Through One Administration

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

She broke off with the ghost of a bitter little laugh.

"I have heard a great deal said about fate," she went on. "Perhaps it was fate; I don't know. I don't care now—it doesn't matter. That very day papa was ill himself, and Philip Tredennis came to me—Philip Tredennis!"

"Oh!" cried Agnes, "it was very cruel!"

"Was it cruel?" said Bertha. "It was something. Perhaps it would do to call it cruel. I had been up with Janey for two or three nights. She had suffered a great deal for a little creature, and I was worn out with seeing her pain and not being able to help it. I was expecting the doctor from Washington, and when she fell asleep at last I went to the window to listen, so that I might go down and keep the dogs quiet if he came. It was one of those still, white moonlight nights—the most beautiful night. After a while I fancied I heard the far-away hoof-beat of a horse on the road, and I ran down. The dogs knew me, and seemed to understand I wished them to be quiet when I spoke to them. As the noise came nearer I went down to the gate. I was trembling with eagerness and anxiety, and I spoke before I reached it. I was sure it was Doctor Malcolm; but it was some one larger and taller, and the figure came out into the moonlight, and I was looking up at Philip Tredennis!"

Agnes laid her hand on her arm.

"Wait a moment before you go on," she said. "Give yourself time."

"No," said Bertha, hurrying, "I will go on to the end. Agnes, I have never lied to myself since that minute—never once. Where would have been the use? I thought he was forty miles away, and there he stood, and the terror, and joy, and anguish of seeing him swept everything else away, and I broke down. I don't know what he felt and thought. There was one strange moment when he stood quite close to me and touched my shoulder with his strong, kind hand. He seemed overwhelmed by what I did, and his voice was only a whisper. There seemed no one in all the world but ourselves, and when I lifted my face from the gate I knew what all I had suffered meant. As he talked to me afterward I was saying over to myself, as if it was a lesson I was learning, 'You are mad with joy just because this man is near you. All your pain has gone away. Everything is as it was before, but you don't care—you don't care.' I said that because I wished to make it sound as wicked as I could. But it was of no use. I have even thought since then that if he had been a bad man, thinking of himself, I might have been saved that night by finding it out. But he was not thinking of himself—only of me. He came, not for his own sake, but for mine and Janey's. He came to help us and stand by us and care for us; to do any common, simple service for us, as well as any great one. We were not to think of him; he was to think of us. And he sent me away upstairs to sleep, and walked outside below the window all night. And I slept like a child. I should not have slept if it had been any one else, but it seemed as if he had brought strength and quietness with him, and I need not stay awake, because everything was so safe. That has been his power over me from the first—that he rested me. Sometimes I have been so tired of the feverish, restless way we have of continually amusing ourselves, as if we dare not stop, and of reasoning and wondering and arguing to no end. We are all introspection and retrospection, and we call it being analytical and clever. If it is being clever, then we are too clever. One gets so tired of it; one wishes one could stop thinking and know less—or more. He was not like that, and he rested me. That was it. He made life seem more simple.

"Well, he rested me then, and, though I made one effort to send him away, I knew he would not go, and I did not try very hard. I did not want him to go. So when he refused to be sent away, an obstinate feeling came over me, and I said to myself that I would not do or say one unkind thing to him while he was there. I would be as gentle and natural with him as if—as if he had been some slight, paltry creature who was nothing, and less than nothing, to me. I should have been amiable enough to such a man if I had been indebted to him for such service."

"Ah!" sighed Agnes, "but it could not end there!"

"End!" said Bertha. "There is no end, there never will be! Do you think I do not see the bitter truth? One may call it what one likes, and make it as pathetic and as tragic and hopeless as words can paint it, but it is only the old, miserable, undignified story of a woman who is married, and who cares for a man who is not her husband. Nothing can be worse than that. It is a curious thing, isn't it, that somehow one always feels as if the woman must be bad?"