At the Mercy of Tiberius Part 55

"So tired, Dulce? You can't be hungry; you must want your nap. There don't fret, baby girl. I will take you directly."

She stepped down, turned the side of the blackboard that contained the sketch to the wall; lowered the sash which she had raised to admit fresh air, and lifted the child from the floor. Approaching the figure who sat motionless as a statue of woe, she laid a hand on the drooping shoulder.

"Shall I help you down the steps?"

"No, I'll stay here a while. This is the only place where I can get courage enough to pray. Couldn't you leave her--the child--with me? It has been years since I could bear the sight of one. I hated children, because my heart was so black--so bitter; but now, I yearn toward this little thing. I am so starved for the kiss of--of--," she swept her hand across her throat, where a sob stifled her.

"Certainly, if she will stay contentedly. See whether she will come to you."

At sight of the extended arms, the baby shrank closer to Beryl, nestled her head under the girl's chin, and put up her lower lip in ominous protest. With an indescribably mournful gesture of surrender, the childless mother sank back in the corner of the bench.

"I don't wonder she is afraid; she knows--everybody, everything knows I killed my baby--my own boy, who slept for nearly four years on my heart--oh!--"

"Hush--she was frightened by your crying. She is sleepy now, but when she has had her nap, and wakes good-humored, I will fill her bottle, and bring her down to you. Try not to torment yourself by dwelling upon a distressing past, which you cannot undo; but by prayer anchor your soul in G.o.d's pardoning mercy. When all the world hoots and stones us, G.o.d is our 'sure refuge'."

"That promise is to pure hearts and innocent hands; not to such as I am, steeped to the lips in crime--black, black--"

"No. One said: 'The whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.' Your soul is sick unto death; claim the pledged cure. Yonder I have copied the hymn for to-morrow's lesson. While you sit here, commit it to memory; and the Shepherd will hear your cry."

Glancing back from the chapel door, she saw that the miserable woman had bowed her face in her hands, and with elbows supported on her knees, was swaying back and forth in a storm of pa.s.sionate sobs.

"O! my beautiful baby, my angel Max, pray for mother now.

Max--Max--there is no 'Sweet By and By'--for mother--"

Hurrying from the wail of anguish that no human agency could lighten, Beryl carried the orphan across the yard, and up the stairs leading to the corridor, whence she was allowed egress at will. She noticed casually, signs of suppressed excitement among some of the convicts, who were lounging in groups, enjoying the half holiday, and three or four men stood around the under-warden who was gesticulating vivaciously; but at her approach he lowered his voice, and she lived so far aloof from the jars and gossip of the lower human strata, that the suspicious indications failed to arouse any curiosity.

The southwest angle of the building was exposed fully to the force of the afternoon sun, and the narrow cell was so hot that Beryl opened the door leading into the corridor, in order to create a draught through the opposite window.

The tired child was fretfully drowsy, but with the innate perversity of toddling babyhood, resented and resisted every effort to soothe her to sleep. Refusing to lie across the nurse's lap, the small tyrant clambered up, wrapped her arms about her neck, and finally Beryl rose and walked up and down, humming softly Chopin's dreamy "Berceuse"; while the baby added a crooning accompaniment that grew fainter and intermittent until the blue eyes closed, one arm fell, and the thumb was plunged between the soft full lips.

Warily the nurse laid her down in a cradle, which consisted of an oval basket mounted on roughly fas.h.i.+oned wooden rockers, and drawing it close to the table, Beryl straightened the white cross-barred muslin slip that was too short to cover the rosy dimpled feet; and smoothed the flossy tendrils of yellow hair crumpled around the lovely face.

The Sister of Charity, who, in the darkest hours of the pestilence had shrouded the poor young mother, did not forget the human waif astray in the world; but having secured a home for it in an "asylum," to which she promised it should be removed so soon as all danger of carrying contagion was over, had appointed the ensuing Monday on which to bear it away from the gloomy precincts, where sinless life had dawned in disgrace and degradation. This pretty toy, dowered with an immortal soul, stained by an inherited criminal strain, had appealed to the feminine tenderness in Beryl's nature, and she stood a moment, lost in admiration of the rounded curves and dainty coloring.

"Poor little blossom. n.o.body's baby! A lily bud adrift on a dead sea of sin. Dovie--Eve Werneth's child--but you will always be to me Dulce, my pretty clinging Dulce, my velvet-eyed cherub model."

Turning away, she bathed her face and hands, and leaned for a while against the southern window; listening to the exultant song of a red bird hovering near his brooding brown mate, to the soothing murmur of the distant falls, borne in on the wings of the thievish June breeze that had rifled some far-off garden of the aroma of honeysuckle. The current of air had swung the door back, leaving only a hand's breadth of open s.p.a.ce, and while she sang to the baby, her own voice had drowned the sound of footsteps in the corridor.

On the whitewashed wall of the cell, a sheet of drawing paper had been tacked, and taking her crayons, Beryl returned to the cradle, changed the position of the child's left hand, and approaching the almost completed sketch on the wall, retouched the outline of the sleeping figure. Now and then she paused in her work, to look down at the golden lashes sweeping the slumber-flushed cheeks, and pondering the mystery of the waif's future, she chanted in a rich contralto voice, the solemn "Reproaches" of Gounod's "Redemption."

"Oh, my vineyard, come tell me why thy grapes are bitter? What have I done, my People? Wherein hast thou been wronged?"

For weeks the elaboration of this sketch had employed every moment which was not demanded for the execution of her allotted daily task in the convict workroom; and knowing that on Monday she would be bereft of her pretty model, she had redoubled her exertions to complete it.

Beside a bier knelt a winged figure, in act of stealing the rigid form, and to the awful yet strangely beautiful face of the messenger of gloom, she had given the streaming hair, the sunken, cavernous but wonderfully radiant eyes of Moritz Retzsch's weird image of Death. A white b.u.t.terfly fluttered upward, and in mid-air--neither descending nor drifting, but waiting--poised on outspread pinions, hovered the Angel of the Resurrection holding out his hands. Behind and beneath the Destroyer, rolled dense shadows, and all the light in this picture rayed out from the plumes above, and fell like a glory on the baby's face.

Cut off from all congenial companions.h.i.+p, thrown upon her own mental resources, the prisoner had learned to live in an ideal world; and her artistic tastes proved an indestructible heritage of comfort, while memory ministered lavishly with images from the crowded realm of aesthetics. Victorious over the stony limitations of dungeon walls and dungeon discipline, fetterless imagination soared into the kingdom of beauty, and fed her lonely soul, as Syrian ravens fed G.o.d's prophet.

Fourteen months had pa.s.sed since Mr. Dunbar walked away from this cell, after the interview relative to Gen'l Darrington's will; and though his longing to see the prisoner had driven him twice to the entrance of the chapel, whence he heard the marvellously sweet voice, and gazed at the figure before the organ, no word was exchanged.

To-day, with his hand on the bolt of the door, and his heart in his eyes, he leaned against the facing, and through the opening studied the occupant of the cell that held the one treasure which fate had denied him.

The ravages of disease, the blemish of acute physical suffering had vanished; the clear pallor of her complexion, the full white throat, the rounded contour of the graceful form, bespoke complete restoration of all the vital forces; and never had she appeared so incomparably beautiful.

Oppressed by the heat, she had pushed back the hair from her temples, and though hopeless sadness reigned over the profound repose of her features, the expression of her eyes told that the dream of the artist had borne her beyond surrounding ills.

Where the b.u.t.ton of her blue homespun dress fastened the collar, she wore a sprig of heliotrope and a cl.u.s.ter of mignonette, from the shallow box in the window-ledge where they grew together.

How long he stood there, surrendering himself to the happiness of watching the woman whom, against his will, he loved with such unreasoning and pa.s.sionate fervor, Mr. Dunbar never knew; but a sudden recollection of the face printed on the gla.s.s, the face, beautiful as fabled Hylas--of the man for whose sake she was willing to die--stung him like an adder's bite; and setting his teeth hard, he rapped upon the door held ajar; then threw it open.

At sight of him, her arm, lifted to the sketch, fell; the crayon slipped from her nerveless fingers, and a glow rich as the heart of some red June rose stained her cheeks.

As he stepped toward her, she leaned against the wall, and swiftly drew the baby's cradle between them. He understood, and for a moment recoiled.

"You barricade yourself as though I were some loathsome monster! Are you afraid of me?"

"What is there left to fear? Have you spared any exertion to accomplish that which you believe would overwhelm me with sorrow?"

"You cannot forgive my rejection of the overtures for a compromise wrung from you by extremity of dread, when I started to Dakota?"

"That rejection freed me from a self-imposed, galling promise; and hence I forgive all, because of the failure of your journey."

"Suppose I have not failed?"

She caught her breath, and the color in her cheeks flickered.

"Had you succeeded, I should not have been allowed so long the comparative mercy of suspense."

"Am I so wantonly cruel, think you, that I gloat over your sufferings as a Modoc at sight of the string of scalps dangling at his pony's neck?"

"When the spirit of revenge is unleashed, Tiberius becomes a law unto himself."

He leaned forward, and his voice was freighted with tenderness that he made no attempt to disguise.

"Once after that long swoon in the court-room, when I held your hand, you looked at me without shrinking, and called me Tiberius. Again, when for hours I sat beside your cot, watching the crisis of your first terrible illness, you opened your eyes and held out your hand, saying: 'Have you come for me, Tiberius?' Why have you told me you were at the mercy of Tiberius?"

Hitherto she had avoided looking at him, and kept her gaze upon the sleeping child, but warned by the tone that made her heart throb, she bravely lifted her eyes.

"When next you write to your betrothed, ask her to go to the Museo Chiaramonti while in Rome, and standing before the crowned Tiberius, she will fancy her future husband welcomes her. Your wife will need no better portrait of you than a copy of that head."

Into his eyes leaped the peculiar glow that can be likened unto nothing but the clear violet flame dancing over a bed of burning anthracite coal, and into his voice an exultant ring:

"Meantime, like my inexorable prototype, 'I hold a wolf by the ears'.

Shall I tell you my mission here?"

"As it appears I am indeed always at the mercy of Tiberius, your courtesy savors of sarcasm."

"Oh, my stately white rose! My Rosa Alba, I will see to it, that no polluting hand lays a grasp on you. My errand should ent.i.tle me to a more cordial reception, for I bring you good news. Will you lay your hand in mine just once, while I tell you?"