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A Modern Instance

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #8203 · 875,080 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Modern Instance

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: June 1, 2005 [eBook #8203]
                Most recently updated: December 23, 2025

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MODERN INSTANCE ***




A MODERN INSTANCE

By William Dean Howells




INTRODUCTION.

Mr. Howells has written a long series of poems, novels, sketches, stories,
and essays, and has been perhaps the most continuous worker in the literary
art among American writers. He was born at Martin's Perry, Belmont County,
Ohio, March 1, 1837, and the experiences of his early life have been
delightfully told by himself in _A Boy's Town_, _My Year in a Log Cabin_,
and _My Literary Passions_. These books, which seem like pastimes in the
midst of Howells's serious work, are likely to live long, not only as
playful autobiographic records, but as vivid pictures of life in the middle
west in the middle of the nineteenth century. The boy lived in a home where
frugality was the law of economy, but where high ideals of noble living
were cheerfully maintained, and the very occupations of the household
tended to stimulate literary activity. He read voraciously and with an
instinctive scent for what was great and permanent in literature, and
in his father's printing-office learned to set type, and soon to make
contributions to the local journals. He went to the state Capitol to report
the proceedings of the legislature, and before he was twenty-two had become
news editor of the _State Journal_ of Columbus, Ohio.

But at the same time he had given clear intimations of his literary
skill, and had contributed several poems to the _Atlantic Monthly_. His
introduction to literature was in the stirring days just before the war for
the Union, and he had a generous enthusiasm for the great principles which
were then at stake. Yet the political leaven chiefly caused the bread
he was baking to rise, and his native genius was distinctly for work in
creative literature. His contribution to the political writing of the day,
besides his newspaper work, was a small campaign life of Lincoln; and
shortly after the incoming of the first Republican administration he
received the appointment of consul at Venice.

At Venice he remained from 1861 to 1865, and these years may fairly be
taken as standing for his university training. He carried with him to
Europe some conversance with French, German, Spanish, and Italian, and an
insatiable thirst for literature in these, languages. Naturally now he
concentrated his attention on the Italian language and literature, but
after all he was not made for a microscopic or encyclopaedic scholar, least
of all for a pedant. What he was looking for in literature, though he
scarcely so stated it to himself at the time, was human life, and it
was this first-hand acquaintance he was acquiring with life in another
circumstance that constituted his real training in literature. To pass from
Ohio straight to Italy, with the merest alighting by the way in New York
and Boston, was to be transported from one world to another; but he carried
with him a mind which had already become naturalized in the large world of
history and men through the literature in which he had steeped his mind. No
one can read the record of the books he had revelled in, and observe the
agility with which he was absorbed, successively, in books of greatly
varying character, without perceiving how wide open were the windows of his
mind; and as the light streamed in from all these heavens, so the inmate
looked out with unaffected interest on the views spread before him.

Thus it was that Italy and Venice in particular afforded him at once the
greatest delight and also the surest test of his growing power. The swift
observation he had shown in literature became an equally rapid survey of
all these novel forms before him. The old life embedded in this historic
country became the book whose leaves he turned, but he looked with the
greatest interest and most sympathetic scrutiny on that which passed
before his eyes. It was novel, it was quaint, it was filled with curious,
unexpected betrayals of human nature, but it was above all real, actual,
a thing to be touched and as it were fondled by hands that were deft by
nature and were quickly becoming more skilful by use. Mr. Howells began to
write letters home which were printed in the _Boston Daily Advertiser_, and
grew easily into a book which still remains in the minds of many of his
readers the freshest of all his writings, _Venetian Life_. This was
followed shortly by _Italian Journeys_, in which Mr. Howells gathered his
observations made in going from place to place in Italy. A good many years
later, after returning to the country of his affection, he wrote a third
book of a similar character under the title of _Tuscan Cities_. But his use
of Italy in literature was not confined to books of travels; he made and
published studies of Italian literature, and he wove the life of the
country into fiction in a charming manner. Illustrations may be found in
_A Foregone Conclusion_, one of the happiest of his novels, whose scene
is laid in Venice, in _The Lady of the Aroostook_, and in many slight
sketches.

When Mr. Howells returned to America at the close of his term as consul, he
found warm friends whom he had made through his writings. He served for a
short time on the staff of _The Nation_, of New York, and then was invited
to Boston to take the position of assistant editor of the _Atlantic
Monthly_ under Mr. Fields. This was in 1866, and five years later, on the
retirement of Mr. Fields, he became editor, and remained in the position
until 1881, living during this period in Cambridge. He was not only editor
of the magazine; he was really its chief contributor. Any one who takes the
trouble to examine the pages of the _Atlantic Index_ will see how far his
work outnumbers in titles that of all other contributors, and the range of
his work was great.

He wrote a large proportion of the reviews of books, which in those
days constituted a marked feature of the magazine. These reviews were
conscientiously written, and showed penetration and justice, but they had
besides a felicitous and playful touch which rendered them delightful
reading, even though one knew little or cared little for the book reviewed.
Sometimes, though not often, he wrote poems, but readers soon learned
to look with eagerness for a kind of writing which seemed almost more
individual with him than any other form of writing. We mean the humorous
sketches of every-day life, in which he took scenes of the commonest
sort and drew from them an inherent life which most never suspected, yet
confessed the moment he disclosed it. He would do such a common-place
thing as take an excursion down the harbor, or even a ride to town in a
horse-car, and come back to turn his experience into a piece of genuine
literature. A number of these pieces were collected into a volume entitled
_Suburban Sketches_.

It is interesting to observe how slowly yet surely Mr. Howells drew
near the great field of novel-writing, and how deliberately he laid the
foundations of his art. First, the graceful sketch which was hardly
more than a leaf out of his note-book; then the blending of travel with
character-drawing, as in _A Chance Acquaintance_ and _Their Wedding
Journey_, and later stories of people who moved about and thus found the
incidents which the author had not to invent, as in _The Lady of the
Aroostook_. Meanwhile, the eye which had taken note of surface effects was
beginning to look deeper into the springs of being, and the hand which had
described was beginning to model figures also which stood alone.

So there followed a number of little dramatic sketches, where the persons
of the drama carried on their little play; and since they were not on a
stage before the spectator, the author constructed a sort of literary stage
for the reader; that is to say, he supplied by paragraphs what in a regular
play would be stage directions. This is seen in such little comedies as _A
Counterfeit Presentment_, which, indeed, was put on the stage. But instead
of pushing forward on this line into the field of great drama, Mr. Howells
contented himself with dexterous strokes with a fine pen, so to speak, and
created a number of sparkling farces like _The Parlor Car_.

The real issue of all this practice in the dramatic art was to disengage
the characters he created from too close dependence on the kind of
circumstance, as of travel, which the author did not invent, and to give
them substantial life in the working out of the drama of their spiritual
evolution. Thus by the time he was released from editorial work, Mr.
Howells was ready for the thorough-going novel, and he gave to readers such
examples of art as _A Modern Instance_, _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, and
that most important of all his novels, _A Hazard of New Fortunes_. By the
time this last novel was written, he had become thoroughly interested, not
merely in the men, women, and children about him, but in that mysterious,
complex order named by us society, with its roots matted together as in a
swamp, and seeming to many to be sucking up maleficent, miasmatic vapors
from the soil in which it was rooted. Like many another lover of his kind,
he has sought to trace the evils of individual life to their source in this
composite order, and to guess at the mode by which society shall right
itself and drink up healthy and life-giving virtues from the soil.

But it must not be inferred that his novels and other literary work have
been by any means exclusively concerned with the reconstruction of the
social order. He has indeed experimented with this theme, but he has always
had a sane interest in life as he sees it, and with the increasing scope
of his observation he has drawn his figures from a larger world, which
includes indeed the world in which he first began to find his characters
and their action.

Not long after retiring from the _Atlantic_ he went to live in New York,
and varied his American experience with frequent travels and continued
residence in Europe. For a while he maintained a department in _Harper's
Magazine_, where he gave expression to his views on literature and the
dramatic art, and for a short period returned to the editorial life
in conducting _The Cosmopolitan_; later he entered also the field of
lecturing, and thus further extended the range of his observation. For many
years, Mr. Howells was the writer of “Editor's Easy Chair” in Harper's
Magazine. In 1909 he was made president of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. Mr. Howells's death occurred May 11, 1920.

This in fine is the most summary statement of his career in
literature,--that he has been a keen and sympathetic observer of life, and
has caught its character, not like a reporter going about with a kodak and
snapping it aimlessly at any conspicuous object, but like an alert artist
who goes back to his studio after a walk and sets down his comments on what
he has seen in quick, accurate sketches, now and then resolving numberless
undrawn sketches into some one comprehensive and beautiful picture.




THE SEQUENCE OF MR. HOWELLS'S BOOKS.


Mr. Howells is the author of nearly seventy books, from which the following
are selected as best representing his work in various fields and at various
periods.

Venetian Life. Travel and description. 1867.

Their Wedding Journey. Novel. 1871.

Italian Journeys. Travel and description. 1872.

Suburban Sketches. 1872.

Poems. 1873 and 1895.

A Chance Acquaintance. Novel. 1873.

A Foregone Conclusion. Novel. 1874.

A Counterfeit Presentment. Comedy. 1877.

The Lady of the Aroostook. Novel. 1879.

The Undiscovered Country. Novel. 1880.

A Fearful Responsibility, and Other Stories. 1881.

A Modern Instance. Novel. 1881.

The Rise of Silas Lapham. Novel. 1884.

Tuscan Cities. Travel and description. 1885.

April Hopes. Novel. 1887.

A Hazard of New Fortunes. Novel. 1889.

The Sleeping Car, and Other Farces. 1889.

A Boy's Town. Reminiscences. 1890.

Criticism and Fiction. Essays. 1891.

My Literary Passions. Essays. 1895.

Stops of Various Quills. Poems. 1895.

Literary Friends and Acquaintances. Reminiscences, 1900.

Heroines of Fiction. Criticism. 1901.

The Kentons. Novel. 1902.

Literature and Life. Criticism. 1902.

London Films. Travel and Description. 1905.




A MODERN INSTANCE.


I.

The village stood on a wide plain, and around it rose the mountains. They
were green to their tops in summer, and in winter white through their
serried pines and drifting mists, but at every season serious and
beautiful, furrowed with hollow shadows, and taking the light on masses
and stretches of iron-gray crag. The river swam through the plain in long
curves, and slipped away at last through an unseen pass to the southward,
tracing a score of miles in its course over a space that measured but three
or four. The plain was very fertile, and its features, if few and of purely
utilitarian beauty, had a rich luxuriance, and there was a tropical riot of
vegetation when the sun of July beat on those northern fields. They waved
with corn and oats to the feet of the mountains, and the potatoes covered
a vast acreage with the lines of their intense, coarse green; the meadows
were deep with English grass to the banks of the river, that, doubling and
returning upon itself, still marked its way with a dense fringe of alders
and white birches.

But winter was full half the year. The snow began at Thanksgiving, and
fell snow upon snow till Fast Day, thawing between the storms, and packing
harder and harder against the break-up in the spring, when it covered the
ground in solid levels three feet high, and lay heaped in drifts, that
defied the sun far into May. When it did not snow, the weather was
keenly clear, and commonly very still. Then the landscape at noon had a
stereoscopic glister under the high sun that burned in a heaven without a
cloud, and at setting stained the sky and the white waste with freezing
pink and violet. On such days the farmers and lumbermen came in to the
village stores, and made a stiff and feeble stir about their doorways, and
the school children gave the street a little life and color, as they went
to and from the Academy in their red and blue woollens. Four times a day
the mill, the shrill wheeze of whose saws had become part of the habitual
silence, blew its whistle for the hands to begin and leave off work,
in blasts that seemed to shatter themselves against the thin air. But
otherwise an arctic quiet prevailed.

Behind the black boles of the elms that swept the vista of the street with
the fine gray tracery of their boughs, stood the houses, deep-sunken in the
accumulating drifts, through which each householder kept a path cut from
his doorway to the road, white and clean as if hewn out of marble. Some
cross streets straggled away east and west with the poorer dwellings; but
this, that followed the northward and southward reach of the plain, was the
main thoroughfare, and had its own impressiveness, with those square white
houses which they build so large in Northern New England. They were all
kept in scrupulous repair, though here and there the frost and thaw of many
winters had heaved a fence out of plumb, and threatened the poise of the
monumental urns of painted pine on the gate-posts. They had dark-green
blinds, of a color harmonious with that of the funereal evergreens in their
dooryards; and they themselves had taken the tone of the snowy landscape,
as if by the operation of some such law as blanches the fur-bearing animals
of the North. They seemed proper to its desolation, while some houses of
more modern taste, painted to a warmer tone, looked, with their mansard
roofs and jig-sawed piazzas and balconies, intrusive and alien.

At one end of the street stood the Academy, with its classic façade and its
belfry; midway was the hotel, with the stores, the printing-office, and the
churches; and at the other extreme, one of the square white mansions stood
advanced from the rank of the rest, at the top of a deep-plunging valley,
defining itself against the mountain beyond so sharply that it seemed as if
cut out of its dark, wooded side. It was from the gate before this house,
distinct in the pink light which the sunset had left, that, on a Saturday
evening in February, a cutter, gay with red-lined robes, dashed away, and
came musically clashing down the street under the naked elms. For the
women who sat with their work at the windows on either side of the way,
hesitating whether to light their lamps, and drawing nearer and nearer to
the dead-line of the outer cold for the latest glimmer of the day, the
passage of this ill-timed vehicle was a vexation little short of grievous.
Every movement on the street was precious to them, and, with all the
keenness of their starved curiosity, these captives of the winter could not
make out the people in the cutter. Afterward it was a mortification to them
that they should not have thought at once of Bartley Hubbard and Marcia
Gaylord. They had seen him go up toward Squire Gaylord's house half an hour
before, and they now blamed themselves for not reflecting that of course he
was going to take Marcia over to the church sociable at Lower Equity.
Their identity being established, other little proofs of it reproached the
inquirers; but these perturbed spirits were at peace, and the lamps were
out in the houses (where the smell of rats in the wainscot and of potatoes
in the cellar strengthened with the growing night), when Bartley and Marcia
drove back through the moonlit silence to her father's door. Here, too, the
windows were all dark, except for the light that sparely glimmered through
the parlor blinds; and the young man slackened the pace of his horse, as if
to still the bells, some distance away from the gate.

The girl took the hand he offered her when he dismounted at the gate, and,
as she jumped from the cutter, “Won't you come in?” she asked.

“I guess I can blanket my horse and stand him under the wood-shed,”
 answered the young man, going around to the animal's head and leading him
away.

When he returned to the door the girl opened it, as if she had been
listening for his step; and she now stood holding it ajar for him to enter,
and throwing the light upon the threshold from the lamp, which she lifted
high in the other hand. The action brought her figure in relief, and
revealed the outline of her bust and shoulders, while the lamp flooded with
light the face she turned to him, and again averted for a moment, as if
startled at some noise behind her. She thus showed a smooth, low forehead,
lips and cheeks deeply red, a softly rounded chin touched with a faint
dimple, and in turn a nose short and aquiline; her eyes were dark, and her
dusky hair flowed crinkling above her fine black brows, and vanished down
the curve of a lovely neck. There was a peculiar charm in the form of her
upper lip: it was exquisitely arched, and at the corners it projected
a little over the lower lip, so that when she smiled it gave a piquant
sweetness to her mouth, with a certain demure innocence that qualified the
Roman pride of her profile. For the rest, her beauty was of the kind that
coming years would only ripen and enrich; at thirty she would be even
handsomer than at twenty, and be all the more southern in her type for the
paling of that northern, color in her cheeks. The young man who looked up
at her from the doorstep had a yellow mustache, shadowing either side of
his lip with a broad sweep, like a bird's wing; his chin, deep-cut below
his mouth, failed to come strenuously forward; his cheeks were filled to
an oval contour, and his face had otherwise the regularity common to
Americans; his eyes, a clouded gray, heavy-lidded and long-lashed, were his
most striking feature, and he gave her beauty a deliberate look from them
as he lightly stamped the snow from his feet, and pulled the seal-skin
gloves from his long hands.

“Come in,” she whispered, coloring with pleasure under his gaze; and she
made haste to shut the door after him, with a luxurious impatience of the
cold. She led the way into the room from which she had come, and set down
the lamp on the corner of the piano, while he slipped off his overcoat and
swung it over the end of the sofa. They drew up chairs to the stove,
in which the smouldering fire, revived by the opened draft, roared and
snapped. It was midnight, as the sharp strokes of a wooden clock declared
from the kitchen, and they were alone together, and all the other inmates
of the house were asleep. The situation, scarcely conceivable to another
civilization, is so common in ours, where youth commands its fate and
trusts solely to itself, that it may be said to be characteristic of the
New England civilization wherever it keeps its simplicity. It was not
stolen or clandestine; it would have interested every one, but would have
shocked no one in the village if the whole village had known it; all that a
girl's parents ordinarily exacted was that they should not be waked up.

“Ugh!” said the girl. “It seems as if I never should get warm.” She leaned
forward, and stretched her hands toward the stove, and he presently rose
from the rocking-chair in which he sat, somewhat lower than she, and lifted
her sack to throw it over her shoulders. But he put it down and took up his
overcoat.

“Allow my coat the pleasure,” he said, with the ease of a man who is not
too far lost to be really flattering.

“Much obliged to the coat,” she replied, shrugging herself into it and
pulling the collar close about her throat. “I wonder you didn't put it on
the sorrel. You could have tied the sleeves around her neck.”

“Shall I tie them around yours?” He leaned forward from the low
rocking-chair into which he had sunk again, and made a feint at what he had
proposed.

But she drew back with a gay “No!” and added: “Some day, father says, that
sorrel will be the death of us. He says it's a bad color for a horse.
They're always ugly, and when they get heated they're crazy.”

“You never seem to be very much frightened when you're riding after the
sorrel,” said Bartley.

“Oh, I've great faith in your driving.”

“Thanks. But I don't believe in this notion about a horse being vicious
because he's of a certain color. If your father didn't believe in it, I
should call it a superstition; but the Squire has no superstitions.”

“I don't know about that,” said the girl. “I don't think he likes to see
the new moon over his left shoulder.”

“I beg his pardon, then,” returned Bartley. “I ought to have said
religions: the Squire has no religions.” The young fellow had a rich,
caressing voice, and a securely winning manner which comes from the habit
of easily pleasing; in this charming tone, and with this delightful
insinuation, he often said things that hurt; but with such a humorous
glance from his softly shaded eyes that people felt in some sort flattered
at being taken into the joke, even while they winced under it. The girl
seemed to wince, as if, in spite of her familiarity with the fact, it
wounded her to have her father's scepticism recognized just then. She said
nothing, and he added, “I remember we used to think that a redheaded
boy was worse-tempered on account of his hair. But I don't believe the
sorrel-tops, as we called them, were any more fiery than the rest of us.”

Marcia did not answer at once, and then she said, with the vagueness of one
not greatly interested by the subject, “You've got a sorrel-top in your
office that's fiery enough, if she's anything like what she used to be when
she went to school.”

“Hannah Morrison?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, she isn't so bad. She's pretty lively, but she's very eager to learn
the business, and I guess we shall get along. I think she wants to please
me.”

“_Does_ she! But she must be going on seventeen now.”

“I dare say,” answered the young man, carelessly, but with perfect
intelligence. “She's good-looking in her way, too.”

“Oh! Then you admire red hair?”

He perceived the anxiety that the girl's pride could not keep out of her
tone, but he answered indifferently, “I'm a little too near that color
myself. I hear that red hair's coming into fashion, but I guess it's
natural I should prefer black.”

She leaned back in her chair, and crushed the velvet collar of his coat
under her neck in lifting her head to stare at the high-hung mezzotints and
family photographs on the walls, while a flattered smile parted her lips,
and there was a little thrill of joy in her voice. “I presume we must be a
good deal behind the age in everything at Equity.”

“Well, you know my opinion of Equity,” returned the young man. “If I didn't
have you here to free my mind to once in a while, I don't know what I
should do.”

She was so proud to be in the secret of his discontent with the narrow
world of Equity that she tempted him to disparage it further by pretending
to identify herself with it. “I don't see why you abuse Equity to me. I Ve
never been anywhere else, except those two winters at school. You'd better
look out: I might expose you,” she threatened, fondly.

“I'm not afraid. Those two winters make a great difference. You saw girls
from other places,--from Augusta, and Bangor, and Bath.”

“Well, I couldn't see how they were so very different from Equity girls.”

“I dare say they couldn't, either, if they judged from you.”

She leaned forward again, and begged for more flattery from him with her
happy eyes. “Why, what _does_ make me so different from all the rest? I
should really like to know.”

“Oh, you don't expect me to tell you to your face!”

“Yes, to my face! I don't believe it's anything complimentary.”

“No, it's nothing that you deserve any credit for.”

“Pshaw!” cried the girl. “I know you're only talking to make fun of me. How
do I know but you make fun of me to other girls, just as you do of them to
me? Everybody says you're sarcastic.”

“Have I ever been sarcastic with you?”

“You know I wouldn't stand it.”

He made no reply, but she admired the ease with which he now turned from
her, and took one book after another from the table at his elbow, saying
some words of ridicule about each. It gave her a still deeper sense of his
intellectual command when he finally discriminated, and began to read out a
poem with studied elocutionary effects. He read in a low tone, but at last
some responsive noises came from the room overhead; he closed the book, and
threw himself into an attitude of deprecation, with his eyes cast up to the
ceiling.

“Chicago,” he said, laying the book on the table and taking his knee
between his hands, while he dazzled her by speaking from the abstraction
of one who has carried on a train of thought quite different from that on
which he seemed to be intent,--“Chicago is the place for me. I don't think
I can stand Equity much longer. You know that chum of mine I told you
about; he's written to me to come out there and go into the law with him at
once.”

“Why don't you go?” the girl forced herself to ask.

“Oh, I'm not ready yet. Should you write to me if I went to Chicago?”

“I don't think you'd find my letters very interesting. You wouldn't want
any news from Equity.”

“Your letters wouldn't be interesting if you gave me the Equity news; but
they would if you left it out. Then you'd have to write about yourself.”

“Oh, I don't think that would interest anybody.”

“Well, I feel almost like going out to Chicago to see.”

“But I haven't promised to write yet,” said the girl, laughing for joy in
his humor.

“I shall have to stay in Equity till you do, then. Better promise at once.”

“Wouldn't that be too much like marrying a man to get rid of him?”

“I don't think that's always such a bad plan--for the man.” He waited for
her to speak; but she had gone the length of her tether in this direction.
“Byron says,--

  'Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,--
  'Tis woman's whole existence.'

Do you believe that?” He dwelt upon her with his tree look, in the happy
embarrassment with which she let her head droop.

“I don't know,” she murmured. “I don't know anything about a man's life.”

“It was the woman's I was asking about.”

“I don't think I'm competent to answer.”

“Well, I'll tell you, then. I think Byron was mistaken. My experience is,
that, when a man is in love, there's nothing else of him. That's the reason
I've kept out of it altogether of late years. My advice is, don't fall
in love: it takes too much time.” They both laughed at this. “But about
corresponding, now; you haven't said whether you would write to me, or not.
Will you?”

“Can't you wait and see?” she asked, slanting a look at him, which she
could not keep from being fond.

“No, no. Unless you wrote to me I couldn't go to Chicago.”

“Perhaps I ought to promise, then, at once.”

“You mean that you wish me to go.”

“You said that you were going. You oughtn't to let anything stand in the
way of your doing the best you can for yourself.”

“But you would miss me a little, wouldn't you? You would try to miss me,
now and then?”

“Oh, you are here pretty often. I don't think I should have much difficulty
in missing you.”

“Thanks, thanks! I can go with a light heart, now. Good by.” He made a
pretence of rising.

“What! Are you going at once?”

“Yes, this very night,--or to-morrow. Or no, I can't go to-morrow. There's
something I was going to do to-morrow.”

“Perhaps go to church.”

“Oh, that of course. But it was in the afternoon. Stop! I have it! I want
you to go sleigh-riding with me in the afternoon.”

“I don't know about that,” Marcia began.

“But I do,” said the young man. “Hold on: I'll put my request in writing.”
 He opened her portfolio, which lay on the table. “What elegant stationery!
May I use some of this elegant stationery? The letter is to a lady,--to
open a correspondence. May I?” She laughed her assent. “How ought I to
begin? Dearest Miss Marcia, or just Dear Marcia: which is better?”

“You had better not put either--”

“But I must. You're one or the other, you know. You're dear--to your
family,--and you're Marcia: you can't deny it. The only question is whether
you're the dearest of all the Miss Marcias. I may be mistaken, you know.
We'll err on the safe side: Dear Marcia:” He wrote it down. “That looks
well, and it reads well. It looks very natural, and it reads like
poetry,--blank verse; there's no rhyme for it that I can remember. Dear
Marcia: Will you go sleigh-riding with me to-morrow afternoon, at two
o'clock sharp? Yours--yours? sincerely, or cordially, or affectionately, or
what? The 'dear Marcia' seems to call for something out of the common.
I think it had better be affectionately.” He suggested it with ironical
gravity.

“And _I_ think it had better be 'truly,'” protested the girl.

“'Truly' it shall be, then. Your word is law,--statute in such case made
and provided.” He wrote, “With unutterable devotion, yours truly, Bartley
J. Hubbard,” and read it aloud.

She leaned forward, and lightly caught it away from him, and made a feint
of tearing it. He seized her hands. “Mr. Hubbard!” she cried, in undertone.
“Let me go, please.”

“On two conditions,--promise not to tear up my letter, and promise to
answer it in writing.”

She hesitated long, letting him hold her wrists. At last she said, “Well,”
 and he released her wrists, on whose whiteness his clasp left red circles.
She wrote a single word on the paper, and pushed it across the table to
him. He rose with it, and went around to her side.

“This is very nice. But you haven't spelled it correctly. Anybody would say
this was No, to look at it; and you meant to write Yes. Take the pencil in
your hand, Miss Gaylord, and I will steady your trembling nerves, so that
you can form the characters. Stop! At the slightest resistance on your
part, I will call out and alarm the house; or I will--.” He put the pencil
into her fingers, and took her soft fist into his, and changed the word,
while she submitted, helpless with her smothered laughter. “Now the
address. Dear--”

“No, no!” she protested.

“Yes, yes! Dear Mr. Hubbard. There, that will do. Now the signature.
Yours--”

“I _won't_ write that. I won't, indeed!”

“Oh, yes, you will. You only think you won't. Yours gratefully, Marcia
Gaylord. That's right. The Gaylord is not very legible, on account of a
slight tremor in the writer's arm, resulting from a constrained posture,
perhaps. Thanks, Miss Gaylord. I will be here promptly at the hour
indicated--”

The noises renewed themselves overhead,--some one seemed to be moving
about. Hubbard laid his hand on that of the girl, still resting on the
table, and grasped it in burlesque alarm; she could scarcely stifle her
mirth. He released her hand, and, reaching his chair with a theatrical
stride, sat there cowering till the noises ceased. Then he began to speak
soberly, in a low voice. He spoke of himself; but in application of a
lecture which they had lately heard, so that he seemed to be speaking of
the lecture. It was on the formation of character, and he told of the
processes by which he had formed his own character. They appeared very
wonderful to her, and she marvelled at the ease with which he dismissed the
frivolity of his recent mood, and was now all seriousness. When he came to
speak of the influence of others upon him, she almost trembled with the
intensity of her interest. “But of all the women I have known, Marcia,” he
said, “I believe you have had the strongest influence upon me. I believe
you could make me do anything; but you have always influenced me for good;
your influence upon me has been ennobling and elevating.”

She wished to refuse his praise; but her heart throbbed for bliss and pride
in it; her voice dissolved on her lips. They sat in silence; and he took in
his the hand that she let hang over the side of her chair. The lamp began
to burn low, and she found words to say, “I had better get another,” but
she did not move.

“No, don't,” he said; “I must be going, too. Look at the wick, there,
Marcia; it scarcely reaches the oil. In a little while it will not reach
it, and the flame will die out. That is the way the ambition to be good and
great will die out of me, when my life no longer draws its inspiration from
your influence.”

This figure took her imagination; it seemed to her very beautiful; and his
praise humbled her more and more.

“Good night,” he said, in a low, sad voice. He gave her hand a last
pressure, and rose to put on his coat. Her admiration of his words, her
happiness in his flattery, filled her brain like wine. She moved dizzily as
she took up the lamp to light him to the door. “I have tired you,” he said,
tenderly, and he passed his hand around her to sustain the elbow of the arm
with which she held the lamp; she wished to resist, but she could not try.

At the door he bent down his head and kissed her. “Good night,
dear--friend.”

“Good night,” she panted; and after the door had closed upon him, she
stooped and kissed the knob on which his hand had rested.

As she turned, she started to see her father coming down the stairs with a
candle in his hand. He had his black cravat tied around his throat, but no
collar; otherwise, he had on the rusty black clothes in which he ordinarily
went about his affairs,--the cassimere pantaloons, the satin vest, and the
dress-coat which old-fashioned country lawyers still wore ten years ago, in
preference to a frock or sack. He stopped on one of the lower steps, and
looked sharply down into her uplifted face, and, as they stood confronted,
their consanguinity came out in vivid resemblances and contrasts; his high,
hawk-like profile was translated into the fine aquiline outline of hers;
the harsh rings of black hair, now grizzled with age, which clustered
tightly over his head, except where they had retreated from his deeply
seamed and wrinkled forehead, were the crinkled flow above her smooth white
brow; and the line of the bristly tufts that overhung his eyes was the same
as that of the low arches above hers. Her complexion was from her mother;
his skin was dusky yellow; but they had the same mouth, and hers showed how
sweet his mouth must have been in his youth. His eyes, deep sunk in their
cavernous sockets, had rekindled their dark fires in hers; his whole
visage, softened to her sex and girlish years, looked up at him in his
daughter's face.

“Why, father! Did we wake you?”

“No. I hadn't been asleep at all. I was coming down to read. But it's time
you were in bed, Marcia.”

“Yes, I'm going, now. There's a good fire in the parlor stove.”

The old man descended the remaining steps, but turned at the parlor door,
and looked again at his daughter with a glance that arrested her, with her
foot on the lowest stair.

“Marcia,” he asked, grimly, “are you engaged to Bartley Hubbard?”

The blood flashed up from her heart into her face like fire, and then, as
suddenly, fell back again, and left her white. She let her head droop and
turn, till her eyes were wholly averted from him, and she did not speak. He
closed the door behind him, and she went upstairs to her own room; in her
shame, she seemed to herself to crawl thither, with her father's glance
burning upon her.




II.


Bartley Hubbard drove his sorrel colt back to the hotel stable through the
moonlight, and woke up the hostler, asleep behind the counter, on a bunk
covered with buffalo-robes. The half-grown boy did not wake easily; he
conceived of the affair as a joke, and bade Bartley quit his fooling, till
the young man took him by his collar, and stood him on his feet. Then he
fumbled about the button of the lamp, turned low and smelling rankly, and
lit his lantern, which contributed a rival stench to the choking air. He
kicked together the embers that smouldered on the hearth of the Franklin
stove, sitting down before it for his greater convenience, and, having put
a fresh pine-root on the fire, fell into a doze, with his lantern in his
hand. “Look here, young man!” said Bartley, shaking him by the shoulder,
“you had better go out and put that colt up, and leave this sleeping before
the fire to me.”

“Guess the colt can wait awhile,” grumbled the boy; but he went out,
all the same, and Bartley, looking through the window, saw his lantern
wavering, a yellow blot in the white moonshine, toward the stable. He sat
down in the hostler's chair, and, in his turn, kicked the pine-root with
the heel of his shoe, and looked about the room. He had had, as he would
have said, a grand good time; but it had left him hungry, and the table in
the middle of the room, with the chairs huddled around it, was suggestive,
though he knew that it had been barrenly put there for the convenience of
the landlord's friends, who came every night to play whist with him, and
that nothing to eat or drink had ever been set out on it to interrupt the
austere interest of the game. It was long since there had been anything
on the shelves behind the counter more cheerful than corn-balls and fancy
crackers for the children of the summer boarders; these dainties being out
of season, the jars now stood there empty. The young man waited in a hungry
reverie, in which it appeared to him that he was undergoing unmerited
suffering, till the stable-boy came back, now wide awake, and disposed to
let the house share his vigils, as he stamped over the floor in his heavy
boots.

“Andy,” said Bartley, in a pathetic tone of injury, “can't you scare me up
something to eat?”

“There aint anything in the buttery but meat-pie,” said the boy.

He meant mince-pie, as Hubbard knew, and not a pasty of meat; and the
hungry man hesitated. “Well, fetch it,” he said, finally. “I guess we can
warm it up a little by the coals here.”

He had not been so long out of college but the idea of this irregular
supper, when he had once formed it, began to have its fascination. He took
up the broad fire-shovel, and, by the time the boy had shuffled to and from
the pantry beyond the dining-room, Bartley had cleaned the shovel with a
piece of newspaper and was already heating it by the embers which he had
raked out from under the pine-root. The boy silently transferred the
half-pie he had brought from its plate to the shovel. He pulled up a chair
and sat down to watch it. The pie began to steam and send out a savory
odor; he himself, in thawing, emitted a stronger and stronger smell of
stable. He was not without his disdain for the palate which must have its
mince-pie warm at midnight,--nor without his respect for it, either. This
fastidious taste must be part of the splendor which showed itself in Mr.
Hubbard's city-cut clothes, and in his neck-scarfs and the perfection of
his finger-nails and mustache. The boy had felt the original impression of
these facts deepened rather than effaced by custom; they were for every
day, and not, as he had at first conjectured, for some great occasion only.

“You don't suppose, Andy, there is such a thing as cold tea or coffee
anywhere, that we could warm up?” asked Bartley, gazing thoughtfully at the
pie.

The boy shook his head. “Get you some milk,” he said; and, after he had let
the dispiriting suggestion sink into the other's mind, he added, “or some
water.”

“Oh, bring on the milk,” groaned Bartley, but with the relief that a choice
of evils affords. The boy stumped away for it, and when he came back the
young man had got his pie on the plate again, and had drawn his chair up to
the table. “Thanks,” he said, with his mouth full, as the boy set down the
goblet of milk. Andy pulled his chair round so as to get an unrestricted
view of a man who ate his pie with his fork as easily as another would
with a knife. “That sister of yours is a smart girl,” the young man added,
making deliberate progress with the pie.

The boy made an inarticulate sound of satisfaction, and resolved in his
heart to tell her what Mr. Hubbard had said.

“She's as smart as time,” continued Bartley.

This was something concrete. The boy knew he should remember that
comparison. “Bring you anything else?” he asked, admiring the young man's
skill in getting the last flakes of the crust on his fork. The pie had now
vanished.

“Why, there isn't anything else, is there?” Bartley demanded, with the
plaintive dismay of a man who fears he has flung away his hunger upon one
dish when he might have had something better.

“Cheese,” replied the boy.

“Oh!” said Bartley. He reflected awhile. “I suppose I could toast a piece
on this fork. But there isn't any more milk.”

The boy took away the plate and goblet, and brought them again replenished.

Bartley contrived to get the cheese on his fork and rest it against one of
the andirons so that it would not fall into the ashes. When it was done, he
ate it as he had eaten the pie, without offering to share his feast with
the boy. “There'” he said. “Yes, Andy, if she keeps on as she's been doing,
she won't have any trouble. She's a bright girl.” He stretched his legs
before the fire again, and presently yawned.

“Want your lamp, Mr. Hubbard?” asked the boy.

“Well, yes, Andy,” the young man consented. “I suppose I may as well go to
bed.”

But when the boy brought his lamp, he still remained with outstretched legs
in front of the fire. Speaking of Hannah Morrison made him think of Marcia
again, and of the way in which she had spoken of the girl. He lolled his
head on one side in such comfort as a young man finds in the conviction
that a pretty girl is not only fond of him, but is instantly jealous of any
other girl whose name is mentioned. He smiled at the flame in his reverie,
and the boy examined, with clandestine minuteness, the set and pattern of
his trousers, with glances of reference and comparison to his own.

There were many things about his relations with Marcia Gaylord which were
calculated to give Bartley satisfaction. She was, without question, the
prettiest girl in the place, and she had more style than any other girl
began to have. He liked to go into a room with Marcia Gaylord; it was some
pleasure. Marcia was a lady; she had a good education; she had been away
two years at school; and, when she came back at the end of the second
winter, he knew that she had fallen in love with him at sight. He believed
that he could time it to a second. He remembered how he had looked up at
her as he passed, and she had reddened, and tried to turn away from the
window as if she had not seen him. Bartley was still free as air; but if he
could once make up his mind to settle down in a hole like Equity, he
could have her by turning his hand. Of course she had her drawbacks, like
everybody. She was proud, and she would be jealous; but, with all her pride
and her distance, she had let him see that she liked him; and with not a
word on his part that any one could hold him to.

“Hollo!” he cried, with a suddenness that startled the boy, who had
finished his meditation upon Bartley's trousers, and was now deeply
dwelling on his boots. “Do you like 'em? See what sort of a shine you can
give 'em for Sunday-go-to-meeting to-morrow morning.” He put out his hand
and laid hold of the boy's head, passing his fingers through the thick red
hair. “Sorrel-top!” he said, with a grin of agreeable reminiscence. “They
emptied all the freckles they had left into your face,--didn't they, Andy?”

This free, joking way of Bartley's was one of the things that made him
popular; he passed the time of day, and was give and take right along,
as his admirers expressed it, from the first, in a community where his
smartness had that honor which gives us more smart men to the square mile
than any other country in the world. The fact of his smartness had been
affirmed and established in the strongest manner by the authorities of the
college at which he was graduated, in answer to the reference he made to
them when negotiating with the committee in charge for the place he now
held as editor of the Equity Free Press. The faculty spoke of the solidity
and variety of his acquirements, and the distinction with which he had
acquitted himself in every branch of study' he had undertaken. They added
that he deserved the greater credit because his early disadvantages as an
orphan, dependent on his own exertions for a livelihood, had been so great
that he had entered college with difficulty, and with heavy conditions.
This turned the scale with a committee who had all been poor boys
themselves, and justly feared the encroachments of hereditary aristocracy.
They perhaps had their misgivings when the young man, in his well-blacked
boots, his gray trousers neatly fitting over them, and his diagonal coat
buttoned high with one button, stood before them with his thumbs in his
waistcoat pockets, and looked down over his mustache at the floor with
sentiments concerning their wisdom which they could not explore; they must
have resented the fashionable keeping of everything about him, for Bartley
wore his one suit as if it were but one of many; but when they understood
that he had come by everything through his own unaided smartness, they
could no longer hesitate: One, indeed, still felt it a duty to call
attention to the fact that the college authorities said nothing of the
young man's moral characteristics in a letter dwelling so largely upon his
intellectual qualifications. The others referred this point by a silent
look to Squire Gaylord.

“I don't know;” said the Squire, “as I ever heard that a great deal of
morality was required by a newspaper editor.” The rest laughed at the joke,
and the Squire continued: “But I guess if he worked his own way through
college, as they say, that he haint had time to be up to a great deal of
mischief. You know it's for idle hands that the Devil provides, doctor.”

“That's true, as far as it goes,” said the doctor.

“But it isn't the whole truth. The Devil provides for some busy hands,
too.”

“There's a good deal of sense in that,” the Squire admitted. “The worst
scamps I ever knew were active fellows. Still, industry is in a man's
favor. If the faculty knew anything against this young man they would
have given us a hint of it. I guess we had better take him; we sha'n't do
better. Is it a vote?”

The good opinion of Bartley's smartness which Squire Gaylord had formed was
confirmed some months later by the development of the fact that the young
man did not regard his management of the Equity Free Press as a final
vocation. The story went that he lounged into the lawyer's office one
Saturday afternoon in October, and asked him to let him take his Blackstone
into the woods with him. He came back with it a few hours later.

“Well, sir,” said the attorney, sardonically, “how much Blackstone have you
read?”

“About forty pages,” answered the young man, dropping into one of the empty
chairs, and hanging his leg over the arm.

The lawyer smiled, and, opening the book, asked half a dozen questions at
random. Bartley answered without changing his indifferent countenance, or
the careless posture he had fallen into. A sharper and longer examination
followed; the very language seemed to have been unbrokenly transferred to
his mind, and he often gave the author's words as well as his ideas.

“Ever looked at this before?” asked the lawyer, with a keen glance at him
over his spectacles.

“No,” said Bartley, gaping as if bored, and further relieving his weariness
by stretching. He was without deference for any presence; and the old
lawyer did not dislike him for this: he had no deference himself.

“You think of studying law?” he asked, after a pause.

“That's what I came to ask you about,” said Bartley, swinging his leg.

The elder recurred to his book, and put some more questions. Then he said,
“Do you want to study with me?”

“That's about the size of it.”

He shut the book, and pushed it on the table toward the young man. “Go
ahead. You'll get along--if you don't get along too easily.”

It was in the spring after this that Marcia returned home from her last
term at boarding-school, and first saw him.




III.


Bartley woke on Sunday morning with the regrets that a supper of mince-pie
and toasted cheese is apt to bring. He woke from a bad dream, and found
that he had a dull headache. A cup of coffee relieved his pain, but it left
him listless, and with a longing for sympathy which he experienced in any
mental or physical discomfort. The frankness with which he then appealed
for compassion was one of the things that made people like him; he flung
himself upon the pity of the first he met. It might be some one to whom he
had said a cutting or mortifying thing at their last encounter, but Bartley
did not mind that; what he desired was commiseration, and he confidingly
ignored the past in a trust that had rarely been abused. If his sarcasm
proved that he was quick and smart, his recourse to those who had suffered
from it proved that he did not mean anything by what he said; it showed
that he was a man of warm feelings, and that his heart was in the right
place.

Bartley deplored his disagreeable sensations to the other boarders at
breakfast, and affectionately excused himself to them for not going to
church, when they turned into the office, and gathered there before the
Franklin stove, sensible of the day in freshly shaven chins and newly
blacked boots. The habit of church-going was so strong and universal in
Equity that even strangers stopping at the hotel found themselves the
object of a sort of hospitable competition with the members of the
different denominations, who took it for granted that they would wish to
go somewhere, and only suffered them a choice between sects. There was no
intolerance in their offer of pews, but merely a profound expectation, and
one might continue to choose his place of worship Sabbath after Sabbath
without offence. This was Bartley's custom, and it had worked to his favor
rather than his disadvantage: for in the rather chaotic liberality into
which religious sentiment had fallen in Equity, it was tacitly conceded
that the editor of a paper devoted to the interests of the whole town ought
not to be of fixed theological opinions.

Religion there had largely ceased to be a fact of spiritual experience,
and the visible church flourished on condition of providing for the social
needs of the community. It was practically held that the salvation of
one's soul must not be made too depressing, or the young people would have
nothing to do with it. Professors of the sternest creeds temporized with
sinners, and did what might be done to win them to heaven by helping them
to have a good time here. The church embraced and included the world. It no
longer frowned even upon social dancing,--a transgression once so heinous
in its eyes; it opened its doors to popular lectures, and encouraged
secular music in its basements, where, during the winter, oyster suppers
were given in aid of good objects. The Sunday school was made particularly
attractive, both to the children and the young men and girls who taught
them. Not only at Thanksgiving, but at Christmas, and latterly even at
Easter, there were special observances, which the enterprising spirits
having the welfare of the church at heart tried to make significant and
agreeable to all, and promotive of good feeling. Christenings and marriages
in the church were encouraged, and elaborately celebrated; death alone,
though treated with cut-flowers in emblematic devices, refused to lend
itself to the cheerful intentions of those who were struggling to render
the idea of another and a better world less repulsive. In contrast with
the relaxation and uncertainty of their doctrinal aim, the rude and bold
infidelity of old Squire Gaylord had the greater affinity with the mood of
the Puritanism they had outgrown. But Bartley Hubbard liked the religious
situation well enough. He took a leading part in the entertainments, and
did something to impart to them a literary cast, as in the series of
readings from the poets which he gave, the first winter, for the benefit of
each church in turn. At these lectures he commended himself to the sober
elders, who were troubled by the levity of his behavior with young people
on other occasions, by asking one of the ministers to open the exercises
with prayer, and another, at the close, to invoke the Divine blessing;
there was no especial relevancy in this, but it pleased. He kept himself,
from the beginning, pretty constantly in the popular eye. He was a speaker
at all public meetings, where his declamation was admired; and at private
parties, where the congealed particles of village society were united in
a frozen mass, he was the first to break the ice, and set the angular
fragments grating and grinding upon one another.

He now went to his room, and opened his desk with some vague purpose
of bringing up the arrears of his correspondence. Formerly, before his
interest in the newspaper had lapsed at all, he used to give his Sunday
leisure to making selections and writing paragraphs for it; but he now
let the pile of exchanges lie unopened on his desk, and began to rummage
through the letters scattered about in it. They were mostly from young
ladies with whom he had corresponded, and some of them enclosed the
photographs of the writers, doing their best to look as they hoped he might
think they looked. They were not love-letters, but were of that sort
which the laxness of our social life invites young people, who have met
pleasantly, to exchange as long as they like, without explicit intentions
on either side; they commit the writers to nothing; they are commonly
without result, except in wasting time which is hardly worth saving. Every
one who has lived the American life must have produced them in great
numbers. While youth lasts, they afford an excitement whose charm is hard
to realize afterward.

Bartley's correspondents were young ladies of his college town, where
he had first begun to see something of social life in days which he now
recognized as those of his green youth. They were not so very far removed
in point of time; but the experience of a larger world in the vacation he
had spent with a Boston student had relegated them to a moral remoteness
that could not readily be measured. His friend was the son of a family who
had diverted him from the natural destiny of a Boston man at Harvard, and
sent him elsewhere for sectarian reasons. They were rich people, devout
in their way, and benevolent, after a fashion of their own; and their son
always brought home with him, for the holidays and other short vacations,
some fellow-student accounted worthy of their hospitality through his
religious intentions or his intellectual promise. These guests were
indicated to the young man by one of the faculty, and he accepted their
companionship for the time with what perfunctory civility he could muster.
He and Bartley had amused themselves very well during that vacation. The
Hallecks were not fashionable people, but they lived wealthily: they had
a coachman and an inside man (whom Bartley at first treated with a
consideration, which it afterward mortified him to think of); their house
was richly furnished with cushioned seats, dense carpets, and heavy
curtains; and they were visited by other people of their denomination,
and of a like abundance. Some of these were infected with the prevailing
culture of the city, and the young ladies especially dressed in a style and
let fall ideas that filled the soul of the country student with wonder and
worship. He heard a great deal of talk that he did not understand; but
he eagerly treasured every impression, and pieced it out, by question
or furtive observation, into an image often shrewdly true, and often
grotesquely untrue, to the conditions into which he had been dropped. He
civilized himself as rapidly as his light permitted. There was a great
deal of church-going; but he and young Halleck went also to lectures and
concerts; they even went to the opera, and Bartley, with the privity of his
friend, went to the theatre. Halleck said that he did not think there was
much harm in a play; but that his people stayed away for the sake of the
example,--a reason that certainly need not hold with Bartley.

At the end of the vacation he returned to college, leaving his measure with
Halleck's tailor, and his heart with all the splendors and elegances of the
town. He found the ceilings very low and the fashions much belated in the
village; but he reconciled himself as well as he could. The real stress
came when he left college and the question of doing something for himself
pressed upon him. He intended to study law, but he must meantime earn his
living. It had been his fortune to be left, when very young, not only an
orphan, but an extremely pretty child, with an exceptional aptness for
study; and he had been better cared for than if his father and mother had
lived. He had been not only well housed and fed, and very well dressed, but
pitied as an orphan, and petted for his beauty and talent, while he was
always taught to think of himself as a poor boy, who was winning his own
way through the world. But when his benefactor proposed to educate him for
the ministry, with a view to his final use in missionary work, he revolted.
He apprenticed himself to the printer of his village, and rapidly picked up
a knowledge of the business, so that at nineteen he had laid by some money,
and was able to think of going to college. There was a fund in aid of
indigent students in the institution to which he turned, and the faculty
favored him. He finished his course with great credit to himself and the
college, and he was naturally inclined to look upon what had been done for
him earlier as an advantage taken of his youthful inexperience. He rebelled
against the memory of that tutelage, in spite of which he had accomplished
such great things. If he had not squandered his time or fallen into vicious
courses in circumstances of so much discouragement, if he had come out of
it all self-reliant and independent, he knew whom he had to thank for it.
The worst of the matter was that there was some truth in all this.

The ardor of his satisfaction cooled in the two years following his
graduation, when in intervals of teaching country schools he was actually
reduced to work at his trade on a village newspaper. But it was as a
practical printer, through the freemasonry of the craft, that Bartley heard
of the wish of the Equity committee to place the Free Press in new hands,
and he had to be grateful to his trade for a primary consideration from
them which his collegiate honors would not have won him. There had not
yet begun to be that talk of journalism as a profession which has since
prevailed with our collegians, and if Bartley had thought, as other
collegians think, of devoting himself to newspaper life, he would have
turned his face toward the city where its prizes are won,--the ten and
fifteen dollar reporterships for which a font years' course of the classics
is not too costly a preparation. But, to tell the truth, he had never
regarded his newspaper as anything but a make-shift, by which he was to be
carried over a difficult and anxious period of his life, and enabled to
attempt something worthier his powers. He had no illusions concerning it;
if he had ever thought of journalism as a grand and ennobling profession,
these ideas had perished, in his experience in a village printing-office.
He came to his work in Equity with practical and immediate purposes which
pleased the committee better. The paper had been established some time
before, in one of those flurries of ambition which from time to time seized
Equity, when its citizens reflected that it was the central town in the
county, and yet not the shire-town. The question of the removal of the
county-seat had periodically arisen before; but it had never been so hotly
agitated as now. The paper had been a happy thought of a local politician,
whose conception of its management was that it might be easily edited by
a committee, if a printer could be found to publish it; but a few months'
experience had made the Free Press a terrible burden to its founders; it
could not be sustained, and it could not be let die without final disaster
to the interests of the town; and the committee began to cast about for a
publisher who could also be editor. Bartley, to whom it fell, could not be
said to have thrown his heart and soul into the work, but he threw all his
energy, and he made it more than its friends could have hoped. He
espoused the cause of Equity in the pending question with the zeal of a
_condottiere_, and did service no less faithful because of the cynical
quality latent in it. When the legislative decision against Equity put an
end to its ambitious hopes for the time being, he continued in control of
the paper, with a fair prospect of getting the property into his own hands
at last, and with some growing question in his mind whether, after all, it
might not be as easy for him to go into politics from the newspaper as from
the law. He managed the office very economically, and by having the
work done by girl apprentices, with the help of one boy, he made it
self-supporting. He modelled the newspaper upon the modern conception,
through which the country press must cease to have any influence in
public affairs, and each paper become little more than an open letter of
neighborhood gossip. But while he filled his sheet with minute chronicles
of the goings and comings of unimportant persons, and with all attainable
particulars of the ordinary life of the different localities, he continued
to make spicy hits at the enemies of Equity in the late struggle, and kept
the public spirit of the town alive. He had lately undertaken to make known
its advantages as a summer resort, and had published a series of encomiums
upon the beauty of its scenery and the healthfulness of its air and water,
which it was believed would put it in a position of rivalry with some of
the famous White Mountain places. He invited the enterprise of outside
capital, and advocated a narrow-gauge road up the valley of the river
through the Notch, so as to develop the picturesque advantages of that
region. In all this, the color of mockery let the wise perceive that
Bartley saw the joke and enjoyed it, and it deepened the popular impression
of his smartness.

This vein of cynicism was not characteristic, as it would have been in
an older man; it might have been part of that spiritual and intellectual
unruliness of youth, which people laugh at and forgive, and which one
generally regards in after life as something almost alien to one's self.
He wrote long, bragging articles about Equity, in a tone bordering on
burlesque, and he had a department in his paper where he printed humorous
squibs of his own and of other people; these were sometimes copied, and in
the daily papers of the State he had been mentioned as “the funny man of
the Equity Free Press.” He also sent letters to one of the Boston journals,
which he reproduced in his own sheet, and which gave him an importance that
the best endeavor as a country editor would never have won him with the
villagers. He would naturally, as the local printer, have ranked a little
above the foreman of the saw-mill in the social scale, and decidedly below
the master of the Academy; but his personal qualities elevated him over the
head even of the latter. But above all, the fact that he was studying law
was a guaranty of his superiority that nothing else could have given; that
science is the fountain of the highest distinction in a country town.
Bartley's whole course implied that he was above editing the Free Press,
but that he did it because it served his turn. That was admirable.

He sat a long time with these girls' letters before him, and lost himself
in a pensive reverie over their photographs, and over the good times he
used to have with them. He mused in that formless way in which a young
man thinks about young girls; his soul is suffused with a sense of their
sweetness and brightness, and unless he is distinctly in love there is no
intention in his thoughts of them; even then there is often no intention.
Bartley might very well have a good conscience about them; he had broken no
hearts among them, and had only met them half-way in flirtation. What he
really regretted, as he held their letters in his hand, was that he had
never got up a correspondence with two or three of the girls whom he had
met in Boston. Though he had been cowed by their magnificence in the
beginning, he had never had any reverence for them; he believed that they
would have liked very well to continue his acquaintance; but he had not
known how to open a correspondence, and the point was one on which he was
ashamed to consult Halleck. These college belles, compared with them, were
amusingly inferior; by a natural turn of thought, he realized that they
were inferior to Marcia Gaylord, too, in looks and style, no less than
in an impassioned preference for himself. A distaste for their somewhat
veteran ways in flirtation grew upon him as he thought of her; he
philosophized against them to her advantage; he could not blame her if she
did not know how to hide her feelings for him. Yet he knew that Marcia
would rather have died than let him suppose that she cared for him, if she
had known that she was doing it. The fun of it was, that she should not
know; this charmed him, it touched him, even; he did not think of it
exultingly, as the night before, but sweetly, fondly, and with a final
curiosity to see her again, and enjoy the fact in her presence. The acrid
little jets of smoke which escaped from the joints of his stove from time
to time annoyed him; he shut his portfolio at last, and went out to walk.




IV.


The forenoon sunshine, beating strong upon the thin snow along the edges of
the porch floor, tattered them with a little thaw here and there; but it
had no effect upon the hard-packed levels of the street, up the middle of
which Bartley walked in a silence intensified by the muffled voices of
exhortation that came to him out of the churches. It was in the very heart
of sermon-time, and he had the whole street to himself on his way up to
Squire Gaylord's house. As he drew near, he saw smoke ascending from the
chimney of the lawyer's office,--a little white building that stood apart
from the dwelling on the left of the gate, and he knew that the old man was
within, reading there, with his hat on and his long legs flung out toward
the stove, unshaven and unkempt, in a grim protest against the prevalent
Christian superstition. He might be reading Hume or Gibbon, or he might be
reading the Bible,--a book in which he was deeply versed, and from which
he was furnished with texts for the demolition of its friends, his
adversaries. He professed himself a great admirer of its literature, and,
in the heat of controversy, he often found himself a defender of its
doctrines when he had occasion to expose the fallacy of latitudinarian
interpretations. For liberal Christianity he had nothing but contempt, and
refuted it with a scorn which spared none of the worldly tendencies of the
church in Equity. The idea that souls were to be saved by church sociables
filled him with inappeasable rancor; and he maintained the superiority of
the old Puritanic discipline against them with a fervor which nothing but
its re-establishment could have abated. It was said that Squire Gaylord's
influence had largely helped to keep in place the last of the rigidly
orthodox ministers, under whom his liberalizing congregation chafed for
years of discontent; but this was probably an exaggeration of the native
humor. Mrs. Gaylord had belonged to this church, and had never formally
withdrawn from it, and the lawyer always contributed to pay the minister's
salary. He also managed a little property for him so well as to make him
independent when he was at last asked to resign by his deacons.

In another mood, Bartley might have stepped aside to look in on the Squire,
before asking at the house door for Marcia. They relished each other's
company, as people of contrary opinions and of no opinions are apt to do.
Bartley loved to hear the Squire get going, as he said, and the old man
felt a fascination in the youngster. Bartley was smart; he took a point as
quick as lightning; and the Squire did not mind his making friends with
the Mammon of Righteousness, as he called the visible church in Equity. It
amused him to see Bartley lending the church the zealous support of the
press, with an impartial patronage of the different creeds. There had been
times in his own career when the silence of his opinions would have greatly
advanced him, but he had not chosen to pay this price for success; he liked
his freedom, or he liked the bitter tang of his own tongue too well, and he
had remained a leading lawyer in Equity, when he might have ended a judge,
or even a Congressman. Of late years, however, since people whom he could
have joined in their agnosticism so heartily, up to a certain point, had
begun to make such fools of themselves about Darwinism and the brotherhood
of all men in the monkey, he had grown much more tolerant. He still clung
to his old-fashioned deistical opinions; but he thought no worse of a man
for not holding them; he did not deny that a man might be a Christian, and
still be a very good man.

The audacious humor of his position sufficed with a people who liked a
joke rather better than anything else; in his old age, his infidelity was
something that would hardly have been changed, if possible, by a popular
vote. Even his wife, to whom it had once been a heavy cross, borne with
secret prayer and tears, had long ceased to gainsay it in any wise. Her
family had opposed her yoking with an unbeliever when she married him,
but she had some such hopes of converting him as women cherish who give
themselves to men confirmed in drunkenness. She learned, as other women do,
that she could hardly change her husband in the least of his habits, and
that, in this great matter of his unbelief, her love was powerless. It
became easier at last for her to add self-sacrifice to self-sacrifice than
to vex him with her anxieties about his soul, and to act upon the feeling
that, if he must be lost, then she did not care to be saved. He had never
interfered with her church-going; he had rather promoted it, for he liked
to have women go; but the time came when she no longer cared to go without
him; she lapsed from her membership, and it was now many years since she
had worshipped with the people of her faith, if, indeed, she were still of
any faith. Her life was silenced in every way, and, as often happens with
aging wives in country towns, she seldom went out of her own door, and
never appeared at the social or public solemnities of the village. Her
husband and her daughter composed and bounded her world,--she always talked
of them, or of other things as related to them. She had grown an elderly
woman, without losing the color of her yellow hair; and the bloom of
girlhood had been stayed in her cheeks as if by the young habit of
blushing, which she had kept. She was still what her neighbors called very
pretty-appearing, and she must have been a beautiful girl. The silence of
her inward life subdued her manner, till now she seemed always to have come
from some place on which a deep hush had newly fallen.

She answered the door when Bartley turned the crank that snapped the
gong-bell in its centre; and the young man, who was looking at the street
while waiting for some one to come, confronted her with a start. “Oh!” he
said, “I thought it was Marcia. Good morning, Mrs. Gaylord. Isn't Marcia at
home?”

“She went to church, this morning,” replied her mother. “Won't you walk
in?”

“Why, yes, I guess I will, thank you,” faltered Bartley, in the
irresolution of his disappointment. “I hope I sha'n't disturb you.”

“Come right into the sitting-room. She won't be gone a great while, now,”
 said Mrs. Gaylord, leading the way to the large square room into which
a door at the end of the narrow hall opened. A slumberous heat from a
sheet-iron wood-stove pervaded the place, and a clock ticked monotonously
on a shelf in the corner. Mrs. Gaylord said, “Won't you take a chair?” and
herself sank into the rocker, with a deep feather cushion in the seat, and
a thinner feather cushion tied half-way up the back. After the more active
duties of her housekeeping were done, she sat every day in this chair with
her knitting or sewing, and let the clock tick the long hours of her life
away, with no more apparent impatience of them, or sense of their dulness,
than the cat on the braided rug at her feet, or the geraniums in the pots
at the sunny window. “Are you pretty well to-day?” she asked.

“Well, no, Mrs. Gaylord, I'm not,” answered Bartley. “I'm all out of sorts.
I haven't felt so dyspeptic for I don't know how long.”

Mrs. Gaylord smoothed the silk dress across her lap,--the thin old black
silk which she still instinctively put on for Sabbath observance, though it
was so long since she had worn it to church. “Mr. Gaylord used to have it
when we were first married, though he aint been troubled with it of late
years. He seemed to think then it was worse Sundays.”

“I don't believe Sunday has much to do with it, in my case. I ate some
mince-pie and some toasted cheese last night, and I guess they didn't agree
with me very well,” said Bartley, who did not spare himself the confession
of his sins when seeking sympathy: it was this candor that went so far to
convince people of his good-heartedness.

“I don't know as I ever heard that meat-pie was bad,” said Mrs. Gaylord,
thoughtfully. “Mr. Gaylord used to eat it right along all through his
dyspepsia, and he never complained of it. And the cheese ought to have made
it digest.”

“Well, I don't know what it was,” replied Bartley, plaintively submitting
to be exonerated, “but I feel perfectly used up. Oh, I suppose I shall get
over it, or forget all about it, by to-morrow,” he added, with strenuous
cheerfulness. “It isn't anything worth minding.”

Mrs. Gaylord seemed to differ with him on this point. “Head ache any?” she
asked.

“It did this morning, when I first woke up,” Bartley assented.

“I don't believe but what a cup of tea would be the best thing for you,”
 she said, critically.

Bartley had instinctively practised a social art which ingratiated him with
people at Equity as much as his demands for sympathy endeared him: he gave
trouble in little unusual ways. He now said, “Oh, I wish you would give me
a cup, Mrs. Gaylord.”

“Why, yes, indeed! That's just what I was going to,” she replied. She went
to the kitchen, which lay beyond another room, and reappeared with the
tea directly, proud of her promptness, but having it on her conscience
to explain it. “I 'most always keep the pot on the stove hearth, Sunday
morning, so's to have it ready if Mr. Gaylord ever wants a cup. He's a
master hand for tea, and always was. There: _I_ guess you better take it
without milk. I put some sugar in the saucer, if you want any.” She dropped
noiselessly upon her feather cushion again, and Bartley, who had risen to
receive the tea from her, remained standing while he drank it.

“That does seem to go to the spot,” he said, as he sipped it, thoughtfully
observant of its effect upon his disagreeable feelings. “I wish I had
you to take care of me, Mrs. Gaylord, and keep me from making a fool of
myself,” he added, when he had drained the cup. “No, no!” he cried, at her
offering to take it from him. “I'll set it down. I know it will fret you to
have it in here, and I'll carry it out into the kitchen.” He did so before
she could prevent him, and came back, touching his mustache with his
handkerchief. “I declare, Mrs. Gaylord, I should love to live in a kitchen
like that.”

“I guess you wouldn't if you had to,” said Mrs. Gaylord, flattered into a
smile. “Marcia, she likes to sit out there, she says, better than anywheres
in the house. But I always tell her it's because she was there so much when
she was little. I don't see as she seems over-anxious to do anything there
_but_ sit, I tell her. Not but what she knows how well enough. Mr. Gaylord,
too, he's great for being round in the kitchen. If he gets up in the night,
when he has his waking spells, he had rather take his lamp out there, if
there's a fire left, and read, any time, than what he would in the parlor.
Well, we used to sit there together a good deal when we were young, and he
got the habit of it. There's everything in habit,” she added, thoughtfully.
“Marcia, she's got quite in the way, lately, of going to the Methodist
church.”

“Yes, I've seen her there. You know I board round at the different
churches, as the schoolmaster used to at the houses in the old times.”

Mi's. Gaylord looked up at the clock, and gave a little nervous laugh.
“I don't know what Marcia will say to my letting her company stay in the
sitting-room. She's pretty late to-day. But I guess you won't have much
longer to wait, now.”

She spoke with that awe of her daughter and her judgments which is one of
the pathetic idiosyncrasies of a certain class of American mothers. They
feel themselves to be not so well educated as their daughters, whose
fancied knowledge of the world they let outweigh their own experience of
life; they are used to deferring to them, and they shrink willingly into
household drudges before them, and leave them to order the social affairs
of the family. Mrs. Gaylord was not much afraid of Bartley for himself, but
as Marcia's company he made her more and more uneasy toward the end of the
quarter of an hour in which she tried to entertain him with her simple
talk, varying from Mr. Gaylord to Marcia, and from Marcia to Mr. Gaylord
again. When she recognized the girl's quick touch in the closing of the
front door, and her elastic step approached through the hall, the mother
made a little deprecating noise in her throat, and fidgeted in her chair.
As soon as Marcia opened the sitting-room door, Mrs. Gaylord modestly rose
and went out into the kitchen: the mother who remained in the room when her
daughter had company was an oddity almost unknown in Equity.

Marcia's face flashed all into a light of joy at sight of Bartley, who
scarcely waited for her mother to be gone before he drew her toward him
by the hand she had given. She mechanically yielded; and then, as if the
recollection of some new resolution forced itself through her pleasure at
sight of him, she freed her hand, and, retreating a step or two, confronted
him.

“Why, Marcia,” he said, “what's the matter?”

“Nothing,” she answered.

It might have amused Bartley, if he had felt quite well, to see the girl
so defiant of him, when she was really so much in love with him, but it
certainly did not amuse him now: it disappointed him in his expectation of
finding her femininely soft and comforting, and he did not know just what
to do. He stood staring at her in discomfiture, while she gained in outward
composure, though her cheeks were of the Jacqueminot red of the ribbon at
her throat. “What have I done, Marcia?” he faltered.

“Oh, you haven't done anything.”

“Some one has been talking to you against me.”

“No one has said a word to me about you.”

“Then why are you so cold--so strange--so--so--different?”

“Different?”

“Yes, from what you were last night,” he answered, with an aggrieved air.

“Oh, we see some things differently by daylight,” she lightly explained.
“Won't you sit down?”

“No, thank you,” Bartley replied, sadly but unresentfully. “I think I had
better be going. I see there is something wrong--”

“I don't see why you say there is anything wrong,” she retorted. “What have
_I_ done?”

“Oh, you have not _done_ anything; I take it back. It is all right. But
when I came here this morning--encouraged--hoping--that you had the same
feeling as myself, and you seem to forget everything but a ceremonious
acquaintanceship--why, it is all right, of course. I have no reason to
complain; but I must say that I can't help being surprised.” He saw her
lips quiver and her bosom heave. “Marcia, do you blame me for feeling hurt
at your coldness when I came here to tell you--to tell you I--I love you?”
 With his nerves all unstrung, and his hunger for sympathy, he really
believed that he had come to tell her this. “Yes,” he added, bitterly, “I
_will_ tell you, though it seems to be the last word I shall speak to you.
I'll go, now.”

“Bartley! You shall _never_ go!” she cried, throwing herself in his way.
“Do you think I don't care for you, too? You may kiss me,--you may _kill_
me, now!”

The passionate tears sprang to her eyes, without the sound of sobs or the
contortion of weeping, and she did not wait for his embrace. She flung her
arms around his neck and held him fast, crying, “I wouldn't let you, for
your own sake, darling; and if I had died for it--I thought I should
die last night--I was never going to let you kiss me again till you
said--till--till--now! Don't you see?” She caught him tighter, and hid
her face in his neck, and cried and laughed for joy and shame, while he
suffered her caresses with a certain bewilderment. “I want to tell you
now--I want to explain,” she said, lifting her face and letting him from
her as far as her arms, caught around his neck, would reach, and fervidly
searching his eyes, lest some ray of what he would think should escape
her. “Don't speak a word first! Father saw us at the door last night,--he
happened to be coming downstairs, because he couldn't sleep,--just when
you--Oh, Bartley, don't!” she implored, at the little smile that made his
mustache quiver. “And he asked me whether we were engaged; and when I
couldn't tell him we were, I know what he thought. I knew how he despised
me, and I determined that, if you didn't tell me that you cared for me--And
that's the reason, Bartley, and not--not because I didn't care more for you
than I do for the whole world. And--and--you don't mind it, now, do you? It
was for your sake, dearest.”

Whether Bartley perfectly divined or not all the feeling at which her words
hinted, it was delicious to be clung about by such a pretty girl as
Marcia Gaylord, to have her now darting her face into his neck-scarf with
intolerable consciousness, and now boldly confronting him with all-defying
fondness while she lightly pushed him and pulled him here and there in the
vehemence of her appeal. Perhaps such a man, in those fastnesses of his
nature which psychology has not yet explored, never loses, even in the
tenderest transports, the sense of prey as to the girl whose love he has
won; but if this is certain, it is also certain that he has transports
which are tender, and Bartley now felt his soul melted with affection that
was very novel and sweet.

“Why, Marcia!” he said, “what a strange girl you are!” He sunk into his
chair again, and, putting his arms around her waist, drew her upon his
knee, like a child.

She held herself apart from him at her arm's length, and said, “Wait! Let
me say it before it seems as if we had always been engaged, and everything
was as right then as it is now. Did you despise me for letting you kiss me
before we were engaged?”

“No,” he laughed again. “I liked you for it.”

“But if you thought I would let any one else, you wouldn't have liked it?”

This diverted him still more. “I shouldn't have liked that more than half
as well.”

“No,” she said thoughtfully. She dropped her face awhile on his shoulder,
and seemed to be struggling with herself. Then she lifted it, and “Did you
ever--did you--” she gasped.

“If you want me to say that all the other girls in the world are not worth
a hair of your head, I'll say that, Marcia. Now, let's talk business!”

This made her laugh, and “I shall want a little lock of yours,” she said,
as if they had hitherto been talking of nothing but each other's hair.

“And I shall want all of yours,” he answered.

“No. Don't be silly.” She critically explored his face. “How funny to have
a mole in your eyebrow!” She put her finger on it. “I never saw it before.”

“You never looked so closely. There's a scar at the corner of your upper
lip that I hadn't noticed.”

“Can you see that?” she demanded, radiantly. “Well, you _have_ got good
eyes! The cat did it when I was a little girl.”

The door opened, and Mrs. Gaylord surprised them in the celebration of
these discoveries,--or, rather, she surprised herself, for she stood
holding the door and helpless to move, though in her heart she had an
apologetic impulse to retire, and she even believed that she made some
murmurs of excuse for her intrusion. Bartley was equally abashed, but
Marcia rose with the coolness of her sex in the intimate emergencies which
confound a man. “Oh, mother, it's you! I forgot about you. Come in! Or I'll
set the table, if that's what you want.” As Mrs. Gaylord continued to look
from her to Bartley in her daze, Marcia added, simply, “We're engaged,
mother. You may as well know it first as last, and I guess you better know
it first.”

Her mother appeared not to think it safe to relax her hold upon the door,
and Bartley went filially to her rescue--if it was rescue to salute her
blushing defencelessness as he did. A confused sense of the extraordinary
nature and possible impropriety of the proceeding may have suggested her
husband to her mind; or it may have been a feeling that some remark was
expected of her, even in the mental destitution to which she was reduced.

“Have you told Mr. Gaylord about it?” she asked of either, or neither, or
both, as they chose to take it.

Bartley left the word to Marcia, who answered, “Well, no, mother. We
haven't yet. We've only just found it out ourselves. I guess father can
wait till he comes in to dinner. I intend to keep Bartley here to prove
it.”

“He said,” remarked Mrs. Gaylord, whom Bartley had led to her chair and
placed on her cushion, “'t he had a headache when he first came in,” and
she appealed to him for corroboration, while she vainly endeavored to
gather force to grapple again with the larger fact that he and Marcia were
just engaged to be married.

Marcia stopped down, and pulled her mother up out of her chair with a hug.
“Oh, come now, mother: You mustn't let it take your breath away,” she said,
with patronizing fondness. “I'm not afraid of what father will say. You
know what he thinks of Bartley,--or Mr. Hubbard, as I presume you'll want
me to call him! Now, mother, you just run up stairs, and put on your best
cap, and leave me to set the table and get up the dinner. I guess I can get
Bartley to help me. Mother, mother, mother!” she cried, in happiness that
was otherwise unutterable, and clasping her mother closer in her strong
young arms, she kissed her with a fervor that made her blush again before
the young man.

“Marcia, Marcia! You hadn't ought to! It's ridiculous!” she protested. But
she suffered herself to be thrust out of the room, grateful for exile, in
which she could collect her scattered wits and set herself to realize the
fact that had dispersed them. It was decorous, also, for her to leave
Marcia alone with Mr. Hubbard, far more so now than when he was merely
company; she felt that, and she fumbled over the dressing she was sent
about, and once she looked out of her chamber window at the office where
Mr. Gaylord sat, and wondered what Mr. Gaylord (she thought of him, and
even dreamt of him, as Mr. Gaylord, and had never, in the most familiar
moments, addressed him otherwise) _would_ say! But she left the solution
of the problem to him and Marcia; she was used to leaving them to the
settlement of their own difficulties.

“Now, Bartley,” said Marcia, in the business-like way that women assume in
such matters, as soon as the great fact is no longer in doubt, “you must
help me to set the table. Put up that leaf and I'll put up this. I'm going
to do more for mother than I used to,” she said, repentant in her bliss.
“It's a shame how much I've left to her.” The domestic instinct was already
astir in her heart.

Bartley pulled the table-cloth straight from her, and vied with her in the
rapidity and exactness with which he arranged the knives and forks at right
angles beside the plates. When it came to some heavier dishes, they agreed
to carry them turn about; but when it was her turn, he put out his hand
to support her elbow: “As I did last night, and saved you from dropping a
lamp.”

This made her laugh, and she dropped the first dish with a crash. “Poor
mother!” she exclaimed. “I know she heard that, and she'll be in agony to
know which one it is.”

Mrs. Gaylord did indeed hear it, far off in her chamber, and quaked with an
anxiety which became intolerable at last.

“Marcia! Marcia!” she quavered, down the stairs, “what _have_ you broken?”

Marcia opened the door long enough to call back, “Oh, only the old
blue-edged platter, mother!” and then she flew at Bartley, crying, “For
shame! For shame!” and pressing her hand over his mouth to stifle his
laughter. “She'll hear you, Bartley, and think you're laughing at her.” But
she laughed herself at his struggles, and ended by taking him by the hand
and pulling him out into, the kitchen, where neither of them could be
heard. She abandoned herself to the ecstasy of her soul, and he thought she
had never been so charming as in this wild gayety.

“Why, Marsh! I never saw you carry on so before!”

“You never saw me engaged before! That's the way all girls act--if they get
the chance. Don't you like me to be so?” she asked, with quick anxiety.

“Rather!” he replied.

“Oh, Bartley!” she exclaimed, “I feel like a child. I surprise myself as
much as I do you; for I thought I had got very old, and I didn't suppose I
should ever let myself go in this way. But there is something about this
that lets me be as silly as I like. It's somehow as if I were a great deal
more alone when I'm with you than when I'm by myself! How does it make you
feel?”

“Good!” he answered, and that satisfied her better than if he had entered
into those subtleties which she had tried to express: it was more like a
man. He had his arm about her again, and she put down her hand on his to
press it closer against her heart.

“Of course,” she explained, recurring to his surprise at her frolic mood,
“I don't expect you to be silly because I am.”

“No,” he assented; “but how can I help it?”

“Oh, I don't mean for the time being; I mean generally speaking. I mean
that I care for you because I know you know a great deal more than I
do, and because I respect you. I know that everybody expects you to be
something great, and I do, too.”

Bartley did not deny the justness of her opinions concerning himself, or
the reasonableness of the general expectation, though he probably could
not see the relation of these cold abstractions to the pleasure of sitting
there with a pretty girl in that way. But he said nothing.

“Do you know,” she went on, turning her face prettily around toward him,
but holding it a little way off, to secure attention as impersonal as might
be under the circumstances, “what pleased me more than anything else you
ever said to me?”

“No,” answered Bartley. “Something you got out of me when you were trying
to make me tell you the difference between you and the other Equity girls?”

She laughed, in glad defiance of her own consciousness. “Well, I _was_
trying to make you compliment me; I'm not going to deny it. But I must say
I got my come-uppance: you didn't say a thing I cared for. But you did
afterward. Don't you remember?”

“No. When?”

She hesitated a moment. “When you told me that my influence had--had--made
you better, you know--”

“Oh!” said Bartley. “That! Well,” he added, carelessly, “it's every word
true. Didn't you believe it?”

“I was just as glad as if I did; and it made me resolve never to do or say
a thing that could lower your opinion of me; and then, you know, there at
the door--it all seemed part of our trying to make each other better. But
when father looked at me in that way, and asked me if we were engaged, I
went down into the dust with shame. And it seemed to me that you had just
been laughing at me, and amusing yourself with me, and I was so furious I
didn't know what to do. Do you know what I wanted to do? I wanted to run
downstairs to father, and tell him what you had said, and ask him if he
believed you had ever liked any other girl.” She paused a little, but he
did not answer, and she continued. “But now I'm glad I didn't. And I shall
never ask you that, and I shall not care for anything that you--that's
happened before to-day. It's all right. And you _do_ think I shall always
_try_ to make you good and happy, don't you?”

“I don't think you can make me much happier than I am at present, and I
don't believe anybody could make me feel better,” answered Bartley.

She gave a little laugh at his refusal to be serious, and let her head, for
fondness, fall upon his shoulder, while he turned round and round a ring he
found on her finger.

“Ah, ha!” he said, after a while. “Who gave you this ring, Miss Gaylord?”

“Father, Christmas before last,” she promptly answered, without moving.
“I'm glad you asked,” she murmured, in a lower voice, full of pride in the
maiden love she could give him. “There's never been any one but you, or the
thought of any one.” She suddenly started away.

“Now, let's play we're getting dinner.” It was quite time; in the next
moment the coffee boiled up, and if she had not caught the lid off and
stirred it down with her spoon, it would have been spoiled. The steam
ascended to the ceiling, and filled the kitchen with the fragrant smell of
the berry.

“I'm glad we're going to have coffee,” she said. “You'll have to put up
with a cold dinner, except potatoes. But the coffee will make up, and I
shall need a cup to keep me awake. I don't believe I slept last night till
nearly morning. Do you like coffee?”

“I'd have given all I ever expect to be worth for a cup of it, last night,”
 he said. “I was awfully hungry when I got back to the hotel, and I couldn't
find anything but a piece of mince-pie and some old cheese, and I had to be
content with cold milk. I felt as if I had lost all my friends this morning
when I woke up.”

A sense of remembered grievance trembled in his voice, and made her drop
her head on his arm, in pity and derision of him. “Poor Bartley!” she
cried. “And you came up here for a little petting from me, didn't you? I've
noticed that in you! Well, you didn't get it, did you?”

“Well, not at first,” he said.

“Yes, you can't complain of any want of petting at last,” she returned,
delighted at his indirect recognition of the difference. Then the daring,
the archness, and caprice that make coquetry in some women, and lurk a
divine possibility in all, came out in her; the sweetness, kept back by the
whole strength of her pride, overflowed that broken barrier now, and she
seemed to lavish this revelation of herself upon him with a sort of tender
joy in his bewilderment. She was not hurt when he crudely expressed the
elusive sense which has been in other men's minds at such times: they
cannot believe that this fascination is inspired, and not practised.

“Well,” he said, “I'm glad you told me that I was the first. I should have
thought you'd had a good deal of experience in flirtation.”

“You wouldn't have thought so if you hadn't been a great flirt yourself,”
 she answered, audaciously. “Perhaps I have been engaged before!”

Their talk was for the most part frivolous, and their thoughts ephemeral;
but again they were, with her at least, suddenly and deeply serious. Till
then all things seemed to have been held in arrest, and impressions, ideas,
feelings, fears, desires, released themselves simultaneously, and sought
expression with a rush that defied coherence. “Oh, why do we try to talk?”
 she asked, at last. “The more we say, the more we leave unsaid. Let us keep
still awhile!” But she could not. “Bartley! When did you first think you
cared about me?”

“I don't know,” said Bartley, “I guess it must have been the first time I
saw you.”

“Yes, that is when I first knew that I cared for you. But it seems to me
that I must have always cared for you, and that I only found it out when I
saw you going by the house that day.” She mused a little time before she
asked again, “Bartley!”

“Well?”

“Did you ever use to be afraid--Or, no! Wait! I'll _tell_ you first, and
then I'll _ask_ you. I'm not ashamed of it now, though once I thought I
couldn't bear to have any one find it out. I used to be awfully afraid you
didn't care for me! I would try to make out, from things you did and said,
whether you did or not; but I never could be certain. I believe I used to
find the most comfort in discouraging myself. I used to say to myself,
'Why, of course he doesn't! How can he? He's been everywhere, and he's seen
so many girls. He corresponds with lots of them. Altogether likely he's
engaged to some of the young ladies he's met in Boston; and he just goes
with me here for a blind.' And then when you would praise me, sometimes,
I would just say, 'Oh, he's complimented plenty of girls. I know he's
thinking this instant of the young lady he's engaged to in Boston.' And it
would almost kill me; and when you did some little thing to show that you
liked me, I would think, 'He doesn't like me! He hates, he despises me. He
does, he does, he does!' And I would go on that way, with my teeth shut,
and my breath held, I don't know _how_ long.” Bartley broke out into a
broad laugh at this image of desperation, but she added, tenderly, “I hope
I never made you suffer in that way?”

“What way?” he asked.

“That's what I wanted you to tell me. Did you ever--did you use to be
afraid sometimes that I--that you--did you put off telling me that you
cared for me so long because you thought, you dreaded--Oh, I don't see what
I can ever do to make it up to you if you did! Were you afraid I didn't
care for you?”

“No!” shouted Bartley. She had risen and stood before him in the fervor
of her entreaty, and he seized her arms, pinioning them to her side, and
holding her helpless, while he laughed, and laughed again. “I knew you were
dead in love with me from the first moment.”

“Bartley! Bartley Hubbard!” she exclaimed; “let me go,--let me go, this
instant! I never heard of such a shameless thing!”

But she really made no effort to escape.




V.


The house seemed too little for Marcia's happiness, and after dinner she
did not let Bartley forget his last night's engagement. She sent him off to
get his horse at the hotel, and ran up to her room to put on her wraps for
the drive. Her mother cleared away the dinner things; she pushed the table
to the side of the room, and then sat down in her feather-cushioned chair
and waited her husband's pleasure to speak. He ordinarily rose from the
Sunday dinner and went back to his office; to-day he had taken a chair
before the stove. But he had mechanically put his hat on, and he wore it
pushed off his forehead as he tilted his chair back on its hind legs, and
braced himself against the hearth of the stove with his feet.

A man is master in his own house generally through the exercise of a
certain degree of brutality, but Squire Gaylord maintained his predominance
by an enlightened absenteeism. No man living always at home was ever so
little under his own roof. While he was in more active business life, he
had kept an office in the heart of the village, where he spent all his
days, and a great part of every night; but after he had become rich enough
to risk whatever loss of business the change might involve, he bought this
large old square house on the border of the village, and thenceforth made
his home in the little detached office.

If Mrs. Gaylord had dimly imagined that she should see something more of
him, having him so near at hand, she really saw less: there was no weather,
by day or night, in which he could not go to his office, now. He went no
more than his wife into the village society; she might have been glad now
and then of a little glimpse of the world, but she never said so, and her
social life had ceased, like her religious life. Their house was richly
furnished according to the local taste of the time; the parlor had a
Brussels carpet, and heavy chairs of mahogany and hair-cloth; Marcia had a
piano there, and since she had come home from school they had made company,
as Mrs. Gaylord called it, two or three times for her; but they had held
aloof from the festivity, the Squire in his office, and Mrs. Gaylord in the
family room where they now sat in unwonted companionship.

“Well, Mr. Gaylord,” said his wife, “I don't know as you can say but what
_Marcia_'s suited well enough.”

This was the first allusion they had made to the subject, but she let it
take the argumentative form of her cogitations.

“M-yes,” sighed the Squire, in long, nasal assent, “most too well, if
anything.” He rasped first one unshaven cheek and then the other, with his
thin, quivering hand.

“He's smart enough,” said Mrs. Gaylord, as before.

“M-yes, most too smart,” replied her husband, a little more quickly than
before. “He's smart enough, even if she wasn't, to see from the start that
she was crazy to have him, and that isn't the best way to begin life for a
married couple, if I'm a judge.”

“It would killed her if she hadn't got him. I could see 't was wearin' on
her every day, more and more. She used to fairly jump, every knock she'd
hear at the door; and I know sometimes, when she was afraid he wa' n't
coming, she used to go out, in hopes 't she sh'd meet him: I don't suppose
she allowed to herself that she did it for that--Marcia's proud.”

“M-yes,” said the Squire, “she's proud. And when a proud girl makes a fool
of herself about a fellow, it's a matter of life and death with her. She
can't help herself. She lets go everything.”

“I declare,” Mrs. Gaylord went on, “it worked me up considerable to have
her come in some those times, and see by her face 't she'd seen him with
some the other girls. She used to _look_ so! And then I'd hear her up in
her room, cryin' and cryin'. I shouldn't cared so much, if Marcia'd been
like any other girl, kind of flirty, like, about it. But she wa' n't. She
was just bowed down before her idol.”

A final assent came from the Squire, as if wrung out of his heart, and he
rose from his chair, and then sat down again. Marcia was his child, and he
loved her with his whole soul. “M-well!” he deeply sighed, “all that part's
over, anyway,” but he tingled in an anguish of sympathy with what she had
suffered. “You see, Miranda, how she looked at me when she first came in
with him,--so proud and independent, poor girl! and yet as if she was
afraid I _mightn't_ like it?”

“Yes, I see it.”

He pulled his hat far down over his cavernous eyes, and worked his thin,
rusty old jaws.

“I hope 't she'll be able to school herself, so 's t' not show out her
feelings so much,” said Mrs. Gaylord.

“I wish she could school herself so as to not have 'em so much; but I guess
she'll have 'em, and I guess she'll show 'em out.” They were both silent;
after a while he added, throwing at the stove a minute fragment of the cane
he had pulled off the seat of his chair: “Miranda, I've expected something
of this sort a good while, and I've thought over what Bartley had better
do.”

Mrs. Gaylord stooped forward and picked up the bit of wood which her
husband had thrown down; her vigilance was rewarded by finding a thread on
the oil-cloth near where it lay; she whipped this round her finger, and her
husband continued: “He'd better give up his paper and go into the law. He
's done well in the paper, and he's a smart writer; but editing a newspaper
aint any work for a _man_. It's all well enough as long as he's single,
but when he's got a wife to look after, he'd better get down to _work_. My
business is in just such a shape now that I could hand it over to him in a
lump; but come to wait a year or two longer, and this young man and that
one 'll eat into it, and it won't be the same thing at all. I shall want
Bartley to push right along, and get admitted at once. He can do it, fast
enough. He's bright enough,” added the old man, with a certain grimness.
“M-well!” he broke out, with a quick sigh, after a moment of musing; “it
hasn't happened at any very bad time. I was just thinking, this morning,
that I should like to have my whole time, pretty soon, to look after my
property. I sha'n't want Bartley to do _that_ for me. I'll give him a good
start in money and in business; but I'll look after my property myself.
I'll speak to him, the first chance I get.”

A light step sounded on the stairs, and Marcia burst into the room,
ready for her drive. “I wanted to get a good warm before I started,” she
explained, stooping before the stove, and supporting herself with one hand
on her father's knee. There had been no formal congratulations upon her
engagement from either of her parents; but this was not requisite, and
would have been a little affected; they were perhaps now ashamed to mention
it outright before her alone. The Squire, however, went so far as to put
his hand over the hand she had laid upon his knee, and to smooth it twice
or thrice.

“You going to ride after that sorrel colt of Bartley's?” he asked.

“Of course!” she answered, with playful pertness. “I guess Bartley can
manage the sorrel colt! He's never had any trouble yet.”

“He's always been able to give his whole mind to him before,” said the
Squire. He gave Marcia's hand a significant squeeze, and let it go.

She would not confess her consciousness of his meaning at once. She looked
up at the clock, and then turned and pulled her father's watch out of his
waistcoat pocket, and compared the time. “Why, you're both fast!”

“Perhaps Bartley's slow,” said the Squire; and having gone as far as he
intended in this direction, he permitted himself a low chuckle.

The sleigh-bells jingled without, and she sprang lightly to her feet. “I
guess you don't think Bartley's slow,” she exclaimed, and hung over her
father long enough to rub her lips against his bristly cheek. “By, mother,”
 she said, over her shoulder, and went out of the room. She let her muff
hang as far down in front of her as her arms would reach, in a stylish way,
and moved with a little rhythmical tilt, as if to some inner music. Even in
her furs she was elegantly slender in shape.

The old people remained silent and motionless till the clash of the bells
died away. Then the Squire rose, and went to the wood-shed beyond the
kitchen, whence he reappeared with an armful of wood. His wife started at
the sight. “Mr. Gaylord, what _be_ you doin'?”

“Oh, I'm going to make 'em up a little fire in the parlor stove. I guess
they won't want us round a great deal, when they come back.”

Mrs. Gaylord said, “Well, I never did!” When her husband returned from the
parlor, she added, “I suppose some folks'd say it was rather of a strange
way of spendin' the Sabbath.”

“It's a very good way of spending the Sabbath. You don't suppose that
any of the people in church are half as happy, do you? Why, old Jonathan
Edwards himself used to allow 'all proper opportunity' for the young
fellows that come to see his girls, 'and a room and fire, if needed.' His
'Life' says so.”

“I guess he didn't allow it on the Sabbath,” retorted Mrs. Gaylord.

“Well, the 'Life' don't say,” chuckled the Squire. “Why, Miranda, I do it
for Marcia! There's never but one first day to an engagement. You know that
as well as I do.” In saying this, Squire Gaylord gave way to his repressed
emotion in an extravagance. He suddenly stooped over and kissed his wife;
but he spared her confusion by going out to his office at once, where he
stayed the whole afternoon.

Bartley and Marcia took the “Long Drive,” as it was called, at Equity. The
road plunged into the darkly wooded gulch beyond the house, and then
struck away eastward, crossing loop after loop of the river on the covered
bridges, where the neighbors, who had broken it out with their ox-teams in
the open, had thickly bedded it in snow. In the valleys and sheltered spots
it remained free, and so wide that encountering teams could easily pass
each other; but where it climbed a hill, or crossed a treeless level, it
was narrowed to a single track, with turn-outs at established points, where
the drivers of the sleighs waited to be sure that the stretch beyond was
clear before going forward. In the country, the winter which held the
village in such close siege was an occupation under which Nature seemed
to cower helpless, and men made a desperate and ineffectual struggle. The
houses, banked up with snow almost to the sills of the windows that looked
out, blind with frost, upon the lifeless world, were dwarfed in the drifts,
and seemed to founder in a white sea blotched with strange bluish shadows
under the slanting sun. Where they fronted close upon the road, it was
evident that the fight with the snow was kept up unrelentingly; spaces were
shovelled out, and paths were kept open to the middle of the highway, and
to the barn; but where they were somewhat removed, there was no visible
trace of the conflict, and no sign of life except the faint, wreathed lines
of smoke wavering upward from the chimneys.

In the hollows through which the road passed, the lower boughs of the
pines and hemlocks were weighed down with the snow-fall till they lay half
submerged in the drifts; but wherever the wind could strike them, they
swung free of this load and met in low, flat arches above the track. The
river betrayed itself only when the swift current of a ripple broke through
the white surface in long, irregular, grayish blurs. It was all wild and
lonesome, but to the girl alone in it with her lover, the solitude was
sweet, and she did not wish to speak even to him. His hands were both busy
with the reins, but it was agreed between them that she might lock hers
through his arm. Cowering close to him under the robes, she laid her head
on his shoulder and looked out over the flying landscape in measureless
content, and smiled, with filling eyes, when he bent over, and warmed his
cold, red cheek on the top of her fur cap.

The moments of bliss that silence a woman rouse a man to make sure of his
rapture. “How do you like it, Marsh?” he asked, trying at one of these
times to peer round into her face. “Are you afraid?”

“No,--only of getting back too soon.”

He made the shivering echoes answer with his delight in this, and chirruped
to the colt, who pushed forward at a wilder speed, flinging his hoofs out
before him with the straight thrust of the horn trotter, and seeming to
overtake them as they flew. “I should like this ride to last forever!”

“Forever!” she repeated. “That would do for a beginning.”

“Marsh! What a girl you are! I never supposed you would be so free to let a
fellow know how much you cared for him.”

“Neither did I,” she answered dreamily. “But now--now the only trouble is
that I don't know _how_ to let him know.” She gave his arm to which she
clung a little convulsive clutch, and pressed her head harder upon his
shoulder.

“Well, that's pretty much my complaint, too,” said Bartley, “though I
couldn't have expressed it so well.”

“Oh, _you_ express!” she murmured, with the pride in him which implied
that there were no thoughts worth expressing to which he could not give a
monumental utterance. Her adoration flattered his self-love to the same
passionate intensity, and to something like the generous complexion of her
worship.

“Marcia,” he answered, “I am going to try to be all you expect of me. And I
hope I shall never do anything unworthy of your ideal.”

She could only press his arm again in speechless joy, but she said to
herself that she should always remember these words.

The wind had been rising ever since they started but they had not noticed
it till now, when the woods began to thin away on either side, and he
stopped before striking out over one of the naked stretches of the
plain,--a white waste swept by the blasts that sucked down through a gorge
of the mountain, and flattened the snow-drifts as the tornado flattens the
waves. Across this expanse ran the road, its stiff lines obliterated here
and there, in the slight depressions, and showing dark along the rest of
the track.

It was a good half-mile to the next body of woods, and midway there was one
of those sidings where a sleigh approaching from the other quarter must
turn out and yield the right of way. Bartley stopped his colt, and scanned
the road.

“Anybody coming?” asked Marcia.

“No, I don't see any one. But if there's any one in the woods yonder,
they'd better wait till I get across. No horse in Equity can beat this colt
to the turn-out.”

“Oh, well, look carefully, Bartley. If we met any one beyond the turn-out,
I don't know what I should do,” pleaded the girl.

“I don't know what _they_ would do,” said Bartley. “But it's their lookout
now, if they come. Wrap your face up well, or put your head under the robe.
I've got to hold my breath the next half-mile.” He loosed the reins, and
sped the colt out of the shelter where he had halted. The wind struck them
like an edge of steel, and, catching the powdery snow that their horse's
hoofs beat up, sent it spinning and swirling far along the glistening
levels on their lee. They felt the thrill of the go as if they were in some
light boat leaping over a swift current. Marcia disdained to cover her
face, if he must confront the wind, but after a few gasps she was glad to
bend forward, and bury it in the long hair of the bearskin robe. When she
lifted it, they were already past the siding, and she saw a cutter dashing
toward them from the cover of the woods. “Bartley!” she screamed, “the
sleigh!”

“Yes,” he shouted. “Some fool! There's going to be trouble here,” he
added, checking his horse as he could. “They don't seem to know how to
manage--It's a couple of women! Hold on! hold on!” he called. “Don't try to
turn out! I'll turn out!”

The women pulled their horse's head this way and that, in apparent
confusion, and then began to turn out into the trackless snow at the
roadside, in spite of Bartley's frantic efforts to arrest them. They sank
deeper and deeper into the drift; their horse plunged and struggled, and
then their cutter went over, amidst their shrieks and cries for help.

Bartley drove up abreast of the wreck, and, saying, “Still, Jerry! Don't be
afraid, Marcia,”--he put the reins into her hands, and sprang out to the
rescue.

One of the women had been flung out free of the sleigh, and had already
gathered herself up, and stood crying and wringing her hands; “Oh, Mr.
Hubbard, Mr. Hubbard! Help Hannah! she's under there!”

“All right! Keep quiet, Mrs. Morrison! Take hold of your horse's head!”
 Bartley had first of all seized him by the bit, and pulled him to his feet;
he was old and experienced in obedience, and he now stood waiting orders,
patiently enough. Bartley seized the cutter and by an effort of all his
strength righted it. The colt started and trembled, but Marcia called to
him in Bartley's tone, “Still, Jerry!” and he obeyed her.

The girl, who had been caught under the overturned cutter, escaped like
a wild thing out of a trap, when it was lifted, and, plunging some paces
away, faced round upon her rescuer with the hood pulled straight and set
comely to her face again, almost before he could ask, “Any bones broken,
Hannah?”

“_No_!” she shouted. “Mother! mother! stop crying! Don't you see I'm not
dead?” She leaped about, catching up this wrap and that, shaking the dry
snow out of them, and flinging them back into the cutter, while she laughed
in the wild tumult of her spirits. Bartley helped her pick up the fragments
of the wreck, and joined her in making fun of the adventure. The wind
hustled them, but they were warm in defiance of it with their jollity and
their bustle.

“Why didn't you let me turn out?” demanded Bartley, as he and the girl
stood on opposite sides of the cutter, rearranging the robes in it.

“Oh, I thought I could turn out well enough. You had a right to the road.”

“Well, the next time you see any one past the turn-out, you better not
start from the woods.”

“Why, there's no more room in the woods to get past than there is here,”
 cried the girl.

“There's more shelter.”

“Oh, I'm not cold!” She flashed a look at him from her brilliant face, warm
with all the glow of her young health, and laughed, and before she dropped
her eyes, she included Marcia in her glance. They had already looked at
each other without any sign of recognition. “Come, mother! All right, now!”

Her mother left the horse's head, and, heavily ploughing back to the
cutter, tumbled herself in. The girl, from her side, began to climb in, but
her weight made the sleigh careen, and she dropped down with a gay shriek.

Bartley came round and lifted her in; the girl called to her horse, and
drove up into the road and away.

Bartley looked after her a moment, and continued to glance in that
direction when he stood stamping the snow off his feet, and brushing it
from his legs and arms, before he remounted to Marcia's side. He was
excited, and talked rapidly and loudly, as he took the reins from Marcia's
passive hold, and let the colt out. “That girl is the pluckiest fool, yet!
Wouldn't let me turn out because I had the right of way! And she wasn't
going to let anybody else have a hand in getting that old ark of theirs
afloat again. Good their horse wasn't anything like Jerry! How well Jerry
behaved! Were you frightened, Marsh?” He bent over to see her face, but she
had not her head on his shoulder, and she did not sit close to him, now.
“Did you freeze?”

“Oh, no! I got along very well,” she answered, dryly, and edged away as far
as the width of the seat would permit. “It would have been better for
you to lead their horse up into the road, and then she could have got in
without your help. Her mother got in alone.”

He took the reins into his left hand, and, passing his strong right around
her, pulled her up to his side. She resisted, with diminishing force; at
last she ceased to resist, and her head fell passively to its former place
on his shoulder. He did not try to speak any word of comfort; he only held
her close to him; when she looked up, as they entered the village, she
confronted him with a brilliant smile that ignored her tears.

But that night, when she followed him to the door, she looked him
searchingly in the eyes. “I wonder if you really do despise me, Bartley?”
 she asked.

“Certainly,” he answered, with a jesting smile. “What for?”

“For showing out my feelings so. For not even trying to pretend not to care
everything for you.”

“It wouldn't be any use your trying: I should know that you did, anyway.”

“Oh, don't laugh, Bartley, don't laugh! I don't believe that I ought to.
I've heard that it makes people sick of you. But I can't help it,--I can't
help it! And if--if you think I'm always going to be so,--and that I'm
going to keep on getting worse and worse, and making you so unhappy, why,
you'd better break your engagement now--while you have a chance.”

“What have you been making me unhappy about, I should like to know? I
thought I'd been having a very good time.”

She hid her face against his breast. “It almost _killed_ me to see you
there with her. I was so cold,--my hands were half frozen, holding the
reins,--and I was so afraid of the colt I didn't know what to do; and I had
been keeping up my courage on your account; and you seemed so long about
it all; and she could have got in perfectly well--as well as her mother
did--without your help--” Her voice broke in a miserable sob, and she
clutched herself tighter to him.

He smoothed down her hair with his hand. “Why, Marsh! Did you think that
made me unhappy? _I_ didn't mind it a bit. I knew what the trouble was, at
the time; but I wasn't going to say anything. I knew you would be all right
as soon as you could think it over. You don't suppose I care anything for
that girl?”

“No,” answered a rueful sob. “But I _wish_ you didn't have anything to do
with her. I know she'll make trouble for you, somehow.”

“Well,” said Bartley, “I can't very well turn her off as long as she does
her work. But you needn't be worried about making me unhappy. If anything,
I rather liked it. It showed how much you _did_ care for me.” He bent
toward her, with a look of bright raillery, for the parting kiss. “Now
then: once, twice, three times,--and good night it is!”




VI.


The spectacle of a love affair in which the woman gives more of her heart
than the man gives of his is so pitiable that we are apt to attribute a
kind of merit to her, as if it were a voluntary self-sacrifice for her to
love more than her share. Not only other men, but other women, look on with
this canonizing compassion; for women have a lively power of imagining
themselves in the place of any sister who suffers in matters of sentiment,
and are eager to espouse the common cause in commiserating her. Each of
them pictures herself similarly wronged or slighted by the man she likes
best, and feels how cruel it would be if he were to care less for her than
she for him; and for the time being, in order to realize the situation, she
loads him with all the sins of omission proper to the culprit in the alien
case. But possibly there is a compensation in merely loving, even where the
love given is out of all proportion to the love received.

If Bartley Hubbard's sensations and impressions of the day had been at all
reasoned, that night as he lay thinking it over, he could unquestionably
have seen many advantages for Marcia in the affair,--perhaps more than for
himself. But to do him justice he did not formulate these now, or in any
wise explicitly recognize the favors he was bestowing. At twenty-six one
does not naturally compute them in musing upon the girl to whom one is just
betrothed; and Bartley's mind was a confusion of pleasure. He liked so well
to think how fond of him Marcia was, that it did not occur to him then to
question whether he were as fond of her. It is possible that as he drowsed,
at last, there floated airily through the consciousness which was melting
and dispersing itself before the approach of sleep, an intimation from
somewhere to some one that perhaps the affair need not be considered too
seriously. But in that mysterious limbo one cannot be sure of what is
thought and what is dreamed; and Bartley always acquitted himself, and
probably with justice, of any want of seriousness.

What he did make sure of when he woke was that he was still out of sorts,
and that he had again that dull headache; and his instant longing for
sympathy did more than anything else to convince him that he really loved
Marcia, and had never, in his obscurest or remotest feeling, swerved in
his fealty to her. In the atmosphere of her devotion yesterday, he had so
wholly forgotten his sufferings that he had imagined himself well; but now
he found that he was not well, and he began to believe that he was going to
have what the country people call a fit of sickness. He felt that he ought
to be taken care, of, that he was unfit to work; and in his vexation at
not being able to go to Marcia for comfort-it really amounted to nothing
less--he entered upon the day's affairs with fretful impatience.

The Free Press was published on Tuesdays, and Monday was always a busy time
of preparation. The hands were apt also to feel the demoralization that
follows a holiday, even when it has been a holy day. The girls who set the
type of the Free Press had by no means foregone the rights and privileges
of their sex in espousing their art, and they had their beaux on Sunday
night like other young ladies. It resulted that on Monday morning they were
nervous and impatient, alternating between fits of giggling delight in the
interchange of fond reminiscences, and the crossness which is pretty sure
to disfigure human behavior from want of sleep. But ordinarily Bartley got
on very well with them. In spite of the assumption of equality between all
classes in Equity, they stood in secret awe of his personal splendor, and
the tradition of his achievements at college and in the great world; and
a flattering joke or a sharp sarcasm from him went a great way with them.
Besides, he had an efficient lieutenant in Henry Bird, the young printer
who had picked up his trade in the office, and who acted as Bartley's
foreman, so far as the establishment had an organization. Bird had industry
and discipline which were contagious, and that love of his work which is
said to be growing rare among artisans in the modern subdivision of trades.
This boy--for he was only nineteen--worked at his craft early and late out
of pleasure in it. He seemed one of those simple, subordinate natures which
are happy in looking up to whatever assumes to be above them. He exulted to
serve in a world where most people prefer to be served, and it is uncertain
whether he liked his work better for its own sake, or Bartley's, for whom
he did it. He was slight and rather delicate in health, and it came natural
for Bartley to patronize him. He took him on the long walks of which he was
fond, and made him in some sort his humble confidant, talking to him of
himself and his plans with large and braggart vagueness. He depended upon
Bird in a great many things, and Bird never failed him; for he had a
basis of constancy that was immovable. “No,” said a philosopher from a
neighboring logging-camp, who used to hang about the printing-office a long
time after he had got his paper, “there aint a great deal of natural git up
and howl about Henry; but he stays put.” In the confidences which Bartley
used to make Bird, he promised that, when he left the newspaper for the
law, he would see that no one else succeeded him. The young fellow did not
need this promise to make him Bartley's fast friend, but it colored his
affection with ambitious enthusiasm; to edit and publish a newspaper,--his
dreams did not go beyond that: to devote it to Bartley's interest in the
political life on which Bartley often hinted he might enter,--that would be
the sweetest privilege of realized success. Bird already wrote paragraphs
for the Free Press, and Bartley let him make up a column of news from the
city exchanges, which was partly written and partly selected.

Bartley came to the office rather late on Monday morning, bringing with him
the papers from Saturday night's mail, which had lain unopened over
Sunday, and went directly into his own room, without looking into the
printing-office. He felt feverish and irritable, and he resolved to fill up
with selections and let his editorial paragraphing go, or get Bird to do
it. He was tired of the work, and sick of Equity; Marcia's face seemed to
look sadly in upon his angry discontent, and he no longer wished to go to
her for sympathy. His door opened, and, without glancing from the newspaper
which he held up before him, he asked, “What is it, Bird? Do you want
copy?”

“Well, no, Mr. Hubbard,” answered Bird, “we have copy enough for the force
we've got this morning.”

“Why, what's up?” demanded Bartley, dropping his paper.

“Lizzie Sawyer has sent word that she is sick, and we haven't heard or seen
anything of Hannah Morrison.”

“Confound the girls!” said Bartley, “there's always something the matter
with them.” He rubbed his hand over his forehead, as if to rub out the dull
pain there. “Well,” he said, “I must go to work myself, then.” He rose,
and took hold of the lapels of his coat, to pull it off; but something in
Bird's look arrested him. “What is it?” he asked.

“Old Morrison was here, just before you came in, and said he wanted to see
you. I think he was drunk,” said Bird, anxiously. “He said he was coming
back again.”

“All right; let him come,” replied Bartley. “This is a free
country,--especially in Equity. I suppose he wants Hannah's wages raised,
as usual. How much are we behind on the paper, Henry?”

“We're not a great deal behind, Mr. Hubbard, if we were not so
weak-handed.”

“Perhaps we can get Hannah back, during the forenoon. At any rate, we can
ask her honored parent when he comes.”

Where Morrison got his liquor was a question that agitated Equity from time
to time, and baffled the officer of the law empowered to see that no strong
drink came into the town. Under conditions which made it impossible even in
the logging-camps, and rendered the sale of spirits too precarious for the
apothecary, who might be supposed to deal in them medicinally, Morrison
never failed of his spree when the mysterious mechanism of his appetite
enforced it. Probably it was some form of bedevilled cider that supplied
the material of his debauch; but even cider was not easily to be had.

Morrison's spree was a movable feast, and recurred at irregular intervals
of two, or three, or even six weeks; but it recurred often enough to keep
him poor, and his family in a social outlawry against which the kindly
instincts of their neighbors struggled in vain. Mrs. Morrison was that
pariah who, in a village like Equity, cuts herself off from hope by taking
in washing; and it was a decided rise in the world for Hannah, a wild girl
at school, to get a place in the printing-office. Her father had applied
for it humbly enough at the tremulous and penitent close of one of his long
sprees, and was grateful to Bartley for taking the special interest in her
which she reported at home.

But the independence of a drunken shoemaker is proverbial, and Morrison's
meek spirit soared into lordly arrogance with his earliest cups. The
first warning which the community had of his change of attitude was
the conspicuous and even defiant closure of his shop, and the scornful
rejection of custom, however urgent or necessitous. All Equity might go in
broken shoes, for any patching or half-soling the people got from him. He
went about collecting his small dues, and paying up his debts as long as
the money lasted, in token of his resolution not to take any favors from
any man thereafter. Then he retired to his house on one of the by streets,
and by degrees drank himself past active offence. It was of course in his
defiant humor that he came to visit Bartley, who had learned to expect
him whenever Hannah failed to appear promptly at her work. The affair was
always easily arranged. Bartley instantly assented, with whatever irony he
liked, to Morrison's demands; he refused with overwhelming politeness even
to permit him to give himself the trouble to support them by argument; he
complimented Hannah inordinately as one of the most gifted and accomplished
ladies of his acquaintance, and inquired affectionately after the health
of each member of the Morrison family. When Morrison rose to go he always
said, in shaking hands, “Well, sir, if there was more like you in Equity
a poor man could get along. You're a gentleman, sir.” After getting some
paces away from the street door, he stumbled back up the stairs to repeat,
“You're a gentleman!” Hannah came during the day, and the wages remained
the same: neither of the contracting parties regarded the increase so
elaborately agreed upon, and Morrison, on becoming sober, gratefully
ignored the whole transaction, though, by a curious juggle of his brain, he
recurred to it in his next spree, and advanced in his new demand from the
last rise: his daughter was now nominally in receipt of an income of forty
dollars a week, but actually accepted four.

Bartley, on his part, enjoyed the business as an agreeable excitement and
a welcome relief from the monotony of his official life. He never hurried
Morrison's visits, but amused himself by treating him with the most
flattering distinction, and baffling his arrogance by immediate concession.
But this morning, when Morrison came back with a front of uncommon
fierceness, he merely looked up from his newspapers, to which he had
recurred, and said coolly. “Oh, Mr. Morrison! Good morning. I suppose it's
that little advance that you wish to see me about. Take a chair. What is
the increase you ask this time? Of course I agree to anything.”

He leaned forward, pencil in hand, to make a note of the figure Morrison
should name, when the drunkard approached and struck the table in front of
him with his fist, and blazed upon Bartley's face, suddenly uplifted, with
his blue crazy eyes:

“No, sir! I won't take a seat, and I don't come on no such business! No,
sir!” He struck the table again, and the violence of his blow upset the
inkstand.

Bartley saved himself by suddenly springing away. “Hollo here!” he shouted.
“What do you mean by this infernal nonsense?”

“What do _you_ mean,” retorted the drunkard, “by makin' up to my girl?”

“You're a fool,” cried Bartley, “and drunk!”

“I'll show you whether I'm a fool, and I'll show you whether I'm drunk,”
 said Morrison. He opened the door and beckoned to Bird, with an air of
mysterious authority. “Young man! Come here!”

Bird was used to the indulgence with which Bartley treated Morrison's tipsy
freaks, and supposed that he had been called by his consent to witness
another agreement to a rise in Hannah's wages. He came quickly, to help
get Morrison out of the way the sooner, and he was astonished to be met by
Bartley with “I don't want you, Bird.”

“All right,” answered the boy, and he turned to go out of the door.

But Morrison had planted himself against it, and waved Bird austerely
back. “_I_ want you,” he said, with drunken impressiveness, “for a
witness--wick--witness--while I ask Mr. Hubbard what he means by--”

“Hold your tongue!” cried Bartley. “Get out of this!” He advanced a pace or
two toward Morrison who stood his ground without swerving.

“Now you--you keep quiet, Mr. Hubbard,” said Morrison, with a swift drunken
change of mood, by which he passed from arrogant denunciation to a smooth,
patronizing mastery of the situation. “_I_ wish this thing all settled
amic--ic--amelcabilly.”

Bartley broke into a helpless laugh at Morrison's final failure on a word
difficult to sober tongues, and the latter went on: “No 'casion for bad
feeling on either side. All I want know is what you mean.”

“Well, go on!” cried Bartley, good-naturedly, and he sat down in his chair,
which he tilted back, and, clasping his hands behind his head, looked up
into Morrison's face. “What do I mean by what?”

Probably Morrison had not expected to be categorical, or to bring anything
like a bill of particulars against Bartley, and this demand gave him pause.
“What you mean,” he said, at last, “by always praising her up so?”

“What I said. She's a very good girl, and a very bright one. You don't deny
that?”

“No--no matter what I deny. What--what you lend her all them books for?”

“To improve her mind. You don't object to that? I thought you once thanked
me for taking an interest in her.”

“Don't you mind what I object to, and what I thank you for,” said Morrison,
with dignity. “I know what I'm about.”

“I begin to doubt. But get on. I'm in a great hurry this morning,” said
Bartley.

Morrison seemed to be making a mental examination of his stock of charges,
while the strain of keeping his upright position began to tell upon him,
and he swayed to and fro against the door. “What's that word you sent her
by my boy, Sat'day night?”

“That she was a smart girl, and would be sure to get on if she was good--or
words to that effect. I trust there was no offence in that, Mr. Morrison?”

Morrison surrendered, himself to another season of cogitation, in which he
probably found his vagueness growing upon him. He ended by fumbling in all
his pockets, and bringing up from the last a crumpled scrap of paper. “What
you--what you say that?”

Bartley took the extended scrap with an easy air. “Miss Morrison's
handwriting, I think.” He held it up before him and read aloud, “'I love my
love with an H because he is Handsome.' This appears to be a confidence of
Miss Morrison to her Muse. Whom do you think she refers to, Mr. Morrison?”

“What's--what's the first letter your name?” demanded Morrison, with an
effort to collect his dispersing severity.

“B,” promptly replied Bartley. “Perhaps this concerns you, Henry. Your name
begins with an H.” He passed the paper up over his head to Bird, who took
it silently. “You see,” he continued, addressing Bird, but looking at
Morrison as he spoke, “Mr. Morrison wishes to convict me of an attempt upon
Miss Hannah's affections. Have you anything else to urge, Mr. Morrison?”

Morrison slid at last from his difficult position into a convenient chair,
and struggled to keep himself from doubling forward. “I want know what you
mean,” he said, with dogged iteration.

“I'll show you what I mean,” said Bartley with an ugly quiet, while his
mustache began to twitch. He sprang to his feet and seized Morrison by
the collar, pulling him up out of the chair till he held him clear of the
floor, and opened the door with his other hand. “Don't show your face here
again,--you or your girl either!” Still holding the man by the collar, he
pushed him before him through the office, and gave him a final thust out of
the outer door.

Bartley returned to his room in a white heat: “Miserable tipsy rascal!” he
panted; “I wonder who has set him on to this thing.”

Bird stood pale and silent, still, nolding the crumpled scrap of paper in
his hand.

“I shouldn't be surprised if that impudent little witch herself had put him
up to it. She's capable of it,” said Bartley, fumbling aimlessly about on
his table, in his wrath, without looking at Bird.

“It's a lie!” said Bird.

Bartley started as if the other had struck him, and as he glared at Bird
the anger went out of his face for pure amazement. “Are you out of your
mind, Henry?” he asked calmly. “Perhaps you're drunk too, this morning. The
Devil seems to have got into pretty much everybody.”

“It's a lie!” repeated the boy, while the tears sprang to his eyes. “She's
as good a girl as Marcia Gaylord is, any day!”

“Better go away, Henry,” said Bartley, with a deadly sort of gentleness.

“I'm going away,” answered the boy, his face twisted with weeping. “I've
done my last day's work for _you_.” He pulled down his shirt-sleeves,
and buttoned them at the wrists, while the tears ran out over his
face,--helpless tears, the sign of his womanish tenderness, his womanish
weakness.

Bartley continued to glare at him. “Why, I do believe you're in love with
her yourself, you little fool!”

“Oh, I've _been_ a fool!” cried Bird. “A fool to think as much of you as
I always have,--a fool to believe that you were a gentleman, and wouldn't
take a mean advantage. I was a fool to suppose you wanted to do her any
good, when you came praising and flattering her, and turning her head!”

“Well, then,” said Bartley with harsh insolence, “don't be a fool any
longer. If you're in love with her, you haven't any quarrel with me, my
boy. She flies at higher game than humble newspaper editors. The head of
Willett's lumbering gang is your man; and so you may go and tell that old
sot, her father. Why, Henry! You don't mean to say you care anything for
that girl?”

“And do you mean to say you haven't done everything you could to turn her
head since she's been in this office? She used to like me well enough at
school.” All men are blind and jealous children alike, when it comes to
question of a woman between them, and this poor boy's passion was turning
him into a tiger. “Don't come to _me_ with your lies, any more!” Here his
rage culminated, and with a blind cry of “Ay!” he struck the paper which he
had kept in his hand into Bartley's face.

The demons, whatever they were, of anger, remorse, pride, shame, were at
work in Bartley's heart too, and he returned the blow as instantly as if
Bird's touch had set the mechanism of his arm in motion. In contempt of
the other's weakness he struck with the flat of his hand; but the blow was
enough. Bird fell headlong, and the concussion of his head upon the floor
did the rest. He lay senseless.




VII.


Bartley hung over the boy with such a terror in his soul as he had never
had before. He believed that he had killed him, and in this conviction came
with the simultaneity of events in dreams the sense of all his blame, of
which the blow given for a blow seemed the least part. He was not so wrong
in that as he was wrong in what led to it. He did not abhor in himself so
much the wretch who had struck his brother down as the light and empty fool
who had trifled with that silly hoyden. The follies that seemed so amusing
and resultless in their time had ripened to this bitter effect, and he knew
that he, and not she, was mainly culpable. Her self-betrayal, however it
came about, was proof that they were more serious with her than with him,
and he could not plead to himself even the poor excuse that his fancy
had been caught. Amidst the anguish of his self-condemnation the need to
conceal what he had done occurred to him. He had been holding Bird's head
in his arms, and imploring him, “Henry! Henry! wake up!” in a low, husky
voice; but now he turned to the door and locked it, and the lie by which he
should escape sprang to his tongue. “He died in a fit.” He almost believed
it as it murmured itself from his lips. There was no mark, no bruise,
nothing to show that he had touched the boy. Suddenly he felt the lie choke
him. He pulled down the window to let in the fresh air, and this pure
breath of heaven blew into his darkened spirit and lifted there a little
the vapors which were thickening in it. The horror of having to tell that
lie, even if he should escape by it, all his life long, till he was a gray
old man, and to keep the truth forever from his lips, presented itself to
him as intolerable slavery. “Oh, my God!” he spoke aloud, “how can I bear
that?” And it was in self-pity that he revolted from it. Few men love the
truth for its own sake, and Bartley was not one of these; but he practised
it because his experience had been that lies were difficult to manage, and
that they were a burden on the mind. He was not candid; he did not shun
concealments and evasions; but positive lies he had kept from, and now he
could not trust one to save his life. He unlocked the door and ran out to
find help; he must do that at last; he must do it at any risk; no matter
what he said afterward. When our deeds and motives come to be balanced at
the last day, let us hope that mercy, and not justice, may prevail.

It must have been mercy that sent the doctor at that moment to the
apothecary's, on the other side of the street, and enabled Bartley to get
him up into his office, without publicity or explanation other than that
Henry Bird seemed to be in a fit. The doctor lifted the boy's head, and
explored his bosom with his hand.

“Is he--is he dead?” gasped Bartley, and the words came so mechanically
from his tongue that he began to believe he had not spoken them, when the
doctor answered.

“No! How did this happen? Tell me exactly.”

“We had a quarrel. He struck me. I knocked him down.” Bartley delivered up
the truth, as a prisoner of war--or a captive brigand, perhaps--parts with
his weapons one by one.

“Very well,” said the doctor. “Get some water.”

Bartley poured some out of the pitcher on his table, and the doctor,
wetting his handkerchief, drew it again and again over Bird's forehead.

“I never meant to hurt him,” said Bartley. “I didn't even intend to strike
him when he hit me.”

“Intentions have very little to do with physical effects,” replied the
doctor sharply. “Henry!”

The boy opened his eyes, and, muttering feebly, “My head!” closed them
again.

“There's a concussion here,” said the doctor. “We had better get him home.
Drive my sleigh over, will you, from Smith's.”

Bartley went out into the glare of the sun, which beat upon him like the
eye of the world. But the street was really empty, as it often was in the
middle of the forenoon at Equity. The apothecary, who saw him untying the
doctor's horse, came to his door, and said jocosely, “Hello, Doc! who's
sick?”

“I am,” said Bartley, solemnly, and the apothecary laughed at his
readiness. Bartley drove round to the back of the printing-office, where
the farmers delivered his wood. “I thought we could get him out better
that way,” he explained, and the doctor, who had to befriend a great many
concealments in his practice, silently spared Bartley's disingenuousness.

The rush of the cold air, as they drove rapidly down the street, with that
limp shape between them, revived the boy, and he opened his eyes, and made
an effort to hold himself erect, but he could not; and when they got him
into the warm room at home, he fainted again. His mother had met them at
the door of her poor little house, without any demonstration of grief or
terror; she was far too well acquainted in her widowhood--bereft of all her
children but this son--with sickness and death, to show even surprise, if
she felt it. When Bartley broke out into his lamentable confession, “Oh,
Mrs. Bird! this is _my_ work!” she only wrung her hands and answered,
“_Your_ work! Oh, Mr. Hubbard, he thought the world of _you_!” and did not
ask him how or why he had done it. After they had got Henry on the bed,
Bartley was no longer of use there; but they let him remain in the corner
into which he had shrunk, and from which he watched all that went on, with
a dry mouth and faltering breath. It began to appear to him that he was
very young to be involved in a misfortune like this; he did not understand
why it should have happened to him; but he promised himself that, if Henry
lived, he would try to be a better man in every way.

After he had lost all hope, the time seemed so long, the boy on the bed
opened his eyes once more, and looked round, while Bartley still sat with
his face in his hands. “Where--where is Mr. Hubbard?” he faintly asked,
with a bewildered look at his mother and the doctor.

Bartley heard the weak voice, and staggered forward, and fell on his
knees beside the bed. “Here, here! Here I am, Henry! Oh, Henry, I didn't
intend--” He stopped at the word, and hid his face in the coverlet.

The boy lay as if trying to make out what had happened, and the doctor told
him that he had fainted. After a time, he put out his hand and laid it on
Bartley's head. “Yes; but I don't understand what makes him cry.”

They looked at Bartley, who had lifted his head, and he went over the whole
affair, except so far as it related to Hannah Morrison; he did not spare
himself; he had often found that strenuous self-condemnation moved others
to compassion; and besides, it was his nature to seek the relief of full
confession. But Henry heard him through with a blank countenance. “Don't
you remember?” Bartley implored at last.

“No, I don't remember. I only remember that there seemed to be something
the matter with my head this morning.”

“That was the trouble with me, too,” said Bartley. “I must have been
crazy--I must have been insane--when I struck you. I can't account for it.”

“I don't remember it,” answered the boy.

“That's all right,” said the doctor. “Don't try. I guess you better let him
alone, now,” he added to Bartley, with such a significant look that the
young man retired from the bedside, and stood awkwardly apart. “He'll get
along. You needn't be anxious about leaving him. He'll be better alone.”

There was no mistaking this hint. “Well, well!” said Bartley, humbly, “I'll
go. But I'd rather stay and watch with him,--I sha'n't eat or sleep till
he's on foot again. And I can't leave till you tell me that you forgive me,
Mrs. Bird. I never dreamed--I didn't intend--” He could not go on.

“I don't suppose you meant to hurt Henry,” said the mother. “You always
pretended to be so fond of him, and he thought the world of you. But I
don't see how you could do it. I presume it was all right.”

“No, it was all wrong,--or so nearly all wrong that I must ask your
forgiveness on that ground. I loved him,--I thought the world of him, too.
I'd ten thousand times rather have hurt myself,” pleaded Bartley. “Don't
let me go till you say that you forgive me.”

“I'll see how Henry gets along,” said Mrs. Bird. “I don't know as I
could rightly say I forgive you just yet.” Doubtless she was dealing
conscientiously with herself and with him. “I like to be sure of a thing
when I say it,” she added.

The doctor followed him into the hall, and Bartley could not help turning
to him for consolation. “I think Mrs. Bird is very unjust, Doctor. I've
done everything I could, and said everything to explain the matter; and
I've blamed myself where I can't feel that I was to blame; and yet you see
how she holds out against me.”

“I dare say,” answered the doctor dryly, “she'll feel differently, as she
says, if the boy gets along.”

Bartley dropped his hat to the floor. “Get along! Why--why you think he'll
get well _now_, don't you, Doctor?”

“Oh, yes; I was merely using her words. He'll get well.”

“And--and it wont affect his mind, will it? I thought it was very strange,
his not remembering anything about it--”

“That's a very common phenomenon,” said the doctor. “The patient usually
forgets everything that occurred for some little time before the accident,
in cases of concussion of the brain.” Bartley shuddered at the phrase, but
he could not ask anything further. “What I wanted to say to you,” continued
the doctor, “was that this may be a long thing, and there may have to be
an inquiry into it. You're lawyer enough to understand what that means. I
should have to testify to what I know, and I only know what you told me.”

“Why, you don't doubt--”

“No, sir; I've no reason to suppose you haven't told me the truth, as far
as it goes. If you have thought it advisable to keep anything back from me,
you may wish to tell the whole story to an attorney.”

“I haven't kept anything back, Doctor Wills,” said Bartley. “I've told
you everything--everything that concerned the quarrel. That drunken old
scoundrel of a Morrison got us into it. He accused me of making love to his
daughter; and Henry was jealous--I never knew he cared anything for her. I
hated to tell you this before his mother. But this is the whole truth, so
help me God.”

“I supposed it was something of the kind,” replied the doctor. “I'm sorry
for you. You can't keep it from having an ugly look if it gets out; and it
may have to be made public. I advise you to go and see Squire Gaylord; he's
always stood your friend.”

“I--I was just going there,” said Bartley; and this was true.

Through all, he had felt the need of some sort of retrieval,--of
re-establishing himself in his own esteem by some signal stroke; and he
could think of but one thing. It was not his fault if he believed that
this must combine self-sacrifice with safety, and the greatest degree of
humiliation with the largest sum of consolation. He was none the less
resolved not to spare himself at all in offering to release Marcia from her
engagement. The fact that he must now also see her father upon the legal
aspect of his case certainly complicated the affair, and detracted from
its heroic quality. He could not tell which to see first, for he naturally
wished his action to look as well as possible; and if he went first to
Marcia, and she condemned him, he did not know in what figure he should
approach her father. If, on the other hand, he went first to Squire
Gaylord, the old lawyer might insist that the engagement was already at an
end by Bartley's violent act, and might well refuse to let a man in his
position even see his daughter. He lagged heavy-heartedly up the middle of
the street, and left the question to solve itself at the last moment. But
when he reached Squire Gaylord's gate, it seemed to him that it would be
easier to face the father first; and this would be the right way too.

He turned aside to the little office, and opened the door without knocking,
and as he stood with the knob in his hand, trying to habituate his eyes,
full of the snow-glare, to the dimmer light within, he heard a rapturous
cry of “Why Bartley!” and he felt Marcia's arms flung around his neck. His
burdened heart yearned upon her with a tenderness he had not known before;
he realized the preciousness of an embrace that might be the last; but he
dared not put down his lips to hers. She pushed back her head in a little
wonder, and saw the haggardness of his face, while he discovered her father
looking at them. How strong and pure the fire in her must be when her
father's presence could not abash her from this betrayal of her love!
Bartley sickened, and he felt her arms slip from his neck. “Why--why--what
is the matter?”

In spite of some vaguely magnanimous intention to begin at the beginning,
and tell the whole affair just as it happened, Bartley found himself
wishing to put the best face on it at first, and trust to chances to make
it all appear well. He did not speak at once, and Marcia pressed him into
a chair, and then, like an eager child, who will not let its friend escape
till it has been told what it wishes to know, she set herself on his knee,
and put her hand on his shoulder. He looked at her father, not at her,
while he spoke hoarsely: “I have had trouble with Henry Bird, Squire
Gaylord, and I've come to tell you about it.”

The old squire did not speak, but Marcia repeated in amazement, “With Henry
Bird?”

“He struck me--”

“Henry Bird _struck_ you!” cried the girl. “I should like to know why
Henry Bird struck _you_, when you've made so much of him, and he's always
pretended to be so grateful--”

Bartley still looked at her father. “And I struck him back.”

“You did perfectly right, Bartley,” exclaimed Marcia, “and I should have
despised you if you had let any one run over you. Struck you! I declare--”

He did not heed her, but continued to look at her father. “I didn't intend
to hurt him,--I hit him with my open hand,--but he fell and struck his head
on the floor. I'm afraid it hurt him pretty badly.” He felt the pang that
thrilled through the girl at his words, and her hand trembled on his
shoulder; but she did not take it away.

The old man came forward from the pile of books which he and Marcia had
been dusting, and sat down in a chair on the other side of the stove. He
pushed back his hat from his forehead, and asked drily, “What commenced
it?”

Bartley hesitated. It was this part of the affair which he would rather
have imparted to Marcia after seeing it with her father's eyes, or
possibly, if her father viewed it favorably, have had him tell her. The old
man noticed his reluctance. “Hadn't you better go into the house, Marsh?”

She merely gave him a look of utter astonishment for answer, and did not
move. He laughed noiselessly, and said to Bartley, “Go on.”

“It was that drunken old scoundrel of a Morrison who began it!” cried
Bartley, in angry desperation. Marcia dropped her hand from his shoulder,
while her father worked his jaws upon the bit of stick he had picked up
from the pile of wood, and put between his teeth. “You know that whenever
he gets on a spree he comes to the office and wants Hannah's wages raised.”

Marcia sprang to her feet. “Oh, I knew it! I knew it! I told you she would
get you into trouble! I told you so!” She stood clinching her hands,
and her father bent his keen scrutiny first upon her, and then upon the
frowning face with which Bartley regarded her.

“Did he come to have her wages raised to-day?”

“No.”

“What did he come for?” He involuntarily assumed the attitude of a lawyer
crossquestioning a slippery witness.

“He came for--He came--He accused me of--He said I had--made love to his
confounded girl.”

Marcia gasped.

“What made him think you had?”

“It wasn't necessary for him to have any reason. He was drunk. I had been
kind to the girl, and favored her all I could, because she seemed to be
anxious to do her work well; and I praised her for trying.”

“Um-umph,” commented the Squire. “And that made Henry Bird jealous?”

“It seems that he was fond of her. I never dreamed of such a thing, and
when I put old Morrison out of the office, and came back, he called me a
liar, and struck me in the face.” He did not lift his eyes to the level of
Marcia's, who in her gray dress stood there like a gray shadow, and did not
stir or speak.

“And you never had made up to the girl at all?”

“No.”

“Kissed her, I suppose, now and then?” suggested the Squire.

Bartley did not reply.

“Flattered her up, and told how much you thought of her, occasionally?”

“I don't see what that has to do with it,” said Bartley with a sulky
defiance.

“No, I suppose it's what you'd do with most any pretty girl,” returned the
Squire. He was silent awhile. “And so you knocked Henry down. What happened
then?”

“I tried to bring him to, and then I went for the doctor. He revived, and
we got him home to his mother's. The doctor says he will get well; but he
advised me to come and see you.”

“Any witnesses of the assault?”

“No; we were alone in my own room.”

“Told any one else about it?”

“I told the doctor and Mrs. Bird. Henry couldn't remember it at all.”

“Couldn't remember about Morrison, or what made him mad at you?”

“Nothing.”

“And that's all about it?”

“Yes.”

The two men had talked across the stove at each other, practically ignoring
the girl, who stood apart from them, gray in the face as her dress, and
suppressing a passion which had turned her as rigid as stone.

“Now, Marcia,” said her father, kindly, “better go into the house. That's
all there is of it.”

“No, that isn't all,” she answered. “Give me my ring, Bartley. Here's
yours.” She slipped it off her finger, and put it into his mechanically
extended hand.

“Marcia!” he implored, confronting her.

“Give me my ring, please.”

He obeyed, and put it into her hand. She slipped it back on the finger from
which she had so fondly suffered him to take it yesterday, and replace it
with his own.

“I'll go into the house now, father. Good by, Bartley.” Her eyes were
perfectly clear and dry, and her voice controlled; and as he stood passive
before her, she took him round the neck, and pressed against his face,
once, and twice, and thrice, her own gray face, in which all love, and
unrelenting, and despair, were painted. Once and again she held him, and
looked him in the eyes, as if to be sure it was he. Then, with a last
pressure of her face to his, she released him, and passed out of the door.

“She's been talking about you, here, all the morning,” said the Squire,
with a sort of quiet absence, as if nothing in particular had happened, and
he were commenting on a little fact that might possibly interest Bartley.
He ruminated upon the fragment of wood in his mouth awhile before he added:
“I guess she won't want to talk about you any more. I drew you out a little
on that Hannah Morrison business, because I wanted her to understand just
what kind of fellow you were. You see it isn't the trouble you've got into
with Henry Bird that's killed her; it's the cause of the trouble. I guess
if it had been anything else, she'd have stood by you. But you see that's
the one thing she couldn't bear, and I'm glad it's happened now instead of
afterwards: I guess you're one of that _kind_, Mr. Hubbard.”

“Squire Gaylord!” cried Bartley, “upon my sacred word of honor, there isn't
any more of this thing than I've told you. And I think it's pretty hard to
be thrown over for--for--”

“Fooling with a pretty girl, when you get a chance, and the girl seems to
like it? Yes, it _is_ rather hard. And I suppose you haven't even seen her
since you were engaged to Marcia?”

“Of course not! That is--”

“It's a kind of retroactive legislation on Marcia's part,” said the Squire,
rubbing his chin, “and that's against one of the first principles of law.
But women don't seem to be able to grasp that idea. They're queer about
some things. They appear to think they marry a man's whole life,--his past
as well as his future,--and that makes 'em particular. And they distinguish
between different kinds of men. You'll find 'em pinning their faith to a
fellow who's been through pretty much everything, and swearing by him from
the word go; and another chap, who's never _done_ anything very bad, they
won't trust half a minute out of their sight. Well, I guess Marcia _is_ of
rather a jealous disposition,” he concluded, as if Bartley had urged this
point.

“She's very unjust to me,” Bartley began.

“Oh, yes,--she's _unjust_,” said her father. “I don't deny that. But it
wouldn't be any use talking to her. She'd probably turn round with some
excuse about what she had suffered, and that would be the end of it. She
would say that she couldn't go through it again. Well, it ought to be a
comfort to you to think you don't care a great deal about it.”

“But I _do_ care!” exclaimed Bartley. “I care all the world for it. I--”

“Since when?” interrupted the Squire. “Do you mean to say that you didn't
know till you asked her yesterday that Marcia was in love with you?”

Bartley was silent.

“I guess you knew it as much as a year ago, didn't you? Everybody else did.
But you'd just as soon it had been Hannah Morrison, or any other pretty
girl. _You_ didn't care! But Marcia did, you see. She wasn't one of the
kind that let any good-looking fellow make love to them. It was because
it was _you_; and you knew it. We're plain men, Mr. Hubbard; and I guess
you'll get over this, in time. I shouldn't wonder if you began to mend,
right away.”

Bartley found himself helpless in the face of this passionless sarcasm. He
could have met stormy indignation or any sort of invective in kind; but
the contemptuous irony with which his pretensions were treated, the cold
scrutiny with which his motives were searched, was something he could not
meet. He tried to pull himself together for some sort of protest, but
he ended by hanging his head in silence. He always believed that Squire
Gaylord had liked him, and here he was treating him like his bitterest
enemy, and seeming to enjoy his misery. He could not understand it; he
thought it extremely unjust, and past all the measure of his offence. This
was true, perhaps: but it is doubtful if Bartley would have accepted
any suffering, no matter how nicely proportioned, in punishment of his
wrong-doing. He sat hanging his head, and taking his pain in rebellious
silence, with a gathering hate in his heart for the old man.

“M-well!” said the Squire, at last, rising from his chair, “I guess I must
be going.”

Bartley sprang to his feet aghast. “You're not going to leave me in the
lurch, are you? You're not--”

“Oh, I shall take care of you, young man,--don't be afraid. I've stood your
friend too long, and your name's been mixed up too much with my girl's, for
me to let you come to shame openly, if I can help it. I'm going to see Dr.
Wills about you, and I'm going to see Mrs. Bird, and try to patch it up
somehow.”

“And--and--where shall I go?” gasped Bartley.

“You might go to the Devil, for all I cared for you,” said the old man,
with the contempt which he no longer cared to make ironical. “But I guess
you better go back to your office, and go to work as if nothing had
happened--till something does happen. I shall close the paper out as soon
as I can. I was thinking of doing that just before you came in. I was
thinking of taking you into the law business with me. Marcia and I were
talking about it here. But I guess you wouldn't like the idea now.”

He seemed to get a bitter satisfaction out of these mockeries, from which,
indeed, he must have suffered quite as much as Bartley. But he ended, sadly
and almost compassionately, with, “Come, come! You must start some time.”
 And Bartley dragged his leaden weight out of the door. The Squire closed it
after him; but he did not accompany him down the street. It was plain that
he did not wish to be any longer alone with Bartley, and the young man
suspected, with a sting of shame, that he scorned to be seen with him.




VIII.


The more Bartley dwelt upon his hard case, during the week that followed,
the more it appeared to him that he was punished out of all proportion to
his offence. He was in no mood to consider such mercies as that he had been
spared from seriously hurting Bird; and that Squire Gaylord and Doctor
Wills had united with Henry's mother in saving him from open disgrace. The
physician, indeed, had perhaps indulged a professional passion for hushing
the matter up, rather than any pity for Bartley. He probably had the
scientific way of looking at such questions; and saw much physical cause
for moral effects. He refrained, with the physician's reticence, from
inquiring into the affair; but he would not have thought Bartley without
excuse under the circumstances. In regard to the relative culpability in
matters of the kind, his knowledge of women enabled him to take much the
view of the woman's share that other women take.

But Bartley was ignorant of the doctor's leniency, and associated him with
Squire Gaylord in the feeling that made his last week in Equity a period of
social outlawry. There were moments in which he could not himself escape
the same point of view. He could rebel against the severity of the
condemnation he had fallen under in the eyes of Marcia and her father; he
could, in the light of example and usage, laugh at the notion of harm in
his behavior to Hannah Morrison; yet he found himself looking at it as a
treachery to Marcia. Certainly, she had no right to question his conduct
before his engagement. Yet, if he knew that Marcia loved him, and was
waiting with life-and-death anxiety for some word of love from him, it was
cruelly false to play with another at the passion which was such a tragedy
to her. This was the point that, put aside however often, still presented
itself, and its recurrence, if he could have known it, was mercy and
reprieve from the only source out of which these could come.

Hannah Morrison did not return to the printing-office, and Bird was still
sick, though it was now only a question of time when he should be out
again. Bartley visited him some hours every day, and sat and suffered under
the quiet condemnation of his mother's eyes. She had kept Bartley's secret
with the same hardness with which she had refused him her forgiveness, and
the village had settled down into an ostensible acceptance of the theory of
a faint as the beginning of Bird's sickness, with such other conjectures
as the doctor freely permitted each to form. Bartley found his chief
consolation in the work which kept him out of the way of a great deal of
question. He worked far into the night, as he must, to make up for the
force that was withdrawn from the office. At the same time he wrote more
than ever in the paper, and he discovered in himself that dual life of
which every one who sins or sorrows is sooner or later aware: that strange
separation of the intellectual activity from the suffering of the soul, by
which the mind toils on in a sort of ironical indifference to the pangs
that wring the heart; the realization that, in some ways, his brain can get
on perfectly well without his conscience.

There was a great deal of sympathy felt for Bartley at this time, and his
popularity in Equity was never greater than now when his life there was
drawing to a close. The spectacle of his diligence was so impressive that
when, on the following Sunday, the young minister who had succeeded to the
pulpit of the orthodox church preached a sermon on the beauty of industry
from the text “Consider the lilies,” there were many who said that they
thought of Bartley the whole while, and one--a lady--asked Mr. Savin if
he did not have Mr. Hubbard in mind in the picture he drew of the Heroic
Worker. They wished that Bartley could have heard that sermon.

Marcia had gone away early in the week to visit in the town where she used
to go to school, and Bartley took her going away as a sign that she wished
to put herself wholly beyond his reach, or any danger of relenting at sight
of him. He talked with no one about her; and going and coming irregularly
to his meals, and keeping himself shut up in his room when he was not
at work, he left people very little chance to talk with him. But they
conjectured that he and Marcia had an understanding; and some of the ladies
used such scant opportunity as he gave them to make sly allusions to her
absence and his desolate condition. They were confirmed in their surmise by
the fact, known from actual observation, that Bartley had not spoken a word
to any other young lady since Marcia went away.

“Look here, my friend,” said the philosopher from, the logging-camp, when
he came in for his paper on the Tuesday afternoon following, “seems to me
from what I hear tell around here, you're tryin' to kill yourself on this
newspaper. Now, it won't do; I tell you it won't do.”

Bartley was addressing for the mail the papers which one of the girls
was folding. “What are you going to do about it?” he demanded of his
sympathizer with whimsical sullenness, not troubling himself to look up at
him.

“Well, I haint exactly settled yet,” replied the philosopher, who was of
a tall, lank figure, and of a mighty brown beard. “But I've been around
pretty much everywhere, and I find that about the poorest use you can put a
man to is to kill him.”

“It depends a good deal on the man,” said Bartley. “But that's stale,
Kinney. It's the old formula of the anti-capital-punishment fellows. Try
something else. They're not talking of hanging me yet.” He kept on writing,
and the philosopher stood over him with a humorous twinkle of enjoyment at
Bartley's readiness.

“Well, I'll allow it's old,” he admitted. “So's Homer.”

“Yes; but you don't pretend that you wrote Homer.”

Kinney laughed mightily; then he leaned forward, and slapped Bartley on the
shoulder with his newspaper. “Look here!” he exclaimed, “I _like_ you!”

“Oh, try some other tack! Lots of fellows like me.” Bartley kept on
writing. “I gave you your paper, didn't I, Kinney?”

“You mean that you want me to get out?”

“Far be it from me to say so.”

This delighted Kinney as much as the last refinement of hospitality would
have pleased another man. “Look here!” he said, “I want you should come out
and see our camp. I can't fool away any more time on you here; but I want
you should come out and see us. Give you something to write about. Hey?”

“The invitation comes at a time when circumstances over which I have no
control oblige me to decline it. I admire your prudence, Kinney.”

“No, honest Injian, now,” protested Kinney. “Take a day off, and fill up
with dead advertisements. That's the way they used to do out in Alkali City
when they got short of help on the Eagle, and we liked it just as well.”

“Now you are talking sense,” said Bartley, looking up at him. “How far is
it to your settlement?”

“Two miles, if you're goin'; three and a half, if you aint.”

“When are you coming in?”

“I'm in, now.”

“I can't go with you to-day.”

“Well, how'll to-morrow morning suit?”

“To-morrow morning will suit,” said Bartley.

“All right. If anybody comes to see the editor to-morrow morning, Marilla,”
 said Kinney to the girl, “you tell 'em he's sick, and gone a-loggin', and
won't be back till Saturday. Say,” he added, laying his hand on Bartley's
shoulder, “you aint foolin'?”

“If I am,” replied Bartley, “just mention it.”

“Good!” said Kinney. “To-morrow it is, then.”

Bartley finished addressing the newspapers, and then he put them up in
wrappers and packages for the mail. “You can go, now, Marilla,” he said to
the girl. “I'll leave some copy for you and Kitty; you'll find it on my
table in the morning.”

“All right,” answered the girl.

Bartley went to his supper, which he ate with more relish than he had
felt for his meals since his troubles began, and he took part in the
supper-table talk with something of his old audacity. The change interested
the lady boarders, and they agreed that he must have had a letter. He
returned to his office, and worked till nine o'clock, writing and selecting
matter out of his exchanges. He spent most of the time in preparing the
funny column, which was a favorite feature in the Free Press. Then he put
the copy where the girls would find it in the morning, and, leaving the
door unlocked, took his way up the street toward Squire Gaylord's.

He knew that he should find the lawyer in his office, and he opened the
office door without knocking, and went in. He had not met Squire Gaylord
since the morning of his dismissal, and the old man had left him for the
past eight days without any sign as to what he expected of Bartley, or of
what he intended to do in his affair.

They looked at each other, but exchanged no sort of greeting, as Bartley,
unbidden, took a chair on the opposite side of the stove; the Squire did
not put down the book he had been reading.

“I've come to see what you're going to do about the Free Press,” said
Bartley.

The old man rubbed his bristling jaw, that seemed even lanker than when
Bartley saw it last. He waited almost a minute before he replied, “I don't
know as I've got any call to tell you.”

“Then I'll tell you what _I'm_ going to do about it,” retorted Bartley.
“I'm going to leave it. I've done my last day's work on that paper. Do you
think,” he cried, angrily, “that I'm going to keep on in the dark, and let
you consult your pleasure as to my future? No, sir! You don't know your man
quite, Mr. Gaylord!”

“You've got over your scare,” said the lawyer.

“I've got over my scare,” Bartley retorted.

“And you think, because you're not afraid any longer, that you're out of
danger. I know my man as well as you do, I guess.”

“If you think I care for the danger, I don't. You may do what you please.
Whatever you do, I shall know it isn't out of kindness for me. I didn't
believe from the first that the law could touch me, and I wasn't uneasy on
that account. But I didn't want to involve myself in a public scandal, for
Miss Gaylord's sake. Miss Gaylord has released me from any obligations to
her; and now you may go ahead and do what you like.” Each of the men knew
how much truth there was in this; but for the moment in his anger, Bartley
believed himself sincere, and there is no question but his defiance was
so. Squire Gaylord made him no answer, and after a minute of expectation
Bartley added, “At any rate, I've done with the Free Press. I advise you to
stop the paper, and hand the office over to Henry Bird, when he gets about.
I'm going out to Willett's logging-camp tomorrow, and I'm coming back to
Equity on Saturday. You'll know where to find me till then, and after that
you may look me up if you want me.”

He rose to go, but stopped with his hand on the door-knob, at a sound,
preliminary to speaking, which the old man made in his throat. Bartley
stopped, hoping for a further pretext of quarrel, but the lawyer merely
asked, “Where's the key?”

“It's in the office door.”

The old man now looked at him as if he no longer saw him, and Bartley went
out, balked of his purpose in part, and in that degree so much the more
embittered.

Squire Gaylord remained an hour longer; then he blew out his lamp, and left
the little office for the night. A light was burning in the kitchen, and he
made his way round to the back door of the house, and let himself in. His
wife was there, sitting before the stove, in those last delicious moments
before going to bed, when all the house is mellowed to such a warmth that
it seems hard to leave it to the cold and dark. In this poor lady, who
had so long denied herself spiritual comfort, there was a certain obscure
luxury: she liked little dainties of the table; she liked soft warmth, an
easy cushion. It was doubtless in the disintegration of the finer qualities
of her nature, that, as they grew older together, she threw more and more
the burden of acute feeling upon her husband, to whose doctrine of life she
had submitted, but had never been reconciled. Marriage is, with all its
disparities, a much more equal thing than appears, and the meek little
wife, who has all the advantage of public sympathy, knows her power over
her oppressor, and at some tender spot in his affections or his nerves can
inflict an anguish that will avenge her for years of coarser aggression.
Thrown in upon herself in so vital a matter as her religion, Mrs. Gaylord
had involuntarily come to live largely for herself, though her talk was
always of her husband. She gave up for him, as she believed, her soul's
salvation, but she held him to account for the uttermost farthing of
the price. She padded herself round at every point where she could have
suffered through her sensibilities, and lived soft and snug in the shelter
of his iron will and indomitable courage. It was not apathy that she
had felt when their children died one after another, but an obscure and
formless exultation that Mr. Gaylord would suffer enough for both.

Marcia was the youngest, and her mother left her training almost wholly
to her father; she sometimes said that she never supposed the child would
live. She did not actually urge this in excuse, but she had the appearance
of doing so; and she held aloof from them both in their mutual relations,
with mildly critical reserves. They spoiled each other, as father and
daughter are apt to do when left to themselves. What was good in the child
certainly received no harm from his indulgence; and what was naughty was
after all not so very naughty. She was passionate, but she was generous;
and if she showed a jealous temperament that must hereafter make her
unhappy, for the time being it charmed and flattered her father to have her
so fond of him that she could not endure any rivalry in his affection.

Her education proceeded fitfully. He would not let her be forced to
household tasks that she disliked; and as a little girl she went to school
chiefly because she liked to go, and not because she would have been
obliged to it if she had not chosen. When she grew older, she wished to go
away to school, and her father allowed her; he had no great respect for
boarding-schools, but if Marcia wanted to try it, he was willing to humor
the joke.

What resulted was a great proficiency in the things that pleased her, and
ignorance of the other things. Her father bought her a piano, on which she
did not play much, and he bought her whatever dresses she fancied. He never
came home from a journey without bringing her something; and he liked to
take her with him when he went away to other places. She had been several
times at Portland, and once at Montreal; he was very proud of her; he could
not see that any one was better-looking, or dressed any better than his
girl.

He came into the kitchen, and sat down with his hat on, and, taking his
chin between his fingers, moved uneasily about on his chair.

“What's brought you in so early?” asked his wife.

“Well, I got through,” he briefly explained. After a while he said,
“Bartley Hubbard's been out there.”

“You don't mean 't he knew she--”

“No, he didn't know anything about that. He came to tell me he was going
away.”

“Well, I don't know what you're going to do, Mr. Gaylord,” said his wife,
shifting the responsibility wholly upon him. “'D he seem to want to make it
up?”

“M-no!” said the Squire, “he was on his high horse. He knows he aint in any
danger now.”

“Aint you afraid she'll carry on dreadfully, when she finds out 't he's
gone for good?” asked Mrs. Gaylord, with a sort of implied satisfaction
that the carrying on was not to affect her.

“M-yes,” said the Squire, “I suppose she'll carry on. But I don't know what
to do about it. Sometimes I almost wish I'd tried to make it up between 'em
that day; but I thought she'd better see, once for all, what sort of man
she was going in for, if she married him. It's too late now to do anything.
The fellow came in to-night for a quarrel, and nothing else; I could see
that; and I didn't give him any chance.”

“You feel sure,” asked Mrs. Gaylord, impartially, “that Marcia wa'n't too
particular?”

“No, Miranda, I don't feel sure of anything, except that it's past your
bed-time. You better go. I'll sit up awhile yet. I came in because I
couldn't settle my mind to anything out there.”

He took off his hat in token of his intending to spend the rest of the
evening at home, and put it on the table at his elbow.

His wife sewed at the mending in her lap, without offering to act upon his
suggestion. “It's plain to be seen that she can't get along without him.”

“She'll have to, now,” replied the Squire.

“I'm afraid,” said Mrs. Gaylord, softly, “that she'll be down sick. She
don't look as if she'd slept any great deal since she's been gone. I d'
know as I like very much to see her looking the way she does. I guess
you've got to take her off somewheres.”

“Why, she's just been off, and couldn't stay!”

“That's because she thought he was here yet. But if he's gone, it won't be
the same thing.”

“Well, we've got to fight it out, some way,” said the Squire. “It wouldn't
do to give in to it now. It always _was_ too much of a one-sided thing,
at the best; and if we tried now to mend it up, it would be ridiculous. I
don't believe he would come back at all, now, and if he did, he wouldn't
come back on any equal terms. He'd want to have everything his own way.
M-no!” said the Squire, as if confirming himself in a conclusion often
reached already in his own mind, “I saw by the way he began to-night that
there wasn't anything to be done with him. It was fight from the word go.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Gaylord, with gentle, sceptical interest in the outcome,
“if you've made up your mind to that, I hope you'll be able to carry it
through.”

“That's what I've made up my mind to,” said her husband.

Mrs. Gaylord rolled up the sewing in her work-basket, and packed it away
against the side, bracing it with several pairs of newly darned socks and
stockings neatly folded one into the other. She took her time for this,
and when she rose at last to go out, with her basket in her hand, the door
opened in her face, and Marcia entered. Mrs. Gaylord shrank back, and then
slipped round behind her daughter and vanished. The girl took no notice of
her mother, but went and sat down on her father's knee, throwing her arms
round his neck, and dropping her haggard face on his shoulder. She had
arrived at home a few hours earlier, having driven over from a station ten
miles distant, on a road that did not pass near Equity. After giving as
much of a shock to her mother's mild nature as it was capable of receiving
by her unexpected return, she had gone to her own room, and remained ever
since without seeing her father. He put up his thin old hand and passed it
over her hair, but it was long before either of them spoke.

At last Marcia lifted her head, and looked her father in the face with a
smile so pitiful that he could not bear to meet it. “Well, father?” she
said.

“Well, Marsh,” he answered huskily. “What do you think of me now?”

“I'm glad to have you back again,” he replied.

“You know why I came?”

“Yes, I guess I know.”

She put down her head again, and moaned and cried, “Father! Father!” with
dry sobs. When she looked up, confronting him with her tearless eyes, “What
shall I do? What shall I do?” she demanded desolately.

He tried to clear his throat to speak, but it required more than one effort
to bring the words. “I guess you better go along with me up to Boston. I'm
going up the first of the week.”

“No,” she said quietly.

“The change would do you good. It's a long while since you've been away
from home,” her father urged.

She looked at him in sad reproach of his uncandor. “You know there's
nothing the matter with me, father. You know what the trouble is.” He
was silent. He could not face the trouble. “I've heard people talk of a
heartache,” she went on. “I never believed there was really such a thing.
But I know there is, now. There's a pain here.” She pressed her hand
against her breast. “It's sore with aching. What shall I do? I shall have
to live through it somehow.”

“If you don't feel exactly well,” said her father “I guess you better see
the doctor.”

“What shall I tell him is the matter with me? That I want Bartley Hubbard?”
 He winced at the words, but she did not. “He knows that already. Everybody
in town does. It's never been any secret. I couldn't hide it, from the
first day I saw him. I'd just as lief as not they should say I was dying
for him. I shall not care what they say when I'm dead.”

“You'd oughtn't,--you'd oughtn't to talk that way, Marcia,” said her
father, gently.

“What difference?” she demanded, scornfully. There was truly no difference,
so far as concerned any creed of his, and he was too honest to make further
pretence. “What shall I do?” she went on again. “I've thought of praying;
but what would be the use?”

“I've never denied that there was a God, Marcia,” said her father.

“Oh, I know. _That_ kind of God! Well, well! I know that I talk like a
crazy person! Do you suppose it was providential, my being with you in the
office that morning when Bartley came in?”

“No,” said her father, “I don't. I think it was an accident.”

“Mother said it was providential, my finding him out before it was too
late.”

“I think it was a good thing. The fellow has the making of a first-class
scoundrel in him.”

“Do you think he's a scoundrel now?” she asked quietly.

“He hasn't had any great opportunity yet,” said the old man,
conscientiously sparing him.

“Well, then, I'm sorry I found him out. Yes! If I hadn't, I might have
married him, and perhaps if I had died soon I might never have found him
out. He could have been good to me a year or two, and then, if I died, I
should have been safe. Yes, I wish he could have deceived me till after we
were married. Then I _couldn't_ have borne to give him up, may be.”

“You _would_ have given him up, even then. And that's the only thing that
reconciles me to it now. I'm sorry for you, my girl; but you'd have made me
sorrier then. Sooner or later he'd have broken your heart.”

“He's broken it now,” said the girl, calmly.

“Oh, no, he hasn't,” replied her father, with a false cheerfulness that did
not deceive her. “You're young and you'll get over it. I mean to take you
away from here for a while. I mean to take you up to Boston, and on to
New York. I shouldn't care if we went as far as Washington. I guess, when
you've seen a little more of the world, you won't think Bartley Hubbard's
the only one in it.”

She looked at him so intently that he thought she must be pleased at his
proposal. “Do you think I could get him back?” she asked.

Her father lost his patience; it was a relief to be angry. “No, I don't
think so. I know you couldn't. And you ought to be ashamed of mentioning
such a thing!”

“Oh, ashamed! No, I've got past that. I have no shame any more where he's
concerned. Oh, I'd give the world if I could call him back,--if I could
only undo what I did! I was wild; I wasn't reasonable; I wouldn't listen to
him. I drove him away without giving him a chance to say a word! Of course,
he must hate me now. What makes you think he wouldn't come back?” she
asked.

“I know he wouldn't,” answered her father, with a sort of groan. “He's
going to leave Equity for one thing, and--”

“Going to leave Equity,” she repeated, absently Then he felt her tremble.
“How do you know he's going?” She turned upon her father, and fixed him
sternly with her eyes.

“Do you suppose he would stay, after what's happened, any longer than he
could help?”

“How do you know he's going?” she repeated.

“He told me.”

She stood up. “He told you? When?”

“To-night.”

“Why, where--where did you see him?” she whispered.

“In the office.”

“Since--since--I came? Bartley been here! And you didn't tell me,--you
didn't let me know?” They looked at each other in silence. At last, “When
is he going?” she asked.

“To-morrow morning.”

She sat down in the chair which her mother had left, and clutched the back
of another, on which her fingers opened and closed convulsively, while she
caught her breath in irregular gasps. She broke into a low moaning, at
last, the expression of abject defeat in the struggle she had waged with
herself. Her father watched her with dumb compassion. “Better go to bed,
Marcia,” he said, with the same dry calm as if he had been sending her away
after some pleasant evening which she had suffered to run too far into the
night.

“Don't you think--don't you think--he'll have to see you again before he
goes?” she made out to ask.

“No; he's finished up with me,” said the old man.

“Well, then,” she cried, desperately, “you'll have to go to him, father,
and get him to come! I can't help it! I can't give him up! You've got to go
to him, now, father,--yes, yes, you have! You've got to go and tell him. Go
and get him to come, for _mercy's_ sake! Tell him that I'm sorry,--that I
beg his pardon,--that I didn't think--I didn't understand,--that I knew he
didn't do anything wrong--” She rose, and, placing her hand on her father's
shoulder, accented each entreaty with a little push.

He looked up into her face with a haggard smile of sympathy. “You're crazy,
Marcia,” he said, gently.

“Don't laugh!” she cried. “I'm not crazy now. But I was, then,--yes, stark,
staring crazy. Look here, father! I want to tell you,--I want to explain to
you!” She dropped upon his knee again, and tremblingly passed her arm round
his neck. “You see, I had just told him the day before that I shouldn't
care for anything that happened before we were engaged, and then at the
very first thing I went and threw him off! And I had no right to do it. He
knows that, and that's what makes him so hard towards me. But if you go and
tell him that I see now I was all wrong, and that I beg his pardon, and
then ask him to give me _one_ more trial, just one _more_--You can do as
much as that for me, can't you?”

“Oh, you poor, crazy girl!” groaned her father. “Don't you see that the
trouble is in what the fellow _is_, and not in any particular thing that
he's done? He's a scamp, through and through; and he's all the more a scamp
when he doesn't know it. He hasn't got the first idea of anything but
selfishness.”

“No, no! Now, I'll tell you,--now, I'll prove it to you. That very Sunday
when we were out riding together; and we met her and her mother, and their
sleigh upset, and he had to lift her back; and it made me wild to see him,
and I wouldn't hardly touch him or speak to him afterwards, he didn't say
one angry word to me. He just pulled me up to him, and wouldn't let me be
mad; and he said that night he didn't mind it a bit because it showed how
much I liked him. Now, doesn't that prove he's good,--a good deal better
than I am, and that he'll forgive me, if you'll go and ask him? I know he
isn't in bed yet; he always sits up late,--he told me so; and you'll find
him there in his room. Go straight to his room, father; don't let anybody
see you down in the office; I couldn't bear it; and slip out with him as
quietly as you can. But, oh, do hurry now! Don't lose another minute!”

The wild joy sprang into her face, as her father rose; a joy that it was
terrible to him to see die out of it as he spoke: “I tell you it's no use,
Marcia! He wouldn't come if I went to him--”

“Oh, yes,--yes, he would! I know he would! If--”

“He wouldn't! You're mistaken! I should have to get down in the dust for
nothing. He's a bad fellow, I tell you; and you've got to give him up.”

“You hate me!” cried the girl. The old man walked to and fro, clutching his
hands. Their lives had always been in such intimate sympathy, his life had
so long had her happiness for its sole pleasure, that the pang in her heart
racked his with as sharp an agony. “Well, I shall die; and then I hope you
will be satisfied.”

“Marcia, Marcia!” pleaded her father. “You don't know what you're saying.”

“You're letting him go away from me,--you're letting me lose him,--you're
killing me!”

“He wouldn't come, my girl. It would be perfectly useless to go to him.
You _must_--you _must_ try to control yourself, Marcia. There's no other
way,--there's no other hope. You're disgraceful. You ought to be ashamed.
You ought to have some pride about you. I don't know what's come over you
since you've been with that fellow. You seem to be out of your senses. But
try,--try, my girl, to get over it. If you'll fight it, you'll conquer yet.
You've got a spirit for anything. And I'll help you, Marcia. I'll take you
anywhere. I'll do anything for you--”

“You wouldn't go to him, and ask him to come here, if it would save his
life!”

“No,” said the old man, with a desperate quiet, “I wouldn't.”

She stood looking at him, and then she sank suddenly and straight down, as
if she were sinking through the floor. When he lifted her, he saw that she
was in a dead faint, and while the swoon lasted would be out of her misery.
The sight of this had wrung him so that he had a kind of relief in looking
at her lifeless face; and he was slow in laying her down again, like one
that fears to wake a sleeping child. Then he went to the foot of the
stairs, and softly called to his wife: “Miranda! Miranda!”




IX.


Kinney came into town the next morning bright and early, as he phrased it;
but he did not stop at the hotel for Bartley till nine o'clock. “Thought
I'd give you time for breakfast,” he exclaimed, “and so I didn't hurry up
any about gettin' in my supplies.”

It was a beautiful morning, so blindingly sunny that Bartley winked as they
drove up through the glistening street, and was glad to dip into the gloom
of the first woods; it was not cold; the snow felt the warmth, and packed
moistly under their runners. The air was perfectly still; at a distance on
the mountain-sides it sparkled as if full of diamond dust. Far overhead
some crows called.

“The sun's getting high,” said Bartley, with the light sigh of one to whom
the thought of spring brings no hope.

“Well, I shouldn't begin to plough for corn just yet,” replied Kinney.
“It's curious,” he went on, “to see how anxious we are to have a thing
over, it don't much matter what it is, whether it's summer or winter. I
suppose we'd feel different if we wa'n't sure there was going to be another
of 'em. I guess that's one reason why the Lord concluded not to keep us
clearly posted on the question of another life. If it wa'n't for the
uncertainty of the thing, there are a lot of fellows like you that
wouldn't stand it here a minute. Why, if we had a dead sure thing of
over-the-river,--good climate, plenty to eat and wear, and not much to
do,--I don't believe any of us would keep Darling Minnie waiting,--well,
a _great_ while. But you see, the thing's all on paper, and that makes us
cautious, and willing to hang on here awhile longer. Looks splendid on the
map: streets regularly laid out; public squares; band-stands; churches;
solid blocks of houses, with all the modern improvements; but you can't
tell whether there's any town there till you're on the ground; and then, if
you don't like it, there's no way of gettin' back to the States.” He turned
round upon Bartley and opened his mouth wide, to imply that this was
pleasantry.

“Do you throw your philosophy in, all under the same price, Kinney?” asked
the young fellow.

“Well, yes; I never charge anything over,” said Kinney. “You see, I have
a good deal of time to think when I'm around by myself all day, and the
philosophy don't cost me anything, and the fellows like it. Roughing it the
way they do, they can stand 'most anything. Hey?” He now not only opened
his mouth upon Bartley, but thrust him in the side with his elbow, and then
laughed noisily.

Kinney was the cook. He had been over pretty nearly the whole uninhabitable
globe, starting as a gaunt and awkward boy from the Maine woods, and
keeping until he came back to them in late middle-life the same gross and
ridiculous optimism. He had been at sea, and shipwrecked on several islands
in the Pacific; he had passed a rainy season at Panama, and a yellow-fever
season at Vera Cruz, and had been carried far into the interior of Peru by
a tidal wave during an earthquake season; he was in the Border Ruffian War
of Kansas, and he clung to California till prosperity deserted her after
the completion of the Pacific road. Wherever he went, he carried or found
adversity; but, with a heart fed on the metaphysics of Horace Greeley, and
buoyed up by a few wildly interpreted maxims of Emerson, he had always
believed in other men, and their fitness for the terrestrial millennium,
which was never more than ten days or ten miles off. It is not necessary to
say that he had continued as poor as he began, and that he was never able
to contribute to those railroads, mills, elevators, towns, and cities which
were sure to be built, sir, sure to be built, wherever he went. When he
came home at last to the woods, some hundreds of miles north of Equity, he
found that some one had realized his early dream of a summer hotel on the
shore of the beautiful lake there; and he unenviously settled down to
admire the landlord's thrift, and to act as guide and cook for parties of
young ladies and gentlemen who started from the hotel to camp in the woods.
This brought 

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