Man, Women and Ghosts by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward - HTML preview

However that might be, that October morning ushered Sharley upon

battle-ground; nor was the struggle the less severe that, she was so

young and so unused to struggling.

I have to tell of nothing new or tragic in the child's days; only of the

old, slow, foolish pain that gnaws at the roots of things. Something was

the matter with the sunsets and the dawns. Moonrise was an agony. The

brown and golden grass had turned dull and dead. She would go away up

garret and sit with her fingers in her ears, that she might not hear the

frogs chanting in the swamp at twilight.

One night she ran away from her father and mother. It chanced to be an

anniversary of their wedding-day; they had kissed each other after tea

and talked of old times and blushed a little, their married eyes

occupied and content with one another; she felt with a sudden, dreary

bitterness that she should not be missed, and so ran out into the field

and sat down there on her stone in the dark. She rather hoped that they

would wonder where she was before bedtime. It would be a bit of comfort.

She was so cold and comfortless. But nobody thought of her; and when she

came weakly up the yard at ten o'clock, the door was locked.

For a week she went about her work like a sleepwalker.

Her future was

settled. Life was over. Why make ado? The suns would set and the moons

would rise: let them; there would always be suns to set and moons to

rise. There were dinners to get and stockings to mend; there would

always be dinners to get and stockings to mend. She was put into the

world for the sake of dinners and stockings, apparently.

Very well; she

was growing used to it; one could grow used to it. She put away the

barbe and the pink muslin, locked her ribbon-box into the lower drawer,

gave up crimping her hair, and wore the chocolate calico all day. She

went to the Thursday-evening conference, discussed the revival with

Deacon Snow, and locked herself into her room one night to put the lamp

on the bureau before the glass and shake her soft hair down about her

colorless, inexpectant face, to see if it were not turning gray. She was

disappointed to find it as brown and bright as ever.

But Sharley was very young, and the sweet, persistent hopes of youth

were strong in her. They woke up presently with a sting like the sting

of a frost-bite.

"O, to think of being an old maid, in a little black silk apron, and

having Halcombe Dike's wedding-cards laid upon a shelf!"

She was holding the baby when this "came all over her,"

and she let him

drop into the coal-hod, and sat down to cry.

What had she done that life should shut down before her in such cruel

bareness? Was she not young, very young to be unhappy?

She began to

fight a little with herself and Providence in savage mood; favored the

crimped hair and Scotch plaids again, tried a nutting-party and a

sewing-circle, as well as a little flirtation with Jim Snow. This lasted

for another week. At the end of that time she went and sat down alone

one noon on a pile of kindlings in the wood-house, and thought it over.

"Why, I can't!" her eyes widening with slow terror.

"Happiness _won't_

come. I _can't_ make it. I can't ever make it. And O, I'm just at the

beginning of everything!"

Somebody called her just then to peel the potatoes for dinner. She

thought--she thought often in those days--of that fancy of hers about

calico-living. Was not that all that was left for her?

Little dreary,

figures, all just alike, like the chocolate morning-dress? O, the

rose-bud and shimmer that might have been waiting somewhere! And O, the

rose-bud and shimmer that were forever gone!

The frosted golds of autumn melted into a clear, sharp, silvered

winter, carrying Sharley with them, round on her old routine. It never

grew any the easier or softer. The girl's little rebellious feet trod it

bitterly. She hated the darning and the sweeping and the baking and the

dusting. She hated the sound of the baby's worried cry.

She was tired of

her mother's illnesses, tired of Moppet's mischief, tired of

Methuselah's solemnity. She used to come in sometimes from her walk to

the office, on a cold, moonlight evening, and stand looking in at them

all through the "keeping-room" window,--her father prosing over the

state of the flour-market, her mother on the lounge, the children

waiting for her to put them to bed; Methuselah poring over his

arithmetic in his little-old-mannish way; Moppet tying the baby and the

kitten together,--stand looking till the hot, shamed blood shot to her

forehead, for thought of how she was wearied of the sight.

"I can't think what's got into Sharley," complained her mother; "she has

been as cross as a bear this good while. If she were eight years old,

instead of eighteen, I should give her a good whipping and send her to

bed!"

Poor Sharley nursed her trouble and her crossness together, in her

aggrieved, girlish way, till the light went out of her wistful eyes, and

little sharp bones began to show at her wrists. She used to turn them

about and pity them. They were once so round and winsome!

Now it was probably a fact that, as for the matter of hard work,

Sharley's life was a sinecure compared to what it would be as the wife

of Halcombe Dike. Double your toil into itself, and triple it by the

measure of responsibility, and there you have your married life, young

girls,--beautiful, dim Eden that you have made of it!

But there was

never an Eden without its serpent, I fancy. Besides, Sharley, like the

rest of them, had not thought as far as that.

Then--ah then, what toil would not be play-day for the sake of Halcombe

Dike? what weariness and wear could be too great, what pain too keen, if

they could bear it together?

O, you mothers! do you not see that this makes "a' the difference"? You

have strength that your daughter knows not of. There are hands to help

you over the thorns (if not, there ought to be). She gropes and cuts her

way alone. Be very patient with her in her little moods and

selfishnesses. No matter if she might help you more about the baby: be

patient. Her position in your home is at best an anomalous one,--a grown

woman, with much of the dependence of a child. She must have all the

jars and tasks and frets of family life, without the relief of

housewifely invention and authority. God and her own heart will teach

her in time what she owes to you. Never fear for that.

But bear long

with her. Do not exact too much. The life you give her did not come at

her asking. Consider this well; and do not press the debt beyond its

due.

"I don't see that there is ever going to be any end to anything!"

gasped Sharley at night between Moppet's buttons.

This set her to thinking. What if one made an end?

She went out one cold, gray afternoon in the thick of a snow-storm and

wandered up and down the railroad. It was easy walking upon the

sleepers, the place was lonely, and she had come out to be alone. She

liked the beat of the storm in her face for a while, the sharp turns of

the wind, and the soft touch of the snow that was drifting in little

heaps about her feet. Then she remembered of how small use it was to

like anything in the world now, and her face grew as wild as the storm.

Fancy yourself hemmed in with your direst grief by a drifting sleet in

such a voiceless, viewless place as that corpse-like track,--the

endless, painless track, stretching away in the white mystery, at peace,

like all dead things.

What Sharley should have done was to go home as straight as she could

go, put on dry stockings, and get her supper. What she did was to

linger, as all people linger, in the luxury of their first

wretchedness,--till the uncanny twilight fell and shrouded her in. Then

a thought struck her.

A freight-train was just coming in, slowly but heavily.

Sharley, as she

stepped aside to let it pass, fixed her eyes upon it for a moment, then,

with a little hesitation, stopped to pick up a bit of iron that lay at

her feet,--a round, firm rod-end,--and placed it diagonally upon the

rail. The cars rumbled by and over it. Sharley bent to see. It was

crushed to a shapeless twist. Her face whitened. She sat down and

shivered a little. But she did not go home. The Evening Accommodation

was due now in about ten minutes.

Girls, if you think I am telling a bit of sensational fiction, I wish

you would let me know.

"It would be quick and easy," thought Sharley. The man of whom she had

read in the Journal last night,--they said he must have found it all

over in an instant. An instant was a very short time!

And forty

years,--and the little black silk apron,--and the cards laid up on a

shelf! O, to go out of life,--anywhere, anyhow, out of life! No, the

Sixth Commandment had nothing to do with ending one's self!

An unearthly, echoing shriek broke through the noise of the

storm,--nothing is more unearthly than a locomotive in a storm. Sharley

stood up,--sat down again. A red glare struck the white mist, broadened,

brightened, grew.

Sharley laid her head down with her small neck upon the rail, and--I am

compelled to say that she took it up again faster than she laid it down.

Took it up, writhed off the track, tumbled down the banking, hid her

face in a drift, and crouched there with the cold drops on her face till

the hideous, tempting thing shot by.

"I guess con-sumption would be--a--little better!" she decided,

crawling to her feet.

But the poor little feet could scarcely carry her. She struggled to the

street, caught at the fences for a while, then dropped.

Somebody stumbled over her. It was Cousin Sue--Halcombe Dike's Cousin

Sue.

"Deary me!" she said; and being five feet seven, with strong Yankee arms

of her own, she took Sharley up in them, and carried her to the house as

if she had been a baby.

Sharley did not commit the atrocity of fainting, but found herself

thoroughly chilled and weak. Cousin Sue bustled about with brandy and

blankets, and Sharley, watching her through her half-closed eyes,

speculated a little. Had _she_ anybody's wedding-cards laid up on a

shelf? She had the little black apron at any rate. Poor Cousin Sue!

Should she be like that? "Poor Cousin Charlotte!" people would say.

Cousin Sue had gone to see about supper when Sharley opened her eyes and

sat strongly up. A gentle-faced woman sat between her and the light, in

a chair cushioned upon one side for a useless arm.

Halcombe had made

that chair. Mrs. Dike had been a busy, cheery woman, and Sharley had

always felt sorry for her since the sudden day when paralysis crippled

her good right hand; three years ago that was now; but she was not one

of those people to whom it comes natural to say that one is sorry for

them, and she was Halcombe's mother, and so Sharley had never said it.

It struck her freshly now that this woman had seen much ill-fortune in

her widowed years, and that she had kept a certain brave, contented look

in her eyes through it all.

It struck her only as a passing thought, which might never have come

back had not Mrs. Dike pushed her chair up beside her, and given her a

long, quiet look straight in the eyes.

"It was late for you to be out in the storm, my dear, and alone."

"I'd been out a good while. I had been on--the track,"

said Sharley,

with a slight shiver. "I think I could not have been exactly well. I

would not go again. I must go home now. But oh"--her voice sinking--"I

wish nobody had found me, I wish nobody had found me!

The snow would

have covered me up, you see."

She started up flushing hot and frightened. What had she been saying to

Halcombe's mother?

But Halcombe's mother put her healthy soft hand down on the girl's shut

fingers. Women understand each other in flashes.

"My dear," she said, without prelude or apology, "I have a thing to say

to you. God does not give us our troubles to think about; that's all. I

have lived more years than you. I know that He never gives us our

troubles to think about."

"I don't know who's going to think about them if we don't!" said

Sharley, half aggrieved.

"Supposing nobody thinks of them, where's the harm done?

Mark my words,

child: He sends them to drive us out of ourselves,--to _drive_ us out.

He had much rather we would go of our own accord, but if we won't go we

must be sent, for go we must. That's just about what we're put into this

world for, and we're not fit to go out of it till we have found this

out."

Now the moralities of conversation were apt to glide off from Sharley

like rain-drops from gutta-percha, and I cannot assert that these words

would have made profound impression upon her had not Halcombe Dike's

mother happened to say them.

Be that as it may, she certainly took them home with her, and pondered

them in her heart; pondered till late in her feverish, sleepless night,

till her pillow grew wet, and her heart grew still.

About midnight she

jumped out into the cold, and kneeled, with her face hidden in the bed.

"O, I've been a naughty girl!" she said, just as she might have said it

ten years ago. She felt so small, and ignorant, and weak that night.

Out of such smallness, and ignorance, and weakness great knowledge and

strength may have beautiful growth. They came in time to Sharley, but it

was a long, slow time. Moppet was just as unendurable, the baby just as

fretful, life just as joyless, as if she had taken no new outlook upon

it, made no new, tearful plans about it.

"Calico! calico!" she cried out a dozen times a day;

"nothing _but_

calico!"

But by and by it dawned in her thoughts that this was a very little

matter to cry out about. What if God meant that some lives should be

"all just alike," and like nothing fresh or bonnie, and that hers should

be one? That was his affair. Hers was to use the dull gray gift he

gave--_whatever_ gift he gave--as loyally and as cheerily as she would

use treasures of gold and rose-tint. He knew what he was doing. What he

did was never forgetful or unkind. She felt--after a long time, and in a

quiet way--that she could be sure of that.

No matter about Halcombe Dike, and what was gone. No matter about the

little black aprons, and what was coming. He understood all about that.

He would take care of it.

Meantime, why could she not as well wash Moppet's face with a pleasant

word as with a cross one? darn the stockings with a smile as well as a

frown? stay and hear her mother discuss her headaches as well as run

away and think of herself? Why not give happiness since she could not

have it? be of use since nobody was of much use to her?

Easier saying

than doing, to be sure, Sharley found; but she kept the idea in mind as

the winter wore away.

She was thinking about it one April afternoon, when she had stolen out

of the house for a walk in the budding woods. She had need enough of a

walk. It was four weeks now since she had felt the wide wind upon her

face; four weeks pleasantly occupied in engineering four boys through

the measles; and if ever a sick child had the capacity for making of

himself a seraph upon earth it was Moppet. It was a thin little face

which stood out against the "green mist" of the unfurling leaves as

Sharley wandered in and out with sweet aimlessness among the elms and

hickories; very thin, with its wistful eyes grown hollow; a shadow of

the old Sharley who fluttered among the plaid ribbons one October

morning. It was a saddened face--it might always be a saddened face--but

a certain pleasant, rested look had worked its way about her mouth, not

unlike the rich mellowness of a rainy sunset. Not that Sharley knew much

about sunsets yet; but she thought she did, which, as I said before,

amounts to about the same thing.

She was thinking with a wee glow of pleasure how the baby's arms clung

around her neck that morning, and how surprised her mother looked when

Methuselah cried at her taking this walk. As you were warned in the

beginning, nothing remarkable ever happened to Sharley.

Since she had

begun in practice to approve Mrs. Dike's theory, that no harm is done if

we never think of our troubles, she had neither become the village idol,

nor in any remarkable degree her mother's pride. But she had

nevertheless cut for herself a small niche in the heart of her home,--a

much larger niche, perhaps, than the excellent Mrs.

Guest was well aware

of.

"I don't care how small it is," cried Sharley, "as long as I have room

to put my two feet on and look up."

And for that old pain? Ah, well, God knew about that, and

Sharley,--nobody else. Whatever the winter had taught her she had bound

and labelled in her precise little way for future use.

At least she had

learned--and it is not everybody who learns it at eighteen,--to wear her

life bravely--"a rose with a golden thorn."

I really think that this is the place to end my story, so properly

polished off with a moral. So many Sharleys, too, will never read

beyond. But being bound in honor to tell the whole moral or no moral, I

must add, that while Sharley walked and thought among her hickories

there came up a thunder-storm. It fell upon her without any warning. The

sky had been clear when she looked at it last. It gaped at her now out

of the throats of purple-black clouds. Thunders crashed over and about

her. All the forest darkened and reeled. Sharley was enough like other

girls to be afraid of a thunder-storm. She started with a cry to break

her way through the matted undergrowth; saw, or felt that she saw, the

glare of a golden arrow overhead; threw out her hands, and fell crushed,

face downward, at the foot of a scorched tree.

When she opened her eyes she was sitting under a wood-pile. Or, to

speak more accurately, she was sitting in Mr. Halcombe Dike's lap, and

Mr. Halcombe Dike was under the wood-pile.

It was a low, triangular wood-pile, roofed with pine boards, through

which the water was dripping. It stood in the centre of a large

clearing, exposed to the rain, but safe.

"Oh!" said Sharley.

"That's right," said he, "I knew you were only stunned.

I've been

rubbing your hands and feet. It was better to come here than to run the

blockade of that patch of woods to a house. Don't try to talk."

"I'm not," said Sharley, with a faint little laugh,

"it's you that are

talking"; and ended with a weak pause, her head falling back where she

had found it, upon his arm.

"I _wouldn't_ talk," repeated the young man, relevantly, after a

profound silence of five minutes. "I was coming 'across lots' from the

station. You fell--Sharley, you fell right at my feet!"

He spoke carelessly, but Sharley, looking up, saw that his face was

white.

"I believe I will get down," she observed, after some consideration,

lifting her head.

"I don't see how you can, you know," he suggested, helplessly; "it pours

as straight as a deluge out there. There isn't room in this place for

two people to sit."

So they "accepted the situation."

The clouds broke presently, and rifts of yellow light darted in through

the fragrant, wet pine boards. Sharley's hair had fallen from her net

and covered her face. She felt too weak to push it away.

After some

thought Halcombe Dike pushed it away for her, reverently, with his

strong, warm hand. The little white, trembling face shone out. He turned

and looked at it--the poor little face!--looked at it gravely and long.

But Sharley, at the look, sat up straight. Her heart leaped out into the

yellow light. All her dreary winter danced and dwindled away. Through

the cracks in the pine boards a long procession of May-days came filing

in. The scattering rain-drops flamed before her. "All the world and all

the waters blushed and bloomed." She was so very young!

"I could not speak," he told her quietly, "when I was at home before. I

could never speak till now. Last October I thought"--his voice sinking

hoarsely--"I thought, Sharley, it could never be. I could barely eke out

my daily bread; I had no right to ask you--to bind you.

You were very

young; I thought, perhaps, Sharley, you might forget.

Somebody else

might make you happier. I would not stand in the way of your happiness.

I asked God to bless you that morning when I went away in the cars,

Sharley. Sharley!"

Something in her face he could not understand. All that was meant by

the upturned face perhaps he will never understand. She hid it in her

bright, brown hair; put her hand up softly upon his cheek and cried.

"If you would like to hear anything about the business part of it--"

suggested the young man, clearing his throat. But Sharley "hated

business." She would not hear.

"Not about the Crumpet Buildings? Well, I carried that affair

through,--that's all."

They came out under the wide sky, and walked home hand in hand. All the

world was hung with crystals. The faint shadow of a rainbow quivered

across a silver cloud.

The first thing that Sharley did when she came home was to find Moppet

and squeeze him.

"O Moppet, we can be good girls all the same if we are happy, can't we?"

"No, sir!" said injured Moppet. "You don't catch me!"

"But O Moppet, see the round drops hanging and burning on the blinds!

And how the little mud-puddles shine, Moppet!"

Out of her pain and her patience God had brought her beautiful answer.

It was well for Sharley. But if such answer had not come? That also

would have been well.

Kentucky's Ghost.

True? Every syllable.

That was a very fair yarn of yours, Tom Brown, very fair for a landsman,

but I'll bet you a doughnut I can beat it; and all on the square, too,

as I say,--which is more, if I don'