University of Virginia Library

29. CHAPTER XXIX.
THE WHITE ASH.

When Helen returned to Elsie's bedside, it
was with a new and still deeper feeling of sympathy,
such as the story told by Old Sophy might
well awaken. She understood, as never before,
the singular fascination and as singular repulsion
which she had long felt in Elsie's presence. It
had not been without a great effort that she had
forced herself to become the almost constant attendant
of the sick girl; and now she was learning,
but not for the first time, the blessed truth
which so many good women have found out for
themselves, that the hardest duty bravely performed
soon becomes a habit, and tends in due
time to transform itself into a pleasure.

The old Doctor was beginning to look graver,
in spite of himself. The fever, if such it was,
went gently forward, wasting the young girl's
powers of resistance from day to day; yet she
showed no disposition to take nourishment, and
seemed literally to be living on air. It was remarkable
that with all this her look was almost
natural, and her features were hardly sharpened

so as to suggest that her life was burning away.
He did not like this, nor various other unobtrusive
signs of danger which his practised eye detected.
A very small matter might turn the
balance which held life and death poised against
each other. He surrounded her with precautions,
that Nature might have every opportunity
of cunningly shifting the weights from the scale
of death to the scale of life, as she will often do,
if not rudely disturbed or interfered with.

Little tokens of good-will and kind remembrance
were constantly coming to her from the
girls in the school and the good people in the
village. Some of the mansion-house people obtained
rare flowers which they sent her, and her
table was covered with fruits which tempted her
in vain. Several of the school-girls wished to
make her a basket of their own handiwork, and,
filling it with autumnal flowers, to send it as a
joint offering. Mr. Bernard found out their project
accidentally, and, wishing to have his share in
it, brought home from one of his long walks some
boughs full of variously tinted leaves, such as
were still clinging to the stricken trees. With
these he brought also some of the already fallen
leaflets of the white ash, remarkable for their rich
olive-purple color, forming a beautiful contrast
with some of the lighter-hued leaves. It so happened
that this particular tree, the white ash, did
not grow upon The Mountain, and the leaflets
were more welcome for their comparative rarity.

So the girls made their basket, and the floor of
it they covered with the rich olive-purple leaflets.
Such late flowers as they could lay their hands
upon served to fill it, and with many kindly messages
they sent it to Miss Elsie Venner at the
Dudley mansion-house.

Elsie was sitting up in her bed when it came,
languid, but tranquil, and Helen was by her, as
usual, holding her hand, which was strangely cold,
Helen thought, for one who was said to have
some kind of fever. The school-girls' basket was
brought in with its messages of love and hopes
for speedy recovery. Old Sophy was delighted
to see that it pleased Elsie, and laid it on the
bed before her. Elsie began looking at the flowers
and taking them from the basket, that she
might see the leaves. All at once she appeared
to be agitated; she looked at the basket, — then
around, as if there were some fearful presence
about her which she was searching for with her
eager glances. She took out the flowers, one by
one, her breathing growing hurried, her eyes staring,
her hands trembling, — till, as she came near
the bottom of the basket, she flung out all the
rest with a hasty movement, looked upon the
olive-purple leaflets as if paralyzed for a moment,
shrunk up, as it were, into herself in a curdling
terror, dashed the basket from her, and fell back
senseless, with a faint cry which chilled the blood
of the startled listeners at her bedside.

“Take it away! — take it away! — quick!

said Old Sophy, as she hastened to her mistress's
pillow. “It's the leaves of the tree that was always
death to her, — take it away! She can't
live wi' it in the room!”

The poor old woman began chafing Elsie's
hands, and Helen to try to rouse her with hartshorn,
while a third frightened attendant gathered
up the flowers and the basket and carried them
out of the apartment. She came to herself after
a time, but exhausted and then wandering. In
her delirium she talked constantly as if she were
in a cave, with such exactness of circumstance
that Helen could not doubt at all that she had
some such retreat among the rocks of The Mountain,
probably fitted up in her own fantastic way,
where she sometimes hid herself from all human
eyes, and of the entrance to which she alone possessed
the secret.

All this passed away, and left her, of course,
weaker than before. But this was not the only
influence the unexplained paroxysm had left behind
it. From this time forward there was a
change in her whole expression and her manner.
The shadows ceased flitting over her features,
and the old woman, who watched her from day
to day and from hour to hour as a mother
watches her child, saw the likeness she bore to
her mother coming forth more and more, as the
cold glitter died out of the diamond eyes, and
the stormy scowl disappeared from the dark brows
and low forehead.

With all the kindness and indulgence her father
had bestowed upon her, Elsie had never felt
that he loved her. The reader knows well enough
what fatal recollections and associations had
frozen up the springs of natural affection in
his breast. There was nothing in the world
he would not do for Elsie. He had sacrificed his
whole life to her. His very seeming carelessness
about restraining her was all calculated; he
knew that restraint would produce nothing but
utter alienation. Just so far as she allowed him,
he shared her studies, her few pleasures, her
thoughts; but she was essentially solitary and
uncommunicative. No person, as was said long
ago, could judge him, — because his task was
not merely difficult, but simply impracticable to
human powers. A nature like Elsie's had necessarily
to be studied by itself, and to be followed
in its laws where it could not be led.

Every day, at different hours, during the whole
of his daughter's illness, Dudley Venner had sat
by her, doing all he could to soothe and please
her. Always the same thin film of some emotional
non-conductor between them; always that
kind of habitual regard and family-interest, mingled
with the deepest pity on one side and a sort
of respect on the other, which never warmed into
outward evidences of affection.

It was after this occasion, when she had been
so profoundly agitated by a seemingly insignificant
cause, that her father and Old Sophy were

sitting, one at one side of her bed and one at the
other. She had fallen into a light slumber. As
they were looking at her, the same thought came
into both their minds at the same moment. Old
Sophy spoke for both, as she said, in a low
voice, —

“It's her mother's look, — it's her mother's
own face right over again, — she never look' so
before, — the Lord's hand is on her! His will be
done!”

When Elsie woke and lifted her languid eyes
upon her father's face, she saw in it a tenderness,
a depth of affection, such as she remembered at
rare moments of her childhood, when she had
won him to her by some unusual gleam of sunshine
in her fitful temper.

“Elsie, dear,” he said, “we were thinking how
much your expression was sometimes like that
of your sweet mother. If you could but have
seen her, so as to remember her!”

The tender look and tone, the yearning of the
daughter's heart for the mother she had never
seen, save only with the unfixed, undistinguishing
eyes of earliest infancy, perhaps the under-thought
that she might soon rejoin her in another
state of being, — all came upon her with a sudden
overflow of feeling which broke through all the
barriers between her heart and her eyes, and
Elsie wept. It seemed to her father as if the
malign influence — evil spirit it might almost
be called — which had pervaded her being, had

at last been driven forth or exorcised, and that
these tears were at once the sign and the pledge
of her redeemed nature. But now she was to be
soothed, and not excited. After her tears she
slept again, and the look her face wore was
peaceful as never before.

Old Sophy met the Doctor at the door and
told him all the circumstances connected with
the extraordinary attack from which Elsie had
suffered. It was the purple leaves, she said.
She remembered that Dick once brought home
a branch of a tree with some of the same leaves
on it, and Elsie screamed and almost fainted
then. She, Sophy, had asked her, after she had
got quiet, what it was in the leaves that made
her feel so bad. Elsie couldn't tell her, — didn't
like to speak about it, — shuddered whenever
Sophy mentioned it.

This did not sound so strangely to the old
Doctor as it does to some who listen to this
narrative. He had known some curious examples
of antipathies, and remembered reading of
others still more singular. He had known those
who could not bear the presence of a cat, and
recollected the story, often told, of a person's
hiding one in a chest when one of these sensitive
individuals came into the room, so as not
to disturb him; but he presently began to sweat
and turn pale, and cried out that there must be a
cat hid somewhere. He knew people who were
poisoned by strawberries, by honey, by different

meats, — many who could not endure cheese, —
some who could not bear the smell of roses. If
he had known all the stories in the old books, he
would have found that some have swooned and
become as dead men at the smell of a rose, —
that a stout soldier has been known to turn and
run at the sight or smell of rue, — that cassia
and even olive-oil have produced deadly faintings
in certain individuals, — in short, that almost
everything has seemed to be a poison to
somebody.

“Bring me that basket, Sophy,” said the old
Doctor, “if you can find it.”

Sophy brought it to him, — for he had not yet
entered Elsie's apartment.

“These purple leaves are from the white ash,”
he said. “You don't know the notion that people
commonly have about that tree, Sophy?”

“I know they say the Ugly Things never go
where the white ash grows,” Sophy answered.
“Oh, Doctor dear, what I'm thinkin' of a'n't
true, is it?”

The Doctor smiled sadly, but did not answer.
He went directly to Elsie's room. Nobody would
have known by his manner that he saw any special
change in his patient. He spoke with her
as usual, made some slight alteration in his
prescriptions, and left the room with a kind,
cheerful look. He met her father on the stairs.

“Is it as I thought?” said Dudley Venner.

“There is everything to fear,” the Doctor said,

“and not much, I am afraid, to hope. Does not
her face recall to you one that you remember, as
never before?”

“Yes,” her father answered, — “oh, yes! What
is the meaning of this change which has come over
her features, and her voice, her temper, her whole
being? Tell me, oh, tell me, what is it? Can
it be that the curse is passing away, and my
daughter is to be restored to me, — such as her
mother would have had her, — such as her mother
was?”

“Walk out with me into the garden,” the
Doctor said, “and I will tell you all I know
and all I think about this great mystery of
Elsie's life.”

They walked out together, and the Doctor
began: —

“She has lived a double being, as it were, —
the consequence of the blight which fell upon
her in the dim period before consciousness. You
can see what she might have been but for this.
You know that for these eighteen years her
whole existence has taken its character from
that influence which we need not name. But
you will remember that few of the lower forms
of life last as human beings do; and thus it
might have been hoped and trusted with some
show of reason, as I have always suspected you
hoped and trusted, perhaps more confidently than
myself, that the lower nature which had become
ingrafted on the higher would die out and leave

the real woman's life she inherited to outlive this
accidental principle which had so poisoned her
childhood and youth. I believe it is so dying
out; but I am afraid, — yes, I must say it, I fear
it has involved the centres of life in its own decay.
There is hardly any pulse at Elsie's wrist;
no stimulants seem to rouse her; and it looks as
if life were slowly retreating inwards, so that by-and-by
she will sleep as those who lie down in
the cold and never wake.”

Strange as it may seem, her father heard all
this not without deep sorrow, and such marks
of it as his thoughtful and tranquil nature, long
schooled by suffering, claimed or permitted, but
with a resignation itself the measure of his past
trials. Dear as his daughter might become to
him, all he dared to ask of Heaven was that she
might be restored to that truer self which lay
beneath her false and adventitious being. If he
could once see that the icy lustre in her eyes had
become a soft, calm light, — that her soul was at
peace with all about her and with Him above, —
this crumb from the children's table was enough
for him, as it was for the Syro-Phœnician woman
who asked that the dark spirit might go out from
her daughter.

There was little change the next day, until all
at once she said in a clear voice that she should
like to see her master at the school, Mr. Langdon.
He came accordingly, and took the place of
Helen at her bedside. It seemed as if Elsie had

forgotten the last scene with him. Might it be
that pride had come in, and she had sent for him
only to show how superior she had grown to the
weakness which had betrayed her into that extraordinary
request, so contrary to the instincts
and usages of her sex? Or was it that the
singular change which had come over her had
involved her passionate fancy for him and swept
it away with her other habits of thought and
feeling? Or could it be that she felt that all
earthly interests were becoming of little account
to her, and wished to place herself right with
one to whom she had displayed a wayward
movement of her unbalanced imagination? She
welcomed Mr. Bernard as quietly as she had
received Helen Darley. He colored at the recollection
of that last scene, when he came into
her presence; but she smiled with perfect tranquillity.
She did not speak to him of any apprehension;
but he saw that she looked upon
herself as doomed. So friendly, yet so calm did
she seem through all their interview, that Mr.
Bernard could only look back upon her manifestation
of feeling towards him on their walk
from the school as a vagary of a mind laboring
under some unnatural excitement, and wholly at
variance with the true character of Elsie Venner
as he saw her before him in her subdued, yet
singular beauty. He looked with almost scientific
closeness of observation into the diamond
eyes; but that peculiar light which he knew so
well was not there. She was the same in one
sense as on that first day when he had seen her
coiling and uncoiling her golden chain; yet how
different in every aspect which revealed her state
of mind and emotion! Something of tenderness
there was, perhaps, in her tone towards him; she
would not have sent for him, had she not felt
more than an ordinary interest in him. But
through the whole of his visit she never lost her
gracious self-possession. The Dudley race might
well be proud of the last of its daughters, as she
lay dying, but unconquered by the feeling of the
present or the fear of the future.

As for Mr. Bernard, he found it very hard to
look upon her, and listen to her unmoved. There
was nothing that reminded him of the stormy-browed,
almost savage girl he remembered in
her fierce loveliness, — nothing of all her singularities
of air and of costume. Nothing? Yes,
one thing. Weak and suffering as she was, she
had never parted with one particular ornament,
such as a sick person would naturally, as it might
be supposed, get rid of at once. The golden cord
which she wore round her neck at the great party
was still there. A bracelet was lying by her pillow;
she had unclasped it from her wrist.

Before Mr. Bernard left her, she said, —

“I shall never see you again. Some time or
other, perhaps, you will mention my name to one
whom you love. Give her this from your scholar
and friend Elsie.”

He took the bracelet, raised her hand to his
lips, then turned his face away; in that moment
he was the weaker of the two.

“Good-bye,” she said; “thank you for coming.”

His voice died away in his throat, as he tried
to answer her. She followed him with her eyes
as he passed from her sight through the door,
and when it closed after him sobbed tremulously
once or twice, — but stilled herself, and
met Helen, as she entered, with a composed
countenance.

“I have had a very pleasant visit from Mr.
Langdon,” Elsie said. “Sit by me, Helen,
awhile without speaking; I should like to sleep,
if I can, — and to dream.”