For the rest, his letters were faithful transcripts of the little events of his uneventful life, warm comments on any of Mercy's writings which he read, and gentle assurances of his continued affection. The old longings, broodings, and passionate yearnings, which he used to pour out, ceased. Stephen was wounded to the very quick; and the wound did not heal. Yet he felt no withdrawal from Mercy: probably nothing she could do would ever drive him from her. He would die, if worst came to worst, lying by her side and looking up in her eyes, like a dog at the feet of its master who had shot him.
Mercy was much moved by this tone of patience in his letters: it touched her, as the look of patient endurance on his face used to touch her. It also irritated her, it was so foreign to her own nature.
"How can he help answering these things I say?" she would exclaim. "He has no right to refuse to talk with me about such a vital matter." If any one had said to Mercy, "He has as much right to refuse to discuss the question as you have to force it upon him," she could not have seen the point fairly.
But all Stephen's patience, gentleness, and firmness did not abate one jot or tittle of Mercy's conviction that he was doing a dishonest thing. Oh the contrary, his quiet appeared to her more and more like a callous satisfaction; and his occasional cheerfulness, like an exultation over his ill-gotten gains. Slowly there crept into her feeling towards him a certain something which was akin to scorn,--the most fatal of deaths to love. The hateful word "thief" seemed to be perpetually ringing in her ears. When she read accounts of robberies, of defalcations, of breaches of trust, she found herself always drawing parallels between the conduct of these criminals and Stephen's. The secrecy, the unassailable safety of his crime, seemed to her to make it inexpressibly more odious.
"I do believe," she thought to herself again and again, "that if he had been driven by his poverty to knocking men down on the highway, and robbing them of their pocket-books, I should not have so loathed it!"
As the weeks went on, Mercy's unhappiness increased rather than diminished. There seemed an irreconcilible conflict between her love and every other emotion in her soul. She seemed to herself to be, as it were, playing the hypocrite to her own heart in thinking thus of a man and loving him still; for that she still loved Stephen, she did not once doubt. At this time, she printed a little poem, which set many of her friends to vondering from what experience of hers it could possibly have been drawn. Mercy's poems were so largely subjective in tone that it was hard for her readers to believe that they were not all drawn from her own individual experience.
A Woman's Battle.
Dear foe, I know thou'lt win the fight;
I know thou hast the stronger bark,
And thou art sailing in the light,
While I am creeping in the dark.
Thou dost not dream that I am crying,
As I come up with colors flying.I clear away my wounded, slain,
With strength like frenzy strong and swift;
I do not feel the tug and strain,
Though dead are heavy, hard to lift.
If I looked on their faces dying,
I could not keep my colors flying.Dear foe, it will be short,--our fight,--
Though lazily thou train'st thy guns:
Fate steers us,--me to deeper night,
And thee to brighter seas and suns;
But thou'lt not dream that I am dying,
As I sail by with colors flying!
There was great injustice to Stephen in this poem. When he read it, he groaned, and exclaimed aloud, "O Mercy! O Mercy!" Then, as he read it over again, he said, "Surely she could not have meant herself in this: it is only dramatic. She could never call me her foe." Mercy had often said to him of some of her most intense poems, "Oh, it was purely dramatic. I just fancied how anybody would feel under such circumstances;" and he clung to the hope that it was true in this case. But it was not. Already Mercy had a sense of antagonism, of warfare, with Stephen, or rather with her love for him. Already her pride was beginning to array itself in reticence, in withdrawal, in suppression. More than once she had said to herself "I can live without him! I could bear that pain better than this." More than once she had asked herself with a kind of terror, "Do I really wish ever to see Stephen again?" and had been forced to own in her secret thought that she shrank from meeting him. She began even to consider the possibility of deferring the visit to Lizzy Hunter, which she had promised to make in the spring. As the time drew nearer, her unwillingness to go increased, and she would no doubt have discovered some way of escape; but one day early in March a telegram came to her, which left her no longer any room for choice.
It ran:--
"Uncle Dorrance is not expected to live. He wishes to see you. He is at my house. Come immediately.