II
It is strange how small a residue will be left by how large a volume of life. Experiences that run through weeks and months can be summed up at last in an epigram. Not that I am one, let me say in passing, who is given to that form of expression. The thing done has for me no such interest as the thing doing—to dip again into that dictionary. Yet the rest of my summer in Marshbury added very little to the picture which I have begun to sketch. I had had my impression. I merely spent my time turning it over, taking it in. And the most curious thing was that, savouring the impression as much as I did, I could go away and think no more about it. I went away, and I stayed away three years. The attractions of Italy for the time outweighed all others. But after my “beaker full of the warm South,” I had a whim to go back to Marshbury. To speak in homely terms, I suppose it was on the same principle that one likes a cold shower after a hot scrub. At any rate, I am never so fond of the North as after a prolonged sojourn in the South, or of America as after Europe. And the picture of my pagan came to me again more strikingly than ever—that picture which would have been so impossible in the country from which I returned, which was so of the soil of that to which I went back. To Marshbury, therefore, I proceeded; and, of course, for old times’ sake, I put up at Mrs. Bennett’s. Indeed I could not put up anywhere else. They were all so a part of the impression.
As for that, however—! I was not in the least prepared for the changes it had undergone. I must even confess that I was at first a little disappointed. I somehow felt that Marshbury had not honourably kept its tryst with me. So does one insist on opposing one’s childish singleness of idea to the richness of life! The background, to be sure, was exactly as I remembered it. The hills looked just as they had from the time of the Flood. So, I felt certain, did the houses and the people. By whom I mean the lay figures, the supernumeraries. And Mrs. Bennett herself, who was no supernumerary, was good enough to spare a shock to my sensibilities. But that only made Mary seem the more unnatural. She had suffered one of those metamorphoses to which the young are so peculiarly susceptible—and which, apparently, no amount of experience can ever teach their absent elders to foresee. The curious thing about it was that I could trace, after the event, how impossible it would have been for her to turn out otherwise. Even through her solidest days she had always been prettier than she could help. It was only natural that she should have grown up into a handsome dignity that barely fell short of beauty and stateliness. And while she was little freer of words than she ever had been, she no longer gave one the feeling that she stood in want of them. Altogether she distinctly left me staring.
And she by no means put an end to it when, in response to my inquiry as to whether she still went to Mr. Marvin’s, she replied:
“Yes. He’s got a girl now. He says she’s the one who used to sing to him in the brook.”
This statement surprised but did not enlighten me. I did not know whether to understand that the Pagan employed a maid or was somehow in possession of a daughter. It appeared, however, that the latter was the case. And it furthermore appeared—at least to my subliminal consciousness—that in Mary a tacit forbearance with her master’s failings, as being more of the head than of the heart, was less unquestioning than it had been. It may have been that I saw more than there was. I generally do. At any rate, when it occurred to me to ask whether Marvin still kept up his bar, I certainly touched something. I could see it in the way Mary told me that everything had changed since the girl came. I felt for her. I felt, that is, as if some bungler had got hold of my rather original little sketch and had finished it off in the conventional old fashion.
Marvin had a child. That was the bare fact. But the full story I did not get then. Nor, for that matter, do I suppose I ever shall. I did pick up one thing and another, though, and the result of my pickings I shall now attempt to set forth. It will take less time if I do it in my own way. Particularly as I have no love for the dialect in which my information came to me. If Truth lie within that pale, let me forever go without!
The affair must have caused a good deal of scandal at the time. Marshbury took even less pride in the possession of a Potter’s Field than in its lack of tenants. And when a strange woman turned up from somewhere, and had the ill grace to die in the Poorhouse, people felt that their good intentions had been imposed upon. Although they did grant that it was the best thing the woman had ever done.... But the worst of it was that a shock-headed little girl of nine or ten was left on the Overseers’ hands—a small imp into whom her mother’s devil had returned with seven wickeder than himself. It took no time at all for the matron of the Poorhouse to shake her head and sigh: “Blood will tell!” Indeed, she openly expressed surprise that the Most High in his mercy had neglected to take the child unto himself at the same time as the mother. It certainly would have saved Mrs. Lovejoy an infinity of trouble. The mischief that child was not up to! She was as unmanageable as quicksilver. Her worst trick though, was running away; and she had a passion for playing in the brook of which no amount of whipping could cure her. Time and again the countryside was beaten by night, the brook dragged from one end to the other, only to have her turn up safe and sound and very hungry, without any idea where she had been or what anxiety she had caused. Nothing ever happened to her, either. It was so notorious that Mrs. Lovejoy would often have been glad to let her go, just to have the child off her mind.
It did not take this inquiring young lady long to discover Marvin. Two causes operated powerfully toward that effect. The first of them was that she had been warned against him, as being the nearest and most dangerous of her neighbours. The second was that her brook ran through his orchard. Accordingly she waded singing upon him one day as he sat with his book under an apple-tree.
“Well!” he exclaimed, as the childish voice suddenly stopped and he looked up to find a bare-legged little apparition holding scant skirts in both hands above the water. “Who are you?”
“I’m Sassy,” she answered, taking him in with big black eyes. “That ain’t my real name, though. The old woman says it ain’t Christian. My real name’s Daphne.”
“Well, well!” ejaculated Marvin. “Mary!” he called to that young woman, who happened to be out at the pump, “here’s the naiad of the brook come to pay me a visit!” And to the child, who balanced herself on a smooth stone while she splashed an overhanging branch with her foot: “What old woman is that?”
“Mis’ Lovejoy,” answered she of the unruly hair.
“Lovejoy,” repeated Marvin. “Love-Joy. That’s a nice name.” He was a little at a loss for something to say. “Is she your mother?”
“Huh!” cried the child. “It may be a nice name, but it’s all that’s nice about her. She’s just as horrid as she can be. I hate her. She ain’t my mother a bit. It ’most seems as if I never had any.” And she began to visit upon the water a series of spiteful kicks that spattered even Marvin’s page.
“Oh!” said he.
The two then looked at each other for a minute. But it was the child who spoke first.
“What do you do?”
“What do I do?” queried Marvin, puzzled. “I don’t do much of anything that I know of.”
“I mean what do you do that’s bad?” promptly returned the child. “They told me I mustn’t ever speak to you, because you’re bad. I’m bad too. That’s why I came.”
“Oh!” laughed Marvin. “Supposing you tell me what you do.”
“Lots of things—tear my clothes, and muddy my shoes, and sit in the grass, and climb trees, and slap, and kick, and run away whenever I get a chance. Most of all, though, I play in the brook. Are you as bad as that?”
Marvin held out his hand.
“Just about!” he told her. “But don’t run away from here yet a while, Daphne—or turn into a laurel. We have too many things to talk about, you and I.”
So it was that Daphne and the Pagan first cemented the bonds of friendship. In the eyes of the unappreciative community that harboured them, however, it was but another point against them both. If Marvin had known what pangs his small ally was compelled to endure in his behalf, he would long before have done what he did. For, as Mrs. Lovejoy had ever been one to live up to her word, Daphne spent an increasing portion of her days in cupboards. She likewise became an expert on the elastic properties of different domestic woods, and subsisted chiefly on bread and water. But when not otherwise engaged she spent all her time at Marvin’s, to the despair and dismay of all in authority above her. “Birds of a feather!” they ominously whispered. Until at last things got too serious for whispers, and Mrs. Lovejoy took matters into her own hands.
It must have been quite a scene. The rumour of it still filled Marshbury at the time of my second visit. Mary Bennett had been washing windows in the kitchen, and I got the most authentic details. It seemed that Mrs. Lovejoy swooped down like the wolf on the fold, one afternoon when Daphne was missing, and discovered the two, as she expected, in earnest colloquy. She did not wait for preliminaries. I must say I rather admire it, too—that trait which will seek the point at any cost, without fear or favour.
“I don’t know what you find in that child,” she said to Marvin—“born of a common woman of the street that’s buried in the Potter’s Field, and as full of Satan as an onion is of smell! But when we’re trying to do our best for her, it seems too bad that you should come along with your heathenish notions and just undo everything. I’ll thank you to keep them to yourself. Sassy, you come along with me.”
“I won’t!” declared the child, roundly. And she ran for refuge into Marvin’s arms.
Well, she stayed there. Of course there was a tremendous row. Mrs. Lovejoy stormed, and Daphne cried, and Marvin manœuvred rather helplessly between. And the upshot of it was that Mrs. Lovejoy retired ignominiously from the field, leaving her adversary the somewhat astonished possessor of an infant. Not that his title was uncontested. Mrs. Lovejoy’s last word had been that she would put the matter before the Overseers, and she did. If she was a harsh woman, she was, according to her lights, a just one. She did what she thought best in circumstances which she was not subtle enough to understand. Sassy was an intolerable incubus to her, but for the good of Sassy’s immortal soul she thought the waif should be saved from Marvin. After much parleying, however, it was concluded to let the child stay. She had been given her chance. The community had done its duty. And its representative, in the person of Mrs. Lovejoy, realised that, after all, there was a limit to the endurance of flesh and blood. It would therefore perhaps be allowable to let the orphan go into hands that were ready to care for her. The community promised itself that, under this provision for the material aspect of the case, it would keep a watchful eye on the child’s moral welfare.
I am not sure that the community did not envy for Marvin a little moral discipline in the contract which he so unexpectedly undertook. Certainly there were distinct elements of humour in the situation. To drop an incorrigible youngster into the arms of a man who knew no more about children than he did about the fourth dimension, and who had risen in the morning without the faintest notion of adopting one, might suggest very dubious results. But the brilliant success of the experiment only served to let in a little light on the ignorance of bachelors and the incorrigibility of waifs. The pair entered upon a life which became no less amazing to themselves than to the community at large. People could not imagine where the two discovered the secrets of virtue and good humour with which they suddenly blossomed forth. It amounted to another proof of their innate perversity.
At all events, for the first time in many days both of them were happy. They paddled unmolested in their brook. They invented solemn mysteries about their relation to it. They climbed their apple-trees. They dug their garden. They kept house—without a bar. They told stories. They explored the countryside for leagues around. Altogether they used to make me wish, when I came to meet them on the hills, that I could be a pagan too.