At Last Part 21

The novelty of the imperative tone and the glitter of his wife's eyes moved Mr. Dorrance to more prompt compliance than he would have adjudged to be dignified and husbandly in the case of another man.

Mabel held out the letter at his approach, still pointing to the pa.s.sage she had asked her brother to explain.

"To whom does this refer? Who was the relative whose husband was a naval officer?"

Herbert Dorrance's const.i.tutional phlegm was a valuable ally in the very contracted quarters into which this question drove him, but his sister was his deliverer. Affecting forgetfulness of the letter and its contents, he glanced down one page, Mrs. Aylett leaning upon his arm, and reading with him.

"I don't think you need mind telling the name, here and at this late day, Herbert," she said, seriously and slowly, "provided Mabel will never repeat the story when it can do harm. Have you never heard any of us speak of poor Ellen Lester, my mother's niece, who died several years before your marriage?" accosting her sister-in-law, with a face so devoid of aught resembling cowardly or guilty fears, that Mabel's brain, tried and shaken, tottered into disbelief at her own wild surmises.

"Not that I remember!"

"Is that so? Yet it might easily have been. She accompanied her husband upon his last voyage, and the s.h.i.+p was never heard of again. Her parents are dead, too, so there are few to cherish her memory. She was a school-fellow of mine, and Herbert loved her as a sister."

Mabel was gazing fixedly at her husband's stolid countenance and averted eyes, and made no rejoinder until the silent intensity of her regards compelled him to look up. Reading distrust and alarm in these, he shook off his sister's warning hold.

"When you wish to catechise me upon family matters, Mabel, it is my wish that you should do it in private," he said, roughly. "Then you shall learn all that it concerns you to know. There are subjects into which only prurient curiosity cares to pry."

"I beg your pardon!" answered Mabel, quietly. "I have but to say, in self-defence, that I did not ask to see the letter."

"It is a matter of profound indifference to me whether you did or not,"

was the reply. "For aught that I know or cared, you may have read it a year and a half ago. I retract nothing that is set down there. Clara, shall we go on with our music?"

Glancing around stealthily at the finale of the (sic) he saw that Mabel's chair was vacant, and Mr. Aylett was reading composedly beneath the lamp.

Clara made the same discovery at the same moment, and came forward laughing to her husband.

"What had you been saying to our dear, excitable Mabel, that challenged the introduction of that unfortunate doc.u.ment?"

"Told her of Frederic Chilton's intended marriage!" curtly, and without laying aside his volume.

"Preposterous!"

"I agree with you--but it is the truth."

Herbert stood apart glowing at the fire.

"You must have approached the subject unskilfully," urged the peacemaker. "These old sores are oest left alone."

"It is best for married woman to have none," retorted Winston, doggedly.

"She does not persist in doubting his unworthiness, does she?" queried the wife, aside, but not so cautiously that her brother did not hear her.

He wheeled about suddenly.

"She SHALL believe it, or call me a liar to my face!" he uttered, angrily. "I will put a stop to this sentimental folly!"

"You are late in beginning your reforms," observed Mr. Aylett, dryly.

"You are a less sensible man than I give you credit for being, if you ever begin!" interposed his sister.

"Leave Mabel to herself until she recovers from the shock--if it be one--of this intelligence. The surest means of keeping alive a dying coal is to stir and blow upon it. And even we"--lifting the heavy locks of her husband's hair in playful dalliance--"even we are mortal. We have had our peccadilloes and our repentances, and have now our little concealments of affairs that would interest n.o.body but ourselves. Do you hear what I am saying, Herbert! Leave off your high tragedy airs and attend to reason, as expressed in your sister's advice. While your wife is my invalid guest, I will not have her subjected to any inquisitorial process. There is a time for everything under the sun, saith the preacher. This is the season for tender forbearance, and if need be, of forgiveness."

Herbert blessed her humane tolerance in his alarmed heart, when Mabel awoke from her troubled slumbers at midnight, in extreme pain, that culminated before dawn, in convulsions.

Two physicians were hastily summoned, and when Mrs. Sutton arrived about noon, she met Phillis outside the door of the sick-chamber, carrying a lifeless infant in her arms, and weeping bitterly.

This was the end of the months of hopeful longing and glad antic.i.p.ation which were Heaven's messengers of healing and comfort to the sick and lonely heart. The cunningly-fas.h.i.+oned robes were never to have a wearer, the clasping arms to remain still empty. Oh wondrous mystery--past finding out--of the human soul! Had the lungs once heaved with breath, the heart given one throb; the eyes caught one beam of Heaven's light ere they were sealed fast in eternal darkness, she, who travailed with the infant through the inexpressible agony of birth, would have been written a mother among women; have had the right accorded her, without the cavil of formalist or the disputations of science, to claim the precious thing as her own still--a living baby-spirit that had fluttered back to the bosom of the Almighty Father, after alighting, for one painful moment, upon the confines of the lower world. As it was, custom ordained that there should be no mourning for what had never really been. Anguish, hope, and the patient love at which we do not scoff when the mother-bird broods over the eggs that may never hatch--these were to be no more named or remembered. In silence and without sympathy she must endure her disappointment. The tenderest woman about whose knees cl.u.s.ter living children, and who has sowed in tears the blessed seed, that in the resurrection-morn shall be gathered in beauteous sheaves of richest recompense--would smile in pitying contempt over the tiny headstone which should be lettered--"Born Dead."

All this and much more Mabel was to learn with the return of health and reason, but she lay now, like one who had pa.s.sed for herself the narrow sea that separates the Now from the Hereafter; her features chiselled into the unmoving outlines of a waxen image, only a feeble flutter of breath and pulse telling that this was lethargy, not death. They watched her all night, Mrs. Sutton on one side and Phillis on the other, the family physician stealing in with slippered tread from hour to hour, to note with his sensitive touch if the few poor drops of vital blood yet trickled from veins to heart, always with the same directions, "Give her the stimulant while she can swallow it. It is the only hope of saving her."

Armed with this, the two devoted women fought the Destroyer, praying inaudibly, while they wrought, for the life of the child they had reared to her sorrowful womanhood.

"HE'S asleep, and so is SHE!" whispered Phillis, once, pointing alternately to the adjoining room where Herbert Dorrance awaited the issue of this critical stage of his wife's illness, and to Mrs. Aylett's chamber across the hall. "The Lord forgive 'em both! It won't be they two that will shed many tears if so be she doesn't see the light of another day--the murdered lamb! They tormented the life out of her. I pa.s.sed by her room last night before bed-time, and heard her a-sobbin'

and talkin' to herself, and walkin' up and down the floor, and THEY a-bangin' away on the pyano down in the parlor!"

The faithful creature's prejudice wronged one of the hated pair. Mrs.

Aylett's slumbers upon her downy couch might be none the less serene for her sister-in-law's danger, but Herbert's was the sleep of exhaustion, not callousness. He had been up all the previous night, and racked by the wildest anxiety throughout the intervening day, and to compa.s.s this vigil was beyond his physical powers. Mabel would not miss him, and he could do nothing for her--would only be in the way, being totally unpractised in the art of nursing, he reasoned; and there was no telling what new draught upon his strength the morrow might bring. He would just lie down for an hour; then he would be fresh for whatever service might be required of him. With this prudent resolve, he threw himself along the bed in the spare-room, and was oblivious of everything sublunary until sunrise.

"If there should be any change, call me!" Mrs. Aylett had enjoined, plaintively. "Winston will not hear of my sitting up, but I shall not close my eyes all night, so do not hesitate to disturb me, if I can be of any use whatever."

Which, it is idle to remark, was the last thing either of the nurses thought of doing. If their darling were, in truth, dying, they were the fittest persons to receive her latest sigh; for had they not been present at her birth, and did not her mother go to glory from their supporting arms?

There was a change, and not a favorable one, before daybreak. The patient, from mutterings and restless starts, pa.s.sed into violent delirium, laughing, crying, and singing in a style so opposed to the prescribed diagnosis of her case, as to lash the provincial doctor to his wits' end, and extinguish in Aunt Rachel's sanguine heart the faint hope to which she had clung until now. Herbert, awakened finally by the turbulent sounds from the room he had been told must be kept perfectly quiet, jumped up, and showed himself, with disordered hair and blinking eyes, in the door of communication, just as Mabel struggled to rise, and pleaded weepingly with those who held her down that they would restore her child to her.

"I had her in my arms not a moment ago!" she insisted. "See! the print of her little head is here on my breast! You have taken her away among you! I saw it all--those who ordered that it should be done and those who did it, when I was too weak to hold her, or to keep them back!"

And pa.s.sing from the height of furious invective to deadly and earnest calm, she told them off upon her fingers.

"Clara Aylett! Rosa Tazewell! Winston Aylett! (he married Clara Louise Dorrance, you know!) Herbert Dorrance! JULIUS LENNOX!"

The household was astir by this time, and Mrs. Aylett entered from the hall as her brother did from his bedroom. There was but one spectator who was sufficiently composed to note and marvel at the scared look exchanged by the two at the sound of the last name. This was Mr. Aylett, who, from his position behind his wife, had an excellent view of all the actors in the exciting tableau before she fell back, swooning, in his arms.

He was alone with her in their chamber when she revived, and the earliest effort of her restored consciousness was to seize both his hands in hers, and scan his face searchingly--it would seem agonizingly--until his fond smile dispelled the unspoken dread.

"Ah!" she murmured, hiding her face upon his bosom, "she is still alive, then! I thought--I thought"--a mighty sob--"Don't despise your weak, silly wife, darling! but it was very terrible! I believed it was the last struggle, and was appalled at the sight. And my poor Herbert! he was frightfully overcome. Did you notice him? Will you send him to me, dear? I can soothe him better than any one else--prepare him for what is, I fear, inevitable. I shall not give way again to my terrors."

The brother and sister were still together when word was brought, two hours later that Mabel had fallen into a profound sleep--a good omen, the doctor said.

"Thank Heaven!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Herbert, fervently, his eyes softening until he turned away to conceal his emotion.

He was haggard with solicitude, while Mrs. Aylett's healthful bloom betokened slight interest in the termination of the seizure, a glance at which had thrown her into a faint. Nor did she echo the thanksgiving.

She waited until the messenger had gone, and continued the conversation her entrance had interrupted.

"I incline to the belief that she caught the name, in some manner, on Christmas before last. HE was delirious, too, and although doctor and nurse reported that he did not speak articulately after he was brought in, she may have heard more than they. From what has been told me, I gather that she was in the room with him alone, while Mrs. Sutton was down-stairs looking for Dr. Ritchie. In a lucid interval he may have given his name--possibly some particulars of his history. Unless--are you positive there has been no indiscretion on your part, or that others may have talked negligently to her, because she was a member of the family?"

"There are topics of which we--your mother, sister, and brothers--never speak, even to one another. You may trust us that far," rejoined Herbert, emphatically. "Nor do I see what we can do, except wait for other proof that Mabel really knows anything beyond a name she has picked up at random and never, to my knowledge, repeated, save in her ravings. Should she recover, the test can be easily applied, and we can judge then, how to handle the dilemma."

"Should she recover!" He said the words reluctantly, as loth to express the doubt.