At six o'clock in the morning Bertha came down the stairs again. Her
simple white gown was a fresh one, and there was a tinge of color in her
cheeks.
"She slept nearly all night," she said to Tredennis, when he joined her,
"and so did I. I am sure she is better." Then she put out her hand for
him to take. "It is all because you are here," she said. "When I wakened
for a moment, once or twice, and heard your footsteps, it seemed to give
me courage and make everything quieter. Are you very tired?"
"No," he answered, "I am not tired at all."
"I am afraid you would not tell me if you were," she said. "You must
come with me now and let me give you some breakfast."
She led him into a room at the side of the hall. When the house had been
a "mansion" it had been considered a very imposing apartment, and, with
the assistance of a few Washingtonian luxuries, which she had
dexterously grafted upon its bareness, it was by no means unpicturesque
even now.
"I think I should know that you had lived here," he said, as he glanced
around.
"Have I made it so personal?" she replied. "I did not mean to do that.
It was so bare at first, and, as I had nothing to do, it amused me to
arrange it. Richard sent me the rugs, and odds and ends, and I found the
spindle-legged furniture in the neighborhood. I am afraid it won't be
safe for you to sit down too suddenly in the chairs, or to lean heavily
on the table. I think you had better choose that leathern arm-chair and
abide by it. It is quite substantial."
He took the seat, and gave himself up to the pleasure of watching her
as she moved to and fro between the table and an antique sideboard, from
whose recesses she produced some pretty cups and saucers.
"What are you going to do?" he asked.
"I am going to set the table for your breakfast," she said, "because
Maria is busy with the children, and the other nurse is with Janey, and
the woman of the house is making your coffee and rolls."
"You are going to set the table!" he exclaimed.
"It doesn't require preternatural intelligence," she answered. "It is
rather a simple thing, on the whole."
It seemed a very simple thing as she did it, and a very pretty thing. As
he leaned against the leathern back of his chair, beginning vaguely to
realize by a dawning sense of weariness that he had been up all night,
he felt that he had not awakened from his dream yet, or that the visions
of the past months were too far away and too unreal to move him.
The early morning sunlight made its way through the vines embowering the
window, and cast lace-like shadows of their swaying leaves upon the
floor, and upon Bertha's dress when she passed near. The softness of the
light mellowed everything, and intensified the touches of color in the
fans and ornaments on the walls and mantel, and in the bits of drapery
thrown here and there as if by accident; and in the midst of this color
and mellowed light Bertha moved before him, a slender, quiet figure,
making the picture complete.
It was her quietness which impressed itself upon him more than all else.
After the first moments, when she had uttered her cry on seeing him, and
had given way in her momentary agitation, he had noticed that a curious
change fell upon her. When she lifted her face from the gate all emotion
seemed to have died out of it; her voice was quiet. One of the things he
remembered of their talk was that they had both spoken in voices so low
as to be scarcely above a whisper.
When the breakfast was brought in she took a seat at the table to pour
out his coffee and attend to his wants. She ate very little herself, but
he rarely looked up without finding her eyes resting upon him with
wistful interest.
"At least," she said once, "I must see that you have a good breakfast.
The kindest thing you can do this morning is to be hungry. Please be
hungry if you can."
The consciousness that she was caring for him was a wonderful and
touching thing to him. The little housewifely acts with which most men
are familiar were bewilderingly new to him. He had never been on
sufficiently intimate social terms with women to receive many of these
pretty services at their hands. His unsophisticated reverence for
everything feminine had worked against him, with the reserve which was
one of its results. It had been his habit to feel that there was no
reason why he should be singled out for the bestowal of favors, and he
had perhaps ignored many through the sheer ignorance of simple and
somewhat exaggerated humility.
To find himself sitting at the table alone with Bertha, in her new
mood,--Bertha quiet and beautiful,--was a moving experience to him. It
was as if they two must have sat there every day for years, and had the
prospect of sitting so together indefinitely. It was the very simplicity
and naturalness of it all which stirred him most. Her old vivid gayety
was missing; she did not laugh once, but her smile was very sweet. They
talked principally of the children, and of the common things about them,
but there was never a word which did not seem a thing to be cherished
and remembered. After a while the children were brought down, and she
took Meg upon her knee, and Jack leaned against her while she told
Tredennis what they had been doing, and the sun creeping through the
vines touched her hair and the child's and made a picture of them. When
she went upstairs she took Meg with her, holding her little hand and
talking to her in pretty maternal fashion; and, after the two had
vanished, Tredennis found it necessary to pull himself together with a
strong effort, that he might prove himself equal to the conversational
demands made upon him by Master Jack, who had remained behind.
"I will go and see Janey again," she had said. "And then, perhaps, you
will pay her a visit."
When he went up, a quarter of an hour later, he found his small favorite
touchingly glad to see him. The fever from which she had been suffering
for several days had left her languid and perishable-looking, but she
roused wonderfully at the sight of him, and when he seated himself at
her bedside regarded him with adoring admiration, finally expressing her
innocent conviction that he had grown very much since their last
meeting.
"But it doesn't matter," she hastened to assure him, "because I don't
mind it, and mamma doesn't, either."
When, in the course of the morning, Doctor Wentworth arrived, he
discovered him still sitting by the bedside, only Janey had crept close
to him and fallen asleep, clasping both her small hands about his large
one, and laying her face upon his palm.
"What!" said the doctor. "Can you do that sort of thing?"
"I don't know," answered Tredennis, slowly. "I never did it before."
He looked down at the small, frail creature, and the color showed itself
under his bronzed skin.
"I think she's rather fond of me--or something," he added with
_naïveté_, "and I like it."
"She likes it, that's evident," said the doctor.
He turned away to have an interview with Bertha, whom he took to the
window at the opposite end of the room, and after it was over they came
back together.
"She is not so ill as she was yesterday," he said; "and she was not so
ill then as you thought her." He turned and looked at Bertha herself.
"She doesn't need as much care now as you do," he said, "that's my
impression. What have you been doing with yourself?"
"Taking care of her," she answered, "since she began to complain of not
feeling well."
He was a bluff, kindly fellow, with a bluff, kindly way, and he shook a
big forefinger at her.
"You have been carrying her up and down in your arms," he said. "Don't
deny it."
"No," she answered, "I won't deny it."
"Of course," he said. "I know you--carrying her up and down in your
arms, and singing to her and telling her stories, and holding her on
your knee when you weren't doing anything worse. You'd do it if she were
three times the size."
She blushed guiltily, and looked at Janey.
"Good Heaven!" he said. "You women will drive me mad! Don't let me hear
any more about fashionable mothers who kill their children! I find my
difficulty in fashionable children who kill their mothers, and in little
simpletons who break down under the sheer weight of their maternal
nonsense. Who was it who nearly died of the measles?"
"But--but," she faltered, deprecatingly, "I don't think I ever had the
measles."
"They weren't your measles," he said, with amiable sternness. "They were
Jack's, and Janey's, and Meg's, and so much the worse."
"But," she interposed, with a very pretty eagerness, "they got through
them beautifully, and there wasn't a cold among them."
"There wouldn't have been a cold among them if you'd let a couple of
sensible nurses take care of them. Do you suppose I'm not equal to
bringing three children through the measles? It's all nonsense, and
sentiment, and self-indulgence. You like to do it, and you do it, and,
as a natural consequence, you die of somebody else's measles--or come as
near it as possible."
She blushed as guiltily as before, and looked at Janey again.
"I think she is very much better," she said.
"Yes," he answered, "she is better, and I want to see you better. Who is
going to help you to take care of her?"
"I came to try to do that," said Tredennis.
Bertha turned to look at him.
"You?" she exclaimed. "Oh, no! You are very good; but now the worst is
over, I couldn't"--
"Should I be in the way?" he asked.
She drew back a little. For a moment she had changed again, and returned
to the ordinary conventional atmosphere.
"No," she said, "you know that you would not be in the way, but I should
scarcely be likely to encroach upon your time in such a manner."
The doctor laughed.
"He is exactly what you need," he said. "And he would be of more use to
you than a dozen nurses. He won't stand any of your maternal weakness,
and he will see that my orders are carried out. He'll domineer over you,
and you'll be afraid of him. You had better let him stay. But you must
settle it between you after I am gone."
Bertha went downstairs with him to receive a few final directions, and
when she returned Tredennis had gently released himself from Janey, and
had gone to the window, where he stood evidently awaiting her.
"Do you know," he said, with his disproportionately stern air, when she
joined him,--"do you know why I came here?"
"You came," she answered, "because I alarmed you unnecessarily, and it
seemed that some one must come, and you were kind enough to assume the
responsibility."
"I came because there was no one else," he began.
She stopped him with a question she had not asked before, and he felt
that she asked it inadvertently.
"Where was Laurence Arbuthnot?" she said.
"That is true," he replied, grimly. "Laurence Arbuthnot would have been
better."
"No," she said, "he would not have been better."
She looked up at him with a curious mixture of questioning and defiance
in her eyes.
"I don't know why it is that I always manage to make you angry," she
said; "I must be very stupid. I always know you will be angry before you
have done with me. When we were downstairs"--
"When we were downstairs," he put in, hotly, "we were two honest human
beings, without any barriers of conventional pretence between us, and
you allowed me to think you meant to take what I had to offer, and then,
suddenly, all is changed, and the barrier is between us again, because
you choose to place it there, and profess that you must regard me, in
your pretty, civil way, as a creature to be considered and treated with
form and ceremony."
"Thank you for calling it a pretty way," she said.
And yet there was a tone in her low voice which softened his wrath
somehow,--a rather helpless tone, which suggested that she had said the
words only because she had no other resource, and still must utter her
faint protest.
"It is for _me_," he went on, "to come to you with a civil pretence
instead of an honest intention? I am not sufficiently used to
conventionalities to make myself bearable. I am always blundering and
stumbling. No one can feel that more bitterly than I do; but you have no
right to ignore my claim to do what I can when I might be of use. I
might be of use, because the child is fond of me, and in my awkward
fashion I can quiet and amuse her as you say no one but yourself can."
"Will you tell me?" she asked, frigidly, "what right I have to permit
you to make of yourself a--a nursemaid to my child?"
"Call it what you like," he answered. "Speak of it as you like. What
right does it need? I came because"--
His recollection of her desolateness checked him. It was not for him to
remind her again by his recklessness of speech that her husband had not
felt it necessary to provide against contingencies. But she filled up
the sentence.
"Yes, you are right," she said. "As you said before, there was no one
else--no one."
"It chanced to be so," he said; "and why should I not be allowed to fill
up the breach for the time being?"
"Because it is almost absurd," she said, inconsequently. "Don't you see
that?"
"No," he answered, obstinately.
Their eyes met, and rested upon each other.
"You don't care?" she said.
"No."
"I knew you wouldn't," she said. "You never care for anything. That is
what I like in you--and dread."
"Dread?" he said; and in the instant he saw that she had changed again.
Her cheeks had flushed, and there was upon her lips a smile,
half-bitter, half-sweet.
"I knew you would not go," she said, "as well as I knew that it was only
civil in me to suggest that you should. You are generous enough to care
for me in a way I am not quite used to--and you always have your own
way. Have it now; have it as long as you are here. Until you go away I
shall do everything you tell me to do, and never once oppose you again;
and--perhaps I shall enjoy the novelty."
There was a chair near her, and she put her hand against it as if to
steady herself, and the color in her face died out as quickly as it had
risen.
"I did not want you to go," she said.
"You did not want me to go?"
"No," she answered, in a manner more baffling than all the rest. "More
than anything in the world I wanted you to stay. There, Janey is
awakening!"
And she went to the bed and kneeled down beside it, and drew the child
into her arms against her bosom.