FAITH AND WORKS.
The next morning the doctor found Susie weak and feverish, and forbade
her to leave her bed. He told her he had not been able to talk with Mrs.
Forest, but should do so the coming evening, and meanwhile Dinah would
be very kind to her and see that she did not want for anything. He was
deeply touched by her condition, seeing her lie there alone, pale and
suffering, with no woman’s sympathy to cheer her, though the house was
full of women; and he dwelt with some bitterness upon the fact that he
could not by a word bring his wife to his side in kindly, womanly faith
that his impulses were generous and right. Clara he knew he could
influence, but he wished her to act freely, and not through love for
him; therefore he determined to have a talk with Mrs. Forest first, but
meanwhile he had had a word with good old Dinah, and flattered her
exceedingly by saying, “Now, you know all, Dinah, and I count on your
help and discretion. You and I are the only ones in the house who know
this. Help Susie all you can, for my sake, and mind that you say
nothing. Are you sure you can keep the secret, Dinah?”
“Lor bress you, Massa! Massa knows Dinah can.”
“All right, Dinah. I trust you, and I go away feeling easier now;” and
he pressed the old servant’s hand cordially.
This interview had taken place while Dinah was putting the dining-room
in order; and while getting the hominy and coffee ready for breakfast,
she found opportunity to prepare Susie some traditional medicament and
carry it to her. Her heart was overflowing with real sympathy for Susie,
and her pride that the wise and great Dr. Forest had chosen to take her
alone into his confidence, made her feel exceedingly important in her
own eyes.
“Lor bress you, chile!” she said, her shining black face beaming as she
held the cup to Susie’s mouth, “Why didn’t ye tell old Dinah long fore
dis time? Dinah could a helped ye, mebbe. Not now. Massa’d kill me, now
you done gone told him; but cheer up, honey. Dem accidens will happen
mos all de time!”
Susie, weak and suffering as she was, could not resist a smile, and as
she drank the decoction Dinah had brought, she thanked her with tears.
It was the first woman who had come to her in her sorrow, and she did
not think of Dinah’s black skin, but silently thanked God for this
blessing.
The breakfast in Dr. Forest’s family was the pleasantest meal of the
day, for it was the only one when he was pretty certain to be present.
On this morning, however, there was something like a cloud over the
family circle, which seemed to oppress all except Leila, who chatted
gayly to, or rather at, Miss Marston. The latter did not respond
readily, and Leila turned her batteries upon Linnie, who was rather of a
sentimental turn, and fancied that she was a victim of heart disease.
Sentimental young ladies perfectly dote on heart disease. Linnie was
disgusted with the incredulity of the family about the cause of her
ailment. Even old Dinah had said, “Lor, Miss Linnie, you is growing like
a potato-vine, and dese pains ain’t noffin but de growing pains!” After
that Leila teazed her sister unmercifully about her “growing pains;” but
that being frowned down by the family, it was held in reserve for
private persecution. By-and-by Leila, finding the want of gayety at the
breakfast table quite oppressive, drew a long sigh as she laid down her
napkin.
“What is the matter, my child?” asked the doctor. Leila glanced at her
sister mischievously, tilting her head low on the left side, and
answered:
“Oh, I have got such a fearful pain in my diaphragm!” Miss Marston
laughed, not fully comprehending the malice of the young minx, but the
rest were very grave. Leila was impatient over mysteries, and clearly
there was something in the air on this particular morning, so she soon
began to probe the silence.
“I declare this breakfast is as solemn as a Quaker funeral,” she said;
and as no one made any remark, she asked where Susie was.
“She is quite ill this morning, my dear,” answered the doctor; “quite
ill. I hope you and Linnie will try to take her place until she is
better.”
“I will, papa,” replied Linnie; “and I will help nurse her too, for I
think Susie is really nice.” Then there was silence again until Leila
exclaimed, “Dear me! They say everybody have their skeleton closet. I
thought we were an exception, as we keep ours right out fairly in the
light. Why, it’s an age since I saw him. I must go up in the garret and
give the old darling a ‘gyrate,’ as we used to say. Do you remember,
Clara?”
“I remember many things,” replied Clara, with a dignity that was perhaps
a little sophomorical.
“O, do we? How antique we are getting.”
“Yes; I remember, for example, that there is a certain young lady who
will probably go on repeating a certain grammatical solecism until she
is gray,” answered Clara, alluding to Leila’s “everybody have.” Leila
made an indiscriminate onslaught upon grammars generally, during which
the doctor was called away to his patients, and the breakfast ended.
During the day Mrs. Forest, and subsequently Clara, visited Susie’s
room; but in both cases Susie seemed disturbed, and disinclined to enter
upon the details of her illness, and declared she wanted nothing. She
thanked them for their kindness, and once, upon some gentle word from
Mrs. Forest, she hid her eyes, which had filled with tears. Dinah was
the only welcome presence to the poor girl during that long, sad day,
and for obvious reasons.
Early in the evening Dr. Delano called, and made himself very agreeable
to all the ladies, and especially so to Clara, a little later, when they
had a long tête-a-tête on the old south-facing veranda. The sunset had
been magnificent, and as Dr. Delano was quite seriously enamoured with
Clara, he was gay, poetic, appreciative—everything that could charm
her—but she could say little in reply to his fervid eloquence, for she
had the disadvantage of being immeasurably in love, and consequently
felt a certain awkwardness, a triumph to Dr. Delano, growing sweeter and
sweeter every hour. It was her first romance. It was his—well, not his
first, certainly. _That_ was an early attachment to Ella Wills, his
father’s ward, and this night he told Clara the story of that romance,
showing her, of course, beyond a shadow of doubt, that _that_ was a very
insignificant passion—“as water unto wine,” was the way he characterized
it—comparing it to his present deeper and dearer love. Do not lovers,
not always, but very generally, tell this same old fib? The truth was,
he had adored Ella with all a boy’s enthusiasm, and she had flirted with
him persistently—“outrageously,” Miss Charlotte Delano, the doctor’s
sister, declared—and had escaped heart-free herself. So when he came to
tell her in words that his heart was under her feet, she affected the
most innocent surprise, and hoped she had not led him to suppose, etc.,
etc. In the end she somehow won his respect, for he did not curse her,
as rejected lovers do, at least in most novels. She wept very lavishly,
for she meant to keep him in reserve, and marry him finally, if no more
brilliant offer occurred, or if ever in danger of becoming an old
maid—that terror of women who have no serious object in life. When Dr.
Delano first began to mention Clara in his letters to his sister
Charlotte, which he did once as “the noblest and sweetest of mortal
women,” Ella felt personally affronted, and commenced at once to
speculate on the chances of winning him back, not once asking herself if
this “noblest and sweetest woman” had not already acquired rights over
the heart once so lightly rejected. She had not seen him since his
return from Europe, where he had spent three years in completing his
medical education.
Ella always played the kitten, though she was no longer a child, and a
very Methuselah, if age could be numbered by her conquests. She had no
heart to speak of, and less conscience, but she impressed every male
creature with a sense of childish, artless innocence. She was a
brunette, petite, with dark short ringlets about her small head, a peach
bloom on her cheeks, and a babyish, pouting mouth, whose sweetness
Albert Delano had found difficult to forget, or even to recall without
regret, until he had found in Clara something infinitely superior to the
sweetness and prettiness that had so charmed him in earlier days. This
something he hardly comprehended, though he owned its power to a certain
extent. It was soul, for want of a better name—a moral sweetness, a
divine, emotional sensitiveness, and a straightforward honesty of
purpose, that made you conscious, last of all, that she was beautiful in
person and exceedingly graceful in every movement.
This evening Clara remembered long after, as the happiest in her life.
The bright moon shone through the climbing foliage on the veranda,
carpeting the floor with soft mosaic patterns, through which the “mated
footsteps” of the lovers passed and repassed, talking in low tones of
the beauty of the scene, at intervals, when time could be spared from
the dearer theme of their perfections in each other’s eyes, and the
future that, before them,
——“like a fruitful land reposed.”
Of course, they took no note of time, and Miss Marston, after talking
some time with Mrs. Forest, went quietly to her room. Leila fidgeted
about for awhile, and then exclaimed, crossly:
“I _don’t_ see why they wish to moon out there all night.”
“Why, Leila!” said Mrs. Forest, reproachfully. “I see nothing improper
in their enjoying each other’s society, and you should not speak in that
way.”
“She’s jealous,” remarked Linnie.
“You mean thing! I’m not,” Leila answered, in a high key, and then they
went to bed to fight it out in the ordinary sisterly way; and I take it
that sisters can be as caustic and insolently mean in their treatment of
each other as any kindred under the sun. In this case, however, Linnie
was really fond of her sister, and would have manifested it quite
lavishly by way of petting, but for being discouraged and called
“spooney” by Leila whenever she attempted any expression of sentiment.
Mrs. Forest waited awhile after the twins were gone, and then went to
the veranda and gave the lovers some friendly caution about the night
air. This duty discharged, and hearing her husband enter his
sleeping-room, she joined him there. He was very glad to see her, for he
wished to broach the subject of Susie’s condition, a task requiring
considerable diplomacy, for he knew Mrs. Forest would naturally be
merciless to one like Susie. But the doctor in his diplomacy, as Clara
said, did very well until he came to the diplomatic part, and then he
lost the first requisite, patience. He greeted Mrs. Forest very
pleasantly, and told her she never looked lovelier in her life.
“Ah! dear,” she answered, “it is very sweet to hear you say so, but”—and
she viewed herself composedly in the mirror of the doctor’s
wardrobe—“this glass shows me my wrinkles and my gray hair.”
“Well, your hair is beautiful, and I like these little crows’-feet at
the corners of your eyes; but this is not what makes your beauty in my
eyes—” and he came beside her, and put his arm around her—“it is the
softness and tenderness of expression in your face. You did not have
this as a girl.” Here was possibly the approach to the needed diplomacy.
“Yet you used to rave about my beauty; and how indifferent I was to it.”
“To which?”
“To your raving, to be sure.”
“Ah! of course.”
“See how my color has gone. I think I never was vain, but who can look
at such a reflection with any satisfaction? You are bronzed by exposure,
but that rather improves you, and I’m sure, as we stand here, you look
ten years younger than I do, instead of five older. That is because you
have had no babies.”
“Ah! Indeed!” exclaimed the doctor, with Pantagruelistic gayety. “I
thought they were all mine—all but that doubling feat. That was entirely
your invention.”
“For shame! Have you not teazed me enough with that. I think you are so
absurd. I wish you would never make such a remark again.”
“Well, then, I won’t; but the way you take it is so amusing. Are you
going to stay?”
“Do you wish me to?”
“Ah! That is not to be considered,” said the doctor, with his usual
gallantry, which was not gallantry at all in his case, but the simple
expression of his interpretation of woman’s most primitive right. “The
question is, do _you_ wish to stay?”
“Yes, dear.”
“You don’t come too often these days,” he said, toying with her ear.
“That is because I know that you are tired, and would rather sleep when
you have left your study.”
“Too tired, you think, to enjoy your presence?”
“Yes; you know I have not lost the girlish habit of liking to lie awake
and talk. You go to sleep the moment you touch the pillow. Ah, me! how
we change! I remember how you used to keep me awake with your ineffable
words and caresses! and I was so indifferent then. You loved me more
than I could possibly appreciate;” and she added, taking the hair-pins
from her silvery hair, and with a little sigh, “Ah! if I were only young
again!” For answer, the doctor sang the trivial words of Beranger:
“Combien je regrette
Mon bras si dodu,
Ma jambe bien faite
Et le temps perdu.”
“Translate your French. It is something shocking, no doubt.”
“No, indeed. But I could not do it justice. I promise to keep you awake
to-night though, for I must consult you about a matter of importance.”
“What is it about?”
“It is about Susie Dykes.”
“She does look ill, I think, and she has been so silent and moody
lately. You don’t think she has anything serious the matter with her, do
you?”
“Yes, serious enough. It is strange you have not guessed.”
“What!” exclaimed Mrs. Forest, a sudden light breaking into her mind.
“You don’t mean to say——”
“Yes, just that,” interrupted the doctor, “and the agony of the poor
girl is dreadful. What is worse, Dan has put it out of his power to save
her from disgrace.”
“Dan!” exclaimed Mrs. Forest, in great disgust. “I don’t believe he
knows anything about it. The shameless thing! No doubt——”
“Now! now! Don’t go off at half-cock. He admits it all—did so in my
study last night, where he said he would rather die than marry Susie.”
“Oh, Heaven! How dreadful for Dan!”
“And you think only of him.”
“Only of him! Is he not my child? Is it not natural that I should think
only of him?”
“Many things are natural that are very selfish. Is Susie not somebody’s
child too as well as Dan? And what is his suffering compared to hers?
Will the world howl at him as a sinner, kick him down further into hell,
and abandon him with virtuous scorn? No, no; there’s plenty of girls
here in Oakdale, of good family too, who would marry him to-morrow for
all his damnable treachery to this poor girl, while the hypocrites,
drawing their immaculate skirts clear of his victim, wink at his act,
and distinguish it ‘as sowing wild oats.’ And you, my wife—you among the
number! You would send her out to die in the streets, would you?”
“I am sorry for her, of course. You know I am.”
Mrs. Forest was thinking of Clara’s prospects; of the aristocratic
Delanos, who were soon coming to Oakdale, and the event was important.
What would they say at Clara’s family supporting and harboring under
their roof a girl so disgraced? Mrs. Forest added, “But we cannot be
expected to be victimized because of her want of virtue. Of course she
cannot stay here.”
“Virtue!” said the doctor, with contempt. “Virtue, in any decent code of
morals, must include all the best qualities of the heart. You are one of
the soulless Pharisees who would cover it with a fig-leaf. I thought I
knew you better, Fannie. Some one says, if you would know a man, divide
an inheritance with him; but, by ——, after you have slept in a woman’s
arms twenty odd years, shared your fortune and all the joys and sorrows
of life with her for that time, a simple case like this arises when you
expect common human sympathy, and she fails you utterly.”
Mrs. Forest began to sob quietly, but finding to her astonishment that
this redoubtable weapon had lost its power over the soft-hearted doctor,
she was piqued, and hardened her heart like a flint. She began hastily
replacing her hair-pins in her hair. This was to punish him by depriving
him of her presence for the night, which she had so sweetly promised.
The doctor noted this movement, the critical moment, probably, if only
his diplomacy had been equal to the situation; but he was “a plain,
blunt man,” as Mark Antony says of himself, and he had already played
his last card. He knew it was hopeless. Mrs. Forest, gentle, mild,
pious, as she undoubtedly was, could not understand the doctor’s broad
love of humanity. She had no power of loving anything that was not
distinctly her own; but she was sure of her own integrity, and when told
by the doctor that there was no more virtue in her love than in that of
a hen for her chickens when she gathers her own under her wings, but
pecks away all others, even though motherless and dying for care, she
was not in the least disturbed; she was sure of her own position, and as
immovable as a rock. “Do as you like,” he said to her, giving up the
case, but determined to speak his mind freely; “do as you like, you and
the other godly who pretend to be followers of one who said, ‘Neither do
I condemn thee.’ Your respect for Christ is a common farce. It is merely
a thing of form and respectability. You don’t take the trouble to see
what manner of man he really was, or you would see how impossible it is
for you to have any sentiments in common with him. Was he not a radical,
sitting down with publicans and sinners, shocking all the conventional
morality of his time, befriending the needy, supporting the outcasts of
society, and a thorough despiser of all cant and hypocrisy?”
“I dislike to hear any one quoting Christ who does not believe in him,”
said Mrs. Forest very softly, but none the less angry for all that.
“Believe,” echoed the doctor. “_You_ are the real infidel. Do you
believe in the divine nature of Christ? Of course you do not; for if you
did, you would have more respect for his morality and magnanimity of
character. Do you believe in your heaven? You have no shadow of real
faith in it, and you know it in your own heart, for it is a place where
this same unhappy girl may be your equal or superior, according to your
own scheme of salvation; and you know you would prefer annihilation to
any such democratic mixing of saint and sinner. Do you think you can
make me think you believe in hell, when you coolly run the risk of its
terrors by turning against the suffering wretches whom Christ helped and
befriended? Oh, Fannie! you have no religion in your heart, for you have
no love for humanity; or, call it religion if you like, and say you have
no honest human sympathy, and no faith that can triumph over the little
expedients and conventional proprieties of the day.”
“I do not wish to manifest levity, but it does seem to me amusing to
hear _you_ talk of faith.”
At another time the doctor would have ceased in despair; but it is so
hard to believe absolutely that those allied to us by many tender ties,
can never respect our most sacred convictions; besides, the doctor’s
sense of human justice was outraged, and he had not yet given full vent
to his righteous indignation.
“I will not try to show you that I have a faith which you can never
comprehend. It would be useless,” he said, “but I can tell you, though
you could never persuade me to cant and howl among your pious herd, that
I respect Christ and his example as I respect the dignity of all
sympathy for human misery; and I shall prove it by standing by this
unhappy girl. I am none the less ready to do so because her suffering is
caused by a knave whom I had the misfortune to beget.”
“Why, I never heard any one utter such language!” exclaimed Mrs. Forest;
“but it is useless to reason with you, when you are in a passion. For my
part, I think ‘charity begins at home.’”
“Yes, I know you do; and according to your creed, it not only begins but
ends there also.”
“Would you sacrifice the prospects of your children to protect a
shameless girl?”
“I’d sacrifice anything and everything on earth to show my faith in the
triumph of justice. Besides, this girl is not shameless. She has a noble
nature. She told Dan to his face that he would never marry Susie
Dykes—this when she found he would marry her, but only as a duty. Yes,
madam, you can now measure my faith, which you despise, and see what it
is worth beside yours. Let what will come, I shall stand by this girl.
Life, with the consciousness that I have acted like a cur, is not worth
having. Now you had better go and pray for grace to do unto others as
you would have others do unto you;” and the doctor burst into a bitter
laugh, as the door closed behind her who had come with wifely tenderness
to sleep by his side.