Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - The Shoulders of Atlas

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Sylvia sat down and took some mending. Henry seated himself opposite,
and stared at her with gloomy eyes, which yet held latent sparks of
joy. "I wish Meeks hadn't told us," he said, angrily.

"So do I," said Sylvia. "I keep telling myself I don't want that poor
old woman to die, and I keep telling myself that you don't; but I'm
dreadful suspicious of us both. It means so much."

"Just the way I feel," said Henry. "I wish he'd kept his news to
himself. It wasn't legal, anyhow."

"You don't suppose it will make the will not stand!" cried Sylvia,
with involuntary eagerness. Then she quailed before her husband's
stern gaze. "Of course I know it won't make any difference," she
said, feebly, and drew her darning-needle through the sock she was
mending.

Henry took up a copy of the East Westland Gazette. The first thing he
saw was the list of deaths, and he seemed to see, quite plainly,
Abrahama White's among them, although she was still quick, and he
loathed himself. He turned the paper with a rattling jerk to an
account of a crime in New York, and the difficulty the police had
experienced in taking the guilty man in safety to the police station.
He read the account aloud.

"Seems to me the principal thing the New York police protect is the
criminals," he said, bitterly. "If they would turn a little of their
attention to protecting the helpless women and children, seems to me
it would be more to the purpose. They're awful careful of the
criminals."

Sylvia did not hear. She assented absently. She thought, in spite of
herself, of the good-fortune which was to befall them. She imagined
herself mistress of the old White homestead. They would, of course,
rent their own little cottage and go to live in the big house. She
imagined herself looking through the treasures which Abrahama would
leave behind her--then a monstrous loathing of herself seized her.
She resolved that the very next morning she would go over and help
Miss Babcock, that she would put all consideration of material
benefits from her mind. She brought her thoughts with an effort to
the article which Henry had just read. She could recall his last
words.

"Yes, I think you are right," said she. "I think criminals ought not
to be protected. You are right, Henry. I think myself we ought to
have a doctor called from Alford to-morrow, if she is no better, and
have a consultation. Dr. Wallace is good, but he is only one, and
sometimes another doctor has different ideas, and she may get help."

"Yes, I think there ought to be a consultation," said Henry. "I will
see about it to-morrow. I will go over there with you myself
to-morrow morning. I think the police ought not to protect the
criminals, but the people who are injured by them."

"Then there would be no criminals. They would have no chance," said
Sylvia, sagely. "Yes, I agree with you, Henry, there ought to be a
consultation."

She looked at Henry and he at her, and each saw in the other's face
that same ignoble joy, and that same resentment and denial of it.

Neither slept that night. They were up early the next morning. Sylvia
was getting breakfast and Henry was splitting wood out in the yard.
Presently he came stumbling in. "Come out here," he said. Sylvia
followed him to the door. They stepped out in the dewy yard and stood
listening. Beneath their feet was soft, green grass strewn with tiny
spheres which reflected rainbows. Over their heads was a wonderful
sky of the clearest angelic blue. This sky seemed to sing with
bell-notes.

"The bell is tolling," whispered Henry. They counted from that
instant. When the bell stopped they looked at each other.

"That's her age," said Sylvia.

"Yes," said Henry.

Chapter III

The weather was wonderful on Abrahama White's funeral day. The air
had at once the keen zest of winter and the languor of summer. One
moment one perceived warm breaths of softly undulating pines, the
next it was as if the wind blew over snow. The air at once stimulated
and soothed. One breathing it realized youth and an endless vista of
dreams ahead, and also the peace of age, and of work well done and
deserving the reward of rest. There was something in this air which
gave the inhaler the certainty of victory, the courage of battle and
of unassailable youth. Even old people, pausing to notice the
streamer of crape on Abrahama White's door, felt triumphant and
undaunted. It did not seem conceivable, upon such a day, that that
streamer would soon flaunt for them.

The streamer was rusty. It had served for many such occasions, and
suns and rains had damaged it. People said that Martin Barnes, the
undertaker, ought to buy some new crape. Martin was a very old man
himself, but he had no imagination for his own funeral. It seemed to
him grotesque and impossible that an undertaker should ever be in
need of his own ministrations. His solemn wagon stood before the door
of the great colonial house, and he and his son-in-law and his
daughter, who were his assistants, were engaged at their solemn tasks
within.

The daughter, Flora Barnes, was arraying the dead woman in her last
robe of state, while her father and brother-in-law waited in the
south room across the wide hall. When her task was performed she
entered the south room with a gentle pride evident in her thin,
florid face.

"She makes a beautiful corpse," she said, in a hissing whisper.

Henry Whitman and his wife were in the room, with Martin Barnes and
Simeon Capen, his son-in-law. Barnes and Capen rose at once with
pleased interest, Henry and Sylvia more slowly; yet they also had
expressions of pleasure, albeit restrained. Both strove to draw their
faces down, yet that expression of pleasure reigned triumphant,
overcoming the play of the facial muscles. They glanced at each
other, and each saw an angry shame in the other's eyes because of
this joy.

But when they followed Martin Barnes and his assistants into the
parlor, where Abrahama White was laid in state, all the shameful joy
passed from their faces. The old woman in her last bed was majestic.
The dead face was grand, compelling to other than earthly
considerations. Henry and Sylvia forgot the dead woman's little store
which she had left behind her. Sylvia leaned over her and wept;
Henry's face worked. Nobody except himself had ever known it, but he,
although much younger, had had his dreams about the beautiful
Abrahama White. He remembered them as he looked at her, old and dead
and majestic, with something like the light of her lost beauty in her
still face. It was like a rose which has fallen in such a windless
atmosphere that its petals retain the places which they have held
around its heart.

Henry loved his wife, but this before him was associated with
something beyond love, which tended to increase rather than diminish
it. When at last they left the room he did what was very unusual with
him. He was reticent, like the ordinary middle-aged New-Englander. He
took his wife's little, thin, veinous hand and clasped it tenderly.
Her bony fingers clung gratefully to his.

When they were all out in the south room Flora Barnes spoke again. "I
have never seen a more beautiful corpse," said she, in exactly the
same voice which she had used before. She began taking off her large,
white apron. Something peculiar in her motion arrested Sylvia's
attention. She made a wiry spring at her.

"Let me see that apron," said she, in a voice which corresponded with
her action.

Flora recoiled. She turned pale, then she flushed. "What for?"

"Because I want to."

"It's just my apron. I--"

But Sylvia had the apron. Out of its folds dropped a thin roll of
black silk. Flora stood before Sylvia. Beads of sweat showed on her
flat forehead. She twitched like one about to have convulsions. She
was very tall, but Sylvia seemed to fairly loom over her. She held
the black silk out stiffly, like a bayonet.

"What is this?" she demanded, in her tense voice.

Flora twitched.

"What is it? I want to know."

"The back breadth," replied Flora in a small, scared voice, like the
squeak of a mouse.

"Whose back breadth?"

"Her back breadth."

"_Her_ back breadth?"

"Yes."

"Robbing the dead!" said Sylvia, pitilessly. Her tense voice was
terrible.

Flora tried to make a stand. "She hadn't any use for it," she
squeaked, plaintively.

"Robbing the dead! Its bad enough to rob the living."

"She couldn't have worn that dress without any back breadth while she
was living," argued Flora, "but now it don't make any odds. It don't
show."

"What were you going to do with it?"

Flora was scared into a storm of injured confession. "You 'ain't any
call to talk to me so, Mrs. Whitman," she said. "I've worked hard,
and I 'ain't had a decent black silk dress for ten years."

"How can you have a dress made out of a back breadth, I'd like to
know?"

"It's just the same quality that Mrs. Hiram Adams's was, and--" Flora
hesitated.

"Flora Barnes, you don't mean to say that you're robbing the dead of
back breadths till you get enough to make you a whole dress?"

Flora whimpered. "Business has been awful poor lately," she said.
"It's been so healthy here we've hardly been able to earn the salt to
our porridge. Father won't join the trust, either, and lots of times
the undertaker from Alford has got our jobs."

"Business!" cried Sylvia, in horror.

"I can't help it if you do look at it that way," Flora replied, and
now she was almost defiant. "Our business is to get our living out of
folks' dying. There's no use mincing matters. It's our business, just
as working in a shoe-shop is your husband's business. Folks have to
have shoes and walk when they're alive, and be laid out nice and
buried when they're dead. Our business has been poor. Either Dr.
Wallace gives awful strong medicine or East Westland is too healthy.
We haven't earned but precious little lately, and I need a whole
black silk dress and they don't."

Sylvia eyed her in withering scorn. "Need or not," said she, "the one
that owns this back breadth is going to have it. I rather think she
ain't going to be laid away without a back breadth to her dress."

With that Sylvia crossed the room and the hall, and entered the
parlor. She closed the door behind her. When she came out a few
minutes later she was pale but triumphant. "There," said she, "it's
back with her, and I've got just this much to say, and no more, Flora
Barnes. When you get home you gather up all the back breadths you've
got, and you do them up in a bundle, and you put them in that barrel
the Ladies' Sewing Society is going to send to the missionaries next
week, and don't you ever touch a back breadth again, or I'll tell it
right and left, and you'll see how much business you'll have left
here, I don't care how sickly it gets."

"If father would--only have joined the trust I never would have
thought of such a thing, anyway," muttered Flora. She was vanquished.

"You do it, Flora Barnes."

"Yes, I will. Don't speak so, Mrs. Whitman."

"You had better."

The undertaker and his son-in-law and Henry had remained quite
silent. Now they moved toward the door, and Flora followed, red and
perspiring. Sylvia heard her say something to her father about the
trust on the way to the gate, between the tall borders of box, and
heard Martin's surly growl in response.

"Laying it onto the trust," Sylvia said to Henry--"such an awful
thing as that!"

Henry assented. He looked aghast at the whole affair. He seemed to
catch a glimpse of dreadful depths of feminity which daunted his
masculine mind. "To think of women caring enough about dress to do
such a thing as that!" he said to himself. He glanced at Sylvia, and
she, as a woman, seemed entirely beyond his comprehension.

The whole great house was sweet with flowers. Neighbors had sent the
early spring flowers from their door-yards, and Henry and Sylvia had
bought a magnificent wreath of white roses and carnations and smilax.
They had ordered it from a florist in Alford, and it seemed to them
something stupendous--as if in some way it must please even the dead
woman herself to have her casket so graced.

"When folks know, they won't think we didn't do all we could," Sylvia
whispered to Henry, significantly. He nodded. Both were very busy,
even with assistance from the neighbors, and a woman who worked out
by the day, in preparing the house for the funeral. Everything had to
be swept and cleaned and dusted.

When the hour came, and the people began to gather, the house was
veritably set in order and burnished. Sylvia, in the parlor with the
chief mourners, glanced about, and eyed the smooth lap of her new
black gown with a certain complacency which she could not control.
After the funeral was over, and the distant relatives and neighbors
who had assisted had eaten a cold supper and departed, and she and
Henry were alone in the great house, she said, and he agreed, that
everything had gone off beautifully. "Just as she would have wished
it if she could have been here and ordered it herself," said Sylvia.

They were both hesitating whether to remain in the house that night
or go home. Finally they went home. There was an awe and strangeness
over them; besides, they began to wonder if people might not think it
odd for them to stay there before the will was read, since they could
not be supposed to know it all belonged to them.

It was about two weeks before they were regularly established in the
great house, and Horace Allen, the high-school teacher, was expected
the next day but one. Henry had pottered about the place, and
attended to some ploughing on the famous White grass-land, which was
supposed to produce more hay than any piece of land of its size in
the county. Henry had been fired with ambition to produce more than
ever before, but that day his spirit had seemed to fail him. He sat
about gloomily all the afternoon; then he went down for the evening
mail, and brought home no letters, but the local paper. Sylvia was
preparing supper in the large, clean kitchen. She had been looking
over her new treasures all day, and she was radiant. She chattered to
her husband like a school-girl.

"Oh, Henry," said she, "you don't know what we've got! I never
dreamed poor Abrahama had such beautiful things. I have been up in
the garret looking over things, and there's one chest up there packed
with the most elegant clothes. I never saw such dresses in my life."

Henry looked at his wife with eyes which loved her face, yet saw it
as it was, elderly and plain, with all its youthful bloom faded.

"I don't suppose there is anything that will suit you to have made
over," he said. "I suppose they are dresses she had when she was
young."

Sylvia colored. She tossed her head and threw back her round
shoulders. Feminine vanity dies hard; perhaps it never dies at all.

"I don't know," she said, defiantly. "Three are colors I used to
wear. I have had to wear black of late years, because it was more
economical, but you know how much I used to wear pink. It was real
becoming to me."

Henry continued to regard his wife's face with perfect love and a
perfect cognizance of facts. "You couldn't wear it now," he said.

"I don't know," retorted Sylvia. "I dare say I don't look now as if I
could. I have been working hard all day, and my hair is all out of
crimp. I ain't so sure but if I did up my hair nice, and wasn't all
tuckered out, that I couldn't wear a pink silk dress that's there if
I tone it down with black."

"I don't believe you would feel that you could go to meeting dressed
in pink silk at your time of life," said Henry.

"Lots of women older than I be wear bright colors," retorted Sylvia,
"in places where they are dressy. You don't know anything about
dress, Henry."

"I suppose I don't," replied Henry, indifferently.

"I think that pink silk would be perfectly suitable and real becoming
if I crimped my hair and had a black lace bonnet to wear with it."

"I dare say."

Henry took his place at the supper-table. It was set in the kitchen.
Sylvia was saving herself all the steps possible until Horace Allen
returned.

Henry did not seem to have much appetite that night. His face was
overcast. Along with his scarcely confessed exultation over his
good-fortune he was conscious of an odd indignation. For years he had
cherished a sense of injury at his treatment at the hands of
Providence; now he felt like a child who, pushing hard against
opposition to his desires, has that opposition suddenly removed, and
tumbles over backward. Henry had an odd sensation of having
ignominiously tumbled over backward, and he missed, with ridiculous
rancor, his sense of injury which he had cherished for so many years.
After kicking against the pricks for so long, he had come to feel a
certain self-righteous pleasure in it which he was now forced to
forego.

Sylvia regarded her husband uneasily. Her state of mind had formerly
been the female complement of his, but the sense of possession
swerved her more easily. "What on earth ails you, Henry Whitman?" she
said. "You look awful down-in-the-mouth. Only to think of our having
enough to be comfortable for life. I should think you'd be real
thankful and pleased."

"I don't know whether I'm thankful and pleased or not," rejoined
Henry, morosely.

"Why, Henry Whitman!"

"If it had only come earlier, when we had time and strength to enjoy
it," said Henry, with sudden relish. He felt that he had discovered a
new and legitimate ground of injury which might console him for the
loss of the old.

"We may live a good many years to enjoy it now," said Sylvia.

"I sha'n't; maybe you will," returned Henry, with malignant joy.

Sylvia regarded him with swift anxiety. "Why, Henry, don't you feel
well?" she gasped.

"No, I don't, and I haven't for some time."

"Oh, Henry, and you never told me! What is the matter? Hadn't you
better see the doctor?"

"Doctor!" retorted Henry, scornfully.

"Maybe he could give you something to help you. Whereabouts do you
feel bad, Henry?"

"All over," replied Henry, comprehensively, and he smiled like a
satirical martyr.

"All over?"

"Yes, all over--body and soul and spirit. I know just as well as any
doctor can tell me that I haven't many years to enjoy anything. When
a man has worked as long as I have in a shoe-shop, and worried as
much and as long as I have, good-luck finds him with his earthworks
about worn out and his wings hitched on."

"Oh, Henry, maybe Dr. Wallace--"

"Maybe he can unhitch the wings?" inquired Henry, with grotesque
irony. "No, Sylvia, no doctor living can give medicine strong enough
to cure a man of a lifetime of worry."

"But the worry's all over now, Henry."

"What the worry's done ain't over."

Sylvia began whimpering softly. "Oh, Henry, if you talk that way it
will take away all my comfort! What do you suppose the property would
mean to me without you?"

Then Henry felt ashamed. "Lord, don't worry," he said, roughly. "A
man can't say anything to you without upsetting you. I can't tell how
long I'll live. Sometimes a man lives through everything. All I meant
was, sometimes when good-luck comes to a man it comes so darned late
it might just as well not come at all."

"Henry, you don't mean to be wicked and ungrateful?"

"If I am I can't help it. I ain't a hypocrite, anyway. We've got some
good-fortune, and I'm glad of it, but I'd been enough sight gladder
if it had come sooner, before bad fortune had taken away my rightful
taste for it."

"You won't have to work in the shop any longer, Henry."

"I don't know whether I shall or not. What in creation do you suppose
I'm going to do all day--sit still and suck my thumbs?"

"You can work around the place."

"Of course I can; but there'll be lots of time when there won't be
any work to be done--then what? To tell you the truth of it, Sylvia,
I've had my nose held to the grindstone so long I don't know as it's
in me to keep away from it and live, now."

Henry had not been at work since Abrahama White's death. He had been
often in Sidney Meeks's office; only Sidney Meeks saw through Henry
Whitman. One day he laughed in his face, as the two men sat in his
office, and Henry had been complaining of the lateness of his
good-fortune.

"If your property has come too late, Henry," said he, "what's the use
in keeping it? What's the sense of keeping property that only
aggravates you because it didn't come in your time instead of the
Lord's? I'll draw up a deed of gift on the spot, and Sylvia can sign
it when you go home, and you can give the whole biling thing to
foreign missions. The Lord knows there's no need for any mortal man
to keep anything he doesn't want--unless it's taxes, or a quick
consumption, or a wife and children. And as for those last, there
doesn't seem to be much need of that lately. I have never seen the
time since I came into the world when it was quite so hard to get
things, or quite so easy to get rid of them, as it is now. Say the
word, Henry, and I'll draw up the deed of gift."

Henry looked confused. His eyes fell before the lawyer's sarcastic
glance. "You are talking tomfool nonsense," he said, scowling. "The
property isn't mine; it's my wife's."

"Sylvia never crossed you in anything. She'd give it up fast enough
if she got it through her head how downright miserable it was making
you," returned the lawyer, maliciously. Then Sidney relented. There
was something pathetic, even tragic, about Henry Whitman's sheer
inability to enjoy as he might once have done the good things of
life, and his desperate clutch of them in flat contradiction to his
words. "Let's drop it," said the lawyer. "I'm glad you have the
property and can have a little ease, even if it doesn't mean to you
what it once would. Let's have a glass of that grape wine."

Sidney Meeks had his own small amusement in the world. He was one of
those who cannot exist without one, and in lieu of anything else he
had turned early in life toward making wines from many things which
his native soil produced. He had become reasonably sure, at an early
age, that he should achieve no great success in his profession.
Indeed, he was lazily conscious that he had no fierce ambition to do
so. Sidney Meeks was not an ambitious man in large matters. But he
had taken immense comfort in toiling in a little vineyard behind his
house, and also in making curious wines and cordials from many
unusual ingredients. Sidney had stored in his cellar wines from elder
flowers, from elderberries, from daisies, from rhubarb, from clover,
and currants, and many other fruits and flowers, besides grapes. He
was wont to dispense these curious brews to his callers with great
pride. But he took especial pride in a grape wine which he had made
from selected grapes thirty years ago. This wine had a peculiar
bouquet due to something which Sidney had added to the grape-juice,
the secret of which he would never divulge.

It was some of this golden wine which Sidney now produced. Henry
drank two glasses, and the tense muscles around his mouth relaxed.
Sidney smiled. "Don't know what gives it that scent and taste, do
you?" asked Sidney. "Well, I know. It's simple enough, but nobody
except Sidney Meeks has ever found it out. I tell you, Henry, if a
man hasn't set the river on fire, realized his youthful dreams, and
all that, it is something to have found out something that nobody
else has, no matter how little it is, if you have got nerve enough to
keep it to yourself."

Henry fairly laughed. His long, hollow cheeks were slightly flushed.
When he got home that night he looked pleasantly at Sylvia, preparing
supper. But Sylvia did not look as radiant as she had done since her
good-fortune. She said nothing ailed her, in response to his inquiry
as to whether she felt well or not, but she continued gloomy and
taciturn, which was most unusual with her, especially of late.

"What in the world is the matter with you, Sylvia?" Henry asked. The
influence of Sidney Meeks's wine had not yet departed from him. His
cheeks were still flushed, his eyes brilliant.

Then Sylvia roused herself. "Nothing is the matter," she replied,
irritably, and immediately she became so gay that had Henry himself
been in his usual mood he would have been as much astonished as by
her depression. Sylvia began talking and laughing, relating long
stories of new discoveries which she had made in the house, planning
for Horace Allen's return.

"He's going to have that big southwest room and the little one out of
it," Sylvia said. "To-morrow you must get the bed moved into the
little one, and I'll get the big room fixed up for a study. He'll be
tickled to pieces. There's beautiful furniture in the room now. I
suppose he'll think it's beautiful. It's terrible old-fashioned. I'd
rather have a nice new set of bird's-eye maple to my taste, and a
brass bedstead, but I know he'll like this better. It's solid old
mahogany."

"Yes, he'll be sure to like it," assented Henry.

After supper, although Sylvia did not relapse into her taciturn mood,
Henry went and sat by himself on the square colonial porch on the
west side of the house. He sat gazing at the sky and the broad acres
of grass-land. Presently he heard feminine voices in the house, and
knew that two of the neighbors, Mrs. Jim Jones and Mrs. Sam Elliot,
had called to see Sylvia. He resolved that he would stay where he was
until they were gone. He loved Sylvia, but women in the aggregate
disturbed and irritated him; and for him three women were sufficient
to constitute an aggregate.

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