Hetty's Strange History Part 20

Are you ill? You shall have a rest; but we can't give you up."

"No, I am not ill," replied Hetty, "but circ.u.mstances have occurred which make it impossible for me to say what my plans will be now."

"What is it? Bless my soul, what shall we do?" said Dr. Macgowan, looking very much vexed. "Really, Mrs. Smailli, you can't give up your post in this way."

The doctor forgot himself in his dismay.

"I would not leave it, if there were no one to fill it," replied Hetty, gently; "but Sister Catharine is a better nurse than I am. She will more than fill my place."

"Pshaw! Mrs. Smailli," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the doctor. "She can't hold a candle to you. Is it any thing about the salary which is taking you away? I will raise it: you shall fix your own price."

Flus.h.i.+ng red with shame, Hetty said hotly:

"I have never worked for the money, Dr. Macgowan; only for enough for my living. Money has nothing to do with it. Good-morning."

"That's just what comes of depending on women," growled Dr. Macgowan.

"They're all alike; no stability to 'em! What under heaven can it be?

She's surely too old to have got any idea of marrying into her head.

I'll go and see Father Antoine, and see if he can't influence her."

But when Dr. Macgowan, a few days later, reached Father Antoine's cottage, he was met by news which slew on the instant all his hopes of ever seeing Mrs. Hibba Smailli in his House again as a nurse. Hetty and her husband had spent the previous evening with Father Antoine, and had laid their case fully before him. Hetty had given him permission to tell all the facts to Dr. Macgowan, under the strictest pledges of secrecy.

"'Pon my word! 'pon my word!" said the doctor, "the most extraordinary thing I ever heard of! Who'd have thought that calm, clearheaded woman would ever have committed such a folly? It's a case of monomania; a real monomania, Father Antoine; never can be sure of such a brain's that; may take another, any day; clear case of monomania; most uncomfortable!

uncomfortable! so embarra.s.sing! don't you know? eh? What's going to be done now? How does the man take it? Is he a gentleman? Hang me, if I wouldn't let a woman stay where she was, that had served me such a trick!"

Father Antoine laughed a low pleasant laugh.

"And that would be by how much you had loved her, is it not?" he said.

"He is a physician also, the good Aunt's husband, and he understands. He will take her with him; and, if he did not, she would die; for, now that it is plain to her, how grievously she hath caused him to sorrow, her love is like a fever till she can make amends for all."

"Amends!" growled Dr. Macgowan, "that's just like a woman too. Amends!

I'd like to know what amends there can be for such a scandal, such a disgrace: 'pon my word she must have been mad; that's the only way of accounting for it."

"It is not that there will be scandal," replied Father Antoine. "I am to marry them in the chapel, and there is no one in all the wide world, except to you and to me, that it will be known that they have been husband and wife before."

"Eh! What! Married again!" exclaimed Dr. Macgowan. "Well, that's like a woman too. Why, what d.a.m.ned nonsense! If she was ever his wife, she's his wife now, isn't she? I shouldn't think you'd lend yourself, Father Antoine, to any such transaction as that."

"Gently, gently!" replied Father Antoine: "rail not so at womankind. It is she who wishes to go with him at once; and who says as thou, that she is still his wife: but it is he who will not. He says that she hath for ten years borne a name other than his; that in her own country she hath been ten years mourned for as dead; that he hath by process of law, on account of her death, inherited and sold all the estate that she did own."

"Rich, was she rich!" interrupted Dr. Macgowan. "Well, 'pon my word, it's the most extraordinary thing I ever did hear of: never could have happened in England, sir, never!"

"I know not if it were a large estate," continued Father Antoine, "it would be no difference: if it had been millions she would have left it and come away. She was full of renunciation. Ah! but she must be beloved of the Virgin."

"So you are really going to marry them over again, are you?" broke in the impatient doctor.

"I have said that I would," replied Father Antoine, "and it is great joy to me: neither should it seem strange to you. Your church doth not recognize the sacrament of baptism, when it has been performed by unconsecrated hands of dissenters: you do rebaptize all converts from those sects. So our church does not recognize the sacrament of marriage, when performed by any one outside of its own priesthood. I shall with true gladness of heart administer the holy sacrament of marriage to these two so strangely separated, and so strangely brought together.

They have borne ten years of penance for whatever of sin had gone before: the church will bless them now."

"Hem," said Dr. Macgowan, gruffly, unable to controvert the logic of Father Antoine's position in regard to the sacraments; "that is all right from your point of view: but what do they make of it; I don't suppose they admit that their first marriage was invalid, do they?"

Dr. Macgowan was in the worst of humors. He was about to lose a nurse who had been to him for ten years, like his right hand; and he was utterly discomfited and confused in all his confirmed impressions of her character, by these startling revelations of her history. He would not have been a Briton if these untoward combinations of events had not made him surly.

"Nay, nay!" said Father Antoine, placably. "Not so. It is only the husband; and he has but one thing to say: that she who was his wife died to him, to her country, to her friends, to the law. There is even in her village a beautiful and high monument of marble which sets forth all the recountal of her death. She would go back to that country with him, and confess to every man the thing she had done. She prayed him that he would take her. But he will not. He says it would be shame; and the name of his wife that died shall never be shamed. It is a narrow strait for a man who loves a woman. I cannot say that it is clear to me what my own will would be in such a case. I am much moved by each when I hear them talk of it. Ah, but she has the grand honesty! Thou shouldst have heard her cry out when he said that to confess all would be a shame.

"'Nay, nay!' cried she, 'to conceal is a shame.'

"' Ay!' replied her husband, 'but thou hast thought it no shame to conceal thyself for these ten years, and to lie about thy name.' He speaketh with a great anger to her at times, spite of his love.

"'Ah,' she answered him, in a voice which nigh set me to weeping: 'Ah, my husband, I did think it shame: but I bore it, for sake of my love to thee; and now that I know I was wrong, all the more do I long to confess all, both that and this, and to stand forgiven or unforgiven, as I may, clear in the eyes of all who ever knew me.'

"But he will not, and I have counselled her to pray him no more. For he has already endured heavy things at her hands; and, if this one thing be to her a grievous burden, all the more doth it show her love, if she accept it and bear it to the end."

"Well, well," said Dr. Macgowan, somewhat wearied with Father Antoine's sentiments and emotions, "I have lost the best nurse I ever had, or shall have. I'll say that much for her; but I can't help feeling that there was something wrong in her brain somewhere, which might have cropped out again any day. Most extraordinary! most extraordinary!" And Dr. Macgowan walked away with a certain lofty, indifferent air, which English people so well understand, of was.h.i.+ng one's hands of matters generally.

There had, indeed, been a sore struggle between Hetty and her husband on this matter of their being remarried by Father Antoine. When Dr. Eben first said to her: "And now, what are we to do, Hetty?" she looked at him in an agony of terror and gasped:

"Why, Eben, there is only one thing for us to do; don't we belong to each other? don't you love me? don't you mean to take me home with you?"

"Would you go home with me, Hetty?" he asked emphatically; "go back to Welbury? let every man, woman, and child in the county, nay, in the State, know that all my grief for you had been worse than needless, that I had been a deserted husband for ten years, and that you had been living under an a.s.sumed name all that time? Would you do this?"

Hetty's face paled. "What else is there to do?" she said.

He continued:

"Could you bear to have your name, your father's name, my name, all dragged into notoriety, all tarnished by being linked with this monstrous tale of a woman who fled--for no reason whatever--from her home, friends, husband, and hid herself, and was found only by an accident?"

"Oh, Eben! spare me," moaned Hetty.

"I can't spare you now, Hetty," he answered. "You must look the thing in the face. I have been looking it in the face ever since the first hour in which I found you. What are we to do?"

"I will stay on here if you think it best," said Hetty. "If you will be happier so. n.o.body need ever know that I am alive."

Doctor Eben threw his arms around her. "Leave you here! Why, Hetty, will you never understand that I love you?" he exclaimed; "love you, love you, would no more leave you than I would kill myself?"

"But what is there, then, that we can do?" asked Hetty.

"Be married again here, as if we had never been married! You under your new name," replied Doctor Eben rapidly.

Hetty's face expressed absolute horror. "We--you and I--married again!

Why Eben, it would be a mockery," she exclaimed.

"Not so much a mockery," her husband retorted, "as every thing that I have done, and every thing that you have done for ten whole years."

"Oh, Eben! I don't think it would be right," cried Hetty. "It would be a lie."

"A lie!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed her husband, scornfully. Poor Hetty! The bitter harvest of her wrong deed was garnered for her, poured upon her head at every turn, by the pitilessness of events. Inexorable seasons, surer than any other seed-time and harvest, are those uncalendared seasons in which souls sow and reap with meek patience.

Hetty replied: