CHAPTER IV.
"O Jesus, if thou wilt not save my soul,
Who may be saved? Who is it may be saved?
Who may be made a saint if I fail here?"
"As who should say: 'I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!'"
There are doubtless a few of us in the world capable of judging and pronouncing sentence upon the rest.
It is unfortunately inevitable, however, that such capabilities remain forever underestimated, and the possessors rarely receive the acknowledgments due from an ungrateful world.
Mrs. Deans was one of the chosen few who recognize their own infallibility, and accept as a sacred trust the knowledge that they are indispensable. To be a god, Mrs. Deans only lacked the minor attribute of immortality—a want of which she was herself unconscious.
Mrs. Deans strove earnestly to better her neighbors and cause them to conform to her standards of what was right. She was a firm believer that "open rebuke is better than secret love," and whatever risk Myron ran, under Mrs. Deans' rule she incurred no danger of being "carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease"—a thing much to be dreaded. Nor was there any possibility of her forgetting, for a half-hour at a time, the light in which Mrs. Deans viewed her, which was, of course, the somewhat trying illumination that the Children of Light project upon the Children of Darkness.
Mrs. Deans had a modestly good opinion of herself. "Thou art the salt of the earth" impressed her with all the directness of a personal remark. Those who enjoyed the privileges of Mrs. Deans' household were, first and least, her husband—Henry Deans. He was a small man, with "a little wee face, with a little yellow beard, a Cain-colored beard." It was five years since his horses, running away as he returned from the market town, capsized him over a steep bank, down which the barrel of salt he had bought rolled also, and, striking him in the back, partially paralyzed him.
Since that time he had sat under his wife's ministry. In summer the back porch held his chair, in winter the kitchen. By keeping a careful eye upon the bound girl, he sometimes discovered her in a dereliction; it was a happy hour for him when this was the case. It had the effect of distracting his wife's attention from him, for one thing—and when too closely centred upon any one person, Mrs. Deans' regard was apt to prove embarrassing; it also won him much commendation from her—being convinced of the utter depravity of the bound girl, both "individually and collectively," it gratified Mrs. Deans to have her "moral certainty" attested by positive proofs. It made her realize her seer-like qualities.
Mrs. Deans' son, Gamaliel, known to his fond mother as "Maley," and to Jamestown as "Male," stood first in his mother's regard.
Gamaliel was Mrs. Deans' idea of a "fancy" name. She had hesitated long before bestowing it upon her boy, wavering between Gamaliel and Ambrose. She finally decided upon the former, it being more uncommon. The son of Mrs. Deans' sister-in-law's brother was called Ambrose—and, also, Gamaliel was, as Mrs. Deans said, "more suitable," whether to her son's mental or physical endowments she did not specify. Old Mrs. Holder once said she never could "picture out" any one else being called Gamaliel, nor believe that Mrs. Deans' son could have had any other name.
He was a stubborn young lout, whose strong will was only subjective to his mother's because he did not recognize his own strength. She had curbed him as he bitted the huge young Clydesdale colts. Sometimes a well-broken horse realizes its own strength, and we hear a horrid story of torn flesh and trampled limbs when it turns to rend its master. If Gamaliel Deans ever revolted, his mother would suffer.
However, he was quiescent enough, for his mother's schemes were all for his benefit. Besides, he appreciated the charms of a quiet life, and had inherited a liberal share of the diplomacy his paralytic father displayed when he feigned sleep for long hours at a stretch, hoping that he might entrap the bound girl into some piece of unwary carelessness. Both Henry Deans and his son Gamaliel had a deeply rooted belief in the value of the bound girl as a counter-irritant.
Mrs. Deans had had just a "pigeon pair" of children, as Jamestown put it, but her girl had died when an infant. Mrs. Deans was too good a woman not to bear up under the loss, especially as she did not care for girls.
The bound girl made up the regular trio which Mrs. Deans drove before her over roads of her choosing.
It is unnecessary to say much of the bound girl. Mrs. Deans described them often—"Evil incarnate," she called them. Mrs. Deans changed her bound girls now and then. They came to her with all the different merits and various vices of their unhappy class. They left her different incarnations of the same weary, broken, deadened spirit of labor and endurance. Their individual characteristics, capabilities and tendencies had nothing whatever to do with their case. Woman and mother as Mrs. Deans was, she was never moved by their peculiar needs.
It is requisite, doubtless, to the "Great Plan" that there be bound ones among us, enduring—like the hereditary embalmer—the parischite of Egypt—a loathsome heritage—and yet—the pity of it! But Mrs. Deans was not one to question the Providence which ordained for these bound girls their lot in life.
"They're born bad, and bad they are, and bad they'll be—every one of them—evil, root and branch; you can't be up to them and their ways." These were Mrs. Deans' sentiments upon the subject of bound girls, and other opinions do not matter.
The hired men Mrs. Deans treated with the deference due to those who must be conciliated and who are free agents. Mrs. Deans, if not exactly harmless as the traditional dove, had at least a smattering of the wisdom of the serpent.
Mrs. Deans was distinctly a leader in Jamestown society. She was a very good woman, liberal to the Church, foremost in collecting for missions, ready to head a donation list at any time; therefore every one said Myron Holder was very lucky to have won Mrs. Deans' help. That this "help" consisted in being allowed to do the hardest work under the most intolerable circumstances for very meagre pay, they did not stop to consider. Mrs. Deans said she felt it a "duty" to have Myron Holder. We are all so thoroughly acquainted with the fact that duties are unpleasant, that the Jamestown women are not to be blamed for looking upon Mrs. Deans in the light of a martyr.
Mrs. Warner expressed the sense of the village view of the matter when she said, "It beats me how Mrs. Deans can put up with that Myron Holder! Going about as if she was injured, bless your heart, with a face as long as a fiddle and looking as if she was half killed, when she ought to be thankful to be let into a decent house to work."
And indeed the hopeless face Myron Holder bore above her aching heart was a public reproach; but we do not see rebuke where we do not look for it, and Jamestown felt itself above censure.
In the old Puritan graveyards in the New England States there was a place set apart, where in a common receptacle were buried those who held a different faith from the Puritans, or who avowed no faith at all. This was called the "damned corner." Whether the Puritans, out of zeal to do their Master's work, intended in this way to facilitate the business of separating the sheep from the goats, or whether it was with a view of securing their own sacred dust from contamination, does not appear. But it is a custom which still survives. We all have a "damned corner," where, beneath the intolerable burden of our disapprobation, we deposit those we know are wrong. Of course, common decency requires that we keep these spots swept with our criticism, garnished with invective; and when it is considered that in Mrs. Deans' eyes even Gamaliel sometimes showed faults, it will be understood the worthy woman had no sinecure.
Mrs. Deans' mind was somewhat "out of drawing" to her body, which was broad, large, fair, and of generous proportions. Why fat and good-temper should have been so long proverbially associated is difficult to discern; in so far as the ordinary mind can analyze, it would seem as if adipose was a distinct excuse for bad temper. To be hotter than other people in summer and not so cold in winter is one of the simplest and most obvious results of fat—yet who shall say this is conducive to sympathy with other people?
Mrs. Deans had been a Warner, and was inclined to goitre. Her large head, with its oily bands of fair hair, was always somewhat inclined backwards. Her general appearance suggested, in a remote way, a colossal and bad-tempered pouter pigeon—a likeness absurdly emphasized sometimes by the redness of her eyes.
When Myron Holder crossed the threshold with the quilting-frames, a scene characteristic of the place greeted her. Mrs. Deans stood in the foreground, holding the floor; her husband listened to her eloquence, blinking appreciatively if somewhat apprehensively. You never knew—to use one of her own expressions—when you "had Mrs. Deans, and when you hadn't." She was apt to deflect suddenly from the chase she was engaged in, and start full cry after another's shortcomings. More than once Henry Deans, enjoying himself hugely while his wife browbeat the bound girls, had his joy turned to mourning by suddenly discovering that the peroration of his wife's address had for its inspiration his own shortcomings.
His wife was, as he confided to Gamaliel, "onsartain"; it was a perilous joy to listen to her, and, therefore, perhaps, the more exhilarating.
The bound girl—a slight, tow-headed child with high, unequal shoulders, and arms, and wrists, developed by her life of toil into absurd disproportion to her body—stood by the stove, listening with a dazed look in her weary eyes. She had broken a seven-cent lamp-glass.
Myron put aside the basket of groceries, took the quilting-frames to an empty corner, and set about her preparations for the weekly washing. The bound girl still stood motionless by the fire, and Mrs. Deans still talked; her husband was shifting uneasily in his chair, for her remarks were beginning to wander from the case in point, and her condemnations and criticisms were becoming too sweeping to be altogether pleasant, when, much to the relief of her hearers, Mrs. Deans' attention was distracted by the arrival of the ragman, with his noisy, rattling van, piled high with coarse, bulging sacks of canvas. Mrs. Deans assumed her sunbonnet, and went out to him. He was a man of sixty or so, thin, good-humored, and with what Mrs. Deans called, "An eye to the main chance." Perched high upon the seat of his old-fashioned blue van, he was exposed to all the variableness of the weather; but he took sunshine and rain in good part, and seemed little the worse, save that he was tanned to a fine mahogany tint.
He went regular rounds through the country, gathering rags and scrap-iron. His calling is a survival of the old classic system of barter. The interior of his van was filled with an array of pans and pails and all sorts of tin-ware; a drawer at the back held common cutlery, horn-handled knives and forks, and tin spoons, such as his customers used. With these wares he paid for the rags and old iron. Many a thousand pounds of each had he and his old black horse collected.
He had a faculty for gauging the weight of a bag of rags that was truly impressive. "That'll go thirty pound," he would say; then weighing it hastily, "Turned at thirty and a half," he would announce with an air of surprise at his own mistake. Then, by a quick fling, the bag would be skillfully bestowed upon the top of the van; his load was always one-sided, but never fell off.
Mrs. Deans always had rags for him, and invariably bought pie-plates.
"Who is that?" said he to Mrs. Deans, after the chaffering process was over, and she stood, pie-plates in hand, watching him put the wooden peg through the staple to keep the hasp tight. He had caught a glimpse of Myron Holder.
"That—oh, Jed Holder's Myron," returned Mrs. Deans, assuming the face with which she taught Sunday school.
"'Tis, eh? What do you have her for?"
"I feel a duty to have her here, but it goes ag'in me, Mr. Long—it does that; but there, we all have our cross and we must help along as well as we can. Are you going to call at old Mrs. Holder's? She takes it most terrible hard."
"Yes, I'll call there; it's a lucky job for the girl she's got such a backer as you, Mrs. Deans. 'Twould be a good thing if there was more like you. It beats all what wimmen is coming to these days! Who's the man?"
"Don't ask me—ask her; that's the only place I know to find out; she's that close, though! And stubborn! Even I, for all I've done for her, and put up with, don't know! No more does her grandmother. But I'll find out."
"Well, well—that's curious," said the ragman, by this time perched aloft again and shaking the reins over the high, lean haunches of his horse; "good day, Mrs. Deans; you have a fine place here."
"Good morning. When'll you be back? Be sure you call."
"I'll be round in a couple of months again. Good morning," he replied, as his van jolted away.
"It seems to me," said he, soliloquizing, "that Mrs. Deans has washed more'n she can hang out! Jed Holder's daughter can keep her month shet if she makes up her mind to it; I knowed Jed."
This ragman had not gathered the rags of Jamestown for thirty years without acquiring some knowledge of the people. "I kin read 'em by their rags," he used to tell his wife.
He was justified in doubting Mrs. Deans' ability to perform the task she had set herself—to fathom Myron's secret.
"That girl of Jed Holder's has made a fine job of herself!" the ragman said to old Mr. Carroll, as he drove homeward in the evening.
"Yes," said old Carroll; "women are a bad lot, a bad, scheming lot."
"Oh, come, come; you'll be getting married to some young girl one of these fine days," retorted the astute ragman.
"I—no, sir; not such a fool," snorted the old man, highly pleased. "Will you come in and have a drop?"
The ragman would; they entered the house together, the black horse meantime reaching down to nibble at the last year's grass, through which the first tender blades of the new growth were pointing.
Presently the ragman emerged, looking much happier and warmer; the wind was chill in the evenings yet, and Mr. Carroll's "drop" meant a good, stiff glass of gin.
Mr. Carroll came to the door after him. "Mrs. Deans declares she'll find out, but the job will puzzle even her, I'll warrant," the ragman was saying as he climbed nimbly up over the front wheel.
"Trust her for that; women are all alike. 'Set a thief to catch a thief,'" replied his host with a sardonic chuckle. (If Mrs. Deans could have heard him!)
The ragman loudly evidenced his appreciation of this fine wit, and departed, calling out, "Evening—good evening—you've got a fine, snug place here, Mr. Carroll."
His homeward way led through quiet country roads, and long grass-grown "concessions."
The promise of spring made sweet the air, and although the night felt gray and chill, it did not numb, as do autumn nights of the same temperature.
The ragman's house stood on the outskirts of a little town, and was dwarfed and overshadowed by the barn, which occupied the main portion of the lot. One little corner of this barn was devoted to the big black horse; the rest was given over to rags. If the rags are not sent to the mills as they are collected, they are "sorted," which means that buttons, hooks, and eyes are cut off, and the woollen separated from the cotton rags. The former are sent to the shoddy mills; the paper factories absorb the others.
The ragman's trade has its traditions and romances; and the tales of fortunes found by ragpickers are beautiful truths to all of their calling; so this ragpicker, like all others, carefully felt the pockets and linings of the garments that came to him. During his thirty years of rag-picking he had found one two-dollar bill, seven ten-cent pieces, eighteen five-cent bits, one pair of gloves and an average of one lead pencil a year—but he still hoped.
Finding a fortune in rags, however, is a little like trying to locate the pot of gold at the rainbow's foot.
Myron Holder had heard plainly the ragman's query and Mrs. Deans' reply. Old Henry Deans, blossoming forth like a snail out of its shell, as soon as his wife's back was turned, said with leering facetiousness, "Ah—a fellow askin' after you, Myron," and pointed his fist with a look that made the blood spring to the woman's cheeks and linger there, a painful blot as though the face had been smitten. She bent over her tub in silence, her heart hot within her. The regard of such men and women as Myron Holder lived among may not seem of much moment to us, nor their criticisms of any import at all, but it must be remembered that they formed Myron Holder's world; and their verdict upon her was terrible, inasmuch as with them lay the power of inflicting the penalty they pronounced.
Mrs. Deans bustled in, rattling her pie-plates. Every one was at work and unhappy, so after scathing her husband with a contemptuous look, on general principles, she betook herself to the kitchen proper, and soon getting the quilting-frames into position, proceeded to "tie" her quilts, which process consisted in dotting their resplendent red and blue surfaces with fuzzy knots of yellow yarn.
That night, when Myron Holder went home, she thought for the first time, once or twice rebelliously, of the portion meted out to her; but that unaccustomed mood passed and left her in her normal condition of self-reproach.
It is perhaps true that martyrdom is a form of beatitude; but, if compulsory, it rarely has a spiritualizing effect. Myron Holder was condemned to endure all the "slings and arrows" that a spiteful, narrow-minded village can aim. She arose in the morning and ate her hasty breakfast to the sound of bitter words, directed with the unerring malignity of long-suppressed dislike, at last given an excuse for expression. She worked all day, subject to the taunts of a vulgar virago, the coarseness of that unlicked cub, Gamaliel, the intolerable leers and jibes of the half-paralyzed Henry Deans. She returned at night to be greeted by her grandmother's venomous reproaches. Doubtless she deserved all this—but her acceptance of it might have been different, for Myron Holder had come of no slavish race of down-trodden serfs. She had sprung from a long line of sturdy English forbears, lowly indeed, but free and bold. It would scarcely be a matter for wonder had Myron Holder fought with her back against the wall, defied the world she knew, utterly—its narrow prejudices, cramped conventions, traditionary decencies; but she did not. At this time she neither rebelled nor struggled—she endured; so did Prometheus.