II
IT was only a few weeks after their betrothal that Norton sailed for Australia on that long journey from which he did not return for three years. The trip was to make his fortune, and fortune meant a home and Milly for his own; so neither rebelled, and, indeed, it was only intended at first that he should stay away a year. In the first ardor of romance parting seemed but a little thing—two hearts like theirs could beat as one with a continent between them. And love shows sweetly in different lights; the purple shadows of impending separation gave it a deeper, richer glow.
She took a little journey in from the country to see him off, and they talked of this beforehand as of something quite festive, although there proved to be a bewildering hurry and bustle about it that mixed everything up in a whirl. Mrs. Preston went with her, and there was a disjointed attempt at conversation on the deck of the steamer with some of Norton’s friends who had also come to see him off, and the examination with them, amid laughter and jokes, of Norton’s tiny stateroom, and the few moments there when, lingering behind, the two kissed each other good-by, and, the veil of pretense ruthlessly torn aside, Milly felt a sudden terrible spasm of heartbreak.
“I cannot let you go—I cannot!” she sobbed, and her lover had to loosen her arms from around his neck and dry her eyes with his handkerchief, whispering soothing words, and then she must be led out into the glaring sunlight and turn her face away from the group of friends, while her hand still lay in Norton’s. And then the bell rang—the signal for parting—and then—do we not know it all? The last look from the pier at the beloved face, and then the slow watching, watching until the vessel is out of sight and the vision is filled with green overlapping waves, and afterwards the walk back again along the wharf, among bales and vans of plunging horses, out into the world of dusty streets and houses, and the midsummer sights and smells, and the busy, empty life that is left.
Milly was grateful to Mrs. Preston for not talking. She blindly let herself be piloted anywhere to find that she was at last ensconced in a hurrying train proceeding homeward through a green landscape, with freshly cooler air blowing in through the open window to soothe her aching head. When they reached the village in the dusk it was Mrs. Preston who walked home with her up the long hill (and, oh, the going home when the one we love most has just left it) and answered all the questions that were showered upon both, and afterward went upstairs to Milly’s room and saw that the girl put on a loose gown to rest in, and made her drink the cup of tea she had brought up. She gave Milly a little kiss, “like a peck,” thought Milly, suddenly alive to the remembrance of those other kisses, and after the elder woman had left, she slipped from the bed where she had even submitted to have her feet covered, and went over to the window and knelt down by it with her head on the sill almost in the branches of the maple tree through which she could see the moon rising in golden quiet. He was looking at the same moon now, and the Lord was watching between them. She pressed the ring to her lips, she pressed it to her bosom—the ring that made her his—joy flooded back upon her with the thought. She had forgotten that she could speak to him still, that she could write.
Oh, quick, quick, lose not a moment; it was treachery to have a thought in her soul and he not know it! Down on her knees in the moonlight she wrote, and wrote, and wrote, all that she never could have said—her very heart.
She woke to joy the next morning, still in this consciousness of new-found power, and with a high ideal of the life before her. She was to grow and grow that she might be worthy of him—that she might help him grow to be worthy of the highest. Every minute of the day she could live for him, just as in every minute of the day he was living for her. She went about her daily tasks with renewed energy, because he was thinking of her while she performed them. Even during little Letty Stevens’s tedious music lesson she smiled, thinking how she would write him that the child’s halting five-finger exercise counted itself out to her in the words, “How I love you, how I love you, how I love you, how I love you, dear!”
She had a little note from him by the pilot boat, written a few hours after they had parted; how little it seemed after all she had thought and felt in this twenty-four hours! But it made the color rise in her soft cheeks, and she cried over it and wore it next her bosom by day and laid it under her pillow by night. For many long weeks it was the only message from him that she had to feed on. The mail does not come quickly from Australia. She had sent off pages and pages to him in the two or three months before his first letter came, and it was much longer before she had an answer to hers. How she studied those letters—simple, almost boyish effusions—full of wondering pride in those that she wrote to him.
“Why, you are a real poetess, Milly; I don’t see how you manage to think of such things. I wish I had been thinking of you at the time you speak of, but I’m afraid that must have been when I was staying at Jackson’s, and he and Blessington and I played cards every evening; awfully poor luck I had, too. I suppose I must have been thinking of you, after all, and that’s what made me play so badly, don’t you believe it? No, I don’t do much reading out here; you’ll have to do the reading for both of us, and you can tell it all to me when I get home. When I get home. Oh, Milly! I can’t write about it as you do, but I’m working for my sweet, sweet girl with all the strength I’ve got.”
The girl bloomed as she never had before with this quickening of her soul. The days were so full of duties; her music scholars, the household matters, in which she helped her widowed aunt, the two young cousins to be looked after, her reading, and, when she could attend them, the weekday afternoon prayers at the little church where she sometimes, with the sexton, represented all Mr. Preston’s congregation. Milly’s people were of the Congregational faith, but Norton and she had gone to St. John’s together. People found fault with Mr. Preston—a rather dull man with impassive wooden features—because he had no variety of expression; he read service and sermon in a low monotonous voice which, however, grew to have a soothing charm for Milly. Why need anyone express anything? It was all in herself—other people’s expression only jarred. Those few moments in the half light of the empty church gave a sense of peace that was an actual physical rest, undisturbed by the personality of others. She was even guilty of slipping from the church afterwards to avoid Mr. Preston’s perfunctory handshake.
Then, after each quickly-passing day, came the long evening when in her little white room she wrote to him—wrote to Norton, her own, own lover. Ah, what fire there can be in the veins of a little Puritan girl!
So the swift winter passed and the spring came around again, and he had not returned.
Then came hours when the sense of separation began to press more heavily upon her, when the soft breeze wearied her and the common roadside flowers brought tears to her eyes—especially when the Australian mail was long delayed. It was in a mood of this kind that she went one day to see Mrs. Preston, whose sharp features relaxed at the sight of her. Mrs. Preston was sitting in the front parlor by the window, with her sleeves rolled up a little, and a gingham apron tied around her waist, beating up eggs in a large bowl.
“Come in,” she called cheerfully to Milly. “I just saw Mrs. Furniss go past; she looked as if she thought I was committing one of the seven deadly sins when she discovered that I was beating my eggs in here. The aborigines consider a parlor a sacred thing, you know. It’s the pleasantest place in the whole house this morning, and this lilac bush is budding. It’s spring again, for certain.”
“Yes,” said Milly listlessly.
“I’m making custard for dessert to-morrow; the bishop’s coming. He always says, ‘Mrs. Preston, it’s such a relief to reach your house and get sponge cake and syllabub, instead of relays of pie!’ You know the poor, dear man has the dyspepsia terribly, and you New England people have no mercy on him. I’m glad he’s coming to-morrow, it gives me something more to do; one must work in the spring, or die. If this weather keeps on I’ll get at the garret. What is the matter with you this morning, Milly?”
“I’m tired,” said Milly with a quiver of her lip.
“Work.”
“I have worked! I’m busy all the time, but it doesn’t do any good. It’s hard to have Norton away for so long. I can’t help feeling—” she stopped a moment and looked very hard out of the window. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to get—melancholy about it.” She was trying to smile, but a bright tear fell in her lap.
“I don’t think you’re very unhappy,” said Mrs. Preston. She put the bowl of eggs down on the table and folded her thin arms. “It’s the luxury of grief that you’re enjoying—part of the romance. Be melancholy—as you call it—while you can.”
“You are always so cheerful,” said Milly rather resentfully.
“I, my dear! I don’t dare to be anything else. I have to be cheerful, or—” She turned a darkening face to the budding lilacs. “I don’t dare to think long enough to be depressed, to even—remember. There’s an awful abyss down which I slip when I get melancholy; it’s the bottomless pit. I know it’s there all the time, but I have to pretend to myself that I’m not near it, or I get dragged under. I avoid it like the plague!” A momentary spasm contracted her face; she added in a lower tone, “Did you know that I had four children once? They died within a year.”
“Oh, you poor thing!” cried Milly. She reached forward and tried to take one of the fast-locked hands of the woman before her. “Oh, how terrible, how terrible! How did you live?”
“I didn’t; all the best part of me went too, this thing you see here—” she stopped, and the same shiver as before went over her.
“But you have your husband,” said Milly, seeking about for comfort. A vision of Mr. Preston, stiff, dull, formal, with his wooden features, fronted her confusingly.
“Yes, that’s the worst of it—if I only had not William!”
“Oh, Mrs. Preston!” cried Milly.
“I suppose it is surprising. After having bored each other for so many years, we really ought to be very much attached, don’t you think? Perhaps even you can see how much comfort I get from William. If I were an article of the Rubric, instead of a woman—but of course, that is different.”
“But you must have loved him when you were married,” cried Milly, shocked.
“Did I, dear? I loved something that went by his name, it wasn’t William. There, don’t let us talk of it; I find no fault. He should have been a celibate priest; I agree with him there. He has never really cared for me, or for—the children.” The spasm passed over her face again. “Oh, if I did not have him, if I were not tied to this narrow round which chokes every higher instinct of me, if I could go off somewhere by myself, to California or Egypt, or Cathay—travel, travel, travel, keep going on and on, seeing something new every hour, breathing freer every day, getting out into the great life of the world!” She clenched her hands. “I have given my life, my aspirations, the whole strength of my being, to William, and now I have nothing left—but William.”
“You have four children in heaven,” said Milly softly.
The elder woman broke down into a fit of weeping that seemed to rend her. Milly sat by, appalled at this glimpse of the inner life of two respectable married people. Later, as she was going home, she met Mr. Preston, his tall, thin figure in its clerical garb silhouetted against the bright green of the spring foliage. His pale eyes gazed solemnly at her as he drew near across the fields; she felt that he might be murmuring Credos, or even Aves, quite oblivious of her presence. But he reached the bars in time to let them down for her, and offer her the handshake from which she had been wont to flee, and then stood a moment as if he would have spoken, while she gazed at him furtively. Could any woman put her arms around that stiff neck or kiss those thin, set lips? Oh, poor Mrs. Preston! But he was really speaking.
“I saw you in the distance and I stopped to pick these for you,” he said in his slow, even tone. It was a little bunch of violets that he held out to her.
“Oh, Mr. Preston, thank you!” said Milly in wonder.
“It is a pleasure to me that you attend our services. If—” he paused, “if my daughter had lived she would have been your age—like you, in her springtime.”
He gazed past her solemnly and then taking off his hat to her, went on his way, leaving Milly overpowered with bewilderment.
What did it all mean? Who was right, and who was wrong? How did people drift apart after they were married? A new idea of the complexity of life came to her, the strange way in which human beings acted on each other, drawn, as by magnets, with the differing forces. Marriage to her had always presented a picture of growth in happiness, growth in goodness, a path upward together for lover and beloved. She tried now and for the first time vainly to recall if any in her limited circle of acquaintance seemed to fulfill these conditions. Sordidness, narrowness, selfishness, a jealous love of one’s children, these stood revealed instead to the casual eye.
She wrote a long page in her journal letter that night. His answer came back at last. It said: “Don’t bother your head, dear, about these things. You will always be the dearest girl in the world to me, and the purest and the best; and as for me, I never forget that I’m working for you, and if that won’t keep me straight, nothing will. What do you care about those old fossils of Prestons, anyhow? You are you, and I am I, and that’s all I care for, sweetheart.”
The wealth of meaning with which Milly freighted these honest lines it would take pages to chronicle; perhaps it was partly on account of some words of Mrs. Preston’s which haunted her: “I loved something that went by his name—it wasn’t William.”
The clergyman’s family remained in her mind an unsolved problem; it was nearly a month before she went to the rectory again, where she found Mrs. Preston “up to her ears,” as she expressed it, endeavoring to settle the affairs of a poor family who were preparing for emigration to the West. Her snapping black eyes and vivacious mien showed thorough enjoyment of the task, to say nothing of her dominant volubility. Mr. Preston, who came in from the garden bearing the first strawberry solemnly on a gilt plate for his wife’s acceptance, was unheeded until Milly directed attention to him. He had been waiting, he explained gravely, some days for this particular strawberry to ripen. Mrs. Preston said, “Oh, yes,” and thereupon ate the fruit absent-mindedly as she went on talking, with apparently no more appreciation of flavor than if it had been gutta percha, and quite ignoring the giver.
Milly could not help smiling, but she left the house more bewildered than ever. Mrs. Preston must like her life more than she thought she did, and it was impossible not to feel a little tinge of sympathy for Mr. Preston. Did people after all know what they really liked—or, indeed, what they really were? The moods of different days, of different hours, what kind of a whole did they form?
Her own life seemed to be all question in these days, to which nobody gave the answer.
Thus the second year stole on, and Norton’s home-coming appeared to grow no nearer. The photograph which he sent her startled by its unlikeness to her thought of him; those were the eyes that were to look into hers again some day, those the lips that were to kiss hers. After a while by much poring over it, the picture looked to her any way she pleased.
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder”—possibly, and possibly not always fonder of the unseen beloved, but of one’s own personality, projected into the suitable position.
But if any moment of serious doubt came, the remembrance of the betrothal in the garden quenched it. There was always that to fall back upon. Milly lived that over again, and again, and again, never without the solemn rush of feeling that had accompanied the pledge with God for their witness—“never to be forgotten, never to be denied”—the latter words Norton had himself used in a letter to her once, a letter from which she never parted.
With love came at last the teaching of death to Milly, and she went down into the shadows and cried out affrighted. All props were torn away from her, and she stood alone trembling, reaching out on the right hand and on the left. “I had not thought it meant this,” she wrote piteously. “I believe in God, and in heaven, why, then, should this desolation touch me? Words—words that I have said all my life and believed in, mean nothing to me. I believe in them now, but they mean nothing. I can’t make anything real but death, not even your love! Oh, help me, tell me that I shall not die alone, that you will go with me, tell me that you are not afraid; help me, Norton. You must know something to make it all better!”
She had gained some peace before his reply reached her—a sense of the eternal Fatherhood that pervaded the unseen world as well as the one she walked and lived and loved in now—a protection that was a rest and brought light into the sunshine once more. But he wrote,
“Milly, if you love me, don’t send me any more letters like the last. To think of such things would drive me mad. I can’t think of death. It’s as much as I can do to work for a living, and try and be worthy of you, and I’ll have to leave the rest to the good Lord, I expect. I’ll be coming home some day before you know it—drop me a line to tell me how you’d feel if you saw me walking in just after you get this.”
If there was a graver look in Milly’s eyes than had been, there was also a sweeter depth. The lines around her mouth were very gentle. She did not talk much. It was the third summer of the separation; she no longer tried to solve the problem of the Prestons, but accepted the fact that she stood a little nearer to each of them than anyone else did. People said she was a good listener, but although she seemed to give a quiet attention to them, it was the voice across the sea that she was always listening for. The letters came now so full of matters and people that she knew nothing of; the whole burden of them for her lay in the few loving sentences that began and ended the pages. Had she ever had a lover? It was so long ago, and for so short a time! Yet at last she had word that he was coming home.
It was after this news had reached her, and nearly three years from the day of the revealing of love in the garden, that the second revelation was given her. This time it was of immortality.
She was kneeling in the church during the afternoon service; the church was almost empty. She had had a singularly calm spirit all day, and as she knelt in the dim aisle, her gaze directed upward to the stained glass window in one of the arches of the ceiling, she was not praying, she was only peaceful. The window was partly open, so that a glimpse of pale blue sky slanted through it with the afternoon sunshine. And as she gazed, not consciously, her spirit went from her and mingled with that sunlight, becoming one with it, and in a rapture of buoyancy, of radiance, of exultant immortality. It had in it no acknowledged perception of God, no conviction of sin, no so-called “experience”; it was simply life eternal, utterly free from the body, the spirit divested of the hampering bonds of the flesh. The wonder of it, the joy of it—yet the wonderful and joyful familiarity with it, as of something known always, that had been only forgotten for a little while, and was now remembered; and beyond and through all something indescribable. One cannot translate the meaning of life into words that belong to mortality.
Milly bowed her head and the light closed over her and her spirit came back to her body once more. She neither wept nor trembled; like Mary of old she marveled and was silent. She thought she would write it all to Norton, but she could not; she thought to tell him when he came, but she did not. She never had the revelation again, but like the first it could never be forgotten nor denied.