Benefits forgot

Front matter

► IT M 1 iiNEFITS FORGOT v:

ESTIER

•

II

It was rather more than an hour before he returned, and Margaret had time to think of many things. She trembled at the thought of what he might be doing at any moment of her watching, and waiting, and poking of the fire. She recalled all that she knew of his hot and reckless temper ; she told over to herself all that she had ever heard from others of the relentless fixity with which he carried out a thing on which he was resolved.

She knew sadly the quality of his temper, of course ; her experiences of it could hardly have failed to be numerous and bitter, in the time which had elapsed since she had known him. It was the chief flaw in his character. In accounting for it to herself, she said, when she was not fresh from suffering from some manifestation of it, that no doubt it went along inevitably with his generous and impulsive heart. She was ignorant about such things, and about men in general, but she had never known any one so entirely good, and kind, and open-hearted, and she told herself it was not for her to measure or question the correlative fault that must always go with a great virtue like that. She had moments of grave doubt about this, of course, and her doubt had been a minor reason among the controlling ones which had caused her to refuse him at first. When she finally discovered that she loved him, it didn't" matter ; nothing seemed to matter then. She now thought of his temper as one of the things she would set herself to modify — or, rather, to help him about — when they were married. What was marriage for, if not for some such mutual strengthening and improvement ?

Something Yertner had told her when she first came, and at which she had laughed at the time, recurred to her. It still made her smile, but in a frightened way. Vertner had heard it in Leadville. It was apropos of the grim strength of purpose which every one felt in Deed. Some one had come to a young lawyer there, to offer him a case in which Deed was engaged on the other side, and had been asked to " come off ! " " Ain't you got more sense," inquired the practitioner, expressively, " than to take half a day out of a ten-dollar-a-day job to come and set me on to Deed in a case where he's got the ghost of a show ? Never saw him grip his fist, like that, in a court of law, did you ? Thought not. Must is must about that time, young man. There ain't no two ways to a burro's kick. I've been there. In fact, I was there day before yesterday. Beaten ? No, sir ; I wasn't beaten. ' I was cyclonized. I was taken up by the toes of my boots, and swung round and round with one of the prettiest rotary motions you ever saw, and banged against the top of Uncompaghre Peak, out there. No one but myself would have thought it worth while to pick up what was left of me, I suppose. But I did it ; and I picked up too much sense at the same time to try it again. Why, that man's got more knowledge of the law, and more raw grit, and hang on, and stick to'n — " he questioned the air with uplifted arm for a comparison — " well," he ended hopelessly. " I'll tell you what it is," he went on, with renewed grip of language ; " for them that likes monkeying with the buzz-saw, there ain't nothing like it, short of breaking a faro-bank. It's strawberries and cream to that sort. But to peaceably disposed citizens like you and me, Charlie, there ain't nothing at all, anywhere, like staying pleasantly and sociably to home, and letting the saw hum its merry little way through the other fellow's fingers."

From time to time Margaret would go to the window, and look wistfully down the road. The expression on her round, shrewd, suggestive, wise little face at these times would have helped an observer to understand the look which made her seem older than her twenty-nine years ; it was the authoritative look of experience. The look of over-experience that sometimes fixes itself, to the sadness of the beholder, on the face of a woman who has been down into the fight for bread with men, had passed by Margaret's inextinguishable womanliness ; but she had not led an easy life ; and one saw it in her face — a face proportioned with a harmony that strangely failed to make it beautiful.

Her eyes, which were small and bright, were deeply set under a high and well-modelled brow, from which the hair was brushed straight back in a way that must have been unbecoming to another type of face, but which was admirably suited to her own. In falling over her shapely little ears, the silky brown hair waved in a fashion pleasant to see. Her mouth, which was small and daintily made, wore an expression of unusual firmness.

In conversation she would fix her animated hazel eyes in absorbed attention on the face of the person with whom she spoke, and when the talk was of serious things, a deep, far-away look would suddenly possess these eyes. She had an extraordinarily sweet smile, and there was a gentle and kindly soberness in her expression. She was well and compactly made, yet her effect was unimposing. She seemed short and slight. She had a well-kept little effect in her dress and the appointments of her person ; but no one would have accused Margaret of knowing anything about dress. She was rather discreetly clothed than dressed in the sense of adornment. She wore white cuffs at her wrists and a narrow collar at her throat, fastened by a brooch of gold wrought in an old-fashioned pattern.

Margaret was not smiling when Beatrice came in, some time after Deed had gone, and found her with her head pressed against the pane. She turned her tearful face away as Beatrice drew her to her.

Mrs. Vertner, one saw, had been quite recently a pretty woman, and she was still young — a year or two younger than Margaret. The brilliant expression which had distinguished her among all her acquaintance in her young girl days in Newton (the Boston Newton), where she was still remembered as a clever girl who had made an inexplicable marriage, was overlaid, for the most part, by a look of anxiety and harassment, due to the conditions of her life. She made her housekeeping as little a sordid, crude, and ugly business as she could, and took its difficulties light-heartedly; but housekeeping in a Western town that has still to " get its growth " is at best a soul-wearing affair. Just now she suffered under the rule of a Swedish maid-servant who knew no English, and whose knowledge of cooking was limited to a fine skill in broiling steak insupportably, and a vain address in the brewing of undrinkable coffee.

" Crying, little one ? " she asked affectionately. " Won't you do something a wee bit like some one else, dear, one of these days, and let me be by to see it? That's a good girl." She kissed her, with a laugh. " But stay odd all the rest of the time, Margaret. I shouldn't like you if you weren't odd, you know — not even if you were ever so little less odd. If I want you to be conventional, it is only for a moment, to see how it would seem. Come! Other brides smile. Try one smile ! " she pleaded. And at Margaret's helpless amusement, she snatched her from the window, and, humming a vague air, which defined itself in a moment as one of the Waldteufel waltzes, she beat time for a second, laughing in Margaret's bewildered, tear-stained face, and caught her away into a romping dance.

" There ! " she cried, as she sank upon the sofa, breathless with laughing and dancing. " I've shaken you into sorts, I hope, and you're ready for the ceremony — or will be, if you'll ever get yourself dressed. Not that I call it dressed, to wear that grey — oh, I don't mean that, Maggie dear," she exclaimed at a pained look on Margaret's face. She crushed Margaret to her in a devouring embrace. " Or, rather, I do," she added honestly ; " but I didn't mean to say it. ~No ; you'd better wear it," she went on, at some sign of hesitation from Margaret. " It will go beautifully with all the rest of it. Margaret Derwenter," she cried, with an affectation of seriousness, "shall I tell you something? You will never be married." She retired for the effect, but fell upon her with all the armoury of woman's peace-making at Margaret's start. " Literal ! " she cried. " Will you never take things less hard ? As if I meant it ! What I did mean sounds foolish after you've taken it like that. But I may as well say it. I don't believe the marriage ceremony is going to marry you as it does other women, Margaret; and you needn't tell me it is. If you are ever married, it will be by yourself ; yes, I mean it — by a kind of slow process of consent to the affair. Of course you will have a proper respect for the ceremony, and you will think it has married you. But women like you, Maggie, — not that there are any, — are not married in that way. Now, I was married when I left the church, and everybody knew it."

Margaret laughed, not on compulsion this time, and, catching her arm about Beatrice's waist, drew her to the window to look down the road with her for Deed's coming.

Almost any part of Margaret's history, before the time when she began to teach, and, by a curious arrangement of her own, to see the world, must wrong, or at least misspeak, in the telling the gentle and sweet-natured woman she had become.

From the first she had ideas ; and it would be hard to say what one must call the ambition which gave purpose and meaning to her young days. From the point of view of her grandmother's farm-house on a bleak New England hill, the pursuit of what she called culture represented to Margaret during these days an inspiration, an intellectual stimulus, and a rule of life. It would be a quarrelsome person who would not suffer any one to get what fun he might out of the idea of culture for culture's angular dear sake ; and as an alternative to the apples and cider, the mite-societies, the " socials," and the lectures which in winter stand for mental diversion in the back country of New England, it has advantages.

But if some one said that the theory of life which it implies lacks ease, atmosphere, curves, lacks even, to say the worst of it at once, the sense of humour, only one who had a great many such New England winters in him ought to say a word.

Margaret, in her pursuit of this mystic culture, conceived education to he, until her education was done, an affair possessing length, breadth, and thickness. It is to be feared that she even " improved " her opportunities. They were not many, poor girl, until she left the New Hampshire village for her first stay in New York, where she studied at a school in which she spent a year learning that she was the only pupil who regarded its advantages as precious privileges. Then she left it for Vassar, which was, at least, not touched with sham. She found here other girls with her thought about education; and she went about the erection of her structure of intelligence with an energy which presently sent her home to her grandmother ill. The structure remained her point after her return, however ; and the reader who knows anything of this habit of thought should not need to be told that she looked upon it, not as a dwelling that she should one day inhabit, much less as a temple which should one day inhabit her, but as a shrine the graceful proportions of which it was the final privilege to set forever within one's blessed sight. At nineteen Margaret was more in the way to becoming that distressing product of our felicitous new ways of thinking about women and about education — the female prig — than a friendly biographer would like to record.

Her escape from such a fate was due to circumstances outside her control. In the midst of one of the summer vacations she took up a copy of the " Springfield Eepublican," to learn that the little competence left her by her father had been embezzled, with more important trust funds, by an unscrupulous executor. Soon after, her grandmother died. Every Sunday morning, from the time when Margaret had come to her as a child, she had lain in bed, this estimable lady, thinking how she would change on Monday in Margaret's favour the will which bequeathed all she had to a charity. On Sunday morning a late breakfast gave time for reflection on such subjects ; but on Monday there was never any time at all. And on one of the Mondays which was to have witnessed the fulfilment of her resolve, she died in Margaret's arms.

The double catastrophe had many lessons for Margaret. She sorrowed for her grandmother bitterly out of the simple and loving heart which no system of cultivation could have educated out of her ; and she never thought of blaming the neglect which had left her with the problem of earning her living close upon her. The money lost through the executor's rascality troubled her solely as an educated girl — a girl with duties, with responsibilities to her self-development. It would be putting it too crudely to say that she grieved for the loss of the money because one might have bought such a lot of culture with it : travel, that is, and the leisure for study, and the sight of good pictures, and the knowledge of all the " cultivated " things. But it is only the expression that is at fault : her idea hovered very near this thought. As she could not have the thing in one shape, she determined to buy it for herself in another.

It was necessary that she should provide for herself, and she conceived the enterprising notion of making this necessity serve her purpose. She " taught " ; but she gave the heavy-hearted word a meaning of her own by procuring, through a friend of her father in Boston (after a year spent in school- teaching), a position as travelling governess with a family which put several of her favourite novels to shame by treating her as one of the species.

She made the tour of Europe with these people, with what she called, in her letters to one of her college friends, " most satisfying results." She did not mean to the business man's children whom she was teaching, but to what she might have called her own " mental progress." The business man, when he called the results " satisfactory," meant something separated by the distance between any two of the planets from the idea contained in Margaret's word ; but his word was at least as much reward as she had expected, outside her salary, for her faithful efforts to decant some of her knowledge into the minds of the business man's children.

When she was back in America again, she recklessly sat down and waited for another engagement looking to the same ends. This time she wanted to go to Japan, and she kept the advertisement in which her wishes were succinctly stated in the " Nation " and in the " Tribune " until a family discovered itself intending towards Japan, and desiring a governess of Margaret's capacity, temperament, and terms.

It will be seen that this was a woman of energy, of independence, and of original ideas ; but so much lies on the surface. To make it at all clear how she contrived to reconcile these rather aggressive qualities to the softest and gentlest womanhood there need be, one must have known her. To be sweetly firm ; to be gifted with the kind of lucidity that does not roil one's own commonplace muddle of a mind by its mere existence ; to know, and not to know you know ; to hold immoderate opinions in a moderate way ; to be transfigured by energy, and yet consent to the propriety of your neighbour lying on his sofa ; to perceive that the boundaries of the State of New York, or even — though this is asking a good deal — the confines of the British Isles, do not limit the imaginable, not to say ladylike, regions of our globe : in a word, to be tolerant — these are great matters. It can hardly discredit Margaret with any reasonable soul to own that she failed, for the most part, to realize all these excellences; but they had become the tormenting measure of her ideal some time before she met Deed, on a visit to Beatrice Vertner (the one friend she had made at her New York school) at her home in Colorado.

It was mainly the travel which she had sought as gratifying her aspirations towards culture which disabused her of her young feeling about that ignis fatuus ; the sight of the various, the populous, the instructive world furnished her with an altogether new point of view, from which she grew to pity the provincial Diana who had set out with such a fine courage to hunt down culture with her little bow and arrow. And yet the Diana remained ; and the Margaret of ten years after the Vassar days was at least as remarkable for her likeness, in remote, illusive ways, to the Margaret who had one and the same conscience for the Temple of Culture, and for the Temple of Pure Eight, as she was remarkable for her exquisite, her admirable, and her surprising difference.

The new notions of life begotten of going about and seeing things had led the way ; but no one who knew her well could have been at a loss to perceive the moulding force which had done the real work of change. It was her womanliness coming in upon her, at the same time, with its incomparable enrichment, which had taught her old vagaries the way to the graces of the new Margaret ; it was what one might almost have called her natural gift for womanliness which finally chastened her edges, and which, in shaping her young strenuousness to softer lines, lost for it none of the validity and justness and simple strength which had gone with her maidenly ways of thinking.

And yet it is certain that one is not reared in New Hampshire for nothing ; that one does not spend four years at Vassar without bearing the Vassar mark ; above all, it is clear that no one can teach for ten years — it may be that no one can teach for an hour — and live to hide the fact.

It was Beatrice who first caught sight of the familiar figures of the pony and his rider, coming np the road at a gallop, pursued by a swirl of dust. She could not be persuaded that she did not hear the baby crying, and descended upon the sound before Deed could reach the porch.

Margaret would rather he had not tried to find a smile for her. He looked a year older than when he had left her side. They stood for a moment, when she opened the door to him, looking into each other's eyes. Then she cast her arms about him, and drew him to her with an impulse of protection, — the kind of refuge against the vexations of the world that a woman offers to the man who is dear to her, as if he were the sole sufferer from them on the planet, — and whispered some words in his ear.

" I am so sorry," she said simply, as she took his arm, and led him into the room, where she had made up a brighter fire against his return.

He sat heavily on the sofa, and stared at the blazing piiion sticks with the look of a man whose fight is done.

He looked away from her. " We musn't talk of it," he said, after a moment. " It's no stuff to make wedding-days of. I don't know," he went on, biting his lip, " how I am going to get my forgiveness that this should have happened as it has."

She came and stood by his side. " Do you begrudge my sharing your trouble, James ? " she asked. " Would you rather have borne it alone ? I thought that was what it meant to be — "

" What, dear ? " he asked tenderly. He drew her down to him, and put his arm about her. She sank on the floor beside him.

"A wife," she said, blushing faintly, and looking down.

Their romance was not less dear to them than if they had been younger : it was more sober, but not less valiant.

" Urn," commented Deed, with a wan smile, patting her hand affectionately. She sat for a moment in a reverie that took no account of their trouble, and was almost happy. But catching sight of his tense and stricken face, " Something has happened," she said tremulously.

" Yes ; the law can't help me," he answered wearily. " If there were nothing else, I must have let him go with his plunder, and have found heart somehow to tell Philip that I had let myself be done out of his future, with a fool's trust."

"Nothing but the law? Then there is something else ? There is a remedy ? "

He did not respond to the joy in her tone. " Yes," he answered gravely.

She started back, and rose from his side, all her fears alive in her face.

" James ! " she cried incriminatingly. He sat silent, with his head in his hands. She regarded him for a moment in anxious perplexity. Then she reached forth her hand, and laid it softly on his shoulder. " Yon — you are quite sure you are doing right ? " she asked gently.

He withdrew himself. " Margaret ! " he cried reproachfully. " How could I do a wrong to him ? "

"You can do a wrong to yourself. You can let a longing to right yourself carry you too far," she said bravely.

" Don't talk in that way, Margaret. There, was but one right and one wrong in the world. I had to have that right. What I have done is just."

" Oh, I hope so ! " she cried.

He was silent for a moment. He was thinking of many things. Suddenly he turned his eyes to hers, and regarded her piercingly. He took her hands in an eager pressure. "What would you do for me?" he asked at last abruptly.

" My dear James, I — " began Margaret, startled.

" Would you give up all that I have meant to make yours for — for me ? "

His intense gaze was unbearable. She turned away. " You know I would," she murmured.

"Don't think that because I am giving I have the right to take away. It's not so."

" Rights, dear ? Must we talk of them ? Don't you think—"

" Well ? " he asked, trying to be gentle ; but his restless anxiety got into his voice.

" That they stop, I was going to say, where love begins. But, James, you seem so far off — so strange." She laid a hand doubtfully upon him, and looked into his face with a questioning glance. " Would it reach you, if I said a thing like that ? " she asked. Her smile was pitiful. " my dearest, of course I don't care. How should I ? Did I ever care ? And now, if it would make you happy—"

" Must it make me happy ? " he asked.

' l Would it be worth while to you if it did not ? "

" Ah, well ! " he exclaimed inconclusively, and for some minutes they did not speak. Margaret watched his absorbed face and knitted brows with a thousand rising doubts.

He may have seen the pained look of inquiry on her face, for he took her clasped hands and stroked her hair thoughtfully. With her elbow on the sofa, and her head in her upturned hand, she coiled herself on the floor, and regarded the crackling fire for a long time in wistful silence.

She was glad when he spoke, though all her fears cried out against what he might say. As he bent over her, speaking in a low voice, she kept her eyes on the fire. " Tell me again it would not pain you to lose it all, Margaret. It is not merely money. It has many sides and meanings. It is all worldly comfort, advantage, leisure, of course ; but, besides, it is freedom — freedom to do the things you have wished to do, Margaret ; the things you have not been able to do. It's not fair to ask you until you have tested it. You don't know how much you would be giving up."

She smiled. " I know how much I shall be gaining if

— if it can serve you," she said softly, her head turned from him.

He observed her with keen, grave eyes, which, as he looked, filled with tenderness. He rose and took her in his arms.

" Is this my reserved Margaret ? " he asked. " Is this the quiet little woman who, a few months since, would scarcely own she loved me, and only the other day was protesting that her training had not taught her the language of affection ? "

She hid her face, " What is it that you wish to do, James?" she asked anxiously, when she could raise it again.

He released her without answering. After a moment he took a turn up and down the room.

" You won't believe it ! " he said suddenly. He went back, and flung himself upon the sofa, with a half groan. The fire had blazed up, and in its play upon his face Margaret read the torture that was going on in him. She was beside him again in a moment. " Margaret," he said, as he caught her hand once more, " do you remember the story of Samson ? "

" Surely," she answered in wonder. " Why ? "

"His locks were traitorously shaven. His strength, which was all his riches, was basely taken from him by one he trusted. Then his enemies believed they had conquered him, for his power was gone, and they had put out his two eyes. But in Gaza — do you remember, dear ? — when they were gathered to see his shame, he put forth one last, mighty effort, and pulled down the temple over their heads and his. The story has always had a noble ring to me, I don't know why. To-day it comes back with special meaning. Would you mind reading it over to me, dear ? "

Margaret gazed at him in trouble and uncertainty; but she went for the Bible which was her single inheritance from her mother. At home she always kept it on the table near her bed. Just now it was in the trunk, up-stairs. When she had found it, she brought the volume to him, and, kneeling down with her arm on his knee and her face to the blaze, where she could see him by turning her head, opened quickly to the place.

" ' But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes,' " she began, " ' and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass — ' "

" No ; a little further on, please," said he, keeping his eyes closed.

" ' And it came to pass,' " she began again, towards the the end of the chapter, " ' when their hearts were merry, that they said, Call for Samson, that he may make us sport. And they called for Samson out of the prison house ; and he made them sport ; and they set him between the pillars.

" ' And Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand, Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them. . . .

"'And Samson called unto the Lord, and said, Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.' "

Deed rose abruptly, and paced the floor. Margaret read on, fearful of she knew not what.