"I thought perhaps you might rest, even if you did not sleep."
"I shall never be any more rested than I am now," answered the Major's wife. After a silence of some length she spoke again; "In all this we should not forget Mr. Owen," she said, as though taking up a task which must be performed. "I feel sure that he is suffering deeply. You know what he must be thinking?"
"So long as he does not speak, what he thinks is of small consequence," said Miss Carroll.
"It may be so to you. It is not to him." She paused. "I can remember that I once liked him," she went on, in a monotonous tone. "And I can even believe that I shall like him again. But not now, not now. Now it is too near – those cruel words he spoke about my boy."
"He did not know – "
"Of course he did not; and I try to be just. He was angry, hurt, alarmed; he was hurt that I should treat him as I did – I treated him horribly – and he was alarmed about you. I have never thanked you for what you did that day, Sara – the day he came to warn us; I could not. For I knew how you loathed it – the expedient you took. You only took it because there was no other."
"You are very hard to me, mamma."
"About your feeling I am; how can I help it? But not about the deed: that was noble. In order to help me you let Mr. Owen suppose that you were engaged to a man he – he utterly despised. Well, you helped me. But you hurt him; you hurt Frederick Owen that morning about as deeply as you could." She moved to Sara's side in the darkness, took her hand with a quick grasp and held it in both her own. "And you are so proud," she whispered softly, "that you will never acknowledge that you hurt yourself too; that the sacrifice you then made in lowering yourself by your own act in his eyes was as great a one as a woman can make; for he loves you devotedly, jealously, and you —you know how much you care for him."
Without leaving time for reply, she moved back to her former place, and went on with what she had been saying, as though that sudden soft interpolated whisper had not existed. "Yes – this strange double feeling that I have about Frederick Owen makes me even feel sorry for him at times, sorry to have him suffer as I know he must be suffering, sorry to have him think what I know he must be thinking of you; and also of me. For he thinks that you had a liking for a man whom he considered unworthy to speak your name (oh, detestable arrogance!); he thinks that it was clandestine, that you dared not tell your father; and that I was protecting you in it as well as I could; all this, of course, he must believe. Death has put an end to it, and now it will never be known; this also he is thinking. But, meanwhile, he knows it. And he cannot forget it. He thinks you have in your heart the same feeling still. But I remembered – I did what I could for you by telling him that it was but a fancy of the moment, that it would pass."
"Oh!" murmured Sara, with a quick, involuntary gesture of repulsion; then she stopped.
"I was trying to pave a way out of it for you. You do not like the way, because it includes – includes the supposition that you – But one can never please you, Sara Carroll!"
She rose and began to walk swiftly to and fro across the room, her footsteps making no sound on the thick, faded, old-fashioned carpet – a relic from the days of the Sea Island Carrolls.
"What do you want me to do?" she said, abruptly, as she passed Sara for the fourth time.
"If you are alluding to Mr. Owen, I don't want you to do anything," answered Miss Carroll.
"Oh, you are proud! For the present nothing can be done. But let me tell you one thing – do not be too repellent. 'Tis good in me to warn you, to take his part, when I hate him so – hate him for what he said. Do you suppose I would have had him reading prayers over my poor dead boy after what had passed? Never in the world. No one who despised him should come near him. So I had the Baptist minister. I was a Baptist myself when I was a girl – if I ever was a girl! All this hurts you, of course; but I cannot help it. Be patient. Some day I shall forgive him. Perhaps soon." She had paused in front of Sara as she said this, for they had both been guardedly careful to speak in the lowest tones.
The girl left her place on the sofa; she rose and walked beside her stepmother as she resumed her quick, restless journey to and fro across the floor. They came and went in silence for many minutes. Then Sara put her arm round Madam Carroll, and drew her towards the sofa again.
"Rest awhile, mamma," she said, placing the cushions so that she could lie easily; "you do not know how very tired you are." And Madam Carroll for a half-hour yielded.
"We must bear with each other, Sara," she said, as she lay with her eyes closed. "For amid all our other feelings, there is one which we have in common, our love for your father. That is and always must be a tie between you and me."
"Always," answered Sara.
A little after daylight the Major woke. There had been no return of the fever; he had slept in peace while they kept the vigil near him; his illness was over. As he opened his eyes, his wife came to the bedside; she had just risen – or so it seemed, for she wore a rose-colored wrapper, and on her head a little lace cap adorned with rose-colored ribbon. The Major had not seen the cap before; he thought it very pretty.
"Trying to be old, are you, Madam Carroll?" he said; "old and matronly?"
Sara came in not long afterwards; she, too, was freshly dressed in a white wrapper.
"I have brought you your breakfast, papa," she said.
"Isn't it earlier than usual?" asked the Major, turning his dim eyes towards the window. But he could not see the light of the sunrise on the peaks.
"I am afraid, Major, that you are growing indolent," said Madam Carroll, with pretended severity, as she poured out his tea.
"Indolent?" said the Major – "indolent? Indolence is nothing to vanity. And you and Sara, in your pink and white gowns, are living images of vanity this morning, Madam Carroll."
CHAPTER VIII
AUTUMN at last came over the mountains; she decked them in her most sumptuous colors, and passed slowly on towards the south. The winds followed the goddess, eight of them; they came sounding their long trumpets through the defiles; they held carnival in the high green valleys; they attacked the forests and routed the lighter foliage, but could not do much against the stiff, dark ranks of the firs. They careered over all the peaks; sometimes they joined hands on Chillawassee's head, and whirled round in a great circle, laughing loudly, for half a day; and then the little people who lived on the ground said to each other that it "blew from all round the sky."
They came to Far Edgerley more than once; they blew through Edgerley Street; at night the villagers in their beds heard the long trumpets through the near gorges, and felt their houses shake. But they were accustomed to these autumn visitors; they had a theory, too, that this great sweeping of their peaks and sky was excellent for their mountain air. And upon the subject of their air there was much conceit in Far Edgerley.
When at length the winds had betaken themselves to the lowlands, with the intention of blowing across the levels of Georgia and Florida, and coming round to surprise the northerners at Indian River and St. Augustine, the quiet winter opened in the mountains they had left behind them. The Major had had no return of his October illness; he came to church on Sundays as usual, and appeared at his wife's receptions. It was noticed, although no one spoke of it, that he did not hold himself quite so erect as formerly, and that perhaps his eyesight was not quite so good; but he still remained to his village the exemplar of all that was noble and distinguished, and they admired him and talked about him as much as ever. He was their legend, their escutcheon; so long as they had him they felt distinguished themselves.
The winter amusements began about Christmastime. They consisted principally of the Sewing Society and the Musical Afternoons. To these entertainments "the gentlemen" came in the evening – F. Kenneway, Mr. Phipps, the junior warden, and the rector, when they could get him. A Whist Club had, indeed, been proposed. There was a double motive in this proposal. There were persons in the congregation who considered whist-playing a test of the best churchmanship; these were secretly desirous to see the test applied to the new rector, or rather the new rector applied to it. But the thoughtful Mrs. Greer, having foreseen this very possibility at an early date in the summer, had herself sounded the rector upon the subject, and brought back a negative upon the end of her delicate conversational line. She had asked him if he thought that the sociability engendered by card-tables at small parties could, in his opinion, counterbalance the danger which familiarity with the pasteboard squares might bring to their young men (Phipps and Kenneway); and whether he himself, at moments of leisure, and when he wished to rest from intellectual fatigue, of which, of course, he must have so much, ever whiled away the time with these same gilded symbols, not with others, but by himself.
Owen, who had not for the moment paid that attention to the eloquence of Mrs. Greer which he should have done, did not understand her. He had received an impression of cymbals. This was no surprise to him; he had found Mrs. Greer capable of the widest range of subjects.
"I mean the painted emblems, you know – cards," explained Mrs. Greer; "clubs, diamonds, and spades, Mr. Owen. Nor should we leave out hearts. I was referring, when I spoke, to solitaire. But there is also whist. Whist is, in its way, a climate by itself – a climate of geniality."
This was a phrase of Madam Carroll's. Mrs. Greer had collected a large assortment of phrases from the overflow of the Farms. These she treasured, and dealt out one by one; her conversation was richly adorned with them. She had excellent opportunities for collecting, as Madam Carroll had long been in the habit of telling her any little item which she wished to have put in circulation through the village in a certain guise. She always knew that her exact phrase would be repeated, but not as hers; it would be repeated as if it were original with the lady who spoke it. This was precisely what Madam Carroll intended. To have said herself, for instance, that the new chintz curtains of her drawing-room combined delicacy and durability, and a bower-like brightness, was too apparent; but for Mrs. Greer to say it (in every house on Edgerley Street) was perfectly proper, and accomplished the same result. The whole town remarked upon the delicacy and the durability and the bower-like brightness; and the curtains, which she had made and put up herself at small expense, took their place among the many other peculiarly admirable things possessed by the Farms. Upon the present occasion, however, Mrs. Greer gave Madam Carroll's name to the phrase she had repeated; she thought it would have more influence. "Yes, that is what our dear Madam Carroll used to call it – a climate of geniality," she said, looking at the rector with an inquiring smile.
But, ignoring the phrase of the Farms, none the less did Owen bring out his negative; with the gilded symbols he did not amuse himself, either alone or in company.
Armed, therefore, with this knowledge, Mrs. Greer was ready; she met the project of the Whist Club in its bud, and vanquished it with a Literary Society, whose first four meetings she gave herself, with a delicate little hot supper thrown in. The Whist Club could not stand against this, Miss Honoria Ashley, who was its chief supporter, offering only apples and conversation. But a large cold apple on a winter night is not calculated to rouse enthusiasm; while, as to conversation, everybody knew that hot coffee promoted it. So the Literary Society conquered, and the whist test was not, for that season at least, applied to the churchmanship of the rector.
During these winter months Owen kept himself constantly busy. It was thought that he worked too hard. He looked tired; sometimes, young and strong as he was, he looked worn. There was a good deal of motherly anxiety about this; some sisterly, too. Ferdinand Kenneway said that he felt towards him like a brother. But Owen pursued his own course, unmindful of these sympathetic feelings. He came to Madam Carroll's receptions as usual, but did not stay long: he was the last to come and the first to go. He called at the Farms, though not often; and when he went there, he did not go alone.
So the winter passed on and departed, and spring came. Then a sorrow fell upon the little mountain town. Early one soft morning in March, when the cinnamon-colored tassels were out on the trees, and the air was warm and gray, with the smell of rain in it, word came down Edgerley Street, passing from house to house, that Carroll Farms had been visited in the night: the Major, their Major, had wakened quiet and content, but like a little child; the powers of his mind had been taken from him.
Every one had loved him, and now there was real mourning. They all said to each other and to themselves that they should never look upon his like again. The poor nation had greatly retrograded since his day; even their state was not what it had been; under these circumstances it could not be expected that the world should soon produce another Scarborough Carroll. They went over all the history of his life: his generous sharing of his fortune with his half-brother; his silence under the forgetfulness of that half-brother's children; his high position and many friends in the old army; his brilliant record in the later army, their own army, vanquished, but still dear to them, the army of the South; they told again the story of his gallant ride round the enemy's forces in the Valley, of his charge up the hill at Fredericksburg, his last brave defence of the bridge on the way to Appomattox. His wounds were recalled, his shattered arm, the loss of his money, so uncomplainingly borne; they spoke of his beautiful courtesy to every one, and of his unfailing kindness to all the poor. And then, how handsome he was, how noble in bearing and expression, how polished in manner! such a devoted husband and father, so pure a patriot! Their dear old Major: they could not say enough.
The junior warden kept his room all day; he could not bear to hear it talked about. Then the next morning out he went at an early hour to see everybody he knew, and he told them all how very imprudent Carroll had always been, recklessly so, recklessly. He was up and down Edgerley Street all day, swinging his cane more than usual as he walked, thus giving a light and juvenile air to his arms and shoulders, which was perhaps somewhat contradicted by the uncertain tread of his little old feet. In the afternoon Frederick Owen went to the Farms; for the first time since the preceding October he went alone. Miss Carroll was in the drawing-room when he came in; she was receiving a visit of general inquiry and condolence from the three Miss Rendleshams. They went away after a while, and then, before he had had time to speak – as he stood there realizing that he had not been alone with her since that day, now six months in the past, when she had told him of her engagement to Dupont – he saw through the open door of the drawing-room the small figure of Madam Carroll. She had not come down to see the three Miss Rendleshams. But she did come down to see the rector. She came straight to him, with her quick, light step. "I heard that you were here, and came down. I am anxious to see you, Mr. Owen. Not to-day, but soon. I thought I would come down myself and ask you; I did not want to write a note."
"At any time you will name," answered Owen. He had risen as she entered. Miss Carroll had seemed to him unchanged, save that her eyes showed that she had been crying; but the Major's wife, he said to himself, with almost awe-struck astonishment – the Major's wife, had he met her elsewhere, he should hardly have known. Her veil of golden hair, no longer curled, was put plainly back, and fastened in a close knot behind; her eyes, the blue eyes he had always thought so pretty, looked tired and sunken and dim, with crows'-feet at their corners; all her lovely bloom was gone, and the whole of her little faded face was a net-work of minute wrinkles. She was still small and slender, and she still had her pretty features; but this was an old woman who was talking to him, and Madam Carroll had been so young.
"It will not be for some days yet, I think," she was saying. "I shall wait until the doctor has made up his mind. He wants more time, though I want none; when he does make it up, it will be as mine is now. But I prefer to wait until he sees clearly; will you ask him from day to day what he thinks, and, when he has decided, then will you come?"
"Yes," replied Owen. "But do you mean that the Major – "
"I mean that the Major is in no immediate danger; that he will continue about the same. He will not grow better, but neither will he grow much worse. He may be brighter at times, but he will not regain his memory; that is gone. But we shall not lose him, Mr. Owen, that is our great happiness. We shall not lose him, Sara and I, as we had at first feared."
Two tears rolled down her cheeks as she spoke. "It is because I am so thankful," she said, wiping them away. Her long lace-bordered sleeves had been turned back, and Owen was struck with the old, withered look of her small wrists and hands.
"I could not have borne it to lose him now," she went on, as if explaining. "You may think that existence such as his will be is no blessing, nothing to be desired for him or for me. But he is not suffering, he is even happy as a child is happy, and he knows me. He would be content himself to wait a little, if he could know how much it was to me, how much to have him with me, so that I can devote myself to him, devote myself entirely."
"You have always done that, Madam Carroll," said Owen, touched by her emotion.
"You will come, then – on whatever day the doctor makes up his mind," she said, controlling herself, and returning to her subject.
Here Miss Carroll spoke. "Isn't it better not to make engagements for the present, mamma?" she said, warningly. "You will overtax your strength."
"It is overtaxed at this moment far less than it has been for many a long month," answered Madam Carroll, as it seemed to Owen, strangely. She passed her hand over her forehead, and then, as if putting herself aside in order to consider her companions for a moment, she looked first at Sara, then turned and looked at Owen. "Do not stay any longer now," she said to him, gently, in an advising tone. He obeyed her, and went away.
On the tenth day after this the doctor, whose conclusions, if slowly made, were sure, announced his decision: it tallied exactly with that of Madam Carroll. The Major was in no present danger; his physical health was fairly good; his condition would not change much, and he might linger on in this state for several years. And then the Far Edgerley people, knowing that no more pain would come to him, and that he was tranquil and even happy, that he recognized his wife, and that she gave to him the most beautiful and tender devotion – then these Far Edgerley people were glad and thankful to have him with them still; not wholly gone, though lying unseen in his peaceful room, which faced the west, so that the sunset could shine every day upon the quiet sunset of his life. And they thought, some of them, that thanksgiving prayers should be offered for this in the church. And they all prayed for him at home, each family in its own way.
On the afternoon of the day when the doctor had made up his mind, Frederick Owen went to the Farms. Madam Carroll came down to see him; she took him to the library, now unused, and when they had entered, she closed the door. "Will you sit here beside me?" she said, indicating a sofa opposite the window. Again he was struck by the great – as it seemed to him, the marvellous – change in her. She looked even older than before; her hair was put back in the same plain way; there was the same absence of color, the same tired look in her eyes, the same fine net-work of wrinkles over all her small face; but added to these there was now a settled sadness of expression which he felt would never pass away. He missed, too, all the changing inflections and gestures, the pretty little manner and attitudes, and even the pronunciation, which he had supposed to belong inseparably to her, which he had thought entirely her own. He missed likewise, though unconsciously, the prettiness of the bright little gowns she had always worn; she was dressed now in black, without color or ornament.
She seemed to divine his thoughts. "The Major can no longer see me," she said, quietly; "that is, with any distinctness. It is no longer anything to him – what I wear."
He had taken the seat she had offered; she sat beside him, with her hands folded, her eyes on the opposite wall. "I have a story to tell you," she said. "But I can make no prefaces; I cannot speak of feelings. I hope for your interest, Mr. Owen, even for your sympathy; but if I get them it will be accomplished by a narrative of facts alone, and not by any pathos in the words themselves. I got beyond pathos long ago. My name was Marion More. My father was a missionary in the Southwest – the exact localities I need not give. At sixteen I married. My father died within the year; my mother had died long before. My first child was a son, born when I was seventeen; I called him Julian. Later there came to me a daughter, my little Cecilia. When she was still a baby, and Julian was seven, my husband, in a brawl at a town some miles from our house, killed a man who was well known and liked in the neighborhood; they had both fired, and the other man was the better shot, but upon this occasion his ball happened to miss, and my husband's did not. I was sitting at home, sewing; the baby was in the cradle at my feet, and Julian was playing with his little top on the floor. My husband rode rapidly into the yard on his fast black horse, Tom, sprang down, came into the house, and went into the inner room. He soon came back and went out. He called Julian. The child ran into the yard; then hurried back to get the little overcoat I had made for him. 'Where are you going?' I said. 'To ride with papa,' he answered, and, eager as he was to go, he did not forget to come and kiss me good-by. Then he ran out, and I heard them start; I heard Tom's hoofs on the hard road farther and farther away; then all was still. But less than half an hour afterwards there was noise enough; the garden was full of armed men. The whole country-side were out after him. They hunted him for three days. But he knew the woods and swamps better than they did, and they could not find him. They knew that he would in time make for the river, and they kept a watch along shore. He reached it on the fourth day, at a lonely point; he turned Tom loose, took a skiff which he knew was there, and started out with my little boy upon the swollen tide – for the river was high. They were soon discovered by the watch on shore. Shots were fired at them. But the skiff was out in the centre of the stream, which was very wide just there, and the shots missed. They followed the skiff along shore. They knew what he did not – that the river narrowed below the bend, and that there were rapids there. He reached the bend, and saw that he was lost; the current carried the boat down towards the narrows; and they began to shoot again; one shot struck Julian. Then his father took him in his arms and jumped overboard with him. That, they knew, was death. They saw the dark bodies whirled round and round, and amused themselves by shooting at them once or twice; they saw them sucked under. Then, farther away, they saw them again swept along like logs, inert, dead; on and on; two black dots; out of sight. Then they rode back, that hunting party; and their wives came and told me, as mercifully as they could, that my husband and my little boy were drowned. I could not bury my dead; on the rapid current of the river they were already miles away; in that country no one cared for the dead. They cared but little for the living. I took my baby and went away; I left that horrible land. I came eastward. I had no money, or very little; my husband had taken what – what he needed for his flight, and there was nothing left. I tried to teach little day schools for children. I gave music lessons. I did my best. But I was not strong; my little girl, too, was very delicate: there was something the matter with her spine. When this life of ours – hers and mine – had lasted ten years (for I am much older than you have supposed), I met Major Carroll. He was so good as to love me; he was so good as to marry me; he took as his own my poor little girl, and gave her all the comforts and luxuries she needed – things I could not give. She died soon afterwards, in spite of all. But in our new home she had had happy days, and when the end came she did not suffer: she went back to God in sleep. On the 6th of last July I was in the garden here, gathering some roses; it was below the slope of the knoll, out of sight from the house. The gate opened, and a young man came in. He came across to me. He introduced himself as a stranger in Far Edgerley, who had admired our flowers. He spoke several sentences while I stood looking at him. I was frightened; I knew not why. At last, recovering myself, I turned to walk towards the house. Then it was that he put his hand on my arm, and said: 'Don't you know me, mother? I am Julian, the little boy you thought dead.' He was thirty-one years old, and I had lost him before he was eight. What had startled me was his likeness to his father. They had escaped, after all. His father had feigned death; he had let himself be swept along, keeping hold of the child, who was unconscious. It was a desperate expedient. But he was desperate. He was an expert swimmer, and he succeeded, though barely, with life just fluttering within them. They lay hid in a canebrake for some days, and then, after much difficulty, they made their way out of the country. They went to Mexico. Then they went to the West India Islands. They lived in Martinique, and they took the name of Dupont. My husband did not try to come back; a reward had been offered for him before he fled; there was a price on his head. He knew that I supposed him dead, and he was quite willing to be dead – to me. He was tired of me. I was only a burden to him. I was always talking about little things. My son thought that we were dead – his little sister and I; his father had told him so. But after his father's death he found among his papers some memoranda which made him think that perhaps we were not, that perhaps he could even find us. He did not try immediately; it was but a chance, and he was interested in other things. But later he did try; that is, in his way; he was never sharp and energetic – as you are. He found me; but his little sister had gone to heaven. My son had had only the education of the islands, and he was, besides, a musician. The temperament of musicians is peculiar. You will allow me to say that I think you do not understand it. He wished to go back to the islands; he had been in the United States for a year, and he did not like the life or climate. I helped him as much as I could. It was not much; but he started. Then he had that illness in New York, and came back. It was most important that he should start again, and soon – before the return of winter. I had nothing to give him, and so I went to my daughter – I mean my step-daughter, Sara. She has, you know, a small income of her own, left her by her uncle. You are asking yourself why I did not go to the Major; why there should have been any secret about it from the first. It was because I had not told him at the time of our marriage, or at any time, that I had ever had a son. He thought when he married me that Cecilia was my only child; he thought me twenty-three, when I was in reality over thirty-five. It would have been a great shock and pain to him to know that I had deceived him – a shock which, in his state of health at that time, he could not have borne. When Sara knew, she helped me; she helped me nobly. But the time for the semi-annual payment of her income was not until the 12th of October, and by the terms of her uncle's will she could not anticipate it; we were therefore obliged to wait. Before the 12th of October my son was taken ill, as I had feared. And the rest – you know. The time when I could tell you this has now come. It has come because nothing can again disturb the Major's peace. He is near us in touch, and close to our love, but earth's sorrows and pains can trouble him no more. I can therefore tell you, and I do it for two reasons. One is that it will explain to you the course we took; it will explain to you what Sara said that afternoon, for I think that it has grieved you – what Sara said. It was an expedient that she thought of to divert your attention, to stop further action on your part. We knew – from your having tried to see the Major, and see him alone – that you had learned something; how much, we could not tell. And when you came again the next day, and spoke as you did, first to me, and then to her, and I was frightened and lost my courage, fearing lest you should speak to others also; then Sara took the only expedient she could think of to silence you, to stop you effectually, and thus secure her father's peace. But it was only an expedient, Mr. Owen. It was never true." She paused for the first time in the utterance of her brief sentences, turned her head, and looked at him with her faded, tired eyes.