Part 12

The girl bloomed as she never had before with this quickening of her soul. The days were so full of duties; her music scholars, the household matters, in which she helped her widowed aunt, the two young cousins to be looked after, her reading, and, when she could attend them, the weekday afternoon prayers at the little church where she sometimes, with the sexton, represented all Mr. Preston’s congregation. Milly’s people were of the Congregational faith, but Norton and she had gone to St. John’s together. People found fault with Mr. Preston—a rather dull man with impassive wooden features—because he had no variety of expression; he read service and sermon in a low monotonous voice which, however, grew to have a soothing charm for Milly. Why need anyone express anything? It was all in herself—other people’s expression only jarred. Those few moments in the half light of the empty church gave a sense of peace that was an actual physical rest, undisturbed by the personality of others. She was even guilty of slipping from the church afterwards to avoid Mr. Preston’s perfunctory handshake.

Then, after each quickly-passing day, came the long evening when in her little white room she wrote to him—wrote to Norton, her own, own lover. Ah, what fire there can be in the veins of a little Puritan girl!

So the swift winter passed and the spring came around again, and he had not returned.

Then came hours when the sense of separation began to press more heavily upon her, when the soft breeze wearied her and the common roadside flowers brought tears to her eyes—especially when the Australian mail was long delayed. It was in a mood of this kind that she went one day to see Mrs. Preston, whose sharp features relaxed at the sight of her. Mrs. Preston was sitting in the front parlor by the window, with her sleeves rolled up a little, and a gingham apron tied around her waist, beating up eggs in a large bowl.

“Come in,” she called cheerfully to Milly. “I just saw Mrs. Furniss go past; she looked as if she thought I was committing one of the seven deadly sins when she discovered that I was beating my eggs in here. The aborigines consider a parlor a sacred thing, you know. It’s the pleasantest place in the whole house this morning, and this lilac bush is budding. It’s spring again, for certain.”

“Yes,” said Milly listlessly.

“I’m making custard for dessert to-morrow; the bishop’s coming. He always says, ‘Mrs. Preston, it’s such a relief to reach your house and get sponge cake and syllabub, instead of relays of pie!’ You know the poor, dear man has the dyspepsia terribly, and you New England people have no mercy on him. I’m glad he’s coming to-morrow, it gives me something more to do; one must _work_ in the spring, or die. If this weather keeps on I’ll get at the garret. What is the matter with you this morning, Milly?”

“I’m tired,” said Milly with a quiver of her lip.

“Work.”

“I _have_ worked! I’m busy all the time, but it doesn’t do any good. It’s hard to have Norton away for so long. I can’t help feeling—” she stopped a moment and looked very hard out of the window. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to get—melancholy about it.” She was trying to smile, but a bright tear fell in her lap.

“I don’t think you’re very unhappy,” said Mrs. Preston. She put the bowl of eggs down on the table and folded her thin arms. “It’s the luxury of grief that you’re enjoying—part of the romance. Be melancholy—as you call it—while you can.”

“You are always so cheerful,” said Milly rather resentfully.

“I, my dear! I don’t dare to be anything else. I _have_ to be cheerful, or—” She turned a darkening face to the budding lilacs. “I don’t dare to _think_ long enough to be depressed, to even—remember. There’s an awful abyss down which I slip when _I_ get melancholy; it’s the bottomless pit. I know it’s there all the time, but I have to pretend to myself that I’m not near it, or I get dragged under. I avoid it like the plague!” A momentary spasm contracted her face; she added in a lower tone, “Did you know that I had four children once? They died within a year.”

“Oh, you poor thing!” cried Milly. She reached forward and tried to take one of the fast-locked hands of the woman before her. “Oh, how terrible, how terrible! How did you _live_?”

“I didn’t; all the best part of me went too, this thing you see here—” she stopped, and the same shiver as before went over her.

“But you have your husband,” said Milly, seeking about for comfort. A vision of Mr. Preston, stiff, dull, formal, with his wooden features, fronted her confusingly.

“Yes, that’s the worst of it—if I only had not William!”

“Oh, Mrs. _Preston_!” cried Milly.

“I suppose it _is_ surprising. After having bored each other for so many years, we really ought to be very much attached, don’t you think? Perhaps even you can see how much comfort I get from William. If I were an article of the Rubric, instead of a woman—but of course, that is different.”

“But you must have loved him when you were married,” cried Milly, shocked.

“Did I, dear? I loved something that went by his name, it wasn’t William. There, don’t let us talk of it; I find no fault. He should have been a celibate priest; I agree with him there. He has never really cared for me, or for—the children.” The spasm passed over her face again. “Oh, if I did not have him, if I were not tied to this narrow round which chokes every higher instinct of me, if I could go off somewhere by myself, to California or Egypt, or Cathay—travel, travel, travel, keep going on and on, seeing something new every hour, breathing freer every day, getting out into the great life of the world!” She clenched her hands. “I have given my life, my aspirations, the whole strength of my being, to William, and now I have nothing left—but William.”

“You have four children in heaven,” said Milly softly.

The elder woman broke down into a fit of weeping that seemed to rend her. Milly sat by, appalled at this glimpse of the inner life of two respectable married people. Later, as she was going home, she met Mr. Preston, his tall, thin figure in its clerical garb silhouetted against the bright green of the spring foliage. His pale eyes gazed solemnly at her as he drew near across the fields; she felt that he might be murmuring Credos, or even Aves, quite oblivious of her presence. But he reached the bars in time to let them down for her, and offer her the handshake from which she had been wont to flee, and then stood a moment as if he would have spoken, while she gazed at him furtively. Could any woman put her arms around that stiff neck or kiss those thin, set lips? Oh, poor Mrs. Preston! But he was really speaking.

“I saw you in the distance and I stopped to pick these for you,” he said in his slow, even tone. It was a little bunch of violets that he held out to her.

“Oh, Mr. Preston, thank you!” said Milly in wonder.

“It is a pleasure to me that you attend our services. If—” he paused, “if my daughter had lived she would have been your age—like you, in her springtime.”

He gazed past her solemnly and then taking off his hat to her, went on his way, leaving Milly overpowered with bewilderment.

What did it all mean? Who was right, and who was wrong? How did people drift apart after they were married? A new idea of the complexity of life came to her, the strange way in which human beings acted on each other, drawn, as by magnets, with the differing forces. Marriage to her had always presented a picture of growth in happiness, growth in goodness, a path upward together for lover and beloved. She tried now and for the first time vainly to recall if any in her limited circle of acquaintance seemed to fulfill these conditions. Sordidness, narrowness, selfishness, a jealous love of one’s children, these stood revealed instead to the casual eye.

She wrote a long page in her journal letter that night. His answer came back at last. It said: “Don’t bother your head, dear, about these things. You will always be the dearest girl in the world to me, and the purest and the best; and as for me, I never forget that I’m working for you, and if that won’t keep me straight, nothing will. What do you care about those old fossils of Prestons, anyhow? You are you, and I am I, and that’s all I care for, sweetheart.”

The wealth of meaning with which Milly freighted these honest lines it would take pages to chronicle; perhaps it was partly on account of some words of Mrs. Preston’s which haunted her: “I loved something that went by his name—it wasn’t William.”

The clergyman’s family remained in her mind an unsolved problem; it was nearly a month before she went to the rectory again, where she found Mrs. Preston “up to her ears,” as she expressed it, endeavoring to settle the affairs of a poor family who were preparing for emigration to the West. Her snapping black eyes and vivacious mien showed thorough enjoyment of the task, to say nothing of her dominant volubility. Mr. Preston, who came in from the garden bearing the first strawberry solemnly on a gilt plate for his wife’s acceptance, was unheeded until Milly directed attention to him. He had been waiting, he explained gravely, some days for this particular strawberry to ripen. Mrs. Preston said, “Oh, yes,” and thereupon ate the fruit absent-mindedly as she went on talking, with apparently no more appreciation of flavor than if it had been gutta percha, and quite ignoring the giver.

Milly could not help smiling, but she left the house more bewildered than ever. Mrs. Preston _must_ like her life more than she thought she did, and it was impossible not to feel a little tinge of sympathy for Mr. Preston. Did people after all know what they really liked—or, indeed, what they really were? The moods of different days, of different hours, what kind of a whole did they form?

Her own life seemed to be all question in these days, to which nobody gave the answer.

Thus the second year stole on, and Norton’s home-coming appeared to grow no nearer. The photograph which he sent her startled by its unlikeness to her thought of him; those were the eyes that were to look into hers again some day, those the lips that were to kiss hers. After a while by much poring over it, the picture looked to her any way she pleased.

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder”—possibly, and possibly not always fonder of the unseen beloved, but of one’s own personality, projected into the suitable position.

But if any moment of serious doubt came, the remembrance of the betrothal in the garden quenched it. There was always that to fall back upon. Milly lived that over again, and again, and again, never without the solemn rush of feeling that had accompanied the pledge with God for their witness—“never to be forgotten, never to be denied”—the latter words Norton had himself used in a letter to her once, a letter from which she never parted.

With love came at last the teaching of death to Milly, and she went down into the shadows and cried out affrighted. All props were torn away from her, and she stood alone trembling, reaching out on the right hand and on the left. “I had not thought it meant this,” she wrote piteously. “I believe in God, and in heaven, why, then, should this desolation touch me? Words—words that I have said all my life and believed in, mean nothing to me. I believe in them now, but they mean nothing. I can’t make anything real but death, not even your love! Oh, help me, tell me that I shall not die alone, that you will go with me, tell me that you are not afraid; help me, Norton. You _must_ know something to make it all better!”

She had gained some peace before his reply reached her—a sense of the eternal Fatherhood that pervaded the unseen world as well as the one she walked and lived and loved in now—a protection that was a rest and brought light into the sunshine once more. But he wrote,

“Milly, if you love me, don’t send me any more letters like the last. To think of such things would drive me mad. I can’t think of death. It’s as much as I can do to work for a living, and try and be worthy of you, and I’ll have to leave the rest to the good Lord, I expect. I’ll be coming home some day before you know it—drop me a line to tell me how you’d feel if you saw me walking in just after you get this.”

If there was a graver look in Milly’s eyes than had been, there was also a sweeter depth. The lines around her mouth were very gentle. She did not talk much. It was the third summer of the separation; she no longer tried to solve the problem of the Prestons, but accepted the fact that she stood a little nearer to each of them than anyone else did. People said she was a good listener, but although she seemed to give a quiet attention to them, it was the voice across the sea that she was always listening for. The letters came now so full of matters and people that she knew nothing of; the whole burden of them for her lay in the few loving sentences that began and ended the pages. Had she ever had a lover? It was so long ago, and for so short a time! Yet at last she had word that he was coming home.

It was after this news had reached her, and nearly three years from the day of the revealing of love in the garden, that the second revelation was given her. This time it was of immortality.

She was kneeling in the church during the afternoon service; the church was almost empty. She had had a singularly calm spirit all day, and as she knelt in the dim aisle, her gaze directed upward to the stained glass window in one of the arches of the ceiling, she was not praying, she was only peaceful. The window was partly open, so that a glimpse of pale blue sky slanted through it with the afternoon sunshine. And as she gazed, not consciously, her spirit went from her and mingled with that sunlight, becoming one with it, and in a rapture of buoyancy, of radiance, of exultant immortality. It had in it no acknowledged perception of God, no conviction of sin, no so-called “experience”; it was simply life eternal, utterly free from the body, the spirit divested of the hampering bonds of the flesh. The wonder of it, the joy of it—yet the wonderful and joyful familiarity with it, as of something known always, that had been only forgotten for a little while, and was now remembered; and beyond and through all something indescribable. One cannot translate the meaning of life into words that belong to mortality.

Milly bowed her head and the light closed over her and her spirit came back to her body once more. She neither wept nor trembled; like Mary of old she marveled and was silent. She thought she would write it all to Norton, but she could not; she thought to tell him when he came, but she did not. She never had the revelation again, but like the first it could never be forgotten nor denied.

III

THEY were married at St. John’s a couple of months after his return. Mr. Preston united them in the bonds of holy matrimony with his still unvarying wooden gravity, through which, however, Milly was able to discern some faint, limited attempt at warmth, and Mrs. Preston folded her in her arms afterwards with a scoffing fondness that rather troubled the bride when she thought of it. She did not want to think now of spoiled lives. Something in Mrs. Preston’s manner implied—could it be pity?

It had been delightful after three years of maiden dreaming and shadowy aspiration to be carried forcibly out of them into a clear, cheerful, masculine territory where things seemed to be exactly what they were. The charm of having a lover who was almost a stranger, yet whom it was taken for granted must be both dear and familiar, was nearly too bewildering. She laughed at absurd jokes, was betrayed into demonstrative foolishness, and could scarcely believe in her own metamorphosis. She was in a state of suppressed excitement which must be happiness.

“I hardly knew you when I saw you coming in the gate,” she confessed one day soon after his arrival. “Think of it! I ran and hid.”

“You did not hide long,” he answered gravely, taking a hairpin from her smooth locks. “Let your hair down, I want to see if it has grown.”

“Norton! how silly. Are you always like this?”

“Certainly.”

“But I want to tell you of so many things that I could not write when you were away. Oh, Norton, the years have been short, yet they were so very, very long, too! There is so much I have to confess to you—how shall I ever begin?”

“Don’t try,” he answered laconically. “Leave all that time out, Milly, I hate it. We’ll begin fresh now.” He drew a long breath. “It was a hard, coarse life out there—you couldn’t even understand it, sweetheart. But one thing I _can_ tell—” he turned around and faced her with steadfast gaze—“I can look you straight in the eyes, dear, and not be ashamed.”

“Why, _of course_!” said Milly.

And so the new life began. A few months after the wedding they went to live in a narrow street in the great city, away from all the dear lovely hills and fields and sky that had hitherto made Milly’s world. She was surprised to find that the dreary outlook on brick and stone affected her like a physical blow, and that she missed familiar voices strangely. She had often and often thought that she would be willing to live with Norton in a desert, and forego all other companionship than his, which necessarily must be satisfying. Was it? Gradually, very gradually, but surely, a sinking of the heart, a gnawing homesickness began to take possession of her—the homesickness of one transplanted in body and mind to an alien soil; a feeling fiercely combated, fiercely denied, yet conquering insidiously. To many women—to most women, perhaps—there is no medium between worshiping and delicately despising the man they love. They must either look up or down; anything but a level view, with clear eyes meeting, and the honest admission: _Dear friend, my insufficiency balances thine. What thou art not to me, that other thing I am not to thee._

But it is torture not to be able to look up! The sense of superiority is only a sting.

Milly took life with intense earnestness. She could not understand Norton’s light, jocular way of looking at things; he cared for nothing “improving,” he simply wanted recreation. He loved her—yes, as much, she thought, sadly, as he could have loved any woman, but not, oh, not as she loved! She missed so much, _so_ much! Each day brought a subtle shock of disappointment with it, a miserable feeling of loss. What could she do about it? She tried vainly to adjust her vision to the man’s point of view. Her husband seemed to her shallow, coarse, with no high standard of honor. It must be her mission to elevate him.

The more unsatisfied her mind became, the more her heart endeavored to make up for it. “You are not what I dreamed—but kiss me, kiss me more passionately that I may forget it!” was the continued inner cry. But kisses do not grow more passionate under the insistent claim.

She prayed for him with a hysterical uplifting of the spirit, followed by fathomless exhaustion and depression. He was always very, very kind to her when she wept—and very glad to get away.

She relapsed into an obedient endurance, a patient and uncomplaining disapproval.

There seemed to be nothing in him of the man she had married except a certain sweet boyishness that had always been one of his charms, and which showed at times through everything, and a bright, yet delicate kindness which other people liked, although to her it had no depth. Sometimes she felt a little envious of his ease with others.

“How you talked to Mrs. Catherwood to-night,” she said one evening after the guests had gone. “You quite monopolized her. I wonder what she thought of you!”

“Oh, that was all right!” he answered somewhat absently. Then he looked up with a smile. “What do you think? I found that she came from the town I used to live in. I knew her sister well. We went back over old times.”

“You never talk to me about them.”

“You—oh, that’s different; you wouldn’t be interested, dear.” He shook his head with a kind of rueful amusement. “I always feel when I tell you of such things that you are wondering how I could enjoy them. It came sort of _easy_ to talk to Mrs. Catherwood—she seemed to understand; some people do make you feel that way, you know.” He looked up a little sadly, and then came over to his wife and kissed her. “You’re a saint, Milly, and saints are not expected to take stock in vain jestings. You have to be good for both of us, you know.”

Milly flushed angrily. “I _wish_ you wouldn’t say such things—you take such a low view! And I wanted you to see something of Professor Stearns to-night, he is such a fine man, so thoroughly high-minded, so firm in principle, he never gives way an inch in what he thinks is right. How people dislike him for it! It’s really splendid.”

Norton looked humorous, but discreetly held his peace.

“I tell you, Jordan,” he said one day to a friend, half sadly, half jestingly, “my wife wants me to be a good _woman_, to like all the things she likes, and to do all the things she does. I know she mourns over me every day of her life. I suppose it’s a hopeless job for both of us. I never was anything but a commonplace sort of fellow, not near good enough for her.”

“That is the proper frame of mind, old fellow,” said his friend, and they went on riding together in silence.

To what end had the higher life been Milly’s? In five years she and Norton had been drifting slowly but surely ever further apart. Had companionship with her elevated him? Impossible not to see that he had deteriorated, that the lax hold on former ideals had lapsed entirely!

Can any human soul thrive in an atmosphere of doubt?

It was when this knowledge of further separation lay heaviest upon her, that word came to Milly one morning in the bright sunlight that Norton had been arrested for embezzlement and was in jail. Her heart stood still. This, then, was what she had been foreboding all along; the instantaneous conviction of his guilt was the cruel blow. Oh, the awful, awful wrench of the heart, when disgrace lays its hand on one we love! Death seems an honest, joyful thing in comparison. Yet she could think of a thousand extenuations for him—she found herself yearning over him as she might have done over the children that had never been hers.

She prayed all the way to jail. How often she had read of similar journeys—the prisoner was always “sitting on the side of his bed,” in the cell. Norton was sitting on the side of his bed; his face was turned away as she came in. She sat down beside him and took his hand. “Norton!” she said and yet again, “Norton!” and he turned and looked at her.

“I knew you would come,” he said, “and I knew—you would think—I had done it.”

“Oh, Norton, Norton! Say only that you did not, and I will believe you.”

“You will believe—if I tell you—that I am not—a thief? What would a thief’s word be good for, Milly? Do I have to tell such a thing to my own wife? Why, even that poor Irish woman you can hear crying in the next cell believes in her husband; you should have heard her talking before you came—and he’s a brute.”

Milly gasped painfully, the tears were running down her cheeks. “You know you always thought some things honest that I did not—some transactions—we have often talked—how could I tell—”

“You had your ideas and I had mine,” he interrupted. “It’s mighty hard to conduct business on abstract principles—perhaps—I don’t deny it! My ways weren’t always what they ought to have been. But this is _stealing_. It somehow kills me to think that you—” he stopped short with a gesture, and hid his face in his hands.

Milly longed to put her arms around him, to kiss the hands that hid him from her, to do anything to show her love and grief, and her faith in him, but she did not dare. This was her husband, but she did not dare.