Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.

MARGRET HOWTH.

A STORY OF TO-DAY

by

Rebecca Harding Davis

"My matter hath no voice to alien ears."

TO MY MOTHER.

CHAPTER I.

Let me tell you a story of To-Day,--very homely and narrow in its scope
and aim.  Not of the To-Day whose significance in the history of
humanity only those shall read who will live when you and I are dead.
We can bear the pain in silence, if our hearts are strong enough, while
the nations of the earth stand afar off. I have no word of this To-Day
to speak.  I write from the border of the battlefield, and I find in it
no theme for shallow argument or flimsy rhymes.  The shadow of death
has fallen on us; it chills the very heaven.  No child laughs in my
face as I pass down the street.  Men have forgotten to hope, forgotten
to pray; only in the bitterness of endurance, they say "in the morning,
'Would God it were even!' and in the evening, 'Would God it were
morning!'"  Neither I nor you have the prophet's vision to see the age
as its meaning stands written before God.  Those who shall live when we
are dead may tell their children, perhaps, how, out of anguish and
darkness such as the world seldom has borne, the enduring morning
evolved of the true world and the true man. It is not clear to us.
Hands wet with a brother's blood for the Right, a slavery of
intolerance, the hackneyed cant of men, or the blood-thirstiness of
women, utter no prophecy to us of the great To-Morrow of content and
right that holds the world.  Yet the To-Morrow is there; if God lives,
it is there. The voice of the meek Nazarene, which we have deafened
down as ill-timed, unfit to teach the watchword of the hour, renews the
quiet promise of its coming in simple, humble things.  Let us go down
and look for it.  There is no need that we should feebly vaunt and
madden ourselves over our self-seen rights, whatever they may be,
forgetting what broken shadows they are of eternal truths in that calm
where He sits and with His quiet hand controls us.

Patriotism and Chivalry are powers in the tranquil, unlimited lives to
come, as well as here, I know; but there are less partial truths,
higher hierarchies who serve the God-man, that do not speak to us in
bayonets and victories,--Mercy and Love.  Let us not quite neglect
them, unpopular angels though they be.  Very humble their voices are,
just now: yet not altogether dead, I think.  Why, the very low glow of
the fire upon the hearth tells me something of recompense coming in the
hereafter,--Christmas-days, and heartsome warmth; in these bare hills
trampled down by armed men, the yellow clay is quick with pulsing
fibres, hints of the great heart of life and love throbbing within;
slanted sunlight would show me, in these sullen smoke-clouds from the
camp, walls of amethyst and jasper, outer ramparts of the Promised
Land.  Do not call us traitors, then, who choose to be cool and silent
through the fever of the hour,--who choose to search in common things
for auguries of the hopeful, helpful calm to come, finding even in
these poor sweet-peas, thrusting their tendrils through the brown
mould; a deeper, more healthful lesson for the eye and soul than
warring truths.  Do not call me a traitor, if I dare weakly to hint
that there are yet other characters besides that of Patriot in which a
man may appear creditably in the great masquerade, and not blush when
it is over; or if I tell you a story of To-Day, in which there shall be
no bloody glare,--only those homelier, subtiler lights which we have
overlooked.  If it prove to you that the sun of old times still shines,
and the God of old times still lives, is not that enough?

My story is very crude and homely, as I said,--only a rough sketch of
one or two of those people whom you see every day, and call "dregs,"
sometimes,--a dull, plain bit of prose, such as you might pick for
yourself out of any of these warehouses or back-streets.  I expect you
to call it stale and plebeian, for I know the glimpses of life it
pleases you best to find; idyls delicately tinted; passion-veined
hearts, cut bare for curious eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and
clear; or some word of pathos or fun from the old friends who have
endenizened themselves in everybody's home. You want something, in
fact, to lift you out of this crowded, tobacco-stained commonplace, to
kindle and chafe and glow in you.  I want you to dig into this
commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it.
Sometimes I think it has a new and awful significance that we do not
see.

Your ears are openest to the war-trumpet now.  Ha! that is
spirit-stirring!--that wakes up the old Revolutionary blood! Your
manlier nature had been smothered under drudgery, the poor daily
necessity for bread and butter. I want you to go down into this common,
every-day drudgery, and consider if there might not be in it also a
great warfare.  Not a serfish war; not altogether ignoble, though even
its  only end may appear to be your daily food.  A great warfare, I
think, with a history as old as the world, and not without its pathos.
It has its slain.  Men and women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow,
silent battle, are in your alleys, sit beside you at your table; its
martyrs sleep under every green hill-side.

You must fight in it; money will buy you no discharge from that war.
There is room in it, believe me, whether your post be on a judge's
bench, or over a wash-tub, for heroism, for knightly honour, for purer
triumph than his who falls foremost in the breach.  Your enemy, Self,
goes with you from the cradle to the coffin; it is a hand-to-hand
struggle all the sad, slow way, fought in solitude,--a battle that
began with the first heart-beat, and whose victory will come only when
the drops ooze out, and sudden halt in the veins,--a victory, if you
can gain it, that will drift you not a little way upon the coasts of
the wider, stronger range of being, beyond death.

Let me roughly outline for you one or two lives that I have known, and
how they conquered or were worsted in the fight.  Very common lives, I
know,--such as are swarming in yonder market-place; yet I dare to call
them voices of God,--all!

My reason for choosing this story to tell you is simple enough.

An old book, which I happened to find to-day, recalled it.  It was a
ledger, iron-bound, with the name of the firm on the outside,--Knowles
& Co.  You may have heard of the firm: they were large woollen
manufacturers: supplied the home market in Indiana for several years.
This ledger, you see by the writing, has been kept by a woman.  That is
not unusual in Western trading towns, especially in factories where the
operatives are chiefly women.  In such establishments, they can fill
every post successfully, but that of overseer: they are too hard with
the hands for that.

The writing here is curious: concise, square, not flowing,--very
legible, however, exactly suited to its purpose.  People who profess to
read character in chirography would decipher but little from these
cramped, quiet lines.  Only this, probably: that the woman, whoever she
was, had not the usual fancy of her sex for dramatizing her soul in her
writing, her dress, her face,--kept it locked up instead, intact; that
her words and looks, like her writing, were most likely simple, mere
absorbents by which she drew what she needed of the outer world to her,
not flaunting helps to fling herself, or the tragedy or comedy that lay
within, before careless passers-by.  The first page has the date, in
red letters, October 2, 1860, largely and  clearly written.  I am sure
the woman's hand trembled a little when she took up the pen; but there
is no sign of it here; for it was a new, desperate adventure to her,
and she was young, with no faith in herself.  She did not look
desperate, at all,--a quiet, dark girl, coarsely dressed in brown.

There was not much light in the office where she sat; for the factory
was in one of the close by-streets of the town, and the office they
gave her was only a small square closet in the seventh story.  It had
but one window, which overlooked a back-yard full of dyeing vats.  The
sunlight that did contrive to struggle in obliquely through the dusty
panes and cobwebs of the window, had a sleepy odour of copperas latent
in it.  You smelt it when you stirred. The manager, Pike, who brought
her up, had laid the day-books and this ledger open on the desk for
her.  As soon as he was gone, she shut the door, listening until his
heavy boots had thumped creaking down the rickety ladder leading to the
frame-rooms.  Then she climbed up on the high office-stool (climbed, I
said, for she was a little, lithe thing) and went to work, opening the
books, and copying from one to the other as steadily, monotonously, as
if she had been used to it all her life.  Here are the first pages: see
how sharp the angles are of the  blue and black lines, how even the
long columns: one would not think, that, as the steel pen traced them
out, it seemed to be lining out her life, narrow and black.  If any
such morbid fancy were in the girl's head, there was no tear to betray
it. The sordid, hard figures seemed to her types of the years coming,
but she wrote them down unflinchingly: perhaps life had nothing better
for her, so she did not care.  She finished soon: they had given her
only an hour or two's work for the first day.  She closed the books,
wiped the pens in a quaint, mechanical fashion, then got down and
examined her new home.

It was soon understood.  There were the walls with their broken
plaster, showing the laths underneath, with here and there, over them,
sketches with burnt coal, showing that her predecessor had been an
artist in his way,--his name, P. Teagarden, emblazoned on the ceiling
with the smoke of a candle; heaps of hanks of yarn in the dusty
corners; a half-used broom; other heaps of yarn on the old toppling
desk covered with dust; a raisin-box, with P. Teagarden done on the lid
in bas-relief, half full of ends of cigars, a pack of cards, and a
rotten apple.  That was all, except an impalpable sense of dust and
worn-outness pervading the whole.  One thing more, odd enough there: a
wire cage, hung on the wall, and in it a miserable pecking chicken,
peering dolefully with suspicious eyes out at her, and then down at the
mouldy bit of bread on the floor of his cage,--left there, I suppose,
by the departed Teagarden.  That was all, inside.  She looked out of
the window.  In it, as if set in a square black frame, was the dead
brick wall, and the opposite roof, with a cat sitting on the scuttle.
Going closer, two or three feet of sky appeared.  It looked as if it
smelt of copperas, and she drew suddenly back.

She sat down, waiting until it was time to go; quietly taking the dull
picture into her slow, unrevealing eyes; a sluggish, hackneyed
weariness creeping into her brain; a curious feeling, that all her life
before had been a silly dream, and this dust, these desks and ledgers,
were real,--all that was real.  It was her birthday; she was twenty.
As she happened to remember that, another fancy floated up before her,
oddly life-like: of the old seat she made under the currant-bushes at
home when she was a child, and the plans she laid for herself, when she
should be a woman, sitting there,--how she would dig down into the
middle of the world, and find the kingdom of the griffins, or would go
after Mercy and Christiana in their pilgrimage.  It was only a little
while ago  since these things were more alive to her than anything else
in the world.  The seat was under the currant-bushes still.  Very
little time ago; but she was a woman now,--and, look here!  A chance
ray of sunlight slanted in, falling barely on the dust, the hot heaps
of wool, waking a stronger smell of copperas; the chicken saw it, and
began to chirp a weak, dismal joy, more sorrowful than tears.  She went
to the cage, and put her finger in for it to peck at.  Standing there,
if the vacant life coming rose up before her in that hard blare of
sunlight, she looked at it with the same still, waiting eyes, that told
nothing.

The door opened at last, and a man came in,--Dr. Knowles, the principal
owner of the factory.  He nodded shortly to her, and, going to the
desk, turned over the books, peering suspiciously at her work.  An old
man, overgrown, looking like a huge misshapen mass of flesh, as he
stood erect, facing her.

"You can go now," he said, gruffly.  "Tomorrow you must wait for the
bell to ring, and go--with the rest of the hands."

A curious smile flickered over her face like a shadow; but she said
nothing.  He waited a moment.

"So!" he growled, "the Howth blood does not blush to go down into the
slime of the gutter? is sufficient to itself?"

A cool, attentive motion,--that was all.  Then she stooped to tie her
sandals.  The old man watched her, irritated.  She had been used to the
keen scrutiny of his eyes since she was a baby, so was cool under it
always.  The face watching her was one that repelled most men:
dominant, restless, flushing into red gusts of passion, a small,
intolerant eye, half hidden in folds of yellow fat,--the eye of a man
who would give to his master (whether God or Satan) the last drop of
his own blood, and exact the same of other men.

She had tied her bonnet and fastened her shawl, and stood ready to go.

"Is that all you want?" he demanded.  "Are you waiting to hear that
your work is well done?  Women go through life as babies learn to
walk,--a mouthful of pap every step, only they take it in praise or
love.  Pap is better.  Which do you want?  Praise, I fancy."

"Neither," she said, quietly brushing her shawl.  "The work is well
done, I know."

The old man's eye glittered for an instant, satisfied; then he turned
to the books.  He thought she had gone, but, hearing a slight clicking
sound, turned round.  She was taking the chicken out of the cage.

"Let it alone!" he broke out, sharply.  "Where are you going with it?"

"Home," she said, with a queer, quizzical face.  "Let it smell the
green fields, Doctor.  Ledgers and copperas are not good food for a
chicken's soul, or body either."

"Let it alone!" he growled.  "You take it for a type of yourself, eh?
It has another work to do than to grow fat and sleep about the
barnyard."

She opened the cage.

"I think I will take it."

"No," he said, quietly.  "It has a master here.  Not P. Teagarden. Why,
Margret," pushing his stubby finger between the tin bars "do you think
the God you believe in would have sent it here without a work to do?"

She looked up; there was a curious tremour in his flabby face, a shadow
in his rough voice.

"If it dies here, its life won't have been lost.  Nothing is lost. Let
it alone."

"Not lost?" she said, slowly, refastening the cage.  "Only I think"----

"What, child?"

She glanced furtively at him.

"It's a hard, scraping world where such a thing as that has work to do!"

He vouchsafed no answer.  She waited to see his lip curl bitterly, and
then, amused, went down the stairs.  She had paid him for his sneer.

The steps were but a long ladder set in the wall, not the great
staircase used by the hands: that was on the other side of the factory.
It was a huge, unwieldy building, such as crowd the suburbs of trading
towns.  This one went round the four sides of a square, with the yard
for the vats in the middle.  The ladders and passages she passed down
were on the inside, narrow and dimly lighted: she had to grope her way
sometimes.  The floors shook constantly with the incessant thud of the
great looms that filled each story, like heavy, monotonous thunder.  It
deafened her, made her dizzy, as she went down slowly.  It was no short
walk to reach the lower hall, but she was down at last.  Doors opened
from it into the ground-floor ware-rooms; glancing in, she saw vast,
dingy recesses of boxes piled up to the dark ceilings. There was a
crowd of porters and draymen cracking their whips, and lounging on the
trucks by the door, waiting for loads, talking politics, and smoking.
The smell of tobacco, copperas, and burning logwood was heavy to
clamminess here.  She stopped, uncertain.  One of the porters, a short,
sickly man, who stood aloof from the rest, pushed open a door for her
with his staff. Margret had a quick memory for faces; she thought she
had seen this one before as she passed,--a dark face, sullen,
heavy-lipped, the hair cut convict-fashion, close to the head. She
thought too, one of the men muttered "jail-bird," jeering him for his
forwardness.  "Load for Clinton! Western Railroad!" sung out a sharp
voice behind her, and, as she went into the street, a train of cars
rushed into the hall to be loaded, and men swarmed out of every
corner,--red-faced and pale, whiskey-bloated and heavy-brained, Irish,
Dutch, black, with souls half asleep somewhere, and the destiny of a
nation in their grasp,--hands, like herself, going through the slow,
heavy work, for, as Pike the manager would have told you, "three
dollars a week,--good wages these tight times."  For nothing more?
Some other meaning may have fallen from their faces into this girl's
subtile intuition in the instant's glance,--cheerfuller, remoter aims,
hidden in the most sensual face,--homeliest home-scenes, low climbing
ambitions, some delirium of pleasure to come,--whiskey, if nothing
better: aims in life like yours differing in degree. Needing only to
make them the same----did you say what?

She had reached the street now,--a back-street, a crooked sort of lane
rather, running between endless piles of warehouses.  She hurried down
it to gain the suburbs, for she lived out in the country.  It was a
long, tiresome walk through the outskirts of the town, where the
dwelling-houses were,--long rows of two-story bricks drabbled with
soot-stains.  It was two years since she had been in the town.
Remembering this, and the reason why she had shunned it, she quickened
her pace, her face growing stiller than before.  One might have fancied
her a slave putting on a mask, fearing to meet her master.  The town,
being unfamiliar to her, struck her newly.  She saw the expression on
its face better.  It was a large trading city, compactly built, shut in
by hills.  It had an anxious, harassed look, like a speculator
concluding a keen bargain; the very dwelling-houses smelt of trade,
having shops in the lower stories; in the outskirts, where there are
cottages in other cities, there were mills here; the trees, which some
deluded dreamer had planted on the flat pavements, had all grown up
into abrupt Lombardy poplars, knowing their best policy was to keep out
of the way; the boys, playing marbles under them, played sharply "for
keeps;" the bony old dray-horses, plodding through the dusty crowds,
had speculative eyes, that measured their oats at night with a
"you-don't-cheat-me" look.  Even the churches had not the grave repose
of the old brown house yonder in the hills, where the few
field-people--Arians, Calvinists, Churchmen--gathered every Sunday, and
air and sunshine  and God's charity made the day holy.  These churches
lifted their hard stone faces insolently, registering their yearly alms
in the morning journals.  To be sure the back-seats were free for the
poor; but the emblazoned crimson of the windows, the carving of the
arches, the very purity of the preacher's style, said plainly that it
was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a man
in a red wamus to enter the kingdom of heaven through that gate.

Nature itself had turned her back on the town: the river turned aside,
and but half a river crept reluctantly by; the hills were but bare
banks of yellow clay.  There was a cinder-road leading through these.
Margret climbed it slowly.  The low town-hills, as I said, were bare,
covered at their bases with dingy stubble-fields. In the sides
bordering the road gaped the black mouths of the coal-pits that
burrowed under the hills, under the town. Trade everywhere,--on the
earth and under it.  No wonder the girl called it a hard, scraping
world.  But when the road had crept through these hills, it suddenly
shook off the cinders, and turned into the brown mould of the
meadows,--turned its back on trade and the smoky town, and speedily
left it out of sight contemptuously, never looking back once.  This was
the country now in earnest.

Margret slackened her step, drawing long breaths of the fresh cold air.
Far behind her, panting and puffing along, came a black, burly figure,
Dr. Knowles.  She had seen him behind her all the way, but they did not
speak.  Between the two there lay that repellent resemblance which made
them like close relations,--closer when they were silent.  You know
such people? When you speak to them, the little sharp points clash.
Yet they are the few whom you surely know you will meet in the life
beyond death, "saved" or not.  The Doctor came slowly along the quiet
country-road, watching the woman's figure going as slowly before him.
He had a curious interest in the girl,--a secret reason for the
interest, which as yet he kept darkly to himself.  For this reason he
tried to fancy how her new life would seem to her.  It should be hard
enough, her work,--he was determined on that; her strength and
endurance must be tested to the uttermost.  He must know what stuff was
in the weapon before he used it.  He had been reading the slow, cold
thing for years,--had not got into its secret yet.  But there was power
there, and it was the power he wanted.  Her history was simple enough:
she was going into the mill to support a helpless father and mother; it
was a common story; she had given up much for them;--other women did
the same. He gave her scanty praise.  Two years ago (he had keen,
watchful eyes, this man) he had fancied that the homely girl had a
dream, as most women have, of love and marriage: she had put it aside,
he thought, forever; it was too expensive a luxury; she had to begin
the life-long battle for bread and butter.  Her dream had been real and
pure, perhaps; for she accepted no sham love in its place: if it had
left an empty hunger in her heart, she had not tried to fill it.  Well,
well, it was the old story.  Yet he looked after her kindly as he
thought of it; as some people look sorrowfully at children, going back
to their own childhood.  For a moment he half relented in his purpose,
thinking, perhaps, her work for life was hard enough.  But no: this
woman had been planned and kept by God for higher uses than daughter or
wife or mother.  It was his part to put her work into her hands.

The road was creeping drowsily now between high grass-banks, out
through the hills.  A sleepy, quiet road.  The restless dust of the
town never had been heard of out there.  It went wandering lazily
through the corn-fields, down by the river, into the very depths of the
woods,--the low October sunshine slanting warmly down it all the way,
touching the grass-banks and the corn-fields with patches of russet
gold.  Nobody in such a road could be in a hurry.  The quiet was so
deep, the free air, the heavy trees, the sunshine, all so full and
certain and fixed, one could be sure of finding them the same a hundred
years from now.  Nobody ever was in a hurry.  The brown bees came along
there, when their work was over, and hummed into the great purple
thistles on the road-side in a voluptuous stupor of delight.  The cows
sauntered through the clover by the fences, until they wound up by
lying down in it and sleeping outright.  The country-people, jogging
along to the mill, walked their fat old nags through the stillness and
warmth so slowly that even Margret left them far behind.  As the road
went deeper into the hills, the quiet grew even more penetrating and
certain,--so certain in these grand old mountains that one called it
eternal, and, looking up to the peaks fixed in the clear blue, grew
surer of a world beyond this where there is neither change nor death.

It was growing late; the evening air more motionless and cool; the
russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now; in the
valleys there was a duskier brown, deepening every moment. Margret
turned from the road, and went down the fields.  One did not wonder,
feeling the silence of these hills and broad sweeps of meadow, that
this woman, coming down from among them, should be strangely still,
with dark questioning eyes dumb to their own secrets.

Looking into her face now, you could be sure of one thing: that she had
left the town, the factory, the dust far away, shaken the thought of
them off her brain.  No miles could measure the distance between her
home and them.  At a stile across the field an old man sat waiting.
She hurried now, her cheek colouring. Dr. Knowles could see them going
to the house beyond, talking earnestly.  He sat down in the darkening
twilight on the stile, and waited half an hour.  He did not care to
hear the story of Margret's first day at the mill, knowing how her
father and mother would writhe under it, soften it as she would.  It
was nothing to her, he knew.  So he waited.  After a while he heard the
old man's laugh, like that of a pleased child, and then went in and
took her place beside him.  She went out, but came back presently,
every grain of dust gone, in her clear dress of pearl gray.  The
neutral tint suited her well.  As she stood by the window, listening
gravely to them, the homely face and waiting figure came into full
relief.  Nature had made the woman in a freak of rare sincerity.  There
were no reflected lights about her; no gloss on her skin, no glitter in
her eyes, no varnish on her soul.  Simple and dark and pure, there she
was, for God and her master to conquer and understand.  Her flesh was
cold and colourless,--there were no surface tints on it,--it warmed
sometimes slowly from far within; her voice, quiet,--out of her heart;
her hair, the only beauty of the woman, was lustreless brown, lay in
unpolished folds of dark shadow.  I saw such hair once, only once.  It
had been cut from the head of a man, who, unconscious, simple as a
child, lived out the law of his nature, and set the world at
defiance,--Bysshe Shelley.

The Doctor, talking to her father, watched the girl furtively, took in
every point, as one might critically survey a Damascus blade which he
was going to carry into battle.  There was neither love nor scorn in
his look,--a mere fixedness of purpose to make use of her some day.  He
talked, meanwhile, glancing at her now and then, as if the subject they
discussed were indirectly linked with his plan for her.  If it were,
she was unconscious of it. She sat on the wooden step of the porch,
looking out on the melancholy sweep of meadow and hill range growing
cool and dimmer in the dun twilight, not hearing what they said, until
the sharpened, earnest tones roused her.

"You will fail, Knowles."

It was her father who spoke.

"Nothing can save such a scheme from failure.  Neither the French nor
German Socialists attempted to base their systems on the lowest class,
as you design."

"I know," said Knowles.  "That accounts for their partial success."

"Let me understand your plan practically," eagerly demanded her father.

She thought Knowles evaded the question,--wished to leave the subject.
Perhaps he did not regard the poor old school-master as a practical
judge of practical matters.  All his life he had called him thriftless
and unready.

"It never will do, Knowles," he went on in his slow way.  "Any plan,
Phalanstery or Community, call it what you please, founded on self
government, is based on a sham, the tawdriest of shams."

The old school-master shook his head as one who knows, and tried to
push the thin gray hairs out of his eyes in a groping way. Margret
lifted them back, so quietly that he did not feel her.

"You'll call the Republic a sham next!" said the Doctor, coolly
aggravating.

"The Republic!"  The old man quickened his tone, like a war-horse
scenting the battle near at hand.  "There never was a thinner-crusted
Devil's egg in the world than democracy.  I think I've told you that
before?"

"I think you have," said the other, dryly.

"You always were a Tory, Mr. Howth," said his wife, in her placid,
creamy way.  "It is in the blood, I think, Doctor.  The Howths fought
under Cornwallis, you know."

The school-master waited until his wife had ended.

"Very true, Mrs. Howth," he said, with a grave smile.  Then his thin
face grew hot again.

"No, Dr. Knowles.  Your scheme is but a sign of the mad age we live in.
Since the thirteenth century, when the anarchic element sprang
full-grown into the history of humanity, that history has been chaos.
And this republic is the culmination of chaos."

"Out of chaos came the new-born earth," suggested the Doctor.

"But its foundations were granite," rejoined the old man with nervous
eagerness,--"granite, not the slime of yesterday.  When you found
empires, go to work as God worked."

The Doctor did not answer; sat looking, instead, out into the dark
indifferently, as if the heresies which the old man hurled at him were
some old worn-out song.  Seeing, however, that the school-master's
flush of enthusiasm seemed on the point of dying out, he roused himself
to gibe it into life.

"Well, Mr. Howth, what will you have?  If the trodden rights of the
human soul are the slime of yesterday, how shall we found our empire to
last?  On despotism?  Civil or theocratic?"

"Any despotism is better than that of newly enfranchised serfs,"
replied the school-master.

The Doctor laughed.

"What a successful politician you would have made?  You would have had
such a winning way to the hearts of the great unwashed!"

Mrs. Howth laid down her knitting.

"My dear," she said, timidly, "I think that is treason."

The angry heat died out of his face instantly, as he turned to her,
without the glimmer of a covert smile at her simplicity. She was a
woman; and when he spoke to the Doctor, it was in a tone less sharp.

"What is it the boys used to declaim, their Yankee hearts throbbing
under their round-aborts?  'Happy, proud America!' Somehow in that way.
'Cursed, abased America!' better if they had said.  Look at her, in the
warm vigour of her youth, most vigorous in decay!  Look at the germs
and dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together!  As for
the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the
three great archetypes of the experiment, into a paling, miserable
failure!"

The Doctor did not hear.  Some sharper shadow seemed to haunt him than
the downfall of the Republic.  What help did he seek in this girl?  His
keen, deep eyes never left her unconscious face.

"No," Mr. Howth went on, having the field to himself,--"we left Order
back there in the ages you call dark, and Progress will trumpet the
world into the ditch."

"Comte!" growled the Doctor.

The school-master's cane beat an angry tattoo on the hearth.

"You sneer at Comte?  Because, having the clearest eye, the widest
sweeping eye ever given to man, he had no more?  It was to show how far
flesh can go alone.  Could he help it, if God refused the prophet's
vision?"

"I'm sure, Samuel," interrupted his wife with a sorrowful earnestness,
"your own eyes were as strong as a man's could be. It was ten years
after I wore spectacles that you began.  Only for that miserable fever,
you could read shorthand now."

Her own blue eyes filled with tears.  There was a sudden silence.
Margret shivered, as if some pain stung her.  Holding her father's bony
hand in hers, she patted it on her knee.  The hand trembled a little.
Knowles's sharp eyes darted from one to the other; then, with a
smothered growl, he shook himself, and rushed headlong into the old
battle which he and the school-master had been waging now, off and on,
some six years.  That was a fight, I can tell you!  None of your
shallow, polite clashing of modern theories,--no talk of your
Jeffersonian Democracy, your high-bred Federalism!  They took hold of
the matter by the roots, clear at the beginning.

Mrs. Howth's breath fairly left her, they went into the soul of the
matter in such a dangerous way.  What if Joel should hear? No doubt he
would report that his master was an infidel,--that would be the next
thing they would hear.  He was in the kitchen now: he finished his
wood-chopping an hour ago.  Asleep, doubtless; that was one comfort.
Well, if he were awake, he could not understand.  That class of
people----And Mrs. Howth (into whose kindly brain just enough of her
husband's creed had glimmered to make her say, "that class of people,"
in the tone with which Abraham would NOT have spoken of Dives over the
gulf) went tranquilly back to her knitting, wondering why Dr. Knowles
should come ten times now where he used to come once, to provoke Samuel
into these wearisome arguments.  Ever since their misfortune came on
them, he had been there every night, always at it.  She should think he
might be a little more considerate.  Mr. Howth surely had enough to
think of, what with his--his misfortune, and the starvation waiting for
them, and poor Margret's degradation, (she sighed here,) without
bothering his head about the theocratic principle, or the Battle of
Armageddon. She had hinted as much to Dr. Knowles one day, and he had
muttered out something about its being "the life of the dog, Ma'am."
She wondered what he meant by that!  She looked over at his bearish
figure, snuff-drabbled waistcoat, and shock of black hair.  Well, poor
man, he could not help it, if he were coarse, and an Abolitionist, and
a Fourierite, and----She was getting a little muddy now, she was
conscious, so turned her mind back to the repose of her stocking.
Margret took it very quietly, seeing her father flaming so.  But
Margret never had any opinions to express.  She was not like the
Parnells: they were noted for their clear judgment.  Mrs. Howth was a
Parnell.

     "The combat deepens,--on, ye brave!"

The Doctor's fat, leathery face was quite red now, and his sentences
were hurled out in a sarcastic bass, enough to wither the marrow of a
weak man.  But the school-master was no weak man. His foot was entirely
on his native heath, I assure you.  He knew every inch of the ground,
from the domination of the absolute faith in the ages of Fetichism, to
its pseudo-presentment in the tenth century, and its actual subversion
in the nineteenth. Every step.  Our politicians might have picked up an
idea or two there, I should think!  Then he was so cool about it, so
skilful! He fairly rubbed his hands with glee, enjoying the combat.
And he was so sure that the Doctor was savagely in earnest: why, any
one with half an ear could hear that!  He did not see how, in the very
heat of the fray, his eyes would wander off listlessly.  But Mr. Howth
did not wander; there was nothing careless or two-sided in the making
of this man,--no sham about him, or borrowing. They came down
gradually, or out,--for, as I told you, they dug into the very heart of
the matter at first,--they came out gradually to modern times.  Things
began to assume a more familiar aspect.  Spinoza, Fichte, Saint
Simon,--one heard about them now.  If you could but have heard the
school-master deal with these his enemies!  With what tender charity
for the man, what relentless vengeance for the belief, he pounced on
them, dragging the soul out of their systems, holding it up for slow
slaughter!  As for Humanity, (how Knowles lingered on that word, with a
tenderness curious in so uncouth a mass of flesh!)--as for Humanity, it
was a study to see it stripped and flouted and thrown out of doors like
a filthy rag by this poor old Howth, a man too child-hearted to kill a
spider.  It was pleasanter to hear him when he defended the great Past
in which his ideal truth had been faintly shadowed.  How he caught the
salient tints of the feudal life!  How the fine womanly nature of the
man rose exulting in the free picturesque glow of the day of crusader
and heroic deed!  How he crowded in traits of perfected manhood in the
conqueror, simple trust in the serf, to colour and weaken his argument,
not seeing that he weakened it!  How, when he thought he had cornered
the Doctor, he would colour and laugh like a boy, then suddenly check
himself, lest he might wound him!  A curious laugh, genial,
cheery,--bubbling out of his weak voice in a way that put you in mind
of some old and rare wine.  When he would check himself in one of these
triumphant glows, he would turn to the Doctor with a deprecatory
gravity, and for a few moments be almost submissive in his reply.  So
earnest and worn it looked then, the poor old face, in the dim light!
The black clothes he wore were so threadbare and shining at the knees
and elbows, the coarse leather shoes brought to so fine a polish!  The
Doctor idly wondered who had blacked them, glancing at Margret's
fingers.

There was a flower stuck in the button-hole of the school-master's
coat, a pale tea-rose.  If Dr. Knowles had been a man of fine
instincts, (which his opaque shining eyes would seem to deny,) he might
have thought it was not unapt or ill-placed even in the shabby, scuffed
coat.  A scholar, a gentleman, though in patched shoes and trousers a
world too short.  Old and gaunt, hunger-bitten even it may be, with
loose-jointed, bony limbs, and yellow face; clinging, loyal and brave,
to the quaint, delicate fancies of his youth, that were dust and ashes
to other men.  In the very haggard face you could find the quiet purity
of the child he had been, and the old child's smile, fresh and
credulous, on the mouth.

The Doctor had not spoken for a moment.  It might be that he was
careless of the poetic lights with which Mr. Howth tenderly decorated
his old faith, or it might be, that even he, with the terrible
intentness of a real life-purpose in his brain, was touched by the
picture of the far old chivalry, dead long ago. The master's voice grew
low and lingering now.  It was a labour of love, this.  Oh, it is so
easy to go back out of the broil of dust and meanness and barter into
the clear shadow of that old life where love and bravery stand eternal
verities,--never to be bought and sold in that dusty town yonder!  To
go back?  To dream back, rather.  To drag out of our own hearts, as the
hungry old master did, whatever is truest and highest there, and clothe
it with name and deed in the dim days of chivalry.  Make a poem of
it,--so much easier than to make a life!

Knowles shuffled uneasily, watching the girl keenly, to know how the
picture touched her.  Was, then, she thought, this grand, dead Past so
shallow to him?  These knights, pure, unstained, searching until death
for the Holy Grail, could he understand the life-long agony, the
triumph of their conflict over Self?  These women, content to live in
solitude forever because they once had loved, could any man understand
that?  Or the dead queen, dead that the man she loved might be free and
happy,--why, this WAS life,--this death!  But did pain, and martyrdom,
and victory lie back in the days of Galahad and Arthur alone?  The
homely face grew stiller than before, looking out into the dun sweep of
moorland,--cold, unrevealing.  It baffled the man that looked at it.
He shuffled, chewed tobacco vehemently, tilted his chair on two legs,
broke out in a thunder-gust at last.

"Dead days for dead men!  The world hears a bugle-call to-day more
noble than any of your piping troubadours.  We have something better to
fight for than a vacant tomb."

The old man drew himself up haughtily.

"I know what you would say,--Liberty for the low and vile.  It is a
good word.  That was a better which they hid in their hearts in the old
time,--Honour!"

Honour!  I think, Calvinist though he was, that word was his religion.
Men have had worse.  Perhaps the Doctor thought this; for he rose
abruptly, and, leaning on the old man's chair, said, gently,--

"It is better, even here.  Yet you poison this child's mind.  You make
her despise To-Day; make honour live for her now."

"It does not," the school-master said, bitterly.  "The world's a
failure.  All the great old dreams are dead.  Your own phantom, your
Republic, your experiment to prove that all men are born free and
equal,--what is it to-day?"

Knowles lifted his head, looking out into the brown twilight. Some word
of pregnant meaning flashed in his eye and trembled on his lip; but he
kept it back.  His face glowed, though, and the glow and strength gave
to the huge misshapen features a grand repose.

"You talk of To-Day," the old man continued, querulously.  "I am tired
of it.  Here is its type and history," touching a county newspaper,--"a
fair type, with its cant, and bigotry, and weight of uncomprehended
fact.  Bargain and sale,--it taints our religion, our brains, our
flags,--yours and mine, Knowles, with the rest.  Did you never hear of
those abject spirits who entered neither heaven nor hell, who were
neither faithful to God nor rebellious, caring only for themselves?"

He paused, fairly out of breath.  Margret looked up.  Knowles was
silent.  There was a smothered look of pain on the coarse face; the
school-master's words were sinking deeper than he knew.

"No, father," said Margret, hastily ending his quotation, "'io non
averei creduto, che [vita] tanta n' avesse disfatta.'"

Skilful Margret!  The broil must have been turbid in the old man's
brain which the grand, slow-stepping music of the Florentine could not
calm.  She had learned that long ago, and used it as a nurse does some
old song to quiet her pettish infant.  His face brightened instantly.

"Do not believe, then, child," he said, after a pause.  "It is a noble
doubt, in Dante or in you."

The Doctor had turned away; she could not see his face.  The angry
scorn was gone from the old master's countenance; it was bent with its
usual wistful eagerness on the floor.  A moment after he looked up with
a flickering smile.

"'Onorate l' altissmo poeta!'" he said, gently  lifting his finger to
his forehead in a military fashion.  "Where is my cane, Margret?  The
Doctor and I will go and walk on the porch before it grows dark."

The sun had gone down long before, and the stars were out; but no one
spoke of this.  Knowles lighted the school-master's pipe and his own
cigar, and then moved the chairs out of their way, stepping softly that
the old man might not hear him.  Margret, in the room, watched them as
they went, seeing how gentle the rough, burly man was with her father,
and how, every time they passed the sweet-brier, he bent the branches
aside, that they might not touch his face.  Slow, childish tears came
into her eyes as she saw it; for the school-master was blind.  This had
been their regular walk every evening, since it grew too cold for them
to go down under the lindens.  The Doctor had not missed a night since
her father gave up the school, a month ago: at first, under pretence of
attending to his eyes; but since the day he had told them there was no
hope of cure, he had never spoken of it again. Only, since then, he had
grown doubly quarrelsome,--standing ready armed to dispute with the old
man every inch of every subject in earth or air, keeping the old man in
a state of boyish excitement during the long, idle days, looking
forward to this nightly battle.

It was very still; for the house, with its half-dozen acres, lay in an
angle of the hills, looking out on the river, which shut out all
distant noises.  Only the men's footsteps broke the silence, passing
and repassing the window.  Without, the October starlight lay white and
frosty on the moors, the old barn, the sharp, dark hills, and the
river, which was half hidden by the orchard.  One could hear it, like
some huge giant moaning in his sleep, at times, and see broad patches
of steel blue glittering through the thick apple-trees and the bushes.
Her mother had fallen into a doze.  Margret looked at her, thinking how
sallow the plump, fair face had grown, and how faded the kindly blue
eyes were now.  Dim with crying,--she knew that, though she never saw
her shed a tear.  Always cheery, going placidly about the house in her
gray dress and Quaker cap, as if there were no such things in the world
as debt or blindness.  But Margret knew, though she said nothing.  When
her mother came in from those wonderful foraging expeditions in search
of late pease or corn, she could see the swollen circle round the eyes,
and hear her breath like that of a child which has sobbed itself tired.
Then, one night, when she had gone into her mother's room, after she
was in bed, the blue eyes were set in a wild, hopeless way, as if
staring down into years of starvation and misery.  The fire on the
hearth burned low and clear; the old worn furniture stood out
cheerfully in the red glow, and threw a maze of twisted shadow on the
floor.  But the glow was all that was cheerful.  To-morrow, when the
hard daylight should jeer away the screening shadows, it would unbare a
desolate, shabby home.  She knew; struck with the white leprosy of
poverty; the blank walls, the faded hangings, the old stone house
itself, looking vacantly out on the fields with a pitiful significance
of loss.  Upon the mantel-shelf there was a small marble figure, one of
the Dancing Graces: the other two were gone, gone in pledge.  This one
was left, twirling her foot, and stretching out her hands in a dreary
sort of ecstasy, with no one to respond.  For a moment, so empty and
bitter seemed her home and her life, that she thought the lonely dancer
with her flaunting joy mocked her,--taunted them with the slow, gray
desolation that had been creeping on them for years.  Only for a moment
the morbid fancy hurt her.

The red glow was healthier, suited her temperament better.  She chose
to fancy the house as it had been once,--should be again, please God.
She chose to see the old comfort and the old beauty which the poor
school-master had gathered about their home.  Gone now.  But it should
return.  It was well, perhaps, that he was blind, he knew so little of
what had come on them.  There, where the black marks were on the wall,
there had hung two pictures. Margret and her father religiously
believed them to be a Tintoret and Copley.  Well, they were gone now.
He had been used to dust them with a light brush every morning,
himself, but now he said always,--

"You can clean the pictures to-day, Margret.  Be careful, my child."

And Margret would remember the greasy Irishman who had tucked them
under his arm, and flung them into a cart, her blood growing hotter in
her veins.

It was the same through all the house; there was not a niche in the
bare rooms that did not recall a something gone,--something that should
return.  She willed that, that evening, standing by the dim fire.  What
women will, whose eyes are slow, attentive, still, as this Margret's,
usually comes to pass.

The red fire-glow suited her; another glow, warming her floating fancy,
mingled with it, giving her every-day purpose the trait of heroism.
The old spirit of the dead chivalry, of succour to the weak, life-long
self-denial,--did it need the sand waste of Palestine or a tournament
to call it into life?  Down in that trading town, in the thick of its
mills and drays, it could live, she thought.  That very night, perhaps,
in some of those fetid cellars or sunken shanties, there were vigils
kept of purpose as unselfish, prayer as heaven-commanding, as that of
the old aspirants for knighthood.  She, too,--her quiet face stirred
with a simple, childish smile, like her father's.

"Why, mother!" she said, stroking down the gray hair under the cap,
"shall you sleep here all night?" laughing.

A cheery, tender laugh, this woman's was,--seldom heard,--not far from
tears.

Mrs. Howth roused herself.  Just then, a broad, high-shouldered man, in
a gray flannel shirt, and shoes redolent of the stable, appeared at the
door.  Margret looked at him as if he were an accusing spirit,--coming
down, as woman must, from heights of self-renunciation or bold resolve,
to an undarned stocking or an uncooked meal.

"Kittle's b'ilin'," he announced, flinging in the information as a
general gratuity.

"That will do, Joel," said Mrs. Howth.

The tone of stately blandness which Mrs. Howth erected as a shield
between herself and "that class of people" was a study: a success; the
resume of her experience in the combat that had devoured half her life,
like that of other American house-keepers.  "Be gentle, but let them
know their place, my dear!"  The class having its type and exponent in
Joel, stopped at the door, and hitched up its suspenders.

"That will DO, Joel," with a stern suavity.

Some idea was in Joel's head under the brush of red hair,--probably the
"anarchic element."

"Uh was wishin' toh read the G'zette." Whereupon he advanced into the
teeth of the enemy and bore off the newspaper, going before Margret, as
she went to the kitchen, and seating himself beside a flaring
tallow-candle on the table.

Reading, with Joel, was not the idle pastime that more trivial minds
find it; a thing, on the contrary, to be gone into with slow spelling,
and face knitted up into savage sternness, especially now, when, as he
gravely explained to Margret, "in HIS opinion the crissis was jest at
hand, and ev'ry man must be seein' ef the gover'ment was carryin' out
the views of the people."

With which intent, Joel, in company with five thousand other
sovereigns, consulted, as definitive oracle, "The Daily Gazette" of
Towbridge.  The school-master need not have grumbled for the old time:
feodality in the days of Warwick and of "The Daily Gazette" was not so
widely different as he and Joel thought.

Now and then, partly as an escape-valve for his overcharged conviction,
partly in compassion to the ignorance of women in political economics,
he threw off to Margret divers commentaries on the text, as she passed
in and out.

If she had risen to the full level of Joel's views, she might have
considered these views tinctured with radicalism, as they consisted in
the propriety of the immediate "impinging of the President."  Besides,
(Joel was a good-natured man, too, merciful to his beast,) Nero-like,
he wished, with the tiger drop of blood that lies hid in everybody's
heart, that the few millions who differed with himself and the
"Gazette" had but one neck for their more convenient hanging, "It's all
that'll save the kentry," he said, and believed it, too.

If Margret fell suddenly from the peak of outlook on life to the homely
labor of cooking supper, some of the healthy heroic flush of the
knightly days and the hearth-fire went down with her, I think.  It
brightened and reddened the square kitchen with its cracked stove and
meagre array of tins; she bustled about in her quaint way, as if it had
been filled up and running over with comforts.  It brightened and
reddened her face when she came in to put the last dish on the
table,--a cosy, snug table, set for four.  Heroic dreams with poets, I
suppose, make them unfit for food other than some feast such as Eve set
for the angel. But then Margret was no poet.  So, with the kindling of
her hope, its healthful light struck out, and warmed and glorified
these common things.  Such common things!  Only a coarse white cloth,
redeemed by neither silver nor china, the amber coffee, (some that
Knowles had brought out to her father--"thrown on his hands; he
couldn't use it,--product of slave-labour!--never, Sir!") the delicate
brown fish that Joel had caught, the bread her mother had made, the
golden butter,--all of them touched her nerves with a quick sense of
beauty and pleasure.  And more, the gaunt face of the blind old man,
his bony hand trembling as he raised the cup to his lips, her mother
and the Doctor managing silently to place everything he liked best near
his plate.  Wasn't it all part of the fresh, hopeful glow burning in
her consciousness?  It brightened and deepened.  It blotted out the
hard, dusty path of the future, and showed warm and clear the success
at the end. Not much to show, you think.  Only the old home as it once
was, full of quiet laughter and content; only her mother's eyes clear
shining again; only that gaunt old head raised proudly, owing no man
anything but courtesy.  The glow deepened, as she thought of it.  It
was strange, too, that, with the deep, slow-moving nature of this girl,
she should have striven so eagerly to throw this light over the future.
Commoner natures have done more and hoped less.  It was a poor gift,
you think, this of the labour of a life for so plain a duty; hardly
heroic.  She knew it.  Yet, if there lay in this coming labour any
pain, any wearing effort, she clung to it desperately, as if this
should banish, it might be, worse loss.  She tried desperately, I say,
to clutch the far, uncertain hope at the end, to make happiness out of
it, to give it to her silent gnawing heart to feed on.  She thrust out
of sight all possible life that might have called her true self into
being, and clung to this present shallow duty and shallow reward.
Pitiful and vain so to cling!  It is the way of women.  As if any human
soul could bury that which might have been, in that which is!

The Doctor, peering into her thought with sharp, suspicious eyes,
heeded the transient flush of enthusiasm but little.  Even the pleasant
cheery talk that pleased her father so was but surface-deep, he knew.
The woman he must conquer for his great end lay beneath, dark and cold.
It was only for that end he cared for her.  Through what cold depths of
solitude her soul breathed faintly mattered  little.  Yet an idle fancy
touched him, what a triumph the man had gained, whoever he might be,
who had held the master-key to a nature so rare as this, who had the
kingly power in his hand to break its silence into electric shivers of
laughter and tears,--terrible subtile pain, or joy as terrible.  Did he
hold the power still?  He wondered.  Meanwhile she sat there, unread.

CHAPTER II.

The evening came on, slow and cold.  Life itself, the Doctor thought,
impatiently, was cool and tardy here among the hills. Even he fell into
the tranquil tone, and chafed under it. Nowhere else did the evening
gray and sombre into the mysterious night impalpably as here.  The
quiet, wide and deep, folded him in, forced his trivial heat into
silence and thought.  The world seemed to think there.  Quiet in the
dead seas of fog, that filled the valleys like restless vapour curdled
into silence; quiet in the listening air, stretching gray up to the
stars,--in the solemn mountains, that stood motionless, like
hoary-headed prophets, waiting with uplifted hands, day and night, to
hear the Voice, silent now for centuries; the very air, heavy with the
breath of the sleeping pine-forests, moved slowly and cold, like some
human voice weary with preaching to unbelieving hearts of a peace on
earth.  This man's heart was unbelieving; he chafed in the oppressive
quiet; it was unfeeling mockery to a sick and hungry world,--a dead
torpor of indifference.  Years of hot and turbid pain had dulled his
eyes to the eternal secret of the night; his soul was too sore with
stumbling, stung, inflamed with the needs and suffering of the
countless lives that hemmed him in, to accept the great prophetic calm.
He was blind to the prophecy written on the earth since the day God
first bade it tell thwarted man of the great To-Morrow.

He turned from the night in-doors.  Human hearts were his proper study.
The old house, he thought, slept with the rest.  One did not wonder
that the pendulum of the clock swung long and slow. The frantic,
nervous haste of town-clocks chorded better with the pulse of human
life.  Yet life in the veins of these people flowed slow and cool;
their sorrows and joys were few and life-long.  The enduring air suited
this woman, Margret Howth. Her blood could never ebb or flow with
sudden gusts of passion, like his own, throbbing, heating continually:
one current, absorbing, deep, would carry its tide from one eternity to
the other, one love or one hate.  Whatever power was in the tide should
be his, in its entirety.  It was his right.  Was not his aim high, the
highest?  It was his right.

Margret, looking up, saw the man's eye fixed on her.  She met it
coolly.  All her short life, this strange man, so tender to the weak,
had watched her with a sort of savage scorn, sneering at her childish,
dreamy apathy, driving her from effort to effort with a scourge of
contempt.  What did he want now with her?  Her duty was light; she took
it up,--she was glad to take it up; what more would he have?  She put
the whole matter away from her.

It grew late.  She sat down by the lamp and began to read to her
father, as usual.  Her mother put away her knitting; Joel came in
half-asleep; the Doctor put out his everlasting cigar, and listened, as
he did everything else, intently.  It was an old story that she
read,--the story of a man who walked the fields and crowded streets of
Galilee eighteen hundred years ago. Knowles, with his heated brain,
fancied that the silence without in the night grew deeper, that the
slow-moving air stopped in its course to listen.  Perhaps the simple
story carried a deeper meaning to these brooding mountains and solemn
sky than to the purblind hearts within.  It was a far-off story to
them,--very far off.  The old school-master heard it with a lowered
head, with the proud obedience with which a cavalier would receive his
leader's orders.  Was not the leader a knights the knight of truest
courage?  All that was high, chivalric in the old man sprang up to own
him Lord.  That he not only preached to, but ate and drank with
publicans and sinners, was a requirement of his mission; nowadays----.
Joel heard the "good word" with a bewildered consciousness of certain
rules of honesty to be observed next day, and a maze of crowns and
harps shining somewhere beyond.  As for any immediate connection
between the teachings of this book and "The Daily Gazette," it was pure
blasphemy to think of it.  The Lord held those old Jews in His hand, of
course; but as for the election next month, that was quite another
thing.  If Joel thrust the history out of the touch of common life, the
Doctor brought it down, and held it there on trial.  To him it was the
story of a Reformer who, eighteen centuries ago, had served his day.
Could he serve this day? Could he?  The need was desperate.  Was there
anything in this Christianity, freed from bigotry, to work out the
awful problem which the ages had left for America to solve? He doubted
it. People called this old Knowles an infidel, said his brain was as
unnatural and distorted as his body.  God, looking down into his heart
that night, saw the savage wrestling there, and judged him with other
eyes than theirs.

The story stood alive in his throbbing brain demanding hearing. All
things were real to this man, this uncouth mass of flesh that his
companions sneered at; most real of all, the unhelped pain of life, the
great seething mire of dumb wretchedness in streets and alleys, the cry
for aid from the starved souls of the world.  You and I have other work
to do than to listen,--pleasanter.  But he, coming out of the mire, his
veins thick with the blood of a despised race, had carried up their
pain and hunger with him: it was the most real thing on earth to
him,--more real than his own share in the unseen heaven or hell.  By
the reality, the peril of the world's instant need, he tried the
offered help from Calvary. It was the work of years, not of this night.
Perhaps, if they who preach Christ crucified had doubted him as this
man did, their work in the coming heaven might be higher,--and ours,
who hear them.  When the girl had finished reading, she went out into
the cool air.  The Doctor passed her without notice.  He went, in his
lumbering way, down the hill into the city; glad to go; the trustful,
waiting quiet oppressed, taunted him.  It sent him back more mad
against Destiny, his heart more bitter in its great pity.  Let him go
to the great city, with its stifling gambling-hells, its negro-pens,
its foul cellars;--his place and work.  If he stumble blindly against
unconquerable ills, and die, others have so stumbled and so died.  Do
you think their work is lost?

Margret stood looking down at the sloping moors and fog.  She, too, had
her place and work.  She thought that night she saw it clearly, and
kept her eyes fixed on it, as I said.  They plodded steadily down the
wide years opening before her.  Whatever slow, unending toil lay in
them, whatever hungry loneliness, or coarseness of deed, she saw it
all, shrinking from nothing.  She looked at the big blue-corded veins
in her wrist, full of untainted blood,--gauged herself coolly, her
lease of life, her power of endurance,--measured it out against the
work waiting for her.  No short task, she knew that.  She would be old
before it was finished, quite an old woman, hard, mechanical, worn out.
But the day would be so bright, when it came, it would atone for all:
the day would be bright, the home warm again; it would hold all that
life had promised her of good.

All?  Oh, Margret, Margret!  Was there no sullen doubt in the brave
resolve?  Was there no shadow just then, dark, ironical, blotting out
father and mother and home, creeping nearer, less alien to your soul
than these, than even your God?

If any such cold, masterful shadow rose out of years gone, and clutched
at the truest life of her heart, she stifled it, and thrust it down.
And yet, leaning on the gate, and thinking vacantly, she remembered a
time when through that shadow, she believed more in a God than she did
now.  When, by the help of that very dead hope, He of whom she read
to-night stood close, an infinitely tender Helper, that with the
differing human loves she knew, had loved His mother and Mary.
Therefore, a Helper.  Now, struggle as she would for warmth or healthy
hopes, the world was gray and silent.  Her defeated woman's nature
called it so, bitterly.  Christ was a dim, ideal power, heaven far-off.
She doubted if it held anything as real as that which she had lost.

As if to bring back the old times more vividly to her, there happened
one of those curious little coincidences with which Fate, we think, has
nothing to do.  She heard a quick step along the clay road, and a muddy
little terrier jumped up, barking, beside her.  She stopped with a
suddenness strange in her slow movements.  "TIGER!" she said, stroking
its head with passionate eagerness.  The dog licked her hand, smelt her
clothes to know if she were the same: it was two years since he had
seen her.  She sat there, softly stroking him.  Presently there was a
sound of wheels jogging down the road, and a voice singing snatches of
some song, one of those cheery street-songs that the boys whistle.  It
was a low, weak voice, but very pleasant.  Margret heard it through the
dark: she kissed the dog with a strange paleness on her face, and stood
up, quiet, attentive as before. Tiger still kept licking her hand, as
it hung by her side: it was cold, and trembled as he touched it.  She
waited a moment, then pushed him from her, as if his touch, even,
caused her to break some vow.  He whined, but she hurried away, not
waiting to know how he came, or with whom.  Perhaps, if Dr. Knowles had
seen her face as she looked back at him, he would have thought there
were depths in her nature which his probing eyes had never reached.

The wheels came close, and directly a cart stopped at the gate. It was
one of those little wagons that hucksters drive; only this seemed to be
a home-made affair, patched up with wicker-work and bits of board.  It
was piled up with baskets of vegetables, eggs, and chickens, and on a
broken bench in the middle sat the driver, a woman.  You could not help
laughing, when you looked at the whole turn-out, it had such a
make-shift look altogether.  The reins were twisted rope, the wheels
uneven.  It went jolting along in such a careless, jolly way, as if it
would not care in the least, should it go to pieces any minute just
there in the road.  The donkey that drew it was bony and blind of one
eye; but he winked the other knowingly at you, to ask if you saw the
joke of the thing.  Even the voice of the owner of the establishment,
chirruping some idle song, as I told you, was one of the cheeriest
sounds you ever heard.  Joel, up at the barn, forgot his dignity to
salute it with a prolonged "Hillo!" and presently appeared at the gate.

"I'm late, Joel," said the weak voice.  It sounded like a child's, near
at hand.

"We can trade in the dark, Lois, both bein' honest," he responded,
graciously, hoisting a basket of tomatoes into the cart, and taking out
a jug of vinegar.

"Is that Lois?" said Mrs. Howth, coming to the gate.  "Sit still,
child.  Don't get down."

But the child, as she called her, had scrambled off the cart, and stood
beside her, leaning on the wheel, for she was helplessly crippled.

"I thought you would be down to-night.  I put some coffee on the stove.
Bring it out, Joel."

Mrs. Howth never put up the shield between herself and this member of
"the class,"--because, perhaps, she was so wretchedly low in the social
scale.  However, I suppose she never gave a reason for it even to
herself.  Nobody could help being kind to Lois, even if he tried.  Joel
brought the coffee with more readiness than he would have waited on
Mrs. Howth.

"Barney will be jealous," he said, patting the bare ribs of the old
donkey, and glancing wistfully at his mistress.

"Give him his supper, surely," she said, taking the hint.

It was a real treat to see how Lois enjoyed her supper, sipping and
tasting the warm coffee, her face in a glow, like an epicure over some
rare Falernian.  You would be sure, from just that little thing, that
no sparkle of warmth or pleasure in the world slipped by her which she
did not catch and enjoy and be thankful for to the uttermost.  You
would think, perhaps, pitifully, that not much pleasure or warmth would
ever go down so low, within her reach.  Now that she stood on the
ground, she scarcely came up to the level of the wheel; some deformity
of her legs made her walk with a curious rolling jerk, very comical to
see.  She laughed at it, when other people did; if it vexed her at all,
she never showed it.  She had turned back her calico sun-bonnet, and
stood looking up at Mrs. Howth and Joel, laughing as they talked with
her.  The face would have startled you on so old and stunted a body.
It was a child's face, quick, eager, with that pitiful beauty you
always see in deformed people.  Her eyes, I think, were the kindliest,
the hopefullest I ever saw.  Nothing but the livid thickness of her
skin betrayed the fact that set Lois apart from even the poorest
poor,--the taint in her veins of black blood.

"Whoy! be n't this Tiger?" said Joel, as the dog ran yelping about him.
"How comed yoh with him, Lois?"

"Tiger an' his master's good friends o' mine,--you remember they allus
was.  An' he's back now, Mr. Holmes,--been back for a month."

Margret, walking in the porch with her father, stopped.

"Are you tired, father?  It is late."

"And you are worn out, poor child!  It was selfish in me to forget.
Good-night, dear!"

Margret kissed him, laughing cheerfully, as she led him to his
room-door.  He lingered, holding her dress.

"Perhaps it will be easier for you to-morrow than it was to-day?"
hesitating.

"I am sure it will.  To-morrow will be sure to be better than to-day."

She left him, and went away with a step that did not echo the promise
of her words.

Joel, meanwhile, consulted apart with his mistress.

"Of course," she said, emphatically.--"You must stay until morning,
Lois.  It is too late.  Joel will toss you up a bed in the loft."

The queer little body hesitated.

"I can stay," she said, at last.  "It's his watch at the mill to-night."

"Whose watch?" demanded Joel.

Her face brightened.

"Father's.  He's back, mum."

Joel caught himself in a whistle.

"He's very stiddy, Joel,--as stiddy as yoh."

"I am very glad he has come back, Lois," said Mrs. Howth, gravely.

At every place where Lois had been that day she had told her bit of
good news, and at every place it had been met with the same kindly
smile and "I'm glad he's back, Lois."

Yet Joe Yare, fresh from two years in the penitentiary, was not exactly
the person whom society usually welcomes with open arms. Lois had a
vague suspicion of this, perhaps; for, as she hobbled along the path,
she added to her own assurance of his "stiddiness" earnest explanations
to Joel of how he had a place in the Croft Street woollen-mills, and
how Dr. Knowles had said he was as ready a stoker as any in the
furnace-rooms.

The sound of her weak, eager voice was silent presently, and nothing
broke the solitary cold of the night.

CHAPTER III.

The morning, when it came long after, came quiet and cool,--the warm
red dawn helplessly smothered under great waves of gray cloud.
Margret, looking out into the thick fog, lay down wearily again,
closing her eyes.  What was the day to her?

Very slowly the night was driven back.  An hour after, when she lifted
her head again, the stars were still glittering through the foggy arch,
like sparks of brassy blue, and hills and valleys were one drifting,
slow-heaving mass of ashy damp.  Off in the east a stifled red film
groped through.  It was another day coming; she might as well get up,
and live the rest of her life out;--what else had she to do?

Whatever this night had been to the girl, it left one thought sharp,
alive, in the exhausted quiet of her brain: a cowardly dread of the
trial of the day, when she would see him again.  Was the old struggle
of years before coming back?  Was it all to go over again?  She was
worn out.  She had been quiet in these two years: what had gone before
she never looked back upon; but it made her thankful for even this
stupid quiet.  And now, when she had planned her life, busy, useful,
contented, why need God have sent the old thought to taunt her?  A
wild, sickening sense of what might have been struggled up: she thrust
it down,--she had kept it down all night; the old pain should not come
back,--it should not.  She did not think of the love she had given up
as a dream, as verse-makers or sham people do; she knew it to be the
quick seed of her soul.  She cried for it even now, with all the fierce
strength of her nature; it was the best she knew; through it she came
nearest to God.  Thinking of the day when she had given it up, she
remembered it with a vague consciousness of having fought a deadly
struggle with her fate, and that she had been conquered,--never had
lived again.  Let it be; she could not bear the struggle again.

She went on dressing herself in a dreary, mechanical way.  Once, a
bitter laugh came on her face, as she looked into the glass, and saw
the dead, dull eyes, and the wrinkle on her forehead. Was that the face
to be crowned with delicate caresses and love? She scorned herself for
the moment, grew sick of herself, balked, thwarted in her true life as
she was.  Other women whom God has loved enough to probe to the depths
of their nature have done the same,--saw themselves as others saw them:
their strength drying up within them, jeered at, utterly alone.  It is
a trial we laugh at.  I think the quick fagots at the stake were fitter
subjects for laughter than the slow gnawing hunger in the heart of many
a slighted woman or a selfish man.  They come out of the trial as out
of martyrdom, according to their faith: you see its marks sometimes in
a frivolous old age going down with tawdry hopes and starved eyes to
the grave; you see its victory in the freshest, fullest lives in the
earth.  This woman had accepted her trial, but she took it up as an
inflexible fate which she did not understand; it was new to her; its
solitude, its hopeless thirst were freshly bitter.  She loathed herself
as one whom God had thought unworthy of every woman's right,--to love
and be loved.

She went to the window, looking blankly out into the gray cold. Any one
with keen analytic eye, noting the thin muscles of this woman, the
protruding brain, the eyes deep, concealing, would have foretold that
she would conquer in the fight; force her soul down,--but that the
forcing down would leave the weak, flaccid body spent and dead.  One
thing was certain: no curious eyes would see the struggle; the body
might be nerveless or sickly, but it had the great power of reticence;
the calm with which she faced the closest gaze was natural to her,--no
mask.  When she left her room and went down, the same unaltered quiet
that had baffled Knowles steadied her step and cooled her eyes.

After you have made a sacrifice of yourself for others, did you ever
notice how apt you were to doubt, as soon as the deed was irrevocable,
whether, after all, it were worth while to have done it?  How mean
seems the good gained!  How new and unimagined the agony of empty hands
and stifled wish!  Very slow the angels are, sometimes, that are sent
to minister!

Margret, going down the stairs that morning, found none of the
chivalric unselfish glow of the night before in her home.  It was an
old, bare house in the midst of dreary stubble fields, in which her
life was slowly to be worn out: working for those who did not
comprehend her; thanked her little,--that was all.  It did not matter;
life was short: she could thank God for that at least.

She opened the house-door.  A draught of cold morning air struck her
face, sweeping from the west; it had driven the fog in great gray banks
upon the hills, or in shimmering swamps into the cleft hollows: a vague
twilight filled the space left bare.  Tiger, asleep in the hall, rushed
out into the meadow, barking, wild with the freshness and cold, then
back again to tear round her for a noisy good-morning.  The touch of
the dog seemed to bring her closer to his master; she put him away; she
dared not suffer even that treachery to her purpose: the very
circumstances that had forced her to give him up made it weak cowardice
to turn again.  It was a simple story, yet one which she dared not tell
to herself; for it was not altogether for her father's sake she had
made the sacrifice.  She knew, that, though she might be near to this
man Holmes as his own soul, she was a clog on him,--stood in his
way,--kept him back.  So she had quietly stood aside, taken up her own
solitary burden, and left him with his clear self-reliant life,--with
his Self, dearer to him than she had ever been.  Why should it not be
dearer?  She thought,--remembering the man as he was, a master among
men: fit to be a master.  She,--what was she compared to him?  He was
back again; she must see him.  So she stood there with this persistent
dread running through her brain.

Suddenly, in the lane by the house, she heard a voice talking to
Joel,--the huckster-girl.  What a weak, cheery sound it was in the cold
and fog!  It touched her curiously: broke through her morbid thought as
anything true and healthy should have done. "Poor Lois!" she thought,
with an eager pity, forgetting her own intolerable future for the
moment, as she gathered up some breakfast and went with it down the
lane.  Morning had come; great heavy bars of light fell from behind the
hills athwart the banks of gray and black fog; there was shifting,
uneasy, obstinate tumult among the shadows; they did not mean to yield
to the coming dawn.  The hills, the massed woods, the mist opposed
their immovable front, scornfully.  Margret did not notice the silent
contest until she reached the lane.  The girl Lois, sitting in her
cart, was looking, attentive, at the slow surge of the shadows, and the
slower lifting of the slanted rays.

"T' mornin' comes grand here, Miss Marg'et!" she said, lowering her
voice.

Margret said nothing in reply; the morning, she thought, was gray and
cold, like her own life.  She stood leaning on the low cart; some
strange sympathy drew her to this poor wretch, dwarfed, alone in the
world,--some tie of equality, which the odd childish face, nor the
quaint air of content about the creature, did not lessen.  Even when
Lois shook down the patched skirt of her flannel frock straight, and
settled the heaps of corn and tomatoes about her, preparatory for a
start, Margret kept her hand on the side of the cart, and walked slowly
by it down the road.  Once, looking at the girl, she thought with a
half smile how oddly clean she was.  The flannel skirt she arranged so
complacently had been washed until the colours had run madly into each
other in sheer desperation; her hair was knotted with relentless
tightness into a comb such as old women wear.  The very cart, patched
as it was, had a snug, cosy look; the masses of vegetables, green and
crimson and scarlet, were heaped with a certain reference to the glow
of colour, Margret noticed, wondering if it were accidental.  Looking
up, she saw the girl's brown eyes fixed on her face.  They were
singularly soft, brooding brown.

"Ye 'r' goin' to th' mill, Miss Marg'et?" she asked, in a half whisper.

"Yes.  You never go there now, Lois?"

"No, 'm."

The girl shuddered, and then tried to hide it in a laugh. Margret
walked on beside her, her hand on the cart's edge. Somehow this
creature, that Nature had thrown impatiently aside as a failure, so
marred, imperfect, that even the dogs were kind to her, came strangely
near to her, claimed recognition by some subtile instinct.

Partly for this, and partly striving to forget herself, she glanced
furtively at the childish face of the distorted little body, wondering
what impression the shifting dawn made on the unfinished soul that was
looking out so intently through the brown eyes.  What artist sense had
she,--what could she know--the ignorant huckster--of the eternal laws
of beauty or grandeur? Nothing.  Yet something in the girl's face made
her think that these hills, this air and sky, were in fact alive to
her,--real; that her soul, being lower, it might be, than ours, lay
closer to Nature, knew the language of the changing day, of these
earnest-faced hills, of the very worms crawling through the brown
mould.  It was an idle fancy; Margret laughed at herself for it, and
turned to watch the slow morning-struggle which Lois followed with such
eager eyes.

The light was conquering.  Up the gray arch the soft, dewy blue crept
gently, deepening, broadening; below it, the level bars of light struck
full on the sullen black of the west, and worked there undaunted,
tinging it with crimson and imperial purple. Two or three coy
mist-clouds, soon converted to the new allegiance, drifted giddily
about, mere flakes of rosy blushes. The victory of the day came slowly,
but sure, and then the full morning flushed out, fresh with moisture
and light and delicate perfume.  The bars of sunlight fell on the lower
earth from the steep hills like pointed swords; the foggy swamp of wet
vapour trembled and broke, so touched, rose at last, leaving patches of
damp brilliance on the fields, and floated majestically up in radiant
victor clouds, led by the conquering wind.  Victory: it was in the
cold, pure ether filling the heavens, in the solemn gladness of the
hills.  The great forests thrilling in the soft light, the very sleepy
river wakening under the mist, chorded with a grave bass in the rising
anthem of welcome to the new life which God had freshly given to the
world.  From the sun himself, come forth as a bridegroom from his
chamber, to the flickering raindrops on the road-side mullein, the
world seemed to rejoice, exultant in victory.  Homely, cheerier sounds
broke the outlined grandeur of the morning, on which Margret looked
wearily.  Lois lost none of them; no morbid shadow of her own balked
life kept their meaning from her.

The light played on the heaped vegetables in the old cart; the bony
legs of the donkey trotted on with fresh vigour.  There was not a
lowing cow in the distant barns, nor a chirping swallow on the
fence-bushes, that did not seem to include the eager face of the little
huckster in their morning greetings.  Not a golden dandelion on the
road-side, not a gurgle of the plashing brown water from the
well-troughs, which did not give a quicker pleasure to the glowing
face.  Its curious content stung the woman walking by her side.  What
secret of recompense had the poor wretch found?

"Your father is here, Lois," she said carelessly, to break the silence.
"I saw him at the mill yesterday."

Her face kindled instantly.

"He's home, Miss Marg'et,--yes.  An' it's all right wid him. Things
allus do come right, some time," she added, in a reflective tone,
brushing a fly off Barney's ear.

Margret smiled.

"Always?  Who brings them right for you, Lois?"

"The Master," she said, turning with an answering smile.

Margret was touched.  The owner of the mill was not a more real verity
to this girl than the Master of whom she spoke with such quiet
knowledge.

"Are things right in the mill?" she said, testing her.

A shadow came on her face; her eyes wandered uncertainly, as if her
weak brain were confused,--only for a moment.

"They'll come right!" she said, bravely.  "The Master'll see to it!"

But the light was gone from her eyes; some old pain seemed to be
surging through her narrow thought; and when she began to talk, it was
in a bewildered, doubtful way.

"It's a black place, th' mill," she said, in a low voice.  "It was a
good while I was there: frum seven year old till sixteen. 'T seemed
longer t' me 'n 't was.  'T seemed as if I'd been there allus,--jes'
forever, yoh know.  'Fore I went in, I had the rickets, they say:
that's what ails me.  'T hurt my head, they've told me,--made me
different frum other folks."

She stopped a moment, with a dumb, hungry look in her eyes. After a
while she looked at Margret furtively, with a pitiful eagerness.

"Miss Marg'et, I think there BE something wrong in my head.  Did YOH
ever notice it?"

Margret put her hand kindly on the broad, misshapen forehead.

"Something is wrong everywhere, Lois," she said, absently.

She did not see the slow sigh with which the girl smothered down
whatever hope had risen just then, listened half-attentive as the
huckster maundered on.

"It was th' mill," she said at last.  "I kind o' grew into that place
in them years: seemed  to me like as I was part o' th' engines,
somehow.  Th' air used to be thick in my mouth, black wi' smoke 'n'
wool 'n' smells.

"In them years I got dazed in my head, I think.  'T was th' air 'n' th'
work.  I was weak allus.  'T got so that th' noise o' th' looms went on
in my head night 'n' day,--allus thud, thud.  'N' hot days, when th'
hands was chaffin' 'n' singin', th' black wheels 'n' rollers was alive,
starin' down at me, 'n' th' shadders o' th' looms was like snakes
creepin',--creepin' anear all th' time.  They was very good to me, th'
hands was,--very good.  Ther' 's lots o' th' Master's people down
there, though they never heard His name: preachers don't go there.  But
He'll see to 't.  He'll not min' their cursin' o' Him, seein' they
don't know His face, 'n' thinkin' He belongs to th' gentry.  I knew it
wud come right wi' me, when times was th' most bad.  I knew"----

The girl's hands were working together, her eyes set, all the slow
years of ruin that had eaten into her brain rising before her, all the
tainted blood in her veins of centuries of slavery and heathenism
struggling to drag her down.  But above all, the Hope rose clear,
simple: the trust in the Master: and shone in her scarred
face,--through her marred senses.

"I knew it wud come right, allus.  I was alone then: mother was dead,
and father was gone, 'n' th' Lord thought 't was time to see to
me,--special as th' overseer was gettin' me an enter to th' poor-house.
So He sent Mr. Holmes along.  Then it come right!"

Margret did not speak.  Even this mill-girl could talk of him, pray for
him; but she never must take his name on her lips!

"He got th' cart fur me, 'n' this blessed old donkey, 'n' my room.  Did
yoh ever see my room, Miss Marg'et?"

Her face lighted suddenly with its peculiar childlike smile.

"No?  Yoh'll come some day, surely?  It's a pore place, yoh'll think;
but it's got th' air,--th' air."

She stopped to breathe the cold morning wind, as if she thought to find
in its fierce freshness the life and brains she had lost.

"Ther' 's places in them alleys 'n' dark holes, Miss Marg'et, like th'
openin's to hell, with th' thick smells 'n' th' sights yoh'd see."

She went back with a terrible clinging pity to the Gehenna from which
she had escaped.  The ill of life was real enough to her,--a hungry
devil down in those alleys and dens.  Margret listened, waked
reluctantly to the sense of a different pain in the world from her
own,--lower deeps from which women like herself draw delicately back,
lifting their gauzy dresses.

"Miss Marg'et!"

Her face flashed.

"Well, Lois?"

"Th' Master has His people 'mong them very lowest, that's not for such
as yoh to speak to.  He knows 'em: men 'n' women starved 'n' drunk into
jails 'n' work-houses, that 'd scorn to be cowardly or mean,--that
shows God's kindness, through th' whiskey 'n' thievin', to th' orphints
or--such as me.  Ther' 's things th' Master likes in them, 'n' it'll
come right, it'll come right at last; they'll have a chance--somewhere."

Margret did not speak; let the poor girl sob herself into quiet. What
had she to do with this gulf of pain and wrong?  Her own higher life
was starved, thwarted.  Could it be that the blood of these her
brothers called against HER from the ground?  No wonder that the
huckster-girl sobbed, she thought, or talked heresy.  It was not an
easy thing to see a mother drink herself into the grave.  And yet--was
she to blame?  Her Virginian blood was cool, high-bred; she had learned
conservatism in her cradle.  Her life in the West had not yet quickened
her pulse.  So she put aside whatever social mystery or wrong faced her
in this girl, just as you or I would have done.  She had her own pain
to bear.  Was she her brother's keeper? It was true, there was wrong;
this woman's soul lay shattered by it; it was the fault of her blood,
of her birth, and Society had finished the work.  Where was the help?
She was free,--and liberty, Dr. Knowles said, was the cure for all the
soul's diseases, and----

Well, Lois was quiet now,--ready to be drawn into a dissertation on
Barney's vices and virtues, or her room, where "th' air was so strong,
'n' the fruit 'n' vegetables allus stayed fresh,--best in THIS town,"
she said, with a bustling pride.

They went on down the road, through the corn-fields sometimes, or on
the river-bank, or sometimes skirting the orchards or barn-yards of the
farms.  The fences were well built, she noticed,--the barns wide and
snug-looking: for this county in Indiana is settled by New England
people, as a general thing, or Pennsylvanians.  They both leave their
mark on barns or fields, I can tell you!  The two women were talking
all the way.  In all his life Dr. Knowles had never heard from this
silent girl words as open and eager as she gave to the huckster about
paltry, common things,--partly, as I said, from a hope to forget
herself, and partly from a vague curiosity to know the strange world
which opened before her in this disjointed talk.  There were no morbid
shadows in this Lois's life, she saw.  Her pains and pleasures were
intensely real, like those of her class.  If there were latent powers
in her distorted brain, smothered by hereditary vice of blood, or foul
air and life, she knew nothing of it.  She never probed her own soul
with fierce self-scorn, as this quiet woman by her side did;--accepted,
instead, the passing moment, with keen enjoyment.  For the rest,
childishly trusted "the Master."

This very drive, now, for instance,--although she and the cart and
Barney went through the same routine every day, you would have thought
it was a new treat for a special holiday, if you had seen the perfect
abandon with which they all threw themselves into the fun of the thing.
Not only did the very heaps of ruby tomatoes, and corn in delicate
green casings, tremble and shine as though they enjoyed the fresh light
and dew, but the old donkey cocked his ears, and curved his scraggy
neck, and tried to look as like a high-spirited charger as he could.
Then everybody along the road knew Lois, and she knew everybody, and
there was a mutual liking and perpetual joking, not very refined,
perhaps, but hearty and kind.  It was a new side of life for Margret.
She had no time for thoughts of self-sacrifice, or chivalry, ancient or
modern, watching it.  It was a very busy ride,--something to do at
every farm-house: a basket of eggs to be taken in, or some egg-plants,
maybe, which Lois laid side by side, Margret noticed,--the pearly white
balls close to the heap of royal purple.  No matter how small the
basket was that she stopped for, it brought out two or three to put it
in; for Lois and her cart were the event of the day for the lonely
farm-houses.  The wife would come out, her face ablaze from the oven,
with an anxious charge about that butter; the old man would hail her
from the barn to know "ef she'd thought toh look in th' mail yes'rday;"
and one or the other was sure to add, "Jes' time for breakfast, Lois."
If she had no baskets to stop for, she had "a bit o' business," which
turned out to be a paper she had brought for the grandfather, or some
fresh mint for the baby, or "jes' to inquire fur th' fam'ly."

As to the amount that cart carried, it was a perpetual mystery to Lois.
Every day since she and the cart went into partnership, she had gone
into town with a dead certainty in the minds of lookers-on that it
would break down in five minutes, and a triumphant faith in hers in its
unlimited endurance.  "This cart 'll be right side up fur years to
come," she would assert, shaking her head.  "It 's got no more notion
o' givin' up than me nor Barney,--not a bit."  Margret had her
doubts,--and so would you, if you had heard how it creaked under the
load,--how they piled in great straw panniers of apples: black apples
with yellow hearts, scarlet veined,--golden pippin apples, that held
the warmth and light longest,--russet apples with a hot blush on their
rough brown skins,--plums shining coldly in their delicate purple
bloom,--peaches with the crimson velvet of their cheeks aglow with the
prisoned heat of a hundred summer days.

I wish with all my heart somebody would paint me Lois and her cart!
Mr. Kitts, the artist in the city then, used to see it going past his
room out by the coal-pits every day, and thought about it seriously.
But he had his grand battle-piece on hand then,--and after that he went
the way of all geniuses, and died down into colourer for a
photographer.  He met them, that day, out by the stone quarry, and
touched his hat as he returned Lois's "Good-morning," and took a couple
of great pawpaws from her.  She was a woman, you see, and he had some
of the school-master's old-fashioned notions about women.  He was a
sickly-looking soul.  One day Lois had heard him say that there were
pawpaws on his mother's place in Ohio; so after that she always brought
him some every day.  She was one of those people who must give, if it
is nothing better than a Kentucky banana.

After they passed the stone quarry, they left the country behind them,
going down the stubble-covered hills that fenced in the town.  Even in
the narrow streets, and through the warehouses, the strong, dewy air
had quite blown down and off the fog and dust.  Morning (town morning,
to be sure, but still morning) was shining in the red window-panes, in
the tossing smoke up in the frosty air, in the very glowing faces of
people hurrying from market with their noses nipped blue and their eyes
watering with cold.  Lois and her cart, fresh with country breath
hanging about them, were not so out of place, after all.  House-maids
left the steps half-scrubbed, and helped her measure out the corn and
beans, gossiping eagerly; the newsboys "Hi-d!" at her in a friendly,
patronizing way; women in rusty black, with sharp, pale faces, hoisted
their baskets, in which usually lay a scraggy bit of flitch, on to the
wheel, their whispered bargaining ending oftenest in a low "Thank ye,
Lois!"--for she sold cheaper to some people than they did in the market.

Lois was Lois in town or country.  Some subtile power lay in the
coarse, distorted body, in the pleading child's face, to rouse,
wherever they went, the same curious, kindly smile.  Not, I think, that
dumb, pathetic eye, common to deformity, that cries, "Have mercy upon
me, O my friend, for the hand of God hath touched me!"--a deeper,
mightier charm, rather: a trust down in the fouled fragments of her
brain, even in the bitterest hour of her bare life,--a faith faith in
God, faith in her fellow-man, faith in herself.  No human soul refused
to answer its summons. Down in the dark alleys, in the very vilest of
the black and white wretches that crowded sometimes about her cart,
there was an undefined sense of pride in protecting this wretch whose
portion of life was more meagre and low than theirs.  Something in them
struggled up to meet the trust in the pitiful eyes,--something which
scorned to betray the trust,--some Christ-like power in their souls,
smothered, dying, under the filth of their life and the terror of hell.
A something in them never to be lost.  If the Great Spirit of love and
trust lives, not lost!

Even in the cold and quiet of the woman walking by her side the homely
power of the poor huckster was wholesome to strengthen. Margret left
her, turning into the crowded street leading to the part of the town
where the factories lay.  The throng of anxious-faced men and women
jostled and pushed, but she passed through them with a different heart
from yesterday's.  Somehow, the morbid fancies were gone: she was
keenly alive; the coarse real life of this huckster fired her, touched
her blood with a more vital stimulus than any tale of crusader.  As she
went down the crooked maze of dingy lanes, she could hear Lois's little
cracked bell far off: it sounded like a Christmas song to her. She half
smiled, remembering how sometimes in her distempered brain the world
had seemed a gray, dismal Dance of Death.  How actual it was
to-day,--hearty, vigorous, alive with honest work and tears and
pleasure!  A broad, good world to live and work in, to suffer or die,
if God so willed it,--God, the good!

CHAPTER IV.

She entered the vast, dingy factory; the woollen dust, the clammy air
of copperas were easier to breathe in; the cramped, sordid office, the
work, mere trifles to laugh at; and she bent over the ledger with its
hard lines in earnest good-will, through the slow creeping hours of the
long day.  She noticed that the unfortunate chicken was making its
heart glad over a piece of fresh earth covered with damp moss.  Dr.
Knowles stopped to look at it when he came, passing her with a surly
nod.

"So your master's not forgotten you," he snarled, while the blind old
hen cocked her one eye up at him.

Pike, the manager, had brought in some bills.

"Who's its master?" he said, curiously, stopping by the door.

"Holmes,--he feeds it every morning."

The Doctor drawled out the words with a covert sneer, watching the cold
face bending over the desk, meantime.

Pike laughed.

"Bah! it's the first thing he ever fed, then, besides himself. Chickens
must lie nearer his heart than men."

Knowles scowled at him; he had no fancy for Pike's scurrilous gossip.

The quiet face was unmoved.  When he heard the manager's foot on the
ladder without, he tested it again.  He had a vague suspicion which he
was determined to verify.

"Holmes," he said, carelessly, "has an affinity for animals.  No
wonder.  Adam must have been some such man as he, when the Lord gave
him 'dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air.'"

The hand paused courteously a moment, then resumed its quick, cool
movement over the page.  He was not baffled.

"If there were such a reality as mastership, that man was born to rule.
Pike will find him harder to cheat than me, when he takes possession
here."

She looked up now.

"He came here to take my place in the mills,--buy me out,--articles
will be signed in a day or two.  I know what you think,--no,--not worth
a dollar.  Only brains and a soul, and he 's sold them at a high
figure,--threw his heart in,--the purchaser being a lady.  It was
light, I fancy,--starved out, long ago."

The old man's words were spurted out in the bitterness of scorn. The
girl listened with a cool incredulity in her eyes, and went back to her
work.

"Miss Herne is the lady,--my partner's daughter.  Herne and Holmes
they'll call the firm.  He is here every day, counting future profit."

Nothing could be read on the face; so he left her, cursing, as he went,
men who put themselves up at auction,--worse than Orleans slaves.
Margret laughed to herself at his passion; as for the story he hinted,
it was absurd.  She forgot it in a moment.

Two or three gentlemen down in one of the counting-rooms, just then,
looked at the story from another point of view.  They were talking low,
out of hearing from the clerks.

"It's a good thing for Holmes," said one, a burly, farmer-like man, who
was choosing specimens of wool.

"Cheap.  And long credit.  Just half the concern he takes."

"There is a lady in the case?" suggested a young doctor, who, by virtue
of having spent six months in the South, dropped his r-s, and talked of
"niggahs" in a way to make a Georgian's hair stand on end.

"A lady in the case?"

"Of course.  Only child of Herne's.  HE comes down with the dust as
dowry.  Good thing for Holmes.  'Stonishin' how he's made his way up.
If money 's what he wants in this world, he's making a long stride now
to 't."

The young doctor lighted his cigar, asserting that--

"Ba George, some low people did get on, re-markably!  Mary Herne, now,
was best catch in town."

"Do you think money is what he wants?"  said a quiet little man,
sitting lazily on a barrel,--a clergyman, Vandyke; whom his clerical
brothers shook their heads when they named, but never argued with, and
bowed to with uncommon deference.

The wool-buyer hesitated with a puzzled look.

"No," he said, slowly; "Stephen Holmes is not miserly.  I've knowed him
since a boy.  To buy place, power, perhaps, eh?  Yet not that,
neither," he added, hastily.  "We think a sight of him out our way,
(self-made, you see,) and would have had him the best office in the
State before this, only he was so cursedly indifferent."

"Indifferent, yes.  No man cares much for stepping-stones in
themselves," said Vandyke, half to himself.

"Great fault of American society, especially in the West," said the
young aristocrat.  "Stepping-stones lie low, as my reverend friend
suggests; impudence ascends; merit and refinement scorn such dirty
paths,"--with a mournful remembrance of the last dime in his
waistcoat-pocket.

"But do you," exclaimed the farmer, with sudden solemnity, "do you
understand this scheme of Knowles's?  Every dollar he owns is in this
mill, and every dollar of it is going into some castle in the air that
no sane man can comprehend."

"Mad as a March hare," contemptuously muttered the doctor.

His reverend friend gave him a look,--after which he was silent.

"I wish to the Lord some one would persuade him out of it," persisted
the wool-man, earnestly looking at the attentive face of his listener.
"We can't spare old Knowles's brain or heart while he ruins himself.
It's something of a Communist fraternity: I don't know the name, but I
know the thing."

Very hard common-sense shone out of his eyes just then at the
clergyman, whom he suspected of being one of Knowles's abettors.

"There's two ways for 'em to end.  If they're made out of the top of
society, they get so refined, so idealized, that every particle flies
off on its own special path to the sun, and the Community 's broke; and
if they're made of the lower mud, they keep going down, down
together,--they live to drink and eat, and make themselves as near the
brutes as they can.  It isn't easy to believe, Sir, but it's true.  I
have seen it.  I've seen every one of them the United States can
produce.  It's FACTS, Sir; and facts, as Lord Bacon says, 'are the
basis of every sound speculation.'"

The last sentence was slowly brought out, as quotations were not
exactly his forte, but, as he said afterwards,--"You see, that nailed
the parson."

The parson nodded gravely.

"You'll find no such experiment in the Bible," threw in the young
doctor, alluding to "serious things" as a peace-offering to his
reverend friend.

"One, I believe," dryly.

"Well," broke in the farmer, folding up his wool, "that's neither here
nor there.  This experiment of Knowles's is like nothing known since
the Creation.  Plan of his own.  He spends his days now hunting out the
gallows-birds out of the dens in town here, and they're all to be
transported into the country to start a new Arcadia.  A few men and
women like himself, but the bulk is from the dens, I tell you.  All
start fair, level ground, perpetual celibacy, mutual trust, honour,
rise according to the stuff that's in them,--pah! it makes me sick!"

"Knowles's inclination to that sort of people is easily explained,"
spitefully lisped the doctor.  "Blood, Sir.  His mother was a
half-breed Creek, with all the propensities of the redskins to
fire-water and 'itching palms.' Blood will out."

"Here he is," maliciously whispered the woolman.  "No, it's Holmes," he
added, after the doctor had started into a more respectful posture, and
glanced around frightened.

He, the doctor, rose to meet Holmes's coming footstep,--"a low fellah,
but always sure to be the upper dog in the fight, goin' to marry the
best catch," etc., etc.  The others, on the contrary, put on their hats
and sauntered away into the street.

The day broadened hotly; the shadows of the Lombardy poplars curdling
up into a sluggish pool of black at their roots along the dry gutters.
The old school-master in the shade of the great horse-chestnuts
(brought from the homestead in the Piedmont country, every one) husked
corn for his wife, composing, meanwhile, a page of his essay on the
"Sirventes de Bertrand de Born."  Joel, up in the barn by himself,
worked through the long day in the old fashion,--pondering gravely
(being of a religious turn) upon a sermon by the Reverend Mr. Clinche,
reported in the "Gazette;" wherein that disciple of the meek Teacher
invoked, as he did once a week, the curses of the law upon
slaveholders, praying the Lord to sweep them immediately from the face
of the earth.  Which rendering of Christian doctrine was so much
relished by Joel, and the other leading members of Mr. Clinche's
church, that they hinted to him it might be as well to continue
choosing his texts from Moses and the Prophets until the excitement of
the day was over.  The New Testament was,--well,--hardly suited for
the--emergency; did not, somehow, chime in with the lesson of the hour.
I may remark, in passing, that this course of conduct so disgusted the
High Church rector of the parish, that he not only ignored all new
devils, (as Mr. Carlyle might have called them,) but talked as if the
millennium were un fait accompli, and he had leisure to go and hammer
at the poor dead old troubles of Luther's time.  One thing, though,
about Joel: while he was joining in Mr. Clinche's petition for the
"wiping out" of some few thousands, he was using up all the fragments
of the hot day in fixing a stall for a half-dead old horse he had found
by the road-side.

Perhaps, even if the listening angel did not grant the prayer, he
marked down the stall at least, as a something done for eternity.

Margret, through the stifling air, worked steadily alone in the dusty
office, her face bent over the books, never changing but once.  It was
a trifle then; yet, when she looked back afterwards, the trifle was all
that gave the day a name.  The room shook, as I said, with the
thunderous, incessant sound of the engines and the looms; she scarcely
heard it, being used to it.  Once, however, another sound came
between,--an iron tread, passing through the long wooden corridor,--so
firm and measured that it sounded like the monotonous beatings of a
clock.  She heard it through the noise in the far distance; it came
slowly nearer, up to the door without,--passed it, going down the
echoing plank walk.  The girl sat quietly, looking out at the dead
brick wall.  The slow step fell on her brain like the sceptre of her
master; if Knowles had looked in her face then, he would have seen
bared the secret of her life.  Holmes had gone by, unconscious of who
was within the door.  She had not seen him; it was nothing but a step
she heard.  Yet a power, the power of the girl's life, shook off all
outward masks, all surface cloudy fancies, and stood up in her with a
terrible passion at the sound; her blood burned fiercely; her soul
looked out, her soul as it was, as God knew it,--God and this man.  No
longer a cold, clear face; you would have thought, looking at it, what
a strong spirit the soul of this woman would be, if set free in heaven
or in hell.  The man who held it in his grasp went on carelessly, not
knowing that the mere sound of his step had raised it as from the dead.
She, and her right, and her pain, were nothing to him now, she
remembered, staring out at the taunting hot sky.  Yet so vacant was the
sudden life opened before her when he was gone, that, in the
desperation of her weakness, her mad longing to see him but once again,
she would have thrown herself at his feet, and let the cold, heavy step
crush her life out,--as he would have done, she thought, choking down
the icy smother in her throat, if it had served his purpose, though it
cost his own heart's life to do it.  He would trample her down, if she
kept him back from his end; but be false to her, false to himself, that
he would never be!

The red bricks, the dusty desk covered with wool, the miserable chicken
peering out, grew sharper and more real.  Life was no morbid nightmare
now; her weak woman's heart found it near, cruel.  There was not a pain
nor a want, from the dumb question in the dog's eyes that passed her on
the street, to her father's hopeless fancies, that did not touch her
sharply through her own loss, with a keen pity, a wild wish to help to
do something to save others with this poor life left in her hands.

So the day wore on in the town and country; the old sun glaring down
like some fierce old judge, intolerant of weakness or shams,--baking
the hard earth in the streets harder for the horses' feet, drying up
the bits of grass that grew between the boulders of the gutter, scaling
off the paint from the brazen faces of the interminable brick houses.
He looked down in that city as in every American town, as in these
where you and I live, on the same countless maze of human faces going
day by day through the same monotonous routine.  Knowles, passing
through the restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange
meanings by this common light of the sun,--meanings such as you and I
might read, if our eyes were clear as his,--or morbid, it may be, you
think?  A commonplace crowd like this in the street without: women with
cold, fastidious faces, heavy-brained, bilious men, dapper 'prentices,
draymen, prize-fighters, negroes.  Knowles looked about him as into a
seething caldron, in which the people I tell you of were atoms, where
the blood of uncounted races was fused, but not mingled,--where creeds,
philosophies, centuries old,  grappled hand to hand in their
death-struggle,--where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers of
intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred together,
struggling for victory.

Vulgar American life?  He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in
its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before.  People called
him a fanatic.  It may be that he was one: yet the uncouth old man,
sick in soul from some pain that I dare not tell you of; in his own
life, looked into the depths of human loss with a mad desire to set it
right.  On the very faces of those who sneered at him he found some
trace of failure, something that his heart carried up to God with a
loud and exceeding bitter cry.  The voice of the world, he thought,
went up to heaven a discord, unintelligible, hopeless,--the great blind
world, astray since the first ages! Was there no hope, no help?

The sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it shone on
open problems in the lives of these men and women, of these dogs and
horses who walked the streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye
could read.  There were places where it did not shine: down in the
fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of
life lay there he dared not think of.  God knows how the man groped for
the light,--for any voice to make earth and heaven clear to him.

There was another light by which the world was seen that day, rarer
than the sunshine, and purer.  It fell on the dense crowds,--upon the
just and the unjust.  It went into the fogs of the fetid dens from
which the coarser light was barred, into the deepest mires of body
where a soul could wallow, and made them clear.  It lighted the depths
of the hearts whose outer pain and passion men were keen to read in the
unpitying sunshine, and bared in those depths the feeble gropings for
the right, the loving hope, the unuttered prayer.  No kind thought, no
pure desire, no weakest faith in a God and heaven somewhere, could be
so smothered under guilt that this subtile light did not search it out,
glow about it, shine under it, hold it up in full view of God and the
angels,--lighting the world other than the sun had done for six
thousand years.  I have no name for the light: it has a name,--yonder.
Not many eyes were clear to see its--shining that day; and if they did,
it was as through a glass, darkly.  Yet it belonged to us also, in the
old time, the time when men could "hear the voice of the Lord God in
the garden in the cool of the day."  It is God's light now alone.

Yet Lois caught faint glimpses, I think, sometimes,  of its heavenly
clearness.  I think it was this light that made the burning of
Christmas fires warmer for her than for others, that showed her all the
love and outspoken honesty and hearty frolic which her eyes saw
perpetually in the old warm-hearted world. That evening, as she sat on
the step of her frame-shanty, knitting at a great blue stocking, her
scarred face and misshapen body very pitiful to the passers-by, it was
this that gave to her face its homely, cheery smile.  It made her eyes
quick to know the message in the depths of colour in the evening sky,
or even the flickering tints of the green creeper on the wall with its
crimson cornucopias filled with hot shining.  She liked clear, vital
colours, this girl,--the crimsons and blues.  They answered her,
somehow.  They could speak.  There were things in the world that like
herself were marred,--did not understand,--were hungry to know: the
gray sky, the mud streets, the tawny lichens.  She cried sometimes,
looking at them, hardly knowing why: she could not help it, with a
vague sense of loss.  It seemed at those times so dreary for them to be
alive,--or for her.  Other things her eyes were quicker to see than
ours: delicate or grand lines, which she perpetually sought for
unconsciously,--in the homeliest things, the very soft curling of the
woollen yarn in her fingers, as in the eternal sculpture of the
mountains.  Was it the disease of her injured brain that made all
things alive to her,--that made her watch, in her ignorant way, the
grave hills, the flashing, victorious rivers, look pitifully into the
face of some starved hound, or dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before
it scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to know
what they would say to us?  Was it weakness and ignorance that made
everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you or
me?  She never got used to living as other people do; these sights and
sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed. Why, sometimes, out in
the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer noons, she had knelt by the
shaded pools, and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of
water-lilies, her blood curdling in a feverish languor, a passioned
trance, from which she roused herself, weak and tired.

She had no self-poised artist sense, this Lois,--knew nothing of
Nature's laws, as you do.  Yet sometimes, watching the dun sea of the
prairie rise and fall in the crimson light of early morning, or, in the
farms, breathing the blue air trembling up to heaven exultant with the
life of bird and forest, she forgot the poor vile thing she was, some
coarse weight fell off, and something within, not the sickly Lois of
the mill, went out, free, like an exile dreaming of home.

You tell me, that, doubtless, in the wreck of the creature's brain,
there were fragments of some artistic insight that made her thus rise
above the level of her daily life, drunk with the mere beauty of form
and colour.  I do not know,--not knowing how sham or real a thing you
mean by artistic insight.  But I do know that the clear light I told
you of shone for this girl dimly through this beauty of form and
colour; alive.  The Life, rather; and ignorant, with no words for her
thoughts, she believed in it as the Highest that she knew.  I think it
came to her thus in imperfect language, (not an outward show of tints
and lines, as to artists,)--a language, the same that Moses heard when
he stood alone, with nothing between his naked soul and God, but the
desert and the mountain and the bush that burned with fire.  I think
the weak soul of the girl staggered from its dungeon, and groped
through these heavy-browed hills, these colour-dreams, through the
faces of dog or man upon the street, to find the God that lay behind.
So she saw the world, and its beauty and warmth being divine as near to
her, the warmth and beauty became real in her, found their homely
reflection in her daily life.  So she knew, too, the Master in whom she
believed,  saw Him in everything that lived, more real than all beside.
The waiting earth, the prophetic sky, the very worm in the gutter was
but a part of this man, something come to tell her of Him,--she dimly
felt; though, as I said, she had no words for such a thought. Yet even
more real than this.  There was no pain nor temptation down in those
dark cellars where she went that He had not borne,--not one.  Nor was
there the least pleasure came to her or the others, not even a cheerful
fire, or kind words, or a warm, hearty laugh, that she did not know He
sent it and was glad to do it.  She knew that well!  So it was that He
took part in her humble daily life, and became more real to her day by
day.  Very homely shadows her life gave of His light, for it was His:
homely, because of her poor way of living, and of the depth to which
the heavy foot of the world had crushed her.  Yet they were there all
the time, in her cheery patience, if nothing more. To-night, for
instance, how differently the surging crowd seemed to her from what it
did to Knowles!  She looked down on it from her high wood-steps with an
eager interest, ready with her weak, timid laugh to answer every
friendly call from below.  She had no power to see them as types of
great classes; they were just so many living people, whom she knew, and
who, most of them, had been kind to her.  Whatever good there was in
the vilest face, (and there was always something,) she was sure to see
it.  The light made her poor eyes strong for that.

She liked to sit there in the evenings, being alone, yet never growing
lonesome; there was so much that was pleasant to watch and listen to,
as the cool brown twilight came on.  If, as Knowles thought, the world
was a dreary discord, she knew nothing of it.  People were going from
their work now,--they had time to talk and joke by the way,--stopping,
or walking slowly down the cool shadows of the pavement; while here and
there a lingering red sunbeam burnished a window, or struck athwart the
gray boulder-paved street.  From the houses near you could catch a
faint smell of supper: very friendly people those were in these houses;
she knew them all well.  The children came out with their faces washed,
to play, now the sun was down: the oldest of them generally came to sit
with her and hear a story.

After it grew darker, you would see the girls in their neat blue
calicoes go sauntering down the street with their sweethearts for a
walk.  There was old Polston and his son Sam coming home from the
coal-pits, as black as ink, with their little tin lanterns on their
caps.  After a while Sam would come out in his suit of Kentucky jean,
his face shining with the soap, and go sheepishly down to Jenny Ball's,
and the old man would bring his pipe and chair out on the pavement, and
his wife would sit on the steps. Most likely they would call Lois down,
or come over themselves, for they were the most sociable, cosiest old
couple you ever knew.  There was a great stopping at Lois's door, as
the girls walked past, for a bunch of the flowers she brought from the
country, or posies, as they called them, (Sam never would take any to
Jenny but "old man" and pinks,) and she always had them ready in broken
jugs inside.  They were good, kind girls, every one of them,--had taken
it in turn to sit up with Lois last winter all the time she had the
rheumatism.  She never forgot that time,--never once.

Later in the evening you would see a man coming along, close by the
wall, with his head down, the same Margret had seen in the mill,--a
dark man, with gray, thin hair,--Joe Yare, Lois's old father.  No one
spoke to him,--people always were looking away as he passed; and if old
Mr. or Mrs. Polston were on the steps when he came up, they would say,
"Good-evening, Mr. Yare," very formally, and go away presently.  It
hurt Lois more than anything else they could have done.  But she
bustled about noisily, so that he would not notice it.  If they saw the
marks of the ill life he had lived on his old face, she did not; his
sad, uncertain eyes may have been dishonest to them, but they were
nothing but kind to the misshapen little soul that he kissed so warmly
with a "Why, Lo, my little girl!"  Nobody else in the world ever called
her by a pet name.

Sometimes he was gloomy and silent, but generally he told her of all
that had happened in the mill, particularly any little word of notice
or praise he might have received, watching her anxiously until she
laughed at it, and then rubbing his hands cheerfully.  He need not have
doubted Lois's faith in him. Whatever the rest did, she believed in
him; she always had believed in him, through all the dark years, when
he was at home, and in the penitentiary.  They were gone now, never to
come back. It had come right.  If the others wronged him, and it hurt
her bitterly that they did, that would come right some day too, she
would think, as she looked at the tired, sullen face of the old man
bent to the window-pane, afraid to go out.  But they had very cheerful
little suppers there by themselves in the odd, bare little room, as
homely and clean as Lois herself.

Sometimes, late at night, when he had gone to bed, she sat alone in the
door, while the  moonlight fell in broad patches over the square, and
the great poplars stood like giants whispering together.  Still the far
sounds of the town came up cheerfully, while she folded up her
knitting, it being dark, thinking how happy an ending this was to a
happy day.  When it grew quiet, she could hear the solemn whisper of
the poplars, and sometimes broken strains of music from the cathedral
in the city floated through the cold and moonlight past her, far off
into the blue beyond the hills.  All the keen pleasure of the day, the
warm, bright sights and sounds, coarse and homely though they were,
seemed to fade into the deep music, and make a part of it.

Yet, sitting there, looking out into the listening night, the poor
child's face grew slowly pale as she heard it.  It humbled her.  It
made her meanness, her low, weak life so plain to her! There was no
pain nor hunger she had known that did not find a voice in its
articulate cry.  SHE! what was she?  The pain and wants of the world
must be going up to God in that sound, she thought.  There was
something more in it,--an unknown meaning of a great content that her
shattered brain struggled to grasp.  She could not.  Her heart ached
with a wild, restless longing.  She had no words for the vague,
insatiate hunger to understand.  It was because she was ignorant and
low, perhaps; others could know. She thought her Master was speaking.
She thought that unknown Joy linked all earth and heaven together, and
made it plain.  So she hid her face in her hands, and listened, while
the low harmony shivered through the air, unheeded by others, with the
message of God to man.  Not comprehending, it may be,--the poor
girl,--hungry still to know.  Yet, when she looked up, there were warm
tears in her eyes, and her scarred face was bright with a sad, deep
content and love.

So the hot, long day was over for them all,--passed as thousands of
days have done for us, gone down, forgotten: as that long, hot day we
call life will be over some time, and go down into the gray and cold.
Surely, whatever of sorrow or pain may have made darkness in that day
for you or me, there were countless openings where we might have seen
glimpses of that other light than sunshine: the light of that great
To-Morrow, of the land where all wrongs shall be righted.  If we had
but chosen to see it,--if we only had chosen!

CHAPTER V.

Now that I have come to the love part of my story, I am suddenly
conscious of dingy common colors on the palette with which I have been
painting.  I wish I had some brilliant dyes.  I wish, with all my
heart, I could take you back to that "Once upon a time" in which the
souls of our grandmothers delighted,--the time which Dr. Johnson sat up
all night to read about in "Evelina,"--the time when all the celestial
virtues, all the earthly graces were revealed in a condensed state to
man through the blue eyes and sumptuous linens of some Belinda Portman
or Lord Mortimer.  None of your good-hearted, sorely-tempted villains
then!  It made your hair stand on end only to read of them,--going
about perpetually seeking innocent maidens and unsophisticated old men
to devour. That was the time for holding up virtue and vice; no trouble
then in seeing which were sheep and which were goats!  A person could
write a story with a moral to it, then, I should hope! People that were
born in those days had no fancy for going through the world with
half-and-half characters, such as we put up with; so Nature turned out
complete specimens of each class, with all the appendages of dress,
fortune, et cetera, chording decently.  The heroine glides into life
full-charged with rank, virtues, a name three-syllabled, and a white
dress that never needs washing, ready to sail through dangers dire into
a triumphant haven of matrimony;--all the aristocrats have high
foreheads and cold blue eyes; all the peasants are old women,
miraculously grateful, in neat check aprons, or sullen-browed
insurgents planning revolts in caves.

Of course, I do not mean that these times are gone: they are alive (in
a modern fashion) in many places in the world; some of my friends have
described them in prose and verse.  I only mean to say that I never was
there; I was born unlucky.  I am willing to do my best, but I live in
the commonplace.  Once or twice I have rashly tried my hand at dark
conspiracies, and women rare and radiant in Italian bowers; but I have
a friend who is sure to say, "Try and tell us about the butcher next
door, my dear."  If I look up from my paper now, I shall be just as apt
to see our dog and his kennel as the white sky stained with blood and
Tyrian purple.  I never saw a full-blooded saint or sinner in my life.
The coldest villain I ever knew was the only son of his mother, and she
a widow,--and a kinder son never lived.  Doubtless there are people
capable of a love terrible in its strength; but I never knew such a
case that some one did not consider its expediency as "a match" in the
light of dollars and cents.  As for heroines, of course I have seen
beautiful women, and good as fair.  The most beautiful is delicate and
pure enough for a type of the Madonna, and has a heart almost as warm
and holy.  (Very pure blood is in her veins, too, if you care about
blood.) But at home they call her Tode for a nickname; all we can do,
she will sing, and sing through her nose; and on washing-days she often
cooks the dinner, and scolds wholesomely, if the tea-napkins are not in
order.  Now, what is anybody to do with a heroine like that?  I have
known old maids in abundance, with pathos and sunshine in their lives;
but the old maid of novels I never have met, who abandoned her soul to
gossip,--nor yet the other type, a life-long martyr of unselfishness.
They are mixed generally, and not unlike their married sisters, so far
as I can see.  Then as to men, certainly I know heroes.  One man, I
knew, as high a chevalier in heart as any Bayard of them all; one of
those souls simple and gentle as a woman, tender in knightly honour.
He was an old man, with a rusty brown coat and rustier wig, who spent
his life in a dingy village office.  You poets would have laughed at
him.  Well, well, his history never will be written.  The kind, sad,
blue eyes are shut now.  There is a little farm-graveyard overgrown
with privet and wild grape-vines, and a flattened grave where he was
laid to rest; and only a few who knew him when they were children care
to go there, and think of what he was to them.  But it was not in the
far days of Chivalry alone, I think, that true and proud souls have
stood in the world unwelcome, and, hurt to the quick, have turned away
and dumbly died.  Let it be.  Their lives are not lost, thank God!

I meant only to ask you, How can I help it, if the people in my story
seem coarse to you,--if the hero, unlike all other heroes, stopped to
count the cost before he fell in love,--if it made his fingers thrill
with pleasure to touch a full pocket-book as well as his mistress's
hand,--not being withal, this Stephen Holmes, a man to be despised?  A
hero, rather, of a peculiar type,--a man, more than other men: the very
mould of man, doubt it who will, that women love longest and most
madly.  Of course, if I could, I would have blotted out every meanness
before I showed him to you; I would have told you Margret was an
impetuous, whole-souled woman, glad to throw her life down for her
father, without one bitter thought of the wife and mother she might
have been; I would have painted her mother tender, (as she was,)
forgetting how pettish she grew on busy days: but what can I do?  I
must show you men and women as they are in that especial State of the
Union where I live.  In all the others, of course, it is very
different.  Now, being prepared for disappointment, will you see my
hero?

He had sauntered out from the city for a morning walk,--not through the
hills, as Margret went, going home, but on the other side, to the
river, over which you could see the Prairie.  We are in Indiana,
remember.  The sunlight was pure that morning, powerful, tintless, the
true wine of life for body or spirit. Stephen Holmes knew that, being a
man of delicate animal instincts, and so used it, just as he had used
the dumb-bells in the morning.  All things were made for man, weren't