MADAME’S SYMPATHY.
When Madame saw the white covers of the returning waggons creeping
across the prairie she set out to meet Ezra in order to deliver her
message to him. Her manner was as quiet and collected as ever, her white
smooth brow was perfectly unruffled, and her blue eyes were as gentle in
expression as her friends had ever known them to be. Was her heart in
reality as calm as her outward appearance would have led the casual
observer to conclude? No one ever knew what was passing in Madame’s
mind. Still she must have known that she was about to stab to the heart
a man upon whose friendship she had seemed to set great value. Having
reached the slope over Weddell’s Gully, whence she could see that
blackened field where she had saved Ezra on the night of the fire, she
sat down and waited until his waggon came up.
“Ah, Madame!” said he cheerily, as he pulled up. “How glad I am to get
home again! It has seemed such a long four days to me.”
“And to us also,” answered Madame.
“All well, I hope,” said Ezra reaching down his hand in order to help
her up to the seat beside himself.
“We have had misfortunes at Perfection City. The brown mare has been
stolen.”
“What! Queen Katharine gone, and our most valuable animal too! That is
indeed a loss!”
“Just wait a few minutes,” said she, putting her hand on his to stop him
from giving the signal to the horses to start on again. “I have some
things to talk about, Ezra. Do you remember that night, not long ago in
reality, though it seems an age, when I found you lying here on the edge
of the fire?”
“Is it likely I could ever forget that or who it was came to my rescue?”
said Ezra warmly.
“I was thinking as you drove up that perhaps it would have been a kinder
act to have left you to die in your unconsciousness.”
“What’s the matter?” said Ezra, greatly startled by her words.
“I have bad news,” said Madame.
“Is it Olive?” asked Ezra, hoarsely.
“Yes, it is Olive.”
“Is she ill?”
“Worse than that.”
“My God, is my wife dead?” cried Ezra in a stifled whisper.
“Worse than that.”
“There can’t be worse,” said Ezra.
“Yes, there can. She has left you and gone off with Cotterell.”
Ezra threw up his arms and fell backwards. Madame thought for a moment
or two that he was dying, for an awful blue-purple look passed over his
face as if his heart had stopped beating. He recovered himself and sat
up, turned ghastly white, and moved his lips. He was trying to speak,
but no sound came. At length he gasped,
“Olive, Olive, where is she?”
“We don’t know. Cotterell took the brown mare, the men turned out and
caught him. Olive disappeared, no one knew where, night before last,
taking our last horse. There was a sort of lynch-law trial at Union
Mills, she appeared in the middle of the proceedings and said she gave
him the horse, and then they went off together and have not since been
heard of.”
“Olive, Olive, Olive!” Ezra kept moaning as Madame drove him back to his
deserted home. He seemed dazed and stupefied.
Surely terrible news was never more crudely broken to a sufferer than
was his bereavement to Ezra Weston, and by that tender and sympathetic
friend, Madame Morozoff-Smith. Had Uncle David or Brother Green heard
her, they would have been shocked beyond measure at having entrusted the
painful embassy to such hands. Not one word of hope or comfort or of
doubt even, nothing but the bald hideous story in its worst complexion
thrown at him.
Olive was gone from him—gone with Cotterell!
Yet after having thus dealt him a death-blow, Madame seemed full of pity
and little acts of personal attention. She helped him out of the waggon,
brought him into the house, took his hands and washed them, cooled his
forehead with a wet towel, offered him food, and in short treated him
much as if he had been a suffering child whom she was tending. At last
he seemed to recover himself somewhat as she was passing her soft hand
across his brow.
“You are very good to me,” he said brokenly, “and if I seem to accept
your kindness unheedingly, forgive me. I am not myself to-night. I don’t
know what I am doing. Oh, it can’t be!” he suddenly burst out. “She is
not gone. I shall see her again. She will come back. How do you know she
has gone with him? I don’t believe it.”
“Poor Ezra, love dies hard, I know. Some of the men asked if she was
going with him, and she answered distinctly, ‘Yes.’ Then they were
sorry, they said, they had not hung him before she came up with them.”
“No, I won’t believe it. Something has happened to her. Why should she
go off with him?” said Ezra distractedly.
“Did you not know that he was repeatedly here to see her, whenever you
were out of the way?” said Madame, who did not think she was
exaggerating in any way.
“She told me all that,” answered Ezra nervously, “but she was only
amused by his talk.”
“No, your love is blind. Dear Ezra, I wish I could soften the blow.
There is no doubt about it. I saw them once together at the spring, he
kissed her at parting. It was a man and the woman he loved. I cannot be
mistaken. Remember he was very handsome and winning in his manners, and
she was young and pretty.”
“Ah, my sweet little Ollie! My little rose-bud,” cried Ezra, starting to
his feet. “I’ll go to her, she shall not wander away out of my reach
without one effort to save her from herself. She was only a child. Why
didn’t you look after her?” he asked, suddenly facing Madame with an
angry glance.
“Did you give her into my charge either by word or hint?” returned she,
somewhat taken aback.
“It was not your fault. Forgive me. I am too distracted to know what I
say. I remember she refused to go to you. She said she would rather stay
at home. I tried to urge her, but she would not consent to it,” said
Ezra in a low voice.
“Ah,” remarked Madame, “very possibly she expected him to come to her
during your absence.”
“No, no, you shall not say that!” said Ezra in agony. “I cannot bear it.
She had no such thought. She was as innocent as the flowers, as she
looked at me with her sweet eyes. She had no such thought, I know.”
“It is ever thus,” said Madame, coming closer to him and speaking with
an unwonted tremor in her voice. “Love seems always at cross purposes.
You give all your love to Olive, who gives all hers to Cotterell.
Another gives all her love to you. We are equally unhappy.”
Ezra gazed at her in silent amazement as if he were doubting that he had
understood her.
“Yes,” she went on more calmly in her deep sweet voice. “I am more in
need of pity than you. Your love has left you, and you grieve, but men
will give you sympathy. When I lost my love I had to smile and pretend
delight. I had to look on his joy and hers. You are not called upon to
congratulate Cotterell on his happiness.”
“Great God, is that you, Madame? Or is it that I am going mad, and is
this some mocking fiend?” gasped Ezra, starting up.
“Not a mocking fiend, Ezra, but I myself who for once in this world am
enjoying the rare privilege of telling the truth. Ezra Weston, you are
not the most unhappy person in Perfection City. I have long enjoyed that
melancholy pre-eminence. Now in a common misfortune let us comfort one
another.”
Ezra sat down again and dropped his head in his hands. Occasionally he
looked at her as she moved about the room putting everything in order.
It almost seemed as if he was trying to understand who she was and that
he could hardly do so, his mind was in such a turmoil of grief and
misery. She laid out two more candles beside those already alight in the
candle-sticks.
“You will sit up all night,” she said at last. “These candles will last
half the time, then light the other two. It is hard sitting in the dark
alone with one’s breaking thoughts. Light the candles and keep them
burning. That is what I did on the night you left to go to Smyrna to be
married, and on the night when you brought her home here to Perfection
City.”
She closed the door and left him alone with those two thoughts. Was it
her marvellous reading of the human heart which prompted this
extraordinary woman to declare her love to Ezra in those bold
uncompromising words on this night of all others in his life? She knew
that he would sit there in his deserted home, brooding over his lost
wife, she knew also that every now and then the scorching recollection
of what she had said would break in upon the brooding thoughts and
scatter them. This then was the means, the almost unheard-of means, she
had taken in order to soften the blow that had fallen upon him. He would
not be able to think of himself as the most unhappy individual in
Perfection City, because she had claimed that distinction in words which
he never could forget. It was just as she had foreseen. It repeatedly
happened during the course of that long and dreadful night that Ezra
forgot why he was sitting alone in the kitchen, so lost was he in
amazement at the recollection of the words which Madame had spoken. As
the hours wore on it seemed to him that they became more and more
impossible, until he began to think of them as the work of a brain
unhinged by sorrow. Was it all a hideous dream, and would he awake by
and bye? The first pair of candles burned out, and he lighted the second
pair, recalling as he did so what she had said she did when he brought
Olive home. Ah, Olive, Olive! His heart kept calling out in its misery.
He went into their little private room off the kitchen, in a sort of
infatuation to see if she might be there. No. All was silent, still,
deserted. He examined the tiny room minutely, saw the half-withered
flowers on the table, took them up, and would have kissed them in his
misery, only his eye lighted on a strange object he had never seen
before. It was a man’s heavy seal-ring. He picked it up and examined it
by the light of the candle: a plain gold ring set with a well-cut onyx
intaglio of a griffin’s head. As he turned it about the light showed
something-engraved in the inside of the ring. He held the candle nearer
and read “J. G. C.”
He dropped the ring as if it had been an adder, and fled out of the
room. As if pursued by furies, he rushed from the house and wandered
about out of doors. Diana, who since Olive’s departure had been in a
most miserable frame of mind, followed him about dejectedly, with her
tail between her legs. Ezra, turning, saw the dog and for one moment
felt a savage desire to kill it, for Olive had loved the dog and Olive
had broken his heart. This phase passed, and in a passion of grief and
despair he stooped and kissed the animal, for Olive had often patted
Diana’s head, and fondled her long ears. The dog whined in sympathy and
turned suggestively back to the house. Ezra followed mechanically. He
would not go into the room where that ring lay, but remained in the
kitchen. Exhausted nature could stand no more, and towards morning he
fell into a troubled sleep, with his head resting upon his arms crossed
on the table. Then in his dreams Olive came back to him in that vivid
yet unsatisfying way in which our dearest do sometimes return to us,
seemingly but to mock our grief. Olive was there, standing before him,
but she looked at him not with her eyes, but with Madame’s. There was
something terrible in seeing her own expression gone and in its place
the look of another, and yet it was Olive, and she called on him to
follow her. He hurried after her with the lead-clogged feet that always
walk in dreams, and strained to reach her. When he did so, he found
Madame. Olive and Madame flitted before his fevered fancy, always
shifting and changing one into another, until he panted with the horror
of it.
He awoke with a start as the door opened. His half-aroused eyes saw a
vaguely defined figure in the door-way, blocking out the light of the
morning.
“Olive,” he said, putting out his hand blindly.
“I have come to cook your breakfast,” said Madame’s soft smooth voice.
“Don’t. I can’t eat it,” said Ezra, falling back into despair.
“Life must go on, even when all joy is banished from it,” she said. “We
have each one of us to learn that lesson, friend Ezra.”
She began deftly enough to light the fire and make the necessary
preparations for breakfast. Madame knew how to do the ordinary
house-work that falls to woman’s lot, only she did not choose to do it
in her own home. Therefore she employed Lucinda for this purpose, until
other and stronger motives arose which prompted her to undertake the
work herself. The habit of every day life is strong, and when Ezra saw
Madame getting breakfast ready, as a matter of course he arose and got
himself ready, by changing his clothes and generally performing the
necessary preliminaries to the morning meal. He was less wild and
hollow-eyed after this ceremony, but the extraordinary drawn and aged
look on his face seemed only the more marked.
Madame cooked an omelette with scraps of savoury dried beef in it, and
after the first mouthful Ezra was obliged to admit that he relished the
food. He could not go on living on his grief, as Madame said. She sat
with him and took her breakfast also. Napoleon Pompey, who would have
been in the way, was relegated to the society of his mother, who divided
her emotions between maternal anger at boyish shortcomings and maternal
love for the short-comer, both of which were expressed with the exalted
vehemence customary to the negro nature.
“I shall come each day and cook your food for you. I have often longed
to be able to do something for you, Ezra. Do not forbid my coming. I
have had so little joy in my life,” said Madame, with a strange humility
of manner totally at variance with her usual character, which was almost
domineering, one might say. Ezra looked at her in a troubled sort of
way. It soothed him to have her there, and he was glad that somebody,
that anybody, could take an interest in him. Still there came across his
mind flashes of doubt as to what this interest meant. He could not
forget those words that Madame had used on the evening before. No man
who had ever heard such words from a woman’s lips, if ever man did hear
them under similar circumstances, would ever again be able to drive them
from his memory, but in his bruised and suffering state Ezra was content
to drift on and let things rest. So Madame came daily to his house and
cooked his food and saw that he ate something at each meal.
Uncle David and the brethren came to see him, but that gave him no
comfort. He shrank from their sympathy, expressed with kindness, but
each word was like a drop of molten lead upon a raw wound. Willette was
perhaps the only one who gave him real consolation in this awful time.
“I say,” remarked the child, in a clear voice and without a trace of
embarrassment, “Sister Ollie’s gone an’ lost herself down there in the
bush, I reckon. She was ’bout the greenest hand at keepin’ to the Pole
Star ever I see. You could throw her out o’ her direction quicker nor
nothin’. I guess she headed plumb for the Missouri border when she come
’long with Cotterell to show him out o’ Union Mills. Guess she’ll ride
’bout down to Saint Jo ’fore she knows she’s headin’ wrong. I wouldn’t
’spect her back ’fore a fortnight.” Willette laughed pleasantly, and
poor Ezra derived some comfort from the preposterous convictions of the
child and her unshakable belief in Olive.
He went to Union Mills to make some inquiries about his lost wife, and
met there the same story that Madame had already told, but the story was
so brutally hurled at him he could not bear it, and came home bruised
and stricken, his heart bleeding tears of agony. Instinctively he went
to Madame for comfort.
“Ezra, perhaps this terrible trial was needed to purify us all, to make
us all more perfect communists. I can discern a valuable lesson that may
be of profit to the brethren. I begin to think that after all marriage
is selfish: perfect love alone is unselfish. You would not have kept
Olive beside you by force, if her heart had gone from you, would you?”
“I thought our marriage was for life.”
“Yes, but she made a mistake as to her feelings; she found she loved
someone else better. It was wise of her, after all, to break the bond.
It would only have galled you both.”
“I should have been content if she had only let me love her,” said Ezra.
“Ah yes, I know that feeling but too well,” said Madame, bringing his
mind with a shock to the thought that she never long allowed to sleep.
“It is a terrible world,” said Ezra beginning to realize what a spell
she was weaving around him.
“It rests with ourselves to make it easier in the only way,” replied
Madame.
Uncle David took up a firm position of his own and refused to listen to
anybody or anything.
“I hain’t agoin’ to b’lieve nothin’ ’gin little Ollie,” he announced. “I
don’t care ’bout proofs an’ things. Land! If I b’lieved in proofs there
hain’t no sort o’ foolishness I shouldn’t be up to. I b’lieve in
pussons.”
That was his position, and he stuck to it with unswerving fidelity. He
was happy in his blind faith, and no one tried to shake it. The old man
then began a strange sort of hunt after Olive. He would sit all day long
at the forge, where, of course, strangers were most likely to pass, and
to each he would put questions about the “little gal” he was so
pathetically seeking. He spoke little, he who used to be so chatty, but
sat hour after hour in silent patient expectation of the return of his
loved one. The brethren began to think he must be losing his wits from
sorrow, poor old man!