Part 21 (2/2)

”Is the favor to be a reward for the fault or for confessing it?” he asked.

I was so much surprised by this mild jest, coming from him, that I almost forgot my errand. I smiled back at him, and forgot the bitterness that had been in my heart. He looked so thin, so bloodless, that it was impossible to have rancor.

”I left Kathie with baby while I went for a walk,” I said, ”and I have stayed away longer than I intended. I forgot to tell her she could call Hannah if she wanted to come home, and she is too conscientious to leave, so I am afraid that she has stayed all this time. I wanted you to know it is my fault.”

”I am glad for her to be useful,” her father said, ”especially as you have been so kind to her.”

”Then you will perhaps let her stay all night,” I went on. ”I can take over her night-things. I promised to show her about making a new kind of pincus.h.i.+on for the church fair; and I could do it this evening. Besides, it is lonely for me in that great house.”

I felt like a hypocrite when I said this, though it is true enough. He looked at me kindly, and even pityingly.

”Yes,” he returned, ”I can understand that. If you think she won't trouble you, and”--

I did not give him opportunity for a word more. I rose at once and held out my hand.

”Thank you so much,” I said. ”I'll find Mrs. Thurston, and get Kathie's things. I beg your pardon for troubling you.”

I was out of the study before he could reconsider. Across the hall I found his wife in the sitting-room with another air-tight stove, and looking thinner and paler than he. She had a great pile of sewing beside her, and her eyes looked as if months of tears were behind them, aching to be shed.

I told her Mr. Thurston had given leave for Kathie to pa.s.s the night with me, and I had come for her night-things. She looked surprised, but none the less pleased. While she was out of the room I looked cautiously at the mending to see if the clothing was too worn for her to be willing that I should see it. When she came in with her little bundle, I said, as indifferently as I could, ”I suppose if Kathie were at home she would help you with the mending, so I'll take her share with me, and we'll do it together.” Of course she remonstrated, but I managed to bring away a good part of the big pile, and now it is all done. Poor Mrs. Thurston, she looked so tired, so beaten down by life, the veins were so blue on her thin temples! If I dared, I'd go every week and do that awful mending for her. I must get Kathie to smuggle some of it over now and then. When we blame these people for the narrowness of their theology, we forget their lives are so constrained and straitened that they cannot take broad views of anything. The man or woman who could take a wide outlook upon life from behind an air-tight stove in a half-starved home would have to be almost a miracle. It is wonderful that so much sweetness and humanity keep alive where circ.u.mstances are so discouraging. When I think of patient, faithful, hard-working women like Mrs. Thurston, uncomplaining and devoted, I am filled with admiration and humility. If their theology is narrow, they endure it; and, after all, men have made it for them. Father said once women had always been the occasion of theology, but had never produced any. I asked him, I remember, whether he said this to their praise or discredit, and he answered that what was entirely the result of nature was neither to be praised nor to be blamed; women were so made that they must have a religion, and men so const.i.tuted as to take the greatest possible satisfaction in inventing one. ”It is simply a beautiful example,” he added, with his wonderful smile which just curled the corners of his mouth, ”of the law of supply and demand.”

I am running on and on, although it is so late at night. Aunt Naomi, I presume, will in some occult way know about it, and ask me why I sat up so long. I am tired, but the excitement of the afternoon is not all gone. That any one in the world should believe it possible for Mother to be unhappy in another life, to be punished, is amazing! Surely a man whose theology makes such an idea conceivable is profoundly to be pitied.

May 19. Hannah is perfectly delightful about Tomine. She hardly lets a day go by without admonis.h.i.+ng me not to spoil baby, and yet she is herself an abject slave to the slightest caprice of the tyrannous small person. We have to-night been having a sort of battle royal over baby's going to sleep by herself in the dark. I made up my mind the time had come when some semblance of discipline must be begun, and I supposed, of course, that Hannah would approve and a.s.sist. To my surprise she failed me at the very first ditch.

”I am going to put Tomine into the crib,” I announced, ”and take away the light. She must learn to go to sleep in the dark.”

”She'll be frightened,” Rosa objected.

”She's too little to know anything about being afraid,” I retorted loftily, although I had secretly a good deal of misgiving.

”Too little!” sniffed Hannah. ”She's too little not to be afraid.”

I saw at a glance that I had before me a struggle with them as well as with baby.

”Children are not afraid of the dark until they are told to be,” I declared as dogmatically as possible.

”They are told not to be,” objected Rosa.

”But that puts the idea into their heads,” was my answer.

Hannah regarded me with evident disapprobation.

”But supposing the baby cries?” she demanded.

”Then she must be left to stop,” I answered, with outward firmness and inward quakings.

”But suppose she cries herself sick?” insisted Rosa.

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