Hetty's Strange History Part 7

"No," said the doctor, "I never have been, but I am now."

"What about?" asked Hetty, innocently: "I don't see what there is to puzzle you here."

"You, Miss Gunn," stoutly answered Dr. Eben, feeling as if he were taking a header into unfathomed waters.

"Me!" exclaimed Hetty, in a tone of utmost surprise. "Why, what do you mean?"

Dr. Eben hesitated a single instant. He had not intended to do this thing, but the occasion had been too much for him. "I may as well do it first as last," he said; "she can but refuse me:" and, in a very few manly words, Dr. Eben Williams straightway asked Hetty Gunn to marry him. He was not prepared for what followed, although in a soliloquy, only a few days before, he had predicted it to himself. Hetty laughed merrily, unaffectedly, in his very face.

"Why, Dr. Williams!" she said, "you can't know what you're saying. You can't want to marry me: I'm not the sort of woman men want to marry"--

He interrupted her. His voice was husky with deep feeling.

"Miss Gunn," he said, "I implore you not to speak in this way. I do know what I am saying, and I do love you with all my heart."

"Nonsense," answered Hetty in the kindliest of tones; "of course you think you do: but it is only because you have been shut up here two whole months, with nothing else to do but fancy that you were in love. I told you it was time we went home. Don't say any thing more about it.

I'll promise you to forget it all," and Hetty laughed again, a merry little laugh. A sharp suspicion crossed the doctor's mind that she was coquetting with him. In a constrained tone he said:

"Miss Gunn, do you really wish me to understand that you reject me?"

"Not at all," said Hetty, gayly. "I wish you to understand that I haven't permitted you to offer yourself. I have simply a.s.sured you that you are mistaken: you'll see it for yourself as soon as we get home. Do you suppose I shouldn't know if you were really in love with me?"

"I didn't know it myself till a week ago," replied Dr. Eben: "I did not understand myself. I never loved any woman before."

"And no man ever asked me to marry him before," answered the honest Hetty, like a child, and with an amused tone in her voice. "It is very odd, isn't it?"

Dr. Eben was confounded. In spite of himself, he felt the contagion of Hetty's merry and unsentimental view of the situation; and it was with a trace of obstinacy rather than of a lover's pain in his tones that he continued:

"But, Miss Gunn, indeed you must not make light of this matter in this way. It is not treating me fairly. With all the love of a man's heart I love you, and have asked you to be my wife: are you sure that you could not love me?"

"I don't really think I could," said Hetty, "but I shall not try, because I am sure you are mistaken. I am too old to be married, for one thing: I shall be thirty-seven in the fall. That's reason enough, if there were no other. A man can't fall in love with a woman after she's as old as that."

Dr. Eben laughed outright. He could not help it.

"There!" said Hetty, triumphantly; "that's right; I like to hear you laugh now; for goodness' sake, let's forget all this. I will, if you will; and we will be all the better friends for it perhaps. At any rate, you'll be all the more friend to me for having saved you from making such a blunder as thinking you were in love with me."

Dr. Eben was on the point of persisting farther; but he suddenly thought to himself:

"I'd better not: I might make her angry. I'll take the friendship platform for the present: that is some gain."

"You will permit me then to be your friend, Miss Gunn," he said.

"Why, certainly," said Hetty, in a matter-of-fact way: "I thought we were very good friends now."

"But you recollect, you distinctly told me I was to come only as physician to Mrs. Little," retorted the doctor.

Hetty colored: the darkness sheltered her.

"Oh! that was a long time ago," she said in a remorseful tone: "I should be very ungrateful if I had not forgotten that."

And with this Dr. Eben was forced to be contented. When he thought the whole thing over, he admitted to himself that he had fared as well as he had a right to expect, and that he had gained a very sure vantage, in having committed the loyal Hetty to the a.s.sertion that they were friends. He half dreaded to see her the next morning, lest there should be some change, some constraint in her manner; not a shade of it. He could have almost doubted his own recollections of the evening before, if such a thing had been possible, so absolutely unaltered was Hetty's treatment of him. She had been absolutely honest in all she said: she did honestly believe that his fancied love for her was a sentimental mistake, a caprice born of idleness and lack of occupation, and she did honestly intend to forget the whole thing, and to make him forget it.

And so they went back to the farm, where the summer awaited them with overflowing harvests of every thing, and Hetty's hands were so full that very soon she had almost ceased to recollect the life at "The Runs."

Sally and the baby were strong and well. The whole family seemed newly glad and full of life. All odd hours they could s.n.a.t.c.h from work, Old Caesar and Nan roamed about in the sun, following the baby, as his nurse carried him in her arms. He had been christened Abraham Gunn Little; poor James Little having persistently refused to let his own name be given to the child, and Hetty having been cordially willing to give her father's. To speak to a baby as Abraham was manifestly impossible, and the little fellow was called simply "Baby" month after month, until, one day, one of Norah's toddlers, who could not speak plain, hit upon a nickname so fortunate that it was at once adopted by everybody. "Raby,"

little Mike called him, by some original process of compounding "Abraham" and "Baby;" and "Raby" he was from that day out. He was a beautiful child: his mother's blue eyes, his father's dark hair, and a skin like a ripe peach, but not over fair,--made a combination of color which was rarely lovely. He was a joyous child, as joyous as if no shadow had ever rested on his mother's heart. Sally watched him day by day with delight; but the delight was never wholly free from pain: the wound she had received, the wound she had inflicted on herself, could never wholly heal. A deep, moral hurt must for ever leave its trace, as surely as a deep wound in a man's flesh must leave its scar. It is of no use for us to think to evade this law; neither is it a law wholly of retribution. The scar on the flesh is token of nature's process of healing: so is the scar of a perpetual sorrow, which is left on a soul which has sinned and repented. Sally and Jim were leading healthful and good lives now; and each day brought them joys and satisfactions: but their souls were scarred; the fulness of joy which might have been theirs they could never taste. And the loss fell where it could never be overlooked for a moment,--on their joy in their child. In the very holiest of holies, in the temple of the mother's heart, stood for ever a veiled shape, making ceaseless sin-offering for the past.

As the winter set in, an anxiety fell on the family which had pa.s.sed so sunny a summer. With the first sharp cold winds, little Raby developed a tendency to croup. Neither Sally nor Hetty had ever seen a case of this terrible and alarming disease; and, in Raby's first attack of it, they had both thought the child dying. Now was Doctor Eben brought again into close and intimate relations with Hetty. During the months of the summer, he had, in spite of all his efforts, in spite of his frequent visits to her house, in spite of all Hetty's frank cordiality of manner, felt himself slowly slipping away from the vantage-ground he hoped he had gained with her. This was the result of two things,--one which he knew, and one which he did not dream of: the cause which he knew, was a very simple and evident one, Hetty's constant preoccupation. Hetty was a very busy woman: what with Raby, the farm, the house, her social relations with the whole village, she had never a moment of leisure.

Often when Dr. Eben came to the house, he found her away; and often when he found her at home, she was called away before he had talked with her half an hour. The other reason, which, if Dr. Eben had only known it, would have more than comforted him for all he felt he had lost on the surface, was that Hetty, in the bottom of her heart, was slowly growing conscious that she cared a great deal about him. No woman, whatever she may say and honestly mean, can entirely dismiss from her thoughts the memory of the words in which a man has told her he loves her. Especially is this true when those words are the first words of love which have ever been spoken to her. Morning and night, as Hetty came and went, in her brisk cheery way, in and out of the house and about the farm, she wore a new look on her face. The words, "I love you with all my heart,"

haunted her. She did not believe them any more now than before; but they had a very sweet sound. She was no nearer now than then to any impulse to take Dr. Williams at his word: nothing could be deeper implanted in a soul than the conviction was in Hetty's that no man was likely to love her. But she was no longer so sure that she herself could not love.

Vague and wistful reveries began to interrupt her activity. She would stand sometimes, with her arms folded, leaning on a stile, and idly watching her men at work, till they wondered what had happened to their mistress. She lost a little of the color from her cheeks, and the full moulded lines of her chin grew sharper.

"Faith, an' Miss Hetty's goin' off, sooner'n she's any right to," said Mike to Norah one day.

"What puts such a notion in your head thin, Mike?" retorted Norah, "sure she's as foine a crayther as's in all the county, an' foiner too."

"Foine enough, but I say for all that that she's a goin' off in her looks mighty fast," replied the keen-eyed Mike. "You don't think she'd be a pinin' for anybody, do you?"

Norah gave a hearty Irish laugh.

"Miss Hetty a pinin'!" she repeated over and over with bursts of merriment:

"Ah, but yez are all alike, ye men. Miss Hetty a pinin'! I 'd like to see the man Miss Hetty wud pine fur."

Mike and Norah were both right. There was no "pining" in Hetty's busy and sensible soul; but there had been planted in it a germ of new life, whose slow quickening and growth were perplexing and disturbing elements: not as yet did she recognize them; she only felt the disturbance, and its link with Dr. Eben was sufficiently clear to make her manner to him undergo an indefinable change. It was no less cordial, no less frank: you could not have said where the change was; but it was there, and he felt it. He ought to have understood it and taken heart.

But he was ignorant like Hetty, only felt the disturbance, and taking counsel of his fears believed that things were going wrong. Sometimes he would stay away for many days, and then watch closely Hetty's manner when they met. Never a trace of resentment or even wonder at his absence. Sometimes he would go there daily for an interval; never a trace of expectation or of added familiarity. But now things were changed. Little Raby's illness seemed to put them all back where they were during the days of the sea-side idyl. Now the doctor felt himself again needed. Both Hetty and Sally lived upon his words, even his looks.

Again and again the child's life seemed hanging in even balances, and it was with a grat.i.tude almost like that they felt to G.o.d that the two women blessed Dr. Eben for his recovery. Night after night, the three watched by the baby's bed, listening to his shrill and convulsive breathings.

Morning after morning, Dr. Eben and Hetty went together out of the chamber, and stood in the open doorway, watching the crimson dawn on the eastern hills. At such times, the doctor felt so near Hetty that he was repeatedly on the point of saying again the words of love he had spoken six months before. But a great fear deterred him.

"If she refuses me once more, that would settle it for ever," he said to himself, and forced the words back.

One morning after a night of great anxiety and fear, they left Sally's room while it was yet dark. It was bitterly cold; the winter stars shone keen and glittering in the bleak sky. Hetty threw on a heavy cloak, and opening the hall-door, said:

"Let us go out into the cold air; it will do us good."

Silently they walked up and down the piazza. The great pines were weighed down to the ground by ma.s.ses of snow. Now and then, when the wind stirred the upper branches, avalanches slid noiselessly off, and built themselves again into banks below. There was no moon, but the starlight was so brilliant that the snow crystals glistened in it. As they looked at the sky, a star suddenly fell. It moved very slowly, and was more than a minute in full sight.

"One lighthouse less," said Dr. Eben.

"Oh," exclaimed Hetty, "what a lovely idea! who said that? Who called the stars light-houses?"

"I forget," said the doctor; "in fact I think I never knew; I think it was an anonymous little poem in which I saw the idea, years ago. It struck me at the time as being a singularly happy one. I think I can repeat a stanza or two of it."

G.o.d'S LIGHT-HOUSES.

When night falls on the earth, the sea From east to west lies twinkling bright With shining beams from beacons high, Which send afar their friendly light.

The sailors' eyes, like eyes in prayer, Turn unto them for guiding ray: If storms obscure their radiance, The great ships helpless grope their way.