The Awakening of Helena Richie Part 55

"Dr. Lavendar, why can't she keep him? She'll never see that scoundrel again!"

"Do you think a woman with such a story is fit to bring up a child, William?"

The doctor was silent.

"She thinks not, herself," said Dr. Lavendar.

"Does she?" William King said; and a minute afterwards fumbled in his coat tails for his pocket-handkerchief. "What is she going to do?" he asked huskily.

"She feels that she had better leave Old Chester."

"Do you think so, sir?"

Dr. Lavendar sighed. "I would like to have her here; I would like to take care of her, for a while. But I don't think she could stand it; on your account."

"My account!" William King pushed his chair back, and got on his feet; "Dr. Lavendar, I--I--"

"She would feel the embarra.s.sment of your knowledge," said the old man.

Dr. King sat down. Then he said, "I am the last man to judge her."

"'Beginning at the eldest, even unto the last,'" murmured Dr.

Lavendar. "Shame is a curious thing, William. It's like some of your medicines. The right amount cures. Too much kills. I've seen that with hard drinkers. Where a drunkard is a poor, uneducated fellow, shame gives him a good boost towards decency. But a man of education, William, a man of opportunity--if he wakes up to what he has been doing, shame gives him such a shove he is apt to go all round the circle, and come up just where he started! Shame is a blessed thing,-- when you don't get too much of it. She would get too much of it here.

But--" he stopped and smiled; "sin has done its divine work, I think."

"Sin?"

"Yes," said Dr. Lavendar, cheerfully; "have you ever noticed that every single human experience--except, perhaps, the stagnation of conceit; I haven't found anything hopeful in that yet; but maybe I shall some day!--but, except for conceit, I have never known any human experience of pain or sin that could not be the gate of heaven. Mind!

I don't say that it always is; but it can be. Has that ever occurred to you?"

"Well, no," the doctor confessed; "I can't say that it has."

"Oh, you're young yet," Dr, Lavendar said encouragingly, "My boy, let me tell you that there are some good folks who don't begin to know their Heavenly Father, as the sinner does who climbed up to Him out of the gutter."

"A dangerous doctrine," William ruminated.

"Oh, I don't preach it," Dr. Lavendar said placidly "but I don't preach everything I know."

William was not following him. He said abruptly, "What are you going to do with David?"

"David is going to stay with me."

And William said again, "It will break her heart!"

"I hope so," said Dr. Lavendar solemnly, How he watched that poor heart, in the next few days! Every afternoon his shabby old buggy went tugging up the hill. Sometimes he found her walking restlessly about in the frosted garden; sometimes standing mutely at the long window in the parlor, looking for him; sometimes prostrate on her bed. When he took her hand--listless one day, fiercely despairing the next,--he would glance at her with a swift scrutiny that questioned, and then waited. The pity in his old eyes never dimmed their relentless keenness; they seemed to raid her face, sounding all the shallows in search of depths. For with his exultant faith in human nature, he believed that somewhere in the depths he should find G.o.d, It is only the pure in heart who can find Him in impurity, who can see, behind the murky veil of stained flesh, the very face of Christ declaring the possibilities of the fles.h.!.+--but this old man sought and knew that he should find Him. He waited and watched for many days, looking for that recognition of wrong-doing which breaks the heart by its revelation of goodness that might have been; for there is no true knowledge of sin, without a divine and redeeming knowledge of righteousness! So, as this old saint looked into the breaking heart, pity for the sinner who was base deepened into reverence for the child of G.o.d who might be n.o.ble.

It is an easy matter to believe in the confident soul; but Dr.

Lavendar believed in a soul that did not believe in itself!

It seemed to Helena that she had nothing to live for; that there was nothing to do except s.h.i.+ver back out of sight, and wait to die. For the time was not yet when she should know that her consciousness of sin might be the chased and fretted Cup from which she might drink the sacrament of life; when she should come to understand, with thanksgiving, that unless she had sinned, the holy wine might never have touched her lips!

In these almost daily talks with Dr. Lavendar, the question of the future was beaten out: it was a bleak enough prospect; it didn't matter, she said, where she went, or what became of her, she had spoiled her life, she said. "Yes," Dr. Lavendar agreed, "you've spoiled what you've had of it. But your Heavenly Father has the rest, in His hands, and He'll give it to you clean and sound. All you've got to do, is to keep it so, and forget the spoiled part." That was the only thing he insisted upon: no dwelling on the past!

"I wish I was one of the people who want to do things," she told him with a sort of wistful cynicism. "But I don't. I have no story-book desires. I don't want to go and nurse lepers!--but I will, if you want me to," she added with quick and touching simplicity.

Dr Lavendar smiled, and said that nursing lepers was too easy. He had suggested that she should live in a distant city;--he had agreed at once to her a.s.sertion that she could not stay in Old Chester. "I know some nice people there," he said; "Ellen Bailey lives there, she's Ellen Spangler now. You've heard me speak of her? Spangler is a parson; he's a good fellow, but the Lord denied him brains to any great extent. But Ellen is the salt of the earth. And she can laugh.

You'll like her."

"But what will I do when I get there?"

"I think Ellen may find something to keep you busy," he said cheerfully; "and, meantime, I'll make a suggestion myself: study Hebrew."

"Hebrew!"

"Or Arabic; or Russian; it doesn't matter which, your mind needs exercise."

"When you said Hebrew, I thought you meant so I could read the Bible."

"Ho!" said Dr. Lavendar, "I think King James's version is good enough for you; or anybody else. And I wouldn't want you to wait until you can read backwards, to read your Bible. No; I only meant that you need something to break your mind on. Hebrew is as good as anything else."

She meditated on this for a while, "I begin to understand," she said with her hesitating smile; and Dr. Lavendar was mightily pleased, for he had not seen that smile of late.

Sometimes they talked about David, Mrs. Richie asking questions in a smothered voice; but she never begged for him. That part of her life was over. Dr. Lavendar sometimes brought the child with him when he and Goliath climbed the hill for that daily visit: but he always took him back again. Indeed, the Rectory was now definitely the little boy's home. Of course Old Chester knew that the Stuffed Animal House was to lose its tenant, and that David had gone to live with Dr.

Lavendar. "I wonder why she doesn't take him with her?" said Old Chester; and called to say good-by and hint that Mrs. Richie must be sorry to leave the little boy behind her? Helena said briefly, yes, she was "sorry." And Old Chester went away no wiser than it came.

William King, wise and miserable, did not call. His wife said that she would say good-by for him, if he was too busy to go up the hill.

"It seems to me you've been very busy lately," she told him; "I've hardly had a glimpse of you. I only hope it will show on your bills.

It is very foolish, William, to take patients so far back in the country; I don't believe it pays, considering how much time it takes.

But I'll tell Mrs. Richie you send your respects, and say good-by for you."

"You needn't mind," said the doctor.

Mrs. King went to make her adieux the very next day. Her manner was so cordial that Helena was faintly surprised; but, as Martha told Dr.

Lavendar, cordiality did not mean the sacrifice of truth to any false idea of politeness.

"I didn't tell her I was sorry she was going," Martha said, standing by the roadside in the chill November wind, talking into the buggy, "because, to speak flatly and frankly, I am not. I don't consider that her example is very good for Old Chester, She is not a good housekeeper. I could tell you certain things--however, I won't, I never gossip. I just said, very kindly,' Good-by, Mrs. Richie. I hope you'll have a pleasant journey.' That was all. No insincere regrets.

That's one thing about me, Dr. Lavendar, I may not be perfect, but I never say anything, just to be pleasant!"

"I've noticed that," said Dr. Lavendar; "G'on, Goliath."

And Martha, in great spirits, told her William at tea, that, though Dr. Lavendar was failing, she had to admit he could still see people's good qualities. "I told him I hadn't put on any airs of regret about Mrs. Richie, and he said he had always noticed my frankness."

William helped himself to gooseberry jam in silence.

"You do leave things so catacornered!" Martha observed, laying the thin silver spoon straight in the dish. "William, I never knew anybody so incapable as that woman. I asked her how she had packed her preserves for moving. She said she hadn't made any! Think of that, for a housekeeper. Oh, and I found out about that perfumery, I just asked her. It's nothing but ground orris!"

William said he would like a cup of tea.

"I can't make her out," Martha said, touching the teapot to make sure it was hot; "I've always said she wasn't her brother's equal, mentally. But you do expect a woman to have certain feminine qualities, now the idea of adopting a child, and then deserting him!"