Chapter I: Part 1

[Transcriber's Note: Some words which appear to be typos are printed
thus in the original book. A list of these possible misprints follows:
enthuiasms
fragant
increduously
insistance
trival]

A VILLAGE OPHELIA

BY ANNE REEVE ALDRICH

NEW YORK: _W. Dillingham Co., Publishers_, MDCCCXCIX.

CONTENTS

A VILLAGE OPHELIA

A STORY OF THE VERE DE VERE

A LAMENTABLE COMEDY

AN AFRICAN DISCOVERY

AN EVENING WITH CALLENDER

A VILLAGE OPHELIA

On the East end of Long Island, from Riverhead to Greenport, a distance of about thirty miles, two country roads run parallel.

The North road is very near the Sound and away from the villages; lonely farm-houses are scattered at long intervals; in some places their number increases enough to form a little desolate settlement, but there is never a shop, nor sign of village life. That, one must seek on the South road, with its small hamlets, to which the "North roaders," as they are somewhat condescendingly called, drive across to church, or to make purchases.

It was on the North road that I spent a golden August in the home of Mrs. Libby. Her small gray house was lovingly empaled about the front and sides by snow-ball bushes and magenta French-lilacs, that grew tenderly close to the weather-worn shingles, and back of one sunburnt field, as far as the eye could see, stretched the expanse of dark, shining scrub-oaks, beyond which, one knew, was the hot, blue glitter of the Sound.

Mrs. Libby was a large iron-gray widow of sixty, insatiably greedy of such fleshly comforts as had ever come within her knowledge--soft cushions, heavily sweetened dishes, finer clothing than her neighbors. She had cold eyes, and nature had formed her mouth and jaw like the little silver-striped adder that I found one day, mangled by some passing cart, in the yellow dust of the road. Her lips were stretched for ever in that same flat, immutable smile. When she moved her head, you caught the gleam of a string of gold beads, half-hidden in a crease of her stout throat. She had still a coarsely handsome figure, she was called a fine looking woman; and every afternoon she sat and sewed by the window of her parlor, dressed in a tight, black gown, with immaculate cuffs about her thick wrists. The neighbors--thin, overworked women, with numerous children--were too tired and busy to be envious. They thought her very genteel. Her husband, before his last illness, had kept a large grocery store in a village on the South side of the Island. It gave her a presumptive right to the difference in her ways, to the stuff gown of an afternoon, to the use of butter instead of lard in her cookery, to the extra thickness and brightness of her parlor carpet.

For days I steeped my soul in the peace and quiet. In the long mornings I went down the grassy path to the beach, and lay on the yellow sands, as lost to the world as if I were in some vast solitude. I had had a wound in my life, and with the natural instinct of all hurt creatures, I wanted to hide and get close to the earth until it healed. I knew that it must heal at last, but there are certain natures in which mental torture must have a physical outcome, and we are happier afterward if we have called in no Greek chorus of friends to the tragedy, to witness and sing how the body comported itself under the soul's woe. But there is no sense of shame when deep cries are wrenched from the throat under the free sky, with only the sea to answer. One can let the body take half the burden of pain, and writhe on the breast of the earth without reproach. I took this relief that nature meant for such as I, wearing myself into the indifference of exhaustion, to which must sooner or later ensue the indifference brought by time. Sometimes a flock of small brown sandbirds watched me curiously from a sodden bank of sea-weed, but that was all.

This story is not of myself, however, or of the pain which I cured in this natural way, and which is but a memory now.

One gray morning a white mist settled heavily, and I could see but a short distance on the dark waters for the fog. A fresh access of the suffering which I was fighting, the wildness of my grief and struggles, wore me out, so that I fell asleep there on the rough sand, my mouth laid against the salty pebbles, and my hands grasping the sharp, yielding grains, crushed as if some giant foot had trodden me into the earth.

I was awakened by a soft speculative voice. "Another, perhaps," I thought it said. Starting up, I saw standing beside me a thin, shrinking figure, drenched like myself by the salt mist. From under a coarse, dark straw hat, a small, delicate face regarded me shyly, yet calmly. It was very pale, a little sunken, and surrounded by a cloud of light, curling hair, blown loose by the wind; the wide sensitive lips were almost colorless, and the peculiar eyes, greenish and great-pupiled, were surrounded by stained, discolored rings that might have been the result of weary vigils, or of ill-health. The woman, who was possibly thirty, must once have been possessed of a fragile type of beauty, but it was irretrievably lost now in the premature age that had evidently settled upon her.

Struggling to a sitting posture, I saw that the thick white fog had closed densely, and that the woodland back of us was barely distinguishable. We too seemed shut in, as in a room. "You live at Mrs. Libby's," said the young woman, after a moment's hesitation. "I am Agnes Rayne. I hope I did not frighten you."

"No," I replied, brushing the sand from my damp clothing as I rose. "I am afraid if you had not come by fortunately, I should have had a thorough wetting. Can we get home before the storm begins?"

"You would not have taken cold down here on the beach," she remarked, turning and looking out to sea. It seemed strangely to me as if those odd eyes of hers could pierce the blinding mist. "I will not go back with you. I have just come."

Whatever she did or said that might have seemed rude or brusque in another, was sweet and courteous from her manner. "Very well," I said. Then I paused,--my desire to meet her again was absurdly keen. Stepping closer to her side, I extended my hand. "Will you come to see me, Miss Rayne? I am very lonely, and I should be so--grateful."

She touched my fingers lightly with a chilly little hand, yet she never looked at me as she replied, "Yes, some day."

As I plodded heavily through the wet sand, I was irresistibly impelled to turn my head. She was merely standing exactly as I left her, thin and straight, in the black gown that clung closely to her slender limbs, with the mass of light hair about her shoulders.

Drenched as I was, when I reached home, with the large warm drops of the storm's beginning, I stopped in the sitting-room a moment before going to my room. The smell of ironing scented the house, but Mrs. Libby was resting placidly in the rocking-chair, her feet on a cushioned stool. She was eating some peaches, tearing them apart from the stone with strong, juice-dropping fingers, and dipping them in a saucer of coarse sugar before she devoured them.

"Mrs. Libby, who is Agnes Rayne?" I asked.

"She is old Martin Rayne's daughter, up to the corner. Seen her down to the beach, I expect. Speak to you? Did? Well, she's as queer as Dick's hat-band, as folks say 'round here. Some say she's crazy--love-cracked, I guess she is." Mrs. Libby paused to kill a fly that ventured too near her saucer on the table at her side, with a quick blow of the fleshy hand. I used to turn away when Mrs. Libby killed flies. "Oh! _I_ d'know! She's just queer. Don't commess with anybody, nor ever go to meetin'. The minister called there once; he ain't ever been again, nor told how he was treated, that's sure. They live queer, too. She don't ever make pies, ner p'serves, ner any kind of sauce. 'N' old Martin, he's childish now. He always was as close-mouthed as a mussel. Nobody ever knew whether he liked such goin's on or not."

I went up the high, narrow stairs, thoughtfully to my small room under the eaves, dark with the storm, and smelling of must and dampness. I smiled a little. It was more than probable that these people would count slight eccentricity in a lady--and this was undoubtedly a lady, whatever her birth and surroundings--as madness. After dinner I stood by the window a long time. Through the network of apple-boughs, I could see the road. Mrs. Libby, coming heavily into the sitting-room, divined my thoughts.

"If you're wondering how Agnes gets home, she goes cross-lots, right through the scrub-oak 'n' poison ivy 'n black-b'ries, 'f she's in a hurry. She ain't afraid o' rain; like's not, she stays down to the shore the whole 'durin' day."

"I suppose the people here talk about her."

"Most of 'em have too much to do to talk," replied Mrs. Libby, smoothing down her shining bands of hair before the hanging glass, and regarding her reflected large, white face and set smile, with dull satisfaction and vanity. "They're used to her now."

One glaring afternoon within the week, I sat out on the tiny porch, idly watching a fat spider throw his ropes from the box-bush to the step. I had been sitting there for three hours, and only one creaking farm-wagon had passed, and two dirty brown-legged children. The air was breathless and spicy, and in the rough clearing opposite, the leaves seemed to curve visibly in the intense heat. Did anything ever happen here? It seemed to me as much out of the range of possible happenings as the grave.

"There's Agnes coming," said Mrs. Libby, inarticulately. She held between her lips some ravellings and bits of thread, and she was sitting by the open window, laboriously pushing her needle through a piece of heavy unbleached cloth.

The young woman who came swaying delicately along the path, with something of the motion of a tall stalk of grass in the wind, wore a scanty white gown, which defined almost cruelly the slenderness of form, that seemed to have returned to the meagre uncertainty of young childhood. To-day, her light hair was strained back from her wide forehead, and knotted neatly under the brim of her rough straw hat. She looked much older as she stood before me in the golden light.

"Will you come home with me this afternoon?" she asked directly. "It is not far; perhaps it might amuse you."

I consented gladly. As we walked along the narrow paths that skirted the roadside together, she turned to me, a sudden flush burning on her thin face. "I am afraid you think I am very cruel to bring you out this hot afternoon, but it is so long since I have talked to any one--so long! I have read your books, and then I said last night to myself: 'If I do not go over it all to some one--tell it aloud, from beginning to end--put it into words, I shall go mad. She is a woman who could understand.' Yes, when I saw your hands on the beach that day, all bruised inside, and on one a little cut, where you had wrenched at the sand and stone before you slept, I knew you were my escape. I am abject, but think of the years I have been dying, here, if you despise me."

"No," I said, "it is not abject. Sometimes in one's life comes a crisis, when one must snatch at some remedy, or else die, or go mad. If there is not then something in us that makes us believe in a future, we, of course, die; but I could never think it a cure myself, merely to be free of the body, because I believe in the soul's immortality, and the body is such a diversion! Once rid of it, with all its imperious clamor to be fed and warmed--nothing but utter freedom to think--the grave has never appealed to me as an escape. Madness is a shade better, perhaps; but then that depends on the form of the illusion. For me the body has got to work out the soul's agony. For you, words may bring relief. Try--try anything that suggests itself."

"Do not think you will hear anything new. It will bore you. Are you willing to listen?"

"I am indeed," I replied. We had come to a lonely farm-house, its roofs moss-grown and sunken, the grass knee-high about it. There was hardly a sign of life about the place, though I could see an aged man smoking a pipe peacefully in the shade of an apple tree at the back. Everything wore an air of melancholy, desertion and loneliness.

My companion lifted the gray gate's rusty latch. The grass was crushed enough to form a path to the front door, which stood open. She led the way into a large, low room off the little hall. The floor was bare. There was a large table in the centre, heaped with books, and some withering flowers stood in a glass. A couple of common chairs, a mattress, on which was thrown an antique curtain of faded blue as a drapery; on the white-washed wall, a tiny and coquetish slipper of yellowish silk, nailed through the sole. This was all the furnishing.

She stood looking around at the barrenness curiously, trying perhaps to see it with the eyes of a stranger. "This is my room," she said, "and the very walls and floor are saturated with my sufferings." She went restlessly to the window, and threw open the broken blind. As the radiance of the afternoon flooded the place with light, I seemed to see it and its wasting occupant, here in this horrible desolation, in the changing seasons, when the window gave on the bitter rigors of blue and white winter mornings, the land choked with snow, on the golden blur of autumn, on the tender mists of April, draping the earth, and forever the cry of the waves on the shore haunting the air. That there was nothing of the mad woman about her, that she had retained reason in such a place, in such a room, with an eating grief to bear, impressed me as one of the marvels of the brain's endurance, with which nature sometimes surprises us. It seemed to me that this might be the hour of partial deliverance to the poor soul who had evidently lived and died so much.

"Why have you stayed here?" I asked. She had now taken the chair fronting me. We were stiffly seated as if for a business interview. I had a desire to take the poor figure in my arms, but I felt as if she were as intangible as a spirit. When mental pain has devoured the body, as physical pain so often does, there is something thrice as ethereal about the wreck.

"What difference could it make?" she asked in her slightly husky voice, with faint surprise. "It is only the old love-story of a village girl you will hear. My mother was different from these people, but I had never known anything beside this life, except books. Of course you can understand how much else than love the man brought me. I was quite beautiful then. Does it not seem strange that it could have been true! I burst into real blossom for him--like Aaron's rod, was it not? And now you see, I am only the bare rod."

She dropped her lids and looked down at herself calmly. The warmth had curled the short hairs into a light halo around her forehead, the little neck was bent, she had folded her hands in her lap. The piteous child-like chest and limbs revealed by the tight white gown, brought tears to my eyes. There was something solemn, terrible, in this virginal decay.

"All that I was to be, was forced into growth at once. He made me a new self; he was in a sense creator, teacher, parent, friend, idol, lover. He was the world I have not known; he taught me that I could myself write, create. I was nearer madness in those days than now, for when he threw himself here--" She rose and pointed to the floor near the table--"here on these boards at my feet, and begged me to listen to his love, to be his wife--I, his wife!--it was as strange, as unreal as a vision.--I had a month." She did not raise her sweet, level voice, but the eyes that she fixed on mine were dilated to blackness, and her face was illumined with an inexpressible light of triumph. "I had one great month of life. Even you cannot have had more in all your years of the world than I in my month! And then he returned to his work again. He was very busy, you understand, a great man, even then, in the world of letters. He could not come to see me, could not leave; but he wrote every day. He will never put into his book such words as he wrote me; he gave me more than he has ever given the world. It may have his books. I have read them, but I have his very soul in these letters!

"I told you he made me believe that I could write. 'What was I, what was I,' I used to ask myself, 'to be lifted from this to his height?' And then I had a secret, which began in that thought. I wrote a novel. It is eight years back now. I never mentioned it in my letters. I knew it was good, as good as his own work. He would be so proud! He talked of publishing-houses, books, authors. I had not forgotten one word. I sent it to a house, one of the largest and best, and it was accepted. It is strange, but I was not at all surprised. Somehow I had never doubted it would be accepted. And then I went to the city alone for a day. I had only a little time; it seemed to me the greatest act of my life to be there, where he was, yet not to see him! But you see I had planned it all in those long nights when the autumn storms would not let me sleep. The rain would dash against this window, and half awake, I would see myself when he should come, with my head against his arm, saying, 'I have been making something for you. Guess.' And then he would laugh and say, 'Perhaps--is it a cake for my tea, home-darling? Is it--is it a cover for my writing-table? No, you do not sew. Tell me.' And then I should say proudly. 'It is nothing of that kind. It is a book, and the people whom you think such good judges say it must be a success!' I saw it again as I was coming down the stairs from the publisher's office. They had praised my work until the blood seemed all in my head and made me dizzy, and the sounds of Broadway confused my country ears.

"At home that dusk my letter stood against the mantel as I came in here. I laughed when I saw the post-mark, to think I had been there. I laid it against my cheek softly where his hand had touched it, writing my name. It so prolonged the pleasure--you know--you are a woman like that. And at last I read it here." She posed herself unconsciously by the table. "It said, 'Have I loved you? I do not know. Curse me, and forget me. I am to be married to-day.'"

A pin from my hair fell to the bare floor and broke the silence with its frivolous click. The tears were raining down my cheeks. She did not look at me now. She stood grasping the table with one tense hand, her white face thrown a little back. Just as she had stood, I knew, eight purgatorial years ago.

The story was done. She sank into the chair.

"And the book?" I asked at length.

She roused from her reverie. "Oh! yes, the book. It had no purpose to live for, you see. I sent for it, cancelled the agreement. They wrote to me twice about it, but I was firm; there was no reason why I should trouble. I have everything I want," and again her voice trailed into silence.

I looked about the strange, bare room, at the strange, slender figure, and I rose and folded her about with my arms; but she struggled in my embrace. "No, no, do not touch me!" she cried sharply, in a tone of suffering. My hands fell from her, and I knelt abashed at her side. "Oh! please forgive me. I cannot be touched. I hate it. You have been so good," she said, with compunction, regarding me with a certain remorse. I was not aggrieved at being repulsed. As I resumed my seat, I said, "You have only one life to live; snatch at least what you can out of the years. Take my wisdom. You have the book yet? Good. Come back with me; we will get it published. Open your heart, make one effort at living: you can but fail. Come away from the sound of the waves and the wind through the scrub-oaks; from this room and its memories. Be what you might have been."

For the first time she faintly smiled. She shook her head. "I told you I was like Aaron's rod. See for yourself. The power of thought or interest in everything else has withered and wasted like my face and body. My days are almost as irresponsible as a child's now. I have gone back to the carelessness of a little girl about the conditions of life. It was once, and once only for me. But you have given me relief, or rather I have given myself relief this afternoon. And now, will you leave me? I am so glad to have said it all over, and yet, since I have done it, I cannot bear to see you."

The peculiarity of her voice and manner, of which I have spoken, that made all her words sweet and gentle, however unconventional they might be, left me unoffended.

"Perhaps you are right;" I said, "yet I wish you would try my way." She did not make any reply, and I left her standing with downcast eyes by the door.

Mrs. Libby still sat sewing by the window when I returned. "Have a pleasant time?" she asked, a gleam of curiosity in her cold eyes. "Seems to me you didn't stay long."

"No, not very long."

"See that queer room of hers? Folks ain't asked into it much. They said she took the minister right in there when he called. Kitchen table piled up with books, 'n papers, books 'round on the floor, 'n' a mattress a-layin' in a corner. Some of the boys peeked in one day when she was down to the beach, 'n' told all 'round how it looked. And a white shoe onto the wall. I expect it must be one o' hers she used to wear. It was before I moved over from South side, but Mrs. Hikes says she had the flightiest clothes when he was courtin' her. Her mother left her some money, I guess, any way, 'n' there wasn't anything too rich, ner too good, ner too foreign for her to wear. 'N' look at her now! Well, it's 'long toward tea-time. You look tired."

I was indeed very tired. I could not assimilate the strange impressions I had received. That night the moon-light streamed broadly into my window through the apple-boughs that showed black shadows on the floor. About midnight I opened my eyes suddenly. Mrs. Libby in a much-frilled night-dress was shaking my shoulder vigorously.

"You'll have to get up. Agnes Rayne's dyin', 'n' she's took a notion to see you. They've sent Hikeses' boy after you; bleedin' at the lungs is all I can get out of him. The Hikeses are all dumb as a stick of cord-wood."

She sat down heavily on my bed, and put a pillow comfortably to her back while I dressed. Hikeses' boy sat waiting for me in the porch whistling under his breath. He was the tallest and lankiest of them all, and like some ghostly cicerone, he never spoke, but led the way through the dewy grass into the white, glorious moonlight, and kept a few yards ahead of me in the dusty road until we reached the Rayne farmhouse.

Through the windows I saw a dim light, and figures moving. I pushed open the door without knocking. A doctor, young and alert, had been summoned from the village, and the dull light from a kerosene lamp, set hastily on the table, touched his curly red hair as he knelt by the mattress. An old white-bearded man sat huddled in one of the shadowy corners, weeping the tears of senility, and a tall, dust-colored woman, whom I rightly took to be Mrs. Hikes, stood stolidly watching the doctor. Outside the crickets were singing cheerily in the wet grass.

"Oh, yes, so glad you've come," murmured the doctor as he rose.

Then I stepped closer to the little figure lying in the old blue curtain, that was stiffened now with blood. The parted lips were gray; the whole face, except the vivid eyes, was dead. The night-dress was thrown back from the poor throat and chest, stained here and there with spots of crimson on the white skin, that seemed stretched over the small bones. I stooped beside her, in answer to an appealing look. She could not lift the frail, tired hand that lay by her, its fingers uncurled, the hand of one who, dying, relinquishes gladly its grasp on life. The hands of the strong, torn from a world they love, clench and clutch at the last; it is an involuntary hold on earth. The doctor moved away. The whining sobs of the old man became more audible. I put my ear to her cold lips.

"His letters ... the letters ... and ... my book ... I told you of, take them. Here, in the closet ... by ... the chimney...."

I could hardly distinguish the faint whispers. I raised my hand impatiently, and the old man stopped moaning. Mrs. Hikes and the doctor ceased speaking in low undertones. Only a great moth, that had fluttered inside the lamp chimney thudded heavily from side to side.

"Yes, yes. What shall I do with them?"

She did not speak, and seeing her agonized eyes trying to tell mine, I cried aloud, "Give her brandy--something. She wants to speak. Oh, give her a chance to speak!"

The doctor stepped to my side. He lifted the wrist, let it fall, and shook his head. "Don't you see?" he said. I looked at the eyes, and saw.

Some days later I went to the lonely house. The old man was sitting in a loose, disconsolate heap in his seat by the apple-tree. The tears rolled down the wrinkles into his beard, when I spoke of his daughter.

"There were some letters and papers she wished me to have," I said. In the closet by the chimney. "If you are willing--"

The old man shuffled into the house, and threw open the blinds of the darkened room. Some one had set the books in neat piles on the table; the chairs were placed against the wall. The drapery had been washed and stretched smoothly across the mattress. There were two or three dark stains on the floor that could not be washed out. The slim little slipper still decked the wall.

I looked up at the door by the chimney. "Here's the key," said the old man, brokenly. "I found it to-day under the mattress." I tried it, but it did not turn in the lock. I was hardly tall enough to reach it. The old man fetched me a chair on which I stood, and after a moment or two I felt the rusty lock yield. The little door gave and opened.

Nothing was there, nothing but the dust of years that blackened my fingers, as I put in my hand, unconvinced by my sense of sight.

"Are you sure no one has been here, no one who could open the closet?"

"Nobody," he proclaimed in the cracked tone of extreme age. "She must have wandered when she told you that. People wander when they are dying, you know. Her mother--but that was long ago." He tapped the key thoughtfully on the mantel. "You see how the lock stuck, and the door. I don't expect Agnes had it open for years. I expect she wandered, like her mother." He peered vaguely in at the empty space, and then turned to me. "I forget a great deal now. I'm getting an old man, a very old man," he said, in an explanatory tone.

"But did you know she had letters somewhere, a pile of papers? You remember her getting letters, do you not, letters from her lover?"

He looked up at me apologetically, with dim, watery blue eyes. "I don't expect I remember much," he confessed. "Not of later years. I could tell you all about things when I was a boy, but I can't seem to remember much that's happened since mother died. That must have been along about twenty years ago. I'm all broken down now, old--very old. You see I am a very old man."

I left him shutting the room into darkness, and passed out into the sunlight, sorely perplexed.

Mrs. Libby was baking when I returned, and the air of the kitchen was full of the sweet, hot smell that gushed from the oven door she had just opened. She stood placidly eating the remnants of dough that clung to the pan.

"Mrs. Libby," said I, sinking down on the door-step, "what was the name of Agnes Rayne's lover? You told me once you could not remember. Will you try to think, please?"

"Well, I was talking to Mrs. Hikes after the fun'r'l," said Mrs. Libby, still devouring the dough. "He boarded to the Hikeses', you see, 'n' she had it as pat as her own," and then Mrs. Libby mentioned calmly a name that now you can hardly pass a book-stall without reading, a name that of late is a synonym for marvellous and unprecedented success in the literary world. I had met this great man at a reception the winter before; let me rather say, I had stood reverently on the outskirts of a crowd of adorers that flocked around him. I looked so fixedly at Mrs. Libby that her smile broadened.

"Don't know him, do you?" she queried.

"I think I have met him," I replied. "Was he engaged to Agnes Rayne?"

Mrs. Libby waited to pierce a loaf of cake with a broom splint. She ran her thick fingers carefully along the splint and then turned the brown loaf on to a sieve.

"Mrs. Hikes says she don't believe a word of it. Folks think he just courted her one spell that summer, not real serious, just to pass the time away, you might say, like many another young man. Mrs. Hikes says, she never heard of him writin' to her, or anything, 'n' if he had, old Hawkins that brings the mail couldn't have kep' it, any more'n he could keep the news he reads off postal cards. They talked enough first about her being love-cracked, but there wa'n't any signs of it I could hear, excep' her trailin' 'round the beach, 'n' looking wimbly, 'n' not doin' jus' like other folks. She never _said_ a word to anybody. Might 'a' been it turned her some," said Mrs. Libby, thoughtfully, rolling the flour in white scales from her heavy wrists. "Might 'a' been she was queer any way--sending off to the city for white silk gowns, 'n' things to wear in that old rack of boards, jus' because she was bein' courted. Most would 'a' kep' the money 'gainst their fittin' out. I guess that was all there was, jus' a little triflin', 'n' she took it in earnest. Well, it don't make any difference now," she concluded coolly, as she turned to her sink of baking-dishes.

I sat listening stupidly to her heavy tread, to the cheery clash of the tins as she washed and put them in place. To never know any more! Yet after all, I knew all that could be known, strangely enough. Then, with a long shiver, I remembered the small closet beside the chimney with its empty, dusty shelves.

"Mrs. Libby," said I, rising, "I think I will go back to the city to-morrow."

A STORY OF THE VERE DE VERE.

The landlord called it an apartment-house, the tenants called their three or four little closets of rooms, flats, and perhaps if you or I had chanced to be in West ---- Street, near the river, and had glanced up at the ugly red brick structure, with the impracticable fire-escape crawling up its front, like an ugly spider, we should have said it was a common tenement house.

Druse, however, had thought it, if a trifle dirty, a very magnificent and desirable dwelling. The entrance floor was tesselated with diamonds of blue and white; there was a row of little brass knobs and letter-boxes, with ill-written names or printed cards stuck askew in the openings above them. Druse did not guess their uses at first, how should she? She had never in all her fifteen years, been in the city before. How should one learn the ways of apartment-houses when one had lived always in a little gray, weather-beaten house, on the very outskirts of a straggling village in Eastern Connecticut?

It happened like this. One day, Tom, the fourth of the nine hungry and turbulent children, sent to the store on an errand, returned, bringing a letter. A letter, that was not a circular about fertilizers, or one of those polite and persuasive invitations to vote for a certain man for a town office, which penetrated even to the Hand's little gray kennel of a house toward election-time, was such a rarity that Mrs. Hand forgot the bread just done in the oven, and sank down wearily on the door-step to read it.

"Well, you ain't a-goin'," she said to Drusilla, who stood quite patiently by, with a faint color in her pale face. "No, sir, you ain't a-goin' one step. She was too stuck-up to come here when she was alive, 'n' you ain't a-goin' to take care of her children dead, 'n' that's the end of it."

Druse made no reply. She never did. Instead, she bent her thin, childish back, and pulled the burning bread out of the oven.

None the less, Druse went.

It was all Pop's work. Pop was meek and soft; he cried gently of a Sunday evening at church, the tears trickling down the furrowed leather-colored skin into the sparse beard, and on week-days he was wont to wear a wide and vacuous smile; yet somehow, if Pop said this or that should be, it was,--at least in the little house on the edge of the village.

And Pop had said Druse should go. For after all, the case is hard, even if one _is_ occupying a lofty position to rural eyes as a carpenter in "York," with a city wife, who has flung her head contemptuously at the idea of visiting his ne'er-do-weel brother; the case is hard, no matter how high one's station may be, to be left with three motherless children, over-fond of the street, with no one to look after them, or make ready a comfortable bit of dinner at night. And so, considering that Elviry was fourteen, and stronger than Druse, any way, and that John Hand had promised to send a certain little sum to his brother every month, as well as to clothe Druse, Druse went to live in the fourth flat in the Vere de Vere.

Perhaps that was not just the name, but it was something equally high-sounding and aristocratic; and it seemed quite fitting that one of the dirty little cards that instructed the postman and the caller, should bear the pleasing name, "Blanche de Courcy." But Druse had never read novels. Her acquaintance with fiction had been made entirely through the medium of the Methodist Sunday School library, and the heroines did not, as a rule, belong to the higher rank in which, as we know, the lords and ladies are all Aubreys, and Montmorencis, and Maudes, and Blanches. Still even Druse's untrained eye lingered with pleasure on the name, as she came in one morning, after having tasted the delights of life in the Vere de Vere for a couple of weeks. She felt that she now lived a very idle life. She had coaxed the three children into a regular attendance at school, and her uncle was always away until night. She could not find enough work to occupy her, though, true to her training, when there was nothing else to do she scrubbed everything wooden and scoured everything tin. Still there were long hours when it was tiresome to sit listening to the tramping overhead, or the quarrels below, watching the slow hands of the clock; and Druse was afraid in the streets yet, though she did not dare say so, because her bold, pert little cousins laughed at her. She was indeed terribly lonely. Her uncle was a man of few words; he ate his supper, and went to sleep after his pipe and the foaming pitcher of beer that had frightened Druse when she first came. For Druse had been a "Daughter of Temperance" in East Green. She had never seen any one drink beer before. She thought of the poem that the minister's daughter (in pale blue muslin, tucked to the waist) had recited at the Temperance Lodge meeting. It began:

"Pause, haughty man, whose lips are at the brim
Of Hell's own draught, in yonder goblet rare--"

She wished she had courage to repeat it. She felt if Uncle John could have heard Lucinda recite it--. Yet he might not think it meant him; he was not haughty, although he was a carpenter, and the beer he drank out of one of the children's mugs. But it troubled Druse. She thought of it as she sat one afternoon, gravely crotcheting a tidy after an East Green pattern, before it was time for the children to be back from school. It was a warm day in October, so warm that she had opened the window, letting in with the air the effluvia from the filthy street, and the discordant noises. The lady in the flat above was whipping a refractory child, whose cries came distinctly through the poor floors and partitions of the Vere De Vere.

Suddenly there was a loud, clumsy knock at the door. She opened it, and a small boy with a great basket of frilled and ruffled clothes, peeping from under the cover, confronted her.

"Say, lady," he asked, red and cross, "Is yer name De Courcy?"

"No, it ain't," replied Druse. "She's the back flat to the right, here. I'll show you," she added, with the country instinct of "neighboring."

The boy followed her, grumbling, through the long narrow hall, and as Druse turned to go, after his loud pound on the door, it suddenly flew open. Druse stood rooted to the ground. A dirty pink silk wrapper, with a long train covered with dirtier lace, is not a beautiful garment by full daylight. Yet to untrained eyes it looked almost gorgeous, gathered about the handsome form. Miss De Courcy had failed to arrange her hair for the afternoon, and it fell in heavy black folds on her shoulders, and her temples were bandaged by a white handkerchief. Perhaps it was not strange that Druse stood and gazed at her. The dark, brilliant eyes fixed themselves on the slight, flat-chested little form, clad in brown alpaca, on the pale hair drawn straight back from the pale face, and arranged in a tight knob at the back of the head.

A whim seized the fair wearer of the negligee. "Come in and sit down, I want to talk to you. There, leave the clothes, boy. I'll pay your mother next time," and she pushed the boy out, and drew the young girl in with easy audacity.

Druse looked around the room in bewilderment. It was not exactly dirty, but things seemed to have been thrown in their places. The carpet was bright, and much stained, rather than worn; hideous plaques and plush decorations abounded. A crimson chair had lost a leg, and was pushed ignominiously in a corner of the tiny room; a table was crowded with bottles and fragments of food, and a worn, velvet jacket and much-beplumed hat lay amongst them. A ragged lace skirt hung over the blue sofa, on one corner of which Miss De Courcy threw herself down, revealing a pair of high heeled scarlet slippers. "Sit down," she said, in a rather metallic voice, that ill accorded with the rounded curves of face and figure. "I've got a beastly headache," pushing up the bandage on her low brow. "What did you run for, when I opened the door? Did your folks tell you not to come in here, ever?"

"Why, no, ma'am!" said Druse, raising her blue, flower-like eyes wonderingly.

"Oh! well," responded Miss De Courcy, with a hoarse little laugh of amusement. "I thought they might have--thought maybe they objected to your making 'cquaintances without a regular introduction, you know. Haven't been here long, have you?"

"No," said Druse, looking down at her tidy, with a sudden homesick thrill. "No, I--I come from East Green, Connecticut. I ain't got used to it here, much. It's kind o' lonesome, days. I s'pose you don't mind it. It's different if you're used to it, I guess."

Somehow Druse did not feel as timid as usual, though her weak little voice, thin, like the rest of her, faltered a trifle, but then she had never called on a lady so magnificently dressed before.

"Yes, I'm pretty well used to it by this," replied Miss De Courcy, with the same joyless little laugh, giving the lace skirt an absent-minded kick with her red morocco toe. "I lived in the country before--when I was little."

"You did!" exclaimed Druse. "Then I guess you know how it is at first. When you think every Friday night (there ain't been but two, yet) 'There, they're gettin' ready for Lodge meetin';' and every Sunday evenin' 'bout half-past seven: 'I guess it's mos' time for the Meth'dis' bell to ring. I must get my brown felt on, and--'"

"Your what?" asked Miss De Courcy.

"My brown felt, my hat, an'--oh! well, there's lots o' things I kind o' forget, and start to get ready for. An' I can't sleep much on account of not having Bell an' Virey an' Mimy to bed with me. It's so lonesome without 'em. The children here won't sleep with me. I did have Gusty one night, but I woke her up four times hangin' on to her. I'm so used to holding Mimy in! Oh! I guess I'll get over it all right, but you know how it is yourself."

Miss De Courcy did not reply. She had closed her eyes, and now she gave the bandage on her head an angry twich. "_Oh_, how it aches!" she said through her shut teeth. "Here, give me that bottle on the stand, will you? It'll make it worse, but _I_ don't care. My doctor's medicine don't seem to do me much good, but I sort of keep on taking it," she said to Druse, grandly as she poured out a brownish liquid into the cloudy glass that the good little housekeeper had eyed dubiously, before giving it to her.

Miss De Courcy's doctor evidently believed in stimulants; a strong odor of Scotch whiskey filled the room.

"It smells quite powerful, does'nt it?" she said. "It has something in it to keep it, you know. It's very unpleasant to take," she added, rolling up her brown eyes to Druse's compassionate face.

"I do' know as it would do you any good, prob'ly it wouldn't," said Druse shyly, shifting the glass from one hand to the other, "but I used to stroke Ma's head lots, when she had a chance to set down, and it ached bad."

Miss De Courcy promptly stretched herself at full length, and settled her feet comfortably in the lace skirts, in which the high, sharp heels tore two additional rents, and pulled the bandage from her forehead.

"Go ahead," she said, laconically. Druse dragged a chair to the side of the couch, and for some minutes there was silence--that is, the comparative silence that might exist in the Vere De Vere--while she deftly touched the burning smooth flesh with her finger tips.

Miss De Courcy opened her eyes drowsily. "I guess I'm going to get a nap, after all. You're doing it splendid. You'll come and see me again, won't you? Say, don't tell your folks you was here to-day, will you? I'll tell you why. I--I've got a brother that drinks. It's awful. He comes to see me evenings a good deal, and some daytimes. They'd be afraid he'd be home, 'n' they wouldn't let you come again. He's cross, you see 'n' they'd never--let you come again 'f you--"

Miss De Courcy was almost overpowered by sleep. She roused herself a moment and looked at Druse with dull pleading. "Don't you tell 'em, will you? Promise! I want you to come again. A girl isn't to blame if her father--I mean her brother--"

"Yes, ma'am, I'll promise, of course I will," said Druse hastily, her thin little bosom swelling with compassion. "I won't never let 'em know I know you, if you say so. No, ma'am, it's awful cruel to blame you for your brother's drinkin'. I've got some pieces about it at home, about folkses' families a-sufferin' for their drinkin'. I'd like to come again if you want me. I'm afraid I ain't much company, but I could stroke your head every time you have a headache. It's awful nice to know somebody that's lived in the country and understands just how it is when you first--"

Druse looked down. The doctor's remedy was apparently successful this time, for with crimson cheeks and parted lips, Miss Blanche De Courcy had forgotten her headache in a very profound slumber. Druse gazed at her with mingled admiration and pity. No wonder the room seemed a little untidy. She would have liked to put it to rights, but fearing she might waken her new friend, who was now breathing very heavily, she only pulled the shade down, and with a last compassionate glance at the victim of a brother's intemperance, she picked up her crocheting and tip-toed lightly from the room.

After that life in the Vere De Vere was not so dreary. Druse was not secretive, but she had the accomplishment of silence, and she kept her promise to the letter. Druse could not feel that she could be much consolation to so elegant a being. Miss De Courcy was often _distraite_ when she brought her crocheting in of an afternoon, or else she was extremely, not to say boisterously gay, and talked or laughed incessantly, or sang at the upright piano that looked too large for the little parlor. The songs were apt to be compositions with such titles as, "Pretty Maggie Kelly," and "Don't Kick him when He's Down," but Druse never heard anything more reprehensible, and she thought them beautiful.

Sometimes, quite often indeed, her hostess had the headaches that forced her to resort to the doctor's disagreeable remedy from the black bottle, or was sleeping off a headache on the sofa. Miss De Courcy did not seem to have many women friends. Once, it is true, two ladies with brilliant golden hair, and cheeks flushed perhaps by the toilsome ascent to the fourth floor, rustled loudly into the parlor. They were very gay, and so finely dressed, one in a bright green plush coat, and the other in a combination of reds, that Druse made a frightened plunge for the door and escaped, but not before one of the ladies had inquired, with a peal of laughter, "Who's the kid?" Druse had flushed resentfully, but she did not care when her friend told her afterward, with a toss of the head, "_They're_ nothing. They just come here to see how I was fixed."

After a little Druse offered timidly to clean up the room for her, and quite regularly then, would appear on each Wednesday with her broom and duster, happy to be allowed to bring order out of chaos.

"Well, you are a good little thing," Miss De Courcy would say, pulling on her yellow gloves and starting for the street when the dust began to fly. She never seemed to be doing anything. A few torn books lay about, but Druse never saw her open them. She had warned Druse not to come in of an evening, for her brother might be home in a temper. Druse thought she saw him once, such a handsome man with his hair lightly tinged with gray; he was turning down the hall as Druse came wearily up the stairs, and she saw him go in Miss De Courcy's room; but then again when Gusty was sick, and she had to go down at night and beg the janitress to come up and see if it were the measles, there was a much younger man, with reddened eyes, from whose glance Druse shrank as she passed him, and he certainly reeled a little, and he also went in Miss De Courcy's door, and from motives of delicacy she did not ask which was he,--though she felt a deep curiosity to know. Not that Miss De Courcy refrained from mentioning him. On the contrary, she told heart-rending incidents of his cruelty, as she tilted back and forth lazily in her rocking-chair, while Druse sat by, spellbound, her thin hands clasped tightly over the work in her lap, neglecting even the bon-bons that Miss De Courcy lavished upon her.

One morning there was a cruel purple mark on the smooth dark skin of Miss De Courcy's brow, and the round wrist was red and swollen. Druse's eyes flashed as she saw them. "I expect I'm as wicked as a murderer," she said, "for I wish that brother of yours was dead. Yes, I do, 'n' I'd like to kill him!" And the self-contained and usually stoical little thing burst into passionate tears, and hid her face in Miss De Courcy's lap.

A dark flush passed over that young lady's face, and something glittered in the hard blue eyes. She drew Druse tight against her heart, as though she would never let her go, and then she laughed nervously, trying to soothe her. "There, there, it ain't anything. They're all brutes, but I was ugly myself last night, 'n' made him mad. Tell me something about the country, Druse, like you did the other day--anything. I don't care."

"Do you wish you was back there, too?" asked homesick Druse, wistfully. Druse could no more take root in the city than could a partridge-berry plant, set in the flinty earth of the back-yard.

"Wish I was back? Yes, if I could go back where I used to live," said Miss De Courcy with her hoarse, abrupt little laugh. "No, I don't either. Folks are pretty much all devils, city or country."

Druse shivered a little. She looked up with dumb pleading into the reckless, beautiful face she had learned to love so well from her humble tendings and ministerings. She had the nature to love where she served. She had no words to say, but Miss De Courcy turned away from the sorrowful, puzzled eyes of forget-me-not blue, the sole beauty of the homely, irregular little face.

"I was only a-joking, Druse," she added, smiling. "Come, let's make some lemonade."

But Druse did not forget these and other words. She pondered over them as she lay in her stifling little dark bedroom at night, or attended to her work by day, and she waged many an imaginary battle for the beautiful, idle woman who represented the grace of life to her.

The fat janitress sometimes stopped to gossip a moment with Druse.

"Ever seen Miss De Courcy on your floor?" she asked, one day, curiously.

"Yes, ma'am, I--I've seen her," replied Druse, truthfully, the color rising to her pale cheeks.