Meant no offence! No. Told you so!”
interrupted Dick. “Meant no offence noway;
Mebbe I 'd better ha' let you alon' altogether;
thought I was doin' the fair thing by ye, that 's
all. I ain't the good-for-nothing I was in old
times; I thought I 'd like to kind o' get you off
my conscience, and spruce up and live like better
folks, — besides, I liked you, Nix, first-rate!”
“But 't ain't no odds,” continued Dick, after
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a pause, — “'t ain't no odds about the child
neither.”
“I understand, I understand,” Eunice answered,
with increasing gentleness. “I know
you don't mean to be a bad boy, Dick. I know
you did n't mean to give me the — pain — you
have given me to-night. But it can't be helped.
God led me one way, you another. We are
different, Dick, — don't you see? — different now,
forever.”
She spoke in a simple, motherly way, as if
she were explaining something to a child. The
young fellow received what she said with a perplexed
and patient face.
“You 're right enough on that. Would n't
have come nigh ye if I 'd known it afore as clear
as I know it now. I thought a lady was a born-thing
like, afore. But, for aught I see, you 're as
fine as any on 'em. I don't see through it,” —
Dick pulled his hat down over a pair of as dull,
good-natured, uncomfortable eyes as ever attacked
an old relentless problem, — “I don't see
through it though! Here 's you and here 's me;
growed up in Thicket Street like 't other folks as
grows up in Thicket Street; all of a piece both
-- 247 --
[figure description] Page 247.[end figure description]
on us; if either on us stood a chance agin
t' other, it was me by all odds (which hung about
me while I was huntin' of ye up). Now, here 's
me, and here 's you!” — Dick glanced across
the shining breach, which all the lighted night
seemed helping to widen between the two figures,
typical as if Thorwaldsen had made a
basso-relievo of them against the shining sky, —
“here 's you, and here 's me! Good luck got
you, — I won't say but you needed good luck,
Nix, — and here ye be, and here, for aught I ken
see, ye 'll continer to be, and no ketchin' up with
you in this world or t' other. Now if a fellar 'd
got his heart sot on ketchin' up, — which I won't
deny I ain't so partikkelar 'bout, — and there,
agin, why ain't I?” continued poor Dick, drowned
in his own metaphysics. “When folks are sot on
ketchin' up, and other folks are sot they won't
be ketched up with, and the God as made 'em
looks on and — and, as you might say, bets on
the innings for the 2.40 creetur — Well! I don't
mean no disrespect to him in especial,” broke off
Dick; “but I can't say as I see it. Howsomever,
that 's no concern o' yourn, and it 's plain
to see it would do ye no kindness to be seen
-- 248 --
[figure description] Page 248.[end figure description]
talkin' to me by neighbors and such. I 'll be
more keerful how I put myself in your way
another time. 'T ain't likely as ye 'll ever be so
put about agin. But I meant to do the fair thing,
if 't was late in the day,” repeated Dick, as he
turned to go.
Eunice, alive in the ears as a panther, — listening
for neighbors, for passers, for Christina, for
all the world to come and see her standing where
and how she stood; sick at heart, as one may
suppose that only the pure who have struggled
against tide for purity can ever be in tainted air,—
found herself, after and above all, growing
very sorry for Dick.
“Perhaps,” she said, trembling very much,
“you would like to know where — the little
boy — is?”
“Not unless you choose to tell,” said Dick.
“Everybody knows,” replied Eunice, simply.
“Perhaps you would like to go and see it —
over there.” She pointed to the corner of the
purple hill, where the light lay very solemnly.
“Dead — hey?”
Dick stood, slouched and still, with his eyes
turned toward the old churchyard and the climbing
moon.
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“Thankee,” said he, after a pause; “mebbe
I 'll go over and make the little fellow a call.
Don't s'pose I 'm fit for 't, but I might be wuss,
an' I guess no harm 'll come on 't. Good by,
Nix; and I 'll not grudge ye the luck, mind, in
sight o' that.”
Dick shuffled away, through the limpid light,
up the purple hill, among the solemn snows
where the baby lay, “ketching up” at last with
the little grave, where Eunice thought she saw
him, after a pause, kneel down and remove his
slouched hat from his head.
She stood quietly enough till this, in the full
light against the pillar; then all the world reeled.
She managed to crawl into the house. When
Christina came home from the prayer-meeting,
she found her on the parlor floor nearly senseless
with what Dr. Burtis pronounced a clear
case of neuralgia at the heart.
When they had left her — feigning sleep —
alone in her gray room with her white cross that
night, she got up, locked her door, and walked
her narrow floor, with only intervals of respite,
till morning, being, she afterwards said, “too
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tired to lie still.” Perhaps there never was a
creature more thoroughly “tired” in brain and
heart and body than Eunice Trent that night.
The mere solitude of such an experience as hers
must, it has often seemed to me, be the weariest
thing in the world. Nothing exhausts like loneliness,
and nothing equals the loneliness of sin,
since nothing but the loneliness of sin is beyond
the comprehending sympathies of Him who was
“without sin among” us. In the bitterest of
human pains, — remorse, — we must bear, as we
incurred, alone. He indeed has agreed to “remember
sins and iniquities no more forever”;
but shall we — can we — forget? Perhaps there
is in guilt a secret nature like the secret of
perpetual motion: grasp the conditions, the result
grasps you.
The thing which had happened to Eunice was
as natural as the multiplication-table; indeed,
she could but feel that Dick had let her off very
easily. She wearied her excited fancy through
the night by conceiving of advantages which he
might have taken, of which she had read or
heard as taken in cases similar to her own,
which would have turned all her patiently
-- 251 --
[figure description] Page 251.[end figure description]
acquired peace a bitter thing till death. Whether
of the Lord's mercy, or whether of the boy's
good heart, she had escaped great perils with
little hurt.
Suppose the neighbors had seen her standing
there; suppose the fellow had dogged her steps,
wrung money from her, used her name lightly
about the town, done any one of a dozen things
which had been done in such circumstances
many times before?
She felt confident, quite, of his sincerity, when
he agreed that she should not “be so put about
agin.” Thicket Street Nix had understood the
boy well enough, — a good-hearted, careless fellow, —
and Miss Trent felt little, if any, concern
lest she were misinterpreting him now. In this,
time proved her to be correct. From the moment
when she turned and left him kneeling in
the moonlight on the purple hill, Eunice never
saw her child's father again. It took, I think, a
little of the loathsomeness of the sight of him
away, that she had seen him last just so and
there, — changed her sense of individual suffering
into a kind of solemn charity for poor Dick;
which, as time softened her memory of the whole
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affair, she felt that she could “well afford” (as
M. Jacques would say) to bestow on the miserable
kneeling figure which was never to “ketch up.”
Yet she passed, that night, hours of the kind
which make old men and women out of young
ones fast. The events of the evening appeared,
she said afterwards to Margaret, “to have taken
her up by the roots.” She seems to have undergone
a stirring, settling process, like fair water
into which a filthy thing is thrown. Life in
Thicket Street, sharp and gaudy and long as
Lize's “panoraymy,” unfurled all night before
her; people, scenes, incidents, which she had for
years forgotten, started up from the gray corners
of her room, and stalked about her. Like the
angel in Miss Ingelow's Story of Doom, she descended
into hell with shining feet that floated,
but did not touch the ground, — but it was hell.
She did not grow to feel herself to be aggrieved
in this experience. The Lord could not help it.
It was mathematics, not affliction.
But I remember once to have heard her say, long
after, — some discussion, I have forgotten what, between
Margaret and myself arousing the words, —
“Save a lost man his memory; he will need
no `eternal nunishment' besides.”
-- 253 -- p735-262
CHAPTER XVII. THE LITTLE DOCTOR.
[figure description] Page 253.[end figure description]
“EUNICE!”
“Christina!”
“I 've done it!”
“What?”
“I — don't — quite know.”
“What is it like, — ink on your wrappers, or
grief to your squash-pies?”
“It is more like — getting engaged, I suppose,”
said Christina, thoughtfully, closing Eunice's door,
which she had held half open, and sitting down
upon the edge of the bed. Eunice laid down
the pile of compositions which she was correcting,
and repeated — in such a grave, peculiar
way, so unlike the way in which almost any
woman of her years would have said it — the
word, —
“Engaged — to be married, you mean?”
“Engaged to be married, I suppose I mean.”
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“I never should have thought of such a
thing!” exclaimed Eunice, and she never would.
“Neither should I,” pursued Christina, shaking
her head very much as the doctor used to shake
his over a discouraging patient; “I never should
have thought of it in the world! I am sure I
don't see why he did. But then he did, and it
can't be helped, as I see.”
“Whom are you going to marry?” asked Eunice,
after a pause.
“Dyke Burtis, I suppose. Whom else should
I marry?”
“Very true. There is nobody else.”
Eunice made this remark with perfect gravity,
and Christina received it as gravely, except that
her eyes twinkled a little, that Eunice did not
notice how grave they both were about it. However
unusual a remark for one young woman to
make to another, it was, nevertheless, an eminently
sensible one.
Christina was about to do that extraordinary
and humiliating thing — which only the lovely
young women who do not get into the novels
ever do — called “taking up with your first
offer.” And Christina, sitting there, all pink and
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[figure description] Page 255.[end figure description]
white except for the shine of her hair and the
stars in her eyes, was a very lovely young woman
indeed! She would have twinkled like her own
eyes, shone like her own hair, in any society
where chance had dropped her; was one of just
those winsome, heartsome creatures who would
set a man dreaming as sweetly and surely as
scarlet poppies, — a girl that your young fellows
would frame by their firesides forever (whether
she knew it or not), as young fellows nowadays
frame Miss Lunt's lovely lithographed “Future”
to expend their spare sentiment upon. That
picture, by the way, is a better portrait of
Christina, as she was in the days of which I
am writing, than any which the daguerreotyping
art of twenty-five years ago could secure
of her.
And yet, until Dr. Dyke Burtis that day, down
in the parlor, had asked her, gravely and abruptly,
as was the doctor's way, to marry him, Christina
had never had a “love-affair.” As Eunice
said, there “was nobody else” in Gower to have
a love-affair with.
“You love the doctor?” asked Eunice, slowly.
“As nearly as I can make out, I love the
-- 256 --
[figure description] Page 256.[end figure description]
doctor. He says I do. It seemed a great pity
to contradict him. He knows a great deal
more than I do. Now, I never should have
known that in the world, if I had n't been told
of it!”
“You love him enough to go away with him —
into his home?” continued Eunice.
“Considering mother has you, and he lives
across the street — on the whole — yes, I think
I should be a happier woman in Dr. Dyke Burtis's
home than anywhere outside of it. If he did
not live in Gower and across the street, I think
I might — if it could not possibly be helped —
go as far as Atlas with him,” said Christina, with
great gravity.
“This seems very strange!” mused Eunice.
It did seem to her strange beyond speaking.
She looked into Christina's straightforward,
proud young eyes — they had grown very proud
all in an hour! — till her own dimmed. The
sacredness of that white thing, a happy woman's
happy love, confused her like a new language.
She did not know any words to use in speaking
of it. It was something foreign, far, beyond seas
of things, from her life. She did not understand
-- 257 --
[figure description] Page 257.[end figure description]
how to put out a finger's weight and touch the
distant, glimmering thing: —
“A shadowy isle of Eden,
Framed in purple spheres of sea.”
So, not knowing anything else to say, she said,
after a long silence, only, —
“Kiss me, dear.”
She felt glad — a little more glad, it seemed,
than she had ever felt before — that Christina
was willing to kiss her.
She held the girl's face down and touched her
ripe lips tremulously, — kissed her eyes, her hair,
her forehead.
Christina winked.
“Are you anointing Aaron, Eunice?” she
said.
Eunice felt that she would like to say something
to the doctor, but knew neither what nor
how. The next time that she saw him, she
somewhat hesitatingly, and in silence, held out
her hand. She did not feel sure that he would
care to be “congratulated” by a Thicket Street
charity patient, and that they both remembered
Thicket Street just then was evident in the
meeting eyes of both. Dyke Burtis esteemed
-- 258 --
[figure description] Page 258.[end figure description]
her, trusted her, but Dyke Burtis was a man, and
one can never count on a man when it comes to
the matter of “chesing hem a wif.” It would
not be unnatural if he should feel far more keenly
than Christina that there was something incongruous,
grating, in ever so slight an assumption
on the part of a woman with such a history as
Eunice Trent's that she — like any other woman—
had right and fitness to step into the holy
place where happiness like his abideth. She
might take the shoes from off her feet, but that
would rather reveal than conceal how scarred
and wayworn the sad feet were.
So at least she thought, and so she felt greatly
comforted when the little doctor, stopping only
to stroke his streaked beard, — which he would
have stopped to do if he were dying, — grasped
her hand like a man who had got something now
which he needed and had missed, — looked her
for a moment full in the eyes with that peculiar
deprecating reverence which newly happy people
(of a certain kind) are apt to carry in the presence
of a sad face, — coughed, and left her suddenly.
Eunice was comforted and surprised; so little
idea had she at that time, or indeed at any other
-- 259 --
[figure description] Page 259.[end figure description]
time, what a singularly consecrated, set-apart,
sacred place she was taking in Margaret Purcell's
household. She slipped, in her later years, into
its purest joys, griefs, hopes, fears, plans, and purposes
as quietly as the little nun in Miss Procter's
legend, for whom Blessed Mary “kept the
place” till she came back; none knowing, indeed,
that she had ever gone away — to carry
flowers every morning to the Virgin Mother at
her altar.
-- 260 -- p735-269
CHAPTER XVIII. THE “METHODY TUNE. ”
[figure description] Page 260.[end figure description]
SOME lives are like pond-lilies, — you think
that you have gathered all the gold and
snow of them, and when you go to look for your
treasure, behold a little plain brown folded bud!
The story of Eunice Trent seems to close
away from my touch in very much this shy, unornamented
fashion; veined and delicate, pearled
and tinted, indeed, like the sheath of the sleeping
lily, but, like that, a suggestion of color, a
hint of wealth.
They were not the miracles, but the maxims,
of Christianity which saved her; and things
befell her not miraculously, but in an ordinary,
quiet manner, no more of interest to the romance-searcher
than the Golden Rule. Her
life was in most respects as uneventful as washing-day,
especially in her latter years. It took
you, and you it, quite as a matter of course. It
-- 261 --
[figure description] Page 261.[end figure description]
never startled you or met you at an unexpected
corner. She “lived along,” as we say, taught
her school, took care of Margaret, made Christina's
wedding clothes, had a class in Sunday
school, watched with sick people, had what is
called a “kind way about her,” commanded the
confidence, enforced the respect, due to a common
virtuous woman's common virtuous life.
When I have said this, I seem to have said a
very simple thing, and Eunice Trent was capable
of very complex things; had certain heroic,
stony elements in her which make women famous
in pestilence, war, famine, which, had
chance so befallen her, would have given to her
history a tragic or triumphant chapter, in which
he who runneth might have read her possibilities.
But to those of us who knew and loved her, in
the very simplicity of her patient and peculiar
life the peculiarly patient victory of it lay. We
who lifted the waxen eyelids and touched the
golden crown of the dreaming flower knew them
sweeter that they were shielded, and rarer for
their drooping.
To have lived out her disgrace would have
been a far more rapid process, if a kind of
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[figure description] Page 262.[end figure description]
stake-and-cross experience had given her opportunities
of social martyrdom; if that capacity of self-abnegation
(marked in Eunice) which shames
down shame itself in almost any history, but to
which the consequences of a woman's sin yield
last and hardest, had had outlets of noticeable,
memorable action.
This, I think, she felt keenly at the time of a
certain visit which she paid, of her own fancy,
and alone, to Thicket Street.
This was immediately after she had, in accordance
with the doctor's orders (which her increasing
attacks of spasmodic pain at the heart rendered
imperative), finally and reluctantly left her
desk at school; at which the Board had protested,
and the children cried, to Margaret's complete
content.
So, perhaps, she felt a more marked than usual
vacancy of life and purpose on the shimmering
sunny morning when she stepped into a sooty
yellow omnibus in South Atlas, striking as near
as she might by wheels for her old home.
“Thicket Street? H—m—m,” the driver
peered at her through his little loop-hole with
curious eyes. “Hain't made a mistake, have
-- 263 --
[figure description] Page 263.[end figure description]
ye? Thicket Street. H—m—m. Yes. Well.
Don't go very nigh Thicket Street — our line
don't. Let you off at the nighest p'int, since
it 's a Land of Liberty, — yes; but it 's not what
you may call an over-pleasant place for a lady.
Sure there 's no mistake?”
“Quite sure,” said Eunice, who — whether from
the stentorian tones of the driver, or from his
fierce black whiskers, grown inches since she saw
them, which choked up the loop-hole and hung
through like a feather duster when he tried to
talk to her — had recognized No. 23.
23 did not, however, recognize in Eunice, in
her careful black, the poor little tramp who had
once stolen a night's lodging in his omnibus.
“The best stuff aboard,” he thought, making
a driver's shrewd inventory of his passengers
through the loop-hole.
Eunice had been but a few moments one of
23's passengers when 23 pulled up at a street
corner for a little dumpy woman, with a little
dumpy girl beside her, and a very little, very
dumpy baby in her arms.
“Bundle in there, and be quick about it!”
said 23.
-- 264 --
[figure description] Page 264.[end figure description]
The little woman, who did not seem as much
offended as might have been expected of her at
this somewhat free-and-easy manner of being addressed
by your omnibus-driver, bundled in, and
bundled the baby in, and bundled in the little
girl, and when they had all bundled into a seat
together Eunice saw that it was Marthy Ann.
“Got the young uns shod?” roared 23, through
the loop-hole.
“Good gracious me, Dan! I 'm not deef, and
there 's no need of tellin' the passengers all as I
went into town for,” said Marthy, blushing as
prettily as ever a little woman of her size blushed
in the world. “Though I did buy the baby a
pair of red ankle-ties, and, thinks says I, I 'll give
'em to her to carry and keep her still, and what
should she do but try to swallow 'em, and one of
'em sticking down her throat like to strangle her,
and when I pulled it out, there it is, all turned
violet in a streak across the toes, — the mischief!”
“Give her t' other,” suggested 23. “Make her
suck 'em both alike.”
“I thought of that,” said Marthy; “a violet
foxing would n't be bad.”
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Marthy was so grave and pretty and happy
about this bit of chatter, and she seemed, as she
used to seem, so fond of her new baby, and 23 so
fond of her, that Eunice felt her heart warmed
through by Marthy almost as much as had poor
Nixy, listening to her lullaby on the kitchen
lounge. She drew her veil and watched the
children behind it; the little girl sat close beside
her, and attracted by the whiteness of her hand,
which lay, half gloved, upon her lap, she put up
her little finger and felt it over shyly. Eunice
raised the child's hand gently to her lips (wondering
if such a happy little matron as Marthy
would be quite willing that she should kiss her
child), and slipped a tiny silver piece (as large as
the hand would hold) into it, as she laid it back.
“Hush!” she whispered, “can you tell your
mother something for me, if I ask you to?”
The child nodded, — a dumpy little nod, but
emphatic.
“And not tell her — mind! — till I have got
out of the omnibus?”
The little girl shook her head shrewdly.
“I want you then to tell her, — and you
can have the silver, — I want you to tell your
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mother, God bless her, and God bless the baby,
and God bless you!”
“How funny! What for?”
“Because your mother is a good woman — a
good woman; and once, long ago, she was kind
to a poor little girl to whom nobody else was
kind — but just your father there; and so I
want you to tell her, for it is easy for you to
remember: God bless them, and God bless the
baby, and God bless you!”
“Might as well bless 'em in a heap, it would n't
take so long,” said the little miss, with an economical
air; “but I 'll 'member.”
Lest the young lady should not have “'membered,”
and if, by any of those chance winds
such as carry seeds to islands, 23 should ever see
this page, he is hereby requested to deliver to
Marthy the message left by the “best stuff
aboard” on the sunny, shimmering morning
when the baby added violet foxings to her scarlet
shoes.
When 23 had dropped her, according to promise,
at the “nighest p'int” to Thicket Street, Eunice
veiled herself with care, feeling rather too
weak and weary to meet the risk (if risk there
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were) of random recognition in Thicket Street,
than ashamed that Thicket Street should recognize
her.
Her heart was full as she strolled up and down
the miserable place. Its foul ditches, its dwarfs
and cripples, its shrieking children, the shamed
and drunken tip of the roofs, the concert-saloons,
Jeb's, No. 19, the codfish on the wharves, the
nauseated sunlight, the very chickweed in the
chill triangular shadows, came into her vision
dully, with at first no more than the familiar
horror of a favorite nightmare. She very seldom
afterwards made reference to the hour which she
spent in the place, but I have understood that
she said, shuddering, once to Margaret: —
“It looked just as I have seen it every night
of my life since I came out of it, and just as I
expect to see it every night till I die.”
It was not until Jeb, casting accounts on his
nails in his doorway, with a legion of ghostly
handbills fluttering about his ponderous figure,
touched his cap to her, and a ragged little Peters
boy, some relative of poor Ann's (she knew him
by the feeble, flexile family mouth), begged coppers
of her, that she roused herself from her
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somnambulistic walk to what had been from the first
her secret object in coming to Thicket Street, —
the discovery of the whereabouts and belongings
of old Monsieur Jacques.
But when she walked, paying little attention
to her surroundings, dreamily through the guitar-shop
door, she walked over, not Monsieur Jacques,
but a mop with a little old Scotch woman at the
end of it, who asked her shortly — I refer to the
woman, not the mop — what was her business,
if she pleased? and instructed her to gang awa'
fra out the soapsuds an she had a care for sich
dainty-shod feet as them she bro't wi' her, delayin'
folks of a busy morn.
“I beg your pardon,” said Eunice, stepping
back; “but I came to find — can you tell me
where I can find an old guitar-maker who —
there are guitars about: perhaps he is here, ill?
I should like, if I may, to go and see him.”
“Gang awa',” said the Scotch woman, scrubbing
the floor violently, and without looking up, —
“gang awa' and welcoom, gin ye 'll tell him the
mess o' clearin' up he 's made me. Look a' that
for a job o' sweepin' — an' that — an' the dust
all alang o' the instremeents, for a decent body to
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be clearin' up for a deid tenant, as caed for
water-gruel thro' a ten-day fever into the bargain!”
“Dead!” echoed Eunice.
“Deid,” repeated the old woman, nodding.
“Deid just this day week, at nine o' the nicht;
an' mony 's the time I 've warned him o' the consequences,
to a landlady o' partikkelarity, o' refusin'
to dust the instremeents in case o' sickness,
pereel, or sudden death, — fra' all o' which, good
Lor', deliver us!”
“Dead — a week ago — poor old Jacques!
He used to be careful enough to dust his guitars,”
said Eunice, sitting down upon a water-pail in
the doorway (the only seat offering), which the
Scotch woman had turned bottom upwards to
dry, and taking a sad survey of the little guitar-shop;
old Jacques's red wig stared emptily at
her from a high shelf, — dusty, like the “instremeents”;
and a pair of torn pink kid gloves, likewise
very dusty, lay upon a little cricket which
Nixy used to fancy drawing to the old man's feet
when he sang of l'amour or l'Empereur, especially
when he talked of “Rue Richelieu” or Dahlia.
Beyond these and one old favorite fiddle, cracked
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now and kicked under the counter, nothing in
the little shop looked familiar to her; and the
confusion of the landlady's pails and brooms gave
a cold, unnatural air to the room, like a dead face
dressed by hired hands. Eunice could not help
thinking how gently Dahlia would have swept
and dusted the dreary place, and how the
“femme blanche” would have cried over the
pink kids, and the red wig, and the cracked
fiddle; what a lonesome dying the poor old man
must have made of it, — “ten day of water-gruel”
and the Scotch woman!
“He fell into drearsome ways,” said the landlady,
scrubbing up her words into a great many
syllables, “afore he died, — moped and pined like;
played nae music and sang nae sangs, an' allooed
the dust to set and choke him, as ye see. It 's
my opinion,” added the Scotch woman, solemnly,
“that he choked to death — of dust — that 's it;
choked. Your doctors may talk o' fevers to me
an they list; I 've seen folks choked o' dust afore
now, in judgment on their slovensome ways an'
manners. I 've seen it! I 've got a bill o' the
instremeents to pay me for my pains an' trouble
alang o' the auld mon's undertakin' to be sick
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an' dee upo' my han's; an' sae ye ken they maun
be cleaned up, worse luck to him!”
“Were you alone with him when he died?”
asked Eunice; “and did he suffer long? I will
make it worth your while to stop and tell me all
you can remember.”
“He suffered lang enow,” said the woman, lifting
her eyes — and Eunice thought what hard
eyes they were to be the last that old Jacques
should see — for the first time, and taking a
keen measure of her visitor's dress and manner.
Having done this, she stopped scrubbing, wiped
her hands, sat down on one of her brooms, and
proceeded, — “suffered lang enow, an' bad enow,—
pains in the head, legs, heart, pains here an'
there an' allwheres; so he lies and shuts his eyes,
an' once he caes for a bit Bible or Testament or
prayer-buik like, I couldna quite mak' it out;
but there wasna one in the shop, sic a heathen
was he; an' when I offered out o' charitee to
cover the kirk prayers o' my ain an' lend it till
him for a space, if he wouldna hurt it, he shook
his head decided, an' wouldna hear o't. As
fast as he grew worse he took to singin'; an' at
the last, — at nine o' the clock this day nicht, in
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a fearsome, still kind o' nicht, a' munelicht an'
stars (it 's alway my luck to sit up wi' a corpse
by munelicht, which is a bad sign — a bad
sign!), — in a nicht a' mune an' stars, an' still,
he sang as you mought hear him across the street,
an' sang as he war bent on singin' o' himsel' to
sleep like, — of which the noise was a great inconvenience;
an' sae singin' an' playin' in the
air wi' his fingers on guitars as nae mon but
himsel' could see, he dropped off, plump! wi' the
stroke o' nine.”
“Could you understand what he sang? What
were the words?” asked Eunice.
“Some o' his heathenish French jabber,” answered
the landlady, coldly. “I couldna mak'
head nae tail o't, only o' the words as he dropped
off wi', — an' them, I tak' it, was Methody, —
`Depths,' I made it, `Depths o' mercy! Depths
o' mercy!' o'er an' o'er, till it war like to ring in
a body's head fore'er, — wi' his eyes quite open,
an' them fingers playin' an' feelin' o'er the
guitars as nae mon else could see nor feel.
`Depths o' mercy!' that war it; then follerin'
after for a bit, —
`Can there be? — can there be?
Depths of mercy! — still —'
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an' there, as I was a tellin' you, he dropped
off at the stroke o' nine precise, an' I puts the
prayer-buik (when I 'd covered it) aneath his
chin, and I watches the corpse by munelicht,
despite the luck, for there was naebody else to
keep things decent, an' a' the nicht, though ye
mayna believe it, I know as them guitars as
nae livin' eye could see went soundin' an' singin'
through the air, an' the tune they sang war the
Methody tune; an' doon in the shop — I 'd take
my oath o't — doon in the shop, at twelve o'
the nicht, I steppin' doon to see that all war well
locked up, the guitars upo' the counter sounded
there before my eyes, an' nae mortal hand to
touch 'em, — an' they sounded a' the Methody
tune at me, till I grew cauld to my shoes, an' I
stood in the munelicht amid the awesome soundin',
a wishin' that I hadna been aye too busy
an' poor an' fretsome an' cross to hae treated the
auld mon mair kindly like, for he was a peaceable
auld mon, an' ne'er did harm to naebody.”
The woman rubbed her cold eyes with a mopend, —
there were no tears in them; tears seemed
to have frozen out of them years ago, but they
were full of a chilly kind of discomfort, — and
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fell, upon that, briskly to scrubbing Nixy's little
cricket, kicking away into the corner, as she did
so, one of the dusty old pink gloves. Eunice
picked it up and carried it away with her.
She had scarcely paid the Scotch woman for
her trouble, and left the guitar-shop, and was
making her way in haste, sick and sad at heart,
up and out of the wretched street, when she
came upon a miserable figure of a woman lying
half in the gutter, half upon the filthy sidewalk,
with her head upon her arm. Some children
were using her as a target for apple-cores and
pebbles; a drunken fellow, in passing, kicked
her heavily out of his way. The woman lifted
her head as Eunice went by, and Eunice stopped.
She hesitated for a moment, trembling and
sick, wondering how and if she could touch her,
then, suddenly stooping, laid her ungloved hand
upon the woman's cheek in a very gentle manner.
“Moll! Poor Moll!”
Moll stared stupidly.
“Look up here; do you know me? — Nixy
Trent?”
Moll crawled up a little from the gutter, and
sat upon her heels, staring still.
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“Nix! Who the devil made a lady of you?”
“God's folks,” said Eunice, giving the first
answer that occurred to her, in Nixy's old
phrase, certain, at least, that Moll would understand
it.
“God's folks indeed!” sneered Moll, most miserably;
“I 'd like to see God's folks, nor yet their
Master, trouble themselves about me! I 'm sick.
Struck through the lungs. Consumption. See,
don't ye?” — she held up her face, emaciated
and livid till it was shocking to see, full in the
pallid sunlight, — “I 'm sick; and I 'm dying,
what 's more. Can't crawl no further 'n the gutter
now. Last week I could get up the street.
It 's all the comfort I get, — the sun on me.
You 'd never guess, if you died for it, how cold it
is in the attic. Once a day I crawl down stairs—
this way — on my hands. At night I crawl
up. I 'm dying like a dog, and starving too, —
and damned besides. How many o' `God's folks'
do you know as would take me in and let me
go to hell from their fine houses, — curse 'em!
I tell you I 'm dying!”
She fell down again weakly, and lay with her
haggard face upon her arm, and her hair in the
mud.
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“There are places. There are folks,” said
Eunice, earnestly, continuing to drop into Nixy's
old, simple, trustful language. “I told you so,
Moll, long ago. I tried it. I found them. If
you want to die like a decent woman, I promise
I 'll find you a place to do it in.”
“I 'd like to die in a bed with a white cover
to it — just washed,” said Moll, slowly. “Don't
know as I 'm partikkelar about nothin' else. I 'd
as lieves do it one place as t' other. I 'd go to a
'sylum or somewheres, if there was sun, and
folks to get me there. Don't make no odds.
I 've heard they lay you out neat — in white
shrouds — at the 'sylum. I want to die in something—
clean,” added Moll, trying to move a little
out of the ditch. “This mud sticks to you so!
And I 've got nobody to bring me water. And
the well 's dirty, if I had. But it don't make no
odds! Got to get used to going without water in
t' other world, I take it. Will I be here day after
to-morrow? Yes, — in the sun, — in the mud
here, — if I ain't got to the thirsty place afore
then; and thankee for your trouble, Nix. No,
don't stop to get me water now — nor move me.
I 'd rather sleep. You 'll draw a crowd if you
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stop here. Good by, and good luck to ye! I 'll
watch for ye — if ye 'll find a white spread — and
the sun stays out so long. There! Go, and be
quick about it!”
Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle had the control of a bed
“with a white spread — just washed,” in the
hospital of the Magdalen Home, and Moll, at
Mrs. Purcell's petition, went into it.
She lingered in it, in a stupid, dozing condition,
for several weeks, paying little or no attention
to nurse or doctor, visitor, chaplain, or trustee;
but, waking suddenly one rainy morning, she
asked for “Nix.” It happened to be inspectionday,
and Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle happened to be at
the Home inspecting, and so it happened that
“Nix” was identified and sent for.
“Shall I not read to you, or — pray — or perhaps
sing a hymn?” Mrs. Myrtle, sitting down
by Moll's bedside, asked, after the messenger
had departed to bring Eunice. “She cannot get
here before night, and if you were to grow worse,
you know, and no religious assistance —”
“I 'll hang on till Nix comes,” interrupted
Moll, wearily turning away her face.
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“But if you are not prepared for the great
change,” urged Mrs. Myrtle, looking much distressed.
“Must run my chances,” said Moll, doggedly.
“I 'm too sick to hear religion, — much obleeged
to you. That dress of yourn rustles all kind o'
through my head. Is that a prayer-book you 've
laid along down there on my feet? It 's awful
heavy to me.”
The prayer-book was not heavier than Mrs.
Myrtle's heart as she rustled, sighing, away.
“Religious effort among the masses,” she sadly
said to the chaplain of the institution, “is not,
I am becoming convinced, at all my forte. I
have no knack at it; I am no more apt in it than
I should be in making bread. I find it extremely
depressing!”
The chaplain (a modest man with a shrill
voice) took off his spectacles, and shrilly said, —
“Make pin-cushions, ma'am!”
“Pin-cushions, my dear sir?”
“Pin-cushions,” said the chaplain; but he
modestly put on his spectacles, and modestly
said no more.
It was, as Mrs. Myrtle had said that it would
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be, quite night before Eunice, in the driving
storm, reached the Home.
Moll, in her white bed, lay in a stupor; had
not spoken, they said, for more than an hour
past; her hand only gave signs of life; it moved
up and down feebly across the coverlet, pulling
off imaginary specks and shreds, feeling, apparently,
to see how “clean” it was. Eunice, after
waiting for a time in silence, to see if she would
not speak, roused her at last by saying, —
“You wanted me, Moll?”
“Nix? Yes. How wet you are!” Moll opened
her sunken eyes. “It was a rainy night to come
out in. And I only wanted you to ask you — if
you don't mind — to let me take hold of your
hand. There!” She took the hand which
Eunice held out to her, and laid it up between
her own, against her cheek, and, so lying, slept
again.
“Was there nothing more, Moll?” asked Eunice
presently.
“Nothing more,” said Moll.
By and by she whispered a word or two, which
Eunice, by careful listening, — the rain beat so
upon the windows, — caught.
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“Is there any of them — the folks — God's
folks you tell on — the other side?”
“The other side?”
“The other side of this which is going to happen
to me, — the other side of layin' here an'
dyin'. If I thought there was —” said Moll.
She broke off there, and neither spoke nor
listened afterwards, except that once, Eunice,
feeling a slight stirring of the cheek which lay
against her hand, and bending her own down
close upon it, heard, or seemed, or dreamed that
she seemed to hear, the echo, the breath, the
shade, of another whisper, —
“If I thought there was —”
-- 281 -- p735-290
CHAPTER XIX. THE NINTH OF AUGUST.
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THE 9th of August, 18—. Many people will
remember the day as the occasion of the
angriest and most destructive thunder-shower
known, either in Atlas or in the region round
about, for several years on either side of the
date.
A few — residents of Gower, or friends of residents
in Gower — will remember the day for those
more especial reasons which induce me to bring
it into the reader's notice.
Of these, I may plainly and at once specify
Christina Purcell's marriage.
I object to closing so grave and old-fashioned
a story as this with a wedding. And if it had
not been the gravest and most old-fashioned of
weddings, I am sure I should have forbidden the
banns.
It was old-fashioned. No cards, no “
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reception,” no satin nor shimmer nor shine, nor trails
nor tears, nor faints, nor fans, nor chignons, —
only Christina in white muslin, and the doctor in
white kids, and the parlor in white flowers, and
the minister and Margaret and Eunice and I
to see. Christina would n't have had so much as
the minister, if it had n't been decided best, “out
of courtesy,” to ask him. “Such a pity mother
can't marry us!” she said.
The doctor had waited a good while for her,
or she for him, or perhaps it was a little of both;
what with Margaret's ill health, and the little
doctor's slowly gained footing in his slow profession,
and planning, and considering, and waiting
till it was “quite best,” as Margaret herself
at last decided for them, they had been
“promised,” as the old folks in Gower called
it, nearly four years when their wedding-day
came.
The doctor was beginning to look old, — so
much older than Christina that only the stars in
the young wife's eyes saved Margaret at times
from some persistent, unromantic, motherly fears
for the permanency of her daughter's happiness,
from wondering, as indeed she half hinted once
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to Eunice, “whether, if Christina had lived anywhere
else than in Gower, she would have loved
and married somebody who would not be an old
man before she was!”
“I suppose I cannot understand these things,”
said Eunice, with a certain reverence in her voice
which moved Margaret much; “but when I look
into Christina's face, I always feel as if nobody
in all the world, but just Dyke Burtis here,
could have made her his wife to-day; not if all
the world had shown its best and manliest side
to her, and not if all the world had tried to win
her love. Is that romantic?” she added, with a
slight smile.
Perhaps it was, but it was very sweet romance
to feel about one on one's wedding-day, and Eunice's
sweet, still face shone full of it, — as
Christina fully felt and well remembered, all day
long.
And though it was a grave little wedding, —
perhaps, indeed, could not be otherwise with
just such a face as Eunice's there, — how could
it be a sad one, with the shining face to light
it?
It was noticed, through the day, that Eunice
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was somewhat more than commonly pale, and
that, though she was busy, in and out, here and
there, up and down, smiling much, that it was
she who tied the flowers, who trimmed the
rooms, who dressed and veiled and gloved and
kissed Christina, and stopped her (so Christina
says) on her way down stairs, to lead her into
the gray room, and close the door, and fold her
in her arms, and move her lips a little as if
she would have spoken; yet, speaking not a
word, unwound her arms, unlatched the door,
and led her, by the hand all the way, down
stairs, — that through all the day she was very
silent.
The doctor came upon her once suddenly, in
a corner of the piazza, where she had crept to be
out of notice, and where, though Christina was
calling her in a pretty little flurry about the
tuberoses, and though Margaret was wondering,
in the hall, who was going to cut the cake, she
sat with her back to the door, and her head
dropped in a peculiar manner, which attracted
his attention. As he drew near, he noticed that
she unclasped her hands, which had been belted
about her knees, as was her way when enduring
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[figure description] Page 285.[end figure description]
sharp pain, raised her bent body from over them,
and made a motion like wringing them, which she
checked when she saw him.
“You are ill — worse?” he asked her.
“It is nothing — nothing at all — no worse
than — not much, at least — I am quite well now.
Let me go. They seem to be calling me. Do
not notice me to-day. They are all so happy!
Do not!”
She sprang up with her bright, white smile,
and found the flowers, and cut the cake, and, as
before, was in and out, and up and down, and
here and there; and either the doctor did not,
in accordance with her wish, notice her again
that day, or he forgot her. I presume he forgot
her. One can pardon a man anything on his
wedding-day.
It has been well remembered that Eunice on
this day, for the first time for many years, removed
her black dress. This was done at Christina's
urgent wish. She had come into Eunice's
room one night a little while before the wedding,
after Eunice had gone to bed, and, “taking advantage
of the dark, or she never should have
dared,” she said, had whispered, —
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[figure description] Page 286.[end figure description]
“You 'll not wear black, dear, to marry me
in?”
“What should I wear?” asked Eunice, after
a pause. “Is it not proper?”
“Not,” said Christina, with decision, “unless
you will agree to wear white kids at my funeral.”
Eunice smiled, but Christina, through the dark,
could see how faintly.
“Well,” she said, patiently, — “the day is
yours. Anything you want, I suppose, if you
won't ask —”
“White, Eunice. That is just what I must
ask. I must see you, for once in my life, and for
this once, in a white dress.”
“All white?”
“All white, from head to foot, — as white as
your face this minute looks through the dark.”
Which was very white indeed.
“What will your mother say?” asked Eunice,
after a pause.
“Mother? She proposed it! Mother?”
“Once I asked her — years ago — if I might
wear a little white jacket like yours. She said
no. But do not tell her that I remembered it.”
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Christina never did.
Eunice chose and wore a solid, soft, snowy
merino, close at the throat and wrists, and hanging
heavily to the floor; an odd dress for a wedding,
“but as perfect as the tea-roses,” said Margaret.
I can remember well, that when she came down
stairs, and slowly in among us, where we stood
chattering and rehearsing, that there was not
one of us who could speak; that Margaret tried
and failed; that Christina tried, but only kissed
her; that Eunice ran her eye quickly from one
to another, over us all, in doubt, or dread, or
hesitation of some kind, which must have abated
with the lifting of an eyelid; but I cannot recall
the features of her face, or their expression.
Something about her dazzled me.
Christina was married in the afternoon, took
tea with the rest of us at home, tied on her hat
and walked off to the doctor's house a little after
the setting of the sun. We made the plainest,
homeliest, heartiest day of it that ever was made
of a wedding-day. And we had the heartiest,
sunniest kind of a day, — alight and warm to
the very tips of the trembling leaves, and serene
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to the brown lips of the earth. There was nothing
at all — unless, perhaps, a little low haze in
the west — that could have indicated or intimated
the coming tempest. Though certain of
the weather-wise were heard, indeed, when the
storm had passed, to say that the sun set in an
ill fashion, the like of which old experienced eyes
had not witnessed for years.
However that may be, it was in a gorgeous
fashion; and we sat on the piazza, after tea, to
watch it, chatting and hushing as the moods took
us, and as the flush and frown of the sky allowed, —
Christina and the doctor, like two children,
at Margaret's feet; Eunice, a little apart
and alone, upon the piazza steps.
She sat quite in the light. The little hop-vine
shadows tripped about her, peered over her shoulder,
peeped into her eyes, stood on tiptoe over
her soft hair, but held up their gray fingers and
motioned each other back, and left not so much
as a footmark on her.
“They don't dare,” whispered Christina, “that
dress shines so! Why, see! — the color; where
does the color come from?”
As Christina spoke, the creamy surface of
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Eunice's dress changed from white to gold, to pallid
pink, to rose, to red, and, looking up, we
saw that all the world lay bathed in redness.
White lilies in the garden held up their faces
for it. The purple hill, with its crown of graves,
laid its cheek solemnly against it. The town,
the church, the distance, took the tint, and all
our little hop-shadows blushed. The low purple
haze, grown solid and slaty, had just caught the
ball of the sun, and there was something singular
in the effect of such a mass of color of which we
could not touch or see the source.
“It is like a prison on fire!” said the doctor.
“It makes me think of the calyx of a great
flower,” mused Christina.
“It is more like a drought than either,” laughed
Margaret.
“I don't altogether like it,” continued Christina,
shaking her head. “It is as solemn as the
Book of Isaiah, and I don't understand it any
better. It makes me feel as if I had been buried
rather than married. Eunice! — look at Eunice;
how still she sits!”
She sat indeed still, with her eyes turned away
to the burning hills, so that we could not see them.
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“Eunice, think aloud for us! Come! What
do you make of such a sky as that, to come to-day,
of all days in the year!”
“It is like,” said Eunice, without turning her
head, — “it is like the blood of Jesus Christ,
which cleanseth from all sin.”
She spoke under her breath, as one very much
awed; and when Christina's chatter broke, and
no one answered her, — perhaps because no one
of us felt, just then, worthy, — she rose and
walked away from us, through the tall ranks of
garden lilies, through the gap in the little broken
fence beyond, up the purple hill, and into the
crown of graves, — drenched, as she went, in the
redness: —
“.... an awful sign and tender, sown on
Earth and sky.”
At the top of the hill, where she stopped, she
seemed to plunge into it, and she stood, or
seemed to stand, quite still, until the scarlet sea
rippled in paling waves away, and the dusk
set in, and we could see her white dress only,
very dimly, through the gloom of the brooding
storm.
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Margaret waited for her upon the piazza after
the rest of us had gone away; and Eunice,
coming wearily up the steps, crept in her old
way to her feet, and laid her head upon her
lap.
“So they have left us,” said Margaret, gently
stroking her hair, “all to ourselves, to finish life,
Eunice.”
“To finish life,” repeated Eunice. “Yes. I
wish —”
“What do you wish?”
“An old fancy. You talked me out of it at
the time. I suppose it is impossible. But I
suppose I shall always want to go back.”
“You mean the Thicket Street plan?”
This was a “fancy” which Margaret had with
difficulty “talked her out of” at the time when
poor Moll Manners dared the risk of finding
God's folks upon the other side of her clean
white death-bed at the Home.
“Yes. I could not go without you. We could
not, I suppose, either of us, have gone without
Christina. But now that she is in her own home
with her own work, and now that you and I have
none —”
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“What would you do in Thicket Street?”
asked Margaret, thoughtfully.
“Save souls!” said Eunice.
Over this blunt, old-fashioned, orthodox answer,
Margaret mused a little in silence.
“There would be peculiar difficulties, peculiar
annoyances for you in ever so successful a missionary
life in Thicket Street. Have you considered
that?”
“O yes! quite considered all of that.”
“You would find it no obstacle?”
“No obstacle. Perhaps altogether the reverse
of an obstacle. I should like to pass along into
some other hands, before I die, a little part of all
that I have borrowed from you, — the long-suffering
and the patience, the trust and tenderness;
the doing what no other woman that I ever knew
would do; the courage and the watching and
the praying and persistence which,” said Eunice,
with much emotion, “would save the world if the
world were Thicket Street!”
“Hush, dear!” Margaret kissed the words off
from her lips, and, feeling how cold they were,
and how they trembled with the excitement of
the day, bade her talk no longer, and said that
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they would consider what she had been saying at
another time.
She watched Eunice climb the stairs with her
little lamp in her hand, thinking how feebly she
walked, and following the slip and bend of her
thin fingers upon the balusters. On the landing
she stopped, and, shading her eyes a little with
her hand, looked smiling down, started, Margaret
afterwards thought, to speak, but said nothing,
and, still smiling, shut the gray-room door.
A fold of her heavy white dress fell out and
caught in the latching. She opened the door,
drew it in, and shut the door again.
The great tempest of the 9th, perhaps, had
been slowly building the sky over with black bulwarks
for several hours, but it sprang fire upon
Gower with great suddenness a little before midnight.
Half the signs in the town went down.
A steeple fell, and another tottered. Railings,
roofings, fences, door-posts, showered all the air,
and the stoutest trees in the old town fell, before
Gower had time to take off its nightcap and look
out of the window. All of this any “old inhabitant”
will tell you as well as I.
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Most of this Margaret and I, roused by a fearful
crash and yet more fearful glare in our very
ears and eyes, confusedly saw or felt, while we
were more particularly conscious that the huge
elm in front of the house had fallen, and lay —
scathed, smoking, torn — prone across the gardenful
of white lilies, and hard by the windows
of the gray room.
“I don't know but we are all going to perish
here! This is horrible!” cried Margaret, groping
for her matches. “Do let us die in the light,
at least, and together. Eunice! How dark it
grows! Eunice, Eunice! She does not hear.
We must get to her, or she to us. Hear that!”
As she spoke, such a shock struck the house
as made her stagger where she stood in the
middle of the room, and the match in her hand
went out. She struck another, — it flashed and
darkened; another, every match in the room, —
every match in the room went out; and it was
as blue and ghostly and ugly a sight as ever I
saw.
Margaret threw down her match-box, and
groped her way, with an exclamation of horror,
through the dark to the gray room.
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“Eunice —” she pushed open the door; but
when Eunice made no answer, she stopped and
called me, and we went both of us in together.
When the storm was over, and the stars out,
and the lighted house grown still, we could see
how quietly she lay, — not struck by the storm,
as we had thought, but sunk in her soft white
dress, as she had fallen hours ago, at the foot
of the great wooden cross, and with her arms
around it.
THE END.
Back matter
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Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 1844-1911 [1870], Hedged in (Fields, Osgood & Co., Boston) [word count] [eaf735T].
