So it was that Daphne and the Pagan first cemented the bonds of friendship. In the eyes of the unappreciative community that harboured them, however, it was but another point against them both. If Marvin had known what pangs his small ally was compelled to endure in his behalf, he would long before have done what he did. For, as Mrs. Lovejoy had ever been one to live up to her word, Daphne spent an increasing portion of her days in cupboards. She likewise became an expert on the elastic properties of different domestic woods, and subsisted chiefly on bread and water. But when not otherwise engaged she spent all her time at Marvin’s, to the despair and dismay of all in authority above her. “Birds of a feather!” they ominously whispered. Until at last things got too serious for whispers, and Mrs. Lovejoy took matters into her own hands.
It must have been quite a scene. The rumour of it still filled Marshbury at the time of my second visit. Mary Bennett had been washing windows in the kitchen, and I got the most authentic details. It seemed that Mrs. Lovejoy swooped down like the wolf on the fold, one afternoon when Daphne was missing, and discovered the two, as she expected, in earnest colloquy. She did not wait for preliminaries. I must say I rather admire it, too—that trait which will seek the point at any cost, without fear or favour.
“I don’t know what you find in that child,” she said to Marvin—“born of a common woman of the street that’s buried in the Potter’s Field, and as full of Satan as an onion is of smell! But when we’re trying to do our best for her, it seems too bad that you should come along with your heathenish notions and just undo everything. I’ll thank you to keep them to yourself. Sassy, you come along with me.”
“I won’t!” declared the child, roundly. And she ran for refuge into Marvin’s arms.
Well, she stayed there. Of course there was a tremendous row. Mrs. Lovejoy stormed, and Daphne cried, and Marvin manœuvred rather helplessly between. And the upshot of it was that Mrs. Lovejoy retired ignominiously from the field, leaving her adversary the somewhat astonished possessor of an infant. Not that his title was uncontested. Mrs. Lovejoy’s last word had been that she would put the matter before the Overseers, and she did. If she was a harsh woman, she was, according to her lights, a just one. She did what she thought best in circumstances which she was not subtle enough to understand. Sassy was an intolerable incubus to her, but for the good of Sassy’s immortal soul she thought the waif should be saved from Marvin. After much parleying, however, it was concluded to let the child stay. She had been given her chance. The community had done its duty. And its representative, in the person of Mrs. Lovejoy, realised that, after all, there was a limit to the endurance of flesh and blood. It would therefore perhaps be allowable to let the orphan go into hands that were ready to care for her. The community promised itself that, under this provision for the material aspect of the case, it would keep a watchful eye on the child’s moral welfare.
I am not sure that the community did not envy for Marvin a little moral discipline in the contract which he so unexpectedly undertook. Certainly there were distinct elements of humour in the situation. To drop an incorrigible youngster into the arms of a man who knew no more about children than he did about the fourth dimension, and who had risen in the morning without the faintest notion of adopting one, might suggest very dubious results. But the brilliant success of the experiment only served to let in a little light on the ignorance of bachelors and the incorrigibility of waifs. The pair entered upon a life which became no less amazing to themselves than to the community at large. People could not imagine where the two discovered the secrets of virtue and good humour with which they suddenly blossomed forth. It amounted to another proof of their innate perversity.
At all events, for the first time in many days both of them were happy. They paddled unmolested in their brook. They invented solemn mysteries about their relation to it. They climbed their apple-trees. They dug their garden. They kept house—without a bar. They told stories. They explored the countryside for leagues around. Altogether they used to make me wish, when I came to meet them on the hills, that I could be a pagan too.
III
That opportunity, however, did not come to me. The same train of circumstances which forced me to leave Marshbury sooner than I expected kept me away from it for the next seven or eight years. But even though the impression which I have been recording had lost a little of its early piquancy in becoming more human, there was something about that quiet corner of New England which always stayed with me. In crowded streets I thought of its open valley. Through the chatter of drawing rooms I heard its running water. Among people sophisticated to the vanishing point I remembered Mrs. Bennett and Mary.
So, when the propitious moment arrived, I went back to them. There was, I fear, a touch of the practical even in my sentiment. I had started to scribble a New England novel and I wanted to be quiet. I therefore thought to kill the most birds with one stone by returning to Marshbury. Be that as it may, when I drove in toward the town it was with an unaffected thrill that I suddenly recognised the old feeling of the river road. I scarcely know how to express it. There are indefinable states of emotion, as distinct in their quality as odours or colours. And only the surroundings which awakened them first can, if ever, awaken them again. This, I suppose, is the ground of that principle of conservatism in man which can never reconcile itself with the flux of the world.