Mercy Philbrick's Choice Part 1

Mercy Philbrick's Choice.

by Helen Hunt Jackson.

I.

_To one who found us on a starless night, All helpless, groping in a dangerous way, Where countless treacherous hidden pitfalls lay, And, seeing all our peril, flashed a light To show to our bewildered, blinded sight, By one swift, clear, and piercing ray, The safe, sure path,--what words could reach the height Of our great thankfulness? And yet, at most, The most he saved was this poor, paltry life Of flesh, which is so little worth its cost, Which eager sows, but may not stay to reap, And so soon breathless with the strain and strife, Its work half-done, exhausted, falls asleep._

II.

_But unto him who finds men's souls astray In night that they know not is night at all, Walking, with reckless feet, where they may fall Each moment into deadlier deaths than slay The flesh,--to him whose truth can rend away From such lost souls their moral night's black pall,-- Oh, unto him what words can hearts recall Which their deep grat.i.tude finds fit to say?

No words but these,--and these to him are best:-- That, henceforth, like a quenchless vestal flame, His words of truth shall burn on Truth's pure shrine; His memory be truth wors.h.i.+pped and confessed; Our grat.i.tude and love, the priestess line, Who serve before Truth's altar, in his name._

Mercy Philbrick's Choice.

Chapter I.

It was late in the afternoon of a November day. The sky had worn all day that pale leaden gray color, which is depressing even to the least sensitive of souls. Now, at sunset, a dull red tint was slowly stealing over the west; but the gray cloud was too thick for the sun to pierce, and the struggle of the crimson color with the unyielding sky only made the heavens look more stern and pitiless than before.

Stephen White stood with his arms folded, leaning on the gate which shut off, but seemed in no wise to separate, the front yard of the house in which he lived from the public highway. There is something always pathetic in the attempt to enforce the idea of seclusion and privacy, by building a fence around houses only ten or twelve feet away from the public road, and only forty or fifty feet from each other. Rows of picketed palings and gates with latches and locks seem superfluous, when the pa.s.ser-by can look, if he likes, into the very centre of your sitting-room, and your neighbors on the right hand and on the left can overhear every word you say on a summer night, where windows are open.

One cannot walk through the streets of a New England village, without being impressed by a sense of this futile semblance of barrier, this touching effort at withdrawal and reticence. Often we see the tacit recognition of its uselessness in an old gate shoved back to its farthest, and left standing so till the very gra.s.s roots have embanked themselves on each side of it, and it can never again be closed without digging away the sods in which it is wedged. The gate on which Stephen White was leaning had stood open in that way for years before Stephen rented the house; had stood open, in fact, ever since old Billy Jacobs, the owner of the house, had been carried out of it dead, in a coffin so wide that at first the bearers had thought it could not pa.s.s through the gate; but by huddling close, three at the head and three at the feet, they managed to tug the heavy old man through without taking down the palings. This was so long ago that now there was n.o.body left who remembered Billy Jacobs distinctly, except his widow, who lived in a poor little house on the outskirts of the town, her only income being that derived from the renting of the large house, in which she had once lived in comfort with her husband and son.

The house was a double house; and for a few years Billy Jacobs's twin brother, a sea captain, had lived in the other half of it. But Mrs. Billy could not abide Mrs. John, and so with a big heart wrench the two brothers, who loved each other as only twin children can love, had separated. Captain John took his wife and went to sea again. The s.h.i.+p was never heard of, and to the day of Billy Jacobs's death he never forgave his wife. In his heart he looked upon her as his brother's murderer. Very much like the perpetual presence of a ghost under her roof it must have been to the woman also, the unbroken silence of those untenanted rooms, and that never opened door on the left side of her hall, which she must pa.s.s whenever she went in or out of her house. There were those who said that she was never seen to look towards that door; and that whenever a noise, as of a rat in the wall, or a blind creaking in the wind, came from that side of the house, Mrs. Billy turned white, and shuddered. Well she might. It is a fearful thing to have lying on one's heart in this life the consciousness that one has been ever so innocently the occasion, if not the cause, of a fellow-creature's turning aside into the path which was destined to take him to his death.

The very next day after Billy Jacobs's funeral, his widow left the house.

She sold all the furniture, except what was absolutely necessary for a very meagre outfitting of the little cottage into which she moved. The miserly habit of her husband seemed to have suddenly fallen on her like a mantle. Her life shrank and dwindled in every possible way; she almost starved herself and her boy, although the rent of her old homestead was quite enough to make them comfortable. In a few years, to complete the poor woman's misery, her son ran away and went to sea. The sea-farer's stories which his Uncle John had told him, when he was a little child, had never left his mind; and the drearier his mother made life for him on land, the more longingly he dwelt on his fancies of life at sea, till at last, when he was only fifteen, he disappeared one day, leaving a note, not for his mother, but for his Sunday-school teacher,--the only human being he loved. This young woman carried the note to Mrs. Jacobs. She read it, made no comment, and handed it back. Her visitor was chilled and terrified by her manner.

"Can I do any thing for you, Mrs. Jacobs?" she said. "I do a.s.sure you I sympathize with you most deeply. I think the boy will soon come back. He will find the sea life very different from what he has dreamed."

"No, you can do nothing for me," replied Mrs. Jacobs, in a voice as unmoved as her face. "He will never come back. He will be drowned." And from that day no one ever heard her mention her son. It was believed, however, that she had news from him, and that she sent him money; for, although the rents of her house were paid to her regularly, she grew if possible more and more penurious every year, allowing herself barely enough food to support life, and wearing such tattered and patched clothes that she was almost an object of terror to children when they met her in lonely fields and woods, bending down to the ground and searching for herbs like an old witch. At one time, also, she went in great haste to a lawyer in the village, and with his a.s.sistance raised three thousand dollars on a mortgage on her house, mortgaging it very nearly to its full value. In vain he represented to her that, in case the house should chance to stand empty for a year, she would have no money to pay the interest on her mortgage, and would lose the property. She either could not understand, or did not care for what he said. The house always had brought her in about so many dollars a year; she believed it always would; at any rate, she wanted this money. And so it came to pa.s.s that the mortgage on the old Jacobs house had come into Stephen White's hands, and he was now living in one half of it, his own tenant and landlord at once, as he often laughingly said.

These old rumors and sayings about the Jacobs's family history were running in Stephen's head this evening, as he stood listlessly leaning on the gate, and looking down at the unsightly spot of bare earth still left where the gate had so long stood pressed back against the fence.

"I wonder how long it'll take to get that old rut smooth and green like the rest of the yard," he thought. Stephen White absolutely hated ugliness. It did not merely irritate and depress him, as it does everybody of fine fastidiousness: he hated not only the sight of it, he hated it with a sort of unreasoning vindictiveness. If it were a picture, he wanted to burn the picture, cut it, tear it, trample it under foot, get it off the face of the earth immediately, at any cost or risk. It had no business to exist: if n.o.body else would make way with it, he must. He often saw places that he would have liked to devastate, to blot out of existence if he could, just because they were barren and unsightly. Once, when he was a very little child, he suddenly seized a book of his father's,--an old, shabby, worn dictionary,--and flung it into the fire with uncontrollable pa.s.sion; and, on being asked why he did it, had nothing to say in justification of his act, except this extraordinary statement: "It was an ugly book; it hurt me. Ugly books ought to go in the fire." What the child suffered, and, still more, what the man suffered from this hatred of ugliness, no words could portray. Ever since he could remember, he had been unhappy from the lack of the beautiful in the surroundings of his daily life. His father had been poor; his mother had been an invalid; and neither father nor mother had a trace of the artistic temperament. From what long-forgotten ancestor in his plain, hard-working family had come Stephen's pa.s.sionate love of beauty, n.o.body knew. It was the despair of his father, the torment of his mother. From childhood to boyhood, from boyhood to manhood, he had felt himself needlessly hurt and perversely misunderstood on this one point. But it had not soured him: it had only saddened him, and made him reticent. In his own quiet way, he went slowly on, adding each year some new touch of simple adornment to their home.

Every dollar he could spare out of his earnings went into something for the eye to feast on; and, in spite of the old people's perpetual grumbling and perpetual antagonism, it came about that they grew to be, in a surly fas.h.i.+on, proud of Stephen's having made their home unlike the homes of their neighbors.

"That's Stephen's last notion. He's never satisfied without he's sticking up suthin' new or different," they would say, as they called attention to some new picture or shelf or improvement in the house. "It's all tom-foolery. Things was well enough before." But in their hearts they were secretly a little elate, as in latter years they had come to know, by books and papers which Stephen forced them to hear or to read, that he was really in sympathy with well-known writers in this matter of the adornment of homes, the love of beautiful things even in every-day life.

A little more than a year before the time at which our story begins, Stephen's father had died. On an investigation of his affairs, it was found that after the settling of the estate very little would remain for Stephen and his mother. The mortgage on the old Jacobs house was the greater part of their property. Very reluctantly Stephen decided that their wisest--in fact, their only--course was to move into this house to live. Many and many a time he had walked past the old house, and thought, as he looked at it, what a bare, staring, hopeless, joyless-looking old house it was. It had originally been a small, square house. The addition which Billy Jacobs had made to it was oblong, running out to the south, and projecting on the front a few feet beyond the other part. This obtrusive jog was certainly very ugly; and it was impossible to conceive of any reason for it. Very possibly, it was only a carpenter's blunder; for Billy Jacobs was, no doubt, his own architect, and left all details of the work to the builders. Be that as it may, the little, clumsy, meaningless jog ruined the house,--gave it an uncomfortably awry look, like a dining-table awkwardly pieced out for an emergency by another table a little too narrow.

The house had been for several years occupied by families of mill operatives, and had gradually acquired that indefinable, but unmistakable tenement-house look, which not even neatness and good repair can wholly banish from a house. The orchard behind the house had so run down for want of care that it looked more like a tangle of wild trees than like any thing which had ever been an orchard. Yet the Roxbury Russets and Baldwins of that orchard had once been Billy Jacobs's great pride, the one point of hospitality which his miserliness never conquered. Long after it would have broken his heart to set out a generous dinner for a neighbor, he would feast him on choice apples, and send him away with a big basket full in his hands. Now every pa.s.sing school-boy helped himself to the wan, withered, and scanty fruit; and n.o.body had thought it worth while to mend the dilapidated fences which might have helped to shut them out.

Even Mrs. White, with all her indifference to externals, rebelled at first at the idea of going to live in the old Jacobs house.

"I'll never go there, Stephen," she said petulantly. "I'm not going to live in half a house with the mill people; and it's no better than a barn, the hideous, old, faded, yellow thing!"

If it crossed Stephen's mind that there was a touch of late retribution in his mother's having come at last to a sense of suffering because she must live in an unsightly house, he did not betray it.

He replied very gently. He was never heard to speak other than gently to his mother, though to every one else his manner was sometimes brusque and dictatorial.

"But, mother, I think we must. It is the only way that we can be sure of the rent. And, if we live ourselves in one half of it, we shall find it much easier to get good tenants for the other part. I promise you none of the mill people shall ever live there again. Please do not make it hard for me, mother. We must do it."

When Stephen said "must," his mother never gainsaid him. He was only twenty-five, but his will was stronger than hers,--as much stronger as his temper was better. Persons judging hastily, by her violent a.s.sertions and vehement statements of her determination, as contrasted with Stephen's gentle, slow, almost hesitating utterance of his opinions or intentions, might have a.s.sumed that she would always conquer; but it was not so. In all little things, Stephen was her slave, because she was a suffering invalid and his mother. But, in all important decisions, he was the master; and she recognized it, and leaned upon it in a way which was almost ludicrous in its alternation with her petulance and perpetual dictating to him in trifles.

And so they went to live in the old Jacobs house. They took the northern half of it, the part in which the sea captain and his wife had lived.

This half of the house was not so pleasant as the other, had less sun, and had no door upon the street; but it was smaller and better suited to their needs, and moreover, Stephen said to his mother,--

"We must live in the half we should find it hardest to rent to a desirable tenant."

For the first six months after they moved in, the "wing," as Mrs. White persisted in calling it, though it was larger by two rooms than the part she occupied herself, stood empty. There would have been plenty of applicants for it, but it had been noised in the town that the Whites had given out that none but people as good as they were themselves would be allowed to rent the house. This made a mighty stir among the mill operatives and the trades-people, and Stephen got many a sour look and short answer, whose real source he never suspected.

"Ahem! there he goes with his head in the clouds, d.a.m.n him!" muttered Barker the grocer, one day, as Stephen in a more than ordinarily absent-minded fit had pa.s.sed Mr. Barker's door without observing that Mr.

Barker stood in it, ready to bow and smile to the whole world. Mr.

Barker's sister had just married an overseer in the mill; and they had been very anxious to set up housekeeping in the Jacobs house, but had been prevented from applying for it by hearing of Mrs. White's determination to have no mill people under the same roof with herself.

"Mill people, indeed!" exclaimed Jane Barker, when her lover told her, in no very guarded terms, the reason they could not have the house on which she had set her heart.

"Mill people, indeed! I'd like to know if they're not every whit's good's an old shark of a lawyer like Hugh White was! I'll be bound, if poor old granny Jacobs hadn't lost what little wit she ever had, it 'ud be very soon seen whether Madam White's got the right to say who's to come and who's to go in that house. It's a nasty old yaller sh.e.l.l anyhow, not to say nothin' o' it's bein' haunted, 's like 's not. But there ain't no other place so handy to the mill for us, an' I guess our money's good ez any lawyer's money, o' the hull on 'em any day. Mill people, indeed! I'll jest give Steve White a piece o' my mind, the first time I see him on the street."

Jane and her lover were sitting on the tops of two barrels just outside the grocery door, when this conversation took place. Just as the last words had left her lips, she looked up and saw Stephen approaching at a very rapid pace. The unusual sight of two people perched on barrels on the sidewalk roused Stephen from the deep reverie in which he habitually walked. Lifting his hat as courteously as if he were addressing the most distinguished of women, he bowed, and said smiling, "How do you do, Miss Jane?" and "Good-morning, Mr. Lovejoy," and pa.s.sed on; but not before Jane Barker had had time to say in her gentlest tones, "Very well, thank you, Mr. Stephen," while an ugly sneer spread over the face of Reuben Lovejoy.

"Woman all over!" he muttered. "Never saw one on ye yet thet wasn't caught by a bow from a palaverin' fool."

Jane laughed nervously. She herself felt ashamed of having so soon given the lie to her own words of bravado; but she was woman enough not to admit her mortification.

"I know he's a palaverin' fool's well's you do; but I reckon I've got some manners o' my own, 's well's he. When a man bids me a pleasant good-mornin', I ain't a-goin' to take that time to fly out at him, however much I've got agin him."

And Reuben was silenced. The under-current of ill-feeling against Stephen and his mother went steadily on increasing. There is a wonderful force in these slow under-currents of feeling, in small communities, for or against individuals. After they have once become a steady tide, nothing can check their force or turn their direction. Sometimes they can be traced back to their spring, as a stream can: one lucky or unlucky word or deed, years ago, made a friend or an enemy of one person, and that person's influence has divided itself again and again, as brooks part off and divide into countless rivulets, and water whole districts. But generally one finds it impossible to trace the like or dislike to its beginning. A stranger, asking the reason of it, is answered in an off-hand way,--"Oh, everybody'll tell you the same thing. There isn't a soul in the town but hates him;" or, "Well, he's just the most popular man in the town. You'll never hear a word said against him,--never; not if you were to settle right down here, and live."

It was months before Stephen realized that there was slowly forming in the town a dislike to him. He was slow in discovering it, because he had always lived alone; had no intimate friends, not even when he was a boy.

His love of books and his pa.s.sionate love of beauty combined with his poverty to hedge him about more effectually than miles of desert could have done. His father and mother had lived upon fairly good terms with all their neighbors, but had formed no very close bonds with any. In the ordinary New England town, neighborhood never means much: there is a dismal lack of cohesion to the relations between people. The community is loosely held together by a few accidental points of contact or common interest. The individuality of individuals is, by a strange sort of paradox, at once respected and ignored. This is indifference rather than consideration, selfishness rather than generosity; it is an unsuspected root of much of our national failure, is responsible for much of our national disgrace. Some day there will come a time when it will have crystallized into a national apathy, which will perhaps cure itself, or have to be cured, as indurations in the body are, by sharp crises or by surgical operations. In the mean time, our people are living, on the whole, the dullest lives that are lived in the world, by the so-called civilized; and the climax of this dulness of life is to be found in just such a small New England town as Penfield, the one of which we are now speaking.

When it gradually became clear to Stephen that he and his mother were unpopular people, his first feeling was one of resentment, his second of calm acquiescence: acquiescence, first, because he recognized in a measure the justice of it,--they really did not care for their neighbors; why should their neighbors care for them? secondly, a diminished familiarity of intercourse would have to him great compensations. There were few people in the town, whose clothes, whose speech, whose behavior, did not jar upon his nerves. On the whole, he would be better content alone; and if his mother could only have a little more independence of nature, more resource within herself, "The less we see of them, the better," said Stephen, proudly.

He had yet to learn the lesson which, sooner or later, the proudest, most scornful, most self-centred of human souls must learn, or must die of loneliness for the want of learning, that humanity is one and indivisible; and the man who shuts himself apart from his fellows, above all, the man who thus shuts himself apart because he thinks of his fellows with pitying condescension as his inferiors, is a fool and a blasphemer,--a fool, because he robs himself of that good-fellows.h.i.+p which is the leaven of life; a blasphemer, because he virtually implies that G.o.d made men unfit for him to a.s.sociate with. Stephen White had this lesson yet to learn.

The practical inconvenience of being unpopular, however, he began to feel keenly, as month after month pa.s.sed by, and n.o.body would rent the other half of the house in which he and his mother lived. Small as the rent was, it was a matter of great moment to them; for his earnings as clerk and copyist were barely enough to give them food. He was still retained by his father's partner in the same position which he had held during his father's life. But old Mr. Williams was not wholly free from the general prejudice against Stephen, as an aristocratic fellow, given to dreams and fancies; and Stephen knew very well that he held the position only as it were on a sort of sufferance, because Mr. Williams had loved his father.

Moreover, law business in Penfield was growing duller and duller. A younger firm in the county town, only twelve miles away, was robbing them of clients continually; and there were many long days during which Stephen sat idle at his desk, looking out in a vague, dreamy way on the street below, and wondering if the time were really coming when Mr. Williams would need a clerk no longer; and, if it did come, what he could possibly find to do in that town, by which he could earn money enough to support his mother. At such times, he thought uneasily of the possibility of foreclosing the mortgage on the old Jacobs house, selling the house, and reinvesting the money in a more advantageous way. He always tried to put the thought away from him as a dishonorable one; but it had a fatal persistency. He could not banish it.

"Poor, half-witted old woman! she might a great deal better be in the poor-house."