When Helen returned to Elsie's bedside, it was with a new and still
deeper feeling of sympathy, such as the story told by Old Sophy might
well awaken. She understood, as never before, the singular fascination
and as singular repulsion which she had long felt in Elsie's presence.
It had not been without a great effort that she had forced herself to
become the almost constant attendant of the sick girl; and now she was
learning, but not for the first time, the blessed truth which so many
good women have found out for themselves, that the hardest duty bravely
performed soon becomes a habit, and tends in due time to transform
itself into a pleasure.
The old Doctor was beginning to look graver, in spite of himself. The
fever, if such it was, went gently forward, wasting the young girl's
powers of resistance from day to day; yet she showed no disposition
to take nourishment, and seemed literally to be living on air. It was
remarkable that with all this her look was almost natural, and her
features were hardly sharpened so as to suggest that her life was
burning away. He did not like this, nor various other unobtrusive signs
of danger which his practised eye detected. A very small matter might
turn the balance which held life and death poised against each other.
He surrounded her with precautions, that Nature might have every
opportunity of cunningly shifting the weights from the scale of death
to the scale of life, as she will often do if not rudely disturbed or
interfered with.
Little tokens of good-will and kind remembrance were constantly coming
to her from the girls in the school and the good people in the village.
Some of the mansion-house people obtained rare flowers which they sent
her, and her table was covered with fruits which tempted her in vain.
Several of the school-girls wished to make her a basket of their own
handiwork, and, filling it with autumnal flowers, to send it as a joint
offering. Mr. Bernard found out their project accidentally, and, wishing
to have his share in it, brought home from one of his long walks some
boughs full of variously tinted leaves, such as were still clinging
to the stricken trees. With these he brought also some of the already
fallen leaflets of the white ash, remarkable for their rich olive-purple
color, forming a beautiful contrast with some of the lighter-hued
leaves. It so happened that this particular tree, the white ash, did
not grow upon The Mountain, and the leaflets were more welcome for their
comparative rarity. So the girls made their basket, and the floor of it
they covered with the rich olive-purple leaflets. Such late flowers as
they could lay their hands upon served to fill it, and with many kindly
messages they sent it to Miss Elsie Venner at the Dudley mansion-house.
Elsie was sitting up in her bed when it came, languid, but tranquil, and
Helen was by her, as usual, holding her hand, which was strangely cold,
Helen thought, for one who was said to have some kind of fever. The
school-girls' basket was brought in with its messages of love and hopes
for speedy recovery. Old Sophy was delighted to see that it pleased
Elsie, and laid it on the bed before her. Elsie began looking at the
flowers, and taking them from the basket, that she might see the leaves.
All at once she appeared to be agitated; she looked at the basket, then
around, as if there were some fearful presence about her which she was
searching for with her eager glances. She took out the flowers, one
by one, her breathing growing hurried, her eyes staring, her hands
trembling,--till, as she came near the bottom of the basket, she flung
out all the rest with a hasty movement, looked upon the olive-purple
leaflets as if paralyzed for a moment, shrunk up, as it were, into
herself in a curdling terror, dashed the basket from her, and fell back
senseless, with a faint cry which chilled the blood of the startled
listeners at her bedside.
“Take it away!--take it away!--quick!” said Old Sophy, as she hastened
to her mistress's pillow. “It 's the leaves of the tree that was always
death to her,--take it away! She can't live wi' it in the room!”
The poor old woman began chafing Elsie's hands, and Helen to try to
rouse her with hartshorn, while a third frightened attendant gathered
up the flowers and the basket and carried them out of the apartment, She
came to herself after a time, but exhausted and then wandering. In
her delirium she talked constantly as if she were in a cave, with such
exactness of circumstance that Helen could not doubt at all that she had
some such retreat among the rocks of The Mountain, probably fitted up
in her own fantastic way, where she sometimes hid herself from all human
eyes, and of the entrance to which she alone possessed the secret.
All this passed away, and left her, of course, weaker than before. But
this was not the only influence the unexplained paroxysm had left behind
it. From this time forward there was a change in her whole expression
and her manner. The shadows ceased flitting over her features, and the
old woman, who watched her from day to day and from hour to hour as a
mother watches her child, saw the likeness she bore to her mother coming
forth more and more, as the cold glitter died out of the diamond eyes,
and the stormy scowl disappeared from the dark brows and low forehead.
With all the kindness and indulgence her father had bestowed upon her,
Elsie had never felt that he loved her. The reader knows well enough
what fatal recollections and associations had frozen up the springs of
natural affection in his breast. There was nothing in the world he would
not do for Elsie. He had sacrificed his whole life to her. His very
seeming carelessness about restraining her was all calculated; he knew
that restraint would produce nothing but utter alienation. Just so
far as she allowed him, he shared her studies, her few pleasures, her
thoughts; but she was essentially solitary and uncommunicative. No
person, as was said long ago, could judge him, because his task was not
merely difficult, but simply impracticable to human powers. A nature
like Elsie's had necessarily to be studied by itself, and to be followed
in its laws where it could not be led.
Every day, at different hours, during the whole of his daughter's
illness, Dudley Venner had sat by her, doing all he could to soothe and
please her. Always the same thin film of some emotional non-conductor
between them; always that kind of habitual regard and family-interest,
mingled with the deepest pity on one side and a sort of respect on the
other, which never warmed into outward evidences of affection.
It was after this occasion, when she had been so profoundly agitated
by a seemingly insignificant cause, that her father and Old Sophy were
sitting, one at one side of her bed and one at the other. She had fallen
into a light slumber. As they were looking at her, the same thought came
into both their minds at the same moment. Old Sophy spoke for both, as
she said, in a low voice,
“It 's her mother's look,--it 's her mother's own face right over
again,--she never look' so before, the Lord's hand is on her! His will
be done!”
When Elsie woke and lifted her languid eyes upon her father's face, she
saw in it a tenderness, a depth of affection, such as she remembered
at rare moments of her childhood, when she had won him to her by some
unusual gleam of sunshine in her fitful temper.
“Elsie, dear,” he said, “we were thinking how much your expression was
sometimes like that of your sweet mother. If you could but have seen
her, so as to remember her!”
The tender look and tone, the yearning of the daughter's heart for the
mother she had never seen, save only with the unfixed, undistinguishing
eyes of earliest infancy, perhaps the under-thought that she might soon
rejoin her in another state of being,--all came upon her with a sudden
overflow of feeling which broke through all the barriers between her
heart and her eyes, and Elsie wept. It seemed to her father as if the
malign influence--evil spirit it might almost be called--which had
pervaded her being, had at last been driven forth or exorcised, and that
these tears were at once the sign and the pledge of her redeemed nature.
But now she was to be soothed, and not excited. After her tears she
slept again, and the look her face wore was peaceful as never before.
Old Sophy met the Doctor at the door and told him all the circumstances
connected with the extraordinary attack from which Elsie had suffered.
It was the purple leaves, she said. She remembered that Dick once
brought home a branch of a tree with some of the same leaves on it, and
Elsie screamed and almost fainted then. She, Sophy, had asked her, after
she had got quiet, what it was in the leaves that made her feel so bad.
Elsie could n't tell her,--did n't like to speak about it,--shuddered
whenever Sophy mentioned it.
This did not sound so strangely to the old Doctor as it does to some
who listen to his narrative. He had known some curious examples of
antipathies, and remembered reading of others still more singular.
He had known those who could not bear the presence of a cat, and
recollected the story, often told, of a person's hiding one in a chest
when one of these sensitive individuals came into the room, so as not
to disturb him; but he presently began to sweat and turn pale, and cried
out that there must be a cat hid somewhere. He knew people who were
poisoned by strawberries, by honey, by different meats, many who could
not endure cheese,--some who could not bear the smell of roses. If he
had known all the stories in the old books, he would have found that
some have swooned and become as dead men at the smell of a rose,--that
a stout soldier has been known to turn and run at the sight or smell of
rue,--that cassia and even olive-oil have produced deadly faintings in
certain individuals,--in short, that almost everything has seemed to be
a poison to somebody.
“Bring me that basket, Sophy,” said the old Doctor, “if you can find
it.”
Sophy brought it to him,--for he had not yet entered Elsie's apartment.
“These purple leaves are from the white ash,” he said. “You don't know
the notion that people commonly have about that tree, Sophy?”
“I know they say the Ugly Things never go where the white ash grows,”
Sophy answered. “Oh, Doctor dear, what I'm thinkin' of a'n't true, is
it?”
The Doctor smiled sadly, but did not answer. He went directly to Elsie's
room. Nobody would have known by his manner that he saw any special
change in his patient. He spoke with her as usual, made some slight
alteration in his prescriptions, and left the room with a kind, cheerful
look. He met her father on the stairs.
“Is it as I thought?” said Dudley Veneer.
“There is everything to fear,” the Doctor said, “and not much, I am
afraid, to hope. Does not her face recall to you one that you remember,
as never before?”
“Yes,” her father answered,--“oh, yes! What is the meaning of this
change which has come over her features, and her voice, her temper, her
whole being? Tell me, oh, tell me, what is it? Can it be that the curse
is passing away, and my daughter is to be restored to me,--such as her
mother would have had her,--such as her mother was?”
“Walk out with me into the garden,” the Doctor said, “and I will tell
you all I know and all I think about this great mystery of Elsie's
life.”
They walked out together, and the Doctor began: “She has lived a double
being, as it were,--the consequence of the blight which fell upon her
in the dim period before consciousness. You can see what she might have
been but for this. You know that for these eighteen years her whole
existence has taken its character from that influence which we need not
name. But you will remember that few of the lower forms of life last as
human beings do; and thus it might have been hoped and trusted with
some show of reason, as I have always suspected you hoped and trusted,
perhaps more confidently than myself, that the lower nature which had
become engrafted on the higher would die out and leave the real woman's
life she inherited to outlive this accidental principle which had so
poisoned her childhood and youth. I believe it is so dying out; but I am
afraid,--yes, I must say it, I fear it has involved the centres of
life in its own decay. There is hardly any pulse at Elsie's wrist;
no stimulants seem to rouse her; and it looks as if life were slowly
retreating inwards, so that by-and-by she will sleep as those who lie
down in the cold and never wake.”
Strange as it may seem, her father heard all this not without deep
sorrow, and such marks of it as his thoughtful and tranquil nature,
long schooled by suffering, claimed or permitted, but with a resignation
itself the measure of his past trials. Dear as his daughter might become
to him, all he dared to ask of Heaven was that she might be restored to
that truer self which lay beneath her false and adventitious being. If
he could once see that the icy lustre in her eyes had become a soft,
calm light,--that her soul was at peace with all about her and with Him;
above,--this crumb from the children's table was enough for him, as it
was for the Syro-Phoenician woman who asked that the dark spirit might
go out from her daughter.
There was little change the next day, until all at once she said in a
clear voice that she should like to see her master at the school,
Mr. Langdon. He came accordingly, and took the place of Helen at her
bedside. It seemed as if Elsie had forgotten the last scene with him.
Might it be that pride had come in, and she had sent for him only to
show how superior she had grown to the weakness which had betrayed her
into that extraordinary request, so contrary to the instincts and usages
of her sex? Or was it that the singular change which had come over her
had involved her passionate fancy for him and swept it away with her
other habits of thought and feeling? Or could it be that she felt that
all earthly interests were becoming of little account to her, and wished
to place herself right with one to whom she had displayed a wayward
movement of her unbalanced imagination? She welcomed Mr. Bernard as
quietly as she had received Helen Darley. He colored at the recollection
of that last scene, when he came into her presence; but she smiled with
perfect tranquillity. She did not speak to him of any apprehension; but
he saw that she looked upon herself as doomed. So friendly, yet so calm
did she seem through all their interview, that Mr. Bernard could only
look back upon her manifestation of feeling towards him on their walk
from the school as a vagary of a mind laboring under some unnatural
excitement, and wholly at variance with the true character of Elsie
Venner as he saw her before him in her subdued, yet singular beauty. He
looked with almost scientific closeness of observation into the diamond
eyes; but that peculiar light which he knew so well was not there. She
was the same in one sense as on that first day when he had seen her
coiling and uncoiling her golden chain; yet how different in every
aspect which revealed her state of mind and emotion! Something of
tenderness there was, perhaps, in her tone towards him; she would not
have sent for him, had she not felt more than an ordinary interest in
him. But through the whole of his visit she never lost her gracious
self-possession. The Dudley race might well be proud of the last of
its daughters, as she lay dying, but unconquered by the feeling of the
present or the fear of the future.
As for Mr. Bernard, he found it very hard to look upon her, and
listen to her unmoved. There was nothing that reminded him of the
stormy--browed, almost savage girl he remembered in her fierce
loveliness,--nothing of all her singularities of air and of costume.
Nothing? Yes, one thing. Weak and suffering as she was, she had never
parted with one particular ornament, such as a sick person would
naturally, as it might be supposed, get rid of at once. The golden cord
which she wore round her neck at the great party was still there. A
bracelet was lying by her pillow; she had unclasped it from her wrist.
Before Mr. Bernard left her, she said,
“I shall never see you again. Some time or other, perhaps, you will
mention my name to one whom you love. Give her this from your scholar
and friend Elsie.”
He took the bracelet, raised her hand to his lips, then turned his face
away; in that moment he was the weaker of the two.
“Good-bye,” she said; “thank you for coming.”
His voice died away in his throat, as he tried to answer her. She
followed him with her eyes as he passed from her sight through the
door, and when it closed after him sobbed tremulously once or twice,
but stilled herself, and met Helen, as she entered, with a composed
countenance.
“I have had a very pleasant visit from Mr. Langdon,” Elsie said. “Sit
by me, Helen, awhile without speaking; I should like to sleep, if I
can,--and to dream.”