The Emperor of Elam, and other stories

by H. G. Dwight

My last visit ought to have prepared me for changes. The drive, however, upset the inner counsels with which I had fortified myself—and Mrs. Bennett. She, immortal woman, was identically the same being whom I had known eleven years earlier. Even Mary had not changed so much between twenty and twenty-eight as she had between seventeen and twenty—although it was curious to me that the effect of time should be so much more visible in the one better able to resist it! The strong colour of her girlhood had softened into that delicate bloom which few but nuns can wear. And there was something about her eyes that intrigued me. But I did not wonder long. I had other sensations to take account of. For in my ointment of happiness at getting back I suddenly discovered a very large and buzzing fly.

Not that the Reverend James Wentworth could precisely be compared to that humble creature. I had come, though, to look upon the Bennetts as my private property, upon their paradise as open to myself alone. And to find it invaded by the new minister put my nose distinctly out of joint. Particularly as I perceived that my hostess fancied herself and me greatly honoured by such fellowship. Of course I could not be nasty about it. In other circumstances, in fact, I might have appreciated it as much as anybody. For I have an odd sympathy for young clergymen. Without knowing very well how much they deserve it, I always look upon them as among the few really romantic people of the world—the people who follow an inner light, regardless of rival luminaries. But the Reverend James, alas, was of those who carry the theory to its logical conclusion. He was inalienably assured that his own inner light was the sole reflection of Truth, and that all men else—with whom he happened to differ—pursued false fires.

It was a tremendous disillusionment, this unexpected change of milieu. I had two ideas of leaving on the spot. The new atmosphere, charged with latent argument, was the medium in which I breathe least easily. Being, however, more or less of a Jesuit, as I have intimated, I merely fumed within—and took copious notes. I promised myself that the Reverend James should one day affront a wider audience in the panoply of fiction. It was doubtless a lame enough compromise. I have always envied those single temperaments that can identify themselves with one side of a cause. For myself, I am unable to do it. I suppose I do not take things seriously enough, or people. They come to me as cases rather than as questions. I have no sense of responsibility about them. At any rate, the case of the Reverend James I proceeded to accept as an element of my Marshbury impression. Little did I foresee how sharply it was to throw into relief the other case with which I had so long been occupied!

That had evidently grown more crucial with the years—Marvin’s case. For Daphne was dead. She had been dead almost four years, it seemed. And in circumstances—One could not expect anything but scandal where such people were concerned, Mrs. Bennett told me. The only decent thing about it was that she and the child had died together. Anybody might have known that she would go wrong. It was what she was born to. She had done it before one could turn around, and just for a good-for-nothing young scamp she hardly had time to get acquainted with. Old Marvin, however, had refused to turn his face from her. He had only kept her the more carefully, and had been inconsolable since. Mary had never known him so queer. But—

Yes, it was evident that there was a “but.” There were things of another, a darker, kind: things which were not so easy to put into words. Between Mary’s eyes and her mother’s mysterious shrugs it was much as ever that I succeeded in getting at what the business was about. If it had not been for the plain-spoken Mr. Wentworth—! There was a strangeness to the thing, though, when I got it. There was a strangeness which I never dreamed eleven years before. It was only the stranger for the apparently conventional touches which my impression had in the meantime received. But as I write of it I realise Mrs. Bennett’s difficulty in speaking to me. It was not a thing that you could say in so many words and then go out of the room. You had to know the place, the people, the circumstances. It was so largely an effect of relativities, and of relativities different for each person whom they touched.

It all began with Daphne’s death. Then Marvin, who for seven years had been as much like other people as he could be, said Mrs. Bennett, suddenly turned more eccentric than ever. He refused to let the girl be buried like a Christian, in the cemetery. Of course she wasn’t one; but it was queer that he should be the first to say so. He said the place for her was between him and the water, and he made them dig a grave in his own orchard—on a sort of little mound there was beside the brook. If it had been anybody else, the Selectmen would have stopped him. But seeing it was that girl—! And instead of getting her a proper tombstone, which he could well afford and which everybody supposed he would do, considering the store he set by her, he just planted on her grave a sprig of lambkill.

That was natural enough in a way, opined Mrs. Bennett. People like to put flowers on graves. But lambkill! Laurel, he called it. He said that was Daphne’s tree. It was all a part of some heathenish business they had had between them. Mary thought he got it out of his books. Anyway, he spent all his time taking care of it. Of course it’s right to keep graves looking tidy. But you don’t build little green-houses over the flowers in winter. Neither do you get up in thunder-storms, in the middle of the night, to go out and attend to them. If the Lord intends things to be taken care of, he takes care of them, in spite of thunder-storms.

The strangest part of it, though, was something more unnatural still—something almost supernatural. The laurel sprig had followed for a time the ordinary course of cuttings; had by sheer force of tenderness been kept alive, and had at last developed into a healthy little plant that could live alone. But then of a sudden it received a new and secret impulse. It began to grow as no laurel had ever grown before. There was nothing like it in the whole country. It outdistanced at a bound the humble shrubs from which it sprang, and bade fair to rival even the great mountain laurel of the woods. And such flowers as it bore—such deep and burning clusters as never would have passed for cousins, even, to the faint-flushed wax of the lambkill!

The thing was unnatural enough in itself, Heaven knew. But Marvin made it a scandal. It hardly needed Mrs. Bennett to make it plain. He insisted that Daphne had turned into a laurel, after all. He called the bush by her name. He spent all his time listening to the growing whisper of its leaves. He said the strangest things to Mary about it—things stranger than any he had told her in the days when he used to say that there was a girl singing to him in the brook. A cult so extraordinary was not one to pass unnoticed. Even if Mr. Wentworth had not been in the village to formulate the moral issues of the case, the miraculous laurel waved there on its mound, more indecently conspicuous every day to those who passed on the road. An uneasiness spread among them. It was a reproach to Church and State alike that such things should go on in their midst. It corrupted youth and was an offence to age. Something should be done.

Mr. Wentworth, accordingly, did it. He, like Mrs. Lovejoy of old, went straight to Marvin. And again I could not help admiring the simplicity of that attack. I almost wished, too, that I might have been present at the encounter. It must have been such a contrast of types as one does not often witness in this half-way world. But it was not difficult to gather what happened. It was wonderful how little Mary said, and how much she expressed! Almost as wonderful were the volubility, the excitement, with which Wentworth came back from his interview.