In the mean time, the young widow,
Mercy Philbrick, and her old and almost childish mother,
Mercy Carr, were coming by slow and tiring stage journeys
up the dreary length of Cape Cod. For thirty years
the elder woman had never gone out of sight of the
village graveyard in which her husband and four children
were buried. To transplant her was like transplanting
an old weather-beaten tree, already dead at the top.
Yet the physicians had said that the only chance of
prolonging her life was to take her away from the
fierce winds of the sea. She herself, while she
loved them, shrank from them. They seemed to
pierce her lungs like arrows of ice-cold steel, at
once wounding and benumbing. Yet the habit and
love of the seashore life were so strong upon her
that she would never have been able to tear herself
away from her old home, had it not been for her daughter’s
determined will. Mercy Philbrick was a woman of
slight frame, gentle, laughing, brown eyes, a pale
skin, pale ash-brown hair, a small nose; a sweet and
changeful mouth, the upper lip too short, the lower
lip much too full; little hands, little feet, little
wrists. Not one indication of great physical
or great mental strength could you point out in Mercy
Philbrick; but she was rarely ill; and she had never
been known to give up a point, small or great, on
which her will had been fully set. Even the cheerfulness
of which her minister, Harley Allen, had written to
Stephen, was very largely a matter of will with Mercy.
She confronted grief as she would confront an antagonist
force of any sort: it was something to be battled
with, to be conquered. Fate should not worst her:
come what might, she would be the stronger of the
two. When the doctor said to her,-
“Mrs. Philbrick, I fear that
your mother cannot live through another winter in
this climate,” Mercy looked at him for a moment
with an expression of terror. In an instant more,
the expression had given place to one of resolute
and searching inquiry.
“You think, then, that she might
be well in a different climate?”
“Perhaps not well, but she might
live for years in a dryer, milder air. There
is as yet no actual disease in her lungs,” the
doctor replied.
Mercy interrupted him.
“You think she might live in
comparative comfort? It would not be merely prolonging
her life as a suffering invalid?” she said; adding
in an undertone, as if to herself, “I would
not subject her to that.”
“Oh, yes, undoubtedly,”
said the doctor. “She need never die of
consumption at all, if she could breathe only inland
air. She will never be strong again, but she
may live years without any especial liability to suffering.”
“Then I will take her away immediately,”
replied Mercy, in as confident and simple a manner
as if she had been proposing only to move her from
one room into another. It would not seem so easy
a matter for two lonely women, in a little Cape Cod
village, without a male relative to help them, and
with only a few thousand dollars in the world, to sell
their house, break up all their life-long associations,
and go out into the world to find a new home.
Associations crystallize around people in lonely and
out of the way spots, where the days are all alike,
and years follow years in an undeviating monotony.
Perhaps the process might be more aptly called one
of petrifaction. There are pieces of exquisite
agate which were once soft wood. Ages ago, the
bit of wood fell into a stream, where the water was
largely impregnated with some chemical matter which
had the power to eat out the fibre of the wood, and
in each spot thus left empty to deposit itself in
an exact image of the wood it had eaten away.
Molecule by molecule, in a mystery too small for human
eye to detect, even had a watchful human eye been
lying in wait to observe, the marvellous process went
on; until, after the lapse of nobody knows how many
centuries, the wood was gone, and in its place lay
its exact image in stone,-rings of growth,
individual peculiarities of structure, knots, broken
slivers and chips; color, shape, all perfect.
Men call it agatized wood, by a feeble effort to translate
the mystery of its existence; but it is not wood,
except to the eye. To the touch, and in fact,
it is stone,-hard, cold, unalterable, eternal
stone. The slow wear of monotonous life in a set
groove does very much such a thing as this to human
beings. To the eye they retain the semblance
of other beings; but try them by touch, that is by
contact with people, with events outside their groove,
and they are stone,-agatized men and women.
Carry them where you please, after they have reached
middle or old age, and they will not change. There
is no magic water, a drop of which will restore to
them the vitality and pliability of their youth.
They last well, such people,-as well, almost,
as agatized wood on museum shelves; and the most you
can do for them is to keep them well dusted.
Old Mrs. Carr belonged, in a degree,
to this order of persons. Only the coming of
Mercy’s young life into the feeble current of
her own had saved it from entire stagnation.
But she was already past middle age when Mercy was
born; and the child with her wonderful joyousness,
and the maiden with her wondrous cheer, came too late
to undo what the years had done. The most they
could do was to interrupt the process, to stay it at
that point. The consequence was that Mrs. Carr
at sixty-five was a placid sort of middle-aged old
lady, very pleasant to talk with as you would talk
with a child, very easy to take care of as you would
take care of a child, but, for all purposes of practical
management or efficient force, as helpless as a baby.
When Mercy told her what the doctor
had said of her health, and that they must sell the
house and move away before the winter set in, she literally
opened her mouth too wide to speak for a minute, and
then gasped out like a frightened child,-
“O Mercy, don’t let’s do it!”
As Mercy went on explaining to her
the necessity of the change, and the arrangements
she proposed to make, the poor old woman’s face
grew longer and longer; but, some time before Mercy
had come to the end of her explanation, the childish
soul had accepted the whole thing as fixed, had begun
already to project itself in childish imaginations
of detail; and to Mercy’s infinite relief and
half-sad amusement, when she ceased speaking, her
mother’s first words were, eagerly,-
“Well, Mercy, if we go ’n
the stage, ‘n’ I s’pose we shall
hev to, don’t ye think my old brown merino’ll
do to wear?”
Fortune favored Mercy’s desire
to sell the house. Stephen’s friend, the
young minister, had said to himself many times, as
he walked up to its door between the quaint, trim
beds of old-fashioned pinks and ladies’ delights
and sweet-williams which bordered the little path,
“This is the only house in this town I want
to live in.” As soon as he heard that it
was for sale, he put on his hat, and fairly ran to
buy it. Out of breath, he took Mercy’s
hands in his, and exclaimed,-
“O Mercy, do you really want to sell this house?”
Very unworldly were this young man
and this young woman, in the matter of sale and purchase.
Adepts in traffic would have laughed, had they overheard
the conversation.
“Yes, indeed, Mr. Allen, I do.
I must sell it; and I am afraid I shall have to sell
it for a great deal less than it is worth,” replied
Mercy.
“No, you sha’n’t,
Mercy! I’ll buy it myself. I’ve
always wanted it. But why in the world do you
want to sell it? Where will you live yourself?
There isn’t another house in the village you’d
like half so well. Is it too large for you?”
continued Mr. Allen, hurriedly. Then Mercy told
him all her plans, and the sad necessity for her making
the change. The young minister did not speak
for some moments. He seemed lost in thought.
Then he exclaimed,-
“I do believe it’s a kind
of Providence!” and drew a letter from his pocket,
which he had only two days before received from Stephen
White. “Mercy,” he went on, “I
believe I’ve got the very thing you want right
here;” and he read her the concluding paragraph
of the letter, in which Stephen had said: “Meantime,
I am waiting as patiently as I can for a tenant for
the other half of this house. It seems to be very
hard to find just the right sort of person. I
cannot take in any of the mill operatives. They
are noisy and untidy; and the bare thought of their
being just the other side of the partition would drive
my mother frantic. I wish so much I could get
some people in that would be real friends for her.
She is very lonely. She never leaves her bed;
and I have to be away all day.”
Mercy’s face lighted up.
She liked the sound of each word that this unknown
man wrote. Very eagerly she questioned Mr. Allen
about the town, its situation, its healthfulness,
and so forth. As he gave her detail after detail,
she nodded her head with increasing emphasis, and finally
exclaimed: “That is precisely such a spot
as Dr. Wheeler said we ought to go to. I think
you’re right, Mr. Allen. It’s a Providence.
And I’d be so glad to be good to that poor old
woman, too. What a companion she’d be for
mother! that is, if I could keep them from comparing
notes for ever about their diseases. That’s
the worst of putting invalid old women together,”
laughed Mercy with a kindly, merry little laugh.
Mr. Allen had visited Penfield only
once. When he and Stephen were boys at school
together, he had passed one of the short vacations
at Stephen’s house. He remembered very
little of Stephen’s father and mother, or of
their way of life. He was at the age when house
and home mean little to boys, except a spot where
shelter and food are obtained in the enforced intervals
between their hours of out-door life. But he had
never forgotten the grand out-look and off-look from
the town. Lying itself high up on the western
slope of what must once have been a great river terrace,
it commanded a view of a wide and fertile meadow country,
near enough to be a most beautiful feature in the
landscape, but far enough away to prevent any danger
from its moisture. To the south and south-west
rose a fine range of mountains, bold and sharp-cut,
though they were not very high, and were heavily wooded
to their summits. The westernmost peak of this
range was separated from the rest by a wide river,
which had cut its way through in some of those forgotten
ages when, if we are to believe the geologists, every
thing was topsy-turvy on this now meek and well-regulated
planet.
The town, although, as I said, it
lay on the western slope of a great river terrace,
held in its site three distinctly marked plateaus.
From the two highest of these, the views were grand.
It was like living on a mountain, and yet there was
the rich beauty of coloring of the river interval.
Nowhere in all New England was there a fairer country
than this to look upon, nor a goodlier one in which
to live.
Mr. Allen’s enthusiasm in describing
the beauties of the place, and Mercy’s enthusiasm
in listening, were fast driving out of their minds
the thought of the sale, which had been mentioned
in the beginning of their conversation. Mercy
was the first to recall it. She blushed and hesitated,
as she said,-
“But, Mr. Allen, we can’t
go, you know, until I have sold this house. Did
you really want to buy it? And how much do you
think I ought to ask for it?”
“To be sure, to be sure!”
exclaimed the young minister. “Dear me,
what children we are! Mercy, I don’t honestly
know what you ought to ask for the house. I’ll
find out.”
“Deacon Jones said he thought,
taking in the cranberry meadow, it was worth three
thousand dollars,” said Mercy; “but that
seems a great deal to me: though not in a good
cranberry year, perhaps,” added she, ingenuously,
“for last year the cranberries brought us in
seventy-five dollars, besides paying for the picking.”
“And the meadow ought to go
with the house, by all means,” said Mr. Allen.
“I want it for color in the background, when
I look at the house as I come down from the meeting-house
hill. I wouldn’t like to have anybody else
own the canvas on which the picture of my home will
be oftenest painted for my eyes. I’ll give
you three thousand dollars for the house, Mercy.
I can only pay two thousand down, and pay you interest
on the other thousand for a year or two. I’ll
soon clear it off. Will that do?”
“Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr.
Allen. It will more than do,” said poor
Mercy, who could not believe in such sudden good fortune;
“but do you think you ought to buy it so quick?
Perhaps it wouldn’t bring so much money as that.
I had not asked anybody except Deacon Jones.”
Mr. Allen laughed. “If
you don’t look out for yourself sharper than
this, Mercy,” he said, “in the new place
’where you’re going to live, you’ll
fare badly. Perhaps it may be true, as you say,
that nobody else would give you three thousand dollars
for the house, because nobody might happen to want
to live in it. But Deacon Jones knows better than
anybody else the value of property here, and I am
perfectly willing to give you the price he set on
the place. I had laid by this two thousand dollars
towards my house; and I could not build such a house
as this, to-day, for three thousand dollars.
But really, Mercy, you must look ’out for yourself
better than this.”
“I don’t know,”
replied Mercy, looking out of the window, with an earnest
gaze, as if she were reading a writing a great way
off,-“I don’t know about that.
I doubt very much if looking out for one’s self,
as you call it, is the best way to provide for one’s
self.”
That very night Mr. Allen wrote to
Stephen; in two weeks, the whole matter was settled,
and Mercy and her mother had set out on their journey.
They carried with them but one small valise.
The rest of their simple wardrobe had gone in boxes,
with the furniture, by sailing vessel, to a city which
was within three hours by rail of their new home.
This was the feature of the situation which poor Mrs.
Carr could not accept. In the bottom of her heart,
she fully believed that they would never again see
one of those boxes. The contents of some which
she had herself packed were of a most motley description.
In the beginning of the breaking up, while Mercy was
at her wits’ end, with the unwonted perplexities
of packing the whole belongings of a house, her mother
had tormented her incessantly by bringing to her every
few minutes some utterly incongruous and frequently
worthless article, and begging her to put it in at
once, whatever she might be packing. Any one
who has ever packed for a long journey, with an eager
and excited child running up every minute with more
and more cumbrous toys, dogs, cats, Noah’s arks,
and so on, to be put in among books and under-clothing,
can imagine Mercy’s despair at her mother’s
restless activity.
“Oh, mother, not in this box!
Not in with the china!” would groan poor Mercy,
as her mother appeared with armfuls of ancient relics
from the garret, such as old umbrellas, bonnets, bundles
of old newspapers, broken spinning-wheels, andirons,
and rolls of remains of old wall-paper, the last of
which had disappeared from the walls of the house,
long before Mercy was born. No old magpie was
ever a more indiscriminate hoarder than Mrs. Carr
had been; and, among all her hoardings, there was none
more amusing than her hoarding of old wall-papers.
A scrap a foot square seemed to her too precious to
throw away. “It might be jest the right
size to cover suthin’ with,” she would
say; and, to do her justice, she did use in the course
of a year a most unexampled amount of such fragments.
She had a mania for papering and repapering and papering
again every shelf, every box, every corner she could
get hold of. The paste and brush were like toys
to her; and she delighted in gay combinations, sticking
on old bits of borders in fantastic ways, in most
inappropriate situations.
“I do believe you’ll paper
the pigsty next, mother,” said Mercy one day:
“there’s nothing left you can paper except
that.” Mrs. Carr took the suggestion in
perfect good faith, and convulsed Mercy a few days
later by entering the kitchen with the following extraordinary
remark,-
“I don’t believe it’s
worth while to paper the pigsty. I’ve been
looking at it, and the boards they’re so rough,
the paper wouldn’t lay smooth, anyhow; and I
couldn’t well get at the inside o’ the
roof, while the pig’s in. It would look
real neat, though. I’d like to do it.”
Mercy endured her mother’s help
in packing for one day. Then the desperateness
of the trouble suggested a remedy. Selecting a
large, strong box, she had it carried into the garret.
“There, mother,” she said,
“now you can pack in this box all the old lumber
of all sorts which you want to carry. And, if
this box isn’t large enough, you shall have
two more. Don’t tire yourself out:
there’s plenty of time; and, if you don’t
get it all packed by the time I am done, I can help
you.”
Then Mercy went downstairs feeling
half-guilty, as one does when one has practised a
subterfuge on a child.
How many times that poor old woman
packed and unpacked that box, nobody could dream.
All day long she trotted up and down, up and down;
ransacking closets, chests, barrels; sorting and resorting,
and forgetting as fast as she sorted. Now and
then she would come across something which would rouse
an electric chain of memories in the dim chambers of
her old, worn-out brain, and she would sit motionless
for a long time on the garret floor, in a sort of
trance. Once Mercy found her leaning back against
a beam, with her knees covered by a piece of faded
blue Canton crape, on which her eyes were fastened.
She did not speak till Mercy touched her shoulder.
“Oh, my! how you scared me,
child!” she exclaimed. “D’ye
see this ere blue stuff? I hed a gown o’
thet once: it was drefful kind o’ clingy
stuff. I never felt exzackly decent in it, somehow:
it hung a good deal like a night-gownd; but your father
he bought it for the color. He traded off some
shells for it in some o’ them furrin places.
You wouldn’t think it now, but it used to be
jest the color o’ a robin’s egg or a light-blue
‘bachelor’s button;’ and your father
he used to stick one o’ them in my belt whenever
they was in blossom, when I hed the gownd on.
He hed a heap o’ notions about things matchin’.
He brought me that gownd the v’yage he made
jest afore Caleb was born; and I never hed a chance
to wear it much, the children come so fast. It
warn’t re’ly worn at all, ‘n’
I hed it dyed black for veils arterwards.”
It was from this father who used to
“stick” pale-blue flowers in his wife’s
belt, and whose love of delicate fabrics and tints
made him courageous enough to lead her draped in Canton
crape into the unpainted Cape Cod meeting-house, where
her fellow-women bristled in homespun, that Mercy
inherited all the artistic side of her nature.
She knew this instinctively, and all her tenderest
sentiment centred around the vague memory she retained
of a tall, dark-bearded man, who, when she was only
three years old, lifted her in his arms, called her
his “little Mercy,” and kissed her over
and over again. She was most loyally affectionate
to her mother, but the sentiment was not a wholly
filial one. There was too much reversal of the
natural order of the protector and the protected in
it; and her life was on too different a plane of thought,
feeling, and interest from the life of the uncultured,
undeveloped, childish, old woman. Yet no one
who saw them together would have detected any trace
of this shortcoming in Mercy’s feeling towards
her mother. She had in her nature a fine and
lofty fibre of loyalty which could never condescend
even to parley with a thought derogatory to its object;
was lifted above all consciousness of the possibility
of any other course. This is a sort of organic
integrity of affection, which is to those who receive
it a tower of strength, that is impregnable to all
assault except that of death itself. It is a
rare type of love, the best the world knows; but the
men and the women whose hearts are capable of it are
often thought not to be of a loving nature. The
cheaper and less lasting types of love are so much
louder of voice and readier of phrase, as in cloths
cheap fabrics, poor to wear, are often found printed
in gay colors and big patterns.
The day before they left home, Mercy,
becoming alarmed by a longer interval than usual without
any sound from the garret, where her mother was still
at work over her fantastic collections of old odds
and ends, ran up to see what it meant.
Mrs. Carr was on her knees before
a barrel, which had held rags and papers. The
rags and papers were spread around her on the floor.
She had leaned her head on the barrel, and was crying
bitterly.
“Mother! mother! what is the
matter?” exclaimed Mercy, really alarmed; for
she had very few times in her life seen her mother
cry. Without speaking, Mrs. Carr held up a little
piece of carved ivory. It was of a creamy yellow,
and shone like satin: a long shred of frayed pink
ribbon hung from it. As she held it up to Mercy,
a sunbeam flashed in at the garret window, and fell
across it, sending long glints of light to right and
left.
“What a lovely bit of carving!
What is it, mother? Why does it make you cry?”
asked Mercy, stretching out her hand to take the ivory.
“It’s Caley’s whistle,”
sobbed Mrs. Carr. “We allus thought
Patience Swift must ha’ took it. She nussed
me a spell when he was a little feller, an’
jest arter she went away we missed the whistle.
Your father he brought that hum the same v’yage
I told ye he brought the blue crape. He knowed
I was a expectin’ to be sick, and he was drefful
afraid he wouldn’t get hum in time; but he did.
He jest come a sailin’ into th’ harbor,
with every mite o’ sail the old brig ‘d
carry, two days afore Caley was born. An’
the next mornin’,-oh, dear me! it
don’t seem no longer ago ’n yesterday,-while
he was a dressin’, an’ I lay lookin’
at him, he tossed that little thing over to me on
the bed, ‘n’ sez he,-”
“T ’ll be a boy, Mercy,
I know ‘twill; an’ here’s his bos’u’n’s
whistle all ready for him,’ an’ that night
he bought that very yard o’ pink rebbin, and
tied it on himself, and laid it in the upper drawer
into one o’ the little pink socks I’d
got all ready. Oh, it don’t seem any longer
ago ‘n yesterday! An’ sure enough
it was a boy; an’ your father he allus
used to call him ‘Bos’u’n,’
and he’d stick this ere whistle into his mouth
an’ try to make him blow it afore he was a month
old. But by the time he was nine months old he’d
blow it ez loud ez I could. And his father he’d
just lay back ’n his chair, and laugh ‘n’
laugh, ‘n’ call out, ’Blow away,
my hearty!’ Oh, my! it don’t seem any longer
ago’n yesterday. I wish I’d ha’
known. I wa’n’t never friends with
Patience any more arter that. I never misgave
me but what she’d got the whistle. It was
such a curious cut thing, and cost a heap o’
money. Your father wouldn’t never tell what
he gin for ’t. Oh, my! it don’t seem
any longer ago ’n yesterday,” and the
old woman wiped her eyes on her apron, and struggling
up on her feet took the whistle again from Mercy’s
hands.
“How old would my brother Caley
be now, if he had lived, mother?” said Mercy,
anxious to bring her mother gently back to the present.
“Well, let me see, child.
Why, Caley-Caley, he’d be-How
old am I, Mercy? Dear me! hain’t I lost
my memory, sure enough, except about these ere old
things? They seem’s clear’s daylight.”
“Sixty-five last July, mother,”
said Mercy. “Don’t you know I gave
you your new specs then?”
“Oh, yes, child,-yes.
Well, I’m sixty-five, be I? Then Caley,-Caley,
he’d be, let me see-you reckon it,
Mercy. I wuz goin’ on nineteen when Caley
was born.”
“Why, mother,” exclaimed
Mercy, “is it really so long ago? Then my
brother Caleb would be forty-six years old now!”
and mercy took again in her hand the yellow ivory
whistle, and ran her fingers over the faded and frayed
pink ribbon, and looked at it with an indefinable sense
of its being a strange link between her and a distant
past, which, though she had never shared it, belonged
to her by right. Hardly thinking what she did,
she raised the whistle to her lips, and blew a loud,
shrill whistle on it. Her mother started.
“O Mercy, don’t, don’t!” she
cried. “I can’t bear to hear it.”
“Now, mother, don’t you
be foolish,” said Mercy, cheerily. “A
whistle’s a whistle, old or young, and made
to be whistled with. We’ll keep this to
amuse children with: you carry it in your pocket.
Perhaps we shall meet some children on the journey;
and it’ll be so nice for you to pop this out
of your pocket, and give it to them to blow.”
“So it will, Mercy, I declare.
That ’ud be real nice. You’re a master-piece
for thinkin’ o’ things.” And,
easily diverted as a child, the old woman dropped
the whistle into her deep pocket, and, forgetting all
her tears, returned to her packing.
Not so Mercy. Having attained
her end of cheering her mother, her own thoughts reverted
again and again all day long, and many times in after
years, whenever she saw the ivory whistle, to the strange
picture of the lonely old woman in the garret coming
upon her first-born child’s first toy, lost
for forty years; the picture, too, of the history of
the quaint piece of carving itself; the day it was
slowly cut and chiselled by a patient and ill-paid
toiler in some city of China; its voyage in the keeping
of the ardent young husband hastening home to welcome
his first child; its forty years of silence and darkness
in the old garret; and then its return to life and
light and sound, in the hands and lips of new generations
of children.
The journey which Mercy had so much
dreaded was unexpectedly pleasant. Mrs. Carr
proved an admirable traveller with the exception of
her incessant and garrulous anxiety about the boxes
which had been left behind on the deck of the schooner
“Maria Jane,” and could not by any possibility
overtake them for three weeks to come. She was,
in fact, so much of a child that she was in a state
of eager delight at every new scene and person.
Her childishness proved the best of claims upon every
one’s courtesy. Everybody was ready to help
“that poor sweet old woman;” and she was
so simply and touchingly grateful for the smallest
kindness that everybody who had helped her once wanted
to help her again. More than one of their fellow-travellers
remembered for a long time the bright-faced young
woman with her childish mother, and wondered where
they could have been going, and what was to be their
life.
On the fourth day, just as the sun
was sinking behind the hills, they entered the beautiful
river interval, through which the road to their new
home lay. Mercy sat with her face almost pressed
against the panes of the car-windows, eagerly scanning
every feature of the landscape, to her so new and
wonderful. To the dweller by the sea, the first
sight of mountains is like the sight of a new heavens
and a new earth. It is a revelation of a new
life. Mercy felt strangely stirred and overawed.
She looked around in astonishment at her fellow-passengers,
not one of whom apparently observed that on either
hand were stretching away to the east and the west
fields that were, even in this late autumn, like carpets
of gold and green. Through these fertile meadows
ran a majestic river, curving and doubling as if loath
to leave such fair shores. The wooded mountains
changed fast from green to purple, from purple to dark
gray; and almost before Mercy had comprehended the
beauty of the region, it was lost from her sight,
veiled in the twilight’s pale, indistinguishable
tints. Her mother was fast asleep in her seat.
The train stopped every few moments at some insignificant
station, of which Mercy could see nothing but a narrow
platform, a dim lantern, and a sleepy-looking station-master.
Slowly, one or two at a time, the passengers disappeared,
until she and her mother were left alone in the car.
The conductor and the brakeman, as they passed through,
looked at them with renewed interest: it was evident
now that they were going through to the terminus of
the road.
“Goin’ through, be ye?”
said the conductor. “It’ll be dark
when we get in; an’ it’s beginnin’
to rain. ‘S anybody comin’ to meet
ye?”
“No,” said Mercy, uneasily.
“Will there not be carriages at the depot?
We are going to the hotel. I believe there is
but one.”
“Well, there may be a kerridge
down to-night, an’ there may not: there’s
no knowin’. Ef it don’t rain too hard,
I reckon Seth’ll be down.”
Mercy’s sense of humor never
failed her. She laughed heartily, as she said,-
“Then Seth stays away, does
he, on the nights when he would be sure of passengers?”
The conductor laughed too, as he replied, –
“Well, ’tisn’t quite
so bad’s that. Ye see this here road’s
only a piece of a road. It’s goin’
up through to connect with the northern roads; but
they ‘ve come to a stand-still for want
o’ funds, an’ more ’n half the time
I don’t carry nobody over this last ten miles.
Most o’ the people from our town go the other
way, on the river road. It’s shorter, an’
some cheaper. There isn’t much travellin’
done by our folks, anyhow. We’re a mighty
dead an’ alive set up here. Goin’
to stay a spell?” he continued, with increasing
interest, as he looked longer into Mercy’s face.
“Probably,” said Mercy,
in a grave tone, suddenly recollecting that she ought
not to talk with this man as if he were one of her
own village people. The conductor, sensitive
as are most New England people, spite of their apparent
familiarity of address, to the least rebuff, felt the
change in Mercy’s tone, and walked away, thinking
half surlily, “She needn’t put on airs.
A schoolma’am, I reckon. Wonder if it can
be her that’s going to teach the Academy?”
When they reached the station, it
was, as the conductor had said, very dark; and it
was raining hard. For the first time, a sense
of her unprotected loneliness fell upon Mercy’s
heart. Her mother, but half-awake, clung nervously
to her, asking purposeless and incoherent questions.
The conductor, still surly from his fancied rebuff
at Mercy’s hands, walked away, and took no notice
of them. The station-master was nowhere to be
seen. The two women stood huddling together under
one umbrella, gazing blankly about them.
“Is this Mrs. Philbrick?”
came in clear, firm tones, out of the darkness behind
them; and, in a second more, Mercy had turned and looked
up into Stephen White’s face.
“Oh, how good you were to come
and meet us!” exclaimed Mercy. “You
are Mr. Allen’s friend, I suppose.”
“Yes,” said Stephen, curtly.
“But I did not come to meet you. You must
not thank me. I had business here. However,
I made the one carriage which the town boasts, wait,
in case you should be here. Here it is!”
And, before Mercy had time to analyze or even to realize
the vague sense of disappointment she felt at his
words, she found herself and her mother placed in
the carriage, and the door shut.
“Your trunks cannot go up until
morning,” he said, speaking through the carriage
window; “but, if you will give me your checks,
I will see that they are sent.”
“We have only one small valise,”
said Mercy: “that was under our seat.
The brakeman said he would take it out for us; but
he forgot it, and so did I.”
The train was already backing out
of the station. Stephen smothered some very unchivalrous
words on his lips, as he ran out into the rain, overtook
the train, and swung himself on the last car, in search
of the “one small valise” belonging to
his tenants. It was a very shabby valise:
it had made many a voyage with its first owner, Captain
Carr. It was a very little valise: it could
not have held one gown of any of the modern fashions.
“Dear me,” thought Stephen,
as he put it into the carriage at Mercy’s feet,
“what sort of women are these I’ve taken
under my roof! I expect they’ll be very
unpleasing sights to my eyes. I did hope she’d
be good-looking.” How many times in after
years did Stephen recall with laughter his first impressions
of Mercy Philbrick, and wonder how he could have argued
so unhesitatingly that a woman who travelled with only
one small valise could not be good-looking.
“Will you come to the house to-morrow?”
he asked.
“Oh, no,” replied Mercy,
“not for three or four weeks yet. Our furniture
will not be here under that time.”
“Ah!” said Stephen, “I
had not thought of that. I will call on you at
the hotel, then, in a day or two.”
His adieus were civil, but only civil:
that most depressing of all things to a sensitive
nature, a kindly indifference, was manifest in every
word he said, and in every tone of his voice.
Mercy felt it to the quick; but she
was ashamed of herself for the feeling. “What
business had I to expect that he was going to be our
friend?” she said in her heart. “We
are only tenants to him.”
“What a kind-spoken young man
he is, to be sure, Mercy!” said Mrs. Carr.
So all-sufficient is bare kindliness
of tone and speech to the unsensitive nature.
“Yes, mother, he was very kind,”
said Mercy; “but I don’t think we shall
ever know him very well.”
“Why, Mercy, why not?”
exclaimed her mother. “I should say he was
most uncommon friendly for a stranger, running back
after our valise in the rain, and a goin’ to
call on you to oncet.”
Mercy made no reply. The carriage
rolled along over the rough and muddy road. It
was too dark to see any thing except the shadowy black
shapes of houses, outlined on a still deeper blackness
by the light streaming from their windows. There
is no sight in the world so hard for lonely, homeless
people to see, as the sight of the lighted windows
of houses after nightfall. Why houses should
look so much more homelike, so much more suggestive
of shelter and cheer and companionship and love, when
the curtains are snug-drawn and the doors shut, and
nobody can look in, though the lights of fires and
lamps shine out, than they do in broad daylight, with
open windows and people coming and going through open
doors, and a general air of comradeship and busy living,
it is hard to see. But there is not a lonely
vagabond in the world who does not know that they do.
One may see on a dark night many a wistful face of
lonely man or lonely woman, hurrying resolutely past,
and looking away from, the illumined houses which
mean nothing to them except the keen reminder of what
they are without. Oh, the homeless people there
are in this world! Did anybody ever think to
count up the thousands there are in every great city,
who live in lodgings and not in homes; from the luxurious
lodger who lodges in the costliest rooms of the costliest
hotel, down to the most poverty-stricken lodger who
lodges in a corner of the poorest tenement-house?
Homeless all of them; their common vagabondage is
only a matter of degrees of decency. All honor
to the bravery of those who are homeless because they
must be, and who make the best of it. But only
scorn and pity for those who are homeless because
they choose to be, and are foolish enough to like it.
Mercy had never before felt the sensation
of being a homeless wanderer. She was utterly
unprepared for it. All through the breaking up
of their home and the preparations for their journey,
she had been buoyed up by excitement and anticipation.
Much as she had grieved to part from some of the friends
of her early life, and to leave the old home in which
she was born, there was still a certain sense of elation
in the prospect of new scenes and new people.
She had felt, without realizing it, a most unreasonable
confidence that it was to be at once a change from
one home to another home. In her native town,
she had had a position of importance. Their house
was the best house in the town; judged by the simple
standards of a Cape Cod village, they were well-to-do.
Everybody knew, and everybody spoke with respect and
consideration, of “Old Mis’ Carr,”
or, as she was perhaps more often called, “Widder
Carr.” Mercy had not thought-in
her utter inexperience of change, it could not have
occurred to her-what a very different thing
it was to be simply unknown and poor people in a strange
place. The sense of all this smote upon her suddenly
and keenly, as they jolted along in the noisy old
carriage on this dark, rainy night. Stephen White’s
indifferent though kindly manner first brought to her
the thought, or rather the feeling, of this.
Each new glimmer of the home-lights deepened her sense
of desolation. Every gust of rain that beat on
the carriage roof and windows made her feel more and
more like an outcast. She never forgot these
moments. She used to say that in them she had
lived the whole life of the loneliest outcast that
was ever born. Long years afterward, she wrote
a poem, called “The Outcast,” which was
so intense in its feeling one could have easily believed
that it was written by Ishmael. When she was
asked once how and when she wrote this poem, she replied,
“I did not write it: I lived it one night
in entering a strange town.” In vain she
struggled against the strange and unexpected emotion.
A nervous terror of arriving at the hotel oppressed
her more and more; although, thanks to Harley Allen’s
thoughtfulness, she knew that their rooms were already
engaged for them. She felt as if she would rather
drive on and on, in all the darkness and rain, no
matter where, all night long, rather than enter the
door of the strange and public house, in which she
must give her name and her mother’s name on the
threshold.
When the carriage stopped, she moved
so slowly to alight that her mother exclaimed petulantly,-
“Dear me, child, what’s
the matter with you? Ain’t you goin’
to git out? Ain’t this the tavern?”
“Yes, mother, this is our place,”
said Mercy, in a low voice, unlike her usual cheery,
ringing tones, as she assisted her mother down the
clumsy steps from the old-fashioned, high vehicle.
“They’re expecting us: it is all
right.” But her voice and face belied her
words. She moved all through the rest of the
evening like one in a dream. She said little,
but busied herself in making her mother as comfortable
as it was possible to be in the dingy and unattractive
little rooms; and, as soon as the tired old woman
had fallen asleep, Mercy sat down on the floor by the
window, and leaning her head on the sill cried hard.