At Last Part 27

"WINSTON!"

She gasped and blanched in pain or terror.

"What is the matter? Have I hurt you?" releasing his grasp.

"Yes--HERE!" laying his hand upon her heart, the beautiful eyes terrified and pathetic as those of a wounded deer. "For the love of Heaven, never stab me again with such suggestions. When you die, I shall not care to live. When you cease to love me, I shall wish we had died together on our marriage-day--my husband!"

He let her twine her arms about his neck, laid his cheek to her brow, clasped her tightly and kissed her impetuously, madly, again and yet again--disengaged himself, and ran down the steps. She was standing on the top one, still flushed and breathless from the violence of his embrace, when he looked back from the gate, her commanding figure framed by the embowering creepers, as Mabel's girlish shape had been when Frederic Chilton waved his farewell to her from the same spot.

Did either of them think of it, or would either have reckoned it an ominous coincidence, if the remembrance of that long-ago parting had presented itself then and there?

Herbert spent the day upon the lounge in the family sitting-room--a cosy retreat, between the parlor and the conservatory, which had been added to the lower floor in the reign of the present queen. Her brother's seizure was no trifling ailment. Alternations of stupor and racking spasms of pain defied, for several hours, his wife's application of the remedies she had found efficacious in former attacks. Her ultimate resort was chloroform, and by the liberal use of this, relaxation of the tense nerves and a sleep that resembled healing repose were induced by the middle of the afternoon. The weather continued to threaten rain, although none had fallen as yet, and the wind moaned lugubriously in the leafless branches of the great walnut before the end window of the narrow apartment. It was a grand tree, the patriarch of the grove that sheltered the house from the north winds. Mabel, relieved from watchfulness, and to some extent from anxiety, by her husband's profound slumber, lay back in her chair with a long-drawn sigh, and looked out at the naked limbs of the wrestling giant--the majestic sway and reel she used to note with childish awe--and thought of many things which had befallen her since then, until the steady rocking of the boughs and hum of the November breeze soothed her into languor--then drowsiness--then oblivion.

She awoke in alarm at the sense of something hurtful or startling hovering near her.

The fire had been trimmed before she slept, and now flamed up gayly; the window was dusky, as were the distant corners of the room, and Herbert was gazing steadfastly at her.

"I fell asleep without knowing it. I am sorry! Have you wanted anything?

How long have you been awake?"

"Only a few minutes, my dearest!" with no change in the mesmeric intentness of his gaze. "I want nothing more than to have you always near me. You have been a good, faithful wife, Mabel, better and n.o.bler--a thousandfold n.o.bler than I deserved. I have thought it all over while you were sleeping so tranquilly in my sight. I wish my conscience were void of evil to all mankind as is yours. I awoke with an odd and awful impression upon my mind. The firelight flamed in a bright stream between your chair and me--and I must have dreamed it--or the chloroform had affected my head--I thought it was a river of light dividing us! You were a calm, white angel who had entered into rest--uncaring for and forgetful of me. I was lost, homeless, wandering forever and ever!"

Had her prosaic spouse addressed her in a rhythmic improvisation, Mabel could not have been more astounded.

"You are dreaming yet!" she said, kneeling by him and binding his temples with her cool, firm palms. "When we are divided, it will be by a dark--not a bright river."

"Until death do us part!" Herbert repeated, thoughtfully. "I wish I could hear you say, once, that you do not regret that clause of your marriage vow. I was not your heart's choice, you know, Mabel, however decided may have been the approval of your friends and of your judgment.

The thought oppresses me as it did not in the first years of our wedded life."

"I am glad you have spoken of this," began the wife. "I would disabuse your mind--"

"All in the dark!" exclaimed Mrs. Aylett, at the door. "And what a stifling odor of chloroform!"

Mabel got up, and drew a heavy travelling-shawl that covered Herbert's lower limbs over his arms and chest.

"I will open the window!" she said, deprecatingly.

A sluice of cold air rushed in, beating the blaze this way and that, puffing ashes from the hearth into the room, and eliciting from Mrs.

Aylett what would have been a peevish interjection in another woman.

"My dear sister! the remedy is worse than the offence. Chloroform is preferable to creosote, or whatever abominable element is the princ.i.p.al ingredient of smoke and cold! The thermometer must be down to the freezing-point!"

Mabel lowered the sash.

"You have been sitting in a room without fire, I suspect. The temperature here is delightful. I am sorry we have exiled you from such comfortable quarters."

"Don't speak of it! I cannot endure to sit here alone--or anywhere else.

I have slept most of the afternoon. How the wind blows! I wish Winston were at home."

"It is a dark afternoon. He seldom returns from court so early as this.

It is not six yet."

Mabel still essayed pacification of the other's ruffled mood.

"You are better, I see," Mrs. Aylett said abruptly to her brother. "You were not subject to these spells formerly. People generally outlive const.i.tutional headaches--so I have noticed. It is queer yours should occur so often and wax more violent each time. You should have medical advice before they ripen into a more serious disorder."

Herbert shaded his eyes from the fire, and lay with out replying, until his wife believed he had relapsed into a doze.

She was convinced of her mistake by his saying, slowly and distinctly,--

"You do not enter into Clara's whole meaning, Mabel. We have been careful, all of us, never to tell you that our father was imbecile by the time he was fifty and died, in his sixtieth year, of the disease your brother named this morning--softening of the brain. I, of all his children, am most like him physically. If it be true that this danger menaces me, you should be informed of it, and know, furthermore, that it is incurable."

Mabel also paused before answering.

"I cannot a.s.sent to the hypothesis of your inherited malady, Herbert.

These headaches may mean nothing. But let that be as it may, you should have told me of this before."

"You see," broke in Mrs. Aylett's triumphant sarcasm. "The reward of your maiden attempt at conjugal confidence is reproof. What have I warned you from the beginning?"

"Not reproof," corrected Mabel, in mild decision. "My knowledge of the secret he deemed it wise and kind to withhold would have gained for him my sympathy, and my more constant and intelligent care of his health. It is the hidden fear that grows and multiplies itself most rapidly. Before it is killed it must be dragged to the light."

"That is YOUR hypothesis," was the bright retort. "We Dorrances have justly earned a reputation for discretion by the excellent preservation of our own secrets, and those committed to our keeping by our friends.

My motto is, tell others nothing about yourself which they cannot learn without your confession. An autobiography is always either a bore or a blunder. Not that I would regulate the number and nature of your divulgations to your wife, Herbert. As to Winston's unlucky hit this morning, it was mere fortuity. I have never felt myself called upon to enlighten him in family secrets, and his is an incurious disposition.

He never asks idle questions. He has a marvellous faculty of striking home-blows in the dark, but that is no reason why one should betray his wound by crying out. Apropos to darkness, may I ring for a lamp, or will the light hurt your eyes?"

"The fire-light is more trying," rejoined Mabel, pus.h.i.+ng a screen before the sofa, and placing herself where she could, in its shadow, hold her husband's hand.

It was cold and limp when she lifted it, but tightened upon hers with the instinctive grip of grat.i.tude too profound to be uttered.

She had never been so near loving him as at the instant in which he believed he had incurred her ever-lasting displeasure. Generosity and pity were fast undoing the petrifying influences of her early disappointment, their mutual reserve, and tacit misunderstandings. If half he feared were true, his need of her affection, her counsel and companions.h.i.+p were dire. Whatever wrong he had done her by keeping back the tale of hereditary infirmity, he had suffered more from the act than she could ever do. Who knew how much of what she, with others, mistook for const.i.tutional phlegm and studied austerity, was the outward sign of the battle between dread of his inherited doom and the resolve of an iron will to defy natural laws and the sentence of destiny herself, and hold reason upon her rickety throne?

Heaven's gentlest and kindest angels were busy with Mabel Dorrance's heart in that reverie, and, as they wrought, the cloud that had rested there for fifteen years broke into rainbow smiles that illumined her countenance into the similitude of the s.h.i.+ning ones.

"I bless Thee, Father, the All-wise and Ever-merciful, that she is safe!" was her voiceless thanksgiving.

No more bitter tears over the lonely, sunken grave! no more hearkening, with aching, never-to-be-satisfied ears for the patter of the "little feet that never trod." The great sorrow of her life that had been good in His sight was at length a blessing in hers. Her "hereafter" of knowledge of His doings had come to her in this world.

"Does it rain, Peter?" questioned Mrs. Aylett of the lad who brought in lights.

"Yes, ma'am. It's beginnin' to storm powerful!" he said, respectfully communicative.

"Your master has not come?"

"No, ma'am."

"See that the lantern over the great gate is lighted, and that some one is ready to take his horse. And, Peter," as he was going out, "tell Thomas not to bring in supper until Mr. Aylett returns."

She moved to the window, bowed her hands on either side of her eyes to exclude the radiance within, and strained them into the black, black night.