Mercy Philbrick's Choice Part 20

"Here is Seth now, Mr. Wheeler. It is so fortunate I met him. Now I can see you off." The old man was so weak that his son had to carry him down the stairs; and his face, seen in the broad daylight, was ghastly. As they placed him in the carriage, he called out to his wife and son, sharply,--

"Don't you get in! You can walk, you can walk. Mind, he's to have but a quarter, tell him." And, as Seth whipped up his horses and drove off, the words, "wolves, wolves, wolves," were heard coming in m.u.f.fled tones through the door.

"He'd never have gone, if you hadn't come back,--never," said Mrs.

Wheeler, as she turned to Mercy. "I never can thank you enough. It'll save his life, getting him out of that garret."

Mercy did not say, but she thought that it was too late. A mortal sickness had fastened upon the old man; and so it proved. When she went to his home the next day, he was in a high fever and delirious; and he lived only a few days. He had intervals of partial consciousness, and in those he seemed to be much touched by the patient care which his two sons were giving to him. He had always been a hard father; had compelled his sons very early to earn their own living, and had refused to give them money, which he could so easily have spared, to establish themselves in business.

Now, that it was too late, he repented.

"Good boys, good boys, good boys after all," he would mutter to himself, as they bent over him, and nursed him tenderly in his helplessness. "Might have left them more money, might have left them more. Mistake, mistake!"

Once he roused, and with great vehemence asked to have his lawyer sent for immediately. But, when the lawyer came, the delirium had returned again: it was too late; and the old man died without repairing the injustice he had done. The last intelligible words he spoke were, "Mistake! mistake!"

And he had indeed made a mistake. When his will was opened, it was found that the whole bulk of his large estate had been left to trustees, to be held as a fund for a.s.sisting poor young men to a certain amount of capital to go into business with,--the very thing which he had never done for his own children. The trust was burdened with such preposterous conditions, however, that it never could have amounted to any thing, even if the courts had not come to the rescue, and mercifully broken the will, dividing the property where it rightfully belonged, between the wife and children.

Early in February Mrs. Carr died. It was more like a going to sleep than like a death. She lay for two days in a dozing state, smiling whenever Mercy spoke to her, and making great efforts to swallow food whenever Mercy offered it to her. At last she closed her eyes, turned her head on one side, as if for a sounder sleep, and never moved again.

However we may think we are longing for the release from suffering to come to one we love, when it does come, it is a blow, is a shock. Hundreds of times Mercy had said to herself in the course of the winter, "Oh, if G.o.d would only take my mother to heaven! Her death would be easier to bear than this." But now she would have called her back, if she could. The silent house, the empty room, still more terrible the long empty hours in which n.o.body needed her help, all wrung Mercy's heart. It was her first experience of being alone. She had often pictured to herself, or rather she thought she had, what it would be; but no human imagination can ever sound the depths of that word: only the heart can feel it. It is a marvel that hearts do not break under it oftener than they do. The silence which is like that darkness which could be felt; the sudden awakening in the night with a wonder what it means that the loved one is not there; the pitiless morning light which fills the empty house, room after room; and harder than all else to forget, to rise above--the perpetual sense of no future: even the little near futures of the next hour, the next day, all cut off, all closed, to the human being left utterly alone. The mockery of the instincts of hunger and need of rest seems cruel. What a useless routine, for one left alone, to be fed, to sleep, and to rise up to eat and sleep again!

Mercy bore all this in a sort of dumb bewilderment for a few days. All Stephen's love and sympathy did not help her. He was unutterably tender and sympathizing now that poor old Mrs. Carr was fairly out of his way. It surprised even himself to see what a sort of respectful affection he felt for her in her grave. Any misgiving that this new quiet and undisturbed possession of Mercy might not continue did not cross his mind; and when Mercy said to him suddenly, one evening about ten days after her mother's death, "Stephen, I must go away, I can't live in this house another week,"

it was almost as sudden a shock to him as if he had gone in and found her dead.

"Go away! Leave me!" he gasped, rather than said. "Mercy, you can't mean it!" and the distress in his face smote Mercy bitterly. But she persisted.

"Yes, I do mean it," she said. "You must not ask me to stay. I should lose my senses or fall ill. You can't think how terrible it is to me to be all alone in these rooms. Perhaps in new rooms I should not feel it so much. I have always looked forward to being left alone at some time, and have thought I would still have my home; but I did not think it could feel like this. I simply cannot bear it,--at any rate, not till I am stronger. And besides, Stephen," and Mercy's face flushed red, "there is another thing you have not thought of: it would never do for me to live here alone in this house with you, as we have been living. You couldn't come to see me so much now mother is not here."

Poor Mrs. Carr! avenged at last, by Stephen's own heart. How gladly would he have called her to life now! Mercy's words carried instantaneous conviction to his mind. It was strange he had never thought of this before; but he had not. He groaned aloud.

"O Mercy! O Mercy!" he exclaimed, "I never once thought of that, we have been living so so long. You are right: you cannot stay here. Oh, what shall I do without you, my darling, my darling?"

"I do not think you can ever be so lonely as I," said Mercy; "for you have still your work left you to do. If I had any human being to need me, I could bear being separated from you."

"Where will you go, Mercy?" asked Stephen, in a tone of dull, hopeless misery.

"I do not know. I have not thought yet. Back to my old home for a visit, I think, and then to some city to study and work. That is the best life for me."

"O Mercy, Mercy, I am going to lose you,--lose you utterly!" exclaimed Stephen.

Mercy looked at him with a pained and perplexed expression. "Stephen," she said earnestly, "I can't understand you. You bear your hard life so uncomplainingly, so bravely, that it seems as if you could not have a vestige of selfishness in you; and yet"--Mercy halted; she could not put her thought in words. Stephen finished it for her.

"And yet," he said, "I am selfish about you, you think. Selfis.h.!.+ Good G.o.d!

do you call it selfishness in a man who is drowning, to try to swim, in a man who is starving, to clutch a morsel of bread? What else have I that one could call life except you? Tell me, Mercy! You are my life: that is the whole of it. All that a man has he will give for his life. Is it selfishness?" Stephen locked his hands tight together, and looked at Mercy almost angrily. She was writhing under his words. She had always an unspeakable dread of being unjust to him. Love made her infinitely tender, and pity made her yearn over him. But neither her own love and pity nor his pa.s.sionate words could wholly blind her now; and there was a sadness in the tones in which she replied,--

"No, Stephen, I did not mean to call you selfish; but I can't understand why you are not as brave and patient about all hard things as you are about the one hardest thing of all."

"Mercy, would you marry me now, if I asked you?" said Stephen. He did not realize the equivocal form of his question. An indignant look swept over Mercy's face for a moment, but only for a moment. She knew Stephen's love too well.

"No, Stephen," she said, "I would not. If you had asked me at first, I should have done it. I thought then that it would be best," she said, with hot blushes mounting high on her cheeks; "but I have seen since that it would not."

Stephen sighed. "I am glad you see that," he said. Then in a lower tone, "You know you are free, Mercy,--utterly free. I would never be so base as to hold you by a word."

Mercy smiled half-bitterly, as she replied,--

"Words never hold people, and you know very well it is only an empty form of words to say that I am free. I do not want to be free, darling," she added, in a burst of tenderness toward him. "You could not set me free, if you tried."

When Mercy told Parson Dorrance her intention of going away, his face changed as if some fierce spasm wrung him; but it was over in a second, and he said,--

"You are quite right, my child,--quite right. It will be a great deal better for you in every way. This is no place for you now. You must have at least a year or two of travel and entire change."

In her heart, Mercy contrasted the replies of her two lovers. She could not banish the feeling that one was the voice of a truer love than the other. She fought against the feeling as against a treason; but the truth was strongest. In her heart, she knew that the man she did not love was manlier than the man she loved.

Chapter XI

For the first few months after Mercy went away, Stephen seemed to himself to be like an automaton, which had been wound up to go through certain movements for a certain length of time, and could by no possibility stop.

He did not suffer as he had expected. Sometimes it seemed to him that he did not suffer at all; and he was terrified at this very absence of suffering. Then again he had hours and days of a dull despair, which was worse than any more active form of suffering. Now he understood, he thought, how in the olden time men had often withdrawn themselves from the world after some great grief, and had lived long, stagnant lives in deserts and caves. He had thought it would kill him to lose Mercy out of his life. Now he felt sure that he should live to be a hundred years old; should live by very help of the apathy into which he had sunk. Externally, he seemed very little changed,--a trifle quieter, perhaps, and gentler.

His mother sometimes said to herself,--

"Steve is really getting old very fast for so young a man;" but she was content with the change. It seemed to bring them nearer together, and made her feel more at ease as to the possibility of his falling in love. Her old suspicions and jealousies of Mercy had died out root and branch, within three months after her departure. Stephen's unhesitating a.s.surance to her that he did not expect to write to Mercy had settled the question in her mind once for all. If she had known that at the very moment when he uttered these words he had one long letter from Mercy and another to her lying in his pocket, the shock might well-nigh have killed her; for never once in Mrs. White's most jealous and ill-natured hours had the thought crossed her mind that her son would tell her a deliberate lie. He told it, however, unflinchingly, in as gentle and even a tone and with as unruffled a brow as he would have bade her good-morning. He had thought the whole matter over, and deliberately resolved to do it. He did it to save her from pain; and he had no more compunction about it than he would have had about closing a blind, to shut out a sunlight too strong for her eyes.

What a terrible thing is the power which human beings have of deceiving each other! Woe to any soul which trusts itself to any thing less than an organic integrity of nature, to which a lie is impossible!

Mercy's letters disappointed Stephen. They were loving; but they were concise, sensible, sometimes merry, and always cheerful. Her life was constantly broadening; friends crowded around her; and her art was becoming more and more to her every day. Her name was beginning to be known, and her influence felt. Her verses were simple, and went to people's hearts. They were also of a fine and subtle flavor, and gave pleasure to the intellect. Strangers began to write words of encouragement to her,--sometimes a word of grat.i.tude for help, sometimes a word of hearty praise. She began to feel that she had her own circle of listeners, unknown friends, who were always ready to hear her when she spoke. This consciousness is a most exquisite happiness to a true artist: it is a better stimulus than all the flattering criticism in the world can give.

She was often touched to tears by the tributes she received from these unknown friends. They had a wide range, coming sometimes from her fellow-artists in literature, sometimes from lowly and uncultured people.

Once there came to her by mail, on a sheet of coa.r.s.e paper, two faded roses, fragrant,--for they were cinnamon roses, whose fragrance never dies,--but yellow and crumpled, for they had journeyed many days to reach her. They were tied together by a bit of blue yarn; and on the paper was written, in ill-spelt words, "I wanted to send you something; and these were all I had. I am an old woman, and very poor. You've helped me ever so much."

Another gift was a moss basket filled with arbutus blossoms. Hid away in the leaves was a tiny paper, on which were written some graceful verses, evidently by a not unpractised hand. The signature was in initials unknown to Mercy; but she hazarded a guess as to the authors.h.i.+p, and sent the following verses in reply:--

TO E.B.

At night, the stream came to the sea.

"Long leagues," it cried, "this drop I bring, O beauteous, boundless sea!

What is the meagre, paltry thing In thine abundance unto thee?

No ripple, in thy smallest wave, of me Will know! No thirst its suffering Shall better slake for my surrendering My life! O sea, in vain My leagues of toil and pain!"

At night, wayfarers reached the sea.

"Long weary leagues we came," they cried, "O beauteous, boundless sea!

The swelling waves of thy swift tide Break on the sh.o.r.es where souls are free: Through lonely wildernesses, unto thee One tiny stream has been our guide, And in the desert we had died, If its oases sweet Had not refreshed our feet."

O tiny stream, lost in the sea, Close symbol of a lifetime's speech!

O beauteous, boundless sea, Close fitting symbol of the reach, Of measureless Eternity!

Be glad, O stream, O sea, blest equally!

And thou whose words have helped to teach Me this,--my unknown friend,--for each Kind thought, warm thanks.

Only the stream can know How at such words the long leagues lighter grow.

All these new interests and occupations, while they did not in the least weaken her loyalty to Stephen, filled her thoughts healthfully and absorbingly, and left her no room for any such pa.s.sionate longing and brooding as Stephen poured out to her in his letters. He looked in vain for any response to these expressions. Sometimes, unable to bear the omission any longer, he would ask her pathetically why she did not say that she longed to see him. Her reply was characteristic:--