Hubert's Wife Part 21

"Look up here, sir," said his father, sharply, "what ails you?"

The child raised his head wearily, and looked pleadingly to his mother.

She arose, about to take him in her arms, when the father interposed.

"Let him alone. The boy is well enough. You are making a fool of him; he will never amount to a row of pins. I am going to take him in my own hands; he is old enough, and has been babied to death." "Shut up, I tell you," addressing Johnny, who was now crying for his mother to take him.

"Yes, a new leaf shall be turned over just so soon as I return from Virginia. And you are about as much of a baby as he is, Althea," whose eyes he observed to be full of tears. "Here, another cup of coffee; you have no thought for me--you give all your attention to that child--there, there is the whistle now! Ten to one I shall be late, and all your fault, forcing me to talk instead of allowing me to eat. Hand me my valise--there, good-by and don't fret," and, rus.h.i.+ng away, he gave no kiss to little Johnny, whom he was never more to behold; no kiss to Althea, whom he was indeed to meet again, to meet again and soon; but a gulf between him and her, insurmountable as death itself.

She turned to her child, now that there was no voice commanding, "let him alone." She rocked him in her arms a long time after he had fallen asleep. Her tears sparkled upon his jet curls, while her heart was heavy as lead in her bosom.

"Am I, then, so unlovely that my husband does not care for me? Once I thought it was so beautiful to love, and to be loved! His love is gone; and mine--O my G.o.d, let me not lose the last particle of love for the one I must live with until 'death do us part.' We might be so happy, but are so miserable! Is it my fault? My conscience is clear; it does not accuse me. He is so unhappy, so morose; he makes us all so wretched, when life ought to be so pleasant."

Althea had placed her low rocker upon the verandah. A gentle breeze stirred the vines that wreathed the pillars. The birds flew hither and thither upon boughs that shaded her cottage. The fragrance of flowers filled the air.

"How beautiful is all this visible world," exclaimed she. "How full should it be of enjoyment." "Yes, yes," chirped the birds, the breeze and the flowers.

She laid down her child, who still slept heavily. She gazed at him intently, resolutely banis.h.i.+ng unwelcome thoughts of aught that should harm him.

The house was in confusion, as it ever is after a hurried departure.

Althea busied herself with setting things straight. Then she sat down to her piano, and commenced a song; but her voice trembled too much. She changed into a favorite march, whose notes rose and fell like the storm-tossed billows of the sea. Battles, quadrilles, waltzes dropped from her finger-ends, as if they had been magicians, and so mingled, dislocated and inharmonious, as to make wildest, though still musical confusion.

Hand-weary, but heart-lightened, she took up a book. It was a new book, she had but half-read, "Gates Ajar." She came to the child eating her ginger snaps in Heaven; to the musician playing favorite airs upon the piano, to the dress-maker fas.h.i.+oning gossamer garments out of aerial fabrics, etc., etc. She put by the book.

"I do not like that kind of a Heaven. How could an auth.o.r.ess make a Heaven out of the lowest part of earth? To think of eating, darning and mending up there! We are to do in perfection there, what we most like to do here! The drunkard then will take his gla.s.s; but he does not go to Heaven. Wonder if the tobacco chewer enters through the pearly gates--'nothing that defileth or maketh a lie'--ah, how beautiful and charming Heaven must be; more than we can conceive, or she, who looked through 'Gates Ajar,' can imagine. I do not quite like to look through her eyes. I suppose my mother is there. How little I ever think of her--wonder if she watches me from above; O my mother, my mother in Heaven, have pity upon your child!"

A noise from the adjoining room startled her. Had the cat gained entrance to her sleeping child? She went in hurriedly; Johnny was in spasms.

She seized him in her arms, and ran screaming for Mary into the kitchen.

Mary ran for the physician, and the distracted mother, still holding the convulsed child in her arms, walked up and down the verandah, shouting for help.

Doctors and neighbors came. All that medical skill and friendly sympathy could suggest was done; but all in vain. When the spasm subsided, the eye was uprolled in unconsciousness, and the face burned with the fiercest fever. Then would come the fearful convulsion, and you would not know the beautiful face so racked and tortured. Again the demon would die out; but reason returned not from his relaxing hold. What a scene was there! All had been set in order a brief while before. Now, again, everywhere was confusion. There lay upon the floor the little cast-off garments. The child had done with them. His rocking-horse stood in the corner, his whip and gun near by, his box of marbles, his countless broken toys and the sled he had never used. The last time he had been to drive with his parents, he had seen that sled inside a store. He insisted upon having it.

"But there is no snow to slide upon," objected his father.

"Johnny no slide--Johnny have 'ittle ocken (oxen) draw sled."

So the sled was purchased, packed into the carriage, and that night little Johnny had wished to sit up all night to admire his treasure.

"These bufully flowers, mamma, see," pointing to the upper surface and sides of the nosegay, facetiously termed. At length sleep overtook him, lying under the table side by side with the gaily-painted sled, one chubby hand grasping the forward rung. The next day the sled had lost its charms, for Johnny was ill; and the next--alas, here was little Johnny! We might speak of Althea's bewildered grief; but why should a mother's hand attempt to write, or a mother desire to read what only a mother's heart can understand, and but imperfectly express?

CHAPTER XXIII.

HUBERT LISLE AT VINE COTTAGE.

It was all over, the death and burial of little Johnny. All Windsor mourned for the beautiful child and the desolate mother. Even Mrs.

Carlton Sharp came, Mr. Rush being gone, and mingled her tears with the bereaved. And Althea was not ungrateful. She turned not away from all expressions of sympathy, as it pleases some to do. She knew that only kindness was intended, and to her wounded, but still loving heart, gentle words and deeds were as balm that is healing.

After the first few days, however, Althea was left more alone. The women of Windsor mostly did their own household labor, and the busy season of the year compelled them to remain at home. Althea could fix her mind only upon her lost darling. She collected his playthings, soiled, broken, and all. She gathered flowers to fling above the brown earth that hid him from her view. She wrote heart-broken verses in his memory, and many more she poured forth in unwritten music to the winds.

There was a certain comfort in thus being able to abandon herself to grief and lamentation. But how would it be when her husband returned home? What would he say to the death of his son? As was usual, would he blame her also for this catastrophe? Or, would this affliction soften his heart, rendering him more kind in his intercourse with herself?

Althea was revolving this in her mind, in a measure temporarily diverted from her grief. She was sitting upon the verandah, amongst her flowers, herself the sweetest of them all. A quick step upon the path startled her. She arose hastily, and glanced through the vines.

A stranger that moment caught sight of her, and came around to where she stood.

For an instant, he remained regarding her; then he clasped her right hand in both of his, and pressed it softly to his lips.

Althea, taken by surprise, was about to resent such a liberty, when the stranger said:

"I am your cousin, Althea, you must have heard of Hubert Lisle?"

It was indeed, Hubert, just over from a six years' residence abroad. Had he been Althea's own brother, she would not have welcomed him with more profuse demonstrations of delight.

"I learned at the hotel of your great affliction, which must be doubly painful, your husband being absent." Hubert glanced searchingly at his cousin's face. He had vivid remembrances of Thornton Rush, and held the conviction, that however much he might have changed for the better, he could be still anything but an agreeable life-companion. He discovered nothing by his searching glance, for Althea was thinking of her child, not of her husband; and this reference replunged her into grief.

Hubert's sympathy was aroused, and he attempted words of consolation.

When he saw how worse than vain these were, he endeavored to withdraw her mind, by giving vivid descriptions of and experiences in foreign lands.

Althea made an effort--an effort for the lack of which died d.i.c.kens'

f.a.n.n.y, little Paul's mother--and listened through politeness and courtesy. Gradually, her mind awakened to a lively interest; and before the day was spent, she regarded her cousin as the most interesting gentleman of her acquaintance.

"How fortunate he should have come now, just in this time of my distress," she whispered to herself, as she was about to retire, stopping to weep over the little night-wrapper, whose wearer was gone, but which still had its place beneath her pillow. She had a thought, too, which she did not whisper, and it was this: "how fortunate too that he should have come while Thornton is gone, that no thundercloud may hang over us."

Hubert had made a short visit to Kennons. Mr. Fuller was still overseer of the plantation, which he had conducted satisfactorily. Mrs. Lisle had, of course, returned to Thornton Hall. Amy and Chloe were installed in their cabins of old, and had supervision of the white house. From these faithful servants Hubert had learned the deception that had been practiced upon his father, during that parent's close of life. At least, he learned how letter after letter had been written, how impatiently his arrival had been awaited, and with what bitter disappointment that father had quitted the world, unreconciled that his son came not.

These communicative old women unfolded to their pet young master, as they still loved to call him, the plan that father had cherished with regard to himself and Althea. For this also was not unknown to them.

Duncan Lisle had dropped into Amy's ear more than one hint of this kind.

He had none other to confide in; and during a sleepless night, while Amy watched, he whiled away an hour discoursing of his son, and of the project in view. This faithful servant had Althea's picture treasured with jealous care.

"You shall see it, Ma.s.sa 'Ubert, an' see what you've done gone an'

lost," unrolling the precious memento from its many wrappings, as if it had been a mummy embalmed.

Hubert beheld "what he had lost" first with admiration, then with a sigh. But the sigh was not for himself only; it was for what that sweet-faced soul must suffer, under such guardians.h.i.+p as that of Thornton Rush.

Hubert Lisle at once rightly inferred the destination of those letters which had never reached him; and he glared fiercely at the fireplace now filled with green boughs, that had afforded flame to enwrap aught so precious. O, cruel flames, to blot out two such privileges--giving consolation to a dying father, and receiving from his hands a wife little less beautiful or good than an angel! And more cruel than flame, than direful fate, than death itself, the heart of Rusha Lisle, which Hubert would fain have trodden into indiscriminate dust, in his first moments of grief and wrath.

An intense desire of revenge took possession of this outraged son; more particularly of revenge against Thornton Rush, whose duplicity in winning Althea was circ.u.mstantially detailed to him.

Hubert Lisle had not only traveled extensively, but had read and studied deeply. He had scanned all religions, from that of Confucius to Mormonism and Free-loveism, which is _beyond_ religion, and had no settled faith in any. He had dived into German transcendentalism and metaphysics so deeply that he came out clogged and permeated as a fly miraculously escaped from a jar of honey. He was naturally good and true, simple minded and high principled; but unlicensed, untrammelled thought, unsubjective to G.o.d's law, had rendered him liable to erect false theories upon unsound premises, and had undermined in a measure that nice sense of right and wrong, which had been his proud, happy birth-right. Yet he would have been startled to have been told that he was not now, as ever, a bold lover of the truth, that he scorned not deception and hypocrisy and all manner of evil. He would have bounded, as from the sting of a serpent, from open temptation to meanness and wrong. He walked upon the border of a precipice, not knowing but he was upon the open plain. Thus walketh human frailty, when unenlightened by faith in G.o.d and unfortified by heavenly counsel.

A modern "reformer," self-styled, acting as a "spiritual medium," is said thus to have addressed a visitor:

"It is my very strong impression that you are my affinity. You are to be my husband; I am to be your wife. You must seek a divorce; so will I, and happiness awaits us."

Two divorces ensued, and the gentleman visitor and the "medium" became one, an affinity, according to "spiritual" directions.