Chapter X: Part 10

When the reading of the dry old books had failed even more completely, if possible, than the reading of the newspaper, Anne tried to talk to her husband; and that was the hardest of all. She had always been a silent woman, well named "still-tongued"; and now that her sad heart lay in her bosom like lead, she found less and less to say, so that this last attempt was the most complete and the saddest of her many repeated defeats. It was then, when at the end of her own resources, that she held to Sidney's hand, and asked with her appealing eyes for the help which she knew not how to beg with her lips. After this Sidney went every day to see Tom, and told him, as amusingly as she could tell anything, of everything that was going on, no matter whether he listened or not. And she also sent Doris, who went often (taking Miss Judy's guitar at that little lady's suggestion) to sing to the invalid, and who was careful to choose her gayest songs and to play nothing less cheerful than the Spanish fandango; and it really seemed, once in a while, as if a light came into the sick man's darkened gaze as it rested upon the girl as she tinkled the old guitar, with the broad blue ribbon falling around her beautiful shoulders.

The whole village was, in truth, unwearying in its kindness all the long days, through all those long months; but there were, nevertheless, the lonely hours of the endless nights to be passed alone, when the desperate husband and the despairing wife dumbly faced the appalling future,--a burning, unlighted, empty desert,--stretching perhaps through many terrible years. And even then Anne stood firm, with her sad, steady eyes ever on the white heights which she saw beyond the black gulf, wherein she strove perpetually with the powers of darkness for her husband's soul.

She never left him now for a moment, night or day, except when there was preaching in her own church and her faith required the "breaking of bread"; and at rare long intervals to go to prayer-meeting, when she felt her strength failing and hoped to find in the prayers of others new strength for her own ceaseless petitions. One night of midsummer, when the bell began to ring for prayer-meeting, she felt that she must go. She accordingly arose--reluctantly as she always left him--and went into the bedroom and put on her quakerish bonnet. Then she came back and stood before her husband, seeking wistfully to do something more for his comfort before leaving him, as she never forgot to try to do. She turned the cushions at his back to make them softer, and moved the pillows behind his head so that it might rest easier, and straightened the cover over his powerless knees. These poor things, which she always did, were all that she ever could do. She would return soon, as soon as she could, she said, as she always said, bending down to press her pale lips to his scarred forehead. At the gate she stopped and lingered, looking back, as she always looked, sorely loath still to leave him even for an hour of uplifting prayer.

Night was near. The last red gold of the sunset had paled from the highest, farthest hilltop, where the graveyard lay. The tombstones--the new white ones that stood so straight, the older gray ones that leaned, the oldest brown ones that had fallen--all were dim now in the soft glory of the afterglow, as many of the cold, hard things of this world are softened by the tender light from the world above. The dusk was already creeping down the darkling arches of the wooded hillsides. Mists were already arising from the low-lying meadows, trailing long white cloud-fleeces, all starred with fireflies, thus making a new heaven of the old earth.

Through the gloaming and the stillness Anne's lonely figure went steadily, swiftly onward toward the church. Lynn Gordon noted the tense paleness and the strange exaltation of her still face, when he met and passed her on the big road, faint as the light was, and the sight of it touched him, though his own mind was lightly at peace and his own heart was over-flowing with thoughtless happiness. The impression of suffering that her face had given him was still in his mind when he drew near the window beside which the sick man sat, and because of it, or some other motive that he did not stop to fathom, he suddenly stood still, and after a hesitating pause, and a longing glance toward the silver poplars, he opened the gate and crossed the yard and went to the window to speak to Tom Watson. Nothing was farther from his thoughts than any intent of going into the house--as he told the doctor afterwards when speaking of what followed.

"It was like mesmerism. I have not the vaguest idea of how it really happened. His awful eyes drew me, when I didn't want to go. They dragged me into that house as if a giant hand had been laid upon my collar. The first thing that I knew the negro boy who waits on Watson had set out a table and put the lamp on it, and had laid a pack of cards between him and me." The young man shuddered at the recollection. "I hope I may never again see anything like that poor wretch's face when his palsied hands first touched the cards which I dealt him. I tried to remind myself that there couldn't be any harm in such a game and that there might be some good. But to see such a passion as his for gambling looking out of a dead man's face is a sight which I hope never to look upon again."

The lamplight shone far down the big road that night, and Anne saw it almost as soon as she left the meeting-house on her lonely way home. At the sight her heavy heart seemed to leap as if it would escape from its cell of pain; and then, faint with deadly fear, it seemed to fall back as though it could never beat again. Too near to fainting to stand, she sat down on the roadside, and remained without moving for a long time. She was all alone in the darkness, no one else was going her way; and no one passed along the deserted thoroughfare. She knew at once what the streaming lamplight meant; and she tried to think what was best to do, now that the worst was come. She arose tremblingly at last, when she had rallied strength enough, and she went on feebly through the still blackness of the night, like a woman suddenly stricken with great age. She did not know that she was weeping, and the great, slow, heavy tears of the rarely moved fell unheeded down her white cheeks. The gate was open, as Lynn Gordon had left it, and she entered the yard noiselessly, passing the window like an unseen shadow and with an averted face. On the steps at the back of the house she sank down almost prone and lay motionless, hardly conscious, she knew not for how long. The heavy tears still fell silently and unnoticed, as the hardest rain falls without storm. She was trying to think, but she could not; she could do nothing but pray. And she prayed--praying as one having great faith does pray when a tidal wave from life's troubled sea sweeps over a stranded soul. For Anne's faith stood, even now, firm as a mighty rock anchored to the foundations of the earth. And through all the darkness and turmoil of this supreme spiritual stress a single ray of white light shone steadily as a beacon to her tossed spirit. The abomination had not come through any weakness of hers; her faith had not yielded to her love.

* * * * *

The next perfect day had worn slowly to another glorious sunset when Anne went again down the big road, but this time toward the Gordon place. Lynn saw her coming, and he arose from his seat on the porch, where he chanced to be sitting alone with his cigar, and went to meet her, thinking how foolish it was for him to be smitten at the first sight of her by a sense of guilt and a painful conviction of having done her an injury. He tried to throw off the feeling with a smile, as he stood holding open the gate for her to enter.

There was no answering smile on Anne's pale face, yet its perfect calmness and the steadiness of her clear gaze reassured him somewhat. Her voice also was quite calm and steady when she said that she could not come in to see his grandmother, as he invited her to do; and after a momentary hesitation added that she had come solely to give him a message from her husband--one that she could not send by any one else.

"Tom has sent me to ask if you will play cards with him again to-night," she said deliberately, in a curiously level tone, as if weighing every word, and with her clear eyes fixed with singular intensity on the young man's face.

"Why--of course I will--I'll be delighted to," Lynn responded eagerly, with much relief. He had not expected her to say anything of this kind. "But, my dear Mrs. Watson, you needn't have taken the trouble to come all this distance yourself to ask me. I should have come willingly, no matter who had brought the request. Mr. Watson had only to tell me when he wished me to come."

"That is why I came. I wanted to make sure that you would come just the same, whether I asked you or not," said Anne, still looking at him with her luminous clearness of gaze, the white light behind her eyes shining high and bright.

"Certainly," he replied quickly, made uneasy by her look, though he knew not why and did not in the least understand what was in the mind of this quiet woman of few words.

She stood silent for a moment, so frail, so pale, under the gloom of the low, dark boughs of the cypress tree, that she seemed more spirit than flesh. Then she silently turned away her clear eyes, in which sorrow lay heavy as stones at the bottom of a still crystal pool. She stood for a moment silently looking far over the shadowed fields, above which the white banners of mist were already afloat on the evening breeze. Her inscrutable gaze then wandered toward the cloud mountains towering in the west, their snowy summits rifted by rivers of molten gold, and flooding the peaceful earth with unearthly beauty.

"Until I knew whether anything that I could say or do would make any difference--about your coming--I could not see my way," she said, turning back, her strange eyes again looking straight into his perplexed eyes. "Now that you have told me, I must do what is right--as nearly as I can."

"I don't understand," faltered the young man. "Would you like me to come with you now--at once? I am quite ready."

"I can't let you--or any one--do for my husband what I am not willing to do for him myself. I can't ask another to commit sin for him in my stead. If it must be done, it is _I_ who must do it--not any one else."

She spoke calmly, but with infinite sadness, and her pale face turned a shade paler, if it could be paler than it had been when she first appeared beneath the gloomy cypress boughs.

The young man was startled, bewildered, touched. He no longer felt like smiling at Anne's taking the matter seriously; there was no longer anything absurd in her attitude. His impulsive heart, always quick to see and to respond to the real, the fine, and the high, filled now with a sudden rush of sympathy for this quiet woman with the white face and the spare speech, for all her narrow mind and her stern faith.

"But, my dear madam, you don't know how to play cards, do you?" he protested confusedly, at a loss what to say or to do.

"No," said Anne, with an involuntary movement of shrinking. "But I thought--I can't see my way. It is the first time. I don't seem to be able to tell right from wrong. But I thought that if--if you would teach me--that is if it wouldn't be wrong for me to ask you--even to do that!"

"How could it be wrong?" he said gently. "I have never thought that there was any harm in card-playing merely for amusement. I will gladly teach you what I know, which isn't a great deal, nor hard to learn."

"The path is dark before my feet. I can only stumble on till the light be given," murmured Anne, as if thinking aloud, even as though she were praying.

"Let's go now," said Lynn, taking a sudden resolution. "If you are not yet satisfied, we can talk it all over as we walk along."

Anne assented silently; they passed out from beneath the shadow of the cypress tree and went on their way up the deserted, darkened big road, but neither found another word to say. The light of the lamp, awaiting the game on the sick man's table, already shone far to meet them, and when its beams fell on Anne's face Lynn turned his eyes away.

But she did not falter; she led the way through the gate and straight into the room where that awful, dumb figure sat, striving to shuffle the cards with its poor palsied hands, and with the gambler's terrible eagerness flaming in his eyes. Anne laid off her bonnet, and without speaking took the player's place opposite her husband.

Lynn was as silent as Anne herself, but he quietly placed himself, standing, beside her, thinking as he did this and glanced at her that the look of exaltation on Anne's white, still face must have been the look that the martyrs wore when they entered the arena to confront the wild beasts. He felt awed by the solemnity of the scene. He hardly dared move or speak, it so weighed upon him, but he explained the rules and the terms of the game as simply and as briefly as he could. He never forgot the sudden dilation of Anne's eyes and the dimness that followed, as though the white light behind them had suddenly flared high before going out, when he first put the cards in her hands and the game began.

"You must draw--you draw to a straight flush. Mr. Watson stands pat," said Lynn, in a hushed tone, feeling as if he were desecrating some holy place--starting at the sound of his own voice as though it sounded through a cathedral.

"I draw to a straight flush. Mr. Watson stands pat," repeated Anne's pale lips, as a pious soul in extremity might murmur a Latin prayer which it did not understand.

"Now you raise him," prompted Lynn.

"Now I raise you," echoed Anne.

"Ah, he calls you and takes the pot."

"He calls me and takes the pot."

Thus begun, the game went on by surer degrees through the terrible hours of the horrible night, till a later bedtime than Tom Watson had known since he had ceased to be the keeper of his own time. The next morning it was resumed as soon as breakfast was over, and continued day after day and night after night. The teacher wearied after the first day, though he came oftener than he might have been expected to come, since he was young and happy, and there were other and pleasanter things drawing him away. But Anne learned fast--faster, perhaps, than she had ever learned anything else. There are few things that the slowest-witted woman cannot learn when her whole heart and soul hang upon the learning. It was therefore not long before she could play alone, after a fashion, and from that time on she played ceaselessly through every waking moment, stopping only for the meals that neither husband nor wife could eat. So that every morning Anne sat down to the card-table, silently imploring pardon for the sin which she was about to commit; every night she lay wearily down on her sleepless bed, praying for forgiveness for the sin which she had committed during the day. And always Anne played with the unaltered belief--firm as her belief in the plan of salvation--that she staked on every game the relief of her husband's body against the saving of his soul.

XXI

WHAT OLDFIELD THOUGHT AND SAID

Thus it was that all the peace and beauty of those glorious midsummer days brought neither rest nor pleasure to Anne.

The quiet awakening of the tranquil world, soft as the tenderest trembling of a harp; the first musical tinkling that came murmuring up from the misty meadows with the earliest stirring of the flocks and herds; the gentle calling of the dumb creatures; the aerial flute notes wafted down the leafy arches of the dew-wet woods; the palest glory of the dawn coming for the perpetual refreshment of the earth; the final coronation of the Day King with the marshalling of his dazzling lances through the royal red and gold of the hilltops,--all these wonders of a marvellously beautiful world were to Anne but the dreaded daily summons to the renewal of a hopeless conflict.

It was like her never to think of sitting elsewhere than in the old place--at her husband's side by the open window--after beginning to play cards. It would have been utterly unlike her to have thought of doing anything else, to have considered for a moment what her neighbors might think or say. For hers was a nature condemned at its creation to a loneliness even greater than that in which every soul must forever dwell apart. All her life she had lived as one alone on a desert island. Now, under this supreme anguish of living, the amazed gaze of the whole world, its approval or its disapproval, would have been to her--had she thought of it--no more than the moaning of the winter wind through the graveyard cedars.

And yet, naturally enough, this utter unconsciousness upon Anne's part did not lessen in the least the shock which the entire community felt on seeing her--Anne Watson--of all women in all the world at the card-table by the open window, in view of everybody passing along the big road! Those who first saw the incredible sight could scarcely believe their own eyes. Those who first heard of it utterly refused to credit it until they had made a special trip up and down the big road, twice passing the window, in order to see and to make sure for themselves. And then, when there was no longer room for doubt or dispute, a sort of panic seized the good people of Oldfield. With this appalling backsliding of Anne Watson's the whole religious and social fabric seemed suddenly going to pieces.

Only Lynn Gordon and the doctor knew the truth. Lynn had not told his grandmother of Anne's visit nor of her request. His grandmother was not one to whom he would have spoken of anything which had touched him keenly or moved him deeply. And he had even not told Doris, whom he would most naturally have trusted, certain of being understood, certain, too, of sympathy for Anne. A feeling of delicate consideration for Anne, a sense that she had trusted him, only because she could not do otherwise, that she had opened her reserved heart to him, who was almost a stranger, only because she was forced to do it, under terrible necessity,--all these mingled feelings had a part in holding him silent. To the doctor alone he felt that he should give a full account of what had taken place. But when he tried to tell even him, Lynn unexpectedly found it very hard to make Anne's motives and position as clear to another person as he had felt them to be. He realized for the first time that she had somehow made him feel much more than she had been able to put into words. She had so few words--poor Anne--and the few that she had were meagre indeed. The impulsive, warm-hearted young fellow stammered, and reddened, and laughed at himself, in a manly embarrassment that was a pleasant thing to see, as he tried clumsily to put the matter before the doctor in its true light, and in a way to do justice to Anne. Fortunately the doctor understood at once, and might have understood had the young man said even less than he finally found to say. That friend of humanity had learned something of Anne's character during her husband's long illness. Two earnest natures, stripped for a shoulder to shoulder contest with death over a sick-bed, come as near, perhaps, to knowing one another as any two souls may ever approach. A doctor's very calling, moreover, must reveal to him--as hardly the confessional can reveal to another man--the winding mazes of the simplest, sincerest woman's conscience.

When the doctor went home after talking with Lynn, he tried to show his wife that there was no occasion for the widespread excitement over this unaccountable change in Anne. He hoped that an off-hand word to his wife might have some effect in settling the swirl of gossip which circled the village, faster and faster, with Anne's continued appearance at the card-table, as the continual casting of pebbles agitates a stagnant pool. But Mrs. Alexander, good, kind, charitable woman though she was, could only sigh and shake her head. She said that she had never understood Anne, but that she had always respected her sincerity, no matter how widely she herself might differ in opinion. But what could anybody think or say of Anne's sincerity now? The doctor's wife cast a shocked, frightened, glance at the Watson house. Such open, flagrant backsliding really was enough to make the lightning strike.

And Mrs. Alexander's view was the one held by most of the Oldfield ladies, all of whom took the incomprehensible affair much to heart. Only Miss Judy and Kitty Mills saw nothing to alarm, nothing to wonder at, nothing in the least unnatural in Anne's change of attitude. But then, Miss Judy was well known to believe that everybody always had some praiseworthy motive for everything, if others were only clear-sighted enough to perceive it. Her pure mind was a flawless crystal, reflecting every ray of light from many exquisite prisms, but sending nothing out of actual darkness. And no one ever regarded seriously the views of Kitty Mills, who was notoriously willing for every one to do precisely as he liked, as nearly as he could, without any explanation or any reason whatever, so that her opinion had the very slight value which usually pertains to the opinions of the easily pleased. All the other Oldfield ladies were too deeply shocked, too utterly amazed, to know what to think, or what to say, or what to do. They could only gather in solemn, excited conclave at one another's houses, and discuss the situation daily and almost hourly, with growing wonder and bated breath.

Sidney was, of course, the central figure in this, as in all other things vital to the life of the village. As much at a loss for once as the dullest, she held nevertheless to her high esteem for Anne, and in canvassing the strangeness of the latter's conduct from house to house, as she felt compelled to canvass it, she invariably spoke of her with great kindness, even while admitting that it would be hard for a Philadelphia lawyer to find out what Anne meant by whirling round like a weathercock. It is likely that Sidney took off her bonnet and let down her hair oftener, and shook it out harder, and twisted it up tighter, at this time, than at any other period of her entire professional career. She used, indeed, to stop all along the big road--anywhere--and hang her bonnet on the fence, while she shook her hair down and twisted it up again; and her knitting-needles flew faster than they had ever done before or ever did afterward. One day, as she happened to be entering the doctor's gate to keep an important engagement with Mrs. Alexander, she saw Miss Pettus standing before the Watson house, gazing at the window,--which had now become the stage of a mystery play,--and not only gazing, but staring as if some dreadful sight had suddenly turned her to stone. Sidney called to her, but she did not turn or respond in any way for some minutes; and when she finally joined Sidney and the doctor's wife on the latter's porch, where they were sitting, she was really pale from agitation and actually sputtering with excitement.

"Chips!" she gasped, sinking into a chair. "Poker chips. I saw 'em with my own eyes and heard 'em with my own ears! I give you both my sacred word as a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church in good standing."

"Poker chips are neither here nor there," said Sidney, in the lofty, judicial tone which she had maintained throughout the controversy.

She eyed Miss Pettus, however, silently and a little severely, as she loosed several rounds of yarn from her big ball, and held them out and deliberately shook them apart at arm's length. It did not please her to hear of poker chips--or anything else of interest--through Miss Pettus or any other person. It was her own special and exclusive province to discover and distribute the news. She felt much as the editor of a great daily newspaper might feel if some casual passer-by should drop in to tell him of the day's greatest public event.

"Poker chips are neither here nor there," she repeated coolly, and almost contemptuously, as one looking to larger things. "No matter what Anne Watson does, and no matter how she does it, there's one thing that you may always be sure of, Miss Pettus, and that is--that she believes she is doing right."

"Who said she didn't?" retorted Miss Pettus. "Have I said anything about the right or wrong of it? I don't care anything about the right or wrong of card-playing. Some folks think one way and some another--and they may go on thinking so for all me. What I do say is that a body ought to stick to what she does believe, whatever it is, no matter whether she's a Methodist like me or a Christian like Anne."

"Well--'pon my word!" exclaimed Sidney, seeing a chance for reprisal, and furtively winking the eye next to the doctor's wife. "To hear you talk, Miss Pettus, folks would think there wasn't anybody but Methodists and Christians. Where, pray, do the rest of us come in? There's Jane there--a Cumberland Presbyterian, dyed blue in the wool. Yonder's Miss Judy, an Episcopalian of the highest latitude and the greatest longitude, and a-training Doris to be just like her. And here am I--a Baptist--a Baptist born and a Baptist bred--and a Whiskey Baptist at that."

"If I were you, Sidney Wendall," replied Miss Pettus, with offended dignity, "I wouldn't make fun of my own religion if I did make fun of every other earthly thing I came across. You know as well as I do, and as Jane here does, that there is no such thing as a Whiskey Baptist--and never was and never will be."

"No such thing as a Whiskey Baptist?" exclaimed Sidney, pretending to be wholly in earnest, and slyly winking again at the doctor's wife. "Then what, may I ask, would you have called my own father and his only brother--two church members in good and regular standing, and two as good and highly respected citizens as this Pennyroyal Region ever had, to boot? What else could you call them, I ask you, 'Mandy Pettus? Didn't they always pay their debts on the stroke of the town clock, and to a hundred cents on the dollar? Didn't they always vote the straight Democratic ticket for fifty years, without ever a scratch from end to end? Didn't they always get drunk on every county court day of their lives, and keep sober all the rest of the year? No Whiskey Baptists indeed!"

"What's all that tirade got to do with what I said about Anne's--and everybody's--being what they pretend to be?" fumed Miss Pettus. "That's what I said and what I'll keep on saying as long as I have the breath to speak my honest mind. And I'll say it about anybody, no matter who, just the same. Chopping and changing till a body don't know where to find you, looks to me just as bad in one denomination as another. And levity in those who ought to be serious-minded is levity to me wherever I find it. Now, look at our own circuit rider, only last Sunday! After that powerful sermon which warmed up the whole town, and shook the dry bones, what did he do?--right out of the pulpit, too,--but stop and hang over the fence like a schoolboy for a laughing confab with Kitty Mills! There she was, of course, standing out in the broiling sun with nothing but her apron thrown over her silly head, while you could hear old man Mills scolding her, the whole blessed time, at the top of his peevish voice. It was perfectly scandalous and nothing but scandalous to see such goings-on on the Lord's Day. Kitty was telling him about her late young turkeys getting out in that last hard rain and holding up their heads with their mouths wide open, till the last one of them drowned. As if there was anything uncommon or funny in that; as if everybody didn't know that young turkeys always did that whenever they got a chance. And the simpletons were both laughing as if they'd never heard such a joke, and as if it had been Monday instead of Sunday, and the circuit rider hadn't had any good work to do."

"Maybe he thinks that is a part of his good work," said the doctor's wife, gently. "Kitty Mills surely needs all the kindness she can get outside her own family, poor thing, though she doesn't seem to know it."

Sidney smiled at a sudden recollection. "I passed there yesterday, in the heat of the day, and saw her in the garden bending over and pulling the weeds out of her handful of vegetables. It made me real uneasy to look at her leaning down so long and steady, and her so short and stout, and I said so. But she only laughed till she cried, and declared there wasn't any danger except to her corset-boards. Then, when she could speak for laughing, she said she had saved almost enough to stick her bunch peas. And,--if you'll believe it,--Sam left the garden gate open last night, and the pigs got in and eat every one of 'em up."

"The corset-boards?" gasped Miss Pettus, in a tone of blank amazement, which implied, nevertheless, that she would not be in the least surprised at anything happening to Kitty Mills.

Sidney eyed Miss Pettus humorously, as she loosed more rounds of yarn from her big ball, holding it out again at arm's length; but there was no time for any reply had she thought it worth while to make one, for Mrs. Alexander's cook appeared in the doorway just at that moment, to say that supper was ready, and, following the hostess, the guest went to enjoy it without allowing it to grow cold. The table had been set on the back porch, which was on the side of the house that was most pleasant at that hour. And a truly pleasant place it was, with its whitewashed pillars, its cool green curtains of Madeira vine, so waxen of leaf and so frost-like in flower, and with its green and restful environment of grass and fruit trees. The table stood directly before the back door of the open passage. Sidney's seat faced the big road, and she had scarcely seated herself, when, chancing to glance up, she saw Lynn and Doris as they passed, going along the big road. She said nothing, however, of having seen them; she was always reserved about her own private affairs, and then she was still holding fast to her early determination to leave the young couple entirely free to follow the natural lead of their own hearts. But the glimpse of them reminded her of an uneasy suspicion that old lady Gordon was not so minded, a suspicion which had occurred to her that day for the first time. Now, therefore, with the unhesitating decision characteristic of her in all things, she resolved, then and there, to talk it over with Miss Judy as soon as she could get away from the supper table.

But it was never easy for Sidney to get away; a hostess, paying the stipulated price of a high-priced entertainer, rightfully expects to get the worth of her fee. No one knew this better than Sidney herself, and she accordingly so exerted her utmost ability, so put forth her most brilliant talent, that she fully made up for the shortened time; and the only regret upon the part of the hostess was that such a delightful entertainment should ever come to an end. Miss Pettus, also, was sorry to have Sidney go; and, now quite restored to good humor, she whispered to her, as they parted at the gate,--one going up the big road and one going down,--that she meant to send Kitty Mills a couple of young turkeys that very night, just to keep her from behaving so like a simpleton the next time the circuit rider went by, and just to make her see how shamefully she had behaved about that stubborn old dorminica.

Out into the dim, dusty highway Sidney now swung, with her long, free, fearless, independent step, which seemed to ask nothing of life and the world but to be allowed to go her own way; walking and knitting as fast as though the dusk had been daylight. Reaching Miss Judy's house she found the little sisters sitting happily side by side just within the open door of the unlighted passage, as they always were to be found at that time on the summer evenings. Miss Judy was talking in her soft, bright little way, which reminded the listener of the chirruping of a happy bird; and Miss Sophia was listening with enthralled interest between lapses of unconscious nodding. And now, as always when they talked together, both had the eager manner of having never before had a really satisfying opportunity to exchange vividly novel views and intensely interesting experiences, so that they hardly knew how to make enough of this truly delightful chance.

They were glad, nevertheless, to greet Sidney, as everybody always was; and Miss Judy said, as soon as Sidney had come within speaking distance, that Lynn and Doris had stopped for a moment to ask how she was feeling, and that she had told them she felt almost strong again,--nearly sure, indeed, of being able to give the tea-party on the coming Thursday.

"I am really mortified at not having given it before this time," she went on, blushing unseen in the gloaming. "It does seem too bad, this spoiling of lovely plans just on account of a foolish shortness of breath. It was such a disappointment to sister Sophia, not to have the tea-party while the blush roses were in bloom, for they match mother's best cups and saucers perfectly. And then came the cinnamon roses--they might have done fairly well, though they are not quite so delicate a shade, but they also have bloomed and faded long ago. Now the hundred-leaf roses will have to do--as I was just saying to sister Sophia when you came, Sidney--although their hearts are rather too dark to be as pretty as the others would have been. But we must give the tea-party anyway, blush roses or no blush roses, without any more delay, since I have thoughtlessly mentioned it to old lady Gordon, who never makes any allowances and who is rather critical."

"Oh, you told her, did you?" exclaimed Sidney. "Then that accounts for what I came to see you about."

"I felt that it was due to Doris that I should tell her; that she should know that only circumstances over which we had no control have so far prevented our paying the dear child the compliment of a formal introduction to society," said Miss Judy, with her pretty, comical, society air.

"Well, it explains what old Lady Gordon said to me without rhyme or reason when she met me on the big road yesterday--stopping her coach in the middle of the big road to do it, too,--something that she never took the trouble to think of before."

Sidney leaned forward and peered up and down the highway to make sure that no one was within hearing, and she listened for an instant to Miss Sophia's deep breathing in the still darkness of the passage.

"Now, mark my words, Miss Judy," she then said, in a guarded undertone. "That old Hessian means to interfere. She is going to make trouble. I feel it in my bones."

"Why?" cried Miss Judy, startled and bewildered. "What do you mean, Sidney? What did she say?"

"She said--without rhyme or reason, as I've told you--that her grandson was going away very soon to begin the practice of his profession, and that he hadn't any time to waste on any nonsense, like old women's silly tea-parties. She didn't call him by his name, either, as she always has called him heretofore. She called him 'my grandson,' in that high and mighty, stand-off-and-keep-your-place way that she knows how to put on, when she wants to and ain't too lazy. Now, mark my word, Miss Judy. Trouble's a-coming!"

"Oh, how could any one be unkind to that dear child," cried Miss Judy, almost in tears.

"I'd like to see anybody try it, while I'm 'round," said Sidney, with the fierceness that appears in the humblest barnyard hen when her chick is touched. "I'm all ready and a-waiting. Just let old lady Gordon so much as bat her eye and I'll give her goss. I'll tell her the Lord's truth, if she never heard it before. I'll tell her to her face that no Gordon that ever stepped ever was, or ever will be, fit to dust my Doris's shoes, so far as being good goes--or smart and good-looking either. This young Gordon is decent enough, I reckon, as young men go. And his father went pretty straight because he hadn't the spunk or the strength to go crooked. He was like a toad under a harrow, poor soul! He was so tame that he'd eat out of your hand. But even that old Hessian never harrowed or tamed the old man, who was a match for her. No-siree! Not while he had the strength to hop over a straw. Why, the whole woods were full of his wild colts."

"Ah, indeed! I never knew that the old gentleman ever had any interest in horses," Miss Judy murmured absently, almost tearfully, not thinking in the least of what she was saying.

"That was a long time ago," said Sidney hastily, remembering suddenly to whom she was speaking. "What the old folks were in their young days is neither here nor there. It makes no difference now. This young Gordon seems to be a fine young fellow, but, fine or coarse, all that I ask of that old Hessian, or of anybody, is to do as I do, and to let him and Doris alone, and not to meddle; just to give the two young things a fair field and no favor. And that's what she and everybody's got to do, too, or walk over Sidney Wendall's dead body."

"Don't--don't," entreated Miss Judy's soft voice, coming out of the quiet darkness with a tremulous gentleness, and telling of the tender tears in her blue eyes. "Let not your heart be troubled, dear friend. All will be well with the child. All is sure to come right at last, if we are but as patient and as trusting and as true and as faithful and as loving--above all as loving--as we should be. For love _is now--as it was in the beginning, and ever shall be_--the strongest thing in the world."

XXII

THE UPAS TREE

When Miss Judy, thus urged, set the day for the tea-party, naming even the hour, she forgot for the moment that the higher court of the district convened its summer session on the day which she had appointed. And this fact made it impossible to give the party on that day. Not because she had ever had or ever expected to have anything to do with any court of law--for coming events do not always cast their shadows before--but because she expected a visit from Judge Stanley on the evening of his first day in town. For she always knew just when to look for him; during many years he had come on the same day of the month, at the same hour and almost at the same minute. And Miss Judy had through all those years been in the habit of making certain delightful preparations for his visit, which nothing but her love and anxiety for Doris ever could have caused her to forget, and which not even that could now induce her to forego.

She looked forward from one of these visits to the next as to the greatest honor, and, after her love for Doris and her tenderness for her sister, the greatest happiness of her life. She knew how great a man this quiet, gray-haired, famous jurist was to a wider world than she had ever known; and the flattery of his open and exclusive devotion filled her gentle heart with sweet and tender pride. But there was something far tenderer and sweeter than pride in the feeling with which Miss Judy awaited the coming of John Stanley; for he was always John Stanley, and never the famous judge, to her. She had loved him before he became a judge, even before he had become a man. She had learned to love him soon after his coming to Oldfield, when he was a mere lad, and her own youth was not long past. She had loved him then as a young and happy mother loves a son who is all that the happiest, proudest mother could wish--noble, gifted, handsome, spirited, fearless--loving him as such a mother loves such a son when they are young together. She loved him afterward with a still more tender love--when, in the space of a pistol shot, he had changed from a light-hearted boy into a sad, silent man--loving him then as a tender mother loves a son who has suffered and grown strong.

His blamelessness in the hideous tragedy which had darkened his life, and the nobility with which he bore himself throughout the monstrous ordeal of blood, claimed all that was strongest and finest in Miss Judy's nature, and touched her romantic imagination as all the brilliant success which came to him later never could have done. It was not for such innocent gentleness as Miss Judy's ever fully to understand the meaning of the tragedy; to comprehend how much more terrible it was than the cruelest destiny of any one man, how much farther reaching through the past and the future than the length of any one man's life. John Stanley himself understood it at the time but dimly. Only by degrees did he come to see the truth: that his forced taking of the life of a man whom he did not know, whom he never had seen or heard of, had not been simply an unavoidable necessity in self-defence, as he had tried to believe,--nor an accident, as the verdict of the law and public opinion had decreed, seeing that it was accidental only so far as his instrumentality was concerned; that he himself was not the victim of chance--_but the helpless transmitter of traditional bloodshed_.

It was revealed to him at the trial which acquitted him, that the man whom he thus had been compelled to kill had been driven--ay, even hounded--by public opinion into seeking the life of the man who had taunted him, and in so doing into finding his own death at the hands of a lad who had no quarrel with any one. It was then shown him that the slain and the slayer were equal sacrifices to this monstrous tradition for the shedding of blood. So that, as he began to see, and as he continually looked back upon this blighting tragedy of his boyhood, it thus became--to John Stanley, who was a thinker, and a christian, even in his youth--infinitely more terrible than any really accidental or necessary taking of another's life would have been. He saw in this monstrous deed which he had been forced to commit, the direct result of a tradition of bloody vengeance: the unmistakable outcome of generations of false thinking, of false believing, of false teaching, of false example, of false following; all the rank growth from one poisonous root, all deeply rooted in a false sense of "honor," which, planted by the Power of Evil, had grown into the very life of the people, until it now towered, a deadly upas tree, darkening and poisoning that whole sunny country, almost as darkly and killingly as its murderous kind had ever darkened and poisoned beautiful Corsica.

When that awful truth first became plain to John Stanley--plain as the handwriting on the wall--it altered not only his character, but the whole trend of his life. From the day that he had first seen it through the bloody tragedy of his youth, John Stanley had watched the growth of the poison tree with ever deepening horror. He had seen its deadly shade pass the limits of the wrong which could never be washed out by the shedding of all the blood that ever flowed in human veins; he had watched its creeping on to trivial and even fancied offences, till it touched trifling discourtesies, till it reached at last inconceivably small things--the too quick lifting of a hat to a lady, the too slow response to the bow of another man--causing trifles light as air to be measured against a human life. As John Stanley thus looked on,--horror-stricken,--at the working of this deadly poison throughout the body of the commonwealth, he came gradually to believe it to be even more deadly and more widespread than perhaps it really was. His dread and fear of any form of violence, his horror of any lightness in the holding of life, his abhorrence of bloodshed under any provocation, grew with this morbid brooding through sad and lonely years, until they imperceptibly went beyond the bounds of perfect sanity, passing into the fixed idea which much lonely thinking brings into many sad lives.

And John Stanley's life was still lonely, notwithstanding his late marriage. Miss Judy felt this to be true, although she could not have told how she knew. It always had been a source of distress to her that she could know nothing of his wife, the beautiful, brilliant woman of fashion whom he had married only a few years before. Miss Judy thought wistfully that she would know why John seemed still so sad and lonely if she could only see his wife. But the judge's fine-lady wife apparently found no inducement to come to Oldfield; so that Miss Judy was compelled to be content with asking how she was, whenever John came, and with hearing him say every time that she was well--and nothing more.

But Miss Judy was not thinking about the judge's wife on that midsummer night. It was enough for her perfect happiness merely to have him there, settled for the evening in her father's arm-chair, which was fetched out of the parlor for him and never for any one else. It was delight only to look at him, smiling at her across the passage--wherein they sat because it was cooler than the room--quite like old times. He was a very handsome, very tall man, of slender but muscular build, stooping slightly from his great height through much bending over books. His head was fine, with a noble width of brow; his thick hair, once very dark, was now silvered about the temples; but his eyes were as dark as ever, and undimmed in their clear, steady brightness. His face was sensitive in its clean-shaven delicacy, and pale with the pallor of the student. It was not so sad though on that night as usual, nor nearly so grave. He was rested and soothed and cheered--this famous man of large affairs--by listening to Miss Judy's gentle twittering, so kind, so loving. It pleased him to see the little things that she had done in preparation for his coming. He smiled at the sight of the small basket of rosy peaches daintily set about with maidenhair fern. He did not know that in order to get the fruit Miss Judy had made a hard bargain with the thrifty Mrs. Beauchamp, who had the only early peaches,--a very hard bargain whereby the little lady went without butter on her bread for a good many days. Nor did he suspect that she had climbed to the top of the steepest hillside trying to reach the woods, regardless of the fluttering of her heart; or that she had ventured bravely even into the shadiest dell, heedless of her fear of snakes, in order to get his favorite fern to wreathe his favorite fruit. Perhaps no man ever knows what the pleasing of him costs a loving woman; certainly no loving woman ever takes the cost into account.

But then, on the other hand, perhaps no woman, however loving, ever can fully realize how much unstinted tenderness may mean to the greatest, the gravest, the most reserved of men, when he has never found it in his own home or anywhere else in all the cold world, which he has conquered by giving up the warmth and sweetness of life--as they must be given up by every conqueror of the region of perpetual ice. Miss Judy's gentle love now enfolded him like a soft, warm mantle, so that the chill at his heart melted away. It was then very sweet on that fragrant midsummer night, to this sad and weary man, to hear Miss Judy babbling gently on. He did not always listen to what she said; but the sound of her soft voice seemed for the moment to take away all weariness and pain, as she talked to him of the people and the things that he had known in his youth. She said about the same over and over, to be sure, almost every time he came, but that made no difference whatever; it was the sweetness of her spirit, the peace of her presence, that the great judge craved and loved and rested upon.

"And now, John, here are a few peaches--just the kind you like," Miss Judy said, in her artlessly artful little way, as if the pretty basket had only that moment fallen from the clouds--as she always said when he had sat a certain length of time in her father's chair in the coolest corner of the passage.

"Why,--so they are!" exclaimed the judge, in delighted surprise, as he always exclaimed when the peaches were offered precisely at the time when he expected them to be. "How in the world do you always remember--never once forgetting--from year to year? And these are the prettiest of all. See the rose velvet of that peach's bloom."

And then Miss Judy, delighted, and beaming, bustled about, spreading her mother's best napkin over the judge's knees and under the plate (the prettiest one with the wreath of forget-me-nots), wishing with all her loving heart that she might find a pretext for tying something around his dear neck. When she had put an old silver knife in his hand,--after being as long about it as she could be--conscientiously,--she gave Miss Sophia also a share of the rosy feast, and then sat down with a sigh of complete content, and looked at them positively radiating happiness; the happiness which only such a woman can feel in seeing those whom she loves enjoying pleasures and privileges which she never claims nor even thinks of, for herself.