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Page 63
"No you won't!"
She walked away as fast as she was able, till she found a still place
down by the water, where no one could see her. There she stood a moment
irresolute, looked up through the storm as if searching for the sky,
then sank upon her knees down in the silent shade of some timber.
Perhaps she was half-frightened at the act, for she knelt so a moment
without speaking. There she began to mutter: "Maybe He won't drive me
off; if they did, maybe he won't. I should just like to tell him,
anyway!"
So she folded her hands, as she had folded them once at her mother's
knee.
"O Lord! I'm tired of being _Meg_. I should like to be something else!"
Then she rose, crossed the bridge, and on past the thinning houses,
walking feebly through the snow that drifted against her feet.
She did not know why she was there, or where she was going. She repeated
softly to herself now and then the words uttered down in the shade of
the timber, her brain dulled by the cold, faint, floating dreams
stealing into them.
Meg! tired of being Meg! She wasn't always that. It was another name, a
pretty name she thought, with a childish smile,--Maggie. They always
call her that. She used to play about among the clover-blossoms and
buttercups then; the pure little children used to kiss her; nobody
hooted after her in the street, or drove her out of church, or left her
all alone out in the snow,--_Maggie_!
Perhaps, too, some vague thought came to her of the mournful,
unconscious prophecy of the name, as the touch of the sacred water upon
her baby-brow had sealed it,--Magdalene.
She stopped a moment, weakened by her toiling against the wind, threw
off her hood, the better to catch her laboring breath, and standing so,
looked back at the city, its lights glimmering white and pale, through
the falling snow.
Her face was a piteous sight just then. Do you think the haughtiest of
the pure, fair women in yonder treasured homes could have loathed her as
she loathed herself at that moment?
Yet it might have been a face as fair and pure as theirs; kisses of
mother and husband might have warmed those drawn and hueless lips; they
might have prayed their happy prayers, every night and morning, to God.
It _might have been_. You would almost have thought he had meant it
should be so, if you had looked into her eyes sometimes,--perhaps when
she was on her knees by the timber; or when she listened to the chant,
crouching out of sight in the church.
Well, it was only that it might have been. Life could hold no possible
blessed change for her, you know. Society had no place for it, though
she sought it carefully with tears. Who of all God's happy children that
he had kept from sin would have gone to her and said, "My sister, his
love holds room for you and me"; have touched her with her woman's hand,
held out to her her woman's help, and blessed her with her woman's
prayers and tears?
Do you not think Meg knew the answer? Had she not learned it well, in
seven wandering years? Had she not read it in every blast of this bitter
night, out into which she had come to find a helper, when all the happy
world passed by her, on the other side?
She stood there, looking at the glittering of the city, then off into
the gloom where the path lay through the snow. Some struggle was in her
face.
"Home! home and mother! She don't want me,--nobody wants me. I'd better
go back."
The storm was beating upon her. But, looking from the city to the
drifted path, and back from the lonely path to the lighted city, she did
not stir.
"I should like to see it, just to look in the window, a little,--it
wouldn't hurt 'em any. Nobody'd know."
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