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.
"Yes, yes, Marty. Tell my mother I will be there in a moment," replied Stephen, as he walked slowly toward the house; even then noting, with the keen and relentless glance of a beauty-worshipper, how grotesquely ugly the old woman's wrinkled face became, lighted up by the intense cross-light. Old Marty's face had never looked other than lovingly into Stephen's since he first lay in her arms, twenty-five years ago, when she came, a smooth-cheeked, rosy country-woman of twenty-five, to nurse his mother at the time of his birth. She had never left the home since. With a faithfulness and devotion only to be accounted for by the existence of rare springs of each in her own nature, surely not by any uncommon lovableness in either Mr. or Mrs. White, or by any especial comforts in her situation, she had stayed on a quarter of a century, in the hard position of woman of all work in a poor family. She worshipped Stephen, and, as I said, her face had never once looked other than lovingly into his; but he could not remember the time when he had not thought her hideous. She had a big brown mole on her chin, out of which grew a few bristling hairs. It was an unsightly thing, no doubt, on a woman's chin; and sometimes, when Marty was very angry, the hairs did actually seem to bristle, as a cat's whiskers do. When Stephen could not speak plain, he used to point his little dimpled finger at this mole and say, "Do doe away,--doe away;" and to this day it was a torment to him. His eyes seemed morbidly drawn toward it at times.. When he was ill, and poor Marty bent over his bed, ministering to him as no one but a loving old nurse can, he saw only the mole, and had to make an effort not to shrink from her. To-night, as she lingered on the threshold, affectionately waiting to light his path, he was thinking only of her ugliness. But when she exclaimed, with the privileged irritability of an old servant,--
"Jest look at your feet, Steve! they're wet through, an' your coat too, a standin' out in that drizzle. Anybody 'ud think you hadn't common sense," he replied with perfect good nature, and as heartily loving a tone as if he had been feasting on her beauty, instead of writhing inwardly at her ugliness,--
"All right, Marty,--all right. I'm not so wet as I look. I'll change my coat, and come in to supper in one minute. Don't you fidget about me so, good Marty." Never was Stephen heard to speak discourteously or even ungently to a human being. It would have offended his taste. It was not a matter of principle with him,--not at all: he hardly ever thought of things in that light. A rude or harsh word, a loud, angry tone, jarred on his every sense like a discord in music, or an inharmonious color; so he never used them. But as he ran upstairs, three steps at a time, after his kind, off-hand words to Marty, he said to himself, "Good heavens! I do believe Marty gets uglier every day. What a picture Rembrandt would have made of her old face peering out into the darkness there to-night! She would have done for the witch of Endor, watching to see if Samuel were coming up." And as he went down more slowly, revolving in his mind what plausible excuse he could give to his mother for his tardiness, he thought, "Well, I do hope she'll be at least tolerably good-looking."
Already the younger of the two women who were coming to live under his roof was "she," in his thoughts.
Chapter II.
In the mean time, the young widow, Mercy Philbrick, and
