Books: Life at High Tide
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"Well, you can't say this ain't respectable."
"No; I can't say it ain't respectable; but I can say it's the
foolishest thing I ever heard of. An' wrong too; 'cause anything
foolish is wrong."
"Anything cruel is wrong," Lizzie said, stubbornly.
"Well, you was crazy to think of havin' him visit you. But it don't
follow, 'cause he can't be visitin' you, that you got to go
_marry_ him."
"I got to do something," Lizzie said, desperately; "I'd never have a
minute's peace if he had to go to the Farm."
"He'd be more comfortable there."
"His stomach might be," Lizzie admitted.
"Well, then!" Mrs. Butterfield declared, triumphantly. "Now you just
let him go, Lizzie. You just be sensible."
"I'm goin' to marry him. I'm goin' to take him round to Rev. Niles day
after to-morrow; he said he'd marry us."
Mrs. Butterfield gasped. "Well, if Rev. Niles does that!--There! You
know he was a 'Piscopal; they'll do anything. What did he say when you
told him?"
"Oh, nothin' much; I asked him about him visitin' me, an' he said it
wa'n't just customary. Said it was better to get married. Said we must
avoid the appearance of evil."
"Well, I ain't sayin' he ain't right; but--" Then, in despair, she
turned to ridicule: "Folks'll say you're marryin' him 'cause you
expect he'll make money on his ghost-machine!"
"Well, you tell 'em I don't believe in ghosts. That'll settle
_that_."
"If folks knew you didn't believe in any hereafter, they'd say you was
a wicked woman!" cried Mrs. Butterfield, angrily;--"an' that fool
machine--"
"I never said I didn't believe in a hereafter. Course his machine
ain't sense. That's what makes it so pitiful."
"He'll never finish it."
"Course he won't. That's why I'm takin' him."
"Well, my _sakes!_" said Mrs. Butterfield, helplessly. And then,
angrily again, "Course if you set out to go your own way, I suppose
you don't expect no help from them as thinks you are all wrong?"
"I do not," Lizzie said, steadily; and then a spark glinted in her
leaf-brown eye: "Folks that have means, and yet would let that poor
unfortunate be taken to the Farm--I wouldn't expect no help from 'em."
"Well, Mis' Graham, you can't say I ain't warned you."
"No, Mis' Butterfield, I can't," Lizzie responded; and the two old
friends parted stiffly.
The word that Lizzie Graham--"poor as Job's turkey!"--was going to
marry Nathaniel May spread like grass fire through Jonesville. Mrs.
Butterfield preserved a cold silence, for her distress was great. To
hear people snicker and say that Lizzie Graham must be "dyin' anxious
to get married"; that she must be "lottin' considerable on a good
ghost-market"; that she "took a new way o' gettin' a hired man without
payin' no wages,"--these things stung her sore heart into actual anger
at the friend she loved. But she did not show it.
"Mis' Graham probably knows her own business," she said, stiffly, to
any one who spoke to her of the matter. Even to her own husband she
was non-committal. Josh sat out by the kitchen door, tilting back
against the gray-shingled side of the house, his hands in his pockets,
his feet tucked under him on the rung of his chair. He was in his
shirt-sleeves, and he had unbuttoned his baggy old waistcoat, for it
was a hot night. Mrs. Butterfield was on the kitchen door-step. They
could look across a patch of grass at the great barn, connected with
the little house by a shed. Its doors were still open, and Josh could
see the hay, put in that afternoon. The rick in the yard stood like a
skeleton against the fading yellow of the sky; some fowls were
roosting comfortably on the tongue. It was very peaceful; but Mrs.
Butterfield's face was puckered with anxiety. "Yet I don't know as I
can do anything about it," she said, her foot tapping the stone step
nervously; "she ain't got no call to be so foolish."
"Well," Josh said, removing his pipe from his lips and spitting
thoughtfully, "seems Mis' Graham's bound to get some kind of a
husband!" Then he chuckled, and thrust his pipe back under his long,
shaven upper lip.
"Now look a-here, Josh Butterfield; you don't want to be talkin' that
way," his wife said, bitterly. "Bad enough to have folks that don't
know no better pokin' fun at her; but I ain't a-goin' to have you do
it."
"Well, I was only just sayin'--"
"Well, don't you say it; that's all."
Josh poked a gnarled thumb down into the bowl of his pipe,
reflectively. "You ain't got a match about you, have you, Emmy?" he
said, coaxingly.
Mrs. Butterfield rose and went into the kitchen to get the match; when
she handed it to him, she said, sighing, "I'm just 'most sick over
it."
"You do seem consid'able shuck up," Josh said, kindly.
"Well,--I know Lizzie's just doin' it out of pure goodness; but she'll
'most starve."
"I don't see myself how she's calculatin' to run things," Josh
ruminated; "course Jim's pension wa'n't much, but it was somethin'.
And without it--"
"Without it?--land! Is the government goin' to stop pensions? There! I
never did like the President!"
"No; the government ain't goin' to stop it. Lizzie Graham's goin' to
stop it."
"What on airth you talkin' about?"
"Why, Emmy woman, don't ye know the United States government ain't no
such fool as to go on payin' a woman for havin' a dead husband when
she catches holt of a livin' one? Don't you know that?"
"Josh Butterfield!--you don't mean--"
"Why, that's true. Didn't you know that? Well, well! Why, a smart
widow woman could get consid'able of a income by sendin' husbands to
wars, if it wa'n't for that. Well, well; to think you didn't know
that! Wonder if Lizzie does?"
"She don't!" Mrs. Butterfield said, excitedly; "course she don't.
She's calculatin' on havin' that pension same as ever. Why, she
_can't_ marry Nat. Goodness! I guess I'll just step down and tell
her. Lucky you told me to-night; to-morrow it would 'a' been too late!"
IV
Lizzie Graham was sitting in the dark on her door-step; a cat had
curled up comfortably in her lap; her elm was faintly murmurous with a
constant soft rustling and whispering of the lace of leaves around its
great boughs. Now and then a tree-toad spoke, or from the pasture pond
behind the house came the metallic twang of a bullfrog. But nothing
else broke the deep stillness of the summer night. Lizzie's elbow was
on her knee, her chin in her hand; she was listening to the peace, and
thinking--not anxiously, but seriously. After all, it was a great
undertaking: Nathaniel wasn't "hearty," perhaps,--but when you don't
average four eggs a day (for in November and December the hens do act
like they are possessed!); when sometimes your cow will be dry; when
your neighbor is mad and won't remember the potato-barrel--the outlook
for one is not simple; for two it is sobering.
"But I can do it," Lizzie said to herself, and set her lips hard
together.
The gate clicked shut, and Mrs. Butterfield came in, running almost.
"Look here, Lizzie Graham,--oh my! wait till I get my breath;--_Lizzie,
you can't do it._ Because--" And then, panting, she explained.
"So, you see, you just can't," she repeated.
Lizzie said something under her breath, and stared with blank
bewilderment at her informant.
"Maybe Josh don't know?"
"Maybe he does know," retorted Mrs. Butterfield. "Goodness! makes me
tremble to think if he hadn't told me to-night! Supposin' he hadn't
let on about it till this time to-morrow?"
Lizzie put her hands over her face with an exclamation of dismay.
"Oh, well, there!" Mrs. Butterfield said, comfortably; "I don't
believe Nat'll mind after he's been at the Farm a bit. Honest, I
don't, Lizzie. How comes it you didn't know yourself?"
"I'm sure I don't know; it ain't on my certificate, anyhow. Maybe it's
on the voucher; but I ain't read that since I first went to sign it. I
just go every three months and draw my money, and think no more about
it. Maybe--if they knew at Washington--"
"Sho! they couldn't make a difference for one; and it's just what Josh
says--they ain't goin' to pay you for havin' a dead husband if you got
a live one. Well, it wouldn't be sense, Lizzie."
Lizzie shook her head. "Wait till I look at my paper--"
Mrs. Butterfield followed her into the house, and waited while she
lighted a lamp and lifted a blue china vase off the shelf above the
stove. "I keep it in here," Lizzie said, shaking the paper out. Then,
unfolding it on the kitchen table, the two women, the lamplight
shining upon their excited faces, read the certificate together,
aloud, with agitated voices:
"BUREAU OF PENSIONS
"It is hereby certified that in conformity with the laws of the
United States--" and on through to the end.
"It don't say a word about not marryin' again," Lizzie declared.
"Well, all the same, it's the law. Josh knows."
Lizzie blew out the lamp, and they went back to the door-step. Mrs.
Butterfield's hard feelings were all gone; her heart warmed to
Nathaniel; warmed even to the mangy dog that limped out from the barn
and curled up on Lizzie's skirt. But when she went away, "comfortable
in her mind," as she told her husband, Lizzie Graham still sat in the
dark under her elm, trying to get her wits together.
"I know Josh is right," she told herself; "he's a careful talker. I
can't do it!" But she winced, and drew in her breath; poor Nathaniel!
She had seen him that afternoon, and had told him, this time with no
embarrassment (for he was as simple as a child about it), that she had
arranged with Mr. Niles to marry them. "An' you fetch your bag along,
Nathaniel, and we'll put the machine together, evenin's," she said.
"Yes, kind woman," he answered, joyously. "Oh, what a weight you have
taken from my soul!"
His half-blind eyes were luminous with belief. Lizzie had smiled, and
shaken her head slightly, looking at the battered rubbish in the
bag--the little, tarnished mirrors, one of them cracked; the two small
lenses, scratched and dim; the handful of rusty cogs and wheels. With
what passion he had dreamed that he would see that which it hath not
entered into the heart of man to conceive! He began to talk, eagerly,
of his invention; but reasonably, it seemed to Lizzie. Indeed, except
for the idea itself, there was nothing that betrayed the unbalanced
mind. His gratitude, too, was sane enough; he had been planning how he
could he useful to her, how he was to do this or that sort of work for
her--at least until his eyes gave out, he said, cheerfully. "But by
that time, kind woman, my invention will be perfected, and you shall
have no need to consider ways and means."
Lizzie, smiling, had left him to his joy, and gone back to sit under
her elm in the twilight, and think soberly of the economies which a
husband--such a husband--would necessitate.
And then Mrs. Butterfield had come panting up to the gate; and now--
"I don't see as I can tell him!" she thought, desperately. To go and
say to Nathaniel, all eager and happy and full of hope as he was, "You
must go to the Farm,"--would be like striking in the face some child
that is holding out its arms to you. Lizzie twisted her hands
together. "I just can't!" But, of course, she would have to. That was
all there was to it. If she married him, why, there would be two to go
to the Farm instead of one. Oh, why wouldn't they give her her pension
if she married again! Her eyes smarted with tears; Nathaniel's pain
seemed to her unendurable.
But all the same, the next morning, heavily, she set out to tell him.
At Dyer's, Jonesville had gathered to see the sight; and as she came
up to the porch, there were nudgings and whisperings, and Hiram Wells,
bolder than the rest, said, "Well, Mis' Graham, this is a fine day for
a weddin'--"
Lizzie Graham, without turning her head, said, coldly, "There ain't
goin' to be no weddin'." Then she went on upstairs to Nathaniel's
room.
The idlers on the porch looked at each other and guffawed. "I knowed
Sam was foolin' us," somebody said.
But Sam defended himself. "I tell you I wa'n't foolin'. You ask Rev.
Niles; she told me only yesterday he said he'd tie the knot. I ain't
foolin'. She's changed her mind, that's all."
"Lookin' for a handsomer man," Hiram suggested;--"chance for yourself,
Sam!"
Lizzie, hot-cheeked, heard the laughter, and went on up-stairs.
Nathaniel was sitting on the edge of his bed, his hat on, his poor
coat buttoned to his chin; he was holding his precious bag, gripped in
two nervous hands, on his knee. When he heard her step, he drew a deep
breath.
"Oh, kind woman!" he said; "I'd begun to fear you were not coming."
"I am--a little late," Lizzie said. "I--I was detained."
"It does not matter," he said, cheerfully; "I have had much food for
thought while awaiting you. I have been thinking that this wonderful
invention will be really your gift to humanity, not mine. Had I gone
to the Farm, it would never have been. Now--!" His voice broke for joy.
"Oh, well, I don't know 'bout that," Lizzie said, nervously; "I guess
you could 'a' done it anywheres."
"No, no; it would have been impossible. And think, Lizzie Graham, what
it will mean to the sorrowful world! See," he explained, solemnly; "we
poor creatures have not been able to conceive that of which we have
had no experience; the unborn child cannot know the meaning of life.
If the babe in the womb questioned, What is birth? what is living?
could even its own mother tell it? Nay! So we, questioning: 'God, what
is death? what is immortality?' Not even God can tell us. The unborn
soul, carried in the womb of Time, has waited death to know the things
of Eternity, just as the unborn babe waits birth to know the things of
life. But now, _now_, is coming to the world the gift of sight!"
There was a pause; Lizzie Graham swallowed once, and set her lips;
then she said, "I am afraid, Nathaniel, that I--I can't marry
you--because--"
"Marry me?" he said, with a confused look.
"We were to get married to-day, you know, Nathaniel?"
"Oh yes," he said.
"Yes; but--but I can't, Nathaniel."
"Never mind," he said. "Shall we go now, kind woman?" He rose,
smiling, and stretched out one groping hand. Involuntarily she took
it; then stood still, and tried to speak. He turned patiently towards
her. "Must we wait longer?" he asked, gently.
"Oh, Nathaniel, I--I don't know what to say, but--"
A startled look came into his face. "Is anything the matter?"
"_Oh!_" Lizzie said. "It just breaks my heart!"
His face turned suddenly gray; he sat down, trembling; the contents of
his bag rattled, and something snapped--perhaps another mirror broke.
He put one hand up to his head.
"It's that pension," Lizzie said, brokenly; "if I get married, I lose
it. An' we wouldn't have a cent to live on. You--you see how it is,
Nathaniel?"
He began to whisper to himself, not listening to her. There was a long
pause, broken by his strange whispering.
Lizzie Graham looked at him, and turned her eyes away, wincing with
pain;--the tears were rolling slowly down his cheeks. She put her
hand on his shoulder in a passion of pity; then, suddenly, fiercely,
she gathered the poor bowed head against her soft breast. "I don't
care! My name ain't worth as much as that! Let 'em talk. Nathaniel,
are you willin' _not_ to get married?"
But she had to speak twice before he heard her. Then he said, looking
up at her out of his despair: "What? What did you say?"
"Nathaniel," she explained, kneeling beside him and holding his hand
against her bosom, "if you were to come and live with me, and we were
not married--"
But he was not listening. A door opened down-stairs, and there was a
noisy burst of laughter; then it closed, and the hot room was still.
"Emily Butterfield will stand my friend," she said, her lips
tightening. Then, gently: "We won't get married; Nathaniel. You will
just come and visit me until--until the machine is finished."
"You will let me come?" he said, with a gasp; "you will let me finish
my invention?" He got up, trembling, clutching his bag, and holding
out one hand to clasp hers.
Lizzie Graham took it, and stood stock-still for one hard moment....
Then she led him down-stairs, out upon the porch, past the loafers
gaping and nudging each other.
"Goin' to be married, after all, Mis' Graham?" some one said.
And Lizzie Graham turned and faced them. "No," she said, calmly.
Then they went out into the sunshine together.
"AND ANGELS CAME--"
BY ANNE O'HAGAN
The full effulgence of cloudless midsummer enveloped the place. The
lawns, bright and soft, sloped for half a mile to the sweetbrier
hedge. Among them wound the drive, now and again crossing the stone
bridges of the small, curving lake which gave the estate its affected
name--Lakeholm. To the left of the house a coppice of bronze beeches
shone with dark lustre; clumps of rhododendrons enlivened the green
with splashes of color. Lombardy poplars, with their gibbetlike
erectness, bordered the roads and intersected them with mathematical
shadows; here and there rose a feathery elm or a maple of
wide-branched beauty. To the right, a shallow fall of terraces led to
the Italian garden, Mrs. Dinsmore's chief pride, now a glory of
matched and patterned color and a dazzle of spray from marble basins.
Beyond all the careful, exotic beauty of the place, the wide valley
dipped away, alternate meadow and grove, until it met the silvery
shiver of willows marking the course of the river. Beyond that again,
the hills, solemn in unbroken green, rose to cloud-touched heights.
Before the house Brockton's new automobile waited. He himself leaned
against a stone pillar of the piazza, facing his hostess, who sat on
the edge of a chair in the tense attitude of protest against delay.
She had scarcely recovered from her waking crossness yet, and found
herself more irritated than amused at the eccentricities of her guest.
She was wondering with unusual asperity why a man with such
lack-lustre blue eyes dared to wear a tie of such brilliant contrast.
He interrupted her musings.
"Miss Harned seems mighty stand-offish these days."
"Millicent is a little difficult," admitted Millicent's cousin.
"What do you suppose it is? She seemed all smooth enough in New York
last winter, and even in the spring after--But now--" He paused again
without finishing his sentence. "And I had counted on your influence
to make her more approachable."
"Oh, Millicent is having a struggle with her better nature, that is
all," laughed Mrs. Dinsmore. "It's hard living with her during the
process, but she's adorable once her noble impulses have been
vanquished and she's comfortably like the rest of the world again."
"I don't know what you mean," said the downright Mr. Brockton.
"No?" Mrs. Dinsmore was sure that the impertinence of her monosyllable
would be lost upon her elderly protege. "I'll make it clear to you, if
I can. Millicent, you know, has nothing--"
"With that figure and that face?" interrupted Brockton, with gallant
enthusiasm.
"I was speaking in your terms, Mr. Brockton," said the lady, with
suave hauteur. "Of course all of us count my cousin's charm and
accomplishments, though we do not inventory them as possessions far
above rubies. But in the valuation of the 'change she has nothing. Oh,
she may manage to extract five or six hundred a year from some
investments of my uncle, and she has the old Harned place in New
Hampshire. That might bring in as much as seven hundred dollars if the
abandoned farm-fever were still on--"
"By ginger!" boasted Brockton, whose expletives lacked _ton_,
"it's more than I had when I started."
"So I remember your saying before. But I fear that my cousin is not a
financial genius. What I meant by her struggles with her better nature
is that she sometimes tries to thwart us when we want to make things
easy for her. Her better nature had a fearful tussle with her common
sense about five years ago, when Aunt Jessie asked her to go abroad;
and it nearly overcame her frivolity and her vanity last winter when I
met her at the dock and insisted upon having her spend the winter with
me, and our second cousin, Alicia Broome, offered to be responsible
for her wardrobe. But, thanks be," she added, laughing, "the world,
the flesh, and the devil won. So cheer up, Mr. Brockton. It may happen
again."
"Oh, I'm not hopeless by any manner of means. I want her pretty badly,
and I'm used to getting what I want. I told her, out and out, when she
turned me down, back there in May, that if she were a young girl I
wouldn't urge her any more, after what she said about her feelings.
But she wasn't, and I thought she could look at a proposition from a
plain business point of view."
"You told her that? You mentioned to her that she was no longer a
young girl?" Mrs. Dinsmore's laugh rippled delightedly on the air.
"I did. Oh, I'm used to bargaining," he rejoined, proudly. "I always
could make the other fellow see what he'd lose by refusing my offers.
And I got her to take the matter under consideration. I heard
somewhere that she was interested in some philanthropy. Well, money
comes in handy in charity." He grinned broadly at Mrs. Dinsmore.
At that moment her protege was extremely distasteful to the lady. But
she was a philosopher where marriage was concerned, and she
whole-heartedly hoped that her cousin Millicent would not dally too
long with her opportunity and allow the matrimonial prize to escape.
She was sincerely fond of Millicent, and desired for her the best
things in the world. She sometimes said so with touching earnestness.
"She told me"--Mr. Brockton stumbled slightly--"that there wasn't any
one else."
"There isn't. She has her train--she's enormously admired--but there
is no one in whom she is sentimentally interested. And Aunt Jessie
says it was so all the time they were in Europe."
"Wasn't there ever?" he demanded.
"My dear Mr. Brockton, Millicent is twenty-nine, as you reminded her,
and she's a normal woman! Of course there have been some ones--her
music-master at fourteen, I dare say, and an actor at sixteen, and a
young curate at eighteen--oh, of course I'm jesting. But I suppose she
was somewhat like other girls. She was engaged at nineteen--and he
must have been quite twenty-three! No, I should dismiss all jealousy
of her past if I were you."
"Engaged?"
Mrs. Dinsmore wondered suddenly if she had been wise, after all, to
admit that widely known fact.
"Oh yes, a bread-and-butter engagement. My uncle was notoriously
inadequate in all practical affairs; he was a scholar and something of
a recluse and the most charming gentleman I ever saw, but a child in
worldly matters,--a child! It ended, you see."
"How did it end?"
"Oh, poor Will Hayter died."
"Dead long?"
"Five or six years."
"Well, I'm not afraid of dead men." Brockton laughed in relief. Mrs.
Dinsmore did not point out to him from her more subtle knowledge that
constancy to the unchanging dead is sometimes easier than constancy to
the variable living. She was only too glad to have the inevitable
disclosure made lightly and the truth dismissed without frightening
off the desirable suitor. "And certainly Miss Harned don't look as if,
as if--"
"Any irremediable grief were gnawing at her damask cheeks?--"
"What's this about damask cheeks?" The question came along with a
swirl of skirts from the great hall. "Cousin Anna, don't hate me for
keeping you so long. Mr. Brockton, I owe you a thousand apologies."
Some of those who admitted Millicent Harned's charm declared that it
lay in her voice. Always there sounded through its music the note of
eagerness, with eagerness's underlying hint of pathos. Her tones were
like her face, her motions, herself. Impulse, merriment, yearning, and
the shadow of melancholy dwelt in her eyes and shaped her lips to
sensitive curves. She was tall, and her motions were of a spontaneous
grace, swifter and more changeful than most women's.
"You have been a disgracefully long time, Millicent," her cousin
answered her apology. "But"--she looked at the beautifully gowned
figure, the lovely, imaginative face, thereby, like a good showman,
calling Mr. Brockton's attention to them--"we'll forgive you."
"Oh, it wasn't primping that kept me. I stopped for a few minutes at
the schoolroom door. Poor Lena! She seemed to be feeling the
responsibilities of erudition terribly this morning. She showed me her
botany slides with such an air! Do you know what genus has the
_rostellum_, Anna?"
"No, I don't," said Anna, shortly. "And Lena's growing up a perfect
young prig. I'll have to change governesses. Heaven knows what I'll
draw next time! The last one had charm, but no learning, and mighty
little intelligence. This one has no manner at all, and is of
encyclopaedic information. A daughter's a terrible responsibility."
"Isn't she?" Millicent's tone was one of affectionate raillery as she
gathered her draperies about her in the automobile. The notion of
Anna's responsibilities amused her; Anna was so untouched by them--as
smooth-skinned, as slim and vivacious, as the forty-year-old mother of
two boys entering college, a girl in the schoolroom and another in the
nursery, as she had been as a _debutante_.
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