Saxe Holm's Stories Part 24

"It grieves me not to go with you to your door," she said, as she bade me good-bye, "but I shall come and see you to-morrow and bring my husband."

"No, you must not," I replied. "To-morrow you will be wise enough--or, if you are not wise enough, you will be kind enough to me because I ask it--to lie in bed all day, and I shall come very early in the morning to see how you are."

She turned suddenly on the carriage-steps, and, leaning both her hands on my knees, exclaimed, in a voice full of emotion.

"Will you let me kiss you? Not even my mother gave me what you have given.

For you have given me back life, when it was too infinitely precious to lose. Surely you will not think me presuming?" and her cheek flushed a little.

"Presuming! my dear child, I loved you the first moment I saw you lying there on the stones; and I am almost old enough to be your mother, too," I replied, and I kissed her sweet face warmly.

This was the beginning of my acquaintance and friends.h.i.+p with Dora Maynard.

At eleven o'clock the next morning I went to see her. I was shown into a room, whose whole air was so unlike that of a Roman apartment, that I could scarcely believe I had not been transported to English or American soil. In spite of its elegance, the room was as home-like and cozy as if it nestled in the Berks.h.i.+re hills or stood on Worcesters.h.i.+re meadows. The windows were heavily curtained, and the furniture covered with gay chintz of a white ground, with moss-rose buds thickly scattered over it between broad stripes of rose-pink. The same chintz was fluted all around the cornice of the room, making the walls look less high and stately; the doorways, also, were curtained with it. Great wreaths and nodding ma.s.ses of pampas gra.s.s were above the doors; a white heron and a rose-colored spoonbill stood together on a large bracket in one corner, and a huge gray owl was perched on what looked like a simple old apple-tree bough, over an inlaid writing-table which stood at an odd slant near one of the windows.

Books were everywhere--in low swinging shelves, suspended by large green cords with heavy ta.s.sels; on low bracket shelves, in unexpected places, with deep green fringes or flutings of the chintz; in piles on Moorish stools or old Venice chests. Every corner looked as if somebody made it a special haunt and had just gone out. On a round mosaic table stood an exqusite black-and-gilt Etruscan patera filled with white anemones; on another table near by stood a silver one filled with the same flowers, pink and yellow. Each was circled round the edge with fringing ma.s.ses of maiden-hair fern. Every lounge and chair had a low, broad foot-stool before it, ruffled with the chintz; and in one corner of the room were a square pink and white and green Moorish rug, with ten or a dozen chintz-covered pillows, piled up in a sort of chair-shaped bed upon it, and a fantastic ebony box standing near, the lid thrown back, and battledoors and shuttlec.o.c.ks, and many other gay-colored games, tossed in confusion. The walls were literally full of exquisite pictures; no very large or rare ones, all good for every-day living; some fine old etchings, exquisite water-colors, a swarthy Campagna herds-boy with a peac.o.c.k feather and a scarlet ribbon in his black hat, and for a companion-picture, the herds-boy of the mountains, fair, rosy, standing out on a opaline snow-peak, with a glistening Edelweiss in his hand; opposite these a large picture of Haag's, a camel in the desert, the Arab wife and baby in a fluttering ma.s.s of basket and fringe and shawl and scarf, on his back; the Arab father walking a few steps in advance, playing on musical pipes, his ta.s.seled robe blowing back in the wind; on one side of this a Venice front, and on another a crag of Norway pines; here and there, small leaves of photographs from original drawings by the old masters, Leonardo, Raphael, t.i.tian, and Luini; and everywhere, in all possible and impossible places, flowers and vines. I never saw walls so decorated. Yellow wall-flowers waved above the picture of the Norway pines; great scarlet thistles branched out each side of the Venetian palace; cool maiden-hair ferns seemed to be growing all around the glowing crimson and yellow picture of the Arabs in the Desert. Afterward I learned the secret of this beautiful effect; large, flat, wide-mouthed bottles, filled with water, were hung on the backs of the picture frames, and in these the vines and flowers were growing; only a wors.h.i.+pper of flowers would have devised this simple method of at once enshrining them, and adorning the pictures.

In one of the windows stood a superbly-carved gilt table, oblong, and with curiously-twisted legs which bent inward and met a small central shelf half-way between the top and the floor, then spread out again into four strange claw-like vases, which bore each two golden lilies standing upright. On this stood the most singular piece of wood-carving I ever saw.

It was of very light wood, almost yellow in tint; it looked like rough vine trellises with vines clambering over them; its base was surrounded by a thick bed of purple anemones; the smaller shelf below was also filled with purple anemones, and each of the golden lilies held all the purple anemones it could--not a shade of any other color but the purple and gold--and rising above them the odd vine trellises in the pale yellow wood. As I stood looking at this in mute wonder and delight, but sorely perplexed to make out the design of the carving, I heard a step behind me.

I turned and saw, not my new friend, as I had expected, but her husband. I thought, in that first instant, I had never seen a manlier face and form, and I think so to-day. Robert Maynard was not tall; he was not handsome; but he had a lithe figure, square-shouldered, straight, strong, vitalized to the last fibre with the swift currents of absolutely healthy blood, and the still swifter currents of a pa.s.sionate and pure manhood. His eyes were blue, his hair and full beard of the bright-brown yellow which we call, rightly or wrongly, Saxon. He came very quickly toward me with both hands outstretched and began to speak. "My dear madam," he said, but his voice broke, and with a sudden, uncontrollable impulse, he turned his back full upon me for a second, and pa.s.sed his right hand over his eyes. The next instant he recovered himself and went on.

"I do not believe you will wonder that I can't speak, and I do not believe you will ever wonder that I do not thank you--I never shall," and he raised both my hands to his lips.

"Dora is in bed as you bade her to be," he continued. "She is well, but very weak. She wants to see you immediately, and she has forbidden me to come back to her room without you. I think, perhaps," he added hesitatingly, "she is not quite calm enough to talk long. Forgive me for saying it. I know you love her already."

"Indeed I do," replied I, "as if I had known her all my life. I will not stay long;" and I followed him through a small dining-room, also gay with flowers and vines, to a little room which had one side almost wholly of gla.s.s and opened on a _loggia_ full of orange-trees and oleanders, geraniums and roses. I will not describe Dora Maynard's bed-room. It was the dainty room of a dainty woman, but spiritualized and individualized and made wonderful, just as her sitting-room was, by a creative touch and a magnetic presence such as few women possess. I believe that she could not be for twenty-four hours in the barrenest and ugliest room possible, without contriving to diffuse a certain enchantment through all its emptiness.

She looked far more beautiful this morning than she had looked the day before. I never forgot the picture of her face as I saw it then, lying on the white pillow and turned toward the door, with the eager expression which her waiting for me had given it. Neither of us spoke for some seconds, and when we did speak we took refuge in commonplaces. Our hearts were too full--mine with a sudden and hardly explicable overflow of affection toward this beautiful being whom I had saved from dying; hers with a like affection for me, heightened a thousand fold by the intense love of love and of living that filled her whole soul and made her grat.i.tude to me partake almost of the nature of adoration. I think it was years before she could see me without recalling the whole scene so vividly that tears would fill her eyes. Often she would suddenly seize both my hands in hers, kiss them and say, "Oh! but for these dear, strong, brave little hands, where should I be!" And whenever we parted for a length of time she was overshadowed by presentiment. "I know it is superst.i.tious and silly," she would say, "but I cannot shake off the feeling that I am safer in the same town with you. I believe if any harm were to threaten me you would be near."

But the story I am to tell now is not the story of Dora Maynard's life after I knew her, nor of our friends.h.i.+p and love for each other, rare and beautiful as they were. It is the story of her girlhood, and of the strange wood-carving which stood on the gilded table in the bed of purple anemones.

One morning in April, as I climbed the long stone stairs which led to her apartment, I met Anita, the flower-woman who carried flowers to her every day. Anita looked troubled.

"What is the matter, my Anita?" said I; "is the Signora ill?"

"Ah no, thank the Blessed Virgin!" said Anita; "the dearest, most beautiful of Signoras is well, but I am obliged to tell her to-day that there are no more anemones. Biagio went yesterday to the farthest corner of the Villa Doria, to a dark shady spot beyond the Dove-Cote, which the strangers know not, hoping to find some; but the heavy rains had beaten them all down--there is no longer one left. And the Signora had tears in her eyes when I told her; and she did not care for all the other beautiful flowers; she said none of them could go on the gold table; never yet has the Signora put any flowers on the gold table except the purple anemones,"

and real tears stood in old Anita's eyes.

"Why, Anita," said I, "I am sure some other flowers would look very pretty there. I do not believe the Signora will be unhappy about it."

Anita shook her head and half smiled with a look of pitying compa.s.sion.

"But, Signora, you do not know; that dearest and most beautiful of Signoras has visions from the angels about her flowers. Holy Virgin! if she would but come and hang flowers around the Bambino in our church! None of the Holy Sisters can so weave them as she does; she makes Festa forever in the house for the Signor; and I think, Signora," crossing herself and looking sharply at me, "perhaps the gold table is the shrine of her religion: does the Signora know?"

I could not help laughing. "Oh no, Anita," I said; "we do not have shrines in our religion."

Anita's face clouded. "Iddio mio!" she said, "but the Virgin will keep the dearest Signora Maynardi. Biagio and I have vowed to keep a candle always burning for her in Ara Coeli! The dearest, most beautiful of Signoras;"

and Anita walked disconsolately on, down the stairs.

I found Dora kneeling before the "gold table," arranging great ma.s.ses of maiden-hair fern around the wood carving and in the shelf below. As I saw the rapt and ecstatic expression of her face, I understood why Anita had believed the gold table to be a shrine.

"They do not suit it like the anemones," said she, sadly; "and I can have no more anemones this year."

"So poor Anita told me just now on the stairs," replied I. "She was almost crying, she was so sorry she could not get them for you. But I am sure, dear, the ferns are beautiful on it. I think the pale green looks even better than the purple with the gold and the pale yellow wood."

"I like the purple best," said Dora; "besides, we always had purple at home," and her eyes filled with tears. Then, turning suddenly to me, she said, "Why have you never asked me what this is? I know you must have wondered: it looks so strange--this poor little clumsy bit of American pine, on my gilt table shrined with flowers!"

"Yes, I have wondered, I acknowledge, for I could not make out the design," I replied; "but I thought it might have some story connected with it, which you would tell me if you wished I should know. I did not think it clumsy; I think it is fantastic, and has a certain sort of weird life-likeness about it."

"Do you really think it has any life-like look about it?" and Dora's face flushed with pleasure. "I think so, but I supposed n.o.body else could see anything in it. No one of my acquaintance has ever alluded to it,"

continued she, half laughing, half crying, "but I see them trying to scrutinize it slyly when they are not observed. As for poor old Anita, I believe she thinks it is our Fetish. She walks round it on tiptoe with her hands clasped on her ap.r.o.n."

"But now," she continued, "I will show you the same design in something else;" and she led the way through her own bedroom to Robert's, which was beyond. On the threshold she paused, and kissing me, said: "If you can stay with me to-day, I will tell you the whole story, dear; but I want you to look at this chintz first." Then she walked to the window, and drawing out one of the curtains to its full width, held it up for me to see. It was a green and white chintz, evidently of cheap quality. At first I did not distinguish any meaning in the pattern; presently I saw that the figures were all of vines and vine-leaves, linked in a fantastic fas.h.i.+on together, like those in the wood-carving on the gold table.

"Oh, yes," I said, "I see; it is exactly like the carving, only it looks different, being on a flat surface."

Dora did not speak; she was gazing absently at the chintz she held in her hand. Her face looked as if her soul were miles and years away. Presently I saw a tear roll down her cheek. I touched her hand. She started, and smiling sweetly, said: "Oh! forgive me. Don't think I am crying for any sorrow; it is for joy. I am so happy, and my life has been so wonderful.

Now would you really have patience to listen to a long story?" she said, beseechingly; "a long story all about me--and--Robert? I have been wanting to tell you ever since I knew you. I think you ought to know all about us."

For my answer, I sank into a large chair, drew her down into my lap, and said: "Begin, you dearest child. Nothing could give me such pleasure.

Begin at the beginning."

She slipped from my lap to a low footstool at my feet, and resting both her arms on my knees in a graceful way she had, looked up into my face, and began by a sentence which made me start.

"I used to work in a factory." My start was so undisguised, so uncontrollable, that Dora drew back and her cheeks turned red.

"Perhaps I ought to have told you before."

"Oh, my dear, beautiful, marvellous child!" I exclaimed; "you cannot so misjudge me. I was startled only because you had always seemed to me so much like one born to all possible luxury. I supposed you had been nurtured on beauty."

"So I have been," she replied, earnestly, smiling through tears; "nevertheless, three years ago I was working in a factory in America."

I did not interrupt her again; hour after hour pa.s.sed by; not until twilight was deepening into dusk did the story come to end. I shall try to give it in Dora's own words--their simplicity adds so much to it; but I cannot give the heightened effect with which they fell upon my ears as I looked down into her sweet child-woman's face.

"I do not remember much about mamma. It is strange, too, that I do not, because I was thirteen when she died; but I always loved papa best, and stayed all the time I could in his study. Mamma was very pretty; the prettiest woman I ever saw; but I don't know how it was, all her prettiness did not seem to make papa care about her. He was a clergyman--an Episcopal clergyman--and his father and his father's father had been too; so you see for three whole generations it had been all books and study in the family; but mamma's father was a farmer, and mamma was stronger than papa; she liked to live in the country and be out of doors, which he hated. I think I know now just how it all was; but it used to puzzle me till I grew up. When I was sixteen, my Aunt Abby, papa's sister, told me that mamma was said to be the most beautiful girl in the whole State, and that papa fell so in love with her when he was just out of college, that he came very near dying because his father did not wish them to be married. Poor papa! it was just so always with him; he had such a poor feeble body that any trouble or worry made him ill. I can see now that it was because he and all his family had been such scholars, and lived in the house, and sat still all their lives; their bodies were not good for anything: and I am thankful enough that my body is like mamma's; but I don't know what good it would do me, either, if dear papa hadn't taught me all his ways of seeing things and feeling things. Mamma never seemed to care much about anything, except when d.i.c.k or Abby were sick, and she always used to go to sleep in church while papa was saying the most beautiful things; sometimes it used to make me almost hate her. I hated everybody that didn't listen to him. But Aunt Abby said once that very few people could understand him, and that was the reason we never stayed long in one place. People got tired of hearing him preach. This made me so angry I did not speak to Aunt Abby for two years, except when I was obliged to. But I see now that she was right. As I read over papa's sermons I see that they would seem very strange to common men and women.

He saw much more in every little thing than people generally do. I used to tell him sometimes he 'saw double,' and he would sigh and say that the world was blind, and did not see half; he never could take any minute by itself; there was the past to cripple it and the future to shadow it.

Poor, poor papa! I really think I have learned in a very strange way to understand his capacity for sadness. I understand it by my own capacity for joy. I often smile to think how I used to accuse him of seeing double, for it is the very thing which Robert says to me again and again when a sight or a sound gives me such intense pleasure that I can hardly bear it.

And I see that while I have nearly the same sensitiveness to all impressions from things or from people which he had, my body compels the impressions to be joyous. This is what I owe mamma. If papa could have been well and strong, he would have sung joy such as no poet has ever sung since suns began to s.h.i.+ne.

"But most that he wrote was sad; and I am afraid most that he taught the people was sad too, or, at any rate, not hopeful as it ought to be in this beautiful, blessed world, which 'G.o.d so loved' and loves. So perhaps it was better for people that papa never preached in any one parish more than three or four years. Probably G.o.d took care to send next a man who would make everybody take courage again. However, it was very hard for mamma, and very hard for us; although for us there was excitement and fun in getting into new houses and getting acquainted with new people; but the worst thing was that we had very little money, and it used it up so to move from place to place, and buy new things. I knew all about this before I was ten years old as well as if I had been forty; and by the time I was twelve, I was a perfect little miser of both clothes and money--I had such a horror of the terrible days, which sometimes came, when we sorely wanted both.

"Early in the spring after I was thirteen--my birthday was in December--we went to live in a little place called Maynard's Mills. It was a suburban village near the largest manufacturing town in the State. The other two homes which I could remember had been very small country villages, where none of the people were rich, and only a few attended the Episcopal church. In Maynard's Mills there were many rich people, and almost everybody went to our church. The whole place was owned by Mr. Maynard, Robert's father. He had gone out there to live near his mills, and the place was so beautiful that family after family of the rich mill-owners had moved out there. At first they used to go into town to church; but it was a long drive, cold in winter and hot in summer, and so Mr. Maynard built a beautiful chapel near his house and sent for papa to come and preach in it. Mr. Maynard had been his cla.s.smate in college and loved him very much, just because they were 'so different,' papa said, and I think it must have been so, for Mr. Maynard is the merriest man I ever saw. He laughs as soon as he sees you, whether there is anything to laugh at or not, and he makes you feel just like laughing yourself, simply by asking you how you do. I never saw papa so happy as he was the day Mr. Maynard's letter came asking him to go there.

"It was a very kind letter, and the salary, of which Mr. Maynard spoke almost apologetically, saying that it would be increased in a few years as the village grew, was more than twice as large as papa had ever received, and there was a nice parsonage besides.

"We moved in April. I always a.s.sociate our moving with blue hepaticas, for I carried a great basketful of them, which I had taken up roots and all, in the woods, the morning we set out; and what should I find under papa's study window but a great thicket of wild ferns and cornel bushes growing--just the place for my hepaticas, and I set them out before I went into the house. The house was very small, but it was so pretty that papa and I were perfectly happy in it. Poor mamma did not like the closets and the kitchen. The house we had left was a huge, old-fas.h.i.+oned house, with four square rooms on a floor; one of these was the kitchen, and mamma missed it very much. But she lived only a few days after we moved in. I never knew of what disease she died. She was ill but a few hours and suffered great pain. They said she had injured herself in some way in lifting the furniture. It was all so sudden and so terrible, and we were surrounded by such confusion and so many strange faces, that I do not remember anything about it distinctly. I remember the funeral, and the great ma.s.ses of white and purple flowers all over the table on which the coffin stood, and I remember how strangely papa's face looked.

"And then Aunt Abby came to live with us, and we settled down into such a new, different life, that it seemed to me as if it had been in some other world that I had known mamma. My sister Abby was two years old, and my darling brother Nat was ten, when mamma died. It is very hard to talk about dear Nat, I love him so. He is so precious, and his sorrow is so sacred, that I am hardly willing to let strangers pity him, ever so tenderly. When he was a baby he sprang out of mamma's lap, one day, as she was reaching up to take something from the mantel piece. He fell on the andiron-head and injured his spine so that he could never walk. He is twenty years old now; his head and chest and arms are about as large as those of a boy of sixteen, but all the rest of his poor body is shrunken and withered; he has never stood upright, and he cannot turn himself in his chair or bed. But his head and face are beautiful. It is not only I who think so. Artists have seen him sitting at the window, or being drawn about in his little wagon, and have begged permission to paint his face, for the face of a saint or of a hero, in their pictures. It is the face of both saint and hero; and after all that must be always so, I think; for how could a man be one without being the other? I know some very brave men have been very bad men, but I do not call them heroes. Nat is the only hero I ever knew; if I were a poet I would write a poem about him. It should be called 'THE CROWNLESS KING.' Oh, how he _does_ reign over suffering, and loss, and humiliation, and what a sweet kingdom spreads out around him wherever he is! He does everybody good, and everybody loves him. Poor papa used to say sometimes, 'My son is a far better preacher than I; see, I sit at his feet to learn;' and it was true. Even when he was a little fellow Nat used to keep up papa's courage. Many a time, when papa looked dark and sad, Nat would call to him, 'Dear papa, will you carry me up and down a little while by the window? I want the sky.' Then, while they were walking, Nat would say such sweet things about the beauty of the sky, and the delight it gave him to see it, that the tears would come into papa's eyes, and he would say, 'Who would think that we could ever forget for a moment this sky which is above us?' and he would go away to his study comforted.

"As I said, when mamma died, Nat was ten and I was thirteen. From that time I took all the care of him. Aunt Abby, was not strong, and she did not love children. She was just, and she meant to be always kind to us; but that sort of kindness is quite different from loving-kindness. Poor Nat never could bear to have her do anything for him, and so it very soon came about that I took all the care of him. It was not hard, for he was never ill; he suffered constant pain but in spite of it he was always cheerful, always said he felt well, and never had any of the small ailments and diseases which healthy children are apt to have. 'I shouldn't know what to do without the ache, Dot,' he said to me one day when he was only twelve years old. 'I've got so used to it, I should miss it as much as I should miss you said it helps me to be good. I don't think I should dare have it go away.' A few years later he wrote some lovely little verses called 'The Angel of Pain,' which I will show you. Our life after mamma died was very happy and peaceful. It makes me grieve for her, even now, to think how little she was missed. We had all loved her. She was always pleasant and good, and took the best possible care of us and of everything; but she was not one of those persons whose presence makes itself necessary to people. It seems hardly right to say such a thing, but I really think papa seemed more cheerful without her, after the first. I think that while she lived he was always groping and reaching after something in her which did not exist. The hourly sight of her reminded him hourly of his ideal of what a wife might be, and he was forever hoping that she might come a little nearer to it--enter a little more into his world of thought and feeling. This is how it has looked to me since I have been married, and can understand just how terrible it must be to have the person whom you love best, disappoint you in any way.