"Whatever can she do with all that green stuff?" she thought. "She"s carried in enough to trim the "Piscopal church twice over."
At last she shared her perplexity with Marty.
"Marty," said she one day, "have you ever seen Mrs. Philbrick come into the house without somethin" green in her hands? What do you suppose she"s goin" to do with it all?"
"Lord knows," answered Marty. "I"ve been a speckkerlatin" about that very thing myself. They can"t be a brewin" beer this time o" year; but I see her yesterday with her hands full o" pyroly."
"I wish you would make an errand in there, Marty," said Mrs. White, "and see if you can any way find out what it"s all for. She"s carried in pretty near a grove of pine-trees, I should say."
The willing Marty went, and returned with a most surprising tale. Every room was wreathed with green vines. There were evergreen trees in boxes; the window-seats were filled with pots of green things growing; waving ma.s.ses of ferns hung down from brackets on the walls.
"I jest stood like a dumb critter the minnit I got in," said Marty. "I didn"t know whether I wuz in the house or out in the woods, the whole place smelled o" hemlock so, an" looked so kind o" sunny and shady all ter oncet.--I jest wished Steve could see it. He"d go wild," added the unconsciously injudicious Marty.
Mrs. White"s face darkened instantly.
"It must be very unwholesome to have rooms made so dark and damp," she said. "I should think people might have more sense."
"Oh, it wa"n"t dark a mite!" interrupted Marty, eagerly. "There wuz a blazin" fire on the hearth in the settin"-room, an" the sun a-streamin"
into both the south winders. It made shadders on the floor, jest as it does in the woods. I"d jest ha" liked to set down there a spell, and not do nothin" but watch "em."
At this moment, a low knock at the door interrupted the conversation.
Marty opened the door, and there stood Mercy herself, holding in her hands some wreaths of laurel and pine, and a large earthen dish with ferns growing in it. It was the day before Christmas; and Mercy had been busy all day, putting up the Christmas decorations in her rooms. As she hung cross after cross, and wreath after wreath, she thought of the poor, lonely, and peevish old woman she had seen there weeks before, and wondered if she would have any Christmas evergreens to brighten her room.
"I don"t suppose a man would ever think of such things," thought Mercy.
"I"ve a great mind to carry her in some. I"ll never muster courage to go in there, unless I go to carry her something; and I may as well do it first as last. Perhaps she doesn"t care any thing about things from the woods; but I think they may do her good without her knowing it. Besides, I promised to go." It was now ten days since Stephen, meeting Mercy in the town one day, had stopped, and said to her, in a half-sad tone which had touched her,--
"Do you really never mean to come again to see my mother? I do a.s.sure you it would be a great kindness."
His tone conveyed a great deal,--his tone and his eyes. They said as plainly as words could have said,--
"I know that my mother treated you abominably, I know she is very disagreeable; but, after all, she is helpless and alone, and if you could only once get her to like you, and would come and see her now and then, it would be a kindness to her, and a great help to me; and I do yearn to know you better; and I never can, unless you will begin the acquaintance by being on good terms with my mother."
All this Stephen"s voice and eyes had said to Mercy"s eyes and heart, while his lips, p.r.o.nounced the few commonplace words which were addressed to her ear. All this Mercy was revolving in her thoughts, as she deftly and with almost a magic touch laid the soft mosses in the earthen dish, and planted them thick with ferns and hepatica and partridge-berry vines and wintergreen. But all she was conscious of saying to herself was, "Mr.
White asked me to go; and it really is not civil not to do it, and I may as well have it over with."
When Mrs. White"s eyes first fell on Mercy in the doorway, they rested on her with the same cold gaze which had so repelled her on their first interview. But no sooner did she see the dish of mosses than her face lighted up, and exclaiming, "Oh, where did you get those partridge-berry vines?" she involuntarily stretched out her hands. The ice was broken.
Mercy felt at home at once, and at once conceived a true sentiment of pity for Mrs. White, which never wholly died out of her heart. Kneeling on the floor by her bed, she said eagerly,--
"I am so glad you like them, Mrs. White. Let me hold them down low, where you can look at them."
Some subtle spell must have linked itself in Mrs. White"s brain with the dainty red partridge berries. Her eyes filled with tears, as she lifted the vines gently in her fingers, and looked at them. Mercy watched her with great surprise; but with the quick instinct of a poet"s temperament she thought, "She hasn"t seen them very likely since she was a little girl."
"Did you use to like them when you were a child, Mrs. White?" she asked.
"I used to pick them when I was young," replied Mrs. White, dreamily,--"when I was young: not when I was a child, though. May I have one of them to keep?" she asked presently, still holding an end of one of the vines in her fingers.
"Oh, I brought them in for you, for Christmas," exclaimed Mercy. "They are all for you."
Mrs. White was genuinely astonished. No one had ever done this kind of thing for her before. Stephen always gave her on her birthday and on Christmas a dutiful and somewhat appropriate gift, though very sorely he was often puzzled to select a thing which should not jar either on his own taste or his mother"s sense of utility. But a gift of this kind, a simple little tribute to her supposed womanly love of the beautiful, a thoughtful arrangement to give her something pleasant to look upon for a time, no one had ever before made. It gave her an emotion of real grat.i.tude, such as she had seldom felt.
"You are very kind, indeed,--very," she said with emphasis, and in a gentler tone than Mercy had before heard from her lips. "I shall have a great deal of comfort out of it."
Then Mercy set the dish on a small table, and hung up the wreaths in the windows. As she moved about the room lightly, now and then speaking in her gay, light-hearted voice, Mrs. White thought to herself,--
"Steve was right. She is a wonderful cheery body." And, long after Mercy had gone, she continued to think happily of the pleasant incident of the fresh bright face and the sweet voice. For the time being, her jealous distrust of the possible effect of these upon her son slumbered.
When Stephen entered his mother"s room that night, his heart gave a sudden bound at the sight of the green wreaths and the dish of ferns. He saw them on fhe first instant after opening the door; he knew in the same instant that the hands of Mercy Philbrick must have placed them there; but, also, in that same brief instant came to him an involuntary impulse to pretend that he did not observe them; to wait till his mother should have spoken of them first, that he might know whether she were pleased or not by the gift. So infinitely small are the first beginnings of the course of deceit into which tyranny always drives its victim. It could not be called a deceit, the simple forbearing to speak of a new object which one observed in a room. No; but the motive made it a sure seed of a deceit: for when Mrs. White said, "Why, Stephen, you haven"t noticed the greens! Look in the windows!" his exclamation of apparent surprise, "Why, how lovely!
Where did they come from?" was a lie. It did not seem so, however, to Stephen. It seemed to him simply a politic suppression of a truth, to save his mother"s feelings, to avoid a possibility of a war of words. Mercy Philbrick, under the same circ.u.mstances, would have replied,--
"Oh, yes, I saw them as soon as I came in. I was waiting for you to tell me about them," and even then would have been tortured by her conscience, because she did not say why she was waiting.
While his mother was telling him of Mercy"s call, and of the report Marty had brought back of the decorations of the rooms, Stephen stood with his face bent over the ferns, apparently absorbed in studying each leaf minutely; then he walked to the windows and examined the wreaths. He felt himself so suddenly gladdened by these tokens of Mercy"s presence, and by his mother"s evident change of feeling towards her, that he feared his face would betray too much pleasure; he feared to speak, lest his voice should do the same thing. He was forced to make a great effort to speak in a judiciously indifferent tone, as he said,--
"Indeed, they are very pretty. I never saw mosses so beautifully arranged; and it was so thoughtful of her to bring them in for you for Christmas Eve. I wish we had something to send in to them, don"t you?"
"Well, I"ve been thinking," said his mother, "that we might ask them to come in and take dinner with us to-morrow. Marty"s made some capital mince-pies, and is going to roast a turkey. I don"t believe they"ll be goin" to have any thing better, do you, Stephen?"
Stephen walked very suddenly to the fire, and made a feint of rearranging it, that he might turn his face entirely away from his mother"s sight. He was almost dumb with astonishment. A certain fear mingled with it. What meant this sudden change? Did it portend good or evil? It seemed too sudden, too inexplicable, to be genuine. Stephen had yet to learn the magic power which Mercy Philbrick had to compel the liking even of people who did not choose to like her.
"Why, yes, mother," he said, "that would be very nice. It is a long time since we had anybody to Christmas dinner."
"Well, suppose you run in after tea and ask them," replied Mrs. White, in the friendliest of tones.
"Yes, I"ll go," answered Stephen, feeling as if he were a man talking in a dream. "I have been meaning to go in ever since they came."
After tea, Stephen sat counting the minutes till he should go. To all appearances, he was buried in his newspaper, occasionally reading a paragraph aloud to his mother. He thought it better that she should remind him of his intention to go; that the call should be purely at her suggestion. The patience and silence with which he sat waiting for her to remember and speak of it were the very essence of deceit again,--twice in this one hour an acted lie, of which his dulled conscience took no note or heed. Fine and impalpable as the meshes of the spider"s-web are the bands and bonds of a habit of concealment; swift-growing, too, and in ever-widening circles, like the same glittering net woven for death.
At last Mrs. White said, "Steve, I think it"s getting near nine o"clock.
You"d better go in next door before it"s any later."
Stephen pulled out his watch. By his own sensations, he would have said that it must be midnight.
"Yes, it is half-past eight. I suppose I had better go now," he said, and bade his mother good-night.
He went out into the night with a sense of ecstasy of relief and joy. He was bewildered at himself. How this strong sentiment towards Mercy Philbrick had taken possession of him he could not tell. He walked up and down in the snowy path in front of the house for some minutes, questioning himself, sounding with a delicious dread the depths of this strange sea in which he suddenly found himself drifting. He went back to the day when Harley Allen"s letter first told him of the two women who might become his tenants. He felt then a presentiment that a new element was to be introduced into his life; a vague, prophetic sense of some change at hand.
Then came the first interview, and his sudden disappointment, which he now blushed to recollect. It seemed to him as if some magician must have laid a spell upon his eyes, that he did not see even in that darkness how lovely a face Mercy had, did not feel even through all the embarra.s.sment and strangeness the fascination of her personal presence. Then he dwelt lingeringly on the picture, which had never faded from his brain, of his next sight of her, as she sat on the old stone wall, with the gay maple-leaves and blackberry-vines in her lap. From that day to the present, he had seen her only a half dozen times, and only for a chance greeting as they had pa.s.sed each other in the street; but it seemed to him that she had never been really absent from him, so conscious was he of her all the time. So absorbed was he in these thoughts that a half-hour was gone before he realized it, and the village bells were ringing for nine o"
clock when he knocked on the door of the wing.
Mrs. Carr had rolled up her knitting, and was just on the point of going upstairs. Their little maid of all work had already gone to bed, when Stephen"s loud knock startled them all.
"Gracious alive! Mercy, what"s that?" exclaimed Mrs. Carr, all sorts of formless terrors springing upon her at once. Mercy herself was astonished, and ran hastily to open the door. When she saw Stephen standing there, her astonishment was increased, and she looked it so undisguisedly that he said,--
"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Philbrick. I know it is late, but my mother sent me in with a message." ...
"Pray come in, Mr. White," interrupted Mercy. "It is not really late, only we keep such absurdly early hours, and are so quiet, as we know n.o.body here, that a knock at the door in the evening makes us all jump. Pray come in," and she threw open the door into the sitting-room, where the lamps had already been put out, and the light of a blazing hickory log made long flickering shadows on the crimson carpet. In this dancing light, the room looked still more like a grove than it had to Marty at high noon.
Stephen"s eyes fastened hungrily on the sight.
"Your room is almost too much to resist," he said; "but I will not come in now. I did not know it was so late. My mother wishes to know if you and your mother will not come in and eat a Christmas dinner with us to-morrow.