CHAPTER XX
HEART OF GRACE
Marley sighed in relief when he went up the steps of the Blair house that evening. Somehow he had got through the long, desolate day. He was sore from his great defeat, but the worst, at any rate, was over; the pang had been sharp, but now the pain had been dulled. He had spent the day in the office. Wade Powell had been in and out, but never once had he spoken of the clerkship, and Marley was too deep in humiliation to mention it. His one consolation was in the fact that he had never told any one of his prospect, not even his own mother; it had been a secret which he and Lavinia had shared luxuriously; though, as Marley now looked back on their joy, he realized that what had kept him from telling any one was a prudent skepticism, a lack of faith in the possibility of human happiness, an inherited dread of the calamity that stalks every joy.
Lavinia flung the hall door wide for him before he could ring the bell.
“What is the matter?”
“How did you know anything was?” he asked.
“Why,” she exclaimed, “I could tell the minute I heard your step. Tell me—what is it?”
Marley, ever sensitive to atmospheres, instantly felt the peace of the household. The glow from the living-room, a quiet voice speaking a commonplace word now and then, told him that Mrs. Blair was there with Connie and Chad, and he knew the children were at their lessons; he caught the faint odor of a cigar, and he knew that Judge Blair was in his library reading peacefully of the dead and silent past, whose men had left all their troubles in the leaves of printed books; all round him life was flowing on, unconsciously, and normally; the tumult and strife in his own soul were nothing to the world. All this flashed on him in an instant—and there was Lavinia, standing before him, her white brow knit in perplexity.
“Tell me,” she was saying, “what it is.”
“Well, I don’t get the job, that’s all.”
He felt a momentary savage pleasure in the pain he inflicted, justifying it in the thought that he eased his own suffering by giving it to another. Then as quickly he repented, and felt ashamed.
“Is that all?” she said. She had come close to him, smiling in her sympathy, and then lifting a hand to his forehead.
“Don’t do that,” she said, as if she would erase the scowl.
When they were seated he gave her the details of his meeting with Carman, and with the recital of his disappointment its sharpness was repeated. He leaned over, his elbows on his knees, and clutched his hair in his fists. For an instant a kind of relief came to Lavinia, a relief that a crisis in her life had been postponed, a crisis from which, instinctively, she had shrunk. Her life could go on for a while as it had always gone on; change, which mortals dread, was delayed. Then in another moment her sympathy went out to him; she was on the floor at his knees, her arms about him.
“Don’t, dear, don’t,” she pleaded. “Why, it is nothing. What does it matter? What does anything matter, so long as we have each other?”
She stroked his hair, she called him by all her endearing names. She tried to take his hands from his face, that she might get him to look at her. But he resisted.
“No,” he said. “I’m no good; I’m a failure; I’m worse than a failure. I’m a fool, a poor, weak, silly fool.”
“Hush, Glenn, hush!” she whispered, as if he were uttering blasphemies. “You must not, you must not!”
She shook him in a kind of fear.
“Look at me!” she said. “Look at me!”
He remained obdurate, slowly shaking his head from side to side.
“Look at me!” Lavinia repeated. “Don’t you see—don’t you see that—I love you?”
A change came over him, subtile, but distinct. Slowly he raised his head, and then he put his arms about her and held her close, and gradually a comfort stole over him,—a comfort so delicious that he felt himself hardly worthy, because he now saw that all through the day he had had a subconsciousness that it would come to him at evening, and that he had somehow exaggerated his own grief in order to make this certain comfort the sweeter when it came.
It seemed to Marley, after he and Lavinia had sat there for a while, that he had come out of some nightmare; sanity returned, things assumed once more their proper proportions and relations to each other. He found himself smiling, if not laughing just yet, and with Lavinia’s hope and confidence the future opened to him once more. Now and then, of course, his disappointment would roll over him as a great wave, and once he said ruefully:
“But think of the little home we were going to have!”
“But we’re going to have it,” Lavinia replied, smiling on him, “we’re going to have it, just the same!”
“But we’ll have to wait!”
“Well, we’re young,” said Lavinia, “and it won’t be so very long.”
“But I wanted it to be in the spring.”
“May be it will be, who knows?” Lavinia could smile in this reassurance, now that she knew it could not be in the spring.
They discussed their future in all its phases, with the hope that Lavinia could so easily inspire in him; Marley was to keep on with his law studies; there was nothing else now to do—unless something should turn up—there was always that hope.
“And it will, you’ll see,” said Lavinia.
They discussed, too, Carman and Wade Powell. Marley thought that Lavinia might return to her old severity with Powell; when he expected her to do this, he was preparing to defend Powell; when she did not, but was generous with him, and urged Marley to reflect that he had done all he had done out of a spirit of kindness, Marley was disposed to be severe with Powell himself. Carman, they agreed, had acted handsomely; they could not find cause to blame him.
“No,” said Marley, “he treated me all right; I believe he was really sorry for me.”
And then, at the thought of Carman’s having pity for him, his rebellion flamed up again.
“It’s humiliating, that’s what it is. Wade Powell had no business making a monkey of me in that way; though it doesn’t take much to make a monkey of me; I had the job almost completed myself, just waiting for some one to come along and put the finishing touches on. And Wade Powell did that!”
Marley spoke in the sardonic humor the wounded and beaten spirit likes to employ in dealing with itself. But Lavinia hushed him.
“You just can not talk that way about yourself, Glenn,” she declared with her finest air of ownership. “I won’t let you.”
“Well, it’s so humiliating,” he said.
“Why, no, it can’t be that,” Lavinia argued. “You can not feel humiliated. You have done nothing that need cause you any humiliation. We are the only ones who can humiliate ourselves; nothing but our own actions can humiliate us; no one else can.”
Lavinia had a smiling little triumph in her own philosophy, but she quickly compromised it by an inconsistency.
“Besides, no one else knows about it.”
“No,” Marley agreed thoughtfully, and without noticing her inconsistency. “No one else knows anything about it. We have that to be thankful for, anyway.”
CHAPTER XXI
CHRISTMAS EVE
Lawrence was arranging for a grand ball in the Odd Fellows’ Hall, on Christmas Eve, and he had, as he came around to the office one day to assure Marley, counted him and Lavinia in. Marley, glad enough to close the law-book he was finding more and more irksome, listened to Lawrence’s enthusiasm for a while, but said at last:
“I’m afraid I can’t go.”
“Why not? Lavinia will want to go; she always does.”
“I know that,” Marley admitted, “but I can’t, that’s all.”
Lawrence looked at him intently for a moment.
“Say, Glenn, what’s the matter with you?” he said. “Anything been going wrong lately? You look like you were in the dumps.”
Marley shook his head with a negative gesture that admitted all Lawrence had said.
“You ain’t fretting over that job, are you?”
“What job?”
Marley looked up suddenly.
“Why, with Carman.”
“How’d you know?”
“Oh, everybody knows about that,” Lawrence replied with a light air that added to Marley’s gloom; “but what of it? I wouldn’t let that cut me up; come out and show yourself a little more! You don’t want to keep Lavinia housed up there, away from all the fun that’s going on, do you? Mayme and I were talking about it the other night; you and Lavinia haven’t been to a thing for months; it isn’t right, I tell you.”
Marley looked sharply at Lawrence for a minute, and Lawrence marking the resentment in his eyes, hastened on:
“Don’t get mad, now; I don’t mean anything. I’m only saying it for your good. I think you need a little shaking up, that’s all.”
“Lavinia can do as she likes,” Marley said with dignity. “I shall not hinder her; I never have.”
“Well, don’t get sore now, old man; I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. The holidays are here and you want to cut into the game; it’s a time to forget your troubles and have a little fun; you’ve only got one life to live; what’s the use of taking it so seriously?”
Marley looked at Lawrence with a genuine envy for an instant, as at a man who never took anything in life very seriously; he looked at the new overcoat Lawrence held over his knee, showing its satin lining; and then, reflecting that Lawrence’s father had left with his estate a block of bank stock which had given Lawrence his position in the bank, Marley’s impatience with him returned and he said:
“Oh, it’s easy enough for you to talk; if you were in my place you might find it different.”
“That’s all right,” Lawrence went on, a smile on his freckled face. “You just come to the party; it’ll cost you only five, and Lavinia would like it. I know that. So do you.”
Marley did know it; and he felt a new disgust with himself that remained with him long after Lawrence had put on his new overcoat and left. He reproached himself bitterly, and he told himself that the best thing he could do would be to go away somewhere, and not tell Lavinia, or anybody.
“I’m only in her way, that’s all,” he thought as he opened his law-book, and bent it back viciously, so that it would stay open.
Ever since the fiasco of his plans as to a place with Carman, he had been seeking consolation in a new resolution to keep on patiently in the law; but it was a consolation that he had to keep active by a constant contemplation of himself as a young man who was making a brave and determined fight against heavy odds. It was difficult to sustain this heroic attitude in his own eyes and at the same time maintain that modesty which he knew would become him best in the eyes of others. The approach of the holiday season, the visible preparations on every hand and the gay spirits everywhere apparent had isolated him more than ever, and he had felt his alienation complete whenever he went to see Lavinia and found the whole Blair family in an excitement over their own festival. Marley would have liked to make Lavinia handsome gifts, but his debts were already large, relatively, and he rose to heights of self-denial that made him pathetic to himself, when he decided that he could give her nothing. Now that Lawrence was getting up a ball to which he knew Lavinia would like to go, as she had always gone to the balls that were not so frequent in Macochee as Lawrence wished they might be, he felt his humiliation deeper than ever. He put the matter honestly to Lavinia, however, and she said promptly:
“Why, I wouldn’t think of going.”
She looked up at him brightly, and then in an instant she looked down again. She relished the nobility of the attitude she had so promptly taken, but the woman in her prevailed over the saint, and told what a moment before she had determined not to tell:
“I’ve already declined one invitation.”
She saw the look of pain come into Marley’s eyes, and instantly she regretted.
“You have?” he said.
“Why, yes.” She looked at him with her head turned to one side; her face wore an expression he did not like to see.
It was on Marley’s lips to ask who had invited her, but his pride would not let him do that; somehow a sense of separation fell suddenly between them. He examined with deep interest the arm of his chair.
“Well,” he began presently, “I wouldn’t have you stay away on my account, you know.” He looked up suddenly. “Please don’t stay away, Lavinia. I’d like to have you go.”
There was contrition in her voice as she almost flew to reply:
“Why, you dear old thing, it was only George Halliday who asked me; and when I told him I wouldn’t go he was actually relieved; he said he didn’t want to go himself; he hates our little functions out here, you know, and has ever since he came back from Harvard. I suppose he was used to so much more in Cambridge!” Lavinia had a sneer in her tone, and it took on a shade of irritation as she added: “He asked me only because he was sorry for me.”
“Yes, sorry for you,” Marley repeated bitterly. “That’s another thing I’ve done for you.”
“Please don’t, dear,” said Lavinia, “don’t let yourself get bitter. It’ll be all right. We’ll spend Christmas Eve here at home and have ever so much more fun by ourselves.”
Mrs. Blair told Marley that she wished Lavinia might go to the ball; her father wished it, too. Mrs. Blair told him that she could easily get George Halliday to take her,—their lifelong intimacy with the Hallidays permitted that. Marley assured her that he wished Lavinia to accept Halliday’s invitation, but that she would not do so.
“I’d take her myself,” he added, “only I can’t dance, and—I have no money. I’d like to have her go, if it would give her pleasure.”
“I know you would, you dear boy,” said Mrs. Blair, laying her hand on his shoulder in her affectionate way.
Mrs. Blair urged Lavinia to go, and so did Marley, and when he saw that she was determined not to go, he urged her all the more strongly, because, now that he was sure of her position, he could so much more enjoy his own disinterestedness and magnanimity. They desisted when Lavinia complained that they were making her life miserable.
Though Marley could deny Lavinia the dance, he found, after all, that he could not deny himself the distinction of giving her a Christmas present. His heroic attitude gradually broke under the temptation of Hoffman’s jewelry store, glittering with its holiday display. Marley already owed Hoffman for Lavinia’s ring, but like most of the merchants in Macochee, Hoffman had to do business on an elastic credit, if he wished to do any business at all, and Marley, after many pains of selection, did not have much difficulty in inducing Hoffman to let him have the pearl opera-glasses he finally chose in the despair of thinking of anything better.
The opera-glasses might have atoned for the deprivation of the ball, had Marley been able to think of them with any comfort. The delight Lavinia expressed in a gift she could never use in Macochee, and the enthusiasm with which Connie admired them, made him nervous and guilty. Connie had temporarily foregone her claims to young-ladyhood, and was a child again for a little while. Her excitement and that of Chad should have made any Christmas Eve merry, but it was not a merry Christmas Eve for Marley.
As Lavinia and he sat in the parlor they caught now and then, or imagined they caught, the strains of the orchestra that was playing for the dancers in the Odd Fellows’ Hall, and they were both conscious that life would be tolerable for them only when the music should cease and the ball take its place among the things of the past, incapable of further trouble in the earth.
“It’s very trying,” said Judge Blair to his wife that night. “I wish there was something we could do.”
“So do I,” his wife acquiesced.
“I don’t like to see Lavinia cut off this way from every enjoyment. The strain must be very wearing.”
“I suppose it is very wearing with most lovers,” said Mrs. Blair. “I don’t see how they ever endure it; but they all do.”
“Have you talked with her about it?” The judge put his question with a guarded look, and was not surprised when his wife quickly replied:
“Gracious, no. I’d never dare.”
“No, I presume not. I don’t know who would, unless it might be Connie.”
Mrs. Blair was silent for a while in the trouble that was all the more serious because they dared not recognize its seriousness, and then she asked:
“Couldn’t you help him to something?”
“I don’t know what,” the judge replied. “There’s really no opening in a little town.”
“If you were off the bench and back in the practice—”
“Great heavens!” he interrupted her. “Don’t mention such a thing!”
“I meant that you might take him in with you.”
“I’d be looking around for some one to take me in,” the judge said. “I’m glad I haven’t the problem to face.” He enjoyed for a moment the snug sense he had in his own position and then he sighed.
“He’s young, he has that, anyway. He’ll work it out somehow, I suppose, though I don’t know how. As for us, all we can do is to have patience, and wait.”
“Yes, that’s all,” said Mrs. Blair. “I don’t believe in long engagements.”
“How long has it been?” he asked.
“Nearly a year now.”
“I thought it had been ten.”
Mrs. Blair laughed as she said: “Connie was wishing this morning that he’d marry her and get it over with.”
CHAPTER XXII
AN ADVERTISEMENT OF DESTINY
The first days of spring contrasted strongly with Marley’s mood. Because of some mysterious similarity in the two seasons he found the melancholy suggestion of fall in this spring, just as, with his high-flown hopes, he had found some of the joyous suggestion of spring in the autumn before. But as failure followed failure, he began to feel more and more an alien in Macochee; he had a sense of exile among his own kind, he was tortured by the thought that here, in a world where each man had some work to do and where, as it seemed, all men had suddenly grown happy in that work, there was no work for him to do.
He was young, healthy, and ambitious; he had given years to what he had been taught was a necessary preparation, and then suddenly, just as he felt himself ready for life, he found that there was no place in life for him. As he went about seeking employment there was borne in on him a sense of criticism and opposition, and he was depressed and humiliated. By the end of the winter he disliked showing himself anywhere; he no longer stopped in the McBriar House of an afternoon to watch Lawrence and Halliday at the billiards they played so well; he thought he detected a coolness in Lawrence’s treatment of him. He felt, or imagined, this coolness in everybody’s attitude now, and finally began to suspect it in the Blairs.
“What’s the matter?” asked Powell, one morning. “You ain’t sick, are you?”
Marley shook his head.
“Well, something ails you. I can see that.” He waited for Marley to speak. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No,” said Marley, “thank you. I’ve just been feeling a little bit blue, that’s all.”
“What about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m kind o’ discouraged. It seems to me that I’m wasting time; I’m not making any headway and then everybody in town is—”
“I wouldn’t mind that,” said Powell, divining the trouble at once. “They’ve had me on the gridiron for about forty years, and they never get tired of giving it a twist. It doesn’t bother me much any more, and I don’t see why you should let it bother you, especially as all they say about you is a damn lie.”
The speech touched Marley, and he lost himself in an impulse of sympathy for Powell, but he could not put his sympathy before Powell in the way he would like and his mind soon returned to himself.
“I’ve got to do something,” he said. “I wish I knew what.”
“Well,” said Powell, “you know what I’ve always told you. I know what I’d do if I were your age. Of course—”
Powell did not finish his sentence. He was looking out the window again, lost in introspection.
Powell’s reiteration of his old advice expressed the very thought that had been nebulous in Marley’s mind for days, and while he was conscious of it, he feared the consciousness, and struggled to prevent it from positing itself. But now that Powell had voiced it for him, he could escape it no longer, and it filled him with a fear. He went about all the day with this fear appalling him; more and more under its perverse influence he felt himself an alien, and the people he met in the street seemed unreal and strange, outlandish persons whom he had never known. They came upon him as ghosts, or if they did something to prove their reality, he seemed to be some ghost himself.
In the afternoon he received a note from Lavinia; she said that she was going that evening with George Halliday to a concert in the Opera House. She did not want to go a bit, she said, but her mother, and especially her father, had urged her to go; arguing that she now went out so seldom that it must do her good, and besides, they had urged her so often that she felt it to be her duty in this instance; she had held out as long as she could, and then had yielded.
Marley tried to look upon the note reasonably; he could see the influence that had compelled Lavinia to go, and he knew he had no right to blame her, and yet, try as he would, he could not escape a feeling of bitterness. When he went home at evening his mother instantly noticed his depression, and implored him for the reason. He did not answer for a while, that is, it seemed a while to Mrs. Marley, but at last he said:
“Mother, I’ve got to leave.”
“Leave?” she repeated, pronouncing the word in a hollow note of fear.
“Yes, leave.”
“But what for?”
“Well, you know I’m no good; I’m making no headway; there’s no place for me here in Macochee; I’ve got to get out into the world and make a place for myself, somewhere.”
“But where?”
“I don’t know—anywhere.”
Marley moved his hand in a wide gesture that included the whole world, and yet was without hope of conquest.
“But you must have some plans—some idea—”
“Well, I’ve thought of going to Cincinnati; maybe to Chicago.”
“But what will you do?” Mrs. Marley looked at him with pain and alarm.
“Do!” he said, his voice rising almost angrily. “Why, anything I can get to do. Anything, anything, sweeping streets, digging ditches, anything!”
Mrs. Marley looked at her son, sitting there before her with his head bowed in his hands. In her own face were reflected the pain and trouble that darkened his, and yet she felt herself helpless; she vaguely realized that he was engaged in a battle that he must after all fight alone; she could not help him, though she wished that she knew how to impart to him the faith she had that he would win the battle, somehow, in the end.
“Poor boy!” she said at length, rising; “you are not yourself just now. Think it all over and talk to your father about it.”
It was the first evening in months that Marley had not spent with Lavinia, and his existence being now so bound up with hers, he found that he could not spend the evening as the other young men in town spent their evenings. However, he went down to the McBriar House and there a long bill hanging on the wall instantly struck his eye. The bill announced an excursion to Chicago. It took away his breath; he stood transfixed before it, fascinated and yet repelled; he read it through a dozen times. The cheerful way in which the railroad held out this trip intensified his own gloom; he wondered how he might escape, but there was no way; it was plainly the revelation of his destiny, prophetic, absolute, final, and he bowed before it as to a decree of fate; he knew now that he must go.
As he went home, as he walked the dark streets in the air that was full of the balm of the coming spring, he felt as one to whom a great sorrow had come. He thought of leaving Macochee, of leaving his father and mother, and then, more than all, of leaving Lavinia, and his throat ached with the pain of parting that, even now, before any of his plans had been made, began to assail him. His plans were nothing now; they had become the merest details; the great decision had been reached, not by him, but for him; the destiny toward which all the lines of his existence for months had been converging, was on him, the moment had arrived, and he had a sense of being the mute and helpless victim of forces that were playing with him, hurrying him along to a future as dark as the moonless night above him.
He told his father of the excursion, though he gave him no notion of it as an expression of his fate, and he was all the more distressed at the calm way in which his father acquiesced in what he put before him as a decision he would have liked to have appear as less final. His father in his mildness could not object to his trying, and he would provide the money for the experiment. It gave Marley a moment’s respite to have his father speak of it as an experiment, for that included the possibility of failure, and hence of his return home, but this meager consolation was immediately dissipated in the surer sense he felt that this was the end—the end of Macochee, the end of home, and the beginning of a new life.