Mercy Philbrick\'s Choice - Helen Hunt Jackson
MERCY PHILBRICK'S CHOICE.
1876
I.
_To one who found us on a starless night,
All helpless, groping in a dangerous way,
Where countless treacherous hidden pitfalls lay,
And, seeing all our peril, flashed a light
To show to our bewildered, blinded sight,
By one swift, clear, and piercing ray,
The safe, sure path,--what words could reach the height
Of our great thankfulness? And yet, at most,
The most he saved was this poor, paltry life
Of flesh, which is so little worth its cost,
Which eager sows, but may not stay to reap,
And so soon breathless with the strain and strife,
Its work half-done, exhausted, falls asleep._
II.
_But unto him who finds men's souls astray
In night that they know not is night at all,
Walking, with reckless feet, where they may fall
Each moment into deadlier deaths than slay
The flesh,--to him whose truth can rend away
From such lost souls their moral night's black pall,--
Oh, unto him what words can hearts recall
Which their deep gratitude finds fit to say?
No words but these,--and these to him are best:--
That, henceforth, like a quenchless vestal flame,
His words of truth shall burn on Truth's pure shrine;
His memory be truth worshipped and confessed;
Our gratitude and love, the priestess line,
Who serve before Truth's altar, in his name._
Mercy Philbrick's Choice.
Chapter I.
It was late in the afternoon of a November day. The sky had worn all day
that pale leaden gray color, which is depressing even to the least
sensitive of souls. Now, at sunset, a dull red tint was slowly stealing
over the west; but the gray cloud was too thick for the sun to pierce, and
the struggle of the crimson color with the unyielding sky only made the
heavens look more stern and pitiless than before.
Stephen White stood with his arms folded, leaning on the gate which shut
off, but seemed in no wise to separate, the front yard of the house in
which he lived from the public highway. There is something always pathetic
in the attempt to enforce the idea of seclusion and privacy, by building a
fence around houses only ten or twelve feet away from the public road, and
only forty or fifty feet from each other. Rows of picketed palings and
gates with latches and locks seem superfluous, when the passer-by can
look, if he likes, into the very centre of your sitting-room, and your
neighbors on the right hand and on the left can overhear every word you
say on a summer night, where windows are open.
One cannot walk through the streets of a New England village, without
being impressed by a sense of this futile semblance of barrier, this
touching effort at withdrawal and reticence. Often we see the tacit
recognition of its uselessness in an old gate shoved back to its farthest,
and left standing so till the very grass roots have embanked themselves on
each side of it, and it can never again be closed without digging away the
sods in which it is wedged. The gate on which Stephen White was leaning
had stood open in that way for years before Stephen rented the house; had
stood open, in fact, ever since old Billy Jacobs, the owner of the house,
had been carried out of it dead, in a coffin so wide that at first the
bearers had thought it could not pass through the gate; but by huddling
close, three at the head and three at the feet, they managed to tug the
heavy old man through without taking down the palings. This was so long
ago that now there was nobody left who remembered Billy Jacobs distinctly,
except his widow, who lived in a poor little house on the outskirts of the
town, her only income being that derived from the renting of the large
house, in which she had once lived in comfort with her husband and son.
The house was a double house; and for a few years Billy Jacobs's twin
brother, a sea captain, had lived in the other half of it. But Mrs. Billy
could not abide Mrs. John, and so with a big heart wrench the two
brothers, who loved each other as only twin children can love, had
separated. Captain John took his wife and went to sea again. The ship was
never heard of, and to the day of Billy Jacobs's death he never forgave
his wife. In his heart he looked upon her as his brother's murderer. Very
much like the perpetual presence of a ghost under her roof it must have
been to the woman also, the unbroken silence of those untenanted rooms,
and that never opened door on the left side of her hall, which she must
pass whenever she went in or out of her house. There were those who said
that she was never seen to look towards that door; and that whenever a
noise, as of a rat in the wall, or a blind creaking in the wind, came from
that side of the house, Mrs. Billy turned white, and shuddered. Well she
might. It is a fearful thing to have lying on one's heart in this life the
consciousness that one has been ever so innocently the occasion, if not
the cause, of a fellow-creature's turning aside into the path which was
destined to take him to his death.
The very next day after Billy Jacobs's funeral, his widow left the house.
She sold all the furniture, except what was absolutely necessary for a
very meagre outfitting of the little cottage into which she moved. The
miserly habit of her husband seemed to have suddenly fallen on her like a
mantle. Her life shrank and dwindled in every possible way; she almost
starved herself and her boy, although the rent of her old homestead was
quite enough to make them comfortable. In a few years, to complete the
poor woman's misery, her son ran away and went to sea. The sea-farer's
stories which his Uncle John had told him, when he was a little child,
had never left his mind; and the drearier his mother made life for him on
land, the more longingly he dwelt on his fancies of life at sea, till at
last, when he was only fifteen, he disappeared one day, leaving a note,
not for his mother, but for his Sunday-school teacher,--the only human
being he loved. This young woman carried the note to Mrs. Jacobs. She read
it, made no comment, and handed it back. Her visitor was chilled and
terrified by her manner.
"Can I do any thing for you, Mrs. Jacobs?" she said. "I do assure you I
sympathize with you most deeply. I think the boy will soon come back. He
will find the sea life very different from what he has dreamed."
"No, you can do nothing for me," replied Mrs. Jacobs, in a voice as
unmoved as her face. "He will never come back. He will be drowned." And
from that day no one ever heard her mention her son. It was believed,
however, that she had news from him, and that she sent him money; for,
although the rents of her house were paid to her regularly, she grew if
possible more and more penurious every year, allowing herself barely
enough food to support life, and wearing such tattered and patched clothes
that she was almost an object of terror to children when they met her in
lonely fields and woods, bending down to the ground and searching for
herbs like an old witch. At one time, also, she went in great haste to a
lawyer in the village, and with his assistance raised three thousand
dollars on a mortgage on her house, mortgaging it very nearly to its full
value. In vain he represented to her that, in case the house should chance
to stand empty for a year, she would have no money to pay the interest on
her mortgage, and would lose the property. She either could not
understand, or did not care for what he said. The house always had brought
her in about so many dollars a year; she believed it always would; at any
rate, she wanted this money. And so it came to pass that the mortgage on
the old Jacobs house had come into Stephen White's hands, and he was now
living in one half of it, his own tenant and landlord at once, as he often
laughingly said.
These old rumors and sayings about the Jacobs's family history were
running in Stephen's head this evening, as he stood listlessly leaning on
the gate, and looking down at the unsightly spot of bare earth still left
where the gate had so long stood pressed back against the fence.
"I wonder how long it'll take to get that old rut smooth and green like
the rest of the yard," he thought. Stephen White absolutely hated
ugliness. It did not merely irritate and depress him, as it does everybody
of fine fastidiousness: he hated not only the sight of it, he hated it
with a sort of unreasoning vindictiveness. If it were a picture, he wanted
to burn the picture, cut it, tear it, trample it under foot, get it off
the face of the earth immediately, at any cost or risk. It had no business
to exist: if nobody else would make way with it, he must. He often saw
places that he would have liked to devastate, to blot out of existence if
he could, just because they were barren and unsightly. Once, when he was a
very little child, he suddenly seized a book of his father's,--an old,
shabby, worn dictionary,--and flung it into the fire with uncontrollable
passion; and, on being asked why he did it, had nothing to say in
justification of his act, except this extraordinary statement: "It was an
ugly book; it hurt me. Ugly books ought to go in the fire." What the child
suffered, and, still more, what the man suffered from this hatred of
ugliness, no words could portray. Ever since he could remember, he had
been unhappy from the lack of the beautiful in the surroundings of his
daily life. His father had been poor; his mother had been an invalid; and
neither father nor mother had a trace of the artistic temperament. From
what long-forgotten ancestor in his plain, hard-working family had come
Stephen's passionate love of beauty, nobody knew. It was the despair of
his father, the torment of his mother. From childhood to boyhood, from
boyhood to manhood, he had felt himself needlessly hurt and perversely
misunderstood on this one point. But it had not soured him: it had only
saddened him, and made him reticent. In his own quiet way, he went slowly
on, adding each year some new touch of simple adornment to their home.
Every dollar he could spare out of his earnings went into something for
the eye to feast on; and, in spite of the old people's perpetual grumbling
and perpetual antagonism, it came about that they grew to be, in a surly
fashion, proud of Stephen's having made their home unlike the homes of
their neighbors.
"That's Stephen's last notion. He's never satisfied without he's sticking
up suthin' new or different," they would say, as they called attention to
some new picture or shelf or improvement in the house. "It's all
tom-foolery. Things was well enough before." But in their hearts they were
secretly a little elate, as in latter years they had come to know, by
books and papers which Stephen forced them to hear or to read, that he was
really in sympathy with well-known writers in this matter of the adornment
of homes, the love of beautiful things even in every-day life.
A little more than a year before the time at which our story begins,
Stephen's father had died. On an investigation of his affairs, it was
found that after the settling of the estate very little would remain for
Stephen and his mother. The mortgage on the old Jacobs house was the
greater part of their property. Very reluctantly Stephen decided that
their wisest--in fact, their only--course was to move into this house to
live. Many and many a time he had walked past the old house, and thought,
as he looked at it, what a bare, staring, hopeless, joyless-looking old
house it was. It had originally been a small, square house. The addition
which Billy Jacobs had made to it was oblong, running out to the south,
and projecting on the front a few feet beyond the other part. This
obtrusive jog was certainly very ugly; and it was impossible to conceive
of any reason for it. Very possibly, it was only a carpenter's blunder;
for Billy Jacobs was, no doubt, his own architect, and left all details of
the work to the builders. Be that as it may, the little, clumsy,
meaningless jog ruined the house,--gave it an uncomfortably awry look,
like a dining-table awkwardly pieced out for an emergency by another table
a little too narrow.
The house had been for several years occupied by families of mill
operatives, and had gradually acquired that indefinable, but unmistakable
tenement-house look, which not even neatness and good repair can wholly
banish from a house. The orchard behind the house had so run down for want
of care that it looked more like a tangle of wild trees than like any
thing which had ever been an orchard. Yet the Roxbury Russets and Baldwins
of that orchard had once been Billy Jacobs's great pride, the one point of
hospitality which his miserliness never conquered. Long after it would
have broken his heart to set out a generous dinner for a neighbor, he
would feast him on choice apples, and send him away with a big basket full
in his hands. Now every passing school-boy helped himself to the wan,
withered, and scanty fruit; and nobody had thought it worth while to mend
the dilapidated fences which might have helped to shut them out.
Even Mrs. White, with all her indifference to externals, rebelled at first
at the idea of going to live in the old Jacobs house.
"I'll never go there, Stephen," she said petulantly. "I'm not going to
live in half a house with the mill people; and it's no better than a barn,
the hideous, old, faded, yellow thing!"
If it crossed Stephen's mind that there was a touch of late retribution
in his mother's having come at last to a sense of suffering because she
must live in an unsightly house, he did not betray it.
He replied very gently. He was never heard to speak other than gently to
his mother, though to every one else his manner was sometimes brusque and
dictatorial.
"But, mother, I think we must. It is the only way that we can be sure of
the rent. And, if we live ourselves in one half of it, we shall find it
much easier to get good tenants for the other part. I promise you none of
the mill people shall ever live there again. Please do not make it hard
for me, mother. We must do it."
When Stephen said "must," his mother never gainsaid him. He was only
twenty-five, but his will was stronger than hers,--as much stronger as his
temper was better. Persons judging hastily, by her violent assertions and
vehement statements of her determination, as contrasted with Stephen's
gentle, slow, almost hesitating utterance of his opinions or intentions,
might have assumed that she would always conquer; but it was not so. In
all little things, Stephen was her slave, because she was a suffering
invalid and his mother. But, in all important decisions, he was the
master; and she recognized it, and leaned upon it in a way which was
almost ludicrous in its alternation with her petulance and perpetual
dictating to him in trifles.
And so they went to live in the old Jacobs house. They took the northern
half of it, the part in which the sea captain and his wife had lived.
This half of the house was not so pleasant as the other, had less sun, and
had no door upon the street; but it was smaller and better suited to their
needs, and moreover, Stephen said to his mother,--
"We must live in the half we should find it hardest to rent to a desirable
tenant."
For the first six months after they moved in, the "wing," as Mrs. White
persisted in calling it, though it was larger by two rooms than the part
she occupied herself, stood empty. There would have been plenty of
applicants for it, but it had been noised in the town that the Whites had
given out that none but people as good as they were themselves would be
allowed to rent the house. This made a mighty stir among the mill
operatives and the trades-people, and Stephen got many a sour look and
short answer, whose real source he never suspected.
"Ahem! there he goes with his head in the clouds, damn him!" muttered
Barker the grocer, one day, as Stephen in a more than ordinarily
absent-minded fit had passed Mr. Barker's door without observing that Mr.
Barker stood in it, ready to bow and smile to the whole world. Mr.
Barker's sister had just married an overseer in the mill; and they had
been very anxious to set up housekeeping in the Jacobs house, but had been
prevented from applying for it by hearing of Mrs. White's determination to
have no mill people under the same roof with herself.
"Mill people, indeed!" exclaimed Jane Barker, when her lover told her, in
no very guarded terms, the reason they could not have the house on which
she had set her heart.
"Mill people, indeed! I'd like to know if they're not every whit's good's
an old shark of a lawyer like Hugh White was! I'll be bound, if poor old
granny Jacobs hadn't lost what little wit she ever had, it 'ud be very
soon seen whether Madam White's got the right to say who's to come and
who's to go in that house. It's a nasty old yaller shell anyhow, not to
say nothin' o' it's bein' haunted, 's like 's not. But there ain't no
other place so handy to the mill for us, an' I guess our money's good ez
any lawyer's money, o' the hull on 'em any day. Mill people, indeed! I'll
jest give Steve White a piece o' my mind, the first time I see him on the
street."
Jane and her lover were sitting on the tops of two barrels just outside
the grocery door, when this conversation took place. Just as the last
words had left her lips, she looked up and saw Stephen approaching at a
very rapid pace. The unusual sight of two people perched on barrels on the
sidewalk roused Stephen from the deep reverie in which he habitually
walked. Lifting his hat as courteously as if he were addressing the most
distinguished of women, he bowed, and said smiling, "How do you do, Miss
Jane?" and "Good-morning, Mr. Lovejoy," and passed on; but not before Jane
Barker had had time to say in her gentlest tones, "Very well, thank you,
Mr. Stephen," while an ugly sneer spread over the face of Reuben Lovejoy.
"Woman all over!" he muttered. "Never saw one on ye yet thet wasn't
caught by a bow from a palaverin' fool."
Jane laughed nervously. She herself felt ashamed of having so soon given
the lie to her own words of bravado; but she was woman enough not to admit
her mortification.
"I know he's a palaverin' fool's well's you do; but I reckon I've got some
manners o' my own, 's well's he. When a man bids me a pleasant
good-mornin', I ain't a-goin' to take that time to fly out at him, however
much I've got agin him."
And Reuben was silenced. The under-current of ill-feeling against Stephen
and his mother went steadily on increasing. There is a wonderful force in
these slow under-currents of feeling, in small communities, for or against
individuals. After they have once become a steady tide, nothing can check
their force or turn their direction. Sometimes they can be traced back to
their spring, as a stream can: one lucky or unlucky word or deed, years
ago, made a friend or an enemy of one person, and that person's influence
has divided itself again and again, as brooks part off and divide into
countless rivulets, and water whole districts. But generally one finds it
impossible to trace the like or dislike to its beginning. A stranger,
asking the reason of it, is answered in an off-hand way,--"Oh,
everybody'll tell you the same thing. There isn't a soul in the town but
hates him;" or, "Well, he's just the most popular man in the town. You'll
never hear a word said against him,--never; not if you were to settle
right down here, and live."
It was months before Stephen realized that there was slowly forming in the
town a dislike to him. He was slow in discovering it, because he had
always lived alone; had no intimate friends, not even when he was a boy.
His love of books and his passionate love of beauty combined with his
poverty to hedge him about more effectually than miles of desert could
have done. His father and mother had lived upon fairly good terms with all
their neighbors, but had formed no very close bonds with any. In the
ordinary New England town, neighborhood never means much: there is a
dismal lack of cohesion to the relations between people. The community is
loosely held together by a few accidental points of contact or common
interest. The individuality of individuals is, by a strange sort of
paradox, at once respected and ignored. This is indifference rather than
consideration, selfishness rather than generosity; it is an unsuspected
root of much of our national failure, is responsible for much of our
national disgrace. Some day there will come a time when it will have
crystallized into a national apathy, which will perhaps cure itself, or
have to be cured, as indurations in the body are, by sharp crises or by
surgical operations. In the mean time, our people are living, on the
whole, the dullest lives that are lived in the world, by the so-called
civilized; and the climax of this dulness of life is to be found in just
such a small New England town as Penfield, the one of which we are now
speaking.
When it gradually became clear to Stephen that he and his mother were
unpopular people, his first feeling was one of resentment, his second of
calm acquiescence: acquiescence, first, because he recognized in a measure
the justice of it,--they really did not care for their neighbors; why
should their neighbors care for them? secondly, a diminished familiarity
of intercourse would have to him great compensations. There were few
people in the town, whose clothes, whose speech, whose behavior, did not
jar upon his nerves. On the whole, he would be better content alone; and
if his mother could only have a little more independence of nature, more
resource within herself, "The less we see of them, the better," said
Stephen, proudly.
He had yet to learn the lesson which, sooner or later, the proudest, most
scornful, most self-centred of human souls must learn, or must die of
loneliness for the want of learning, that humanity is one and indivisible;
and the man who shuts himself apart from his fellows, above all, the man
who thus shuts himself apart because he thinks of his fellows with pitying
condescension as his inferiors, is a fool and a blasphemer,--a fool,
because he robs himself of that good-fellowship which is the leaven of
life; a blasphemer, because he virtually implies that God made men unfit
for him to associate with. Stephen White had this lesson yet to learn.
The practical inconvenience of being unpopular, however, he began to feel
keenly, as month after month passed by, and nobody would rent the other
half of the house in which he and his mother lived. Small as the rent
was, it was a matter of great moment to them; for his earnings as clerk
and copyist were barely enough to give them food. He was still retained by
his father's partner in the same position which he had held during his
father's life. But old Mr. Williams was not wholly free from the general
prejudice against Stephen, as an aristocratic fellow, given to dreams and
fancies; and Stephen knew very well that he held the position only as it
were on a sort of sufferance, because Mr. Williams had loved his father.
Moreover, law business in Penfield was growing duller and duller. A
younger firm in the county town, only twelve miles away, was robbing them
of clients continually; and there were many long days during which Stephen
sat idle at his desk, looking out in a vague, dreamy way on the street
below, and wondering if the time were really coming when Mr. Williams
would need a clerk no longer; and, if it did come, what he could possibly
find to do in that town, by which he could earn money enough to support
his mother. At such times, he thought uneasily of the possibility of
foreclosing the mortgage on the old Jacobs house, selling the house, and
reinvesting the money in a more advantageous way. He always tried to put
the thought away from him as a dishonorable one; but it had a fatal
persistency. He could not banish it.
"Poor, half-witted old woman! she might a great deal better be in the
poor-house."
"There is no reason why we should lose our interest, for the sake of
keeping her along."
"The mortgage was for too large a sum. I doubt if the old house could
sell to-day for enough to clear it, anyhow." These were some of the
suggestions which the devil kept whispering into Stephen's ear, in these
long hours of perplexity and misgiving. It was a question of casuistry
which might, perhaps, have puzzled a finer moral sense than Stephen's. Why
should he treat old Mrs. Jacobs with any more consideration than he would
show to a man under the same circumstances? To be sure, she was a helpless
old woman; but so was his own mother, and surely his first duty was to
make her as comfortable as possible.
Luckily for old Mrs. Jacobs, a tenant appeared for the "south wing." A
friend of Stephen's, a young clergyman living in a seaport town on Cape
Cod, had written to him, asking about the house, which he knew Stephen was
anxious to rent. He made these inquiries on behalf of two women,
parishioners of his, who were obliged to move to some inland town on
account of the elder woman's failing health. They were mother and
daughter, but both widows. The younger woman's marriage had been a
tragically sad one, her husband having died suddenly, only a few days
after their marriage. She had returned at once to her mother's house,
widowed at eighteen; "heart-broken," the young clergyman wrote, "but the
most cheerful person in this town,--the most cheerful person I ever knew;
her smile is the sunniest and most pathetic thing I ever saw."