University of Virginia Library

31. CHAPTER XXXI.
WHITHER, O WHITHER?

“And she won't have a doctor!” continued Imogen Eleonore with mingled
pity and horror, as if here were a piece of either madness or blasphemy.

The sympathetic Lehming sprang to his feet, ready to scour the entire city
for help. But he was not one of those headlong good souls who trample
blindly into a case of distress and save looking-glasses by pitching them out
of a window. Even while he threw down his pen and rose from his table he
had a gleam of that meditative, considerate wisdom which was one of his finest
intellectual traits, and which frequently enabled him to make his deeds as
gracious as his purposes. Little as he had consorted with women in society,
he had noted the impulsive promptness with which they turn in trouble to a
healer or consoler, whether in the guise of physician, or clergyman, or confidant.
The fact that this girl should in her illness refuse to see a doctor struck
him as very singular and very significant. Either she was a person of rare
courage, or she was in strange circumstances.

“We will not call any one, unless it proves necessary,” he said. “Perhaps
this is only a sickness of the mind,” he added, remembering the plaintive mystery
which he had detected in Nestoria's face and demeanor. “Will you
please ask if I may come in with you and see her for just one moment?”

Imogen Eleonore hurried away much comforted; she had laid her burden
of responsibility and alarm on the shoulders of another; and, like most of her
sex, or, perhaps I should say, like most of both sexes, she found the act cheering.
But she did not return for many minutes, and Lehming said to himself,
“I shall not be received.”

So it proved. Nestoria would see no one, neither physician nor confessor.
She bore this new and terrible affliction as she had borne all those other terrible
ones which preceded it—alone. And she did really bear it; that is, she
did not sink under it. Already she was like an otter, or other hunted beast,
torn at by many hounds; one more snarling and mangling enemy made no
difference, or seemed to make none. Indeed, the multitude of tormentors
rather helped her to endure the suffering which each one inflicted; they
crowded each other away from their victim, and the poison of one bite neutralized
that of another. It is marvellous, but it is nevertheless a fact, that
brave souls can withstand a host of afflictions almost as easily as one. It is
brooding over a single calamity which brings on prostration and stupor, and
which kills. Many blows at once, falling from all sides, keep the mind in activity.
We are roused by a sense of injustice; we are exhilarated as by a
physical conflict; and from the passion of battle we gather life.

It is true that most persons might have been crushed by what Nestoria endured
at this time. But she had a vigor of constitution, both physical and
moral, which kept her out of sickness and out of despair. There could hardly
be a more healthy creature than this small and seemingly delicate young
woman. And health, the mere well-being of the body, is the spring of almost
all human strength. With few exceptions the men who have done great
things in this world have been distinguished by enormous vitality, while many
of them have been remarkable for muscular power. Plato was a boxer; Byron
was an athlete and could swim eight miles; Washington, Scott, and
Wordsworth had muscles of iron; Lincoln could lift a thousand pounds. We
do not mean to insinuate that Nestoria was intellectually great like these men,
but only that she had somewhat of their moral vigor, and that it sprang from
the same cause, health.

We must pass over a day or two in the girl's history. It is impossible to
describe adequately the sufferings of a bereaved soul while its loss is fresh
upon it; you might as well try to paint in mere words the agonies of victims
in Dominican chambers of torture. Show the rack and the thumbscrews and
the lacerating knives of the deadly “virgin,” and leave the conception of
what these things can inflict to the imagination of the spectator.

A day passed like a car of Juggernant over Nestoria; a day which to her
fellow lodgers seemed sickness, but which was merely anguish; a drama in
which the mightiest and cruellest feelings that can find room in the human
heart were the actors; a battle worthy of having angels and demons for combatants,
if indeed such were not actually present. At the end of that twenty-four
hours she still retained life, reason, and even physical strength. She
came out upon her little world of three persons, much the same that they had
previously known her. Imogen Eleonore, returning from a hasty twilight
shopping excursion, peeped into the sick-room to see how her patient fared,
and found her painting.

“I am so glad you have got well!” she exclaimed, moved by such honest
feeling that she spoke simply.

“I have not been sick,” replied Nestoria, looking up with the patient smile
of one who has truly learned to endure.

“Not been sick!” stared Miss Jones. “Why, you've been looking dreadfully—just
like a ghost.”

“Yes, I have had a bad day, it is true. What I meant was that I have had
no serious illness. I am not accustomed to call myself sick so long as I can
get up when I wish to.”

“Well, you are a strange piece!” continued Imogen, still marvelling at
this sudden recovery, which struck her as something like a resuscitation. “I
wonder if you are made like other people. Do let me feel of you. Why, your
check is as hard as marble. I never felt such solid flesh. How strong you
must be! Are you as hard as that all over?”

“My father has often remarked how firm my flesh was,” replied Nestoria.

She stopped; she had inadvertently mentioned her father; at times his
death semed unreal to her. But the moment she recalled the fact, speech on
any subject became an impossibility, at least for a time.

“Have you a father?” asked Imogen Eleonore, in that melodramatic voice
which she put on as a garment whenever she made her entry upon what seemed
to her a great subject.

Nestoria shook her head and tried to go on painting; but the blundering
shock of this inquiry was too much for her; she dropped her brush, covered
her face with her hands, and burst into tears. They were the first tears which
she had shed upon her bereavement, and they came rather as a rain of mercy
than as a storm of castigation.

“Long dead?” queried Miss Jones, trusting that curiosity might seem to be
sympathy, and indeed conscious of a cordial sympathy beneath an equally fervid
curiosity. But Nestoria, deafened by the tempest of her own sobbing, was
spared from hearing the loutish question.

Imogen Eleonore, who, in spite of her relish for ghoulish literature, was
really a human being, presently became ashamed of herself and then pitiful.
She was not accustomed to witness strong emotions, except through the
dingy veil of letter-press and woodcuts; and she recoiled from this violent
paroxysm of grief as she would have flinched from the actual presence of
wounds and blood.

“I am awfully sorry!” she apologized. “I was not aware of the plaintive
abyss of the unknown from which my careless foot extorted this cry of soul
agony. It was not that my heart was lacking in the tendrils of tenderness,
but only that I have had no such sad, sorrowful, solemn experience. I never
lost a payrent.”

To this simple and egotistic girl it seemed as if no grief could resist such
soothing, or fail to be charmed by such excuses. But the soul before her was
in truly deep waters; and, dim as Imogen's spiritual eyesight was, she presently
became troublously aware of the fact; she seemed to discern a spirit
tottering and sinking amid raging, obscure billows. Nestoria's spasm of sobbing
was so fierce and persistent that it fairly terrified the inadequate comforter.

“For pity's sake don't cry that way,” she implored. “You'll strain yourself
and burst a blood-vessel. Why, your face is all crimson. Oh, don't be so
unhappy! You make me cry, and scare me.”

Slender as was this stream of consolation, and turbid too with the common
clay of the nature which yielded it, nevertheless it had force and subtlety
enough to reach the bereaved heart. It was received there with gratitude:
extreme anguish is not exacting nor fastidious: Dives in his torments asked
for but a single drop of water.

Nestoria withdrew one hand from her face, let it glide slowly down Imogen's
extended arm, and took an infantile hold on the skirt of her dress. The
gesture, as we remember, was characteristic of her; it was her favorite manner
of claiming sympathy and support. Imogen thought very strange of it,
and said to herself that this was surely the oddest girl that she had ever met;
but within the last minute or so she had caught a grace of delicacy which
enabled her to resist all blundering temptations to speech; the one wise, gentle
thing which she did was to lay her hand upon the tremulous hand which
clung to her. The two girls sat thus, fingers intertwined with fingers, while
the tempest of sobs slowly died away, like waves lapsing to rest.

“It is over,” said Nestoria at last, forcing such a plaintive smile as a resigned
ghost might wear on returning to its grave. “How patient and kind
you are! I shall always love you.”

It was the last violent throe of grief which Imogen ever witnessed in her
friend. Henceforward Nestoria was able to draw a veil of obscuring tranquallity
over her filial sorrow, as well as over her perplexities and terrors.
Secrecy at every point was an absolute necessity; she must not even mourn
visibly and audibly for her father. If ever the tears came into her eyes at the
thought of his burial afar off in a spot unknown to her, she drove the piteous,
pleading drops back to their lair, as enemies who might betray and ruin her.
If a sob burst up from her deserted heart, she made cruel haste to smother it
before some accusing voice should respond, “Are you not she whom justice
seeks?”

Hardly dared she go deeply veiled to purchase such religious periodicals as
she supposed might contain notices of her father's life and the manner of his
death; and when she had obtained them, she read them in watchful solitude
and then hid them under her mattress, as if they were proofs of crime. The
four or five obituaries and eulogies which came to her hand were of course infinitely
precious to her; and she longed to cut them out and keep them always
near her heart and ready for her eye. But that would not do, for, if they were
discovered in her possession, they might suggest her identity. Her grief was
held in check by her constant dread of discovery and of the results which discovery
would surely bring in its train. She was like a child shut up in a dark
room, who dares not sob for fear of being overheard by some monster.

Meantime what should she do? The angel of death had changed the face
of the world to her; he had swept clean out of life her only imaginable refuge.
Her situation was that of a wanderer in deserts who hears that the oasis towards
which he was faintly struggling has been overwhelmed by sandstorms,
its sheltering palms uprooted and its wells choked. During weeks, which
flowed with the scorching slowness of melted lead. Nestoria had been supported
by the hope of reaching her father, and casting at his feet that horrible
secret, so like to a mangled and blood-dripping corpse which a demoniacal
destiny had fastened upon her. Now there was no one in all the earth to relieve
her of her grisly load; she must bear it alone until she should be able to
lay it beside her in her grave. There were times when the whole of this wearying
pilgrimage seemed to open before her, the vastness of the inhospitable

outlook drinking up all her strength and courage, as the Sahara absorbs a rivulet
at the beginning of its course.

But she must not faint; she must struggle to shape her future so that it
should be bearable; especially must she discover and attain to some place of
hiding. With a travail of spirit which was so immense and various that we
may speak of it as her labors of Hercules, she ransacked the whole world for
an asylum. Where was the spot which could give security to a friendless
girl, whose terrible treasure, eagerly sought for by whole communities, was
the secret of a murder?

Little by little she settled upon the resolution that as soon as she had money
enough for the voyage, she would fly to some barbarous island of the Pacific
ocean, there to end in obscurity her outcast life.