University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.
THE GRAY ROOM.

“CHRISTINA!”

Christina sat by the fire again, now that
Nixy had gone to bed. Mrs. Purcell was walking
very nervously up and down and across the
room.

“Christina, come here!”

Christina came. Her mother drew her into
the light, and held up the girl's bright face in her
two hands. She had no sooner touched the
saucy face than she dropped it, and walked the
room for a space again. Presently she came
back, and, with unusual persistency in an unusual
caress, drew her daughter's face once more into
the light, and once more, and without a smile,
examined it.

Christina sat mute and lovely; she did not
dare to be mischievous.

It was a lovely face, all dimples and color,

very healthy, very happy, not very wise, with
lips too merry to be moulded, — they had never
been still long enough, — and eyes, as Nixy had
thought, “like a white star.” Christina, Margaret
avers, has her dead father's eyes. It was
a face for any mother to be proud of, and careful
for; for which to thank Heaven's mercy, and to
pray Heaven's protection; a face to trust, and a
face to watch.

“But snow is no whiter!” said Margaret, as
if speaking to an unseen listener. Her hand
fell, as she dropped the upturned face, on her
daughter's head, and lay there for a moment,
gently.

“Why do you bless me, mother?” asked
Christina, winking briskly. It always made
her cry to feel her mother's hand upon her
head, and she disapproved of crying for nothing.

“Go to bed, and say your prayers!” said Margaret,
bluntly. “No, — on the whole, stop a
moment. I don't know what to do with that
poor girl up stairs!”

Christina liked to be “consulted,” as she often
was, upon family affairs. Margaret, upon principle,

took her daughter into her confidence
whenever she could. She grew at once grave
and womanly, and she came at once, shrewdly
enough, to the point.

“What do you want to do with her, mother?”

This was exactly what Mrs. Purcell did not
know.

“I think, at least, that I shall keep her for a
couple of days to rest. She is ill, and ought
not to be travelling about alone. She wants
work. It will be very little trouble to let her
stay in the corner-room for a night or two, unless
you object to having her about. She will
not want anything of you, though.”

“I wish she did,” said Christina, simply. “She
looks so forlorn!”

“She does look sick.”

“I don't wonder she could n't find work,” continued
Christina, lifting her innocent eyes. Her
mother watched them. “I could n't find work,
if I had to earn my living, unless I could make
tatting or give music-lessons. I 've been thinking
all this evening how funny that I should be
your daughter, and she should be she, you know.
How long has she been sick?”

Mrs. Purcell was taken aback by the abruptness
of the question.

“I have not inquired very fully into particulars,”
she answered, evasively. “And if I were
you, Christina, I should not question her much.
I should rather that you would not. You do not
want to be impertinent because the girl is poor.”

“Of course not.” Christina, who was a little
lady to her fingers' ends, looked grieved at the
implication. Her mother half repented having
made it, partly because Christina did not deserve
it, partly because it was not altogether honestly
made. But it was too late to retract; and what
else could she have done, looking into the young
girl's starry eyes? They were not eyes to be
darkened by a breath of Nixy's black story.

“At least, as I said before,” she continued,
after a silence, “I will keep the girl for a couple
of days; perhaps, by looking about, I can find
something for her to do. It does not seem exactly
Christian to send her off again without
making at least an effort to help her. She has
no mother.”

Christina was very sleepy, or she would have
expressed herself upon that subject. Shutting

the door, on her way to bed, she stopped, in
thought.

“You know it 's next week Ann goes?”

“What of that?”

“I did n't know but you might like — out of
charity, and all that — to take this sick girl in
her place. I suppose she 'd be any amount of
bother!”

“I suppose she would. I will think it over,
however.”

I can hardly explain by what mental process
Mrs. Purcell had preferred to await this very
suggestion from her daughter's lips; certain it
is, that she had been revolving it in her troubled
thought the entire evening, and that her objections
to it, which were very strong, narrowed, as
she found on careful inspection, to one word, —
Christina.

Nixy shut the door of the little corner-room
with wondering eyes. In all her life she had
never laid down and slept in a room like it. It
was small, and simply furnished, but it was soft
and gray, — gray was a color that Nixy particularly
fancied, — and there was a shade of

silver-gray in counterpane, wood-work, carpet,
papering, curtains; a little gray statuette upon
the mantel, and a few pictures in gray frames
about the walls.

When she was left alone, and when Mrs. Purcell's
step had dropped into silence upon the
carpeted stairs, Nixy stood just in the middle of
the gray room for a few moments, almost without
motion, almost without breath.

It seemed to her like the first twilight which
she saw settle down upon the open country. It
stilled her. It folded her in. It spoke many
things to her. What they were I suppose it
would be difficult for you or me to understand if
we altogether knew. Peace and purity met together;
righteousness and judgment kissed each
other before the young girl's opening eyes. Yet
she felt nothing of what we should distinguish as
the sense of shame. At this period of her life,
Nixy scarcely felt herself to be ashamed. She
knew herself to be outcast, lonely; a creature
of miserable yesterdays and more miserable tomorrows,
— most miserable when the gray room
had yielded her up to Thicket Street. She knew
that her dress was dirty, and that there was

mud upon her feet. She felt that the delicate
room was too fine for her. She folded away her
dingy clothes with great care, lest they should
stain the pearl-gray margins of the chair upon
which she laid them. She crept timidly into the
white bed; it seemed like creeping into a sunny
snow-drift, as if the very breath of her own lips
would melt it away from about her. She thought
of Mrs. Zerviah Myrtle's attic, and of the bundle
of straw in No. 19; wondered why Mrs. Purcell
should have put “the likes of her” in such a bed,
rather than bid her room with her servants.

Christina, at that very moment, was expending
some wonder upon that identical subject; not
suspecting, for her mother had not hinted them,
the motives which influenced the mistress of the
house in this perhaps extraordinary disposal of
the poor little straggler. Whereas Mrs. Purcell's
course of reasoning was simple enough. Ann,
if she did make sour bread, and paste her four
walls over with blessed gilt-paper Marys, was
an honest woman. Knowing what she knew of
poor Nixy, feeling as she felt herself to be the
keeper of the maid-servant who was within her
gates, Mrs. Purcell would have offered the outcast

choice of all her pretty spare-rooms, would
have bidden her, indeed, into her very own bed,
rather than have imposed her presence upon
the Irish girl. Here again was one of Margaret's
“ideas.”

Nixy, upon creeping under the fine gray counterpane,
discovered, folded white across it, a wonderful
garment, scented and soft, and heavy with
delicate embroidery. It was, in fact, one of
Christina's night-dresses; and I am compelled to
admit that it was her best one too.

“Why, how could you?” her mother, in real
dismay, exclaimed when she found it out. To
tell the truth, — and I propose always to tell the
truth about Margaret, — Mrs. Purcell was for
the instant shocked. That girl in Christina's
clothes!

“Why not? Of course she had n't any with
her, and I thought she 'd like a pretty one while
she was about it, you know. I did n't mean to
do anything out of the way, I 'm sure.”

Christina stood with wide-open, lighted eyes.
Of such as she had, she had given, on hospitable
thought intent, to Nixy Trent, precisely as she
would to Fanny Myrtle. She was so simple and

straightforward about it, and her mother was so
annoyed, and ashamed of herself for being annoyed
about it, that no more words passed between
them on the subject, — as was generally
the case when they differed. Only, said Mrs.
Purcell, —

“She might have had one of mine, you know!”

Nixy, on seeing the delicate thing, had laid
it away at first carefully, supposing only that
Christina had left it there by some mistake; after
a while it occurred to her that the young lady
might by possibility have intended the garment
for her use.

She unfolded, examined, refolded, placed it
carefully upon the foot of the bed.

“It 's too grand for me,” she said.

This disappointed Christina. When her mother
was “benevolent” she liked to “help,” in a pretty,
childish fashion. It was altogether a pretty
fashion, and not altogether a common one, in
which Christina at that time blended in herself
the child and the woman. As, for instance, this
little incident of Nixy and the night-dress; ten
years might have done the thing, thirty could not
have done it on more advanced and consistent
principle.

Let us smile, if we feel like it; it may be a
comfort to ourselves, it will be a harm to nobody;
but I venture to say that the time may — I do
not assert that it will, but that it may — come
when not to offer Nixy our best night-clothes
would be as much of a departure from the ordinary
customs of Christian society as it would be
now to offer her a shroud. “Freely ye have received,
freely give,” may have been spoken even
touching embroidery and lace-work. Who knows?

Nixy, for very strangeness of comfort, lay waking
much in the gray room that night.

There was a late moon, and the light, where it
entered the room, was like the room, — all of shining
gray. She thought, between her dreams, that
she lay in a pearl and silver bath.

When she awoke in the morning, alone and
still, in the clean room, in the clean sunlight, —

“Mebbe God 's got folks, after all,” she said in
her heart. “Mebbe she 's one,” meaning, of
course, Margaret Purcell.

She felt glad to have found her, merely from a
scientific point of view, even if, when found, the
discovery must — as it must — mean nothing to
her. She felt glad to have lived to sleep a night

in the gray room, though she went back to
Thicket Street to-morrow. She wondered — this
at intervals — what kind of a girl she, Nixy
Trent, should now be, had she lived all her
happy life in a pearly-gray room.

Christina broke upon the thought, in a morning-dress
as fresh as her eyes, with a message
from her mother, to the effect that Mrs. Purcell
would like to inquire after the health of her guest
to-day. And Nixy, scarcely hearing the message
(though she afterwards recalled it, and thought it
very odd), lifted her thoughtful eyes to the messenger,
and wondered on: —

“Would I been like that?”

Would she? Who dares to say?

Mrs. Purcell, asking herself the very question,
through the first night and day that Nixy spent
under her roof, did not dare. She looked from
one girl to the other with a restless mouth. Out
of the mouth the heart speaketh, and Margaret
was restless in heart.

She had passed a disturbed night on account
of this stranger who was beneath her roof; she
pitied her much, she dreaded her more. To have
given her lodging, food, rest, advice, money, the

gray room, would not, or did not, satisfy the
healthy conscience of this Christian woman. To
take the trouble of providing the poor girl with
such a home or such a “Retreat” as offers to
Nixy's kind, promised to give her poor content.

These were the common humanities of life.
A cultivated infidel (with a nice eye), like Sainte-Beuve,
for instance, might far surpass them. Of
Margaret Purcell, sitting down to darn stockings
while Nixy was at breakfast, something
finer than charity, something greater than philanthropy,
it was reasonable to expect, it was —
was it, or was it not? — right to demand; for
Margaret Purcell was a Christian. The “All-Soul”
tired her, it must be admitted, very much.
“The powers of Nature, formerly called God,”
somehow or other seriously offended that measure
of common sense of which, by man's inalienable
“right to reason,” she conceived herself
to be possessed. She professed herself to
be — and she had a native and emphatic fancy for
being that which she professed — a disciple of a
very plain and a very busy Man, who stopped, it
has been said, of a certain summer night, weary

and dusty, and faint at heart, to make of himself
a drawer of eternal water for a passing sinner's
thirst.

Mrs. Purcell, darning her stocking, mused for
a space upon this busy Man.

But had she not done already more than half
the Christian women of her acquaintance would
have done for that wretched girl? And should
she be bound under obligations to do what none
of the Christian women of her acquaintance —
at least, none of whom she could think at that
particular moment, which spoke the worse for
either her acquaintance or her memory, of
course — would do?

But Nixy's mute eyes pleaded, Give, give!
There it was! She could not deny it. The
Man who sat by the well expected more of her,
expected much of her. He was not inconsiderate
either. She had never known him unreasonable;
she had never regretted a sacrifice made
for one of his little ones.

In her simple life, with its simple burdens,
simple blessings, — for so, as she grows older,
she is fond of regarding what has often seemed
a complex history to me, — in all this life her

allegiance to Him had returned to her what she
estimated as a hundred-fold of wealth. Thus it
had become — a very simple matter — her habit
of life, no more to question a clearly expressed
wish of his than to fight the sunlight. If he
had called her, like Abraham of old, to cut
Christina's throat, I believe she would have
done it. She might feel very wicked about it
for a week or so, before she made up her mind
to do the deed, but she would have done it.

But was poor Nixy one of his little ones?
Far be it from her to offend against Nixy then.
To the half of her kingdom — for was not her
home her kingdom? — would she offer her, if in
thus doing she felt confident that she was about
her Master's business. She said, over her stockings,
Behold thy handmaid, — and would he do
with Nixy according to his will?

After this she rolled the stockings up, and set
her wits to work to discover what his will might
be; meantime she said to Nixy, —

“Stay another day and rest.”

In the course of the day she sought the girl
out, and asked a few questions to this effect: —

“No parents, you said?”

“No, ma'am. Never had none. There was the
organ-grinder, and the woman as got drunk, and
the woman as adopted me; then the 'sylum and
Jeb Smith, — that 's where I tended table, — Jeb's,
— and so, when I took sick, there was nobody
that minded much but Lize; and so you see there
warn't nobody to take me in and help me bear
what folks said. I always thought I 'd kinder
like to be a different girl, if I had anybody to help
me bear what folks said. It 's chances I come
up country after. You have to have chances, —
don't you see? Sometimes, when I 'm layin'
awake o' nights and thinkin' to myself, I seem
to think as I should n't have ben like as I am,
ma'am, if I 'd had chances instead. That 's what
I thinks to myself last night, — begging your
pardon for it; but it come along of the grayness
of the room.”

Mrs. Purcell made no answer. There was a
silence; Nixy stood, through it, listless and pale.
Mrs. Purcell broke it.

“You have not — I hardly know how to ask
the question, for I do not like to insult you
because you have sinned once — but —” she
stopped.

“Ma'am!” Nixy looked puzzled, then flushed
and paled.

“I 'm not a wicked girl,” she said.

“She may or she may not be,” thought Mrs.
Purcell. For what was the word of poor Nixy
worth to a woman who knew as much as Margaret
does of Nixy's like? But what could one do?
If there were but a germ of purity in the girl, how
trample it by mistrust?

“I would rather be deceived twenty times
over,” said Margaret once to me, in speaking of
this matter, “than to doubt one soul in which
I should have confided. Cheated? Of course I
get cheated! Who does n't? But God knows it
is hard enough for a poor sinner to trust himself,
without all his fellow-sinners piling their mistrust
across his way. Never was Christian laborer
worse cheated, in the world's eyes, than our
Lord himself in Judas. You might as well put
on gloves at a cotton-loom, as to be afraid of
being cheated in the work of saving souls.

So Mrs. Purcell, after a little thought, looked
across her silence into Nixy's young, unhappy
eyes, and said, —

“Perhaps I cannot better beg your pardon,
child, than by believing precisely what you say
to me. Do you understand?”

Nixy understood, at least, that she was trusted.
A falsehood in the light of a sin seldom presents
itself to a Thicket Street girl's most vivid
imagination. But partly from a keen sense of
policy, and partly from a real though crude sense
of honor, Nixy from that moment decided, in her
own words, to “go it honest” with Mrs. Purcell,
thinking, —

“She shall have all there is of me. 'T ain't no
great. Pity to spoil it.”

“So you would like” — Mrs. Purcell questioned
— “you say you would like to live an
honest life in an honest home?”

She had risen and stood now, taller than Nixy,
looking down from her fine pure height upon the
girl.

Said Nixy, looking up, “You bet!”

Mrs. Purcell actually started. The rough words
fell from Nixy's lips as if they had dropped from
the Mount of Transfiguration, for her face in the
moment quivered, changed, flushed all over like a
homesick child's, paled like a wasted prisoner's.

“She is starved!” cried Margaret to herself.
“The girl is starved for the very crumbs
that fall from her Father's table!” Aloud she
said, —

“And the table is full, — full. God forgive
us all!”

“I did not ask to sit at the table, ma'am,”
said Nixy, with some pride and much wonder.

“Go away now,” Margaret made answer
gently, —she was too much moved to smile, —
“to-night again I shall like to talk a little with
you, before — that is, if —”

As she did not finish, Nixy left her.

It took her, I believe, till night to finish the
sentence.

“For there,” said the mother in her, “is Christina!”

“Here,” said the Christian in her, “is the
Lord!”

Why not go about the Lord's business, and
trust Christina to him?

But what was the Lord's business if not the
soft shielding of Christina's eyes from the stains
of the evil world?

But if Nixy were a “little one”? If, in the

girl's mute importunity, the very eyes of the
Master pleaded to weary her? How fall upon
her knees and say, “Here, Lord! I send her
back to Thicket Street and sin. Am I my sister's
keeper?”

Again, who knew what taints of blood and
brain were lodged in the poor girl's growing
life? Neither the Lord nor Margaret Purcell
could bewilder the corrupt tree into bringing
forth of healthy fruit. What if, after all the
sacrifice, all the risk, all the possible mischief
and misery of sheltering this stained thing in
her pure home, the hidden serpent stung her in
the bosom, — the girl betrayed, disgraced, dishonored
her?

She might send her to the Home that intelligent
Christian liberality had provided for her
class. It was indeed one of the strong points
in her maturer theories of usefulness to work, so
far as might be, in the organized avenues of
charity. There being a place for Nixy, — endowed,
inspected, trusteed, prayed for, — why
not put her in her place? What business was
it of hers to turn her individual house into a
Magdalen Retreat? What then? If Nixy

went, — and Nixy would n't, — it would be only
to await the welcome of just such a Christian
household as her own.

But she might find some “pious and intelligent”
family who would take in the girl. How?
At the gain of her own personal relief; at the
loss of her own personal chance of saving a
most miserable little woman, whom to save
would be — what would it not be of richness of
privilege, of peace that passeth understanding?
Margaret's earnest eyes filled with solemn tears.

But Margaret's practical heart went questioning
on.

Why not find the girl an honest business and
put her in it, and leave her — in a factory boarding-house,
for instance? Poor Nixy! Thicket
Street would wellnigh be as safe a shelter.

But a family without children; it was the
Christian duty of such families — old, excellent,
at the end of life, nothing else to do — to look
up the Nixys of their time.

If she had no child — or a husband; if she
had had anything that she did not have, or had
not everything that she had, Nixy would have a
claim upon her.

But that her white little daughter and that
miserable girl — two mere children yet — should
take hands and step on into their coming womanhood
together!

Then, should Nixy be child or servant, or both?
Either was a wretched arrangement; both, intolerable.

She would make heavy cake; she would talk
bad grammar; she would eat with her knife;
she —

Margaret Purcell stopped here. She went
away into her room, and fell upon her knees,
and said, —

“For Christ's sake,” — this only, and this with
a countenance awed, as if she too stood by the
well in the dusk, and saw the thirsty woman and
saw the wearied Man.

She came down to Christina, and said,—

“We will keep the girl.”

But she gathered her daughter with a sudden
sharp motion into her arms, kissed her once,
kissed her many times.

“My daughter, do you suppose that the time
will ever come when — perhaps — you may not
tell me — everything?”

“It never has,” said Christina, gravely.

“You are growing up so fast!” mused Mrs.
Purcell, in a disturbed voice.

She felt very vividly at that moment the fact
which dawns so slowly and so painfully upon ever
so wise a mother's comprehension, that her very
own child, her flesh and blood, her life, her heart,
— her soul, it had seemed, — is, after all, somebody
else; a creature with just as distinct a will
and way and worth, with as independent moral
risks and obligations, with as sharp a sense of
character, and as sharp a mould cast by fate for
the cooling of that character, as if she had never
borne it upon her heart and carried it in her
bosom. She felt, in the risks which she ran for
Christina in this business of the girl, that Christina
was fast coming to a point where she must
run her own risks, and that was the sting of it.
In her perplexity and pain it seemed to her that
her arms were unclasping from the growing girl,
that there was “Nothing all hers on this side
heaven!”

Christina stood smiling by, like a star-flower.

“When you were little I could command your
confidence, you know,” said her mother; “as you

grow older I hope — that I shall be able, my
dear, to win it.”

“Why — yes,” said Christina, only half understanding.
“I am sure I would trust you, mother,
twice as soon as I would trust myself!”

So Mrs. Purcell went to Nixy. “Very well,”
said Nixy, upon hearing her errand, which she
took very quietly; “I 'll serve you, ma'am, honest.
I wanted honest work when I found the places
and the folks. I did n't come to beg. If I
thought you took me for a beggar I would rather
not stay. But then perhaps God's folks —”

“What about `God's folks'?”

“I don't know,” said Nixy, slowly; “something
as I can't get hold on. I s'pose you could get a
sight better help nor me. But you don't treat
me like a beggar, ma'am. It 's something as I
can't get hold on.”

After a long pause she looked up; she had
been sitting with her clouded eyes — it was wellnigh
impossible to brighten Nixy's eyes — bent
upon the pretty gray carpet, and said, —

“Perhaps I 'd ought to thank you?”

Why, of course she ought! So, for the moment,
Mrs. Purcell bluntly thought. Nixy had

taken her “charity” so much as a matter of
course; had so entirely failed to appreciate her
“sacrifice”; had accepted the results of her two
days' striving with conscience and praying for
light so simply! The girl scarcely seemed to
feel under “obligations,” — assumed that she undertook
the burden of her youth and misery and
disgrace quite as a matter of individual privilege.
Now, in theory, as we have seen, this was exactly
what Mrs. Purcell did. Our theories are like our
faces; we never know what either looks like till
we see its photograph. It struck Margaret —
and Margaret was honest enough to see that it
so struck her — as extraordinary that her own
principles of conduct should return to her in such
a very active shape. Was it not now “very
odd” in “that kind of a girl” to receive her
kindness as if — As if what? As if she meant
it, nothing more.

Mrs. Purcell's good sense rebounded quickly.
She concluded, on reflection, that Nixy had rather
honored her than otherwise. What, indeed, had
the girl done but evolved “the situation,” from
her own crude conception of “God's folks”? This
thing which was finer than philanthropy, which

was greater than charity, in which kings and
priests unto God have read dark riddles, little
Nixy Trent — for not many mighty are called!
— had put her stained finger trustfully upon.
She had paid Margaret Purcell royal tribute.

“I will put it,” said Margaret, with bowed head,
“on usury for her.”