CHAPTER LV.
“There is something wrong about the publication of my new book, dear, and my publisher has telegraphed me to come immediately to New York,” Norman said the next day to his wife, handing her the telegram to read.
“Must you go?”
“I suppose so. Can you come with me?”
“Yes.”
“Why, Thea, my love!” remonstrated Mrs. de Vere, who was at the window in an easy-chair knitting silken hose for Master Alan.
Thea looked at her in some surprise.
“Why not, mother?” she asked.
“You forget how cold it is at the North now. How could you take your nursing baby there?” said grandmamma.
“That is true. I did not think,” Thea cried, penitently, then her smile faded. “But how could I let Norman go without me?”
“And how could I leave you?” cried the lover-husband, fondly; and the dark eyes dwelt on the blue ones with passionate tenderness.
“Alan takes precedence of everybody else,” grandmamma announced, peremptorily.
“Leave him at home with a wet-nurse,” said Norman.
“Oh, I couldn’t! What, be parted from my darling! It would break his little heart,” cried the young mother; and after an excited discussion and floods of tears Master Alan’s interests won the day against his loving parents. Thea, frightened by the idea of croup, dared not take her darling from his Southern home to the wintery North, and could not bear to leave him behind. So Norman must go alone—the first parting from his wife since their marriage.
“It will break my heart!” Thea cried, forlornly. “I hate that publishing. Why should he drag you away from your home just now, and Christmas barely over. You will not get home before New Year’s.”
“I am afraid I can not, but I will not stay a week if I can help it. Try to be as happy as you can, my darling, without me,” he said, folding her closely to his heart, with bitter reluctance to leave her even for an hour, so dear had she grown.
But the summons was imperative. A few hours more and he was on his way, leaving behind him a weeping little wife who felt indeed as if she were heart-broken. But for Baby Alan she must have been inconsolable. A heavy cloud had settled on her spirits, and for the remainder of the day she moped miserably about the house. As evening fell the gloom became almost insupportable.
“How sad and dreary everything seems without him!” sighed the devoted young wife; and she took refuge in the nursery with her child, giving leave to the nurse to attend a negro dance in the neighborhood with the other servants.
“My little darling, you may be just as cross and naughty as you please. The more trouble I have with you, the less time I shall have to think of your dear absent papa,” she cried, as she hung over the lace-draped crib where he lay, so bright, so beautiful, that she covered his sweet, laughing face with eager kisses.
But just because she wanted something to distract her thoughts, Alan was on his good behavior. He responded sleepily to her fond blandishments, and shut his white lids fast in happy slumber just before his fond grandmamma came tiptoeing in for a good-night kiss.
“Little darling, how sweet and lovely he is!” she cried, kissing his dimpled white fists. “Are you going to sit up for the nurse, Thea?”
“Perhaps—I don’t know. But there—of course not; itwill be too late. I shall just take baby to bed with me,” Thea answered, with an irrepressible sigh.
“I wish now that you had kept nurse home. I have been sent for to see a dying woman to-night. But of course I shall not go till the servants come back; I could not leave you all alone.”
“A dying woman?”
“Yes; a poor negro girl who was chamber-maid at Verelands for many years. She sent a boy here just now to ask me to come—said she had a dying confession to make to me, although I can’t guess what Nance can have to say to me. She never had any secrets that I know of—certainly none that could interest me.”
“But she will be looking for you. It is dreadful to disappoint a dying person—even a poor negro,” Thea said, with a sort of awe, and added: “I—I—wish now we had not let our maids go to that concert to-night. We should not then have been so utterly alone, but”—with a slight shudder—“go, dear mother. I will stay alone. I will have Alan, my little man, for company.”
“Leave you alone here? No, indeed, although of course you would be safe enough. I have been at Verelands alone many a time at night. But it would be too lonely for you, my dear, and Norman would not like it if I left you here,” cried the kind old lady whose standard of right was almost wholly what Norman liked or disliked. Yet she was most anxious to go to Nance, having a keen, womanly curiosity over what the woman had to confess.
But she was too loyal to Thea to even desire to gratify her curiosity at the expense of the girl’s comfort. She turned toward the door, saying, mildly:
“I will go and tell the boy he must go and bring Nurse Mary from the dance to stay with you, then I will go to Nance just for a few minutes, if you do not mind, dear.”
But Thea was marshaling all her courage to the rescue.
“There would be so much time wasted waiting here for Mary to come, and if the woman is dying, there is not a minute to lose,” she said. “Mother, put on your bonnet and go with the boy, and you can send Mary to me as you go along. It is not quite a mile, I think. I can stay alone that little while.”
“You would really not be afraid, my dear?”
“Certainly not. But if I should feel lonely, I can wake baby and play with him.”
“That would spoil him, and he would expect it to-morrow night,” said oracular grandmamma.
“I will read, then,” said Thea.
She recommenced her persuasions, and as a result she presently had the old lady going docilely away with the messenger to poor Nance’s bedside, leaving her locked securely into the large, lonely house, its only occupant save the tiny sleeping babe.
Thea quickly came back along the silent hall and shut herself into the nursery.
“I hope nurse will not be long,” she murmured, beginning to walk restlessly up and down the floor. “Of course, I am not exactly afraid, but it seems so very still and lonely, and—I miss Norman so very much. I wonder how far he is on his way by now? It is just seven hours and a half since he went. Baby, baby, I wish you would wake up and talk to me! Of course, you couldn’t say anything but papa and mamma and gee-gee and boo, but even that would be cheering now.”
She leaned over the foot of the crib and pinched one of Alan’s soft, rosy toes, eager for him to wake, and even scream if he chose.
“I certainly am not afraid, but I feel foolishly nervous and blue. I wish nurse would hurry. What can that dying woman want with mother? Ugh! it makes one shiver to think of death in this great, lonely house; but there is nothing to harm one here—nothing.” Yet she grew pale as a mouse nibbled behind the wainscot, and cried out: “Oh, how can Alan sleep so when I pull his toes so hard? Can it be that Mary dosed him with paregoric to make him rest while she was gone? Oh, I almost wish he would wake and scream with the colic! It would be better than this.”
But Alan only kicked when she pinched his toes, and slept on more soundly than ever, confirming her in her theory of the paregoric.
“I’ll discharge her to-morrow,” Thea thought, indignantly, throwing herself into a chair. “Oh, I won’t be so nervous and silly,” she went on, vexedly. “I know there’s nothing to make cold chills run down my back this way. I’ll think about something pleasant—about Norman. I’ll compose some poetry on his absence.”
She flung herself into a chair at a little table where there was a pencil and a pad of writing-paper, and putting her golden head on one side with a pretty, bird-like motion, began to think in rhyme:
“’Tis midnight, my darling—the house is so lonely.”
“’Tis midnight, my darling—the house is so lonely.”
“’Tis midnight, my darling—the house is so lonely.”
“’Tis midnight, my darling—the house is so lonely.”
“If it is not midnight, it might almost be, it is so dismal,” soliloquized Thea, with a sigh, as she jotted down the first line and proceeded:
“All, all are asleep but me.I waken to weep—”
“All, all are asleep but me.I waken to weep—”
“All, all are asleep but me.I waken to weep—”
“All, all are asleep but me.
I waken to weep—”
“That is not very accurate, as I have not been asleep yet, but it is poetical license,” murmured Thea, as she scribbled some more words:
—“Ah, beloved, if only,If only I were with thee!”
—“Ah, beloved, if only,If only I were with thee!”
—“Ah, beloved, if only,If only I were with thee!”
—“Ah, beloved, if only,
If only I were with thee!”
The tears rushed to the blue eyes, and a smothered sob came from her throat, so passionately real was her aspiration. A moment’s pause, and the little pencil went on:
“But the swift hours are bearing thee further away,The swift hours whose flight my poor heart can not stay!Come back to me, my darling, my eager heart cries,And the bitter tears rush from my heart to my eyes.”
“But the swift hours are bearing thee further away,The swift hours whose flight my poor heart can not stay!Come back to me, my darling, my eager heart cries,And the bitter tears rush from my heart to my eyes.”
“But the swift hours are bearing thee further away,The swift hours whose flight my poor heart can not stay!Come back to me, my darling, my eager heart cries,And the bitter tears rush from my heart to my eyes.”
“But the swift hours are bearing thee further away,
The swift hours whose flight my poor heart can not stay!
Come back to me, my darling, my eager heart cries,
And the bitter tears rush from my heart to my eyes.”
“The last four lines are true, anyhow,” sobbed Thea, forlornly. She laid her fair head down on the table a moment in silence, thinking surely it must be time for the nurse now, although barely fifteen minutes have elapsed since she had been left alone.
But no sound broke the stillness, save the torturing gnawing of a miserable mouse in the wainscot, and Thea’s mind wandered a minute from her own poor attempt at poetry to the glorious laureate:
“All day within the dreary houseThe doors upon their hinges creaked;The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouseBehind the moldering wainscot shrieked,Or from the crevice peered about.Old faces glimmered through the doors,Old footsteps trod the upper floors,Old voices called her from without,She only said: ‘My life is dreary,’‘He cometh not,’ she said.”
“All day within the dreary houseThe doors upon their hinges creaked;The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouseBehind the moldering wainscot shrieked,Or from the crevice peered about.Old faces glimmered through the doors,Old footsteps trod the upper floors,Old voices called her from without,She only said: ‘My life is dreary,’‘He cometh not,’ she said.”
“All day within the dreary houseThe doors upon their hinges creaked;The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouseBehind the moldering wainscot shrieked,Or from the crevice peered about.Old faces glimmered through the doors,Old footsteps trod the upper floors,Old voices called her from without,She only said: ‘My life is dreary,’‘He cometh not,’ she said.”
“All day within the dreary house
The doors upon their hinges creaked;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the moldering wainscot shrieked,
Or from the crevice peered about.
Old faces glimmered through the doors,
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without,
She only said: ‘My life is dreary,’
‘He cometh not,’ she said.”
Thea lifted her head, shook the golden curls back from her face, and sighed.
“I wish those terribly real lines had not come to my mind just now. ‘Old faces!’ What if they were to glimmer through that door now? That dying woman, Nance, she used to be here. What if her departing spirit chose to haunt the scene of its former life by ghostly rappings such as I have heard the old Virginia darkies whisper about in twilight hours?Ugh!” shuddering, “that dead woman, too—Norman’s first wife, who hated me so bitterly in my childhood—I hope her phantom footsteps will never tread these ‘upper floors.’ I am afraid of ‘old voices’ and ‘old footsteps’ to-night. I never was so nervous in all my life before. I can’t finish my verses with those cold chills running down my spine and my curls rising on end with terror that has no reason for it.”
She thrust the scribbled lines carelessly into a drawer of the table, and running to the crib, laid her pale, cold cheek down by the warm, rosy baby one, shutting her eyes and whimpering, distressfully:
“Alan, Alan, wake, dear, and protect your poor silly little mamma. I am frightened, but I do not know why. Surely there is nothing near to harm me, and nurse must surely be coming in a minute—Ah!” with sudden gladness, “I hear her now.”