Mercy Philbrick's Choice

by Helen Hunt Jackson

Mercy wrote on and on. The reaction from the pent-up grief, the prolonged strain, was great. In her first joy at any, even the least, alleviation of the horror she had felt at the thought of Stephen's dishonesty, she over-estimated the extent of the relief she would feel from his surrendering the money at her request. She wrote as buoyantly, as confidently, as if his doing that would do away with the whole wrong from the beginning. In her overflowing, impetuosity, also, she did not consider what severe and cutting things were implied as well as said in some of her sentences. She closed the letter without rereading it, hastened to send it by the first mail, and then began to count the days which must pass before Stephen's answer could reach her.

Alas for Mercy! this was a sad preparation for the result which was to follow her hastily written words. It seems sometimes as if fate delighted in lifting us up only to cast us down, in taking us up into a high mountain to show us bright and goodly lands, only to make our speedy imprisonment in the dark valley the harder to bear.

Stephen read this last letter of Mercy's with an ever-increasing sense of resentment to the very end. For the time being it seemed to actually obliterate every trace of his love for her. He read the words as wrathfully as if they had been written by a mere acquaintance.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed. "'Stolen money! Inform the authorities!' Let her do it if she likes and see how she would come out at the end of that.' And Stephen wrote Mercy very much such a letter as he would have written to a man under the same circumstances. Luckily, he kept it a day, and, rereading it in a cooler moment was shocked at its tone, destroyed it, and wrote another. But the second one was no less hard, only more courteous, than the first. It ran thus:--

"Mercy,--I am sorry that any thing in my last letter should have led you to suppose that under the existing circumstances you could control my actions. All I said was that I might, for the sake of your peace of mind, give up this money, if it were not for my obligations to my mother. It was a foolish thing to say, since those obligations could not be done away with. I ought to have known that in your overwrought frame of mind you would snatch at the suggestion, and make it the basis of a fresh appeal.

"Now let me say, once for all, that my mind is firmly made up on this subject, and that it must be dropped between us. The money is mine, and I shall keep it. If you think it your duty to 'inform the authorities,' as you say, you must do so; and I would not say one word to hinder you. I would never, as you do in this case, attempt to make my own conscience the regulator of another's conduct. If you do regard me as the possessor of 'stolen money,' it is undoubtedly your duty to inform against me. I can only warn you that all you would gain by it would be a most disagreeable exposure of your own and my private affairs, and much mortification to both of us. The money is mine beyond all question. I shall not reply to any more letters from you on this subject. There is nothing more to be said; and all prolonging of the discussion is a needless pain, and is endangering the very foundations of our affection for each other. I want to say one thing more, however; and I hope it will impress you as it ought. Never forget that the strongest proof that my conscience was perfectly clear in regard to that money is that I at once told you of its discovery. It would have been perfectly easy for me to have accounted to you in a dozen different ways for my having come into possession of a little money, or even to have concealed from you the fact that I had done so; and, if I had felt myself a thief, I should certainly have taken good care that you did not know it.

"I must also thank you for your expressions of willingness to take care of my mother, in case of any thing's happening to me. Until these last letters of yours, I had often thought, with a sense of relief, that, if I died, you would never see my mother suffer; but now any such thought is inseparably associated with bitter memories. And my mother will not, in any event, need your help; for the money I shall have from the sale of the house, together with this which I have found, will give her all she will require.

"You must forgive me if this letter sounds hard, Mercy. I have not your faculty of mingling endearing epithets with sharp accusations and reproaches. I cannot be lover and culprit at once, as you are able to be lover and accuser, or judge. I love you, I think, as deeply and tenderly as ever; but you yourself have made all expression of it impossible. Stephen."

This letter roused in Mercy most conflicting emotions. Wounded feeling at its coldness, a certain admiration for its tone of immovable resolution, anger at what seemed to her Stephen's unjustifiable resentment of her effort to influence his action,--all these blended in one great pain which was well-nigh unbearable. For the time being, her distress in regard to the money seemed cast into shadow and removed by all this suffering in her personal relation with Stephen; but the personal suffering had not so deep a foundation as the other. Gradually, all sense of her own individual hurts in Stephen's words, in his acts, in the weakening of the bond which held them together, died out, and left behind it only a sense of bereavement and loss; while the first horror of Stephen's wrong-doing, of the hopeless lack in his moral nature, came back with twofold intensity. This had its basis in convictions,--in convictions which were as strong as the foundations of the earth: the other had its basis in emotions, in sensibilities which might pass away or be dulled.

Spite of Stephen's having forbidden all reference to the subject, Mercy wrote letter after letter upon it, pleading sometimes humbly, sometimes vehemently. It seemed to her that she was fighting for Stephen's very life, and she could not give way. To all these out-pourings Stephen made no reply. He answered the letters punctually, but made no reference to the question of the money, save by a few short words at the end of his letter, or in a postscript: such as, "It grieves me to see that you still dwell on that matter of which I said we must speak no more;" or, "Pray, dear Mercy, do not prolong that painful discussion. I have nothing more to say to you about it."