Hagar 5

Hagar 5

The latter had defended her daughter, but afterwards she told Hagar

that in this world, even if you didn't think you were doing wrong, it

made for all the happiness there seemed to be not to do what other

people thought you ought not to do.... But Hagar didn't believe yet

that there was anything wrong in reading "The Scarlet Letter." She had

been passionately sorry for Hester, and she had felt--she did not know

why--a kind of terrified pity for Mr. Dimmesdale, and she had loved

little Pearl. She had intended asking her mother what the red-cloth

letter that Hester Prynne wore meant, but it had gone out of her mind.

The chapter she liked best was the one with little Pearl playing in the

wood.... Perhaps Aunt Serena, having been mistaken about that book, was

mistaken, too, about Charles Darwin.

 

Neither now nor later did she in any wise love the feel of wrong-doing.

Forbidden fruit did not appeal to her merely because it was forbidden.

But if there was no inner forbidding, if she truly doubted the justice

or authority or abstract rightness of the restraining hand, she was

capable of attaining the fruit whether forbidden or no. There was

always the check of great native kindliness. If what she wanted to do

was going--no matter how senselessly--to trouble or hurt other people's

feelings, on the whole she wouldn't do it. In the case of this June

day and the "Descent of Man" the library was empty. She only wanted to

look at the pictures and to run over the reading enough to see what it

was about--then she would put it back on the top shelf. She was not by

nature indirect or secretive. She preferred to go straightforwardly,

to act in the open. But if the wall of not-agreed-in objection stood

too high and thick before her, she was capable of stealing forth in the

dusk and seeking a way around it. Coiled now in the cool hollow of the

sofa, half in and half out of the shaft of sunshine, she began to read.

 

The broad band of gold-dust shifted place. Miss Serena, arrived at

the last ten minutes of her hour and a half at the piano, began to

play "Pearls and Roses." Out in the brick kitchen Old Miss dropped a

tablespoonful of raspberry jam into a saucer, let it cool, tasted, and

pronounced it done. The negro boy and Mimy between them lifted the

copper kettle from the stove. Upstairs in Gilead Balm's best room the

Bishop folded and slipped into an addressed envelope the last letter he

was going to write that morning. Out under the cedars Mrs. LeGrand came

to a dull stretch in her novel. She yawned, closed the book, and leaned

back against the pillows in the hammock.

 

Mrs. LeGrand was fair and forty, but only pleasantly plump. She had

a creamy skin, moderately large, hazel eyes, moderately far apart, a

small, straight nose, a yielding mouth, and a chin that indubitably

would presently be double. She was a widow and an orphan. Married at

nineteen, her husband, the stars of a brigadier-general upon his grey

collar, had within the year fallen upon some one of the blood-soaked

battle-grounds of the state. Her father, the important bearer of an

old, important name, had served the Confederacy well in a high civil

capacity. When the long horror of the war was over, and the longer,

miserable torture of the Reconstruction was passing, and a comparative

ease and pale dawn of prosperity rose over the state, Mrs. LeGrand

looked about her from the remnant of an old plantation on the edge of

a tidewater town. The house was dilapidated, but large. The grounds had

Old Neglect for gardener, but they, too, were large, and only needed

Good-Care-at-Last for complete rehabilitation. Mrs. LeGrand had a kind

of smooth, continuous, low-pressure energy, but no money. "A girls'

school," she murmured to herself.

 

When she wrote, here and there over the state, it was at once seen by

her correspondents that this was just the thing for the daughter of a

public man and the widow of a gallant officer. It was both ladylike

and possible.... That was some years ago. Mrs. LeGrand's School for

Young Ladies was now an established fact. The house was repaired, the

grounds were trim, there was a corps of six teachers, with prospects

of expansion, there were day pupils and boarding pupils. Mrs LeGrand

saw in her mind's eye long wing-like extensions to the main house where

more boarding pupils might be accommodated.... She was successful, and

success agreed with her. The coat grew sleek, the cream rose to the

top, every angle disappeared; she was warmly optimistic, and smooth,

indolent good company. In the summer-time she left Eglantine and from

late June to September shared her time between the Springs and the

country homes of kindred, family connections, or girlhood friends. She

nearly always came for a fortnight or more to Gilead Balm.

 

Now, leaning back in the hammock, the novel shut, her eyes closed, she

was going pleasantly over to herself the additions and improvements

to be carried out at Eglantine. From this her mind slipped to her

correspondence with a French teacher who promised well, and thence

to certain letters received that week from patrons with daughters.

One of these, from a state farther south, spoke in highest praise of

Mrs. LeGrand's guardianship of the young female mind, of the safe and

elegant paths into which she guided it, and of her gift generally for

preserving dew and bloom and ignorance of evil in her interesting

charges. Every one likes praise and no one is so churlish as to refuse

a proffered bouquet or to doubt the judgment of the donor. Mrs. LeGrand

experienced from head to foot a soft and amiable glow.

 

For ten minutes longer she lay in an atmosphere of balm, then she

opened her eyes, drew her watch from her white-ribbon belt, and

glancing at it surmised that by now the Bishop might have finished his

letters. Upon this thought she rose, and paced across the bright June

grass to the house. "Pearls and Roses" floated from the parlour. Her

hand on the doorknob, Mrs. LeGrand paused irresolutely for a moment,

then lightly took it away and crossed the hall to the library. A minute

later the Bishop, portly and fine, letters in his hand, came down the

stairs, and turned toward this room. The mail-bag always hung, he

remembered, by the library escritoire. Though he was a large man, he

moved with great lightness; he was at once ponderous and easy. Miss

Serena at the piano could hardly have heard him pass the door, so

something occult, perhaps, made her ignore the _da capo_ over the bar

of "Pearls and Roses" which she had now reached. She struck a final

chord, rose, closed the piano, and left the parlour.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER IV

 

THE CONVICT

 

 

"My dear Bishop!" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand; "won't you come here and talk

to this little girl?"

 

"To Hagar?" answered the Bishop. "What is the trouble with Hagar?

Have you broken your doll, poor dear?" He came easily across to the

horsehair sofa, a good man, by definition, as ever was. "What's

grieving you, little girl?"

 

"I think that it is Hagar who may come to grieve others," said Mrs.

LeGrand. "I do not suppose it is my business to interfere,--as I should

interfere were she in my charge at Eglantine,--but I cannot but see in

my daily task how difficult it is to eradicate from a youthful mind the

stain that has been left by an improper book--"

 

"An improper book! What are you doing, Hagar, with an improper book?"

 

The Bishop put out his hand and took it. He looked at the title and at

the author's name beneath, turned over a dozen pages, closed the book,

and put it from him on the cold, bare mahogany table. "It was not for

this that I christened you," he said.

 

Miss Serena joined the group.

 

"Serena," appealed Mrs. LeGrand, "_do_ you think Hagar ought to be

allowed to contaminate her mind by a book like that?"

 

Miss Serena looked. "That child!--She's been reading Darwin!"

 

A slow colour came into her cheeks. The book was shocking, but the

truly shocking thing was how absolutely Hagar had disobeyed. Miss

Serena's soul was soft as wax, pliant as a reed to the authorities her

world ranged before her. By an inevitable reaction stiffness showed

in the few cases where she herself held the orb of authority. To be

disobeyed was very grievous to her. Where it was only negligence in

regard to some command of her own,--direction to a servant, commands

in her Sunday-School class,--she had often to put up with it, though

always with a swelling sense of injury. But when things combined,

when disobedience to Serena Ashendyne was also disobedience to the

constituted authorities, Miss Serena became adamant.

 

Now she looked at Hagar with a little gasp, and then, seeing through

the open door the elder Mrs. Ashendyne entering from the kitchen, she

called to her. "Mother, come here a moment!"...

 

"If she had said that she was sorry," pronounced the Bishop, "you might

forgive her, I think, this time. But if she is going to harden her

heart like that, you had best let her see that all sin, in whatever

degree, brings suffering. And I should suit, I think, the punishment

to the offence. Hagar told me only yesterday that she had rather read

a book than gather cherries or play with dolls, or go visiting, or

anything. I think I should forbid her to open any book at all for a

week."

 

Behind Gilead Balm, beyond the orchard and a strip of meadow, sprang

a ridge of earth, something more than a hill, something less than

a low mountain. It was safe, dry, warm, and sandy, too cut-over

and traversed to be popular with snakes, too within a stone's throw

of the overseer's house and the overseer's dogs to be subject to

tramps or squirrel-hunting boys, just wooded enough and furrowed with

shallow ravines to make it to children a romantic, sprite-inhabited

region. When children came to Gilead Balm, as sometimes, in the slow,

continuous procession through the houses of a people who traditionally

kept "open house," they did come, Hagar and they always played

freely and alone on the home-ward-facing side of the ridge. When the

overseer's grandchildren, too, came to visit him, they and Hagar played

here, and sometimes Mary Magazine, Isham and Car'line's ten-year-old

at the Ferry, was allowed to spend the day, and she and Hagar played

together on the ridge. Hagar was very fond of Mary Magazine.

 

One day, having completed her circle of flower dolls before her

companion's was done, she leaned back against the apple tree beneath

which the two were seated and thoughtfully regarded the other's

down-bent brown face and "wrapped" hair. "Mary Magazine, you couldn't

have been named 'Mary Magazine.' You were named Mary Magdalene."

 

"No'm," said Mary Magazine, a pink morning-glory in one hand and a

blue one in the other. "No'm. I'm named Mary Magazine. My mammy done

named me for de lady what took her cologne bottle somebody give her