_ Chapter XVI
Henry Whitman awoke the next morning with sensations of delight and terror. He found himself absolutely unable to rouse himself up to that pitch of courage necessary to tell Sylvia that he intended to return to his work in the shop. He said to himself that it would be better to allow it to become an accomplished fact before she knew it, that it would be easier for him. Luckily for his plans, the family breakfasted early.
Directly after he had risen from the table, Henry attempted to slip out of the house from the front door without Sylvia's knowledge. He had nearly reached the gate, and had a sensation of exultation like a child playing truant, when he heard Sylvia's voice.
"Henry!" she called. "Henry Whitman!"
Henry turned around obediently.
"Where are you going?" asked Sylvia.
She stood under the columns of the front porch, a meagre little figure of a woman dressed with severe and immaculate cheapness in a purple calico wrapper, with a checked gingham apron tied in a prim bow at her back. Her hair was very smooth. She was New England austerity and conservatism embodied. She was terrifying, although it would have puzzled anybody to have told why. Certain it was that no man would have had the temerity to contest her authority as she stood there. Henry waited near the gate.
"Where are you going?" asked Sylvia again.
"Down street," replied Henry.
"Whereabouts down street?"
Henry said again, with a meek doggedness, "Down street."
"Come here," said Sylvia.
Henry walked slowly towards her, between the rows of box. He was about three feet away when she spoke again. "Where are you going?" said she.
"Down street."
Sylvia looked at Henry, and he trembled inwardly. Had she any suspicion? When she spoke an immense relief overspread him. "I wish you'd go into the drug store and get me a quarter of a pound of peppermints," said she.
Then Henry knew that he had the best of it. Sylvia possessed what she considered an almost guilty weakness for peppermints. She never bought them herself, or asked him to buy them, without feeling humiliated. Her austere and dictatorial manner vanished at the moment she preferred the request for peppermints.
"Of course I'll get them," said Henry, with enthusiasm. He mentally resolved upon a pound instead of a quarter.
"I don't feel quite right in my stomach, and I think they're good for me," said Sylvia, still abjectly. Then she turned and went into the house. Henry started afresh. He felt renewed compunction at his deceit as he went on. It seemed hard to go against the wishes of that poor, little, narrow-chested woman who had had so little in life that a quarter of a pound of peppermints seemed too much for her to desire.
But Henry realized that he had not the courage to tell her. He went on. He had just about time to reach the shop before the whistle blew. As he neared the shop he became one of a stream of toilers pressing towards the same goal. Most of them were younger than he, and it was safe to assume none were going to work with the same enthusiasm. There were many weary, rebellious faces. They had not yet come to Henry's pass. Toil had not yet gotten the better of their freedom of spirit. They considered that they could think and live to better purpose without it. Henry had become its slave. He was his true self only when under the conditions of his slavery. He had toiled a few years longer than he should have done, to attain the ability to keep his head above the waters of life without toil. The mechanical motion of his hands at their task of years was absolutely necessary to him. He had become, in fact, as a machine, which rusts and is good for nothing if left long inactive. Henry was at once pitiable and terrible when he came in sight of the many-windowed building which was his goal. The whistles blew, and he heard as an old war-horse hears the summons to battle. But in his case the battle was all for naught and there was no victory to be won. But the man was happier than he had been for months. His happiness was a pity and a shame to him, but it was happiness, and sweet in his soul. It was the only happiness which he had not become too callous to feel. If only he could have lived in the beautiful old home, and spent the rest of his life in prideful wrestling with the soil for goodly crops, in tasting the peace of life which is the right of those who have worked long!
But it all seemed too late. When a man has become welded to toil he can never separate himself from it without distress and loss of his own substance of individuality. What Henry had told Sidney Meeks was entirely true: good-fortune had come too late for him to reap the physical and spiritual benefit from it which is its usual dividend. He was no longer his own man, but the man of his life-experience.
When he stood once more in his old place, cutting the leather which smelled to him sweeter than roses, he was assailed by many a gibe, good-natured in a way, but still critical.
"What are you to work again for, Henry?" "You've got money enough to live on." "What in thunder are you working for?"
One thing was said many times which hit him hard. "You are taking the bread out of the mouth of some other man who needs work; don't you know it, Henry?" That rankled. Otherwise Henry, at his old task, with his mind set free by the toil of his hands, might have been entirely happy.
"Good Lord!" he said, at length, to the man at his side, a middle-aged man with a blackened, sardonic face and a forehead lined with a scowl of rebellion, "do you suppose I do it for the money? I tell you it's for the work."
"The work!" sneered the other man.
"I tell you I've worked so long I can't stop, and live."
The other man stared. "Either you're a damned fool, or the men or the system--whatever it is that has worked you so long that you can't stop--ought to go to--" he growled.
"You can't shake off a burden that's grown to you," said Henry.
The worker on Henry's other side was a mere boy, but he had a bulging forehead and a square chin, and already figured in labor circles.
"As soon try to shake off a hump," he said, and nodded.
"Yes," said Henry. "When you've lived long enough in one sort of a world it settles onto your shoulders, and nothing but death can ease a man from the weight of it."
"That's so," said the boy.
"But as far as keeping the bread from another man goes--" said Henry. Then he hesitated. He was tainted by the greed for unnecessary money, in spite of his avowal to the contrary. That also had come to be a part of him. Then he continued, "As far as that goes, I'm willing to give away--a--good part of what I earn."
The first man laughed, harshly. "He'll be for giving a library to East Westland next, to make up to men for having their money and freedom in his own pockets," he said.
"I 'ain't got so much as all that, after all," said Henry. "Because my wife has had a little left to her, it don't follow that we are millionaires."
"I guess you are pretty well fixed. You don't need to work, and you know it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. There's my wife's brother can't get a job."
"Good reason why," said the boy on the other side. "He drinks."
"He drinks every time he gets out of work and gets clean discouraged," retorted the man.
"Well," said the boy, "you know me well enough to know that I'm with my class every time, but hanged if I can see why your wife's brother 'ain't got into a circle that there's no getting him out of. We've got to get out of work sometimes. We all know it. We've got to if we don't want humps on all our shoulders; and if Jim can't live up to his independence, why, he's out of the running, or, rather, in his own running so neither God nor man can get him out of it. You know the time that last strike was on he was in the gutter every day, when he could beg enough money to keep him there. Now, we can't have that sort of thing. When a man's got so he can't work nor fight neither, why, he's up against it. If Henry here gave up his job, Jim couldn't get it, and you know it."
Henry went on. He hardly heard now what they were saying. His mind was revelling in its free flights of rebellion against everything. Henry, for a man who kept the commandments, was again as wicked as he could be, and revelling in his wickedness. He was like a drinker returned to his cups. His joy was immense, but unholy. However, the accusation that he was taking bread from another man who needed it more than he still rankled. He could, after all, rise somewhat above mere greed. He resolved that he would give, and no one should know of his giving, to the family of the man Jim who had no work.
During the morning Henry did not trouble himself about Sylvia and what she would think about it all. Towards noon, however, he began to dread going home and facing her. When he started he felt fairly cowardly. He stopped at the drug store and bought a pound of peppermints.
Albion Bennet waited on him. Albion Bennet was an intensely black-haired man in his forties. His black hair was always sleek with a patent hair-oil which he carried in his stock. He always wore a red tie and an old-fashioned scarf-pin set with a tiny diamond, and his collars were made of celluloid.
"I have gone back to the hotel to board," he informed Henry, while tying up the parcel. He colored a little under his black, bristling cheeks as he spoke.
"I thought you left," said Henry.
"So I did. I went to board at the Joneses', but--I can't stand a girl right in my face and eyes all the time. When I want to get married, and see the right one, then I want to do the courting; but hang it if I can stand being courted, and that's what I've been up against ever since I left the hotel, and that's a fact. Susy Jones was enough, but when it came to Fanny Elliot getting thick with her, and both of them on hand, it was too much. But I stuck it out till Susy began to do the cooking and her mother made me eat it."
"I have heard Miss Hart wasn't a very good cook," said Henry.
"Well, she ain't anything to brag of; but say, a man can stand regulation cooking done bad, but when it comes to new-fangled messes done bad, so a man don't know what he's eating, whether it's cats or poisonous mushrooms, I draw the line. Miss Hart's bread is more generally saleratusy and heavy, but at least you know it's heavy bread, and I got heavy stuff at the Joneses and didn't know what it was. And Miss Hart's pies are tough, but you know you've got tough pies, and at the Joneses' I had tough things that I couldn't give a name to. Miss Hart's doughnuts are greasy, but Lord, the greasy things at the Joneses' that Susy made! At least you know what you've got when you eat a greasy doughnut, and if it hurts you you know what to tell the doctor, but I had to give it up. I'd rather have bad cooking and know what it is than bad cooking and know what it isn't. Then there were other things. I like, when I get home from the store, to have a little quiet and read my paper, and Susy and Fanny, if I didn't stay in the parlor, were banging the piano and singing at me all the time to get me down-stairs. So I've gone back to the hotel, and I'm enough sight better off. Of course, when that matter of Miss Farrel came up I left. A man don't want to think he may get a little arsenic mixed in with the bad cooking, but now I'm convinced that's all right."
"How do you know?" asked Henry, paying for the peppermints. "I never thought Miss Hart had anything to do with it myself, but of course she wasn't exactly acquitted, neither she nor the girl. You said yourself that she bought arsenic here."
"So she did, and it all went to kill rats," said Albion. "Lots of folks have bought arsenic here to kill rats with. They didn't all of them poison Miss Farrel." Albion nodded wisely and mysteriously. "No, Lucinda's all right," he said. "I ain't at liberty to say how I know, but I do know. I may get bad cooking at the hotel, but I won't get no arsenic."
Henry looked curiously at the other man. "So you've found out something?" he said.
"I ain't at liberty to say," replied Albion. "It's a pretty nice day, ain't it? Hope we ain't going to have such a hot summer as last, though hot weather is mighty good for my business, since I put in the soda-fountain."
Henry, walking homeward with his package of peppermints, speculated a little on what Albion Bennet had said; then his mind reverted to his anxiety with regard to Sylvia, and her discovery that he had returned to the shop. He passed his arm across his face and sniffed at his coat-sleeve. He wondered if he smelled of leather. He planned to go around to the kitchen door and wash his hands at the pump in the yard before entering the house, but he could not be sure about the leather. He wondered if Rose would notice it and be disgusted. His heart sank as he neared home. He sniffed at his coat-sleeve again. He wondered if he could possibly slip into the bedroom and put on another coat for dinner before Sylvia saw him. He doubted if he could manage to get away unnoticed after dinner. He speculated, if Sylvia asked him where he was going again, what he could say. He considered what he could say if she were to call him to account for his long absence that forenoon.
When he reached the house he entered the side yard, stopped at the pump, washed his hands and dried them on his handkerchief, and drank from the tin cup chained to the pump-nose. He thought he might enter by the front door and steal into his bedroom and get the other coat, but Sylvia came to the side door.
"Where in the world have you been?" she said. Henry advanced, smiling, with the peppermints. "Why, Henry," she cried, in a voice of dismay which had a gratified ring in it, "you've been and bought a whole pound! I only said to buy a quarter."
"They're good for you," said Henry, entering the door.
Sylvia could not wait, and put one of the sweets in her mouth, and to that Henry owed his respite. Sylvia, eating peppermint, was oblivious to leather.
Henry went through into the bedroom and put on another coat before he sat down at the dinner-table.
Sylvia noticed that. "What did you change your coat for?" said she.
Henry shivered as if with cold. "I thought the house seemed kind of damp when I came in," he said, "and this coat is some heavier."
Sylvia looked at him with fretful anxiety. "You've got cold. I knew you would," she said. "You stayed out late last night, and the dew was awful heavy. I knew you would catch cold. You had better stop at the drug store and get some of those pellets that Dr. Wallace puts up."
Again was Henry's way made plain for him. "Perhaps I had," said he, eagerly. "I'll go down and get some after dinner."
But Horace innocently offered to save him the trouble. "I go past the drug store," said he. "Let me get them."
But Sylvia unexpectedly came to Henry's aid. "No," she said. "I think you had better not wait till Mr. Allen comes home from school. Dr. Wallace says those pellets ought to be taken right away, just as soon as you feel a cold, to have them do any good."
Henry brightened, but Rose interposed. "Why, I would love to run down to the drug store and get the medicine," she said. "You lie down after dinner, Uncle Henry, and I'll go."
Henry cast an agonizing glance at Horace. The young man did not understand in the least what it meant, but he came to the rescue.
"The last time I took those pellets," he said, "Mr. Whitman got them for me. It was one Saturday, and I was home, and felt the cold coming on, and I lay down, just as you suggest Mr. Whitman's doing, and got asleep, and awoke with a chill. I think that if one has a cold the best thing is to keep exercising until you can get hold of a remedy. I think if Mr. Whitman walks down to the drug store himself and gets the pellets, and takes one, and keeps out in the open air afterwards, as it is a fine day, it will be the very best thing for him."
"That is just what I think myself," said Henry, with a grateful look at Horace.
Henry changed his coat again before leaving, on the plea that it was better for him to wear a lighter one when walking and the heavier one when he was in the house. He and Horace walked down the street together. They were out of sight of the house when Henry spoke.
"Mrs. Whitman don't know it yet," said he, "but there's no reason why you shouldn't. I 'ain't got any cold. I'll get the pellets to satisfy her, but I 'ain't got any cold. I wanted to get out again and not tell her, if I could help it. I didn't want a fuss. I'm going to put it off as long as I can. Mrs. Whitman's none too strong, and when anything goes against her she's all used up, and I must save her as long as possible."
Horace stared at Henry with some alarm. "What on earth is it?" he said.
"Nothing, only I have gone back to work in the shop."
Horace looked amazed. "But I thought--"
"You thought we had enough so I hadn't any need to work, and you are right," said Henry, with a pathetic firmness. "We have got property enough to keep us, if nothing happens, as long as we live, but I had to go back to that infernal treadmill or die."
Horace nodded soberly. "I think I understand," said he.
"I'm glad you do."
"But Mrs. Whitman--"
"Oh, poor Sylvia will take it hard, and she won't understand. Women don't understand a lot of things. But I can't help it. I'll keep it from her for a day or two. She'll have to hear of it before long. You don't think Rose will mind the leather smell?" concluded Henry.
"I wouldn't worry about that. There is nothing very disagreeable about it," Horace replied, laughing.
"I will always change my coat and wash my hands real particular before I set down to the table," said Henry, wistfully. Then he added, after a second's hesitation: "You don't think she will think any the less of me? You don't suppose she won't be willing to live in the house because I work in the shop?"
"You mean Rose--Miss Fletcher?"
"Yes; of course she's been brought up different. She don't know anything about people's working with their hands. She's been brought up to think they're beneath her. I suppose it's never entered into the child's head that she would live to set at the same table with a man who works in a shoe-shop. You don't suppose it will set her against me?"
"I think even if she has been brought up differently, as you say, that she has a great deal of sense," replied Horace. "I don't think you need to worry about that."
"I'm glad you don't. I guess it would about break Sylvia's heart to lose her now, and I've got so I set a good deal by the child myself. Mr. Allen, I want to ask you something."
Henry paused, and Horace waited.
"I want to ask you if you've noticed anything queer about Sylvia lately," Henry said, at last.
Horace looked at him. "Do you mean in her looks or her manners?"
"Both."
Horace hesitated in his turn. "Now you speak of it--" he began.
"Well," said Henry, "speak out just what you think."
"I have not been sure that there was anything definite," Horace said, slowly. "I have not been sure that it was not all imagination on my part."
"That's just the way I've been feeling," Henry said, eagerly. "What is it that you've been noticing?"
"I told you I am not sure that it is not all imagination, but--"
"What?"
"Well, sometimes your wife has given me the impression that she was brooding over something that she was keeping entirely to herself. She has had a look as if she had her eyes turned inward and was worrying over what she saw. I don't know that you understand what I mean by that?"
Henry nodded. "That's just the way Sylvia's been looking to me."
"I don't know but she looks as well as ever."
"She's grown thin."
"Maybe she has. Sometimes I have thought that, but what I have noticed has been something intangible in her manner and expression, that I thought was there one minute and was not at all sure about the next. I haven't known whether the trouble, or difference, as perhaps I had better put it, was with her or myself."
Henry nodded still more emphatically. "That's just the way it's seemed to me, and we 'ain't either of us imagined it. It's so," said he.
"Have you any idea--"
"No, I haven't the least. But my wife's got something on her mind, and she's had something on her mind for a long time. It ain't anything new."
"Why don't you ask her?"
"I have asked her, and she says that of course she's got something on her mind, that she ain't a fool. You can't get around Sylvia. She never would tell anything unless she wanted to. She ain't like most women."
Just then Horace turned the corner of the street leading to his school, and the conversation ceased, with an enjoinder on his part to Henry not to be disturbed about it, as he did not think it could be anything serious.
Henry's reply rang back as the two men went their different ways. "I don't suppose it can be anything serious," he said, almost angrily.
Horace, however, was disposed to differ with him. He argued that a woman of Sylvia Whitman's type does not change her manner and grow introspective for nothing. He was inclined to think there might be something rather serious at the bottom of it all. His imagination, however, pictured some disease, which she was concealing from all about her, but which caused her never-ceasing anxiety and perhaps pain.
That night he looked critically at her and was rather confirmed in his opinion. Sylvia had certainly grown thin, and the lines in her face had deepened into furrows. She looked much older than she had done before she had received her inheritance. At the same time she puzzled Horace by looking happier, albeit in a struggling sort of fashion. Either Rose or the inheritance was the cause of the happiness. Horace was inclined to think it was Rose, especially since she seemed to him more than ever the source of all happiness and further from his reach.
That night he had found in the post-office a story of whose acceptance he had been almost sure, accompanied by the miserable little formula which arouses at once wrath and humiliation. Horace tore it up and threw the pieces along the road. There was a thunder-shower coming up. It scattered the few blossoms remaining on the trees, and many leaves, and the bits of the civilly hypocritical note of thanks and rejection flew with them upon the wings of the storm wind.
Horace gazed up at the clouds overhead, which looked like the rapids of some terrible, heavenly river overlapping each other in shell-like shapes and moving with intense fury. He thought of Rose, and first hoped that she was in the house, and then reflected that he might as well give up all hope of ever marrying her. The returned manuscript in his pocket seemed to weigh down his very soul. He recalled various stories which he had read in the current magazines of late, and it seemed to him that his compared very favorably with them. He tried to think of the matter judicially, as if the rejected story were not his own, and felt justified in thinking well of it. He had a sickening sense of being pitted against something which he could not gainsay, which his own convictions as to the privilege of persons in authority to have their own opinions forbade him to question.
"The editors had a perfect right to return my story, even if it is every whit as worthy of publication, even worthier, than anything which has appeared in their magazine for a twelvemonth," he told himself.
He realized that he was not dependent upon the public concerning the merit of his work--he could not be until the work appeared in print--but he was combating the opinions (or appealing to them) of a few men whose critical abilities might be biassed by a thousand personal matters with which he could not interfere. He felt that there was a broad, general injustice in the situation, but absolute right as to facts. These were men to whom was given the power to accept or refuse. No one could question their right to use that power. Horace said to himself that he was probably a fool to entertain for a moment any hope of success under such conditions.
"Good Lord! It might depend upon whether the readers had indigestion," he thought; and at the same time he accepted the situation with a philosophic pride of surrender.
"It's about one chance in a good many thousand," he told himself. "If I don't get the chance some other fellow does, and there's no mortal way but to make the best of it, unless I act like a fool myself." Horace was exceedingly alive to the lack of dignity of one who kicked against the pricks. He said to himself that if he could not marry Rose, if he could not ask her why, he must accept his fate, not attack it to his own undoing, nor even deplore it to his ignominy.
In all this he was, rather curiously, leaving the girl and her possible view of the matter entirely out of the question. Horace, while he was not in the least self-deprecatory, and was disposed to be as just in his estimate of himself as of other men, was not egotistical. It did not really occur to him that Rose's fancy, too, might have been awakened as his own had been, that he might cause her suffering. It went to prove his unselfishness that, upon entering the house, and seeing Rose seated beside a window with her embroidery, his first feeling was of satisfaction that she was housed and safe from the fast-gathering storm.
Rose looked up as he entered, and smiled.
"There's a storm overhead," remarked Horace.
"Yes," said Rose. "Aunt Sylvia has just told me I ought not to use a needle, with so much lightning. She has been telling me about a woman who was sewing in a thunder-storm, and the needle was driven into her hand." Rose laughed, but as she spoke she quilted her needle into her work and tossed it on a table, got up, and went to the window.
"It looks almost wild enough for a cyclone," she said, gazing up at the rapid scud of gray, shell-like clouds.
"Rose, come right away from that window," cried Sylvia, entering from the dining-room. "Only last summer a woman in Alford got struck standing at a window in a tempest."
"I want to look at the clouds," said Rose, but she obeyed.
Sylvia put a chair away from the fireplace and out of any draught. "Here," said she. "Set down here." She drew up another chair close beside Rose and sat down. There came a flash of lightning and a terrible crash of thunder. A blind slammed somewhere. Out in the great front yard the rain swirled in misty columns, like ghostly dancers, and the flowering shrubs lashed the ground. Horace watched it until Sylvia called him, also, to what she considered a place of safety. "If you don't come away from that window and set on the sofa I shall have a conniption fit," she said. Horace obeyed. As he sat down he thought of Henry, and without stopping to think, inquired where he was.
"He went down to Mr. Meeks's," replied Sylvia, with calm decision.
Horace stared at her. He wondered if she could possibly be lying, or if she really believed what she said.
He did not know what had happened that afternoon; neither did Rose. Rose had gone out for a walk, and while Sylvia was alone a caller, Mrs. Jim Jones, had come. Mrs. Jim Jones was a very small, angry-looking woman. Nature had apparently intended her to be plump and sweet and rosy, and altogether comfortable, but she had flown in the face of nature, like a cross hen, and had her own way with herself.
It was scarcely conceivable that Mrs. Jim Jones could be all the time in the state of wrath against everything in general which her sharp tongue and her angry voice evinced, but she gave that impression. Her little blond face looked like that of a doll which has been covered with angry pin-scratches by an ill-tempered child. Whenever she spoke these scratches deepened.
Mrs. Jim Jones could not bring herself to speak of anything without a show of temper, whether she really felt it or not. She fairly lashed out at Sylvia when the latter inquired if it was true that Albion Bennet had left her house and returned to the hotel.
"Yes, it is true, and thank the Lord for His unspeakable mercy to the children of men. I couldn't have stood that man much longer, and that's the gospel truth. He ate like a pig, so there wasn't a mite of profit in it. And he was as fussy as any old maid I ever saw. If I have to choose between an old maid and an old batch for a boarder, give me the old maid every time. She don't begin to eat so much, and she takes care of her room. Albion Bennet about ruined my spare chamber. He et peanuts every Sunday, and they're all ground into the carpet. Yes, I'm mighty glad to get rid of him. Let alone everything else, the way he pestered my Susy was enough to make me sick of my bargain. There that poor child got so she tagged me all over the house for fear Albion Bennet would make love to her. I guess Susy ain't going to take up with a man like Albion Bennet. He's too old for her anyhow, and I don't believe he makes much out of his drug store. I rather guess Susy looks higher than that. Yes, he's gone, and it's 'good riddance, bad rubbish.'"
"If you feel so about it I'm glad he's gone back to Lucinda," said Sylvia. "She didn't have many steady boarders, and it did sort of look against her, poor thing, with all the mean talk there's been."
"I guess there wasn't quite so much smoke without a little fire," said Mrs. Jim Jones, and her small face looked fairly evil.
Then Sylvia was aroused. "Now, Mrs. Jones, you know better," said she. "You know as well as you want to that Lucinda Hart was no more guilty than you and I were. We both went to school with her."
Mrs. Jim Jones backed down a little. There was something about Sylvia Whitman when she was aroused that a woman of Mrs. Jones's type could not face with impunity. "Well, I don't pretend to know," said she, with angry sullenness.
"You pretended to know just now. If folks don't know, it seems to me the best thing they can do is to hold their tongues, anyhow."
"I am holding my tongue, ain't I? What has got into you, Sylvia Whitman?"
"No, you didn't hold your tongue when you said that about there not being so much smoke without some fire."
"Well, there always is fire when there's smoke, ain't there?"
"No, there ain't always, not on the earth. Sometimes there's smoke that folks' wicked imaginations bring up out of the other place. I do believe that."
"Why, Sylvia Whitman, how you do talk! You're almost swearing."
"Have it swearing if you want to," said Sylvia. "I know I'm glad that Albion Bennet has gone back to Lucinda's. Everybody knows how mortal scared he is of his own shadow, and if he's got grit enough to go back there it's enough to about satisfy folks that there wasn't anything in the story."
"Well, it's 'good riddance, bad rubbish,' as far as I'm concerned," said Mrs. Jim Jones. There had been on her face when she first entered an expression of peculiar malignity. Sylvia knew it of old. She had realized that Mrs. Jones had something sweet for her own tongue, but bitter for her, in store, and that she was withholding it as long as possible, in order to prolong the delight of anticipation. "You've got two boarders, ain't you?" inquired Mrs. Jim Jones.
"I've got one boarder," replied Sylvia, with dignity, "and we keep him because he can't bear to go anywhere else in East Westland, and because we like his company."
"I thought Abrahama White's niece--"
"She ain't no boarder. She makes her home here. If you think we'd take a cent of money from poor Abrahama's own niece, you're mistaken."
"I didn't know. She takes after her grandmother White, don't she? She was mortal homely."
Then Sylvia fairly turned pale with resentment. "She doesn't look any more like old Mrs. White than your cat does," said she. "Rose is a beauty; everybody says so. She's the prettiest girl that ever set foot in this town."
"Everybody to their taste," replied Mrs. Jim Jones, in the village formula of contempt. "I heard Mr. Allen, your boarder, was going to marry her," she added.
"He ain't."
"I'm glad to hear it from headquarters," said Mrs. Jim Jones. "I said I couldn't believe it was true."
"Mr. Allen won't marry any girl in East Westland," said Sylvia.
"Is there anybody in Boston?" asked Mrs. Jim Jones, losing her self-possession a little.
Sylvia played her trump card. "I don't know anything--that is, I ain't going to say anything," she replied, mysteriously.
Mrs. Jim Jones was routed for a second, but she returned to the attack. She had not yet come to her particular errand. She felt that now was the auspicious moment. "I felt real sorry for you when I heard the news," said she.
Sylvia did not in the least know what she meant. Inwardly she trembled, but she would have died before she betrayed herself. She would not even disclose her ignorance of what the news might be. She did not, therefore, reply in words, but gave a noncommittal grunt.
"I thought," said Mrs. Jim Jones, driven to her last gun, "that you and Mr. Whitman had inherited enough to make you comfortable for life, and I felt real bad to find out you hadn't."
Sylvia turned a little pale, but her gaze never flinched. She grunted again.
"I supposed," said Mrs. Jim Jones, mouthing her words with intensest relish, "that there wouldn't be any need for Mr. Whitman to work any more, and when I heard he was going back to the shop, and when I saw him turn in there this morning, I declare I did feel bad."
Then Sylvia spoke. "You needn't have felt bad," said she. "Nobody asked you to."
Mrs. Jim Jones stared.
"Nobody asked you to," repeated Sylvia. "Nobody is feeling at all bad here. It's true we've plenty, so Mr. Whitman don't need to lift his finger, if he don't want to, but a man can't set down, day in and day out, and suck his thumbs when he's been used to working all his life. Some folks are lazy by choice, and some folks work by choice. Mr. Whitman is one of them."
Mrs. Jim Jones felt fairly defrauded. "Then you don't feel bad?" said she, in a crestfallen way.
"Nobody feels bad here," said Sylvia. "I guess nobody in East Westland feels bad unless it's you, and nobody wants you to."
After Mrs. Jim Jones had gone, Sylvia went into her bedroom and sat down in a rocking-chair by the one window. Under the window grew a sweetbrier rose-bush. There were no roses on it, but the soothing perfume of the leaves came into the room. Sylvia sat quite still for a while. Then she got up and went into the sitting-room with her mouth set hard.
When Rose had returned she had greeted her as usual, and in reply to her question where Uncle Henry was, said she guessed he must be at Mr. Meeks's; there's where he generally was when he wasn't at home.
It did not occur to Sylvia that she was lying, not even when, later in the afternoon, Horace came home, and she answered his question as to her husband's whereabouts in the same manner. She had resolved upon Sidney Meeks's as a synonyme for the shoe-shop. She knew herself that when she said Mr. Meeks's she in reality meant the shoe-shop. She did not worry about others not having the same comprehension as herself. Sylvia had a New England conscience, but, like all New England consciences, it was susceptible of hard twists to bring it into accordance with New England will.
The thunder-tempest, as Sylvia termed it, continued. She kept glancing, from her station of safety, at the streaming windows. She was becoming very much worried about Henry. At last she saw a figure, bent to the rainy wind, pass swiftly before the side windows of the sitting-room. She was on her feet in an instant, although at that minute the room was filled with blue flame followed by a terrific crash. She ran out into the kitchen and flung open the door.
"Come in quick, for mercy's sake!" she called. Henry entered. He was dripping with rain. Sylvia did not ask a question. "Stand right where you are till I bring you some dry clothes," she said.
Henry obeyed. He stood meekly on the oil-cloth while Sylvia hurried through the sitting-room to her bedroom.
"Mr. Whitman has got home from Mr. Meeks's, and he's dripping wet," she said to Horace and Rose. "I am going to get him some dry things and hang the wet ones by the kitchen stove."
When she re-entered the kitchen with her arms full, Henry cast a scared glance at her. She met it imperturbably.
"Hurry and get off those wet things or you'll catch your death of cold," said she.
Henry obeyed. Sylvia fastened his necktie for him when he was ready for it. He wondered if she smelled the leather in his drenched clothing. His own nostrils were full of it. But Sylvia made no sign. She never afterwards made any sign. She never intimated to Henry in any fashion that she knew of his return to the shop. She was, if anything, kinder and gentler with him than she had been before, but whenever he attempted, being led thereto by a guilty conscience, to undeceive her, Sylvia lightly but decidedly waved the revelation aside. She would not have it.
That day, when she and Henry entered the sitting-room, she said, so calmly that he had not the courage to contradict her: "Here is your uncle Henry home from Mr. Meeks's, and he was as wet as a drowned rat. I suppose Mr. Meeks didn't have any umbrella to lend. Old bachelors never do have anything."
Henry sat down quietly in his allotted chair. He said nothing. It was only when the storm had abated, when there was a clear streak of gold low in the west, and all the wet leaves in the yard gave out green and silver lights, when Sylvia had gone out in the kitchen to get supper and Rose had followed her, that the two men looked at each other.
"Does she know?" whispered Horace.
"If she does know, and has taken a notion never to let anybody know she knows, she never will," replied Henry.
"You mean that she will never mention it even to you?"
Henry nodded. He looked relieved and scared. He was right. He continued to work in the shop, and Sylvia never intimated to him that she knew anything about it. _