Susan Warner - The Letter of Credit

It came to be the latter end of June. Windows were open; what would have been delicious summer air came in laden with the mingled odours of street mud and street dust, garbage, the scents of butcher stalls and grocery shops, and far worse, the indefinable atmospheric tokens of poor living and uncleanness. Now and then a whiff of more energy brought a reminder not quite perverted of the places where flowers grow and cows pasture and birds sing. It only served to make the next breath more heavy and disappointing. Mrs. Carpenter sat by the window to get all the freshness she could; albeit with the air came also the sounds from without; the creak or the rattle of wheels on the pavement, the undistinguishable words of a rough voice here and there, the shrill cry of the strawberry seller, the confused, mixed, inarticulate din of the great city all around. A sultry heaviness seemed to rest upon everything, disheartening and depressing to anybody whose physical powers were not strong or his nerves not well strung for the work and struggle of life. There was a pump over the way; and from time to time the creak of its handle was to be heard, and then the helpless drip and splash of the last runnings of the water falling into the gutter, after the applicant had gone away with his or her pail. It mocked Mrs. Carpenter's ear with the recollection of running brooks, and of a certain cool deep well into which the bucket used to go down from the end of a long pole and come up sparkling with drops of the clear water. —

"Well, how do you do?" said the alert voice of Mrs. Marble by her side.

"Sort o' close, aint it?"

"Rather."

"The city aint a place for Christians to live in, when it gets to this time; anyhow, not for Christians that aint good and strong. I'd like to put you out to pasture somewheres."

"She won't go," said Rotha longingly.

"I am, very comfortable here," said the invalid faintly.

"Comfortable! well, I feel as if you ought to be top of a mountain somewheres; out o' this. I'd like to; but I guess I'm a fixtur. Mr. Digby I'd find ways and means, I'll engage," she said, eyeing the sick woman with kindly interest and concern, who however only shook her head.

"Could you eat your strawberries?" she asked presently.

"A few of them. They were very nice."

"I never see such berries. They must have been raised somewhere in Gulliver's Brobdignay; and Gulliver don't send 'em round in these parts. I thought, maybe you'd pay 'em the compliment to eat 'em; but when appetite's gone, it's no use to have big strawberries. That's what I thought a breath of hilly air somewheres would do for you."

And Mrs. Marble presently went away, shaking her head, just as Mr. Digby came in; exchanging a look with him as she passed. Mr. Digby came up to the window, and greeted Mrs. Carpenter with the gentle affectionate reverence he always shewed her.

"No stronger to-day?" said he.

"She won't go into the country, Mr. Digby," said Rotha.

"You may go and get a walk at least, my child," Mrs. Carpenter said. "Ask Mrs. Cord to be so kind as to take you. Now while Mr. Digby is here, I shall not be alone. Can you stay half an hour?" she asked him suddenly.

He gave ready assent; and Rotha, weary of her cooped-up life, eagerly sought Mrs. Cord and went off for her walk. Mrs. Carpenter and Mr. Digby were left alone.

"I am not stronger," the former began as the house door closed. "I am losing strength, I think, every day. I wanted to speak to you; and it had better be done at once."

She paused, and he waited. The trickle of the water from the pump came to her ear again, stirring memories oddly.

"You asked me the other day, whether I had no friends in the city. I told you I had not. I told you the truth, but not the whole truth. Before Rotha I could not say all I wished. I have a sister living in New York."

"A sister!" Mr. Digby echoed the word in great surprise. "She knows of your being here?"

"She does not."

"Surely she ought to know."

"No, I think not. I told you the truth the other day. I have not a friend, here or elsewhere. Not what you call a friend. Only you."

"But your sister? How is that possible?"

Mrs. Carpenter sighed. "I had better tell you all about it, and then you will know how to understand me. Perhaps. I can hardly understand it myself."

There was a pause again. The sick woman was evidently looking back in thought over days and years and the visions of what had been in them. Her gentle, quiet eyes had grown intent, and over her brows there was a fold in her forehead that Mr. Digby had never seen there before. But there was no trembling of the mouth. That was steady and grave and firm.

"There were two of us," she said at last. "My father had but us two, how long it is ago! – "

She was silent again with her thoughts, and Mr. Digby again waited. It was a patient face he was looking at; a gentle face; not a face that spoke of any experience that could be called bitter, yet the patient lines told of something endured or something resigned; it might be both. The last two years of experience, with a sister in the same city, must needs furnish occasion. But Mrs. Carpenter's brow was quiet, except for that one fold in it. Yet she seemed to have forgotten what she had meant to say, and only after a while pulled herself up, as it were, and began again.

"It is not so long as it seems, I suppose, for I am not very old; but it seems long. We two were girls together at home, and my father was living; and I knew nothing about the world."

"Was that here? in New York?" Mr. Digby asked, by way of helping her on.

"O no. I knew nothing about New York. I had never been here. No; our home was not far from Tanfield; up in this state, near the Connecticut border. We lived a little out of the town, and had a nice place. My father was very well off indeed. I wanted for nothing in those days." She sighed.

"The world is a strange place, Mr. Digby! I cannot comprehend, even now, how things should have gone as they did. We lived as happy as anybody; until a gentleman, a young lawyer of New York, began to make visits at our house. He paid particular attention to me at first; but it was of no use; I had learned to know Mr. Carpenter, and nobody else could be anything to me. He was a thriving lawyer; a rising young man, people said; and my father would have had me marry him; but I could not. So then he courted my sister. O the splash of that water from the pump over there! it keeps me thinking to-day of the well behind our house – where it stood on a smooth green plat of grass – and of the trickle of the water from the buckets as they were drawn up. Just because the day is so warm, I think of those buckets of well water. The well was sixty feet deep, and the water was clear and cold and beautiful – I never saw such water anywhere else; and when the bucket came slowly up, with the moss on its sides glittering with the wet, there was refreshment in the very look of it. Tanfield seems to me a hundred thousand miles away from Jane Street; and those times about a thousand years ago. I wonder, how will all our life seem when we look back upon it from the other side?"

"Very much as objects seen under a microscope, I fancy."

"Do you? Why?"

"In the clear understanding of details, and in the new perception of the relative bearing and importance of parts."

"Yes, I suppose so. Things are very mixed and confused as we see them here. Take what I am telling you, for instance; it is incredible, only that it is true."

"You have not told me much yet," said her friend gently.

"No. The gentleman I spoke of, the lawyer, he married my sister. And then, when I would have married Mr. Carpenter, my sister set herself against it, and she talked over my father into her views, and they both opposed it all they could."