THE LETTER RECEIVED.
Arthur had been spending the evening at Prospect Hill. The Hethertons
had returned and would remain till after the fifteenth, and since they
had come the rector found it even pleasanter calling there than it had
been before, with only his bride-elect to entertain him. Sure of Dr.
Bellamy, Fanny had laid aside her sharpness, and was exceedingly witty
and brilliant, while, now that it was settled, the colonel was too
thoroughly a gentleman to be otherwise than gracious to his future
nephew; and Mrs. Hetherton was always polite and lady-like, so that
the rector looked forward with a good deal of interest to the evenings
he usually gave to Lucy, who, though satisfied to have him in her
sight, still preferred the olden time, when she had him all to herself
and was not disquieted with the fear that she did not know enough for
him, as she often was when she heard him talking with Fanny and her
uncle of things she did not understand.
This evening, however, the family were away and she received him
alone, trying so hard to come up to his capacity, talking so
intelligibly of books she had been reading and looking so lovely in
her winter crimson dress, besides being so sweetly affectionate and
confiding, that for once since his engagement Arthur was more than
content, and returned her modest caresses with a warmth he had not
felt before. He did love her, he said to himself, or, at least, he was
learning to love her very much; and when at last he took his leave,
and she went with him to the door, there was an unwonted tenderness in
his manner as he pushed her gently back, for the first snow of the
season was falling and the large flakes dropped upon her golden hair,
from which he brushed them carefully away.
"I cannot let my darling take cold," he said, and Lucy felt a strange
thrill of joy, for never before had he called her his darling, and
sometimes she had thought that the love she received was not as great
as the love she gave.
But she did not think so now, and in an ecstasy of joy she stood in
the deep recess of the bay window, watching him as he went away
through the moonlight and the feathery cloud of snow, wondering why,
when she was so happy, there could cling to her a haunted presentiment
that she and Arthur would never meet again just as they had parted.
Arthur, on the contrary, was troubled with no such presentiment. Of
Anna he hardly thought, or, if he did, the vision was obscured by the
fair picture he had seen standing in the door, with the snowflakes
resting in her hair like pearls in a golden coronet. And Arthur
thanked his God that he was beginning at last to feel right--that the
solemn vows that he was so soon to utter would be more than a mockery.
It was Arthur's work to teach others how dark and mysterious are the
ways of Providence, but he had not himself half learned that lesson in
all its strange reality; but the lesson was coming on apace; each
stride of his swift-footed beast brought him nearer to the great shock
waiting for him upon the study table, where Thomas, his man, had put
it.
He saw it the first thing on entering the room, but he did not take
it up until the snow was brushed from his garments and he had warmed
himself by the cheerful fire blazing on the hearth. Then, sitting in
his easy-chair, and moving the lamp nearer to him, he took Mrs.
Meredith's letter and broke the seal, starting as if a serpent had
stung him when, in the note inclosed, he recognized his own
handwriting, the same he had sent to Anna when his heart was so full
of hope as the brown stalks now beating against his windows with a
dismal sound were full of fragrant blossoms. Both had died since
then--the roses and his hopes--And Arthur almost wished that he, too,
were dead when he read Mrs. Meredith's letter and saw the gulf his
feet were treading. Like the waves of the sea, his love for Anna came
rolling back upon him, augmented and intensified by all that he had
suffered, and by the terrible conviction that it could not be,
although, alas! "it might have been."
He repeated the words over and over again, as stupified with pain, he
sat gazing at vacancy, thinking how true was the couplet--
"Of all sad words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are these, it might have been."
He could not even pray at once, his brain was so confused, but when,
at last, the white, quivering lips could move, and the poor aching
heart could pray, he only whispered, "God help me to do right," and by
that prayer he knew that for a single instant there had crept across
his mind the possibility of sacrificing Lucy, who loved and trusted
him so much. But only for an instant. He could not cast her from him,
though to take her now, knowing what he did, were almost death itself.
"But God can help me to bear it," he cried; then, falling upon his
knees, with his face bowed to the floor, the Rector of St. Mark's
prayed as he had never prayed before--first for himself, whose need
was greatest, and then for Lucy, that she might never know what making
her happy had cost him, and then for Anna, whose name he could not
speak. "That other one," he called her, and his heart kept swelling in
his throat and preventing his utterance, so that the words he would
say never reached his lips.
But God heard them just the same, and knew his child was asking that
Anna might forget him, if to remember him was pain; that she might
learn to love another far worthier than he had ever been.
He did not think of Mrs. Meredith; he had no feeling of resentment
then; he was too wholly crushed to care how his ruin had been brought
about, and, long after the wood fire on the hearth had turned to cold,
gray ashes, he knelt upon the floor and battled with his grief, and
when the morning broke it found him still in the cheerless room where
he had passed the entire night and from which he went forth
strengthened, as he hoped, to do what he believed to be his duty. This
was on Saturday, and on the Sunday following there was no service at
St. Mark's. The rector was sick, the sexton said; "hard sick, too, he
had heard," and the Hetherton carriage, with Lucy in it, drove swiftly
to the rectory, where the quiet and solitude awed and frightened Lucy
as she entered the house and asked the housekeeper how Mr. Leighton
was.
"It is very sudden," she said. "He was perfectly well when he left me
on Friday night. Please tell him I am here."
The housekeeper shook her head. Her master's orders were that no one
but the doctor should be admitted, she said, repeating what Arthur had
told her in anticipation of just such an infliction as this.
But Lucy was not to be denied. Arthur was hers, his sickness was
hers, his suffering was hers, and see him she would.
"He surely did not mean me when he asked that no one should be
admitted. Tell him it is I; it is Lucy," she said with an air of
authority, which, in one so small, so pretty and so child-like, only
amused Mrs. Brown, who departed with the message, while Lucy sat down
with her feet upon the stove and looked around the sitting-room,
thinking that it was smaller and poorer than the one at Prospect Hill,
and how she would remodel it when she was mistress there.
"He says you can come," was the word Mrs. Brown brought back, and,
with a gleam of triumph in her eye and a toss of the head, which said,
"I told you so," Lucy went softly into the darkened room and shut the
door behind her.
Arthur had half expected this and had nerved himself to meet it, but
the cold sweat stood on his face and his heart throbbed painfully as
Lucy bent over him and Lucy's tears fell on his face while she took
his feverish hands in hers and murmured softly, "Poor, dear Arthur, I
am so sorry for you, and if I could I'd bear the pain so willingly."
He knew she would; she was just as loving and unselfish as that, and
he wound his arms around her and drew her down close to him while he
whispered, "My poor, little Lucy; I don't deserve this from you."
She did not know what he meant, and she only answered him with
kisses, while her little hands moved caressingly across his forehead
just as they had done years ago in Rome, when she soothed the pain
away. There certainly was a mesmeric influence emanating from those
hands, and Arthur felt its power, growing very quiet and at last
falling away to sleep, while the soft passes went on, and Lucy held
her breath lest she would waken him.
"She was a famous nurse," the physician said when he came,
constituting her his coadjutor and making her tread wild with joy and
importance when he gave his patient's medicine into her hands.
"It was hardly proper for her niece to stay," Mrs. Hetherton
thought, but Lucy was one who could trample down proprieties, and it
was finally arranged that Fanny should stay with her. So, while Fanny
went to bed and slept, Lucy sat all night in the sick room with Mrs.
Brown, and when the next morning came she was looking very pale and
languid, but very beautiful withal. At least, such was the mental
compliment paid her by Thornton Hastings, who was passing through
Hanover and had stopped over one train to see his old college friend
and, perhaps, tell him what he began to feel it was his duty to tell
him in spite of his promise to Anna. She was nearly well now and had
driven with him twice to the park, but he could not be insensible to
what she suffered, or how she shrank from having the projected wedding
discussed, and, in his intense pity for her, he had half resolved to
break his word and tell Arthur what he knew. But he changed his mind
when he had been in Hanover a few hours and watched the little fairy
who, like some ministering angel, glided about the sick room, showing
herself every whit a woman, and making him repent that he had ever
called her frivolous or silly. She was not either, he said, and, with
a magnanimity for which he thought himself entitled to a good deal of
praise, he even felt that it was very possible for Arthur to love the
gentle little girl who smoothed his pillows so tenderly and whose
fingers threaded so lovingly the damp, brown locks when she thought
he, Thornton, was not looking on. She was very coy of him and very
distant towards him, too, for she had not forgotten his sin, and she
treated him at first with a reserve for which he could not account.
But, as the days went on, and Arthur grew so sick that his
parishioners began to tremble for their young minister's life, and to
think it perfectly right for Lucy to stay with him, even if she was
assisted in her labor of love by the stranger from New York, the
reserve disappeared and on the most perfect terms of amity she and
Thornton Hastings watched together by Arthur's side. Thornton Hastings
learned more lessons than one in that sick room where Arthur's faith
in God triumphed over the terrors of the grave, which, at one time,
seemed so near, while the timid Lucy, whom he had only known as a gay
butterfly of fashion, dared before him to pray that God would spare
her promised husband or give her grace to say, "Thy will be done."
Thornton could hardly say that he was skeptical before, but any doubts
he might have had touching the great fundamental truths on which a
true religion rests were gone forever, and he left Hanover a changed
man in more respects than one.
Arthur did not die, and on the Sunday preceding the week when the
usual Christmas decorations were to commence he came again before his
people, his face very pale and worn, and wearing upon it a look which
told of a new baptism, an added amount of faith which had helped to
lift him above the fleeting cares of this present life. And yet there
was much of earth clinging to him still, and it made itself felt in
the rapid beating of his heart when he glanced towards the square pew
where Lucy knelt and knew that she was giving thanks for him restored
again.
Once, in the earlier stages of his convalescence, he had almost
betrayed his secret by asking her which she would rather do--bury him
from her sight, feeling that he loved her to the last, or give him to
another, now that she knew he would recover. There was a frightened
look in Lucy's eyes as she replied: "I would ten thousand times rather
see you dead, and know that, even in death, you were my own, than to
lose you that other way. Oh, Arthur, you have no thought of leaving me
now?"
"No, darling, I have not, I am yours always," he said, feeling that
the compact was sealed forever and that God blessed the sealing.
He had written to Mrs. Meredith, granting her his forgiveness and
asking that, if Anna did not already know of the deception, she might
never be enlightened. And Mrs. Meredith had answered that Anna had
only heard a rumor that an offer had been made her, but that she
regarded it as a mistake, and was fast recovering both her health and
spirits. Mrs. Meredith did not add her surprise at Arthur's generosity
in adhering to his engagement, nor hint that, now her attack of
conscience was so safely over, she was glad he did so, having hope yet
of that house on Madison Square; but Arthur guessed at it and
dismissed her from his mind just as he tried to dismiss every
unpleasant thought, waiting with a trusting heart for whatever the
future might bring.