THE PATHOS OF A QUIET LIFE.
"Oh, being of beauty and bliss! seen and known
In the depths of my soul, and possessed there alone!
My days know thee not; and my lips name thee never;
Thy place in my poor life is vacant forever.
We have met; we have parted. No more is recorded
In my annals on earth."
--FROM LUCILLE.
Captain Clendenon is taking an afternoon cigar.
He has stepped out of the hospital, where, thank God! there are fewer
patients and less need of him now, for a stroll in the fresh air, and
while he meanders down the principal thoroughfare, he lights a Havana
and enjoys his walk.
In financial panics one sees a crowded thoroughfare, with people
rushing hither and thither, and blockading the banks; in pestilential
panics one sees silent, deserted streets, and dreary, deserted-looking
buildings. This is all that meets Willard's gaze as he stops on the
corner, man-fashion, and looks idly up and down at the occasional
passers-by, for human faces are the exception, not the rule. Now and
then a man goes by, looks hard at him, and nods respectfully. He is
very well known here as the noted Norfolk lawyer who has so nobly
volunteered in the cause of suffering humanity. Not a woman but looks
twice at the tall figure, with its fine military bearing, its handsome
head, set so grandly on its broad shoulders, its empty, pathetic
coat-sleeve pinned across the left breast.
Old death has been at work here. Those whom he has not mowed down
with his awful scythe have fled, terrified, beyond his present
harvest-field. There are places of business closed--some of whose
owners are abroad in other cities, others of whom are holding commerce
now with the worm and the grave. Here and there a school-house
is closed, the most of whose little pupils have gone to learn of
the angels. It is the dreariness of desolation, and as he puffs
meditatively away, these familiar lines of Hemans come into his
thoughts:
"Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set, but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, oh, death!
We know when moons shall wane,
When summer birds from far shall cross the sea,
When autumn's hue shall touch the golden grain--
But who shall tell us when to look for thee?"
"A penny for your thoughts, Captain Clendenon," says a fresh, young
voice, and a small hand taps him on the shoulder.
He turns with a start. One of the dusky-eyed belles of Memphis, with
whom he has a casual acquaintance, has stopped to chat with him--a
tall, handsome young lady in a mannish costume of navy-blue velvet,
double-breasted English walking-jacket, a mannish hat set jauntily on
her black hair, and a set of Grecian features, and large, black eyes.
His gray eyes light momentarily.
"Ah! Miss De Vere, this _is_ a pleasure! About the thoughts--they were
not worth your inquiry."
"I am the best judge of that," and something in her tones, not her
careless words, imply that all his thoughts are precious to her.
He tosses his cigar away, and turning, asks, politely:
"Are you out for a stroll? May I walk with you?"
"Am I out for a stroll? Yes, but on my way home now. You may see me
there with pleasure."
They walk on together down the quiet street, and her cheek flushes a
warmer red as she chatters softly to him, he rather listening than
talking. It is his way.
"I thought you were out of the city--at the North," he says, in answer
to some remark. "Your father told me two months ago he meant to take
his family away from the pestilence."
"And so we were. We have but just gotten back since the fever began to
lose its hold. How brave you were to stay here! Ugh!" she shuddered a
little, "that terrible fever! Do you know people say that you are a
hero?"
"Do they?"
A low laugh ripples over his serene, finely cut lips. He wears no
beard, no mustache, and every flitting emotion shows itself about his
mobile mouth.
She sees a careless sort of surprise on his face now--nothing more.
"Don't you care for it? It is so pleasant to be praised," she says, in
some wonder.
"I don't know--is it?"
"Is it not? Do you mean to say that you attach no value to fame--fame
that is won by good deeds?"
"I don't know," he answers again, in an absent way. "I might have done
it in my younger days--scarcely now. I like to do good for its own
sake--not for any praise that may follow it."
"I know--I have heard at least," she stammered, with strange timidity,
"that you lost your arm to--to save another man's life! Is it so,
Captain Clendenon--did you give your arm for his life?" her dusky eyes
kindling with a passionate hero-worship, that is characteristic of
Southern women.
"Yes, I gave my arm for his life," he says, grimly. "I might as
well have given him my life, for when I buried my left arm on the
battle-field at Chancellorsville I buried with it all the hopes that
make a man's life worth the living."
"And why?" an unspoken sympathy on her pretty face. "What hopes can
there be that your misfortune can possibly destroy?"
They turn a corner into a side street, where her home lies, meeting a
group coming toward them, a man with a bright-faced wife clinging to
one arm, a little laughing child by the other hand, and two others
following after. His glance marks them out a moment, then meets hers,
as he quotes, half-sadly:
"'Domestic happiness! thou only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the fall.'
"Miss De Vere, cannot you suppose that a man getting into the 'sere and
yellow leaf'--I am almost six-and-thirty years old--must feel the need
of some 'fair spirit for his minister?' And," his glance falling, hers
following, on his empty sleeve, "what woman could I ask to give herself
to half a man?"
She slackens her pace to look up at him, in genuine honest astonishment.
"Captain Clendenon, you have never been so quixotic, so absurdly
chivalrous as to think that any woman would not feel honored to cast
her lot with yours in spite of your honorable misfortune--yes, if you
had lost both your arms in the army as nobly as you have lost one!"
"Thank you! thank you!" he answers, deeply moved, and seeing the sudden
waves of hot color breaking over the warm Southern beauty of her face,
he looks blindly away and thinks what a noble-hearted girl she is, and
how he has misjudged her in thinking her a fine, fashionable flirt, as
all along he had been doing, when he thought of her at all, which was
but seldom.
And then they are at the steps of the elegant De Vere mansion, and she
gently invites him to enter. He shakes his head.
"I thank you; but I will continue my stroll. One gets so little fresh
air indoors, and I have been so confined lately. To-day I am off duty,
and making the most of it. My respects to the family."
"Oh!" she says, turning, with her foot on the marble step. "May I ask
you one question?"
"A dozen, if you please," he returned, gallantly.
"It is only this: It is a current report here that the Hon. Mrs.
Winans, who came down here with your party to help nurse the fever
patients, is, or was, Miss Grace Grey of this city--do you know if this
is true?" lifting eager, inquiring eyes to his face.
"Yes, it is certainly true," and she sees some sort of a change pass
over his face--what, she cannot fathom.
"Indeed!" she says, in quick surprise and pleasure. "I knew her
intimately as a child; we were next-door neighbors"--she nods at the
handsome residence standing next to her own, and he looks at it with
tender interest--"and afterward we were in boarding-school together. I
always liked her so much. Will you give her Stella De Vere's love, and
tell her I will come and see her if she will let me?"
"I certainly will, with pleasure," and they shake hands and say good-by
again, and she runs up the steps of her father's stately home, pausing
in the door-way as he turns away.
"He _is_ a hero," she says, with a dreamy light in her dark eyes. "How
I _could love_ him, if----"
She shuts the door, half-sighing, and goes in.
For him, he walks away, stopping a moment in front of the next-door
house to light a fresh cigar, and glancing at the green grounds, with
their graveled paths, goes away with a fancy in his mind of a fairy
child with violet eyes and golden curls at play beside the marble
fountain under its dashing spray.
Grace Grey!
He walks on down the lonely street, his heart full of Grace Grey, not
Grace Winans; full of the child and girl whose light steps have danced
down this street in happier days--not the Senator's sad-eyed wife--he
has no right to think of _her_. But this fairy, winning child, this
innocent, joyous maiden, who grows into shape and life in his loving
imagination--she is his own, his very own, to hold in his "heart of
hearts," to think of, to idealize, to worship. He creates in his own
mind the goddess she was, goes back from the days when he first knew
her to those earlier days when Stella De Vere knew her. Then an idle
remembrance of Stella's praise of him sets him thinking. Was it true?
Would any woman have loved him as well with his one arm as with two?
Would Grace have done it had he tried to win her? For a moment a
half-wish that he had tried, that he had won her for his own idolized
wife, overwhelmed him.
"She might have been quietly content with me," he thinks. "At least
she should never have known the suffering, the passionate pathos that
darkens her young life now."
Too late! "Her place in his poor life is vacant for ever," and, as
Grace has said once, he repeats:
"Fate is above us all."
He goes back to his visions of the child and maiden again; his heart
thrills with passionate fondness for the happy child, the lovely girl
whose dual lives have merged into the shadowed life of beautiful Grace
Winans. Fancies come and go, the "light that never was on sea nor land"
shining over his mild pictures of what "might have been," and never
opium-eater's visions were fairer than the ideal dreams that go curling
up in the blue, fantastic smoke-wreaths of Captain Clendenon's cigar.
Sunset drives him to his hotel, chilled and thoughtful. The winter
sunshine, pleasant enough in this southern city, in its declining, has
left a chill in the air that seems to strike to his heart. At the door
he tosses away the remains of that magic cigar and goes up to his room,
where a cheerful fire throws its genial warmth over everything, and
brings out the stale odor of cigar smoke that clings to him. He throws
off his coat, and in his white shirt-sleeves, pours fresh water from
the pitcher into the basin.
"Phew!" he says, in disgust, "how smoky I am!" pushing back his neat
linen cuff and bending over, in manly fashion, to dip head and hand
into the water; he gives a slight cough, then, gasping, bends lower,
while a crimson stream flows fast from his lips into the crystal water,
turning it all to blood.
Again and again that slight cough, again and again that warm tide
flowing from his lips--and yet he seems not in the least surprised, not
in the least alarmed, only steadies himself, with his hand pressed on
the edge of the wash-stand, and watches the flowing life-stream, his
face growing white as marble.
Then the stream thins, grows less and less, and less, and gradually
ceases. Taking up a glass of fresh water he rinses his mouth of
the blood, and standing, looking down at the scarlet flood in the
wash-basin, says thoughtfully, but not fearfully:
"This is the second time I have done it. I think I will see Dr.
Constant to-morrow."
A tap at the door.
"Mother must not _know_," he says, and hurriedly laying a large towel
over the wash-basin, is sitting comfortably in front of his fire when
he calls out:
"Come in."
It is Mrs. Clendenon, just come in from the hospital, her gentle face
flushed from walking, a placid smile on her lip.
"Willard, are you here? Gracie and I have but just come in and missed
you--why, how pale you are--are you sick?"
"No, not sick. I have but just come in also. I was out walking and came
in chilled--have not thawed out yet."
"Oh, Willard, my boy!" she cries, in a horrified tone, "what is that?"
A great spat of blood he had not observed stained his spotless linen
cuff; she turned dead white as she saw it.
"It is nothing," he answers, with his handkerchief at his lips, but he
draws it away dashed with minute streaks of blood; "sit down, mother,
dear, don't get nervous, don't get excited."
She is leaning over his chair, her arm around his shoulder, her eyes
full of piteous mother's love and fear fixed on his pale face.
"My son, what does it mean?"
"Mother, nothing much. I have only had a slight hemorrhage from the
lungs--from over-exertion, I presume. It is all over now; but to make
all sure I will consult Doctor Constant to-morrow, and I will be more
careful of my health and strength hereafter, I promise you."
"Oh, I knew you were killing yourself," she wailed; "I knew it!"
"Don't, mother--don't talk so wildly. It was for the best, I assure
you; it had to come. I shall be very much better after this; Doctor
Constant will tell you so," he says, tenderly, to the wild-eyed mother,
who is white with fear for her boy, and with all a woman's physical
horror at the sight of blood.
She glances around her vacantly, then suddenly walks across the room,
lifting the towel from the wash-basin. She looks with reeling brain and
dazed eyes on that scarlet tide, and turns on her son a look of awful
horror and anguish--such anguish as a mother's heart can feel--down,
down, down in its fathomless, illimitable depths. He comes forth and
steadies her reeling form with his one arm about her waist, looking
down at her with those earnest, beautiful gray eyes.
"Oh, mother, don't look so--don't grieve so! I tell you, certainly, I
shall be better after this. I have only lost a little blood. Cheer up,
little mother. Doctor Constant shall give me a tonic, and make it all
right. You won't tell Mrs. Winans? I would rather she did not know. She
would worry over it, too, and there is nothing to alarm either of your
tender hearts."
He did get better of it, though Doctor Constant shook his head
warningly when he met him still at his labors in the hospital. Grace
knew nothing of it, by his wish, and in February a letter from
Lulu, who had spent a portion of the winter in Italy, filled Mrs.
Clendenon with the same perplexities, doubts, and hopes that agitated
Lulu's heart in her far away home in London, which, with its foggy
atmosphere and chilly rains, made itself peculiarly disagreeable to
the young American lady who pined for the clear, pure atmosphere and
health-giving sea-breeze of her own native home, while she gently
deferred to the wishes of her husband and his aunt, and remained abroad
until it pleased them to turn their faces homeward.