"IN HIS HEART CONSENTING TO A PRAYER GONE BY."
"The boon for which we gasp in vain,
If hardly won at length, too late made ours,
When the soul's wing is broken, comes like rain."
--HEMANS.
"Fare thee well! Yet think awhile
On one whose bosom bleeds to doubt thee;
Who now would rather trust than smile,
And die with thee than live without thee."
--MOORE.
Sitting at her window watching the radiant day hiding its blushes on
the breast of night, Lulu Clendenon's heart was full of a strange,
aching pain. She had, as Captain Fontenay had told Winans, removed
to the hotel where Mrs. Conway had taken rooms, to remain until Mrs.
Winans recovered from her attack of impending brain fever.
As yet she had not seen Mrs. Winans, no one being permitted to enter
the sick-room excepting those who were in close attendance on the
patient; and, truth to tell, Lulu was lonely. She missed Bruce Conway.
For many weeks now the twilight hour had been the pleasantest of the
day to her, for it had been passed in his company. Now as she sat at
the window, cuddled up in a great easy-chair, her cheek pressed down in
the hollow of her little white hand, her wistful brown eyes watching
the fairy hues of sunset, Lulu was waking to a realization of her own
heart.
The little sister that Captain Clendenon had wanted to keep a child
forever was a child no longer. Love--the old, old story, old as the
world, and yet new and sweet as the blushing flowers of to-day's
blossoming--had opened for her the portals of a broader existence, and
Lulu was learning the strength and depth of her woman's heart first by
its intense aching.
According to the verdict of the world, it is a woman's shame to love
unsought; and yet I think that that is scarcely love which waits to
be given leave to love. Flowers blossom of their own sweet will, and
often as not their sweetest perfume rises under the heedless feet that
trample them down. It is much so with the human heart. It gives love,
not where it is asked always, but often where it is uncared for and
unknown; and the cold steel of disappointment is but to such love as
the knife that digs round the roots of our flowers--it makes the fibers
strike deeper in the soil of the heart.
"Successful love may sate itself away,
The wretched are the faithful."
Lulu wished idly that she were floating in ether on the top of that
gold-tinged cloud that rose in the far west, wave on wave, over masses
of violet, rose, and crimson; or that she might have laid her hot cheek
against that white drift that looked like a chilly bank of snow, and
cooled the fever that sent its warm flushes over her face.
The pretty lip trembled a little, and Lulu felt as if she wanted to go
home, like a tired and weary child, to her mother.
Mrs. Conway's light footsteps, as she entered softly, startled her from
her painful reverie. She roused up into a more dignified posture, and
inquired touching the state of the young patient.
"She has been delirious to-day, but is now for the time being quite
rational, though still and silent. I want to take you to see her, my
dear. You will have to help nurse her (we cannot leave her solely to
the care of that nurse and the doctor--it would be cruel), and it is
better to have her get acquainted with you now, and accustomed to
seeing you about her room. You can come now, if you please, dear. I
have spoken to her of you, and she will be prepared to see you."
Lulu rose from her easy-chair, shook out her tumbled skirts, trying to
shake off a portion of her heart's heaviness at the same time, and
smoothing her dark braids a little, followed her friend.
But her heart rose to her throat as they crossed the threshold of the
sick-room, and stood in the presence of a woman who had always been
such an object of interest to her.
The fading winter sunshine glimmered into the apartment and shone on
Norah, where she sat, grave and anxious-looking, at the side of the
low French bed, whose sweeping canopy of lace thrown back over the top
revealed the form of Grace Winans lying under the silken coverlet, like
some rare picture, her cheeks flushed scarlet with fever, the white
lids drooping over her brilliant eyes, her arms thrown back over her
head, her small hands twisted in the bright drift of golden hair that
swept back over the embroidered pillow.
"Dear Grace," Mrs. Conway said, softly, "this is my young friend, Lulu,
Mrs. Winans, Miss Clendenon."
Slowly the sweeping lashes lifted, and the melancholy gaze dwelt on
Lulu's face, but the lips that opened to speak only trembled and shut
again in that set, firm line with which proud women keep back a sob.
One little hand came down from over her head, and was softly laid
in Lulu's own. As it lay there, warm, feverish, fluttering like a
wounded bird, the young girl's heart swelled with a throb of passionate
sympathy.
She bent impulsively and pressed her cool, dewy lips on the fevered
brow of the other, while she registered a vow in her unselfish soul,
that she would stand between Grace Winans and every sorrow that effort
or sacrifice of hers could avert.
How potent is the spell of sympathy! The light pressure of those soft
lips touched a chord in Grace's tortured heart that never in after
years ceased to vibrate. Her husband had spoken truly in saying that
she had no intimate woman-friend, but it was scarcely her fault.
Her nature was a singularly pure and elevated one; the majority of
the women she knew had few feelings in common with her, and she was
too much superior to them not to be an object of envy rather than a
congenial friend to most. She had found a kindred spirit at last in the
sister of Willard Clendenon; and if the shifting current of fate had
ordered her life otherwise than what it was--had she married Willard
Clendenon, maimed, comparatively poor, unskilled in the current coin of
worldly compliment though he was, she would have found her soul-mate.
But these strange mistakes lie scattered all along the path of life,
and it is true that matches, if made in heaven, sometimes get woefully
mismatched coming down.
"Her fever is getting higher," Mrs. Conway said, as she anxiously
fingered the blue-veined wrist.
It rose higher and higher; delirium set in, and in restless visions the
young mother babbled of her lost child; she was seeking him--seeking
him everywhere, through the wide, thronged avenues of Washington, the
long corridors of the capitol, the dull, narrow streets of Norfolk,
by the moonlit shores of Ocean View; and the red light of a meteor in
the sky was blinding her so that she could not see; and when it faded
she was in darkness--and now burning reproaches scorched the sweet
lips with their fiery breath, and Paul Winans' name was whispered,
but with inexpressible bitterness. The impression on her mind,
strengthened by his words at their last interview, was that he had
intentionally secreted her baby to punish her in some sort for what
seemed to him faults in her. He had struck a blow at her heart where
it was most vulnerable; she had told him it would be her death, and
he had wanted her to die; and this dismal refrain haunted her fevered
slumbers through long hours. In vain Norah cooled the burning head
with linen strips, holding masses of powdered ice; the white arms
tossed restlessly, the lips still babbled incoherent grief and anger;
the physician came, watched her for an hour, went through the formula
of prescribing, and shaking his head and promising to see her in the
morning, went his way; and the hours went on--it was ten o'clock, and
quieter slumbers seemed to fall upon the worn-out patient; she talked
less incoherently, tossed and moaned less often.
"A gentleman to see Mrs. Conway," was announced by the subdued voice of
a servant at the door.
Supposing that it was her nephew, she glided softly out, returning
in ten minutes, to find Grace feebly tossing again and staring with
wide-open eyes at every object in the dimly lighted room. She bent
over her and tried to fix her wavering attention.
"My dear, will you see your husband? Senator Winans desires an
interview with you."
Something in the name seemed to fix and hold her wandering thoughts.
She half-lifted herself, resting on her elbow and sweeping her hand
across her brow.
"My husband--did you say that?"
"Yes; listen, dear. He has come to see you, and is waiting in the
parlor. May I bring him in? Will you see him?"
A flash of hope in the fever-bright violet eyes, a hopeful ring in the
trembling voice:
"The baby--he has brought the baby?"
"No, not yet; he hopes to soon," taking the small hands and softly
caressing them with hers, "indeed, you are mistaken, Gracie, in
thinking, dear child, that he is deceiving you in this matter. He is in
great distress, longs to tell you so, and to try to comfort you; say
that you will see him."
"No, not I; you do not know him--he is so cruel. Oh, my poor heart!"
clasping her hands across her heaving breast, "He has come to triumph
in my anguish, to laugh at the wreck he has made of my life."
"Not so, Gracie, dear little one, he has come to sympathize with
you--won't you let him come?"
"No, no, never!" rising straight up and shaking herself free of Mrs.
Conway's detaining hand, the delirium clouding her brain again. "Oh,
never till he comes to me with our baby in his arms will I look upon
his face again. Tell him this, and say that if he entered that door I
would most surely spring from that window rather than look on his face
with its smile of triumph at my suffering."
She fell back, exhausted and quite delirious now, and Mrs. Conway
turned with a heavy heart to carry the ill tidings to the man who
waited in the next room. She was spared that pain. The clear, bell-like
voice, sharpened by anger and scorn that was strange to that gentle
spirit, had penetrated the next room, and he knew his doom and felt
it to be just, as he stood in the middle of the floor, his hands
clasped behind him, his head bowed on his breast, a perfect picture of
humiliation and despair.
"I have heard," he said, with a ghastly smile, as her fingers touched
his arm.
"My poor boy!" she said.
"It is just," he said, in a whisper of intense pain. "God knows I
merit worse at her hands, but, all the same, it goes hard with me--the
worse because, as I told you just now, I leave for Europe to-morrow in
quest of our child. Oh! Mrs. Conway, take care of her while I am gone.
Don't--don't let her die!"
"She shall not die," said Lulu's soft, low tones, as she glided into
the room and up to his side. "I will--we all will--do everything to
keep her for you until you come back to make her happiness your chief
care in life hereafter. She must not, will not, die!"
He looked up, caught her hand, and touched it gratefully to his lips.
"God bless you for those words, Miss Clendenon! You always come with
renewed life and promises of hope. Oh! watch over her well, I entreat
you; and, oh! teach her, if you can, to think less harshly of me. May
God forgive me for my folly and wickedness to her, and give me a chance
to retrieve the past by the future."
The two ladies looked at each other, deeply moved.
"I am coming back at the very earliest possible day after I recover my
child," he went on; "but never till then. I have heard my doom from her
own lips." Then he stopped, too deeply pained for words, and with only
a heart-wrung "good-by," was gone.
"The next time _you will seek me_," she had said, at their last fatal
interview.
There are many thoughtless words spoken that afterward seem like
prophecies.
Mrs. Conway and Lulu went back to the room where they were doomed to
watch for many long weeks yet to come over the sick-bed where life and
death were waging fierce warfare over a life-weary, reckless victim.
But the "balance so fearfully and darkly hung" that a touch may turn
the scale toward "that bourne whence no traveler returns," wavered, and
dropped its pale burden back into the arms of those who loved her; and,
shadowy, wasted, and hopeless, Grace Winans took up the cross of her
life again, with all the sunshine gone out of it, the only comfort left
to her bruised heart that "comfort scorned of devils"--that comfort
that is "sorrow's crown"--"remembering happier things."