The Diary of a Saint

It is perhaps making too much of it to be so disappointed. Certainly baby must be taken care of, and I have promised to take care of her. I fear that it will be a good while before I see Europe again. I am sorry for Cousin Mehitable, but she has never any difficulty in finding friends to travel with. It is evident enough that my duty is here.

May 10. Rosa has not yet come to the end of her matrimonial perplexities. The divorced wife of Ran Gargan is now reported as near death, and Rosa is debating whether to give up Dennis Maloney and wait for Ran.

"Of course Dennis is gone on me," she explained last night in the most cold-bloodedly matter-of-fact fashion, "and I'd make him a main good wife. But Ran was always the boy for me, barring Father O'Rafferty wouldn't let me marry him."

"Rosa," I said, with all the severity I could command, "you must not talk like that. It sounds as if you hadn't any feeling at all. You don't mean it."

Rosa tossed her saucy head with emphatic scorn.

"What for don't I mean it?" she demanded. "Any woman wants to marry the man she likes best, and, barring him, she'd take up with the man who likes her best."

I laughed, and told her she was getting to be a good deal of a philosopher.

"Humph!" was her not very respectful reply; "it's the only choice a woman has, and she don't always have that. She's better off if she'll take the man that's sweet on her; but it's the way we girls are made, to hanker after the one we're sweet on ourselves."

Her earnestness so much interfered with the supper which she was giving to Thomasine that I took baby into my arms, and left Rosa free to speak out her mind without hindrance.

"I'm not going to take either of 'em in a hurry," she went on. "I'd not be leaving you in the lurch with the baby, Miss Ruth. I'd like to have Ran, but I don't know what he's got. He'd make me stand round awful, they say, and Dennis'd be under my thumb like a crumb of butter. I mistrust I'd be more contented with Ranny. It'd be more stirred up like; but I'd have some natural fear of him, and that's pleasant for a woman."

I had never seen Rosa in this astonishing mood before, and so much worldly wisdom was bewildering. Such generalizations on the relation of the sexes took away my breath. I was forced to be silent, for there was evidently no chance of my holding my own in a conversation of this sort. It is strange how boldly and bluntly this uneducated girl has thought out her relations with her lovers. She recognizes entirely that Dennis, who is her slave, will treat her better than Ran, who will be her master; yet she "mistrusts she will be more contented with Ranny." The moral seems to be that a woman is happier to be abused by the man she loves than to be served by the man who loves her. That can only be crude instinct, the relics of savagery. In civilized woman, I am sure, when respect goes love must go also.

No; that isn't true! Women keep on loving men when they know them to be unworthy. Perhaps this applies especially to good wives. A good woman is bound to love her husband just as long as she can in any way compass it, and to deceive herself about him to the latest possible instant. I wonder what I should do? I wonder – Well, George has shown that he is not what I thought him, and do I care for him less? He only showed, however, that he did not care for me as much as I thought, and of course that does not necessarily prove him unworthy. And yet —

What is the use of all this? What do I know about it anyway? I will go to bed.

May 12. It is amusing to see how jealous Hannah and Rosa are of baby's attention. Thomasine can as yet hardly be supposed to distinguish one human being from another, and very likely has not drawn very accurate comparisons between any of us and the furniture; but Rosa insists that baby knows her, and is far more fond of her than of Hannah, while of course Hannah indignantly sniffs at an idea so preposterous.

"She really laughed at me this morning when I was giving her her bath," Rosa assured me to-day. "She knows me the minute I come into the nursery."

It is beautiful to see how the sweetness and helplessness of the little thing have so appealed to the girls that prejudices are forgotten. When I brought Thomasine home I feared that I might have trouble. They scorned the child of that Brownrig girl, and they both showed the fierce contempt which good girls of their class feel for one who disgraces herself. All this is utterly forgotten. The charm of baby has so enslaved them that if an outsider ventured to show the feelings they themselves had at first, they would be full of wrath and indignation. The maternal instinct is after all the strongest thing in most women. Rosa considers her matrimonial chances in a bargain-and-sale fashion which takes my breath, but she will be perfectly fierce in her fondness for her children. Hannah is a born old maid, but she cannot help mothering every baby who comes within her reach, and for Thomasine she brings out all the sweetness of her nature.

May 15. I have been through a whirlwind, but now I am calm, and can think of things quietly. It is late, but the fire has not burned down, and I could not sleep, so Peter and I may as well stay where we are a while longer.

I was reading this afternoon, when suddenly Kathie rushed into the room out of breath with running, her face smooched and wet with tears, and her hair in confusion.

"Why, Kathie," I asked, "what is the matter?"

Her answer was to fly across the room, throw herself on her knees beside me, and burst into sobs. The more I tried to soothe her, the more she cried, and it was a long time before she was quiet enough to be at all reasonable.

"My dear," I said, "tell me what has happened. What is the matter?"

She looked up at me with wild eyes.

"It isn't true!" she broke out fiercely. "I know it isn't true! I didn't say a word to him, because I knew you wouldn't want me to; but it's a lie! It's a lie, if my father did say it."

"Why, Kathie," I said, amazed at her excitement, "what in the world are you saying? Your father wouldn't tell a lie to save his life."

"He believes it," she answered, dropping her voice. A sullen, stubborn look came into her face that it was pitiful to see. "He does believe it, but it's a lie."

I spoke to her as sternly as I could, and told her she had no right to judge of what her father believed, and that I would not have her talk so of him.

"But I asked him about your mother, and he said she would be punished forever and ever for not being a church member!" she exclaimed before I could stop her. "And I know it's a lie."

She burst into another tempest of sobs, and cried until she was exhausted. Her words were so cruel that for a moment I had not even the power to try to comfort her; but she would soon have been in hysterics, and for a time I had to think only of her. Fortunately baby woke. Rosa was not at home, and by the time Hannah and I had fed Thomasine, and once more she was asleep in her cradle, I had my wits about me. Kathie had, with a child's quick change of mood, become almost gay.

"Kathie," I said, "do you mind staying here with baby while I take a little walk? Rosa is out, and I have been in the house all day. I want a breath of fresh air."

"Oh, I should love to," she answered, her face brightening at the thought of being trusted with a responsibility so great.

I was out of doors, and walking rapidly toward Mr. Thurston's house, before I really came to my senses. I was so wounded by what Kathie had thoughtlessly repeated, so indignant at this outrage to my dead, that I had had strength only to hide my feelings from her. Now I came to a realization of my anger, and asked myself what I meant to do. I had instinctively started out to denounce Mr. Thurston for bigotry and cruelty; to protest against this sacrilege. A little, I feel sure, – at least I hope I am right, – I felt the harm he was doing Kathie; but most I was outraged and angry that he had dared to speak so of Mother. I was ashamed of my rage when I grew more composed; and I realized all at once how Mother herself would have smiled at me. So clear was my sense of her that it was almost as if she really repeated what she once said to me: "My dear Ruth, do you suppose that what Mr. Thurston thinks alters the way the universe is made? Why should he know more about it than you do? He's not nearly so clever or so well educated." I smiled to recall how she had smiled when she said it; then I was blinded by tears to remember that I should never see her smile again; and so I walked into a tree in the sidewalk, and nearly broke my nose. That was the end of my dashing madly at Mr. Thurston. The wound Kathie's words had made throbbed, but with the memory of Mother in my mind I could not break out into anger.

I turned down the Cove Road to walk off my ill-temper. After all Mr. Thurston was right from his point of view. He could not believe without feeling that he had to warn Kathie against the awful risk of running into eternal damnation. It must hurt him to think or to say such a thing; but he believes in the cruelty of the deity, and he has beaten his natural tenderness into subjection to his idea of a Moloch. It is so strange that the ghastly absurdity of connecting God's anger with a sweet and blameless life like Mother's does not strike him. Indeed, I suppose down here in the country we are half a century or so behind the thought of the real world, and that Mr. Thurston's creed would be impossible in the city, or among thinkers even of his own denomination. At least I hope so, though I do not see what they have left in the orthodox creed if they take eternal punishment out of it.

The fresh air and the memory of Mother, with a little common sense, brought me right again. I walked until I had myself properly in hand, and till I hoped that the trace of tears on my face might pass for the effect of the wind. It was growing dusk by this time, and the lamps began to appear in the houses as I came to Mr. Thurston's at last. I slipped in at the front door as quietly as I could, and knocked at the study.

Mr. Thurston himself opened the door. He looked surprised, but asked me in, and offered me a chair. He had been writing, and still held his pen in his hand; the study smelled of kerosene lamp and air-tight stove. Poor man! Theology which has to live by an air-tight stove must be dreary. If he had an open fire on his hearth, he might have less in his religion.

"I have come to confess a fault, Mr. Thurston," I said, "and to ask a favor."

He smiled a little watery smile, and put down his pen.

"Is the favor to be a reward for the fault or for confessing it?" he asked.

I was so much surprised by this mild jest, coming from him, that I almost forgot my errand. I smiled back at him, and forgot the bitterness that had been in my heart. He looked so thin, so bloodless, that it was impossible to have rancor.

"I left Kathie with baby while I went for a walk," I said, "and I have stayed away longer than I intended. I forgot to tell her she could call Hannah if she wanted to come home, and she is too conscientious to leave, so I am afraid that she has stayed all this time. I wanted you to know it is my fault."

"I am glad for her to be useful," her father said, "especially as you have been so kind to her."

"Then you will perhaps let her stay all night," I went on. "I can take over her night-things. I promised to show her about making a new kind of pincushion for the church fair; and I could do it this evening. Besides, it is lonely for me in that great house."

I felt like a hypocrite when I said this, though it is true enough. He looked at me kindly, and even pityingly.

"Yes," he returned, "I can understand that. If you think she won't trouble you, and" —

I did not give him opportunity for a word more. I rose at once and held out my hand.

"Thank you so much," I said. "I'll find Mrs. Thurston, and get Kathie's things. I beg your pardon for troubling you."

I was out of the study before he could reconsider. Across the hall I found his wife in the sitting-room with another air-tight stove, and looking thinner and paler than he. She had a great pile of sewing beside her, and her eyes looked as if months of tears were behind them, aching to be shed.

I told her Mr. Thurston had given leave for Kathie to pass the night with me, and I had come for her night-things. She looked surprised, but none the less pleased. While she was out of the room I looked cautiously at the mending to see if the clothing was too worn for her to be willing that I should see it. When she came in with her little bundle, I said, as indifferently as I could, "I suppose if Kathie were at home she would help you with the mending, so I'll take her share with me, and we'll do it together." Of course she remonstrated, but I managed to bring away a good part of the big pile, and now it is all done. Poor Mrs. Thurston, she looked so tired, so beaten down by life, the veins were so blue on her thin temples! If I dared, I'd go every week and do that awful mending for her. I must get Kathie to smuggle some of it over now and then. When we blame these people for the narrowness of their theology, we forget their lives are so constrained and straitened that they cannot take broad views of anything. The man or woman who could take a wide outlook upon life from behind an air-tight stove in a half-starved home would have to be almost a miracle. It is wonderful that so much sweetness and humanity keep alive where circumstances are so discouraging. When I think of patient, faithful, hard-working women like Mrs. Thurston, uncomplaining and devoted, I am filled with admiration and humility. If their theology is narrow, they endure it; and, after all, men have made it for them. Father said once women had always been the occasion of theology, but had never produced any. I asked him, I remember, whether he said this to their praise or discredit, and he answered that what was entirely the result of nature was neither to be praised nor to be blamed; women were so made that they must have a religion, and men so constituted as to take the greatest possible satisfaction in inventing one. "It is simply a beautiful example," he added, with his wonderful smile which just curled the corners of his mouth, "of the law of supply and demand."

I am running on and on, although it is so late at night. Aunt Naomi, I presume, will in some occult way know about it, and ask me why I sat up so long. I am tired, but the excitement of the afternoon is not all gone. That any one in the world should believe it possible for Mother to be unhappy in another life, to be punished, is amazing! Surely a man whose theology makes such an idea conceivable is profoundly to be pitied.

May 19. Hannah is perfectly delightful about Tomine. She hardly lets a day go by without admonishing me not to spoil baby, and yet she is herself an abject slave to the slightest caprice of the tyrannous small person. We have to-night been having a sort of battle royal over baby's going to sleep by herself in the dark. I made up my mind the time had come when some semblance of discipline must be begun, and I supposed, of course, that Hannah would approve and assist. To my surprise she failed me at the very first ditch.

"I am going to put Tomine into the crib," I announced, "and take away the light. She must learn to go to sleep in the dark."

"She'll be frightened," Rosa objected.

"She's too little to know anything about being afraid," I retorted loftily, although I had secretly a good deal of misgiving.

"Too little!" sniffed Hannah. "She's too little not to be afraid."

I saw at a glance that I had before me a struggle with them as well as with baby.

"Children are not afraid of the dark until they are told to be," I declared as dogmatically as possible.

"They are told not to be," objected Rosa.

"But that puts the idea into their heads," was my answer.

Hannah regarded me with evident disapprobation.

"But supposing the baby cries?" she demanded.

"Then she must be left to stop," I answered, with outward firmness and inward quakings.

"But suppose she cries herself sick?" insisted Rosa.

"She won't. She'll just cry a little till she finds nobody comes, and then she'll go to sleep."

The two girls regarded me with looks that spoke disapproval in the largest of capitals. It is so seldom they are entirely united that it was disconcerting to have them thus make common cause against me, but I had to keep up for the sake of dignity if for nothing else. Thomasine was fed and arranged for the night; she was kissed and cuddled, and tucked into her crib. Then I got Hannah and Rosa, both protesting they didn't mind sitting up with the darling all night, out of the room, darkened the windows, and shut baby in alone for the first time in her whole life, a life still so pathetically little.

I closed the nursery door with an air of great calmness and determination, but outside I lingered like a complete coward. The girls were glowering darkly from the end of the hall, and we needed only candlelight to look like three bloodthirsty conspirators. For two or three minutes there was a soothing and deceptive silence, so that I turned to smile with an air of superior wisdom on the maids. Then without warning baby uplifted her voice and wailed.

There was something most disconcertingly explosive about the cry, as if Thomasine had been holding her breath until she were black in the face, and only let it escape one second short of actual suffocation. I jumped as if a mouse had sprung into my face, and the two girls swooped down upon me in a whirl of triumphant indignation.

"There, Miss Ruth!" cried Hannah.

"There, Miss Privet!" cried Rosa.

"Well," I said defensively; "I expected her to cry some."

"She wants to be walked with, poor little thing," Rosa said incautiously.

I was rejoiced to have a chance to turn the tables, and I sprang upon her tacit admission at once.

"Rosa," I said severely, "have you been walking Thomasine to sleep? I told you never to do it."

Rosa, self-convicted, could only murmur that she had just taken her up and down two or three times to make her sleepy; she hadn't really walked her to sleep.

"What if she had?" Hannah demanded boldly, her place entirely forgotten in the excitement of the moment. "If babies like to be walked to sleep, it stands to reason that's nature."

I began to feel as if all authority were fast slipping away from me, and that I should at this rate soon become a very secondary person in my own house. I tried to recover myself by assuming the most severe air of which I was capable.

"You must not talk outside the nursery door," I told them. "If Thomasine hears voices, of course she'll keep on crying. Go downstairs, both of you. I'll see to baby."

They had not yet arrived at open mutiny, and so with manifest unwillingness they departed, grumbling to each other as they went. Baby seemed to have some superhuman intelligence that her firmest allies were being routed, for she set up a series of nerve-splitting shrieks which made every fibre of my body quiver. As soon as the girls were out of sight I flopped down on my knees outside of the door, and put my hands over my ears. I was afraid of myself, and only the need I felt of holding out for Tomine's own sake gave me strength to keep from rushing into the nursery in abject surrender.

The absurdity of it makes me laugh now, but with the shrieks of baby piercing me, I felt as if I were involved in a tragedy of the deepest dye. I think I was never so near hysterics in my life; but I had even then some faint and far-away sense of how ridiculous I was, and that saved me. Thomasine yelled like a young tornado, and every cry went through me like a knife. I was on my knees on the floor, pouring out tears like a watering-pot, trying to shut out the sound. There is something in a baby's cry that is too much even for a sense of humor; and no woman could have heard it without being overcome.

I had so stopped my ears that although I could not shut out baby's cries entirely I did not hear Hannah and Rosa when they came skulking back. The first I knew of their being behind me was when Hannah, in a whispered bellow, shouted into my ear that baby would cry herself into convulsions. Demoralized as I was already, I almost yielded; I started to my feet, and faced them in a tragic manner, ready to give up everything. I was ready to say that Rosa might walk up and down with Tomine every night for the rest of her life. Fortunately some few gleams of common sense asserted themselves in my half-addled pate, and instead of opening the door, I spread out my arms, and without a word shooed the girls out of the corridor as if they were hens. Then the ludicrousness of it came over me, and although I still tingled with baby's wailing, I could appreciate that the cries were more angry than pathetic, and that we must fight the battle through now it had been begun. The drollest thing about it all was that it seemed almost as if the willful little lady inside there had some uncanny perception of my thought. I had no sooner got the girls downstairs again, and made up my mind to hold out than she stopped crying; and when we crept cautiously in ten minutes after, she was asleep as soundly and as sweetly as ever.

But I feel as if I had been through battles, murders, and sudden deaths.

May 20. Baby to-night cried two or three minutes, but her ladyship evidently had the sense to see that crying is a painful and useless exercise when she has to deal with such a hard-hearted tyrant as I am, and she quickly gave it up. Rosa hoped pointedly that the poor little thing's will isn't broken, and Hannah observed piously that she trusted I realized we all of us had to be treated like babies by our Heavenly Father. I was tempted to ask her if our Heavenly Father never left us to cry in the dark. If we could be as firm with ourselves as we can be with other people, what an improvement it would be. I wonder what Tom would think of my first conflict with his baby.

May 25. I went to-day to call on Mrs. Weston. Although I am in mourning, I thought it better to go. I feared lest she should think my old relations to George might have something to do with my staying away.

It was far less difficult than I thought it would be. I may be frank in my diary, I suppose, and say I found her silly and rather vulgar, and I wonder how George can help seeing it. She was inclined to boast a little that all the best people in town had called.

"Olivia Watson acted real queer about my wedding-calls," she said. "She doesn't seem to know the rich folks very well."

"Oh, we never make distinctions in Tuskamuck by money," I put in; but she went on without heeding.

"Olivia said Mrs. Andrews – she called her Lady Andrews, just as if she was English."

"It is a way we have," I returned. "I'm sure I don't know how it began. Very likely it is only because it fits her so well."

"Well, anyway, she called; and Olivia owned she'd never been to see them. I could see she was real jealous, though she wouldn't own it."

"Old lady Andrews is a delightful person," I remarked awkwardly, feeling that I must say something.

"I didn't think she was much till Olivia told me," returned Mrs. Weston, with amazing frankness. "I thought she was a funny old thing."

It is not kind to put this down, I know; but I really would like to see if it sounds so unreal when it is written as it did when it was said. It was so unlike anything I ever heard that it seemed almost as if Mrs. Weston were playing a part, and trying to cheat me into thinking her more vulgar and more simple than she is. I am afraid I shall not lessen my unpleasant impression, however, by keeping her words.

Mrs. Weston talked, too, about George and his devotion as if she expected me to be hurt. Possibly I was a little; although if I were, it was chiefly because my vanity suffered that he should find me inferior in attraction to a woman like this. I believe I am sincerely glad that he should prove his fondness for his wife. Indeed fondness could be the only excuse for his leaving me, and I do wish happiness to them both.

I fear what I have written gives the worst of Mrs. Weston. She perhaps was a little embarrassed, but she showed me nothing better. She is not a lady, and I see perfectly that she will drop out of our circle. We are a little Cranfordish here, I suppose, but anywhere in the world people come in the long run to associate with their own kind. Mrs. Weston is not our kind; and even if this did not affect our attitude, she would herself tire of us after the first novelty is worn off.