Kitabı oku: «The Senator's Bride», sayfa 14
CHAPTER XXV.
THE PATHOS OF A QUIET LIFE
"Oh, being of beauty and bliss! seen and known
In the depths of my soul, and possessed there alone!
My days know thee not; and my lips name thee never;
Thy place in my poor life is vacant forever.
We have met; we have parted. No more is recorded
In my annals on earth."
—From Lucille.
Captain Clendenon is taking an afternoon cigar.
He has stepped out of the hospital, where, thank God! there are fewer patients and less need of him now, for a stroll in the fresh air, and while he meanders down the principal thoroughfare, he lights a Havana and enjoys his walk.
In financial panics one sees a crowded thoroughfare, with people rushing hither and thither, and blockading the banks; in pestilential panics one sees silent, deserted streets, and dreary, deserted-looking buildings. This is all that meets Willard's gaze as he stops on the corner, man-fashion, and looks idly up and down at the occasional passers-by, for human faces are the exception, not the rule. Now and then a man goes by, looks hard at him, and nods respectfully. He is very well known here as the noted Norfolk lawyer who has so nobly volunteered in the cause of suffering humanity. Not a woman but looks twice at the tall figure, with its fine military bearing, its handsome head, set so grandly on its broad shoulders, its empty, pathetic coat-sleeve pinned across the left breast.
Old death has been at work here. Those whom he has not mowed down with his awful scythe have fled, terrified, beyond his present harvest-field. There are places of business closed—some of whose owners are abroad in other cities, others of whom are holding commerce now with the worm and the grave. Here and there a school-house is closed, the most of whose little pupils have gone to learn of the angels. It is the dreariness of desolation, and as he puffs meditatively away, these familiar lines of Hemans come into his thoughts:
"Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set, but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, oh, death!
We know when moons shall wane,
When summer birds from far shall cross the sea,
When autumn's hue shall touch the golden grain—
But who shall tell us when to look for thee?"
"A penny for your thoughts, Captain Clendenon," says a fresh, young voice, and a small hand taps him on the shoulder.
He turns with a start. One of the dusky-eyed belles of Memphis, with whom he has a casual acquaintance, has stopped to chat with him—a tall, handsome young lady in a mannish costume of navy-blue velvet, double-breasted English walking-jacket, a mannish hat set jauntily on her black hair, and a set of Grecian features, and large, black eyes.
His gray eyes light momentarily.
"Ah! Miss De Vere, this is a pleasure! About the thoughts—they were not worth your inquiry."
"I am the best judge of that," and something in her tones, not her careless words, imply that all his thoughts are precious to her.
He tosses his cigar away, and turning, asks, politely:
"Are you out for a stroll? May I walk with you?"
"Am I out for a stroll? Yes, but on my way home now. You may see me there with pleasure."
They walk on together down the quiet street, and her cheek flushes a warmer red as she chatters softly to him, he rather listening than talking. It is his way.
"I thought you were out of the city—at the North," he says, in answer to some remark. "Your father told me two months ago he meant to take his family away from the pestilence."
"And so we were. We have but just gotten back since the fever began to lose its hold. How brave you were to stay here! Ugh!" she shuddered a little, "that terrible fever! Do you know people say that you are a hero?"
"Do they?"
A low laugh ripples over his serene, finely cut lips. He wears no beard, no mustache, and every flitting emotion shows itself about his mobile mouth.
She sees a careless sort of surprise on his face now—nothing more.
"Don't you care for it? It is so pleasant to be praised," she says, in some wonder.
"I don't know—is it?"
"Is it not? Do you mean to say that you attach no value to fame—fame that is won by good deeds?"
"I don't know," he answers again, in an absent way. "I might have done it in my younger days—scarcely now. I like to do good for its own sake—not for any praise that may follow it."
"I know—I have heard at least," she stammered, with strange timidity, "that you lost your arm to—to save another man's life! Is it so, Captain Clendenon—did you give your arm for his life?" her dusky eyes kindling with a passionate hero-worship, that is characteristic of Southern women.
"Yes, I gave my arm for his life," he says, grimly. "I might as well have given him my life, for when I buried my left arm on the battle-field at Chancellorsville I buried with it all the hopes that make a man's life worth the living."
"And why?" an unspoken sympathy on her pretty face. "What hopes can there be that your misfortune can possibly destroy?"
They turn a corner into a side street, where her home lies, meeting a group coming toward them, a man with a bright-faced wife clinging to one arm, a little laughing child by the other hand, and two others following after. His glance marks them out a moment, then meets hers, as he quotes, half-sadly:
"'Domestic happiness! thou only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the fall.'
"Miss De Vere, cannot you suppose that a man getting into the 'sere and yellow leaf'—I am almost six-and-thirty years old—must feel the need of some 'fair spirit for his minister?' And," his glance falling, hers following, on his empty sleeve, "what woman could I ask to give herself to half a man?"
She slackens her pace to look up at him, in genuine honest astonishment.
"Captain Clendenon, you have never been so quixotic, so absurdly chivalrous as to think that any woman would not feel honored to cast her lot with yours in spite of your honorable misfortune—yes, if you had lost both your arms in the army as nobly as you have lost one!"
"Thank you! thank you!" he answers, deeply moved, and seeing the sudden waves of hot color breaking over the warm Southern beauty of her face, he looks blindly away and thinks what a noble-hearted girl she is, and how he has misjudged her in thinking her a fine, fashionable flirt, as all along he had been doing, when he thought of her at all, which was but seldom.
And then they are at the steps of the elegant De Vere mansion, and she gently invites him to enter. He shakes his head.
"I thank you; but I will continue my stroll. One gets so little fresh air indoors, and I have been so confined lately. To-day I am off duty, and making the most of it. My respects to the family."
"Oh!" she says, turning, with her foot on the marble step. "May I ask you one question?"
"A dozen, if you please," he returned, gallantly.
"It is only this: It is a current report here that the Hon. Mrs. Winans, who came down here with your party to help nurse the fever patients, is, or was, Miss Grace Grey of this city—do you know if this is true?" lifting eager, inquiring eyes to his face.
"Yes, it is certainly true," and she sees some sort of a change pass over his face—what, she cannot fathom.
"Indeed!" she says, in quick surprise and pleasure. "I knew her intimately as a child; we were next-door neighbors"—she nods at the handsome residence standing next to her own, and he looks at it with tender interest—"and afterward we were in boarding-school together. I always liked her so much. Will you give her Stella De Vere's love, and tell her I will come and see her if she will let me?"
"I certainly will, with pleasure," and they shake hands and say good-by again, and she runs up the steps of her father's stately home, pausing in the door-way as he turns away.
"He is a hero," she says, with a dreamy light in her dark eyes. "How I could love him, if–"
She shuts the door, half-sighing, and goes in.
For him, he walks away, stopping a moment in front of the next-door house to light a fresh cigar, and glancing at the green grounds, with their graveled paths, goes away with a fancy in his mind of a fairy child with violet eyes and golden curls at play beside the marble fountain under its dashing spray.
Grace Grey!
He walks on down the lonely street, his heart full of Grace Grey, not Grace Winans; full of the child and girl whose light steps have danced down this street in happier days—not the Senator's sad-eyed wife—he has no right to think of her. But this fairy, winning child, this innocent, joyous maiden, who grows into shape and life in his loving imagination—she is his own, his very own, to hold in his "heart of hearts," to think of, to idealize, to worship. He creates in his own mind the goddess she was, goes back from the days when he first knew her to those earlier days when Stella De Vere knew her. Then an idle remembrance of Stella's praise of him sets him thinking. Was it true? Would any woman have loved him as well with his one arm as with two? Would Grace have done it had he tried to win her? For a moment a half-wish that he had tried, that he had won her for his own idolized wife, overwhelmed him.
"She might have been quietly content with me," he thinks. "At least she should never have known the suffering, the passionate pathos that darkens her young life now."
Too late! "Her place in his poor life is vacant for ever," and, as Grace has said once, he repeats:
"Fate is above us all."
He goes back to his visions of the child and maiden again; his heart thrills with passionate fondness for the happy child, the lovely girl whose dual lives have merged into the shadowed life of beautiful Grace Winans. Fancies come and go, the "light that never was on sea nor land" shining over his mild pictures of what "might have been," and never opium-eater's visions were fairer than the ideal dreams that go curling up in the blue, fantastic smoke-wreaths of Captain Clendenon's cigar.
Sunset drives him to his hotel, chilled and thoughtful. The winter sunshine, pleasant enough in this southern city, in its declining, has left a chill in the air that seems to strike to his heart. At the door he tosses away the remains of that magic cigar and goes up to his room, where a cheerful fire throws its genial warmth over everything, and brings out the stale odor of cigar smoke that clings to him. He throws off his coat, and in his white shirt-sleeves, pours fresh water from the pitcher into the basin.
"Phew!" he says, in disgust, "how smoky I am!" pushing back his neat linen cuff and bending over, in manly fashion, to dip head and hand into the water; he gives a slight cough, then, gasping, bends lower, while a crimson stream flows fast from his lips into the crystal water, turning it all to blood.
Again and again that slight cough, again and again that warm tide flowing from his lips—and yet he seems not in the least surprised, not in the least alarmed, only steadies himself, with his hand pressed on the edge of the wash-stand, and watches the flowing life-stream, his face growing white as marble.
Then the stream thins, grows less and less, and less, and gradually ceases. Taking up a glass of fresh water he rinses his mouth of the blood, and standing, looking down at the scarlet flood in the wash-basin, says thoughtfully, but not fearfully:
"This is the second time I have done it. I think I will see Dr. Constant to-morrow."
A tap at the door.
"Mother must not know," he says, and hurriedly laying a large towel over the wash-basin, is sitting comfortably in front of his fire when he calls out:
"Come in."
It is Mrs. Clendenon, just come in from the hospital, her gentle face flushed from walking, a placid smile on her lip.
"Willard, are you here? Gracie and I have but just come in and missed you—why, how pale you are—are you sick?"
"No, not sick. I have but just come in also. I was out walking and came in chilled—have not thawed out yet."
"Oh, Willard, my boy!" she cries, in a horrified tone, "what is that?"
A great spat of blood he had not observed stained his spotless linen cuff; she turned dead white as she saw it.
"It is nothing," he answers, with his handkerchief at his lips, but he draws it away dashed with minute streaks of blood; "sit down, mother, dear, don't get nervous, don't get excited."
She is leaning over his chair, her arm around his shoulder, her eyes full of piteous mother's love and fear fixed on his pale face.
"My son, what does it mean?"
"Mother, nothing much. I have only had a slight hemorrhage from the lungs—from over-exertion, I presume. It is all over now; but to make all sure I will consult Doctor Constant to-morrow, and I will be more careful of my health and strength hereafter, I promise you."
"Oh, I knew you were killing yourself," she wailed; "I knew it!"
"Don't, mother—don't talk so wildly. It was for the best, I assure you; it had to come. I shall be very much better after this; Doctor Constant will tell you so," he says, tenderly, to the wild-eyed mother, who is white with fear for her boy, and with all a woman's physical horror at the sight of blood.
She glances around her vacantly, then suddenly walks across the room, lifting the towel from the wash-basin. She looks with reeling brain and dazed eyes on that scarlet tide, and turns on her son a look of awful horror and anguish—such anguish as a mother's heart can feel—down, down, down in its fathomless, illimitable depths. He comes forth and steadies her reeling form with his one arm about her waist, looking down at her with those earnest, beautiful gray eyes.
"Oh, mother, don't look so—don't grieve so! I tell you, certainly, I shall be better after this. I have only lost a little blood. Cheer up, little mother. Doctor Constant shall give me a tonic, and make it all right. You won't tell Mrs. Winans? I would rather she did not know. She would worry over it, too, and there is nothing to alarm either of your tender hearts."
He did get better of it, though Doctor Constant shook his head warningly when he met him still at his labors in the hospital. Grace knew nothing of it, by his wish, and in February a letter from Lulu, who had spent a portion of the winter in Italy, filled Mrs. Clendenon with the same perplexities, doubts, and hopes that agitated Lulu's heart in her far away home in London, which, with its foggy atmosphere and chilly rains, made itself peculiarly disagreeable to the young American lady who pined for the clear, pure atmosphere and health-giving sea-breeze of her own native home, while she gently deferred to the wishes of her husband and his aunt, and remained abroad until it pleased them to turn their faces homeward.
CHAPTER XXVI.
LULU TO HER MOTHER
"Tis strange but true; for truth is always strange,
Stranger than fiction."
—Byron.
"London, Eng., March 20th, 1874.
"I promised to write you, dear mother if I should discover anything of interest relating to the little child of whom I wrote you in the autumn; and thanks to dear Bruce (who pretended not to take any interest in the matter at all) I have something to write you which, if nothing more comes of it, is certainly one of the strangest coincidences that ever happened. Mrs. Conway and Bruce think it can be only a coincidence, but my hopeful heart whispers that it may be more. But I will tell you of it, mother dearest, and leave you to judge for yourself.
"In the first place, then, my dear Bruce used only to be amused at my fondness for and interest in the child that bore such marked resemblance to two of my friends, though he could not but admit the likeness himself. But after he became convinced, as I was, that there was some mystery or some secret about the little one's parentage, he, quite unknown to me (not wishing to arouse hopes that might be disappointed in the end), set about making inquiries in a quiet and cautious manner, which brought to light the facts I am about to relate.
"I suppose it is hardly necessary I should remind you, mother, that the Englishwoman, Mrs. Moreland, who stole little Paul Winans from the hotel in Washington, D. C., and was traced to the steamer that left for England, told the servant-girl there that she had buried her husband in New York, as also a little girl and boy one year old, and that he was the last child of five. You will also remember that the girl, Annie Grady, and other waiters in the hotel thought that Mrs. Moreland was not quite right in her mind—that is to say, she was on the verge of insanity, and it was supposed that, under some hallucination that the child was her own, she kidnapped little Paul, and, with a lunatic's proverbial cunning, succeeded in getting away with him.
"Now, mother, this is what Bruce has discovered. First, that Sir Robert and Lady Marguerite Willoughby never had but one child, a fair and gentle young daughter, who mortally offended them by eloping with and marrying her drawing-master, a young man with the beauty of a Greek god and the humble station and sheer poverty which is too often the birthright of such beauty. For this offense she was disinherited and exiled forever from the presence of her haughty patrician father. It is said that the gentle mother would gladly have forgiven the erring child and made the best of the mesalliance, but Sir Robert's will being law, she had no choice but to abide by it. Secondly, that the disinherited daughter and her poor and handsome husband led a precarious existence in London for ten years, during which time four children were successively born to them and died; all this time the cruel parents of the willful daughter refusing her appeal for forgiveness. At the death of the last child the unfortunate but devoted pair concluded to try their fortune in America, whither they accordingly went, settling in New York. There another child was born to them, and fortune, long unpropitious, began to smile on the loving pair, when the sudden death of the husband left the timid young mother a widow and a stranger, with a fatherless child. The shock nearly unsettled her reason, and she waited only for the burial of her husband before she started for England with her baby, and on reaching here, presented herself, homeless, friendless, almost destitute, before her cruel parents, with an ill and fretful babe in her arms. They would have been inhuman to have turned her away. She was taken back to their home and hearts, but too late, for she was barely sane enough to give an incoherent account of her husband's death in America before her melancholy madness reached such a violent stage that they were compelled to remove her to a lunatic asylum, where she still remains, a hopeless maniac.
"The child, whose dark beauty and lack of resemblance to his mother's family they attributed to a perfect likeness of its deceased father, they received into their home and hearts, and formally adopted as their own, since they two, being really the last of his race, this child was the only one left to perpetuate the name and title of the proud Willoughbys. Remorse for the part they acted to their unhappy daughter leads them to preserve entire silence as to her and the sad story I have been telling you. All this Bruce learned from one who is intimate with the family, and, indeed, the story is well known in London, though they never mention it to strangers. But her parents, of course, knowing of her life while in New York, have not the slightest doubt of the little boy being their grandchild, the son of their daughter, Christine, and her husband, Earle Moreland. You will remember, mother, that the kidnapper of Grace's little son was registered at the Washington hotel as Mrs. Earle Moreland. I think we only need to prove that Mrs. Moreland's child died in New York to claim this little child of Grace. But I leave you to draw all inferences, dear mother, and I know that you will agree with me that there is more than coincidence in the case.
"All that I have told you Bruce discovered before we went to Italy. Now that we have returned he intends to push the matter further and try to get at the truth of the whole affair. I do not yet know what steps he will take in the matter, but pray with me, my own beloved mother, that 'the truth may be made manifest,' and that dear, patient Grace may have her child restored to her, for I feel certain that this darling little boy, of whom we are all so fond, is her own child. And, oh! what a pleasure it will be to me to see him restored to her by any instrumentality of mine.
"Still I think it best to keep her in ignorance of all this yet awhile; for uncertainty and suspense on this subject now would be, I know, more than she could bear; and, besides, we cannot yet know what the end may be. I will send you further tidings as soon as we have any. You can tell brother Willie of it all. His clear, prudent judgment may be of use to us, but he is not to let Grace know.
"I am almost counting the days, mother, between this and the happy day that shall bring me to your dear, loving arms again! I miss you so much, and brother Willie, and dear Gracie, too.
"I had intended to tell you of my pleasant time at Lady T–'s reception, my dining at the embassy, and many other interesting things, which I will have to postpone until my next, as my husband is now waiting to take me for a drive, and I, as of old, dear mother, am so fond of driving. How I used to like dear Grace's little phaeton!
"Bruce and Aunt Conway both join me in love to all, and both are well, but beginning, I believe, like myself, to feel a little homesick.
"My warmest love to dear Gracie and my darling brother Willie, and, mother, dear, do, do, all of you, take care of your health, and don't kill yourselves in that awful Memphis, and do not fail to write at earliest convenience to your
"Devoted daughter,"Lulu C. Conway."
