Part 18 (1/2)

”The best thing you can do for Tom Webbe is to believe in him. He isn't worth your pity, but your caring what happens to him will do him more good than anything else.”

I have been wondering ever since she went how much truth there is in what she said. Tom cannot care so much for me as that, although placed as he is the faith of any woman ought to help him. I know, of course, he is fond of me, and that he was always desperate over my engagement; but I cannot believe the motive power of his life is so closely connected with my opinions as Aunt Naomi seems to think. If it were he would never have been involved at all in this dreadful business. But I do so pity him, and I so wish I might really help him!

April 18. Julia is very low. I have been sitting alone with her this afternoon, almost seeing life fade away from her. Only once was she at all like her old self. I had given her some wine, and she lay for a moment with her great black eyes gleaming out from the hollows into which they have sunk. She seemed to have something on her mind, and at last she put it feebly into words.

”Don't tell her any bad of me,” she said.

For an instant I did not understand, and I suppose that my face showed this. She half turned her heavy head on her pillow, so that her glance might go toward the place where the baby slept in the broken clothes-basket. The sadness of it came over me so suddenly and so strongly that tears blinded me. It was the most womanly touch that I have ever known in Julia; and for the moment I was so moved that I could not speak. I leaned over and kissed her, and promised that from me her child should never know harm of its mother.

”She'd be more likely to go to the devil if she knew,” Julia explained gaspingly. ”Now she'll have some sort of a chance.”

The words were coa.r.s.e, but as they were said they were so pathetic that they pierced me. Poor little baby, born to a tainted heritage! I must save her clean little soul somehow. Poor Julia, she certainly never had any sort of a chance.

April 24. She is in her grave at last, poor girl, and it is sad to think that n.o.body alive regrets her. Tom cannot, and even her dreadful mother showed no sorrow to-day. Somehow the vulgarity of the mother and her behavior took away half the sadness of the tragedy. When I think about it the very coa.r.s.eness of it all makes the situation more pathetic, but this is an afterthought that can be felt only when I have beaten down my disgust. When one considers how Julia grew up with this woman, and how she had no way of learning the decencies of life except from a mother who had no conception of them, it makes the heart ache; and yet when Mrs. Brownrig broke in upon us at the graveyard this morning, disgust was the strongest feeling of which I was conscious. The violation of conventionalities always shocks a woman, I suppose, and when it comes to anything so solemn as services over the dead, the lack of decency is shocking and exasperating together, with a little suggestion besides of sacrilege.

Miss Charlotte surprised me by coming over just after breakfast to go to the funeral with me.

”I don't like to have you go alone,” she said, ”and I knew you would go.”

I asked her in some surprise how in the world she knew when the funeral was to be, for we thought that we had kept it entirely quiet.

”Aunt Naomi told me last night,” she answered. ”I suppose she heard it from some familiar spirit or other,--a black cat, or a toad, or something of the kind.”

I could only say that I was completely puzzled to see how Aunt Naomi had discovered the hour in any other way, and I thanked Miss Charlotte for coming, though I told the dear she should not have taken so much trouble.

”I wanted to do it, my dear,” she returned cheerfully. ”I am getting to be an old thing, and I find funerals rather lively and amusing. Don't you remember Maria Harmon used to say that to a pious soul a funeral was a heavenly picnic?”

Whatever a ”heavenly picnic” may be, the funeral this morning was one of the most ghastly things imaginable. Tom and Mr. Thurston were in one carriage and Miss Charlotte and I in another. We went to the graveyard at the Rim, where Julia's father and brother were buried, a place half overgrown with wild-rose and alder bushes. In summer it must be a picturesque tangle of wild shrubs and blossoms, but now it is only chill, and barren, and neglected. The spring has reddened and yellowed the tips of the twigs, but not enough to make the bushes look really alive yet. The heap of clay by the grave, too, was of a hideous ochre tint, and horribly sodden and oozy.

Just as the coffin was being lowered a wild figure suddenly appeared from somewhere behind the thickets of alders and low spruces which skirt the fence on one side. It proved to be old Mrs. Brownrig, who with rags and tags, and even her disheveled gray hair fluttering as she moved, half ran down the path toward us. She must have been hiding in the woods waiting, and I found afterward that she had been seen lurking about yesterday, though for some reason she had not been to her house. Now she had evidently been drinking, and she was a dreadful thing to look at.

I wonder why it is that nature, which makes almost any other ruin picturesque, never succeeds in making the wreck of humanity anything but hideous? An old tower, an old tree, even an old house, has somehow a quality that is prepossessing; but an old man is apt to look unattractive, and an old woman who has given up taking care of herself is repulsive. Perhaps we cannot see humanity with the impartial eyes with which we regard nature, but I do not think this is the whole of it.

Somehow and for some reason an inanimate ruin is generally attractive, while a human ruin is ugly.

Mrs. Brownrig seemed to me an incarnation of the repulsive. She made me shudder with some sort of a feeling that she was wicked through and through. Even the pity she made me feel could not prevent my sense that she was vicious. I wanted to wash my hands just for having seen her. I was ashamed to be so uncharitable, and of course it was because she was so hideous to look at; but I do not think I could have borne to have her touch me.

”Stop!” she called out. ”I'm the mother of the corpse. Don't you dare to bury her till I get there!”

I glanced at Tom in spite of myself. He had been stern and pale all the morning, not saying a word more than was necessary, but now the color came into his face all at once. I could not bear to see him, and tried to look at the mother, but repulsion and pity made me choke. She was panting with haste and intoxication by the time she reached us, and stumbled over something in the path. She caught at Tom's arm to save herself, and there she hung, leering up into his face.

”You didn't mean for me to come, did you?” she broke out, half whimpering and half chuckling. ”She was mine before she was yours. You killed her, too.”

Tom kept himself still, though it must have been terribly hard. He must have been in agony, and I could have sobbed to think how he suffered. He grew white as I have never seen him, but he did not look at the old woman. She was perhaps too distracted with drink and I hope with grief to know what she was doing. She turned suddenly, and looked at the coffin, which rested on the edge of the grave.

”My handsome Jule!” she wailed. ”Oh, my handsome Jule! They're all dead now! What did you put on her? Did you make a shroud or put on a dress?”

”She has a white shroud,” I said quickly. ”I saw to everything myself.”