CHAPTER XI.FAITH AND WORKS.
The next morning the doctor found Susie weak and feverish, and forbade her to leave her bed. He told her he had not been able to talk with Mrs. Forest, but should do so the coming evening, and meanwhile Dinah would be very kind to her and see that she did not want for anything. He was deeply touched by her condition, seeing her lie there alone, pale and suffering, with no woman’s sympathy to cheer her, though the house was full of women; and he dwelt with some bitterness upon the fact that he could not by a word bring his wife to his side in kindly, womanly faith that his impulses were generous and right. Clara he knew he could influence, but he wished her to act freely, and not through love for him; therefore he determined to have a talk with Mrs. Forest first, but meanwhile he had had a word with good old Dinah, and flattered her exceedingly by saying, “Now, you know all, Dinah, and I count on your help and discretion. You and I are the only ones in the house who know this. Help Susie all you can, for my sake, and mind that you say nothing. Are you sure you can keep the secret, Dinah?”
“Lor bress you, Massa! Massa knows Dinah can.”
“All right, Dinah. I trust you, and I go away feelingeasier now;” and he pressed the old servant’s hand cordially.
This interview had taken place while Dinah was putting the dining-room in order; and while getting the hominy and coffee ready for breakfast, she found opportunity to prepare Susie some traditional medicament and carry it to her. Her heart was overflowing with real sympathy for Susie, and her pride that the wise and great Dr. Forest had chosen to take her alone into his confidence, made her feel exceedingly important in her own eyes.
“Lor bress you, chile!” she said, her shining black face beaming as she held the cup to Susie’s mouth, “Why didn’t ye tell old Dinah long fore dis time? Dinah could a helped ye, mebbe. Not now. Massa’d kill me, now you done gone told him; but cheer up, honey. Dem accidens will happen mos all de time!”
Susie, weak and suffering as she was, could not resist a smile, and as she drank the decoction Dinah had brought, she thanked her with tears. It was the first woman who had come to her in her sorrow, and she did not think of Dinah’s black skin, but silently thanked God for this blessing.
The breakfast in Dr. Forest’s family was the pleasantest meal of the day, for it was the only one when he was pretty certain to be present. On this morning, however, there was something like a cloud over the family circle, which seemed to oppress all except Leila, who chatted gayly to, or rather at, Miss Marston. The latter did not respond readily, and Leila turned her batteries upon Linnie, who was rather of a sentimental turn, and fancied that she was a victim of heart disease. Sentimental youngladies perfectly dote on heart disease. Linnie was disgusted with the incredulity of the family about the cause of her ailment. Even old Dinah had said, “Lor, Miss Linnie, you is growing like a potato-vine, and dese pains ain’t noffin but de growing pains!” After that Leila teazed her sister unmercifully about her “growing pains;” but that being frowned down by the family, it was held in reserve for private persecution. By-and-by Leila, finding the want of gayety at the breakfast table quite oppressive, drew a long sigh as she laid down her napkin.
“What is the matter, my child?” asked the doctor. Leila glanced at her sister mischievously, tilting her head low on the left side, and answered:
“Oh, I have got such a fearful pain in my diaphragm!” Miss Marston laughed, not fully comprehending the malice of the young minx, but the rest were very grave. Leila was impatient over mysteries, and clearly there was something in the air on this particular morning, so she soon began to probe the silence.
“I declare this breakfast is as solemn as a Quaker funeral,” she said; and as no one made any remark, she asked where Susie was.
“She is quite ill this morning, my dear,” answered the doctor; “quite ill. I hope you and Linnie will try to take her place until she is better.”
“I will, papa,” replied Linnie; “and I will help nurse her too, for I think Susie is really nice.” Then there was silence again until Leila exclaimed, “Dear me! They say everybody have their skeleton closet. I thought we were an exception, as we keep ours right out fairly in the light. Why, it’s an age since I saw him. I must go upin the garret and give the old darling a ‘gyrate,’ as we used to say. Do you remember, Clara?”
“I remember many things,” replied Clara, with a dignity that was perhaps a little sophomorical.
“O, do we? How antique we are getting.”
“Yes; I remember, for example, that there is a certain young lady who will probably go on repeating a certain grammatical solecism until she is gray,” answered Clara, alluding to Leila’s “everybody have.” Leila made an indiscriminate onslaught upon grammars generally, during which the doctor was called away to his patients, and the breakfast ended.
During the day Mrs. Forest, and subsequently Clara, visited Susie’s room; but in both cases Susie seemed disturbed, and disinclined to enter upon the details of her illness, and declared she wanted nothing. She thanked them for their kindness, and once, upon some gentle word from Mrs. Forest, she hid her eyes, which had filled with tears. Dinah was the only welcome presence to the poor girl during that long, sad day, and for obvious reasons.
Early in the evening Dr. Delano called, and made himself very agreeable to all the ladies, and especially so to Clara, a little later, when they had a long tête-a-tête on the old south-facing veranda. The sunset had been magnificent, and as Dr. Delano was quite seriously enamoured with Clara, he was gay, poetic, appreciative—everything that could charm her—but she could say little in reply to his fervid eloquence, for she had the disadvantage of being immeasurably in love, and consequently felt a certain awkwardness, a triumph to Dr. Delano, growing sweeter and sweeter every hour. It was her first romance. It was his—well, not his first, certainly.Thatwas anearly attachment to Ella Wills, his father’s ward, and this night he told Clara the story of that romance, showing her, of course, beyond a shadow of doubt, thatthatwas a very insignificant passion—“as water unto wine,” was the way he characterized it—comparing it to his present deeper and dearer love. Do not lovers, not always, but very generally, tell this same old fib? The truth was, he had adored Ella with all a boy’s enthusiasm, and she had flirted with him persistently—“outrageously,” Miss Charlotte Delano, the doctor’s sister, declared—and had escaped heart-free herself. So when he came to tell her in words that his heart was under her feet, she affected the most innocent surprise, and hoped she had not led him to suppose, etc., etc. In the end she somehow won his respect, for he did not curse her, as rejected lovers do, at least in most novels. She wept very lavishly, for she meant to keep him in reserve, and marry him finally, if no more brilliant offer occurred, or if ever in danger of becoming an old maid—that terror of women who have no serious object in life. When Dr. Delano first began to mention Clara in his letters to his sister Charlotte, which he did once as “the noblest and sweetest of mortal women,” Ella felt personally affronted, and commenced at once to speculate on the chances of winning him back, not once asking herself if this “noblest and sweetest woman” had not already acquired rights over the heart once so lightly rejected. She had not seen him since his return from Europe, where he had spent three years in completing his medical education.
Ella always played the kitten, though she was no longer a child, and a very Methuselah, if age could be numbered by her conquests. She had no heart to speak of, and lessconscience, but she impressed every male creature with a sense of childish, artless innocence. She was a brunette, petite, with dark short ringlets about her small head, a peach bloom on her cheeks, and a babyish, pouting mouth, whose sweetness Albert Delano had found difficult to forget, or even to recall without regret, until he had found in Clara something infinitely superior to the sweetness and prettiness that had so charmed him in earlier days. This something he hardly comprehended, though he owned its power to a certain extent. It was soul, for want of a better name—a moral sweetness, a divine, emotional sensitiveness, and a straightforward honesty of purpose, that made you conscious, last of all, that she was beautiful in person and exceedingly graceful in every movement.
This evening Clara remembered long after, as the happiest in her life. The bright moon shone through the climbing foliage on the veranda, carpeting the floor with soft mosaic patterns, through which the “mated footsteps” of the lovers passed and repassed, talking in low tones of the beauty of the scene, at intervals, when time could be spared from the dearer theme of their perfections in each other’s eyes, and the future that, before them,
——“like a fruitful land reposed.”
——“like a fruitful land reposed.”
——“like a fruitful land reposed.”
——“like a fruitful land reposed.”
Of course, they took no note of time, and Miss Marston, after talking some time with Mrs. Forest, went quietly to her room. Leila fidgeted about for awhile, and then exclaimed, crossly:
“Idon’tsee why they wish to moon out there all night.”
“Why, Leila!” said Mrs. Forest, reproachfully. “Isee nothing improper in their enjoying each other’s society, and you should not speak in that way.”
“She’s jealous,” remarked Linnie.
“You mean thing! I’m not,” Leila answered, in a high key, and then they went to bed to fight it out in the ordinary sisterly way; and I take it that sisters can be as caustic and insolently mean in their treatment of each other as any kindred under the sun. In this case, however, Linnie was really fond of her sister, and would have manifested it quite lavishly by way of petting, but for being discouraged and called “spooney” by Leila whenever she attempted any expression of sentiment.
Mrs. Forest waited awhile after the twins were gone, and then went to the veranda and gave the lovers some friendly caution about the night air. This duty discharged, and hearing her husband enter his sleeping-room, she joined him there. He was very glad to see her, for he wished to broach the subject of Susie’s condition, a task requiring considerable diplomacy, for he knew Mrs. Forest would naturally be merciless to one like Susie. But the doctor in his diplomacy, as Clara said, did very well until he came to the diplomatic part, and then he lost the first requisite, patience. He greeted Mrs. Forest very pleasantly, and told her she never looked lovelier in her life.
“Ah! dear,” she answered, “it is very sweet to hear you say so, but”—and she viewed herself composedly in the mirror of the doctor’s wardrobe—“this glass shows me my wrinkles and my gray hair.”
“Well, your hair is beautiful, and I like these little crows’-feet at the corners of your eyes; but this is not what makes your beauty in my eyes—” and he camebeside her, and put his arm around her—“it is the softness and tenderness of expression in your face. You did not have this as a girl.” Here was possibly the approach to the needed diplomacy.
“Yet you used to rave about my beauty; and how indifferent I was to it.”
“To which?”
“To your raving, to be sure.”
“Ah! of course.”
“See how my color has gone. I think I never was vain, but who can look at such a reflection with any satisfaction? You are bronzed by exposure, but that rather improves you, and I’m sure, as we stand here, you look ten years younger than I do, instead of five older. That is because you have had no babies.”
“Ah! Indeed!” exclaimed the doctor, with Pantagruelistic gayety. “I thought they were all mine—all but that doubling feat. That was entirely your invention.”
“For shame! Have you not teazed me enough with that. I think you are so absurd. I wish you would never make such a remark again.”
“Well, then, I won’t; but the way you take it is so amusing. Are you going to stay?”
“Do you wish me to?”
“Ah! That is not to be considered,” said the doctor, with his usual gallantry, which was not gallantry at all in his case, but the simple expression of his interpretation of woman’s most primitive right. “The question is, doyouwish to stay?”
“Yes, dear.”
“You don’t come too often these days,” he said, toying with her ear.
“That is because I know that you are tired, and would rather sleep when you have left your study.”
“Too tired, you think, to enjoy your presence?”
“Yes; you know I have not lost the girlish habit of liking to lie awake and talk. You go to sleep the moment you touch the pillow. Ah, me! how we change! I remember how you used to keep me awake with your ineffable words and caresses! and I was so indifferent then. You loved me more than I could possibly appreciate;” and she added, taking the hair-pins from her silvery hair, and with a little sigh, “Ah! if I were only young again!” For answer, the doctor sang the trivial words of Beranger:
“Combien je regretteMon bras si dodu,Ma jambe bien faiteEt le temps perdu.”
“Combien je regretteMon bras si dodu,Ma jambe bien faiteEt le temps perdu.”
“Combien je regretteMon bras si dodu,Ma jambe bien faiteEt le temps perdu.”
“Combien je regrette
Mon bras si dodu,
Ma jambe bien faite
Et le temps perdu.”
“Translate your French. It is something shocking, no doubt.”
“No, indeed. But I could not do it justice. I promise to keep you awake to-night though, for I must consult you about a matter of importance.”
“What is it about?”
“It is about Susie Dykes.”
“She does look ill, I think, and she has been so silent and moody lately. You don’t think she has anything serious the matter with her, do you?”
“Yes, serious enough. It is strange you have not guessed.”
“What!” exclaimed Mrs. Forest, a sudden light breaking into her mind. “You don’t mean to say——”
“Yes, just that,” interrupted the doctor, “and theagony of the poor girl is dreadful. What is worse, Dan has put it out of his power to save her from disgrace.”
“Dan!” exclaimed Mrs. Forest, in great disgust. “I don’t believe he knows anything about it. The shameless thing! No doubt——”
“Now! now! Don’t go off at half-cock. He admits it all—did so in my study last night, where he said he would rather die than marry Susie.”
“Oh, Heaven! How dreadful for Dan!”
“And you think only of him.”
“Only of him! Is he not my child? Is it not natural that I should think only of him?”
“Many things are natural that are very selfish. Is Susie not somebody’s child too as well as Dan? And what is his suffering compared to hers? Will the world howl at him as a sinner, kick him down further into hell, and abandon him with virtuous scorn? No, no; there’s plenty of girls here in Oakdale, of good family too, who would marry him to-morrow for all his damnable treachery to this poor girl, while the hypocrites, drawing their immaculate skirts clear of his victim, wink at his act, and distinguish it ‘as sowing wild oats.’ And you, my wife—you among the number! You would send her out to die in the streets, would you?”
“I am sorry for her, of course. You know I am.”
Mrs. Forest was thinking of Clara’s prospects; of the aristocratic Delanos, who were soon coming to Oakdale, and the event was important. What would they say at Clara’s family supporting and harboring under their roof a girl so disgraced? Mrs. Forest added, “But we cannot be expected to be victimized because of her want of virtue. Of course she cannot stay here.”
“Virtue!” said the doctor, with contempt. “Virtue, in any decent code of morals, must include all the best qualities of the heart. You are one of the soulless Pharisees who would cover it with a fig-leaf. I thought I knew you better, Fannie. Some one says, if you would know a man, divide an inheritance with him; but, by ——, after you have slept in a woman’s arms twenty odd years, shared your fortune and all the joys and sorrows of life with her for that time, a simple case like this arises when you expect common human sympathy, and she fails you utterly.”
Mrs. Forest began to sob quietly, but finding to her astonishment that this redoubtable weapon had lost its power over the soft-hearted doctor, she was piqued, and hardened her heart like a flint. She began hastily replacing her hair-pins in her hair. This was to punish him by depriving him of her presence for the night, which she had so sweetly promised. The doctor noted this movement, the critical moment, probably, if only his diplomacy had been equal to the situation; but he was “a plain, blunt man,” as Mark Antony says of himself, and he had already played his last card. He knew it was hopeless. Mrs. Forest, gentle, mild, pious, as she undoubtedly was, could not understand the doctor’s broad love of humanity. She had no power of loving anything that was not distinctly her own; but she was sure of her own integrity, and when told by the doctor that there was no more virtue in her love than in that of a hen for her chickens when she gathers her own under her wings, but pecks away all others, even though motherless and dying for care, she was not in the least disturbed; she was sure of her own position, and as immovable as a rock. “Doas you like,” he said to her, giving up the case, but determined to speak his mind freely; “do as you like, you and the other godly who pretend to be followers of one who said, ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’ Your respect for Christ is a common farce. It is merely a thing of form and respectability. You don’t take the trouble to see what manner of man he really was, or you would see how impossible it is for you to have any sentiments in common with him. Was he not a radical, sitting down with publicans and sinners, shocking all the conventional morality of his time, befriending the needy, supporting the outcasts of society, and a thorough despiser of all cant and hypocrisy?”
“I dislike to hear any one quoting Christ who does not believe in him,” said Mrs. Forest very softly, but none the less angry for all that.
“Believe,” echoed the doctor. “Youare the real infidel. Do you believe in the divine nature of Christ? Of course you do not; for if you did, you would have more respect for his morality and magnanimity of character. Do you believe in your heaven? You have no shadow of real faith in it, and you know it in your own heart, for it is a place where this same unhappy girl may be your equal or superior, according to your own scheme of salvation; and you know you would prefer annihilation to any such democratic mixing of saint and sinner. Do you think you can make me think you believe in hell, when you coolly run the risk of its terrors by turning against the suffering wretches whom Christ helped and befriended? Oh, Fannie! you have no religion in your heart, for you have no love for humanity; or, call it religion if you like, and say you have no honest humansympathy, and no faith that can triumph over the little expedients and conventional proprieties of the day.”
“I do not wish to manifest levity, but it does seem to me amusing to hearyoutalk of faith.”
At another time the doctor would have ceased in despair; but it is so hard to believe absolutely that those allied to us by many tender ties, can never respect our most sacred convictions; besides, the doctor’s sense of human justice was outraged, and he had not yet given full vent to his righteous indignation.
“I will not try to show you that I have a faith which you can never comprehend. It would be useless,” he said, “but I can tell you, though you could never persuade me to cant and howl among your pious herd, that I respect Christ and his example as I respect the dignity of all sympathy for human misery; and I shall prove it by standing by this unhappy girl. I am none the less ready to do so because her suffering is caused by a knave whom I had the misfortune to beget.”
“Why, I never heard any one utter such language!” exclaimed Mrs. Forest; “but it is useless to reason with you, when you are in a passion. For my part, I think ‘charity begins at home.’”
“Yes, I know you do; and according to your creed, it not only begins but ends there also.”
“Would you sacrifice the prospects of your children to protect a shameless girl?”
“I’d sacrifice anything and everything on earth to show my faith in the triumph of justice. Besides, this girl is not shameless. She has a noble nature. She told Dan to his face that he would never marry Susie Dykes—this when she found he would marry her, but only as a duty.Yes, madam, you can now measure my faith, which you despise, and see what it is worth beside yours. Let what will come, I shall stand by this girl. Life, with the consciousness that I have acted like a cur, is not worth having. Now you had better go and pray for grace to do unto others as you would have others do unto you;” and the doctor burst into a bitter laugh, as the door closed behind her who had come with wifely tenderness to sleep by his side.