Mercy Philbrick's Choice Part 7

Mercy's eyes grew dark and stern as she fixed them on Mr. Allen. "I wonder I believe any thing you say, Mr. Allen. How many things do you keep back from me, or state differently from what they are, to save my feelings? or to adapt the truth to my feebleness, which is not like the feebleness of old age, to be sure, but is feebleness in comparison with your knowledge and strength? I hate, hate, hate, your theories about deceiving people. I shall certainly tell my mother, if I keep on writing, and am paid for it,"

she said impetuously.

"Very well. Of course, if you think it wrong to leave her in ignorance about it, you must tell her. I myself see no reason for your mentioning the fact, unless you choose to. You are a mature and independent woman: she is old and childish. The relation between you is really reversed. You are the mother, and she the child. Suppose she had become a writer when you were a little girl: would it have been her duty to tell you of it?"

replied Mr. Allen.

"I don't care! I shall tell her! I never have kept the least thing from her yet, and I don't believe I ever will," said Mercy. "You'll never make me think it's right, Mr. Allen. What a good Jesuit you'd have made, wouldn't you?"

Mr. Allen colored. "Oh, child, how unjust you are!" he exclaimed. "But it must be all my stupid way of putting things. One of these days, you'll see it all differently."

And she did. Firm as were her resolutions to tell her mother every thing, she could not find courage to tell her about the verses and the price paid for them. Again and again she had approached the subject, and had been frightened back,--sometimes by her own unconquerable dislike to speaking of her poetry; sometimes, as in the instance above, by an outbreak on her mother's part of indignation at the bare suggestion of her earning money.

After that conversation, Mercy resolved within herself to postpone the day of the revelation, until there should be more to tell and more to show.

"If ever I have a hundred dollars, I'll tell her then," she thought. "So much money as that would make it seem better to her. And I will have a good many verses by that time to read to her." And so the secret grew bigger and heavier, and yet Mercy grew more used to carrying it, until she herself began to doubt whether Mr. Allen were not right, after all; and if it would not be a pity to trouble the feeble old heart with a needless perplexity and pain.

Chapter V.

When Stephen White saw his new tenants' first preparations for moving into his house, he was conscious of a strangely mingled feeling, half irritation, and half delight. Four weeks had pa.s.sed since the unlucky evening on which he had taken Mercy to his mother's room, and he had not seen her face again. He had called at the hotel twice, but had found only Mrs. Carr at home. Mercy had sent a messenger with only a verbal message, when she wished the key of the house.

She had an undefined feeling that she would not come into any relation with Stephen White, if it could be avoided. She was heartily glad that she had not been in the house when he called. And yet, had she been in the habit of watching her own mental states, she would have discovered that Stephen White was very much in her thoughts; that she had come to wondering why she never met him in her walks; and, what was still more significant, to mistaking other men for him, at a distance. This is one of the oddest tricks of a brain preoccupied with the image of one human being. One would think that it would make the eye clearer-sighted, well-nigh infallible, in the recognition of the loved form. Not at all.

Waiting for her lover to appear, a woman will stand wearily watching at a window, and think fifty times in sixty minutes that she sees him coming.

Tall men, short men, dark men, light men; men with Spanish cloaks, and men in surtouts,--all wear, at a little distance, a tantalizing likeness to the one whom they in no wise resemble.

After such a watching as this, the very eye becomes disordered, as after looking at a bright color it sees a spectrum of a totally different tint; and, when the long looked-for person appears, he himself looks unnatural at first, and strange. How well many women know this curious fact in love's optics! I doubt if men ever watch long enough, and longingly enough, for a woman's coming, to be so familiar with the phenomenon.

Stephen White, however, had more than once during these four weeks quickened his pace to overtake some slender figure clad in black, never doubting that it was Mercy Philbrick, until he came so near that his eyes were forced to tell him the truth. It was truly a strange thing that he and Mercy did not once meet during all these weeks. It was no doubt an important element in the growth of their relation, this interval of unacknowledged and combated curiosity about each other. Nature has a myriad of ways of bringing about her results. Seed-time and harvest are constant, and the seasons all keep their routine; but no two fields have the same method or measure in the summer's or the winter's dealings.

Hearts lie fallow sometimes; and seeds of love swell very big in the ground, all undisturbed and unsuspected.

When Mercy and her mother drove up to the house, Stephen was standing at his mother's window. It was just at dusk.

"Here they are, mother," he said. "I think I will go out and meet them."

Mrs. White lifted her eyes very slowly towards her son, and spoke in the measured syllables and unvibrating tone which always marked her utterance when she was displeased.

"Do you think you are under any obligation to do that? Suppose they had hired a house of you in some other part of the town: would you have felt called upon to pay them that attention? I do not know what the usual duties of a landlord are. You know best."

Stephen colored. This was the worst of his mother's many bad traits,--an instinctive, unreasoning, and unreasonable jealousy of any mark of attention or consideration shown to any other person than herself, even if it did not in the smallest way interfere with her comfort; and this cold, sarcastic manner of speaking was, of all the forms of her ill-nature, the one he found most unbearable. He made no reply, but stood still at the window, watching Mercy's light and literally joyful movements, as she helped her mother out of, and down from, the antiquated old carriage, and carried parcel after parcel and laid them on the doorstep.

Mrs. White continued in the same sarcastic tone,--

"Pray go and help move all their baggage in, Stephen, if it would give you any pleasure. It is nothing to me, I am sure, if you choose to be all the time doing all sorts of things for everybody. I don't see the least occasion for it, that's all."

"It seems to me only common neighborliness and friendly courtesy, mother,"

replied Stephen, gently. "But you know you and I never agree upon such points. Our views are radically different, and it is best not to discuss them."

"Views!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mrs. White, in a voice more like the low growl of some animal than like any sound possible to human organs. "I don't want to hear any thing about 'views' about such a trifle. Why don't you go, if you want to, and be done with it?"

"It is too late now," answered Stephen, in the same unruffled tone. "They have gone in, and the carriage is driving off."

"Well, perhaps they would like to have you put down their carpets for them, or open their boxes," sneered Mrs. White, still with the same intolerable sarcastic manner. "I don't doubt they could find some use for your services."

"O mother, don't!" pleaded Stephen, "please don't. I do not wish to go near them or ever see them, if it will make you any less happy. Do let us talk of something else."

"Who ever said a word about your not going near them, I'd like to know?

Have I ever tried to shut you up, or keep you from going anywhere you wanted to? Answer me that, will you?"

"No, mother," answered Stephen, "you never have. But I wish I could make you happier."

"You do make me very happy, Steve," said Mrs. White, mollified by the gentle answer. "You're a good boy, and always was; but it does vex me to see you always so ready to be at everybody's beck and call; and, where it's a woman, it naturally vexes me more. You wouldn't want to run any risk of being misunderstood, or making a woman care about you more than she ought."

Stephen stared. This was a new field. Had his mother gone already thus far in her thoughts about Mercy Philbrick? And was her only thought of the possibility of the young woman's caring for him, and not in the least of his caring for her?

And what would ever become of the peace of their daily life, if this kind of jealousy--the most exacting, most insatiable jealousy in the world--were to grow up in her heart? Stephen was dumb with despair. The apparent confidential friendliness and a.s.sumption of a tacit understanding and agreement between him and her on the matter, with which his mother had said, "You wouldn't want to be misunderstood, or make a woman care more for you than she ought," struck terror to his very soul. The apparent amicableness of her remark at the present moment did not in the least blind him to the enormous possibilities of future misery involved in such a train of feeling and thought on her part. He foresaw himself involved in a perfect network of espionage and cross-questioning and suspicion, in comparison with which all he had hitherto borne at his mother's hands would seem trivial. All this flashed through his mind in the brief instant that he hesitated before he replied in an off-hand tone, which for once really blinded his mother,--

"Goodness, mother! whatever put such ideas into your head? Of course I should never run any such risk as that."

"A man can't possibly be too careful," remarked Mrs. White, sententiously.

"The world's full of gossiping people, and women are very impressionable, especially such high-strung women as that young widow. A man can't possibly be too careful. Read me the paper now, Stephen."

Stephen was only too thankful to take refuge in and behind the newspaper.

A newspaper had so often been to him a shelter from his mother's eyes, a protection from his mother's tongue, that, whenever he saw a storm or a siege of embarra.s.sing questioning about to begin, he looked around for a newspaper as involuntarily as a soldier feels in his belt for his pistol.

He had more than once smiled bitterly to himself at the consciousness of the flimsy bulwark; but he found it invaluable. Sometimes, it is true, her impatient instinct made a keen thrust at the truth, and she would say angrily,--

"Put down that paper! I want to see your face when I speak to you;" but his reply, "Why, mother, I am reading. I was just going to read something aloud to you," would usually disarm and divert her. It was one of her great pleasures to have him read aloud to her. It mattered little what he read: she was equally interested in the paragraphs of small local news, and in the telegraphic summaries of foreign affairs. A revolt in a distant European province, of which she had never heard even the name, was neither more nor less exciting to her than the running away of a heifer from the premises of an unknown townsman.

All through the evening, the sounds of moving of furniture, and brisk going up and down stairs, came through the part.i.tion, and interrupted Stephen's thoughts as much as they did his mother's. They had lived so long alone in the house in absolute quiet, save for the semi-occasional stir of Marty's desultory house-cleaning, that these sounds were disturbing, and not pleasant to hear. Stephen did not like them much better than his mother did; and he gave her great pleasure by remarking, as he bade her good-night,--

"I suppose those people next door will get settled in a day or two, and then we can have a quiet evening again."

"I should hope so," replied his mother. "I should think that a caravan of camels needn't have made so much noise. It's astonis.h.i.+ng to me that folks can't do things without making a racket; but I think some people feel themselves of more consequence when they're making a great noise."

The next morning, as Stephen was bidding his mother good-morning, he accidentally glanced out of the window, and saw Mercy walking slowly away from the house with a little basket on her arm.

"She'll go to market every morning," he thought to himself. "I shall see her then."

Not the slightest glance of Stephen's eye ever escaped his mother's notice.

"Ah! there goes the lady," she said. "I wonder if she is always going down town at this hour? You will have to manage to go either earlier or later, or else people will begin to talk about you."

Stephen White had one rule of conduct: when he was uncertain what to do, not to do any thing. He broke it in this instance, and had reason to regret it long. He spoke impulsively on the instant, and revealed to mother his dawning interest in Mercy, and planted then and there an ineffaceable germ of distrust in her mind.

"Now, mother," he said, "what's the use of you beginning to set up this new worry? Mrs. Philbrick is a widow, and very sad and lonely. She is the friend of my friend, Harley Allen; and I am in duty bound to show her some attention, and help her if I can. She is also a bright, interesting person; and I do not know so many such that I should turn my back on one under my own roof. I have not so many social pleasures that I should give up this one, just on account of a possible gossip about it."

Silence would have been wiser. Mrs. White did not speak for a moment or two; then she said, in a slow and deliberate manner, as if reflecting on a problem,--"You enjoy Mrs. Philbrick's society, then, do you, Stephen? How much have you seen of her?"