Jessamine Part 20

"Jessie! are you mad?"

He had arisen with her, and would have drawn nearer to her side, but she waved him off. There was a terrible beauty in her wrath that fascinated him, in spite of her cutting words.

"I was a happy, trustful child when you crossed my path. I am a hard, bitter, suspicious woman--and the change is your work. You have humbled me forever in my own eyes, by letting me into the dark secrets of my instability and idiotic credulity. I care not what others think of me. I shall write to Mr. Fordham before I sleep, and release him; if he still considers himself bound to me, shall tell him plainly that my love is dead--and my heart!"

"You will judge me more mercifully, and yourself more justly one day, Jessie. Your self-reproaches pain me more than do your vituperations against myself. Nothing you can say in your present mood can alter my feelings for you. You have had much to try you, to-day, my poor child! When you are cooler, you will retract--mentally at least--the charges you have brought against one whose heart is now--and always will be--your own. You know me better than you think. I can wait for time and your sober reason to right me. Implacable as I know Fordham to be, under his impa.s.sive demeanor, he will be more lenient to what he will esteem my breach of trust--the wrong I have done him--when once he has heard my defence, than you are at this moment."

"You suppose, then, that I am going to lodge a complaint against you?" she said, contemptuously. "I shall not mention your name. I should be ashamed to own who was the cause of my folly. You have nothing to dread from your cousin's anger."

And, although his last remark was a "feeler," designed to elicit such an a.s.surance, this speech stung him more sharply than had the volley of invectives that preceded it.

Mr. Kirke and Eunice did not return until midnight. Jessie had the evening to herself, and the letter to Roy was sent to the post-office before she went to bed.

It was short and decisive to unkindness:

"When I wrote to you, last week," was the unceremonious commencement,--"I said that I would await your reply before sending another letter. I believed that the information contained in the former would be the means of terminating our engagement. I have learned since that the story was a malicious or idle exaggeration. My mother died, as she had lived, a sane woman. But this matters little so far as our relation to one another is concerned. Another, and an insuperable obstacle to our union, exists in the change of my feelings toward yourself. If I ever loved you--I think, sometimes, I never did--I love you no longer. Months of doubt and suffering have brought me to the determination to confess this without reserve. I offer no extenuation of my fickleness.

I ought to have remained constant, but I have not. May you choose more happily and wisely in the future!

"I write this without conference with my father or sister,--in the knowledge, also, that my change of purpose and prospects will be a sorrow and a surprise to both. But I cannot hesitate or draw back. I need hardly say that I have entered into pledges with no one else. No one desires that I should, or seeks to win my affections. It rests with you to give me the release I ask of your generosity and humanity, or to hold me to the letter of my bond. If, having learned the extent of the change that has come over me since I gave it, you insist upon the fulfilment of my promise, I shall submit to your decision.

"Foreseeing what your action will be, it only remains for me to add that your gifts and letters await your order.

"JESSAMINE KIRKE."

CHAPTER XV.

The September nights were cool among the mountains, and as Mr. Kirke and his elder daughter drove home through the moonlight, between eleven and twelve o'clock, from the visit of mercy they had been paying on the other side of the ridge, there were white blankets of mist upon the meadows, and filling up the valleys along which their route lay.

The fire was out in the kitchen, and Patsey had been asleep for two hours and more, having made up her mind that her master would not return until the morrow. There was still a light in Jessie's chamber, and she came down, wide-awake and dressed, to admit the travellers. The servant man slept in a room over the stable, and, after calling to him two or three times without arousing him, the worthy clergyman took pity upon his weariness after his hard day's work, and groomed his horse himself. Eunice exclaimed at the dampness of his overcoat in helping him remove it, and Jessie--instructed in such appliances to health and comfort by her watery adventure, the telling of which she reserved for a more convenient season--prescribed a gla.s.s of brandy-and-water. Mr. Kirke needed nothing except a night's rest, he a.s.sured them both; pinched Jessie's cheek, in kissing her "good-night," and rallied her upon her anti-temperance proclivities, then ascended to his chamber. He came down late to breakfast, the next morning; owned that sleep had proved obdurate to his wooing; that he had had something very like an ague during the night, and that it was a violent headache which deprived him of appet.i.te.

When he arose from table, Jessie coaxed him, almost in the old winsome way he could never resist, into the parlor; made him lie upon the sofa; tucked a shawl warmly about his shoulders, and sitting down of her own accord to the piano, played plaintive, soothing airs until he fell asleep.

This was the beginning of the spell of fever that, within twelve hours, laid him upon his bed, and which, ten days later, a.s.sumed a typhoid form.

His daughters were his nurses, by day and night. Offers of watchers poured in from the few gentle and the many simple who were his parishioners and neighbors; but the sisters courteously and gratefully declined them all. Their patient was all-deserving of the name, and needed no other care than they could give him. He slept much, and suffered little pain, and their light household tasks allowed one or the other to be constantly with him. Thus, to the kindly applicants; while to each other and their parent they said that love would not allow them to delegate a duty so dear and pious even to the true friends who sought to divide their labors. No man ever had more tender and gentle custodians. There was no perceptible difference in the a.s.siduity and skill of the two, but visitors were unanimous in the expression of the opinion that their anxious vigils told more visibly upon Jessie than upon her sister. She wasted almost as rapidly as the sick man, while her eyes were settled in their mournfulness, and she seemed to forget how to smile days before the physician expressed any doubt as to the sequel of her parent's illness.

He had been confined to his room three weeks, when, on the morning of the 27th of September, Jessie met the doctor on the stairs, as she was carrying in a bowl of beef tea she had just made.

"Ah, doctor! I did not know you were here!" she said, more cheerfully than he had heard her speak for several days, unless when within her father's hearing. "Papa is more comfortable--is he not?"

"He is more quiet, certainly. Can I see you for a moment, my dear, when you have taken that in? I shall wait for you in the parlor."

He spoke very gravely, averting his eyes as he finished; and hope went suddenly and completely out of the daughter's heart.

She bore the basin carefully and steadily into the chamber, up to the bedside of the patient, and called his name clearly:

"Papa, dear, will you take a little of this for me?"

She watched him narrowly as he aroused himself to respond.

"He sleeps all the time, to-day," whispered Eunice.

There was a dull glow in his half-open eyes, and he put his hand to his head, confusedly, staring in his younger daughter's face, as she repeated her request.

"It is Jessie, papa! You have been dreaming, and are not yet awake.

Here is your beef tea. May I give you a spoonful or two?"

"I thought you were your mother, child!" he said, smiling faintly but lovingly at her. "I was dreaming, as you say."

She fed him as she would an infant, but he would take only a few spoonfuls of the nourishment, turned his face away, and fell asleep again instantly.

The doctor's delicate and unenviable duty was half done for him before she joined him in the lower room.

"You consider my father worse?" was the address with which she opened the interview.

"I grieve to say that I do."

"Can nothing be done for him?"

He hesitated.

"I am answered!" she said, hastily. "Don't shelter yourself behind the hateful, worthless subterfuge about hope ceasing only with life.

Tell me, instead, how long--"

The rest of the sentence was beyond her powers of utterance. But she did not succ.u.mb in aspect, after the wordless struggle died away in a quiver of the unmoistened lips. She was very white, but very still. The doctor congratulated himself upon the sagacity that had led him to choose this one of the twain as the recipient of his unwelcome intelligence. Jessie was his favorite, and he had always contended that hers was the stronger, as well as the more sprightly nature of the two. Since she was so collected--so well prepared for the sad probability--if not the fell certainty--he could be entirely frank.

"The symptoms are of general congestion," he said. "If this should advance rapidly, we cannot hope to have him with us more than twenty-four hours, at the utmost. I shall return, presently, with Dr. Trimble. But his verdict will, I think, coincide with mine. The indications are distinct. Your father will probably be unconscious much of the time, and suffer little, if at all. No one can doubt his fitness for the great change. I have known him for over thirty years, and I can testify that he has walked humbly and closely with his G.o.d. He has instructed you so carefully, Jessie, my dear, that you, do not require to be told where to look for consolation, for grace, and strength, in this trying hour--"

A motion of prohibition that had in it none of the grace of entreaty, checked his formula.

"You will not be long absent?" asked a voice from between the rigid lips.

The circles under her eyes were blacker and broader each second.

"I shall be in again as soon as I can find Dr. Trimble. You had better take Miss Eunice into your confidence without delay. She might think it strange--might take it hard if anything were to happen, you know--"

"Yes! I know!"

That shut his mouth, and rid her of his presence.

The day was warm for the season--so sultry that the cirrus clouds swimming in the blue ether, looked soft to April tearfulness. How still it was, as Jessie stood in the open oriel-window, and let her eyes roam through garden and church-yard,--ever returning, without volition of hers, to the gap in the long lines of gravestones next her mother's tomb! Had Nature swooned all over the broad earth? Was there nothing real left in creation save the fact of her great woe?

"My father is dying!" she said, aloud and distinctly.