By Margaret Deland
I
Robert Gray’s first wife, Alys (Old Chester had hard work to swallow her name; “but it’s better than any of your silly ‘ie’s,’” said Old Chester)—this first Mrs. Gray was a good deal of a trial to everybody. She was not only “new,” but foreign; not only foreign, but indifferent to Old Chester. Indeed, it took all Old Chester’s politeness and Christian forbearance to invite Mrs. Robert Gray to tea—with the certainty that the invitation would be declined. She was an English girl whom Robert met somewhere in Switzerland—a heavy-eyed, silent creature, certainly a very beautiful woman, but most inefficient and sickly; and there were so many nice, sensible girls in Old Chester! (However, there is no use saying things like that: as if a man ever married a girl because she was sensible!)
Yet young Gray certainly needed a sensible wife; his wealth was limited to character and good manners, plus a slender income as tutor in the Female Academy in Upper Chester. Excellent things, all; but a wife with sense (and money) would have been an agreeable addition to his circumstances. Whereas, this very beautiful English girl was a penniless governess, left stranded in Germany by an employer, who had, apparently, got tired of her. Robert Gray had met the poor, frightened creature, who was taking her wandering way back to England, and married her, frantic with rage at the way she had been treated. When he brought her home, he was so madly in love that he probably did not half appreciate Old Chester’s patience with her queer ways. But the fact was, that for the few months she lived, she was so miserable that Old Chester could not help being patient, and forgiving her her half-sullen indifference, and her silence, and her distaste for life—even in Old Chester!
For in spite of Robert’s adoration, in spite of all the ready friendliness about her, in spite of the birth of a baby girl, she seemed, as it were, to turn her face to the wall. She died when the child was about a week old. Died, the doctor said, only because, so far as he could see, she did not care to live.
“You ought to try to get better for the baby’s sake,” said Miss Rebecca Jones, who had come in to help nurse her. And the poor girl frowned and shook her head, the heavy, white lids falling over her dark eyes.
“I don’t like it.”
And Rebecca (who had too much good sense to be shocked by the vagaries of a sick woman) said, decidedly: “Oh, you’ll learn to like her. Come, now, just try!”
But she did not seem to try; even though Robert, kneeling with his arm under her pillow, holding her languid hand to his lips, said, sobbing, “Oh, Alys, Alys—for God’s sake—don’t leave me—”
Then she opened her beautiful eyes and looked at him solemnly. “Robert,” she said, “I am sorry. I am—sorry. I—am—”
“What for, precious?” he entreated; “sorry for what? to leave me? Oh, Alys, then live, live, dear!”
“I—am—” she began; and then her voice trailed into eternity.
Miss Rebecca Jones hung about the house for a few days, to make the poor gentleman comfortable; then he was left alone with the child (purchased at so dreadful a cost) and one servant, and his daily work of teaching the polite languages at the Female Academy. Miss Rebecca’s hard face softened whenever she thought of him; but all she could do for him was to go often to see the poor seven-months baby—which seemed for a time inclined to follow its mother.
Now it must be understood at once that Rebecca Jones was not a schemer, or a mean or vulgar woman. She was merely a hard-headed, honest-hearted product of years of public-school teaching, with a passion for truth and no grace in telling it. She was sorry for Mr. Gray, and sorry for the poor baby, who was being allowed, she said to herself, to grow up every which way; and sorry for the comfortless house left to the care of what she called “an uneducated servant-girl.” So, after school, and on Saturday mornings, she used to go over to Mr. Gray’s house and bustle about to the bettering of several things. Indeed, old Mr. Jones told her more than once that he didn’t know what that there widower would do without her. And Rebecca said, truthfully enough, that she didn’t know, either. And when she said it her heart warmed with something more than pity.
As for Robert Gray, dazed and absent, trying to do his duty at the Academy during the day, and coming home at night to look blankly at his child, he, too, did not know what he would have done that first year without Miss Rebecca’s efficient kindness. He was so centred in his grief, and also of so gentle a nature, that he took the kindness as simply as a child might have done. Like many another sweet-minded man, he had not the dimmest idea of the possible effect of his rather courtly manner and his very delicate courtesy upon a woman of slightly different class, whose life had been starved of everything romantic or beautiful. He became to sharp-tongued Miss Rebecca Jones a vision of romance; and, somehow, quite suddenly, about eighteen months after his wife’s death, he discovered that he was going to marry her. In his startled astonishment, he realized that he had himself led up to her avowal of willingness by some talk about her kindness. Perhaps she had misunderstood his words; if she had, Robert Gray was not the man to offer an explanation…. However, after the first shock of being accepted, he was gently explicit:
“I realize that the child ought to have the care of a good woman, and therefore I—”
“I’ll do my duty by her,” Rebecca said.
“I want her brought up to love and reverence her mother. I want her brought up to be like her. It is for the child’s sake that I—I marry again. I speak thus frankly, Miss Rebecca, because I so entirely respect you that I could not be anything but frank.”
Rebecca’s square face flushed over the high cheek-bones to the gaunt forehead and the sparse hair; then her eyes looked passionately into his. “I understand. Yes; I understand. And I will be good to your child, Mr. Gray.”
And so he married her; and, when you come to think of it, it was a very sensible thing to do. Even Old Chester said he was very sensible. A man of thirty, with a baby—of course he ought to marry again! “But why on earth,” said Old Chester, “when there are so many girls of his own class!—not but what Rebecca Jones is a very worthy person.”
Meanwhile, Rebecca, with hard conscientiousness, set herself to bring the child up. She trained her, and disciplined her, and made a painful point of talking to her about the first Mrs. Gray, according to her promise to teach her to “love and reverence her mother.” The discipline sometimes made Robert Gray wince; but it was wise, and never unkind; so he never interfered;—but he left the room when it was going on. Once he said, nervously:
“I scarcely think, Mrs. Gray, that it is necessary to be quite so severe?”
“She must be made a good child,” Rebecca answered.
“I am not afraid that she will not be a good child,” Robert Gray said; “she is her mother’s daughter.”
“Well, she is her father’s daughter, too,” Rebecca declared, briefly. And her husband, shrinking, said:
“Light is stronger than darkness; Alice’s mother was a creature of light. I am not afraid of her inheritance of darkness.”
As for Rebecca, she went away and shut herself up in the garret. “’Creature of light!’” she said, sitting on the floor under the rafters, and leaning her head on an old horsehair-covered trunk wherein were packed away Mr. Gray’s winter flannels—”well, I am a good wife to him, if I ain’t a ‘creature of light.’”
Yes, she was a good wife…. How carefully she put his flannels away in May; how prudently she planned his food; how she managed to make the two ends of his little income meet—yes, and lap over, so that every summer he could go away from her for a two months’ vacation in the woods! Not once did he find a button lacking; not once had he put on a clean pair of stockings and then pulled them off because of a hole in the heel. Can our lords say as much, my mistresses? I trow not! Yes, a good wife: that lovely being who left the world with a faint, unfinished regret upon her pitiful lips could never have made him so comfortable.
Indeed, the whole household revolved upon Robert’s comfort. Every domestic arrangement had reference to his well-being. That he did not become intolerably selfish was not Rebecca’s fault, for, like many good wives, she was absolutely without conscience in the matter of self-sacrifice; but Robert escaped spiritual corruption, thanks to his own very gentle nature and his absolute unconsciousness of the situation. Perhaps, too, Rebecca’s tongue mitigated the spoiling process. She never spared him what she considered to be the truth about himself or Alice. But her truthfulness stopped here; she spared the dead, perforce. For what could she say ill of that beautiful creature whose only wrong-doing lay in dying? But she knew, with shame, that she would have liked to speak ill of her—in which reprehensible impulse to remove a fellow-being from a pedestal, Rebecca showed herself singularly like the rest of us.
In this bleak air of unselfishness and truth-telling, Robert Gray became more and more aloof. Gradually he retreated quite into his past, doing his daily work at the Academy—where successive classes of young ladies adored him for his gentle manners and his mild, brown eyes—and living very harmlessly with his memories, which he kept fresh and fragrant by sharing them with Alys’s daughter, who, it must be admitted, being young and human, was not always intensely interested; but Rebecca had trained her too well for Alice ever to show any weariness. Robert kept his little collection of pictures and photographs of his first wife shut behind the curtained doors of an old secretary. If his second wife found him standing, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes wandering from one lovely presentment to another, he never displayed an embarrassed consciousness, but he shut the doors. He accepted Rebecca’s devotion respectfully; he was never impolite, still less unkind; in fact, in all their married life he had never, she used to tell herself, spoken unkindly save once; and then his words were nothing more dreadful than, “We will not discuss it, if you please, Mrs. Gray.” At first he had, very gently, made some grammatical suggestions; and she had profited by them, though, being a true Pennsylvanian, she never mastered “shall” and “will,” nor did she lose the Pennsylvania love for the word ‘just’; to the end of her days, Rebecca was ‘just tired out’; or ‘just real glad’; or ‘just as busy as could be.’ Grammar, however, was as far as Robert Gray went in any personal relation. He addressed her, in his courteous voice (always a little timidly), as “Mrs. Gray”; and he kept as much as possible out of her way. Meantime, Rebecca (remembering why he had married her) did her duty by the child, and never failed to mention, in her hard voice, that Alice must try to grow up like her mother.
“Make me a good girl,” Alice used to say in her sleepy prayers every night—”make me a good girl, like my dear mother.” Once, of her own accord, the child added, “And make me pretty like her, too.” Rebecca, listening to the little figure at her knee, said, sternly, when Alice got up and began to climb into the big four-poster:
“Don’t be vain. Don’t ask God for foolish things. Beauty is foolish and favor is deceitful. Just ask Him to make you as good as your mother was.”
And, indeed, it must be admitted that the child did not inherit her mother’s wonderful beauty. At first her father had expected it; he used to take liberties with his Horace, and say:
“O filia pulchra matre pulchriore.”
But as Alice grew older, Robert Gray had to admit that the dead woman had taken her beauty away with her. The child had just a pleasant face; eyes that were gray or blue, as it happened; a commonplace nose, and uncompromisingly red hair. In those days red hair was thought to be a mortifying affliction, and poor, plain Alice shed many tears over the rough, handsome shock of hair that broke into curls about her forehead and all around the nape of her pretty, white neck.
II
But in spite of red hair, and what Old Chester religiously believed to be its accompanying temper, Alice Gray was a lovable girl, and at twenty, behold, she had a lover; indeed, she had more than one (not counting Dr. Lavendar); but Alice never gave a thought to anybody but Luther Metcalf. Luther was a good boy, Old Chester said; but added that he would never set the river on fire.
Certainly he did not use his incendiary opportunity; he had a small printing-office, and he owned and edited Old Chester’s weekly newspaper, the Globe; but neither the news nor the editorial page ever startled or displeased the oldest or the youngest inhabitant. The Globe confined itself to carefully accredited cuttings from exchanges; it had a Poet’s Corner, and it gave, politely, any Old Chester news that could be found; besides this, it devoted the inner sheet to discreet advertisements, widely spaced to take up room. All Old Chester subscribed for it, and spoke of it respectfully, because it was a newspaper; and snubbed its editor, because he was one of its own boys—and without snubbing boys are so apt to put on airs! Poor Luther was never tempted to put on airs; he was too hard-worked and too anxious about his prospects. He and Alice were to get married when he and the Globe were out of debt; for his father had left him a mortgage on the office building, as well as an unpaid-for press. When Luther was particularly low-spirited, he used to tell Alice it would take him five years to pay his debts; and, to tell the truth, that was an optimistic estimate, for the Globe and the printing-office together did very little more than pay the interest on the notes and Luther’s board.
So, when they became engaged, waiting was what they looked forward to, for, of course, Robert Gray could not help them; it was all Rebecca could do to stretch his salary to cover the expenses of their own household. But the two young people were happy enough, except when Luther talked about five years of waiting.
“We’ve been engaged two years already,” he said, moodily; “I don’t want to be another case of Andrew Steele.”
“I’m not afraid,” Alice said. “Why, if you get the new job press, and get that Mercer work, think how much that will help!”
“Well,” Luther said, “yes; but if I get the press, there’s another debt. And if I don’t get it, I can’t get the work; so there it is. A vicious circle.”
This question of the purchase of a new press, before the old press had been paid for, was a very serious and anxious one. “I wish father could help,” Alice said—they were walking home from Wednesday-evening lecture, loitering in the moonlight, and wishing the way were twice as long.
“Oh, I wouldn’t think of such a thing,” the young man declared; “we’ll pull out somehow. He’s gone off to the woods, hasn’t he?”
“Yes, he went this morning; he’s so pleased to get away! He won’t be back till the Academy opens.”
“I suppose he hates to leave you, though,” Lute said.
“Yes, but I can see that the getting away is a great relief. I keep his pictures dusted, and take the flowers up to the cemetery for him; so he knows things are not neglected.”
“But,” Luther said, thoughtfully, “I think she’s sorry to have him go?”
“Oh yes; sorry, I suppose,” Alice admitted. “She’s fond of him—in her way.”
“Then why—” Luther began.
“My dear, she’s jealous of my mother.”
“Oh, Alice!”
“Well, you know,” Alice explained, “my mother was so beautiful—and poor Mrs. Gray! But I must say, Lute, she’s the justest person I know. She’s always told me that my mother was perfect. And of course she was; but when you’re jealous, it isn’t so easy to acknowledge things like that.”
“But I don’t see how you can be jealous of the dead,” Luther ruminated.
“Oh, I do! I could be jealous of some girl who was dead, if you’d loved her, Lute.” And then the boy put his arm round her, and they kissed each other there in the shadows of the locust-trees overhanging a garden wall. “I’m so glad there isn’t anybody, dead or alive,” Alice said, happily; “though I’d rather have her alive than dead. If she were alive, you’d have quarrelled with her, and stopped loving her. But if she were dead, she would keep on being perfect. Yes; I’d rather marry a man who had been—been divorced,” said Alice, lowering her voice, because the word was hardly considered proper in Old Chester, “than a man whose wife was dead, because he would always be thinking what an angel she was and what a sinner I was.”
“He would think you were an angel,” the boy told her, blushing at his own fervency.
But the fervency died on his ardent young lips when they got into the house and sat decorously in the parlor with Mrs. Gray. Rebecca was sewing, her hard, square face a little harder than usual. Mr. Gray had gone away on that annual fishing-trip—gone, with a look of relief growing in his eyes even as he stepped into the stage and pulled the door to behind him; pulled it hurriedly, as though he feared she would follow. Then, baring his head politely, he had looked out of the window and said:
“Good-bye. You will send for me should you, by any chance, need me. I trust you will be very well.”
“I don’t know that I have ever had to interrupt your fishing-trip with any of my needs,” Rebecca had answered, briefly. She spoke only the truth; she never had interfered with any pleasure of his; and yet Robert Gray had winced, as if he had not liked her words. Now, alone, in the parlor, darning his stockings, she wondered why. She never said anything but the simple truth; but he looked at her sometimes as a dog looks who expects a blow. He was truthful himself, but he never seemed to care much to hear the truth, she thought, heavily. Once he told her that truth was something more than a statement of fact. The statement of a fact may be a lie, he had said, smiling whimsically; and Rebecca used to wonder how a fact could be a lie? She recalled the time when, with brief accuracy, she had mentioned to him in what condition of ragged neglect she had found his wardrobe after the “creature of light” had left him; and how he had seemed to shrink not from the shiftless dead, but from her. And she remembered painfully that one unkindness: She had told him that, to her mind, not even the weakness of death was quite an excuse for saying you didn’t like your own baby; and he had said, with a terrible look, “We will not discuss it, if you please, Mrs. Gray.” She had never spoken of it again; but his look had burned into her poor, narrow, sore mind; she thought of it now, moodily, as she sat alone, her heart following him on his journey. If his first wife had only not been so perfect, she said to herself, she could have borne it better; if she had had a bad temper, even, it would have been something. But she had often heard Robert tell Alice that her mother had an “angelic temper.” Rebecca wished humbly she herself could be pleasanter. “I don’t feel unpleasant inside; but I seem to talk so,” she thought, helplessly. She was thinking of this when the two young people came in; and looking up over her spectacles, she said, coldly:
“Did you remember to wipe your feet, Luther? You are careless about that. Alice, I found a flower on my daphne; you can carry the pot up to the cemetery when you go.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Alice said. She took up her sewing (for Rebecca would not have idle hands about); sometimes she glanced at Luther, sitting primly in the corner of the sofa, and once caught his eye and smiled; but there were no sheep’s-eyes or sweet speeches. They were Old Chester young people, and such things would have been considered improper; just as sitting by themselves would have been thought not only indecorous, but selfish.
“Oh, Alice,” Luther said, suddenly, “I meant to ask you; wasn’t your mother’s name spelled ‘Alys’?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Well, it’s such an unusual name that it struck my attention when I saw it in the paper.”
“What about it?” Alice asked. “Oh, dear, why didn’t father spell me ‘Alys’ instead of ‘Alice’? It’s so much prettier!”
“Prettiness isn’t everything; and ‘Alice’ is a sensible name,” Rebecca said. “Don’t criticise your father.”
“It was an advertisement in one of the Globe’s exchanges,” Luther explained. “I was scissoring things, and the name caught my eye. It was information wanted. Of course it’s just a coincidence, but it’s queer, because—here it is,” said the editor of the Globe, fumbling in his pocket. “I cut it out and meant to show it to you, but I forgot.” Then he read, slowly, “Information wanted of one Alys Winton—”
“Why, but Winton was my mother’s name!” cried Alice.
“—one Alys Winton, who married sometime in 1845; husband thought to be an American, name unknown. She (or a child of hers, born in 1846) is requested to communicate with Amos Hughes, Attorney at Law,” etc.
Alice stared, open-mouthed. “Why, Lute!” she said—”why, but that must be my mother!”
Lute shook his head. “I don’t think there’s anything in it. Do you, Mrs. Gray?”
“Might be,” she said, briefly.
Alice took the crumpled cutting, and holding it under the lamp, read it through to herself. “But, Lute, really and truly,” she said, “it is queer. Perhaps some of my mother’s rich relations have left her a fortune! Then we could pay off the mortgage. Only I’m afraid my mother hadn’t any rich relations—or poor ones, either. I never heard of any. Did you, Mrs. Gray?”
“No,” Rebecca said.
“She was a governess, you know, Lute, in some horrid English family; the wife didn’t like her, and she discharged my poor little mother; then the family went off and left her all alone in Germany. Perfectly abominable!”
“Don’t be unjust, Alice; you don’t know anything about it,” Mrs. Gray said. “She was very young. Perhaps she couldn’t teach the children to suit their parents. Though it was unkind to leave her unprovided for,” she added, with painful fairness.
“I guess it was!” cried Alice. “Oh, how angry father gets when he talks about it! He says she was in such terror, poor little thing, when he met her. And yet she was very forgiving, father says. He says she wrote and told the gentleman that she was married. I wouldn’t have. I’d have let him think I’d starved, so he would have suffered remorse—the wretch!”
“I hope you would not have been so foolish or so selfish,” her step-mother said.
“You see, she had no relations to turn to,” Alice explained to Luther; “if father hadn’t come, dear knows what would have become of her.”
“I suppose she could have earned an honest living, like anybody else,” Mrs. Gray said.
“Well, anyway,” Alice said, thoughtfully, “this advertisement is queer. She had no relations that father ever heard of; but there might be some one. What do you think, Mrs. Gray?”
“There might be,” Rebecca said. She thought to herself that it was very probable; that first wife had brought Robert Gray beauty and love; it only needed that she should bring him money to make it all perfect. In her bleak mind a window of imagination suddenly opened, and she had a vision of what wealth would mean to her husband, coming as a gift from those dead hands. She set her lips, and said: “Better find out about it, Luther. Write to the man and say that a person of that name before her marriage, died here in Old Chester, leaving a child—and don’t keep your hands in your pockets; it’s bad manners.”
“Do you really think it is worth while, ma’am?” Luther said, incredulously.
“Of course it is,” said Alice. “Suppose it should be some inheritance? Such things do happen.”
“In story-books,” Lute said.
“Well, then I’d like to be in a story-book,” Alice said, sighing. “Just think, Lute, we might pay for the press and pay off the mortgage!”
“Golly!” said Lute.
Then they fell to making all sorts of plans, gayly, each tripping the other up with the prosaic reminder of improbability.
“Or, if it should be anything,” Luther said, “it won’t be more than $100.”
“Well, that’s something; it will meet two monthly payments on the press.”
“It will pay for a diamond-ring for you,” Lute said.
“Nonsense! We’ll buy father a horse.”
“And who will buy the oats?” Rebecca said.
“I could give you a big oleander, Mrs. Gray,” Alice told her, smiling.
“You could put the money in the bank, like a sensible girl,” Rebecca said, severely. “Don’t speak of this outside, either of you. Mr. Gray wouldn’t wish his wife’s name talked about.”
“And don’t let’s write anything about it to him,” Alice said; “let’s have it a surprise!—if there is anything in it; only, of course, there isn’t anything,” she ended, sighing. “But you might write to the man, Lute.”
“Of course there isn’t anything,” Lute agreed, sensibly. “I’ll write if you want me to; but I wouldn’t build on it, Ally,” he said, as he got up to go. And when he paused a minute in the darkness on the porch, he added, softly, “If you get rich, maybe you won’t want a poor printer?”
And she laughed, and said, “Maybe I won’t!”
Then he kissed her just under her left ear, and said, “Money isn’t everything, Ally.”
III
Money isn’t everything, but it has so much to do with most things that even a dim, story-book vision of it stirred Alice’s imagination. Luther, having no imagination, dismissed the vision from his mind after writing a letter to “Amos Hughes, Attorney at Law.” Indeed, Luther had more practical things to think of than possible legacies, poor fellow. His balance-sheet for that month of June was very dark. More than once, after the office was closed for the day, he sat at his desk in his shirt-sleeves, hot and tired and grimy, poring over his ledger by the light of a swinging lamp. Alice grew worried about his pallor and the hollows in his cheeks; but there was nothing she could do, though she chafed against her helplessness to help, and revolved all sorts of schemes in her impractical girl-mind. Indeed, she went so far as to pour out her heart to Dr. Lavendar, in the hope that he could make some suggestion. She found the old man sitting in the wistaria arbor near his beehives, smoking peacefully, and throwing sticks to Danny, who needed exercise and scrambled after them into the tall grass, bringing them back with fatiguing alacrity.
“Look here, sir,” said Dr. Lavendar, “don’t find ‘em so quick. I’m worn out pitching them.”
Then Alice Gray came down between the box borders and said she wanted his advice; and Dr. Lavendar, glancing up at her, saw an uncertain lip and heard a catch in her voice; whereupon he told her to give Danny a run. “The scoundrel has kept me working for the last half-hour,” he complained.
When she came back, flushed and laughing, and sat down on the arbor step, her voice was quite steady; so he listened placidly to her story.
“You want to get some work to help Lute, do you, good-for-nothing?”
“Yes,” Alice said, eagerly. “Oh, Dr. Lavendar, can you think of anything? I wanted to go into the office and learn to set type, but Mrs. Gray—”
“Well?”
“Mrs. Gray said I had better learn to keep house economically. She said father wouldn’t like it.”
“Mrs. Gray would always think first of what your father would like.”
Alice scratched lines in the gravel with one of Danny’s sticks. “I suppose she would,” she admitted.
“And what did Lute say?”
“Oh, he wouldn’t listen to it. But I thought maybe you could make him, Dr. Lavendar?”
“I?” said Dr. Lavendar. “No, thank you. Do you think I’d rob the boy?”
“Rob him?”
“Of his self-respect; a boy wants to stand on his own legs; he doesn’t want a girl propping him up. You let Lute alone. He’ll manage. And you’re young yet, anyhow. It won’t hurt ye to wait. Mrs. Gray is right. You learn to be as good a housekeeper as she is; and though you mayn’t put money into Lute’s pocket before you’re married, you’ll not be taking it out after you’re married.”
Alice sighed. “Oh, I wish I could help Lute; I wish I had a lot of money.”
“A lot of sense is better,” Dr. Lavendar said, chuckling. “Oh, you women! You steal a man’s unselfishness and self-respect, and you put it down to love. Love? You’re a pack of thieves, the lot of you. You ought to be prosecuted. I’d do it, if I had time. Hey, Danny! bite her; she’s like all the rest of ‘em.”
Alice hugged him, and defended herself. “You’re just an old bachelor; you don’t appreciate us.”
“Appreciate ye? I appreciate you. Maybe that’s why I’m an old bachelor.”
But though he discouraged Alice’s projects for assisting Luther, Dr. Lavendar went plodding up the printing-office stairs the next morning. Luther, emerging from behind a press, brightened at the sight of his caller, and ushered him into a small closet which he called his private office; and when Dr. Lavendar asked him to print some more missionary-meeting notices, he said he would put them in at cost price.
“Don’t you do it!” said Dr. Lavendar, thumping the floor with his umbrella. “Look here; I’ll have to teach you the first principles of business: make your profit—and don’t go to ‘pauperizing the Church,’ sir. There’s too much of that sort of thing,” he added, with reminiscent crossness. “Some scalawag of a bookseller wrote and offered to sell me books at thirty-three per cent. discount because I was a parson. There’s no more reason why a parson should get a discount than a policeman. I told him so. I tell you so. Print those slips, and print ‘em better than you did the last lot! Do you hear that? You forgot a comma on the second line. How’s business, Lute?”
Lute’s face fell. Then they talked things over, to the boy’s great comfort; and at the end of the talk Lute straightened his shoulders and drew a good breath.
“By George! sir, if hanging on does it, I’ll hang on—” he stopped, and looked round, in answer to a knock. “Well?” he said, impatiently. But the gentleman who stood in the doorway was not rebuffed.
“Are you Mr. Metcalf, the editor of the Globe?”
“Yes, sir,” said Luther.
“I called in relation to an advertisement”—Luther was instantly alert, and Dr. Lavendar, scenting a customer, was about to withdraw—”an advertisement in a New York paper, requesting information of a certain person—”
“What!” cried Luther. “I had forgotten all about it.”
“My name is Carter. I am from the office of Mr. Amos Hughes. Messrs. Pritchett, Carver, and Pritchett, Solicitors at Law, of London, are our principals. The advertisement was in relation to a person called Alys Winton.”
Luther, stumbling in his astonishment over his words, began to explain. “Mrs. Gray is dead,” he ended. “And Alice is her daughter; isn’t she, Dr. Lavendar? She asked me to write to you.”
“Well, well; this is very interesting,” said Dr. Lavendar. “I hope your object in seeking to obtain information is to benefit this young lady? She’s one of my children.”
Mr. Carter, still standing in the doorway, smiled, and said, “Do I understand that this Miss Alice is the daughter of the person named Alys Winton?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Lavendar. “You can easily satisfy yourself on that point by consulting my parish records.”
“And her mother is the lady you advertised for!” cried Luther. The boy was red with excitement. It was just as Alice said—a story-book. And they could get married right away! For it would be a lot of money—perhaps $5000; people in England didn’t advertise for information of a person dead for twenty-two years for any small amount; well, even if it were $4000, they could get married; even if it were $3000. “How m—” he began, and stopped; of course that was not a proper question. “Alice’s mother is the lady you advertised about,” he said, lamely.
“Well, that does not follow, young gentleman; but the coincidence of the name was of sufficient interest for our firm to feel that I might, perhaps, just look into it. There may be dozens of Alys Wintons, you know.”
“Oh,” said Luther, so blankly that Dr. Lavendar laughed.
“Perhaps before beginning at the beginning you might save time by looking at the end,” he said to the lawyer. “If you will step over to my church, you will see that our little Alice here is the daughter of Mr. Robert Gray and a lady named Alys Winton.”
“A very good idea, sir. You, I infer, are a clergyman in this place? Ah, yes; just so. Lavendar? Ah, yes. I shall be pleased to look at the records, as you suggest, sir.”
Luther, rather abashed, longing to accompany them, stood waiting for an invitation. But none came. Dr. Lavendar went pounding down the stairs, followed by Mr. Carter, and Lute heard them talking about the roughness of the road from Mercer over which Mr. Carter had come on the morning stage.
“Confound the road!” said Lute to himself. “Hi! Davidson! I’m going out. The first page is all made up; you can close up the fourth.” Then he dashed down the creaking stairs and out into the hot sunshine. He had a glimpse up the street of the church, and Dr. Lavendar bending down fumbling with the key of the vestry door; it was evident that Luther’s presence was not considered necessary. “I don’t care,” the boy said to himself, joyously, and started at a swinging pace out over the hill. “I’ll be the one to tell her, anyhow!” His face was all aglow. As he hurried along he made calculations as to the rent of the little house. To be sure, he was reckoning on Alice’s money; but the boy was so honest, and so in love, that he had no mean self-consciousness of that kind. “We can get married!” He had no room for any other thought.
Mrs. Gray was sitting on the back porch shelling pease; there was a grape trellis running out from the porch roof, and under it the shadows lay cool and pleasant on the damp flagstones. Rebecca, absorbed in the lulling snap of pods, looked up, frowning, at the noisy interruption, for the young man burst in, breathless, swinging his cap, his eyes shining.
“Oh, Mrs. Gray, where’s Alice? Oh, my, such news! I never was so excited in my life!”
“That is not saying much,” Rebecca told him; “you’ve not had a very exciting life. Alice is in the dining-room. Alice! come out here. Here’s Luther. He says he never was so excited in his life; and I hope he won’t be again, for he has upset my bucket of pods.”
Luther, full of apologies, began to pick them up. “I’m so sorry, but I was so dreadfully excited—”
“Dreadful is a large word,” Rebecca said. “I doubt whether either you or I have ever seen anything ‘dreadful’ in our lives. Don’t exaggerate, Luther.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lute said. “Oh, there’s Alice! Alice!” He stood up, his hands full of pods, his face red. “Oh, Alice, what do you suppose has happened? You’ll never guess!”
“The advertisement man!” cried Alice. Luther’s face fell a little, and he laughed.
“Well, you’re pretty smart. Yes, it is—”
“What?” said Rebecca Gray. As for Alice, she whirled out on the cool flags and jumped up and down.
“Oh, Lute, tell us—tell us! What does he say? Has he sent some money? Oh, how much is it? Oh, Lute, we’ll pay for the press. Lute, is it—is it $1000? Tell us; hurry, hurry!”
Upon which Lute began to subside. “Well, it isn’t quite—I mean, he didn’t—he hasn’t said just exactly how much. I mean, of course, I suppose, it isn’t certain; but I’m sure there isn’t a particle of doubt; only—”
“Now, Lute, begin at the beginning and tell us.” Alice sat down breathlessly beside her step-mother, and began mechanically to shell the pease.
“Don’t,” Rebecca said; “I will do my own work. You’d better get your table-cloth and finish that darning.” Her face had grown quite pale; she saw the fabric of her life crumbling at the base; if, through that first wife, money should come into the family, what use for her patient economies? What use for her existence? That first wife, yet more perfect, would crowd her further from her husband’s life. In her heart, used to the long, dull ache of unloved years, rose up a murderous hatred of the dead woman. At first she hardly heard Luther’s story, but as it went on she began to listen and the pain in her tightened throat of unshed tears lessened. It might not be. As this Mr. Carter said, there might be dozens of Alys Wintons. Her hands, motionless after the first shock, went at their work again.
“You’re the daughter of a lady of that name,” she said, coldly; “but she may not be the lady they want. Better not count on it.” Alice looked rather blank for a moment; and then she burst into even more than Luther’s confidence.
“Do you suppose it will be $2000? Oh, Lute, just think, we’ll pay for the new press right down!”
“No, we won’t, either,” Lute said, stoutly. “I’m not going to let you spend your money on printing-presses.”
“Nonsense!” Alice cried, laughing and stamping her foot.
Rebecca frowned and looked at her over her glasses. “Don’t be unlady-like, Alice.”
“No, ‘m,” Alice said; and then she laughed at her own excitement; “it may be only $100.”
“It may be nothing at all,” Rebecca Gray said, and got up and took her pan and bucket and went into the house. It seemed to her that if she had to hear any more of Alys Winton she would speak out and say some dreadful thing about her. But what could she say with any kind of truth? What could she say ill of that poor creature, so beloved and so harmless? For, after all, though a woman ought to see that a man’s buttons are sewed on, you can’t say that mere shiftlessness is a sin. Besides, she was sick for those few months. “Perhaps if my health hadn’t been good, I would have been careless myself,” Rebecca thought, with painful justice. But she went up-stairs to her own room and locked the door. She felt sure that it was as Alice and Luther said: there would be money, and she would be of still less consequence to her husband; for what did Robert Gray, nervously polite, really care for her economies and her good housekeeping?
“Not that!” she said to herself, bitterly.
IV
“You will stay and have dinner with me,” Dr. Lavendar had told the lawyer, hospitably, “and then Goliath and I will take you up the hill to Mr. Gray’s house.”
And so, in the early afternoon, Goliath brought Mr. Carter to the Grays’ door. Alice, who was on the porch, insisted that Dr. Lavendar should come in, too; she leaned into the buggy to whisper, joyously, “If it is anything nice, I want you to hear it.”
But for once Dr. Lavendar did not laugh and give her a kiss and call her his good-for-nothing; he got out silently, and followed Mr. Carter into the parlor, where Luther and Mrs. Gray were awaiting them. There was a tense feeling of expectation in the air. The two young people were together on the sofa, smiling and laughing, with small, whispered jokes of presses and diamond-rings and mortgages. Rebecca sat by the table, her worn hands in a trembling grip in her lap; she sat very upright, and was briefer and curter than ever, and she looked most of the time at the floor.
“You have been informed of my errand, madam?” said Mr. Carter. “It is unfortunate that Mr. Gray is not at home, but perhaps you may be able to give us some information on certain points, which will at least instruct me as to whether the facts in the case warrant further reference to him for confirmation. I will ask a few questions, if you please?”
“Go on,” Rebecca said.
“The late Mrs. Gray, the mother of this young lady,” said Mr. Carter—”do you happen to know her nationality?”
“English.”
“Ah, yes. Just so. And do you know the date of her marriage to Mr. Gray?”
Rebecca gave it.
“If any facts in regard to her occur to you—” the lawyer began.
“I’ve heard Mr. Gray say that she was a governess in the family of a Mr. Urquhart,” Rebecca said; and added, “They discharged her in Berlin.”
Mr. Carter, glancing at a memorandum, his face keen with interest, said, eagerly, “Pray proceed, madam.”
“I don’t know much more; Mr. Gray met her in Interlaken. They were married three weeks afterwards.”
“Ah, Switzerland? That explains; there was no record of a marriage at the Embassy. Can you tell me anything of the parentage of the lady?”
“Her father’s name was George Winton,” Alice broke in, “and they lived in a place called Medfield. He was a clergyman. Her mother’s name was Alys, too. Father has a prayer-book belonging to my grandmother; it has her name in it, and my mother’s. Would you like to see it, sir?”,
“Exceedingly,” Mr. Carter said; and while Alice ran to get the book, he studied his memorandum so closely that no one dared to ask him a question, if, indeed, any one wanted to. Rebecca had answered him dully, looking out of the window part of the time, part of the time at the floor. Dr. Lavendar, on the other side of the room, his hands on the head of his cane, sat silently staring down at the carpet, his face heavy and rather stern. Lute, radiant, twirled his cap in his hands, and resolutely held his tongue.
Alice, as she handed the prayer-book to Mr. Carter, stopped on her way back to Luther and squeezed Dr. Lavendar’s hand. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she whispered; and he shook his head a little impatiently.
“Go and sit down, my dear,” he said.
Mr. Carter, glancing at the name on the flyleaf, looked at his notes again and then at Alice, “And this young lady—can she give me the date of her birth?”
There was a little laugh, and Luther and Alice gave it together, eagerly.
There were two or three more questions, and then Mr. Carter folded his memorandum and slipped it within its rubber band with a snap; then he smiled. Rebecca looked at him drearily. “Of course,” he said, addressing himself to her, “a question of identity cannot be decided offhand; it is necessary to have certain affidavits which the surviving husband of the deceased (who is asserted to be the person in question) would be obliged, legally, to furnish. I think, however, that I am not going beyond the line of discretion and propriety if I say that if Mr. Robert Gray can produce such proofs (which I think I am not unwarranted in saying I believe he can)—if he can, then this young lady is the heir to a very considerable fortune. I think, in point of fact, I have the right to say that, if (as I have said before) these proofs are forthcoming, the amount to be paid to the daughter of Alys Winton is £5000.”
Rebecca Gray put her hand to her mouth and stared blindly at the floor. Dr. Lavendar thrust out his lower lip and frowned. As for Alice, she laughed aloud, then burst out crying.
“Oh, Lute!” she said, tremulously; and, somehow, the two children found themselves holding hands. “It’s—it’s so much!” she faltered.
“Five thousand pounds is—is $25,000!” the boy said, turning pale. There was a pause; no one seemed to know just what to say. Then Lute, suddenly: “Is it your mother’s father that left it to you, Alice?”
She turned to Mr. Carter, drawing in her breath like a child. “Is it?”
“Ah—no,” he answered, briefly.
“But I didn’t know my mother had any relations?” Alice said, in a dazed way; “I thought father said—I’m sure he said—she hadn’t any relations? Perhaps—perhaps it is a mistake, after all?”
“The testator was not a relative of the Alys Winton in question,” Mr. Carter said. He glanced uneasily at Dr. Lavendar, who lifted his head and looked at him searchingly. “It will be best to make further explanations to Mr. Gray,” Mr. Carter said, hurriedly.
“But who has left the money to me—if it is to me?” Alice said, bewildered. “Can’t I ask that? What is the name of the kind person? I think I might ask that.”
“The name of the testator was Urquhart,” Mr. Carter said, “but—but, you know, my dear young lady, the identity is not yet legally authenticated; so—therefore—perhaps—I think, Dr. Lavendar, I had best go now? I think you mentioned that the stage leaves at four?”
“Urquhart?” Alice said; “the man who was so unkind? Oh, Lute, I suppose he repented. Oh, how astonished father will be! He’ll have to forgive him now.”
“It’s a pretty late repentance,” Luther said, with a chuckle; “and how did he know about you, Alice? I don’t see why he should leave you money, even if he was a brute to your mother. Still,” said the boy, gayly, “I guess we won’t complain?”
“Gracious!” cried Alice, “that is queer. Well, he was a kind person!”
Rebecca Gray stared, frowning, at the lawyer. “He knew—this Urquhart—that she had a child?” she said, slowly.
Mr. Carter was gathering up his papers. “Yes,” he said—”yes; he—knew it.”
“What?” said Rebecca, in a very low voice—”what?”
“In view of the fact that, legally, the matter is still undecided,” Mr. Carter said, hurriedly, “perhaps we need not take this point up? At all events, not here.”
“Sir,” said Rebecca, “why does Mr. Urquhart leave £5000 to Robert Gray’s daughter?”
“He was sorry he was unkind to my mother,” Alice said, her voice quivering. (“Oh, Lute, $25,000!”)
“Alice,” her step-mother said, in a loud, harsh voice, “you had better leave the room. Luther, go with Alice, please.”
The two young people, bewildered, got up with blank faces, and with obvious reluctance obeyed. “But why should I be sent out, Lute?” Alice said, hotly, when they were in the hall. “It’s my money—if I’m the person.”
Luther stopped, and stood, frowning. On the boy’s open, honest face came a perplexed look. But Alice said again, in injured tones, that she didn’t know what Mrs. Gray meant. In the parlor the three elders looked at each other in silence. Mrs. Gray had risen, and stood leaning forward, her trembling hands flat on the table.
“I don’t—understand,” she said.
“Mr. Carter,” said Dr. Lavendar, “certain remarks of yours on our way up here made me apprehensive. I see that my friend, Mrs. Gray, is also—apprehensive. I would suggest that you have a few words with her alone. I will leave you.”
“No,” Rebecca said; “hear the end of it.” Her hard face was red and hot. “Why does Mr. Urquhart leave the child of Robert Gray £5000? Why?”
“It is as I think you surmise, madam,” John Carter said, gravely.
Rebecca recoiled, with a broken exclamation of horror.
Dr. Lavendar drew in his breath. “Oh, my poor Robert!” he said.
“It is so stated in the will,” the lawyer went on; “there is no disguising it; nor, as far as I can see, can it be hidden from the legatee. The directions for finding this heir make the thing explicit. The testator states that he received information of the expected birth of his child after the marriage of the person in question, who did not mention her married name—hence our difficulty in tracing her.”
Rebecca, her eyes narrowing into a cruel smile, sat down and rocked backward and forward in her chair.
“Dreadful—dreadful—dreadful!” she said, aloud, exultantly.
V.
The last quarter of an hour, packed with tragic revelation, lost Mr. Carter the stage.
“I hope you will put up at the Rectory, sir,” Dr. Lavendar said, as they drove away from Robert Gray’s door.
“I thank you, sir,” said Mr. Carter.
Then they fell into silence—Mr. Carter from politeness, Dr. Lavendar from horror. He was going back in his memory with painful effort; but it was all very vague…. He had hardly known her; she had been ill for those months that she had been in Old Chester, and she had made it very clear that she did not care to see people. He thought of her beautiful, sullen face; of Robert Gray’s passionate devotion; of Old Chester’s silent disapproval…. He groaned to himself, and John Carter looked at him sidewise.
After supper at the Rectory, they sat down to smoke in heavy silence; Mr. Carter respected the old man’s distress, but wondered if he should not have been more comfortable with Van Horn at the Tavern. The glowing July day had darkened into rainy night, with a grumble of thunder back among the hills; but in the midst of a sudden downpour they heard footsteps on the path, and then some one pushed open the hall door, and flapped a wet umbrella on the steps before entering. A minute later Luther Metcalf stood, hesitating, on the study threshold.
“Dr. Lavendar—”
The old man got up hurriedly. “Yes, Lute. Come into the dining-room. You will excuse me, sir?” he said to Mr. Carter. He put his hand on Lute’s arm, in a friendly grip, for there was a break in the boy’s voice.
“I know about it,” Lute said. They sat down at the dining-room table; Lute swallowed hard, and pulled with trembling fingers at his hatband; he did not lift his eyes. “And—and I want you to tell her not to take it.”
“How is she, Lute?”
“I haven’t seen her. She wouldn’t come down-stairs. She sent me a little note,” Luther said, taking it out of his breast-pocket, and then putting it back again tenderly. “’Course I won’t pay any attention to it.”
“Saying she’d release you, I suppose?”
“Yes; but that’s nothing. I’ll make her understand the minute I see her. But, Dr. Lavendar, I don’t want that—that money!” the boy ended, almost with a sob. “I want you to tell her not to take it.”
Dr. Lavendar was silent.
“At first I thought—I couldn’t help thinking—we could get married right off. We could get married and have a home of our own; you know, we’d be rich people with all that money. And I suppose, honestly, that as things are now, there’s no chance of our getting married for a good while. But I—I tell you what, sir. I’d rather never get married than—than touch that money!”
Dr. Lavendar nodded.
“You won’t let her, sir? You’ll make her give it back?”
“My dear boy, I can’t ‘make’ Alice do anything. The money is hers.”
“Oh, but Dr. Lavendar, won’t you go and talk to her? It may be a temptation to her, just as it was to me, for a minute. We could just make the office hum, sir. We could put it right on its feet; we could have a real Daily. I know she’ll think of that. I just thought we could get married. But Alice will think about helping the office, and me.”
“Of course the money would bring ease to her father—” Dr. Lavendar stopped abruptly.
“Oh, my God!” Lute said, and dropped his head on his arms.
“Bring ease to—to the family,” Dr. Lavendar ended lamely.
“You know Mr. Gray won’t touch it,” Lute burst out; “and I can’t let Alice, either. Dr. Lavendar, I thought maybe you’d let me hitch Goliath up and drive you out to the house?”
“Not to-night, Lute. Alice has got to be alone. Poor child, poor child! Yes; we’ve all of us got to meet the devil alone. Temptation is a lonely business, Lute. To-morrow I’ll go, of course. Did you answer her note?”
“Oh yes; right off. I just said, ‘Don’t be foolish,’ and—and some other things. I didn’t tell her we mustn’t take the money, because I hadn’t thought of it then. Mrs. Gray said she wouldn’t come out of her room. Oh, just think of her, all by herself!” Luther bent over and fumbled with his shoelace; when he looked up, Dr. Lavendar pretended not to see his eyes.
When the boy went away, Dr. Lavendar went back to the study and asked John Carter some legal questions: Suppose he had not found this child, what would have become of the money? Suppose the child should now decline to take it, what then?
“Well,” said Mr. Carter, smiling, “as a remote contingency, I suppose I might reply that it would revert to the residuary estate. But did you ever know anybody decline £5000, Dr. Lavendar?”
“Never knew anybody who had the chance,” Dr. Lavendar said; “but there’s no telling what human critters will do.”
“They won’t do that,” said John Carter.
What a long night it was, of rain and wind and dreadful thought! … Rebecca had told Alice, with kindness, but with such a grip upon herself lest exultation should tremble in her voice, that she seemed harsher than ever. Then she told Lute. He pleaded that Alice would speak to him, and Mrs. Gray had gone to the girl’s room and bidden her come down-stairs.
“Come, Alice. You must control yourself. Come down and talk to Luther.”
Alice shook her head. “I’ll—write him a note.”
Mrs. Gray carried the note back to Lute, and brought up the answer, which Alice read silently. Rebecca watched her; and then, with an effort, she said:
“Alice, remember we are not to judge. We don’t understand. We must not judge. Good-night.” She opened the door, and then looked at the child, seated, speechless, with blank eyes, on the edge of the bed. “Good-night, Alice. I—I’m sorry for you, poor girl!” and she came back hastily and kissed her.
At that, even in her daze of horror, a glimmer of astonishment came into Alice’s face. But she did not look up or speak. When it grew dark, she began mechanically to get ready for bed; she knelt down, as usual, at the big chintz-covered winged chair and began to say her prayers, her mind blind as to her own words: “Bless dear father—” Then she cried out, suddenly and dreadfully, and covered her poor, shamed head with her arms, and prayed no more. Then came a long fit of crying, and then a dreary calm. Afterwards, as the night shut in with rain and rumble of thunder, the shame lightened a little, for, though she could not read it in the darkness, she held Lute’s little note against her lips and kissed it, and cried over it, and said his words over to herself, and felt that at any rate there was one bright spot in it all: Lute would never have any more anxieties. Of Robert Gray she thought pitifully, but with not much understanding. Oh, dreadful, dreadful! But he had loved his wife so much (so the child thought) he would surely forgive her. Not knowing how little forgiveness counts for when a star goes out. Sometimes, sitting there on the floor, listening to the rain, she slept; then woke, with a numb wonder, which darkened into cruel understanding. Shame; shame—but Lute wouldn’t be worried any more; Lute would be rich.
So the night passed….
Rebecca Gray did not sleep. When the house was still she went up-stairs, eager to be alone. She shut her bedroom door softly; then she put her brass candlestick on the high bureau and looked about her…. Everything seemed strange. Here was her old-fashioned bed with its four mahogany posts like four slender obelisks; there was the fine darn in the valance of the tester; the worn strip of carpet on which she had knelt every night for all these twenty years; it was all the same, but it was all different, all unfamiliar. The room was suddenly the room where that woman had died; the old four-poster was the bed of that heartbreaking night, with sheets rumpling under a wandering hand and pillows piled beneath a beautiful, dying head; not her own bed, smooth and decorous and neat, with her own fine darn in the tester valance. She did not know the room as it was now; she did not know herself; nor Robert; nor that—that—that woman. She sat down, suddenly a little faint with the effort of readjusting a belief of twenty-two years. “She was a wicked woman,” she said, out loud; and her astounded face stared back at her from the dim mirror over the mantel-piece. After a while she got up and began to walk back and forth; sometimes she drew a deep breath; once she laughed. “A wicked woman!” … Now he would know. Now he would see. And he would loathe her. He would hate her. He would—her lip drooped suddenly from its fierce, unconscious smile; he would—suffer. Yes; suffer, of course. But that couldn’t be helped. Just at first he would suffer. Then he would hate her so much that he would not suffer. Not suffer? It came over her with a pang that there is no suffering so dreadful as that which comes with hating. However, she could not help that. Truth was truth! All the years of her hungry wifehood rose up, eager for revenge; her mind went hurriedly, with ecstasy, over the contrast; her painful, patient, conscientious endeavor to do her best for him. Her self-sacrifice, her actual deprivations—”I haven’t had a new bonnet for—for four years!” she thought; and her lip quivered at the pitifulness of so slight a thing. But it was the whole tenor of her life. She had no vacations in the mountains; she would have liked new valances, but she spent hours in darning her old ones to save his money; she had turned her black silk twice; she had only had two black silks in twenty years. All the great things she had done, all the petty things she had suffered, rose up in a great wave of merit before her; and against it—what? Hideous deceit! Oh, how he would despise the creature! Then she winced; he would—suffer? Well, she couldn’t help that. It was the truth, and he had got to face it. She was walking up and down, whispering to herself, a sobbing laugh on her lips, when suddenly, as she passed the mirror, she had a dim, crazy vision of herself that struck her motionless. A moment later she took the candle, and with one hand clutching for support at the high mantel-shelf—for her knees were shaking under her—held it close to the glass and peered into the black depths. Her pale, quivering face, ravaged with tears, stared back at her, like some poor ghost more ugly even than in life. “A wicked woman.” Yes—yes—yes; and he would have to know it. But when he knew it, what then? If his eyes opened to sin, would they open to—
“I have tried to make him comfortable,” she said, faintly.
Suddenly she put the candle down and sank into a chair, covering her face with her poor, gaunt hands….
And so the night passed…. The dawn was dim and rainy. It was about four o’clock that Alice, sitting on the floor, sleeping heavily, her head on the cushion of the chair, started, bewildered, at the noise of the opening door. Rebecca, in her gray dressing-gown, one hand shielding the flare of her candle, came abruptly into the room.
“Alice,” she said, harshly, and stopped by the empty bed; then her eyes found the figure on the floor (“you ought to be in bed”), she said, in a brief aside; then: “Alice, I’ve been thinking it over. You can’t take that money.”
“I don’t understand,” Alice said, confused with sleep and tears.
“You can’t take that money. If you do, your father would have to know. And he never must—he never must.”
Alice pulled herself up from the floor and sat down in her big chair. “Not take the money?” she said, in a dazed way; “but it’s mine.”
“That’s why you needn’t take it. Thank God it was left to you, not just to ‘her heirs.’ Alice, I’ve gone all over it. I—I wanted you to take it”—Rebecca’s voice broke; “yes, I—did.”
“Well, it’s mine,” Alice repeated, bewildered.
Rebecca struck her hands together. “Yours not to take! Don’t you see? You can save your father.”
Alice, cringing, dropped her head on her breast with a broken word.
“Don’t be a fool,” the older woman said, trembling. “He’s been your father ever since you were born. And it would be a pretty return for his love to tell him—”
Alice burst out crying; her step-mother softened.
“I am sorry for you, you poor girl. But, oh, Alice, think, think of your father!” She clasped her hands and stood, trembling; she took a step forward, almost as if she would kneel.
“If he would feel so dreadfully,” Alice said, at last, “why—we needn’t tell him where the money comes from.”
“Now, Alice, that is absurd. Of course he would know. He would have to know. A girl doesn’t inherit £5000 without her father’s knowing where it comes from. And, anyway, Mr. Carter said that Mr. Gray would have to make a statement and swear to it. Of course he would—know.”
“Do you mean you don’t want me to have it at all?” Alice said, blankly.
“I’ve just explained it to you,” Rebecca said, her voice harsh with anxiety. “You can’t have it.”
“But it’s my money; I have a right to it. And it would make all the difference in the world to Lute. If he is going to take a girl—like me, he ought to have the money, anyhow.”
“And kill your father?” Rebecca said. “Alice! Don’t you see, he must go on believing that she is”—her voice grew suddenly tender—”that she is ‘a creature of light?’”
“I want Lute to have the money,” Alice said.
“Alice!” the other exclaimed, with dismay, “don’t you think of your father at all? And—for your mother’s sake.”
Alice was silent; then, in a hard voice, “I don’t like her.”
“Oh!” Rebecca cried, and shivered. There was a pause; then she said, faintly, “For your own sake?”
Alice looked up sullenly. “Nobody need know; we would only say it had been left to—her. Nobody would know.”
Suddenly, as she spoke, despite the plain face and the red hair, Alice looked like her mother. Rebecca stepped back with a sort of shock. Alice, crying a little, got up and began to pull down her hair and braid it, with unsteady fingers. Her step-mother watched her silently; then she turned to go away; then came back swiftly, the tears running down her face.
“Oh, Alice, it is my fault! I’ve had you twenty-two years, and yet you are like— See, Alice, child; give her a chance to be kind to him, in you. Oh, I—I don’t know how to say it; I mean, let her have a chance! Oh—don’t you see what I mean? She said she was sorry!” All the harshness had melted out of Rebecca’s face; she was nothing but gentleness, the tears falling down her cheeks, her voice broken with love. “Alice, be good, dear. Be good. Be good. And I—I will be pleasanter, Alice; I’ll try, indeed; I’ll try—”
VI
“Well,” said Mr. Amos Hughes, a week later, in the cool dusk of Dr. Lavendar’s study, just before tea, “this is a most extraordinary situation, sir!”
“Will ye have a pipe?” said Dr. Lavendar, hospitably.
John Carter, his feet well apart, his back to the fireless grate, his hands thrust down into his pockets, said, looking over at his partner:
“Amos, Dr. Lavendar once remarked to me that there was no telling what human critters would do.”
Dr. Lavendar chuckled.
“Very true,” Amos Hughes admitted, putting one fat knee over the other; “but I must say that I never before knew a human critter throw away £5000.”
“I’m sorry you haven’t had better acquaintances,” said Dr. Lavendar. “I have. I’m not in the least surprised at this child’s behavior. Mr. Carter, are you looking for anything? You’ll find a decanter on the sideboard in the next room, sir. This is a pretty good world, Mr. Amos Hughes; I’ve lived in it longer than you have, so you’ll take my word for it. It’s a pretty good old world, and Miss Alice Gray has simply decided to do the natural and proper thing. Why, what else could she do?”
“I could mention at least one other thing,” said Mr. Carter.
“Extraordinary situation! but I suppose the residuary legatees won’t make any objection,” murmured Amos Hughes.
Dr. Lavendar rapped on the table with the bowl of his pipe. “My dear sir, would you have a girl, for a paltry £5000, break her father’s heart?”
“Her father?”
“Mr. Gray would not, in my judgment, survive such a revelation,” said Dr. Lavendar, stiffly.
“May I ask one question?” John Carter said.
“G’on,” said Dr. Lavendar.
“What I would like to know is: How did you bring Miss Gray to look at the thing in this way?”
“I didn’t bring her,” said Dr. Lavendar, indignantly; “her Heavenly Father brought her. Look here, sir; this business of the law is all very well, and necessary, I suppose, in its way, but let me tell you, it’s a dangerous business. You see so much of the sin of human nature that you get to thinking human nature has got to sin. You are mistaken, sir; it has got to be decent. We are the children of God, sir. I beg that you’ll remember that—and then you won’t be surprised when a child like our Alice does the right thing. Surprise is confession, Mr. Carter.”
Mr. Carter laughed, and apologized as best he could for his view of human nature; and Dr. Lavendar was instantly amicable and forgiving. He took Mr. Amos Hughes’s warning, that he should, as a matter of duty, lay very clearly before the young lady the seriousness of what she proposed to do, and not until he had exhausted every argument would he permit her to sign the papers of release which (as a matter of precaution) he had prepared. “She’s of age,” said Amos Hughes, “and nobody can say that she has not a right to refuse to proceed further in the matter. But I shall warn her.”
“’Course, man,” said Dr. Lavendar; “that’s your trade.”
And so the evening came, and the three men went up to Robert Gray’s house.
It was a long evening. More than once Dr. Lavendar trembled as he saw the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them spread before his child’s eyes. But he said no word, and once, sternly, he laid his hand on Rebecca’s arm to check some word of hers.
“Let her alone,” he said.
It was eleven o’clock before there came a moment of solemn silence. Alice bent over a paper, which John Carter had read aloud to her, and signed her name. Luther and Rebecca and Dr. Lavendar witnessed the signature. Then Rebecca Gray took the girl in her arms.
“That young man has got something to him,” Mr. Amos Hughes said, as they went back to the Rectory.
“If you could put some printing in his way, it would be a favor to me,” said Dr. Lavendar.
“I shouldn’t wonder if I could,” the lawyer said.
“The girl is a fine creature, poor child,” said Mr. Carter.
“Gentlemen,” said Dr. Lavendar, “they are both good children, and they have behaved well; but there’s somebody else, let me tell you!”
However, he did not tell them. Perhaps he kept his opinion for Robert Gray’s ears, for once he said, smiling, in Rebecca’s presence:
“Robert, this wife of yours is a noble woman.”
Mr. Gray, a little surprised, said, politely, looking with kind eyes at Rebecca, “Mrs. Gray is a very good wife, sir.”
And Rebecca went up and hid herself in the garret and cried with joy.
