"But its mother?" I managed to stammer at last.
"If I'm to marry her for the sake of the child," he answered in a voice I hardly recognized, "it would be perfect tomfoolery to leave it to grow up with the Brownrigs. If that's to be the plan, I'll save myself. Jule doesn't mind not being married. You don't know what a tribe the Brownrigs are. It's an insult for me to be talking to you about them, only it can't be helped. Is it a boy or a girl?"
I told him.
"And you think a girl ought to be left to follow the noble example of the mother!"
"Oh no, no!" I cried out. "Anything is better than that."
"That is what must happen unless you take the poor thing," he said in a voice which, though it was hard, seemed somehow to have a quiver in it.
"But would she give the baby up?" I asked. "She's its mother."
"Jule? She'll be only too glad to get rid of it. Anyway she'd do what I told her to."
I tried to think clearly and quickly. To have the baby left to follow in the steps of its mother was a thing too terrible to be endured, and yet I shrank selfishly from taking upon my shoulders the responsibility of training the child. Whatever Tom decided about the marriage, however, I felt that he should not have to resolve under pressure. If he were doing it for the sake of the baby's future, I could clear his way of that complication. I could not bear the thought of having Tom marry Julia. This would be a bond on his whole life; and yet I could not feel that he had a right to shirk it now. If I agreed to take the child, that would leave him free to decide without being pushed on by fear about the baby. My mind seemed to me wonderfully clear. I see now it was all in a whirl, and that the only thing I was sure of was that if it would help him for me to take the baby there was nothing else for me to do.
"Tom," I said, "I do not, and I will not, decide for you; and I will not have anything to do with conditions. If she will give me the baby, I will take it, and you may decide the rest without any reference to that at all."
He took a step forward so quickly and so fiercely that he startled me, and put out his hand as if he meant to take me by the arm. Then he dropped it.
"Do you think," he said, "that I would have an illegitimate brat near you? It is bad enough as it is, but you shall not have the reproach of that."
My cheeks grew hot, but the whole talk was so strange and so painful that I let this pass with the rest. I cannot tell how I felt, but I know the remembrance of it makes my eyes swim so that I cannot write without stopping continually; and I am writing here half the night because I cannot sleep. I could not answer Tom; I only stood dully silent until he spoke again.
"I know I can't have you, Ruth," he said, "and I know you were right. I'm not good enough for you."
"I never said that," I interrupted. "I never thought that."
"Never mind. It's true; but I'd have been a man if you'd have given me a chance."
"Oh, Tom," I broke in, "don't! It is not fair to make me responsible!"
"No," he acknowledged, with the shake of his shoulders I have known ever since we were children; "you are not to blame. It's only my infernal, sneaking self!"
I could not bear this, either. Everything that was said hurt me; and it seemed to me that I had borne all that I could endure.
"Will you go away now, Tom," I begged him. "I – I can't talk any more to-night. Shall I tell Julia you have come?"
He gave a start at the name, and swore under his breath.
"It is damnable for you to be here with that girl," he burst out bitterly; "and I brought it on you! It isn't your place, though. Where are all the Christians and church members? I suppose all the pious are too good to come. They might get their righteousness smudged. Oh, how I hate hypocrisy!"
"Don't, Tom," I interrupted. "Go away, please."
My voice was shaky; and indeed I was fast getting to the place where I should have broken down in hysterical weeping.
"I'll go," he responded quickly. "I'll come in the morning with a minister. Will eight o'clock do? I'd like to get it over with."
The bitterness of his tone was too much for me. I caught one of his hands in both of mine.
"Oh, Tom," I said, "are you quite sure this is what you ought to do?"
"Do you tell me not to marry her?" he demanded fiercely.
I was completely unnerved; I could only drop his hand and press my own on my bosom, as if this would help me to breathe easier.
"Oh no, no," I cried, half sobbing. "I can't, I can't. I haven't the right to say anything; but I do think it is the thing you ought to do. Only you are so noble to do it!"
He made a sound as if he would answer, and then he turned away suddenly, and dashed off with great strides. I could not go back into the house, but came home without saying good-night, or letting Miss Dyer know. I must be ready to go back as soon as it is light.
April 12. It seems so far back to this morning that I might have had time to change into a different person; and yet most of the day I have simply been longing to get home and think quietly. I wanted to adjust myself to the new condition of things. Last night the idea that Tom should marry the girl was so strange and unreal that it could make very little impression on me. Now it is done it is more appallingly real than anything else in the world.
I went down to the red house almost before light, but even as early as I came I found Tom already there. The nurse had objected to letting him in, and even when I came she was evidently uncertain whether she had done right in admitting him; but Tom has generally a way of getting what he is determined on, and before I reached the house everything had been arranged with Julia.
"I wanted to come before folks were about to see me," Tom said to me. "There'll be talk enough later, and I'd rather be out of the way. I've arranged it with her."
"Does she understand" – I began; but he interrupted.
"She understands all there is to understand; all that she could understand, anyway. She knows I'm marrying her for the sake of the child, and that you're to have it."
The Munson boy that I have hired to sleep in the house now Mrs. Bagley is gone, in order that Miss Dyer may have somebody within call, appeared at this minute with a pail of water, and we were interrupted. The boy stared with all his eyes, and I was half tempted to ask him not to speak of Tom's being here; but I reflected with a sick feeling that it was of no use to try to hide what was to be done. If Tom's act was to have any significance it must be known. I turned away with tears in my eyes, and went to Julia.
Julia I found with her eyes shining with excitement, and I could see that despite Tom's idea that she did not care about the marriage, she was greatly moved by it.
"Oh, Miss Privet," she cried out at once, "ain't he good! He's truly goin' to marry me after all! I never 'sposed he'd do that."
"You must have thought" – I began; and then, with a sinking consciousness of the difference between her world and mine, I stopped.
"And he says you want the baby," she went on, not noticing; "though I dunno what you want of it. It'll be a pesky bother for yer."
"Mr. Webbe wanted me to take it and bring it up."
"Well," Julia remarked with feeble dispassionateness, "I wouldn't 'f I was you."
"Are you willing I should have it?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm willing anything he wants," was her answer. "He's awful good to marry me. He never said he would. He's real white, he is."
She was quiet a moment, and then she broke out in a burst of joy.
"I never 'sposed I'd marry a real gentleman!" she cried.
Her shallow delight in marrying above her station was too pathetic to be offensive. I was somehow so moved by it that I turned away to hide my face from her; but she caught my hand and drew me back. Then she peered at me closely.
"You don't like it," she said excitedly. "You won't try to stop him?"
"No," I answered. "I think he ought to do it for the sake of his child."
She dropped her hold, and a curious look came into her face.
"That's what he said. Yer don't either of yer seem to count me for much."
I was silent, convicted to the soul that I had not counted her for much. I had accepted Tom's decision as right, not for the sake of this broken girl-mother, this castaway doomed to shame from her cradle, but for the sake purely of the baby that I was to take. It came over me how I might have been influenced too much by the selfish thought that it would be intolerable for me to have the child unless it had been as far as might be legitimatized by this marriage. I flushed with shame, and without knowing exactly what I was doing I bent over and kissed her.
"It is you he marries," I said.
Her tears sprang instantly, tears, I believe, of pure happiness.
"You're real good," she murmured, and then closed her eyes, whether from weakness or to conceal her emotion I could not be sure.
It was nearly eight before Mr. Thurston came. Tom has never been on good terms with Mr. Saychase, and it must have been easier for him to have a clergyman with whom he had never, I suppose, exchanged a word, than one who knew him and his people. I took the precaution to say at once to Mr. Thurston that Julia was too ill to bear much, and that he must not say a word more than was necessary.
"I will only offer prayer," he returned.
I know Mr. Thurston's prayers. I have heard them at funerals when I have been wickedly tempted to wonder whether he were not attempting to fill the interval between us and the return of the lost at the Resurrection.
"I am afraid it will not do," I told him. "You do not realize how feeble she is."
"Then I will only give them the blessing. Perhaps I might talk with Mr. Webbe afterward, or pray with him."
I knew that if this proposition were made to Tom he would say something which would wound the clergyman's feelings.
"Mr. Thurston," I urged, "if you'll pardon me, I wouldn't try to say anything to him just now. He is doing a plucky thing, and a thing that's noble, but it must be terribly hard. I don't think he could endure to have anybody talk to him. He'll have to be left to fight it out for himself."
It was not easy to convince Mr. Thurston, for when once a narrow man gets an idea of duty he can see nothing else; but I managed in the end to save Tom at least the irritation of having to fight off religious appeals. The ceremony was as brief as possible. It was touching to see how humble and yet how proud Julia was. She seemed to feel that Tom was a sort of god in his goodness in marrying her, – and after all perhaps she was partly right. His coldness only made her deprecatory. I wondered how far she was conscious of his evident shrinking from her. He seemed to hate even to touch her fingers. I cannot understand —
April 15. I have had many things to do in the last two days, and I find myself so tired with the stress of it all that I have not felt like writing. It is perhaps as much from a sort of feverish uneasiness as from anything else I have got out my diary to-night. The truth is, that I suffer from the almost intolerable suspense of waiting for Julia to die. Dr. Wentworth and Miss Dyer both are sure there is no chance whatever of her getting well, and I cannot think that it would be better for her, or for Tom, or for her baby – who is to be my baby! – if she should live. We are all a little afraid to say, or even to think, that it is better for a life of this sort to end, and I seem to myself inhuman in putting it down in plain words; but we cannot be rational without knowing that it is better certain persons should be out of the way, for their own sakes as well as for the good of the community, and the more quickly the better. Julia is a weed, poor thing, and the sooner she is pulled up the better for the garden. And yet I pity her so! I can understand religion easily when I think of lives like hers. It is so hard to see the justice of having the weed destroyed for the good of the flowers that men have to invent excuses for the Eternal. Somebody has defined theology as man's justification of a deity found wanting by human standards, and now I realize what this means. Human mercy could not bear to make a Julia, and a power which allows the possibility of such beings has to be excused to human reason. The gods that men invent always turn to Frankensteins on their hands. If there is a conscious power that directs, He must pity the gropings of our race, although I suppose seeing what it is all for and what it all leads to must make it possible to bear the sight of human weakness.
The baby is growing wonderfully attractive now she is so well fed and attended to. I am ashamed to think how little the poor wee morsel attracted me at first. She was so associated with dreadful thoughts, and with things which I hated to know and did not wish to remember, that I shrank from her. Perhaps now the fact that she is to be mine inclines me to look at her with different eyes, but she is really a dear little thing, pretty and sweet. Oh, I will try hard to make her life lovely!
April 16. Aunt Naomi came in last night almost as soon as I was at home. She should not have been out in the night air, I think, for her cold is really severe, and has kept her shut up in the house for a fortnight. She was so eager for news, however, that she could not rest until she had seen me, and I am away all day.
"Well," was her greeting, "I am glad to see you at home once more. I've begun to feel as if you lived down in that little red house."
I said I had pretty nearly lived there for the last two weeks, but that since Miss Dyer came I had been able to get home at night most of the time.
"How do you like going out nursing?" she asked, thrusting her tongue into her cheek in that queer way she has.
I told her I certainly shouldn't think of choosing it as a profession, at least unless I could go to cleaner places.
"I hear you had Hannah clean up," she remarked with a chuckle.
"How did you hear that?" I asked her. "I thought you had been housed with a cold."
Aunt Naomi's smile was broad, and she swung her foot joyously.
"I've had all my faculties," she answered.
"So I should think. You must keep a troop of paid spies."
"I don't need spies. I just keep my eyes and ears open."
I wondered in my heart whether she had heard of the marriage, and as if she read the question in my mind, she answered it.
"I thought I'd like to know one thing, though," she observed with the air of one who candidly concedes that he is not infallible. "I'd like to know how the new Mrs. Webbe takes his marrying her."
"Aunt Naomi," I burst out in astonishment, "you are a witch, and ought to be looked after by the witch-finders."
Aunt Naomi laughed, and her eyes twinkled at the agreeable compliment I paid to her cleverness. Then she suddenly became grave.
"I am not sure, Ruth," she said, "that I should be willing to have your responsibility in making him marry such a girl."
I disclaimed the responsibility entirely, and declared I had not even suggested the marriage. I told her he had done it for the sake of the child, and that the proposition was his, and his only.
She sniffed contemptuously, with an air which seemed to cast doubts on my sanity.
"Very likely he did, and I don't suppose you did suggest it in words; but it's your doing all the same."
"I will not have the responsibility put on me," I protested. "It isn't for me to determine what Tom Webbe shall do."
"You can't help it," was her uncompromising answer. "You can make him do anything you want to."
"Then I wish I were wise enough to know what he ought to do," I could not help crying out. "Oh, Aunt Naomi, I do so want to help him!"
She looked at me with her keen old eyes, to which age has only imparted more sharpness. I should hate to be a criminal brought before her as my judge; her eyes would bring out my guilty secret from the cunningest hiding-place in my soul, and she would sentence me with the utmost rigor of the law. After the sentence had been executed, though, she would come with sharp tongue and gentle hands, and bind up my wounds. Now she did not answer my remark directly, but went on to question me about the Brownrig girl and the details of her illness; only when she went away she stopped to turn at the door and say, —
"The best thing you can do for Tom Webbe is to believe in him. He isn't worth your pity, but your caring what happens to him will do him more good than anything else."
I have been wondering ever since she went how much truth there is in what she said. Tom cannot care so much for me as that, although placed as he is the faith of any woman ought to help him. I know, of course, he is fond of me, and that he was always desperate over my engagement; but I cannot believe the motive power of his life is so closely connected with my opinions as Aunt Naomi seems to think. If it were he would never have been involved at all in this dreadful business. But I do so pity him, and I so wish I might really help him!
April 18. Julia is very low. I have been sitting alone with her this afternoon, almost seeing life fade away from her. Only once was she at all like her old self. I had given her some wine, and she lay for a moment with her great black eyes gleaming out from the hollows into which they have sunk. She seemed to have something on her mind, and at last she put it feebly into words.
"Don't tell her any bad of me," she said.
For an instant I did not understand, and I suppose that my face showed this. She half turned her heavy head on her pillow, so that her glance might go toward the place where the baby slept in the broken clothes-basket. The sadness of it came over me so suddenly and so strongly that tears blinded me. It was the most womanly touch that I have ever known in Julia; and for the moment I was so moved that I could not speak. I leaned over and kissed her, and promised that from me her child should never know harm of its mother.
"She'd be more likely to go to the devil if she knew," Julia explained gaspingly. "Now she'll have some sort of a chance."
The words were coarse, but as they were said they were so pathetic that they pierced me. Poor little baby, born to a tainted heritage! I must save her clean little soul somehow. Poor Julia, she certainly never had any sort of a chance.
April 24. She is in her grave at last, poor girl, and it is sad to think that nobody alive regrets her. Tom cannot, and even her dreadful mother showed no sorrow to-day. Somehow the vulgarity of the mother and her behavior took away half the sadness of the tragedy. When I think about it the very coarseness of it all makes the situation more pathetic, but this is an afterthought that can be felt only when I have beaten down my disgust. When one considers how Julia grew up with this woman, and how she had no way of learning the decencies of life except from a mother who had no conception of them, it makes the heart ache; and yet when Mrs. Brownrig broke in upon us at the graveyard this morning, disgust was the strongest feeling of which I was conscious. The violation of conventionalities always shocks a woman, I suppose, and when it comes to anything so solemn as services over the dead, the lack of decency is shocking and exasperating together, with a little suggestion besides of sacrilege.
Miss Charlotte surprised me by coming over just after breakfast to go to the funeral with me.
"I don't like to have you go alone," she said, "and I knew you would go."
I asked her in some surprise how in the world she knew when the funeral was to be, for we thought that we had kept it entirely quiet.
"Aunt Naomi told me last night," she answered. "I suppose she heard it from some familiar spirit or other, – a black cat, or a toad, or something of the kind."
I could only say that I was completely puzzled to see how Aunt Naomi had discovered the hour in any other way, and I thanked Miss Charlotte for coming, though I told the dear she should not have taken so much trouble.
"I wanted to do it, my dear," she returned cheerfully. "I am getting to be an old thing, and I find funerals rather lively and amusing. Don't you remember Maria Harmon used to say that to a pious soul a funeral was a heavenly picnic?"
Whatever a "heavenly picnic" may be, the funeral this morning was one of the most ghastly things imaginable. Tom and Mr. Thurston were in one carriage and Miss Charlotte and I in another. We went to the graveyard at the Rim, where Julia's father and brother were buried, a place half overgrown with wild-rose and alder bushes. In summer it must be a picturesque tangle of wild shrubs and blossoms, but now it is only chill, and barren, and neglected. The spring has reddened and yellowed the tips of the twigs, but not enough to make the bushes look really alive yet. The heap of clay by the grave, too, was of a hideous ochre tint, and horribly sodden and oozy.
Just as the coffin was being lowered a wild figure suddenly appeared from somewhere behind the thickets of alders and low spruces which skirt the fence on one side. It proved to be old Mrs. Brownrig, who with rags and tags, and even her disheveled gray hair fluttering as she moved, half ran down the path toward us. She must have been hiding in the woods waiting, and I found afterward that she had been seen lurking about yesterday, though for some reason she had not been to her house. Now she had evidently been drinking, and she was a dreadful thing to look at.
I wonder why it is that nature, which makes almost any other ruin picturesque, never succeeds in making the wreck of humanity anything but hideous? An old tower, an old tree, even an old house, has somehow a quality that is prepossessing; but an old man is apt to look unattractive, and an old woman who has given up taking care of herself is repulsive. Perhaps we cannot see humanity with the impartial eyes with which we regard nature, but I do not think this is the whole of it. Somehow and for some reason an inanimate ruin is generally attractive, while a human ruin is ugly.
Mrs. Brownrig seemed to me an incarnation of the repulsive. She made me shudder with some sort of a feeling that she was wicked through and through. Even the pity she made me feel could not prevent my sense that she was vicious. I wanted to wash my hands just for having seen her. I was ashamed to be so uncharitable, and of course it was because she was so hideous to look at; but I do not think I could have borne to have her touch me.
"Stop!" she called out. "I'm the mother of the corpse. Don't you dare to bury her till I get there!"
I glanced at Tom in spite of myself. He had been stern and pale all the morning, not saying a word more than was necessary, but now the color came into his face all at once. I could not bear to see him, and tried to look at the mother, but repulsion and pity made me choke. She was panting with haste and intoxication by the time she reached us, and stumbled over something in the path. She caught at Tom's arm to save herself, and there she hung, leering up into his face.
"You didn't mean for me to come, did you?" she broke out, half whimpering and half chuckling. "She was mine before she was yours. You killed her, too."
Tom kept himself still, though it must have been terribly hard. He must have been in agony, and I could have sobbed to think how he suffered. He grew white as I have never seen him, but he did not look at the old woman. She was perhaps too distracted with drink and I hope with grief to know what she was doing. She turned suddenly, and looked at the coffin, which rested on the edge of the grave.
"My handsome Jule!" she wailed. "Oh, my handsome Jule! They're all dead now! What did you put on her? Did you make a shroud or put on a dress?"
"She has a white shroud," I said quickly. "I saw to everything myself."
She turned to me with a fawning air, and let go her clasp on Tom's arm.
"I'm grateful, Miss Privet," she said. "We Brownrigs ain't much, but we're grateful. I hope you won't let 'em bury my handsome gel till I've seen her," she went on, with a manner pitifully wheedling. "She was my gel before she was anybody else's, and it ain't goin' to hurt nobody for me to see her. I'd like to see that shroud."
How much natural grief, how much vanity, how much maudlin excitement was in her wish, I cannot tell; but manifestly there was nothing to do but to have the coffin opened. When the face of the dead woman had once more been uncovered to the light, the dreadful mother hung over it raving and chuckling. Now she shrieked for her handsome Jule, and wailed in a way that pierced to the marrow; then she would fall to imbecile laughter over the shroud, "just like a lady's, – but then Jule was a lady after she was married." Miss Charlotte, Tom, and I stood apart, while Mr. Thurston tried to get the excited creature away; and the grave-diggers looked on with open curiosity. I could not help thinking how they would tell the story, and of how Tom's name would be bandied about in connection with it. Sometimes I feel as if it were harder to bear the vulgarities of life than actual sorrows. Father used to say that pain is personal, but vulgarity a violation of general principles. This is one of his sayings which I do not feel that I understand entirely, and yet I have some sense of what he meant. A thing which is vulgar seems to fly in the face of all that should be, and outrages our sense of the fitness of things.
Well, somehow we got through it all. It is over, and Julia is in her grave. I cannot but think that it is better if she does not remember; if she has gone out like an ill-burning candle. Nothing is left now but to consider what can be done for the lives that we can reach. I am afraid that the mother is beyond me, but for Tom I can, perhaps, do something. For baby I should do much.
April 25. It is so strange to have a child in the house. I feel queer and disconcerted when I think of it, although things seem to go easily enough. The responsibility of taking charge of a helpless life overwhelms me, and I do not dare to let my thoughts go when they begin to picture possibilities in the future. I wonder that I ever dared to undertake to have baby; and yet her surroundings will be so much better here than with the dreadful Brownrig grandmother that she must surely be better for them. In any case I had to help Tom.
I proposed a permanent nurse for baby, but Hannah and Rosa took up arms at once, and all but upbraided me with having cast doubts on their ability and faithfulness. Surely we three women among us should be able to take care of one morsel, although none of us ever had babies of our own.
April 29. Nothing could be more absurd than the way in which the entire household now revolves about baby. All of us are completely slaves already, although the way in which we show it is naturally different. Rosa has surrendered frankly and without reservations. She sniffed and pouted at the idea of having the child "of that Brownrig creature" in the house. She did not venture to say this to me directly, of course; but she relieved her mind by making remarks to Hannah when I could not help hearing. From the moment baby came, however, Rosa succumbed without a struggle. It is evident she is born with the full maternal instinct, and I see if she does not marry her Dennis, or some more eligible lover, and take herself away before baby is old enough to be much affected, the child will be spoiled to an unlimited extent. As for Hannah, her method of showing her affection is to exhibit the greatest solicitude for baby's spiritual welfare, mingled with the keenest jealousy of Rosa's claims on baby's love. I foresee that I shall have pretty hard work to protect my little daughter from Hannah's well-meant but not very wise theology; and how to do this without hurting the good old soul's feelings may prove no easy problem.
As for myself – of course I love the little, helpless, pink thing; the waif from some outside unknown brought here into a world where everything is made so hard to her from the start. She woke this afternoon, and looked up at me with Tom Webbe's eyes, lying there as sweet and happy as possible, so that I had to kiss and cuddle her, and love her all at once. It is wonderful how a baby comes out of the most dreadful surroundings as a seedling comes out of the mud, so clean and fresh. I said this to Aunt Naomi yesterday, and she sniffed cynically.
"Yes," she answered, "but a weed grows into a weed, no matter how it looks when it is little."
The thought is dreadful to me. I will not believe that because a human being is born out of weakness and wickedness there is no chance for it. The difference, it seems to me, is that every human being has at least the germs of good as well as of bad, and one may be developed as well as the other. Baby must have much that is good and fine from her father, and the thing I have to do is to see to it that the best of her grows, and the worse part dies for want of nourishment. Surely we can do a great deal to aid nature. Perhaps my baby cannot help herself much, at least not for years and years; but if she is kept in an atmosphere which is completely wholesome, whatever is best in her nature must grow strong and crowd down everything less noble.