"Probably," said Mercy, in a grave tone, suddenly recollecting that she ought not to talk with this man as if he were one of her own village people. The conductor, sensitive as are most New England people, spite of their apparent familiarity of address, to the least rebuff, felt the change in Mercy's tone, and walked away, thinking half surlily, "She needn't put on airs. A schoolma'am, I reckon. Wonder if it can be her that's going to teach the Academy?"
When they reached the station, it was, as the conductor had said, very dark; and it was raining hard. For the first time, a sense of her unprotected loneliness fell upon Mercy's heart. Her mother, but half-awake, clung nervously to her, asking purposeless and incoherent questions. The conductor, still surly from his fancied rebuff at Mercy's hands, walked away, and took no notice of them. The station-master was nowhere to be seen. The two women stood huddling together under one umbrella, gazing blankly about them.
"Is this Mrs. Philbrick?" came in clear, firm tones, out of the darkness behind them; and, in a second more, Mercy had turned and looked up into Stephen White's face.
"Oh, how good you were to come and meet us!" exclaimed Mercy. "You are Mr. Allen's friend, I suppose."
"Yes," said Stephen, curtly. "But I did not come to meet you. You must not thank me. I had business here. However, I made the one carriage which the town boasts, wait, in case you should be here. Here it is!" And, before Mercy had time to analyze or even to realize the vague sense of disappointment she felt at his words, she found herself and her mother placed in the carriage, and the door shut.
"Your trunks cannot go up until morning," he said, speaking through the carriage window; "but, if you will give me your checks, I will see that they are sent."
"We have only one small valise," said Mercy: "that was under our seat. The brakeman said he would take it out for us; but he forgot it, and so did I."
The train was already backing out of the station. Stephen smothered some very unchivalrous words on his lips, as he ran out into the rain, overtook the train, and swung himself on the last car, in search of the "one small valise" belonging to his tenants. It was a very shabby valise: it had made many a voyage with its first owner, Captain Carr. It was a very little valise: it could not have held one gown of any of the modern fashions.
"Dear me," thought Stephen, as he put it into the carriage at Mercy's feet, "what sort of women are these I've taken under my roof! I expect they'll be very unpleasing sights to my eyes. I did hope she'd be good-looking." How many times in after years did Stephen recall with laughter his first impressions of Mercy Philbrick, and wonder how he could have argued so unhesitatingly that a woman who travelled with only one small valise could not be good-looking.
"Will you come to the house to-morrow?" he asked.
"Oh, no," replied Mercy, "not for three or four weeks yet. Our furniture will not be here under that time."
"Ah!" said Stephen, "I had not thought of that. I will call on you at the hotel, then, in a day or two."
His adieus were civil, but only civil: that most depressing of all things to a sensitive nature, a kindly indifference, was manifest in every word he said, and in every tone of his voice.
Mercy felt it to the quick; but she was ashamed of herself for the feeling. "What business had I to expect that he was going to be our friend?" she said in her heart. "We are only tenants to him."
"What a kind-spoken young man he is, to be sure, Mercy!" said Mrs. Carr.
So all-sufficient is bare kindliness of tone and speech to the unsensitive nature.
"Yes, mother, he was very kind," said Mercy; "but I don't think we shall ever know him very well."
"Why, Mercy, why not?" exclaimed her mother. "I should say he was most uncommon friendly for a stranger, running back after our valise in the rain, and a goin' to call on you to oncet."
Mercy made no reply. The carriage rolled along over the rough and muddy road. It was too dark to see any thing except the shadowy black shapes of houses, outlined on a still deeper blackness by the light streaming from their windows. There is no sight in the world so hard for lonely, homeless people to see, as the sight of the lighted windows of houses after nightfall. Why houses should look so much more homelike, so much more suggestive of shelter and cheer and companionship and love, when the curtains are snug-drawn and the doors shut, and nobody can look in, though the lights of fires and lamps shine out, than they do in broad daylight, with open windows and people coming and going through open doors, and a general air of comradeship and busy living, it is hard to see. But there is not a lonely vagabond in the world who does not know that they do. One may see on a dark night many a wistful face of lonely man or lonely woman, hurrying resolutely past, and looking away from, the illumined houses which mean nothing to them except the keen reminder of what they are without. Oh, the homeless people there are in this world! Did anybody ever think to count up the thousands there are in every great city, who live in lodgings and not in homes; from the luxurious lodger who lodges in the costliest rooms of the costliest hotel, down to the most poverty-stricken lodger who lodges in a corner of the poorest tenement-house? Homeless all of them; their common vagabondage is only a matter of degrees of decency. All honor to the bravery of those who are homeless because they must be, and who make the best of it. But only scorn and pity for those who are homeless because they choose to be, and are foolish enough to like it.
Mercy had never before felt the sensation of being a homeless wanderer. She was utterly unprepared for it. All through the breaking up of their home and the preparations for their journey, she had been buoyed up by excitement and anticipation. Much as she had grieved to part from some of the friends of her early life, and to leave the old home in which she was born, there was still a certain sense of elation in the prospect of new scenes and new people. She had felt, without realizing it, a most unreasonable confidence that it was to be at once a change from one home to another home. In her native town, she had had a position of importance. Their house was the best house in the town; judged by the simple standards of a Cape Cod village, they were well-to-do. Everybody knew, and everybody spoke with respect and consideration, of "Old Mis' Carr," or, as she was perhaps more often called, "Widder Carr." Mercy had not thought--in her utter inexperience of change, it could not have occurred to her--what a very different thing it was to be simply unknown and poor people in a strange place. The sense of all this smote upon her suddenly and keenly, as they jolted along in the noisy old carriage on this dark, rainy night. Stephen White's indifferent though kindly manner first brought to her the thought, or rather the feeling, of this. Each new glimmer of the home-lights deepened her sense of desolation. Every gust of rain that beat on the carriage roof and windows made her feel more and more like an outcast. She never forgot these moments. She used to say that in them she had lived the whole life of the loneliest outcast that was ever born. Long years afterward, she wrote a poem, called "The Outcast," which was so intense in its feeling one could have easily believed that it was written by Ishmael. When she was asked once how and when she wrote this poem, she replied, "I did not write it: I lived it one night in entering a strange town." In vain she struggled against the strange and unexpected emotion. A nervous terror of arriving at the hotel oppressed her more and more; although, thanks to Harley Allen's thoughtfulness, she knew that their rooms were already engaged for them. She felt as if she would rather drive on and on, in all the darkness and rain, no matter where, all night long, rather than enter the door of the strange and public house, in which she must give her name and her mother's name on the threshold.
When the carriage stopped, she moved so slowly to alight that her mother exclaimed petulantly,--
"Dear me, child, what's the matter with you? Ain't you goin' to git out? Ain't this the tavern?"
"Yes, mother, this is our place," said Mercy, in a low voice, unlike her usual cheery, ringing tones, as she assisted her mother down the clumsy steps from the old-fashioned, high vehicle. "They're expecting us: it is all right." But her voice and face belied her words. She moved all through the rest of the evening like one in a dream. She said little, but busied herself in making her mother as comfortable as it was possible to be in the dingy and unattractive little rooms; and,