Fennel and Rue Part 2

His mother let the paper drop from her hands. "Philip! You haven't sent this!"

"Yes, I have. It wasn't what I wanted to make it, but I wished to get the detestable experience out of my mind, and it was the best I could do at the moment. Don't you like it?"

"Oh--" She seemed beginning to say something, but without saying anything she took the fallen leaf up and read it again.

"Well!" he demanded, with impatience.

"Oh, you may have been right. I hope you've not been wrong."

"Mother!"

"She deserved the severest things you could say; and yet--"

"Well?"

"Perhaps she was punished enough already."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't like your being-vindictive."

"Vindictive?"

"Being so terribly just, then." She added, at his blank stare, "This is killing, Philip."

He gave a bitter laugh. "I don't think it will kill her. She isn't that kind."

"She's a girl," his mother said, with a kind of sad absence.

"But not a single-minded girl, you warned me. I wish I could have taken your warning. It would have saved me from playing the fool before myself and giving myself away to Armiger, and letting him give himself away. I don't think Miss Brown will suffer much before she dies. She will 'get together,' as she calls it, with that other girl and have 'a real good time' over it. You know the village type and the village conditions, where the vulgar ignorance of any larger world is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Don't be troubled by my vindictiveness or my justice, mother! I begin to think I have done justice and not fallen short of it, as I was afraid."

Mrs. Verrian sighed, and again she gave his letter back to her son.

"Perhaps you are right, Philip. She is probably so tough as not to feel it very painfully."

"She's not so tough but she'll be very glad to get out of it so lightly.

She has had a useful scare, and I've done her a favor in making the scare a sharp one. I suppose," Verrian mused, "that she thinks I've kept copies of her letters."

"Yes. Why didn't you?" his mother asked.

Verrian laughed, only a little less bitterly than before. "I shall begin to believe you're all alike, mother."

I didn't keep copies of her letters because I wanted to get her and her letters out of my mind, finally and forever. Besides, I didn't choose.

to emulate her duplicity by any sort of dissimulation.

"I see what you mean," his mother said. "And, of course, you have taken the only honorable way."

Then they were both silent for a time, thinking their several thoughts.

Verrian broke the silence to say, "I wish I knew what sort of 'other girl' it was that she 'got together with.'"

"Why?"

"Because she wrote a more cultivated letter than this magnanimous creature who takes all the blame to herself."

"Then you don't believe they're both the same?"

"They are both the same in stationery and chirography, but not in literature."

"I hope you won't get to thinking about her, then," his mother entreated, intelligibly but not definitely.

"Not seriously," Verrian rea.s.sured her. "I've had my medicine."

V.

Continuity is so much the lesson of experience that in the course of a life by no means long it becomes the instinctive expectation. The event that has happened will happen again; it will prolong itself in a series of recurrences by which each one's episode shares in the unending history of all. The sense of this is so pervasive that humanity refuses to accept death itself as final. In the agonized affections, the shattered hopes, of those who remain, the severed life keeps on unbrokenly, and when time and reason prevail, at least as to the life here, the defeated faith appeals for fulfilment to another world, and the belief of immortality holds against the myriad years in which none of the numberless dead have made an indisputable sign in witness of it.

The lost limb still reports its sensations to the brain; the fixed habit mechanically attempts its repet.i.tion when the conditions render it impossible.

Verrian was aware how deeply and absorbingly he had brooded upon the incident which he had done his utmost to close, when he found himself expecting an answer of some sort from his unknown correspondent. He perceived, then, without owning the fact, that he had really hoped for some protest, some excuse, some extenuation, which in the end would suffer him to be more merciful. Though he had wished to crush her into silence, and to forbid her all hope of his forgiveness, he had, in a manner, not meant to do it. He had kept a secret place in his soul where the sinner against him could find refuge from his justice, and when this sanctuary remained unattempted he found himself with a regret that he had barred the way to it so effectually. The regret was so vague, so formless, however, that he could tacitly deny it to himself at all times, and explicitly deny it to his mother at such times as her touch taught him that it was tangible.

One day, after ten or twelve days had gone by, she asked him, "You haven't heard anything more from that girl?"

"What girl?" he returned, as if he did not know; and he frowned. "You mean the girl that wrote me about my story?"

He continued to frown rather more darkly. "I don't see how you could expect me to hear from her, after what I wrote. But, to be categorical, I haven't, mother."

"Oh, of course not. Did you think she would be so easily silenced?"

"I did what I could to crush her into silence."

"Yes, and you did quite right; I am more and more convinced of that. But such a very tough young person might have refused to stay crushed. She might very naturally have got herself into shape again and smoothed out the creases, at least so far to try some further defence."

"It seems that she hasn't," Verrian said, still darkly, but not so frowningly.

"I should have fancied," his mother suggested, "that if she had wanted to open a correspondence with you--if that was her original object--she would not have let it drop so easily."

"Has she let it drop easily? I thought I had left her no possible chance of resuming it."

"That is true," his mother said, and for the time she said no more about the matter.

Not long after this he came home from the magazine office and reported to her from Armiger that the story was catching on more and more with the best cla.s.s of readers. The editor had shown Verrian some references to it in newspapers of good standing and several letters about it.

"I thought you might like to look at the letters," Verrian said, and he took some letters from his pocket and handed them to her across the lunch-table. She did not immediately look at them, because he went on to add something that they both felt to be more important. "Armiger says there has been some increase of the sales, which I can attribute to my story if I have the cheek."

"That is good."

"And the house wants to publish the book. They think, down there, that it will have a very pretty success--not be a big seller, of course, but something comfortable."