A Christmas Accident and Other Stories Part 2

"You see, I'm all she's got," she said.

"I ain't goin' to take you away from her, unless you want to go," he replied, without looking at her.

"She thinks I'll be happier if I don't--if I don't marry."

"Happier!"--he paused in scorn--"and she badgerin' you all the time if you take a walk with me, and watchin' us as if we were thieves! You ain't happy now, are you?"

"No." Mellony's eyes filled, and a sigh caught and became almost a sob.

"Well, I wish she'd give me a try at makin' you happy, that's all." His would-be sulkiness softened into a tender sense of injury. Mellony twisted her hands together, and looked over beyond the vessels to the long, narrow neck of land with its cl.u.s.tering houses, beyond which again, unseen, were booming the waves of the Atlantic.

"Oh, if I only knew what to do!" she exclaimed,--"if I only knew what to do!"

"I'll tell you what to do, Mellony," he began.

"There's ma, now," she interrupted.

Ira turned quickly and looked over his shoulder. Across the uneven ground, straight towards them, came the figure of Mrs. Pember. The tenseness of her expression had further yielded to resolution, which had in turn taken on a stolidity which declared itself una.s.sailable. No one of the three spoke as she seated herself on a bit of timber near them, and, folding her hands, waited with the immobility and the apparent impartiality of Fate itself. At last Mellony spoke, for of the three she was the most acutely sensitive to the situation, and the least capable of enduring it silently.

"Which way did you come, ma?" she asked.

"I come down Rosaly's Lane," Mrs. Pember answered. "I met Cap'n Phippeny, and he told me you was down here."

"I'm obligated to Cap'n Phippeny," observed Ira, bitterly.

"I dono as he's partickler to have you," remarked Mrs. Pember, imperturbably.

There was another silence. Mrs. Pember's voice had a marked sweetness when she spoke to her daughter, which it lost entirely when she addressed her daughter's companion, but always it was penetrated by the timbre of a certain inflexibility.

The shadows grew deeper on the water, the glow-worms of lanterns glimmered more sharply, and the softness of the night grew more palpable.

"I guess I may as well go back, ma," said Mellony, rising.

"I was wonderin' when you cal'lated on going," remarked her mother, as she rose too, more slowly and stiffly, and straightened her decent black bonnet.

"I suppose you was afraid Mellony wouldn't get back safe without you came after her," broke out Ira.

"I guess I can look after Mellony better than anybody else can, and I count on doing it, and doing it right along," she replied.

"Come, ma," said Mellony, impatiently; but she waited a moment and let her mother pa.s.s her, while she looked back at Ira, who stood, angry and helpless, kicking at the rusted timbers.

"Are you coming, too, Ira?" she asked in a low voice.

"No," he exclaimed, "I ain't coming! I don't want to go along back with your mother and you, as if we weren't old enough to be out by ourselves.

I might as well be handcuffed, and so might you! If you'll come round with me the way we came, and let her go the way she came, I'll go with you fast enough."

Mellony's eyes grew wet again, as she looked from him to her mother, and again at him. Mrs. Pember had paused, also, and stood a little in advance of them. Her stolidity showed no anxiety; she was too sure of the result.

"No,"--Mellony's lips framed the words with an accustomed but grievous patience,--"I can't to-night, Ira; I must go with ma."

"It's to-night that'll be the last chance there'll be, maybe," he muttered, as he flung himself off in the other direction.

The two women walked together up the rough ascent, and turned into Rosaly's Lane. Mellony walked wearily, her eyes down, the red feather, in its uncurled, unlovely a.s.sertiveness, looking more like the oriflamme of a forlorn hope than ever. But Mrs. Pember held herself erect, and as if she were obliged carefully to repress what might have been the signs of an ill-judged triumph.

Ira prolonged his walk beyond the limits of the little gray town, goaded by the irritating p.r.i.c.ks of resentment. He would bear it no longer, so he told himself. Mellony could take him or leave him. He would be a laughing-stock not another week, not another day. If Mellony would not a.s.sert herself against her tyrannical old mother, he would go away and leave her! And then he paused, as he had paused so often in the flood of his anger, faced by the realization that this was just what Mrs. Pember wanted, just what would satisfy her, what she had been waiting for,--that he should go away and leave Mellony alone. It was an exasperating dilemma, his abdication and her triumph, or his uncertainty and her anxiety.

Mellony and her mother pa.s.sed Captain Phippeny and Captain Smart, who still stood talking in the summer evening, the fence continuing to supply all the support their stalwart frames needed in this their hour of ease. Captain Smart nudged Captain Phippeny as the two figures turned the corner of Rosaly's Lane.

"So you found 'em, Mis' Pember," remarked Captain Phippeny. He spoke to the mother, but he looked, not without sympathy at the daughter.

"Yes, I found 'em."

"You reckoned on fetchin' only one of 'em home, I take it," said Captain Smart.

"I ain't responsible but for one of 'em," replied Mrs. Pember with some grimness, but with her eyes averted from Mellony's crimsoning face.

"Come, ma," said Mellony again, and they pa.s.sed on.

"Mis' Pember is likely enough lookin' woman herself," observed Captain Smart; "it's kind of cur'ous she should be so set agen marryin,' just _as_ marryin'."

"'Tis so," a.s.sented Captain Phippeny, thoughtfully, looking after the two women.

Without speaking, Mellony and her mother entered the little house where they lived, and the young girl sank down in the stiff, high-backed rocker, with its thin calico-covered cushion tied with red braid, that stood by the window. Outside, the summer night buzzed and hummed, and breathed sweet odors. Mrs. Pember moved about the room, slightly altering its arrangements, now and then looking at her daughter half furtively, as if waiting for her to speak; but Mellony's head was not turned from the open window, and she was utterly silent. At last this immobility had a sympathetic effect upon the mother, and she seated herself not far from the girl, her hands, with their prominent knuckles and shrunken flesh, folded in unaccustomed idleness, and waited, while in the room dusk grew to dark. To Mellony the hour was filled with suggestions that emphasized and defined her misery. In her not turbulent or pa.s.sionate nature, the acme of its capacity for emotional suffering had been reached. Hitherto this suffering had been of the perplexed, patient, submissive kind; to-night, the beauty of the softly descending gloom, the gentle freedom of the placid harbor, the revolt of her usually yielding lover, deepened it into something more acute.

"Mellony," said her mother, with a touch of that timidity which appeared only in her speech with her daughter, "did you count on going over to the Neck to-morrow, as you promised?"

"I'll never count on doing anything again," said Mellony, in a voice she tried to make cold and even, but which vibrated notwithstanding,--"never, so long as I live. I'll never think, or plan, or--or speak, if I can help it--of what I mean to do. I'll never do anything but just work and shut my eyes and--and live, if I've got to!" Her voice broke, and she turned her head away from the open window and looked straight before her into the shadowed room. Her mother moved uneasily, and her knotted hands grasped the arms of the stiff chair in which she sat.

"Mellony," she said again, "you've no call to talk so."

"I've no call to talk at all. I've no place anywhere. I'm not anybody. I haven't any life of my own." The keen brutality of the thoughtlessness of youth, and its ignoring of all claims but those of its own happiness, came oddly from the lips of submissive Mellony. Mrs. Pember quivered under it.

"You know you're my girl, Mellony," she answered gently. "You're all I've got."

"Yes," the other answered indifferently, "that's all I am,--Mellony Pember, Mrs. Pember's girl,--just that."

"Ain't that enough? Ain't that something to be,--all I plan for and work for? Ain't that enough for a girl to be?"

Mellony turned her eyes from emptiness, and fixed them upon her mother's face, dimly outlined in the vagueness.

"Is that all you've been," she asked, "just somebody's daughter?"

It was as if a heavy weight fell from her lips and settled upon her mother's heart. There was a silence. Mellony's eyes, though she could not see them, seemed to Mrs. Pember to demand an answer in an imperative fashion unlike their usual mildness.

"It's because I've been,--it's because I'd save you from what I have been that I--do as I do. You know that," she said.

"I don't want to be saved," returned the other, quickly and sharply.

The older woman was faced by a situation she had never dreamed of,--a demand to be allowed to suffer! The guardian had not expected this from her carefully shielded charge.