University of Virginia Library

29. CHAPTER XXIX.
LILLIE REACHES THE APOTHEOSIS OF WOMANHOOD.

Woman is more intimately and irresponsibly a child of
Nature than man. She comes oftener, more completely,
and more evidently under the power of influences which
she can neither direct nor resist, and which make use of
her without consulting her inclination. Her part then is
passive obedience and uncomplaining suffering, while
through her the ends of life are accomplished. She has no
choice but to accept her beneficent martyrdom. Like
Jesus of Nazareth she agonzies that others may live; but,
unlike Him, she is impelled to it by a will higher than her
own. At the same time, a loving spirit is given to her, so
that she is consoled in her own anguish, and does not seriously
desire that the cup may pass from her before she has
drunk it to the dregs. She has the patience of the
lower animals and of inanimate nature, ennobled by a
heavenly joy of self-sacrifice, a divine pleasure in suffering
for those whom she loves. She is both lower and higher
than man, by instinct rather than by reason, from necessity
rather than from choice.

There came a day to Lillie during which she lay between

two worlds, not caring which she entered, submissive to
whatever might be, patient though weeping with pain.
Her father did not dare trust her to his own care, but
called in his old friend and colleague, Doctor Elderkin.
These two, with Carter, Mrs. Larue, and a hired nurse, did
not quit the house for twenty-four hours, and all but the
husband and father were almost constantly in the room of
the invalid. The struggle was so long and severe that
they thought it would end in death. Neither Mrs. Larue
nor the nurse slept during the whole night, but relieved
each other at the bedside, holding by turns the quivering,
clutching hand of Lillie, and fanning the crimson cheeks
and the brow covered with a cold sweat as of a death agony.
The latent womanliness of Mrs. Larue, the tenderness which
did actually exist in some small measure beneath her
smooth surface of amiability and coquetry, was profoundly
stirred by her instinctive sympathy for a suffering which
was all feminine. She remembered that same anguish in
her own life, and lived it over again. Every throe of the
sick girl seemed to penetrate her own body. She thought
of the child which had been given and taken years ago,
and then she wiped away a tear, lest Lillie might see it
and fear for herself. When she was not by the bedside
she stood at the window, now looking for a glimpse of
dawn as if that could bring any hope, and then turning to
gaze at the tossing invalid.

The Doctor only once allowed Carter to enter the room.
The very expansion of Lillie at sight of him, the eagerness
with which her soul reached out to him for help, pity, love,
was perilous. There was danger that she might say, “My
dear, good-bye;” and in the exaltation of such an impulse
she might have departed. As for him, he had never before
witnessed a scene like this, and he never forgot it.
His wife held both his hands, clasping them spasmodically,
a broad spot of fever in either cheek, the veins of her forehead
swollen, and her neck suffused, her eyes preternaturally
open and never removed from his, her whole expression

radiant with agony. The mortal pain, the supernatural
expectation, the light of that other world which was so
near, spiritualized her face, and made it unhumanly beautiful.
He seemed to himself to be standing on earth and
joining hands with her in heaven. He had never before
reached so far; never so communed with another life. His
own face was all of this world, stern with anxiety and perhaps
remorse; for the moment was so agitating and imperious
that he could not direct his emotions nor veil his
expression. Happy for her that she had no suspicion of
one thing which was in his heart. She believed that he
was solely tortured by fear that she would die; and if she
could have thought to speak, she would have comforted
him. On her own account she did not desire to live; only
for his sake, and for her father's, and perhaps a little for
her child's. The old Doctor watched her, shook his head,
signed to the husband to leave the room, and took his wife's
hands in his place. As Carter went out Mrs. Larue followed
him a few steps into the passage.

“What is between you and me must end,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he replied in the same tone, and went to his
room somewhat comforted.

At seven in the morning he was awakened by a tremulous
knocking at his door. Springing from the sofa, on which
he had dozed for an hour or two without undressing, he
opened, and encountered Mrs. Larue, pale with sleeplessness
but smiling gaily.

“Venez,” she said, speaking her mother tongue in her
haste, and hastened noiselessly, like a swift sprite, back to
the sick room. Carter followed, entered with a sense of
awe, passed softly around the screen which half encircled
the bed, and saw his wife and child lying side by side.
Lillie was very pale; her face was still spiritualized by the
Gethsemane of the night; but her eyes were still radiant
with a purely human happiness. She was in eager haste
to have him drink at the newly-opened fountain of joy.

Even as he stooped to kiss her she could not wait, but
turned her head towards the infant with a smile of exultation
and said, “Look at him.”

“But how are you?” he asked, anxiously; for a man
does not at once forget his wife in his offspring; and Carter
had a stain of remorse on his soul which he needed to
wash away with rivers of tenderness.

“Oh, I am perfectly well,” she answered. “Isn't he
pretty?”

At that moment the child sneezed; the air of this world
was too pungent.

“Oh, take him!” she exclaimed, looking for the nurse.
“He is going to die.”

The black woman lifted the boy and handed him to the
father.

“Don't drop him,” said Lillie. “Are you sure you can
hold him? I wouldn't dare to take him.”

As if she could have taken him! In her eagerness she
forgot that she was sick, and talked as if she were in her
full strength. Her eyes followed the infant so uneasily
about the room that Elderkin motioned Carter to replace
him on the bed.

“Now he won't fall,” she said, cheerfully.—“It was only
a sneeze,” she added presently, with a little laugh which was
like a gurgle, a purr of happiness. “I thought something
was the matter with him.”—Shortly afterward she asked,
“How soon will he talk?”

“I am afraid not for two or three weeks, unless the
weather is favorable,” replied Elderkin, with a chuckle
which under the circumstances was almost blasphemous.

“How strange that he can't talk!” she replied, without
noticing the old gentleman's joke. “He looks so intelligent!”

“She wouldn't be a bit surprised to hear him sing an
Italian opera,” said Ravenel. “She has seen a miracle to-day.
Nothing could astonish her.”

Lillie did not laugh nor answer; nothing interested her

which did not say, Baby! Baby was for the time the
whole thought, the whole life, of this girl, who a little previous
existed through her husband, and before that through
her father. Each passion had been stronger than its predecessor;
but now she had reached the culminating point
of her womanhood: higher than Baby it was impossible
for her to go. Even her father distressed and alarmed her
a little by an affection for the newly-arrived divinity which
lacked what she felt to be the proper reverence. Not content
with worshiping afar off, he picked up the tiny god
and carried him to the partial day of a curtained window,
desiring, as he said, the honor of being the first to give him
an idea.

“The first to give him an idea!” laughed the father.
“Why, he looks as if he had been thinking for centuries.
He looks five thousand years old.”

Seeing that Lillie began to weary, the old Doctor replaced
the deity on the pillow which served him for an
altar, and turned the male worshipers out of the room.

“How delighted they are with him!” she said when the
door had closed behind them. “Doctor, isn't he an uncommonly
handsome child?” she added with the adorable
simplicity of perfect love. “I thought babies were not
pretty at first.”

The room was now kept still. The mother and child
lay side by side, reposing from their night-long struggle
for life. The mother looked steadily at the infant; the infant
looked with equal fixity at the window: each gazed
and wondered at an unaccustomed glory. In a few minutes
both dropped to sleep, overcome by fatigue, and by
novel emotions, or sensations. For three days a succession
of long slumbers, and of waking intervals similar to
tranquilly delightful dreams, composed their existence.
When they were thus reposed they tasted life with a more
complete and delicious zest. Lillie entertained her husband
and father for hours at a time with discoursing on
the attributes of the baby, pointing out the different

elements of his glory, and showing how he grew in graces.
She was quite indifferent to their affectionate raillery;
nothing could shake her faith in the illimitability of the
new deity. They two, dear as they were, were nevertheless
human, and were not so necessary as they had been
to her faith in goodness, and her happiness in loving. So
long as she had the baby to look at, she could pass the
whole day without them, hardly wondering at their
absence.

“We are dethroned,” said the Doctor to the Colonel.
“We are a couple of Saturns who have made way for the
new-born Jupiter.”

“Nonsense!” smiled Lillie. “You think that you are
going to spend all your time with your minerals now.
You are perfectly happy in the idea. I sha'n't allow it.”

“No. We must remain and be converts to the new
revelation. Well, I suppose we sha'n't resist. We are
ready to make our profession of faith at all times and in
all places.”

“This is the place,” said Lillie. “Isn't he sweet?”

The grandfather knew a great deal better than either
the father or mother how to handle the diminutive Jupiter.
He took him from the pillow, carried him to the window,
drew the curtain slowly, and laughed to see the solemn
little eyes, after winking slowly, turn upward and fix
themselves steadily on the broad, mild effulgence of the
sky.

“He looks for the light, as plants and trees lean towards
it,” said he. “He is trying to see the heavenly
mansions which he may some day inhabit. Nobody knows
how soon. They get up their chariots very suddenly
sometimes, these little Elijahs.”

“Oh, don't talk so,” implored Lillie. “He sha'n't die.”

The Doctor was thinking of his own only boy, who had
flown from the cradle to Heaven more than twenty years
ago.

Aside from tenderness for his wife, Carter's principal

emotion all this while was that of astonishment at his position.
It cost him considerable mental effort, and stretch
of imagination, to conceive himself a relative of the newcomer.
He did not, like Lillie, love the child by passionate
instinct; and he had not yet learned to love him as he had
learned to love her. He was tender of the infant, as a
creature whose weakness pleaded for his protection; but
when it came to the question of affection, he had to confess
that he loved him chiefly through his mother. He
was a poor hand at fondling the boy, being always afraid
of doing him some harm. He was better pleased to see
him in Lillie's arms than to feel him in his own; the little
burden was curiously warm and soft, but so evidently susceptible
to injury as to be a terror.

“I would rather lead a storming party,” he said. “I
have been beaten in that sort of thing, and lived through
it. But if I should drop this fellow—”

And here the warrior absolutely flinched at the thought
of how he would feel in such a horrible case.

Now commenced a beautiful reciprocal education of
mother and child. Each discovered every day new mysteries,
new causes of admiration and love, in the other.
Long before a childless man or even woman would have
imagined signs of intelligence in the infant, the mother had
not merely imagined but had actually discovered them.
You would have been wrong if you had laughed incredulously
when she said, “He begins to take notice.” Of
course her fondness led her into errors: she mistook symptoms
of mere sensation for utterances of ideas; she perceived
prophetically rather than by actual observation:
but some things, some opening buds of intellect, she saw
truly. She deceived herself when she thought that at the
age of three weeks he knew his father; but at the same
time she was quite correct in believing that he recognized
and cried for his mother. This delighted her; she would
let him cry for a moment, merely for the pleasure of being
so desired; then she would fold him to her breast and be

his comforter, his life. They were teachers, consolers,
deities, the one to the other.

Her love gave a fresh inspiration to her religious feeling.
Here was a new object of thanksgiving and prayer: an
object so nearly divine that only Heaven could have sent
it: an object so delicate that only Heaven could preserve
it. For her baby she prayed with an intelligence, a feeling,
a faith, such as she had never known before, not even
when praying for her husband during his times of battle.
It seemed certain to her that the merciful All-Father and
the Son who gave himself for the world would sympathize
compassionately with the innocence, and helplessness of
her little child. These sentiments were not violent: she
would have withered under the breath of any passionate
emotion: they were as gentle and comforting as summer
breezes from orange groves. Once only, during a slight
accession of fever, there came something like a physical
revelation; a room full of mysterious, dazzling light; a
communication of some surprising, unutterable joy; an impression
as of a divine voice, saying, “Thy sins are forgiven
thee.”

Forgiven of God, she wished also to be forgiven of man.
The next morning, moved by the remembrance of the vision,
although its exaltation had nearly vanished with the
fall of the fever, she beckoned her husband to her, and
with tears begged his pardon for some long since forgotten
petulance. This was the hardest trial that Carter had yet
undergone. To have her plead for his forgiveness was a
reproach that he could hardly bear with self-possession.
He must not confess—no such relief was there for his burdened
spirit—but he sank on his knees in miserable penitence.

“Oh! forgive me,” he said. “I am not half good enough
for you. I am not worthy of your love. You must pray
for me, my darling.”

For the time she was his religion: his loving, chastening,

though not all-seing deity: uplifting and purifying him,
even as she was exalted and sanctified by her child.

Her sick-bed happiness was checkered by some troubles.
It was hard not to stir; not to be able to help herself; not
to tend the baby. When her face was washed for her by
the nurse, there would be places where it was not thoroughly
dried, and which she sought to wipe by rubbing
against the pillow. After a few trials of this sort she forbade
the nurse to touch her, and installed her husband in
the duty. It was actually a comfort to him to seek to
humiliate himself by these dressing-maid services; and it
seemed to him that he was thereby earning forgiveness for
the crime which he dared not confess. He washed her
face, took her meals in, and put them out, fed her with his
own hands, fanned her by the hour, and all, she thought,
as no one else could.

“How gentle you are!” she said, her eyes suddenly
moistening with gratitude. “How nicely you wait on me!
And to think that you have led a storming party! And I
have seen men afraid of you! My dear, what did you
ever mean by saying that you are not good enough for
me? You are a hundred times better than I deserve.”

Carter laid his forehead in her gently clasping hands
without speaking.

“What are you going to call him?” he asked presently.

“Why, Ravenel;—didn't you know?” she answered
with a smile.

She had been calling him Ravenel to herself for several
days, without telling any one of it. It was a pleasure to
think that she alone knew his name; that she had so much
in him of an unshared, secret possession.

“Ravenel Carter,” she repeated. “We can make that
into Ravvie. Don't you like it?”

“I do,” he answered. “It is the best name possible.
It contains the name of at least one good man.”

“Of two good men,” she insisted. “A good husband
and a good father.”

Her first drive in the pony carriage was an ecstacy. By
her side sat the nurse holding Ravvie, and opposite sat
her husband and father. Presently she made the Colonel
and the nurse change places.

“I want my child where I can see him, and my husband
where I can lean against him,” she said.

“I don't come in,” observed the Doctor. “I am Monsieur
De Trop—Mr. No Account.”

“No you are not. I want you to look at Ravvie and
me.”

Soon she was anxious lest the child should catch cold
by riding backwards.

“No more danger one way than the other,” said the
Doctor. “The back of his head goes all around.”

“I dare say his hair will protect him; won't it?” she
asked.

“His hair is about as heavy as his whiskers,” laughed
the Doctor. “He is in no danger of Absalom's fate.”

The nurse having pulled up a shawl in rear of the little
bobbing head, Lillie was satisfied, and could turn her attention
to other things. She laid her slender hand on her
husband's knee, nestled against his strong shoulder and
said, “Isn't it lovely—isn't the whole world beautiful!”

They had taken the nearest cut out of the city, and were
passing a surburban mansion, the front yard of which was
full of orange trees and flowers. A few weeks before she
would have wanted to steal the flowers; now she eagerly
asked her husband to get out and beg for some. When
he returned with a gorgeous bouquet she was full of gratitude,
exclaiming, “Oh, how lovely! Did you thank the
people? I am so obliged to them. Did they see the child
in the carriage?”

“Yes,” said the Colonel, smiling with pleasure at her
naïve delight. “The lady saw the child, and said this
rose was for him.”

Accordingly the rose, carefully stripped of all thorns,

was put into the dimpled fist of Ravvie, who of course proceeded
to suck it.

“He is smelling of it,” cried Lillie, with a charming faith
in the little god's precocity.

“He is trying it by his universal test—his all-sufficient
crucible,” said the Doctor. “Everything must go into
that mouth. It is his only medium for acquiring knowledge
at present. If it was large enough and he could reach far
enough, he would investigate the nature of the solar system
by means of it. It is lucky for the world that he is not
sufficiently big to put the sun in his mouth. We should
certainly find ourselves in darkness—not to mention that
he might burn himself. My dear, I am afraid he will
swallow some of the leaves,” he added. “We must interfere.
This is one of the emergencies when a grandfather
has a right to exercise authority.”

The rose was gently detached from Ravvie's fat grasp,
and stuck in his little silk bonnet, his eyes following it till
it disappeared.

“You see he is an eating animal,” continued the Doctor.
“That is pretty much all at present, and that is enough.
He has no need of any more wisdom than what will enable
him to demand nourishment and dispose of it; and God, in
his great kindness towards infants, has not troubled him
with any further revelations so far. God has provided us
to do all the necessary thinking in his case. The infant is
a mere swallower, digestor, and assimilator. He knows
how to convert other substances into himself. He does it
with energy, singleness of purpose, perseverance, and wonderful
success. Nothing more is requisite. In eating he
is performing the whole duty of man at his age. So far as
he goes he is a masterpiece.”

“But you are making a machine of him—an oyster,”
protested Lillie.

“Very like,” said the Doctor. “Very like an oyster.
His existence has a simplicity and unity very similar to
that of the lower orders of creation. Of course I am not

speaking of his possibilities. They are spiritual, grand,
perhaps gigantic. If you could see the inferior face of his
brain, you would be able to perceive even now the magnificent
capacities of the as yet untuned instrument.”

“Oh don't, papa!” implored Lillie. “You trouble me.
Do they ever dissect babies?”

“Not such lively ones as this,” said the Doctor, and proceeded
to change the subject. “I never saw a healthier
creature. I shouldn't wonder if he survived this war,
which you used to say would last forty years. Perhaps
he will be the man to finish it.”

“I don't say so now. I didn't think my husband would
be on the Union side when I said that. I think we shall
beat them now.”

“Since the miracle all other things seem possible,”
philosophised the Doctor.

I do not repeat the Colonel's talk. It was not so appropriate
as that of the others to the occasion; for he knew
little as yet of the profounder depths of womanly and infantile
nature; his first marriage had been brief and childless.
In fact, Carter was rather a silent man in family
conclaves, unless the conversation turned on some branch
of his profession, or the matters of ordinary existence. He
occupied himself with watching alternately his wife and
child; with wrapping up the former, and occasionally
fondling the latter.

“How very warm he feels!—how amazingly he pulls
hair!—I believe he wants to get my head in his mouth,”
are samples of his observations on the infant wonder. He
felt that the baby was either below him or above him, he
really could not tell which. Of his wife's position he was
certain: she was far higher than his plane of existence:
when she took his hand it was from the heavens.

From Mrs. Larue he was thoroughly detached, and with
a joyful sense of relief, freedom, betterment. They talked
very little with each other, and only on indifferent subjects
and in the presence of others. It is possible that this separation

would not have lasted if they had been thrown
together unguarded, as had been the case on board the
Creole; but here, caring for his infant and for the wife
who had suffered so much and so sweetly for his sake, the
Colonel felt no puissance of passionate temptation.

Mrs. Larue had no conscience, no sense of honor; but
like many cold blooded people, she valued herself on her
firmness. In an unwonted burst of enthusiasm she had
told him that all must be over between them, and she
meant to make her words good, no matter what he might
desire. She was a little mortified to see how easily he had
cut loose from her; but she knew how to explain it so as
not to wound her vanity, nor tempt her to break her resolution.

“If he did not love his wife now, he would be a brute,”
she reflected. “And if he had had the possibilities of a
brute in him, I never should have had a caprice for him.
After all, I do not care much for the merely physical human
being. C'est par le côte morale qu 'on s'empare de
moi. Apres tout je suis presque aussi pure dans les sentiments
que ma petite cousine.”

Meanwhile her self-restraint was something of a trial to
her. At times she thought seriously of marrying again,
with the idea of putting an end to these risky intrigues and
harassing struggles. Perhaps it was under this impression
that she wrote a letter to Colburne, informing him of
the birth of Ravvie, and sketching some few items of the
scene with a picturesqueness and sympathy that quite
touched the young gentleman, astonished as he was at the
frankness of the language.

“After all,” she concluded, “married life has exquisite
pleasures, as well as terrific possibilities of sorrow. I do
not really know whether to advise a young man like you to
take a wife or not. Whether you marry or remain single
you will be sorry. I think that in either state the pains
outweigh the pleasures. It follows that we are not to consider
our own happiness, but to do what we think is

for the happiness of others. Is not this the true secret of
life?”

“Is it possible that I have been unjust?” queried Colburne.
“Those are not the teachings of a corrupted nature.”

He did not know and could not have conceived the unnatural
conscience, the abnormal ideas of purity and duty,
which this woman had created for her own use and comfort,
out of elements that are beyond the ken of most New
Englanders. He was the child of Puritanism, and she of
Balzac's moral philosophy.