It is beautiful to see how the sweetness and helplessness of the little thing have so appealed to the girls that prejudices are forgotten. When I brought Thomasine home I feared that I might have trouble. They scorned the child of that Brownrig girl, and they both showed the fierce contempt which good girls of their cla.s.s feel for one who disgraces herself. All this is utterly forgotten. The charm of baby has so enslaved them that if an outsider ventured to show the feelings they themselves had at first, they would be full of wrath and indignation.
The maternal instinct is after all the strongest thing in most women.
Rosa considers her matrimonial chances in a bargain-and-sale fashion which takes my breath, but she will be perfectly fierce in her fondness for her children. Hannah is a born old maid, but she cannot help mothering every baby who comes within her reach, and for Thomasine she brings out all the sweetness of her nature.
May 15. I have been through a whirlwind, but now I am calm, and can think of things quietly. It is late, but the fire has not burned down, and I could not sleep, so Peter and I may as well stay where we are a while longer.
I was reading this afternoon, when suddenly Kathie rushed into the room out of breath with running, her face smooched and wet with tears, and her hair in confusion.
"Why, Kathie," I asked, "what is the matter?"
Her answer was to fly across the room, throw herself on her knees beside me, and burst into sobs. The more I tried to soothe her, the more she cried, and it was a long time before she was quiet enough to be at all reasonable.
"My dear," I said, "tell me what has happened. What is the matter?"
She looked up at me with wild eyes.
"It isn"t true!" she broke out fiercely. "I know it isn"t true! I didn"t say a word to him, because I knew you wouldn"t want me to; but it"s a lie! It"s a lie, if my father did say it."
"Why, Kathie," I said, amazed at her excitement, "what in the world are you saying? Your father wouldn"t tell a lie to save his life."
"He believes it," she answered, dropping her voice. A sullen, stubborn look came into her face that it was pitiful to see. "He does believe it, but it"s a lie."
I spoke to her as sternly as I could, and told her she had no right to judge of what her father believed, and that I would not have her talk so of him.
"But I asked him about your mother, and he said she would be punished forever and ever for not being a church member!" she exclaimed before I could stop her. "And I know it"s a lie."
She burst into another tempest of sobs, and cried until she was exhausted. Her words were so cruel that for a moment I had not even the power to try to comfort her; but she would soon have been in hysterics, and for a time I had to think only of her. Fortunately baby woke. Rosa was not at home, and by the time Hannah and I had fed Thomasine, and once more she was asleep in her cradle, I had my wits about me. Kathie had, with a child"s quick change of mood, become almost gay.
"Kathie," I said, "do you mind staying here with baby while I take a little walk? Rosa is out, and I have been in the house all day. I want a breath of fresh air."
"Oh, I should love to," she answered, her face brightening at the thought of being trusted with a responsibility so great.
I was out of doors, and walking rapidly toward Mr. Thurston"s house, before I really came to my senses. I was so wounded by what Kathie had thoughtlessly repeated, so indignant at this outrage to my dead, that I had had strength only to hide my feelings from her. Now I came to a realization of my anger, and asked myself what I meant to do. I had instinctively started out to denounce Mr. Thurston for bigotry and cruelty; to protest against this sacrilege. A little, I feel sure,--at least I hope I am right,--I felt the harm he was doing Kathie; but most I was outraged and angry that he had dared to speak so of Mother. I was ashamed of my rage when I grew more composed; and I realized all at once how Mother herself would have smiled at me. So clear was my sense of her that it was almost as if she really repeated what she once said to me: "My dear Ruth, do you suppose that what Mr. Thurston thinks alters the way the universe is made? Why should he know more about it than you do?
He"s not nearly so clever or so well educated." I smiled to recall how she had smiled when she said it; then I was blinded by tears to remember that I should never see her smile again; and so I walked into a tree in the sidewalk, and nearly broke my nose. That was the end of my dashing madly at Mr. Thurston. The wound Kathie"s words had made throbbed, but with the memory of Mother in my mind I could not break out into anger.
I turned down the Cove Road to walk off my ill-temper. After all Mr.
Thurston was right from his point of view. He could not believe without feeling that he had to warn Kathie against the awful risk of running into eternal d.a.m.nation. It must hurt him to think or to say such a thing; but he believes in the cruelty of the deity, and he has beaten his natural tenderness into subjection to his idea of a Moloch. It is so strange that the ghastly absurdity of connecting G.o.d"s anger with a sweet and blameless life like Mother"s does not strike him. Indeed, I suppose down here in the country we are half a century or so behind the thought of the real world, and that Mr. Thurston"s creed would be impossible in the city, or among thinkers even of his own denomination.
At least I hope so, though I do not see what they have left in the orthodox creed if they take eternal punishment out of it.
The fresh air and the memory of Mother, with a little common sense, brought me right again. I walked until I had myself properly in hand, and till I hoped that the trace of tears on my face might pa.s.s for the effect of the wind. It was growing dusk by this time, and the lamps began to appear in the houses as I came to Mr. Thurston"s at last. I slipped in at the front door as quietly as I could, and knocked at the study.
Mr. Thurston himself opened the door. He looked surprised, but asked me in, and offered me a chair. He had been writing, and still held his pen in his hand; the study smelled of kerosene lamp and air-tight stove.
Poor man! Theology which has to live by an air-tight stove must be dreary. If he had an open fire on his hearth, he might have less in his religion.
"I have come to confess a fault, Mr. Thurston," I said, "and to ask a favor."
He smiled a little watery smile, and put down his pen.
"Is the favor to be a reward for the fault or for confessing it?" he asked.
I was so much surprised by this mild jest, coming from him, that I almost forgot my errand. I smiled back at him, and forgot the bitterness that had been in my heart. He looked so thin, so bloodless, that it was impossible to have rancor.
"I left Kathie with baby while I went for a walk," I said, "and I have stayed away longer than I intended. I forgot to tell her she could call Hannah if she wanted to come home, and she is too conscientious to leave, so I am afraid that she has stayed all this time. I wanted you to know it is my fault."
"I am glad for her to be useful," her father said, "especially as you have been so kind to her."
"Then you will perhaps let her stay all night," I went on. "I can take over her night-things. I promised to show her about making a new kind of pincushion for the church fair; and I could do it this evening. Besides, it is lonely for me in that great house."
I felt like a hypocrite when I said this, though it is true enough. He looked at me kindly, and even pityingly.
"Yes," he returned, "I can understand that. If you think she won"t trouble you, and"--
I did not give him opportunity for a word more. I rose at once and held out my hand.
"Thank you so much," I said. "I"ll find Mrs. Thurston, and get Kathie"s things. I beg your pardon for troubling you."
I was out of the study before he could reconsider. Across the hall I found his wife in the sitting-room with another air-tight stove, and looking thinner and paler than he. She had a great pile of sewing beside her, and her eyes looked as if months of tears were behind them, aching to be shed.
I told her Mr. Thurston had given leave for Kathie to pa.s.s the night with me, and I had come for her night-things. She looked surprised, but none the less pleased. While she was out of the room I looked cautiously at the mending to see if the clothing was too worn for her to be willing that I should see it. When she came in with her little bundle, I said, as indifferently as I could, "I suppose if Kathie were at home she would help you with the mending, so I"ll take her share with me, and we"ll do it together." Of course she remonstrated, but I managed to bring away a good part of the big pile, and now it is all done. Poor Mrs. Thurston, she looked so tired, so beaten down by life, the veins were so blue on her thin temples! If I dared, I"d go every week and do that awful mending for her. I must get Kathie to smuggle some of it over now and then. When we blame these people for the narrowness of their theology, we forget their lives are so constrained and straitened that they cannot take broad views of anything. The man or woman who could take a wide outlook upon life from behind an air-tight stove in a half-starved home would have to be almost a miracle. It is wonderful that so much sweetness and humanity keep alive where circ.u.mstances are so discouraging. When I think of patient, faithful, hard-working women like Mrs. Thurston, uncomplaining and devoted, I am filled with admiration and humility. If their theology is narrow, they endure it; and, after all, men have made it for them. Father said once women had always been the occasion of theology, but had never produced any. I asked him, I remember, whether he said this to their praise or discredit, and he answered that what was entirely the result of nature was neither to be praised nor to be blamed; women were so made that they must have a religion, and men so const.i.tuted as to take the greatest possible satisfaction in inventing one. "It is simply a beautiful example," he added, with his wonderful smile which just curled the corners of his mouth, "of the law of supply and demand."
I am running on and on, although it is so late at night. Aunt Naomi, I presume, will in some occult way know about it, and ask me why I sat up so long. I am tired, but the excitement of the afternoon is not all gone. That any one in the world should believe it possible for Mother to be unhappy in another life, to be punished, is amazing! Surely a man whose theology makes such an idea conceivable is profoundly to be pitied.
May 19. Hannah is perfectly delightful about Tomine. She hardly lets a day go by without admonishing me not to spoil baby, and yet she is herself an abject slave to the slightest caprice of the tyrannous small person. We have to-night been having a sort of battle royal over baby"s going to sleep by herself in the dark. I made up my mind the time had come when some semblance of discipline must be begun, and I supposed, of course, that Hannah would approve and a.s.sist. To my surprise she failed me at the very first ditch.
"I am going to put Tomine into the crib," I announced, "and take away the light. She must learn to go to sleep in the dark."
"She"ll be frightened," Rosa objected.
"She"s too little to know anything about being afraid," I retorted loftily, although I had secretly a good deal of misgiving.
"Too little!" sniffed Hannah. "She"s too little not to be afraid."
I saw at a glance that I had before me a struggle with them as well as with baby.
"Children are not afraid of the dark until they are told to be," I declared as dogmatically as possible.
"They are told not to be," objected Rosa.
"But that puts the idea into their heads," was my answer.
Hannah regarded me with evident disapprobation.
"But supposing the baby cries?" she demanded.
"Then she must be left to stop," I answered, with outward firmness and inward quakings.
"But suppose she cries herself sick?" insisted Rosa.