"OTHER REFUGE HAVE I NONE."
"There's a stone--the Asbestos--that flung in the flame,
Unsullied comes forth with a color more sure--
Thus shall virtue, the victim of sorrow and shame,
Refined by the trial, forever endure." --OSGOOD.
Mrs. Winans sat in her dressing-room before the mirror in the softest
of easy-chairs, the daintiest of dressing-gowns, under the skillful
hands of Norah, whom she had retained as her personal attendant.
It was a chilly night in November, but a soft warmth pervaded the
rooms, which were heated by Latrobe stoves in the basement of the
house, and the light, and fragrance, and beauty within seemed even more
delightful by contrast with the cold winds that whistled sharply and
sullenly without. A look of sadness was noticeable on Norah's rosy face
as with gentle touches she brushed out the long curls of Grace's hair
that crinkled and waved in spite of all effort to straighten it.
"Norah," Mrs. Winans had said, a moment before, "it is the fifteenth
day of November--do you recollect? Little Paul--dear little baby--is
two years old to-night."
"And sure did I not recollect?" answered Norah, brushing away a
quick-starting tear; "but did not speak of it to you hoping it had
escaped your own memory."
"As if I could forget," murmured Grace, looking down, and beginning to
slip the diamond ring that blazed on her taper finger nervously off and
on; "as if I could forget."
"'Tis so strange he can't be found," mused Norah, keeping time to her
words with the brush that she was plying on that lovely hair, "and
such a great reward offered by his father for his restoration--forty
thousand dollars--why that's a fortune itself. Mrs. Winans, have you
heard nothing of the matter lately?"
"Miss Clendenon received a letter from her brother yesterday--she came
around to tell me this morning--in which he stated there was positively
not the slightest cue yet. The supposition is that--oh, Norah, think of
it!--is that my little boy is _dead_. Captain Clendenon is coming home
by Christmas--he has been in Europe ever since February, now, and even
he, hopeful as he was, has given up the search in vain!"
"And your husband, ma'am? Has he also given up the search? Is he, too,
coming home?" asked Norah, cautiously.
"He has put the whole affair in the hands of skillful detectives to
be kept up six months longer; then if unsuccessful to be abandoned as
hopeless. Captain Clendenon has the management of his business affairs,
and will take charge of this as of the others. Senator Winans himself,
Norah, has gone over to Paris--to France."
"To France?" Norah echoes in surprise, "why there is a war there--the
French are fighting the Dutch."
"Yes, there is a war there," comes the low reply, "my husband is
by birth a Louisianian, Norah, and partly, I believe, of French
extraction--his whole sympathies are with that nation. He has joined
the French army and is gone to fight the Germans--ah! there goes my
ring--pick it up, Norah. It has rolled away under the sofa."
Norah obeys and in silence replaces the ring on the little hand that in
spite of the warmth pervading the room is cold and icy as she takes it
in hers.
"You are nervous," she ventures to say, watching the still, impassive
face, "will you take some valerian, wine, or something?"
"Nothing, Norah," but, all the same, Norah goes out and comes back with
a silver salver holding a small Venetian goblet of ruby wine.
"Just a few drops," she urges with loving voice, and touching the glass
to the pale lips.
"I think you always take your own way, Norah," her mistress answers, as
she takes the goblet and drains it obediently. "Now, finish my hair,
please, and you can go. It is almost eleven o'clock."
Silently Norah obeys, gathering up the shining mass in her hands, and
twisting it into a burnished coil at the back of the small head where
she confines it with a diminutive silver comb. Then with a wistful
sigh, and pitying backward glance, she says good-night and Grace is
left alone.
Alone! how cruelly alone! All her life-time now it seems to her she
will be thus solitary. She leans her small head back, and stares
vacantly at the face whose wondrous beauty is reflected there in the
mirror, and a light scornful smile curves her lips as she thinks:
"Is this the form--
That won his praise night and morn?
She thought: my spirit is here alone,
Walks forgotten, and is forlorn."
Rising suddenly she threw up the window and looked out into the night.
A gust of cold wind and rain blew into her face. She faced it a moment,
then, shutting down the window and dropping the crimson curtains
together, passed into her sleeping apartment. But she could not rest.
Her downy pillows might have been a bed of thorns. She rose, and
gliding across the floor and, pausing one moment in grave irresolution,
put her hand on the sliding door of the adjoining nursery, pushed it
open and entered by the light that streamed from her own apartment.
All was still and silent here. Shadows lay on everything as heavy as
those that clouded her life. She stood gazing mutely around her for an
instant; then, with a low, smothered sob of agony, rushed forward, and
pushing up the sweeping Valenciennes canopy of the rosewood crib that
stood in the center of the room, buried her face in the small pillow
that still held the impress of a baby's head.
Then silence fell. Some women carry beneath a calm, perhaps smiling,
face, a deeper pain than was ever clothed in words or tears. The
acme of human suffering crushes, paralyzes some hearts into terrible
silence. It was thus with Grace. Her sorrow had sunk to the bottom of
the sea of anguish, so deep that not a ripple on the surface, not a
sparkling drop, leaped up to show where it fell.
Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes went by. She lifted her face at last--as
white and chill as that of the dead, but lighted by
"Melancholy eyes divine,
The home of woe without a tear."
She comes to this room as to a grave. Over the grave of the child of
her heart she may never kneel. She fancies it in her mind sometimes
away off under foreign skies, lying in the shadow of some frowning
English church, with not a flower on its low mound, unless Nature, more
loving than cold humanity, has dropped it there like a jewel in the
grass. She sees the sunshine lying on it in the quiet days, hears the
birds--the only thing that ever sings in a graveyard--warbling matin
songs and vesper hymns in the ivy that clings to the imaginary old
church. _There_ she may never kneel--here are gathered all her simple
mementoes of him--
"Playthings upon the carpet,
And dainty little shoes--
With snow-white caps and dresses
That seem too fair to use."
There is the crib where she has watched his rosy slumbers; there in
the corner is the little bathing-tub where she has seen the dimpled
struggling limbs flashing through the diamond spray of cold water,
like polished marbles; there upon the wall, smiling down at her in its
infantile beauty and joy, hangs the pictured semblance of the face that
her foreboding heart whispers to her is moldering into kindred dust
beneath the coffin-lid. This room is to her alike a shrine and a grave.
How it rains!
In the dead, unhappy night, when the rain is on the roof, with what
vivid distinctness does memory recall scenes and hopes that are past.
Poor Grace hears the winds and the rain as they hold their midnight
revels outside, and shudders as the thronging ghosts of memory flit by.
Her brief and exquisite wedded happiness, her love for the dark-eyed
husband who has wronged her so cruelly--she shudders and tries to put
these thoughts away.
But she cannot. She has tried before. So long as her child was left,
with "baby fingers" to "press him from the mother's breast," she had
tried to put her husband away from her heart; tried to be content
with his darling little prototype; tried with all the strength of her
resolute young soul to crush her love for him. But there are some
things that the strongest and bravest of us cannot do. Love is "beyond
us all;" the battle is not always to the strong; success does not
always crown the bravest efforts. It is something to know that they who
fail are sometimes braver than they who succeed.
Now, when the little child that was such a darling comfort to her sad,
lonely life is so rudely wrested from that yearning heart, her thoughts
irresistibly center about the father of her child. She had loved her
baby best--the maternal love was more deeply developed in her than the
conjugal--but even then her husband had been blessed with a fervent,
tender worship that is the overflow of only such deep, strong natures
as hers--natures prodigal of sweetness. Latterly, when the terrible
news that he had six months before joined the army of France had come
to her with all its terrible possibilities, she had only begun to
fathom the depths of her unsounded love for him. It amazed herself--she
put it from her with angry pain, and rushed into the whirl of social
life to keep herself from thinking; wore the mask of smiles above her
pain, and sunned herself in the light of admiring eyes, but though
fashion and pride and station bowed low to the Senator's deserted
wife, acknowledging her calm supremacy still, though sympathy and
curiosity--(softly be it spoken) met her with open arms, though the
wine-cup circled in the gay and brilliant coterie, it held no Lethean
draught for her, and weary and heart-sick she turned from it all, and
sought oblivion in the seclusion of home, and the ever welcome company
of cheerful Lulu Clendenon. But her heart would not be satisfied thus.
Failing in its earthly love and hope, true to itself through all her
mistakes and follies, the heaven-born soul yearned for more than all
this to fill up its aching vacancy, for more than all this to bind
round the tortured heart and keep it from breaking.
"Where shall I turn?" she asked herself, as with folded arms she paced
the floor with rapid steps, keeping time to the falling rain outside
that poured in swift torrents as "though the heart of heaven were
breaking in tears o'er the fallen earth." Human love, human ties seemed
lost to her, earth offered no refuge from her suffering. Poor, wronged,
and tortured young spirit, "breathing in bondage but to bear the ills
she never wrought"--where could she turn but to Him who pours the oil
of comfort on wounds that in His strange providence may grow to be
"blessings in disguise?"
She paused in the middle of the floor, lifting her eyes mournfully
upward, half-clasping her hands, wavered an instant, then falling on
her knees, lifted reverent hands and eyes, while from her lips broke
the humble rhymic prayer:
"Other refuge have I none,
Helpless to Thy cross I cling;
Cover my defenseless head
With the shadow of Thy wing."
Surely, if "He giveth his angels charge concerning us," that pure,
heart-wrung petition floated upward on wings seraphic.