“No matter. That does n’t alter the appearance to people here. I don’t wish you to go with him alone any more.”
“Well, Grace, I won’t,” said Mrs. Maynard earnestly. “I won’t, indeed. And that makes me think: he wanted you to go along this morning.”
“To go along? Wanted me — What are you talking about?”
“Why, I suppose that’s his boat, out there, now.” Mrs. Maynard pointed to a little craft just coming to anchor inside the reef. “He said he wanted me to take a sail with him, this morning; and he said he would come up and ask you, too. I do hope you’ll go, Grace. It’s just as calm; and he always has a man with him to help sail the boat, so there is n’t the least danger.” Grace looked at her in silent sorrow, and Mrs. Maynard went on with sympathetic seriousness: “Oh! there’s one thing I want to ask you about, Grace: I don’t like to have any concealments from you.” Grace did not speak, but she permitted Mrs. Maynard to proceed: “Barlow recommended it, and he’s lived here a great while. His brother took it, and he had the regular old New England consumption. I thought I shouldn’t like to try it without your knowing it.”
“Try it? What are you talking about, Louise?”
“Why, whiskey with white-pine chips in it.”
Grace rose, and moved towards the door, with the things dropping from her lap. One of these was a spool, that rolled down the steps and out upon the sandy road. She turned to pursue it, and recovered it at the cost of dropping her scissors and thimble out of opposite sides of her skirt, which she had gathered up apronwise to hold her work. When she rose from the complicated difficulty, in which Mrs. Maynard had amiably lent her aid, she confronted Mr. Libby, who was coming towards them from the cliff. She gave him a stiff nod, and attempted to move away; but in turning round and about she had spun herself into the folds of a stout linen thread escaping from its spool. These gyves not only bound her skirts but involved her feet in an extraordinary mesh, which tightened at the first step and brought her to a standstill.
Mrs. Maynard began to laugh and cough, as Mr. Libby came to her friend’s help. He got the spool in his hand, and walked around her in the endeavor to free her; but in vain. She extended him the scissors with the stern passivity of a fate. “Cut it,” she commanded, and Mr. Libby knelt before her and obeyed. “Thanks,” she said, taking back the scissors; and now she sat down again, and began deliberately to put up her work in her handkerchief.
“I ‘ll go out and get my things. I won’t be gone half a minute, Mr. Libby,” said Mrs. Maynard, with her first breath, as she vanished indoors.
Mr. Libby leaned against the post lately occupied by the factotum in his talk with Mrs. Maynard, and looked down at Grace as she bent over her work. If he wished to speak to her, and was wavering as to the appropriate style of address for a handsome girl, who was at once a young lady and a physician, she spared him the agony of a decision by looking up at him suddenly.
“I hope,” he faltered, “that you feel like a sail, this morning? Did Mrs. Maynard—”
“I shall have to excuse myself,” answered Grace, with a conscience against saying she was sorry. “I am a very bad sailor.”
“Well, so am I, for that matter,” said Mr. Libby. “But it’s smooth as a pond, to-day.”
Grace made no direct response, and he grew visibly uncomfortable under the cold abstraction of the gaze with which she seemed to look through him. “Mrs. Maynard tells me you came over with her from Europe.”
“Oh yes!” cried the young man, the light of pleasant recollection kindling in his gay eyes. “We had a good time. Maynard was along: he’s a first-rate fellow. I wish he were here.”
“Yes,” said Grace, “I wish so, too.” She did not know what to make of this frankness of the young man’s, and she did not know whether to consider him very depraved or very innocent. In her question she continued to stare at him, without being aware of the embarrassment to which she was putting him.
“I heard of Mrs. Maynard’s being here, and I thought I should find him, too. I came over yesterday to get him to go into the woods with us.”
Grace decided that this was mere effrontery. “It is a pity that he is not here,” she said; and though it ought to have been possible for her to go on and rebuke the young fellow for bestowing upon Mrs. Maynard the comradeship intended for her husband, it was not so. She could only look severely at him, and trust that he might conceive the intention which she could not express. She rebelled against the convention and against her own weakness, which would not let her boldly interfere in what she believed a wrong; she had defied society, in the mass, but here, with this man, whom as an atom of the mass she would have despised, she was powerless.
“Have you ever seen him?” Libby asked, perhaps clinging to Maynard because he was a topic of conversation in default of which there might be nothing to say.
“No,” answered Grace.
“He ‘s funny. He’s got lots of that Western humor, and he tells a story better than any man I ever saw. There was one story of his” —
“I have no sense of humor,” interrupted Grace impatiently. “Mr. Libby,” she broke out, “I ‘m sorry that you’ve asked Mrs. Maynard to take a sail with you. The sea air” — she reddened with the shame of not being able to proceed without this wretched subterfuge— “won’t do her any good.”
“Then,” said the young man, “you must n’t let her go.”
“I don’t choose to forbid her,” Grace began.
“I beg your pardon,” he broke in. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
He turned, and ran to the edge of the cliff, over which he vanished, and he did not reappear till Mrs. Maynard had rejoined Grace on the piazza.
“I hope you won’t mind its being a little rough, Mrs. Maynard,” he said, breathing quickly. “Adams thinks we’re going to have it pretty fresh before we get back.”
“Indeed, I don’t want to go, then!” cried Mrs. Maynard, in petulant disappointment, letting her wraps fall upon a chair.
Mr. Libby looked at Grace, who haughtily rejected a part in the conspiracy. “I wish you to go, Louise,” she declared indignantly. “I will take the risk of all the harm that comes to you from the bad weather.” She picked up the shawls, and handed them to Mr. Libby, on whom her eyes blazed their contempt and wonder. It cost a great deal of persuasion and insistence now to make Mrs. Maynard go, and he left all this to Grace, not uttering a word till he gave Mrs. Maynard his hand to help her down the steps. Then he said, “Well, I wonder what Miss Breen does want.”
“I ‘m sure I don’t know,” said the other. “At first she did n’t want me to go, this morning, and now she makes me. I do hope it is n’t going to be a storm.”
“I don’t believe it is. A little fresh, perhaps. I thought you might be seasick.”
“Don’t you remember? I’m never seasick! That’s one of the worst signs.”
“Oh, yes.”
“If I could be thoroughly seasick once, it would be the best thing I could do.”
“Is she capricious?” asked Mr. Libby.
“Grace?” cried Mrs. Maynard, releasing her hand half-way down the steps, in order to enjoy her astonishment without limitation of any sort. “Grace capricious!”
“Yes,” said Mr. Libby, “that’s what I thought. Better take my hand again,” and he secured that of Mrs. Maynard, who continued her descent. “I suppose I don’t understand her exactly. Perhaps she did n’t like my not calling her Doctor. I did n’t call her anything. I suppose she thought I was dodging it. I was. I should have had to call her Miss Breen, if I called her anything.”
“She wouldn’t have cared. She is n’t a doctor for the name of it.”
“I suppose you think it’s a pity?” he asked.
“What?”
“Her being a doctor.”
“I’ll tell her you say so.”
“No, don’t. But don’t you?”
“Well, I would n’t want to be one,” said Mrs. Mayward candidly.
“I suppose it’s all right, if she does it from a sense of duty, as you say,” he suggested.
“Oh, yes, she’s all right. And she’s just as much of a girl as anybody; though she don’t know it,” Mrs. Maynard added astutely. “Why would n’t she come with us? Were you afraid to ask her?”
“She said she was n’t a good sailor. Perhaps she thought we were too young. She must be older than you.”
“Yes, and you, too!” cried Mrs. Maynard, with good-natured derision.
“She doesn’t look old,” returned Mr. Libby.
“She’s twenty-eight. How old are you?”
“I promised the census-taker not to tell till his report came out.”
“What is the color of her hair?”
“Brown.”
“And her eyes?”
“I don’t know!”
“You had better look out, Mr. Libby!” said Mrs. Maynard, putting her foot on the ground at last.
They walked across the beach to where his dory lay, and Grace saw him pulling out to the sail boat before she went in from the piazza. Then she went to her mother’s room. The elderly lady was keeping indoors, upon a theory that the dew was on, and that it was not wholesome to go out till it was off. She asked, according to her habit when she met her daughter alone, “Where is Mrs. Maynard?”
“Why do you always ask that, mother?” retorted Grace, with her growing irritation in regard to her patient intensified by the recent interview. “I can’t be with her the whole time.”
“I wish you could,” said Mrs. Breen, with noncommittal suggestion.
Grace could not keep herself from demanding, “Why?” as her mother expected, though she knew why too well.
“Because she wouldn’t be in mischief then,” returned Mrs. Breen.
“She’s in mischief now!” cried the girl vehemently; “and it’s my fault! I did it. I sent her off to sail with that ridiculous Mr. Libby!”
“Why?” asked Mrs. Breen, in her turn, with unbroken tranquillity.
“Because I am a fool, and I couldn’t help him lie out of his engagement with her.”
“Did n’t he want to go?”
“I don’t know. Yes. They both wanted me to go with them. Simpletons! And while she had gone up-stairs for her wraps I managed to make him understand that I did n’t wish her to go, either; and he ran down to his boat, and came back with a story about its going to be rough, and looked at me perfectly delighted, as if I should be pleased. Of course, then, I made him take her.”
“And is n’t it going to be rough?” asked Mrs. Green.
“Why, mother, the sea’s like glass.”
Mrs. Breen turned the subject. “You would have done better, Grace, to begin as you had planned. Your going to Fall River, and beginning practice there among those factory children, was the only thing that I ever entirely liked in your taking up medicine. There was sense in that. You had studied specially for it. You could have done good there.”
“Oh, yes,” sighed the girl, “I know. But what was I to do, when she came to us, sick and poor? I couldn’t turn my back on her, especially after always befriending her, as I used to, at school, and getting her to depend on me.”
“I don’t see how you ever liked her,” said Mrs. Breen.
“I never did like her. I pitied her. I always thought her a poor, flimsy little thing. But that ought n’t to make any difference, if she was in trouble.”
“No,” Mrs. Breen conceded, and in compensation Grace admitted something more on her side: “She’s worse than she used to be, — sillier. I don’t suppose she has a wrong thought; but she’s as light as foam.”
“Oh, it is n’t the wicked people who, do the harm,” said Mrs. Green.
“I was sure that this air would be everything for her; and so it would, with any ordinary case. But a child would take better care of itself. I have to watch her every minute, like a child; and I never know what she will do next.”
“Yes; it’s a burden,” said Mrs. Breen, with a sympathy which she had not expressed before. “And you’re a good girl, Grace,” she added in very unwonted recognition.
The grateful tears stole into the daughter’s eyes, but she kept a firm face, even after they began to follow one another down her cheeks. “And if Louise had n’t come, you know, mother, that I was anxious to have some older person with me when I went to Fall River. I was glad to have this respite; it gives me a chance to think. I felt a little timid about beginning alone.”
“A man would n’t,” Mrs. Breen remarked.
“No. I am not a man. I have accepted that; with all the rest. I don’t rebel against being a woman. If I had been a man, I should n’t have studied medicine. You know that. I wished to be a physician because I was a woman, and because — because — I had failed where — other women’s hopes are.” She said it out firmly, and her mother softened to her in proportion to the girl’s own strength. “I might have been just a nurse. You know I should have been willing to be that, but I thought I could be something more. But it’s no use talking.” She added, after an interval, in which her mother rocked to and fro with a gentle motion that searched the joints of her chair, and brought out its most plaintive squeak in pathetic iteration, and watched Grace, as she sat looking seaward through the open window, “I think it’s rather hard, mother, that you should be always talking as if I wished to take my calling mannishly. All that I intend is not to take it womanishly; but as for not being a woman about it, or about anything, that’s simply impossible. A woman is reminded of her insufficiency to herself every hour of the day. And it’s always a man that comes to her help. I dropped some things out of my lap down there, and by the time I had gathered them up I was wound round and round with linen thread so that I could n’t move a step, and Mr. Libby cut me loose. I could have done it myself, but it seemed right and natural that he should do it. I dare say he plumed himself upon his service to me, — that would be natural, too. I have things enough to keep me meek, mother!”
She did not look round at Mrs. Breen, who said, “I think you are morbid about it.”
“Yes. And I have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever people think of Louise’s giddiness, I’m, a great deal more scandalous to them than she is simply because I wish to do some good in the world, in a way that women have n’t done it, usually.”
“Now you are morbid.”
“Oh, yes! Talk about men being obstacles! It’s other women! There isn’t a woman in the house that would n’t sooner trust herself in the hands of the stupidest boy that got his diploma with me than she would in mine. Louise knows it, and she feels that she has a claim upon me in being my patient. And I ‘ve no influence with her about her conduct because she understands perfectly well that they all consider me much worse. She prides herself on doing me justice. She patronizes me. She tells me that I’m just as nice as, if I hadn’t ‘been through all that.’” Grace rose, and a laugh, which was half a sob, broke from her.
Mrs. Breen could not feel the humor of the predicament. “She puts you in a false position.”
“I must go and see where that poor little wretch of a child is,” said Grace, going out of the room. She returned in an hour, and asked her mother for the arnica. “Bella has had a bump,” she explained.
“Why, have you been all this time looking for her?
“No, I couldn’t find her, and I’ve been reading. Barlow has just brought her in. HE could find her. She fell out of a tree, and she’s frightfully bruised.”
She was making search on a closet shelf as she talked. When she reappeared with the bottle in her hand, her mother asked, “Is n’t it very hot and close?”
“Very,” said Grace.
“I should certainly think they would perish,” said Mrs. Breen, hazarding the pronoun, with a woman’s confidence that her interlocutor would apply it correctly.
When Grace had seen Bella properly bathed and brown-papered, and in the way to forgetfulness of her wounds in sleep, she came down to the piazza, and stood lookin
g out to sea. The ladies appeared one by one over the edge of the cliff, and came up, languidly stringing their shawls after them, or clasping their novels to their bosoms.
“There isn’t a breath down there,” they said, one after another. The last one added, “Barlow says it’s the hottest day he’s ever seen here.”
In a minute Barlow himself appeared at the head of the steps with the ladies’ remaining wraps, and confirmed their report in person. “I tell you,” he said, wiping his forehead, “it’s a ripper.”
“It must be an awful day in town,” said one of the ladies, fanning herself with a newspaper.
“Is that to-day’s Advertiser, Mrs. Alger?” asked another.
“Oh, dear, no! yesterday’s. We sha’n’t have today’s till this afternoon. It shows what a new arrival you are, Mrs. Scott — your asking.”
“To be sure. But it’s such a comfort being where you can see the Advertiser the same morning. I always look at the Weather Report the first thing. I like to know what the weather is going to be.”
“You can’t at Jocelyn’s. You can only know what it’s been.”
“Well,” Barlow interposed, jealous for Jocelyn’s, “you can most al’ays tell by the look o’ things.”
“Yes,” said one of the ladies; “but I’d rather trust the Weather Report. It’s wonderful how it comes true. I don’t think there ‘s anything that you miss more in Europe than our American Weather Report.”
“I’m sure you miss the oysters,” said another.
“Yes,” the first admitted, “you do miss the oysters. It was the last of the R months when we landed in New York; and do you know what we did the first thing — ? We drove to Fulton Market, and had one of those Fulton Market broils! My husband said we should have had it if it had been July. He used to dream of the American oysters when we were in Europe. Gentlemen are so fond of them.”
Barlow, from scanning the heavens, turned round and faced the company, which had drooped in several attitudes of exhaustion on the benching of the piazza. “Well, I can most al’ays tell about Jocelyn’s as good as the Weather Report. I told Mrs. Maynard here this mornin’ that the fog was goin’ to burn off.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 125