Chapter VI: This Greater Love

"How can I approach the girl?" thought Mrs. Garrison. "If I should send word for Vesta Kirtland to come here and see me, Notely would be sure to hear of it; he would wonder; ask questions. If I go down and see her it will provoke endless comment and wonder among those people. I never visit them. There is no other way. Notely takes the Langhams for the day in his boat to-morrow. I will be driven to the Basin. I will ask Vesta indifferently, by the way, to go with me in those woods where I played in childhood, too timid now to walk there alone. They will say, as well as they can express it, that sentiment must be getting fashionable! Never mind. I shall see and talk with the girl. We will see."

Mrs. Garrison alighted from her carriage before she reached Vesty's door.

"Wait here," she said to her coachman. Vesty saw her approach. Off there in the bay, sublimely guarding and making a gateway to its waters, were two little green mountain peaks of islands, just a narrow surge of the waters flowing between; the "Lions," the "Twin Brothers," they were called.

One does not look off daily, from one's very infancy, on such a view for nothing. Mrs. Garrison saw the "lion" in Vesty's quick-divining eyes, and was glad.

"Anything but heart-break and slow consumption. Of battle I am not afraid," she said to herself.

"I took a fancy to leave my carriage and walk a bit among those old trees. I used to know them well. Will you go with me, child?"

"Certainly, Mrs. Garrison." Vesty handed the baby which she was tending to its mother, and walked away with the fine lady.

"Vesta Kirtland," said Mrs. Garrison, as they entered the shadow of the woods, "your face tells me plainly that you know I have some object in asking you to walk with me here. I have.

"I am proud, cold, indifferent regarding you people here; I have not noticed you, hardly even by recognition, if we chanced to meet in the lanes; yes, I know. I bring no personal claims. But"--she was going to say, "you are fond of Notely," but she looked at the girl, and a proud, sarcastic smile curved her lips instead--"my son, Notely Garrison, adores you, I believe? I do not know whether you care for him; I presume not so ardently; but if you were even a little fond of him, for the sake of childhood days when he made you his little playmate--you would try to do the best for his good now--would you not, child?"

Vesty showed so few symptoms of slow consumption, and the lions in the gateway of her soul glowed so ominously, that Mrs. Garrison concluded to be brief. She turned her face away a little; the operation was unpleasant, and she took out the knife, only in speech.

"Notely has quixotic ideas in many ways: if he had given any ground for a foolish confidence in his boyhood he would hold to it now, against all his life's advancement, filial duty--yes, even against personal inclination, for that matter."

Mrs. Garrison was a resolved surgeon. "Do you know what Notely's prospects are in life--socially, politically, financially? But he must take the tide as it serves. To turn now is to lose all. He has many friends. He is beloved by a rich, beautiful, accomplished girl, influential in that sphere where her family have for so long moved. I seem cruel, child."

"Call me by my name. Call me Vesty Kirtland. I hate you! With my whole heart and soul I hate you!"

So the bold lions at the gate, desperately guarding sea-depths of pain behind.

"Really, Vesta Kirtland! if things were different I would rather be mother-in-law to you than to Grace Langham. You are a pupil worthy of my metal! You are fire, I see. Bravo!"

Vesty stood with her head on her arm, resting against a tree, holding herself.

"I do not know that there is anything more to say. Notely will never seek his own release. But, if you loved him _truly_----"

"I do!"

Flaming scorn and a smile as defiant as Mrs. Garrison's own.

"Do you?" said the surgeon. "Then release him."

"You told a lie. Notely does not want to be released. He loves me, not Grace Langham. You know how it is with men. If I should go to your house and say to him, 'Come with me; come down to my father's house, since there is no other way, and help troll, and haul the traps, and make the nets, and be with me,' he would come!"

"Yes," said the lady, pale, "he would go. Therefore, as I said, do you save him."

"What makes that life so much better, out there, than ours, that I should give him up to it, and break my heart and his? Are you one that they make?"

"All people do not regard me with such disfavor." She looked at the girl almost wistfully. "Life _is_ hard, Vesta, and exacting, spite of all that we can do; and the world is hard and exacting, supercilious, ready to pick at a flaw--you do not know."

"Well, I think Notely will be happier here with me."

Yet one could see the girl's pale resolve, only she was turning the knife a little on the heartless surgeon. It cut sharply.

"For a month or two, Vesta, yes."

"And then?"

"One who has been accustomed to champagne from an ice-cooler will not be satisfied forever with sucking warm spring water in the sun, however wholesome."

"Ah!"

"He will grow very tired. He will not speak, but he will regret."

"Ah! he will think what he has given up; and it _is_ so much, all in all; yes, it is too much!"

Mrs. Garrison turned, startled at the girl's voice. The lions held the gateway, sad and gloomy. Into those heaving depths behind she should not enter.

"You have not told me anything. I only got you to say it over. I had thought it all out for myself. I do not mean, any more, that Notely shall marry me."

Mrs. Garrison gave her a wild glance of gratitude, of sorrow. In that instant her heart yearned intensely over the long-limbed girl, standing so sorrowful and proud, and cut by Fate.

"How will you manage?" she cried impulsively. "He _is_ so fond of you!"

"I can manage. Promise me one thing?"

"Anything I have."

Vesty smiled. "Promise me, if Notely should be sick, in danger, I mean, or hurt, unfortunate, it might be--you would let me know, and let me come and care for him, just while he needed care. I want you to promise me!"

Her voice took the sharp tone, her eyes the frenzy, of a bird guarding its young.

"Ah, Vesta Kirtland, you did love him! Oh, I promise."

"If you did not, there 's such a feeling toward him, different from the others, I can't tell; if you did not, and I should ever know, it would be like I had some little child of my own--yes, like I had some poor little baby of my own, crying for me, and I did not come--I did not come!"

Vesty turned. The tide had run so high those wild ocean guards were covered by the surge.

She led the way to the outskirts of the wood and stood aside for Mrs. Garrison to pass. The woman would have drawn near her; she waved her hand, standing aside from her. Mrs. Garrison hesitated. The sight of Dan Kirtland's low, brown cottage, the squalid babies in the doorway, the fishing-nets, Vesty's last week's cotton gown swinging on the line, some humiliating, harsh memories of her own, spurred her on, with a sigh.

"She is fire, thank God! It will be all right," she said.

Vesty drew back into the woods.

She pressed her forehead hard against the rough bark of a tree. To "fall down there, and to be found and taken home and put away beside her own mother in the little home lot by the sea-wall--not to have to stand up wearily any more, and walk back, dazed and sick, into the light"--so she yearned--"what was there to stand up for?"

A pitiful little wail, and "Lowizy's" weary voice trying to sing reached her.

Clouds drifted over the sky. The poplars shivered; no voice of the thrush now chanting from the wood-depths; but the poplars, that Christ's cross was made from, what soft voice is this of theirs falling? "Love, love, love"--this too? sighing with strange rapture.

Vesty pulled her thick hair down over the bruised place on her forehead. She went out of the woods, toward her father's poor house and the wailing and the feeble singing.

"Vesty! Vesty!" one of the school-children came running toward her. "Lowizy said you was up here. I came to look for you. Here 's a note Jane Pray sent."

DEAR VESTY: You told me last meetun you was comern up to sett with me and my border some evening. Come tonyte. hees a poor erflickted creetur, seems to me. hees lamer 'an ever an smaller 'an ever this week, an' the burth-scalds on his face shows more, seems to me. Ef that he was payin' 3 dollars a week, I should feel easier, bring your soing an' sett a good long spale.

yours truly,
JANE PRAY.

Vesty came, just as the firelight grew welcome and tender. She put aside her hat and shawl, unrolled her parcel of sewing-work, and sat down by the little lamp at one end of the room with Miss Pray.

She took in my presence naturally, with no obtrusive kindness; she was at a necessitous task--putting a broad gray patch, the best available from the resources at home, on Jimmy Kirtland's brown jacket, doing it deftly with her supple hands.

"You'll be doing that for some boys of your own by and by," said Miss Pray, intending to have a cheerful evening.

Vesty grew sweet and pale; she shook her head. Her dark eye-sockets had a look, I thought, as though she had been ill and fasting. I mused in the firelight.

"And what if that should not be your fate indeed, Vesta Kirtland: not bearing, and toil, and pain, and all the heart-breaking vicissitudes of woman's life, but some peculiar station?

"So tall and gracious, to go robed costly, to ride splendidly accoutred and attended, to condescend almost to _all_, to give gracious _downward_ smiles.

"What if they knew the power of wealth and alien rank, for that matter, I held in that miserable, lean, little paw of mine! You should outshine Grace Langham as the sun, Vesty. Some time, if she were wronged and sorrowful, could I point her, delicately, with all forbearance and worship of my own, that way?"

"Be you rebellious?" Unsuccessful in her cheerful attempts with Vesty, Jane Pray had turned to me.

But Vesty resented her companion's question, almost involuntarily turning to me with a quick and awful pity.

(No; I had been lost, dreaming: not that way, surely; not though her heart were moved with the purest pity angels could bestow; not thou, Vesty, above all, sweet one, beautiful one! to a union so unfit and repelling.)

But I had to bring my thoughts back from a long way to answer Miss Fray's question.

"No," I said. "I settled that with God long ago. It is all right between us."

Miss Pray, confused by Vesty's look, blushed painfully.

"Thank you for asking me about it," I said gently.

At that Miss Pray rose. "Come; le's play words," she said.

So the girl and the woman folded their sewing, and Miss Pray brought from some hitherto unknown recreative source a little box of cardboard letters, and we sat at the table together.

Miss Pray and Vesty thoughtfully selected some letters and shook them together and handed them each to me to make into words. I gave them each a word.

The letters I gave Miss Pray composed a simple and striking feature of the Basin vocabulary, "w-h-a-l-e."

Those I gave Vesty I studied to make a little more difficult, "c-o-n-t-i-n-u-e."

Miss Pray gave me three letters. It happened as I dropped them on the table that they fell of themselves into complete literary sequence, "c-o-w." But Vesty handed me eleven shuffled letters, a ladylike aspiration, and looked at me with a little appealing blush--the Basin school is so brief, so limited in its curriculum.

Miss Pray put on her glasses and studied wearily and long on her letters, placing them every way. I saw that she had them now at last, "w-h-a-l-e," but was regarding them as blankly as ever.

"Pray do not move them again," I cried hopefully, finding the game more exciting than I had anticipated. "You have it, 'w-h-a-l-e,' whale--see?"

Miss Pray looked shocked and dubious. I saw at once that she was suffering under the sorrowful mental conviction that I had spelled the word wrongly: but that she was resolved not again to wound my feelings. She turned to assist Vesty.

"That," she said at length, struck by some suggestive combination, "might be 'continnu,' Vesty, ef it had more 'n's and no 'e'."

"Oh," said Vesty, pleased and enlightened. "But major knows," she added promptly, "about the spelling."

"I have your word, you see, Vesty," I said. "'S-e-p-p-e-r-a-t-i-o-n.'"

I had it spread out proudly on the table. She looked at me and blushed again. I smiled, only as I would at a priceless child.

"You _are_ cute at _guessin'_, major," said Miss Pray admiringly; but I saw that she held me deficient in the classical prearrangement of words, and that the game had lost interest to her on that account. So we laid it by.

When Vesty rose to go home, "I will go with you," I said, wrapping my sad little presence in an overcoat.

Miss Pray looked as she had when she asked me if I was rebellious.

But Vesty said quickly: "I wish you would. I am so afraid in the dark!"

Afraid in the dark! Not she; but this was some ointment for that unconscious thrust Miss Pray had given.

I walked home with her. Coming back, there was ever a slight crackling in the bushes and stealthy breathing behind me. It was the lad, Jimmy Kirtland, sent by Vesty surreptitiously to see that I arrived safely at Miss Pray's.

I regarded sacredly this innocent device, but, arrived in the house, I heard Jimmy outside pleading cautiously to Miss Pray through the window that he was afraid to go back alone.

Miss Pray tried to arouse one of her two orphans--her help: for answer they screamed aloud, sinking back into a sleep deep with snores of utter repose.

"Sh! sh!" she said. "I'll go home with you, Jimmy."

I had not taken off my great-coat. I went out of my room and followed them, unseen. In sight of the Kirtland home-light Jimmy ran in, glad. Miss Pray turned to face the darkness alone; she went a few paces, stopped, hesitated, and began to weep softly.

"I am here to walk home with you, Miss Pray," I said. "Come; I can see very well in the dark."

"Thank God!" said she, and came toward me with a little bound; for it seemed that it did not make any difference to her in this emergency that I did not know how to spell.