William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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it."
Marcia leaned forward, and brushed a tendril of the baby's hair out of its eye. "She's the greatest little sleeper that ever was when she gets into her carriage," she half mused, leaning back with her hands folded in her lap, and setting her head on one side for the effect of the baby without the stray ringlet. "She's getting so fat!" she said, proudly.
Halleck smiled. "Do you find it makes a difference in pushing her carriage, from day to day?"
Marcia took his question in earnest, as she must take anything but the most obvious pleasantry concerning her baby. "The carriage runs very easily; we picked out the lightest one we could, and I never have any trouble with it, except getting up curbstones and crossing Cambridge Street. I don't like to cross Cambridge Street, there are always so many horse-cars. But it's all down-hill coming here: that's one good thing."
"That makes it a very bad thing going home, though," said Halleck.
"Oh, I go round by Charles Street, and come up the hill from the other side; it isn't so steep there."
There was no more to be said upon this point, and in the lapse of their talk Halleck broke off some boughs of the blooming pear, and dropped them on the baby's afghan.
"Your mother won't like your spoiling her pear-tree," said Marcia, seriously.
"She will when she knows that I did it for Miss Hubbard."
"Miss Hubbard!" repeated the young mother, and she laughed in fond derision. "How funny to hear you saying that! I thought you hated babies!"
Halleck looked at her with strong self-disgust, and he dropped the bough which he had in his hand upon the ground. There is something in a young man's ideal of women, at once passionate and ascetic, so fine that any words are too gross for it. The event which intensified the interest of his mother and sisters in Marcia had abashed Halleck; when she came so proudly to show her baby to them all, it seemed to him like a mockery of his pity for her captivity to the love that profaned her. He went out of the room in angry impatience, which he could hardly hide, when one of his sisters tried to make him take the baby. Little by little his compassion adjusted itself to the new conditions; it accepted the child as an element of her misery in the future, when she must realize the hideous deformity of her marriage. His prophetic feeling of this, and of her inaccessibility to human help here and hereafter, made him sometimes afraid of her; but all the more severely he exacted of his ideal of her that she should not fall beneath the tragic dignity of her fate through any levity of her own. Now, at her innocent laugh, a subtile irreverence, which he was not able to exorcise, infused itself into his sense of her.
He stood looking at her, after he dropped the pear-bough, and seeing her mere beauty as he had never seen it before. The bees hummed in the blossoms, which gave out a dull, sweet smell; the sunshine had the luxurious, enervating warmth of spring. He started suddenly from his reverie: Marcia had said something. "I beg your pardon?" he queried.
"Oh, nothing. I asked if you knew where I went to church yesterday?"
Halleck flushed, ashamed of the wrong his thoughts, or rather his emotions, had done. "No, I don't," he answered.
"I was at your church."
"I ought to have been there myself," he returned, gravely, "and then I should have known."
She took his self-reproach literally. "You couldn't have seen me. I was sitting pretty far back, and I went out before any of your family saw me. Don't you go there?"
"Not always, I'm sorry to say. Or, rather, I'm sorry not to be sorry. What church do you generally go to?"
"Oh, I don't know. Sometimes to one, and sometimes to another. Bartley used to report the sermons, and we went round to all the churches then. That is the way I did at home, and it came natural to me. But I don't like it very well. I want Flavia should belong to some particular church."
"There are enough to choose from," said Halleck, with pensive sarcasm.
"Yes, that's the difficulty. But I shall make up my mind to one of them, and then I shall always keep to it. What I mean is that I should like to find out where most of the good people belong, and then have her be with them," pursued Marcia. "I think it's best to belong to some church, don't you?"
There was something so bare, so spiritually poverty-stricken, in these confessions and questions, that Halleck found nothing to say to them. He was troubled, moreover, as to what the truth was in his own mind. He answered, with a sort of mechanical adhesion to the teachings of his youth, "I should be a recreant not to think so. But I'm not sure that I know what you mean by belonging to some church," he added. "I suppose you would want to believe in the creed of the church, whichever it was."
"I don't know that I should be particular," said Marcia, with perfect honesty.
Halleck laughed sadly. "I'm afraid they would, then, unless you joined the Broad Church."
"What is that?" He explained as well as he could. At the end she repeated, as if she had not followed him very closely: "I should like her to belong to the church where most of the good people went. I think that would be the right one, if you could only find which it is." Halleck laughed again. "I suppose what I say must sound very queer to you; but I've been thinking a good deal about this lately."
"I beg your pardon," said Halleck. "I had no reason to laugh, either on your account or my own. It's a serious subject." She did not reply, and he asked, as if she had left the subject, "Do you intend to pass the summer in Boston?"
"No; I'm going down home pretty early, and I wanted to ask your mother what is the best way to put away my winter things."
"You'll find my mother very good authority on such matters," said Halleck. Through an obscure association with moths that corrupt, he added, "She's a good authority on church matters, too."
"I guess I shall talk with her about Flavia," said Marcia.
Cyrus came out of the house. "Mis' Halleck will be here in a minute. She's got to get red of a lady that's calling, first," he explained.
"I will leave you, then," said Halleck, abruptly.
"Good by," answered Marcia, tranquilly. The baby stirred; she pushed the carriage to and fro, without glancing after him as he walked away.
His mother came down the steps from the house, and kissed Marcia for welcome, and looked under the carriage-top at the sleeping baby. "How she does sleep!" she whispered.
"Yes," said Marcia, with the proud humility of a mother, who cannot deny the merit of her child, "and she sleeps the whole night through. I'm never up with her. Bartley says she's a perfect Seven-Sleeper. It's a regular joke with him,—her sleeping."
"Ben was a good baby for sleeping, too," said Mrs. Halleck, retrospectively emulous. "It's one of the best signs. It shows that the child is strong and healthy." They went on to talk of their children, and in their community of motherhood they spoke of the young man as if he were still an infant. "He has never been a moment's care to me," said Mrs. Halleck. "A well baby will be well even in teething."
"And I had somehow thought of him as sickly!" said Marcia, in self-derision.
Tears of instant intelligence sprang into his mother's eyes. "And did you suppose he was always lame?" she demanded, with gentle indignation. "He was the brightest and strongest boy that ever was, till he was twelve years old. That's what makes it so hard to bear; that's what makes me wonder at the way the child bears it! Did you never hear how it happened? One of the big boys, as he called him, tripped him up at school, and he fell on his hip. It kept him in bed for a year, and he's never been the same since; he will always be a cripple," grieved the mother. She wiped her eyes; she never could think of her boy's infirmity without weeping. "And what seemed the worst of all," she continued, "was that the boy who did it never expressed any regret for it, or acknowledged it by word or deed, though he must have known that Ben knew who hurt him. He's a man here, now; and sometimes Ben meets him. But Ben always says that he can stand it, if the other one can. He was always just so from the first! He