The Diary of a Saint
Olivia Watson came to the door, and asked me into the parlor, where I was left to wait some time before Miss West appeared. I confessed then to myself how I had really half hoped that she would not be in; but now the call is over I am glad to have seen her. I am a little confused, but I know what she is.
She is the most beautiful creature I ever saw. She has a clear color, when she flushes, like a red clover in September, the last and the richest of all the clovers of the year. Then her hair curls about her forehead in such dear little ringlets that it is enough to make one want to kiss her. She speaks with a funny little Western burr to her r's which might not please me in another, but is charming from her lips, the mouth that speaks is so pretty. Yes, George was right.
Of her mind one cannot say quite as much. She is not entirely well bred, it seemed to me; but then we are a little old-fashioned in Tuskamuck. She did notice the scarf, and asked me where I got it.
"Oh," she said, when I had told her, "then you have been abroad."
"Yes," I said, "I went with my father."
"Judge Privet took you abroad several times, didn't he?" Olivia put in.
"Yes; I went with him three times."
"Oh, my!" commented Miss West. "How set up you must feel!"
"I don't think I do," I answered, laughing. "Do you feel set up because you have seen the West that so few of us have visited?"
"Why, I never thought of that," she responded. "You haven't any of you traveled in the West, have you?"
"I haven't, at least."
"But that ain't anything to compare with going abroad," she continued, her face falling; "and going abroad three times, too. I should put on airs all the rest of my life if I'd done that."
It is not fair to go on putting down in black and white things that she said without thinking. I am ashamed of the satisfaction I found myself taking in her commonness. I was even so unfair to her that I could not help thinking that she somehow did not ring true. I wonder if a woman can ever be entirely just to another woman who has been praised by the man she cares for? If not I will be an exception to my sex! I will not be small and mean, just because Miss West is so lovely that no man could see her without – well, without admiring her greatly.
January 22. I went down to the grist-mill this afternoon to see Deacon Daniel, and to represent to him the sufferings of the faithful at frozen prayer-meetings. He was standing in the door of the mill, which was open to the brisk air, and his mealy frock gave a picturesque air to his great figure. He greeted me pleasantly, as he always does.
"I've come on business," I said.
"Your own or somebody's else?" he asked, with a grin.
"Not exactly mine," I admitted.
"What has Aunt Naomi sent you for now?" he demanded.
I laughed at his penetration.
"You are too sharp to be deceived," I said. "Aunt Naomi did send me. They tell me you are trying to destroy the church by freezing them all to death at the prayer-meetings."
"Aunt Naomi can't be frozen. She's too dry."
"That isn't at all a nice thing to say, Deacon Richards," I said, smiling. "You can't cover your iniquities by abusing her."
He showed his teeth, and settled himself against the door-post more comfortably.
"Why didn't she come herself?" he inquired.
"She said that she was afraid you'd pop her into the hopper. You see what a monster you are considered."
"I wouldn't be willing to spoil my meal."
Deacon Daniel likes to play at badinage, and if he had ever had a chance, might have some skill at it. As it is, I like to see how he enjoys it, if I am not always impressed by the wit of what he says.
"Deacon Richards," I said, "why do you freeze the people so in the vestry?"
"I haven't known of anybody's being frozen."
"But why don't you have a fire?" I persisted. "If you don't want to build it, there are boys enough that can be hired."
"How is your mother to-day?" was the only answer the deacon vouchsafed.
"She's very comfortable, thank you. Why don't you have a fire?"
"Makes folks sleepy," he declared; and once more switched off abruptly to another subject. "Did you know Tom Webbe's gone off?"
"Yes."
"Where's he gone?"
"I don't know. Why should I?"
"If you don't know," Deacon Daniel commented, "I suppose nobody does."
"Why don't you have a fire in the vestry?" I demanded, determined to tire him out.
"You asked me that before," he responded, with a grin of delight.
I gave it up then, for I saw that there was nothing to be got out of him in that mood. I looked up at the sky, and saw how the afternoon was waning.
"I must go home," I said. "Mother may want me; but I do wish you would be reasonable about the vestry. I'll give you a load of wood if you'll use it."
"Send the wood, and we'll see," was all the promise I could extract from the dear old tease.
Deacon Daniel was evidently not to be cornered, and I came away without any assurance of amendment on his part. The faithful will have still to endure the cold, I suppose; but I have made an effort.
What I said to Deacon Richards and what Deacon Richards said to me is not what I sat down to write. I have been lingering over it because I hated to put down what happened to me after I left the mill. Why should I write it? This diary is not a confessional, and nothing forces me to set these things down. I really write it as a penance for the uncharitable mood I have been in ever since. I may as well have my thoughts on paper as to keep turning them over and over in my mind.
I crossed the foot-bridge and turned up Water Street. I went on, pleased by the brown water showing through the broken ice in the mill-flume, and the fantastic bunches of snow in the willows beyond, like queer, white birds. I smiled to myself at the remembrance of Deacon Daniel, and somehow felt warmed toward him, as I always do, despite all his crotchety ways. He radiates kindness of heart through all his gruffness.
Suddenly I saw George coming toward me with Miss West. They did not notice me at first, they were so engaged in talking and laughing together. My mood sobered instantly, but I said to myself that I certainly ought to be glad to see George enjoying himself; and, in any case, a lady does not show her foolish feelings. So I went toward them, trying to look as I had before I caught sight of them. They saw me in a moment, and instantly their laughter stopped. If they had come forward simply and at ease, I should have thought no more about it, I think; but no one could see their confusion without feeling that they expected me to disapprove. And if they expected me to disapprove, it seems to me they must have been saying things – But probably this is all my imagination and mean jealousy.
"You see I've captured him," Miss West called out in rather a high voice, as we came near each other.
"I have no doubt he was a very willing captive," I answered, smiling, and holding out my hand.
I realize now how I hated to give her my hand, and most certainly her manner was not entirely that of a lady.
"We've been for a long walk," she went on, "and now I suppose I ought to let you have him."
"I couldn't think of taking him. I am only going home."
"But it seems real mean to keep him, after I've had him all the afternoon. I must give him to you."
"I hope he wouldn't be so ungallant as to be given, and leave you to go home alone," I said. "That is not the way we treat strangers in Tuskamuck."
"Oh, you mustn't call me a stranger," Miss West responded, twisting her head to look up into George's face. "I'm really in love with the place, and I should admire to live here all the rest of my life."
To this I had nothing to say. George had not spoken a word. I could not look at him, but I moved on now. I felt that I must get away from this girl, with her strange Western speech, and her familiar manner.
"Good-by," I said. "Mother will want me, and I mustn't linger any longer."
I managed to smile until I had left them, but the tears would come as I hurried up the hill toward home. Oh, how can I bear it!
January 23. The happiness of George is the thing which should be considered. In any case I am helpless. I can only wait, in woman's fashion. Even if I were convinced he would be happier and better with me, – and how can I tell that? – what is there I could do? My duty is by mother's sick-bed, and even if my pride would let me struggle for the possession of any man, I am not free to try even that degrading conflict. I should know, moreover, that any man saved in spite of himself would be apt to look back with regret to the woman he was saved from. Jean Ingelow's "Letter L" is not often repeated in life, I am afraid. Still, if one could be sure that it is a danger and he were saved, this might be borne. If it were surely for his good to think less of me, I might bear it somehow, hard as it would be. But my hands are tied. There is nothing for me but waiting.
January 24. George met Kathie last night as she was coming here, and sent word that he had to drive over to Canton. I thought it odd for him to send me such a message instead of coming himself, for he had not seen me since I met him in the street with Miss West. To-day Aunt Naomi came in, and the moment I saw her I knew that she had something to say that it would not be pleasant to hear.
"What's George Weston taking that West girl over to Canton for?" she asked.
It was like a stab in the back, but I tried not to flinch.
"Why shouldn't he take her?" I responded.
Aunt Naomi gave a characteristic sniff, and wagged her foot violently.
"If he wants to, perhaps he should," she answered enigmatically.
The subject dropped there, but I wonder a little why she put it that way.
January 26. Our engagement is broken. George is gone, and the memory of six years, he says, had better be wiped out.
January 27. I could not tell Mother to-day. By the time I got my courage up it was afternoon, and I feared lest she should be too excited to sleep to-night. To-morrow morning she must know.
II
FEBRUARY
February 1. I wonder sometimes if human pride is not stronger than human affection. Certainly it seems sometimes that we feel the wound to vanity more than the blow to love. I suppose that the truth is that the little prick stings where the blow numbs. For the moment it seemed to me to-night as if I felt more the sudden knowledge that the village knows of my broken engagement than I did the suffering of the fact; but I shall have forgotten this to-morrow, and the real grief will be left.
Miss Charlotte, tall and gaunt, came in just at twilight. She brought a lovely moss-rose bud.
"Why, Miss Charlotte," I said, "you have never cut the one bud off your moss-rose! I thought that was as dear to you as the apple of your eye."
"It was," she answered with her gayest air. "That's why I brought it."
"Mother will be delighted," I said; "that is, if she can forgive you for picking it."
"It isn't for your mother," Miss Charlotte said, with a sudden softening of her voice; "it is for you. I'm an old woman, you know, and I've whims. It's my whim for you to have the bud because I've watched it growing, and loved it almost as if it were my own baby."
Then I knew that she had heard of the broken engagement. The sense of the village gossip, the idea of being talked over at the sewing-circle, came to me so vividly and so dreadfully that for a moment I could hardly get my breath. Then I remembered the sweetness of Miss Charlotte's act, and I went to her and kissed her. The poor old dear had tears in her eyes, but she said nothing. She understood, I am sure, that I could not talk, but that I had seen what she meant me to see, her sympathy and her love. We sat down before the fire in the gathering dusk, and talked of indifferent things. She praised Peter's beauty, although the ungrateful Peter refused to stay in her lap, and would not be gracious under her caresses. She did not remain long, and she was gay after her fashion. Miss Charlotte is apt to cover real feeling with a decent veil of facetiousness.
"Now I must go home and get my party ready," she said, rising with characteristic suddenness.
"Are you going to have a party?" I asked in some surprise.
"I have one every night, my dear," she returned, with her explosive laugh. "All the Kendall ghosts come. It isn't very gay, but it's very select."
She hurried away, and left me more touched than I should have wished her to see.
February 2. It was well for me that Miss Charlotte's visit prepared me last night, for to-day Kathie broke in upon me with the most childish frankness.
"Miss Ruth," she burst out, "ain't you going to marry George Weston?"
"No, my dear," I answered; "but you mustn't say 'ain't.'"
"'Aren't,' then. But I thought you promised years and years ago."
"Kathie, dear," said I, "this isn't a thing that you may talk about. You are too young to understand, and it is vulgar to talk to people about their private affairs unless they begin."
"But it's no wronger than" —
"There's no such word as 'wronger,' Kathie."
"No worse than to break one's word, is it?"
"When two persons make an agreement they have a right to unmake it if they change their minds; and that is not breaking their word. How do the skates work?"
"All right," Kathie answered; "but father said that you and George Weston" —
"Kathie," I said as firmly as I could, "I have told you before that you must not repeat what your father says."
"It isn't wrong," she returned rather defiantly.
I was surprised at her manner, but I suppose that she is always fighting with her conscience about right and wrong, so the mere idea makes her aggressive.
"I am not so sure," I told her, trying to turn the whole matter off with a laugh. "I don't think it's very moral to be ill bred. Do you?"
"Why, Father says manners don't matter if the heart is right."
"This is only another way of saying that if the heart is right the manners will be right. If you in your heart consider whether your father would wish you to tell me what he did not say for my ears, you will not be likely to say it."
That sounds rather priggish now it is written down, but I had to stop the child, and I could not be harsh with her. She evidently wanted much to go on with the subject, but I would not hear another word. How the town must be discussing my affairs!
February 5. Mother is certainly growing weaker, and although Dr. Wentworth will not admit to me that she is failing, I am convinced that he thinks so. She has been telling me this afternoon of things which she wishes given to this and that relative or friend.
"It will not make me any more likely to die, Ruth," she said, "and I shall feel more comfortable if I have these things off my mind. I've thought them out, and if you'll put them on paper, then I shall feel perfectly at liberty to forget them if I find it too much trouble to remember."
I put down the things which she told me, trying hard not to let her see how the tears hindered my writing. When I had finished she lay quiet for some time, and then she said, —
"May I say one thing, Ruth, about George?"
She has said nothing to me before except comforting words to show me that she felt for me, and that she knew I could not bear to talk about it.
"You know you may," I told her, though I confess I shrank at the thought.
"I know how it hurts you now," she said, "and for that I am grieved to the heart; but Ruth, dear, I can't help feeling that it is best after all. You are too much his superior to be happy with him. You would try to make him what you think he ought to be, and you couldn't do it. The stuff isn't in him. He'd get tired of trying, and you would be so humiliated for him that in the end I'm afraid neither of you would be happy."
She stopped, and rested a little, and then went on.
"I am afraid I don't comfort you much," she said, with a sigh. "I suppose that that must be left to time. But I want you to remember it is much less hard for me to leave you alone than it would have been to go with the feeling that you were to make a mistake that would hamper and sadden your whole life."
The tears came into her eyes, and she put out her dear, shadowy hand so feebly that I could not bear it. I dropped on my knees by the bed, and fell to sobbing in the most childish way. Mother patted my head as if I were the baby I was acting.
"There, there, Ruth," she said; "the Privets, as your father would have said, do not cry over misfortunes; they live them down."
She is right; and I must not break down again.
February 7. There are times when I seem like a stranger visiting myself, and I most inhospitably wish that this guest would go. I must determine not to think about my feelings; or, rather, without bothering to make resolutions, I must stop thinking about myself. The way to do it, I suppose, is to think about others; and that would be all very well if it were not that the others I inevitably think about are George and Miss West. I cannot help knowing that he is with her a great deal. Somehow it is in the air, and comes to me against my will. If I go out, I cannot avoid seeing them walking or driving together. I am afraid that George's law business must suffer. I should never have let him neglect it so for me. Perhaps I am cold-blooded.
What Mother said to me the other day has been much in my thoughts. I wonder how it was ever possible for me to be engaged to a man of whom neither Father nor Mother entirely approved. To care for him was something I could not help; I am sure of that. But the engagement is another matter. It came about very naturally after his being here so much in Father's last illness. George was so kind and helpful about the business that we were all full of gratitude, and in my blindness I did not perceive how Mother really felt. I realize now it was his kindness to Father, and the relief his help brought to Mother, which made it hard for her to say then that she did not approve of the engagement; and so soon after she became a helpless invalid that things went on naturally in their own course.
I am sure that if Mother could have known George as I have known him, she would have cared for him. She has hardly seen him in all these years. She hopes that I will forget, but I should be poorer if I could. One does not leave off loving just because circumstances alter. He is free to go his way, but that does not make me any the less his if there is any virtue in my being so.
February 8. I met Mrs. Webbe in the street to-day, her black eyes brighter, more piercing, more snapping than ever. She came up to me in her quick, jerky way, stopped suddenly, tall and strong, and looked at me as if she were trying to read some profound secret, hid in the very bottom of my soul. I could never by any possibility be half so mysterious as Mrs. Webbe's looks seemed to make me.
"Do you write to Tom?" she demanded.
"I don't even know where he is," I answered.
"Then you don't write to him?"
"No."
"That's a pity," Mrs. Webbe went on, her eyes piercing me so that they almost gave me a sensation of physical discomfort. "He ought to know."
I looked at her a moment in silence, thinking she might explain her enigmatic words.
"To know what?" I asked at length.
"About you and George Weston," she responded, nodding her head emphatically; "but if you don't know where he is, that's the whole of it. Good-day."
She was gone before I could gather my wits to tell her that the news could make no difference to Tom. In discussing my separation from George I suppose the village gossips – But I will not be unkind because I am unhappy. I know, and know with sincere pain, that Deacon and Mrs. Webbe believe that I could have saved Tom if I had been willing to marry him. I have cared for Tom from girlhood, and I am fond of him now, in spite of all that has happened to show how weak he is; but it would be wicked for him to be allowed to suppose the breaking of my engagement makes any difference in our relations. He cannot be written to, however, so I need not trouble.
February 10. Miss West has gone back to Franklin, but I do not see that this makes any especial difference to me. Aunt Naomi told me this afternoon, evidently thinking that I should wish to hear it, and evidently, too, trying not to let me see that she regarded it as more than an ordinary bit of news. I only wonder how long it will be before George will follow her. Oh, I do hope she will make him happy!
February 12. The consequence of my being of no religion seems to be that I am regarded as a sort of neutral ground by persons of all religions, where they may air their theological troubles. Now it is a Catholic who asks advice. Perhaps I had better set up as a consulting something or other. Mediums are the only sort of female consulting things that I think of, and they are so far from respectable that I could not be a medium; but I shall have to invent a name to call myself by, if this goes much further.
This time it is Rosa. Rosa is as devout a little superstitious body as I ever saw. She firmly believes all that her church teaches her, and she believes all sorts of queer things besides. I wonder sometimes that her small mind, which never can remember to lay the table properly, can hold in remembrance all the droll superstitions she shiveringly accepts. Perhaps the reason why she is so inefficient a servant, and is so constantly under the severe blight of Hannah's awful disapproval, is that her mental faculties are exhausted in remembering signs and omens. I've no right to make fun of her, however, for I don't like to spill salt myself!
The conundrum which Rosa brings to me is not one which it is easy to handle. She believes that her church has the power of eternal life and death over her, and she wishes, in defiance of her church's prohibition, to marry a divorced man. She declares that unless she can marry Ran Gargan her heart will be broken into the most numerous fragments, and she implores me to devise a method by which she can accomplish the difficult feat of getting the better of the church.
"Sure, Miss Privet," she said in the most naïve way in the world, "you're that clever that ye could invint a way what would get round Father O'Rafferty; he's no that quick at seein' things."
I suspect, from something the child let fall, that Hannah, with genuine righteous hatred of the Scarlet Woman, had urged Rosa to fly in the face of her church, and marry Ran. Hannah would regard it as a signal triumph of grace if Rosa could be so far persuaded to disobey the tenets of Catholicism. I can understand perfectly Hannah's way of looking at the matter; but I have no more against Rosa's church than I have against Hannah's, so this view does not appeal to me.
"Rosa," I said, "don't you believe in your church?"
She broke into voluble protestations of her entire faithfulness, and seemed inclined to feel that harm might come to her from some unseen malevolence if such charges were made so as to be heard by spying spirits.
"Then I don't see why you come to me," I said. "If you are a good Catholic, I should think that that settled the matter."
"But I thought you'd think of some way of gettin' round it," she responded, beginning to cry. "Me heart is broke for Ran, an' it is himsilf that'll go to the bad if I don't have him."
Poor little ignorant soul! How could one reason with her, or what was there to say? I could only try to show her that she could not be happy if she did the thing that she knew to be wrong.
"But what for is ye tellin' me that, when ye don't belave it's wrong?" she demanded, evidently aggrieved.
"I do think it is wrong to act against a church in which you believe," I said.
I am afraid I did not in the least comfort her, for she went away with an air in which indignation was mingled with disappointment.
February 15. Rosa is all right. She told me to-day, fingering her apron and blushing very prettily, that she saw Dennis Maloney last night, and was engaged to him already. He has, it seems, personal attractions superior to those of Ran, and Rosa added that on the whole she prefers a first-hand husband.
"So I'm obliged to ye for yer advisin' me to give Ran the go-by," she concluded. "I thought yer would."
I do not know whether the swiftness of the change of sweethearts or the amazing conclusion of her remarks moved me more.