Mercy Philbrick's Choice Part 21

"You ask me, dear, why I do not say that I long to see you. I am not sure that I ever do long, in the sense in which you use the word. I know that I cannot see you till next winter, just as I used to know every morning that I could not see you until night; and the months between now and then seem to me one solid interval of time to be filled up and made the most of, just as the interval of the daytime between your going away in the morning and coming home at night used to seem to me. I do not think, dear Stephen, there is a moment of any day when I have not an under current of consciousness of you; but it is not a longing for the sight of you. Are you sure, darling, that the love which takes perpetual shape in such longings is the strongest love?"

Little by little, phrases like this sank into Stephen's mind, and gradually crystallized into a firm conviction that Mercy was being weaned from him. It was not so. It was only that separation and its surer tests were adjusting to a truer level the relation between them. She did not love him one whit less; but she was taking the position which belonged to her stronger and finer organization. If she had ever lived by his side as his wife, the same change would have come; but her never-failing tenderness would have effectually covered it from his recognition, and hid it from her own, so long as he looked into her eyes with pleading love, and she answered with woman's fondness. No realization of inequality could ever have come. It is, after all, the flesh and blood of the loved one which we idealize. There is in love's sacraments a "real presence," which handling cannot make us doubt. It is when we go apart and reflect that our reason asks questions. Mercy did not in the least know that she was outgrowing Stephen White. She did not in the least suspect that her affection and her loyalty were centring around an ideal personality, to which she gave his name, but which had in reality never existed. She believed honestly that she was living for and in Stephen all this time; that she was his, as he was hers, inalienably and for ever. If it had been suggested to her that it was unnatural that she should be so content in a daily life which he did not share, so busy and glad in occupations and plans and aspirations into which he did not enter, she would have been astonished. She would have said, "How foolish of me to do otherwise! We have our lives to lead, our work to do. It would be a sin to waste one's life, to leave one's work undone, because of the mere lack of seeing any one human being, however dear." Stephen knew love better than this: he knew that life without the daily sight of Mercy was a blank drudgery; that, day by day, month by month, he was growing duller and duller, and more and more lifeless, as if his very blood were being impoverished by lack of nourishment. Surely it was a hard fate which inflicted on this man, already so overburdened, the perpetual pain of a love denied, thwarted, unhappy. Surely it was a brave thing in him to bear the double load uncomplainingly, to make no effort to throw it off, and never by a word or a look to visit his own sufferings on the head of the helpless creature, who seemed to be the cause of them all. If there were any change in his manner toward his mother during these months, it was that he grew tenderer and more demonstrative to her. There were even times when he kissed her, solely from the yearning need he felt to kiss something human, he so longed for one touch of Mercy's hand. He would sometimes ask her wistfully, "Do I make you happy, mother?" And she would be won upon and softened by the words; when in reality they were only the outcry of the famished heart which needed some rea.s.surance that its sacrifices had not been all in vain.

Month after month went on, and no tenants came for the "wing." Stephen even humiliated himself so far as to offer it to Jane Barker's husband at a lowered rent; but his offer was surlily rejected, and he repented having made it. Very bitterly he meditated on the strange isolation into which he and his mother were forced. His sympathies were not broad and general enough to comprehend it. He did not know how quickly all people feel an atmosphere of withdrawal, an air of indifference. If Stephen had been rich and powerful, the world would have forgiven him these traits, or have smothered its dislike of them; but in a poor man, and an obscure one, such "airs" were not to be tolerated. n.o.body would live in the "wing." And so it came to pa.s.s that one day Stephen wrote to Mercy the following letter:--

"You will be sorry to hear that I have had to foreclose the mortgage on this house. It was impossible to get a tenant for the other half of it, and there was nothing else to be done. The house must be sold, but I doubt if it brings the full amount of the loan. I should have done this three months ago, except for your strong feeling against it. I am very sorry for old Mrs. Jacobs; but it is her misfortune, not my fault. I have my mother to provide for, and my first duty is to her. Of course, Mrs. Jacobs will now have to go to the alms-house but I am not at all sure that she will not be more comfortable there than she has made herself in the cottage.

She has starved herself all these years. Some people say she must have a h.o.a.rd of money there somewhere, that she cannot have spent even the little she has received.

"I shall move out of the house at once, into the little cottage you liked so much, farther up on the hill. That is for rent, only fifty dollars a year. I shall put this house into good repair, run a piazza around it as you suggested, and paint it; and then I think I shall be sure of finding a purchaser. It can be made a very pretty house by expending a little money on it; and I can sell it for enough more to repay me. I am sure n.o.body would buy it as it is."

Mercy replied very briefly to this part of Stephen's letter. She had discussed the question with him often before, and she knew the strict justice of his claim; but her heart ached for the poor friendless old woman, who was thus to lose her last dollar. If it had been possible for Mercy to have continued to pay the rent of the wing herself, she would gladly have done so; but, at her suggestion of such a thing, Stephen had been so angry that she had been almost frightened.

"I am not so poor yet, Mercy," he had exclaimed, "as to take charity from you! I think I should go to the alms-house myself first. I don't see why old Granny Jacobs is so much to you, any way."

"Only because she is so absolutely friendless, Stephen," Mercy had replied gently. "I never before knew of anybody who had not a relative or a friend in the world; and I am afraid they are cruel to the poor people at the alms-house. They all look so starved and wretched!"

"Well, it will be no more than she deserves," said Stephen; "for she was cruel to her husband's brother's wife. I used to hear horrid stories, when I was a boy, about how she drove them out of the house; and she was cruel to her son too, and drove him away from home. Of course, I am sorry to be the instrument of punis.h.i.+ng her, and I do have a certain pity for the old woman; but it is really her own fault. She might be living now in comfort with her son, perhaps, if she had treated him well."

"We can't go by such 'ifs' in this world, Steve," said Mercy, earnestly.

"We have to take things as they are. I don't want to be judged way back in my life. Only G.o.d knows all the 'ifs.'" Such conversations as these had prepared Mercy for the news which Stephen now wrote her; but they had in no wise changed her feeling in regard to it. She believed in the bottom of her heart that Stephen might have secured a tenant, if he had tried. He had once, in speaking of the matter, dropped a sentence which had shocked her so that she could never forget it.

"It would be a great deal better for me," he had said, "to have the money invested in some other way. If the house does fall into my hands, I shall sell it; and, even if I don't get the full amount of what father loaned, I shall make it bring us in a good deal more than it does this way."

This sentence rang in Mercy's ears, as she read in Stephen's letter all his plans for improving the house; but the thing was done, and it was not Mercy's habit to waste effort or speech over things which could not be altered.

"I am very sorry," she wrote, "that you have been obliged to take the house. You know how I always felt for poor old Granny Jacobs. Perhaps we can do something to make her more comfortable in the alms-house. I think Lizzy could manage that for us."

And in her own mind Mercy resolved that the old woman should never lack for food and fire, however unwilling the overseers might be to permit her to have unusual comforts.

Stephen's next letter opened with these words: "O Mercy, I have such a strange thing to tell you. I am so excited I can hardly find words. I have found a lot of money in your old fireplace. Just think of our having sat there so quietly night after night, within hands' reach of it, all last winter! And how lucky that I found it, instead of any of the workmen!

They'd have pocketed it, and never said a word."

"To be sure they would," thought Mercy, "and poor old Granny Jacobs would have been"--she was about to think, "cheated out of her rights again,"

but with a pang she changed the phrase into "none the better off for it.

Oh, how glad I am for the poor old thing! People always said her husband must have hid money away somewhere."

Mercy read on. "I was in such a hurry to get the house done before the snow came that I took hold myself, and worked every night and morning before the workmen came; and, after they had gone, I found this last night, and I declare, Mercy, I haven't shut my eyes all night long. It seems to me too good to be true. I think there must be as much as three thousand dollars, all in solid gold. Some of the coins I don't know the value of; but the greater proportion of them are English sovereigns. Of course rich people wouldn't think this such a very big sum, but you and I know how far a little can go for poor people."

"Yes, indeed," thought Mercy. "Why, it will make the poor old woman perfectly comfortable all her life: it will give her more than she had from the house." And Mercy laid the letter in her lap and fell into a reverie, thinking how strange it was that this good fortune should have come about by means of an act which had seemed to her cruel on Stephen's part.

She took the letter up again. It continued: "O Mercy, my darling, do you suppose you can realize what this sudden lift is to me? All my life I have found our poverty so hard to bear, and these latter years I have bitterly felt the hards.h.i.+p of being unable to go out into the world and make my fortune as other men do, as I think I might, if I were free. But this sum, small as it is, will be a nucleus, I feel sure it will, of a competency at least. I know of several openings where I can place it most advantageously. O Mercy! dear, dear Mercy! what hopes spring up in my heart! The time may yet come when we shall build up a lovely home together. Bless old Jacobs's miserliness! How little he knew what he was h.o.a.rding up his gold for!"

At this point, Mercy dropped the letter,--dropped it as if it had been a viper that stung her. She was conscious of but two things: a strange, creeping cold which seemed to be chilling her to the very marrow of her bones; and a vague but terrible sense of horror, mentally. The letter fell to the floor. She did not observe it. A half-hour pa.s.sed, and she did not know that it had been a moment. Gradually, her brain began to rouse into activity again, and strove confusedly with the thoughts which crowded on it.

"That would be stealing. He can't mean it. Stephen can't be a thief."

Half-formed, incoherent sentences like these floated in her mind, seemed to be floating in the air, p.r.o.nounced by hissing voices.

She pressed her hands to her temples, and sprang to her feet. The letter rustled on the floor, as her gown swept over it. She turned and looked at it, as if it were a living thing she would kill. She stooped to pick it up, and then recoiled from it. She shrank from the very paper. All the vehemence of her nature was roused. As in the moment of drowning people are said to review in one swift flash of consciousness their whole lives, so now in this moment did Mercy look back over the months of her life with Stephen. Her sense of the baseness of his action now was like a lightning illuming every corner of the past: every equivocation, every concealment, every subterfuge he had practised, stood out before her, bare, stripped of every shred of apology or excuse. "He lies; he has always lied. Why should he not steal?" she exclaimed. "It is only another form of the same thing.

He stole me, too; and he made me steal him. He is dishonest to the very core. How did I ever love such a man? What blinded me to his real nature?"

Then a great revulsion of feeling, of tenderness toward Stephen, would sweep over her, and drown all these thoughts. "O my poor, brave, patient darling! He never meant to do any thing wrong in his life. He does not see things as I do: no human soul could see clearly, standing where he stands.

There is a moral warp in his nature, for which he is no more responsible than a tree is responsible for having grown into a crooked shape when it was broken down by heavy stones while it was a sapling. Oh, how unjust I am to him! I will never think such thoughts of him again. My darling, my darling! He did not stop to think in his excitement that the money was not his. I daresay he has already seen it differently."

Like waves breaking on a beach, and rolling back again to meet higher waves and be swallowed up in them, these opposing thoughts and emotions struggled with each other in Mercy's bosom. Her heart and her judgment were at variance, and the antagonism was irreconcilable. She could not believe that her lover was dishonest. She could not but call his act a theft. The night came and went, and no lull had come to the storm by which her soul was tossed. She could not sleep. As the morning dawned, she rose with haggard and weary eyes, and prepared to write to Stephen. In some of her calmer intervals, she had read the remainder of his letter. It was chiefly filled with the details of the manner in which the gold had been hidden. A second fireplace had been built inside the first, leaving a s.p.a.ce of several inches between the two brick walls. On each side two bricks had been so left that they could be easily taken out and replaced; and the bags of gold hung upon iron stanchions in the outer wall. What a strange picture it must have been in the silent night hours,--the old miser bending above the embers of the dying fire on the hearth, and reaching down the crevice to his treasures! The bags were of leather, curiously embossed; they were almost charred by the heat, and the gold was dull and brown.

"I wonder which old fellow put it there?" said Stephen, at the end of his letter. "Captain John would have been more likely to have foreign gold; but why should he hide it in his brother's fireplace? At any rate, to whichever of them I am indebted for it, I am most profoundly grateful. If ever I meet him in any world, I'll thank him."

Suddenly the thought occurred to Mercy, "Perhaps old Mrs. Jacobs is dead.

Then there would be n.o.body who had any right to the money. But no: Stephen would have told me if she had been."

Still she clung to this straw of a hope; and, when she sat down to write to Stephen, these words came first to her pen:--

"Is Mrs. Jacobs dead, Stephen? You do not say any thing about her; but I cannot imagine your thinking for a moment of keeping that money for yourself, unless she is dead. If she is alive, the money is hers. n.o.body but her husband or his brother could have put it there. n.o.body else has lived in the house, except very poor people. Forgive me, dear, but perhaps you had not thought of this when you first wrote: it has very likely occurred to you since then, and I may be making a very superfluous suggestion." So hard did she cling to the semblance of a trust that all would yet prove to be well with her love and her lover.

Stephen's reply came by the very next mail. It was short: it ran thus:--

"DEAR DARLING,--I do not know what to make of your letter. Your sentence, 'I cannot imagine your thinking for a moment of keeping that money for yourself,' is a most extraordinary one. What do you mean by 'keeping it for myself'? It is mine: the house was mine and all that was in it. Old Mrs. Jacobs is alive still, at least she was last week; but she has no more claim on that money than any other old woman in town. I can't suppose you would think me a thief, Mercy; but your letter strikes me as a very strange one. Suppose I were to discover that there is a gold mine in the orchard,--stranger things than that have happened,--would you say that that also belonged to Mrs. Jacobs and not to me? The cases are precisely parallel. You have allowed your impulsive feeling to run away with your judgment; and, as I so often tell you, whenever you do that, you are wrong. I never thought, however, it would carry you so far as to make you suspect me of a dishonorable act."

Stephen was deeply wounded. Mercy's attempted reticence in her letter had not blinded him. He felt what had underlain the words, and it was a hard blow to him. His conscience was as free from any shadow of guilt in the matter of that money as if it had been his by direct inheritance from his own father. Feeling this, he had naturally the keenest sense of outrage at Mercy's implied accusation.

Before Stephen's second letter came, Mercy had grown calm. The more she thought the thing over, the more she felt sure that Mrs. Jacobs must be dead, and that Stephen in his great excitement had forgotten to mention the fact. Therefore the second letter was even a greater blow to her than the first: it was a second and a deeper thrust into a wound which had hardly begun to heal. There was also a tone of confident, almost arrogant, a.s.sumption in the letter, it seemed to Mercy, which irritated her. She did not perceive that it was the inevitable confidence of a person so sure he is right that he cannot comprehend any doubt in another's mind on the subject. There was in Mercy's nature a vein of intolerance, which was capable of the most terrible severity. She was as blinded, to Stephen's true position in the matter as he was to hers. The final moment of divergence had come: its seeds were planted in her nature and in Stephen's when they were born. Nothing could have hindered their growth, nothing could have forestalled their ultimate result. It was only a question of time and of occasion, when the two forces would be arrayed against each other, and would be found equally strong.

Mercy took counsel with herself now, and delayed answering this second letter. She was resolved to be just to Stephen.

"I will think this thing over and over," she said to herself, "till I am sure past all doubt that I am right, before I say another word."

But her long thinking did not help Stephen. Each day her conviction grew deeper, her perception clearer, her sense of alienation from Stephen profounder. If a moral antagonism had grown up between them in any other shape, it would have been less fatal to her love. There were many species of wrong-doing which would have been less hateful in her sight. It seemed to her sometimes that there could be no crime in the world which would appear to her so odious as this. Her imagination dwelt on the picture of the lonely old woman in the alms-house. She had been several times to see Mrs. Jacobs, and had been much moved by a certain grim stoicism which gave almost dignity to her squalor and wretchedness.

"She always had the bearing of a person who knew she was suffering wrongly, but was too proud to complain," thought Mercy. "I wonder if she did not all along believe there was something wrong about the mortgage?"

and Mercy's suspicious thoughts and conjectures ran far back into the past, fastening on the beginnings of all this trouble. She recollected old Mr. Wheeler's warnings about Stephen, in the first weeks of her stay in Penfield. She recollected Parson Dorrance's expression, when he found out that she had paid her rent in advance. She tortured herself by reviewing minutely every little manoeuvre she had known of Stephen's practising to conceal his relation with her.

Let Mercy once distrust a person in one particular, and she distrusted him in all. Let one act of his life be wrong, and she believed that his every act was wrong in motive, or in relation to others, however specious and fair it might be made to appear. All the old excuses and apologies she had been in the habit of making for Stephen's insincerities to his mother and to the world seemed to her now less than nothing; and she wondered how she ever could have held them as sufficient. In vain her heart pleaded. In vain tender memories thrilled her, by their vivid recalling of hours, of moments, of looks and words. It was with a certain sense of remorse that she dwelt on them, of shame that she was conscious of clinging to them still. "I shall always love him, I am afraid," she said to herself; "but I shall never trust him again,--never!"

And hour by hour Stephen was waiting and looking for his letter.

Chapter XII.

Stephen took Mercy's letter from the post-office at night. It was one week past the time at which it would have reached him, if it had been written immediately on the receipt of his. Only too well he knew what the delay meant. He turned the letter over and over in his hand, and noted without surprise it was very light. The superscription was written with unusual care. Mercy's handwriting was free and bold, but illegible, unless she made a special effort to write with care; and she never made that effort in writing to Stephen. How many times he had said to her: "Never mind how you write to me, dear. I read your sentences by another sense than the sense of sight." This formally and neatly written, superscription smote him, as a formal bow and a chilling glance from Mercy would, if he had pa.s.sed her on the street.

He carried the letter home unopened. All through the evening it lay like a leaden weight in his bosom, as he sat by his mother's side. He dared not read it until he was sure of being able to be alone for hours. At last he was free. As he went upstairs to his room, he thought to himself, "This is the hour at which I used to fly to her, and find such welcome. A year ago to-night how happy we were!" With a strange disposition to put off the opening of the letter, he moved about his room, rearranged the books, lighted an extra lamp, and finally sat down in an arm-chair, and leaning both his arms on the table looked at the letter lying there so white, so still. He felt a preternatural consciousness of what was in it; and he shrank from looking at the words, as a condemned prisoner might shrink from reading his own death-warrant. The room was bitterly cold. Fires in bed-rooms were a luxury Stephen had never known. As he sat there, his body and heart seemed to be growing numb together. At last he said, "I may as well read it," and took the letter up. As he opened it and read the first words, "My darling Stephen," his heart gave a great bound. She loved him still. What a reprieve in that! He had yet to learn that love can be crueller than any friends.h.i.+p, than any indifference, than any hate: nothing is so exacting, so inexorable, as love. The letter was full of love; but it was, nevertheless, hard and pitiless in its tone. Stephen read it again and again: then he held it in the flame of the lamp, and let it slowly burn, until only a few scorched fragments remained. These he folded in a small paper, and put into his pocket-book. Why he did this, he could not tell, and wondered at himself for doing it. Then he walked the room for an hour or two, revolving in his mind what he should say to Mercy. His ideas arranged themselves concisely and clearly. He had been stung by Mercy's letter into a frame of feeling hardly less inexorable than her own. He said to himself, "She never truly loved me, or nothing under heaven could make her believe me capable of a dishonesty;" and, in midst of all his pain at this thought, he had an indignant resentment, as if Mercy herself had been in some way actively responsible for all this misery.

His letter was shorter than Mercy's. They were sad, strange letters to have pa.s.sed between lovers. Mercy's ran as follows:--