A Modern Instance. William Dean Howells

Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу A Modern Instance - William Dean Howells страница 10

Автор:
Серия:
Издательство:
A Modern Instance - William Dean Howells

Скачать книгу

congregation chafed for years of discontent; but this was probably an exaggeration of the native humor. Mrs. Gaylord had belonged to this church, and had never formally withdrawn from it, and the lawyer always contributed to pay the minister's salary. He also managed a little property for him so well as to make him independent when he was at last asked to resign by his deacons.

      In another mood, Bartley might have stepped aside to look in on the Squire, before asking at the house door for Marcia. They relished each other's company, as people of contrary opinions and of no opinions are apt to do. Bartley loved to hear the Squire get going, as he said, and the old man felt a fascination in the youngster. Bartley was smart; he took a point as quick as lightning; and the Squire did not mind his making friends with the Mammon of Righteousness, as he called the visible church in Equity. It amused him to see Bartley lending the church the zealous support of the press, with an impartial patronage of the different creeds. There had been times in his own career when the silence of his opinions would have greatly advanced him, but he had not chosen to pay this price for success; he liked his freedom, or he liked the bitter tang of his own tongue too well, and he had remained a leading lawyer in Equity, when he might have ended a judge, or even a Congressman. Of late years, however, since people whom he could have joined in their agnosticism so heartily, up to a certain point, had begun to make such fools of themselves about Darwinism and the brotherhood of all men in the monkey, he had grown much more tolerant. He still clung to his old-fashioned deistical opinions; but he thought no worse of a man for not holding them; he did not deny that a man might be a Christian, and still be a very good man.

      The audacious humor of his position sufficed with a people who liked a joke rather better than anything else; in his old age, his infidelity was something that would hardly have been changed, if possible, by a popular vote. Even his wife, to whom it had once been a heavy cross, borne with secret prayer and tears, had long ceased to gainsay it in any wise. Her family had opposed her yoking with an unbeliever when she married him, but she had some such hopes of converting him as women cherish who give themselves to men confirmed in drunkenness. She learned, as other women do, that she could hardly change her husband in the least of his habits, and that, in this great matter of his unbelief, her love was powerless. It became easier at last for her to add self-sacrifice to self-sacrifice than to vex him with her anxieties about his soul, and to act upon the feeling that, if he must be lost, then she did not care to be saved. He had never interfered with her church-going; he had rather promoted it, for he liked to have women go; but the time came when she no longer cared to go without him; she lapsed from her membership, and it was now many years since she had worshipped with the people of her faith, if, indeed, she were still of any faith. Her life was silenced in every way, and, as often happens with aging wives in country towns, she seldom went out of her own door, and never appeared at the social or public solemnities of the village. Her husband and her daughter composed and bounded her world,—she always talked of them, or of other things as related to them. She had grown an elderly woman, without losing the color of her yellow hair; and the bloom of girlhood had been stayed in her cheeks as if by the young habit of blushing, which she had kept. She was still what her neighbors called very pretty-appearing, and she must have been a beautiful girl. The silence of her inward life subdued her manner, till now she seemed always to have come from some place on which a deep hush had newly fallen.

      She answered the door when Bartley turned the crank that snapped the gong-bell in its centre; and the young man, who was looking at the street while waiting for some one to come, confronted her with a start. “Oh!” he said, “I thought it was Marcia. Good morning, Mrs. Gaylord. Isn't Marcia at home?”

      “She went to church, this morning,” replied her mother. “Won't you walk in?”

      “Why, yes, I guess I will, thank you,” faltered Bartley, in the irresolution of his disappointment. “I hope I sha'n't disturb you.”

      “Come right into the sitting-room. She won't be gone a great while, now,” said Mrs. Gaylord, leading the way to the large square room into which a door at the end of the narrow hall opened. A slumberous heat from a sheet-iron wood-stove pervaded the place, and a clock ticked monotonously on a shelf in the corner. Mrs. Gaylord said, “Won't you take a chair?” and herself sank into the rocker, with a deep feather cushion in the seat, and a thinner feather cushion tied half-way up the back. After the more active duties of her housekeeping were done, she sat every day in this chair with her knitting or sewing, and let the clock tick the long hours of her life away, with no more apparent impatience of them, or sense of their dulness, than the cat on the braided rug at her feet, or the geraniums in the pots at the sunny window. “Are you pretty well to-day?” she asked.

      “Well, no, Mrs. Gaylord, I'm not,” answered Bartley. “I'm all out of sorts. I haven't felt so dyspeptic for I don't know how long.”

      Mrs. Gaylord smoothed the silk dress across her lap,—the thin old black silk which she still instinctively put on for Sabbath observance, though it was so long since she had worn it to church. “Mr. Gaylord used to have it when we were first married, though he aint been troubled with it of late years. He seemed to think then it was worse Sundays.”

      “I don't believe Sunday has much to do with it, in my case. I ate some mince-pie and some toasted cheese last night, and I guess they didn't agree with me very well,” said Bartley, who did not spare himself the confession of his sins when seeking sympathy: it was this candor that went so far to convince people of his good-heartedness.

      “I don't know as I ever heard that meat-pie was bad,” said Mrs. Gaylord, thoughtfully. “Mr. Gaylord used to eat it right along all through his dyspepsia, and he never complained of it. And the cheese ought to have made it digest.”

      “Well, I don't know what it was,” replied Bartley, plaintively submitting to be exonerated, “but I feel perfectly used up. Oh, I suppose I shall get over it, or forget all about it, by to-morrow,” he added, with strenuous cheerfulness. “It isn't anything worth minding.”

      Mrs. Gaylord seemed to differ with him on this point. “Head ache any?” she asked.

      “It did this morning, when I first woke up,” Bartley assented.

      “I don't believe but what a cup of tea would be the best thing for you,” she said, critically.

      Bartley had instinctively practised a social art which ingratiated him with people at Equity as much as his demands for sympathy endeared him: he gave trouble in little unusual ways. He now said, “Oh, I wish you would give me a cup, Mrs. Gaylord.”

      “Why, yes, indeed! That's just what I was going to,” she replied. She went to the kitchen, which lay beyond another room, and reappeared with the tea directly, proud of her promptness, but having it on her conscience to explain it. “I 'most always keep the pot on the stove hearth, Sunday morning, so's to have it ready if Mr. Gaylord ever wants a cup. He's a master hand for tea, and always was. There: I guess you better take it without milk. I put some sugar in the saucer, if you want any.” She dropped noiselessly upon her feather cushion again, and Bartley, who had risen to receive the tea from her, remained standing while he drank it.

      “That does seem to go to the spot,” he said, as he sipped it, thoughtfully observant of its effect upon his disagreeable feelings. “I wish I had you to take care of me, Mrs. Gaylord, and keep me from making a fool of myself,” he added, when he had drained the cup. “No, no!” he cried, at her offering to take it from him. “I'll set it down. I know it will fret you to have it in here, and I'll carry it out into the kitchen.” He did so before she could prevent him, and came back, touching his mustache with his handkerchief. “I declare, Mrs. Gaylord, I should love to live in a kitchen like that.”

      “I guess you wouldn't if you had to,” said Mrs. Gaylord, flattered into a smile. “Marcia, she likes to sit out there, she says, better than anywheres

Скачать книгу