The Storm Centre Part 3

Captain Baynell himself, throughout his illness, saw naught of the feminine inmates of the house, but the first day of convalescence that he was able to be out of his room and to descend the stairs, unsteadily enough and holding to the bal.u.s.trade all the way, he was very civilly greeted by Mrs. Gwynn when he suddenly appeared at the library door.

She glanced up with obvious surprise, then advanced with the light, airy elegance that was naturally appurtenant to her slight figure, and seemed no more a conscious pose or gait than the buoyancy of a bird or a b.u.t.terfly. She shook hands with him, hoped he was better, congratulated him on the happy termination of so serious an illness, cautioned him against exposure to the chilly uncertain weather, drew a great arm-chair nearer to the fire, and as he seated himself she piled up some old numbers of _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Edinburgh Review_ on a little table close to his elbow.

Her regard for his comfort--casual, even official, so to speak, though it was, the attentive, considerate expression of her beautiful eyes, the kindly tones of her dulcet, drawling voice--affected him like a benediction. He was still feeble, tremulous, and his heart throbbed with sudden surges of emotion. He was grateful, recognizant, flattered, although the provision for his mental entertainment bore also the interpretation that he need not trouble himself to talk.

Therefore he affected to read, and she sat apparently oblivious of his presence, crocheting a fichu-like garment, called a "sontag" in those days, destined for a friend, evidently, not for her own sombre wear. The material was of an ultramarine blue zephyr, with a border of flecked black and white. She was making no great speed, for often the long, white bone needle fell from her listless grasp, and with her beautiful eyes on the fire, her face no longer a cold, impa.s.sive mask, but all unconscious, soft, wistful, sweet, showing her real ident.i.ty, she would lose herself in revery till some interruption--Judge Roscoe's entrance, the "ladies" and their demands, old Ephraim seeking orders--would rouse her with a start as from a veritable dream.

As the days went thus slowly by it soon came to pa.s.s that Baynell could not be silent. Her presence here flattered him, but he did not reflect that the library was the gathering-place of all the family; it held, too, the only fire, except his own, in the house, a fact which he, forgetful of the scarcity of fuel which the army had occasioned, did not appreciate. She could hardly withdraw, and, with her work in her hand, she could not ignore her uncle's guest.

Sometimes he caught himself covertly studying her expression, marvelling at its complete absorption;--at the strange fact that so slight a token of such deep introspection showed on the surface. It was like some expanse of still, clear waters--one can only know that here are unmeasured fathoms, abysses of unexplored depths. Her meditation, her obvious brooding thought, seemed significant; yet sometimes he was p.r.o.ne to deem this merely the cast of her n.o.ble, reflective features, her expansive brow, the comprehensive intelligence of her limpid eyes,--all so beautiful, yet endowed with something far beyond mere beauty. Now and again he read aloud a pa.s.sage which specially struck his attention, and occasionally her comments jarred on his preconceived opinion of her, or, rather, of what a woman so young, so favored, so graciously endowed, ought to feel and think. One day, particularly, he was much impressed by this. Some benignant philosopher, reaching out both hands to the happy time of the millennium, had given voice to the theory that man's inhumanity to man, particularly in the more cultured circles, was the result of scant mutual knowledge--if we but knew the sorrows of others, how hate would be metamorphosed to pity, the bruised reed unbroken! This sentiment mightily pleased Captain Baynell, and he read it aloud.

It seemed potently to arrest her attention. She laid her work down on her knee and gazed steadily at him.

"If we could know the secret heartache--the blighted aspiration--the denied longing--the bruised pride of others?"

As he signified a.s.sent, she gazed steadily at him for a moment longer in silence. Then--

"If we only knew!" she cried,--"Christian brethren,--what a laughing, jeering, gibing world we should be!"

Once more she took her work in her hands, once more exclaimed, "If we only knew!" and paused to laugh aloud with a low icy tone. Then she inserted the dexterous needle into the fashioning of the "sh.e.l.l" and bent her reflective, smiling face over the swift serpentines of the "zephyr."

Captain Baynell was shocked in some sort. This frank unconscious cynicism was out of keeping with so much grace and charm. He was hardly ready to argue the question. He was dismayed by a sense of futility. If she had thought this, it was enough to show her inmost nature. A subst.i.tuted, cultivated conviction does not uproot the spontaneous productions of the mind. It is only foisted in their midst. He was silent in his turn, and presently fell to fluttering the leaves of his book and reading with slight interest and only a superficial appearance of absorption.

If we only knew the sorrows of others! Mrs. Gwynn's satiric eyes glowed with the uncomfortable thought that hers at all events had been public enough. If openness be a claim for sympathy, she might well be ent.i.tled to receive balm of all her world. It seared every sensitive fibre within her to realize how much of her intimate inner life they all knew,--her friends, who masked this knowledge with a casual face, but talked over her foolish miseries among themselves with the mingled gusto of gossip, the superiority of contemptuous commiseration, and a rabid zest of speculation concerning such poor reserves as she had been able to maintain. Much of this drifted back to her knowledge through her old colored nurse, who since her childhood had remained her special attendant, though now officiating as cook to the Roscoe household, and by all respectfully called "Aunt Chaney." Her a.s.sociation with other cooks and ladies' maids enabled her to become well informed as to what was said and known in other households of these affairs. As Aunt Chaney detailed the gossip, she herself would burst into painful tears at the humiliating disclosures, exclaiming ever and anon, "Oh, de debbil was busy, sh.o.r.ely, de day dee married dat man!"

But despite her burden of sympathetic woe, she would gather her powers to compa.s.s a debonair a.s.surance toward observant outsiders and optimistically toss her head. "De man was good-looking to _de_straction," she would loftily a.s.severate, in defence of the situation, "and he didn't live long, nohow."

Continuing, she would remind her hearers that she had been opposed to her young mistress's marriage, "But shucks! de pore chile saw how the other gals wuz runnin' arter Rufus Allerton Gwynn,--dat Fisher gal tried hard fur true, an' not married yit,--an' dat made Leonora Gwynn--Leonora Roscoe dat wuz--think mo' of his bein' so taken up with her! De hansomes' man in de whole country! He didn't live long!"

This gallant outward show did not prevent the iron from entering the old nurse's soul especially as she detailed the gossip of Miss Fisher's maid, Leanna, who overheard the conversation of her mistress with two particular girl-cronies beside the midnight fire, pending the duty of brushing the long hair of the Fisher enchantress, which, being of a thrice-gilded red tint, required much care and gave her much trouble. It gave trouble elsewhere. Its flaring glories kept others awake besides poor Leanna, plying the brush nightly one "solid hour by the clock." For the fair Miss Mildred Fisher was a famous belle, and many hearts had been entangled in those glittering meshes.

This trio had been Leonora Gwynn's intimate coterie, and she knew just how they looked as they sat half undressed in the chilly midnight before the dying fire in a great bedroom, in the home of one of the three, their tresses--Maude Eldon's dark, and Margaret Duncan's brown, and Mildred Fisher's red-gold, with Leanna's interested face leaning above their gilded shimmer--hanging down over dressing-sacques or nightgowns, while they actively gesticulated at each other with handgla.s.s or brush, and with spirit disputed whether it was a chair which Rufus Gwynn had broken over Leonora's head, or did he merely drag her around by the hair--"Think of that, my dear,--by her hair!"

It was a poor consolation, but this neither they, nor any other, would ever know. With the reflection Leonora set her even little teeth together as she still dreamily gazed into the fire.

Other more obvious facts she could not conceal. Her stringent, hopeless poverty would bring a piteous expression to Judge Roscoe's face as occasion required him to seek to gather together some humble remnants of the estate her husband had recklessly flung away, for he had dissipated her fortune as well as desolated her heart. She needed no reminder, and indeed no word pa.s.sed Judge Roscoe's lips of the settlements that he had drawn when he discovered that, despite all remonstrances, his orphaned niece was bent upon this marriage. Though Rufus Gwynn protested that he would sign them, she had tossed them into the fire like a heroine of romance, grandiloquently declaring that she would not trust herself to a man to whom she could not trust her fortune.

How pleased her lover had been! How gay, gallant, triumphant! Later he found his account in her folly and a more substantial value than flattered pride, for by reason of her marriage the financial control of her guardian was abrogated, and her thousands slipped through her husband's fingers like sand at the gaming-table, the wine-rooms, the race-track, as with his wild, riotous companions he went his swift way to destruction and death. And even this did not alienate her, for her early admiration and foolish adoration had a continuance that a devotion for a worthier object rarely attains, and she loved him long, despite financial reverses and wicked waste and cruelty and neglect. She could have forgiven him aught, all, but his own unworthiness. Who can gauge the sophistries, the extenuations, the hopes, that delude a woman who clings to an ideal of her own tender fashioning, the dream of a fond heart, and the sacrifice of a loving young life. He left her not one vain imagining that she might still hold dear amidst the wreck of her existence.

The crisis came at the end of a quarrel,--one of his own making,--a quarrel about a horse that he wished to sell;--oh, the trifle--the trifle that had wrought such woe!

As she thought of it anew, sitting before the fire, she laid the work upon her knee and unconsciously wrung her hands. The next moment she felt the eyes of the officer lifted toward her in a cursory glance. She affected to shift the rings on her fingers, then took up the crochet-needle and bent her head to the deft fashioning of sh.e.l.ls.

Now she could think unmolested, think of what she could never forget!

Yet why should she canva.s.s the details again and again, save that she must. The event marked an epoch of final significance in her life,--the moment that her dream fled and she awakened to the stern fact that she had ceased to love. And at first it was a trifle, a mere trifle, that had inaugurated this amazing change. Her husband wished to sell the horse, her horse, that Judge Roscoe had given her a week before. The gift had come, she knew, as an overture of reconciliation, as there had been much hard feeling between Judge Roscoe and his niece. For after her elopement and marriage he promptly applied to the chancery court seeking to protect her future by securing the settlement on her of certain funds of her estate, urging the fact of her minority and the spendthrift character of her husband. Leonora vehemently opposed the pet.i.tion, and owing to the efforts of her counsel to gain time and the law's delays, she came of age before any decree could be granted, and then defeated the measure by making a full legal waiver of her rights in favor of her husband. But, at length, when pity overmastered Judge Roscoe's just anger, she welcomed a token of his renewed cordiality. She did not feel at liberty to sell the gift, she had remonstrated. It was not bestowed as a resource--to sell. She feared to wound her kinsman. What was the pressing necessity for money? Why not manage as if the horse had not been given her?

The contention waxed high as she stood in habit and hat just in the vestibule with the horse outside hitched to the block, for Judge Roscoe was coming to ride with her. She held fast, for a wonder; she seldom could resist; but the horse was not theirs _to sell_. Rufus Gwynn suddenly turned at last, sprang up the stairs, three steps at a time, and as he came bounding down again she saw the glint of steel in his hand.

Even now she shuddered.

"It is growing colder," Captain Baynell said. (How observant that man seemed to be!) "Allow me to mend the fire."

He stirred the hickory logs, and as the yellow flames shot up the chimney he sank back into his great chair, and she took up the thread of her work and her reminiscences together.

She honestly thought her husband had intended to kill her. Somehow the veil dropped from her eyes, and she knew him for the fiend he was even before the dastardly act that revealed him unqualified.

But it was not she on whom his spite was to fall. Such deeds bring retribution. Only the horse--the glossy, graceful, spirited animal, turning his l.u.s.trous confiding eyes toward the house as the door opened, whinnying a low joyous welcome, antic.i.p.ative of the breezy gallop--received the bullet just below the ear.

It was then and afterward like the distraught agony of a confused dream.

She heard her own screams as if they had been uttered by another; she saw the great bulk of the horse lying in the road, struggling frightfully, futilely, whether with conscious pain or merely the last reserves of muscular energy she did not know; she noted the gathering crowd, dismayed, bewildered, angry; she knew that her husband had hastily galloped off, a trifle out of countenance because of certain threats of some brawny Irish railroad hands going home with their dinner-pails who had seen the whole occurrence. Then Judge Roscoe had ridden up at last to accompany her as of old, thinking how pretty and pleased she would be on the new horse,--for equestrianism was the vaunt of the girls of that day and she had been a famous horsewoman,--and feeling a great pity because of her privations, and her cruel folly, and her unworthy husband. When he saw what had just occurred, he said instantly, "You must come home with me, Leonora; you are not safe." And she had answered, "Take me with you--quick--quick! So that I may never see that coward again." Thus she had left her husband forever.

"Shall I draw up the blind?" asked Captain Baynell, seeing her fumble for her zephyr.

"No, thank you; there is still light sufficient, I think. The days are growing longer."

Again, in the silence of the quiet room, the spell of her reminiscences resumed its sway. She recalled the promises that had not sufficed; no explanations extenuated the facts; no lures could avail; her resolution was taken and held firm. She laughed when, with full confidence in her unshaken love for him, her husband appealed to her by their mutual devotion. She was simply enlightened. But she resented the satisfaction that Judge Roscoe and his wife obviously felt in the separation, and the knowledge of the secret triumph of all her friends who had opposed the match. She was embittered, humiliated, broken-spirited, yet she maintained throughout a mask of placidity to the world, inquisitive, pitying, ridiculing, as she knew it to be. The separation pa.s.sed as temporary. She was making a visit to her former home. This feint had the more countenance when a sudden need for her presence arose. Her aunt fell ill and died, and soon there came tidings of the death of Clarence Roscoe's wife while he was far away in the Confederate army. The three little girls were all alone.

"Bring them here, Uncle Gerald. I will take charge of them," Leonora had said. "Perhaps I can feel less dependent then."

And Judge Roscoe, who had borne his own losses like a philosopher, had tears in his eyes for her losses. "Oh, poor Leonora!" he had exclaimed.

"Your very presence is a boon, my dear. But for _you_ to be so stricken and desolate and--"

He was about to say "robbed," but the facts forbade him; for Gwynn's legal rights rendered her position as difficult as unenviable. In her own house she had contrived to hold her belongings together. Now, day by day, came tidings of the sale of her special personal effects--her carriage, her domestic animals, her furniture, the very pictures on the walls; then had followed a letter from her husband, regretting all his misdeeds and promising infinite rehabilitation if she would but forgive him. Naught could provoke a remonstrance, could stimulate Leonora to action, could induce a return.

Judge Roscoe had said but little. He had the deep-seated juridical respect for the relation of man and wife as a creation of law, as well as an inst.i.tution of G.o.d. When he was appealed to, he felt it his duty to place impartially before her the husband's arguments, and promises, and protestations, but he experienced intense relief when she tersely dismissed Rufus Gwynn's plea for a reconciliation. "I know him now," she replied.

"An' 'fore de Lawd, _I_ knows him too!" her old nurse declared; "I jes'

uped an' I sez, 'Ma.r.s.e Rufe, ye hev' got sech a notion o' sellin' out, ye mought sell old Chaney--ef ennybody would buy sech a contraption in dese days! So I'm goin' over to my old home at Judge Roscoe's place, to wait on Miss Leonora. I knows she needs me, an' I 'spect she's watchin'

fur me now.' An' Ma.r.s.e Rufe, he says, 'Aunt Chaney, I don't know _what_ you are talking about! Go over there, an' welcome! An' try to get my wife to see I was just overtaken in my temper and desperate; _you_ persuade her to come back, Aunt Chaney.' Dat's what de debbil said ter me. I always heard dat de debbil had a club foot. But, mon, he ain't.

Two long, slim, handsome feet, an' his boots, sah, made in New Orleens!"

The end had come characteristically at last! A horse, furiously ridden, brutally beaten, reared suddenly, lost his balance, fell backward, crushing the rider and breaking his neck. And so Rufus Gwynn reached his goal, and his wife was free at last.

Free as some defenceless, hunted, tremulous animal, miraculously escaping fierce fangs, and a furious rush of a murderous pursuit; forever dominated by the sense of disaster, and despair, and flight; forever looking backward, forever hearkening to the echoes of the troublous past--exhausted, listless, hopeless, every impulse of volition stunned.

It was well for her, doubtless, that the insistent duties of the care of her uncle's household had grown difficult in the changed conditions induced by the war; that the education, the training, the well-being, of the motherless little "ladies"--all restricted by the ever narrowing opportunity of the beleaguered town, and overshadowed by the impending clouds of disaster--appealed to her womanly heart and her maternal instincts. Their needs had roused her interest, stimulated her invention, elicited her self-control, that she might more definitely control them.

In the days of Captain Baynell's convalescence he had unique opportunities for observing the methods that had prevailed under her management, for all the life of the house revolved about the one big fire in the library. Sometimes, as he and Judge Roscoe sat there with papers and books and cigars, presumably oblivious of the minuti of the household matters, while the fire flared and the tobacco smoke hung in blue wreaths about the stuccoed ceiling and the carved ornaments of the tall book-cases, he fancied that it was the characteristic interest in trifles animating an invalid which caused him to smilingly watch the scholastic struggles of the "ladies,"--their turmoils with "jogaphy,"

for it was decreed that they should learn somewhat of the earth on which they lived; the anguish inflicted by that potent instrument of torture, the Blue Speller; the bowed head of juvenile despair on the wooden rim of the slate, over the mysteries of "subscraction," as the "lady" sobbed softly, under her breath, for loud weepings were interdicted, however poignant the woe might be. Mrs. Gwynn was indeed unfeeling in these crises and often sarcastic. "You might use your sponge to wipe away your tears, Geraldine," she would say, with that curt icy inflection of her soft voice. "I notice it is too dry for use on your slate."

Each slate had a string to which was attached a small sponge and a short slate-pencil, capable of an excruciating creak, which often set the judge's teeth on edge; as he would wince from the sound, Mrs. Gwynn would comment in this wise, "I have often heard that learned ladies do not contribute to household comfort,--so your Honor must suffer for the erudition that we have here."

And the activities of "subscraction" were never abated.

Baynell had at first a certain shrinking to witness the lessons of the deaf-mute, pitying the poor deprived child, so young, so tender, so pretty, so plaintive in her infirmity, shut out from all the usual avenues of knowledge. He would take up his book and withdraw his attention. But after a time there was suddenly forced upon his observation the superior judgment and ac.u.men and careful altruistic thought exerted in these small matters by Mrs. Gwynn. Inexpert in the manual alphabet, she wasted no time nor labor on its acquisition for herself; but, notwithstanding this, "subscraction" had no terrors for Lucille. So practised was she in the domain of demonstration that her slate was swiftly covered with figures, and her sponge had no necessity to be diverted to the incongruous function of wiping her bright eyes.

All the questions were put in writing and answered by the little deaf-mute with correct spelling and a most legible and creditable chirography, over which Captain Baynell found himself exclaiming with delighted surprise, while the cheeks both of the scholar and teacher flushed with pride and gratification, as they exchanged congratulatory smiles. So far from being the sport of her limitations and humiliated by them, Lucille was pressed forward to excel, and the twins gazed upon her as a miracle of learning, and often craved the privilege of scanning her slate, and imitating the childish flourishes of her capital letters. In naught was she permitted to feel her deficiencies--so craftily tender was her preceptress. The hour which the twins devoted to playing scales on the grand piano--being snugly b.u.t.toned up in sacques to protect them from the chill of the great parlors, and often called across the hall to warm their fingers at the library fire--Lucille sat at her drawing-board, and although she had only an ordinary degree of talent, she acquired a deftness and a proficiency that made the result remarkable for a child of her age; her leisure was encouraged to express itself in sketching from nature, and she went about much of the time pleasantly engrossed, holding up a pencil at a stiff angle and at arm's-length to take accurate measurement of relative distances and details of perspective.