“Because,” continued Mrs. Farrell, “whatever I have done, I am not doing my own pleasure now, and my part isn’t an easy one to play.”
“I’m sorry you must play a part at all—my dear,” said Mrs. Gilbert, with impulsive kindness. “Why must you? Or, no, now it is all your affair, and I have no right to ask you anything. Don’t tell me—don’t speak to me about it!”
“But if I don’t speak to you, whom shall I speak to? And I shall go wild if I don’t speak to some one! Oh, what shall I do?”
“Do?”
“Yes, yes; it drives me to despair! Ought I to break with him now, at once, or wait and wait? Or shall I go on and marry him? I respect and honor him with my whole heart, indeed I do; and if he took me away with him—away to Europe, somewhere—for years and years, I know I should be good, and I should try hard to make him happy, and never, never let him know that I didn’t care for him as he did for me. Women often marry for money, for ambition, for mere board and lodging; you know they do; and why shouldn’t I marry him because I can’t bear to tell him I’m afraid I don’t love him?”
“That’s a question that nobody can answer for you,” said Mrs. Gilbert. “But all those marriages are abominable; and even to marry from respect seems wrong—hideous.”
“Yes, oh yes, it is hideous; it would be making this wearisome deceit a lifelong burden. I know what it would be better than anyone could tell me. I feel the horror of it every minute, and it isn’t for myself that I care now; it’s the shame to him; it seems to ridicule and degrade him; it’s ghastly! And he so generous and high-minded, he never could think that I wasn’t always just as good and constant as he was. No, I’m not fit for him, and I never was. He’s whole worlds above me, and it would wear my life out trying to be what he thinks me, and even then I couldn’t be it. Oh, why did he fall in love with me, when there are so many women in the world who would have been so happy in the love of such a man? Why did he ever see me? Why did he come here? Good-by, Mrs. Gilbert, good-by! I wish I were dead!”
Mrs. Gilbert caught her in an impetuous embrace of pity and atonement. Yet, an hour after, when she finally parted from her, it was by no means with equal tenderness; it was guardedly, almost coldly.
A week later, Ben Woodward asked his mother’s leave to go visit his married sister, who lived at Rock Island, Illinois. He urged that, now her boarders were mostly gone, she did not need him so much about the house; he hung his head and kicked the chips of the woodpile by which they stood. She looked at him a moment, and, fetching a long breath, said he was a good son and she wished he should please himself.
The next morning he kissed her and Rachel, shook hands with his father, nodded to his brothers, and started off toward the village, carrying his bag. At the foot of the hill on which the village stood he met Mrs. Farrell, who was coming from the post-office with letters in one hand. With the other she held by their stems some bright autumn leaves, and she stooped from time to time and added to them from the fallen splendors about her feet. It ought to have been a poet or a painter who met Mrs. Farrell in the country road, under the tinted maples, that morning, but it was only a simple farm boy whose soul was inarticulate in its tender pain. When she saw him she put the leaves and letters together in one hand, and began to feel in her pocket with the other. His face flushed as he came up to her, where she stood waiting for him, and blanched with a foolish, hopeless pleasure in the sight of her.