 | XX. The thief in the night |  |
20. XX.
The snowy silken curtains had been loosed from
their cords of gold, and only swayed gently in the
breeze that crept through the blinds, sweeping
their heavy fringes along the floor, and filling the
room with a soft and sacred gloom, as Gaston
still stood there gazing down at Beaudesfords
lying in the filtered light which made the atmosphere
about him seem like that of some other
world. The house was without a sound; for
Caroline's hysterics, and Mrs. Stanhope's heavy
steps to and fro in her own room, were hushed
by closed doors and distance. Beaudesfords lay,
as he had been left in Dr. Ruthven's hurried
absence, like one who sleeps upon his pillow, and
not yet robed in the final habiliments, for the
people had said, in their ghastly jargon, that it
would be easier to clothe one in that condition
to-morrow than to-day; nor had the warmth of
life quite ebbed in these two hours. That horrid
faint, and the cataleptic share alike, had slowly
and entirely passed away, the eyelids had partially
closed, an utter calm lay on the white face, and
something so like a smile had settled round those
chiselled lips, that it seemed now far more the
sweet slumber of fatigue than that eternal sleep
which knows no waking in the flesh. There was
a majesty about that prostrate form with which
not all the helplessness that wraps the dead could
do away, — that abandoned helplessness which
cannot give back look for look, which is forced
to suffer the reading of secrets hidden once by
bloom and smile and sparkle, but now all plainly
written to the eye that knows the cipher, — that
helplessness which leaves the dead at the mercy
of the gazer, exposed to love or scorn alike.
This majesty of Beaudesfords' was something now
superior to clay or to corruption: as if the monarch
of creation, Death, which is the life everlasting,
held his state in such dust that day.
But while he gazed upon this mould of death,
a living flame seemed to have heated Gaston's
memory: every day, every hour, every word of
his intercourse with Beaudesfords started up in it
complete, and their black shadows stalked through
and of the fact that he should never
be forgotten by them in their haunting power.
The wrongs he had done the dead man looked
him in the face with their evil eyes, the treachery
to his friend upbuoyed all these wrongs like an
element to which they were native, — a heavy,
leaden element into which they could never sink
and drown fathoms deep. Beaudesfords' long
service of loving-kindness became like the festering
wound of a poisoned blade, one sharp and
bitter agony of remembrance. Such confused
and terrible images were shaping themselves in
his mind, like the phantasmal outlines of those
wavering exhalations that rise from regions of
stagnant marshes, that he began to fear lest his
reason reeled already, and he should expiate
his folly and his sin in a mad-house.
But through it all, as I have said, through the
frenzy of sorrow and shame and dread and passion,
one thought domineered, kept piercing him
again and again with its thrill of delicious pain, —
every thing whirled and centred about it, every
thing came back to it, he opened his arms and
took it and hugged it to his heart: it was this,
that whether Beaudesfords lived or Beaudesfords
other!
Whether Beaudesfords' own will had put a
period to the light of day that shone for him, —
or whether Catherine's strong, firm hand it was
that had guided home that little knife, — the deed
was done, the barrier was down, there was nothing
now between the two, the way was clear before
them for all earthly bliss; and when Death took
them, — dearest delight of all! — their dust should
mingle into one dust. For beyond death Gaston
never looked: he believed nothing but the evidence
of the senses. “There is a sixth sense,” said a
witty Frenchman, “the sense of the ideal; and
d'Holbach had but five senses.” Gaston had no
more. He had never seen the grand shadows of
futurity with any eye of faith: to him the hereafter
was only a vast void. He meant all the more
to suck the honey from each moment as it became
the present: he needed to hear with his own ears
the voice of some actual angel of the resurrection
declare, “And yet the dead do rise!”
Perhaps Gaston was trying himself too far in
calling up this throng of dark and sad recollections,
of intentions rosily glowing with hope and
rapture, while looking down on that still face
life. But he knew that, so long as he lived on
the solid earth, that face, the immaterial counterpart
of that face, must hang like a dreadful mask
perpetually between him and the world; and if
now, at its first and strongest, he met it and
blunted all the anguish it could yield, it would
afterwards become of no more import than any
face-cloth tossed aside by the rifler of a grave.
But, when Gaston said that, a taunting voice
seemed to speak close beside his ear, and tell him
that he was not rifling a grave, he was filling
one; and then another voice returned, like a
mocking antiphon, that he was rifling it even of
its good name. For was he not suffering Beaudesfords'
name to be sent abroad on the winds
blasted with the stigma of suicide? And that
when he knew, and none better, that yonder white
hand upon the wall had severed the vein, that
yonder face, that blotch of beauty in the portrait
there, had darkened while the deed was doing.
If it was not thus — if — but there Gaston's courage
stayed — he had loved Beaudesfords — strange
contravention of his being, he loved him still —
he feared to think of what it could have been that
had spurred his own hand to such a thrust, he
Beaudesfords staggered out of the world because,
finding his wife worthless and his friend false,
the foundations of life gave way beneath him.
The surprise and the contempt of this dead man
were strokes that he alive had no courage to
meet: he evaded all the subject by fastening
upon that hand in the portrait; a white hand, —
but red last night, he said. And what of that?
he said. We make the act hideous by the name
of murder; but what signifies a name? Was
life, after all, so precious a boon — for himself,
he had never until now found it worth the keeping,
— so cruel a loss, a matter of such moment,
that its taker must needs be a fiend? A fair
fiend here, — ah, heavens, how fair! — how sweet
the smile, how exquisite the grace, how rare the
tints! — those locks of palest gold, that sapphire
sheen in the eye, that bloom upon the cheeks like
a wild-rose grown in happy shadow, those lips
that pouted for their lover's kiss — ah, once,
once! Be she however false, be she however
base, be she twice as foul as she was fair, in spite
of sin or shame or life or death he loved her!
It was time that Gaston looked to his reason lest
it reeled. Stone walls never shut in from further
when he had lost his last perception of right or
wrong; when honor, that runs along the flashing
of a soldier's sword, had ceased to have an existence
for him; when virtue had become a thing of
no account; when the embrace of a presumed
murderess allured and did not repel him; when
the moral leprosy, engendered by the mind's
familiar contact with possible sin in the future,
had penetrated the brain with its foul loathsomeness
and disease, till it had lost polarity and
meridian, and did not know heaven from hell.
The bright breeze, creeping over the bosom of
the blossoms in the garden, came bustling into
the room again, lifting the drapery of the casement,
and bringing Beaudesfords word of the
beautiful world outside, — of the world he had renounced
but two hours since, of the cedarn alleys
full of shadow, where he had wandered when
first his heart swelled with love for Catherine,
of the flowers whose fragrance was not so fragrant
in his fancy then as Catherine's lips, of the
birds whose most delicate melody was less melodious
than her voice had been, but all of which
he had held dear to him with the strong love he
had of the vivid real earth, and God's hand
curled among the silken curtains, it lifted the
lock on Beaudesfords' marble forehead, mocking
life as it could; it poured its gay message into his
silent ear, it made all the room fresh and sweet
with its burden. But Beaudesfords heard and
Gaston heeded nothing, the one in his white icy
slumber, the other in his black hot reverie. And
while the breeze blew and rioted there, and shook
down the petals from the silver tripod of red
roses, a footfall had sounded on the carpet, —
not that step light as the breeze itself on the
summer turf, — but the heavy foot that has
stumbled upon a grave; and Catherine stood
again on the other side of that still sleeper,
with all the curtains looped away between them
from the carved pearl of their supports.
Gaston did not glance at her at first: he was
still gazing at the portrait over her head, the portrait
full of such palpitating color, such beauty
and such life. For many minutes after he was
aware of Catherine's presence he still kept his
eyes on the painting, with a vicious intensity, till
the lovely face might have been fixed, as if with
fire, upon their retina. When at length he
lowered his gaze towards Catherine herself, the
seemed to quiver ever so slightly beneath his
feet that failed him; for whether it were some
power from his body, some faculty from his
mind, some person from his world, something
had vanished: what it was, he had no means
of conjecturing; his heart was not beating, but
trembling; his memory appeared all at once to
encumber his mind like dead stuff, beneath the
paralyzing potency of this inexplicable sensation.
For that vision of a woman standing before him
was an unfamiliar thing: it was no longer
Catherine; or, if it was indeed the person of
that portrait, it was she repeated in what ghostly
medium, beneath the ray of what unearthly spectrum?
Where had fled the radiances, the warm
flesh-tints, the glory about her that always reminded
you of light, as if a star had opened to
let her forth? This woman was whiter than the
form beneath her hand, — only the violet eyes
looked out as if all heaven were shining into
them.
It was the briefest space ere Gaston had himself
in hand again, a space only long enough to
shiver in; one of those lingering, curdling shivers
with which gossips say that some foot treads on
sight of the sun. But what had given him his
bewildered pause was the recoil — with all his
thoughts surging on in their certainty — in this
new woman's face, as if day after day had lied to
him, as if sunshine had grown blood-red, as if
the earth were but a cloud and vapor, — the
doubt, the dread, that she could never have done
this deed, that Catherine could never have loved
him. “Catherine!” he cried, and paused.
He had never called her so before. But it was
her name; and there are times when people forget
their ceremonies. A simple word; but its
intonation bore such hope, such determination,
such a claim, such proud, quick, pleasured confidence,
that its sound was an offence.
She had not heard him at the first. The full
meaning of it did not overcome her till Gaston
called her name the third time. Then she looked
up, calm as only those are who rise great on great
events, and meet life or death even-handed, an
equal, asking no odds. “I think you forget,”
she said gently, “that you speak to the wife of
Beaudesfords.”
“His widow,” said Gaston.
“Death cannot widow me of Beaudesfords,”
his wife.”
“No more, no more!” suddenly cried the other,
his dark face dark as a thunder-cloud, his eye
heavy with lightnings and with rain. “Not his,
but mine, — oh, mine!”
Was this the haughty Gaston, the self-repressed
and silent man? Or was the so-long-pent lava-stream
of that volcanic nature, now that the
barrier was destroyed, pouring forth fused with
its fierce central fire. It was not Catherine,
though, that asked the question, — far too highly
wrought herself to wonder at the same thing in
another. She only drew back a little, with a
quick anger as if her husband had been hurt
through her, — an anger that passed like a mere
flash upon the great stress of the so much stronger
emotions with which she had been overwhelmed.
And as for Gaston, he had not meant that any
temptation should betray him to such lengths;
he had not meant to see her, to speak with her,
much less to claim her, for days or even months
to come; he had a tigerish quality that loved to
dally with its prey; and, so far as he had any plan
of action at all, it was the scheme of commanding
reverence from the fickle falsehood of a weak soul
that was constant to its friendship through all
the labyrinths of passion; and it may be that he
had besides a certain mantle of decorous and
noble behavior to assume and deceive even himself.
Yet now, when all these contending forces
of rage and grief and horror, and desire and fear,
overmastered him, he was not the demi-god he
had believed himself to be: he had no more
resistance than if an alien power from far without
had seized him and bent him like a straw to
its wicked will.
“Not his, but mine!” cried Gaston once again;
for now that the first word had been spoken, the
first glance given, he could not break too boldly,
too utterly, the seal of his past silence. “We
have endured, we have suffered. You are no
longer bound, — the world, the whole world is
before us, — mine while life lasts!” he said exultingly,
and the great scar along his face leaped
into light.
“And then?” asked Catherine, choking down
the tremor in her tone, and speaking because it
was time she should be heard, as even her exalted
mood could perceive, and although it were in that
presence.
“And then one dust! an everlasting sleep in
one another's arms!” he exclaimed, with a smile
as triumphant as a sunburst.
“Thank God!” she said, more to herself than
him. “It never could have been. I never could
have cared for him!” and her involuntary shudder
of disgust shook even the chill hand she held.
“Stop!” said Gaston, bending forward, and
using such effort at control, in order to be calm,
that it seemed to him it was turning him into
iron. “Do you mean to say you never loved
me?”
“Never!” answered Catherine, firmly. And her
face flushed crimson and then grew white once
more, as she blushed beneath the sting of such
words spoken to Beaudesfords' wife. “Never! I
will speak the truth, though it is here and now.
Speak it,” she said solemnly, “because it is here
and now; as if this heart, on which I lay my
hand, were God's altar.” For Catherine, in the
suffering of the night before, albeit unconsciously,
had done with reserve. In reaching her right
place; in recognizing the love whose silent growth
had uprooted the noxious parasite and weed; in
remembering, and gladly remembering, that she
was the wife of Beaudesfords; in seeing now that,
of the spirit could never expire, — she stood upon
a plane as far above this man and his words as
heaven is above the earth. She had sinned in
soul, but she had struggled; she had overcome;
and he had only tempted. “If ever any delirium
disturbed my fancy,” she said, “I saw it — long
before this horror happened, — saw it for a delirium,
detested it, escaped it. I escaped it. I
have never loved — I know it now — I have never
loved any one but him, my husband, — so lofty, so
generous, so brave, so good, so pure! Oh, Beaudesfords,
what is death between us?” she cried,
forgetting Gaston's existence then. “You waited
for me so long, surely we can wait a little longer!
Married for the moment only here? oh, it were
sacrilege, with all eternity to be happy in! Nearer,
nearer now than we ever were before, our love
hallowed in heaven as it never was on earth, —
not death, not fate, can separate us, — we are
one! I shall hear and know and feel you in
every breath I draw, in every thought, in every
pulse, — summer mornings will seem to bring
you back to me, — no night will be too high, with
its heaven full of stars, for me to find you, — for
oh! I love you, Beaudesfords! Beaudesfords, I
love you!”
“Stop!” exclaimed Gaston again. He shut
his teeth together a moment, as he listened, and
writhed in strange torture. If this were Catherine,
he could not then resist the impression that
he was another than himself. “And yet it was
your hand,” said he in a voice that she had never
heard before, “your hand that prepared the way
— that set us free — that opened for us both, last
night, a path to paradise! Your hand that did
this” —
“What!” murmured Catherine, in an awestruck
whisper, losing thought for the instant even
of Beaudesfords' loss. “Do you” —
Gaston pointed at the sleeper in his bed. His
gesture denied the need of words.
For a moment she returned his gaze, speechless,
with a kind of faint sickness. Not at the
accusation; for the remembrance of the gardener's
words in the morning, which she had
disregarded and forgotten, had rushed over her,
and been spurned. “And is it possible, then,”
she said, “that you can believe, can entertain —
you — Gaston — his friend — Oh, you betrayed
him! But can you think that I, his wife — that
for the sake of any lawless love, though it were
an archangel's, I could take my husband's life?”
“Which you did,” he said.
“And if I did, — which, O my God! declare to
be the lie it is! — is any man so base as, knowing
her, to take to his arms that adulteress in
desire, that murderess in deed! Oh, go, go, go!
leave such a place as this!” she commanded, in
that hushed, clear tone of hers. “Oh that his
last rest should be profaned by words like these!”
and suddenly she faced him with her appalling
whiteness and fire. “Go from the room!” she
said. “Your presence is an insult to his ashes.
Should you meet him in the world to come, one
glance of his pure eye must needs annihilate
you. Beneath contempt. Too low for hatred.
Nothing! — Oh, Beaudesfords, come back, come
back!” she cried, as Gaston tottered off, like one
who has been struck, from where he had approached
her. “Do not leave me in this cruel
world alone! Come back, or take me with
you, Beaudesfords, my own!” And she fell
upon her knees, hiding her head against his cold
heart, and wetting it with torrents of hot tears,
the first tears she had shed, creeping up to lay
her mouth on his lips, pouring between them
the warm breath of her breast, that labored on
his with sobs.
While the silence in the room was broken by
nothing but those sobs, and Gaston towered
there, at the foot of the bed, as immovable and
rigid as if he had been cast in bronze, there were
voices in the garden. It was the voice of Rose,
who, while the other women had hidden themselves
away with their grief, had been unable to
follow them, but still hovered round the spot,
now wringing her hands in a bewilderment of
terror, now blind with bursts of weeping. She
had gone down the garden, gathering, as she
went, an armful of the great day-lilies, hardly
knowing what she did, connecting them with a
vague idea of that sacred chamber, and adding
her heavy tears to the dew, of which the sun had
not yet robbed their white and gold lustrousness.
And then she had waited at the lower paling,
quivering with hope and fear, and comprehending
that Dr. Ruthven's hasty departure, after his
orders to Frye to have the cordials at hand, and
the hot flannels and ammonia and strong spirits
ready for renewed effort, meant quick return and
mighty possibilities. And suddenly she had cried
out, as she saw him leap from his saddle at the
nearest gate, — saw through her wet eyes not one,
but twenty Dr. Ruthvens, with as many parcels
pausing at her ejaculation.
Perhaps the old Doctor was thinking within
himself that, if all Nature took the disastrous
thing so sweetly, if the garden that Beaudesfords
had tended still blushed as brightly, the flowers
bloomed, the winds, the skies, were just as fresh
and fair, it must be because they were in the
secret of God, and knew this thing that we call
death to be no such blot upon the universe at all.
But he was aware of thinking of nothing save
that one moment's delay was ruin.
“It 's the last resort!” he cried, hurrying on
without staying, and not glancing at her enough
to notice the eagerness that sparkled through her
weeping eyes. “It 's our dear boy's last chance.
I couldn't trust any of the blundering idiots,
after I had sent them for it: but if I can get
some cordial into his stomach with this tube now,
and then apply the battery, — such things are
possible,” he mumbled defiantly to himself, as he
went, while Rose hung breathless on his words.
“Faint with loss of blood, — suspended animation,
— 'twouldn't be the first instance, — Boerhaave
gives a case of six hours. The battery 'll
do no harm!”
“Oh, Doctor!” Rose began again, as well as
she could for crying. “I 've been standing on
fire. It doesn't seem like death in there, for I
looked in, and Gaston was the only dreadful
thing to see. And Mrs. Grey — oh, Doctor!
Mrs. Grey just told me how he had a fall years
and years ago, and bled so” —
“Good God, and I forgot it! Oh, I 'm an old
man! And he lying like death then for hours.
Don't lose a breath!” exclaimed Dr. Ruthven,
springing forward as though he were twenty years
younger, though you would have said he could
move no faster than he was already moving.
“Frye! Where's Frye? Help me here! Every
thing at hand? Don't let us have any false
alarm. Quiet, quiet! But Heaven grant” —
And suddenly Catherine sprung to her feet.
“Call Ruthven!” she almost shrieked. “Send
for him! Bring him!” And just at that moment
the casement's blind flew open, and the flood
of glad light fell in and overlay the flame of her
scarlet cheeks, and spread around her head like a
glory. “Oh, come here! come here!” she said,
as Dr. Ruthven himself hastened through from
the garden. “His heart beats! it beats beneath
my hand! oh, it beats, I tell you! and he breathes,
are not dead! Speak to me, — look at me!”
Dr. Ruthven came up behind her while she
clung there, and took her like a child, and seated
her in a great sleepy-hollow of an arm-chair.
“Let no one speak in this room again while Death
and I wrestle,” his manner said, but he uttered
not a word; for he had straightway forgotten
every thing in that physiological passion that lit
up for him the dark places where matter and
spirit antagonize, yet join, as he strove to kindle
the blood once more, to renew the breath, and,
charging the battery along the whole course of
the nerves, to strike them into action, till one
wheel catching on another the entire machinery
should be in motion with that life which Bichât
asserted to be, after all, only the totality of the
functions!
You might as well ask the great angels who
watched the Almighty hands fashion that red
clay upon Aornos, when the first man entered into
the sacrament of life, as have asked Catherine
what took place in the long hour that followed
Dr. Ruthven's return. It always seemed to her
as if she had entered, during that time, into
the secrets of eternity; as if she had herself
of being; as if she had been a witness of some
awful rite of preternatural powers, and had seen
behind the hollow masks of life and death the
form of indestructible spirit; as if she had been
shown the hidden mysteries of creation, and God
had led her by the hand out of darkness into light.
She was never exactly the same woman, — she
had watched a soul come back from the vast
shadowy brink, and seize its body. Some strong,
crystallic current, too, had changed her from an
amorphous existence into the perfect jewel, so
to say. There was always something sweetly
solemn in her face in those after-days: happiness
had been purchased at a price that rendered
it too costly for any thing but serious and
conscious use. She never felt that she could
afford to be happy in the irresponsible way which
belonged to the birds and breezes and Rose.
But now, when at last a long tremble vibrated
through Beaudesfords' frame, when a shiver shook
his ashy lips, when the blood rushed into them
and left them again, when the great, gleaming
eyes opened bewilderedly a moment, closed, and
then lifted again, and lay resting on the blue
splendor of Catherine's, she believed heaven had
was working miracles there; and she stood transfixed,
just as she had sprung forward with her
clasped hands, and seeming to receive her own
existence only from that smile which, from its
faint beginning, grew and overspread the face
of Beaudesfords with the old brilliance and beauty
of earthly life.
They neither felt nor remembered, for the while,
the presence of any other than themselves in the
place: for him, the shadow of the grave slowly
drawing off still obscured all but her; for her,
all being, all identity of others, was lost in the
light of Beaudesfords' gaze, as sunlight drowns
the stars. They knew the meaning in each
other's soul as their eyes hung there: he read
her love, her confession, her prayer; she heard
his answer ere the prayer was spoken. His lips
were murmuring. “Come to me,” he tried to
say. She was there, sobbing out, “Oh, Beaudesfords,
I am not fit to touch you!” hiding her
face beside his, silent and breathless then, while
he whispered: “I could not move, I could not
stir, — the weight of my grave was on my breast.
But I heard it all, — all you said to him. I
should never have come back to life, — had it
leap, — had you not proved your faith to me, —
had you not set my heart beating to yours, — oh,
Catherine, my wife!”
No one heard them. Dr. Ruthven was crying
aloud, without a qualm. Frye, faint with joy
and fear, and his exertions in behalf of the master
he had served from a child, had sunk upon
the floor. Only Gaston looked at them, with a
wild and burning look.
Not enough strength had returned to Beaudesfords
to let him move his head. But, as if that
look compelled them, his eyes wandered round
and rested now on Gaston's. Wide and fervid
eyes, full of fevered light, large drops of lustre, —
they surveyed him; and their recognition was as
blasting as the recognition of the judgment-day.
No smile upon the lips, no softness on the brow,
no woman-like reproach, no sorrowing loss, only
that great, grave gaze that took the measure
of the man's perfidy. It was the last blow, — the
blow that Gaston could not bear. He had met
much that morning. The shock when Beaudesfords'
death was announced seemed to have reversed
the currents of his blood. His head had
whirled when he so suddenly found Catherine
ever since his self-assurance that the
deed was hers, ever since he felt that, despite
crime or shamelessness, his passion was the same,
as dear and dearer. He had believed her hand
red with guilt, and found it stainless. He had
believed that Catherine's kisses were ripe for his
gathering, — remembering, with long, piercing
thrills, one night beneath the starlit shadows
of the swinging tree-branches, the lips that bent,
the lips that rose: an innocent night of a youth
too long fled to be condemned, — and he had
seen those kisses showered upon another man, a
dead man. He had seen that dead man speak
and gaze — Great God! how dead men gaze! He
raised his hand to his head in a distracted way, —
could he never rid himself of that stare? Must
it hang there for ever before him, like a dazzling
sun obliterating all the rest of the world? A
slow tear gathered in Beaudesfords' eye. Gaston
recalled vacantly, as he saw it, that the dead
never weep, nor yet the dying. Just as vacantly,
too, he recalled the fact of those glass spheres, in
which an imprisoned drop of water changes and
sublimes and swells to scalding vapor, till it
bursts and shatters its shell to atoms; and in a
tear were something bursting in his own brain.
He turned away, as the pain passed, with a low,
idiotic laugh, no longer a man, but a maniac.
When, by and by, Beaudesfords went about the
place again, a harmless creature followed him
like a hound, never happy out of his sight, — one
who had forgotten his own name, and remembered
nothing but Beaudesfords'. If Catherine needed
a punishment and a humiliation, she had it ever
before her. They kept the forlorn wretch with
them; Dr. Ruthven giving him especial care
from day to day. The western wing was still
his domicile when he needed quiet, but at all
times he was a member of the household; and,
though strong servants waited on him in his own
apartments, he never needed other restraint than
a pleasant word of Beaudesfords'. He knew none
but gentle influences, sweet faces, the music of
soft voices. He sailed with them upon the river,
he hunted with Beaudesfords through the fields
and woods. One day, when Beaudesfords had
fallen upon his gun in vaulting across a hedge,
lying for the moment quite still and faint, and
had then suddenly opened his eyes, this follower,
head to foot, and fell down before him, calling out
for his forgiveness and mercy, — taking up his
thread of life where he had lost it, in that wondering
look of Beaudesfords' clear eyes, — and Gaston
was himself again, himself with a mighty change,
— the dross was gone. And in the long hours of
that noon, as they sat there, the two friends, loving
each other with a love passing that of woman,
made all bright between them. Thus a fleet
season sped, and Gaston was a reasonable man
once more: one atom too noble and too nobly
trusted to cherish any sentiment of ill-will or any
thing but veneration towards the woman who
once swayed soul and sense alike, — a strange
being, with his dark, scarred face and iron-gray
head; a man with all his youthful fires and furies
burned out of him, content enough with fate, and
thankful for the sunshine that fell on him as he
sat in the garden at Beaudesfords. One person,
though, never ceased to observe him; for McRoy,
the gardener, when he relieved his mistress of
his suspicions, was nevertheless unable to believe
Beaudesfords, as the latter assured him, that,
being ill and with a disordered mind, which was
certainly no more than the truth, he had inflicted
find it in his heart to credit the statement; and,
as long as his lamp of life held out to burn, he
would have turned its vigilant ray on Gaston,
had not Gaston hindered such necessity when his
old ambitions began to throb, as they did before
that dream of passion clouded his days; and,
drawn by the subsidence of revolution on his
former field of action, he departed for the tropical
regions, where he is still at work with a scheme
as grand as the mountains he shall pierce and
the seas he shall unite; while McRoy's inspection
is turned over to the purlieus of the garden and
the sparrows.
That garden at Beaudesfords is still more
beautiful than any painted scene of a fairy
spectacle. It is no wonder that Gaston loved
his chair and cigar there; that Mrs. Stanhope's
netting and Caroline's sofa are as much a part
of it as the standards and the annuals; that the
family fairly live there the livelong summer
through. The broad beds of geranium still blossom
in it like flames of sunrise fallen on the grass;
the fragrant flower-fence spices the air all day;
the roses revel together, and climb the trellis, and
look back with blushing faces where the bees are
the sun-soaked cedarn alleys are still leading
away into misty shadow; the wind is still ravishing
every bud of its odors; the Triton is still
blowing the sparkling water-streams from his
horn, rocking the pickerel-weed and arrowhead
and golden lilies on the ripple that he makes;
birds are twittering, leaves are rustling, a woman
is singing: —
The bees on the bells of thyme,
The birds on the myrtle-bushes,
The cicale above in the lime,
And the lizards below in the grass,
Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was
Listening to my sweet pipings.”
But sweeter music still than breezes make or
bird-song chirrups through the place: it comes
from where a golden-haired urchin sits upon the
edgestone of the shallow lake, fishing with a pin,
and soaking his bits of shoes into a pulp; it
comes from where Beaudesfords strolls up the
path with a couple of cherubs on his shoulders, —
lovely, laughing, rosy things, whose voices are
the most delightful melody, as they shower their
little handfuls of blossoms on the mother, who sits
in her low garden-seat among the violets, where
a tuneful fright of the dark-eyed, peach-bloomed
little woman that frolics round them.
“Do you know,” said Beaudesfords to his wife,
on the evening of one of these summer days, after
the garden was still from the joyance and music
of these voices, — “do you know that, though
this happiness is so deep, so real, so intense, it is
a very different thing from my old ideal of happiness?
I have grown so still, — I think that that
time I died I must have been made over.”
“It is not that you are more still,” said Catherine,
“but only that you are at rest.”
“Yet there is no buoyancy left in me: my
bubble is all from the outside. If you were not
at my hand, if these little airy creatures dropped
me, I should sink.” Without, the summer stars
were trembling in the warm and rushing wind;
within, the soft, low breathing from the room beyond
seemed to rise and fall with the beating of
their own hearts. You could not hear that regular,
sweet sound without seeing the picture of the
rosy little faces bathed in their dewy sleep. “Listen,”
said Beaudesfords, “while we look out on
this infinity that almost tempts one away, listen
to the murmurings of our anchorage on earth.
perfect peace, so slight a thing may break it,
— after all, it makes me tremble!”
“No, no,” she answered him. “You and I
have been through the Valley of Death, — there
was nothing there to tremble at. We can trust
our future and our darlings in the hand that has
been so tender with our past.”
“Let us go and look at them,” said Beaudesfords.
And, kneeling beside the little beds, they
thanked God for their lot, and, while the seasons
pass and old age comes, for the perpetual youth
in life which children bring.
| XX. The thief in the night | |