Margret Howth, a Story of To-Day, Rebecca Harding Davis [best novels for students TXT] 📗

There was such calm! such infinite love and justice! it was around, above him; it held him, it held the world,--all Wrong, all Right! For an instant the turbid heart of the man cowered, awestruck, as yours or mine has done when some swift touch of music or human love gave us a cleaving glimpse of the great I AM. The next, he opened the newspaper in his hand. What part in the eternal order could THAT hold? or slavery, or secession, or civil war? No harmony could be infinite enough to hold such discords, he thought, pushing the whole matter from him in despair. Why, the experiment of self-government, the problem of the ages, was crumbling in ruin! So he despaired, just as Tige did the night the mill fell about his ears, in full confidence that the world had come to an end now, without hope of salvation,--crawling out of his cellar in dumb amazement, when the sun rose as usual the next morning.
Knowles sat, peering at Holmes over his paper, watching the languid breath that showed how deep the hurt had been, the maimed body, the face outwardly cool, watchful, reticent as before. He fancied the slough of disappointment into which God had crushed the soul of this man: would he struggle out? Would he take Miss Herne as the first step in his stair-way, or be content to be flung down in vigorous manhood to the depth of impotent poverty? He could not tell if the quiet on Holmes's face were stolid defiance or submission: the dumb kings might have looked thus beneath the feet of Pharaoh. When he walked over the floor, too, weak as he was it was with the old iron tread. He asked Knowles presently what business he had gone into.
"My old hobby in an humble way,--the House of Refuge."
They both laughed.
"Yes, it is true. The janitor points me out to visitors as 'under-superintendent, a philanthropist in decayed circumstances.' Perhaps it is my life-work,"--growing sad and earnest.
"If you can inoculate these infant beggars and thieves with your theory, it will be practice when you are dead."
"I think that," said Knowles, gravely, his eye kindling,--"I think that."
"As thankless a task as that of Moses," said the other, watching him curiously. "For YOU will not see the pleasant land,--YOU will not go over."
The old man's flabby face darkened.
"I know," he said.
He glanced involuntarily out at the blue, and the clear-shining, eternal stars.
"I suppose," he said, after a while, cheerfully, "I must content myself with Lois's creed, here,--'It'll come right some time.'"
Lois looked up from the saucepan she was stirring, her face growing quite red, nodding emphatically some half-dozen times.
"After all," said Holmes, kindly, "this chance may have forced you on the true road to success for your new system of Sociology. Only untainted natures could be fitted for self-government. Do you find the fallow field easily worked?"
Knowles fidgeted uneasily.
"No. Fact is, I'm beginning to think there 's a good deal of an obstacle in blood. I find difficulty, much difficulty, Sir, in giving to the youngest child true ideas of absolute freedom, and unselfish heroism."
"You teach them these by reason alone?" said Holmes, gravely.
"Well,--of course,--that is the true theory; reason is the only yoke that should be laid upon a free-born soul; but I--I find it necessary to have them whipped, Mr. Holmes."
Holmes stooped suddenly to pat Tiger, hiding a furtive smile. The old man went on, anxiously,--
"Old Mr. Howth says that is the end of all self-governments: from anarchy to despotism, he says. Brute force must come in. Old people are apt to be set in their ways, you know. Honestly, we do not find unlimited freedom answer in the House. I hope much from a woman's assistance: I have destined her for this work always: she has great latent power of sympathy and endurance, such as can bring the Christian teaching home to these wretches."
"The Christian?" said Holmes.
"Well, yes. I am not a believer myself, you know; but I find that it takes hold of these people more vitally than more abstract faiths: I suppose because of the humanity of Jesus. In Utopia, of course, we shall live from scientific principles; but they do not answer in the House."
"Who is the woman?" asked Holmes, carelessly.
The other watched him keenly.
"She is coming for five years. Margret Howth."
He patted the dog with the same hard, unmoved touch.
"It is a religious duty with her. Besides, she must do something. They have been almost starving since the mill was burnt."
Holmes's face was bent; he could not see it. When he looked up, Knowles thought it more rigid, immovable than before.
When Knowles was going away, Holmes said to him,--
"When does Margret Howth go into that devils' den?"
"The House? On New-Year's." The scorn in him was too savage to be silent. "It is the best time to begin a new life. Yourself, now, you will have fulfilled your design by that time,--of marriage?"
Holmes was leaning on the mantel-shelf; his very lips were pale.
"Yes, I shall, I shall,"--in his low, hard tone.
Some sudden dream of warmth and beauty flashed before his gray eyes, lighting them as Knowles never had seen before.
"Miss Herne is beautiful,--let me congratulate you, in Western fashion."
The old man did not hide his sneer.
Holmes bowed.
"I thank you, for her."
Lois held the candle to light the Doctor out of the long passages.
"Yoh hev n't seen Barney out 't Mr. Howth's, Doctor? He's ther' now."
"No. When shall you have done waiting on this--man, Lois? God help you, child!"
Lois's quick instinct answered,--
"He's very kind. He's like a woman fur kindness to such as me. When I come to die, I'd like eyes such as his to look at, tender, pitiful."
"Women are fools alike," grumbled the Doctor. "Never mind. 'When you come to die?' What put that into your head? Look up."
The child sheltered the flaring candle with her hand.
"I've no tho't o' dyin'," she said, laughing.
There was a gray shadow about her eyes, a peaked look to the face, he never saw before, looking at her now with a physician's eyes.
"Does anything hurt you here?" touching her chest.
"It's better now. It was that night o' th' fire. Th' breath o' th' mill, I thenk,--but it's nothin'."
"Burning copperas? Of course it's better! Oh, that's nothing!" he said, cheerfully.
When they reached the door, he held out his hand, the first time he ever had done it to her, and then waited, patting her on the head.
"I think it'll come right, Lois," he said, dreamily, looking out into the night. "You're a good girl. I think it'll all come right. For you and me. Some time. Good-night, child."
After he was a long way down the street, he turned to nod good-night again to the comical little figure in the door-way.


CHAPTER IX.
If Knowles hated anybody that night, he hated the man he had left standing there with pale, heavy jaws, and heart of iron; he could have cursed him, standing there. He did not see how, after he was left alone, the man lay with his face to the wall, holding his bony hand to his forehead, with a look in his eyes that if you had seen, you would have thought his soul had entered on that path whose steps take hold on hell.
There was no struggle in his face; whatever was the resolve he had reached in the solitary hours when he had stood so close upon the borders of death, it was unshaken now; but the heart, crushed and stifled before, was taking its dire revenge. If ever it had hungered, through the cold, selfish days, for God's help, or a woman's love, it hungered now, with a craving like death. If ever he had thought how bare and vacant the years would be, going down to the grave with lips that never had known a true wife's kiss, he remembered it now, when it was too late, with bitterness such as wrings a man's heart but once in a lifetime. If ever he had denied to his own soul this Margret, called her alien or foreign, it called her now, when it was too late, to her rightful place; there was not a thought nor a hope in the darkest depths of his nature that did not cry out for her help that night,--for her, a part of himself,--now, when it was too late. He went over all the years gone, and pictured the years to come; he remembered the money that was to help his divine soul upward; he thought of it with a curse, getting up and pacing the floor of the narrow room, slowly and quietly. Looking out into the still starlight and the quaint garden, he tried to fancy this woman as he knew her, after the restless power of her soul should have been chilled and starved into a narrow, lifeless duty. He fancied her old, and stern, and sick of life, she that might have been what might they not have been, together? And he had driven her to this for money,--money!
It was of no use to repent of it now. He had frozen the love out of her heart, long ago. He remembered (all that he did remember of the blank night after he was hurt) that he had seen her white, worn-out face looking down at him; that she did not touch him; and that, when one of the sisters told her she might take her place, and sponge his forehead, she said, bitterly, she had no right to do it, that he was no friend of hers. He saw and heard that, unconscious to all else; he would have known it, if he had been dead, lying there. It was too late now: why need he think of what might have been? Yet he did think of it through the long winter's night,--each moment his thought of the life to come, or of her, growing more tender and more bitter. Do you wonder at the remorse of this man? Wait, then, until you lie alone, as he had done, through days as slow, revealing as ages, face to face with God and death. Wait until you go down so close to eternity that the life you have lived stands out before you in the dreadful bareness in which God sees it,--as you shall see it some day from heaven or hell: money, and hate, and love will stand in their true light then. Yet, coming back to life again, he held whatever resolve he had reached down there with his old iron will: all the pain he bore in looking back to the false life before, or the ceaseless remembrance that it was too late now to atone for that false life, made him the stronger to abide by that resolve, to go on the path self-chosen, let the end be what it might. Whatever the resolve was, it did not still the gnawing hunger in his heart that night, which every trifle made more fresh and strong.
There was a wicker-basket that Lois had left by the fire, piled up with bits of cloth and leather out of which she was manufacturing Christmas gifts; a pair of great woollen socks, which one of the sisters had told him privately Lois meant