among the neighbors for the plain truth and courage of her astonishing
avowal. They had thought her proud, exclusive, hard in the security
of wealth. Here she stood by a pauper's bed in the name of simple
constancy, stripping herself of all earthly surplusage, exposing her
deepest wound, proclaiming the bond--herself its only witness--between
her and this speechless wreck, drifting out on the tide of death. She
had but to let him go. It was the wild word she had spoken in the name
of truth and deathless love that fired the imagination of that slow
countryside. It was the touch beyond nature that appeals to the higher
sense of a community, and there is no community without a soul.
The straight demands of justice are frequently hard to meet, but its
ironies are crushing. Mrs. Bogardus had fallen back on the line of a
mother's duty since that moment of personal accountability. She read
the unspoken reverence in the eyes of all around her, but she put in
no disclaimer. Her past was not her own. She could not sin alone. Only
those who have been honest are privileged under all conditions to remain
so.
On his arrival with the doctor, Paul endeavored first to see his
mother alone. For some reason she would not have it so. She took the
unspeakable situation as it came. He was shown into the room where she
sat, and by her orders Doctor Gainsworth was with him.
She rose quietly and came to meet them. Placing her hand in her son's
arm, and looking towards the bed, she said:--
“Doctor--my husband.”
“Madam!” said Doctor Gainsworth. He had been Mrs. Bogardus's family
physician for many years.
“My husband,” she repeated.
The doctor appeared to accept the statement. As the three approached the
bed Mrs. Bogardus leaned heavily upon her son. Paul released his arm and
placed it firmly around her. He felt her shudder. “Mother,” he said to
her with an indescribable accent that tore her heart.
The doctor began his examination. He addressed his patient as “Mr.
Bogardus.”
“Mistake,” said a low, husky voice from the bed. “This ain't the man.”
Doctor Gainsworth pursued his investigations. “What is your name?” he
asked the patient suddenly.
The hunted eyes turned with ghastly appeal upon the faces around him.
“Paul, speak to him! Own your father,” Mrs. Bogardus whispered
passionately.
“It is for him to speak now,” said Paul. “When he is well, Doctor,” he
added aloud, “he will know his own name.”
“This man will never be well,” the doctor answered. “If there is
anything to prove, for or against the identity you claim for him, it
will have to be done within a very few days.”
Doctor Gainsworth rose and held out his hand. He was a man of delicate
perceptions. His respect at that moment for Mrs. Bogardus, though
founded on blindest conjecture, was an emotion which the mask of his
professional manner could barely conceal. “As a friend, Mrs. Bogardus, I
hope you will command me--but you need no doctor here.”
“As a friend I ask you to believe me,” she said. “This man _is_ my
husband. He came back here because this was his home. I cannot tell you
any more, but this we expect you and every one who knows”--
The dissenting voice from the bed closed her assertion with a hoarse
“No! Not the man.”
“Good-by, Mrs. Bogardus,” said the doctor. “Don't trouble to explain.
You and I have lived too long and seen too much of life not to recognize
its fatalities: the mysterious trend in the actions of men and women
that cannot be comprised in--in the locking of a door.”
“It is of little consequence--what was done, compared to what was not
done.” This was all the room for truth she could give herself to turn
in. The doctor did not try to understand her: yet she had snatched a
little comfort from merely uttering the words.
Paul and the doctor dined together, Mrs. Bogardus excusing herself.
“There seems to be an impression here,” said the doctor, examining
the initials on his fish-fork, “that your mother is indulging an
overstrained fancy in this melancholy resemblance she has traced.
It does not appear to have made much headway as a fact, which rather
surprises me in a country neighborhood. Possibly your doctor here, who
seems a very good fellow, has wished to spare the family any unnecessary
explanations. If you'll let me advise you, Paul, I would leave it as
it is,--open to conjecture. But, in whatever shape this impression
may reach you from outside, I hope you won't let it disturb you in the
least, so far as it describes your mother's condition. She is one of the
few well-balanced women I have had the honor to know.”
Paul did not take advantage of the doctor's period. He went on.
“Not that I do know her. Possibly you may not yourself feel that you
altogether understand your mother? She has had many demands upon her
powers of adaptation. I should imagine her not one who would adapt
herself easily, yet, once she had recognized a necessity of that sort,
I believe she would fit herself to its conditions with an exacting
thoroughness which in time would become almost, one might say, a second,
an external self. The 'lendings' we must all of us wear.”
“There will be no explanations,” said Paul, not coldly, but helplessly.
“Much the best way,” said the doctor relieved, and glad to be done with
a difficult undertaking. “If we are ever understood in this world, it
is not through our own explanations, but in spite of them. My daughters
hope to see a good deal of your charming wife this winter. I hear great
pleasure expressed at your coming back to town.”
“Thank you, Doctor. She will be up this evening. We shall stay here
with my mother for a time. It will be her desire to carry out
this--recognition--to the end. We must honor her wishes in the matter.”
The talk then fell upon the patient's condition. The doctor left certain
directions and took shelter in professional platitudes, but his eyes
rested with candid kindness upon the young man, and his farewell
hand-clasp was a second prolonged.
He went away in a state of simple wonderment, deeply marveling at Paul's
serenity.
“Extraordinary poise! Where does it come from? No: the boy is happy! He
hides it; but it is the one change in him. He has experienced a great
relief. Is it possible”--
On his way down the river the doctor continued to muse upon the dignity,
the amazingly beautiful behavior of this rising family in whose somewhat
commonplace city fortunes he had taken a friendly interest for years. He
owned that he had sounded them with too short a line.
* * * * *
Watching with the dying man hours when she was with him alone, Emily
Bogardus continued to test his resolution. He never retracted by a
look--faithful to the word she had spoken which made them strangers.
It was the slightest shell of mortality that ever detained a soul on
earth. The face, small like the face of an old, old child, waxed finer
and more spiritual, yet ever more startlingly did it bear the stamp of
that individuality which the spirit had held so cheap--the earthly
so impenetrated with the spiritual part that the face had become a
sublimation. As one sees a sheet of paper covered with writing wither
in flame and become a quivering ash, yet to the last attenuation of
its fibre the human characters will stand forth, till all is blown up
chimney to the stars.
Still, peaceful, implacable in its peace, settling down for the silence
of eternity. Still no sign.
The younger ones came and went. The little boy stole in alone and pushed
against his grandmother's knee,--she seated always by the bed,--gazed,
puzzled, at the strange, still face, and whispered obediently,
“Gran'faver.” There was no response. Once she took the boy and drew him
close and placed his little tender hand within the dry, crumpled husk
extended on the bedclothes. The eyes unclosed and rested long and
earnestly on the face of the child, who yawned as if hypnotized and
flung his head back on the grandmother's breast. She bent suddenly and
laid her own hand where the child's had been. The eyes turned inward
and shut again, but a sigh, so deep it seemed that another breath might
never come, was all her answer.
Past midnight of the fourth night's watch Paul was awakened by a light
in his room. His mother stood beside him, white and worn. “He is
going,” she said. It was the final rally of the body's resistance. A
few moments' expenditure, and that stubborn vitality would loose its
hold.--The strength of the soil!
The wife stood aside and gave up her place to the children. Her
expression was noble, like a queen rebuked before her people. There was
comfort in that, too. A great, solemn, mutual understanding drew this
death-bed group together. Within the sickle's compass so they stood:
the woman God gave this man to found a home; the son who inherited
his father's gentleness and purity of purpose; the fair flower of the
generations that father's sacrifice had helped him win; the bud of
promise on the topmost bough. Those astonished eyes shed their last
earthly light on this human group, turned and rested in the eyes of
the woman, faded, and the light went out. He died, blessing her in one
whispered word. Her name.
Before daybreak on the morning of the funeral, Paul awoke under pressure
of disturbing dreams. There were sounds of hushed movements in the
house. He traced them to the door of the room below stairs where his
father lay. Some one had softly unlocked that door, and entered. He knew
who that one must be. His place was there alone with his mother, before
they were called together as a family, and the mask of decency resumed
for those ironic rites in the presence of the unaccusing dead.
The windows had been lowered behind closed curtains, and the air of the
death chamber, as he entered, was like the touch of chilled iron to the
warm pulse of sleep. Without, a still dark night of November had frosted
the dead grass.
The unappeasable curiosity of the living concerning the Great
Transition, for the moment appeared to have swept all that was personal
out of the watcher's gaze, as she bent above the straightened body.
And something of the peace there dawning on the cold, still face was
reflected in her own.
“You have never seen your father before. There he is.” She drew a
deep sigh, as if she had been too intent to breathe naturally. All her
self-consciousness suddenly was gone. And Paul remembered his dream,
that had goaded him out of sleep, and vanished with the shock of waking.
It gave him the key to this long-expected moment of confidence.
“The old likeness has come back,” his mother repeated, with that new
quietness which restored her to herself.
“I dreamed of that likeness,” said Paul, “only it was much
stronger--startling--so that the room was full of whispers and
exclamations as the neighbors--there were hundreds of them--filed past.
And you stood there, mother, flushed, and talking to each person who
passed and looked at him and then at you; you said--you”--
Mrs. Bogardus raised her head. “I know! I have been thinking all night.
Am I to do that? Is that what you wish me to do? Don't hesitate--to
spare me.”
“Mother! I could not imagine you doing such a thing. It was like
insanity. I wanted to tell you how horrible, how unseemly it was,
because I was sure you had been dwelling on some form--some outward”--
“No,” she said. “I know how I should face this if it were left to me.
But you are my only earthly judge, my son. Judge now between us two. Ask
of me anything you think is due to him. As to outsiders, what do they
matter! I will do anything you say.”
“_I_ say! Oh, mother! Every hand he loved was against him--bruising his
gentle will. Each one of us has cast a stone upon his grave. But you
took the brunt of it. You spoke out plain the denial that was in my
coward's heart from the first. And I judged you! I--who uncovered
my father's soul to ease my own conscience, and put him to shame and
torture, and you to a trial worse than death. Now let us think of the
whole of his life. I have much to tell you. You could not listen before;
but now he is listening. I speak for him. This is how he loved us!”
In hard, brief words Paul told the story of his father's sin and
self-judgment; his abdication in the flesh; what he esteemed the rights
to be of a woman placed as he had placed his wife; how carefully he had
guarded her in those rights, and perjured himself at the last to
leave her free in peace and honor with her children. She listened, not
weeping, but with her great eyes shining in her pallid face.
“All that came after,” said Paul, taking her cold hands in his--“after
his last solemn recantation does not touch the true spirit of his
sacrifice. It was finished. My father died to us then as he meant to
die. The body remained--to serve out its time, as he said. But his brain
was tired. I do not think he connected the past very clearly with the
present. I think you should forget what has happened here. It was a
hideous net of circumstance that did it.”
“There is no such thing as circumstance,” said Mrs. Bogardus with
loftiness. Her face was calm and sweet in its exaltation. “I cannot
say things as you can, but this is what I mean. I was the wife of his
body--sworn flesh of his flesh. In the flesh that made us one I denied
him, and caused his death. And if I could believe as I used to about
punishment, I would lock myself in that room, and for every hour he
suffered there, I would suffer two. And no one should prevent me,
or hasten the end. And the feet of the young men that carried out my
husband who lied to save me, should wait there for me who lied to save
myself. All lies are death. But what is a made-up punishment to me! I
shall take it as it comes--drop by drop--slowly.”
“Mother--my mother! The fashion of this world does not last; but one
thing does. Is it nothing to you, mother?”
“Have I my son--after all?” she said as one dreaming.
The night lamp expired in smoke that tainted the cold air. Paul drew
back the curtains one by one, and let in the new-born day.
“'Peace to this house,'” he said; “'not as the world giveth,'” his
thought concluded.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Desert and The Sown, by Mary Hallock Foote