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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Mercy Philbrick's Choice," Helen Hunt Jackson intricately weaves a tale of moral dilemmas and personal growth, set against the backdrop of 19th-century America. The novel explores the life of Mercy Philbrick, a woman torn between societal expectations and her own desires as she faces profound choices about love, loyalty, and individual agency. Jackson employs a lyrical prose style that echoes the complexities of her characters' inner lives, inviting readers into their psychological turmoil while reflecting broader themes of women's rights and the societal norms of her time. Helen Hunt Jackson was not only a prominent novelist but also a passionate advocate for Native American rights. Her experiences with injustice and her reformist zeal profoundly influenced her writing, lending a sense of urgency and authenticity to the moral quandaries faced by Mercy Philbrick. Jackson's background as a poet and her keen observations of social issues imbue her narrative with depth, making her characters resonate with authenticity and emotional weight. "Mercy Philbrick's Choice" is a remarkable exploration of the human condition and societal constraints. Readers interested in early feminist literature, moral philosophy, and richly drawn characters will find this novel both thought-provoking and deeply engaging. Jackson's blend of social commentary and narrative artistry ensures that this work remains relevant and captivating, inviting reflection on the choices that define our morality and identity. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Mercy Philbrick's Choice
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its core, Mercy Philbrick’s Choice contemplates the peril and promise of a single decision, showing how a woman’s conscience, affections, and sense of self can converge at a threshold where every step forward illuminates one truth while casting another into shadow.
Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel belongs to the tradition of nineteenth-century American domestic and moral fiction, and it was published in the 1870s, several years before the author’s widely known works on social reform. Jackson (1830–1885) is remembered for her literary range and public conscience, and this earlier novel reflects her attention to private ethics and intimate consequences. Without relying on spectacle, the book situates readers in a recognizable social world whose customs and expectations exert real pressure on individual choice. The result is a narrative grounded in everyday life, yet charged with the significance that moral decisions assume within it.
The premise is deceptively simple: Mercy Philbrick faces a defining choice that tests her loyalty, her integrity, and her understanding of love. Rather than stage the problem as a puzzle to be solved, the novel observes how a decision grows out of temperament, circumstance, and values. Jackson guides readers through the tensions that precede any irrevocable act, inviting close attention to the origins of motive and the costs of consequence. The experience is reflective and intimate, more concerned with inward weather than with outward shocks, yet it moves with a quiet momentum that makes the outcome feel momentous.
Jackson’s narrative voice is composed and exact, attentive to the textures of thought and the subtle pressure of social expectation. The style balances sympathy with scrutiny, allowing readers to feel the pull of competing duties without collapsing the novel’s ethical complexity into easy answers. Dialogue and description serve character, but the emphasis remains on the interior clarities and confusions that guide human conduct. The mood is earnest rather than sentimental, sober without being severe, and suffused with a moral curiosity that invites readers to hold judgment in suspension as they inhabit Mercy’s evolving point of view.
Themes of autonomy and obligation anchor the book, especially as they intersect with the roles women were expected to inhabit in its historical moment. The story probes the boundaries between personal desire and social duty, between truthfulness and the forms of concealment that politeness or loyalty can demand. It contemplates the ethics of promise-making, the weight of conscience, and the ways affection can both clarify and cloud judgment. By tracing how a decision gathers force, the novel examines character as a process rather than a fixed trait, asking what integrity requires when different goods cannot be harmonized.
Contemporary readers may find the novel resonant for its exploration of boundaries, consent, and the emotional labor entwined with care. Mercy’s predicament raises questions that remain urgent: How do we distinguish generosity from self-erasure? What do we owe to others when honoring them seems to compromise ourselves? Jackson refrains from spectacle, trusting the drama of moral attention to hold the stage. That quiet intensity encourages reflection on how social scripts continue to shape private lives, and it offers a historically grounded vantage from which to consider enduring debates about agency, responsibility, and the costs of doing right.
Reading Mercy Philbrick’s Choice is thus less like watching a trial than like listening carefully in a room where each word matters. The novel’s satisfactions come from its close study of motive, its steady moral pulse, and its humane attention to the textures of decision-making. Readers can expect a thoughtful, character-centered narrative that builds suspense from ethical stakes rather than outward action. Without prescribing answers, Jackson creates the conditions for clarity, allowing Mercy’s dilemma to illuminate a wider field of questions. The book invites not only sympathy but also self-scrutiny, a kind of companionable seriousness that lingers.
Synopsis
Set in a mid-nineteenth-century New England town, Mercy Philbrick’s Choice follows Mercy, a quiet, capable young woman whose life is governed by conscience and duty. She supports her household with steady work and holds firm views about honesty and promise keeping. The community around her is close-knit and attentive to reputation, leaving little room for impulsive feeling. Mercy’s reserve conceals a deep capacity for attachment and a rigorous habit of self-examination. From the outset, the narrative emphasizes daily rhythms, plain surroundings, and the inner texture of thought, establishing the moral landscape in which Mercy will be asked to decide her future.
Change enters Mercy’s routine through acquaintance with a cultivated outsider whose tastes in books and music mirror her own. Their conversations open intellectual vistas and awaken emotions that she has disciplined herself to ignore. The friendship develops through reading aloud, quiet walks, and letters that balance candor with restraint. While nothing overt disturbs propriety, the connection forces Mercy to weigh the meaning of affinity and the boundaries drawn by custom. At the same time, her responsibilities at home remain pressing, reminding her that choices are not made in isolation but in the context of need, expectation, and the judgment of neighbors.
Against this awakening stands a proposal of another kind: a practical, honorable offer that promises stability to Mercy and security to those dependent on her. The suitor is respected, steady, and plainly affectionate, if less imaginatively attuned. Mercy measures the difference between a love that stirs the mind and a partnership that safeguards daily life. She consults her own conscience more than any confidant, testing motives for selfishness and illusion. Helen Hunt Jackson stages the deliberation in small scenes and letters rather than dramatic speeches, underscoring how serious decisions are formed quietly, over time, within habits of truth and restraint.
Mercy’s decision sets the course for a marriage described with attention to simple tasks, shared plans, and the adjustment of two temperaments. The early months show kindness and mutual respect alongside moments of misreading, as implied expectations surface and are negotiated. Mercy seeks to be transparent while protecting others from needless pain, and she guards against self-deception with deliberate care. The narrative remains close to her perspective, letting external events register primarily through their moral weight. Gradually, the fragile balance between contentment and unacknowledged longing becomes apparent, preparing the way for circumstances that will test the premises on which she chose.
An unexpected communication brings troubling news, casting retrospective light on earlier assumptions that shaped Mercy’s choice. Hints of misunderstanding, absence, and accident complicate the story she believed, introducing questions about duty and prior claim. The development is conveyed through letters and secondhand reports, amplifying uncertainty rather than offering immediate proof. Mercy responds not with impulsive change but with a methodical search for facts, mindful of the obligations she has already embraced. Her inquiries lead her beyond the village, into settings where her private history intersects with wider currents of ambition, illness, and reputation, each adding weight to the moral equation.
In a spare sequence of visits and interviews, Mercy hears accounts that challenge her settled view of what she owes and to whom. She confronts the possibility that loyalty to a vow may conflict with loyalty to a truth discovered later. The narrative emphasizes her inward debate more than outward spectacle, situating key moments in quiet rooms, at thresholds, and in the pause before an answer is given. The figure from her earlier life is present chiefly through testimony and remembered words, keeping focus on Mercy’s discernment rather than romance. The question hardens: what constitutes fidelity when knowledge has changed.
The story reaches a turning point when Mercy is compelled to speak plainly to those most affected by her decision. Without theatrics, she states what she now knows and what she believes she must do, accepting that any path will involve loss. The scene is decisive yet restrained, shaped by the values the book has established from the beginning. In place of dramatic reversal, Jackson offers careful disclosure, mutual appeals to conscience, and the gradual acceptance of consequences. The particulars of Mercy’s answer are not the focus here; rather, the emphasis lies on the integrity of choosing in full awareness.
After the decision, the novel attends to its repercussions in the home, the neighborhood, and Mercy’s daily work. Friendships recalibrate, routines change, and sorrow yields, slowly, to a workable peace. Mercy finds scope for usefulness that aligns with her nature, whether in teaching, care for the ill, or the faithful keeping of a household. Letters close certain threads and open others, suggesting continuities that survive altered circumstances. The community’s judgment softens as time passes and conduct steadies. The narrative’s plain style reinforces the sense that restoration, when it comes, is earned through patience, fairness, and sustained regard for truth.
Mercy Philbrick’s Choice concludes by reaffirming the novel’s central concern: a woman’s capacity to reason morally within the constraints of her era. It presents choice not as sudden passion but as the disciplined outcome of character, information, and empathy. Without sensational disclosure, the ending leaves readers with the impression of a life reoriented but not undone, and of relationships preserved to the extent integrity allows. The book’s message is steady and humane: promises matter, truth matters, and persons are honored when decisions are made with clear sight and courage. Mercy’s path embodies that balance, quiet yet unmistakably consequential.
Historical Context
Mercy Philbrick’s Choice, published in 1876, unfolds within the moral and social atmosphere of postbellum New England, evoking small-town Massachusetts or neighboring states where Congregational meetinghouses, common greens, and close-knit kin networks set the tempo of civic life. Rail links to Boston, Springfield, and Hartford had shortened distances, but parochial oversight of reputation and marriage remained powerful. Domestic interiors—parlors, kitchens, schoolrooms—served as stages for communal judgment and private deliberation. The agricultural calendar still shaped work, even as nearby mills and shops signaled a changing economy. In this milieu, female respectability, property, and choice were scrutinized by clergy, neighbors, and family elders, framing the novel’s central dilemma: how a woman of conscience navigates duty, affection, and legal constraints in an era of guarded reform.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) ended with Union victory and enormous social aftershocks: between 620,000 and 750,000 dead, the rise of veterans’ organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic (founded 1866), and the national observance of Memorial Day beginning in 1868. Reconstruction (1865–1877) reshaped constitutional order but also altered Northern towns through mourning cultures, widows’ pensions, and civic rituals that praised sacrifice and restraint. Helen Hunt Jackson herself was widowed in 1863 when her first husband, Captain Edward Bissell Hunt, died in a wartime accident, giving her intimate knowledge of loss and moral recalibration. Even when the novel does not name the war, its New England reserve, somber self-scrutiny, and emphasis on duty and prudence mirror postwar sensibilities that influence characters’ calculations about love and obligation.
Industrial growth transformed New England from the 1820s through the 1870s, with textile centers at Lowell and Lawrence on the Merrimack River, shoe shops in Lynn, and machine works along the Connecticut River valley. Women’s wage labor, first organized in the Lowell system, sparked early reform agitation: the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association formed in 1844 to petition for a ten-hour day. Later, the Knights of Labor (1869) expanded worker organization, and the 1870s saw strikes and wage disputes from Fall River to the wider Northeast. Factory schedules, cash wages, and market fluctuations filtered into rural towns via kinship and credit. The novel’s attention to household thrift, female self-support, and the social meaning of work reflects this industrial hinterland, where a woman’s economic options—teaching, sewing, shopkeeping—intersected with expectations about marriage and respectability.
Debates over women’s legal status formed a crucial backdrop. Massachusetts enacted Married Women’s Property Acts beginning in 1845, expanding through the 1850s to let wives hold separate property and earnings, and by the 1870s many states allowed women to contract and sue independently. Parallel agitation for political rights advanced through the Worcester women’s rights conventions (1850–1851), the 1869 formation of the American Woman Suffrage Association in Cleveland under Boston-based leaders like Lucy Stone, and partial victories such as Massachusetts school suffrage for women in 1879. Divorce statutes, too, broadened acceptable grounds (cruelty, desertion) in New England courts. Mercy Philbrick’s very “choice” is anchored in this transforming legal landscape: the novel probes marriage as a civil contract, asks who controls property and conscience within it, and dramatizes the moral stakes of asserting female agency under evolving but incomplete reforms.
Temperance activism suffused New England’s civic vocabulary. The pioneering Maine Law (1851) introduced statewide prohibition, and the region cycled through prohibitory, license, and local-option regimes from the 1850s into the 1870s. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (founded in 1874 at Cleveland) grew rapidly under Frances Willard after 1879, using prayer meetings, petitions, and parlor organizing to regulate family life and male drinking culture. Such campaigns located moral authority in the home and elevated female guardianship of virtue. The novel’s portrait of self-command, community surveillance, and the scrutiny of male conduct echoes these currents. Its women negotiate the burden of moral suasion—protecting household welfare while judging whether marital ties secure or imperil dignity—mirroring the temperance-era conviction that private choices bore public consequences.
The Panic of 1873 and the subsequent Long Depression (often dated to 1879 in the United States) imposed a harsh economic climate. Jay Cooke & Co. collapsed on September 18, 1873, prompting a 10-day closure of the New York Stock Exchange and cascading railroad bankruptcies. Wage cuts of 10–30 percent struck industrial workers; New England textile towns such as Fall River experienced layoffs and intermittent strikes through the mid- to late 1870s. The Boston Fire of 1872 had already strained credit and construction. Households responded by delaying marriages, consolidating kin living arrangements, and hoarding liquidity. The novel’s ethical calculus—evaluating love alongside stability, reputation alongside solvency—aligns with this austerity. Its emphasis on careful household economies and prudent commitments reflects a readership attuned to precarious income, debt, and the fragile security that marriage might promise.
Geographic mobility and the western horizon reframed possibilities. The Colorado Territory, created in 1861, achieved statehood in 1876; railways such as the Denver & Rio Grande accelerated migration, while the Leadville silver boom (beginning 1878) redrew fortunes. Helen Hunt Jackson moved to Colorado Springs in 1875 and married William Sharpless Jackson, a banker and railroad executive, situating her at the intersection of eastern moral culture and western individualism. Colorado held a women’s suffrage referendum in 1877 (it failed; full suffrage arrived in 1893), marking the region as a laboratory for reform. The novel’s insistence on decisive female choice and its openness to redefining home resonate with this moment of national mobility, as Americans weighed rooted New England proprieties against the expansiveness—and risks—of the West.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the constraints that domestic ideology and town governance placed on women’s legal personhood, economic security, and moral autonomy. By staging marriage as a contract negotiated under unequal statutes and relentless surveillance, it indicts the gendered double standards upheld by churchly authority and civic custom. Its disciplined, restrained New England setting reveals how class-coded respectability policed sentiment and foreclosed dissent, even amid postwar and industrial change. The narrative’s moral seriousness—asking when duty becomes coercion, and when conscience must prevail—implicitly demands reforms consistent with the era’s property and suffrage debates, urging a broader recognition of women’s capacity to choose without forfeiting dignity, livelihood, or standing.
Mercy Philbrick's Choice
1876,
I.
To one who found us on a starless night, All helpless, groping in a dangerous way, Where countless treacherous hidden pitfalls lay, And, seeing all our peril, flashed a light To show to our bewildered, blinded sight, By one swift, clear, and piercing ray, The safe, sure path,--what words could reach the height Of our great thankfulness? And yet, at most, The most he saved was this poor, paltry life Of flesh, which is so little worth its cost, Which eager sows, but may not stay to reap, And so soon breathless with the strain and strife, Its work half-done, exhausted, falls asleep.
II.
But unto him who finds men's souls astray In night that they know not is night at all, Walking, with reckless feet, where they may fall Each moment into deadlier deaths than slay The flesh,--to him whose truth can rend away From such lost souls their moral night's black pall,-- Oh, unto him what words can hearts recall Which their deep gratitude finds fit to say? No words but these,--and these to him are best:-- That, henceforth, like a quenchless vestal flame, His words of truth shall burn on Truth's pure shrine; His memory be truth worshipped and confessed; Our gratitude and love, the priestess line, Who serve before Truth's altar, in his name.
Mercy Philbrick's Choice.
Chapter I.
It was late in the afternoon of a November day. The sky had worn all day that pale leaden gray color, which is depressing even to the least sensitive of souls. Now, at sunset, a dull red tint was slowly stealing over the west; but the gray cloud was too thick for the sun to pierce, and the struggle of the crimson color with the unyielding sky only made the heavens look more stern and pitiless than before.
Stephen White stood with his arms folded, leaning on the gate which shut off, but seemed in no wise to separate, the front yard of the house in which he lived from the public highway. There is something always pathetic in the attempt to enforce the idea of seclusion and privacy, by building a fence around houses only ten or twelve feet away from the public road, and only forty or fifty feet from each other. Rows of picketed palings and gates with latches and locks seem superfluous, when the passer-by can look, if he likes, into the very centre of your sitting-room, and your neighbors on the right hand and on the left can overhear every word you say on a summer night, where windows are open.
One cannot walk through the streets of a New England village[1], without being impressed by a sense of this futile semblance of barrier, this touching effort at withdrawal and reticence. Often we see the tacit recognition of its uselessness in an old gate shoved back to its farthest, and left standing so till the very grass roots have embanked themselves on each side of it, and it can never again be closed without digging away the sods in which it is wedged. The gate on which Stephen White was leaning had stood open in that way for years before Stephen rented the house; had stood open, in fact, ever since old Billy Jacobs[2], the owner of the house, had been carried out of it dead, in a coffin so wide that at first the bearers had thought it could not pass through the gate; but by huddling close, three at the head and three at the feet, they managed to tug the heavy old man through without taking down the palings. This was so long ago that now there was nobody left who remembered Billy Jacobs distinctly, except his widow, who lived in a poor little house on the outskirts of the town, her only income being that derived from the renting of the large house, in which she had once lived in comfort with her husband and son. The house was a double house; and for a few years Billy Jacobs's twin brother, a sea captain, had lived in the other half of it. But Mrs. Billy could not abide Mrs. John, and so with a big heart wrench the two brothers, who loved each other as only twin children can love, had separated. Captain John took his wife and went to sea again. The ship was never heard of, and to the day of Billy Jacobs's death he never forgave his wife. In his heart he looked upon her as his brother's murderer. Very much like the perpetual presence of a ghost under her roof it must have been to the woman also, the unbroken silence of those untenanted rooms, and that never opened door on the left side of her hall, which she must pass whenever she went in or out of her house. There were those who said that she was never seen to look towards that door; and that whenever a noise, as of a rat in the wall, or a blind creaking in the wind, came from that side of the house, Mrs. Billy turned white, and shuddered. Well she might. It is a fearful thing to have lying on one's heart in this life the consciousness that one has been ever so innocently the occasion, if not the cause, of a fellow-creature's turning aside into the path which was destined to take him to his death.
The very next day after Billy Jacobs's funeral, his widow left the house. She sold all the furniture, except what was absolutely necessary for a very meagre outfitting of the little cottage into which she moved. The miserly habit of her husband seemed to have suddenly fallen on her like a mantle. Her life shrank and dwindled in every possible way; she almost starved herself and her boy,[1q] although the rent of her old homestead was quite enough to make them comfortable. In a few years, to complete the poor woman's misery, her son ran away and went to sea. The sea-farer's stories which his Uncle John had told him, when he was a little child, had never left his mind; and the drearier his mother made life for him on land, the more longingly he dwelt on his fancies of life at sea, till at last, when he was only fifteen, he disappeared one day, leaving a note, not for his mother, but for his Sunday-school teacher,--the only human being he loved. This young woman carried the note to Mrs. Jacobs. She read it, made no comment, and handed it back. Her visitor was chilled and terrified by her manner.
"Can I do any thing for you, Mrs. Jacobs?" she said. "I do assure you I sympathize with you most deeply. I think the boy will soon come back. He will find the sea life very different from what he has dreamed."
"No, you can do nothing for me," replied Mrs. Jacobs, in a voice as unmoved as her face. "He will never come back. He will be drowned." And from that day no one ever heard her mention her son. It was believed, however, that she had news from him, and that she sent him money; for, although the rents of her house were paid to her regularly, she grew if possible more and more penurious every year, allowing herself barely enough food to support life, and wearing such tattered and patched clothes that she was almost an object of terror to children when they met her in lonely fields and woods, bending down to the ground and searching for herbs like an old witch. At one time, also, she went in great haste to a lawyer in the village, and with his assistance raised three thousand dollars on a mortgage[3] on her house, mortgaging it very nearly to its full value. In vain he represented to her that, in case the house should chance to stand empty for a year, she would have no money to pay the interest on her mortgage, and would lose the property. She either could not understand, or did not care for what he said. The house always had brought her in about so many dollars a year; she believed it always would; at any rate, she wanted this money. And so it came to pass that the mortgage on the old Jacobs house had come into Stephen White's hands, and he was now living in one half of it, his own tenant and landlord at once, as he often laughingly said.
These old rumors and sayings about the Jacobs's family history were running in Stephen's head this evening, as he stood listlessly leaning on the gate, and looking down at the unsightly spot of bare earth still left where the gate had so long stood pressed back against the fence.
"I wonder how long it'll take to get that old rut smooth and green like the rest of the yard," he thought. Stephen White absolutely hated ugliness. It did not merely irritate and depress him, as it does everybody of fine fastidiousness: he hated not only the sight of it, he hated it with a sort of unreasoning vindictiveness. If it were a picture, he wanted to burn the picture, cut it, tear it, trample it under foot, get it off the face of the earth immediately, at any cost or risk. It had no business to exist: if nobody else would make way with it, he must. He often saw places that he would have liked to devastate, to blot out of existence if he could, just because they were barren and unsightly. Once, when he was a very little child, he suddenly seized a book of his father's,--an old, shabby, worn dictionary,--and flung it into the fire with uncontrollable passion; and, on being asked why he did it, had nothing to say in justification of his act, except this extraordinary statement: "It was an ugly book; it hurt me. Ugly books ought to go in the fire." What the child suffered, and, still more, what the man suffered from this hatred of ugliness, no words could portray. Ever since he could remember, he had been unhappy from the lack of the beautiful in the surroundings of his daily life. His father had been poor; his mother had been an invalid; and neither father nor mother had a trace of the artistic temperament. From what long-forgotten ancestor in his plain, hard-working family had come Stephen's passionate love of beauty, nobody knew. It was the despair of his father, the torment of his mother. From childhood to boyhood, from boyhood to manhood, he had felt himself needlessly hurt and perversely misunderstood on this one point. But it had not soured him: it had only saddened him, and made him reticent. In his own quiet way, he went slowly on, adding each year some new touch of simple adornment to their home. Every dollar he could spare out of his earnings went into something for the eye to feast on; and, in spite of the old people's perpetual grumbling and perpetual antagonism, it came about that they grew to be, in a surly fashion, proud of Stephen's having made their home unlike the homes of their neighbors.
"That's Stephen's last notion. He's never satisfied without he's sticking up suthin' new or different," they would say, as they called attention to some new picture or shelf or improvement in the house. "It's all tom- foolery. Things was well enough before." But in their hearts they were secretly a little elate, as in latter years they had come to know, by books and papers which Stephen forced them to hear or to read, that he was really in sympathy with well-known writers in this matter of the adornment of homes, the love of beautiful things even in every-day life.
A little more than a year before the time at which our story begins, Stephen's father had died. On an investigation of his affairs, it was found that after the settling of the estate very little would remain for Stephen and his mother. The mortgage on the old Jacobs house was the greater part of their property. Very reluctantly Stephen decided that their wisest--in fact, their only--course was to move into this house to live. Many and many a time he had walked past the old house, and thought, as he looked at it, what a bare, staring, hopeless, joyless-looking old house it was. It had originally been a small, square house. The addition which Billy Jacobs had made to it was oblong, running out to the south, and projecting on the front a few feet beyond the other part. This obtrusive jog was certainly very ugly; and it was impossible to conceive of any reason for it. Very possibly, it was only a carpenter's blunder; for Billy Jacobs was, no doubt, his own architect, and left all details of the work to the builders. Be that as it may, the little, clumsy, meaningless jog ruined the house,--gave it an uncomfortably awry look, like a dining-table awkwardly pieced out for an emergency by another table a little too narrow.
The house had been for several years occupied by families of mill operatives, and had gradually acquired that indefinable, but unmistakable tenement-house look, which not even neatness and good repair can wholly banish from a house. The orchard behind the house had so run down for want of care that it looked more like a tangle of wild trees than like any thing which had ever been an orchard. Yet the Roxbury Russets and Baldwins of that orchard had once been Billy Jacobs's great pride, the one point of hospitality which his miserliness never conquered. Long after it would have broken his heart to set out a generous dinner for a neighbor, he would feast him on choice apples, and send him away with a big basket full in his hands. Now every passing school-boy helped himself to the wan, withered, and scanty fruit; and nobody had thought it worth while to mend the dilapidated fences which might have helped to shut them out.
Even Mrs. White, with all her indifference to externals, rebelled at first at the idea of going to live in the old Jacobs house.
"I'll never go there, Stephen," she said petulantly. "I'm not going to live in half a house with the mill people; and it's no better than a barn, the hideous, old, faded, yellow thing!"
If it crossed Stephen's mind that there was a touch of late retribution in his mother's having come at last to a sense of suffering because she must live in an unsightly house, he did not betray it.
He replied very gently. He was never heard to speak other than gently to his mother, though to every one else his manner was sometimes brusque and dictatorial.
"But, mother, I think we must. It is the only way that we can be sure of the rent. And, if we live ourselves in one half of it, we shall find it much easier to get good tenants for the other part. I promise you none of the mill people shall ever live there again. Please do not make it hard for me, mother. We must do it."
When Stephen said "must," his mother never gainsaid him. He was only twenty-five, but his will was stronger than hers,--as much stronger as his temper was better. Persons judging hastily, by her violent assertions and vehement statements of her determination, as contrasted with Stephen's gentle, slow, almost hesitating utterance of his opinions or intentions, might have assumed that she would always conquer; but it was not so. In all little things, Stephen was her slave, because she was a suffering invalid and his mother. But, in all important decisions, he was the master; and she recognized it, and leaned upon it in a way which was almost ludicrous in its alternation with her petulance and perpetual dictating to him in trifles.
And so they went to live in the old Jacobs house. They took the northern half of it, the part in which the sea captain and his wife had lived. This half of the house was not so pleasant as the other, had less sun, and had no door upon the street; but it was smaller and better suited to their needs, and moreover, Stephen said to his mother,--
"We must live in the half we should find it hardest to rent to a desirable tenant."
For the first six months after they moved in, the "wing," as Mrs. White persisted in calling it, though it was larger by two rooms than the part she occupied herself, stood empty. There would have been plenty of applicants for it, but it had been noised in the town that the Whites had given out that none but people as good as they were themselves would be allowed to rent the house. This made a mighty stir among the mill operatives and the trades-people, and Stephen got many a sour look and short answer, whose real source he never suspected.
"Ahem! there he goes with his head in the clouds, damn him!" muttered Barker the grocer, one day, as Stephen in a more than ordinarily absent-minded fit had passed Mr. Barker's door without observing that Mr. Barker stood in it, ready to bow and smile to the whole world. Mr. Barker's sister had just married an overseer in the mill; and they had been very anxious to set up housekeeping in the Jacobs house, but had been prevented from applying for it by hearing of Mrs. White's determination to have no mill people under the same roof with herself.
"Mill people, indeed!" exclaimed Jane Barker, when her lover told her, in no very guarded terms, the reason they could not have the house on which she had set her heart.
"Mill people, indeed! I'd like to know if they're not every whit's good's an old shark of a lawyer like Hugh White was! I'll be bound, if poor old granny Jacobs hadn't lost what little wit she ever had, it 'ud be very soon seen whether Madam White's got the right to say who's to come and who's to go in that house. It's a nasty old yaller shell anyhow, not to say nothin' o' it's bein' haunted, 's like 's not. But there ain't no other place so handy to the mill for us, an' I guess our money's good ez any lawyer's money, o' the hull on 'em any day. Mill people, indeed! I'll jest give Steve White a piece o' my mind, the first time I see him on the street."
Jane and her lover were sitting on the tops of two barrels just outside the grocery door, when this conversation took place. Just as the last words had left her lips, she looked up and saw Stephen approaching at a very rapid pace. The unusual sight of two people perched on barrels on the sidewalk roused Stephen from the deep reverie in which he habitually walked. Lifting his hat as courteously as if he were addressing the most distinguished of women, he bowed, and said smiling, "How do you do, Miss Jane?" and "Good-morning, Mr. Lovejoy," and passed on; but not before Jane Barker had had time to say in her gentlest tones, "Very well, thank you, Mr. Stephen," while an ugly sneer spread over the face of Reuben Lovejoy.
"Woman all over!" he muttered. "Never saw one on ye yet thet wasn't caught by a bow from a palaverin' fool."
Jane laughed nervously. She herself felt ashamed of having so soon given the lie to her own words of bravado; but she was woman enough not to admit her mortification.
"I know he's a palaverin' fool's well's you do; but I reckon I've got some manners o' my own, 's well's he. When a man bids me a pleasant good-mornin', I ain't a-goin' to take that time to fly out at him, however much I've got agin him."
And Reuben was silenced. The under-current of ill-feeling against Stephen and his mother went steadily on increasing. There is a wonderful force in these slow under-currents of feeling, in small communities, for or against individuals. After they have once become a steady tide, nothing can check their force or turn their direction. Sometimes they can be traced back to their spring, as a stream can: one lucky or unlucky word or deed, years ago, made a friend or an enemy of one person, and that person's influence has divided itself again and again, as brooks part off and divide into countless rivulets, and water whole districts. But generally one finds it impossible to trace the like or dislike to its beginning. A stranger, asking the reason of it, is answered in an off-hand way,--"Oh, everybody'll tell you the same thing. There isn't a soul in the town but hates him;" or, "Well, he's just the most popular man in the town. You'll never hear a word said against him,--never; not if you were to settle right down here, and live."
It was months before Stephen realized that there was slowly forming in the town a dislike to him. He was slow in discovering it, because he had always lived alone; had no intimate friends, not even when he was a boy. His love of books and his passionate love of beauty combined with his poverty to hedge him about more effectually than miles of desert could have done. His father and mother had lived upon fairly good terms with all their neighbors, but had formed no very close bonds with any. In the ordinary New England town, neighborhood never means much: there is a dismal lack of cohesion to the relations between people. The community is loosely held together by a few accidental points of contact or common interest. The individuality of individuals is, by a strange sort of paradox, at once respected and ignored. This is indifference rather than consideration, selfishness rather than generosity; it is an unsuspected root of much of our national failure, is responsible for much of our national disgrace. Some day there will come a time when it will have crystallized into a national apathy, which will perhaps cure itself, or have to be cured, as indurations in the body are, by sharp crises or by surgical operations. In the mean time, our people are living, on the whole, the dullest lives that are lived in the world, by the so-called civilized; and the climax of this dulness of life is to be found in just such a small New England town as Penfield, the one of which we are now speaking.
When it gradually became clear to Stephen that he and his mother were unpopular people, his first feeling was one of resentment, his second of calm acquiescence: acquiescence, first, because he recognized in a measure the justice of it,--they really did not care for their neighbors; why should their neighbors care for them? secondly, a diminished familiarity of intercourse would have to him great compensations. There were few people in the town, whose clothes, whose speech, whose behavior, did not jar upon his nerves. On the whole, he would be better content alone; and if his mother could only have a little more independence of nature, more resource within herself, "The less we see of them, the better," said Stephen, proudly.
He had yet to learn the lesson which, sooner or later, the proudest, most scornful, most self-centred of human souls must learn, or must die of loneliness for the want of learning, that humanity is one and indivisible; and the man who shuts himself apart from his fellows, above all, the man who thus shuts himself apart because he thinks of his fellows with pitying condescension as his inferiors, is a fool and a blasphemer,--a fool, because he robs himself of that good-fellowship which is the leaven of life; a blasphemer, because he virtually implies that God made men unfit for him to associate with. Stephen White had this lesson yet to learn.
The practical inconvenience of being unpopular, however, he began to feel keenly, as month after month passed by, and nobody would rent the other half of the house in which he and his mother lived. Small as the rent was, it was a matter of great moment to them; for his earnings as clerk and copyist were barely enough to give them food. He was still retained by his father's partner in the same position which he had held during his father's life. But old Mr. Williams was not wholly free from the general prejudice against Stephen, as an aristocratic fellow, given to dreams and fancies; and Stephen knew very well that he held the position only as it were on a sort of sufferance, because Mr. Williams had loved his father. Moreover, law business in Penfield was growing duller and duller. A younger firm in the county town, only twelve miles away, was robbing them of clients continually; and there were many long days during which Stephen sat idle at his desk, looking out in a vague, dreamy way on the street below, and wondering if the time were really coming when Mr. Williams would need a clerk no longer; and, if it did come, what he could possibly find to do in that town, by which he could earn money enough to support his mother. At such times, he thought uneasily of the possibility of foreclosing the mortgage on the old Jacobs house, selling the house, and reinvesting the money in a more advantageous way. He always tried to put the thought away from him as a dishonorable one; but it had a fatal persistency. He could not banish it.
"Poor, half-witted old woman! she might a great deal better be in the poor-house."
"There is no reason why we should lose our interest, for the sake of keeping her along."
"The mortgage was for too large a sum. I doubt if the old house could sell to-day for enough to clear it, anyhow." These were some of the suggestions which the devil kept whispering into Stephen's ear, in these long hours of perplexity and misgiving. It was a question of casuistry which might, perhaps, have puzzled a finer moral sense than Stephen's. Why should he treat old Mrs. Jacobs with any more consideration than he would show to a man under the same circumstances? To be sure, she was a helpless old woman; but so was his own mother, and surely his first duty was to make her as comfortable as possible.
Luckily for old Mrs. Jacobs, a tenant appeared for the "south wing." A friend of Stephen's, a young clergyman living in a seaport town on Cape Cod, had written to him, asking about the house, which he knew Stephen was anxious to rent. He made these inquiries on behalf of two women, parishioners of his, who were obliged to move to some inland town on account of the elder woman's failing health. They were mother and daughter, but both widows. The younger woman's marriage had been a tragically sad one, her husband having died suddenly, only a few days after their marriage. She had returned at once to her mother's house, widowed at eighteen; "heart-broken," the young clergyman wrote, "but the most cheerful person in this town,--the most cheerful person I ever knew; her smile is the sunniest and most pathetic thing I ever saw."
Stephen welcomed most gladly the prospect of such tenants as these. The negotiations were soon concluded; and at the time of the beginning of our story the two women were daily expected.
A strange feverishness of desire to have them arrive possessed Stephen's mind. He longed for it, and yet he dreaded it. He liked the stillness of the house; he felt a sense of ownership of the whole of it: both of these satisfactions were to be interfered with now. But he had a singular consciousness that some new element was coming into his life. He did not define this; he hardly recognized it in its full extent; but if a bystander could have looked into his mind, following the course of his reverie distinctly, as an unbiassed outsider might, he would have said, "Stephen, man, what is this? What are these two women to you, that your imagination is taking these wild and superfluous leaps into their history?"
There was hardly a possible speculation as to their past history, as to their looks, as to their future life under his roof, that Stephen did not indulge in, as he stood leaning with his folded arms on the gate, in the gray November twilight, where we first found him. His thoughts, as was natural, centred most around the younger woman.
"Poor thing! That was a mighty hard fate. Only nineteen years old now,--six years younger than I am; and how much more she must know of life than I do. I suppose she can't be a lady, exactly,--being a sea captain's wife. I wonder if she's pretty? I think Harley might have told me more about her. He might know I'd be very curious.
"I wonder if mother'll take to them? If she does, it will be a great comfort to her. She 's so alone." And Stephen's face clouded, as he reflected how very seldom the monotony of the invalid's life was broken now by a friendly visit from a neighbor.
"If they should turn out really social, neighborly people that we liked, we might move away the old side-board from before the hall door, and go in and out that way, as the Jacobses used to. It would be unlucky though, I reckon, to use that door. I guess I'll plaster it up some day." Like all people of deep sentiment, Stephen had in his nature a vein of something which bordered on superstition.
The twilight deepened into darkness, and a cold mist began to fall in slow, drizzling drops. Still Stephen stood, absorbed in his reverie, and unmindful of the chill.
The hall door opened, and an old woman peered out. She held a lamp in one hand; the blast of cold air made the flame flicker and flare, and, as she put up one hand to shade it, the light was thrown sharply across her features, making them stand out like the distorted features of a hideous mask.
"Steve! Steve!" she called, in a shrill voice. "Supper's been waitin' more 'n half an hour. Lor's sake, what's the boy thinkin' on now, I wonder?" she muttered in an impatient lower tone, as Stephen turned his head slowly.
