Mercy Philbrick's Choice Part 11

We live in the plainest way, and cannot entertain in the ordinary acceptation of the term. We only ask you to our ordinary home-dinner," he added, with a sudden sense of the incongruity between the atmosphere of refined elegance which pervaded Mercy's simple, little room, and the expression which all his efforts had never been able to banish from his mother's parlor.

"Oh thank you, Mr. White. You are very good. I think we should like to come very much. Mother and I were just saying that it would be the first Christmas dinner we ever ate alone. But you must come in, Mr. White,--I insist upon it," replied Mercy, stretching out one hand towards him, as if to draw him in.

Stephen went. On the threshold of the sitting-room he paused and stood silent for some minutes. Mercy was relighting the lamps.

"Oh, Mrs. Philbrick!" he exclaimed, "won't you please not light the lamps.

This firelight on these evergreens is the loveliest thing I ever saw."

Too unconventional to think of any reasons why she should not sit with Stephen White alone by firelight in her own house, Mercy blew out the lamp she had lighted, and drawing a chair close up to the hearth sat down, and clasping her hands in her lap looked eagerly into Stephen's face, and said as simply as a child,--

"I like firelight, too, a great deal better than any other light. Some evenings we do not light the lamps at all. Mother can knit just as well without much light, and I can think better."

Mercy was sitting in a chair so low that, to look at Stephen, she had to lift her face. It was the position in which her face was sweetest. Some lines, which were a shade too strong and positive when her face fully confronted you, disappeared entirely when it was thrown back and her eyes were lifted. It was then as ingenuous and tender and trustful a face as if she had been but eight instead of eighteen.

Stephen forgot himself, forgot the fact that Mercy was comparatively a stranger, forgot every thing, except the one intense consciousness of this sweet woman-face looking up into his. Bending towards her, he said suddenly,--

"Mrs. Philbrick, your face is the very loveliest face I have ever seen in my life. Do not be angry with me. Oh, do not!" he continued, seeing the color deepen in Mercy's cheeks, and a stern expression gathering in her eyes, as she looked steadily at him with unutterable surprise. "Do not be angry with me. I could not help saying it; but I do not say it as men generally say such things. I am not like other men: I have lived alone all my life with my mother. You need not mind my saying your face is lovely, any more than my saying that the ferns on the walls are lovely."

If Stephen had known Mercy from her childhood, he could not have framed his words more wisely. Every fibre of her artistic nature recognized the possibility of a subtle truth in what he said, and his calm, dreamy tone and look heightened this impression. Moreover, as Stephen's soul had been during all the past four weeks slowly growing into the feeling which made it inevitable that he should say these words on first looking closely and intimately into Mercy's face, so had her soul been slowly growing into the feeling which made it seem not really foreign or unnatural to her that he should say them.

She answered him with hesitating syllables, quite unlike her usual fluent speech.

"I think you must mean what you say, Mr. White; and you do not say it as other men have said it. But will you please to remember not to say it again? We cannot be friends, if you do."

"Never again, Mrs. Philbrick?" he said,--he could almost have said "Mercy,"--and looked at her with a gaze of whose intentness he was hardly aware.

Mercy felt a strange terror of this man; a few minutes ago a stranger, now already asking at her hands she hardly knew what, and compelling her in spite of herself. But she replied very quietly, with a slight smile,--

"Never, Mr. White. Now talk of something else, please. Your mother seemed very much pleased with the ferns I carried her to-day. Did she love the woods, when she was well?"

"I do not know. I never heard her say," answered Stephen, absently, still gazing into Mercy's face.

"But you would have known, surely, if she had cared for them," said Mercy, laughing; for she perceived that Stephen had spoken at random.

"Oh, yes, certainly,--certainly. I should have known," said Stephen, still with a preoccupied air, and rising to go. "I thank you for letting me come into this beautiful room with you. I shall always think of your face framed in evergreens, and with flickering firelight on it."

"You are not going away, are you, Mr. White?" asked Mercy, mischievously.

"Oh, no, certainly not. I never go away. How could I go away? Why did you ask?"

"Oh," laughed Mercy, "because you spoke as if you never expected to see my face after to-night. That's all."

Stephen smiled. "I am afraid I seem a very absent-minded person," he said.

"I did not mean that at all. I hope to see you very often, if I may.

Good-night."

"Good-night, Mr. White. We shall be very glad to see you as often as you like to come. You may be sure of that; but you must come earlier, or you will find us all asleep. Good-night."

Stephen spent another half-hour pacing up and down in the snowy path in front of the house. He did not wish to go in until his mother was asleep.

Very well he knew that it would be better that she did not see his face that night. When he went in, the house was dark and still. As he pa.s.sed his mother's door, she called, "Steve!"

"All right, mother. They'll come," he replied, and ran swiftly up to his own room.

During this half-hour, Mercy had been sitting in her low chair by the fire, looking steadily into the leaping blaze, and communing very sternly with her own heart on the subject of Stephen White. Her pitiless honesty of nature was just as inexorable in its dealing with her own soul as with others; she never paltered with, nor evaded an accusation of, her consciousness. At this moment, she was indignantly admitting to herself that her conduct and her feeling towards Stephen were both deserving of condemnation. But, when she asked herself for their reason, no answer came framed in words, no explanation suggested itself, only Stephen's face rose up before her, vivid, pleading, as he had looked when he said, "Never again, Mrs. Philbrick?" and as she looked again into the dark blue eyes, and heard the low tones over again, she sank into a deeper and deeper reverie, from which gradually all self-accusation, all perplexity, faded away, leaving behind them only a vague happiness, a dreamy sense of joy.

If lovers could look back on the first quickening of love in their souls, how precious would be the memories; but the unawakened heart never knows the precise instant of the quickening. It is wrapped in a half-conscious wonder and antic.i.p.ation; and, by the time the full revelation comes, the impress of the first moments has been wiped out by intenser experiences.

How many lovers have longed to trace the sweet stream back to its very source, to the hidden spring which no man saw, but have lost themselves presently in the broad greenness, undisturbed and fertile, through which, like a hidden stream through an emerald meadow, the love had been flowing undiscovered.

Months after, when Mercy's thoughts reverted to this evening, all she could recollect was that on the night of Stephen's first call she had been much puzzled by his manner and his words, had thought it very strange that he should seem to care-so much for her, and perhaps still more strange that she herself found it not unpleasing that he did so. Stephen's reminiscences were at once more distinct and more indistinct,--more distinct of his emotions, more indistinct of the incidents. He could not recollect one word which had been said: only his own vivid consciousness of Mercy's beauty; her face "framed in evergreens, with the firelight flickering on it," as he had told her he should always think of it.

Christmas morning came, clear, cold, s.h.i.+ning bright. A slight thaw the day before had left every bough and twig and pine-needle covered with a moisture that had frozen in the night into glittering crystal sheaths, which flashed like millions of prisms in the sun. The beauty of the scene was almost solemn. The air was so frosty cold that even the noon sun did not melt these ice-sheaths; and, under the flood of the full mid-day light, the whole landscape seemed one blaze of jewels. When Mercy and her mother entered Mrs. White's room, half an hour before the dinner-hour, they found her sitting with the curtains drawn, because the light had hurt her eyes.

"Oh, Mrs. White!" exclaimed Mercy. "It is cruel you should not see this glorious spectacle! If you had the window open, the light would not hurt your eyes. It is the glare of it coming through the gla.s.s. Let us wrap you up, and draw you close to the window, and open it wide, so that you can see the colors for a few minutes. It is just like fairy-land."

Mrs. White looked bewildered. Such a plan as this of getting out-door air she had never thought of.

"Won't it make the room too cold?" she said.

"Oh, no, no!" cried Mercy; "and no matter if it does. We can soon warm it up again. Please let me ask Marty to come?" And, hardly waiting for permission, she ran to call Marty. Wrapped up in blankets, Mrs. White was then drawn in her bed close to the open window, and lay there with a look of almost perplexed delight on her face. When Stephen came in, Mercy stood behind her, a fleecy white cloud thrown over her head, pointing out eagerly every point of beauty in the view. A high bush of sweet-brier, with long, slender, curving branches, grew just in front of the window.

Many of the cup-like seed-vessels still hung on the boughs: they were all finely encrusted with frost. As the wind faintly stirred the branches, every frost-globule flashed its full rainbow of color; the long sprays looked like wands strung with tiny fairy beakers, inlaid with pearls and diamonds. Mercy sprang to the window, took one of these sprays in her fingers, and slowly waved it up and down in the sunlight.

"Oh, look at it against the blue sky!" she cried. "Isn't it enough to make one cry just to see it?"

"Oh, how can mother help loving her?" thought Stephen. "She is the sweetest woman that ever drew breath."

Mrs. White seemed indeed to have lost all her former distrust and antagonism. She followed Mercy's movements with eyes not much less eager and pleased than Stephen's. It was like a great burst of sunlight into a dark place, the coming of this earnest, joyous, outspoken nature into the old woman's narrow and monotonous and comparatively uncheered life. She had never seen a person of Mercy's temperament. The clear, decided, incisive manner commanded her respect, while the sunny gayety won her liking. Stephen had gentle, placid sweetness and much love of the beautiful; but his love of the beautiful was an indolent, and one might almost say a-haughty, demand in his nature. Mercy's was a bounding and delighted acceptance. She was cheery: he was only placid. She was full of delight; he, only of satisfaction. In her, joy was of the spirit, spiritual. Keen as were her senses, it was her soul which marshalled them all. In him, though the soul's forces were not feeble, the senses foreran them,--compelled them, sometimes conquered them. It would have been impossible to put Mercy in any circ.u.mstances, in any situation, out of which, or in spite of which, she would not find joy. But in Stephen circ.u.mstance and place might as easily destroy as create happiness. His enjoyment was as far inferior to Mercy's in genuineness and enduringness as is the shallow lake to the quenchless spring. The waters of each may leap and sparkle alike, to the eye, in the suns.h.i.+ne; but when drought has fallen on the lake, and the place that knew it knows it no more, the spring is full, free, and glad as ever.

Mrs. White's pleasure in Mercy's presence was short-lived. Long before the simple dinner was over, she had relapsed into her old forbidding manner, and into a silence which was more chilly than any words could have been. The reason was manifest. She read in every glance of Stephen's eyes, in every tone of his voice, the depth and the warmth of his feeling towards Mercy. The jealous distrust which she had felt at first, and which had slept for a brief time under the spell of Mercy's kindliness towards herself, sprang into fiercer life than ever. Stephen and Mercy, in utter unconsciousness of the change which was gradually taking place, talked and laughed together in an evident gay delight, which made matters worse every moment. A short and surly reply from Mrs. White to an innocent question of Mrs. Carr's fell suddenly on Mercy's ear. Keenly alive to the smallest slight to her mother, she turned quickly towards Mrs. White, and, to her consternation, met the same steady, pitiless, aggressive look which she had seen on her face in their first interview. Mercy's first emotion was one of great indignation: her second was a quick flash of comprehension of the whole thing. A great wave of rosy color swept over her face; and, without knowing what she was doing, she looked appealingly at Stephen.

Already there was between them so subtle a bond that each understood the other without words. Stephen knew all that Mercy thought in that instant, and an answering flush mounted to his forehead. Mrs. White saw both these flushes, and compressed her lips still more closely in a grimmer silence than before. Poor, unsuspecting Mrs. Carr kept on and on with her meaningless and childish remarks and inquiries; and Mercy and Stephen were both very grateful for them. The dinner came to an untimely end; and almost immediately Mercy, with a nervous and embarra.s.sed air, totally foreign to her, said to her mother,--

"We must go home now. I have letters to write."

Mrs. Carr was disappointed. She had antic.i.p.ated a long afternoon of chatty gossip with her neighbor; but she saw that Mercy had some strong reason for hurrying home, and she acquiesced unhesitatingly.

Mrs. White did not urge them to remain. To all Mrs. White's faults it must be confessed that she added the virtue of absolute sincerity.

"Good-afternoon, Mrs. Carr," and "Good-afternoon, Mrs. Philbrick," fell from her lips in the same measured syllables and the same cold, unhuman voice which had so startled Mercy once before.

"What a perfectly horrid old woman!" exclaimed Mercy, as soon as they had crossed the threshold of their own door. "I'll never go near her again as long as I live!"

"Why, Mercy Carr!" exclaimed her mother, "what do you mean? I don't think so. She got very tired before dinner was over. I could see that, poor thing! She's drefful weak, an' it stan's to reason she'd be kind o'

snappish sometimes."

Mercy opened her lips to reply, but changed her mind and said nothing.

"It's just as well for mother to keep on good terms with her, if she can,"

she thought. "Maybe it'll help divert a little of Mrs. White's temper from him, poor fellow!"

Stephen had followed them to the door, saying little; but at the last moment, when Mercy said "good-by," he had suddenly held out his hand, and, clasping hers tightly, had looked at her sadly, with a world of regret and appeal and affection and almost despair in the look.