It was settled that they should set out for home a week from that day.
“Only seven days left,” said the doctor. “What can I do in that time?”
Never was man so baffled in attempts to woo. Hetty saw nothing, heard
nothing, understood nothing; unwittingly she defeated every project he
made for seeing her alone; unconsciously she chilled and dampened and
arrested every impulse he had to speak to her, till Dr. Eben's temper
was tried as well as his love. Sally, the baby, the nurse, all three,
were simply a wall of protection around Hetty. Her eyes, her ears, her
hands were full; and as for her heart and soul, they were walled about
even better than her body. Nothing can be such a barrier to love's
approach as an honest nature's honest unconsciousness. Dr. Eben was
wellnigh beside himself. The days flew by. He had done nothing, gained
nothing. How he cursed his folly in having let two whole months slip
away, before he found out that he loved this woman, whom now he could
no more hope to impress in a few hours' time than a late afternoon sun
might think to melt an iceberg.
“It would take a man a lifetime to make her understand that he loved
her,” groaned the doctor, “and I've only got two days;” and more than
ever his anxiety deepened as he wondered whether, after they returned
home, she would allow him to continue these friendly and familiar
relations. This uncertainty led to a most unfortunate precipitation on
his part. The night before they were to go, he found Hetty at sunset
sitting under the trees, and looking dreamily out to sea. Her attitude
and her look were pensive. He had never seen such an expression on
Hetty's face or figure, and it gave him a warmer yearning towards her
than he had ever yet dared to let himself feel. It was just time for the
lamp in the lighthouse to be lit, and Hetty was watching for it. As the
doctor approached her, she said, “I am waiting for the lighthouse light
to flash out. I like so to see its first ray. It is like seeing a new
planet made.” Dr. Eben sat down by her side, and they both waited in
silence for the light. The whole western and southern sky glowed red; a
high wind had been blowing all day, and the water was covered with foamy
white caps; the tall, slender obelisk of the lighthouse stood out black
against the red sky, and the shining waves leaped up and broke about
its base. But all was quiet in the sheltered curve of the beach on which
Hetty and Dr. Eben were sitting: the low surf rose and fell as gently as
if it had a tide of its own, which no storm could touch. Presently the
bright light flashed from the tower, shone one moment on the water of
the river's mouth, then was gone.
“Now it is lighting the open sea,” said Hetty. In a few moments more the
lantern had swung round, and again the bright rays streamed towards the
beach, almost reaching the shore.
“And now it is lighting us,” said Dr. Eben: “I wish it were as easy
to get light upon one's path in life, as it is to hang a lantern in a
tower.”
Hetty laughed.
“Are you often puzzled?” she asked lightly.
“No,” said the doctor, “I never have been, but I am now.”
“What about?” asked Hetty, innocently: “I don't see what there is to
puzzle you here.”
“You, Miss Gunn,” stoutly answered Dr. Eben, feeling as if he were
taking a header into unfathomed waters. “Me!” exclaimed Hetty, in a tone
of utmost surprise. “Why, what do you mean?”
Dr. Eben hesitated a single instant. He had not intended to do this
thing, but the occasion had been too much for him. “I may as well do
it first as last,” he said; “she can but refuse me:” and, in a very few
manly words, Dr. Eben Williams straightway asked Hetty Gunn to marry
him. He was not prepared for what followed, although in a soliloquy,
only a few days before, he had predicted it to himself. Hetty laughed
merrily, unaffectedly, in his very face.
“Why, Dr. Williams!” she said, “you can't know what you're saying. You
can't want to marry me: I'm not the sort of woman men want to marry”--
He interrupted her. His voice was husky with deep feeling.
“Miss Gunn,” he said, “I implore you not to speak in this way. I do know
what I am saying, and I do love you with all my heart.”
“Nonsense,” answered Hetty in the kindliest of tones; “of course you
think you do: but it is only because you have been shut up here two
whole months, with nothing else to do but fancy that you were in love.
I told you it was time we went home. Don't say any thing more about it.
I'll promise you to forget it all,” and Hetty laughed again, a merry
little laugh. A sharp suspicion crossed the doctor's mind that she was
coquetting with him. In a constrained tone he said:
“Miss Gunn, do you really wish me to understand that you reject me?”
“Not at all,” said Hetty, gayly. “I wish you to understand that I
haven't permitted you to offer yourself. I have simply assured you that
you are mistaken: you'll see it for yourself as soon as we get home. Do
you suppose I shouldn't know if you were really in love with me?”
“I didn't know it myself till a week ago,” replied Dr. Eben: “I did not
understand myself. I never loved any woman before.”
“And no man ever asked me to marry him before,” answered the honest
Hetty, like a child, and with an amused tone in her voice. “It is very
odd, isn't it?”
Dr. Eben was confounded. In spite of himself, he felt the contagion of
Hetty's merry and unsentimental view of the situation; and it was with
a trace of obstinacy rather than of a lover's pain in his tones that he
continued:
“But, Miss Gunn, indeed you must not make light of this matter in this
way. It is not treating me fairly. With all the love of a man's heart I
love you, and have asked you to be my wife: are you sure that you could
not love me?”
“I don't really think I could,” said Hetty; “but I shall not try,
because I am sure you are mistaken. I am too old to be married, for one
thing: I shall be thirty-seven in the fall. That's reason enough, if
there were no other. A man can't fall in love with a woman after she's
as old as that.”
Dr. Eben laughed outright. He could not help it.
“There!” said Hetty, triumphantly; “that's right; I like to hear you
laugh now; for goodness' sake, let's forget all this. I will, if you
will; and we will be all the better friends for it perhaps. At any rate,
you'll be all the more friend to me for having saved you from making
such a blunder as thinking you were in love with me.”
Dr. Eben was on the point of persisting farther; but he suddenly thought
to himself:
“I'd better not: I might make her angry. I'll take the friendship
platform for the present: that is some gain.”
“You will permit me then to be your friend, Miss Gunn,” he said. “Why,
certainly,” said Hetty, in a matter-of-fact way: “I thought we were very
good friends now.”
“But you recollect, you distinctly told me I was to come only as
physician to Mrs. Little,” retorted the doctor.
Hetty colored: the darkness sheltered her.
“Oh! that was a long time ago,” she said in a remorseful tone: “I should
be very ungrateful if I had not forgotten that.”
And with this Dr. Eben was forced to be contented. When he thought the
whole thing over, he admitted to himself that he had fared as well as
he had a right to expect, and that he had gained a very sure vantage,
in having committed the loyal Hetty to the assertion that they were
friends. He half dreaded to see her the next morning, lest there should
be some change, same constraint in her manner; not a shade of it. He
could have almost doubted his own recollections of the evening before,
if such a thing had been possible, so absolutely unaltered was Hetty's
treatment of him. She had been absolutely honest in all she said: she
did honestly believe that his fancied love for her was a sentimental
mistake, a caprice born of idleness and lack of occupation, and she did
honestly intend to forget the whole thing, and to make him forget it.
And so they went back to the farm, where the summer awaited them with
overflowing harvests of every thing, and Hetty's hands were so full that
very soon she had almost ceased to recollect the life at “The Runs.”
Sally and the baby were strong and well. The whole family seemed newly
glad and full of life. All odd hours they could snatch from work, Old
Cæsar and Nan roamed about in the sun, following the baby, as his nurse
carried him in her arms. He had been christened Abraham Gunn Little;
poor James Little having persistently refused to let his own name be
given to the child, and Hetty having been cordially willing to give her
father's. To speak to a baby as Abraham was manifestly impossible, and
the little fellow was called simply “Baby” month after month, until,
one day, one of Norah's toddlers, who could not speak plain, hit upon a
nickname so fortunate that it was at once adopted by everybody.
“Raby,” little Mike called him, by some original process of compounding
“Abraham” and “Baby;” and “Raby” he was from that day out. He was a
beautiful child: his mother's blue eyes, his father's dark hair, and a
skin like a ripe peach, but not over fair,--made a combination of color
which was rarely lovely. He was a joyous child, as joyous as if no
shadow had ever rested on his mother's heart. Sally watched him day by
day with delight; but the delight was never wholly free from pain: the
wound she had received, the wound she had inflicted on herself, could
never wholly heal. A deep, moral hurt must for ever leave its trace, as
surely as a deep wound in a man's flesh must leave its scar. It is of
no use for us to think to evade this law; neither is it a law wholly
of retribution. The scar on the flesh is token of nature's process of
healing: so is the scar of a perpetual sorrow, which is left on a soul
which has sinned and repented. Sally and Jim were leading healthful and
good lives now; and each day brought them joys and satisfactions: but
their souls were scarred; the fulness of joy which might have been
theirs they could never taste. And the loss fell where it could never
be overlooked for a moment,--on their joy in their child. In the very
holiest of holies, in the temple of the mother's heart, stood for ever a
veiled shape, making ceaseless sin-offering for the past.
As the winter set in, an anxiety fell on the family which had passed so
sunny a summer. With the first sharp cold winds, little Raby developed a
tendency to croup. Neither Sally nor Hetty had ever seen a case of this
terrible and alarming disease; and, in Raby's first attack of it, they
had both thought the child dying. Now was Doctor Eben brought again
into close and intimate relations with Hetty. During the months of the
summer, he had, in spite of all his efforts, in spite of his frequent
visits to her house, in spite of all Hetty's frank cordiality of manner,
felt himself slowly slipping away from the vantage-ground he hoped he
had gained with her. This was the result of two things,--one which he
knew, and one which he did not dream of: the cause which he knew, was a
very simple and evident one, Hetty's constant preoccupation. Hetty was
a very busy woman: what with Raby, the farm, the house, her social
relations with the whole village, she had never a moment of leisure.
Often when Dr. Eben came to the house, he found her away; and often when
he found her at home, she was called away before he had talked with her
half an hour. The other reason, which, if Dr. Eben had only known it,
would have more than comforted him for all he felt he had lost on the
surface, was that Hetty, in the bottom of her heart, was slowly growing
conscious that she cared a great deal about him.
No woman, whatever she may say and honestly mean, can entirely dismiss
from her thoughts the memory of the words in which a man has told her he
loves her. Especially is this true when those words are the first words
of love which have ever been spoken to her. Morning and night, as Hetty
came and went, in her brisk cheery way, in and out of the house and
about the farm, she wore a new look on her face. The words, “I love you
with all my heart,” haunted her. She did not believe them any more now
than before; but they had a very sweet sound. She was no nearer now than
then to any impulse to take Dr. Williams at his word: nothing could be
deeper implanted in a soul than the conviction was in Hetty's that
no man was likely to love her. But she was no longer so sure that she
herself could not love. Vague and wistful reveries began to interrupt
her activity. She would stand sometimes, with her arms folded, leaning
on a stile, and idly watching her men at work, till they wondered what
had happened to their mistress. She lost a little of the color from her
cheeks, and the full moulded lines of her chin grew sharper.
“Faith, an' Miss Hetty's goin' off, sooner 'n she's any right to,”
said Mike to Norah one day. “What puts such a notion in your head thin,
Mike?” retorted Norah, “sure she's as foine a crayther as's in all the
county, an' foiner too.”
“Foine enough, but I say for all that that she's a goin' off in her
looks mighty fast,” replied the keen-eyed Mike. “You don't think she'd
be a pinin' for anybody, do you?”
Norah gave a hearty Irish laugh.
“Miss Hetty a pinin'!” she repeated over and over with bursts of
merriment:
“Ah, but yez are all alike, ye men. Miss Hetty a pinin'! I'd like to see
the man Miss Hetty wud pine fur.”
Mike and Norah were both right. There was no “pining” in Hetty's busy
and sensible soul; but there had been planted in it a germ of new
life, whose slow quickening and growth were perplexing and disturbing
elements: not as yet did she recognize them; she only felt the
disturbance, and its link with Dr. Eben was sufficiently clear to make
her manner to him undergo an indefinable change. It was no less cordial,
no less frank: you could not have said where the change was; but it was
there, and he felt it. He ought to have understood it and taken heart.
But he was ignorant like Hetty, only felt the disturbance, and taking
counsel of his fears believed that things were going wrong. Sometimes
he would stay away for many days, and then watch closely Hetty's
manner when they met. Never a trace of resentment or even wonder at
his absence. Sometimes he would go there daily for an interval; never
a trace of expectation or of added familiarity. But now things were
changed. Little Raby's illness seemed to put them all back where they
were during the days of the sea-side idyl. Now the doctor felt himself
again needed. Both Hetty and Sally lived upon his words, even his looks.
Again and again the child's life seemed hanging in even balances, and
it was with a gratitude almost like that they felt to God that the two
women blessed Dr. Eben for his recovery. Night after night, the three,
watched by the baby's bed, listening to his shrill and convulsive
breathings.
Morning after morning, Dr. Eben and Hetty went together out of the
chamber, and stood in the open door-way, watching the crimson dawn on
the eastern hills. At such times, the doctor felt so near Hetty that
he was repeatedly on the point of saying again the words of love he had
spoken six months before. But a great fear deterred him.
“If she refuses me once more, that would settle it for ever,” he said to
himself, and forced the words back.
One morning after a night of great anxiety and fear, they left Sally's
room while it was yet dark. It was bitterly cold; the winter stars shone
keen and glittering in the bleak sky. Hetty threw on a heavy cloak, and
opening the hall-door, said:
“Let us go out into the cold air; it will do us good.”
Silently they walked up and down the piazza. The great pines were
weighed down to the ground by masses of snow. Now and then, when the
wind stirred the upper branches, avalanches slid noiselessly off, and
built themselves again into banks below. There was no moon, but the
starlight was so brilliant that the snow crystals glistened in it. As
they looked at the sky, a star suddenly fell. It moved very slowly, and
was more than a minute in full sight.
“One light-house less,” said Dr. Eben.
“Oh,” exclaimed Hetty, “what a lovely idea! who said that? Who called
the stars lighthouses?”
“I forget,” said the doctor; “in fact I think I never knew; I think
it was an anonymous little poem in which I saw the idea, years ago. It
struck me at the time as being a singularly happy one. I think I can
repeat a stanza or two of it.”