Bressant Part 31

"When does the next train go through here in the opposite direction?"

"We're just awaiting for one to come along and give us the track--and there she is now," returned the conductor, as he took his departure.

The whistle screamed malevolently, and, with a jerk and a rattle, the car began to move off. Bressant rose suddenly from his seat, walked quickly along the aisle to the door, pa.s.sed through to the platform, grasped the iron bal.u.s.trade with one hand, and swung himself lightly to the ground. The whistle screamed again like a disappointed fiend.

"Guess that young man was up late last night," remarked the conductor to the brakeman; "a powerful sound sleep he was in, anyhow."

"Off on a spree to New York, most like," responded the brakeman, tightening his dirty-brown tippet around his neck, "and thought better of it at the last minute."

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

TILL THE ELEVENTH HOUR.

Her fruitless call for Bressant seemed quite to exhaust Sophie. For a long time afterward she hardly opened her mouth, except to swallow some hot black coffee. The professor sat, for the most part, with his finger on her pulse, his eyes looking more hollow and his forehead more deeply lined than ever before, but with no other signs of anxiety or suffering.

Cornelia came in and out--a restless spirit. She awaited Sophie's recovery with no less of dread than of hope. Her life hung, as it were, upon her sister's. The moment in which Sophie recovered her faculties enough to think and speak would be the last that Cornelia could maintain her mask of honor and respectability, for Cornelia knew that Sophie was in possession of her secret; she had been up in her room, and the open window had told the story.

It was a time of awful suspense. Cornelia wished there had been somebody there to talk with; even Bill Reynolds would have been welcome now. He, however, had departed long ago, having bethought himself that his horse was catching its death o' cold, standing out there with no rug on. She was entirely alone; she hardly dared to think, for fear something guilty should be generated in her mind; and, though every moment was pain, without stop or mitigation, every moment was inestimably precious, too; it was so much between her and revelation. She almost counted the seconds as they pa.s.sed, yet rated them for dragging on so wearily.

Every tick of the little ormolu clock marked away a large part of her life, and yet was wearisome to so much of it as remained. Sometimes she debated whether she could not antic.i.p.ate the end by speaking out at once, of her own free-will; but no, short as her time was, she could not afford to lose the smallest fraction of it--no, she could not.

Bethinking herself that her father would be lost to her after the revelation had taken place, Cornelia felt a consuming desire to enjoy his love to the fullest possible extent during the interval. She wanted him to call her his dear daughter--to hold her hand--to pat her check--to kiss her forehead with his rough, bristly lips--to tell her, in his gruff, kind voice, that she was a solace and a resource to him.

The thousand various little ways in which he had testified his deep-lying affection--she had not noticed them or thought much of them, so long as she felt secure of always commanding them--with what different eyes she looked back upon them now. Oh! if they might all be lavished upon her during these last few remaining hours or minutes.

Should she not go and sit down at his knee, and ask him to pet her and caress her?

No; she would not steal the love for which her soul thirsted, even though he whom she robbed should not feel the loss. She had stripped him of much that would doubtless seem to him of far more worth and importance; but, when it came to taking, under false pretenses, a thing so sacred as her father's love, Cornelia drew back, and, spite of her great need, had the grace to make the sacrifice. Let it not be underrated: a woman who sees honor, reputation, and happiness slipping away from her, will struggle hardest of all for the little remaining sc.r.a.p of love, and only feel wholly forlorn after that, too, has vanished away.

At length, about daybreak or a little after, Sophie spoke, low, but very distinctly:

"I'm going to sleep; don't wake me or disturb me;" and almost immediately sank into a profound slumber--so very profound, indeed, that it rather bore likeness to a trance. Yet, her pulse still beat regularly, though faintly, and at long intervals, and her breath went and came, though with a motion almost imperceptible to the eye.

"Is it a good sign? Will she get well now?" asked Cornelia, as she and her father stood looking down at her.

"She'll never get well, my dear," said Professor Valeyon, very quietly.

"Her mind and body both have had too great a shock--far too great. More has happened than we know of yet, I suspect. But we shall hear, we shall hear. Yes, sleep is good for her: it'll make her comfortable. Her nerves will be the quieter."

"O papa! papa! is our little Sophie going to die?" faltered Cornelia; and then she broke down completely. She had not fully grasped the idea until that moment; but the very tone in which her father spoke had the declaration of death in it. It was not his usual deep, gruff, forcible voice, shutting off abruptly at the end of his sentences, and beginning them as sharply. It had lost body and color, was thin, subdued, and monotonous. Professor Valeyon had changed from a l.u.s.ty winter into a broken, infirm, and marrowless thaw.

He stood and watched her weep for a long while, bending his eyes upon her from beneath their heavy, impending brows. Heavy and impending they were still, but the vitality--the sort of warm-hearted fierceness--of his look was gone--gone! A young and bitter grief, like Cornelia's, coming at a time of life when the feelings are so tender and their manifestation of pain so poignant--is terrible enough to see, G.o.d knows!

but the dry-eyed anguish of the old, of those who no longer possess the latent, indefinite, all-powerful encouragement of the future to support them--who can breathe only the lifeless, cheerless air of the past--grief with them does not convulse: it saps, and chills, and crumbles away, without noise or any kind of demonstration. The sight does not terrify or harrow us, but it makes us sick at heart and tinges our thoughts with a gloomy stain, which rather sinks out of sight than is worn away.

"Will you stay and watch with her, my dear?" said the old man, at last.

"She'll sleep some hours, I think. I'll take a little sleep myself. Call me when she wakes."

So Cornelia was left alone to watch her sleeping and dying sister. All the morning she sat by the bed, almost as motionless as Sophie herself.

Her mind was like a surf-wave that breaks upon the sh.o.r.e, slips back, regathers itself, and undulates on, to break again. Begin where she would, she always ended on that bed, with its well-known face, set around with soft dark hair, always in the same position upon the pillow, which yielded beneath it in always the same creases and curves.

By-and-by, wherever she turned, still she saw that face, with the pillow rising around it; and when she shut her eyes, there it was, growing, in the blackness, clearer the more she tried to avert her mind.

It seemed to Cornelia--for time enters involuntarily into our thoughts upon all subjects--that the present order of things must have existed for a far longer period than a single night. How could the events of a few hours wear such deep and uneffaceable channels in human lives? But our souls have a chronology of their own, compared with the vividness and instantaneous workings of which, our bodies bear but a dull and lagging part. Sorrow and joy, which act upon the soul immediately, must labor long ere they can write themselves legibly and permanently upon our faces.

Cornelia fell to wondering, too--as most people under the pressure of grief are p.r.o.ne to do--whether there were any sympathy or any connection between the world and the human beings who live upon it. Her eyes wandered hither and thither about the room, and found it almost startling in its unaltered naturalness. There was the same view of trees, road, and field, out of the window; and the same snow which had fallen before the tragedy, lay there now. Even in Sophie's face there was no adequate transformation. Indeed, being somewhat reddened and swollen by the reaction from freezing, a stranger might have supposed that she was tolerably stout and glowing with vitality. And Cornelia looked at her own hands, as they lay in her lap: they were as round and shapely as ever; and there, upon the smooth back of one, below the forefinger, was a white scar, where she had cut herself when a little girl. Moreover--Cornelia started as her eyes rested upon it, and the blood rose painfully to her face--there was a dark, discolored bruise, encircling one wrist: Bressant's last gift--an ominous betrothal ring!

Thus several hours pa.s.sed away, until, at length, Cornelia raised her eyes suddenly, and encountered those of Sophie, fixed upon her.

What a look was that! At all times there was more to be seen in Sophie's eyes than in most women's; but now they were fathomless, and yet never more clear and simple. Cornelia read in them all and more than legions of words could have told her. There were visible the complete grasp and appreciation of Cornelia's and Bressant's crime; the realization of her own position between them; pity and sympathy for the sinners, too, were there; and love, not sisterly, nor quite human, for Sophie had already begun to put on immortality--but such a love as an angel might have felt, knowing the temptation and the punishment. Before that look Cornelia felt her own bitterness and anguish fade away, as a candle is obliterated by the sun. She saw in Sophie so much higher a capacity for feeling, so much profounder and more sublime an emotion, that she was ashamed of her own beside it.

There was at once a comprehensiveness and a particularity in Sophie's gaze which, while humbling and abasing Cornelia, brought a comforting feeling that full justice, upon all points, had been done her in Sophie's mind. There was no lack of charity for her trials and temptations, no vindictiveness. Cornelia felt no impulse to plead her cause, because aware that all she could say would be antic.i.p.ated in her sister's forgiveness. Nay, she almost wished there had been some bitterness and anger against which to contend. Perhaps it may be so with our souls in their judgment-day; G.o.d's mercy may outstrip the poor conjectures we have formed about it. He may see palliation for our sins, which we ourselves had not taken into account.

After a few moments, Sophie beckoned Cornelia to come near, and, as the latter stood beside the bed, took her by the hand and smiled.

"I've been all this time with Bressant," were her first words, spoken faintly, but with a quiet and serene a.s.surance.

Cornelia made no answer; indeed, she could not speak. Strange and incomprehensible as Sophie's a.s.sertion was, she did not think of doubting but that in some way it must be true. Sophie continued:

"Before I went to sleep, I prayed G.o.d to send my spirit to him; and we have been together. Neelie, he is coming back!"

"Coming back! Sophie, coming back! For what?"

"Don't look so frightened, my darling. He will tell you why when he gets here. That will be to-morrow at noon."

"O Sophie! Sophie! the day and hour of your marriage!"

Cornelia sank upon her knees, and hid her face upon the edge of the bed.

But Sophie let her hand wander over her head, with a soothing motion.

"No, dear; that's all over, Neelie dear, you know. Not the day and hour of my marriage any more. Neelie, I want to ask you something."

Cornelia lifted her head from the bedside; then, divining from Sophie's face, ere it was spoken, what her question was to be, faintness and terror seized upon her, and she clasped her hands over her eyes. The unexpectedness of Sophie's first awakening, and her subsequent strange speech concerning Bressant, had driven from Cornelia's head the matter which had monopolized her thoughts and fears before; and it now recurred to her with an effect almost as overwhelming as if the idea had been a new one.

"I couldn't do it," said she, huskily; "it seemed worse than killing myself. I believe it would have killed me to have stood before him, with his eyes upon my face, and have told him--told him--"

"Yes, dear, yes; it must not be you, Neelie. How is he? Does he seem well and cheerful?"

"I don't know--I've hardly dared to look at him, or speak to him. He's been lying down, I believe, since you went to sleep."

"Ask him to come to me," Sophie said, after a pause. "I will speak to him; I'll tell him; it will be best that I should do it; and you will trust me?"

"O Sophie!" was all that Cornelia could say; but it expressed at least the fullness of her heart. What must be the love and tenderness that could undertake such a task as this! How great the trial for a nature delicate and shrinking, like Sophie's, to bear witness before their own father of her sister's sin against herself! But Sophie was as brave as she was feminine and delicate.

Cornelia's grat.i.tude, however, was mingled still with a despairing agony, and her life seemed to be escaping from her. If this cup might but pa.s.s!

"He will not be to me as you are, Sophie. He will never look at me again."

"Do not fear," replied Sophie, with her faint but incomparable smile.

"If I can forgive you, surely he must. Go and call him, and then stay in your room till he comes to you."