Oldfield Part 8

You don't know anything about chess, do you, Tom?" he asked.

The stricken man made no reply; he could utter but few words and those only with indistinctness and difficulty. He did not even turn his head; the turning of it ever so slowly was hard and caused him great pain.

"I scarcely think chess would be the thing anyway--it's too heavy and requires too much thinking to be good for an invalid. You must have something light and amusing. That's the sort of game we must give you to keep you from moping."

The doctor spoke to the husband, but his eyes were on the wife and regarding her anxiously, though his lips were smiling.

There was no responsive smile on Anne's pale face. It was quite still and grave as it always was, but a thin cloud of alarm seemed suddenly rising in her clear gaze, as white smoke floats over the crystalline sky of a winter's day. But yet she said not a word.

The doctor also fell unexpectedly silent, with his eyes fixed sternly on the back of the sick man's chair and a frown gathering between his s.h.a.ggy, grizzled brows, as it always gathered when he was sorely perplexed. He was only an old-fas.h.i.+oned country doctor--merely a good man first and scientist afterwards. So that he now sat speechless, casting about in his troubled thoughts for the gentlest words wherewith he must wound the quiet, pale-faced woman, whose very lack of comprehension appealed to his great heart as all helplessness did. He saw, as only doctors can see, how frail was the body holding this strenuous spirit. As he thus sat silent, gathering courage, the utter stillness of the room grew tense. The young man, sitting on the other side of the chamber, silent and ill at ease, moved uneasily, keeping his eyes on the floor. The soft, monotonous murmur of the bees in the honeysuckle over the window sounded unnaturally loud and shrill.

At last the doctor spoke distinctly and firmly, but without looking at Anne:--

"There is only one thing to do. We must find a partner for Tom--Mr.

Gordon here has kindly offered--and we must give him a real good, lively game of cards."

It was out now, and he was glad and sorry at the same time.

Anne gave a startled cry, inarticulate, like the terror of a dumb creature. She recoiled as if a black pit had opened at her feet.

"Tom's need is very great. He is very, very weak," the doctor urged, in the s.p.a.ce of the recoil.

Anne instantly flew to her husband as the mother bird flies to the fallen fledgling, and laid her little trembling hands on his broken shoulders, as the mother bird spreads her weak wings between helplessness and danger.

"I will take care of him," she said, speaking out of that tender, protecting maternal instinct which is the divine part of every good woman's love for her husband.

"I can see no other way," the doctor urged gently, not knowing what else to say.

"There must be some other way! Surely our Father never forces us to commit sin. Surely in His mercy He gives us a choice;" Anne panted, like a frightened wild creature at bay.

Yet she faced the two men steadily over her husband's powerless head, her clear eyes clouded darkly now, and her set face as white and as inscrutable as the cold mask of death.

"I can only say again what I have said before," the doctor repeated weakly, glancing at Anne and quickly looking away.

"The way will mercifully be opened unto me. A light will be shown as a lamp to my feet."

Anne's murmured words were barely to be heard, yet they bore, nevertheless, to the three men who listened, the full strength of her faith, firm as the Rock of Ages.

The doctor arose hurriedly and went out into the pa.s.sage, and stood for a while in the doorway, looking at the quiet big road, at the peace of the green earth, and at the sunlight flooding the blue heavens. When he turned back his sunken eyes were wet and he could not meet Anne's gaze nor the sick man's, which was also turned upon him with all its dumb, restless, desperate misery--with all its terrible voiceless clamor for relief.

"I don't know what to do," he said, trying to speak lightly, but sighing in spite of himself and spreading out his hands. "I suppose we'll have to give it up, Tom, old fellow. Well, maybe Anne knows best after all.

These wives of ours usually do know better what is good for us than we know ourselves. A good wife is always more to be depended upon than medicine when a man's pulling through a tedious convalescence. You don't need any more medicine. I am coming, though, every day, if I can--just as a neighbor, to see how you are getting along."

He turned away from the sick man. He could not look at him without being compelled to renew the struggle with Anne; that infinitely cruel, that ineffably piteous struggle which wrung his own heart, and which would be useless in the end. He took one of Anne's cold little hands in his warm large clasp, thinking how small and weak it was to hold so firmly to its mistaken ideals, how much more firm than his own, which was not strong enough to hold to an unmistakable duty. And then he and Lynn Gordon went away, as best they could go, both feeling as the conscientious and the impressionable must always feel after having, however unwillingly, stirred the depths of the deep, still pool of another's life.

Out of the house, and out of hearing, the doctor became, however, once more himself in a measure. He smote his powerful thigh with his strong hand, and upbraided himself aloud for most disgraceful moral cowardice.

He convicted himself, almost in a shout, of having deserted Tom Watson--poor devil--and of having virtually run away, like the veriest coward, simply because he knew that, in a moment more, he would have been crying like any child. And all on account of the silly fanaticism of a woman with a mind no wider than a cambric needle--sheer foolishness, morbid sentimentality--and much more of the same tenor, while Lynn Gordon laughed at him a little nervously.

"But, foolish or wise, she believes what she does believe. By the eternal, I'd like to hear any man doubt it! Why, young sir, that little slim, unbending splinter of a woman is the stuff that they threw to the beasts in old Rome!"

There was no consciousness of heroism in Anne's own sadly humble thoughts. When the doctor and the young man were gone, she bent down silently and kissed her husband with tender timidity, as if begging his forgiveness for what she could not help. Kneeling by his side, as she often knelt in her unwearying service, she strove to look into his averted face, and to meet and to hold his miserable eyes with her own clear gaze, from which the clouds were fast drifting away. The white light behind her strange eyes had sunk low under the shock, and had died out in the stress of terror; but it was gradually beginning to rise and s.h.i.+ne again through the crystal windows of her soul. Her husband did not look at her; he seemed not to hear what she said; he was staring after the two men who were walking away down the big road, his look straining to follow them as a chained animal strains its fetters toward companions.h.i.+p. Anne saw nothing of this; she was not a bright woman, and entirely without imagination. She saw only that he did not notice her, that she was far from his thoughts. And she was used to being over-looked by her husband, and accustomed to being forgotten by him.

She arose and went quietly across the room, and brought a footstool, and sat down upon it by his side, laying her head on the arm of his chair, with her hands folded on her lap.

She was not weeping,--she had never been a crying woman,--and in truth she was not more unhappy at this moment than she had been for years. She was, indeed, even less unhappy, now that the shock was well over and the danger safely pa.s.sed. A feeling of peace was in truth already hovering in her breast, though very timidly, as a frightened dove comes slowly back to its nest. This spirit of peace had begun to brood in Anne's lonely heart soon after her husband's hurt, although Anne herself was scarcely aware of the fact. Through the endless months of his greatest suffering she had been not only upheld, but comforted, by the growing belief--changing little by little to exaltation--that the torture was but a fiery furnace intended for the purification of her husband's soul and her own--for she, too, suffered with every pang which wrenched his shattered body. It was a terrible faith, and yet it was the faith of the martyrs; and Anne held not back from sealing it, as they sealed it, with life itself,--ay! even unto the dear life of her husband, which was infinitely dearer to her than her own. For she loved him as none save a nature such as hers can love; with an intense, narrow, almost fierce and wholly terrible concentration. It was a love which had almost entirely excluded every one else; not only every other man, but her father and mother and sisters and brothers, all had been shut out from her inmost heart, from her earliest youth till this latest moment when she sat unnoticed by her husband's side. He had never loved her with the best love that he was capable of giving. Love is perhaps never quite equal, certainly it never seems equal, in any marriage. The one always loves more, or less, than the other. And then, in circ.u.mscribed lives, such as Anne's and Tom's were, both men and women choose the one whom they prefer from among the few whom they chance to know; they cannot choose from a large number which might possibly have induced a different selection. But the width of the world would not have altered Anne's choice. And a love like hers changes no more with time than it is influenced by environment; it is too little of the flesh, and too much of the spirit to age, or to wither, or to grow cold. Even her husband's neglect had made no difference through all the unhappy years of her married life; even his disregard of religion did not lessen or alter her love, although it put her and her husband farther apart than they might otherwise have been, and came nearer than all else to breaking her heart. She could bear the loss of happiness in her daily life; she could bear to be deprived of her husband's society day after day and night after night, by interests and a.s.sociations in which she had no part,--living was but waiting, anyway, to Anne. But she could not bear the thought of the Long Time without the beloved. To Anne, as much as to any mediaeval saint in any rock-ribbed cell, the longest, happiest earthly life measured nothing against a glorious eternity. Her husband was handsome, spirited, high-hearted, masterful, compelling, and kind, too, in his careless way; another woman might have been happy and proud to be his wife; but Anne's heart had ached from first to last for the one thing of which she never spoke, and for which she was always praying.

Then came the accident, striking down the strong man at the height of his powers, as the lightning blasts the mighty oak in full leaf. Stunned at first, Anne, rallying, felt the blow as a manifestation of offended Power. A mind like hers works in strangely tortuous ways. But after a while she began to see in this awful affliction a means of grace thus given when all else had failed; and it was then that the wan ghost of happiness began to visit Anne's desolate breast. The world had been violently wrenched away from her husband's grasp, which otherwise would, most likely, never have loosed; it might perhaps now come to pa.s.s--through mercy cloaked in cruelty--that his thoughts would turn heavenward. So poor Anne thought, and thus it was that when, to all outward seeming, the husband's hopeless convalescence was the last settling down of darkest despair, in reality a s.h.i.+ning rainbow of hope first began to span the wife's long-clouded content.

Was it then possible for Anne to listen for a moment to this incredible, monstrous, destroying thing which the doctor had urged? Could she by listening endanger this late-coming chance for the salvation of her husband's soul in consenting to the sinful relief of his bodily need?

The thought of yielding never crossed her mind, nor the shade of a shadow of doubt that she was right. It was to her simply a question of her conscience standing firm against her love. Anne--fortunate in this, however unfortunate in all other respects--always saw the way before her, open, and straight, and very, very narrow. To her clear sight a sharp, distinct line ever divided right from wrong; on this side everything was snow-white, on that side everything was jet-black. There were no myriad middle shades of gray to bewilder Anne's crystal gaze.

Living were less hard for some of us--some, too, as conscientious as Anne--if all could see, or even think they see, as clearly through the whitish, grayish, blackish mists, so that they also might be able unerringly to tell where the pure white ends and the real black begins.

XII

MISS JUDY'S LITTLE WAYS

When the doctor's deep voice roared out what he thought of any man who failed in his duty for fear of offending anybody's prejudices, Miss Judy, who was busy among the shrubbery in her yard, overheard him, and was quite frightened by the severity of his tone, though she did not catch the words. She knew him to be the mildest of absent-minded men, and she accordingly fluttered around the house, wondering what could be the matter.

She had been engaged in tying up a rose bush which grew at the side of the door, and which was too heavy laden with its sweet burden of blush roses. She was holding a big bunch in her hand as she hurried toward the gate, blus.h.i.+ng when she saw the gentlemen, till her delicate face was as pink as the freshest among her roses. The doctor brightened and smiled, as everybody brightened and smiled at the sight of Miss Judy. He opened the gate before she reached it, knowing that she would never tempt ill luck by shaking hands over it. When they had shaken hands, he presented Lynn Gordon, whom she had not met, and who stood a little apart, thinking what a pretty old lady she was.

"Miss Judy," said the doctor, before she had time to ask what had happened, "what do you think of playing poker?"

"Mercy--me!" exclaimed Miss Judy, opening her blue eyes very wide in blank amazement. And then, catching her breath, she became mildly scandalized.

"Well--really, doctor!" she began, blus.h.i.+ng more vividly, making her little mouth smaller than usual, "primping" it, as she would have said, and bridling with the daintiest little air of prudery, which she never would have dreamt of putting on for the doctor alone, but which seemed to her to be the proper manner before a strange young gentleman--and one from Boston too. "I have never been required to think anything of any gambling game! Such matters were left entirely to gentlemen; they were not mentioned before ladies in my day."

"Bless your little heart!" exclaimed the doctor. "If I've said a word that you don't like, I'm ready to go right down on my knees in the dust--here and now--in the middle of the big road."

Miss Judy smiled, shaking her little head till the thin curls behind her pretty ears were more like silver mist than ever. In gentle confusion she began dividing the bunch of blush roses into halves, giving one to the doctor and the other to Lynn. She had known his father, she said shyly to the young man, and his mother also, although not so well, since the latter had not been brought up in Oldfield as his father was.

"But, Miss Judy, I want to talk to you seriously about card-playing,"

the doctor persisted. "You see you have got us all into the selfish habit of bringing every one of our burdens to lay them on your little shoulders. Unselfishness like yours does harm; it breeds selfishness in others."

Miss Judy protested that she had not the least idea of what he was talking about; but she saw that he was in earnest, and she straightway forgot all her quaint airs, and listened with deepest interest and tenderest sympathy to his story of his perplexity over the hopeless case of Tom Watson, and over the unbending att.i.tude of Anne.

"The pa.s.sion for gaming is just as strong in that poor fellow as it ever was. I had suspected it before, but I wasn't sure until to-day," the doctor went on, looking across the way at the sick man's window. "I disapprove of gambling as much as any one, but I can't for the life of me see any harm that could possibly come now to that poor unfortunate, from any sort of a game--if anybody can possibly stand it to play with him."

Miss Judy looked puzzled and a little alarmed. "Were you--do you wish _me_ to play with him?" she faltered, rather shocked, yet wondering if she could learn, and quite ready to try.

The doctor was too deeply absorbed--too seriously troubled--to smile as he usually did at Miss Judy's sweet absurdities, appreciating them almost as much as he valued her heart of gold. In truth he hardly heard what she said.

"Maybe you can make Anne see how different things are now," he went on musingly, and somewhat hesitatingly, as though the possibility had suddenly occurred to him. "Women understand one another," he added, uttering a fallacy accepted by many a sensible man and rejected by every sensible woman.

The fair old face on the other side of the gate grew grave in its perplexity. Quick to decide for herself in any matter of principle, Miss Judy was slow to decide for any one else. She did not consider herself wise, and it was hard, she thought, for the wisest to put herself in another's place, and no one--so she believed--could judge justly without so doing. She knew Anne's prejudice, that had been well known always to all the Oldfield people; but she had never ventured to form an opinion as to whether Anne had ever been justified in taking such a stand, which appeared strange to Miss Judy even in the beginning, and stranger now in Tom's extremity. She had merely wondered, as everybody had; but it was always harder for Miss Judy than for almost any one else to understand how there ever could be any actual conflict between love and faith, which were always and inseparably one and the same to her.