Kitabı oku: «The Senator's Bride», sayfa 12
CHAPTER XXI.
"RUE."
"Hope, cheated too often when life's in its spring,
From the bosom that nursed it forever takes wing;
And memory comes as its promises fade
To brood o'er the havoc that passion has made."
—C. F. Hoffman.
The gossips of Norfolk are weary of wondering at the vagaries of the Hon. Mrs. Winans. They admired and envied her very much in the role of queen of beauty and fashion; they are simply amazed when she glides before the foot-lights in the garb of a "ministering angel."
When she first began to aid and assist Miss Clendenon in her charitable undertakings they thought it only natural, in view of the sudden intimacy that had sprung up between the two, that the one should be found wherever the other was. But it was quite a different thing when the Senator's lovely and exclusive wife assumed those duties alone. Society, wounded by her quiet and almost complete withdrawal from its fascinations, set it down to a lack of a new sensation, and predicted that as soon as the novelty wore out Mrs. Winans would seek some newer and fresher hobby.
But quietly oblivious to it all, the young lady went her way, smoothing with gentle advice and over thoughtful bounty many a thorny path where poverty walked falteringly on, lending a patient and sympathetic ear to the grievous complaints that rose from the homes of want and distress, strangely gentle to all little children, careful of their needs, thoughtful of their future, dropping the gentle promises of Christ along darkened paths barren of such precious seeds, and often society was scandalized by the not unfrequent sight of the young lady taking out for an airing on the cool, breezy suburbs or sea-shore some puny child or ailing adult from the haunts of poverty and making them comfortable by her side in that darling little phaeton that all Norfolk ran to their windows to gaze at when it passed.
Miss Lavinia Story—dear old spinster!—undertook to interview the lady on the subject of her going so far in alleviating the "fancied wants and grievances of those wretched poor trash," and was fairly driven from the field when Mrs. Winans, with a glimmer of mischief under her black lashes and a very serious voice asked her if her leisure would admit of her joining the sewing society, of which she was manager.
"For indeed," said Grace, half playfully, half in earnest, "we are in want of workers very badly. A lady from 'our set' volunteered very kindly last week as operator on the sewing-machine I donated the society, and they are so dreadfully in want of basters. Surely, Miss Lavinia, you will enlist as baster—that, if not more. Think of the poor people who need clothing so badly, and say 'yes.'"
"I? I would not spoil my eyesight with everlasting stitching for poor people, who are always lazy and shiftless, and smell of onions," said Miss Story, loftily.
"I beg your pardon, I am sure," smoothly returned her merciless tormentor. "I forgot that your eyesight cannot be as strong as it once was. Perhaps you would not object to becoming a visitor of the sick, or something of that sort."
"My eyesight not as strong as it once was?" returned the lady, in perceptible anger. "You mistake very much, Mrs. Winans; my eyes are as young as they ever were" (she was fifty at the least), "but I can use them to better advantage than by wearing them out in the service of your sewing circle."
"It is rather tedious—this endless stitching," confessed the zealous advocate of the sewing society, "but perhaps you would not object to taking a little sewing at home occasionally—little dresses or aprons, and such trifling things for the little folks—even that would be a help to us in the present limited number of workers—won't you try to help us out that much?"
Miss Lavinia adjusted her spectacles on her high Roman nose, the better to annihilate with a flashing glance the persistent young lady whom she felt dimly persuaded in her own mind was "laughing in her sleeve at her," and Mrs. Winans, with the pearly edge of one little tooth repressing the smile that wanted to dimple on her lip, sat demurely expectant.
"I did not call on you, Mrs. Winans, I assure you, to solicit a situation as seamstress. I never allow myself to be brought into personal contact with the filthy and odious poor. I do my share in taking care of them by contributing to the regular poor fund of the church."
"Oh, indeed?" said the listener, still unmoved and demure. "I am sure it is very considerate of you and very comforting to the poor people besides."
"I think, my dear," answered Miss Lavinia, pacified by the rather equivocal compliment, "that it would be better for you to confine yourself to the same plan. Let those who have not our refined and delicate instincts minister to those of the poor class who are really deserving of pity and of assistance, while we can do our part just as well by placing our contributions in the hands of some worthy person who can undertake its proper distribution. It hardly looks well for a lady of your standing to be brought into such frequent and familiar intercourse with the vulgar and low people to be met in the homes of poverty, if you will pardon such plain speaking from an old friend and well-wisher."
"And so you will not undertake to help us sew," persisted the placid little tormentor, as the rustle of Miss Story's brown silk flounces announced impending departure.
"No, indeed—quite out of the question," answered the irate spinster, as she hurried indignantly away to report to her gossips, and only sorry that it was out of her power or that of any of her peers to socially ostracize the self-possessed young advocate of the sewing society.
"The most persistent little woman you ever saw," she said. "I fairly thought she'd have coaxed me into that low sewing-circle, or sent me away with a bundle of poor children's rags to mend. I won't undertake to advise her again in a hurry; and my advice to all of her friends is to let her alone. She is 'joined to her idols.'"
And the "persistent little woman" ran up stairs and jotted down a spirited account of her pleasant sparring with the spinster in her friendly, even sympathetic journal—the dear little book to which was confided the gentle thoughts of her pure young heart.
"Dear little book," she murmured, softly fluttering the scented leaves and glancing here and there at little detatched jottings in her pretty Italian text, "how many of my thoughts, nay hopes and griefs are recorded here."
Now and then a smile dawns in her blue eyes, and anon her sweet lip quivers as the written record of a joy or grief meets her gaze. Looking back over earlier years, the pleasures of the fleeting hours, the dawning hopes of maidenhood, the deep, wild sorrow of her slighted love, she suddenly pauses, her finger between the pages, and says to herself with a half-sad smile:
"And this was about the time when I fancied myself a poet. Why have I not torn this out long ago? I wonder why I have kept this foolish rhyme all these years?"
In soft, murmuring tones she read it aloud, a faint inflection of scorn running through her low, musical voice:
RUE!
"Violets in the spring
You gave me with the dew-tears in their eyes,
I said, in faint surprise:
Love do not tearful omens round them cling?
You answered: Pure as dew
Our new-born love, no omens sad have we
From morning violets, save that love shall be
Forever fresh and new.
"Roses, through summer's scope,
You brought me when the violets were flown—
Flushed, like the dawn—full-blown;
No folded leaves where hope could 'live in hope,'
I moaned; the perfume soon departs;
The scented leaves fall from the thorny stem.
You said: But they were sun-kissed, child, what then?
The fragrance lingers yet within our hearts.
"November's 'flying gold'
Drives through the 'ruined woodlands,' drift on drift,
Nor violet nor rose, your later gift,
Love's foolish, sun-kissed story has been told.
Dear, were you false or true?
I know not—only this: Love had its blight;
Nor dews nor fragrance fill my heart to-night—
But only—Rue!
"Ocean View, November, 1866."
"Rue!" she repeats, with a low, bitter laugh; "ah, me, I have been gathering a harvest of rue all my life."
The leaves fall together over the sorrowful, girlish rhyme, the book drops from her hand, and, sighing, she throws herself down on a low divan of cushioned pale blue silk, looking idly out of the open window at the evening sky glowing with the opalescent hues of a summer's sunset.
"I daresay it's quite natural to make a dunce of one's self once in a life-time," she muses, "and I presume there is a practical era in every one's life. All the same I wish it had never come to me; the consequences have followed me through life."
Her small hand goes up to her throat, touching the spring of the pearl-studded locket she wears there. The lid flying open shows the dusk glory of Paul Winans' pictured face smiling on her through a mist of her own tears.
"And I drove you from me. Lulu says I did it; spoke my own doom with fever-parched, delirious lips! Why did they believe me? Why did they not tell me of it long ago? They should have known I could not have been so cruel! All this time you have thought I hated you, all this time I have thought you hated me! You did come; you did want to make peace with your wronged though willful wife. It is joy to know that though too late for hope even. Why did I go to Washington? Why did I go in defiance of his will? All might have been well with us ere this. Both of them—the darling baby and the darling father—might have been mine now. Instead—oh, Heaven, Paul dearest, you will never know now—unless, perchance, you are in heaven—how deeply, how devotedly I loved you! Who is to blame? Ah, me! It is all rue!"
A moment her lips trembled against the pictured face, then she shuts it with a snap, and lies with closed eyes and compressed lips, thinking deeply and intensely, as "hearts too much alone" always think. But with the passing moments her sudden heart-ache softens a little. Rousing herself she walks over to the window, saying, with a faint, fluttering sigh:
"Ah, well! 'Fate is above us all.'"
How sweet the air is! The salt breeze catches the odor of the mignonette in her window, and wafts it to her, lifting the soft tresses from her aching temples with its scented breath, and with the sublime association that there is in some faint flower perfumes and grief, the bitter leaven at her heart swells again with all the painful luxury of sorrow.
"I am so weary of it all—life's daily treadmill round! What is it worth? How is it endurable when love is lost to us?"
Ah! poor child! Love is not all of life. When love is lost life's cares and duties still remain. We must endure it. Well for us that God's love is over all.
Some thought like this calms the seething waves of passion in her heart. She picks up her journal from the floor where it had fallen, and listlessly tears out the page that holds the simple rhyme of her girlhood's folly. Leaning on the window she takes it daintily between her fingers and tears it into tiny bits that scatter like snow-flakes down on the graveled path of the garden below.
"Loved by two," she says, musingly. "What was Bruce Conway's love worth, I wonder? Or Paul Winans' either, for that matter? The one fickle, unstable, the other jealous, proud, unbending as Lucifer! Not quite my ideal of perfect love, either one of them! After all, what is any man's love worth, I wonder, that it should blight a woman's life?"
Loved by three she might have said, but she did not know. How much the fleshly vail between our spirits hides from our finite eyes. How often and often a purer, better, stronger love than we have ever known is laid in silence at our feet, over which we walk blinded and never know the truth.
And yet by some odd chance, nay, rather unconscious prescience, she thinks of Willard Clendenon, recalling his words on the day of his sister's marriage:
"Never again on this side of eternity."
"What did it mean?" she mused aloud. "It was strange at the least. I trust no harm will come to Lulu, little darling. She is still well and happy, or at least her letters say so." And drawing from her pocket a letter lately received from Lulu, she ran over its contents again with all a woman's innocent pleasure in re-reading letters.
"How happy she seems," a faint smile curving the perfect lips; "and how devoted is Mr. Conway; how her innocent, joyous, loving heart mirrors itself in her letters! Sunshine, roses, honeymoon, bliss. Ah, me," with a light sigh chasing the smile away, "how evanescent are all things new and sweet; like that sky late aglow with the radiance of day, now darkening with the shades of twilight."
Norah comes in to light the gas, and is gently motioned away.
"Not yet, Norah. I have a fancy to sit in the twilight. You can come in later."
And Norah goes obediently.
Then she incloses the perfumed pink epistle in the dainty envelope bearing the monogram of the newly made wife, and laying it aside rests her head upon her hands, watching with dusk pained eyes the shadows that darken over the sky and over her golden head as she sits alone, her heart on fire with that keenest refinement of human suffering—"remembering happier things." All her brightness, all her love lies behind her in the past, in the green land of memory. The present holds no joy, the future no promise. The dimness of uncertainty, of doubt, of suspense, lies darkly on the present hour, the hopelessness of hope clouds the future. Heaven seems so far away as she lifts her mournful gaze to the purple, mysterious twilight sky, life seems so long as she remembers how young she is, and what possibilities for length of days lie before her. What wonder that her brave, long-tried strength fails her a little, that her sensitive spirit quails momentarily, and the angel of the human breast, hope,
"Comes back with worn and wounded wing,
To die upon the heart she could not cheer."
CHAPTER XXII.
ON TIPTOE FOR A FLIGHT
"If it be a sin to love thee,
Then my soul is deeply dyed
With a stain more dark than crimson,
That hath all the world defied;
For it holds thine image nearer
Than all else this earth hath given,
And regarded thee as dearer
Almost than its hopes of heaven!"
A period of three months goes by after Lulu's marriage, swiftly to those who are gone, slowly to those who remain. Mrs. Clendenon, in quiet household employments, in prayerful study of her Bible, fills up the aching void of her daughter's absence. Grace, in pursuance of the charge Lulu has left her, finds much of her leisure employed in scenes and undertakings that gently divert her mind from her own troubles to those of others. Under it all, the wound that time has only seared lies hidden, as near as she can hide it, from the probing of careless fingers.
Captain Clendenon shuts himself up in his dusty law office with his red-tape documents and law books. Of late he has covered himself with glory in the winning of a difficult suit at law, and Norfolk is loud in praise of the one-armed soldier, the maimed hero who has grown into such an erudite lawyer. He takes the adulation very quietly. "The time has passed when he sighed for praise." A shadow lies darkly on his life—the shadow of Grace Winans' unhappiness. In that strong, pure heart of his, no thought of himself, no selfish wish for his own happiness ever intrudes. Had peace folded his white wings over her fair head she would long ago have become to his high, honorable heart, a thing apart from his life, as something fair and lovely that was dead; and with her safe in the shelter of another man's love he would have tutored his heart to forget her. As it was, when he looked on the fair face that was to him but a reflex of the saintly soul within, his whole soul yearned over her; his love, which had in it more of heaven than earth, infolded her within the sphere of its own idolizing influence. She became to him, not the fair, fascinating, but sometimes faulty mortal woman the world saw in her, but rather a goddess, a creature most like
"That ethereal flower—
No more a fabled wonder—
That builds in air its azure bower,
And floats the starlight under.
Too pure to touch our sinful earth,
Too human yet for heaven,
Half-way it has its glorious birth,
With no root to be riven."
Such worship as this has always been the attribute of the purest, most unselfish love.
He sat alone in his office one day, his head bowed idly over Blackstone, his thoughts far away, when the sharp grating of wheels on the street outside startled him into rising and glancing out of the window. She was springing from her little pony-phaeton, and in another moment came flitting down the steps and into the room like a ray of sunshine.
"Moping, are you?" she asked with her head on one side, and a glimmer of her old-time jaunty grace.
"Not exactly," he answered, cheerfully bowing over the gloved hand she extended with frank sweetness—"only thinking; our life is too short for moping."
She might have added:
"I myself must mix with action
Lest I wither by despair."
"Are you busy?" glancing, as he offered her a seat, at the table littered with books and papers.
"Not at all; I am at your service," he replied.
"I want to talk to you; but—excuse me—your office looks so gloomy—makes me blue," she shivered a little. "Is your mother quite well?"
"Quite well—thanks. Will you not go up and see her?—or shall I bring her down?"
"Thanks—neither, I believe. I saw her a day or two since, and I am come on business now. Captain Clendenon, is it quite comme il faut for a lady to ask you to take a drive? If so, my phaeton is at your service. I want to ask you something; I cannot here. Some of your tiresome clients may disturb me."
The soft appealing eyes and voice work their will with this infatuated man. If she had asked him to lie down under the hoofs of her cream-white ponies and be trampled on, I fear he would have done it. A man's love for a woman sometimes rises above its ordinary ridiculousness into the sublimity of pathos, and how little it is for him to consent to sit by her side and hear those magical tones, perhaps give some advice to that ever restless young spirit. He calls his office boy, takes his hat, and goes. Presently they are rolling over one of Norfolk's handsome drives, and censorious people, looking from their windows, exchange opinions that Mrs. Winans is "rather fast."
"Alas! for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun."
"I have been over to Portsmouth this morning," she says, in the midst of their small talk. "It is rather a nice little jaunt over there on the ferry-boat over the Elizabeth River—don't you think so?"
"Yes, I do think so; had you a nice time?"
"I don't know—yes, I suppose so. I visited some friends, and we went down and saw the beautiful grounds of the Naval Hospital—what a handsome building it is! The pride of Portsmouth. And what romantic grounds! I sat there a long time and looked at the sea."
To what is all this idle chatter leading, he wonders, seeing perfectly well with what consummate art she is leading the subject whither she wants it to go.
"We were all talking of that dreadful fever at Memphis," she resumes, constrainedly. "What swift progress it is making! The newspaper accounts of it are just terrible—heart-rending, indeed; and they are so fearfully in need of nurses and money. I have sent them a small sum—a mere 'drop in the ocean.'"
"So have I," he answers, white to the lips. He knows what is coming.
She gives him a flitting glance, fanning herself energetically the while. A useless proceeding, for the sea-breeze, that flutters her fair curls like golden banners, is simply delicious.
"I heard something about you over there," she ventures. "One always has to go abroad to hear news from home, you know."
"Very likely; you can hear anything you want to over there. Little Portsmouth is the hot bed of gossip," he answers, smiling dryly.
"Well, for that matter, all places are," she returns. "But you do not ask what it was that I heard?"
"Is it worth the repetition?"
"I think so, but you are not interested, I see;" and she leans back with some displeasure—a pout on the curve of her crimson lip.
He rouses himself, all penitence and forced gallantry.
"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Winans. Any remark from yourself cannot fail to be interesting."
"I heard—I wonder you did not tell me of it yourself—that you and your mother are going next week to Memphis to help to nurse the fever patients."
No answer.
"Is this true?"
Her eyes are seeking his. He looks down on her, answering constrainedly:
"It is perfectly true, Mrs. Winans."
"Why have you kept it from me?" in some wonder this.
"We intended telling you, of course, before we left; but it is such a harrowing topic—the sufferings of those poor yellow fever patients—that I have hesitated in mentioning it to you."
"Was that your only reason?"
No answer. He cannot bear to speak.
"I know," she resumes, "why you have not told me. You feared I would want to go, too, and so kept it from me in your good, true, brotherly love; but in this case," smiling willfully up into his disturbed face, "your painstaking has been 'Love's Labor Lost.' I have been making my mind up to go all along, and now I mean to make the trip there under the protection of your mother and yourself—if you will permit me."
The murder is out. She looks away from him demurely, waiting his reply. It comes, full of a shocked horror.
"Mrs. Winans, are you mad?"
"Not at all; are you? I am quite as strong, quite as able to help those poor sufferers, as your mother is; and yet you do not think she is mad," she answers, half offended.
"No; for she has had the fever, and so have I. You have heard of the fever that desolated Norfolk and Portsmouth in 1855? Mother and I both had the yellow fever in its worst form then, so you see it is perfectly safe and our bounden duty for us to go to the relief of those poor sufferers. But you are frail and delicate yourself. You have never had the fever; you are not acclimated there, and would only fall a victim. It would be a sort of disguised suicide, for you would be voluntarily rushing into the jaws of death."
"No, no," she answered, half bitterly. "I bear a charmed life. Nothing seems to check the current of my doomed existence. And you forget that Memphis is my native home. I lived there the first sixteen years of my life, and am quite accustomed to the peculiar climate. And what if death should come? It would only be to 'leave all disappointment, care, and sorrow, and be at rest forever,' But no, I shall not die. I have borne illness, suffering, sorrow—everything that breaks the heart, and snaps the frail threads of existence—yet here I am still, quite healthy, passably rosy, and willing to devote my strength to those who need it. I have been 'through the fire,' Captain Clendenon, and really," with a subdued smile, "I think I am fireproof."
"Some are refined in the furnace of affliction," he repeats, very gently.
Soothed by the softly spoken words, she asks, timidly:
"Tell me if I may go under your care?"
"If you will go, I shall be most happy to take all the annoyances of travel off your hands; but, little friend, think better of it, and give up this mad, quixotic scheme."
"Do you think it such a mad scheme?" she asks, mortified and humiliated. "Do you think I could do no good to those poor suffering victims who need gentle womanly tending so badly? Do you think the sacrifice of my ease, and luxury, and comfort, would count as nothing with Christ? If you think this, Captain Clendenon, tell me so frankly, and I will remain in Norfolk—not otherwise."
There is nothing for him to urge against this appeal. She touches up the ponies with her slim, little whip, lightly and impatiently. They are off, like the wind, for home again, as he makes the last appeal he can think of to this indomitable young spirit.
"News may come of your husband at any time, Mrs. Winans. Were you to go, and he, returning, found you gone, he would be most bitterly displeased. Remember, it was his express desire that you should remain in your home here. I beg your pardon, if I seem persistent, but it is only through friendly interest in you and yours that I take the liberty."
"Ah! but," a gleam of triumph lightening under her black lashes, "you forget that I have my husband's consent to visit Memphis? You brought it to me. I'm returning to the home of my childhood. I am not violating any command or desire of his."
"Once more," he says, desperately "let me beg you not to think, for the sake of all those who love you, all you love, of going to that plague-stricken city."
"It is useless." She set her lips firmly. "I am sorry to refuse your request, but the call of duty I must obey. My arrangements are all made. Norah is to stay and to take care of my home. My visit to Portsmouth this morning was for the purpose of leaving Lulu's precious charge in the hands of a dear Christian friend; so," trying to win him to smile by an affected lightness, "you may tell your mother she will have company she did not anticipate, though you were so ungallant as to persuade me not to come."
"When a woman will she will."
She carried her point against the entreaties of all her friends, and in less than two weeks, three dusty travelers—weary in body, but very strong in prayerful resolves and hopes—were entered as assistants in nursing in one of the crowded hospitals of the desolated, plague-stricken city of Memphis.
