Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/918

850 sound so very sure, after all. "But I shall never call on you, nor need to." There are those whose championship of a cause alone would defeat it.

She followed the aunt's laborious withdrawal with a rush of sympathy for the foster-son. Poor Ned! No wonder. What a lot he would need from her. And yet, poor Mrs. Darcy, too! (Which would have surprised and amused that lady no little.) Probably she had done a great deal for Ned; and, even if indifferent herself, would have found it pleasant for him to be less so. But wasn't it natural (and naturally to Gertrude more than pardonable) that his absorption in one should exclude interest in others?

"No one need be surprised at anything any one, a woman especially, does in connection with love;" but, oh, the marvel of the perpetual tragedy of womanhood! her eternal sacrifice to imaginary, false, or demi gods; the constant hide-and-seek between herself and her real feelings; the unending maze of meeting, dividing, crossing motives.

"You never saw such a household," Mrs. Darcy told Anne Harcourt. She had equipped the young-folks generously with linen and china. "Oh yes, they get along perfectly together; but, dear me! that's the worst of it. I stopped by the other day about noon. The house was empty and open. Any one could have gone all through. The breakfast-table wasn't half cleared, and not a dish washed. In the middle of the kitchen floor, where she had stepped out of it, was Gertrude's apron. I supposed the child had been sent for in some emergency, and, waiting for trouble all along, I got at the bread. Saved it, too, though it was so light 'twas coarse. And then I took the opportunity to give the whole place a cleaning it was crying for. I was just dead on my feet—what with my weight and the weather—and was turning out the hot loaves, when in trailed those babes in the wood, swinging hands, limp but smiling. Ed had got a day off unexpectedly, had rushed home for her, and they had skipped off picnicking together. The minute Gertrude caught sight of me she stopped smiling. 'Oh, Mrs. Darcy, why did you do that?' 'You didn't suppose I could let that dough waste?' I said. And Ed said he didn't see why I couldn't if they could! And they not able to afford a servant!"

"And you dead on your feet over her work!"

"Oh, as to that,"—Mrs. Darcy was as uncompromisingly honest with herself as with everybody else,—"there's no unselfishness in doing a thing it would make you more uncomfortable to neglect. I can't stand the looks of that house."

Gertrude's devotion she discounted on the same principle. That others should be selfish was only an opportunity to Gertrude. No matter what crowded the days, she was always ready for anything Ned proposed. The evenings she kept for him, busied only sharpening his pencils as he worked, her very mind empty to take up instantly a phrase he would throw her proudly, or a verse he would read doubtfully. When he was doubtful she quickly learned not to be: criticism unnerved him completely, and, anyway, he would get enough of that outside. So she used only praise, graduated; though he grew so keen about its degrees that the less complimentary chilled and cut like open disapproval. She, he told her, was like ink to his pen, brains to his thought; he could do nothing without her. One of his daintiest verses was on this gain in sharing, like those fairy charms of folk-lore that double in potency every time they are passed on. All of which was as precious to Gertrude as to Darcy. If she was his stimulating wine, he was her very bread of life.

"He showed good sense at least," Anne Harcourt commented. "That sends him up in my opinion. And for him to get her, makes me wonder if there mayn't be more to him than anybody else credited."

"That's no argument." To Mrs. Darcy there were no half-tones in life, only blacks and whites. "Most women have to love something: if they can't love a man because they admire him, they'll love him because it's too bad they can't."

To Gertrude it was all half-tones. Things she and Mrs. Darcy had said in their first conversation had a way of flashing out on her like alternating electric-light signs. How both of them could have been right was confusing. Ned was different too, but not before her; so that she came in for her share of it in