Mercy Philbrick

“ How well many women know this curious fact in love's optics! I doubt if men ever watch long enough, and longingly enough, for a woman's coming, to be so familiar with the phenomenon. Stephen White, however, had more than once during these four weeks quickened his pace to overtake some slender figure clad in black, never doubting that it was Mercy Philbrick, until he came so near that his eyes were forced to tell him the truth. It was truly a strange thing that he and Mercy did not once meet during all these weeks. ”

“ As in the moment of drowning people are said to review in one swift flash of consciousness their whole lives, so now in this moment did Mercy look back over the months of her life with Stephen. Her sense of the baseness of his action now was like a lightning illuming every corner of the past: every equivocation, every concealment, every subterfuge he had practised, stood out before her, bare, stripped of every shred of apology or excuse. "He lies; he has always lied. Why should he not steal?" ”

“ Past, present, and future all melt into one great harmonious whole under the spell of love in a nature like Mercy's. They are like so many rooms in one great house; and in one or the other the loved being is always to be found, always at home, can never depart! Could one be lonely for a moment in such a house?
Mercy's perpetual and abiding joy at times terrified Stephen. It was a thing so foreign to his own nature that it seemed to him hardly natural. Calm acquiescence he could understand,--serene endurance: he himself never chafed at the barriers, little or great, which kept him from Mercy. ”

“ Mercy could not refrain from laughing in his face, as she retreated a few steps towards the piazza, and said,--
"It is I who ought to beg your pardon. I had no business to be standing stock-still in the middle of the highway like a post."
"Sensible young woman! sensible young woman! God bless my soul! don't know your face, don't know your face," said the old gentleman, peering out from under the eaves of his eyebrows, and scrutinizing Mercy as a child might scrutinize a new-comer into his father's house. One could not resent it, any more than one could resent the gaze of a child. ”

“ We shall know some joys, Mercy, which joyous lovers never know. Happy people do not need each other as sad people do. O Mercy, do try and remember all the time that you are the one bright thing in my life,--in my whole life."
"I will, Stephen, I will," said Mercy, resolutely, her whole face glowing with the new purposes forming in her heart. It was marvellous how clear the relation between herself and Stephen began to seem to her. It was rather by her magnetic consciousness of all that he was thinking and feeling than by the literal acceptance of any thing or all things which he said. ”

“ All day long she trotted up and down, up and down; ransacking closets, chests, barrels; sorting and resorting, and forgetting as fast as she sorted. Now and then she would come across something which would rouse an electric chain of memories in the dim chambers of her old, worn-out brain, and she would sit motionless for a long time on the garret floor, in a sort of trance. Once Mercy found her leaning back against a beam, with her knees covered by a piece of faded blue Canton crape, on which her eyes were fastened. She did not speak till Mercy touched her shoulder. ”

“ Intellectually, he was, in spite of his superior culture, far Mercy's inferior. He had been brave enough and manly enough to recognize this, and also to recognize what it took still more manliness to recognize,--that she could never love a man of his temperament. It would have been very easy for him to love Mercy. He was not a man of a passionate nature; but he felt himself strangely stirred whenever he looked into her sensitive, orchid-like face. He felt in every fibre of him that to have the whole love of such a woman would be bewildering joy ”

“ Woe to any soul which trusts itself to any thing less than an organic integrity of nature, to which a lie is impossible!
Mercy's letters disappointed Stephen. They were loving; but they were concise, sensible, sometimes merry, and always cheerful. Her life was constantly broadening; friends crowded around her; and her art was becoming more and more to her every day. Her name was beginning to be known, and her influence felt. Her verses were simple, and went to people's hearts. They were also of a fine and subtle flavor, and gave pleasure to the intellect. ”

“ It would have been impossible to put Mercy in any circumstances, in any situation, out of which, or in spite of which, she would not find joy. But in Stephen circumstance and place might as easily destroy as create happiness. His enjoyment was as far inferior to Mercy's in genuineness and enduringness as is the shallow lake to the quenchless spring. The waters of each may leap and sparkle alike, to the eye, in the sunshine; but when drought has fallen on the lake, and the place that knew it knows it no more, the spring is full, free, and glad as ever. ”

“ White thought to herself,--
"Steve was right. She is a wonderful cheery body." And, long after Mercy had gone, she continued to think happily of the pleasant incident of the fresh bright face and the sweet voice. For the time being, her jealous distrust of the possible effect of these upon her son slumbered.
When Stephen entered his mother's room that night, his heart gave a sudden bound at the sight of the green wreaths and the dish of ferns. He saw them on fhe first instant after opening the door; he knew in the same instant that the hands of Mercy Philbrick must have placed them there ”

“ Mercy! couldn't I make all days sweet for you? Come to me, darling, and let me try!" came from Parson Dorrance's lips in hurried and husky tones.
Mercy looked at him for one second in undisguised terror and bewilderment. Then she uttered a sharp cry, as of one who had suddenly got a wound, and, burying her face in her hands, sank into a chair and began to cry convulsively.
Parson Dorrance walked up and down the room. He dared not speak. He was not quite sure what Mercy's weeping meant; so hard is it, for a single moment, to wrench a great hope out of a man's heart. ”

“ We are almost always a little vexed, when we point out a distant object to a friend, and hear him reply,-- "No, I do not see it at all. I am near-sighted."
"What! can't you see that far?" is the frequent retort, and in the pity is a dash of impatience.
There is a great deal of intolerance in the world, which is closely akin to this; and not a whit more reasonable or righteous, though it makes great pretensions to being both. Mercy Philbrick was full of such intolerance, on this one point of honesty. She was intolerant not only to others, she was intolerant to herself. ”

“ Don't let us keep any thing back from each other."
Poor Mercy! the days were beginning to be hard for her. Her face often wore a look of perplexed thought which was very new to it. Still she never wavered for a moment in her devotion to Stephen. If she had stood acknowledged before all the world as his wife, she could not have been any more single-hearted and unquestioning in her loyalty.
It was at a picnic in which the young people of both Danby and Penfield had joined that Mercy met Parson Dorrance. No such gathering was ever thought complete without the Parson's presence. ”

“ White's eyes first fell on Mercy in the doorway, they rested on her with the same cold gaze which had so repelled her on their first interview. But no sooner did she see the dish of mosses than her face lighted up, and exclaiming, "Oh, where did you get those partridge-berry vines?" she involuntarily stretched out her hands. The ice was broken. Mercy felt at home at once, and at once conceived a true sentiment of pity for Mrs. White, which never wholly died out of her heart. ”

“ I am not like other men: I have lived alone all my life with my mother. You need not mind my saying your face is lovely, any more than my saying that the ferns on the walls are lovely."
If Stephen had known Mercy from her childhood, he could not have framed his words more wisely. Every fibre of her artistic nature recognized the possibility of a subtle truth in what he said, and his calm, dreamy tone and look heightened this impression. ”

“ I've given the orchard to the boys. The fruit's all their own."
This was the man whom Mercy Philbrick met early in her first summer at Penfield. She had heard him preach twice, and had been so greatly impressed by his words and by his face that she longed very much to know him. She had talked with Stephen about him, but had found that Stephen did not sympathize at all in her enthusiasm. "The people over at Danby are all crazy about him, I think," said Stephen. "He is a very good man no doubt, and does no end of things for the college boys, that none of the other professors do. ”

“ She did not perceive that it was the inevitable confidence of a person so sure he is right that he cannot comprehend any doubt in another's mind on the subject. There was in Mercy's nature a vein of intolerance, which was capable of the most terrible severity. She was as blinded, to Stephen's true position in the matter as he was to hers. The final moment of divergence had come: its seeds were planted in her nature and in Stephen's when they were born. Nothing could have hindered their growth, nothing could have forestalled their ultimate result. ”

“ Stephen sighed. "I am glad you see that," he said. Then in a lower tone, "You know you are free, Mercy,--utterly free. I would never be so base as to hold you by a word."
Mercy smiled half-bitterly, as she replied,--
"Words never hold people, and you know very well it is only an empty form of words to say that I am free. I do not want to be free, darling," she added, in a burst of tenderness toward him. "You could not set me free, if you tried."
When Mercy told Parson Dorrance her intention of going away, his face changed as if some fierce spasm wrung him ”

“ White," interrupted Mercy. "It is not really late, only we keep such absurdly early hours, and are so quiet, as we know nobody here, that a knock at the door in the evening makes us all jump. Pray come in," and she threw open the door into the sitting-room, where the lamps had already been put out, and the light of a blazing hickory log made long flickering shadows on the crimson carpet. In this dancing light, the room looked still more like a grove than it had to Marty at high noon. Stephen's eyes fastened hungrily on the sight. ”

“ Parson Dorrance's hair was white as snow; but his eyes were as keen and dark as in his youth, his step as firm, and his pulse as quick. Long before he dreamed of such a thing, he might have known, if he had taken counsel of his heart, that Mercy was becoming to him the one woman in the world. There was always this peculiarity in Mercy's influence upon all who came to love her. She was so unique and incalculable a person that she made all other women seem by comparison with her monotonous and wearying. Intimacy with her had a subtle flavor to it, by which other flavors were dulled. ”

“ On such days, joy becomes inevitable even to inert and lifeless natures: to enthusiastic and spontaneous ones, the exhilaration of the air and the sun is as intoxicating as wine. Mercy was in one of her most mirthful moods. She frolicked with the negro children, and decked their little woolly heads with wreaths of golden-rod, till they looked as fantastic as dancing monkeys. She gathered great sheaves of ferns and blue gentians and asters, until the Parson implored her to "leave a few just for the poor sun to shine on." ”

“ As the morning dawned, and she drew near the old familiar scenes, her heart was wrung with conflicting memories and hopes and fears. The whole landscape was dreary: the fields were dark and sodden, with narrow banks of discolored snow lying under the fences, and thin rims of ice along the edges of the streams and pools. The sky was gray; the bare trees were gray: all life looked gray and hopeless to Mercy. She had had an over-mastering presentiment from the moment when she read the telegram that she should reach Penfield too late to see Parson Dorrance alive. ”

“ I never should, if I were in her place."
"Very well, I hope she never will, if her presence is to produce such an effect on you. It is enough to turn her head to see that she has such power over a man like you. She is a very vain woman, anyway,--vain of her power over people, I think."
Stephen could bear no more. With a half-smothered ejaculation of "O mother!" he left the room.
And thus the old year went out and the new year came in for Mercy Philbrick and Stephen White,--the old year in which they had been nothing, and the new year in which they were to be every thing to each other. ”

“ I cannot be lover and culprit at once, as you are able to be lover and accuser, or judge. I love you, I think, as deeply and tenderly as ever; but you yourself have made all expression of it impossible. Stephen."
This letter roused in Mercy most conflicting emotions. Wounded feeling at its coldness, a certain admiration for its tone of immovable resolution, anger at what seemed to her Stephen's unjustifiable resentment of her effort to influence his action,--all these blended in one great pain which was well-nigh unbearable. ”

“ I do not think, dear Stephen, there is a moment of any day when I have not an under current of consciousness of you; but it is not a longing for the sight of you. Are you sure, darling, that the love which takes perpetual shape in such longings is the strongest love?"
Little by little, phrases like this sank into Stephen's mind, and gradually crystallized into a firm conviction that Mercy was being weaned from him. ”