Mercy Philbrick's Choice

by Helen Hunt Jackson

"Oh, hev we? Well, well, I daresay it's comfortable enough; so the sun shines in mornin's, thet's the most I care for. You'll make any kind o' house pooty to look at inside, an' I reckon we needn't roost on the fences outside, a-lookin' at it, any more'n we choose to. It does look, for all the world though, like 'Bijah Jenkins's old yaller barn; 'n' thet there jog's jest the way he jined on his cow-shed. I declare it's too redicklus." And the old lady laughed till she had to wipe her spectacles.

"It could be made very pretty, I think," said Mercy, "for all it is so hideous now. I know just what I'd do to it, if it were mine. I'd throw out a big bay window in that corner where the jog is, and another on the middle of the north side, and then run a piazza across the west side, and carry the platform round both the bay windows. I saw a picture of a house in a book Mr. Allen had, which looked very much as this would look then. Oh, but I'd like to do it!" Mercy's imagination was so fired with the picture she had made to herself of the house thus altered and improved, that she could not easily relinquish it.

"But, Mercy, you don't know the lay o' the rooms, child. You don' 'no' where that ere jog comes. Your bay window mightn't come so's't would be of any use. Yer wouldn't build one jest to look at, would you?" said her mother.

"I'm not so sure I wouldn't, if I had plenty of money," replied Mercy, laughing. "But I have no idea of building bay windows on other people's houses. I was only amusing myself by planning it. I'd rather have that house, old and horrid as it is, than any house in the town. I like the situation so much, and the woods are so beautiful. Perhaps I'll earn a lot of money some day, and buy the place, and make it just as we like it."

"You earn money, child!" said Mrs. Carr, in a tone of unqualified wonder. "How could you earn money, I'd like to know?"

"Oh, make bonnets or gowns, dear little mother, or teach school," said Mercy, coloring. "Mr. Allen said I was quite well enough fitted to teach our school at home, if I liked."

"But, Mercy, child, you'd never go to do any such thing's thet, would yer now?" said her mother, piteously. "Don't ye hev all ye want, Mercy? Ain't there money enough for our clothes? I'm sure I don't need much; an' I could do with a good deal less, if there was any thing you wanted, dear. Your father he 'd never rest in his grave, ef he thought his little Mercy was a havin' to arn money for her livin'. You didn't mean it, child, did yer? Say yer didn't mean it, Mercy," and tears stood in the poor old woman's eyes.

It is strange what a tenacious pride there was in the hearts of our old sea-faring men of a half century ago. They had the same feeling that kings and emperors might have in regard to their wives and daughters, that it was a disgrace for them to be obliged to earn money. It would be an interesting thing to analyze this sentiment, to trace it to its roots: it was so universal among successful sea-faring men that it must have had its origin in some trait distinctively peculiar to their profession. All the other women in the town or the village might eke out the family incomes by whatever devices they pleased; but the captains' wives were to be ladies. They were to wear silk gowns brought from many a land; they were to have ornaments of quaint fashion, picked up here and there; they were to have money enough in the bank to live on in quiet comfort during the intervals when the husbands sailed away to make more. So strong was this feeling that it crystallized into a traditionary custom of life, which even poverty finds it hard to overcome. You shall find to-day, in any one of the seaport cities or towns of New England, widows and daughters of sea-captains, living, or rather seeming to live, upon the most beggarly incomes, but still keeping up a certain pathetic sham of appearance of being at ease. If they are really face to face with probable starvation, they may go to some charitable institution where fine needlework is given out, and earn a few dollars in that way. But they will fetch and carry their work by night, and no neighbor will ever by any chance surprise them with it in their hands. Most beautifully is this surreptitious sewing done; there is no work in this country like it. The tiny stitches bear the very aroma of sad and lonely leisure in them; a certain fine pride, too, as if the poverty-constrained lady would in no wise condescend to depart from her own standard in the matter of a single loop or stitch, no matter to what plebeian uses the garment might come after it should leave her hands.

Mercy's deep blush when she replied to her mother's astonished inquiry, how she could possibly earn any money, sprung from her consciousness of a secret,--a secret so harmless in itself, that she was ashamed of having any feeling of guilt in keeping it a secret; and yet, her fine and fastidious honesty so hated even the semblance of concealment, that the mere withholding of a fact, simply because she disliked to mention it, seemed to her akin to a denial of it. If there is such a thing in a human being as organic honesty,--an honesty which makes a lie not difficult, but impossible, just as it is impossible for men to walk on ceilings like flies, or to breathe in water like fishes,--Mercy Philbrick had it. The least approach to an equivocation was abhorrent to her: not that she reasoned about it, and submitting it to her conscience found it wicked, and therefore hateful; but that she disliked it instinctively,--as instinctively as she disliked pain. Her moral nerves shrank from it, just as nerves of the body shrink from suffering; and she recoiled from the suggestion of such a thing with the same involuntary quickness with which we put up the hand to ward off a falling blow, or drop the eyelid to protect an endangered eye. Physicians tell us that there are in men and women such enormous differences in this matter of sensitiveness to physical pain that one person may die of a pain which would be comparatively slight to another; and this is a fact which has to be taken very carefully into account, in all dealing with disease in people of the greatest capacity for suffering. May there not be equally great differences in souls, in the matter of sensitiveness to moral hurt?--differences for which the soul is not responsible, any more than the body is responsible for its skin's having been made thin or thick. Will-power has nothing whatever to do with determining the latter conditions. Let us be careful how far we take it to task for failing to control the others. Perhaps we shall learn, in some other stage of existence, that there is in this world a great deal of moral color blindness, congenital, incurable; and that God has much more pity than we suppose for poor things who have stumbled a good many times while they were groping in darkness.

People who see clearly themselves are almost always intolerant of those who do not. We often see this ludicrously exemplified, even in the trivial matter of near-sightedness. We are almost always a little vexed, when we point out a distant object to a friend, and hear him reply,-- "No, I do not see it at all. I am near-sighted."