Mercy said nothing to her mother of
Mrs. White’s rudeness. She merely mentioned
the fact of her having met Mr. White near the house,
and having gone with him, at his request, to speak
to his mother.
“What’s she like, Mercy?”
asked Mrs. Carr, eagerly. “Is she goin’
to be company for me?”
“I could not tell, mother,”
replied Mercy, indifferently; “for it was just
their tea-hour, and I did not stay a minute,-only
just to say, How d’ye do, and Good-evening.
But Mr. White says she is very lonely; people don’t
go to see her much: so I should think she would
be very glad of somebody her own age in the house,
to come and sit with her. She looks very ill,
poor soul. She hasn’t been out of her bed,
except when she was lifted, for eight years.”
“Dear me! dear me!” exclaimed
Mrs. Carr. “Oh, I hope I’ll never
be that way. What’u’d you ever do
child, if I’d get to be like that?”
“No danger, mother dear, of
your ever being like Mrs. White,” said Mercy,
with an incautious emphasis, which, however, escaped
Mrs. Carr’s recognition.
“Why, how can you be so sure
I mightn’t ever get into jest so bad a way,
child? There’s none of us can say what diseases
we’re likely to hev or not to hev. Now
there’s never been a case o’ lung trouble
in our family afore mine, not ’s fur back ’s
anybody kin trace it out; ‘n’ there’s
been two cancers to my own knowledge; ‘n’
I allus hed a most awful dread o’ gettin’
a cancer. There ain’t no death like thet.
There wuz my mother’s half-sister, Keziah,-she
that married Elder Swift for her second husband.
She died o’ cancer; an’ her oldest boy
by her first husband he hed it in his face awful.
But he held on ter life ’s ef he couldn’t
say die, nohow; and I tell yer, Mercy, it wuz a sight
nobody’d ever forget, to see him goin’
round the street with one side o’ his face all
bound up, and his well eye a rolling round, a-doin’
the work o’ two. He got so he couldn’t
see at all out o’ either eye afore he died, ‘n’
you could hear his screeches way to our house.
There wouldn’t no laudalum stop the pain a mite.”
“Oh, mother! don’t! don’t!”
exclaimed Mercy. “It is too dreadful to
talk about. I can’t bear to think that
any human being has ever suffered so. Please
don’t ever speak of cancers again.”
Mrs. Carr looked puzzled and a little
vexed, as she answered, “Well, I reckon they’ve
got to be talked about a good deal, fust and last,
’s long ’s there’s so many dies
on ’em. But I don’t know ’s
you ‘n’ I’ve got any call to dwell
on ’em much. You’ve got dreadful quick
feelin’s, Mercy, ain’t you? You allus
was orful feelin’ for everybody when you wuz
little, ‘n’ I don’t see ’s
you’ve outgrowed it a bit. But I expect
it’s thet makes you sech friends with folks,
an’ makes you such a good gal to your poor old
mother. Kiss me, child,” and Mrs. Carr lifted
up her face to be kissed, as a child lifts up its
face to its mother. She did this many times a
day; and, whenever Mercy bent down to kiss her, she
put her hands on the old woman’s shoulders,
and said, “Dear little mother!” in a tone
which made her mother’s heart warm with happiness.
It is a very beautiful thing to see
just this sort of relation between an aged parent
and a child, the exact reversal of the bond, and the
bond so absolutely fulfilled. It seems to give
a new and deeper sense to the word “filial,”
and a new and deeper significance to the joy of motherhood
or fatherhood. Alas, that so few sons and daughters
are capable of it! so few helpless old people know
the blessedness of it! No little child six years
old ever rested more entirely and confidingly in the
love and kindness and shelter and direction of its
mother than did Mrs. Carr in the love and kindness
and shelter and direction of her daughter Mercy.
It had begun to be so, while Mercy was yet a little
girl. Before she was fifteen years old, she felt
a responsibility for her mother’s happiness,
a watchfulness over her mother’s health, and
even a care of her mother’s clothes. With
each year, the sense of these responsibilities grew
deeper; and after her marriage, as she was denied
the blessing of children, all the deep maternal instincts
of her strong nature flowed back and centred anew
around this comparatively helpless, aged child whom
she called mother, and treated with never-failing
respect.
When Mrs. Carr first saw the house
they were to live in, she exclaimed,-
“O Lor’, Mercy! Is
thet the house?” Then, stepping back a few steps,
shoving her spectacles high on her nose, and with her
head well thrown back, she took a survey of the building
in silence. Then she turned slowly around, and,
facing Mercy, said in a droll, dry way, not uncommon
with her,-
“’Bijah Jenkins’s barn!”
Mercy laughed outright.
“So it is, mother. I hadn’t
thought of it. It looks just like that old barn
of Deacon Jenkins’s.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Carr.
“That’s it, exzackly. Well, I never
thought o’ offerin’ to hire a barn to
live in afore, but I s’pose ’t’ll
do till we can look about. Mebbe we can do better.”
“But we’ve taken it for
a year, mother,” said Mercy, a little dismayed.
“Oh, hev we? Well, well,
I daresay it’s comfortable enough; so the sun
shines in mornin’s, thet’s the most I care
for. You’ll make any kind o’ house
pooty to look at inside, an’ I reckon we needn’t
roost on the fences outside, a-lookin’ at it,
any more’n we choose to. It does look, for
all the world though, like ’Bijah Jenkins’s
old yaller barn; ‘n’ thet there jog’s
jest the way he jined on his cow-shed. I declare
it’s too redicklus.” And the old
lady laughed till she had to wipe her spectacles.
“It could be made very pretty,
I think,” said Mercy, “for all it is so
hideous now. I know just what I’d do to
it, if it were mine. I’d throw out a big
bay window in that corner where the jog is, and another
on the middle of the north side, and then run a piazza
across the west side, and carry the platform round
both the bay windows. I saw a picture of a house
in a book Mr. Allen had, which looked very much as
this would look then. Oh, but I’d like
to do it!” Mercy’s imagination was so fired
with the picture she had made to herself of the house
thus altered and improved, that she could not easily
relinquish it.
“But, Mercy, you don’t
know the lay o’ the rooms, child. You don’
‘no’ where that ere jog comes. Your
bay window mightn’t come so’s’t would
be of any use. Yer wouldn’t build one jest
to look at, would you?” said her mother.
“I’m not so sure I wouldn’t,
if I had plenty of money,” replied Mercy, laughing.
“But I have no idea of building bay windows on
other people’s houses. I was only amusing
myself by planning it. I’d rather have that
house, old and horrid as it is, than any house in the
town. I like the situation so much, and the woods
are so beautiful. Perhaps I’ll earn a lot
of money some day, and buy the place, and make it just
as we like it.”
“You earn money, child!”
said Mrs. Carr, in a tone of unqualified wonder.
“How could you earn money, I’d like to
know?”
“Oh, make bonnets or gowns,
dear little mother, or teach school,” said Mercy,
coloring. “Mr. Allen said I was quite well
enough fitted to teach our school at home, if I liked.”
“But, Mercy, child, you’d
never go to do any such thing’s thet, would yer
now?” said her mother, piteously. “Don’t
ye hev all ye want, Mercy? Ain’t there
money enough for our clothes? I’m sure I
don’t need much; an’ I could do with a
good deal less, if there was any thing you wanted,
dear. Your father he ’d never rest in his
grave, ef he thought his little Mercy was a havin’
to arn money for her livin’. You didn’t
mean it, child, did yer? Say yer didn’t
mean it, Mercy,” and tears stood in the poor
old woman’s eyes.
It is strange what a tenacious pride
there was in the hearts of our old sea-faring men
of a half century ago. They had the same feeling
that kings and emperors might have in regard to their
wives and daughters, that it was a disgrace for them
to be obliged to earn money. It would be an interesting
thing to analyze this sentiment, to trace it to its
roots: it was so universal among successful sea-faring
men that it must have had its origin in some trait
distinctively peculiar to their profession. All
the other women in the town or the village might eke
out the family incomes by whatever devices they pleased;
but the captains’ wives were to be ladies.
They were to wear silk gowns brought from many a land;
they were to have ornaments of quaint fashion, picked
up here and there; they were to have money enough
in the bank to live on in quiet comfort during the
intervals when the husbands sailed away to make more.
So strong was this feeling that it crystallized into
a traditionary custom of life, which even poverty
finds it hard to overcome. You shall find to-day,
in any one of the seaport cities or towns of New England,
widows and daughters of sea-captains, living, or rather
seeming to live, upon the most beggarly incomes, but
still keeping up a certain pathetic sham of appearance
of being at ease. If they are really face to
face with probable starvation, they may go to some
charitable institution where fine needlework is given
out, and earn a few dollars in that way. But they
will fetch and carry their work by night, and no neighbor
will ever by any chance surprise them with it in their
hands. Most beautifully is this surreptitious
sewing done; there is no work in this country like
it. The tiny stitches bear the very aroma of
sad and lonely leisure in them; a certain fine pride,
too, as if the poverty-constrained lady would in no
wise condescend to depart from her own standard in
the matter of a single loop or stitch, no matter to
what plebeian uses the garment might come after it
should leave her hands.
Mercy’s deep blush when she
replied to her mother’s astonished inquiry,
how she could possibly earn any money, sprung from
her consciousness of a secret,-a secret
so harmless in itself, that she was ashamed of having
any feeling of guilt in keeping it a secret; and yet,
her fine and fastidious honesty so hated even the
semblance of concealment, that the mere withholding
of a fact, simply because she disliked to mention it,
seemed to her akin to a denial of it. If there
is such a thing in a human being as organic honesty,-an
honesty which makes a lie not difficult, but impossible,
just as it is impossible for men to walk on ceilings
like flies, or to breathe in water like fishes,-Mercy
Philbrick had it. The least approach to an equivocation
was abhorrent to her: not that she reasoned about
it, and submitting it to her conscience found it wicked,
and therefore hateful; but that she disliked it instinctively,-as
instinctively as she disliked pain. Her moral
nerves shrank from it, just as nerves of the body
shrink from suffering; and she recoiled from the suggestion
of such a thing with the same involuntary quickness
with which we put up the hand to ward off a falling
blow, or drop the eyelid to protect an endangered
eye. Physicians tell us that there are in men
and women such enormous differences in this matter
of sensitiveness to physical pain that one person
may die of a pain which would be comparatively slight
to another; and this is a fact which has to be taken
very carefully into account, in all dealing with disease
in people of the greatest capacity for suffering.
May there not be equally great differences in souls,
in the matter of sensitiveness to moral hurt?-differences
for which the soul is not responsible, any more than
the body is responsible for its skin’s having
been made thin or thick. Will-power has nothing
whatever to do with determining the latter conditions.
Let us be careful how far we take it to task for failing
to control the others. Perhaps we shall learn,
in some other stage of existence, that there is in
this world a great deal of moral color blindness,
congenital, incurable; and that God has much more pity
than we suppose for poor things who have stumbled
a good many times while they were groping in darkness.
People who see clearly themselves
are almost always intolerant of those who do not.
We often see this ludicrously exemplified, even in
the trivial matter of near-sightedness. We are
almost always a little vexed, when we point out a
distant object to a friend, and hear him reply,-
“No, I do not see it at all. I am near-sighted.”
“What! can’t you see that
far?” is the frequent retort, and in the pity
is a dash of impatience.
There is a great deal of intolerance
in the world, which is closely akin to this; and not
a whit more reasonable or righteous, though it makes
great pretensions to being both. Mercy Philbrick
was full of such intolerance, on this one point of
honesty. She was intolerant not only to others,
she was intolerant to herself. She had seasons
of fierce and hopeless debating with herself, on the
most trivial matters, or what would seem so to nine
hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand.
During such seasons as these, her treatment of her
friends and acquaintances had odd alternations of
frank friendliness and reticent coolness. A sudden
misgiving whether she might not be appearing to like
her friend more than she really did would seize her
at most inopportune moments, and make her absent-minded
and irresponsive. She would leave sentences abruptly
unfinished,-invitations, perhaps, or the
acceptances of invitations, the mere words of which
spring readily to one’s lips, and are thoughtlessly
spoken. But, in Mercy’s times of conflict
with herself, even these were exaggerated in her view
to monstrous deceits. She had again and again
held long conversations with Mr. Allen on this subject,
but he failed to help her. He was a good man,
of average conscientiousness and average perception:
he literally could not see many of the points which
Mercy’s keener analysis ferreted out, and sharpened
into weapons for her own pain. He thought her
simply morbid.
“Now, child,” he would
say,-for, although he was only a few years
Mercy’s senior, he had taught her like a child
for three years,-“now, child, leave
off worrying yourself by these fancies. There
is not the least danger of your ever being any thing
but truthful. Nature and grace are both too strong
in you. There is no lie in saying to a person
who has come to see you in your own house, ‘I
am glad to see you,’ for you are glad; and,
if not, you can make yourself glad, when you think
how much pleasure you can give the person by talking
with him. You are glad, always, to give pleasure
to any human being, are you not?”
“Yes,” Mercy would reply unhesitatingly.
“Very well. To the person
who comes to see you, you give pleasure: therefore,
you are glad to see him.”
“But, Mr. Allen,” would
persist poor Mercy, “that is not what the person
thinks I mean. Very often some one comes to see
me, who bores me so that I can hardly keep awake.
He would not be pleased if he knew that all my cordial
welcome really meant was,-’I’m
glad to see you, because I’m a benevolent person,
and am willing to make my fellow-creatures happy at
any sacrifice, even at the frightful one of entertaining
such a bore as you are!’ He would never come
near me again, if he knew I thought that; and yet,
if I do think so, and make him think I do not, is not
that the biggest sort of a lie? Why, Mr. Allen,
many a time when I have seen tiresome or disagreeable
people coming to our house, I have run away and hid
myself, so as not to be found; not in the least because
I could not bear the being bored by them, but because
I could not bear the thought of the lies I should
speak, or at least act, if I saw them.”
“The interpretation a visitor
chooses to put upon our kind cordiality of manner
to him is his own affair, not ours, Mercy. It
is a Christian duty to be cordial and kindly of manner
to every human being: any thing less gives pain,
repels people from us, and hinders our being able to
do them good. There is no more doubt of this
than of any other first principle of Christian conduct;
and I am very sorry that these morbid notions have
taken such hold of you. If you yield to them,
you will make yourself soon disliked and feared, and
give a great deal of needless pain to your neighbors.”
It was hard for Mr. Allen to be severe
with Mercy, for he loved her as if she were his younger
sister; but he honestly thought her to be in great
danger of falling into a chronic morbidness on this
subject, and he believed that stern words were most
likely to convince her of her mistake. It was
a sort of battle, however,-this battle which
Mercy was forced to fight,-in which no
human being can help another, unless he has first been
through the same battle himself. All that Mr.
Allen said seemed to Mercy specious and, to a certain
extent, trivial: it failed to influence her,
simply because it did not so much as recognize the
point where her difficulty lay.
“If Mr. Allen tries till he
dies, he will never convinc me that it is not deceiving
people to make them think you’re glad to see
them when you’re not,” Mercy said to herself
often, as, with flushed cheeks and tears in her eyes,
she walked home after these conversations. “He
may make me think that it is right to deceive them
rather than to make them unhappy. It almost seems
as if it must be; yet, if we once admitted that, where
should we ever stop? It seems to me that would
be a very dangerous doctrine. A lie’s a
lie, let whoever will call it fine names, and pass
it off as a Christian duty The Bible does not say,
’Thou shalt not lie, except when it is necessary
to lie, to avoid hurting thy neighbor’s feelings,’
It says, ‘Thou shalt not lie.’ Oh,
what a horrible word ‘lie’ is! It
stings like a short, sharp stroke with a lash.”
And Mercy would turn away from the thought with a
shudder, and resolutely force hersef to think of something
else. Sometimes she would escape from the perplexity
for weeks: chance would so favor her, that no
opportunity for what she felt to be deceit would occur;
but, in these intervals of relief, her tortured conscience
seemed only to renew its voices, and spring upon her
all the more fiercely on the next occasion. The
effect, of all these indecisive conflicts upon Mercy’s
character had not been good. They had left her
morally bruised, and therefore abnormally sensitive
to the least touch. She was in danger of becoming
either a fanatic for truth, or indifferent to it.
Paradoxcal as it may seem, she was in almost as much
danger of the one as of the other. But always,
when our hurts are fast healing without help, the
help comes. It is probable that there is to-day
on the earth a cure, either in herb or stone or spring,
for every ill which men’s bodies can know.
Ignorance and accident may hinder us long from them,
but sooner or later the race shall come to possess
them all. So with souls. There is the ready
truth, the living voice, the warm hand, or the final
experience, waiting for each soul’s need.
We do not die till we have found them. There
were yet to enter into Mercy Philbrick’s life
a new light and a new force, by the help of which
she would see clearly and stand firm.
The secret which she had now for nearly
a year kept from her mother was a very harmless one.
To people of the world, it would appear so trivial
a thing, that the conscience which could feel itself
wounded by reticence on such a point would seem hardly
worth a sneer. Mr. Allen, who had been Mercy’s
teacher for three years, had early seen in her a strong
poetic impulse, and had fostered and stimulated it
by every means in his power. He believed that
in the exercise of this talent she would find the best
possible help for her loneliness and comfort for her
sorrow. He recognized clearly that, to so exceptional
a nature as Mercy’s, a certain amount of isolation
was inevitable, all through her life, however fortunate
she might be in entering into new and wider relations.
The loneliness of intense individuality is the loneliest
loneliness in the world,-a loneliness which
crowds only aggravate, and which even the closest and
happiest companionship can only in part cure.
The creative faculty is the most inalienable and uncontrollable
of individualities. It is at once its own reward
and its own penalty: until it has conquered the
freedom of its own city, in which it must for ever
dwell, more or less apart, it is only a prisoner in
the cities of others. All this Mr. Allen felt
for Mercy, recognized in Mercy. He felt and recognized
it by the instinct of love, rather than by any intellectual
perception. Intellectually, he was, in spite
of his superior culture, far Mercy’s inferior.
He had been brave enough and manly enough to recognize
this, and also to recognize what it took still more
manliness to recognize,-that she could never
love a man of his temperament. It would have
been very easy for him to love Mercy. He was
not a man of a passionate nature; but he felt himself
strangely stirred whenever he looked into her sensitive,
orchid-like face. He felt in every fibre of him
that to have the whole love of such a woman would be
bewildering joy; yet never for one moment did he allow
himself to think of seeking it. “I might
make her think she loved me, perhaps,” he said
to himself. “She is so lonely and sad,
and has seen so few men; but it would be base.
She needs a nature totally different from mine, a life
unlike the life I shall lead. I will never try
to make her love me. And he never did. He
taught her and trained her, and developed her, patiently,
exactingly, and yet tenderly as if she had been his
sister; but he never betrayed to her, even by a look
or tone, that he could have loved her as his wife.
No doubt his influence was greater over her for this
subtle, unacknowledged bond. It gave to their
intercourse a certain strange mixture of reticence
and familiarity, which grew more and more perilous
and significant month by month. Probably a change
must have come, had they lived thus closely together
a year or two longer. The change could have been
in but one direction. They loved each other too
much to ever love less: they might have loved
more; and Mercy’s life had been more peaceful,
her heart had known a truer content, if she had never
felt any stronger emotion than that which Harley Allen’s
love would have roused in her bosom. But his
resolution was inexorable. His instinct was too
keen, his will too strong: he compelled all his
home-seeking, wife-loving thoughts to turn away from
Mercy; and, six months after her departure, he had
loyally and lovingly promised to be the husband of
another. In Mercy’s future he felt an intense
interest; he would never cease to watch over her, if
she would let him; he would guide, mould, and direct
her, until the time came-he knew it would
come-when she had outgrown his help, and
ascended to a plane where he could no longer guide
her. His greatest fear was lest, from her overflowing
vitality and keen sensuous delight in all the surface
activities and pleasures of life, the intellectual
side of her nature should be kept in the background
and not properly nourished. He had compelled
her to study, to think, to write. Who would do
this for her in the new home? He knew enough
of Stephen White’s nature to fear that he, while
he might be an appreciative friend, would not be a
stimulating one. He was too dreamy and pleasure-loving
himself to be a spur to others. A vague wonder,
almost like a presentiment, haunted his thoughts continually
as to the nature of the relation which would exist
between Stephen and Mercy. One day he wrote a
long letter to Stephen, telling him all about Mercy,-her
history; her peculiarities, mental and moral; her great
need of mental training; her wonderful natural gifts.
He closed his letter in these words:-
“There is the making of a glorious
woman and, I think, a true poet in this girl; but
whether she ever makes either will depend entirely
upon the hands she falls into. She has a capacity
for involuntary adaptation of herself to any surroundings,
and for an unconscious and indomitable loyalty to
the every-day needs of every-day life, which rarely
go with the poetic temperament. She would contentedly
make bread and do nothing else, till the day of her
death, if that seemed to be the nearest and most demanded
duty. She would be heartily faithful and joyous
every day, in intercourse with only common and uncultivated
people, if fate sets her among them. She seems
to me sometimes to be more literally a child of God,
in the true and complete sense of the word ‘child,’
than any one I ever knew. She takes every thing
which comes to her just as a happy and good little
child takes every thing that is given to him, and is
pleased with all; yet she is not at all a religious
person. I am often distressed by her lack of
impulse to worship. I think she has no strong
sense of a personal God; yet her conscience is in
many ways morbidly sensitive. She is a most interesting
and absorbing person,-one entirely unique
in my experience. Living with her, as you will,
it will be impossible for you not to influence her
strongly, one way or the other; and I want to enlist
your help to carry on the work I have begun. She
owes it to herself and to the world not to let her
mind be inactive. I am very much mistaken if she
has not within her the power to write poems, which
shall take place among the work that lasts.”
Mr. Allen read this letter over several
times, and then, with a gesture of impatience, tore
the sheets down the middle, and threw them into the
fire, exclaiming,-
“Pshaw! as if there were any
use in sending a man a portrait of a woman he is to
see every day. If Stephen is the person to amount
to any thing in her life, he will recognize her.
If he is not, all my descriptions of her will be thrown
away. It is best to let things take their own
course.”
After some deliberation, he decided
to take a step, which he would never have taken, had
Mercy not been going away from his influence,-a
step which he had again and again said to himself
he would hot risk, lest the effect might be to hinder
her intellectual growth. He sent two of her poems
to a friend of his, who was the editor of one of the
leading magazines in the country. The welcome
they met exceeded even his anticipations. By
the very next mail, he received a note from his friend,
enclosing a check, which to Harley Allen’s inexperience
of such matters seemed disproportionately large.
“Your little Cape Cod girl is a wonder, indeed,”
wrote the editor. “If she can keep on writing
such verse as this, she will make a name for herself.
Send us some more: we’ll pay her well for
it.”
Mr. Allen was perplexed. He had
not once thought of the verses being paid for.
He had thought that to see her poems in print might
give Mercy a new incentive to work, might rouse in
her an ambition, which would in part take the place
of the stimulus which his teachings had given her.
He very much disliked to tell her what he had done,
and to give to her the money she had unwittingly earned.
He feared that she would resent it; he feared that
she would be too elated by it; he feared a dozen different
things in as many minutes, as he sat turning the check
over and over in his hands. But his fears were
all unfounded. Mercy had too genuine an artistic
nature to be elated, too much simplicity to be offended.
Her first emotion was one of incredulity; her second,
of unaffected and humble wonder that any verses of
hers should have been so well spoken of; and her next,
of childlike glee at the possibility of her earning
any money. She had not a trace of the false pride
which had crystallized in her mother’s nature
into such a barrier against the idea of a paid industry.
“O Mr. Allen!” she exclaimed,
“is it really possible? Do you think the
verses were really worth it? Are you quite sure
the editor did not send the money because the verses
were written by a friend of yours?”
Harley Allen laughed.
“Editors are not at all likely,
Mercy,” he said, “to pay any more for
things than the things are worth. I think you
will some day laugh heartily, as you look back upon
the misgivings with which you received the first money
earned by your pen. If you will only work faithfully
and painstakingly, you can do work which will be much
better paid than this.”
Mercy’s eyes flashed.
“Oh! oh! Then I can have
books and pictures, and take journeys,” she said
in a tone of such ecstasy that Mr. Allen was surprised.
“Why, Mercy,” he replied,
“I did not know you were such a discontented
girl. Have you always longed for all these things?”
“I’m not discontented,
Mr. Allen,” answered Mercy, a little proudly.
“I never had a discontented moment in my life.
I’m not so silly. I have never yet seen
the day which did not seem to me brimful and running
over with joys and delights; that is, except when
I was for a little while bowed down by a grief nobody
could bear up under,” she added, with a sudden
drooping of every feature in her expressive face, as
she recalled the one sharp grief of her life.
“I don’t see why a distinct longing for
all sorts of beautiful things need be in the least
inconsistent with absolute content. In fact,
I know it isn’t; for I have both.”
Mr. Allen was not enough of an idealist
to understand this. He looked puzzled, and Mercy
went on,-
“Why, Mr. Allen, I should like
to have our home perfectly beautiful, just like the
most beautiful houses I have read about in books.
I should like to have the walls hung full of pictures,
and the rooms filled full of books; and I should like
to have great greenhouses full of all the rare and
exquisite flowers of the whole world. I’d
like one house like the house you told me of, full
of all the orchids, and another full of only palms
and ferns. I should like to wear always the costliest
of silks, very plain and never of bright colors, but
heavy and soft and shining; and laces that were like
fleecy clouds when they are just scattering. I
should like to be perfectly beautiful, and to have
perfectly beautiful people around me. But all
this doesn’t make me one bit less contented.
I care just as much for my few little, old books,
and my two or three pictures, and our beds of sweet-williams
and pinks. They all give me such pleasure that
I’m just glad I’m alive every minute.-What
are you thinking of, Mr. Allen!” exclaimed Mercy,
breaking off and coloring scarlet, as she became suddenly
aware that her pastor was gazing at her with a scrutinizing
look she had never seen on his face before.
“Of your future life, Mercy,-of
your future life. I am wondering what it will
be, and if the dear Lord will carry you safe through
all the temptations which the world must offer to
one so sensitive as you are to all its beauties,”
replied Mr. Allen, sadly. Mercy was displeased.
She was always intolerant of this class of references
to the Lord. Her sense of honesty took alarm
at them. In a curt and half-petulant tone, she
answered,-
“I suppose ministers have to
say such things, Mr. Allen; but I wish you wouldn’t
say them to me. I do not think that the Lord made
the beautiful things in this world for temptations;
and I believe he expects us to keep ourselves out
of mischief, and not throw the responsibility on to
him!”
“Oh, Mercy, Mercy! don’t
say such things! They sound irreverent: they
shock me!” exclaimed Mr. Allen, deeply pained
by Mercy’s tone and words.
“I am very sorry to shock you,
Mr. Allen,” replied Mercy, in a gentler tone.
“Pray forgive me. I do not think, however,
there is half as much real irreverence in saying that
the Lord expects us to look out for ourselves and
keep out of mischief as there is in teaching that he
made a whole world full of people so weak and miserable
that they couldn’t look after themselves, and
had to be lifted along all the time.”
Mr. Allen shook his head, and sighed.
When Mercy was in this frame of mind, it was of no
use to argue with her. He returned to the subject
of her poetry.
“If you will keep on reading
and studying, Mercy, and will compel yourself to write
and rewrite carefully, there is no reason why you should
not have a genuine success as a writer, and put yourself
in a position to earn money enough to buy a great
many comforts and pleasures for yourself, and your
mother also,” he said.
At the mention of her mother, Mercy
started, and exclaimed irrelevantly,-
“Dear me! I never once thought of mother.”
Mr. Allen looked, as well he might,
mystified. “Never once thought of her!
What do you mean, Mercy?”
“Why, I mean I never once thought
about telling her about the money. She wouldn’t
like it.”
“Why not? I should think
she would not only like the money, but be very proud
of your being able to earn it in such a way.”
“Perhaps that might make a difference,”
said Mercy, reflectively: “it would seem
quite different to her from taking in sewing, I suppose.”
“Well, I should think so,”
laughed Mr. Allen. “Very different, indeed.”
“But it’s earning money,
working for money, all the same,” continued
Mercy; “and you haven’t the least idea
how mother feels about that. Father must have
been full of queer notions. She got it all from
him. But I can’t see that there is any
difference between a woman’s taking money for
what she can do, and a man’s taking money for
what he can do. I can do sewing, and you can
preach; and of the two, if people must go without one
or the other, they could do without sermons better
than without clothes,-eh, Mr. Allen?”
and Mercy laughed mischievously. “But once
when I told mother I believed I would turn dressmaker
for the town, I knew I could earn ever so much money,
besides doing a philanthropy in getting some decent
gowns into the community, she was so horrified and
unhappy at the bare idea that I never have forgotten
it. It is just so with ever so many women here.
They would rather half-starve than do any thing to
earn money. For my part, I think it is nonsense.”
“Certainly, Mercy,-certainly
it is,” replied Mr. Allen, anxious lest this
new barrier should come between Mercy and her work.
“It is only a prejudice. And you need never
let your mother know any thing about it. She
is so old and feeble it would not be worth while to
worry her.”
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.