"AN EXCEEDING HIGH MOUNTAIN"

I

Robert Gray's first wife, Alys (Old Chester had hard work to swallow her name; "but it's better than any of your silly 'ie's,'" said Old Chester)--this first Mrs. Gray was a good deal of a trial to everybody.

She was not only "new," but foreign; not only foreign, but indifferent to Old Chester. Indeed, it took all Old Chester's politeness and Christian forbearance to invite Mrs. Robert Gray to tea--with the certainty that the invitation would be declined. She was an English girl whom Robert met somewhere in Switzerland--a heavy-eyed, silent creature, certainly a very beautiful woman, but most inefficient and sickly; and there were so many nice, sensible girls in Old Chester!

(However, there is no use saying things like that: as if a man ever married a girl because she was sensible!)

Yet young Gray certainly needed a sensible wife; his wealth was limited to character and good manners, plus a slender income as tutor in the Female Academy in Upper Chester. Excellent things, all; but a wife with sense (and money) would have been an agreeable addition to his circ.u.mstances. Whereas, this very beautiful English girl was a penniless governess, left stranded in Germany by an employer, who had, apparently, got tired of her. Robert Gray had met the poor, frightened creature, who was taking her wandering way back to England, and married her, frantic with rage at the way she had been treated. When he brought her home, he was so madly in love that he probably did not half appreciate Old Chester's patience with her queer ways. But the fact was, that for the few months she lived, she was so miserable that Old Chester could not help being patient, and forgiving her her half-sullen indifference, and her silence, and her distaste for life--even in Old Chester!

For in spite of Robert's adoration, in spite of all the ready friendliness about her, in spite of the birth of a baby girl, she seemed, as it were, to turn her face to the wall. She died when the child was about a week old. Died, the doctor said, only because, so far as he could see, she did not care to live.

"You ought to try to get better for the baby's sake," said Miss Rebecca Jones, who had come in to help nurse her. And the poor girl frowned and shook her head, the heavy, white lids falling over her dark eyes.

"I don't like it."

And Rebecca (who had too much good sense to be shocked by the vagaries of a sick woman) said, decidedly: "Oh, you'll learn to like her. Come, now, just try!"

But she did not seem to try; even though Robert, kneeling with his arm under her pillow, holding her languid hand to his lips, said, sobbing, "Oh, Alys, Alys--for G.o.d's sake--don't leave me--"

Then she opened her beautiful eyes and looked at him solemnly.

"Robert," she said, "I am sorry. I am--sorry. I--am--"

"What for, precious?" he entreated; "sorry for what? to leave me? Oh, Alys, then live, live, dear!"

"I--am--" she began; and then her voice trailed into eternity.

Miss Rebecca Jones hung about the house for a few days, to make the poor gentleman comfortable; then he was left alone with the child (purchased at so dreadful a cost) and one servant, and his daily work of teaching the polite languages at the Female Academy. Miss Rebecca's hard face softened whenever she thought of him; but all she could do for him was to go often to see the poor seven-months baby--which seemed for a time inclined to follow its mother.

Now it must be understood at once that Rebecca Jones was not a schemer, or a mean or vulgar woman. She was merely a hard-headed, honest-hearted product of years of public-school teaching, with a pa.s.sion for truth and no grace in telling it. She was sorry for Mr.

Gray, and sorry for the poor baby, who was being allowed, she said to herself, to grow up every which way; and sorry for the comfortless house left to the care of what she called "an uneducated servant-girl."

So, after school, and on Sat.u.r.day mornings, she used to go over to Mr.

Gray's house and bustle about to the bettering of several things.

Indeed, old Mr. Jones told her more than once that he didn't know what that there widower would do without her. And Rebecca said, truthfully enough, that she didn't know, either. And when she said it her heart warmed with something more than pity.

As for Robert Gray, dazed and absent, trying to do his duty at the Academy during the day, and coming home at night to look blankly at his child, he, too, did not know what he would have done that first year without Miss Rebecca's efficient kindness. He was so centred in his grief, and also of so gentle a nature, that he took the kindness as simply as a child might have done. Like many another sweet-minded man, he had not the dimmest idea of the possible effect of his rather courtly manner and his very delicate courtesy upon a woman of slightly different cla.s.s, whose life had been starved of everything romantic or beautiful. He became to sharp-tongued Miss Rebecca Jones a vision of romance; and, somehow, quite suddenly, about eighteen months after his wife's death, he discovered that he was going to marry her. In his startled astonishment, he realized that he had himself led up to her avowal of willingness by some talk about her kindness. Perhaps she had misunderstood his words; if she had, Robert Gray was not the man to offer an explanation.... However, after the first shock of being accepted, he was gently explicit:

"I realize that the child ought to have the care of a good woman, and therefore I--"

"I'll do my duty by her," Rebecca said.

"I want her brought up to love and reverence her mother. I want her brought up to be like her. It is for the child's sake that I--I marry again. I speak thus frankly, Miss Rebecca, because I so entirely respect you that I could not be anything but frank."

Rebecca's square face flushed over the high cheek-bones to the gaunt forehead and the spa.r.s.e hair; then her eyes looked pa.s.sionately into his. "I understand. Yes; I understand. And I will be good to your child, Mr. Gray."

And so he married her; and, when you come to think of it, it was a very sensible thing to do. Even Old Chester said he was very sensible. A man of thirty, with a baby--of course he ought to marry again! "But why on earth," said Old Chester, "when there are so many girls of his own cla.s.s!--not but what Rebecca Jones is a very worthy person."

Meanwhile, Rebecca, with hard conscientiousness, set herself to bring the child up. She trained her, and disciplined her, and made a painful point of talking to her about the first Mrs. Gray, according to her promise to teach her to "love and reverence her mother." The discipline sometimes made Robert Gray wince; but it was wise, and never unkind; so he never interfered;--but he left the room when it was going on. Once he said, nervously:

"I scarcely think, Mrs. Gray, that it is necessary to be quite so severe?"

"She must be made a good child," Rebecca answered.

"I am not afraid that she will not be a good child," Robert Gray said; "she is her mother's daughter."

"Well, she is her father's daughter, too," Rebecca declared, briefly.

And her husband, shrinking, said:

"Light is stronger than darkness; Alice's mother was a creature of light. I am not afraid of her inheritance of darkness."

As for Rebecca, she went away and shut herself up in the garret.

"'Creature of light!'" she said, sitting on the floor under the rafters, and leaning her head on an old horsehair-covered trunk wherein were packed away Mr. Gray's winter flannels--"well, I am a good wife to him, if I ain't a 'creature of light.'"

Yes, she was a good wife.... How carefully she put his flannels away in May; how prudently she planned his food; how she managed to make the two ends of his little income meet--yes, and lap over, so that every summer he could go away from her for a two months' vacation in the woods! Not once did he find a b.u.t.ton lacking; not once had he put on a clean pair of stockings and then pulled them off because of a hole in the heel. Can our lords say as much, my mistresses? I trow not! Yes, a good wife: that lovely being who left the world with a faint, unfinished regret upon her pitiful lips could never have made him so comfortable.

Indeed, the whole household revolved upon Robert's comfort. Every domestic arrangement had reference to his well-being. That he did not become intolerably selfish was not Rebecca's fault, for, like many good wives, she was absolutely without conscience in the matter of self-sacrifice; but Robert escaped spiritual corruption, thanks to his own very gentle nature and his absolute unconsciousness of the situation. Perhaps, too, Rebecca's tongue mitigated the spoiling process. She never spared him what she considered to be the truth about himself or Alice. But her truthfulness stopped here; she spared the dead, perforce. For what could she say ill of that beautiful creature whose only wrong-doing lay in dying? But she knew, with shame, that she would have liked to speak ill of her--in which reprehensible impulse to remove a fellow-being from a pedestal, Rebecca showed herself singularly like the rest of us.

In this bleak air of unselfishness and truth-telling, Robert Gray became more and more aloof. Gradually he retreated quite into his past, doing his daily work at the Academy--where successive cla.s.ses of young ladies adored him for his gentle manners and his mild, brown eyes--and living very harmlessly with his memories, which he kept fresh and fragrant by sharing them with Alys's daughter, who, it must be admitted, being young and human, was not always intensely interested; but Rebecca had trained her too well for Alice ever to show any weariness. Robert kept his little collection of pictures and photographs of his first wife shut behind the curtained doors of an old secretary. If his second wife found him standing, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes wandering from one lovely presentment to another, he never displayed an embarra.s.sed consciousness, but he shut the doors.

He accepted Rebecca's devotion respectfully; he was never impolite, still less unkind; in fact, in all their married life he had never, she used to tell herself, spoken unkindly save once; and then his words were nothing more dreadful than, "We will not discuss it, if you please, Mrs. Gray." At first he had, very gently, made some grammatical suggestions; and she had profited by them, though, being a true Pennsylvanian, she never mastered "shall" and "will," nor did she lose the Pennsylvania love for the word 'just'; to the end of her days, Rebecca was 'just tired out'; or 'just real glad'; or 'just as busy as could be.' Grammar, however, was as far as Robert Gray went in any personal relation. He addressed her, in his courteous voice (always a little timidly), as "Mrs. Gray"; and he kept as much as possible out of her way. Meantime, Rebecca (remembering why he had married her) did her duty by the child, and never failed to mention, in her hard voice, that Alice must try to grow up like her mother.

"Make me a good girl," Alice used to say in her sleepy prayers every night--"make me a good girl, like my dear mother." Once, of her own accord, the child added, "And make me pretty like her, too." Rebecca, listening to the little figure at her knee, said, sternly, when Alice got up and began to climb into the big four-poster:

"Don't be vain. Don't ask G.o.d for foolish things. Beauty is foolish and favor is deceitful. Just ask Him to make you as good as your mother was."

And, indeed, it must be admitted that the child did not inherit her mother's wonderful beauty. At first her father had expected it; he used to take liberties with his Horace, and say:

"O filia pulchra matre pulchriore."

But as Alice grew older, Robert Gray had to admit that the dead woman had taken her beauty away with her. The child had just a pleasant face; eyes that were gray or blue, as it happened; a commonplace nose, and uncompromisingly red hair. In those days red hair was thought to be a mortifying affliction, and poor, plain Alice shed many tears over the rough, handsome shock of hair that broke into curls about her forehead and all around the nape of her pretty, white neck.

II

But in spite of red hair, and what Old Chester religiously believed to be its accompanying temper, Alice Gray was a lovable girl, and at twenty, behold, she had a lover; indeed, she had more than one (not counting Dr. Lavendar); but Alice never gave a thought to anybody but Luther Metcalf. Luther was a good boy, Old Chester said; but added that he would never set the river on fire.

Certainly he did not use his incendiary opportunity; he had a small printing-office, and he owned and edited Old Chester's weekly newspaper, the _Globe_; but neither the news nor the editorial page ever startled or displeased the oldest or the youngest inhabitant. The _Globe_ confined itself to carefully accredited cuttings from exchanges; it had a Poet's Corner, and it gave, politely, any Old Chester news that could be found; besides this, it devoted the inner sheet to discreet advertis.e.m.e.nts, widely s.p.a.ced to take up room. All Old Chester subscribed for it, and spoke of it respectfully, because it was a newspaper; and snubbed its editor, because he was one of its own boys--and without snubbing boys are so apt to put on airs! Poor Luther was never tempted to put on airs; he was too hard-worked and too anxious about his prospects. He and Alice were to get married when he and the _Globe_ were out of debt; for his father had left him a mortgage on the office building, as well as an unpaid-for press. When Luther was particularly low-spirited, he used to tell Alice it would take him five years to pay his debts; and, to tell the truth, that was an optimistic estimate, for the _Globe_ and the printing-office together did very little more than pay the interest on the notes and Luther's board.

So, when they became engaged, waiting was what they looked forward to, for, of course, Robert Gray could not help them; it was all Rebecca could do to stretch his salary to cover the expenses of their own household. But the two young people were happy enough, except when Luther talked about five years of waiting.

"We've been engaged two years already," he said, moodily; "I don't want to be another case of Andrew Steele."

"I'm not afraid," Alice said. "Why, if you get the new job press, and get that Mercer work, think how much that will help!"

"Well," Luther said, "yes; but if I get the press, there's another debt. And if I don't get it, I can't get the work; so there it is. A vicious circle."