The Diary of a Saint

"Don't be a humbug, Ruth," she said; "and for pity's sake don't be such a fool as to try to humbug yourself. You're not a sentimental schoolgirl to moon after a man, especially when he's shown what his taste is by taking up with such a horror as Mrs. Weston."

"I am fond of him," I asserted, stubbornly enough.

She seized me by the shoulders, and looked with her quick black eyes into mine so that I felt as if she could see down to my very toes.

"Can you look me in the face, Ruth Privet, and tell me you really care for a man who could marry that ignorant, vulgar, dowdy woman just for her pretty face? Can you fool yourself into thinking that you haven't had a lucky escape from a man that's in every way your inferior? You know you have! Why, can you honestly think now for a moment of marrying him without feeling your backbone all gooseflesh?"

Fortunately she did not insist upon my answering her, but shook me and let me go. I doubt if I could have borne to have her press her questions. I was suddenly conscious that George has changed or that my idea of him has altered; and that if he were still single, I could not marry him under any circumstances.

Cousin Mehitable went home this morning, but her talk has been in my mind all day.

It comes over me that I have lost more than George. His loving another did not deprive me of the power or the right to love him, and his marriage simply set him away from my life. In some other life, if there be one, I might have always been sure he would come back to me. I cannot help knowing I fed his higher nature, and I helped him to grow, while his wife appeals to something lower, even if it is more natural and human. I felt that in some other possible existence he would see more clearly, and she would no longer satisfy him. Now I begin to feel that I have lost more than I knew. I have lost not only him, but I have lost – no, I cannot have lost my love for him. It is only that to-night I am foolish. It is rainy, dreary, hopeless; and seeing Mrs. Weston through Cousin Mehitable's eyes has put things all askew.

Yet why not put it down fearlessly, since I have begun? If I am to write at all it should be the truth. I am beginning to see that the man I loved was not George Weston so much as a creature I conjured up in his image. I see him now in a colder, a more sane light, and I find that I am not looking at the man who filled my heart and thought. He has somehow changed. This would be a comfort to some, I suppose. I see now how Mother felt about him. She never thought him what he seemed to me, and she always believed that sooner or later I should be disappointed in him. I should not have been disappointed if I had married him – I think! Yet now I see how he is under the influence of his wife – But no, it is not her influence only; I see him now, I fear, as he is when he is free to act his true self, unmoved by the desire to be what I would have had him. He was influenced by me. I knew it from the very first, and I see with shame how proud of it I was. Yet it gave me a chance to help him, to grow with him, to feel that we were together developing and advancing. Oh, dear, how cold and superior, and conceited it sounds now it is on paper! It truly was not that I thought I was above him; but it is surely the part of a woman to inspire her lover and to grow into something better with him. Now it seems as if whatever George did he did for me, and not because of any inner love for growth. He appears now less worthy by just so much as what he was seems to me higher than what he is. I have lost what he was. It is cruel that I cannot find the George I cared for. It is hard to believe he existed only in my mind.

July 9. I have been reading over what I wrote last night. It troubles me, and it has a most self-righteous flavor; but I cannot see that it is not true. It troubles me because it is true. I remember that I wondered when George tired of me if the same would have come about if we had married. Am I so changeable that if I had been his wife I should have tried him by my severe standards, and then judged him unworthy? I begin to think the Pharisees were modest and self-distrustful as compared to self-righteous me. It is terribly puzzling. If I were his wife I should surely feel that my highest duty was to help him, to bring out whatever is best in him. I think I should have been too absorbed in this ever to have discovered that I was idealizing him. Now I am far enough away from him to see him clearly. The worse part of him has come out; and very likely I am not above a weak feminine jealousy which makes me incapable of doing him justice. I believe if I had been his wife I might have kept him – Yet he was already tired of my influence!

Such speculations are pretty unprofitable work. The only thing to keep in mind now is that he is my friend, and that it is for me to do still whatever I can for him. I confess that Cousin Mehitable is right. I am no longer sorry I did not marry George, but I still care for him sincerely, and mean to serve him in every way possible.

July 12. Miss Charlotte came in this morning while I was playing with Tomine, and hailed me as a mother in Israel. She is a great admirer of baby, but she declines to touch her.

"I'm too big and too rough," she says. "I know I should drop her or break her, or forget she isn't a plant, and go to snipping her with my pruning-shears. You'd better keep her. You've the motherly way with you."

It must please any woman to be told that she has the motherly way, and just now I certainly need it. Miss Charlotte came to talk with me about Kathie. The poor child has been growing more and more morbid all summer, and I do not see what is to be done for her. I have tried to comfort and help her, but as her troubles are religious I am all but helpless.

Miss Charlotte went over the Cove yesterday on one of her roving tramps in the woods, – "bushwhacking," as she calls it, – and found Kathie roaming about in Elder's Cut-down, wringing her hands and crying aloud like a mad thing.

"You can't tell what a start it gave me, Ruth," she said. "I heard her, and I thought of wild beasts and wild Indians, and all sorts of horrors. Then when I saw her, I didn't know her at first. Her hair was all tousled up, and she wrung her hands in the craziest way."

"Did you speak to her?" I asked.

"I couldn't. She ran away as soon as I called to her. She'll end in a lunatic asylum if you don't get hold of her."

I could only shake my head.

"What can I do, Miss Charlotte?" I asked her. "The trouble is she is half crazy about sin and judgment, and things of that sort that I don't even believe in at all. What can I say? You don't want me to tell her her father's religion is a mistake, I suppose."

Miss Charlotte smiled serenely, and regarded me with a look of much sweet kindliness.

"You're a fearful heathen, Ruth," was her response, "but you have a fine wheedling way with you. Couldn't you persuade her she's too young to think about such things?"

"I've tried something of the kind, but she says she is not too young to die. She is like a child out of an old memoir. She isn't of our time at all. We read of that sort of a girl, but I supposed they all died a hundred years ago."

"I doubt if there ever were such girls," Miss Charlotte returned with candor; "except once in a very great while. I think the girls of the memoirs were very much like the rest of us most of the time. They probably had spells of being like Kathie. The difference is that she is at boiling point all the time."

"Of course it's her father," I said thoughtfully.

"Yes," she assented. "He's such a rampant Methodist."

I could not help the shadow of a smile, and when she saw it Miss Charlotte could no more help smiling in her turn.

"Of course you think it's a case of the pot's calling the kettle black," she said, "but the Methodists do make such a business of frightening folks out of their wits. We don't do that."

I let this pass, and asked if she couldn't make some practical suggestion for the treatment of Kathie.

"I can't tell you how to dilute her Methodism," she returned with a shrewd twinkle in her eye. "You must know the way better than I do."

I am troubled and perplexed. I have so many times wondered what I ought to do about talking to Kathie. I have always felt that the fact her father trusted her with me put me on my honor not to say things to her of which he would not approve. It seemed unwise, too, for the child to have any more turmoil in her brain than is there already; and I know that to make her doubt would be to drive her half distracted. The question is whether she has not really begun to doubt already, and needs to be helped to think fearlessly. She is a strange survival from another century. Our grandmothers used to agonize over sin, it is claimed, although I think Miss Charlotte is probably right when she says they were after all a good deal like us. At any rate they were brought up to dread eternal punishment, but it is astonishing to find anybody now who receives this as anything but a theory. Belief in the old creeds would seem impossible in these days except in a conventional and remote fashion; and yet Kathie takes it all with the desperation of two hundred years ago. If she were to listen to a suggestion of using her creed less like a hair-shirt, she would feel she had committed an appalling transgression. She is only a baby after all, and heaven knows what business she has with creeds anyway. I would as soon think of giving Tomine dynamite bombs to play with.

I said something of this sort to Miss Charlotte, and she agreed with me that Kathie ought not to brood over theologic questions, but she thought even a child ought, as she put it, instinctively falling into the conventional phraseology of the church, to make her peace with God. I am so glad that nobody ever put it into my childish head that I could ever be at war with God.

Peter has made a leap to the table, and set his foot on my wet writing. Evidently he thinks it foolish to waste time in this sort of scribbling; but I do wish I knew what I can do and what I ought to do.

July 15. Deacon Daniel Webbe came this afternoon to see his granddaughter. Mrs. Webbe – had forbidden him, I was about to write, but perhaps that is not fair. He only said she thought he had better not come, and he tried clumsily to hint that he hoped I would not betray him. It was touching to see him, he was so much moved by the beauty and the daintiness of baby, and by all the thoughts he must have had about Tom. He said little, only that he spoke with a good deal of feeling of how good it is in Tom to stay at home and take charge of the farm; but tears were in his patient eyes, and he looked at Tomine with a glance so pathetic that I had to go away to wipe my own.

I find that having baby here naturally keeps my thoughts a good deal on Tom and his possible future. I can't help the feeling that I owe him some sort of reparation for the devotion he has given me all these years. Surely a woman owes a man something for his caring for her so, even if she cannot feel in the same way toward him. Tom has always been a part of my life. We were boy and girl together long before I knew George. When the Westons moved here, I must have been ten or twelve years old; and I never knew George until Father took him into the office. It was the winter Father had first been ill, and he had to have an assistant at once. I remember perfectly the excellent reports Father got from some office in Boston where George had been, and these decided him. He had been inclined not to like George at the beginning. I think I first became interested in George through defending him.

George always seemed rather to prefer that I should not know his people, and this struck me as strange. The less admirable they were the more Tom would have insisted upon my knowing them. Dear old Tom! How many times he has told me of his own faults, and never of his good deeds. He is certainly one of the most stubbornly honest creatures alive.

Tom and George are about as different as two mortals could be. George has very little of Tom's frankness, and he has not much of Tom's independence. Father used to declare that George would always be led by a woman, but would never own it to himself. I wonder if this is true. He is being led now by his wife. I fancy, though, he has no idea of such a thing. Tom would lead wherever he was.

I have rambled far enough away from Deacon Daniel and the baby. I do hope Tomine will have her father's honesty. If she have that, other things may be got over. Deacon Daniel spoke of her having her father's eyes, and she could hardly have Tom's eyes and not be straightforward.

July 20. Mr. Saychase has taken to frequent pastoral visitations of late. He probably feels now that the moral welfare of baby is involved he must be especially active. I wish he did not bore me so, for he comes often, and I do wish to be friendly.

To-night he seemed rather oddly interested in my plans for the future.

"I hope that you mean to remain in Tuskamuck," he said. "Some folks think you are likely to move to Boston."

I told him that I had no such intention, and reminded him that baby made a new bond between me and the place.

"Oh, the baby," he responded, it seemed to me rather blankly. "You mean, I presume, that you contemplate keeping the infant."

"Keeping her?" I responded. "Why, I have adopted her."

"I heard so," Mr. Saychase admitted; "but I did not credit the report. I suppose you will place her in some sort of a home."

"Yes," I answered; "in my home."

He flushed a little, and as he was my guest I set myself to put him at his ease. But I should like to understand why everybody is so determined that Tomine shall be sent to a "Home."

July 21. I went to see old lady Andrews to-day. She was as sweet and dear as ever, and as immaculate as if she had just been taken out of rose-leaves and lavender. She never has a hair of her white curls out of place, and her cheeks are at seventy-five pinker than mine. I like to see her in her own house, for she seems to belong to the time of the antique furniture, so entirely is she in harmony with it. I get a fresh sense of virtue every time I look at her beautiful old laces. I wonder if the old masters ever painted angels in thread laces; if not it was a great oversight. Dear old lady Andrews, she has had enough sorrow in her life to embitter any common mortal; her husband, her two sons, and her near kin are all dead before her; but she is too sweet and fine to degenerate. When sorrow does not sour, how it softens and ennobles.

Old lady Andrews was greatly interested about baby, and we gossiped of her in a delightful way for half an hour.

"It pleases me very much, Ruth," she said at last, "to see how motherly you are. I never had any doubt about you at all except that I wondered whether you could really mother a baby. I knew you would love it, and be kind, of course; but babies ought to have motherliness if they are really to thrive."

I flushed with pleasure, and asked if she meant that she had thought me cut out for an old maid.

"If I did," she answered, with that smile of hers which always makes me want to kiss her on the spot, "I shall never think so again. You've the genuine mother-instinct."

She looked at me a moment as if questioning with herself.

"The truth is," she went on, as if she had made up her mind to say the whole, "you have been for years making an intellectual interest do instead of real love, and of course your manner showed it."

I could not ask her what she meant, though I only half understood, and I wished to hear more. She grew suddenly more serious, and spoke in a lower tone.

"Ruth," she asked, "I am an old woman, and I am fond of you. May I say something that may sound impertinent?"

Of course I told her she might say anything, and that I knew she could not be impertinent. I could not think what was coming. She leaned forward, and put her thin hand on mine, the little Tennant hand with its old-fashioned rings.

"It is just this, Ruth. Be careful whom you marry. I'm so afraid you'll marry somebody out of charity. At least don't think of being a parson's wife."

"A parson's wife?" I echoed stupidly, not in the least seeing what she meant.

"That would be worse than to take up with the prodigal son," she added, not heeding my interrogation; "though it does seem to me, my dear, that you are too good to be just served up like a fatted calf in honor of his return."

I stared at her with bewilderment so complete that she burst into a soft laugh, as mellow as her old laces.

"I am speaking parables, of course, and it's no matter now about the prodigal. I only wanted to suggest that you are not just the wife for Mr. Saychase, and" —

"Mr. Saychase!" I burst out, interrupting her, I think, for the first time in my life. "Why, who ever thought of anything so preposterous?"

"Oh, you innocent!" she laughed. "I knew you'd be the last one to see it, and I wanted to warn you so that he need not take you entirely by surprise. He is my pastor, and a very good man in his way; but he isn't our kind, my dear."

I sat staring at her in a sort of daze, while I suddenly remembered how much Mr. Saychase has been to see me lately, and how self-conscious he has seemed sometimes. I had not a word to say, even in protest, and old lady Andrews having, I suppose, accomplished all she wished in warning me, dropped the subject entirely, and turned back to Thomasine's doings and welfare.

The idea that Mr. Saychase has been thinking of me as a possible helpmate is certainly ludicrous. I believe thoroughly any girl should "thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love," but in this case I do not see how love comes into the question at all. I cannot help feeling that he would intellectually be the sort of a husband to put into a quart-pot, there to bid him drum, and at least he will lose no sleep from a blighted passion for me. Certainly I should be intellectually starved if I had to live with him. He is not naturally a man of much power of thinking, I suppose, and he has never cultivated the habit. One cannot help seeing that whatever his original capabilities they have been spoiled by his profession. A minister, Father said to me once, must either be so spiritual that his creed has no power to restrain him, or a poor crippled thing, pathetic because the desire of rising has made him hamper himself with vows. I think I understand what he meant, and I am afraid Mr. Saychase is of the latter sort: a man who meant well, and so pledged himself always to cling to the belief the church had made for him, no matter what higher light might come into his life. He is to be pitied, – though he would not understand why. He could hardly care for anybody so far from his way of thinking as I am, so old lady Andrews cannot be right there.

July 25. George is having his house enlarged. Mrs. Weston is certainly energetic, with what is perhaps a Western energy. She has been married only about four months. George told me the other day that he meant to make the house larger.

"Gertrude wants a bigger parlor," he explained, rather ill at ease, I thought. "The house is big enough for me, but when a man has a wife things are different."

There was a labored playfulness in his manner which troubled me. He has bought a phaeton and pony for her. I hope that he is not going beyond his means. As for a larger parlor, I am afraid that Mrs. Weston will have to fill it with rather odd people.

July 27. Kathie has shown a new side to her character which troubles me. It is all, I suppose, part of her morbid, unhinged condition, but it is unpleasant. She has conceived a violent jealousy of baby. She refuses to stay in the house if I have Thomasine with me. This afternoon I had sent for her to come over and stay to tea. She came in about five, with a wild look in her eyes which she has almost all the time now. She sat down without saying anything, and began to pull the roses in a bowl on the table to pieces, scattering the petals on the floor.

I laughingly told her that she evidently thought she was in the woods where roses grew wild and there were no rugs. Instead of answering me, or apologizing, she looked at me strangely, and for a moment said nothing.

"Are you going to have baby brought down here this afternoon?" she demanded at last.

I said Tomine was out with Rosa, but that I expected them in soon, as it was almost time for baby's supper.

"Will she come in here?" Kathie asked.

"Oh, yes," was my reply. "You will see her. Never fear."

"Then I may as well go home now," observed this astounding child, rising, and going deliberately toward the door.

"What in the world do you mean?" I cried out, completely taken by astonishment.

"I never will stay in the room with her again," Kathie responded emphatically. "I just hate her!"

I could only stare at her.

"You're all taken up with her now," Kathie continued. "You used to like me, but now it's all that baby. I'm much obliged to you for inviting me to supper, but I can't stay any longer if she's coming."

If anybody could make me understand whether Kathie is sane or not I should have more confidence in attempting to deal with her. To-day I felt as if I were dealing with a mad creature, and that it was idle to try to do anything. It seemed to me it would be a pity to treat the matter too seriously, and I tried to act as if I thought she was merely joking. I laughingly told her that the idea was one of the funniest I ever heard, and that we must tell baby when she came in, to see if we could make the small person laugh. Kathie received my remarks with unmoved seriousness.

"It isn't a joke at all, Miss Ruth," she said, with an uncanny air which was most uncomfortable, but which in some indefinable way gave me for the first time in all my dealings with the girl a sort of hint that she was partly acting. "It is just my wicked heart. I hate" —

I interrupted her briskly.

"Your wicked fiddlesticks, Kathie!" I said. "Don't talk nonsense. What time has been settled on for the church fair?"

She was so taken aback that she had no defense ready, and after a sort of gasp of amazement she answered my question, and said no more about her wickedness. Baby came in with Rosa, and Kathie behaved as usual, only I remember now that she did not offer to touch Tomine. I went upstairs for a moment with Rosa and baby to see if everything was right, and when I went back to the parlor my guest had taken herself off. She had gone without her supper as she had said she should. I confess my first feeling was that she needed to be soundly shaken; but after all when a child is morbidly wrong in her feelings the particular way in which she shows it is not of much consequence. Perhaps she had better be expending her distempered mood on jealousy of baby than on religion. The question is what I had better do; and I confess I do not know how to answer it.

July 28. Mr. Saychase has made his purpose and his ideas entirely clear, and I wish I could think of them with less inclination to laugh. If he could for a single minute know how funny he was, it would do him more good than anything I can think of as likely to happen to him.

He came to call to-night, and so evident was his air of excitement that even Rosa must have noticed it; she was all significant smiles when she ushered him in. I tried to talk about commonplace things, but could get practically no response. For half an hour by the clock we went stumbling on with intervals of silence when I could think of nothing except that I must say something. At last he cleared his throat with a manner so desperate and determined that I knew something dreadful was coming.

"Miss Privet," he said, "I thought I would mention to you that I came to-night for a particular purpose."

It came over me with a sickening sense that old lady Andrews was right, and that it was too late to stop him. I did make a desperate effort to interpose, but he had at last got started, and would not be stayed.

"You must have noticed," he went on, as if he were repeating a lesson, "that I entertain a great respect for your character."

"Indeed, Mr. Saychase," I responded, with a laugh which was principally nerves, "you evidently mean to make me unbearably vain."

"That you could never be," he returned with an air of gallantry I should not have thought him capable of. "Your modesty is one of your greatest charms."