University of Virginia Library

32. CHAPTER XXXII.

Philippa, with her chin on the sill, was looking out
of the parlor window one morning at the black stalks
protruding from patches of ice, and the brown birds
that hopped in the fir-branches, or ran over the snow
with alert dipping motions, and thinking that she should
be sorry when the winter was over. She had felt it a
protection, shielding her mood with its inclement spirit.
With the spring, she must resume something of her old
life. The twigs yonder, that had kept upright in spite
of the winter storms—what were they hoping?—that
they might drop at last, when new leaves pushed through
the mould? Fresh leaves, blossoms, and fruit! Her
faded self was apart from them—yet the breath of
spring must have touched her, for she thought of the
deserted hill, its rocks, the old cedars, and the oaks.
Then the picture of the house, opened, as it used to be
in summer, rose before her; she heard the sound of the
summer sea again, and felt its cool, moist balm in the
darkened rooms; its murmur crept into the parlor where
the piano stood, and mingled with the melody of a wild
pathetic waltz, whose eternal round involved Parke
forever and forever!

She rushed to the front window, thrust the curtains
apart, and, jumping on a chair, tried to get a glimpse
of the outlet of the bay. The tide was out, for the
boulders on Gull's Point stood high out of the water;
behind them was the outlet—a purple bar of sea and

cloud joined together. A boat shot within the range
of her vision, whose sail loomed against the rocks; its
hull bulged out of the water, and its side ploughed the
waves; she longed to be in it, and steering for another
world, which might give her Crest as it had been in the
past. She made a descent from the chair, and went into
the kitchen.

“Mary,” she asked, “do you think Mr. Auster is out
with his boat?”

“He has been outside the Point every day this week.
He calls the weather mild. It is blowing great guns
outside, I'll warrant; but if he likes it it is all right.
Mrs. Rogers has sent you a bit of a billet by Bill Smith's
boy; he told me what was in it. She wants to come
and spend to-morrow afternoon with you; she has got
some news to bring.”

“Certainly; where's the boy?”

“He is coming back for the answer when he darn
pleases, he said, which will be in the course of an
hour. We ought to make cake; do you recollect how
long it is since you made any?”

“No.”

“'Twas the day when your father came in, and said
the little tins reminded him of his sins—the very last of
October.”

“And he said, `Come,'” Philippa murmured. “If I
had answered `Yes,' what should I be with them?”

Mary stared at her, and raising her voice, as if addressing
a deaf person, asked, “You don't realize, I
guess, that you have been eating my doughnuts, and
cookies, and gingerbread all this time; plenty of them,
such as they were.”

Philippa's eyes were fixed on some remote boundary;
she did not hear Mary, who peevishly exclaimed: “She's
off to South America. I trust she will get back in time
to give that boy an answer; he is a sass-box, that boy.”

But Philippa was nearer home, and grappling with
an irritating conviction, which the recollection of that
interview with her father caused. If, at this moment,
she was with Parke, she knew there would be a sediment
in her satisfaction, because her plans would still
be thwarted. Away from Crest, he could not be to her
what she had believed he would be everywhere. The
conviction was humiliating, for it proved that he was
not single in her heart, but surrounded by other ideas,
and selfish ones.

The boy returned, and her revery was broken. A
message was sent to Mrs. Rogers; and Philippa, roused
with the necessity of doing away her ill opinion of herself
by exertion in somebody's behalf, not only made
cake, but went all over the house, opened closets, drawers,
and windows. By night, she was in a different
mood. Mary noticed the change. She had heard an
unwonted slamming of doors, and mentioned it to Gilbert,
who replied that he supposed she was feeling her
oats. When Jason came home, wet, cold, and hungry,
Philippa had subsided into her old place by the window,
and was engaged with a book. While he was drinking
his tea with wondering eyes, he noticed that the long-closed
curtains before the front windows were drawn
apart, and asked her if she had been looking for spring.

“No,” she answered, “has it come?”

“I heard a frog last night; don't the verse-makers
call the frog `spring's harbinger?'”

“I don't read verses; but I fancy it was the cowslip
and the violet instead.”

“What are you reading?”

“Robinson Crusoe.”

“Robinson Crusoe!”

He finished his tea in silence, and she went on with
her book.

Half an hour afterwards, he knocked the ashes from
his cigar, and asked her if she intended to plant the
terrace.

“I have not thought about it; the geraniums are
dead in the cellar, Mary says.”

“Shall I send for some new ones?”

“I don't care.”

“So I thought.”

“I never was very fond of flowers,” she answered in
an apologetic tone, shutting her book.

“Why don't Ritchings come here any more?” he
asked abruptly.

“He was here last week. By the way, Mrs. Rogers
has asked for an invitation to pass to-morrow afternoon
with me.”

“She has heard from Sam, then. What is Mr. Ritchings
doing? How is his sore throat?”

“Poor Mr. Ritchings!”

“Why is he poor? Because he is madly in love with
you?”

The tone of his voice was savage, and she looked at
him, coloring with surprise.

“A woman despises a man,” he continued, “for loving
her, unless she happens to return his love; is it not so?
Inform me; I am green about the sentiments.”

“Jason!”

“How is it, I ask, between you and the parson?
Have you a contempt for him?”

An angry gesture was all her answer.

“Why don't you pity him?”

“Pity a man?”

“Oh, a man needs it, I assure you, more than a woman
ever does.”

“You may console Mr. Ritchings, since that is your
opinion,” she answered, leaving the room.

“Every evening,” he said to himself, “for three
months, she has kept me in this place, and then, by some
damnable force or unrelenting magnetism, compelled
me to leave it; but to-night I have sent her away,—not
in a nice manner, perhaps,—but she is gone, and I feel as
if the room was in a state of arrest.”

He looked over the little table which stood by the
window; it was more disordered than usual, and his eye
fell on a daguerreotype. He recognized it, and opened
the case. It contained a picture of his wife, taken some
ten years before. She looked at him from behind the
glass, with her cold, hard, glittering eyes; the lines of
her mouth, the black crisp curls over her polished forehead,
were no more rigid in the picture than he remembered
them in life. It was a stern relief to gaze at the
face which had always been inscrutable to him. Could
there have been any communion between their spirits,
he would have said: “Behold me without the imposition
laid upon me by you.” He would have asked, if
she had yet learned the secret of the destiny which had
bound them together, without the aim of self-advantage,
or of the higher or more exalted feelings. Though her

spirit was unseen, and silent as its image in his hand, he
closed the case with the feeling of having made her the
witness of his past and present conscience; it was
washed clean for the future. He sought out the remaining
contents of the table, and detected a dilapidated
pocket-book, with the name of “Parke Auster,”
in half-obliterated gilt letters stamped upon it: inserting
his long fingers into one of its compartments, he
drew out a bill for some sheets of music, and a little
bunch of dried flowers.

“The geraniums are all dead in the cellar,” quoth
Jason.

In another, he found a battered silver sixpence, strung
on a faded silk string, and a card, with “Theresa Bond,
49 Graham Place,” engraved upon it.

“Philippa has been stirring about the house to-day,
and opened her graves,” he said, throwing the pocket-book
into the fire. “Theresa's call is returned, and the
silver sixpence goes back to the furnace. Parke has
turned the key on his memories, and I'll lock up Philippa's.”

He found nothing more to attract speculation, and
after finding her place in Robinson Crusoe, and reading
a few pages, folded his arms on the table, and fell
asleep.

He was off by daybreak, Mary told Philippa, with his
dogs, a chunk of bread, and a surveyor's scale; so she
guessed he was up in the wood-lots. Before tea-time
he was at home, and, contrary to his custom, went at
once to the parlor, where he found Mrs. Rogers, as
cheerful, talkative, and friendly as if she had seen him
but the day before, when, in fact, they had not met since

the day of Sarah's funeral, more than eight months ago.
As he had surmised, she brought a letter from Sam, and
the early part of her visit had been consumed by its perusal,
and the development of her feelings concerning
him. The letter was graphic, and Philippa laughed
over his account of a “bear-grab”—his meeting with a
dingy fellow on the ice, in search of the northwest passage,
who had, in the warmth of his greeting, clawed
him unpleasantly.

“I wish Sam would come home,” she remarked.

“Now, do you? he'd be clawed home, as well as
abroad, poor fellow.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don't know what paws of velvet can do, do
you?”

“Cats'?”

“Women's paws, Philippa.”

“Who could have the heart to torment the best man
I ever knew?”

“That's what I say; but did you never know of anybody
that might do it?”

“Never.”

Philippa blushed like a blaze of brushwood at the intrusive
torch which Mrs. Rogers applied to her.

“Philippa,” she said, “this letter has rather stirred me
up, and I have made up my mind to give you a piece of
it, because I love you, my dear, and because I want to
see you differently situated. I never should have opened
my mouth if Parke hadn't left you; now you know he
has, you needn't fire up—I know what's what. In my
opinion, and I tell you candidly, I wouldn't dare mention
it if Sam wasn't on the other side of Jordan, as it were,

clawed with bears and harpooned by whales,—but as it
is, it is my opinion that Sam Rogers adores the ground
you tread on.”

“He doesn't,” said Philippa, indignantly.

“Oh yes, he does; but he has had his reasons for keeping
dark; he might have been afraid of interfering, or of
looking too high. But things are changed. What you
have, you know, is your own now, and you have got to
keep it, too; and Sam is a captain, able to hold his own
anywhere; and a sensible, better man never walked.”

“He would not thank you for this. I am glad he is
thousands of miles from me.”

“Of course, he wouldn't thank me—children never
thank their parents; but you ought to thank me, for
wanting to give you something worth living for. You
know in your heart of hearts that Sam would stop at no
sacrifice for your sake. What ails him? You didn't
fall in love with him, that's all. Do you suppose the
married state is a state of being in love?”

“I believe that he would sacrifice his happiness for me,
but I could not accept it from him. I shall not marry
Sam, Mrs. Rogers.”

“Well, I can't offer anybody else; but what are you
going to do—marry Jason?”

The question fell on Philippa like a thunderbolt; Mrs.
Rogers was scared at her aspect.

“Do you dare say that?” she cried.

“Others say that he will marry.”

“I tell you that I will make no change—he will make
none—we shall live on the same terms as now. Oh the
cowardly world, that invents what it contemns!”

“You lamb, you are dreadfully earnest; but Jason is a

man, my dear; do not believe that he is going to be
mewed up this way forever.”

“Why not?”

“Every man has in his life a period of breaking out.
It has always seemed to me that Jason has never had his
turn; there is something smouldering in him, you may be
sure. I presume he is not aware of it himself, but it will
make no difference, he will have his day, according to his
nature. I have noticed, over and over again, that men
belie the character the world and circumstances give
them. There was Lem Baker, till forty-nine he was a
sober man, spoke at all the temperance meetings, and
never showed the least mercy for those who tasted
ardent spirits; before he was fifty, he was an awful
drunkard. And there was Eben Millet, who was so devoted
to his wife, and always leading about his children;
one scarce ever saw him without a child fastened to his
forefinger, and he was always talking about what his
wife thought and said and did; but on the fifteenth year
of his marriage, he went mad after a young woman, who
drove him to his grave.”

“These cases do not prove what the race is.”

“Race! there isn't but one race all over the world,
and Jason belongs to it.”

“The grovelling fools talk about him, do they? Why
do people marry twice?”

“Although I have been married twice, I don't think I
can tell you.”

“I did not know it.”

“The first time was long before you were born, when
Sarah Parke was growing up. My second wedding
came off when I was twenty-three. I then married Mr.
Rogers, who was forty-three.”

“I almost wish myself in the Arctic seas, among the
mute beasts.”

“The must be's are there, Philippa, as well as here;
but I am dreadful sorry I have upset you so. How
the afternoon has slipped away! I do believe it's getting
towards five o'clock.”

Jason was a welcome sight to her at this moment.
She had been no advantage to Philippa, that was certain;
but what would become of the wilful, innocent,
friendless girl, if Jason should bring a strange woman
into the house as his wife? That jade, Elsa, must have
been of her way of thinking, or she would not have left
her. With all her money, Philippa was no better off
than the poorest girl in Crest with a mother. Mrs.
Rogers felt little disappointment in her scheme as far as
Sam was concerned, for she had the fullest confidence in
his ability to weather any thing, from Cape Horn to the
stormiest passions which rage in the region of the soul.

They sat down to tea, and her first observation was,
“What a change!” The second embodied a joke, and
the third contained the exclamation, “Why, Jason, you
are getting gray.”

“I am old,” he replied.

“Philippa is growing old, too; she stays in the house
too much. Did you never think the house was damp?
It has been built near a hundred years; its beams and
foundation must be rotting.”

“It may fall on us some day,” said Philippa.

“I hope nobody will take the trouble to unroof us if
it happens,” said Jason.

“Be sure to let us alone, Mrs. Rogers,” Philippa
added.

“Old Mr. Turner's house came down by the run—you
recollect, Jason,” Mrs. Rogers remarked.

But he made no reply; he was occupied in observing
Philippa, for her last remark was an enigma to him. If
Mrs. Rogers had not been there, he would have prayed
for the walls to fall, for the sake of solving it. She
raised her eyes to his face, and was struck with an uneasy
surprise; it contained an information that caused
her to look about her, and discover where she was.
With a sudden instinct, forgetting the presence of Mrs.
Rogers, she asked him where the pocket-book was. He
indicated the fire, and asked her, in a gentle voice,
whether she had finished Robinson Crusoe.

“You haven't thieves in the neighborhood, have
you?” Mrs. Rogers inquired. “Becky Freeman was
telling me that her chickens had disappeared lately.”

“I should not be surprised if we had,” cried Philippa;
“how can we punish them?”

“There is a great deal of rubbish, that might as well
be stolen as not,” said Jason; “why should we punish
one for taking what he can't get except by stealing?”

“Why, Jason, where's your religion?” asked Mrs.
Rogers.

“Safe enough; whenever I want to use it, it will be
at hand.”

An argument set in between them, which was closed
by her declaring that she must go home, and attend to
her cat and parrot. Philippa accompanied her to the
gate, and watched her down the street; instead of returning
to the parlor, she went to her chamber, and spent
the evening in darkness.