A Modern Instance Part 44

"Then they are so many h.e.l.ls," cried Halleck, "where self-respect perishes with resentment, and the husband and wife are enslaved to each other. They ought to be broken up!"

"I don't think so," said Atherton, soberly. "The sort of men and women that marriage enslaves would be vastly more wretched and mischievous if they were set free. I believe that the h.e.l.l people make for themselves isn't at all a bad place for them. It's the best place for them."

"Oh, I know your doctrine," said Halleck, rising. "It's horrible! How a man with any kindness in his heart can harbor such a cold-blooded philosophy _I_ don't understand. I wish you joy of it. Good night," he added, gloomily, taking his hat from the table. "It serves me right for coming to you with a matter that I ought to have been man enough to keep to myself."

Atherton followed him toward the door. "It won't do you any harm to consider your perplexity in the light of my philosophy. An unhappy marriage isn't the only h.e.l.l, nor the worst."

Halleck turned. "What could be a worse h.e.l.l than marriage without love?" he demanded, fiercely.

"Love without marriage," said Atherton.

Halleck looked sharply at his friend. Then he shrugged his shoulders as he turned again and swung out of the door. "You're too esoteric for me. It's quite time I was gone."

The way through Clover Street was not the shortest way home; but he climbed the hill and pa.s.sed the little house. He wished to rehabilitate in its pathetic beauty the image which his friend's conjectures had jarred, distorted, insulted; and he lingered for a moment before the door where this vision had claimed his pity for anguish that no after serenity could repudiate. The silence in which the house was wrapped was like another fold of the mystery which involved him. The night wind rose in a sudden gust, and made the neighboring lamp flare, and his shadow wavered across the pavement like the figure of a drunken man. This, and not that other, was the image which he saw.

XXVII.

"Of course," said Marcia, when she and Bartley recurred to the subject of her visit to Equity, "I have always felt as if I should like to have you with me, so as to keep people from talking, and show that it's all right between you and father. But if you don't wish to go, I can't ask it."

"I understand what you mean, and I should like to gratify you," said Bartley. "Not that I care a rap what all the people in Equity think. I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll go down there with you and hang round a day or two; and then I'll come after you, when your time's up, and stay a day or two there. I _couldn't_ stand three weeks in Equity."

In the end, he behaved very handsomely. He dressed Flavia out to kill, as he said, in lace hoods and embroidered long-clothes, for which he tossed over half the ready-made stock of the great dry-goods stores; and he made Marcia get herself a new suit throughout, with a bonnet to match, which she thought she could not afford, but he said he should manage it somehow.

In Equity he spared no pains to deepen the impression of his success in Boston, and he was affable with everybody. He hailed his friends across the street, waving his hand to them, and shouting out a jolly greeting.

He visited the hotel office and the stores to meet the loungers there; he stepped into the printing-office, and congratulated Henry Bird on having stopped the Free Press and devoted himself to job-work. He said, "h.e.l.lo, Marilla! h.e.l.lo, Hannah!" and he stood a good while beside the latter at her case, joking and laughing. He had no resentments. He stopped old Morrison on the street and shook hands with him. "Well, Mr. Morrison, do you find it as easy to get Hannah's wages advanced nowadays as you used to?"

As for his relations with Squire g.a.y.l.o.r.d, he flattened public conjecture out like a pancake, as he told Marcia, by making the old gentleman walk arm-and-arm with him the whole length of the village street the morning after his arrival. "And I never saw your honored father look as if he enjoyed a thing less," added Bartley. "Well, what's the use? He couldn't help himself." They had arrived on Friday evening, and, after spending Sat.u.r.day in this social way, Bartley magnanimously went with Marcia to church. He was in good spirits, and he shook hands, right and left, as he came out of church. In the afternoon he had up the best team from the hotel stable, and took Marcia the Long Drive, which they had taken the day of their engagement. He could not be contented without pushing the perambulator out after tea, and making Marcia walk beside it, to let people see them with the baby.

He went away the next morning on an early train, after a parting which he made very cheery, and a promise to come down again as soon as he could manage it. Marcia watched him drive off toward the station in the hotel barge, and then she went upstairs to their room, where she had been so long a young girl, and where now their child lay sleeping. The little one seemed the least part of all the change that had taken place. In this room she used to sit and think of him; she used to fly up thither when he came unexpectedly, and order her hair or change a ribbon of her dress, that she might please him better; at these windows she used to sit and watch, and long for his coming; from these she saw him go by that day when she thought she should see him no more, and took heart of her despair to risk the wild chance that made him hers. There was a deadly, unsympathetic stillness in the room which seemed to leave to her all the responsibility for what she had done.

The days began to go by in a sunny, still, midsummer monotony. She pushed the baby out in its carriage, and saw the summer boarders walking or driving through the streets; she returned the visits that the neighbors paid her; indoors she helped her mother about the housework. An image of her maiden life reinstated itself. At times it seemed almost as if she had dreamed her marriage. When she looked at her baby in these moods, she thought she was dreaming yet. A young wife suddenly parted for the first time from her husband, in whose intense possession she has lost her individual existence, and devolving upon her old separate personality, must have strong fancies, strange sensations. Marcia's marriage had been full of such shocks and storms as might well have left her dazed in their entire cessation.

"She seems to be pretty well satisfied here," said her father, one evening when she had gone upstairs with her sleeping baby in her arms.

"She seems to be pretty quiet," her mother noncommittally a.s.sented.

"M-yes," snarled the Squire, and he fell into a long revery, while Mrs.

g.a.y.l.o.r.d went on crocheting the baby a bib, and the smell of the petunia-bed under the window came in through the mosquito netting. "M-yes," he resumed, "I guess you're right. I guess it's only quiet. I guess she ain't any more likely to be satisfied than the rest of us."

"I don't see why she shouldn't be," said Mrs. g.a.y.l.o.r.d, resenting the compa.s.sion in the Squire's tone with that curious jealousy a wife feels for her husband's indulgence of their daughter. "She's had her way."

"She's had her way, poor girl,--yes. But I don't know as it satisfies people to have their way, always."

Doubtless Mrs. g.a.y.l.o.r.d saw that her husband wished to talk about Marcia, and must be helped to do so by a little perverseness. "I don't know but what most of folks would say 't she'd made out pretty well. I guess she's got a good provider."

"She didn't need any provider," said the Squire haughtily.

"No; but so long as she would have something, it's well enough that she should have a provider." Mrs. g.a.y.l.o.r.d felt that this was reasoning, and she smoothed out so much of the bib as she had crocheted across her knees with an air of self-content. "You can't have everything in a husband," she added, "and Marcia ought to know that, by this time."

"I've no doubt she knows it," said the Squire.

"Why, what makes you think she's disappointed any?" Mrs. g.a.y.l.o.r.d came plump to the question at last.

"Nothing she ever said," returned her husband promptly. "She'd die, first.

When I was up there I thought she talked about him too much to be feeling just right about him. It was Bartley this and Bartley that, the whole while. She was always wanting me to say that I thought she had done right to marry him. I _did_ sort of say it, at last,--to please her. But I kept thinking that, if she felt sure of it, she wouldn't want to talk it into me so. Now, she never mentions him at all, if she can help it. She writes to him every day, and she hears from him often enough,--postals, mostly; but she don't talk about Bartley, Bartley!" The Squire stretched his lips back from his teeth, and inhaled a long breath, as he rubbed his chin.

"You don't suppose anything's happened since you was up there," said Mrs.

g.a.y.l.o.r.d.

"Nothing but what's happened from the start. _He's_ happened. He keeps happening right along, I guess."

Mrs. g.a.y.l.o.r.d found herself upon the point of experiencing a painful emotion of sympathy, but she saved herself by saying: "Well, Mr. g.a.y.l.o.r.d, I don't know as you've got anybody but yourself to thank for it all. You got him here, in the first _place_." She took one of the kerosene lamps from the table, and went upstairs, leaving him to follow at his will.

Marcia sometimes went out to the Squire's office in the morning, carrying her baby with her, and propping her with law-books on a newspaper in the middle of the floor, while she dusted the shelves, or sat down for one of the desultory talks in the satisfactory silences which she had with her father.

He usually found her there when he came up from the post-office, with the morning mail in the top of his hat: the last evening's Events,--which Bartley had said must pa.s.s for a letter from him when he did not write,--and a letter or a postal card from him. She read these, and gave her lather any news or message that Bartley sent; and then she sat down at his table to answer them. But one morning, after she had been at home nearly a month, she received a letter for which she postponed Bartley's postal. "It's from Olive Halleck!" she said, with a glance at the handwriting on the envelope; and she tore it open, and ran it through.

"Yes, and they'll come here, any time I let them know. They've been at Niagara, and they've come down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, and they will be at North Conway the last of next week. Now, father, I want to do something for them!" she cried, feeling an American daughter's right to dispose of her father, and all his possessions, for the behoof of her friends at any time. "I want they should come to the house."

"Well, I guess there won't be any trouble about that, if you think they can put up with our way of living.' He smiled at her over his spectacles.

"Our way of living! Put up with it! I should hope as much! They're just the kind of people that will put up with anything, because they've had everything. And because they're all as sweet and good as they can be. You don't know them, father, you don't half know them! Now, just get right away,"--she pushed him out of the chair he had taken at the table,--"and let me write to Bartley this instant. He's got to come when they're here, and I'll invite them to come over at once, before they get settled at North Conway."

He gave his dry chuckle to see her so fired with pleasure, and he enjoyed the ardor with which she drove him up out of his chair, and dashed off her letters. This was her old way; he would have liked the prospect of the Hallecks coming, because it made his girl so happy, if for nothing else.

"Father, I will tell you about Ben Halleck," she said, pounding her letter to Olive with the thick of her hand to make the envelope stick. "You know that lameness of his?"

"Yes."

"Well, it came from his being thrown down by another boy when he was at school. He knew the boy that did it; and the boy must have known that Mr.

Halleck knew it, but he never said a word to show that he was sorry, or did anything to make up for it He's a man now, and lives there in Boston, and Ben Halleck often meets him. He says that if the man can stand it he can.

Don't you think that's grand? When I heard that, I made up my mind that I wanted Flavia to belong to Ben Halleck's church,--or the church he did belong to; he doesn't belong to any now!"

"He couldn't have got any damages for such a thing anyway," the Squire said.

Marcia paid no heed to this legal opinion of the case. She took off her father's hat to put the letters into it, and, replacing it on his head, "Now don't you forget them, father," she cried.

She gathered up her baby and hurried into the house, where she began her preparations for her guests.

The elder Miss Hallecks had announced with much love, through Olive, that they should not be able to come to Equity, and Ben was to bring Olive alone. Marcia decided that Ben should have the guest-chamber, and Olive should have her room; she and Bartley could take the little room in the L while their guests remained.

But when the Hallecks came, it appeared that Ben had engaged quarters for himself at the hotel, and no expostulation would prevail with him to come to Squire g.a.y.l.o.r.d's house.

"We have to humor him in such things, Mrs. Hubbard," Olive explained, to Marcia's distress. "And most people get on very well without him."

This explanation was of course given in Halleck's presence. His sister added, behind his back: "Ben has a perfectly morbid dread of giving trouble in a house. He won't let us do anything to make him comfortable at home, and the idea that you should attempt it drove him distracted. You mustn't mind it. I don't believe he'd have come if his bachelor freedom couldn't have been respected; and we both wanted to come Very much."