Mercy Philbrick's Choice

by Helen Hunt Jackson

As soon as his mother was buried, he closed the house and went abroad. There he roamed about listlessly from country to country, for many years, acquiring a certain desultory culture, and buying, so far as his income would permit, every thing he saw which he thought Mercy would like. Then he went home, bought the old Jacobs house back again, and fitted it up in every respect as Mercy had once suggested. This done, he sat down to wait--for he knew not what. He had a vague feeling that he would die soon, and leave the house and his small fortune to Mercy; and she would come and spend her summers there, and so he would recall to her their old life together. He led the life of a hermit,--rarely went out, and still more rarely saw any one at home. He looked like a man of sixty rather than like one of fifty. He was fast becoming an invalid, more, however, from the lack of purpose and joy than from any disease. Life had been very hard to Stephen.

Nothing seemed more probable, contrasting his listless figure, gray hair, and jaded face with Mercy's full, fresh countenance and bounding elasticity, than that his dream of going first, and leaving to her the gift of all he had, would be realized; but he was destined to outlive her by many a long year.

Mercy's death was a strange one. She had gone with two of Lizzy Hunter's daughters to spend a few weeks in one of the small White Mountain villages, which was a favorite haunt of hers. The day after their arrival, a two days' excursion to some of the mountains was proposed; and Mercy, though not feeling well enough to join it herself, insisted that the girls should go. They were reluctant to leave her; but, with her usual vehemence, she resisted all their protestations, and compelled them to join the party. She was thus left alone in a house crowded with people, all of whom were strangers to her. Some of them recollected afterward to have noticed her sitting on the piazza at sunset, looking at the mountains with an expression of great delight; but no one spoke with her, and no one missed her the next morning, when she did not come to breakfast. Late in the forenoon, the landlady came running in great terror and excitement to one of the guests, exclaiming: "That lady that came yesterday is dying. The chambermaids could not get into her room, nor get any answer, so we broke open the door. The doctor says she'll never come to again!"

Helpless, the village doctor, and the servants, and the landlady, and as many of the guests as could crowd into the little room, stood around Mercy's bed. It seemed a sad way to die, surrounded by strangers, who did not even know her name; but Mercy was unconscious. It made no difference to her. Her heavy breathing told only too well the nature of the trouble.

"This cannot be the first attack she has had," said the doctor; and it was found afterward that Mercy had told Lizzy Hunter of her having twice had threatenings of a paralytic seizure. "If only I die at once," she had said to Lizzy, "I would rather go that way than in most others. I dread the dying part of death. I don't want to know when I am going."

And she did not. All day her breathing grew slower and more labored, and at night it stopped. In a few hours, there settled upon her features an expression of such perfect peace that each one who came to look at her stole away reverent and subdued.

The two old crones who had come to "lay out" the body crept about on tiptoe, their usual garrulity quenched by the sad and beautiful spectacle. It was a singular thing that no one knew the name of the stranger who had died thus suddenly and alone. In the confusion of their arrival, Mercy had omitted to register their names. In the smaller White Mountain houses, this formality is not rigidly enforced. And so it came to pass that this woman, so well known, so widely beloved, lay a night and a day dead, within a few hours' journey of her home as unknown as if she had been cast up from a shipwrecked vessel on a strange shore.

The two old crones sat with the body all night and all the next day. They sewed on the quaint garments in which it is still the custom of rural New England to robe the dead. They put a cap of stiff white muslin over Mercy's brown hair, which even now, in her fiftieth year, showed only here and there a silver thread. They laid fine plaits of the same stiff white muslin over her breast, and crossed her hands above them.

"She must ha' been a handsome woman in her time, Mis' Bunker. I 'spect she was married, don't you?" said Ann Sweetser, Mrs. Bunker's spinster cousin, who always helped her on these occasions.

"Well, this ere ring looks like it," replied Mrs. Bunker, taking up a bit of the muslin and rubbing the broad gold band on the third finger of Mercy's left hand. "But yer can't allers tell by that nowadays. There's folks wears 'em that ain't married. This is a real harndsome ring, 's heavy 's ever I see."