Bressant Part 21

The fat girl met these demonstrations with a fat smile, and extended to the young man a long, narrow envelop, laid crossways over the dirty palm of her large, thick hand.

"A letter!" exclaimed she, resuming her ap.r.o.n as soon as her hand was at liberty. "A letter from New York I'm thinking it is; and sure the handwriting's a lady's, every bit of it; which I don't know what Miss Sophie would be after saying if she should hear of it--nay, don't fear me, sir, that I'd ever have the heart to be telling her of it! And it's Abbie as fetched it, and the same bid me tell you as how she'd be after coming up here directly; she'll be cleaning her face first, and removing her bonnet; which she's always a right neat body, and it's myself can testify, as has lived with her nine years, and never had cause to complain, G.o.d bless her!"

When Bressant was alone, he sat down in the chair, with the letter between his fingers. On such slight hinges do our destinies turn. If Abbie had neglected to call at the post-office, or if she had been satisfied to give the letter to the young man herself, instead of sending it to him five minutes beforehand, or if the writing of the letter had been delayed a few hours (how many _ifs_ there always are in such cases!), Bressant would have had a far different fate, and this story would never have been written. But as it was, five fatal minutes intervened between the delivery of the letter and Abbie's appearance, during which time he had read it through twice--at first hurriedly, the second time slowly and carefully--had replaced it in the envelop, and put the envelop in his pocket. Then he sat quite quiet, leaning back in his chair, his head thrown forward, his under eyelids drawn up, and contracted around the piercing glance of his eves, his jaws and lips set tight, and a straight line up his forehead from between his eyebrows. A more unpleasant and forbidding expression one does not often meet; but, such as it was, it grew still more stern and unpromising when the door once more slowly opened, and Abbie appeared upon the threshold.

Nevertheless, he at once rose, and inclined forward his lofty shoulders in a remarkably courteous bow. Abbie, who showed some traces of discomposure, and held one finger nervously to her under lip, stepped into the room, and they shook hands.

"I'm glad to welcome you back," said she, apparently unable to remove her eyes from his face. "You'll not likely find this place as convenient as the Parsonage, though."

"It's very pleasant; these flowers are delightful. I wanted to thank you for them; it seems like home to be here."

"Like home!" repeated Abbie. Her body seemed to bend and sway toward him, and the outer extremity of the eyebrows drooped a little, giving a singularly soft and gentle expression to her elderly visage. But seeing that he only colored, turning his head aside, and fumbling with his beard, her expression changed into one of constraint, which appeared to stiffen on her features.

"I'm glad you like the flowers; I didn't know as you cared for such things. I thought if you were ill they might be pleasant to you. But you're looking very well, sir, for one who has had so severe an accident."

"Oh, yes; I'm as well as ever. I've had very good nursing."

"Yes--yes," she said, slowly; "it was better you should be there; you couldn't have been so well cared for here. I told Professor Valeyon so at the time. I knew you'd feel happier there--more at home. It's all for the best--all for the best, in the end." She rattled the keys in her girdle before proceeding, with a distraught, embarra.s.sed manner: "By-the-way, you had something more than good nursing to help you to health, I heard. Is it Cornelia--or Sophie?"

Bressant hesitated and stammered--a weakness he seldom was guilty of, especially when there was so little reason for it as at present.

"It's--I'm--oh!--Sophie!" said he.

"I heard it was Sophie, but I thought likely as not it was a mistake of one for another. Sophie," repeated she, musingly, "that sweet, delicate little angel. Oh, I should fear, I should fear! Cornelia would have been better--not so sensitive--she can bear more--and who knows?--No; but I do him wrong; he loves her: she'll be happy; she can't help it!"

Here Abbie became aware that she had been thinking aloud; her hand sought her mouth, and she glanced apprehensively at Bressant. But he had evidently heard nothing of the latter part of her speech, which was spoken in a low tone. He had taken a flower from the bunch on the table, and was pulling it ruthlessly to pieces. He did not look up. Abbie, rattling her keys, retired toward the door.

"I'll bid you good-morning, sir. A house-keeper always must be busy, you know; and, of course, you can't afford to be disturbed. You need never fear any disturbance from me--never, I a.s.sure you. By-the-way, you received your letter? I gave it to the servant, instead of waiting to bring it myself, because I thought it might be important."

"Oh, yes, I have it; no--no importance at all. Good-morning."

Abbie walked hurriedly and unevenly to her room, shut herself in, and fastened the door. She sat down on a chair which stood by the old-fas.h.i.+oned desk in the corner, and it seemed to her she could not rise from it again. A faintness was upon her, which she thought might, perhaps, be death. There was a sensation within her as if a clock had run down in her head, and had dropped the heavy weight into her heart.

She could feel the paleness of her face, and the drops of moisture on her forehead. Her breathing was wellnigh imperceptible. She sat quite, still, in a kind of awful expectation, as if listening for the echoless footfall of Death. But he pa.s.sed by on the other side, and left her to face her life again.

She felt rather tired of it, as she sat up and looked dimly around her.

Putting her hand in the pocket of her dark dress, she drew out the small square morocco case which contained the daguerreotype. It was rather mortifying, certainly: every one knows what it is to appear, dressed for a party, and find you have mistaken the night. In what pleasant little episode had Abbie flattered herself that this portrait, with its grave, dark, baby eyes, its soft, light curls, its slender, solemn little face, might be going to play a part? No matter: the hope was gone by; and every day the portrait faded more and more indistinguishably into the dark background. Abbie looked at it a moment or two only, then closed the case, and carefully fastened the two little hooks which kept it shut. Opening the old-fas.h.i.+oned desk, she put the daguerreotype in its little drawer, and locked it up. She held the key--a small bra.s.s key--between her finger and thumb, meditating. Presently she went to the window, opened it, and looked out. Beneath, a little to one side, stood a huge black water-b.u.t.t, half buried in the earth, and partly full of rain-water, contributed by the tin spout whose mouth opened above it.

Into this b.u.t.t Abbie dropped the key. It struck the water with a faint pat, and disappeared, causing two or three circles to expand to the edges of the b.u.t.t, against which they disappeared also.

She did not immediately draw back, but remained leaning with her arms upon the window-sill. It was a beautiful, cool, September morning, such as makes breathing and eyesight luxurious. The fat Irish girl sat on the back steps, peeling potatoes for dinner. On the step by her side was a large earthen bowl, into which she put the potatoes, while throwing the skins into the swill-pail on her right. She was obliged to give her whole mind to the operation, there being a danger lest, in rapid working, she should happen to throw the potato into the swill-pail, and put the skin into the earthen bowl. She was much too absorbed to notice the beautiful weather, even had she been inclined to do so; but it remained beautiful, nevertheless.

"I'd be a fool to find fault with him," said Abbie to herself. "How can I expect him to see any thing in me, more than I can see myself in the looking-gla.s.s? And then, he loves Sophie, and perhaps he thinks I'd rob her; the Lord knows I only coveted the luxury of giving away my own, and seeing them happy with it. Well, he may set his mind at rest; he shall never suffer the mortification of having to thank a boarding-house keeper for his fortune.

"O my boy--my dear, dear boy!"

Meanwhile Bressant, having been relieved, by the timely arrival of the letter, from any present necessity of visiting his aunt, was devoting himself pretty diligently to the cultivation of that line in his forehead running perpendicularly up from between the eyebrows. It bade fair to become a permanent feature in his face.

CHAPTER XXIII.

ARMED NEUTRALITY.

One afternoon in the cool heart of October, Cornelia and Sophie found themselves on the hill which rose up in front of the house, above the road, bound on a hunt for autumn leaves. They were alone. Bressant's time for coming was still an hour distant. A few nights before there had been a frost, which had inspired a rainbow soul into the woods; and the glory of the golden and crimson leaves made it imperatively necessary that they should be gathered and allowed to illuminate the dusky interior of the Parsonage.

Since Cornelia's return home, the sisters had not been so much together as formerly. Sophie had observed it, and secretly blamed herself: she allowed Bressant to monopolize her--left Cornelia out in the cold--was selfish and thoughtless just because she was happy--and so forth: taking herself severely to task, and resolving to amend her behavior forthwith.

But there seemed to be some difficulty in the way of consummating her best intentions.

Cornelia was no longer so easily to be come at; she did not volunteer herself now in the liberal, joyous way she used to do; did not, in fact, appear half so ready to do her share in the work of reconstruction. It began to force itself upon Sophie that the edifice of their former relations was not lightly to be rebuilt; and the growth of this conviction occasioned her to mar her ordinarily serene and justly harmonized existence with sundry little fits of crying and other mournful indulgences.

As for Cornelia, if she noticed the estrangement at all, she did not allow it to occasion her any anxiety. Jealousy and discontent are more self-absorbing pa.s.sions than love, and they closed her eyes to whatever they did not involve. Yet the effect of the estrangement was more hurtful upon her than upon Sophie; for never had her pure-minded sister's influence been so needful to her as now, when the very nature of the malady forbade its being so relieved.

But this afternoon it had so happened that they found themselves together, on the hill. Each had filled a basket with the most brilliant, or harmonious, or vividly contrasted colors they could find. They had emerged from the wood into the clear autumn suns.h.i.+ne which rested upon the hill-side, and sat down upon a gray knee of rock, encased with crisp gray and black lichens. Below lay the Parsonage, with its weather-blackened, s.h.i.+ngled roof, and the garden, full of shrubbery, intersected by winding paths, the fountain in the centre. The stony road wound around the spur of the hill, and was visible here and there, in its slopes and turnings on the way to the village, light buff between the many-colored bordering of foliage. The winding valley looked like Nature's color-box; the tall hills beyond, sleeping beneath their Persian shawls, contrasted richly with the cool pearl-gray of the lower sky behind them. Away to the right, though seemingly nearer than from the road below, rose the white steeple of the meeting-house, and, peeping out around it, the roofs and gable-ends of the village houses.

"There could not be a more lovely place to be happy in!" said Sophie, sighing from excess of pleasure.

"Any place is as lovely as another when you're in love, I suppose,"

remarked her sister; "that is, if being in love is as nice as poets say it is."

Sophie looked around with a smile, implying that the best description a poet ever wrote could give but a faint impression of the reality.

"But," pursued Cornelia, "don't you find it very stupid when he's away?

The happier you are with him, the unhappier you'd be without him, I should think."

"Oh, no, dear!" returned Sophie. "I'm happy mostly, because I know he cares for me more than for any one else in the world, and because I know he's one of the best and truest of men. I can feel that, you know, just as much when he's at Abbie's, as when he's here. The happiness of love isn't all in seeing and hearing, and--all that tangible part."

"Don't it make any difference, then, if you never Bee one another from the day you're engaged until you're married?"

Sophie began to blush, as she generally did when called upon to speak of her love. "Of course, it's delicious to be together," said she, "and it would be very sad if we could not meet. But it would be more sad to think that our love depended on meeting."

"Well, it may be so to you," returned Cornelia, picking lichens from the rock and crus.h.i.+ng them between her rounded fingers; "but my idea is that the whole object of being engaged and married is to be together all the time. I don't see what on earth we are made visible and tangible for, unless to be seen and touched by the persons we love."

Sophie looked distressed, and a little embarra.s.sed.

"You can't think our bodies are the most important part of us, Neelie, dear? It's our souls that love and are loved, you know. How could we love in heaven if it were not so?"

"Oh, I don't know any thing about that. It's love in this world I'm speaking of. I believe it has as much to do with flesh and blood, as an instrument has with the music that it makes. What would become of the music if it wasn't for the instrument?"

"That's a beautiful ill.u.s.tration, my dear," observed Sophie, after a thoughtful pause, "but I think it can be used better the other way. The music of love, like other music, is an existence by itself, exclusive of the flesh-and-blood instruments, which weren't given us to create music, but to interpret it to our earthly senses. Our souls are the players; but in the next world we shall be able to perceive the harmony without need of any medium. We can remember music, too, and enjoy it, long after we have heard it--that is why we don't need to be always together. And yet it's always sweet to meet, to hear a new tune; and the number of tunes is infinite; so love needs all eternity to make itself complete."

When Sophie hit upon an idea which seemed to her spiritually beautiful and harmonious, she was apt to be carried away--sometimes, perhaps, into deep water. Yet thus, occasionally, did she catch glimpses of higher truths than a broader and safer wisdom could have attained. Cornelia took one of the glowing leaves out of her basket, and looked at it.

Perhaps she saw, in the perfect earthly self-sufficiency of its splendor, something akin to herself.

"I suppose I don't half appreciate your theory, Sophie, though it's certainly pretty enough. But you're more soul than body, to begin with, I believe. For my part, I almost think, sometimes, I could get along without any soul at all, and never feel the least inconvenience. Perhaps everybody hasn't a soul--only a few favored ones."

"What is it gives you such thoughts, Neelie?" said her sister, in a tone which, had it not been charged with so ranch depth of feeling, would have been plaintive. Her gray, profound eyes, from a slight slanting upward of the brows above them, took on an expression in harmony with her tone. "I never knew you to have such, until lately."

"I suppose, until lately, I didn't have any thoughts at all." There was a pause. Sophie looked away over the beautiful valley, but it could not drive the shadow of anxious and loving sorrow from her face. Cornelia busied herself selecting leaves from her basket, and arranging them in a bouquet. Like them, she was more vividly and variously beautiful since the frost.