MABEL was still turning the vexed question of right and expediency over
in her fast-heating brain, the next evening, as she sat in the parlor,
and feigned to hearken to the diligent duett-practising going on at the
piano, her husband and Mrs. Aylett being the performers.
Mrs. Sutton had gone home that afternoon, engaging to return for a
longer sojourn in the course of a month. Mr. Aylett read his newspaper
at one side of the centre table, and his sister employed her fingers and
eyes at the other with a trifle of fancy-work---an antimacassar she
was crocheting for her hostess. Her industrious or fidgetty habits were
chronic and inveterate, and people, in remarking upon them, did not
reflect that this species of restlessness is in itself a disease, seldom
analyzed, more seldom cured. There are few students or physicians of
human nature, in this world of superficial observers, who go deep enough
into the springs of man's action to distinguish the external symptoms
of heart-cancer from ossification, or to learn the difference between
satiety and atrophy. A night of nervous sleeplessness, a day of
irresolution and dread, had aggravated almost beyond her control the
restlessness which in Mabel was the unerring indication of unhealthiness
of mind and body. To sit still was impracticable; to talk connectedly
and easily would soon be as difficult. She was glad to see Aunt Rachel
go--immeasurably relieved when a musical evening was proposed by the
brother and sister, seconding the motion with alacrity that called forth
a pleased smile from the one, and a look of surprised inquisitiveness
from the other.
“You have grown more fond of instrumental music,” said Mrs. Aylett, half
interrogatively. “You used always to prefer vocal.”
“Try me and see what an appreciative listener I am,” rejoined Mabel,
with a sickly smile, and the concert commenced.
Overmuch thought upon the revelation of the preceding day had begotten
in her, fears of the imminence of the dangers to Winston's peace of
mind--a persuasion that the birds of the air and the restless air itself
might bear to him the news she still withheld. Mammy had averred, upon
her cross-examination, that “not a living soul had ever seen the wallet”
since it fell from the dying man's pocket--an affirmation Mabel could
not decide whether to believe or discredit. If she could but be certain
that the secret was all hers!
She trembled guiltily when her brother folded his last paper, and
sauntered around to the back of her chair, leaning upon it, while he
affected to be interested in her work, and the too-ready scarlet blood
pulsed now hotly in her cheeks with each moment of his mute observation.
“I heard a piece of news to-day,” he said, presently, in his most even
tone; but Mabel's start upon her seat was almost a leap, while her
fingers moved faster and more irregularly.
“I suspect, from your unsettled demeanor this evening, that it reached
you before it did me,” continued he. “I can attribute your badly
suppressed pertubation to no other cause. Mrs. Sutton is such an
indefatigable gossip, that this item could hardly have passed her by.
Has she told you that Rosa Tazewell is shortly to become Mrs. Chilton?”
“She has.”
He thought she was nerving herself to a simulation of hardihood, and the
long-indulged habit of censorship was strong upon him.
“I had trusted, until to-day, Mabel, that you had conquered that
disgraceful weakness,” he resumed, yet more pitilessly.
Domination was one of his besetting sins. He never saw a helpless or
cowering thing without feeling the inclination to set his foot upon it,
and the least show of resistance in such, piqued him into despotism.
“I was aware that it was not dead when you married a man worth a
thousand such scoundrels as that fellow in Philadelphia. I believed that
the sentiment was powerful in impelling you to that marriage, and that
this irrevocable measure would be an antidote to the evil. It was a wise
course, and I commended you for pursuing it. But I am too well read in
your countenance and moods not to see that there is something far amiss
with you. You have been playing a part for twenty-four hours, and you
have played it wretchedly. Your nervous flutters and laugh, your sudden
changes of complexion, and the incoherence of your language, would
betray you to the least penetrating observer. I caution you to be on
your guard lest your husband should take just offence at all this. The
need of dissimulation is the evidence that something is radically wrong
in your moral nature, and is derogatory to your lawful partner. I am
ashamed to remind you of the golden maxim of wedded life--that without
perfect and mutual confidence there can be no substantial happiness.
Does Dorrance know of your escapade at the Springs?”
“If you refer to my engagement to Mr. Chilton, I told him of it before
our marriage.”
“I rejoice to hear it--am pleased at this one proof of good sense and
right feeling,” in lofty patronage. “You owed him no less. You have,
without doubt been informed long since how I obtained the most important
proof against that villain?”
“I have not heard Mr. Chilton's name in a year until yesterday,” said
Mabel, the scarlet spots ceasing to flicker, and her voice hard as was
his own.
Unable to interpret her sudden steadiness of demeanor and accent,
Winston leaped to the irritating conclusion that she was sullen, and
meditated a defiant retreat from this untimely usurpation of his olden
authority.
“It was injudicious--miserably ill-judged in Dorrance not to acquaint
you with this. I have always feared lest his indulgence might not be the
most salutary method of repressing your self-will and pride of opinion.
You, more than any other woman I know, require the tight rein of
vigilant discipline. I intimated as much to Dorrance when he asked my
consent to your engagement. But this is his lookout, not mine. What I
began to say was that, in MY opinion, he would have acted more sensibly
had he not encouraged your squeamish repugnance to talking of your early
fault and its mortifying consequences.”
“Fortunately for me, my husband is a man of feeling and delicacy!” Mabel
was goaded to boast. “I said to him, the evening of our betrothal, that
the subject you have chosen to revive to-night was painful to me, and he
has respected the reluctance you condemn.”
“He would have overcome it more quickly and thoroughly had he informed
you that he had had the honor of horse-whipping your ci-devant
betrothed!” sneered Winston, with white dinted nostrils. “That he was
the author of the letter, a portion of which I copied for your perusal,
when I announced the dissolution of your provisional engagement--the
main agent, in effect, of the rupture, since but for him I should
have had much difficulty in proving what I had believed from the
beginning--that the rascal ought to be shot for presuming to think of
you in any other light than as the merest acquaintance. And he should
never have been that, had I been with you that unlucky summer.”
“We have been over that ground so often, Winston, that both of us should
be tolerably familiar with it,” rejoined Mabel, decidedly. “I prefer
that, instead of reviewing the circumstances of what you term my 'early
fault,' you should show me the evidence of your singular assertion
respecting Mr. Dorrance's agency in a matter in which he could not at
that time have had the slightest personal interest. Or, shall I ask him?
It is an enigma to me.”
Without other answer than a contemptuous laugh, Winston left the room,
unnoticed by the musicians. But before she could form a conjecture as
to the meaning of his abrupt movement, he was back with a letter in his
hand.
“Documentary testimony!” he said, shortly, passing it to her. “I should
have forwarded it entire, instead of transcribing an extract, but for
Clara's fear lest you should be led thereby to dislike her brother
before you had ever seen him. I take it there is no danger of
prejudicing you against him now!”
The letter was from Herbert Dorrance, and began thus:
“Mr. Aylett:
“Dear Sir,--Your favor of the 15th, enclosed in one from my sister,
reached me this morning.”
Then followed the expose of Frederic Chilton's misdeeds, which Winston
had transferred to his own epistle to Mabel, as the leading argument in
his refusal to sanction her engagement.
Mabel read it through without flinching; then turned over to the first
page and put her finger upon a paragraph.
“Who was the lady here mentioned?”
Mr. Aylett shrugged his fine shoulders.
“I have never interested myself to inquire. Beyond the statement of your
friend's rascality, the story was nothing to me.”
“Herbert!”
The ringing call--sharp and clear--checked the pianists in the middle of
a bar.
“Step here a moment, if you please!”
The novelty of the imperative tone and the glitter of his wife's eyes
moved Mr. Dorrance to more prompt compliance than he would have adjudged
to be dignified and husbandly in the case of another man.
Mabel held out the letter at his approach, still pointing to the passage
she had asked her brother to explain.
“To whom does this refer? Who was the relative whose husband was a naval
officer?”
Herbert Dorrance's constitutional phlegm was a valuable ally in the very
contracted quarters into which this question drove him, but his sister
was his deliverer. Affecting forgetfulness of the letter and its
contents, he glanced down one page, Mrs. Aylett leaning upon his arm,
and reading with him.
“I don't think you need mind telling the name, here and at this late
day, Herbert,” she said, seriously and slowly, “provided Mabel will
never repeat the story when it can do harm. Have you never heard any of
us speak of poor Ellen Lester, my mother's niece, who died several
years before your marriage?” accosting her sister-in-law, with a face so
devoid of aught resembling cowardly or guilty fears, that Mabel's brain,
tried and shaken, tottered into disbelief at her own wild surmises.
“Not that I remember!”
“Is that so? Yet it might easily have been. She accompanied her husband
upon his last voyage, and the ship was never heard of again. Her
parents are dead, too, so there are few to cherish her memory. She was a
school-fellow of mine, and Herbert loved her as a sister.”
Mabel was gazing fixedly at her husband's stolid countenance and averted
eyes, and made no rejoinder until the silent intensity of her regards
compelled him to look up. Reading distrust and alarm in these, he shook
off his sister's warning hold.
“When you wish to catechise me upon family matters, Mabel, it is my wish
that you should do it in private,” he said, roughly. “Then you shall
learn all that it concerns you to know. There are subjects into which
only prurient curiosity cares to pry.”
“I beg your pardon!” answered Mabel, quietly. “I have but to say, in
self-defence, that I did not ask to see the letter.”
“It is a matter of profound indifference to me whether you did or not,”
was the reply. “For aught that I know or cared, you may have read it a
year and a half ago. I retract nothing that is set down there. Clara,
shall we go on with our music?”
Glancing around stealthily at the finale of the (sic) he saw that
Mabel's chair was vacant, and Mr. Aylett was reading composedly beneath
the lamp.
Clara made the same discovery at the same moment, and came forward
laughing to her husband.
“What had you been saying to our dear, excitable Mabel, that challenged
the introduction of that unfortunate document?”
“Told her of Frederic Chilton's intended marriage!” curtly, and without
laying aside his volume.
“Preposterous!”
“I agree with you--but it is the truth.”
Herbert stood apart glowing at the fire.
“You must have approached the subject unskilfully,” urged the
peacemaker. “These old sores are oest left alone.”
“It is best for married woman to have none,” retorted Winston, doggedly.
“She does not persist in doubting his unworthiness, does she?” queried
the wife, aside, but not so cautiously that her brother did not hear
her.
He wheeled about suddenly.
“She SHALL believe it, or call me a liar to my face!” he uttered,
angrily. “I will put a stop to this sentimental folly!”
“You are late in beginning your reforms,” observed Mr. Aylett, dryly.
“You are a less sensible man than I give you credit for being, if you
ever begin!” interposed his sister.
“Leave Mabel to herself until she recovers from the shock--if it be
one--of this intelligence. The surest means of keeping alive a dying
coal is to stir and blow upon it. And even we”--lifting the heavy locks
of her husband's hair in playful dalliance--“even we are mortal. We
have had our peccadilloes and our repentances, and have now our little
concealments of affairs that would interest nobody but ourselves. Do
you hear what I am saying, Herbert! Leave off your high tragedy airs and
attend to reason, as expressed in your sister's advice. While your wife
is my invalid guest, I will not have her subjected to any inquisitorial
process. There is a time for everything under the sun, saith the
preacher. This is the season for tender forbearance, and if need be, of
forgiveness.”
Herbert blessed her humane tolerance in his alarmed heart, when Mabel
awoke from her troubled slumbers at midnight, in extreme pain, that
culminated before dawn, in convulsions.
Two physicians were hastily summoned, and when Mrs. Sutton arrived about
noon, she met Phillis outside the door of the sick-chamber, carrying a
lifeless infant in her arms, and weeping bitterly.
This was the end of the months of hopeful longing and glad anticipation
which were Heaven's messengers of healing and comfort to the sick and
lonely heart. The cunningly-fashioned robes were never to have a wearer,
the clasping arms to remain still empty. Oh wondrous mystery--past
finding out--of the human soul! Had the lungs once heaved with breath,
the heart given one throb; the eyes caught one beam of Heaven's light
ere they were sealed fast in eternal darkness, she, who travailed with
the infant through the inexpressible agony of birth, would have been
written a mother among women; have had the right accorded her, without
the cavil of formalist or the disputations of science, to claim the
precious thing as her own still--a living baby-spirit that had fluttered
back to the bosom of the Almighty Father, after alighting, for one
painful moment, upon the confines of the lower world. As it was, custom
ordained that there should be no mourning for what had never really
been. Anguish, hope, and the patient love at which we do not scoff when
the mother-bird broods over the eggs that may never hatch--these were to
be no more named or remembered. In silence and without sympathy she must
endure her disappointment. The tenderest woman about whose knees cluster
living children, and who has sowed in tears the blessed seed, that in
the resurrection-morn shall be gathered in beauteous sheaves of richest
recompense--would smile in pitying contempt over the tiny headstone
which should be lettered--“Born Dead.”
All this and much more Mabel was to learn with the return of health and
reason, but she lay now, like one who had passed for herself the narrow
sea that separates the Now from the Hereafter; her features chiselled
into the unmoving outlines of a waxen image, only a feeble flutter of
breath and pulse telling that this was lethargy, not death. They watched
her all night, Mrs. Sutton on one side and Phillis on the other, the
family physician stealing in with slippered tread from hour to hour, to
note with his sensitive touch if the few poor drops of vital blood yet
trickled from veins to heart, always with the same directions, “Give her
the stimulant while she can swallow it. It is the only hope of saving
her.”
Armed with this, the two devoted women fought the Destroyer, praying
inaudibly, while they wrought, for the life of the child they had reared
to her sorrowful womanhood.
“HE'S asleep, and so is SHE!” whispered Phillis, once, pointing
alternately to the adjoining room where Herbert Dorrance awaited the
issue of this critical stage of his wife's illness, and to Mrs. Aylett's
chamber across the hall. “The Lord forgive 'em both! It won't be they
two that will shed many tears if so be she doesn't see the light of
another day--the murdered lamb! They tormented the life out of her. I
passed by her room last night before bed-time, and heard her a-sobbin'
and talkin' to herself, and walkin' up and down the floor, and THEY
a-bangin' away on the pyano down in the parlor!”
The faithful creature's prejudice wronged one of the hated pair. Mrs.
Aylett's slumbers upon her downy couch might be none the less serene for
her sister-in-law's danger, but Herbert's was the sleep of exhaustion,
not callousness. He had been up all the previous night, and racked by
the wildest anxiety throughout the intervening day, and to compass this
vigil was beyond his physical powers. Mabel would not miss him, and
he could do nothing for her--would only be in the way, being totally
unpractised in the art of nursing, he reasoned; and there was no telling
what new draught upon his strength the morrow might bring. He would just
lie down for an hour; then he would be fresh for whatever service might
be required of him. With this prudent resolve, he threw himself along
the bed in the spare-room, and was oblivious of everything sublunary
until sunrise.
“If there should be any change, call me!” Mrs. Aylett had enjoined,
plaintively. “Winston will not hear of my sitting up, but I shall not
close my eyes all night, so do not hesitate to disturb me, if I can be
of any use whatever.”
Which, it is idle to remark, was the last thing either of the nurses
thought of doing. If their darling were, in truth, dying, they were
the fittest persons to receive her latest sigh; for had they not been
present at her birth, and did not her mother go to glory from their
supporting arms?
There was a change, and not a favorable one, before daybreak. The
patient, from mutterings and restless starts, passed into violent
delirium, laughing, crying, and singing in a style so opposed to the
prescribed diagnosis of her case, as to lash the provincial doctor to
his wits' end, and extinguish in Aunt Rachel's sanguine heart the faint
hope to which she had clung until now. Herbert, awakened finally by the
turbulent sounds from the room he had been told must be kept perfectly
quiet, jumped up, and showed himself, with disordered hair and blinking
eyes, in the door of communication, just as Mabel struggled to rise, and
pleaded weepingly with those who held her down that they would restore
her child to her.
“I had her in my arms not a moment ago!” she insisted. “See! the print
of her little head is here on my breast! You have taken her away among
you! I saw it all--those who ordered that it should be done and those
who did it, when I was too weak to hold her, or to keep them back!”
And passing from the height of furious invective to deadly and earnest
calm, she told them off upon her fingers.
“Clara Aylett! Rosa Tazewell! Winston Aylett! (he married Clara Louise
Dorrance, you know!) Herbert Dorrance! JULIUS LENNOX!”
The household was astir by this time, and Mrs. Aylett entered from the
hall as her brother did from his bedroom. There was but one spectator
who was sufficiently composed to note and marvel at the scared look
exchanged by the two at the sound of the last name. This was Mr. Aylett,
who, from his position behind his wife, had an excellent view of all the
actors in the exciting tableau before she fell back, swooning, in his
arms.
He was alone with her in their chamber when she revived, and the
earliest effort of her restored consciousness was to seize both
his hands in hers, and scan his face searchingly--it would seem
agonizingly--until his fond smile dispelled the unspoken dread.
“Ah!” she murmured, hiding her face upon his bosom, “she is still alive,
then! I thought--I thought”--a mighty sob--“Don't despise your weak,
silly wife, darling! but it was very terrible! I believed it was the
last struggle, and was appalled at the sight. And my poor Herbert! he
was frightfully overcome. Did you notice him? Will you send him to me,
dear? I can soothe him better than any one else--prepare him for what
is, I fear, inevitable. I shall not give way again to my terrors.”
The brother and sister were still together when word was brought, two
hours later that Mabel had fallen into a profound sleep--a good omen,
the doctor said.
“Thank Heaven!” ejaculated Herbert, fervently, his eyes softening until
he turned away to conceal his emotion.
He was haggard with solicitude, while Mrs. Aylett's healthful bloom
betokened slight interest in the termination of the seizure, a glance
at which had thrown her into a faint. Nor did she echo the thanksgiving.
She waited until the messenger had gone, and continued the conversation
her entrance had interrupted.
“I incline to the belief that she caught the name, in some manner, on
Christmas before last. HE was delirious, too, and although doctor and
nurse reported that he did not speak articulately after he was brought
in, she may have heard more than they. From what has been told me, I
gather that she was in the room with him alone, while Mrs. Sutton was
down-stairs looking for Dr. Ritchie. In a lucid interval he may have
given his name--possibly some particulars of his history. Unless--are
you positive there has been no indiscretion on your part, or that others
may have talked negligently to her, because she was a member of the
family?”
“There are topics of which we--your mother, sister, and brothers--never
speak, even to one another. You may trust us that far,” rejoined
Herbert, emphatically. “Nor do I see what we can do, except wait for
other proof that Mabel really knows anything beyond a name she has
picked up at random and never, to my knowledge, repeated, save in her
ravings. Should she recover, the test can be easily applied, and we can
judge then, how to handle the dilemma.”
“Should she recover!” He said the words reluctantly, as loth to express
the doubt.
His sister's lips twitched nervously into a sinister smile. It was as if
she would have whispered, had she dared, “Heaven forbid!”
“You have chosen a toilsome and a perilous path, Clara,” he resumed,
by and by. “I do not wonder that you are, with all your courage and
sanguine trust in your own powers, sometimes disquieted, and often
weary.”
“Who says that I am ever weary? And did you ever know me to disquiet
myself in vain?” with the low, musical ripple of laughter that belonged
to her sunniest mood. “Had I been born in the classic age, I should have
been a devout disciple of Epicurus. Don't imagine that my success has
not, thus far, amply repaid me for my toil and ingenuity. Having lived
upon excitement all my days, I should starve without it. Pleasure, like
safety, is the dearer for being plucked from that evergreen nettle,
Danger!”