CHAPTER X
So it happened that when Jefferson Delavan came back to consciousness Mrs. Ware was bending over him, extreme anxiety in her look. Dr. Ware had found that his manifest injuries consisted in a broken rib and some burns upon his arms. But an accidental blow while clinging to a plank in the water had rendered him unconscious and he had been rescued barely in time to prevent him from slipping off and sinking to his death. Over the possible results of this blow the physician was anxious. Everything would depend, he had told his wife and Rhoda, upon how the young man came out of the oblivion. He had warned them that it might be with wandering wits, and in that case only time could tell how severe, possibly even how permanent, would be the results of the accident.
Delavan stirred and moaned slightly and Mrs. Ware, bending over him with her fingers upon his pulse, saw that his eyelids fluttered. “Rhoda!” she called, her voice a-tremble and sinking to a whisper, “he’s coming to!” Rhoda, leaning across the foot of the bed upon her clenched hands, was watching his face with intent eyes.
“Come and stand beside me!” her mother wenton with quivering lips. “If he shouldn’t know me I—I can’t stand it!” Rhoda took his wrist from her shaking hand, pressed firm fingers upon his pulse and threw her other arm with a little soothing caress around the elder woman’s shoulders. Suddenly the patient’s eyes flew open and with a bewildered stare looked up into Mrs. Ware’s pale and anxious face.
“Jeff, dear boy, don’t you know me?” she begged. His blank, unrecognizing gaze rested upon her for a silent minute, then wandered on and fell upon her companion.
“Speak to him, dear,” Mrs. Ware whispered brokenly. But there was no need. Slowly a puzzled expression crept into the vacuity, and that presently gave way to one of recognition, and then the hearts of the two women were stirred to their depths by the glad wonder that illumined his countenance. Never would Rhoda be able to forget that look, like the sudden happiness over-spreading the face of a child at unexpected sight of a loved one, which her presence had inspired—her presence, which had brought back his sense, trembling upon the verge of that unknown black gulf, into the world of light and reason.
“Rhoda!” he said feebly, and then, smiling, closed his eyes again.
“Stay here beside him,” Mrs. Ware whispered, “while I go and see if your father has returned. Oh, honey! I think it’s going to be all right!”
When she came back with Dr. Ware, half an hour later, she slipped quietly into the room a few steps ahead of her husband and found Rhoda telling her patient what had happened, while he listened, with her hand clasped in his. Her motherly heart gave a quick throb. “It has brought Rhoda to her senses too, at last!” was her quick inference. But a moment later doubts disturbed her certainty as she saw the unconcern with which the girl withdrew her hand and made way for her father.
Dr. Ware was well pleased with the young man’s condition. “You’ll have to stay in bed a few days, perhaps a week,” was his decision, “while your broken rib is knitting itself together again. You’ve got a pretty good case of nervous shock also, as the result of that blow on your head—and you can thank God, Mr. Delavan, that it’s nothing worse than shock. But a few days of quiet will make that all right too.”
There was no perturbation in the physician’s mind, at first, over the presence of Jefferson Delavan in his house, invested though the young man was with the romantic interest of his narrow escape from death. He felt sure of his daughter now and did not believe there was any danger of her marrying the southerner. She had thrown herself unreservedly into sympathy with the anti-slavery cause and she was working with him enthusiastically and efficiently in making of their house a “station” on the Underground Railroad.
“No,” he assured himself, “she won’t go back on her convictions now. She’s decided what’s right for her to do, and she’ll stick to it like a soldier.” He smiled with pride, but a moment later his thought supplemented, with softened feeling, “It will be hard on her, though!”
On the whole, feeling thus sure about Rhoda, he was rather glad to have the young man there, because of the pleasure it would give his wife to mother him and to recall the memories of her youth. In Dr. Ware’s feeling toward his wife there was a strong element of compassion. In serious middle age, considering the past with judicial mind, he doubted not a little if, in that wildly impelling time of youthful passion, it had been quite the fair thing for him to marry her and take her away from all her girlish associations. He knew well enough that she had loved him then and that she still loved him and that their life together had been as calmly happy as imperfect mortals have any right to expect the wedded state to be.
But he also felt quite sure that if he had not paid impetuous court to her in those vivid youthful days she would have loved and married some man of her own region and lived her life surrounded by the conditions and the people with whom she was most in sympathy. His conviction that she would have been happier in such estate inspired him with a very great tenderness towardher, and with a half-realized wish to make atonement, in such little ways as became possible, for what she had missed.
She had been loyal to him through all these years, and from the start had refused to go back to her old home for even a short visit, because the invitations from her family had never included him. That one stay at Fairmount, with Jeff Delavan’s mother, had been the only return to the old life which she had ever allowed herself. So now he was pleased when he foresaw how much comfort she would find in having “Adeline’s boy” under her roof and needing her ministrations.
But Mrs. Ware had still another reason to be pleased that Jeff Delavan was to be a member of their household for several days and under such conditions. She warmly hoped and therefore almost believed that Rhoda’s determination would go down under the persuasive influence of daily association with her lover. The girl was a good nurse. She had considerable knowledge, acquired from her father, of what ought to be done in a sick-room and she was one of those people with a native knack for making an invalid comfortable. Therefore, Mrs. Ware argued, it would be her duty to take main charge of their bedridden guest, and Rhoda would do it if she could be made to see that it was her duty.
There was nothing so sure to soften a girl’s heart, she told herself, as seeing a strong mandependent upon her care. And this combined with Jeff’s masterful love-making and the pleadings of her own heart—could there be a better combination? Truly, it was almost providential, Jeff’s being upon that boat.
She began at once to plan the household matters so that Rhoda would be free to devote the greater part of each day to the sick-room. She decided also that it was most necessary for the patient to be kept quiet, to be undisturbed by much going in and out of his room, and that therefore Charlotte, at least for several days, should not be admitted.
Charlotte keenly resented this order. She felt it to be most unfair that she, who would undoubtedly be to any young man the most entertaining member of the family, should be barred from a room so full of romantic interest as this, in which lay a good-looking young gentleman, who had barely been rescued from a tragic death but who doubtless would still be capable of good judgment in the matter of feminine attractions. When Rhoda found her at the piano practising “The Last Rose of Summer” in the late afternoon of that first day she was looking very glum.
“What’s the matter, sister?” Rhoda queried.
“Nothing,” Charlotte answered shortly.
“Really? I’d never think it!” Rhoda smiled at her, sitting down with a lapful of stockings to be sorted into goats-to-be-mended and sheep-not-to-be-mended.“If I were going to guess, I’d say you were sleepy and needed to go to bed early. I heard you come in last night, and it was pretty late. You haven’t told me a word yet about the party. Did you have a good time?”
Charlotte laughed and tinkled some notes upon the piano keys. “Yes, indeed! I haven’t had such a perfectly lovely time in I don’t know when!”
“That’s good!” Rhoda smiled discreetly, her eyes upon her work. “And Billy—did he have a good time too?”
“Oh, Billy! Rhoda, you ought to have seen him! He was just furious! He looked as if he wouldn’t want to speak to me for a month. But he will!”
“You haven’t said anything about Horace. Did he enjoy the evening?”
Charlotte, with her eyes on Rhoda’s face, opened her lips to make a merry answer, hesitated, then darted at her sister a searching glance.
“Rhoda,” she exclaimed, “Horace has been telling you about it!”
“About what?” Rhoda looked up, the suspicion of a smile at the corners of her mouth.
“O, la! Aboutit, I said, didn’t I? Oh, Rhoda, it was such fun!” Charlotte’s voice was suffused with laughter. “But it’s nothing to make Horace propose. Why, Rhoda, you could do it!”
Rhoda laid her stockinged hand, in whose covering she was searching for possible holes, in her lap and turned serious eyes upon Charlotte’s face, alight with merriment. “Do you really think so, sister? But, then, I don’t think I should want him to.”
Charlotte looked at her in surprise. “You wouldn’t, Rhoda? That’s queer! But you are queer, anyway! The first thing we know you’ll be wearing short hair and bloomers and going to woman’s rights conventions! But please don’t, until after I’m married, anyway, so I won’t belong to the family any more!”
“If you’re going to marry Horace right away I shan’t have to wait very long, shall I?”
“Who said I was going to marry Horace? Did he?”
“No. He said he—hoped you wouldn’t!”
They both laughed and Charlotte went on, with a saucy toss of her head: “Oh, he did, did he! He ought to be punished for that! Rhoda, I’m going to tell him he’s either got to keep his promises or vote for Buchanan! You know, I’m awfully fond of Horace”—her mouth drooped and her voice was plaintive—“but I’d be willing to give him up for the sake of a vote for Buck!”
“Poor Horace! You ought to be ashamed to tease him so!”
“Well, then, if you don’t want him teased, I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” She stooped to pluckBully Brooks, now verging fast upon the dignity of cathood, from the comfort of a nap upon a chair. “If you’ll persuade mother to let me go in to see Jeff Delavan whenever I want to I’ll let Horace off. But if you don’t he’ll have to either marry me or vote for my side. Won’t he, Bully Brooks?”
The response of the kitten was of such emphatic sort that she boxed its ears and threw it to the floor. “The kitten’s getting too big to be teased,” Rhoda commented quietly.
“Well, Horace isn’t!” she responded saucily and went whistling from the room.