V
MAY
May 1. Baby is more bewitching every day. She is so wonderful and so lovely that I am never tired of watching her. The miracle of a baby's growth makes one stand speechless in delight and awe. When this little morsel of life, hardly as many days in the world as I have been years, coos and smiles, and stretches out those tiny rosebud fingers only big enough for a fairy, I feel like going down on my knees to the mystery of life. I do not wonder that people pray. I understand entirely the impulse to cry out to something mighty, something higher than our own strength, some sentient heart of nature somewhere; the desire to find, by leaning on the invisible, a relief from the oppressiveness of the emotions we all must feel when a sense of the greatness of life takes hold on us. If it were but possible to believe in any of the many gods that have been offered to us, how glad I should be. Father used to say that every human being really makes a deity for himself, and that the difference between believers and unbelievers is whether they can allow the church to give a name to the god a man has himself created. I cannot accept any name from authority, but the sense of some brooding power is very strong in me when I see this being growing as if out of nothing in my very hands.
When I look at baby I have so great a consciousness of the life outside of us, the life of the universe as a whole, that I am ready to agree with any one who talks of God. The trouble is that one idea of deity seems to me as true and also as inadequate as all the rest; so that in the end I am left with only my overwhelming sense of the mightiness of the mystery of existence and of the unity of all the life in the universe.
May 2. To-day we named baby. I would not do it without consulting her father, so I sent for Tom, and he came over just after breakfast. The day has been warm, and the windows were open; a soft breath of wind came in with a feeling of spring in it, and a faint hint of a summer coming by and by. I was upstairs in the nursery when Tom came; for we have made a genuine, full-fledged nursery of the south chamber, and installed Rosa and the baby there. When they told me that he was here, I took baby, all pink and sweet from her bath, and went down with her.
Tom stood with his back to the parlor door, looking out of the window. He did not hear me until I spoke, and said good-morning. Then he turned quickly. At sight of baby he changed color, and forgot to answer my greeting. He came across the room toward us, so that we met in the middle of the floor.
"Good God, Ruth!" he said. "To think of seeing you with her baby in your arms!"
The words hurt me for myself and for him.
"Tom," I cried out excitedly, "I will not hear you say anything against baby! It is neither hers nor yours now. It is mine, mine! You shall not speak of her as if she were anything but the sweetest, purest thing in the whole world!"
He looked at me so intently and so feelingly while I snuggled the pink ball up to me and kissed it, that it was rather disconcerting. To change the subject, I went straight to the point.
"Tom," I said, "I want to ask you about baby's name."
"Oh, call it anything you like," he answered.
"But you ought to name her," I told him.
He was silent a moment; then he turned and walked away to the window again. I thought that he might be considering the name, but when he came back abruptly he said: —
"Ruth, I can't pretend with you. I haven't any love for that child. I wish it weren't here to remind me of what I would give anything to have forgotten. If I have any feeling for it, it is pity that the poor little wretch had to be chucked into the world, and shame that I should have any responsibility about it."
I told him he would come to love her some time; that she was after all his daughter, and so sweet he couldn't help being fond of her.
"If I ever endure her," he said, almost doggedly, "it will be on your account."
"Nonsense, Tom," I retorted, as briskly as I could when I wanted to cry, "you'll be fond of her because you can't help it. See, she has your eyes, and her hair is going to be like yours."
He laughed with a trace of his old buoyant spirit.
"What idiocy!" was his reply. "Her eyes are any color you like, and she has only about six hairs on her head anyway."
I denied this indignantly, partly because it was not true, and partly, I am afraid, with feminine guile, to divert him. We fell for a moment almost into the oldtime boy-and-girl tone of long ago, and only baby in my arms reminded us of what had come between.
"Well," I said at last, "it is evident that you are not worthy to give this nice little, dear little, superfine little girl a name; so I shall do it myself. I shall call her Thomasine."
"What an outlandish name!"
"It is your own, so you needn't abuse it. Do you agree?"
"I don't see how I can help myself, for you can call her anything you like."
"Of course I shall," I told him; "but I thought you should be consulted."
He shrugged his shoulders with a laugh.
"Having made up your mind," he said, "you ask my advice."
"I shouldn't think of consulting you till I had made up my mind," was my retort. "Now I want you to give her her name."
"Give it to her how?"
"Her name is to be Thomasine," I repeated.
"It is an absurd name," Tom commented.
"That's as it may be," was all I would answer, "but that's what she's to be called. You're to kiss her, and" —
He looked at me with a sudden flush. He had never, I am sure, so much as touched his child with the tip of his finger, much less caressed her. The proposition took him completely by surprise, and evidently disconcerted him. I did not give him time to consider. I made my tone and manner as light as I could, and hurried on.
"You are to kiss her and say, 'I name you Thomasine.' I suppose that really you ought to say 'thee,' but that seems rather theatrical for us plain folk."
He hesitated a second, and then he bent over baby in my arms.
"I name you Thomasine," he said, and just brushed her forehead with his lips. Then he looked at me solemnly. "You will keep her?" he said.
"Yes," I promised.
So baby is named, and Tom must have felt that she belongs really to him, however he may shrink from her.
May 3. I have had a dreadful call from Mrs. Webbe. She came over in the middle of the forenoon, and the moment I saw her determined expression I felt sure something painful was to happen.
"Good-morning," she said abruptly; "I have come after my son's infant."
"What?" I responded, my wits scattering like chickens before a hawk.
"I have come after my son's infant," she repeated. "We are obliged to you for taking care of it; but I won't trouble you with it any longer."
I told her I was to keep baby always. She looked at me with tightening lips.
"I don't want to have disagreeable words with you, Ruth," she said, "but you must know we could never allow such a thing."
I asked her why.
"You must know," she said, "you are not fit to be trusted with an immortal soul."
I fear that I unmeaningly let the shadow of a smile show as I said, —
"But baby is so young" —
"This is no laughing matter," she interrupted with asperity, "even if the child is young. I must do my duty to her from the very beginning. Of course it will be a cross for me, but I hope I shall bear it like a Christian."
Something in her voice and manner exasperated me almost beyond endurance. I could not help remembering the day Mrs. Webbe came to the Brownrig house, and I am much afraid I was anything but conciliatory in my tone when I answered.
"Mrs. Webbe," I said to her, "if you cared for baby, and wanted to love her, I might perhaps think of giving her up, though I am very fond of her, dear little thing."
Mrs. Webbe's keen black eyes snapped at me.
"I dare say you look at it in that way," she retorted. "That's just it. It's just the sort of worldliness that would ruin the child. It's come into the world with sin and shame enough to bear, and you'd never help it to grace to bear it."
The words were not entirely clear, yet I had little doubt of their meaning. The baby, however, was after all her own flesh and blood, and I was secretly glad that to strengthen me in my resolve to keep Thomasine I had my promise to the dead mother and to Tom.
"But, Mrs. Webbe," I said as gently as I could, "don't you think the fact that baby has no mother, and must bear that, will make her need love more?"
"She'll need bracing up," was the emphatic rejoinder, "and that's just what she won't get here. I don't want her. It's a cross for me to look at her, and realize we've got to own a brat with Brownrig blood in her. I'm only trying to do my duty. Where's that baby going to get any religious training from you, Ruth Privet?"
I sat quiet a moment, thinking what I had better say. Mrs. Webbe was entirely conscientious about it all. She did not, I was sure, want baby, and she was sincere in saying that she was only trying to do her duty. When I thought of Thomasine, however, as being made to serve as a living and visible cross for the good of Mrs. Webbe's soul, I could not bear it. Driven by that strong will over the thorny paths of her grandmother's theology, poor baby would be more likely to be brought to despair than to glory. It was of course right for Mrs. Webbe to wish to take baby, but it could not be right for me to permit her to do so. If my duty clashed with hers, I could not change on that account; but I wished to be as conciliatory as possible.
"Don't you think, Mrs. Webbe," I asked, trying to look as sunny as a June day, "that baby is rather young to get harm from me or my heresies? Couldn't the whole matter at least be left till she is old enough to know the meaning of words?"
She looked at me with more determination than ever.
"Well, of course it's handsome of you to be willing to take care of Tom's baby, and of course you won't mind the expense; but you made him marry that girl, so it's only fair you should expect to take some of the trouble that's come of what you did."
"You don't mean," I burst out before I thought, "that you wouldn't have had Tom marry her?"
"It's no matter now, as long as she didn't live," Mrs. Webbe answered; "though it isn't pleasant knowing that one of that Brownrig tribe married into our family."
I had nothing to say. It would have hurt my pride, of course, had one of my kin made such a marriage, and I cannot help some secret feeling that Julia had forfeited her right to be treated like an honest girl; but there was baby to be considered. Besides this, the marriage was made, it seems to me, by Tom's taking the girl, not by the service at her deathbed. Mrs. Webbe and I sat for a time without words. I looked at the carpet, and was conscious that Mrs. Webbe looked at me. She is not a pleasant woman, and I have had times of wishing she might be carried off by a whirlwind, so that Deacon Webbe and Tom might have a little peace; but I believe in her way she tries to be a good one. The trouble is that her way of being good seems to me to be a great deal more vicious than most kinds of wickedness. She uses her religion like a tomahawk, and whacks with it right and left.
"Look here," she broke out at last, "I don't want to be unpleasant, but it ain't a pleasant thing for me to come here anyway. I suppose you mean to be kind, but you'd be soft with baby. That's just what she mustn't have. She'd better be made to know from the very start what's before her."
"What is before her?" I asked.
Mrs. Webbe flushed.
"I don't know as there's any use of my telling you if you don't see it yourself. She's got to fight her way through life against her inheritance from that mother of hers, and – and her father."
She choked a little, and I could not help laying my hand on hers, just to show that I understood. She drew herself away, not unkindly, I believe, but because she is too proud to endure pity.
"She's got to be hardened," she went on, her tone itself hardening as she spoke. "From her cradle she's got to be set to fight the sin that's in her."
I could not argue. I respected the sternness of her resolve to do her duty, and I knew that she was sacrificing much. Every smallest sight of the child would be an hourly, stinging humiliation to her pride, and perhaps, too, to her love. In her fierce way she must love Tom, so that his shame would hurt her terribly. Yet I could not give up my little soft, pink baby to live in an atmosphere of disapproval and to be disciplined in the rigors of a pitiless creed. That, I am sure, would never save her. Tom Webbe is a sufficient answer to his mother's argument, if she could only see it. If anything is to rescue Thomasine from the disastrous consequences of an unhappy heritage, it must be just pure love and friendliness.
"Mrs. Webbe," I said, as firmly as I could, "I think I know how you feel; but in any case I could not give up baby until I had seen Tom."
A deeper flush came over the thin face, and a look which made me turn my eyes away, because I knew she would not wish me to see the pain and humiliation which it meant.
"Tom," she began, "Tom! He" – She broke off abruptly, and, rising, began to gather her shawl about her. "Then you refuse to let me have her?" she ended.
"The baby's father should have something to say in the matter, it seems to me," I told her.
"He has already decided," she replied sternly, "and decided against the child's good. He wants her to stay with you. I suppose," she added, and I must say that her tone took a suggestion of spite, "he thinks you'll get so interested in the baby as sometime" —
She did not finish, perhaps because I gave her a look, which, if it expressed half I felt, might well silence her. She moved quickly toward the door, and tightened her shawl with an air of virtuous determination.
"Well," she observed, "I have done my duty by the child. What the Lord let it live for is a mystery to me."
She said not another word, not even of leave-taking, but strode away with something of the air of a brisk little prophetess who has pronounced the doom of heaven on the unrighteous. It is a pity such people will make of religion an excuse for taking themselves so seriously. All the teachings of theology Mrs. Webbe turns into justifications of her prejudices and her hardness. The very thought of Thomasine under her rigorous rule makes me shiver. I wonder how her husband has endured it all these years. Saintship used to be won by making life as disagreeable as possible for one's self; but nowadays life is made sufficiently hard by others. If living with his wife peacefully, forbearingly, decorously, does not entitle Deacon Webbe to be considered a saint, it is time that new principles of canonization were adopted.
Heavens! What uncharitableness I am running into myself!
May 4. I told Aunt Naomi of Mrs. Webbe's visit, and her comments were pungent enough. It is wicked, perhaps, to set them down, but I have a vicious joy in doing it.
"Of course she'd hate to have the baby," Aunt Naomi declared, "but she'd more than get even by the amount of satisfaction she'd get nagging at it. She's worn Deacon Daniel till he's callous, so there can't be much fun rasping him, and Tom won't listen to her. She wants somebody to bully, and that baby'd just suit her. She could make it miserable and get in side digs at its father at the same time."
"You are pretty severe, Aunt Naomi," I said; "but I know you don't mean it. As for troubling Tom, he says he doesn't care for baby."
"Pooh! He's soft-hearted like his father; and even if he didn't care for his own child, which is nonsense anyway, he'd be miserable to see any child go through what he's been through himself with that woman."
It is useless to attempt to stay Aunt Naomi when once she begins to talk about Mrs. Webbe, and she has so much truth in her favor I am never able successfully to urge the other side of the case so as to get for Mrs. Webbe any just measure of fair play. To-night I almost thought that Aunt Naomi would devour her green veil in the energy with which she freed her mind. The thing which she cannot see is that Mrs. Webbe is entirely blind to her own faults. Mrs. Webbe would doubtless be amazed if she could really appreciate that she is unkind to Deacon Daniel and to Tom. She acts her nature, and simply does not think. I dare say most of us might be as bad if we had her disposition. – Which tags on at the end of the nasty things I have been writing like a piece of pure cant!
May 6. It certainly would seem on the face of it that a woman alone in the world as I am, of an age when I ought to have the power of managing my own affairs, and with the means of getting on without asking financial aid, might take into her house a poor, helpless, little baby if she wished. Apparently there is a conspiracy to prevent my doing anything of the sort. Cousin Mehitable has now entered her protest, and declares that if I do not give up what she calls my mad scheme she shall feel it her duty to have me taken in charge as a lunatic. She wants to know whether I have no decency about having a bachelor's baby in the house, although she is perfectly well aware that Tom was married. She reminds me that she expects me to go to Europe with her in about a month, and asks whether I propose to leave Thomasine in a foundling hospital or a day nursery while I am gone. Her letter is one breathless rush of indignation from beginning to end, so funnily like her that with all my indignation I could hardly read it for laughing.
I confess it is hard to give up the trip abroad. I was only half aware how I have been counting on it until now I am brought face to face with the impossibility of carrying out the plan. I have almost unconsciously been piecing together in my mind memories of the old days in Europe, with delight in thinking of seeing again places which enchanted me. Any one, I suppose, who has been abroad enough to taste the charm of travel, but who has not worn off the pleasure by traveling too much, must have moments of longing to get back. I have had the oddest, sudden pangs of homesickness when I have picked up a photograph or opened a magazine to a picture of some beautiful place across the ocean. The smallest things can bring up the feeling, – the sound of the wind in the trees as I heard it once when driving through the Black Forest, the sun on a stone wall as it lay in Capri, the sky as it looked at one place, or the grass as I saw it at another. I remember how once a white feather lying on the turf of the lawn brought up the courtyard of Warwick Castle as if a curtain had lifted suddenly; and always these flashing reminders of the other side of the world have made me feel as if I must at once hurry across the ocean again. Now I have let myself believe I was really going, and to give it up is very hard.
It is perhaps making too much of it to be so disappointed. Certainly baby must be taken care of, and I have promised to take care of her. I fear that it will be a good while before I see Europe again. I am sorry for Cousin Mehitable, but she has never any difficulty in finding friends to travel with. It is evident enough that my duty is here.
May 10. Rosa has not yet come to the end of her matrimonial perplexities. The divorced wife of Ran Gargan is now reported as near death, and Rosa is debating whether to give up Dennis Maloney and wait for Ran.
"Of course Dennis is gone on me," she explained last night in the most cold-bloodedly matter-of-fact fashion, "and I'd make him a main good wife. But Ran was always the boy for me, barring Father O'Rafferty wouldn't let me marry him."
"Rosa," I said, with all the severity I could command, "you must not talk like that. It sounds as if you hadn't any feeling at all. You don't mean it."
Rosa tossed her saucy head with emphatic scorn.
"What for don't I mean it?" she demanded. "Any woman wants to marry the man she likes best, and, barring him, she'd take up with the man who likes her best."
I laughed, and told her she was getting to be a good deal of a philosopher.
"Humph!" was her not very respectful reply; "it's the only choice a woman has, and she don't always have that. She's better off if she'll take the man that's sweet on her; but it's the way we girls are made, to hanker after the one we're sweet on ourselves."
Her earnestness so much interfered with the supper which she was giving to Thomasine that I took baby into my arms, and left Rosa free to speak out her mind without hindrance.
"I'm not going to take either of 'em in a hurry," she went on. "I'd not be leaving you in the lurch with the baby, Miss Ruth. I'd like to have Ran, but I don't know what he's got. He'd make me stand round awful, they say, and Dennis'd be under my thumb like a crumb of butter. I mistrust I'd be more contented with Ranny. It'd be more stirred up like; but I'd have some natural fear of him, and that's pleasant for a woman."
I had never seen Rosa in this astonishing mood before, and so much worldly wisdom was bewildering. Such generalizations on the relation of the sexes took away my breath. I was forced to be silent, for there was evidently no chance of my holding my own in a conversation of this sort. It is strange how boldly and bluntly this uneducated girl has thought out her relations with her lovers. She recognizes entirely that Dennis, who is her slave, will treat her better than Ran, who will be her master; yet she "mistrusts she will be more contented with Ranny." The moral seems to be that a woman is happier to be abused by the man she loves than to be served by the man who loves her. That can only be crude instinct, the relics of savagery. In civilized woman, I am sure, when respect goes love must go also.
No; that isn't true! Women keep on loving men when they know them to be unworthy. Perhaps this applies especially to good wives. A good woman is bound to love her husband just as long as she can in any way compass it, and to deceive herself about him to the latest possible instant. I wonder what I should do? I wonder – Well, George has shown that he is not what I thought him, and do I care for him less? He only showed, however, that he did not care for me as much as I thought, and of course that does not necessarily prove him unworthy. And yet —
What is the use of all this? What do I know about it anyway? I will go to bed.
May 12. It is amusing to see how jealous Hannah and Rosa are of baby's attention. Thomasine can as yet hardly be supposed to distinguish one human being from another, and very likely has not drawn very accurate comparisons between any of us and the furniture; but Rosa insists that baby knows her, and is far more fond of her than of Hannah, while of course Hannah indignantly sniffs at an idea so preposterous.
"She really laughed at me this morning when I was giving her her bath," Rosa assured me to-day. "She knows me the minute I come into the nursery."
It is beautiful to see how the sweetness and helplessness of the little thing have so appealed to the girls that prejudices are forgotten. When I brought Thomasine home I feared that I might have trouble. They scorned the child of that Brownrig girl, and they both showed the fierce contempt which good girls of their class feel for one who disgraces herself. All this is utterly forgotten. The charm of baby has so enslaved them that if an outsider ventured to show the feelings they themselves had at first, they would be full of wrath and indignation. The maternal instinct is after all the strongest thing in most women. Rosa considers her matrimonial chances in a bargain-and-sale fashion which takes my breath, but she will be perfectly fierce in her fondness for her children. Hannah is a born old maid, but she cannot help mothering every baby who comes within her reach, and for Thomasine she brings out all the sweetness of her nature.
May 15. I have been through a whirlwind, but now I am calm, and can think of things quietly. It is late, but the fire has not burned down, and I could not sleep, so Peter and I may as well stay where we are a while longer.
I was reading this afternoon, when suddenly Kathie rushed into the room out of breath with running, her face smooched and wet with tears, and her hair in confusion.
"Why, Kathie," I asked, "what is the matter?"
Her answer was to fly across the room, throw herself on her knees beside me, and burst into sobs. The more I tried to soothe her, the more she cried, and it was a long time before she was quiet enough to be at all reasonable.
"My dear," I said, "tell me what has happened. What is the matter?"
She looked up at me with wild eyes.
"It isn't true!" she broke out fiercely. "I know it isn't true! I didn't say a word to him, because I knew you wouldn't want me to; but it's a lie! It's a lie, if my father did say it."
"Why, Kathie," I said, amazed at her excitement, "what in the world are you saying? Your father wouldn't tell a lie to save his life."
"He believes it," she answered, dropping her voice. A sullen, stubborn look came into her face that it was pitiful to see. "He does believe it, but it's a lie."
I spoke to her as sternly as I could, and told her she had no right to judge of what her father believed, and that I would not have her talk so of him.
"But I asked him about your mother, and he said she would be punished forever and ever for not being a church member!" she exclaimed before I could stop her. "And I know it's a lie."
She burst into another tempest of sobs, and cried until she was exhausted. Her words were so cruel that for a moment I had not even the power to try to comfort her; but she would soon have been in hysterics, and for a time I had to think only of her. Fortunately baby woke. Rosa was not at home, and by the time Hannah and I had fed Thomasine, and once more she was asleep in her cradle, I had my wits about me. Kathie had, with a child's quick change of mood, become almost gay.
"Kathie," I said, "do you mind staying here with baby while I take a little walk? Rosa is out, and I have been in the house all day. I want a breath of fresh air."
"Oh, I should love to," she answered, her face brightening at the thought of being trusted with a responsibility so great.
I was out of doors, and walking rapidly toward Mr. Thurston's house, before I really came to my senses. I was so wounded by what Kathie had thoughtlessly repeated, so indignant at this outrage to my dead, that I had had strength only to hide my feelings from her. Now I came to a realization of my anger, and asked myself what I meant to do. I had instinctively started out to denounce Mr. Thurston for bigotry and cruelty; to protest against this sacrilege. A little, I feel sure, – at least I hope I am right, – I felt the harm he was doing Kathie; but most I was outraged and angry that he had dared to speak so of Mother. I was ashamed of my rage when I grew more composed; and I realized all at once how Mother herself would have smiled at me. So clear was my sense of her that it was almost as if she really repeated what she once said to me: "My dear Ruth, do you suppose that what Mr. Thurston thinks alters the way the universe is made? Why should he know more about it than you do? He's not nearly so clever or so well educated." I smiled to recall how she had smiled when she said it; then I was blinded by tears to remember that I should never see her smile again; and so I walked into a tree in the sidewalk, and nearly broke my nose. That was the end of my dashing madly at Mr. Thurston. The wound Kathie's words had made throbbed, but with the memory of Mother in my mind I could not break out into anger.
I turned down the Cove Road to walk off my ill-temper. After all Mr. Thurston was right from his point of view. He could not believe without feeling that he had to warn Kathie against the awful risk of running into eternal damnation. It must hurt him to think or to say such a thing; but he believes in the cruelty of the deity, and he has beaten his natural tenderness into subjection to his idea of a Moloch. It is so strange that the ghastly absurdity of connecting God's anger with a sweet and blameless life like Mother's does not strike him. Indeed, I suppose down here in the country we are half a century or so behind the thought of the real world, and that Mr. Thurston's creed would be impossible in the city, or among thinkers even of his own denomination. At least I hope so, though I do not see what they have left in the orthodox creed if they take eternal punishment out of it.
The fresh air and the memory of Mother, with a little common sense, brought me right again. I walked until I had myself properly in hand, and till I hoped that the trace of tears on my face might pass for the effect of the wind. It was growing dusk by this time, and the lamps began to appear in the houses as I came to Mr. Thurston's at last. I slipped in at the front door as quietly as I could, and knocked at the study.
Mr. Thurston himself opened the door. He looked surprised, but asked me in, and offered me a chair. He had been writing, and still held his pen in his hand; the study smelled of kerosene lamp and air-tight stove. Poor man! Theology which has to live by an air-tight stove must be dreary. If he had an open fire on his hearth, he might have less in his religion.
"I have come to confess a fault, Mr. Thurston," I said, "and to ask a favor."
He smiled a little watery smile, and put down his pen.
"Is the favor to be a reward for the fault or for confessing it?" he asked.
I was so much surprised by this mild jest, coming from him, that I almost forgot my errand. I smiled back at him, and forgot the bitterness that had been in my heart. He looked so thin, so bloodless, that it was impossible to have rancor.
"I left Kathie with baby while I went for a walk," I said, "and I have stayed away longer than I intended. I forgot to tell her she could call Hannah if she wanted to come home, and she is too conscientious to leave, so I am afraid that she has stayed all this time. I wanted you to know it is my fault."