Myron Holder

“ The springing hopvines seemed to twine their tendrils tight and tighter about her heart. All the scents and sounds of spring were ever after to her an exquisite torture. But her soul was of strong fibre.
Before all the scorn of the village, all the rebukes of Mrs. Deans, all the wrath of her grandmother, all the bitterness and misery and hopelessness of her own heart, Myron Holder was mute.
No murmur escaped her lips against the man who had forsaken her. The village knew her shame, but it could not fathom her secret. Myron Holder was deaf to all commands, entreaties, persuasions, sneers. ”

“ Does any one live who has not, at one time or other, recognized that it may require, under certain circumstances, the supremest effort of will to look behind one?
That effort Myron Holder made, but sustained the gaze but a moment; for, gleaming from the death chamber, nay, from the very couch of death, shone two balls of livid light. With a moan of extreme terror, Myron slid from her chair and, catching at the boy's cradle, fell helpless to the floor.
Homer Wilson did not stand long knocking at the cottage door: his heart misgave him when he saw there was no light. ”

“ It would seem that he was content so long as Myron made the decision and thus relieved him from the responsibility and consequences of doing so. Well, we cannot tell. "The heart knoweth its own bitterness," and it is not for us to judge Hardman. But whilst withholding judgment upon him we need not spare to pity Myron, who, prone upon the narrow couch in the bare dormitory, was face to face with her own soul.
Whilst Hardman slept, having cast off his burden, she was tasting the bitterness of death. Myron Holder's agony would have indeed bewildered him could he have witnessed it. ”

“ Myron Holder would not pay their price.
The dim gray dawn lighted the pain-scarred face of a sleeping mother, by whose side reposed a fair-haired child; a child the secret of whose parentage was still locked within its mother's heart.
* * * * * *
"Them kind always lives," Mrs. Warner said to her husband, when, on a June morning, she saw Myron Holder totter past her door. Mrs. Warner should have thanked the God she worshipped, fasting, that it was so: had Myron Holder died, no woman in all Jamestown would have been free from blood-guiltiness. ”

“ Homer was getting exasperated. The knowledge that he had that very morning passed Myron Holder in absent-minded silence added to the irritation of his mood. His mother's persistent misconstruction of his motives and actions was at times almost unbearable. He answered out of pure perversity: "She's the best looking girl in the village, by long odds; and as for not speaking to her, I fancy the women do plenty of 'passing by on the other side' business without the men helping them. You won't find many men, I reckon, unwilling to speak to Myron Holder." ”

“ Deans, looking judicial; "that would be pretty serious, even for Myron Holder. But I don't know; she's bad clean through—that's easy enough seen; why she makes the greatest time over that young one you ever seen. Why, Mrs. Warner told me that the other Sunday, when she went to Holder's well for a pail of water, that the house being very quiet, she went and looked in the windows, knowing old Mrs. Holder was out to Disney's for milk. She couldn't see nothing in the front room nor the kitchen, but in the bedroom there she seen Myron Holder with the boy. ”

“ Don't you see I would then be vile?"
"No, I don't," said Homer. "Marry me—you and the boy will have my name, and let me hear man or woman say one word against it!"
"I can't," she said.
"Marry me," he urged. "Let me take care of you. Let me show you what a man is. Let me give you a heart and a home. You are lonely, you will be lonely no more; defenseless, I will protect you; sad, I will make you happy; shamed, I will compel them to respect you. Myron"—he held out his arms—"marry me!"
Myron Holder had thought of this hour ever since the day of her grandmother's funeral. ”

“ He soon went to sleep again, and Myron Holder and Homer Wilson sat down together to drink the tea. Her eyes rested upon him, as if well content, and he noted this with delight. The truth was they dared not yet stray elsewhere, lest the spectres he had banished might jibber at her from the dusky corners of the room.
Love is served on strange altars, and the sacrifice of a heart was again proffered in that lonely cottage, whose atmosphere was chill with the dreadful influence of death, whose silence was broken by the soft breathing of a child of shame. ”

“ Outwardly the lives of Myron Holder and Homer Wilson gave no sign of these conflicts. It is the petty worries and every-day griefs of life that traces lines upon the brow. A fretful discontent often leaves a wrinkle when a great grief obscures itself behind the placidity of despair. ”

“ Deans resumed her irate way. Myron Holder held on her path to the village. She was numb alike in mind and body; the accumulated weariness of days of toil and nights of painful thought pressed upon her; it was marvellous how she endured the fatigues of her life without breaking down physically. "As thy days so shall thy strength be!" has hidden a germ of bane as well as blessing. Does it not often seem as if sorrow imbued life with its own bitter tenacity? ”

“ What Myron Holder endured daily no words can tell. By what written sign may we symbolize the agony of a heart, bruised and pierced and crushed day after day? By what language express the torture of a pure soul, stifled in a chrysalis of shame?
Some souls may be purified by fire, doubtless, as the old Greeks cleansed their asbestos fabrics; but we should be wary how we thrust our fellows into the furnace, for no base tissue will stand the fire, and a soul, to emerge unsmirched and undestroyed, must be of strong fibre indeed. ”

“ All the morning the anticipated agony of the ordeal of walking up the path, under these scathing eyes, oppressed and tortured her. No martyr ever contemplated with greater dread the red-hot ploughshares than Myron Holder did those few yards of red trodden earth, bordered by fox grass and burdock leaves. ”

“ Thundering down the street, almost upon the child already, came Disney's great black horse, its huge head outstretched, its nostrils distended—two glowing scarlet pits—its lips drawn back, exposing the gleaming teeth flecked with blood-stained foam, flinging its forefeet out so madly that the glitter of its shoes could be seen from the front. Shreds of its harness clung to it and lashed it to greater fury.
Without a second's hesitation, Myron Holder rushed to her child—to death, as she doubted not. But another form sprang forward also. ”

“ Such was Myron Holder—meek, quiet, hopeless; bearing the burden imposed upon her by convention's unsparing, if righteous, hand. Men, looking at her, instinctively felt their own vileness; and women saw in her a refuge from their own weakness and sins until they knew of hers; then, rejoicing that they yet had power to wound something, crucified her afresh. Many a time her heart bled from stings implanted by lips she had moistened night after night. Many a time her face flushed before the scorn expressed in eyes that would have been forever darkened but for her untiring skill and patience. ”

“ She was Myron Holder—a mother, but not a wife.
When under no more sacred canopy than the topaz of a summer sky—with no other bridal hymn than the choral of the wind among the trees—in obedience to no law but the voice of nature—and the pleading of loved lips—with no other security than the unwitnessed oath of a man—a woman gives herself utterly, then she is doubtless lost. ”

“ Disney was the bigger man, and quite as clever with his hands as Homer; but the latter's arm was nerved by every insult Myron Holder had endured. As Disney sprang forward, he uttered her name, coupled with an epithet that simply maddened Homer. There was no resisting the fury of his attack.... Many hands dragged Homer from the man he had knocked insensible and bade fair to kill, if left alone. ”

“ Think of it, you holy women, who fare delicately, sleeping on soft couches, guarded and consoled, caressed and kept from all evil! For you are like Myron Holder in one thing: Not in suffering, nor shame, nor sorrow; not perhaps in humbleness of heart, nor meekness of spirit, nor in courage, in patience, in faithfulness, nor in hopelessness; not in poverty, nor in endurance; but with her you share, despite yourselves, a common womanhood. Remember that!
Remember also she bore upon her brow the marks of motherhood's crown of thorns. ”

“ Deans smiled to think of Myron's surprise when she found out. Myron Holder had never done Mrs. Deans any injury, but the latter cherished against her that inexplicable hatred, that alien from rhyme or reason, sometimes fearfully fostered in the human heart. This feeling, mature and enfranchised, made the streets of Paris red with blood; has nerved the hand that hurled a bomb; has steadied the aim of the assassin and, developed by heredity and indulged by training and opportunity, has made the Thugs a people. To inflict what others endure with pain is their life. ”

“ Finding a fortune in rags, however, is a little like trying to locate the pot of gold at the rainbow's foot.
Myron Holder had heard plainly the ragman's query and Mrs. Deans' reply. Old Henry Deans, blossoming forth like a snail out of its shell, as soon as his wife's back was turned, said with leering facetiousness, "Ah—a fellow askin' after you, Myron," and pointed his fist with a look that made the blood spring to the woman's cheeks and linger there, a painful blot as though the face had been smitten. She bent over her tub in silence, her heart hot within her. ”

“ No prayer more eloquent of human agony ever beat against deaf skies, yet it was but the repetition of one word—"My—My!"
An hour crept by. The flush had deepened on My's cheeks; his eyes were glazed. Once again, in surpassing pain, Myron Holder called aloud her child's name. There came no heavenly answer; but the true little heart, beating so faintly, responded once more to the beloved voice. Little My's eyes cleared a space and his fingers closed round his mother's.
"My's mama!" He uttered the alliterative little babble in strange, shackled tones. ”

“ There have been many changes in Jamestown—great factories disfigure the margin of the lake, defile the streams with their refuse, and befoul the atmosphere with their smoke. A long row of workmen's cottages, depressingly alike in gable and window, has crowded the Black Horse Inn out of existence. Its old bricks pave the paths over which the mill-hands go to work; the last vestige of its violets has vanished.
The hearts of the Jamestown women, however, have not changed. The same merciless virtue that hounded Myron Holder pursues the poor factory girl who falters on her way. ”

“ Sometimes our wilderness is a perfumed garden, through which insidious devils dog our laggard footsteps. Sometimes it is a shaded pleasaunce, through which we tread with stately steps, unwitting of the derisive demons that smile as they mock our pageantry of pride. With retrospective agony, we turn to gaze upon the mirages of these scenes, as one views sunlit seas where wrecks have been, and cry aloud, "Here much precious treasure was lost!" But there are other wildernesses wherein we wander, consciously beset with Evil Spirits whose faces we know.
It was thus with Myron Holder. ”

“ Let those who jeer with righteous lips at women such as this poor village outcast, remember that the meek Maid-Mother whom they adore perchance shrank before the cruel taunts and pointing fingers of women at the doorways and the wells.
Myron Holder left the butcher's to go to the grocery store; from thence she crossed diagonally to Mrs. Warner's, the woman who, half an hour before, had looked so lingeringly after her child. Myron stood at the back door waiting, whilst Mrs. Warner came down stairs to answer her knock. "Mrs. Deans wanted to know if Mrs. ”

“ Holder from all blame and relieving her of all responsibility for Myron's behavior, remarked that "It did seem as if bad was born in some people."
Old Mrs. Holder rose at that, and speedily made Mrs. Weaver aware that Myron's badness was purely sporadic, and that heredity had nothing to do with it. She did not express herself in this way, but conveyed the same idea much more forcibly.
It is possible that, being Myron's grandmother, she felt a slight reflection from Mrs. Weaver's well-meant suggestion that Myron had inherited vice as her birthright; be that as it may, she speedily made Mrs. ”

“ But Myron was not thinking of the busy city, of the tapping chestnut boughs, nor even of the overspan of pellucid sky. She was thinking of a cruel, sordid, babbling little village and of the silent, unkempt field wherein its dead lay. Her musings were interrupted by the ringing of a bell. She turned and hastened from the room—blue-clad, white-capped, capable—to find a new patient had arrived in her ward; a new patient, with thin, broad, stooped shoulders, overhanging pent-house brow, sad and secret, above sunken gray eyes that shone with unalterable love for mankind ”

“ That night Myron Dill came into the sitting-room after his chores were done, and lay down on the lounge between the two front windows. He composed himself on his back with his hands placidly folded, and there his wife found him when she came in after her own completed list of deeds. He did not look up at her, and she was glad. She did not know how her eyes gleamed behind the glittering plane of their glasses, nor how deep the red was in her cheeks; but she was conscious of an inward tumult which must, she knew, somehow betray itself. ”