The Diary of a Saint
February 16. Father used to say that Peggy Cole was the proudest thing on the face of the earth, and he would certainly be amused if he could know how her pride has increased. I could not leave Mother this afternoon, and so I sent Rosa down with a pail of soup to the poor old goody. Peggy refused to have it because I did not bring it myself. She wasn't a pauper to have me send her soup, she informed Rosa. I am afraid that Rosa was indiscreet enough to make some remark upon the fact that I carry her food pretty often, for old Peggy said, – I can see her wrinkled old nose turned up in supreme scorn as she brought it out, – "That's different. When Miss Ruth brings me a little thing now and then, – and it ain't often she'll take that trouble, either! – that's just a friend dropping in with something to make her sure of her welcome!" I shall have to leave everything to-morrow to go and make my peace with Peggy, for the old goose would starve to death before she would take anything from the Overseers of the Poor, and I do not see how she keeps alive, anyway.
February 17. I had a note from George this morning about the Burgess mortgage, and in it he said that he is to be away for a week or two. That means —
But I have no longer any right to speculate about him. It is not my business what it means. Henceforth he must come and go, and I must not even wonder about it.
February 19. I must face the fact that Mother will not be with me much longer. I can see how she grows weaker, and I can only be thankful that she does not suffer. She speaks of death now and then as calmly as if it were a matter of every-day routine.
"Mrs. Privet," Dr. Wentworth said this morning, "you seem to be no more afraid of death than you are of a sunrise."
"I'm not orthodox enough to be afraid," she answered, with her little quizzical smile.
Dear little Mother, she is so serene, so sweet, so quiet; nothing could be more dignified, and yet nothing more entirely simple. She is dying like a gentlewoman. She lies there as gracious as if she had invited death as a dear friend, and awaited him with the kindliest welcome. The naturalness of it all is what impresses me most. When I am with her it is impossible for me to feel that anything terrible is at hand. She might be going away to pass a pleasant summer visit somewhere; but there is no suspicion of anything dreadful or painful.
It is not that she is indifferent, either, – she has always found life a thing to be glad of.
"I should have liked well enough to stay a while longer to bother you, Ruth," she said, after Dr. Wentworth had gone, "but we must take things as they come. It's better, perhaps; you need a rest."
Dear Mother! She is always so lovely and so wonderful!
February 21. Mother has been brighter to-day, and really seems better. If it will only last! I asked her last night if she expected to see Father. She lay quiet a moment, and then she turned her face to smile on me before she answered.
"I don't know, Ruth," she said. "I have wondered about that a good deal, and I cannot be sure. If he is alive and knows, then I shall see him. I am sure of that. It is only life that has been keeping us apart. If he is not any more, why, then I shall not be either, and so of course I can't be unhappy. I feel just as he used to when he had you read that translation from something to him the week before he died; the thing that said death could not be an evil, for if we kept on existing we would be no longer bothered by the body, and that if we didn't, it was no matter, for we shouldn't know."
She was still a moment, looking into some great distance with her patient, sunken eyes. Then she smiled again, and said as if to herself, "But I think I shall see him."
February 25. George is married. Aunt Naomi has been in to tell me. She mentioned it as if it were a thing in which I should have no more interest than in any bit of village news. She did not watch me, I remember now, or ask my opinion as she generally does. She was wonderfully tactful and kind; only I can see she thought I ought to know about it, and that the best way was to put the matter bluntly and simply, as if it had no possible sentiment connected with it. When she had done her errand, she went on to make remarks about Deacon Richards and the vestry fires; just what, I do not know, for I could not listen. Then she mercifully went away.
I did not expect it so soon! I knew that it must come, but I was not prepared for this suddenness. I supposed that I should hear of the engagement, and get used to it; and then come to know the wedding was to be, and so come gradually to the thing itself that shuts George forever out of my life. It is better, it is a thousand times better to have it all over at once. I might have brooded morbidly through the days as they brought nearer and nearer the time when George was to be her husband instead of mine. Now it is done without my knowing. For three days he has been married; and I have only to think of him as the husband of another woman, and try to take it as a matter of course. Whether George has done this because he cares so much for her or not, he has done what is kindest for me. It is like waking from the ether to find that the tooth is out. We may be sick and sore, but the worst is past, and we may begin, slowly perhaps, but really, to recover.
Yet it is so soon! How completely he must be carried away to be so forgetful of all that is past! We were engaged six years; and he marries Miss West after an acquaintance of hardly as many weeks. I wonder if all men are like this. It seems sometimes as if they were not capable of the long, brooding devotion of women. But it is better so, and I would not have him thinking about me. He must be wrapped up in her. I do care most for his happiness, and his happiness now lies in his thinking of her and forgetting all the six years when he was – when I thought he was mine.
I will not moon, and I will not fret. That George has changed does not, of course, alter my feeling. I am sore and hurt; I see life now restricted in its uses. He has cut me off from the happiness of serving him and helping him as a wife; but as a friend there is still much that I may do. Very likely I can help his wife, – she seems so far short of what his wife should be. For service in all loyalty I belong to him still; and that is the thought which must help me.
February 28. I have already had a chance to do something for George. I hope that I have not been unfair to my friends; but I do not see how I could decide any other way.
Old lady Andrews came in this afternoon, with her snowy curls and cheeks pink from the wind. Almost as soon as she was seated she began with characteristic directness.
"I know you won't mind my coming straight to the point, my dear," she said. "I came to ask you about George Weston's new wife. Do you think we had better call on her?"
The question had come to me before, but I confess I had selfishly thought of it only as a personal matter.
"Mr. Weston's people were hardly of our sort, you know," she continued in her gentle voice, "though of course after your father took him into his office as a student we all felt like receiving him. I never knew him until after that."
"I have seen a good deal of him," I said, wondering if my voice sounded queer; "you know he helped settle the estate."
"It did seem providential," Mrs. Andrews went on, "that his mother did not live, for of course we could hardly have known her. She was a Hardy, you know, from Canton. But I have always found Mr. Weston a very presentable young man, especially for one of his class. He is really very intelligent."
"As we have received him," I said, "I don't see how we can refuse to receive his wife."
"That's the way I thought you would feel about it," old lady Andrews answered; "but I wished to be sure. As he has been received entirely on account of his connection with your family, I told Aunt Naomi that it ought to be for you to say whether the favor should be extended to his wife. I am informed that she is very pretty, but she is not, I believe, exactly one of our sort."
"She is exceedingly pretty," I assured her. "I have seen her. She is not – Well, I am afraid that she is rather Western, but I shall call."
"Then that settles it. Of course we shall do whatever you decide. I suppose he will bring her to our church. I say 'our,' Ruth, because you really belong to it. You are just a lamb that has found a place with a picket off, and got outside the fold. We shall have you back some time."
"I am afraid," I said laughing, "that I should only disgrace you and injure the fold by pulling a fresh picket off somewhere to get out again."
She laughed in turn, and fluttered her small hands in her delightful, birdlike way.
"I am not afraid of that," she responded. "When the Lord leads you in, He is able to make you want to stay. I hope your mother is comfortable."
So that is settled, and Miss West – Why am I such a coward about writing it? – Mrs. Weston is to be one of us. George will be glad that she is not left out of society.
III
MARCH
March 2. Mother's calmness keeps me ashamed of the hot ache in my heart and the restlessness which makes it so hard for me to keep an outward composure. Hannah is rather shocked that she should be so entirely unmoved in the face of death, and the dear, foolish old soul, steeped in theological asperities from her cradle, must needs believe that Mother is somehow endangering her future welfare by this very serenity.
"Don't you think, Miss Ruth," she said to me yesterday, "that you could persuade your mother to see Mr. Saychase? She'd do it to oblige you."
"But it wouldn't oblige me, Hannah."
"Oh, Miss Ruth, think of her immortal soul!"
"Hannah," I said as gently as I could, she was so distressed, "you know how Mother always felt about those things. It certainly couldn't do any good now to try to alter her opinions, and it would only tire her."
I left Hannah as quickly as I could without hurting her feelings, but I might have known that her conscience would force her to speak to Mother.
"Bless me, Hannah," Mother said to her, "I'm no more wicked because I'm going to die than if I were going to live. I can't help dying, you know, so I don't feel responsible."
When Hannah tried to go on, and broke down with tears, Mother put out her thin hand, like a sweet shadow.
"Hannah," she said, "I know how you feel, and I thank you for speaking; but don't be troubled. Where there are 'many mansions,' don't you think there may be one even for those who did not see the truth, if they were honest in their blindness?"
March 4. How far away everything else seems when the foot of death is almost at the door! As I sit by the bedside in the long nights, wondering whether he will come before morning, I think of the nights in which I may sometime be waiting for death myself. I wonder whether I shall be as serene and absolutely unterrified as Mother is. It is after all only the terror of the unknown. Why should we be more ready to think of the unknown as dreadful than as delightful? We certainly hail the thought of new experiences in the body; why not out of it? Novelty in itself must give a wonderful charm to that new life, at least for a long time. Think of the pleasure of having youth all over again, for we shall at least be young to any new existence into which we go, just as babies are young to this.
Death is terrible, it seems to me, only when we think of ourselves who are left behind, not when we think of those who go. Life is a thing so beautiful that it may be sad to think of them as deprived of it; but the more beautiful it is, the more I am assured that whatever power made the earth must be able to make something better. If life is good, a higher step in evolution must be nobler; and however we mourn, none of us would dare to say that our grief is caused by the belief that our friends have through death gone on to sorrow.
March 8. This morning —
March 11. Mother was buried to-day. I have taken out this book to try to set down – to set down what? Not what I have felt since the end came. That is not possible, and if it were, I have not the courage. I suppose the mournful truth is that in the dreadful loneliness which death has left in the house, I got out my diary as a companion. One's own thoughts are forlorn company when they are so sad, but if they are written out they may come to have more reality, and the journal to seem more like another personality. How strange and shameful the weakness is which makes it hard for us to be alone; the feeling that we cannot endure the brooding universe about us unless we have hold of some human hand! Yet we are so small, – the poor, naked, timorous soul, a single fleck of thistle-down tossed about by all the winds which fill the immensities of an infinite universe. Why should we not be afraid? Father would say, "Why should we?" He believed that the universe took care of everything in it, because everything is part of itself. "You've only to think of our own human instinct of self-preservation on a scale as great as you can conceive," he told me the day before he died, "and you get some idea of the way in which the universal must protect the particular." I am afraid that I am not able to grasp the idea as he did. I have thought of it many times, and of how calm and dignified he was in those last days. I am a woman, and the universe is so great that it turns me cold to think of it. I am able to get comfort out of Father's idea only by remembering how sure he was of it, and how completely real it was to him. Yet Mother was as sure as he. She told me once that not to be entirely at ease would be to dishonor Father's belief, and she was no less serene in the face of death than he was. Yes; it would be to dishonor them both to doubt, and I do not in my heart of hearts; but it is lonely, lonely.
March 12. It is touching to see how human kindness, the great sympathy with what is real and lasting in the human heart, overcomes the narrowness of creeds in the face of the great tragedy of death. Hannah would be horrified at any hint that she wavered in her belief, yet she said to me to-day: —
"Don't you worry about your mother, Miss Ruth. She was a good woman, if her eyes were not opened to the truth as it is in Jesus. Her Heavenly Father'll look after her. I guess she sees things some different now she's face to face with Him; and I believe she had the root of the matter in her somehow, though she hadn't grace given her to let her light shine among men."
Dear old Hannah! She is too loving in her heart not to be obliged to widen her theology when she is brought to the actual application of the awful belief she professes, and she is too human not to feel that a life so patient and so upright as Mother's must lead to eternal peace, no matter what the creed teaches.
March 13. The gray kitten is chasing its tail before the fire, and I have been looking at it and the blazing wood through my tears until I could bear it no longer. The moonlight is on the snow in the graveyard, and must show that great black patch where the grave is. She cannot be there; she cannot be conscious of the bleak chill of the earth; and the question whether she is anywhere and is conscious at all is in my mind constantly. She must be; she cannot have gone out like a candle-flame. She said to Mr. Saychase, that day Hannah brought him and Mother was too gentle to refuse to see him, that she had always believed God must have far too much self-respect not to take care of creatures He had made, and that she was not in the least troubled, because she did not feel any responsibility about what was to happen after death. She was right, of course; but he was horrified. He began to stammer out something, but Mother stopped him.
"I didn't mean to shock you," she said gently; "but don't you think, Mr. Saychase, I am near enough to the end to have the privilege of saying what I really believe?"
He wouldn't have been human if he could have resisted the voice that said it or the smile that enforced the words. Now she knows. She has found the heart of truth somewhere out there in the sky, which to us looks so wide, so thick with stars which might be abiding-places. She may have met Father. How much he, at least, must have to tell her! Whether he would know about us or not, I cannot decide. In any case I think he would like her to tell him. She is learning wonderful things. Yes; she knows, and I am sure she is glad.
March 14. George has been to see me. In the absorption and grief of the last fortnight I have hardly remembered him, and he has brought his wife home without my giving the matter a thought. It is wonderful that anything could so hold me that I have not been moved, but they came back the day after the funeral, and I did not hear of it until a couple of days later. It gave me a great shock when I saw him coming up the walk, but by the time he was in the house, I had collected myself, and I had, I think, my usual manner.
He was most kind and sympathetic, and yet he could not help showing how ill at ease he was. Perhaps he could not help reflecting that my duty to Mother had been the thing which kept us apart, and that it was strange for this to end just as there was no longer the possibility of our coming together.
I do not remember what George and I said to each other to-night, any more than I can recall what we said on that last time when he was here. I might bring back that other talk out of the dull blur of pain, but where would be the good? Nothing could come of it but new suffering. We were both outwardly calm and self-possessed, I know, and talked less like lovers than like men of business. So a merchant might sell the remnants of a bankrupt fortune, I fancy; and when he was gone I went to prepare Mother's night drink as calmly as if nothing had happened. I did not dare not to be calm.
To-night we met like the friends we promised to be. He was uncomfortable at first, but I managed to make him seem at ease, or at least not show that he felt strange. He looked at me rather curiously now and then. I think he was astonished that I showed no more feeling about our past. I cannot have him unhappy through me, and he must feel that at least I accept my fate serenely, or he will be troubled. I must not give myself the gratification of proving that I am constant. He may believe I am cold and perhaps heartless, but that is better than for him to feel responsible for my being miserable.
What did he tell me that night? It was in effect – though I think he hardly realized what he said or implied – how our long engagement had worn out the passion of a lover, and he felt only the friendship of a brother; the coming of a new, real love had shown him the difference. Does this mean that married love goes through such a change? Will he by and by have lived through his first love for his wife, and if so what will be left? That is not my concern; but would this same thing have come if I had been his wife, and should I now find myself, if we had been married when we hoped to be, only a friend who could not so fill his heart as to shut out a new love? Better a hundredfold that it should be as it is. At least he was not tied to me when the discovery came. But it is not always so. Certainly Father and Mother loved each other more after long years of living together. – But this is not a train of thought which it is well to follow. What is must be met and lived with; but I will not weaken my heart by dwelling on what might have been.
George was most kind to come, and it must have been hard for him; but I am afraid it was not a happy half-hour for either of us. I suppose that any woman brought face to face with a man she still loves when he has done with loving her must feel as if she were shamed. That is nonsense, however, and I fought against the feeling. Now I am happy in the thought that at least I have done one thing. I have made it possible for George to come to me if hereafter he need me. If he were in trouble and I could help, I know he would appeal to me as simply as ever. If I can help him, I am yet free to do it. I thank God for this!
March 16. I have asked Charlotte Kendall to stay with me for a while. Dear old Miss Charlotte, she is so poor and so proud and so plucky! I know that she is half starving in that great, gaunt Kendall house, that looms up so among its Balm of Gilead trees, as if it were an asylum for the ghosts of all the bygone generations of the family. Somehow it seems to me that in America the "decayed gentlewomen," as they are unpleasantly called in England, have a harder time than anywhere else in the world. Miss Charlotte has to live up to her instincts and her traditions or be bitterly humiliated and miserable. People generally assume that the family pride behind this is weak if it is not wicked; but surely the ideal of an honorable race, cultivated and right-minded for generations, is a thing to be cherished. The growth of civilization must depend a good deal upon having these ideas of family preserved somehow. Father used to say the great weakness of modern times is that nowadays the best of the race, instead of saying to those below, "Climb up to us," say, "We will come down to you." I suppose this is hardly a fair summing up of modern views of social conditions, though of course I know very little about them; but I am sure that the way in which class distinctions are laughed at is a mistake. I hope I hate false pride as much as anybody could; yet dear Miss Charlotte, trying hard not to disgrace her ancestors, and being true to her idea of what a gentlewoman should do, is to me pathetic and fine. She cares more for the traditions of her race than she does for her own situation; and anybody who did not admire this strong and unselfish spirit must look at life from a point of view that I cannot understand. I can have her here now on an excuse that she will not suspect, and she shall be fed and rested as she has not been for years.
March 17. I forgot Miss Charlotte's plants when I asked her to come here. I went over this morning to invite her, and I found her trimming her great oleander tree with tender little snips and with loving glances which were like those a mother gives her pet child in dressing it for a party. The sun came in at the bay window, and the geraniums which are the pride of Miss Charlotte's heart were coming finely into blossom. If the poor old soul is ever really happy it is in the midst of her plants, and things grow for her as for nobody else.
"Do look, Ruth," she said with the greatest eagerness; "that slip of heather that came from the wreath is really sprouting. I do think it will live."
She brought me a vial full of greenish water into which was stuck a bit of heather from the wreath that Cousin Mehitable sent for Mother. Miss Charlotte had asked me if she might go to the graveyard for the slip. She was so pathetic when she spoke of it!
"It isn't just to have a new plant," she said. "It is partly that it would always remind me of your mother, and I should love it for that."
To-day she was wonderful. Her eyes shone as she looked at the twig, and showed me the tiny white point, like a little mouse's tooth, that had begun to come through the bark under the green water. It was as if she had herself somehow accomplished the miracle of creation. I could have taken her into my arms and cried over her as she stood there so happy with just this slip and her plants for family and riches.
I told her my errand, and she began to look troubled. Unconsciously, I am sure, she glanced around at the flowers, and in an instant I understood.
"Oh, I beg your pardon," I said before she had time to speak, "I forgot that you cannot leave the plants."
"I was thinking how I could manage," she answered, evidently troubled between the wish to oblige me and the thought that her precious plants could not be left.
"You need not manage," I said. "I was foolish enough not to think of them. Of course you can't leave them."
"I might come over in the daytime," she proposed hesitatingly. "I could make up the fire in the morning, and at this time of the year the room would be warm enough for them till I came back at night. I know you must be most lonely at night, and I would stay as late as I could."
"You are a dear thing," I said, and her tone brought tears to my eyes. "If you will come over after breakfast and stay until after supper that will do nicely, – if you think you can spare the time."
"There's nothing I can spare better," she said, laughing. "I'm like the man that was on his way to jail and was met by a beggar. 'I've nothing to give you but time,' he said, 'and that his Honor just gave me, so I don't like to give it away.' That's one of your father's stories, Ruth."