Part 30 (1/2)
I wonder if little Tomine will ever ask me, when she is grown, about her mother. If she does I can only say that I never saw Julia until she was on her deathbed; and that will have to do. Dear little soft baby! The idea of her being grown up is too preposterous. She is always to be my baby Thomasine, and then I can love her without the penalty of having to answer troublesome questions.
VIII
AUGUST
August 1. I said a thing to Tom to-day which was the most natural thing in the world, yet which teases me. He came to pay one of his rare visits to baby, and we were bending over her so that our heads were almost together. I was not thinking of him, but just of Tomine, and without considering how he might take it I declared that I felt exactly as if she were my very own.
”What do you mean?” Tom asked. ”She is yours.”
”Oh, but I mean as if I were really her mother,” I explained, stupidly making my mistake worse.
”Would to G.o.d you were!” he burst out. ”Would to G.o.d you cared enough for me to be now!”
I was of course startled, though I had brought it on myself. I got out of it by jumping up and calling to Rosa to take Tomine and give her her supper. Now recalling it, and remembering how Tom looked, his eyes and his voice, I wonder what I ought to do. I do not know how to make him understand that because George has left me I am no more likely to marry somebody else. I may not feel the same toward George, but nothing follows from that. I own to myself frankly that I respect Tom more than I do George; I can even say that I find more and more as time goes on that I had rather see Tom coming up the walk. The old boy and girl friends.h.i.+p has largely come back between Tom and me; and I am a little, just a little on the defensive on his account against the talk of the village. I think now all is over, and Julia in her grave, that might be allowed to rest. Only one thing I do not understand. I am no more moved by the touch of George's hand now than by that of any acquaintance; I cannot touch Tom's fingers without remembering Julia.
August 2. It is curious to see how Rosa's heart and her religion keep up the struggle. Ran's wife has obstinately refused to die, but has instead got well enough to send Rosa an insulting message; so the hope of finding a solution of all difficulties in Ran's becoming a widower is for the present at least abandoned. Rosa is evidently fond of Ran, and while the priest and her conscience--or rather her religious fear of consequences--keep her from marrying him, they cannot make her give him up entirely. She still clings to some sort of an engagement with Dennis; and she still talks in her amazingly cold-blooded way about her lovers, speculating on the practical side of the question in a fas.h.i.+on so dispa.s.sionate that Ran's chance would seem to be gone forever; but in the end she comes back to him. What the result will be I cannot even guess, but I feel it my duty not to encourage Rosa to incline toward Ran, who is really drunken and disreputable. I remind her how he beat his wife; but then she either says any man with s.p.u.n.k must beat his wife now and then when he isn't sober, or she declares that anybody might and indeed should beat that sort of a woman. I can only fall back upon the fact that she cannot marry him without incurring the displeasure of her church, and although she never fails to retort that I do not believe in her religion, I can see that the argument moves her. In dealing with Rosa it is very easy to see how necessary a religion is for the management of the ignorant and unreasonable. In this case the obstinacy of Rosa's attachment may prove too strong for the church, but the church is the only thing which in her undisciplined mind could combat her inclination for a moment.
Sometimes when Rosa appeals to me for sympathy I wonder whether genuine love is not entirely independent of reason; and I wonder, too, whether it is or is not a feeling which must last a whole life long. I seem to myself to be sure that if I had married George I should always have loved him,--or I should have loved the image of him I kept in my mind. I would have defied proof and reason, and whatever he did I should have persuaded myself that no matter what circ.u.mstances led him to do he was really n.o.ble in his nature. I know I should have stultified myself to the very end, rather than to give up caring for him; and it seems to me that I should have done it with my mental eyes shut. I should have been hardly less illogical about it than Rosa is. What puzzles me most is that while I can a.n.a.lyze myself in this lofty way, I believe I have in me possibilities of self-deception so complete. Whether it is a virtue in women to be able to cheat themselves into constancy I can't tell, and indeed I think all these speculations decidedly sentimental and unprofitable.
August 5. Aunt Naomi came to-day, like an east wind bearing depression.
She has somehow got hold of a rumor that George is speculating. Where she obtained her information I could not discover. She likes to be a little mysterious, and she pieces together so many small bits of information that I dare say it would often be hard for her to say exactly what the source of her information really was. She is sometimes mistaken, but for anybody who tells so many things she is surprisingly seldom entirely wrong. Besides I half think that in a village like ours thoughts escape and disseminate themselves. I am sometimes almost afraid as I write things down in this indiscreet diary of mine, lest they shall somehow get from the page into the air, and Aunt Naomi will know them the next time she appears. This is to me the worst thing about living in a small place. It is impossible not to have the feeling of being under a sort of foolish slavery to public opinion, a slavish regard to feelings we neither share nor respect; and greater still is the danger of coming to be interested in trifles, of growing to be gossips just as we are rustics, simply from living where it is so difficult not to know all about our neighbors.
Speculation was the word which to-day Aunt Naomi rolled as a sweet morsel under her tongue. Any sort of financial dealing is so strangely far away from our ordinary village ways that any sort of dealing in stocks would, I suppose, be regarded as dangerously rash, if not altogether unlawful; but I do hope that there is nothing in George's business which will lead him into trouble. I know that I am bothering about something which is none of my affair, and which is probably all right, if it has any existence.
”I don't know much about speculation myself,” Aunt Naomi observed; ”and I doubt if George Weston does. He's got a wife who seems bound to spend every cent she can get hold of, and it looks as if he found he'd got to take extra pains to get it.”
”But how should anybody know anything about his affairs?” I asked in perplexed vexation.
She regarded me shrewdly.
”Everybody knows everything in a place like this,” she responded waggishly. ”I'm sure I don't see how everything gets to be known, but it does. You can't deny that.”
I told her that I was afraid we were dreadfully given to gossiping about our neighbors, and to talking about things which really didn't concern us.
”Some do, I suppose,” she answered coolly, but with a twinkle from behind the green veil which is always aslant across her face. ”It's a pity, of course; but you wouldn't have us so little interested in each other as not to notice the things we hear, would you?”
I laughed, of course, but did not give up my point entirely.
”But so much that is said is nonsense,” I persisted. ”Here Mrs. Weston has been in Tuskamuck for four or five months, and she is already credited with running into extravagance, and bringing her husband into all sorts of things. We might at least give her time to get settled before we talk about her so much.”
”She hadn't been here four or five weeks before she made it plain enough what she is,” was the uncompromising retort. ”She set out to astonish us as soon as she came. That's her Western spirit, I suppose.”
I did not go on with the talk, but secretly the thing troubles me.
Speculation is a large word, and it is nonsense to suppose George to be speculating in any way which could come to much, or that Aunt Naomi would know it if he were. I do wish people would either stop talking about George, or talk to somebody besides me.
August 6. Mrs. Tracy came in to call to-day. She makes a round of calls about once in two years, and I have not seen her for a long time. She had her usual string of questions, and asked about me and baby and Tom and the girls and the summer preserving until I felt as if I had been through the longest kind of a cross-examination. Just before she left she inquired if Mrs. Weston had told me that her husband was going to make a lot of money in stocks. I said at once that I seldom saw Mrs.