Mercy Philbrick's Choice

by Helen Hunt Jackson

"This must end, Stephen. How hard it is to me to give it up you know very well. It is like the sunrise to my day, always, these moments with you. But I will not multiply concealments. It makes me guilty and ashamed all the time. Don't urge me to any such thing; for I am not sure that too much of it would not kill my love for you. Let us be patient. Chance will do a good deal for us; but I will not plan to meet clandestinely. Whenever you can come to our house, that is different. It distresses me to have you do that and never tell of it; but that is yours and not mine, if any thing can be yours and not mine," she added sadly. Stephen had not heard the last words.

"Kill your love for me, Mercy!" he exclaimed. "Are you really afraid of that?"

"No, not kill my love for you," replied Mercy, "I think nothing could do that, but kill all my joy in my love for you; and that would be as terrible to you as if the love were killed. You would not know the difference, and I should not be able to make you see it."

It was a strange thing that with all Stephen's jealousy of Mercy's enlarged and enlarging life, of her ever-widening circle of friends, he had no especial jealousy of Parson Dorrance. The Parson was Mercy's only frequent visitor; and Stephen knew very well that he had become her teacher and her guide, that she referred every question to his decision, and was guided implicitly by his taste and wish in her writing and in her studies. But, when Stephen was a boy in college, Parson Dorranee had seemed to him an old man; and he now seemed venerable. Stephen could not have been freer from a lover's jealousy of him, if he had been Mercy's own father. Perhaps, if his instinct had been truer, it might have quickened Mercy's. She was equally unaware of the real nature of the Parson's regard for her. He did for her the same things he did for Lizzy, whom he called his child. He came to see her no oftener, spoke to her no more affectionately: she believed that she and Lizzy were sisters together in his fatherly heart.

When she was undeceived, the shock was very great: it was twofold,--a shock to her sense of loyalty to Stephen, a shock to her tender love for Parson Dorrance. It was true, as she had said to Lizzy, that she would have died to give him a pleasure; and yet she was forced to inflict on him the hardest of all pains. Every circumstance attending it made it harder; made it seem to Mercy always in after life, as she looked back upon it, needlessly hard,--cruelly, malignantly hard.

It was in the early autumn. The bright colors which had thrilled Mercy with such surprise and pleasure on her first arrival in Penfield were glowing again on the trees, it seemed to her brighter than before. Purple asters and golden-rod waved on the roadsides and in the fields; and blue gentians, for which Penfield was famous, were blooming everywhere. Parson Dorrance came one day to take Lizzy and Mercy over to his "Parish," as he called "The Cedars." They had often been with him there; and Mercy had been for a long time secretly hoping that he would ask her to help him in teaching the negroes. The day was one of those radiant and crystalline days peculiar to the New England autumn. On such days, joy becomes inevitable even to inert and lifeless natures: to enthusiastic and spontaneous ones, the exhilaration of the air and the sun is as intoxicating as wine. Mercy was in one of her most mirthful moods. She frolicked with the negro children, and decked their little woolly heads with wreaths of golden-rod, till they looked as fantastic as dancing monkeys. She gathered great sheaves of ferns and blue gentians and asters, until the Parson implored her to "leave a few just for the poor sun to shine on." The paths winding among "The Cedars" were in some places thick-set with white eupatoriums, which were now in full, feathery flower, some of them so old that, as you brushed past them, a cloud of the fine thread-like petals flew in all directions. Mercy gathered branch after branch of these, but threw them away impatiently, as the flowers fell off, leaving the stems bare.

"Oh, dear!" she exclaimed. "Nature wants some seeds, I suppose; but I want flowers. What becomes of the poor flower, any way? it lives such a short while; all its beauty and grace sacrificed to the making of a seed for next year."

"That's the way with every thing in life, dear child," said Parson Dorrance. "The thing that shall be is the thing for which all the powers of nature are at work. We, you and Lizzy and I, will drop off our stems presently,--I, a good deal the first, for you and Lizzy have the blessing of youth, but I am old."

"You are not old! You are the youngest person I know," exclaimed Mercy, impetuously. "You will never be old, Mr. Dorrance, not if you should live to be as old as--as old as the Wandering Jew!"

Mercy's eyes were fixed intently on the Parson's face; but she did not note the deep flush which rose to his very hair, as she said these words. She was thinking only of the glorious soul, and seeing only its shining through the outer tabernacle. Lizzy Hunter, however, saw the flush, and knew what it meant, and her heart gave a leap of joy. "Now he can see that Mercy never thinks of him as an old man, and never would," she thought to herself; and while her hands were idly playing with her flowers and mosses, and her face looked as innocent and care-free as a baby's, her brain was weaving plots of the most complicated devices for hastening on the future which began to look to her so assured for these two.