Mercy Philbrick's Choice Part 24

Mercy Philbrick lived thirty years after the events described in these pages. It was a life rich to overflowing, yet uneventful, as the world reckons: a life lonely, yet full of companionship; sady yet full of cheer; hard, and yet perpetually uplifted by an inward joy which made her very presence like sunshine, and made men often say of her, "Oh, she has never known sorrow." This was largely the result of her unquenchable gift of song, of the true poet's temperament, to which life is for ever new, beautiful, and glad. It was also the result of her ever-increasing spirituality of nature. This took no shape of creed, worship, or what the world's common consent calls religion. Most of the words spoken by the teachers of churches repelled Mercy by their monotonous iteration of the letter which killeth. But her realization of the solemn significance of the great fact of being alive deepened every hour; her tenderness, her sense of brotherhood to every human being, and her sense of the actual presence and near love of G.o.d. Her old intolerance was softened, or rather it had changed from antagonisms on the surface to living principles at the core. Truth, truth, truth, was still the war-cry of her soul; and there was an intensity in every word of her written or spoken pleadings on this subject which might well have revealed to a careful a.n.a.lyzer of them that they had sprung out of the depths of the profoundest experiences. Her influence as a writer was very great. As she grew older, she wrote less and less for the delight of the ear, more and more for the stirring of the heart. To do a little towards making people glad, towards making them kind to one another, towards opening their eyes to the omnipresent beauty,--these were her ambitions. "Oh, the tender, unutterable beauty of all created things!" were the opening lines of one of her sweetest songs; and it might have been said to be one of the watchwords of her life.

It took many years for her to reach this plane, to attain to the fulness of this close spiritual communion with things seen and unseen. The double bereavement and strain of her two years of life in Penfield left her for a long time bruised and sore. Her relation with Stephen, as she looked back upon it, hurt her in every fibre of her nature. Sometimes she was filled with remorse for the grief she had caused him, and sometimes with poignant distress, of doubt whether she had not after all been unjust to him.

Underlying all this remorse, all this doubt was a steadily growing consciousness that her love for him was in the very outset a mistake, an abnormal emotion, born of temporary and insufficient occasion, and therefore sure to have sooner or later proved too weak for the tests of life. On the other hand, her thoughts of Parson Dorrance grew constantly warmer, tenderer, more a.s.sured. His character, his love for her, his beautiful life, rose steadily higher and higher, and brighter and brighter on her horizon, as the lofty snow-clad peaks of a mountain land reveal themselves in all their grandeur to our vision only when we have journeyed away from their base. Slowly the whole allegiance of her heart transferred itself to the dead man's memory; slowly her grief for his loss deepened, and yet with the deepened grief came a certain new and holy joy. It surely could not be impossible for him to know in heaven that she was his on earth? As confidently as if she had been wedded to him here, she looked forward to the reunion with him there, and found in her secret consciousness of this eternal bond a hidden rapture, such as has been the stay of many a widowed heart through long lifetimes of loneliness. This secret bond was like an impalpable yet impenetrable veil between her soul and the souls of all men who came into relation with her. Men loved her and sought her,--loved her warmly and sought her with long years of devotion. The world often judged her uncharitably by reason of these friendships, which were only friendships, and yet pointed to a warmer regard than the world consents that friends may feel. But there was never a man, of all the men who loved Mercy, who did not feel himself, spite of all her frank and loving intimacy, withheld, debarred, separated from her at a certain point, as if there stood drawn up there a cordon of viewless spirits.

The one grief above which she could not wholly rise, which at times smote her and bowed her down, was her sense of her loss in being childless. The heart of mother was larger in her even than the heart of wife. Her longing for children of her own was so great that it was often more than she could bear to watch little children at their play. She stood sometimes at her window at dusk, and watched the poor laboring men and women going home, leading or carrying their children; and it seemed as if her heart would break. Everywhere, her eye noted the swarming groups of children, poor, uncared for, so often unwelcome; and she said sadly to herself, "So many!

so many! and not one for me." Yet she never felt any desire to adopt children. She distrusted her own patience and justice too much; and she feared too deeply the development of hereditary traits which she could not conquer; "I might find that I had taken a liar," she thought; "and I should hate him."

As she reached middle age, this unsatisfied desire ceased to be so great a grief. She became more and more like a motherly friend to the young people surrounding her. Her house was a home to them all, and she reproduced in her own life very nearly the relation which Parson Dorrance had held to the young people of Danby. Her friend Lizzy Hunter was now the mother of four girls, all in their first young womanhood. They all strove eagerly for the privilege of living with "Aunt Mercy," and went in turn to spend whole seasons with her.

On Stephen White's thirty-sixth birthday, his mother died. The ten years which had pa.s.sed since Mercy left him had grown harder and harder, day by day; but he bore the last as silently and patiently as he bore the first, and Mrs. White's last words to the gray-haired man who bent over her bed were,--

"You have been a good boy, Steve,--a good boy. You'll have some rest now."

Since the day he bade good-by to Mercy in the room from which Parson Dorrance had just been buried, Stephen had never written to her, never heard from her, except as all the world heard from her, in her published writings. These he read eagerly, and kept them carefully in sc.r.a.p-books.

He took great delight in collecting all the copies of her verses.

Sometimes a little verse of hers would go the rounds of the newspapers for months, and each reappearance of it was a new pleasure to Stephen. He knew most of them by heart; and he felt that he knew Mercy still, as well as he knew her when she looked up in his face. On the night of his mother's death he wrote to her these words:--

"MERCY,--It is ten years since we parted. I love you as I loved you then.

I shall never love any other woman. I am free now. My mother has died this night. May I come and see you? I ask nothing of you, except to be your friend. Can I not be that?

"STEPHEN."

If a ghost of one dead for ten years had entered her presence, Mercy had hardly been more startled. Stephen had ceased to be a personality to her.

Striving very earnestly with herself to be kind, and to do for this stranger whom she knew not what would be the very best and most healing thing for his soul, Mercy wrote to him as follows:--

"DEAR STEPHEN,--Your note was a very great surprise to me. I am most heartily thankful that you are at last free to live your life like other men. I think that the future ought to hold some very great and good gifts in store for you, to reward you for your patience. I have never known any human being so patient as you.

"You must forgive me for saying that I do not believe it is possible for us to be friends. I could be yours, and would be glad to be so. But you could not be mine while you continue so to set me apart from all other women, as you say you do, in your affection. I am truly grieved that you do this, and I hope that in your new free life you will very soon find other relations which will make you forget your old one with me. I did you a great harm, but we were both ignorant of our mistake. I pray that it may yet be repaired, and that you may soon be at rest in a happy home with a wife and children. Then I should be glad to see you: until then, it is not best.

"Yours most honestly,

"MERCY."

Until he read this letter, Stephen had not known that secretly in the bottom of his heart he riad all these years cherished a hope that there might yet be a future in store for him and Mercy. Now, by the new sense of desolation which he felt, he knew that there must have been a little more life than he thought left; in him to die.

As soon as his mother was buried, he closed the house and went abroad.

There he roamed about listlessly from country to country, for many years, acquiring a certain desultory culture, and buying, so far as his income would permit, every thing he saw which he thought Mercy would like. Then he went home, bought the old Jacobs house back again, and fitted it up in every respect as Mercy had once suggested. This done, he sat down to wait--for he knew not what. He had a vague feeling that he would die soon, and leave the house and his small fortune to Mercy; and she would come and spend her summers there, and so he would recall to her their old life together. He led the life of a hermit,--rarely went out, and still more rarely saw any one at home. He looked like a man of sixty rather than like one of fifty. He was fast becoming an invalid, more, however, from the lack of purpose and joy than from any disease. Life had been very hard to Stephen.

Nothing seemed more probable, contrasting his listless figure, gray hair, and jaded face with Mercy's full, fresh countenance and bounding elasticity, than that his dream of going first, and leaving to her the gift of all he had, would be realized; but he was destined to outlive her by many a long year.

Mercy's death was a strange one. She had gone with two of Lizzy Hunter's daughters to spend a few weeks in one of the small White Mountain villages, which was a favorite haunt of hers. The day after their arrival, a two days' excursion to some of the mountains was proposed; and Mercy, though not feeling well enough to join it herself, insisted that the girls should go. They were reluctant to leave her; but, with her usual vehemence, she resisted all their protestations, and compelled them to join the party. She was thus left alone in a house crowded with people, all of whom were strangers to her. Some of them recollected afterward to have noticed her sitting on the piazza at sunset, looking at the mountains with an expression of great delight; but no one spoke with her, and no one missed her the next morning, when she did not come to breakfast. Late in the forenoon, the landlady came running in great terror and excitement to one of the guests, exclaiming: "That lady that came yesterday is dying.

The chambermaids could not get into her room, nor get any answer, so we broke open the door. The doctor says she'll never come to again!"

Helpless, the village doctor, and the servants, and the landlady, and as many of the guests as could crowd into the little room, stood around Mercy's bed. It seemed a sad way to die, surrounded by strangers, who did not even know her name; but Mercy was unconscious. It made no difference to her. Her heavy breathing told only too well the nature of the trouble.

"This cannot be the first attack she has had," said the doctor; and it was found afterward that Mercy had told Lizzy Hunter of her having twice had threatenings of a paralytic seizure. "If only I die at once," she had said to Lizzy, "I would rather go that way than in most others. I dread the dying part of death. I don't want to know when I am going."

And she did not. All day her breathing grew slower and more labored, and at night it stopped. In a few hours, there settled upon her features an expression of such perfect peace that each one who came to look at her stole away reverent and subdued.

The two old crones who had come to "lay out" the body crept about on tiptoe, their usual garrulity quenched by the sad and beautiful spectacle.

It was a singular thing that no one knew the name of the stranger who had died thus suddenly and alone. In the confusion of their arrival, Mercy had omitted to register their names. In the smaller White Mountain houses, this formality is not rigidly enforced. And so it came to pa.s.s that this woman, so well known, so widely beloved, lay a night and a day dead, within a few hours' journey of her home as unknown as if she had been cast up from a shipwrecked vessel on a strange sh.o.r.e.

The two old crones sat with the body all night and all the next day. They sewed on the quaint garments in which it is still the custom of rural New England to robe the dead. They put a cap of stiff white muslin over Mercy's brown hair, which even now, in her fiftieth year, showed only here and there a silver thread. They laid fine plaits of the same stiff white muslin over her breast, and crossed her hands above them.

"She must ha' been a handsome woman in her time, Mis' Bunker. I 'spect she was married, don't you?" said Ann Sweetser, Mrs. Bunker's spinster cousin, who always helped her on these occasions.

"Well, this ere ring looks like it," replied Mrs. Bunker, taking up a bit of the muslin and rubbing the broad gold band on the third finger of Mercy's left hand. "But yer can't allers tell by that nowadays. There's folks wears 'em that ain't married. This is a real harndsome ring, 's heavy 's ever I see."

How Mercy's heart must have been touched, and also her fine and pathetic sense of humor, if her freed spirit hovered still in that little low-roofed room! This cast-off garment of hers, so carefully honored, so curiously considered and speculated upon by these simple-minded people!

There was something rarely dramatic in all the surroundings of these last hours. Among the guests in the house was one, a woman, herself a poet, who toward the end of the second day came into the chamber, bringing long trailing vines of the sweet Linnea, which was then in full bloom. Her poet's heart was moved to the depths by the thought of this unknown, dead woman lying there, tended by strangers' hands. She gazed with an inexplicable feeling of affection upon Mercy's placid brow. She lifted the lifeless hands and laid them down again in a less constrained position.

She, too, noted the broad gold ring, and said,--

"She has been loved then. I wonder if he is alive!" The door was closed, and no one was in the room. With a strange impulse she could not account for to herself, she said, "I will kiss her for him," and bent and kissed the cold forehead. Then she laid the fragrant vines around the face and across the bosom, and went away, feeling an inexplicable sense of nearness to the woman she had kissed. When the next morning she knew that it was Mercy Philbrick, the poet, in whose lifeless presence she had stood, she exclaimed with a burst of tears, "Oh, I might have known that there was some subtile bond which made me kiss her! I have always loved her verses so."

On the day after Lizzy Hunter returned from Mercy's funeral, Stephen White called at her house and asked to speak to her. She had almost forgotten his existence, though she knew that he was living in the Jacobs house.

Their paths never crossed, and Lizzy had long ago forgotten her pa.s.sing suspicion of Mercy's regard for him. The haggard and bowed man who met her now was so unlike the Stephen White she recollected, that Lizzy involuntarily exclaimed. Stephen took no notice of her exclamation.

"No, thank you, I will not sit down," he said, as with almost solicitude in her face she offered him a chair. "I merely wish to give you something of"--he hesitated--"Mrs. Philbrick's."

He drew from his breast a small package of papers, yellow, creased, old.

He unfolded one of these and handed it to Lizzy, saying,--

"This is a sonnet of hers which has never been printed. She gave it to me when,"--he hesitated again,--"when she was living in my house. She said at that time that she would like to have it put on her tombstone. I did not know any other friend of hers to go to but you. Will you see that it is done?"

Lizzy took the paper and began to read the sonnet. Stephen stood leaning heavily on the back of a chair; his breath was short, and his face much flushed.

"Oh, pray sit down, Mr. White! You are ill," exclaimed Lizzy.

"No, I am not ill. I would rather stand," replied Stephen. His eyes were fixed on the spot where thirty years before Mercy had stood when she said, "I can't, Stephen."

Lizzy read the sonnet with tears rolling down her cheeks.

"Oh, it is beautiful,--beautiful!" she exclaimed. "Why did she never have it printed?"

Stephen colored and hesitated. One single thrill of pride followed by a bitter wave of pain, and he replied,--

"Because I asked her not to print it."

Lizzy's heart was too full of tender grief now to have any room for wonder or resentment at this, or even to realize in that first moment that there was any thing strange in the reply.

"Indeed, it shall be put on the stone," she said. "I am so thankful you brought it. I have been thinking that there were no words fit to put above her grave. No one but she herself could have written any that would be,"

and she was folding up the paper.

Stephen stretched out his hand. "Pardon me," he said, "I cannot part with that. I have brought a copy to leave with you," and he gave Lizzy another paper.

Mechanically she restored to him the first one, and gazed earnestly into his face. Its worn and harrowed features, its look of graven patience, smote her like a cry. She was about to speak to him eagerly and with sympathy, but he was gone. His errand was finished,--the last thing he could do for Mercy. She watched his feeble steps as he walked away, and her pity revealed to her the history of his past.

"How he loved her! how he loved her!" she said, and watched his figure lingeringly, till it was out of sight.