Mercy Philbrick's Choice Part 14

"I do not believe any thing is chance," murmured Mercy. "I must have been sent here for something."

"I believe you were, dear," said Stephen, "sent here for my salvation. I was thinking last night that, no matter if my life should end without my ever knowing what other men call happiness, if I must live lonely and alone to the end, I should still have the memory of you,--of your face, of your hand, and the voice in which you said you cared for me. O Mercy, Mercy! you have not the least conception of what you are to me!" And Stephen stretched out both his arms to her, with unspeakable love in the gesture.

So swiftly that he had not the least warning of her intention, Mercy threw herself into them, and laid her head on his shoulder, sobbing. Shame filled her soul, and burned in her cheeks, when Stephen, lifting her as he would a child, and kissing her forehead gently, placed her again in her chair, and said,--

"My darling, I cannot let you do that. I will never ask from you any thing that you can by any possibility come to regret at some future time. I ought perhaps to be unselfish enough not to ask from you any thing at all.

I did not mean to; but I could not help it, and it is too late now."

"Yes, it is too late now," said Mercy,--"too late now." And she buried her face in her hands.

"Mercy," exclaimed Stephen, in a voice of anguish, "you will break my heart: you will make me wish myself dead, if you show such suffering as this. I thought that you, too, could find joy, and perhaps help, in my love, as I could in yours. If it is to give you pain and not happiness, it were better for you never to see me again. I will never voluntarily look on your face after to-night, if you wish it,--if you would be happier so."

"Oh, no, no!" cried Mercy. Then, overwhelmed with the sudden realization of the pain she was giving to a man whom she so loved that at that moment she would have died to shield him from pain, she lifted her face, shook back the hair from her forehead, and, looking bravely into his eyes, repeated,--

"No, no! I am very selfish to feel like this. I do understand you. I understand it all; and I will help you, and comfort you all I can. And I do love you very dearly," she added in a lower voice, with a tone of such incomparable sweetness that it took almost superhuman control on Stephen's part to refrain from clasping her to his heart. But he did not betray the impulse, even by a gesture. Looking at her with an expression of great thankfulness, he said,--

"I believe that peace will come to us, Mercy. I believe I can do something to make you happy. To know that I love you as I do will be a great deal to you, I think." He paused.

"Yes," answered Mercy, "a great deal." He went on,--

"And to know that you are perpetually helping and cheering me will be still more to you, I think. We shall know some joys, Mercy, which joyous lovers never know. Happy people do not need each other as sad people do. O Mercy, do try and remember all the time that you are the one bright thing in my life,--in my whole life."

"I will, Stephen, I will," said Mercy, resolutely, her whole face glowing with the new purposes forming in her heart. It was marvellous how clear the relation between herself and Stephen began to seem to her. It was rather by her magnetic consciousness of all that he was thinking and feeling than by the literal acceptance of any thing or all things which he said. She seemed to herself to be already one with him in all his trials, burdens, perplexities; in his renunciation; in his self-sacrifice; in his loyalty of reticence; in his humility of uncomplainingness.

When she bade him "good-night," her face was not only serene: it was serene with a certain exaltation added, as the face of one who had entered into a great steadfastness of joy. Stephen wondered greatly at this transition from the excitement and grief she had at first shown. He had yet to learn what wellsprings of strength lie in the poetic temperament.

As he stood lingering on the threshold, finding it almost impossible to turn away while the sweet face held him by the honest gaze of the loving eyes, he said,

"There will be many times, dear, when things will have to be very hard, when I shall not be able to do as you would like to have me, when you may even be pained by my conduct. Shall you trust me through it all?"

"I shall trust you till the day of my death," said Mercy, impetuously.

"One can't take trust back. It isn't a gift: it is a necessity."

Stephen smiled,--a smile of sorrow rather than gladness.

"But if you thought me other than you had believed?" he said.

"I could never think you other than you are," replied Mercy, proudly. "It is not that I 'believe' you. I know you. I shall trust you to the day of my death."

Perhaps nothing could ill.u.s.trate better the difference between Mercy Philbrick's nature and Stephen White's, between her love for him and his for her, than the fact that, after this conversation, she lay awake far into the early hours of the morning, living over every word that he had spoken, looking resolutely and even joyously into the strange future which was opening before her, and scanning with loving intentness every chance that it could possibly hold for her ministrations to him. He, on the other hand, laid his head on his pillow with a sense of dreamy happiness, and sank at once into sleep, murmuring,--

"The darling! how she does love me! She shall never regret it,--never. We can have a great deal of happiness together as it is; and if the time ever should come," ...

Here his thoughts halted, and refused to be clothed in explicit phrase.

Never once had Stephen White permitted himself to think in words, even in his most secret meditations, "When my mother dies, I shall be free." His fine fastidiousness would shrink from it, as from the particular kind of brutality and bad taste involved in a murder. If the whole truth could have been known of Stephen's feeling about all crimes and sins, it would have been found to be far more a matter of taste than of principle, of instinct than of conviction.

Surely never in this world did love link together two souls more diametrically opposite than Mercy Philbrick's and Stephen White's. It needed no long study or especial insight into character to know which of the two would receive the more and suffer the less, in the abnormal and unfortunate relation on which they had entered. But no presentiment warned Mercy of what lay before her. She was like a traveller going into a country whose language he has never heard, and whose currency he does not understand. However eloquent he may be in his own land, he is dumb and helpless here; and of the fortune with which he was rich at home he is robbed at every turn by false exchanges which impose on his ignorance.

Poor Mercy! Vaguely she felt that life was cruel to Stephen and to her; but she accepted its cruelty to her as an inevitable part of her oneness with him. Whatever he had to bear she must bear too, especially if he were helped by her sharing the burden. And her heart glowed with happiness, recalling the expression with which he had said,--

"Remember, Mercy, you are the one bright thing in my life."

She understood, or thought she understood, precisely the position in which he was placed.

"Very possibly he has even promised his mother," she said to herself, "even promised her he would never be married. It would be just like her to exact such a promise from him, and never think any thing of it. And, even if he has not, it is all the same. He knows very well no human being could live in the house with her, to say nothing of his being so terribly poor.

Poor, dear Stephen! to think of our little rent being more than half his income! Oh, if there were only some way in which I could contrive to give him money without his knowing it."

If any one had said to Mercy at this time: "It was not honorable in this man, knowing or feeling that he could not marry you, to tell you of his love, and to allow you to show him yours for him. He is putting you in a false position, and may be blighting your whole life," Mercy would have repelled the accusation most indignantly. She would have said: "He has never asked me for any such love as that. He told me most honestly in the very beginning just how it was. He always said he would never fetter me by a word; and, once when I forgot myself for a moment, and threw myself into his very arms, he only kissed my forehead as if I were his sister, and put me away from him almost with a reproof. No, indeed! he is the very soul of honor. It is I who choose to love him with all my soul and all my strength. Why should not a woman devote her life to a man without being his wife, if she chooses, and if he so needs her? It is just as sacred and just as holy a bond as the other, and holier, too; for it is more unselfish. If he can give up the happiness of being a husband and father, for the sake of his duty to his mother, cannot I give up the happiness of being a wife and mother, for the sake of my affection and duty towards him?"

It looked very plain to Mercy in these first days. It looked right, and it seemed very full of joy. Her life seemed now rounded and complete. It had a ruling motive, without which no life is satisfying; and that motive was the highest motive known to the heart,--the desire to make another human being perfectly happy. All hindrances and difficulties, all drawbacks and sacrifices, seemed less than nothing to her. When she saw Stephen, she was happy because she saw him; and when she did not see him, she was happy because she had seen him, and would soon see him again. Past, present, and future all melt into one great harmonious whole under the spell of love in a nature like Mercy's. They are like so many rooms in one great house; and in one or the other the loved being is always to be found, always at home, can never depart! Could one be lonely for a moment in such a house?

Mercy's perpetual and abiding joy at times terrified Stephen. It was a thing so foreign to his own nature that it seemed to him hardly natural.

Calm acquiescence he could understand,--serene endurance: he himself never chafed at the barriers, little or great, which kept him from Mercy. But there were many days when his sense of deprivation made him sad, subdued, and quiet. When, in these moods, he came into Mercy's presence, and found her radiant, buoyant, mirthful even, he wondered; and sometimes he questioned. He strove to find out the secret of her joy. There seemed to him no legitimate reason for it.

"Why, to see that I make you glad, Stephen," she would say. "Is not that enough? Or even, when I cannot make you glad, just to love you is enough."

"Mercy, how did you ever come to love me?" he said once, stung by a sense of his own unworthiness. "How do you know you love me, after all?"

"How do I know I love you!" she exclaimed. "Can any one ever tell that, I wonder? I know it by this: that every thing in the whole world, even down to the smallest gra.s.s-blade, seems to me different because you are alive."

She said these words with a pa.s.sionate vehemence, and tears in her eyes.

Then, changing in a second to a mischievous, laughing mood, she said,--

"Yes: you make all that odds to me. But let us not talk about loving each other, Stephen. That's the way children do with their flower-seeds,--keep pulling them up, to see how they grow."

That night, Mercy gave Stephen this sonnet,--the first words she had written out of the great wellspring of her love:--

"HOW WAS IT?"

Why ask, dear one? I think I cannot tell, More than I know how clouds so sudden lift From mountains, or how snowflakes float and drift, Or springs leave hills. One secret and one spell All true things have. No sunlight ever fell With sound to bid flowers open. Still and swift Come sweetest things on earth.

So comes true gift Of Love, and so we know that it is well.

Sure tokens also, like the cloud, the snow, And silent flowing of the mountain-springs, The new gift of true loving always brings.

In clearer light, in purer paths, we go: New currents of deep joy in common things We find. These are the tokens, dear, we know!

Chapter VIII.

As the months went on, Mercy began to make friends. One person after another observed her bright face, asked who she was, and came to seek her out. "Who is that girl with fair hair and blue eyes, who, whenever you meet her in the street, always looks as if she had just heard some good news?" was asked one day. It was a noteworthy thing that this description was so instantly recognized by the person inquired of, that he had no hesitancy in replying,--

"Oh, that is a young widow from Cape Cod, a Mrs. Philbrick. She came last winter with her mother, who is an invalid. They live in the old Jacobs house with the Whites."

Among the friends whom Mercy thus met was a man who was destined to exercise almost as powerful an influence as Stephen White over her life.

This was Parson Dorrance.

Parson Dorrance had in his youth been settled as a Congregationalist minister. But his love of literature and of science was even stronger than his love of preaching the gospel; and, after a very few years, he accepted a position as professor in a small college, in a town only four miles distant from the village in which Mercy had come to live. This was twenty-five years ago. Parson Dorrance was now fifty-five years old. For a quarter of a century, his name had been the pride, and his hand had been the stay, of the college. It had had presidents of renown and professors of brilliant attainments; but Parson Dorrance held a position more enviable than all. Few lives of such simple and steadfast heroism have ever been lived. Few lives have ever so stamped the mark of their influence on a community. In the second year of his ministry, Mr. Dorrance had married a very beautiful and brilliant woman. Probably no two young people ever began married life with a fairer future before them than these. Mrs. Dorrance was as exceptionally clever and cultured a person as her husband; and she added to these rare endowments a personal beauty which is said by all who knew her in her girlhood to have been marvellous.

But, as is so often the case among New England women of culture, the body had paid the cost of the mind's estate; and, after the birth of her first child, she sank at once into a hopeless invalidism,--an invalidism all the more difficult to bear, and to be borne with, that it took the shape of distressing nervous maladies which no medical skill could alleviate. The brilliant mind became almost a wreck, and yet retained a preternatural restlessness and activity. Many regarded her condition as insanity, and believed that Mr. Dorrance erred in not giving her up to the care of those making mental disorders a specialty. But his love and patience were untiring. When her mental depression and suffering reached such a stage that she could not safely see a human face but his, he shut himself up with her in her darkened room till the crisis had pa.s.sed. There were times when she could not close her eyes in sleep unless he sat by her side, holding her hand in his, and gently stroking it. He spent weeks of nights by her bedside in this way. At any hour of the day, a summons might come from her; and, whatever might be his engagement, it was instantly laid aside,--laid aside, too, with cheerfulness and alacrity. At times, all his college duties would be suspended on her account; and his own specialties of scientific research, in which he was beginning to win recognition even from the great masters of science in Europe, were very early laid aside for ever. It must have been a great pang to him,--this relinquishment of fame, and of what is dearer to the true scientific man than all fame, the joys of discovery; but no man ever heard from his lips an allusion to the sacrifice. The great telescope, with which he had so many nights swept the heavens, still stood in his garden observatory; but it was little used except for recreation, and for the pleasure and instruction of his boy.

Yet no one would have dreamed, from the hearty joy with which he used it for these purposes, that it had ever been to him the token and the instrument of the great hope of his heart. The resolute cheer of this man's life pervaded the whole atmosphere of his house. Spite of the perpetual shadow of the invalid's darkened room, spite of the inevitable circ.u.mscribing of narrow means, Parson Dorrance's cottage was the pleasantest house in the place, was the house to which all the townspeople took strangers with pride, and was the house which strangers never forgot. There was always a new book, or a new print, or a new flower, or a new thought which the untiring mind had just been shaping; and there were always and ever the welcome and the sympathy of a man who loved men because he loved G.o.d, and who loved G.o.d with an affection as personal in its nature as the affection with which he loved a man.