A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

A Modern Instance

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He rose, and went over to the crib, and kissed the head of their little
girl. "Ask Flavia," he said from the door.

"Bartley!" she cried, in utter fondness, as he vanished from her happy
eyes.

The next morning they heard the Squire moving about in his room, and he was
late in coming down to breakfast, at which he was ordinarily so prompt.
"He's packing," said Marcia, sadly. "It's dreadful to be willing to have
him go!"

Bartley went out and met him at his door, bag in hand. "Hollo!" he cried,
and made a decent show of surprise and regret.

"M-yes!" said the old man, as they went down stairs. "I've made out a
visit. But I'm an old fellow, and I ain't easy away from home. I shall tell
Mis' Gaylord how you're gettin' along, and she'll be pleased to hear
it. Yes, she'll be pleased to hear it. I guess I shall get off on the
ten-o'clock train."

The conversation between Bartley and his father-in-law was perfunctory. Men
who have dealt so plainly with each other do not assume the conventional
urbanities in their intercourse without effort. They had both been growing
more impatient of the restraint; they could not have kept it up much
longer.

"Well, I suppose it's natural you should want to be home again, but I
can't understand how any one can want to go back to Equity when he has the
privilege of staying in Boston."

"Boston will do for a young man," said the Squire, "but I'm too old for
it. The city cramps me; it's too tight a fit; and yet I can't seem to find
myself in it."

He suffered from the loss of identity which is a common affliction with
country people coming to town. The feeling that they are of no special
interest to any of the thousands they meet bewilders and harasses them;
after the searching neighborhood of village life, the fact that nobody
would meddle in their most intimate affairs if they could, is a vague
distress. The Squire not only experienced this, but, after reigning so long
as the censor of morals and religion in Equity, it was a deprivation for
him to pass a whole week without saying a bitter thing to any one. He was
tired of the civilities that smoothed him down on every side.

"Well, if you must go," said Bartley, "I'll order a hack."

"I guess I can walk to the depot," returned the old man.

"Oh, no, you can't." Bartley drove to the station with him, and they bade
each other adieu with a hand-shake. They were no longer enemies, but they
liked each other less than ever.

"See you in Equity next summer, I suppose?" suggested the Squire.

"So Marcia says," replied Bartley. "Well, take care of yourself.--You
confounded, tight-fisted old woodchuck!" he added under his breath, for the
Squire had allowed him to pay the hack fare.

He walked home, composing variations on his parting malison, to find that
the Squire had profited by his brief absence while ordering the hack, to
leave with Marcia a silver cup, knife, fork, and spoon, which Olive Halleck
had helped him choose, for the baby. In the cup was a check for five
hundred dollars. The Squire was embarrassed in presenting the gifts, and
when Marcia turned upon him with, "Now, look here, father, what do you
mean?" he was at a loss how to explain.

"Well, it's what I always meant to do for you."

"Baby's things are all right," said Marcia. "But I'm not going to let
Bartley take any money from you, unless you think as well of him as I do,
and say so, right out."

The Squire laughed. "You couldn't quite expect me to do that, could you?"

"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 fortitude 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 trimming 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 passionate 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 compassion 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 pass the summer in
Boston?"

"No; I'm going down home pretty early, and I wanted to ask your mother what
is the best way to put away my winter things."

"You'll find my mother very good authority on such matters," said Halleck.
Through an obscure association with moths that corrupt, he added, "She's a
good authority on church matters, too."

"I guess I shall talk with her about Flavia," said Marcia.

Cyrus came out of the house. "Mis' Halleck will be here in a minute. She's
got to get red of a lady that's calling, first," he explained.

"I will leave you, then," said Halleck, abruptly.

"Good by," answered Marcia, tranquilly. The baby stirred; she pushed the
carriage to and fro, without glancing after him as he walked away.

His mother came down the steps from the house, and kissed Marcia for
welcome, and looked under the carriage-top at the sleeping baby. "How she
_does_ sleep!" she whispered.

"Yes," said Marcia, with the proud humility of a mother, who cannot deny
the merit of her child, "and she sleeps the whole night through. I'm
_never_ up with her. Bartley says she's a perfect Seven-Sleeper. It's a
regular joke with him,--her sleeping."

"Ben was a good baby for sleeping, too," said Mrs. Halleck, retrospectively
emulous. "It's one of the best signs. It shows that the child is strong and
healthy." They went on to talk of their children, and in their community of
motherhood they spoke of the young man as if he were still an infant. "He
has never been a moment's care to me," said Mrs. Halleck. "A well baby will
be well even in teething."

"And I had somehow thought of him as sickly!" said Marcia, in
self-derision.

Tears of instant intelligence sprang into his mother's eyes. "And did you
suppose he was _always_ lame?" she demanded, with gentle indignation. "He
was the brightest and strongest boy that ever was, till he was twelve years
old. That's what makes it so hard to bear; that's what makes me wonder at
the way the child bears it! Did you never hear how it happened? One of the
big boys, as he called him, tripped him up at school, and he fell on his
hip. It kept him in bed for a year, and he's never been the same since;
he will always be a cripple," grieved the mother. She wiped her eyes; she
never could think of her boy's infirmity without weeping. "And what seemed
the worst of all," she continued, "was that the boy who did it never
expressed any regret for it, or acknowledged it by word or deed, though
he must have known that Ben knew who hurt him. He's a man here, now; and
sometimes Ben meets him. But Ben always says that he can stand it, if the
other one can. He was always just so from the first! He wouldn't let us
blame the boy; he said that he didn't mean any harm, and that all was fair
in play. And now he says he knows the man is sorry, and would own to what
he did, if he didn't have to own to what came of it. Ben says that very few
of us have the courage to face the consequences of the injuries we do, and
that's what makes people seem hard and indifferent when they are really not
so. There!" cried Mrs. Halleck. "I don't know as I ought to have told you
about it; I know Ben wouldn't like it. But I can't bear to have any one
think he was always lame, though I don't know why I shouldn't: I'm prouder
of him since it happened than ever I was before. I thought he was here with
you," she added, abruptly.

"He went out just before you came," said Marcia, nodding toward the gate.
She sat listening to Mrs, Halleck's talk about Ben; Mrs. Halleck took
herself to task from time to time, but only to go on talking about him
again. Sometimes Marcia commented on his characteristics, and compared them
with Bartley's, or with Flavia's, according to the period of Ben's life
under consideration.

At the end Mrs. Halleck said: "I haven't let you get in a word! Now you
must talk about _your_ baby. Dear little thing! I feel that she's been
neglected. But I'm always just so selfish when I get to running on about
Ben. They all laugh at me."

"Oh, I like to hear about other children," said Marcia, turning the
perambulator round. "I don't think any one can know too much that has the
care of children of their own." She added, as if it followed from something
they had been saying of vaccination, "Mrs. Halleck, I want to talk with you
about getting Flavia christened. You know I never was christened."

"Weren't you?" said Mrs. Halleck, with a dismay which she struggled to
conceal.

"No," said Marcia, "father doesn't believe in any of those things, and
mother had got to letting them go, because he didn't take any interest in
them. They did have the first children christened, but I was the last."

"I didn't speak with your father on the subject," faltered Mrs. Halleck. "I
didn't know what his persuasion was."

"Why, father doesn't belong to _any_ church! He believes in a God, but he
doesn't believe in the Bible." Mrs. Halleck sank down on the garden seat
too much shocked to speak, and Marcia continued. "I don't know whether the
Bible is true or not; but I've often wished that I belonged to church."

"You couldn't, unless you believed in the Bible," said Mrs. Halleck.

"Yes, I know that. Perhaps I should, if anybody proved it to me. I presume
it could be explained. I never talked much with any one about it. There
must be a good many people who don't belong to church, although they
believe in the Bible. I should be perfectly willing to try, if I only knew
how to begin."

In view of this ruinous open-mindedness, Mrs. Halleck could only say, "The
way to begin is to read it."

"Well, I will try. How do you know, after you've become so that you believe
the Bible, whether you're fit to join the church?"

"It's hard to tell you, my dear. You have to feel first that you have a
Saviour,--that you've given your whole heart to him,--that he can save you,
and that no one else can,--that all you can do yourself won't help you.
It's an experience."

Marcia looked at her attentively, as if this were all a very hard saying.
"Yes, I've heard of that. Some of the girls had it at school. But I never
did. Well," she said at last, "I don't feel so anxious about myself, just
at present, as I do about Flavia. I want to do everything I can for Flavia,
Mrs. Halleck. I want her to be christened,--I want her to be baptized into
some church. I think a good deal about it. I think sometimes, what if she
should die, and I hadn't done that for her, when may be it was one of
the most important things--" Her voice shook, and she pressed her lips
together.

"Of course," said Mrs. Halleck, tenderly, "I think it is the _most_
important thing."

"But there are so many churches," Marcia resumed. "And I don't know about
any of them. I told Mr. Halleck just now, that I should like her to belong
to the church where the best people went, if I could find it out. Of
course, it was a ridiculous way to talk; I knew he thought so. But what I
meant was that I wanted she should be with good people all her life; and I
didn't care what she believed."

"It's very important to believe the truth, my dear," said Mrs. Halleck.

"But the truth is so hard to be certain of, and you know goodness as soon
as you see it. Mrs. Halleck, I'll tell you what I want: I want Flavia
should be baptized into your church. Will you let her?"

"_Let_ her? O my dear child, we shall be humbly thankful that it has been
put into your heart to choose for her what _we_ think is the true church,"
said Mrs. Halleck, fervently.

"I don't know about that," returned Marcia. "I can't tell whether it's the
true church or not, and I don't know that I ever could; but I shall be
satisfied--if it's made you what you are," she added, simply.

Mrs. Halleck did not try to turn away her praise with vain affectations of
humility. "We try to do right, Marcia," she said. "Whenever we do it, we
must be helped to it by some power outside of ourselves. I can't tell you
whether it's our church; I'm not so sure of that as I used to be. I once
thought that there could be no real good out of it; but I _can't_ think
that, any more. Olive and Ben are as good children as ever lived; I _know_
they won't be lost; but neither of them belongs to our church."

"Why, what church does he belong to?"

"He doesn't belong to any, my dear," said Mrs. Halleck, sorrowfully.

Marcia looked at her absently. "I knew Olive was a Unitarian; but I
thought--I thought he--"

"No, he doesn't," returned Mrs. Halleck. "It has been a great cross to
his father and me. He is a good boy; but we think the _truth_ is in our
church!"

Marcia was silent a moment. Then she said, decisively, "Well, I should like
Flavia to belong to your church."

"She couldn't belong to it now," Mrs. Halleck explained. "That would have
to come later, when she could understand. But she could be christened in
it--dear little thing!"

"Well, christened, then. It must be the training he got in it. I've thought
a great deal about it, and I think my worst trouble is that I've been left
too free in everything. One mustn't be left too free. I've never had any
one to control me, and now I can't control myself at the very times when I
need to do it the most, with--with--When I 'in in danger of vexing--When
Bartley and I--"

"Yes," said Mrs. Halleck, sympathetically.

"And Bartley is just so, too. He's always been left to himself. And Flavia
will need all the control we can give her,--I know she will. And I shall
have her christened in your church, and I shall teach her all about it. She
shall go to the Sunday school, and I will go to church, so that she can
have an example. I told father I should do it when he was up here, and he
said there couldn't be any harm in it. And I've told Bartley, and _he_
doesn't care."

They were both far too single-minded and too serious to find anything droll
in the terms of the adhesion of Marcia's family to her plan, and Mrs.
Halleck entered into its execution with affectionate zeal.

"Ben, dear," she said, tenderly, that evening, when they were all talking
it over in the family council, "I hope you didn't drop anything, when that
poor creature spoke to you about it this morning, that could unsettle her
mind in any way?"

"No, mother," said Halleck, gently.

"I was sure you didn't," returned his mother, repentantly.

They had been talking a long time of the matter, and Halleck now left the
room.

"Mother! How could you say such a thing to Ben?" cried Olive, in a quiver
of indignant sympathy. "Ben say anything to unsettle anybody's religious
purposes! He's got more religion now than all the rest of the family put
together!"

"Speak for yourself, Olive," said one of the intermediary sisters.

"Why, Olive, I spoke because I thought she seemed to place more importance
on Ben's belonging to the church than anything else, and she seemed so
surprised when I told her he didn't belong to any."

"I dare say she thinks Ben is good when she compares him with that mass of
selfishness of a husband of hers," said Olive. "But I will thank her," she
added, hotly, "not to compare Ben with Bartley Hubbard, even to Bartley
Hubbard's disadvantage. I don't feel flattered by it."

"Of course she thinks all the world of her husband," said Mrs. Halleck.
"And I know Ben is good; and, as you say, he is religious; I feel that,
though I don't understand how, exactly. I wouldn't hurt his feelings for
the world, Olive, you know well enough. But it was a stumbling-block when I
had to tell that poor, pretty young thing that Ben didn't belong to church;
and I could see that it puzzled her. I couldn't have believed," continued
Mrs. Halleck, "that there was any person in a Christian land, except among
the very lowest, that seemed to understand so little about the Christian
religion, or any scheme of salvation. Really, she talked to me like a
pagan. She sat there much better dressed and better educated than I was;
but I felt like a missionary talking to a South Sea Islander."

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