Bressant Part 28

It was hopeless, and yet she kept on. Rather than let him go without having a.s.sured her it was all a wicked dream--without having hugged her in his arms, and given her her good-night kiss--without having called her his own, only Sophie, and promised he would always love her and no other--rather than give up all this, she would die in the pursuit, and it were well that she should die. So on she ran: her brain reeled, she could scarcely feel whether her limbs yet moved: there was a griping in her heart, and her breath came in short gasps of agony. The earth darkened and tipped before her eyes, but her resolve never faltered. To reach him, or die. Oh! how gladly she would die, if only she might reach him. Was not that he--there--only a short way on? Might not her voice reach him? Would not some good angel bear it to him? Even then she stumbled, and fell forward on her knees; but, ere she sank quite down, she threw forth a wild, piercing, despairing cry, giving to it her whole desolate soul--

"Bressant! Bressant!"

Then blackness obliterated every thing. But Bressant, as he walked heavily along, encompa.s.sed with bitter and miserable thoughts, suddenly halted, as if an iron hand had been laid upon his shoulder. Either he had actually heard a faint echo of that unearthly cry, or his spiritual ear had taken cognizance of the call of Sophie's soul. He turned himself about, with a quaking heart. There was the long white road, but no human being was visible upon it. Yet he knew that Sophie's voice had called him. She must be near. Slowly he began to walk back, half dreading to behold her image rise before him, with deep, reproachful eyes.

He had not gone twenty yards, when he started back, having almost set his foot upon something which lay face downward in the snow, clad in a dress almost as white. He would not have seen her but for her brown hair, which, falling loosely about, was caught and stirred by the inquisitive breeze. She herself lay quite still.

Bressant took her beneath the arms, and lifted her up. Crouching down, he supported her head against his shoulder, and brushed away the snow that had adhered to her face. There was a cut upon her chin, but the blood, after running a few moments, had congealed. Her eyes were not quite shut, but the lids were stiff and immovable. The mouth, too, was a little open. Was it the moonlight that gave her that death-like look? or was she dead indeed?

The young man broke out into a long, wavering cry. It was not weeping; it was not laughter; yet it bore a resemblance to both. It curdled his own blood, but he could not repress it. It was the voice of overstrained, unendurable emotion, and a horrible voice it was to hear.

He feared he was losing his senses--looking in that white, motionless face, and uttering such a cry! At last, however, it died away, and there was silence. The silence was almost worse than the cry--the utter silence of a winter night.

"What shall I do?" he said to himself, helplessly.

The unearthly voice, and the discovery to which it had led, following the other events of the night, had made Bressant unfit to deal with this matter after his usual ready and practical style. But he would have found the problem an awkward one at his best. How could he appear at the Parsonage? What account could he give there of this lifeless body? What account could he give of it to himself? He was utterly bewildered and aghast. It seemed that the dead had risen from the grave, to drag him relentlessly back to the fullest glare of earthly ignominy--to the keenest experience of human suffering. And yet, did he quite deserve it?

Was there no grain of leaven in his lump of sinfulness and weakness, if all were known? He is a hardened criminal, indeed, who can find no hope in the thought of appealing from human judgment to Divine!

Meanwhile, Mr. Reynolds had been luxuriating in a very unmistakable sense of injury. To some persons there are a positive relief and gratification in being really wronged: it raises their estimate of their own importance: by virtue of their t.i.tle to feel angry, disappointed, or deceived, they can take their place in a higher than their ordinary rank. So Mr. Reynolds, finding himself qualified to plead a clear case of absolute and unwarrantable desertion, held up his head, and bore himself with becoming dignity.

His dignity did not, however, interfere with his seeking to drown his slight in the good, old-fashioned way. He solaced himself beyond prudence with the varied products of the hotel bar, and then settled himself solitary in his sleigh and jingled homeward. His road took him past the Parsonage, and he enlivened the lonely way by sc.r.a.ps of songs, reflections upon the perfidy of women, and portentous yawns at intervals of two or three minutes. In fact, by the time he had gone a mile the most predominant sensation he had was sleepiness, and half a mile more came very near making a second Endymion of him. From this, however, he was preserved by the very sudden stoppage of his sleigh, which threw him on his knees against the dasher, and forcibly knocked his eyes open. He rolled over to the ground, but, happening to light on his feet, he stood unsteadily erect, and asked a very tall and powerful man, who was holding his horse's head, when he was going to let that drop?

Receiving no intelligible answer, he stumbled in the powerful man's direction, perhaps contemplating the performance of some deed of desperate valor. Meanwhile the object of his hostility had relinquished his hold of the horse, and appeared kneeling on the ground, supporting the form of a woman, dressed in a tasteful white dress, with dark, disordered hair lying around her colorless face.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

LOST.

Mr. Reynolds immediately paused, and regarded this group for some moments with an air of singular sagacity and archness.

"I say, young fellow," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed he, at length, with an evident effort to attain distinctness of utterance, "that sort of thing won't do, you know."

Bressant looked up and recognized the rustic baccha.n.a.lian for the first time. He had always had a peculiar antipathy to this young gentleman; but at this moment it was intensified into a loathing. How could he ask a.s.sistance from such a degraded creature as this?

The recognition had been mutual, and Mr. Reynolds, tacking unsteadily around, brought himself to bear in such a position as to catch a fair view of Sophie's face, with the spot of blood on her chin. The first glance so terrified him, that he utterly, forsook his footing, and came abruptly to the ground, never once taking his eyes from the face, all the way. But the shock of his fall, and the awful solemnity of what he saw, sobered him considerably. He turned to Bressant, and eyed him with anxious earnestness.

"Why, you're the fellow she's engaged to, ain't you? What on earth's been the row? She ain't dead, is she? How did she get here? In her wedding-rig, too, by golly!"

Bressant's frame vibrated with a savage impulse; but Mr. Reynolds, not being of a sensitive temperament, was not at all disconcerted.

"Well, say, I guess she'd better be fetched home, first thing," said he, bestirring himself to arise from the chilly seat he had taken. "Lucky I happened along, too. Guess you was hoping I might, wasn't you? Well, you hoist her under the arms, and I'll hang on by the feet--ain't that it?

and we'll have her into the sleigh in no time."

"Don't touch her!" said the other, fiercely. "Let her alone, you drunken fool!"

"Now, look here, Mr. Bressant," rejoined Bill Reynolds, resting his hands on his knees, and looking intently in Bressant's face, "I may not be rich and a swell, like you are; but I guess I'm an honest man, any way, as much as ever you be; and I ain't insulting n.o.body by helping take home a poor frozen girl. I don't care if she is engaged to you. You don't mean to keep her here till morning do you? and seeing she ain't married yet, I guess the right place for her to be in, is her father's house."

Perhaps it was the moonlight, glinting on Bill's immovable eye-gla.s.ses, that gave extraordinary impressiveness to his words; or it may have been Bressant's reflection, that this young country b.u.mpkin, sullied with drink, coa.r.s.e and ignorant though he was, would have probably found his sense of equality in no way diminished, had he known more of the facts to which the present catastrophe was a sequel; at all events, he made no further objections. His manner changed to an almost submissive humbleness, and, without more words, he helped Bill to place the insensible woman in the sleigh.

"That's the talk," remarked Mr. Reynolds, as he drew the sleigh-robe over her. "Now, then, Mr. Bressant, just you jump in and hold on to her, and I'll lead the horse along. We'll be there in half a shake."

"No," replied Bressant, after a mental conflict as violent as it was brief; "I'll lead the horse myself." The only pleasure now left to this young man was to insult and torture himself to the utmost of his ingenuity. He had forfeited all right to protect or care for Sophie, and it was with a savage satisfaction that he resigned it to Bill Reynolds, as being the worthier and better man. It was the quixoticism of self-degradation, but was doubtless not without some wholesome influence.

In three minutes more they were at the Parsonage-gate. They made a stretcher of the sleigh-robe, and carried Sophie in on it. The gate, flapping-to behind them, sounded like a fretful and querulous complaint.

As they mounted the porch-steps, which creaked and crackled beneath their weight, the door was opened by Cornelia, in her travelling-dress.

Her face expressed so vividly the unspeakable horror which she felt as her eyes rested on her sister's half-opened lids, that Bressant, seeing it, was stricken anew with the perception of his own misery. As Cornelia looked up from the pure and innocent features--which never had worn an awful and forbidding expression until now, when all power of expression was gone--her glance and Bressant's met; but, after a moment's encounter, both dropped their eyes, with an involuntary shudder. Their trial and sentence were condensed into so seemingly brief a s.p.a.ce.

But Bill Reynolds neither dealt in nor appreciated such refinements upon the good old ways of communicating sentiments.

"Good-evening, Miss Valeyon," exclaimed he. "I guess we didn't expect to see one another again to-night. Pray don't imagine, miss, that I bear you any grudge. At times like this personal considerations don't count--not with me. I'll shake hands with you, Miss Valeyon, first chance I get, and we'll be just as much friends as ever we was before.

That's the right way, I guess."

The door of the guest-chamber stood open, and the sleigh-robe, with its burden, was laid upon the bed whereon Bressant had spent so many weary days. Then the voice of the professor, who had been awakened by the noise and the sound of feet, was heard from the top of the stairs, demanding to know what was the matter.

"Come down," said Bressant, stepping to the guest-chamber door. "Be quick!"

He spoke more slowly and deeply than was his wont. In spite--or perhaps in consequence--of his abas.e.m.e.nt, forlornness, and unworthiness, he showed a dignity and impressiveness which were novel in him. The boyishness, vivacity, and motion, had quite vanished. There were a depth and hollowness in his eyes which gave a singular power to his face.

There must have been a vein of genuine strength and n.o.bleness in the man, or he would have been too much crushed to show any thing but weak despair or brutal sullenness. Had Professor Valeyon's attention been directed to the point, he might have recognized his pupil as being now thoroughly grounded in the elements of emotional experience.

The old gentleman, in dressing-gown and slippers, came thumping hastily down-stairs, in response to Bressant's summons. The strange solemnity in the latter's tone, no less than the ominousness of the hour, probably gave him premonition of some disaster. He reached the threshold of the room, and paused a moment there, settling his spectacles with trembling fingers, and looking from one silent face to another. The room was lighted only by the declining moon, which shone coldly through the windows. The bed, and that which was on it, were in shadow. In an instant or two, however, the professor's eyes made the discovery to which none of those who stood about had had the nerve to help him. And then the old man proved himself to be the most stout-hearted of them all. He only said "Sophie" in a voice so profoundly indrawn as scarcely to be audible; then walked unfalteringly across the room, bent over the bed, and proceeded to examine whether there were yet life in his daughter or not. Even the moonlight seemed to wait and listen.

"Bring a candle," said be, presently, breaking the awful silence.

Cornelia brought it, and the warmer light inspired a sickly flicker of hope into the expectant faces. The little ormolu-clock on the mantel-piece whirred, and struck half-past one. As the ring of the last stroke faded away, Professor Valeyon raised himself, and turned his face toward the others. So strongly did his soul inform his harsh and deeply-lined features, that it seemed, for a moment, as if there were a majestic angel where he stood.

"Be of good cheer," quoth the old man--for no smaller words than those which Christ had spoken seemed adequate to clothe his thought; "she is not dead; we shall hear her speak again."

Bressant threw up his arms, as if about to shout aloud; but only gave utterance to a gasping breath, and, stepping backward, leaned heavily against the wall, near the door. Cornelia, standing in the centre of the room, broke into quivering, lingering sobs, opening and clinching her hands, which hung at her side. Bill Reynolds, however, being overcome with joy, at once gave intelligible manifestation of it.

"Good enough!" cried he, slapping his leg, and looking from one to another with a giggle of relief. "Bully for her! Bless you, _I_ knew Sophie Valeyon warn't dead. Speak again! I believe you. _She'll_ tell us what's the matter, I guess."

Professor Valeyon rapidly and collectedly gave his directions as to what steps were to be taken, and in a few minutes every thing was being done that skill could do. Snow was brought in to encourage back the life it had dismayed, and camphor and coffee awaited their turn to take part in the resuscitation. Slow and reluctant it was, like dragging a dead weight up from an unknown depth. More than another hour had pa.s.sed away before Sophie's eyelids quivered, and a slight tremor moved her lips.

By-and-by she opened her eyes, slowly and uncertainly, let them close again, and once more opened them; and, after several inaudible efforts, there came, like an echo from an immeasurable distance, one word, twice repeated:

"Bressant! Bressant!"

They looked around for him, but he was not in the room, nor in the house. Questioning among themselves, none could tell whether it were an hour or a minute since he had departed. When life began to take fresh hold on her he had so loved and wronged, his heart had failed him, and, without a word, he had gone out and away. But not to escape; for on no heart was the weight of sorrow and suffering so heavy as on his.

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

MOTHER AND SON.