LILLIE REACHES THE APOTHEOSIS OF WOMANHOOD.
Woman is more intimately and irresponsibly a child of Nature than man.
She comes oftener, more completely, and more evidently under the power
of influences which she can neither direct nor resist, and which make
use of her without consulting her inclination. Her part then is passive
obedience and uncomplaining suffering, while through her the ends of
life are accomplished. She has no choice but to accept her beneficent
martyrdom. Like Jesus of Nazareth she agonizes that others may live; but
unlike Him, she is impelled to it by a will higher than her own. At the
same time, a loving spirit is given to her, so that she is consoled in
her own anguish, and does not seriously desire that the cup may pass
from her before she has drunk it to the dregs. She has the patience of
the lower animals and of inanimate nature, ennobled by a heavenly joy of
self-sacrifice, a divine pleasure in suffering for those whom she loves.
She is both lower and higher than man, by instinct rather than by
reason, from necessity rather than from choice.
There came a day to Lillie during which she lay between two worlds, not
caring which she entered, submissive to whatever might be, patient
though weeping with pain. Her father did not dare trust her to his own
care, but called in his old friend and colleague, Doctor Elderkin. These
two, with Carter, Mrs. Larue, and a hired nurse, did not quit the house
for twenty-four hours, and all but the husband and father were almost
constantly in the room of the invalid. The struggle was so long and
severe that they thought it would end in death. Neither Mrs. Larue nor
the nurse slept during the whole night, but relieved each other at the
bedside, holding by turns the quivering, clutching hand of Lillie, and
fanning the crimson cheeks and the brow covered with a cold sweat as of
a death agony. The latent womanliness of Mrs. Larue, the tenderness
which did actually exist in some small measure beneath her smooth
surface of amiability and coquetry, was profoundly stirred by her
instinctive sympathy for a suffering which was all feminine. She
remembered that same anguish in her own life, and lived it over again.
Every throe of the sick girl seemed to penetrate her own body. She
thought of the child which had been given and taken years ago, and then
she wiped away a tear, lest Lillie might see it and fear for herself.
When she was not by the bedside she stood at the window, now looking for
a glimpse of dawn as if that could bring any hope, and then turning to
gaze at the tossing invalid.
The Doctor only once allowed Carter to enter the room. The very
expansion of Lillie at sight of him, the eagerness with which her soul
reached out to him for help, pity, love, was perilous. There was danger
that she might say, "My dear, good-bye;" and in the exaltation of such
an impulse she might have departed. As for him, he had never before
witnessed a scene like this, and he never forgot it. His wife held both
his hands, clasping them spasmodically, a broad spot of fever in either
cheek, the veins of her forehead swollen, and her neck suffused, her
eyes preternaturally open and never removed from his, her whole
expression radiant with agony. The mortal pain, the supernatural
expectation, the light of that other world which was so near,
spiritualized her face, and made it unhumanly beautiful. He seemed to
himself to be standing on earth and joining hands with her in heaven. He
had never before reached so far; never so communed with another life.
His own face was all of this world, stern with anxiety and perhaps
remorse; for the moment was so agitating and imperious that he could not
direct his emotions nor veil his expression. Happy for her that she had
no suspicion of one thing which was in his heart. She believed that he
was solely tortured by fear that she would die; and if she could have
thought to speak, she would have comforted him. On her own account she
did not desire to live; only for his sake, and for her father's, and
perhaps a little for her child's. The old Doctor watched her, shook his
head, signed to the husband to leave the room, and took his wife's hands
in his place. As Carter went out Mrs. Larue followed him a few steps
into the passage.
"What is between you and me must end," she whispered.
"Yes," he replied in the same tone, and went to his room somewhat
comforted.
At seven in the morning he was awakened by a tremulous knocking at his
door. Springing from the sofa, on which he had dozed for an hour or two
without undressing, he opened, and encountered Mrs. Larue, pale with
sleeplessness but smiling gaily.
"_Venez_," she said, speaking her mother tongue in her haste, and
hastened noiselessly, like a swift sprite, back to the sick room. Carter
followed, entered with a sense of awe, passed softly around the screen
which half encircled the bed, and saw his wife and child lying side by
side. Lillie was very pale; her face was still spiritualized by the
Gethsemane of the night; but her eyes were still radiant with a purely
human happiness. She was in eager haste to have him drink at the
newly-opened fountain of joy. Even as he stooped to kiss her she could
not wait, but turned her head towards the infant with a smile of
exultation and said, "Look at him."
"But how are _you_?" he asked, anxiously; for a man does not at once
forget his wife in his offspring; and Carter had a stain of remorse on
his soul which he needed to wash away with rivers of tenderness.
"Oh, I am perfectly well," she answered. "Isn't he pretty?"
At that moment the child sneezed; the air of this world was too pungent.
"Oh, take him!" she exclaimed, looking for the nurse. "He is going to
die."
The black woman lifted the boy and handed him to the father.
"Don't drop him," said Lillie. "Are you sure you can hold him? I
wouldn't dare to take him."
As if she could have taken him! In her eagerness she forgot that she was
sick, and talked as if she were in her full strength. Her eyes followed
the infant so uneasily about the room that Elderkin motioned Carter to
replace him on the bed.
"Now he won't fall," she said, cheerfully.--"It was only a sneeze," she
added presently, with a little laugh which was like a gurgle, a purr of
happiness. "I thought something was the matter with him."--Shortly
afterward she asked, "How soon will he talk?"
"I am afraid not for two or three weeks, unless the weather is
favorable," replied Elderkin, with a chuckle which under the
circumstances was almost blasphemous.
"How strange that he can't talk!" she replied, without noticing the old
gentleman's joke. "He looks so intelligent!"
"She wouldn't be a bit surprised to hear him sing an Italian opera,"
said Ravenel. "She has seen a miracle to-day. Nothing could astonish
her."
Lillie did not laugh nor answer; nothing interested her which did not
say, Baby! Baby was for the time the whole thought, the whole life, of
this girl, who a little previous existed through her husband, and before
that through her father. Each passion had been stronger than its
predecessor; but now she had reached the culminating point of her
womanhood: higher than Baby it was impossible for her to go. Even her
father distressed and alarmed her a little by an affection for the
newly-arrived divinity which lacked what she felt to be the proper
reverence. Not content with worshiping afar off, he picked up the tiny
god and carried him to the partial day of a curtained window, desiring,
as he said, the honor of being the first to give him an idea.
"The first to give him an idea!" laughed the father. "Why, he looks as
if he had been thinking for centuries. He looks five thousand years
old."
Seeing that Lillie began to weary, the old Doctor replaced the deity on
the pillow which served him for an altar, and turned the male worshipers
out of the room.
"How delighted they are with him!" she said when the door had closed
behind them. "Doctor, isn't he an uncommonly handsome child?" she added
with the adorable simplicity of perfect love. "I thought babies were not
pretty at first."
The room was now kept still. The mother and child lay side by side,
reposing from their night-long struggle for life. The mother looked
steadily at the infant; the infant looked with equal fixity at the
window: each gazed and wondered at an unaccustomed glory. In a few
minutes both dropped to sleep, overcome by fatigue, and by novel
emotions, or sensations. For three days a succession of long slumbers,
and of waking intervals similar to tranquilly delightful dreams,
composed their existence. When they were thus reposed they tasted life
with a more complete and delicious zest. Lillie entertained her husband
and father for hours at a time with discoursing on the attributes of the
baby, pointing out the different elements of his glory, and showing how
he grew in graces. She was quite indifferent to their affectionate
raillery; nothing could shake her faith in the illimitability of the new
deity. They two, dear as they were, were nevertheless human, and were
not so necessary as they had been to her faith in goodness, and her
happiness in loving. So long as she had the baby to look at, she could
pass the whole day without them, hardly wondering at their absence.
"We are dethroned," said the Doctor to the Colonel. "We are a couple of
Saturns who have made way for the new-born Jupiter."
"Nonsense!" smiled Lillie. "You think that you are going to spend all
your time with your minerals now. You are perfectly happy in the idea. I
sha'n't allow it."
"No. We must remain and be converts to the new revelation. Well, I
suppose we sha'n't resist. We are ready to make our profession of faith
at all times and in all places."
"This is the place," said Lillie. "Isn't he sweet?"
The grandfather knew a great deal better than either the father or
mother how to handle the diminutive Jupiter. He took him from the
pillow, carried him to the window, drew the curtain slowly, and laughed
to see the solemn little eyes, after winking slowly, turn upward and fix
themselves steadily on the broad, mild effulgence of the sky.
"He looks for the light, as plants and trees lean towards it," said he.
"He is trying to see the heavenly mansions which he may some day
inhabit. Nobody knows how soon. They get up their chariots very suddenly
sometimes, these little Elijahs."
"Oh, don't talk so," implored Lillie. "He sha'n't die."
The Doctor was thinking of his own only boy, who had flown from the
cradle to Heaven more than twenty years ago.
Aside from tenderness for his wife, Carter's principal emotion all this
while was that of astonishment at his position. It cost him considerable
mental effort, and stretch of imagination, to conceive himself a
relative of the newcomer. He did not, like Lillie, love the child by
passionate instinct; and he had not yet learned to love him as he had
learned to love her. He was tender of the infant, as a creature whose
weakness pleaded for his protection; but when it came to the question of
affection, he had to confess that he loved him chiefly through his
mother. He was a poor hand at fondling the boy, being always afraid of
doing him some harm. He was better pleased to see him in Lillie's arms
than to feel him in his own; the little burden was curiously warm and
soft, but so evidently susceptible to injury as to be a terror.
"I would rather lead a storming party," he said. "I have been beaten in
that sort of thing, and lived through it. But if I should drop this
fellow--"
And here the warrior absolutely flinched at the thought of how he would
feel in such a horrible case.
Now commenced a beautiful reciprocal education of mother and child. Each
discovered every day new mysteries, new causes of admiration and love,
in the other. Long before a childless man or even woman would have
imagined signs of intelligence in the infant, the mother had not merely
imagined but had actually discovered them. You would have been wrong if
you had laughed incredulously when she said, "He begins to take notice."
Of course her fondness led her into errors: she mistook symptoms of mere
sensation for utterances of ideas; she perceived prophetically rather
than by actual observation: but some things, some opening buds of
intellect, she saw truly. She deceived herself when she thought that at
the age of three weeks he knew his father; but at the same time she was
quite correct in believing that he recognized and cried for his mother.
This delighted her; she would let him cry for a moment, merely for the
pleasure of being so desired; then she would fold him to her breast and
be his comforter, his life. They were teachers, consolers, deities, the
one to the other.
Her love gave a fresh inspiration to her religious feeling. Here was a
new object of thanksgiving and prayer: an object so nearly divine that
only Heaven could have sent it: an object so delicate that only Heaven
could preserve it. For her baby she prayed with an intelligence, a
feeling, a faith, such as she had never known before, not even when
praying for her husband during his times of battle. It seemed certain to
her that the merciful All-Father and the Son who gave himself for the
world would sympathize compassionately with the innocence, and
helplessness of her little child. These sentiments were not violent: she
would have withered under the breath of any passionate emotion: they
were as gentle and comforting as summer breezes from orange groves. Once
only, during a slight accession of fever, there came something like a
physical revelation; a room full of mysterious, dazzling light; a
communication of some surprising, unutterable joy; an impression as of a
divine voice, saying, "Thy sins are forgiven thee."
Forgiven of God, she wished also to be forgiven of man. The next
morning, moved by the remembrance of the vision, although its exaltation
had nearly vanished with the fall of the fever, she beckoned her husband
to her, and with tears begged his pardon for some long since forgotten
petulance. This was the hardest trial that Carter had yet undergone. To
have her plead for his forgiveness was a reproach that he could hardly
bear with self-possession. He must not confess--no such relief was there
for his burdened spirit--but he sank on his knees in miserable
penitence.
"Oh! forgive me," he said. "I am not half good enough for you. I am not
worthy of your love. You must pray for me, my darling."
For the time she was his religion: his loving, chastening, though not
all-seeing deity: uplifting and purifying him, even as she was exalted
and sanctified by her child.
Her sick-bed happiness was checkered by some troubles. It was hard not
to stir; not to be able to help herself; not to tend the baby. When her
face was washed for her by the nurse, there would be places where it was
not thoroughly dried, and which she sought to wipe by rubbing against
the pillow. After a few trials of this sort she forbade the nurse to
touch her, and installed her husband in the duty. It was actually a
comfort to him to seek to humiliate himself by these dressing-maid
services; and it seemed to him that he was thereby earning forgiveness
for the crime which he dared not confess. He washed her face, took her
meals in, and put them out, fed her with his own hands, fanned her by
the hour, and all, she thought, as no one else could.
"How gentle you are!" she said, her eyes suddenly moistening with
gratitude. "How nicely you wait on me! And to think that you have led a
storming party! And I have seen men afraid of you! My dear, what did you
ever mean by saying that you are not good enough for me? You are a
hundred times better than I deserve."
Carter laid his forehead in her gently clasping hands without speaking.
"What are you going to call him?" he asked presently.
"Why, Ravenel;--didn't you know?" she answered with a smile.
She had been calling him Ravenel to herself for several days, without
telling any one of it. It was a pleasure to think that she alone knew
his name; that she had so much in him of an unshared, secret possession.
"Ravenel Carter," she repeated. "We can make that into Ravvie. Don't you
like it?"
"I do," he answered. "It is the best name possible. It contains the name
of at least one good man."
"Of two good men," she insisted. "A good husband and a good father."
Her first drive in the pony carriage was an ecstacy. By her side sat
the nurse holding Ravvie, and opposite sat her husband and father.
Presently she made the Colonel and the nurse change places.
"I want my child where I can see him, and my husband where I can lean
against him," she said.
"I don't come in," observed the Doctor. "I am Monsieur De Trop--Mr. No
Account."
"No you are not. I want you to look at Ravvie and me."
Soon she was anxious lest the child should catch cold by riding
backwards.
"No more danger one way than the other," said the Doctor. "The back of
his head goes all around."
"I dare say his hair will protect him; won't it?" she asked.
"His hair is about as heavy as his whiskers," laughed the Doctor. "He is
in no danger of Absalom's fate."
The nurse having pulled up a shawl in rear of the little bobbing head,
Lillie was satisfied, and could turn her attention to other things. She
laid her slender hand on her husband's knee, nestled against his strong
shoulder and said, "Isn't it lovely--isn't the whole world beautiful!"
They had taken the nearest cut out of the city, and were passing a
suburban mansion, the front yard of which was full of orange trees and
flowers. A few weeks before she would have wanted to steal the flowers;
now she eagerly asked her husband to get out and beg for some. When he
returned with a gorgeous bouquet she was full of gratitude, exclaiming,
"Oh, how lovely! Did you thank the people? I am so obliged to them. Did
they see the child in the carriage?"
"Yes," said the Colonel, smiling with pleasure at her naïve delight.
"The lady saw the child, and said this rose was for him."
Accordingly the rose, carefully stripped of all thorns, was put into
the dimpled fist of Ravvie, who of course proceeded to suck it.
"He is smelling of it," cried Lillie, with a charming faith in the
little god's precocity.
"He is trying it by his universal test--his all-sufficient crucible,"
said the Doctor. "Everything must go into that mouth. It is his only
medium for acquiring knowledge at present. If it was large enough and he
could reach far enough, he would investigate the nature of the solar
system by means of it. It is lucky for the world that he is not
sufficiently big to put the sun in his mouth. We should certainly find
ourselves in darkness--not to mention that he might burn himself. My
dear, I am afraid he will swallow some of the leaves," he added. "We
must interfere. This is one of the emergencies when a grandfather has a
right to exercise authority."
The rose was gently detached from Ravvie's fat grasp, and stuck in his
little silk bonnet, his eyes following it till it disappeared.
"You see he is an eating animal," continued the Doctor. "That is pretty
much all at present, and that is enough. He has no need of any more
wisdom than what will enable him to demand nourishment and dispose of
it; and God, in his great kindness towards infants, has not troubled him
with any further revelations so far. God has provided us to do all the
necessary thinking in his case. The infant is a mere swallower,
digestor, and assimilator. He knows how to convert other substances into
himself. He does it with energy, singleness of purpose, perseverance,
and wonderful success. Nothing more is requisite. In eating he is
performing the whole duty of man at his age. So far as he goes he is a
masterpiece."
"But you are making a machine of him--an oyster," protested Lillie.
"Very like," said the Doctor. "Very like an oyster. His existence has a
simplicity and unity very similar to that of the lower orders of
creation. Of course I am not speaking of his possibilities. They are
spiritual, grand, perhaps gigantic. If you could see the inferior face
of his brain, you would be able to perceive even now the magnificent
capacities of the as yet untuned instrument."
"Oh don't, papa!" implored Lillie. "You trouble me. Do they ever dissect
babies?"
"Not such lively ones as this," said the Doctor, and proceeded to change
the subject. "I never saw a healthier creature. I shouldn't wonder if he
survived this war, which you used to say would last forty years. Perhaps
he will be the man to finish it."
"I don't say so now. I didn't think my husband would be on the Union
side when I said that. I think we shall beat them now."
"Since the miracle all other things seem possible," philosophised the
Doctor.
I do not repeat the Colonel's talk. It was not so appropriate as that of
the others to the occasion; for he knew little as yet of the profounder
depths of womanly and infantile nature; his first marriage had been
brief and childless. In fact, Carter was rather a silent man in family
conclaves, unless the conversation turned on some branch of his
profession, or the matters of ordinary existence. He occupied himself
with watching alternately his wife and child; with wrapping up the
former, and occasionally fondling the latter.
"How very warm he feels!--how amazingly he pulls hair!--I believe he
wants to get my head in his mouth," are samples of his observations on
the infant wonder. He felt that the baby was either below him or above
him, he really could not tell which. Of his wife's position he was
certain: she was far higher than his plane of existence: when she took
his hand it was from the heavens.
From Mrs. Larue he was thoroughly detached, and with a joyful sense of
relief, freedom, betterment. They talked very little with each other,
and only on indifferent subjects and in the presence of others. It is
possible that this separation would not have lasted if they had been
thrown together unguarded, as had been the case on board the Creole; but
here, caring for his infant and for the wife who had suffered so much
and so sweetly for his sake, the Colonel felt no puissance of passionate
temptation.
Mrs. Larue had no conscience, no sense of honor; but like many cold
blooded people, she valued herself on her firmness. In an unwonted burst
of enthusiasm she had told him that all must be over between them, and
she meant to make her words good, no matter what he might desire. She
was a little mortified to see how easily he had cut loose from her; but
she knew how to explain it so as not to wound her vanity, nor tempt her
to break her resolution.
"If he did not love his wife now, he would be a brute," she reflected.
"And if he had had the possibilities of a brute in him, I never should
have had a caprice for him. After all, I do not care much for the merely
physical human being. _C'est par le côte morale qu 'on s'empare de moi.
Après tout je suis presque aussi pure dans les sentiments que ma petite
cousine._"
Meanwhile her self-restraint was something of a trial to her. At times
she thought seriously of marrying again, with the idea of putting an end
to these risky intrigues and harassing struggles. Perhaps it was under
this impression that she wrote a letter to Colburne, informing him of
the birth of Ravvie, and sketching some few items of the scene with a
picturesqueness and sympathy that quite touched the young gentleman,
astonished as he was at the frankness of the language.
"After all," she concluded, "married life has exquisite pleasures, as
well as terrific possibilities of sorrow. I do not really know whether
to advise a young man like you to take a wife or not. Whether you marry
or remain single you will be sorry. I think that in either state the
pains outweigh the pleasures. It follows that we are not to consider our
own happiness, but to do what we think is for the happiness of others.
Is not this the true secret of life?"
"Is it possible that I have been unjust?" queried Colburne. "Those are
not the teachings of a corrupted nature."
He did not know and could not have conceived the unnatural conscience,
the abnormal ideas of purity and duty, which this woman had created for
her own use and comfort, out of elements that are beyond the ken of most
New Englanders. He was the child of Puritanism, and she of Balzac's
moral philosophy.