T’FÉRGORE
A PASTORAL IN THREE PARTS
Time, 1883
PART I
HE THREATENS TO ARRIVE
“We will not endeavor to modify the motions of the elements, or fix the destiny of kingdoms. It is our business to consider what beings like us may perform: each laboring for his own happiness by promoting within his circle, however narrow, the happiness of others.”—Rasselas.
“Come into the painting-room,” said Julian, “and let’s talk it over.”
“How excited you are!” I said.
“Well, after balancing one way and another for years, my mind’s made up. We’re going.”
“To Europe?”
“Yes, to Europe.”
“Oh, what a beautiful prospect,” I said. And then leaning against his elbow I heaved a great sigh.
“It must be a beautiful prospect if you groan like that over it.”
“The groan’s because I can’t go.”
Julian sat down and took me indulgently on his knee. Some women in marriage have their pride gratified by a good match, by all the pomps of life, or by unlimited allowances of spending money. But my portion is to be loved and cherished and fondled like an infant. I like it very much. Some part of me lingers in eternal babyhood. In the glass I frequently see a juvenile face with dimples around the mouth, that disowns its thirty years.
“You think,” said Julian, after kissing me in a way which would scandalize some of the girls who made the best matches, “that we can’t raise the money.”
Such a thought would have been justified by the fact that we seldom could raise the money.
“But we can. And what’s the use of waiting around till we are old? I’m in my thirties. And if I ever do anything now’s the time to do it. A man can’t make a success of painting here in the west.”
I looked all around Julian’s studio. He had done many portraits, and hated them. They made our living. But he believed he was wasting time.
I always loved to be in the studio, and sometimes sat there a whole afternoon, with bits of sewing, behind a screen. A great many people took the elevator to explore Julian’s work place. He had reputation in his native city. And when they stumbled around the screen on me, they might have taken me for a model. But most of the explorers were country people, piloted by their town friends to see the sights. I only looked odd to them. I know I looked odd, because Julian had me dress in loose gowns and broad hats. Cheese cloth is only four cents a yard and very wide, and with borders of velvet or lace it made sumptuous cool toilets. I was slim; and a dull blue gown, belted just under my arms and puffed at the shoulders, with an aureole of dull blue hat over it, made me look nice in Julian’s eyes or I never should have had the courage to face the street. When a person is slim and lithe, however, her daring clothes have not the aggressive grossness of a fat woman’s daring clothes.
Looking around the painting-room, I could not think Julian a failure. He had made it so pretty with tiles and pottery and draping stuff, and flowers painted in dull red or bronze vases, or in masses wasting their petals, and landscapes, some blurred so you had to squint your eyes to get the outlines. Looking at himself I always considered him a great success. His mouth and chin were so refined. He was muscular and alert in his carriage for a man of his profession, and his ideas were far grander than mine.
“So I’m going to sell the little farm,” said Julian.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, “that’s all the property we’ve got.”
“Why, I thought you were perfectly willing. What does it amount to, anyhow? Fifteen acres and a scrubby house and barn.”
“What will old Lena do?”
“Oh, she’ll continue her gardening. I’ve had an offer of two thousand dollars for it. One thousand down, five hundred in one year, and the balance in eighteen months. We can live a long time abroad on that. And I shall get hold of something then. We’ll never come back here.”
I did not mind that at all. The prospect was dazzling. But I saw I should have to tell him at once.
“You didn’t know your poor painter would take you to Europe, did you? Think of Rome, think of Paris, think of being domesticated in some ancient German city while I paint!”
“Oh, I think of it, Julian; but could you go without me?”
“Could I go without you?” said Julian, setting me off on the tip of his knees. “Did I ever go to any place without you? Didn’t I manage that jaunt up to Canada with you? Did I scour out to Colorado and leave you at home? Do you want me to go without you?”
“Oh, no!”
“Then what are you talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“You certainly don’t know,” said Julian severely, “if you think I would go off to Europe for even a limited time, to say nothing of an indefinite time, without you. Why, you great baby, you’d cry your eyes out! And if you got sick who would do you up in packs and give you your medicine? You can’t get along away from me.”
“I know it, Julian.”
“And where would you stay!” continued Julian with increasing indignation. “You wouldn’t want to keep up a house, and you wouldn’t want to board. And what business would you have over here by yourself, anyhow! You provoke me!”
“I believe I’m going to cry,” I said.
“I should think you would, for proposing such a thing. But don’t do it.”
“I am going to cry,” I affirmed, and put my hands up to my face, while I quivered all over. These mute fits of sobbing, relics of my babyhood which I try so hard to outgrow, seize me unreasonably. They take away every scrap of dignity. I never could get the best end of a quarrel on account of this weakness; for who could sweep out of a room with a stinging retort, when at the door she was sure to break down, lay her cheek against the frame, and sob until every fibre in her seemed melting!
The only good effect of my crying, besides the delicious languor it left over me, was that it melted Julian also. I have known it to be a very convenient solvent when he hardened himself into a male tyrant. His face was sure to relax and his motherly arms to gather me in. Some men will run from tears, and very disagreeable men they are. Julian seems to like the soaking. It is tribute to him as a man, and certifies to his grip on my individuality. He is convinced I am very fond of him, and dependent on his gracious favor, when I creep to his knees to cry.
Julian wiped my tears and comforted me upon his shoulder, his face assuming its usual superior expression.
When I got my breath and knew that I could talk becomingly between little hiccoughs, I told him the message I had from T’férgore, and he saw at once how it would prevent the European trip.
He whistled a minute, and we studied each other’s eyes.
“Well,” said Julian, “I suppose we owe everything to the old fellow, and if he is really coming we’ll have to prepare for him.”
“Perhaps we better go out to the little farm,” I suggested.
“Yes, I think we better. We’ll have to economize, to gratify all his fastidious tastes.”
“I wish he’d sent word to you, instead of to me,” I burst out. “It’s your relation this time.”
“Yes, I wish he had,” said Julian, smiling.
“Are you glad or sorry, Julian?”
“Glad, of course. But why didn’t you tell me before?”
“How could I tell you what I didn’t know myself?”
“Oh, it’s his fault, evidently,” said Julian.
I began to wonder if Julian would not be a little jealous of T’férgore. As I had never seen T’férgore myself, I did not know what his aptitude might be at putting himself forward and eclipsing the master of the house. But I was glad it was Julian’s relation this time.
We had had several of my kin living upon our hearthstone at various times, and though Julian was always kind, I think he undervalued the stock from which I sprung. He said I must have been changed in the cradle, for refinement was my natural atmosphere. I did myself feel a creeping of the flesh at brother Jack’s ways; but the dear boy had been brought up away from me, and his manners were not his fault. He had an affectionate and honorable nature, and soon quit spitting upon our Brussels rugs and hard finished floors; his English, however, was beyond all help. I loved Jack so dearly that it was a grief to me to see him falling to pieces in his clothes, and slipping up and down in shoes that were never buttoned. He frequently put his trousers on wrong side foremost, and came to me to help him hunt the pockets. With my own pin-money I bought him hats that must adorn his rosy face, but after he slouched out in them once they looked disreputable. His coat-sleeves hung over his dirty fists like a hackman’s. Whenever he passed through his room he left it as if it had been struck by a tornado. The earth adhered to Jack. Stray burrs and dumpings of gravel appeared by the chair where he sat to put on his slippers. He had no cattish horror of mud, and left the print of his foot on his napkin under the table. When Jack was partially dressed, he shouted for me, to the remotest corners, to come and button his sleeves and hand him his tie.
The more fastidious our company, the louder would Jack bite his nails, while he sprawled like a spread eagle on the sofa, until every pause in conversation became vocal with that horrible cracking. He lost everything portable which was not tied or buttoned about his person, but he was always so good-natured about the losses it seemed stingy to regret the money it cost to replace things.
As he had no inclination toward Art, and walked flat-footed over canvases whenever he came into the studio, Julian got him employment. Jack’s apprenticeship to buying and selling was to me a long period of alternate hopes and despairs. He would begin well, and in fancy I saw him a merchant prince; but eventually he fell out with everybody and thought himself abused when his employer objected to his dribbling small change along the streets, and losing keys. I did not know what to do for Jack when the despair seasons came upon me. But in the end he did very well for himself. He got tired of the city, and no cajoling of mine could keep him from thrusting some shirts into a valise, grasping a pair of heavy boots in his hand, and starting for the country, sowing handkerchiefs and unmated socks in his wake. He went to work for a middle-aged widow with considerable property, and she got the dear boy’s consent to marry him: so there he is, a landed proprietor, with a thrifty wife to button his sleeves and join knives with him in the butter. Our bric-à-brac ways trouble him no more, and what he loses in the furrow at planting time he may find again during harvest. And when he comes to see us, his loving heart is as mellow as the apples he brings.
Then there was Aunt Lizy. I suppose she was christened Eliza, but her name was always pronounced Lizy with a plaintive lingering on the i. We had her with us two years. She was a stepsister of my stepmother’s. She looked like an Indian, and had seen more trouble than any other woman with whom she ever measured experiences. Her breathing was all done in sighs, and she tweaked her nose so much it was twisted at the end, and all of a dark red color. She and I never could understand why fortune hit her so hard, and we talked about it so much that I was kept quite bilious.
Aunt Lizy felt too low to sit in the parlor unless dragged there by entreaties, and spent a great deal of her time on the back stairs with a sunbonnet drawn over her eyes. She did not want to go anywhere, and the sound of the door-bell exorcised her as if she were a ghost. She compared her lot to mine until I was ashamed of myself, wondering if I had not stood in her sun.
I think Julian secretly regarded her as a trying disease that we had in the house, and that must be doctored and endured. She was so much in awe of him that I suffered anguish with her whenever he tried to show a man’s bluff kindness to her.
Aunt Lizy finally died, and her face looked young and cheerful in the coffin. We scraped some money together and bought a lot in the cemetery, and her misused body rests there under roses, myrtle, and verbenas. I take pains to keep her shade pleasant and her sod well trimmed; and when the flowers look particularly thrifty, I feel as if Aunt Lizy were learning how to laugh, at last.
Her daughter, who had been deserted by a husband as soon as she gave him a child to support, came to the funeral, and remained to make an unlimited visit and pick up such wearing apparel and other comforts as we had given Aunt Lizy.
She took entire possession of the house, being as loud-voiced and self-assertive as her mother was crushed and sensitive. But she owned me before everybody as her cousin, and took notice of Julian, though she preferred Irish society in the kitchen, and installed me as her nurse, while she enjoyed it. The baby’s usual expression was that of a young bird when it hears the parent return to the nest with a full beak. I used to sit studying the interior of the poor child’s throat, while its voice pierced my marrow. Julian made a sketch of the pimply little face, but finished it up with a black cat’s body and a high fence. It cried steadily during its stay, and had the croup and the doctor and our sleep, until Julian said he must follow the excusable example of its father and abandon it. He paid the fare of Aunt Lizy’s daughter to relations in the far west, and loaded her with whatever she fancied her mother’s. Yet she probably thought we shirked kinsmen’s duty toward her, for we have since heard the whisper that we got all that Aunt Lizy ought to have left her.
So I was glad that T’férgore and not one of my own stock now dictated a postponement of the foreign trip.
Next day we drove out to the little farm and saw old Lena. Julian declared she was worth driving the five miles to see, if it was only to say “Good-day, Lena,” and watch her shriveled smiles. She always wore a blue calico or blue woolen dress, low shoes, and scarlet stockings. Her gait was a cheerful trot, but her tongue was lamest at the English language of any tongue I have ever heard. She had a grandson named Fritz, tallow-colored and blue-eyed, and covered with contagious smiles. He never had forgotten the feeling of wooden shoes on his feet, and clumped conscientiously in leather. Lena and Fritz rented the little farm, and Fritz pushed the vegetables, fruit, and butter to market in a hand-cart. Summer or winter, the road, a turnpike, was as smooth and hard as a floor. Every inch of the fifteen acres was under cultivation. Such weeds as were allowed to grow had some medicinal property, or were good for feeding Lena’s birds. She had her cages hung along the porch, the two canaries, the red-bird, and the mockingbird trying to out-sing and out-chatter the wild things in the cherry-trees.
It was the last of May, and I snuffed delightful odors from the little farm. Nasturtium vines were already running up strings at the window. They produced little pods of which Lena made my favorite pickles. She had one blazing bed of tulips in the garden, and her early vegetables were showing green. Everything Lena tended grew like magic. Fritz had raked every stick and bit of trash into the meadow, and the heap was burning with a pale flicker in the sunlight, and raising smoke like incense from the sod. Whenever I smell that smoke I think I must tell my sensations to somebody who can put them in a poem: a homely poem about last year’s pea-vines and strawberry and currant leaves, exhaling the dew as they turned into blue vapor, and suggesting, though I cannot tell why, the old home garden life when Adam and Eve were content to lean down to the sweet ground and feel the loam with their fingers, or take delight in the breath of fresh-cut grass.
The walk up to the porch was of uneven stones, each outlined by moss. Lena arose between two gaping cellar doors at the side of the house, and ambled down the walk to meet us.
“Wie befinden, Lena?” said Julian. “Suppose we put off that sale and you take us to live on your prospective estate?”
“Was Lena going to buy it?” I exclaimed.
“Of course. She’s grown so wealthy off my land that she was going to turn me away entirely.”
Lena laughed and shook her head and made gestures of good-will.
We went into the house, and Julian bargained with Lena to take us home unto our estate. There was plenty of room for our furniture. Lena had nothing but a spinning-wheel in one long slant-sided room over the wing. Julian said he should leave the spinning-wheel alone, hang his draperies and pictures there, set up his easels, and make it a painting-room. The house had all sorts of tags and after-thoughts built to the main part. Some boards in the floors arched downwards like inverted rainbows. You mounted two steps to one room and descended three to another. There were tall mantles and unexpected closets. The staircase twisted in a way I fancied T’férgore would not like. I sat down on the porch bench while Julian was giving Lena directions, and tried to picture T’férgore coming up the walk toward the house. Was he white or brown? Would he be churlish or full of the spirit of laughter? Was he bringing trouble or gladness to Julian and me?
PART II
WE PREPARE FOR HIM
“So many hours must I take my rest;
So many hours must I contemplate;
So many hours must I sport myself.”
“Ah, what a life were this! how sweet—how lovely!
Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds looking on their silly sheep
Than doth a rich embroidered canopy
To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery?”
“For trust not him that once hath broken faith.”
King Henry VI.
“Against ill chances men are ever merry;
But heaviness foreruns the good event.”
King Henry VI.
It took several weeks for us to get quite comfortably settled at the little farm. We lazily decorated our residence, or suspended labor upon it, just as we pleased. Then the delicious June days trod upon each other’s heels. It seemed as if I had scarcely risen and found the breakfast Lena always kept for me—of toast and jelly and chocolate—before the evening star trembled in the west, and I was following her and Fritz to the barnyard to take my cup of new milk with the foam on. Even Midsummer Day, the longest and loveliest day in the year, was gone while we talked about it.
At first our friends came down from the city, but as the heat increased they took longer journeys. Julian painted zealously. He said after T’férgore came he would be hindered a great deal. I lay in a hammock and watched him, sometimes wondering at my new languor. I thought a great deal about T’férgore, without talking of him to Julian. Julian licensed me to be silly to a certain extent: beyond that limit I kept my silliness to myself. It was nothing for me to twist Mr. Fergus Dering’s name into T’férgore, because I had a talent for rechristening people and objects. But how impatient Julian would have been with all my speculations about T’férgore! I could not make an image of him in my mind, yet he was always haunting me. I wondered if he would stay with us always; sometimes his ideal head, with impalpable garments below it, changing from expression to expression, laughed at me from the clouds. What an individuality he must have to seize upon me so before his coming! He was a gifted creature, according to Julian; and his silent approach was weaving me in a network of fascination that I never thought at first of resisting.
When I was roused to activity, we made haste to finish our arrangements about the house and get T’férgore’s room ready. Julian himself hung some draping stuff from the studio there. We spent money on a bath, and a curious water jug and basin, and I could not feel contented without giving the chamber a more delicate look with muslin and blue silesia. We used to stand looking around this apartment with admiration. Julian hung one of his flower pictures there, though he said T’férgore would probably do nothing but make a face at it. And I never went into the woods for a handful of wild flowers, without filling T’férgore’s vase of Dresden china, when I got back.
Then Julian said we must have a horse and vehicle, for if he knew anything about T’férgore that young gentleman would want to take the air on wheels. We had, however, very little cash to spend on such a turnout.
“We can dispense with style,” said Julian, “if a kind, serviceable rig is to be bought cheap.”
So he kept a liveryman in town on the lookout for him, and one afternoon he received a message and went to drive home our bargain.
Lena followed me to the gate to see the flourish Julian described there before alighting.
“What made you get a cart?” I inquired.
“This,” said Julian, “is a sort of a dog-cart. The rage is all for dog-carts just now, and we couldn’t have a phaeton, you know.”
“But they aren’t painted red.”
“This one is,” said Julian.
“And there is no place behind for the dogs,” I further objected.
“Oh, well, T’férgore won’t want to carry a dog,” said Julian. “It’s a bargain on two wheels!”
Whatever is mine acquires peculiar merits in my eyes. A halo of possession arches it, making it a little better than the same thing owned by anybody else. I accepted the red cart and followed Julian into the stable-yard, where, after Fritz helped him unhitch, he showed me the points of the horse.
“Women always notice the ornamental part of a turnout first,” said Julian. “Before you looked at the cart you ought to have taken in Leander.”
“Is his name Leander?” I inquired.
“So I have been informed,” replied Julian.
“What makes him look as if he were crying?”
“His eyes need sponging,” said Julian. “This warm weather is severe on a horse’s eyes.”
“I hope he has not parted with any near and dear friend.” “He looks as if he could hardly stand up under some affliction.”
“Horses are dear now,” observed Julian with severity, “and you can’t expect to get a thoroughbred for forty dollars. The liveryman said he shipped a car-load to Louisville last week, some of them so weak they had to lean against the sides of the car. This one is sound, and only needs a little good care to bring him out.”
“Yes, his bones all look nice,” I assented. My heart began to warm toward Leander.
“It’s a fine thing to own a noble animal like a horse, isn’t it, Julian?—and to see him grazing around one’s homestead.”
Julian said he believed he would take Leander into the yard and let him clip off some of the grass, before stabling him.
Fritz put the red cart under a shed, and helped Lena milk, while we walked enamored after our purchase from one part of the lawn to another.
“What makes his hams look so sad, Julian?” I inquired with concern.
“Flanks, you mean,” said Julian.
“Yes. But aren’t horses usually cushiony there?”
“Pigs and prize cattle are,” said Julian contemptuously.
“But his hind legs run up so tall that when he lifts one he seems to be coming in two, like Baron Munchausen’s horse when it got caught in the city gates.”
“Sorry you don’t like him,” observed Julian, scratching a match on his heel and lighting a cigar.
“I do like him, Julian. It would be strange if I didn’t like our own horse! The way he is standing now doesn’t show his ribs so. Couldn’t we induce him to keep that position generally?”
But Leander now drew all his feet nearer to a focus, and frightened me by a convulsion.
“He’s just going to lie down,” explained Julian. “He wants to roll in the grass. They say a horse that rolls clear over is worth fifty dollars, anyhow. Watch him, now.”
We watched him in breathless suspense, Julian holding the lighted cigar away from his lips. Leander, after several half revolutions, brandished his heels triumphantly in the air and rolled clear over.
Julian and I shook hands.
“Gained ten dollars in value since I brought him home,” said Julian.
Whatever doubts I had harbored about an artist’s knowledge of horses certainly vanished. And Leander, after standing up to shake himself, lay down to try it again. But this time he brandished ineffectual heels and contented himself with only a half turn.
“Do you suppose he has gone off any in his value, Julian?” I inquired anxiously.
“Not at all,” said Julian, throwing out clouds of smoke. “You mustn’t expect too much of a horse on a couple of mouthfuls of grass.”
We drove Leander a great deal during the July weather. The cart had very easy springs, and I liked billowing along on them, though the motion was a little jerky. Leander was a kind creature. He never kicked, though he sometimes got his legs tangled in his tackling, fighting flies; and notwithstanding his countenance continued watery, he took a widow-like interest in us. I fed him lumps of sugar and bunches of very sweet grass, which he swallowed in a resigned way. Julian, with sleeves rolled up, zealously mixed chopped feed for him, and Leander smeared this from sunken temple to sunken jaw, so that often when I entered the stable I thought he was undergoing a poulticing.
Leander objected to railway trains, so we knew he had spirit.
“There’s considerable go in him,” said Julian as we trotted between fence-rows where elderberries were spreading and ripening. “Wait till I get him fat once! You’ll be astonished to see how he comes out.”
“Do you think his eyes will quit weeping as his condition improves, Julian?” I inquired.
“Naturally. We can get him glasses if they don’t,” said Julian. “What an absurd baby you are in your demands! Beauty and muscle never go together in a horse. Some of the best goers on the turf are a mere mass of wires when you look at them from an æsthetic standpoint.”
It was really enough to have any kind of power, except our own, trundling us along the pleasant roads. I grew to feel no solicitude whatever about Leander’s ribs while he stood cooling them in the creek, and Julian and I in the high cart watched the sunlight come down the woods’ aisles, and long festoons of grapevine dipping and reflecting their leaves in water. When we met anybody I tried complacently to imagine we were an English farm-couple very well-to-do and what they call smart in our turnout; or that we were Italian peasants, basking in the sun as we jogged royally to some festa. But Julian became very critical on the proportions of horses and vehicles to each other. He ridiculed a combination of tall horse and low phaeton, the top of which barely reached up to the horse’s back; or of pony and double-seated carriage, looking like a tug drawing a steamer. In short, we were satisfied with our own goods and chattels: and when Julian graciously lent Lena the turnout to go to town in, and she filled the cart bed with ripe tomatoes and the seat with her blue person and Fritz, its perfect adaptation to her uses convinced me what a versatile and valuable bargain ours was.
The time came for me to meet and bring home Jennie Purdy from the Avenue station. She had been one of my special chums at school. I always loved women; there seems to me something unwholesome and unsound in the woman who proclaims that she hates and distrusts all of her own sex. At school I was Jennie Purdy’s easily-moulded slave: she dictated what I should wear and how I should conduct myself. I denied myself many a game of croquet, when that pastime was fresh, to sit and fan her while she slept off some slight indisposition. And in return she petted and instructed me in all the niceties of etiquette. She was half a dozen years my senior, and at that time enjoying a small fortune of her own; but this was afterward lost, and she had many a struggle before deciding upon and mastering the profession of medicine.
Jennie Purdy was one of the most fastidious creatures alive, an epicure, and unsparing of herself as a student. Years did not age, but rather ground her down to finer delicacy. I felt considerable pride in her, and counted on having her at hand when T’férgore came. She did not lack the eccentricities which always cluster around any woman living outside of intimate family life. She professed to dislike men; but I, knowing her warm heart, knew also her self-deception. All isolated women fall into one of two errors about the opposite sex: they count mankind a vast monster, to be avoided and suspected, or a vast angel to be worshiped in secrecy and silence; whereas, men are only good, comfortable souls, very much like ourselves, but made a little stouter so they can hold us and spread out their shoulders for irrigation when we want to cry.
Though Jennie Purdy held dark views of mankind, I suspected that under the surface she was one of the worshiping ones. Still, I was not prepared to have her tell me, an hour after our arrival at home, that she was on the point of marriage.
We sat down in T’férgore’s room, where I had been showing her the appointments, and I pulled a hassock to her side, eager for particulars. She should be married from the little farm instead of a boarding-house, if she could be content with such a wedding as we could give. But I upbraided her for keeping her secret from me, almost as seriously as she once upbraided me for daring to marry at all.
“You won’t want me to be married here,” said Jennie, with a snap. “You’ll have too many prejudices.”
“But I always thought you were the person with prejudices, dear,” I remonstrated, “and that Julian and I were too unconventional for you.”
“I am going to marry a divorced man,” disclosed Jennie.
I caught my breath and said “Oh!”
“There—I knew it!” observed Jennie.
“I didn’t say anything but ‘Oh.’ What made him get divorced?”
“You don’t know him,” said Jennie, “and so you can’t judge of the circumstances.”
“But you might try me,” I pleaded. “Has he been divorced a long time?”
“About a month,” owned my old, fastidious chum, turning into another woman before my very eyes. She never was pretty, but a certain noble pride had given her a carriage I enthusiastically admired. Now she sat before me a dupe of her own absurd fancies, half defiant and half apologetic. The woman who had taught me that only most serious incompatibility should separate a married pair was going to wed a man who had been divorced one month!
“His wife was never a fit companion for him.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“An ignorant, miserable creature, who entrapped him when he was a boy and has kept him down in the world ever since.”
“It’s always the wife’s fault,” I said.
“People were continually asking him how he came to marry such a woman.”
“And he let the question pass without knocking down the questioner?”
“There never was anything fit to eat in the house, and his clothes were never fit to wear.”
“Poor dear!” I observed. “Had his income anything to do with it?”
“She kept him from getting on,” expostulated my old chum.
“And he brought all his grievances to you for redress?”
“I expected to meet nothing but prejudiced opposition in you,” said Jennie. “But of course I was bound to tell you. You cannot say anything to alter my determination.”
My head whirled with this spectacle of a sane woman suddenly gone mad over a worthless man. Shakespeare never touched the weakness of womankind so closely as when he made Titania’s infatuation. The greater the ass, the more Titania adores him.
“I hate such an irregular marriage!” I said, breathing quickly.
“Yes, I know you do,” retorted Jennie. “You’re the slave of society. You wouldn’t have the courage to go against one of society’s whims.”
“I don’t want that kind of courage which tramples on decent marriage customs. And you were the first to teach me the value of an irreproachable standing before the world.”
“It’s easy for women like you, who know nothing of the miseries of an unequal marriage, to take a high moral stand,” said my old chum, turning whiter always as our talk sunk lower. I was afraid Julian would hear us and come down from the painting-room overhead. He never liked Jennie as heartily as I thought it his duty to like her. And he laughed at the little barnacles of whims which an isolated life fastened on her.
All the time I was talking to her the fancied image of T’férgore was before my eyes.
“How much more faithful will this man be to you,” I went on, “than he was to the woman he left one month ago? He has somehow cast a glamour over you. I know just how he looks—a great, whimpering, Falstaffian baby of a thing, coarse to his last fibre!”
“Go on,” said Jennie.
“If he were not coarse would he ever allow a woman standing related to him as wife to be slurred to his face? Would he be so ready to attach his mildewed life to yours without a blemish?”
“I can’t hear you talk so,” said Jennie. “You’d better let me go away. I cannot stay in the house.”
“You cannot go away,” I declared fiercely. “I understand now why parents have locked their daughters up.”
“You are interfering with what does not concern you at all,” said Jennie, trembling, “and not in the least altering my determination. You cannot choose my fate for me. I have lived a lonely life year after year. Nobody considered me. Why am I to stand on nice points considering everybody? He thinks I can make him happy. I believe he will treat me kindly.”
“You have every warrant for believing that,” I exclaimed, struggling to calm myself in the fear that I was going to make a scene.
“I have,” said Jennie, with a kind of pride strange in her; “for he provided for the family to the full extent of his means, before separating from them.”
“So he had children? And deserted them?”
“Five,” replied Jennie in embarrassment.
“Five children! And he provided for them by taking their father from them when they needed a father most!”
“They are all boys but the youngest,” said Jennie.
I knew now that I was going to make a scene, struggle against it as I might.
“And is the smallest a little child yet?”
“Not an exceedingly little child,” said Jennie, picking at her dress and not seeming to see the fingers at which she stared. “Two years old, I believe.”
“Don’t you understand about family life? Don’t you see what a callous wretch is the man who can abandon his own flesh and blood? How will you ever close your eyes in sleep again if you help him in wronging that little child—that little child!”
I stood up from my seat and groped toward her. The moment of my own weakness and terror was coming.
Jennie took hold of me as she used to do at school.
“I have spoken out to you,” I said, hanging to her neck; “and now you must take care of me.”
She saw that T’férgore was approaching the house; and her face filled with tender solicitude is the last thing I can recall as I fainted.
PART III
THE AMBROSIAL YOUTH
“His flesh is angel’s flesh, all alive.”
“Honor to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws of the universe, the soul worships truth and love, honor and courtesy flow into all deeds.”
Emerson.
September weather was over the world before I felt able to be carried out-of-doors. I had been very ill, but at my worst I remember having Jennie on my mind, and hanging to her hand while I pleaded over and over the cause of the little child.
Now, though weak, I had reached a state of rapturous convalescence, and reached it quite suddenly. Julian lifted me out to the shaded lawn, where Jennie had wadded a rocking-chair with pillows. The leaves were turning, but none had fallen. Lena’s birds hanging in a row along the eaves of the porch kept it up at a great rate, the canary seeming to recognize me and give me the name he had long since invented for me: turning his head and calling through the bars, “Maë, Maë!”
Lena and Fritz came around the corner of the house and grinned. Lena had saved the biggest pear on the dwarf tree for me, and Fritz brought a nosegay of marigolds, strong enough to stifle many invalids. “It’s quite like a Harvest Home,” said Julian. “We ought to strap a corn-shock on Leander’s back and lead him in the procession.”
Then Jennie went into the house to bring out T’férgore. Jennie was not only my doctor, but she had turned up her sleeves and showed Lena how to cook the dishes I could eat. She had discharged two nurses, one after the other, and relied on herself and Lena’s help, and Julian’s solicitude.
“You never know what a woman is until you try her in a family crisis,” said Julian, sitting down near me. “I wasn’t enamored of your Dr. Purdy before, but I’ll say this of her now: she has the coolest head, the readiest hand, and the largest fund of domestic skill of any woman I ever saw.”
“I always told you that,” said I in a superior tone.
“She’s stayed by us to the neglect of her city practice, I’m afraid,” said Julian.
“She is just getting into practice,” I assured him, “and before coming out here announced her intention of leaving town for a change. It has been a severe change, though.”
“But a man has been here importuning her about something.”
I took hold of the arms of my chair. “What kind of a man, Julian?”
“Oh, an ordinary person. Nothing striking about him. I thought he looked very sulky the last time he went away.”
“Jennie was short with him, was she?”
“She saw him only a few minutes each time, after the first, and I thought she was rather peremptory. There’s Doctor Theophilus again, and he’s footed it from the Avenue station. The Reverend never was so devoted to us as he has been since T’férgore’s arrival,” said Julian, smiling drolly.
I had a nervous dread of Julian’s uncle; he was the most respectable man who ever had the right to add Doctor of Divinity to his name. Large, broad, and ponderous, his mere presence seemed to reprehend the playful antics of life. I was afraid of his long upper lip, which shut as close as a snuff-box lid. His white neckties awed me, and the solidity of his choice words reproached me. Behind his back, and in spite of Julian’s laughing remonstrance, I had rechristened Uncle Doctor Theophilus, whose surname was Marvin, The Old Daguerreotype. It is true he had not his case on, though the snap with which it formerly shut had probably passed into his lips. I could even fancy that when you got a side-light on him he retained the glare of the old daguerreotype, and effaced himself in a sheet of glitter. His expression seemed unalterably made up; and though he looked more ancient than other men of his age, I knew he thought himself well taken, and all his tints neat without being gaudy. He oppressed me so that I frequently wanted to rub him out. I always trod on a stone and turned my foot, or ran against a chair, when the Old Daguerreotype was by. Or he threw me into a nervous trance, and I sat with parted lips, glaring eyes, and aching neck, fancying that my own daguerreotype was being taken. Aunt Doctor Theophilus used to be a worthy companion picture to him, but death years ago effaced her lineaments and snapped her case shut, to be opened no more.
I felt that I could hardly stand the Old Daguerreotype just at this time, but said to Julian it was kind of him, taken in such a precise attitude as he was, to dust himself walking out from the Avenue, on our account.
“Oh, it isn’t the first time he has done it,” said Julian. “Something about our rural domicile has seized upon Uncle Doctor. He didn’t go out of town this year, and he’s taking whiffs of the country between sermons.”
“Between poses,” I suggested softly. “I hope Jennie isn’t bothered by his coming. She takes strong antipathies, and he does make one’s backbone ache.”
“Oh, she stands it,” said Julian laughing, “affably, as if she were the artist who had taken him.”
I turned around towards Jennie as Julian went to the gate to meet his uncle. She was bringing T’férgore across the porch and smoothing down the angel robes. She herself looked like a Madonna picture, pale and somewhat saddened, but most womanly, most touching.
“Jennie,” I said, as she put T’férgore on my lap, standing before me to do so, “you have taken care of me as only a woman can, and pulled me through to paradise.”
“Well,” she replied quickly, “you took care of me first. I think I must have been out of my senses. But having this little monster to handle made things appear very different.”
T’férgore blinked lazily, and struck out with ineffectual fists. The cherub-wings were perhaps hidden in folds of mull, but gazing on this wonderful creature’s allurements, I was seized with a Saturn-like desire to bite and devour every flower-tinted atom. I forgot that the Old Daguerreotype was at the gate, and worried my prey, breaking into a rhapsody of baby Romany.
In the midst of my Bess’ums and S’eetums, and Old Dol’ums, Uncle Doctor appeared before me, and bent himself at T’férgore’s shrine, with an expression nearly as idiotic as my own. He clucked, whistled, and snapped his fingers, and for one moment I thought he was going to dance. But his legs were taken too stiffly for that, and he only limbered his entire length and cracked the glass in a way which damaged him forever as my Old Daguerreotype.
Then he straightened himself up apologetically and shook hands with Jennie, saying in his most ministerial tones, “And how are you to-day, Dr. Jane?”
I must say that everything Uncle Doctor did on this occasion astonished me. It was the first time I had been permitted to see a visitor, and they should have prepared me for the unusual side-lights I should now catch upon the Old Daguerreotype. He held professional women in disdain, and I had heard him utter homilies against wives who tacked all their maiden or acquired names before their husband’s cognomen. Yet here he was parading Dr. Jane’s title, and almost capering before her in his exuberant desire to win favor.
They sat down around me, and I noticed how unembarrassed Jennie was by the Daguerreotype’s white tie and the clip of his lips and fearful respectability.
“A little daughter in the house,” said Uncle Doctor Theophilus, indicating with pomp the human atom in my lap, “is indeed a well-spring of pleasure.”
“We counted on her brother Trotwood Copperfield, instead of his sister Betsey Trotwood,” said Julian.
“It was a mere fancy,” I insisted, “and girls are just as good as boys any day.”
“Better,” granted Julian.
“I’m quite as glad that T’férgore is a girl.”
“But it disarranges the name,” said Julian. “His name was Fergus Dering, but I think we shall have to call her Ferguson.”
“Not at all,” I dissented indignantly.
“T’férgore!” mused Uncle Doctor Theophilus. “What kind of un-Christian appellation have you stumbled upon there?”
“The name being Fergus,” explained Julian, “we call her—as Lena would put it—T’férgore in short.”
We sat in silences of several minutes at a time, hearing an apple drop in the orchard, the call of the katydids, or the restless stepping of Leander in his stable. Already the smoky light of autumn was mellowing distances.
“How remote this little spot appears to be from the centres of traffic,” said Uncle Doctor Theophilus, with a pulpit gesture.
“It’s a good place for fever patients,” said Dr. Jane in a tone of authority. “There’s health in the air of the house.”
“Yes, I should apprehend as much,” asserted Uncle Doctor Theophilus.
“You mean the intellectual atmosphere, of course,” said Julian, as a whiff of the sauerkraut Lena did love came around the house. “Oh yes, we are remote, but we have had great company here. Emerson has uttered wisdom from your chair, Uncle Doctor, and near him sat Hawthorne, and against that tree leaned Thoreau. We have even had what some fantastic literary fellow calls the tone poets all around us, and no end of painters and sketchers.”
“It’s nothing but a play of ours,” I explained. “Whenever I wished we had such people for visitors, Julian piled chairs full of their books, or their music, or stood up copies of their pictures. Then we talked to them, and Julian read from them in reply, or I ran over the musical score, or he hung a picture where it could speak for itself. In that way he thinks we enjoyed just as close communion with them as their nearest friends ever had; because their elusive souls would speak to us more directly and coherently than if they were sitting opposite us in the flesh.”
The Old Daguerreotype shook his head indulgently over such pastime. On deliberation, however, he said the next time we had such a gathering he would like to join it.
After supper, and while Uncle Doctor Theophilus and Julian were trailing their feet through the grass, carrying their hands behind them, and all but chewing the bovine cud in their ruminative gazing on the bee-hives, the orchard, the stable, and meadow, Jennie put on her hat and gloves to drive our relative back to the Avenue station. I knew the drive would be good for her.
“You can come home the long way, through the creek—the water is always low—after you have left him at his train,” I hinted.
“I guess I shall go the long way,” said Jennie. “It will be pleasanter having someone to talk with.”
T’férgore and I exchanged a long stare; that is, I exchanged a long stare with T’férgore for a series of self-absorbed blinks.
“I am so glad,” I then remarked to Jennie, “that you aren’t put out by the old Dag—Doctor; when I say old, I mean, of course, reverend; for he isn’t really elderly, you know.”
“He doesn’t put me out a bit,” answered Jennie. “He is very quieting to me. I believe he is a sound man.”
“There is no man sounder,” I declared. “And he was just as good as he could be to his wife. I think she actually died because there was nothing more she could ask of life. I never saw such a self-satisfied expression as she had—outside of a miniature. His position is excellent and influential, too. A woman can’t help looking at that sort of thing when she is once married.”
Jennie turned about to face me, smiling. “Now, don’t, my dear, don’t,” she objected. “Let us not give our talk any such bias.”
“Oh, I won’t,” I exclaimed apprehensively. “I’m not throwing anybody at you at all. I was just going to say that though he is such an excellent man, and near to Julian and all that, he ossifies the working of my joints: I feel in such awe of him.”
“I don’t,” said Jennie.
“Yes; I’ve noticed that.”
“I think his society is wholesome for me.”
“Yes; it seems to be mutual,” I could not help suggesting. “Either you or T’férgore is limbering him up until I do believe in the course of time his presence will become wholesome for me.”
Leander, drawing Jennie and the Old Daguerreotype in our red cart, went briskly down the road, and Julian and T’férgore and I sat watching them.
“They will loiter through the woods,” mused I, “and watch the festoons of grapevine, and get a sniff of sycamore leaves and pennyroyal mixed with loam.”
“Yes,” said Julian. “Next week I shall take you and Ferguson off through the woodsiest drive of them all.”
“Julian,” I remonstrated, “her name isn’t and it never will be Ferguson.”
“Oh, well,” said Julian, “the bill is laid on the table then. Another motion will be in order.”
“And they’ll see bunches of goldenrod in a thicket,” I continued, returning to Leander’s load, “and the Old Daguerreotype will jump out to get it for her, footing it lightsomely among the burrs.”
“You make quite a beau of our uncle,” said Julian, turning his cigar over.
“Well, I should think anybody could see that’s what he wants to be considered.”
“He has my consent,” said Julian.
“Mine, too,” said I, taking high grounds; “but I’m not so sure about Jennie. She’s a woman who has been hard to suit. Nothing else stood in the way of her marrying long ago.”
I looked keenly at Julian, but he evidently knew naught about the one month divorced man with a wife and five children—the youngest two years old. It was the only secret I had ever kept from him, and it burned guiltily at the roots of my tongue. But the woman who reveals to her lord and master some unlovely weakness of her own sex helps him to a judgment-seat too dangerously lofty.
“She’s what you may really call superior,” admitted Julian, “but far enough into the woods to be afraid of the crooked stick. And Uncle Theoph. isn’t so bad.”
“No,” I granted generously: “he doesn’t make me half as miserable as he used to. And I know he won’t mind getting bugs down his neck and stumbling over old logs for yellow and chocolate colored pawpaw leaves and branches of fire-red maple, if Jennie wants him to.”
“I wonder,” Julian ruminated, “if Aunt Marvin ever made him dance around when they were young together and she had a ribbon headdress on her hair, and he choked himself with a stock.”
“No,” said I, “she was his first wife.”
Julian reached over, at the risk of waking T’férgore, and laid his arm across my shoulder.
“Besides, she never cried,” I added. “And a good husband is just like a growing crop: he needs to be rained on.”
Julian uttered a little grunt of contempt, but it was the kind of contempt which magnified the importance of his own sex and therefore did no real harm to ours.
“Uncle Doctor Theophilus is lonely,” said Julian, “having once lived the life of a family man.”
“And Jennie is lonely, too,” I admitted, “having never lived the life of a family woman. Think how hard it is to stand outside of—say the little farm—and see T’férgore come home, and our comfort and satisfaction.”
“Man: his wife: his child:” ruminated Julian. “The family; the little spot of our own ground. That’s the primitive and true life.”
We heard the creek frogs lifting up their voices.
“Next summer when T’férgore is big enough to be carried across the field,” said I, “I will make a Kate Greenaway dress with a yoke, and flare a hat of muslin for her, or better still, pucker her face into a frilly cap, and set her down in the midst of the clover where there aren’t any bees.”
“And put a crook in her hand,” said Julian. “For now we are her sheep. We can’t stray across blue water until the shepherdess permits.”