Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty Part 43

"Ain't you ashamed to ask me to speak plainly? I don't want to speak plainly. Do you actually want to have me?"

"If it wouldn't overpower your reason, I should like it. It would be such a convenience to me."

"Well, I mean, papa," said Lillie, coloring at her audacity, "that I don't like Mrs. Larue!"

"Don't like Mrs. Larue! Why, she is as kind to you as she can possibly be. I thought you were on the best of terms."

"I mean that I don't like her well enough to call her Mamma."

"Call her Mamma!" repeated the Doctor, staring over his spectacles in amazement. "You don't mean?--upon my honor, you are too nonsensical, Lillie."

"Am I? Oh, I am so delighted!" exclaimed Lillie eagerly. "But I _was_ so afraid."

"Do you think I am in my dotage?" inquired the Doctor, almost indignant.

"No no, papa. Don't be vexed with me. I dare say it was very absurd in me. But I do think she is so artful and designing."

"She is a curious woman, we know," observed Ravenel. "She certainly has some--peculiarities."

Lillie laughed outright, and said, "Oh yes," with a gay little air of satire.

"But she is too young to think of me," pursued the Doctor. "She can't be more than twenty-five."

"Papa!!" protested Lillie. "She is thir--ty! Have you lost your memory?"

"Thirty! Is it possible? Really, I am growing old. I am constantly understating other people's ages. I have caught myself at it repeatedly.

I don't know whether it is forgetfulness, or inability to realize the flight of time, or an instinctive effort to make myself out a modern by showing that my intimates are youthful. But I am constantly doing it. Do you recollect how I have laughed about Elderkin for this same trick? He is always relating anecdotes of his youth in a way which would lead you to suppose that the events happened some fifteen or twenty years ago.

And yet he is seventy. I mustn't laugh at Elderkin any more."

"Nonsense!" said Lillie. "You are not a bit like him. He blacks his hair to correspond with his dates. He means to humbug people. And then you are not old."

"But, to return to Mrs. Larue," observed the Doctor. "She has a clear head; she is pretty sensible. She is not a woman to put herself in a false or ridiculous position. I really have not observed anything of what you hint."

"Oh no. Of course not. Men never do; they are _so_ stupid! Of course you wouldn't observe anything until she went on her knees and made you a formal declaration. I was afraid you might say, 'Yes,' in your surprise."

"My dear, don't talk in that way of a lady. You degrade your own s.e.x by such jesting."

However, the Doctor did in a quiet way put himself on his guard against Mrs. Larue; and Lillie, observing this, did also in a quiet way feel quite elated over the condition of things in the family. She was as happy as she had ever been, or could desire to be. It was a shocking state of deception; corruption lilied over with decorum and smiling amiability; whited sepulchres, apples of Sodom, blooming Upas. Carter saw Mrs. Larue as often as he wanted, and even much oftener, in a private room, which even his wife did not know of, in rear of his offices. Closely veiled she slipped in by a back entrance, and reappeared at the end of ten minutes, or an hour, or perhaps two hours.

It was after such interviews had taken place that his wife welcomed him with those touching words. "Oh, where have you been? I thought you never would come."

He would have been glad to break the evil charm, but he was too far gone to be capable of virtuous effort.

CHAPTER XXIX.

LILLIE REACHES THE APOTHEOSIS OF WOMANHOOD.

Woman is more intimately and irresponsibly a child of Nature than man.

She comes oftener, more completely, and more evidently under the power of influences which she can neither direct nor resist, and which make use of her without consulting her inclination. Her part then is pa.s.sive obedience and uncomplaining suffering, while through her the ends of life are accomplished. She has no choice but to accept her beneficent martyrdom. Like Jesus of Nazareth she agonizes that others may live; but unlike Him, she is impelled to it by a will higher than her own. At the same time, a loving spirit is given to her, so that she is consoled in her own anguish, and does not seriously desire that the cup may pa.s.s from her before she has drunk it to the dregs. She has the patience of the lower animals and of inanimate nature, enn.o.bled by a heavenly joy of self-sacrifice, a divine pleasure in suffering for those whom she loves.

She is both lower and higher than man, by instinct rather than by reason, from necessity rather than from choice.

There came a day to Lillie during which she lay between two worlds, not caring which she entered, submissive to whatever might be, patient though weeping with pain. Her father did not dare trust her to his own care, but called in his old friend and colleague, Doctor Elderkin. These two, with Carter, Mrs. Larue, and a hired nurse, did not quit the house for twenty-four hours, and all but the husband and father were almost constantly in the room of the invalid. The struggle was so long and severe that they thought it would end in death. Neither Mrs. Larue nor the nurse slept during the whole night, but relieved each other at the bedside, holding by turns the quivering, clutching hand of Lillie, and fanning the crimson cheeks and the brow covered with a cold sweat as of a death agony. The latent womanliness of Mrs. Larue, the tenderness which did actually exist in some small measure beneath her smooth surface of amiability and coquetry, was profoundly stirred by her instinctive sympathy for a suffering which was all feminine. She remembered that same anguish in her own life, and lived it over again.

Every throe of the sick girl seemed to penetrate her own body. She thought of the child which had been given and taken years ago, and then she wiped away a tear, lest Lillie might see it and fear for herself.

When she was not by the bedside she stood at the window, now looking for a glimpse of dawn as if that could bring any hope, and then turning to gaze at the tossing invalid.

The Doctor only once allowed Carter to enter the room. The very expansion of Lillie at sight of him, the eagerness with which her soul reached out to him for help, pity, love, was perilous. There was danger that she might say, "My dear, good-bye;" and in the exaltation of such an impulse she might have departed. As for him, he had never before witnessed a scene like this, and he never forgot it. His wife held both his hands, clasping them spasmodically, a broad spot of fever in either cheek, the veins of her forehead swollen, and her neck suffused, her eyes preternaturally open and never removed from his, her whole expression radiant with agony. The mortal pain, the supernatural expectation, the light of that other world which was so near, spiritualized her face, and made it unhumanly beautiful. He seemed to himself to be standing on earth and joining hands with her in heaven. He had never before reached so far; never so communed with another life.

His own face was all of this world, stern with anxiety and perhaps remorse; for the moment was so agitating and imperious that he could not direct his emotions nor veil his expression. Happy for her that she had no suspicion of one thing which was in his heart. She believed that he was solely tortured by fear that she would die; and if she could have thought to speak, she would have comforted him. On her own account she did not desire to live; only for his sake, and for her father's, and perhaps a little for her child's. The old Doctor watched her, shook his head, signed to the husband to leave the room, and took his wife's hands in his place. As Carter went out Mrs. Larue followed him a few steps into the pa.s.sage.

"What is between you and me must end," she whispered.

"Yes," he replied in the same tone, and went to his room somewhat comforted.

At seven in the morning he was awakened by a tremulous knocking at his door. Springing from the sofa, on which he had dozed for an hour or two without undressing, he opened, and encountered Mrs. Larue, pale with sleeplessness but smiling gaily.

"_Venez_," she said, speaking her mother tongue in her haste, and hastened noiselessly, like a swift sprite, back to the sick room. Carter followed, entered with a sense of awe, pa.s.sed softly around the screen which half encircled the bed, and saw his wife and child lying side by side. Lillie was very pale; her face was still spiritualized by the Gethsemane of the night; but her eyes were still radiant with a purely human happiness. She was in eager haste to have him drink at the newly-opened fountain of joy. Even as he stooped to kiss her she could not wait, but turned her head towards the infant with a smile of exultation and said, "Look at him."

"But how are _you_?" he asked, anxiously; for a man does not at once forget his wife in his offspring; and Carter had a stain of remorse on his soul which he needed to wash away with rivers of tenderness.

"Oh, I am perfectly well," she answered. "Isn't he pretty?"

At that moment the child sneezed; the air of this world was too pungent.

"Oh, take him!" she exclaimed, looking for the nurse. "He is going to die."

The black woman lifted the boy and handed him to the father.

"Don't drop him," said Lillie. "Are you sure you can hold him? I wouldn't dare to take him."

As if she could have taken him! In her eagerness she forgot that she was sick, and talked as if she were in her full strength. Her eyes followed the infant so uneasily about the room that Elderkin motioned Carter to replace him on the bed.

"Now he won't fall," she said, cheerfully.--"It was only a sneeze," she added presently, with a little laugh which was like a gurgle, a purr of happiness. "I thought something was the matter with him."--Shortly afterward she asked, "How soon will he talk?"

"I am afraid not for two or three weeks, unless the weather is favorable," replied Elderkin, with a chuckle which under the circ.u.mstances was almost blasphemous.

"How strange that he can't talk!" she replied, without noticing the old gentleman's joke. "He looks so intelligent!"

"She wouldn't be a bit surprised to hear him sing an Italian opera,"

said Ravenel. "She has seen a miracle to-day. Nothing could astonish her."

Lillie did not laugh nor answer; nothing interested her which did not say, Baby! Baby was for the time the whole thought, the whole life, of this girl, who a little previous existed through her husband, and before that through her father. Each pa.s.sion had been stronger than its predecessor; but now she had reached the culminating point of her womanhood: higher than Baby it was impossible for her to go. Even her father distressed and alarmed her a little by an affection for the newly-arrived divinity which lacked what she felt to be the proper reverence. Not content with wors.h.i.+ping afar off, he picked up the tiny G.o.d and carried him to the partial day of a curtained window, desiring, as he said, the honor of being the first to give him an idea.

"The first to give him an idea!" laughed the father. "Why, he looks as if he had been thinking for centuries. He looks five thousand years old."

Seeing that Lillie began to weary, the old Doctor replaced the deity on the pillow which served him for an altar, and turned the male wors.h.i.+pers out of the room.