"No, of course not. But what I mean is, do you think _now_ that I did right to marry him?"
"Oh, _you"re_ all right, Marcia. I"m glad you"re getting along so well."
"No, no! Is Bartley all right?"
The Squire laughed again, and rubbed his chin in enjoyment of her persistence. "You can"t expect me to own up to everything all at once."
"So you see, Bartley," said Marcia, in repeating these words to him, "it was quite a concession."
"Well, I don"t know about the concession, but I guess there"s no doubt about the check," replied Bartley.
"Oh, don"t say that, dear!" protested his wife. "I think father was pleased with his visit every way. I know he"s been anxious about me, all the time; and yet it was a good deal for him to do, after what he had said, to come down here and as much as take it all back. Can"t you look at it from his side?"
"Oh, I dare say it was a dose," Bartley admitted. The money had set several things in a better light. "If all the people that have abused me would take it back as handsomely as your father has,"--he held the check up,--"why, I wish there were twice as many of them."
She laughed for pleasure in his joke. "I think father was impressed by everything about us,--beginning with baby," she said, proudly.
"Well, he kept his impressions to himself."
"Oh, that"s nothing but his way. He never was demonstrative,--like me."
"No, he has his emotions under control,--not to say under lock and key,--not to add, in irons."
Bartley went on to give some instances of the Squire"s fort.i.tude when apparently tempted to express pleasure or interest in his Boston experiences.
They both undeniably felt freer now that he was gone. Bartley stayed longer than he ought from his work, in tacit celebration of the Squire"s departure, and they were very merry together; but when he left her, Marcia called for her baby, and, gathering it close to her heart, sighed over it, "Poor father! poor father!"
XXIII.
When the spring opened, Bartley pushed Flavia about the sunny pavements in a baby carriage, while Marcia paced alongside, looking in under the calash top from time to time, arranging the bright afghan, and twitching the little one"s lace hood into place. They never noticed that other perambulators were pushed by Irish nurse-girls or French _bonnes_; they had paid somewhat more than they ought for theirs, and they were proud of it merely as a piece of property. It was rather Bartley"s ideal, as it is that of most young American fathers, to go out with his wife and baby in that way; he liked to have his friends see him; and he went out every afternoon he could spare. When he could not go, Marcia went alone. Mrs. Halleck had given her a key to the garden, and on pleasant mornings she always found some of the family there, when she pushed the perambulator up the path, to let the baby sleep in the warmth and silence of the sheltered place. She chatted with Olive or the elder sisters, while Mrs. Halleck drove Cyrus on to the work of tying up the vines and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the shrubs, with the pitiless rigor of women when they get a man about some outdoor labor.
Sometimes, Ben Halleck was briefly of the party; and one morning when Marcia opened the gate, she found him there alone with Cyrus, who was busy at some belated tasks of horticulture. The young man turned at the unlocking of the gate, and saw Marcia lifting the front wheels of the perambulator to get it over the steps of the pavement outside. He limped hastily down the walk to help her, but she had the carriage in the path before he could reach, her, and he had nothing to do but to walk back at its side, as she propelled it towards the house. "You see what a useless creature a cripple is," he said.
Marcia did not seem to have heard him. "Is your mother at home?" she asked.
"I think she is," said Halleck. "Cyrus, go in and tell mother that Mrs.
Hubbard is here, won"t you?"
Cyrus went, after a moment of self-respectful delay, and Marcia sat down on a bench under a pear-tree beside the walk. Its narrow young leaves and blossoms sprinkled her with shade shot with vivid sunshine, and in her light dress she looked like a bright, fresh figure from some painter"s study of spring. She breathed quickly from her exertion, and her cheeks had a rich, dewy bloom. She had pulled the perambulator round so that she might see her baby while she waited, and she looked at the baby now, and not at Halleck, as she said, "It is quite hot in the sun to-day." She had a way of closing her lips, after speaking, in that sweet smile of hers, and then of glancing sidelong at the person to whom she spoke.
"I suppose it is," said Halleck, who remained on foot. "But I haven"t been out yet. I gave myself a day off from the Law School, and I hadn"t quite decided what to do with it."
Marcia leaned forward, and brushed a tendril of the baby"s hair out of its eye. "She"s the greatest little sleeper that ever was when she gets into her carriage," she half mused, leaning back with her hands folded in her lap, and setting her head on one side for the effect of the baby without the stray ringlet. "She"s getting so fat!" she said, proudly.
Halleck smiled. "Do you find it makes a difference in pushing her carriage, from day to day?"
Marcia took his question in earnest, as she must take anything but the most obvious pleasantry concerning her baby. "The carriage runs very easily; we picked out the lightest one we could, and I never have any trouble with it, except getting up curbstones and crossing Cambridge Street. I don"t like to cross Cambridge Street, there are always so many horse-cars. But it"s all down-hill coming here: that"s one good thing."
"That makes it a very bad thing going home, though," said Halleck.
"Oh, I go round by Charles Street, and come up the hill from the other side; it isn"t so steep there."
There was no more to be said upon this point, and in the lapse of their talk Halleck broke off some boughs of the blooming pear, and dropped them on the baby"s afghan.
"Your mother won"t like your spoiling her pear-tree," said Marcia, seriously.
"She will when she knows that I did it for Miss Hubbard."
"Miss Hubbard!" repeated the young mother, and she laughed in fond derision. "How funny to hear you saying that! I thought you hated babies!"
Halleck looked at her with strong self-disgust, and he dropped the bough which he had in his hand upon the ground. There is something in a young man"s ideal of women, at once pa.s.sionate and ascetic, so fine that any words are too gross for it. The event which intensified the interest of his mother and sisters in Marcia had abashed Halleck; when she came so proudly to show her baby to them all, it seemed to him like a mockery of his pity for her captivity to the love that profaned her. He went out of the room in angry impatience, which he could hardly hide, when one of his sisters tried to make him take the baby. Little by little his compa.s.sion adjusted itself to the new conditions; it accepted the child as an element of her misery in the future, when she must realize the hideous deformity of her marriage.
His prophetic feeling of this, and of her inaccessibility to human help here and hereafter, made him sometimes afraid of her; but all the more severely he exacted of his ideal of her that she should not fall beneath the tragic dignity of her fate through any levity of her own. Now, at her innocent laugh, a subtile irreverence, which he was not able to exorcise, infused itself into his sense of her.
He stood looking at her, after he dropped the pear-bough, and seeing her mere beauty as he had never seen it before. The bees hummed in the blossoms, which gave out a dull, sweet smell; the sunshine had the luxurious, enervating warmth of spring. He started suddenly from his reverie: Marcia had said something. "I beg your pardon?" he queried.
"Oh, nothing. I asked if you knew where I went to church yesterday?"
Halleck flushed, ashamed of the wrong his thoughts, or rather his emotions, had done. "No, I don"t," he answered.
"I was at your church."
"I ought to have been there myself," he returned, gravely, "and then I should have known."
She took his self-reproach literally. "You couldn"t have seen me. I was sitting pretty far back, and I went out before any of your family saw me.
Don"t you go there?"
"Not always, I"m sorry to say. Or, rather, I"m sorry not to be sorry. What church do you generally go to?"
"Oh, I don"t know. Sometimes to one, and sometimes to another. Bartley used to report the sermons, and we went round to all the churches then. That is the way I did at home, and it came natural to me. But I don"t like it very well. I want Flavia should belong to some particular church."
"There are enough to choose from," said Halleck, with pensive sarcasm.
"Yes, that"s the difficulty. But I shall make up my mind to one of them, and then I shall always keep to it. What I mean is that I should like to find out where most of the good people belong, and then have her be with them," pursued Marcia. "I think it"s best to belong to some church, don"t you?"
There was something so bare, so spiritually poverty-stricken, in these confessions and questions, that Halleck found nothing to say to them.
He was troubled, moreover, as to what the truth was in his own mind. He answered, with a sort of mechanical adhesion to the teachings of his youth, "I should be a recreant not to think so. But I"m not sure that I know what you mean by belonging to some church," he added. "I suppose you would want to believe in the creed of the church, whichever it was."
"I don"t know that I should be particular," said Marcia, with perfect honesty.
Halleck laughed sadly. "I"m afraid _they_ would, then, unless you joined the Broad Church."
"What is that?" He explained as well as he could. At the end she repeated, as if she had not followed him very closely: "I should like her to belong to the church where most of the good people went. I think that would be the right one, if you could only find which it is." Halleck laughed again. "I suppose what I say must sound very queer to you; but I"ve been thinking a good deal about this lately."
"I beg your pardon," said Halleck. "I had no reason to laugh, either on your account or my own. It"s a serious subject." She did not reply, and he asked, as if she had left the subject, "Do you intend to pa.s.s the summer in Boston?"