University of Virginia Library

40. CHAPTER XL.
BETTER AT LENGTH.

Old Mrs. Murray had never heard of the
scene between her brother-in-law and Josie;
but she inferred from the silence of her hus
band respecting the claim that it was still
afoot.

No doubt this scandalous business did its
part in hurrying her frail being toward that
chasm which yawns at the crumbling base
of the declivity of years. The rector, who
was always ready to attest, and perhaps to
believe, that his old wife had “as good health
as any body,” asserted constantly that it was
the claim which was killing her, and that it
was her only ailment. Something, undoubtedly,
was working her evil; she failed, visibly
and rapidly, from day to day. She, too,
thought that Josie's suit was the cause of
her illness, and fretted a great deal over the
irritating supposition.

Several times she said to her husband, with
a peevishness of utterance which seemed beyond
her strength,

“That woman will kill me.”

Yet, had there been no claim, something
else might easily have worried her feeble life
out; she might have died of listening for the
street-noises, or of counting the specks on
the ceiling; for at the last moment in the
race every little obstacle is able to trip the
tired foot. That one pre-eminent annoyance,
however, swallowed up all minor troubles,
and thretened to devour her also.

In these latter days, by-the-way, she laid
a heavy burden upon her husband. She
could no longer take thought of his weakness,
and control her own agitations for the
sake of keeping him tranquil, as she had
done so often for so many years. Nor was
he strong enough to endure his load without a
reeling and a fretfulness which increased her
trouble. They worried each other incessantly,
without the slightest intention, and yet
with great cruelty. They were two pure,
honorable, pious people, and nevertheless
they led a profoundly wretched life, more
unhappy than the mass of the “unco' wicked.”
It seemed very unjust, and it was surely
very pitiable.

A single one of the brief, doleful dialogues
which they held with each other will exhibit
sufficiently the sombre nature of their
existence.

After one of her long fits of speechless languor,
resembling insensibility and nearly
counterfeiting death, Mrs. Murray roused
herself, turned her faded, watery eyes in
search of her husband, and gasped, pettishly,

“That woman will kill me!”

By-the-way, it must be understood that,
although she uttered this prophecy very dolorously,
she did not utter it with full sincerity.
Life had been, on the whole, delightful
to her, and she was far from being
willing to part with it, or from supposing
that her departure was really near. Had
some authoritative messenger proclaimed to
her that death was not far away, the revelation
would have been not merely a keen affliction,
but also a startling surprise. Nevertheless,

she would persist in declaring from
time to time, “That woman will kill me.”

“Oh dear!” groaned the husband. “This
is Satan's own world. His children have
power to slay.”

“I don't see how she can do so,” murmured
the old lady, her brief pulsation of strength
beginning to pass away.

“It is wonderful and dreadful,” sighed
the prematurely old man. “It is one of the
mysteries of sin.”

“Mysteries of sin,” repeted Mrs. Murray,
in a whisper, still ruled by her affectionate
admiration of her husband, and still capable
of saying litany to his utterances.

“But we must not talk of it now, Huldah,”
he added, suddenly alarmed for her.
Indeed, he had already greatly overtaxed her
strength, or, rather, permitted her to overtax
it.

Her head was sinking lower on her pillow,
as if some supernatural abyss were
sucking her down, and she would disappear
presently from his sight. Her small, wilted,
puckered face turned whiter than its accustomed
whiteness, and her lips parted dumbly
and inexpressively, like those of one lately
dead. Then came one of his spasms of
terror: shouting for the nurse in the adjoining
room, ringing for all the servants in the
house, sending wild messages for the doctor,
and all the while whimpering, “Huldah!
Huldah!”

It was a torturing life, painful to look
upon. There were scenes of distress and despair
too pitiable for description, and which
seemed to belong, not to this earth, but to
some world of unmixed sorrow and lament.
How could it be otherwise when a sick man
undertook to care personally for a sick woman
whom he tenderly loved?

Any chance observer would have said that
the rector ought to have been sent away and
kept away. But nothing short of force could
have debarred him from that bedside; and,
had he failed from it, all the sooner would it
have become a death-bed. Since their marriage
these two people had never been separated
for a day; and to have divided them
now would have been to slay the weaker at
once, and the other shortly.

Outside of the sick-room the rector's conduct
was as strange as within it; it was of
a piece with his unsteady gait and his spasmodic
or relaxed features. People do not
imagine odder things in reverie than he did
in reality, only that (as usually happens, too,
in reverie) he mostly left his purposes uncompleted.
It might be said that his life
now was a series of transitions from one
broken, disturbing dream to another.

He wrote a letter to Josie, summoning her
to “come and look upon her murderous
work;” but he never sent it, lest she should
appear, and the sight of her should kill his
wife. He wrote another letter to request
the attendance of a distinguished medical
specialist in New York, and burned that also,
for fear his precious invalid should suspect
that her case was a desperate one. He commenced
a memorial to Congress against the
Murray claim, but stopped, fatigued and dizzy,
in the middle of the second sentence.
Then he fell to studying medical books and
quack advertisements in newspapers, with
the hope of finding a remedy which would
set old age on its feet in full vigor.

Meantime he would admit to no one that
Mrs. Murray was ill, or even noticeably weak.
She would soon be about again, he said; she
was stronger than himself, and much stronger
than most young women; she had a constitution
of iron, like all her ancestors. Yes,
he flatly fibbed about her health, as indeed
he always had done. Even to the colonel
he recited these absurd tales, although he
must have known that his listener would not
credit them, and could not make believe to
credit them without difficulty.

The dialogues of pretended confidence
which he held with his brother at this period
were both whimsical and pathetic. The one
told as true what he wanted to have true;
and the other, sure that it was false, expressed
his pleasure at hearing it.

Once, when Julian called on John, he found
him searching for some sovereign cure in an
ancient, many-colored basket, full of pillboxes
with broken crowns, and phials with
smirched physiognomies, the hoardings of
Mrs. Murray through many years, and consequently
the veneration of her husband.

“This must be it,” said the rector, picking
up with tremulous eagerness a little flattish,
circular package. “Julian, I wish you
would read that inscription for me. My
glasses don't seem to work of late.”

The colonel put on his spectacles, bent
over his brother's quivering hand, and read,
in the round, formal writing of Mrs. Murray,
“Top of pomatum-bottle.”

“Ah, yes,” said the rector, almost gladdened
by this memento of happier days. “It is
a bottle which got broken some years ago,
and Huldah put away the stopper.”

“What a bump of order she has!” responded
the colonel, scarcely repressing a smile.
“I never saw any body who beat her for assorting
and pigeon-holing and indorsing.
She ought to have been in the War Department.”

“Oh, she is a wonderful woman,” sighed
the husband, in perfect good faith. “Every
little loose article in the house is folded up
and neatly tied, and legibly labeled in just
that way. She is a person of immense industry
and oversight. Every thing has its
place and its superscription. Whatever you
find, you can tell at a glance what it is, just
the same as if you saw it.”

“Only, if there had been no envelope on
this affair,” Julian could not help suggesting,

“we should have known it for a piece
of pottery without our specs.”

“But this is so much neater!” said the
rector, almost ready to shed tears of admiration
upon the package while he replaced
it. “It is so like her! She has kept all our
affairs of every sort in the same order,” he
added, and with a considerable accuracy of
statement, for Mrs. Murray had been a wise
woman financially, and in her prime a sensible
one every way. “If it had not been for
her, I should have made ducks and drakes
of our possessions long ago.”

“Yes, you were extravagant once, John,
and Huldah has been of great service to you,”
conceded the elder brother, wondering the
while at the strange ways in which men are
led to good or to evil.

He had feared, when John married a woman
fifteen years his senior, that the result
would be speedy disillusion, quarrels, and
perhaps scandals. But it had only been a
life-long content, and an exemplary, a wondrous,
affection.

Such is the power of character, of instinctive,
and, one might say, irrational, tendencies,
over circumstances and hinderances.

“I should have gone to utter wreck, body
and soul, for this world and for the next,
without her,” was the rector's next loving
hyperbole. “And even now, if she should be
taken away, I don't know what the end
would be with me,” the shaking old gentleman
declared, as if he were still capable of
dissipation.

Presently another package was found, likewise
neatly folded in white paper and legibly
legended. The colonel took it and read
aloud, “Leaves of a rose given me by Mrs.
Augustus Murray on her wedding-day.”

“That creature!” exclaimed the rector,
slightly recoiling, as if from the preserved
venom of a serpent. “Julian, I had better
destroy those leaves, don't you think so?
She never could look upon them again; they
would give her one of her faint turns. I
really think I had better burn them.” Then
he checked himself. “No! She put them
up. I had better leave them just there.
What do you think, Julian?”

The colonel, after pondering for a moment,
and saying to himself that John was surely
losing his reason, replied considerately that
the matter might perhaps be referred to Mrs.
Murray when she should get about again.

“Precisely,” nodded the rector, gravely.
“Julian, I feel as if I had been handling a
dose of deadly poison,” he added, shaking
his fingers with a shudder, and a shudder,
too, of profound feeling. “I can not think
of that woman without thinking of the Marchioness
of Brinvilliers. She has put hemlock
and arsenic in my wife's cup of life.
She has been the cause, the sole cause, the
wicked and willful cause, of Huldah's illness.
Not that it is dangerous. Thanks be to the
mercy of Heaven, it will soon pass away.
But it might have been dangerous. I shall
always hold her responsible for all that has
happened, and for all that might have happened.”

It seemed to the colonel that he ought to
remonstrate once more against this exaggeration
of Josie's malign enchantments. He did
not specially care to defend the character
and life of a young woman whom he now regarded
with no little contempt and with
some anger; but he had an instinctive desire
to state the cool, judicial truth on all
subjects whatsoever, and, moreover, he wanted
to prevent his brother from sliding into
the chasm of a monomania.

“It appears to me that you rather overstate
that case, John,” he began. “Josie's
conduct has no doubt agitated Huldah, and
been one cause of her—of her sick turn, in
short. But not the sole cause, I should say.
Your wife was not strong before. It would
be only fair to attribute somewhat of her
present weakness to—to—in fact, to declining
years.”

The rector's revolt from this suggestion
was violent, and it led him to make a statement
which was surely very remarkable, at
least in view of his character as a clergyman.

“She is not old enough to account for such
an attack,” he broke out in an agitated voice.
“She is only a year or two older than myself.”

“Well, well, you know best,” muttered the
colonel, pacifically and almost apologetically.
Then he said to himself as he had said
a hundred times before, “John is just like a
woman, and always was.”

“She has more solid health than nine
young women out of ten,” repeated the rector,
for the twentieth time in the last week.
“She has a constitution of iron.”

But all this affectionate and piteous fibbing
about Mrs. Murray's age and health
could not deceive Death. One day he came,
the tigerish separator and destroyer, cruel to
the victim of his stealthy creepings, still more
cruel to the maimed and sorrowing survivor.
Unheard and by surprise he came; up to the
last instant he had lurked from covert to
covert; even when he was sucking away
the life-blood, no spectator of the tragedy
divined it; no, not even was the dying one
aware that his fangs were fastened upon her,
never to be loosened.

Her husband had often noted changes in
her face which startled him; he noted one
such now, and was alarmed by it; but no
more than usual. He was sitting near her,
fanning her gently by moments to give her
easier breath, and by moments ceasing lest
he should chill her feeble life.

Her eyes were closed, but he knew that
she was not slumbering, for now and then
the wrinkled lids parted slightly. It seemed

to him as if she were looking to make
sure that he was there before she could dare
to loose her hold on waking consciousness.
He was uneasy, and wanted often to say
“Huldah,” but still restrained himself for
fear of disturbing her.

There was a blessed hope in his heart (a
vague and flickering but still comforting
hope) that she would fall healthily asleep,
and awake greatly refreshed by some marvel,
and then be quite herself again.

Of a sudden he observed that ominous
change in her visage; or was it only a darkening,
a passing tremor, of his wearied eyesight?
He cast an impatient glance at the
curtained window, and then bent forward
eagerly to study those precious, faded features.

“Are you better, Huldah?” he whispered,
too anxious to keep silence longer.

Observe the tender, cheering form of the
question; he never, by any chance, asked
her if she were worse.

“Yes—better,” she whispered back, opening
her eyes merely to close them, and becoming
the while swiftly other-world-like.

Yes, she was “better at length,” better
“of the fever called living.” She had bent
her last earthly gaze upon her loved one,
and spoken to him her last mortal syllable.

Crowding drops of perspiration gushed
out upon the bereaved man's high, bald,
ashy forehead. He spoke to his wife again;
he took her hand to see if it was cold; he
pressed it, drew her by it, kissed it.

But these gentle solicitations and timorous
urgencies elicited no echo from the mysterious
distances without horizon which had
rushed in between him and the soul which
was lately his comrade.

The thought crossed him that he was
alone in the world; that he was floating on
the frail wreck of his life alone. This
thought came upon him suddenly, like a
murderer, and struck him a torturing, crazing
blow.

“Oh, Huldah, Huldah!” he called aloud,
in a high, quavering scream, meanwhile
clutching the arms of the lifeless body and
shaking them with maniacal force.

There was no protest against the violence,
and no return from the far-away refuge.
There was nothing but the unconscious placidity
and the unresisting meekness of death.

Then came loud, hoarse shouts for assistance
— for the nurse, for Sarah, for all the
domestics by name, for persons who were
not in the house—for Julian and the doctor.

One would have said that no such voice
had ever been heard before on earth, so
strange and unhuman was this broken, indistinct,
and yet stentorian, bellowing. It
was like the cry of great animals in pain,
or of newly created, nondescript, monstrous
creatures.

Help arrived promptly. There was a
wild application of stimulants and other
restoratives; messengers were sent for the
physician and the colonel. Meanwhile the
bereaved husband shouted directions in the
thick speech of a paralytic, and then suddenly
dropped on his knees by the bedside,
there to pray in sobs and whisperings.

But prayer was not enough; it seemed to
him that human remedies might still avail;
and, tottering to his feet, he recommenced a
labor without hope. When the colonel arrived
he found his sister-in-law quite dead,
and his brother striving with stimulants to
bring her out of a swoon.

“John, it is useless,” said the old soldier,
taking the clergyman by the arm. “John,
be a man and a Christian! John, surrender
to your God!”

“Oh, if the Master would but call us both
together!” implored the widower, in a harsh,
piercing whisper, lifting up his shaking
hands to heaven. Then recollecting, perhaps,
how he had exhorted others to bear
their bereavements with submission, he added,
in the same strained, exalted hiss: “But
I will summon all my strength and say—His
will be done!”

“It is done,” answered the colonel, bursting
into a sob—his first sob for near half a
century.

“No!” exclaimed the rector, in a loud
scream of despairing denial, and fell senseless
to the floor.