The Sword of Damocles Part 32

--BYRON.

"Colonel j.a.pha recovered from his shock, but was never the same man again. All that was genial, affectionate and confiding in his nature, had been turned as by a lightning's stroke, to all that was hard, bitter and suspicious. He would not allow the name of Jacqueline to be spoken in his presence; he would listen to no allusion made to those days when she was the care and perplexity, but also the light and pleasure of the house. Men are not like women, my child; when they turn, it is at an angle, the whole direction of their nature changes.

"Perhaps the news that presently came to us from Boston may have had something to do with this. It was surely dreadful enough; Jacqueline's perfidy had slain her lover. Mr. Robert Holt, the cultured, n.o.ble, high-souled gentleman, had been found lying dead on the floor of his room, a few days after the events I have just related, with a lady's diamond ring in his hand and the remnants of a hastily burned letter in the grate before him. He had burst a blood-vessel, and had expired instantly.

"This sudden and tragic ending of a man of energy and will, was also the reason, perhaps, why Grotewell never arrived at the truth of Jacqueline's history. Boston was a long way from here in those days, and the story of her lover's death was not generally known, while the fact of her elopement was. Consequently she was supposed to have fled with the man who had been seen to visit her most frequently; a report which neither the Colonel nor myself had the courage to deny.

"My child, you have a brow like snow, and a cheek like roses; you know little of life's sorrows and little of life's sins. To you the skies are blue, the woods vernal, the air balmy; the sad looks upon men's and women's faces, tell but shallow tales of the ceaseless grinding of grief in their pent up souls. But you are gentle, and you have an imagination that goes beyond your experience; perhaps if you pause and think, you can understand what a tale could be told of the weeks and months and years that now followed, without hint or whisper of the fate of her who had gone out from amongst us with the brand of her father's curse upon her brow. At first we hoped, yes, _he_ hoped,--I could see it in his eyes when there came a sudden ring at the bell,--that some sign of her penitence, or some proof of her existence, would come to relieve the torture of our fears, if not the shame of our memories. But the door that closed upon her on that fatal eve, had shut without an echo. While we vainly waited, time had ample leisure to carve the furrows of age as well as of suffering on the Colonel's once smooth brow, and to change my daily vigil into a custom of despair, rather than of hope. Time had also leisure to rob us of much of our worldly goods and to make our continued living in this grand old house, an act that involved constant care and the closest economy. That we were enabled to preserve appearances to the day that beheld the Colonel laid low by the final stroke of his dread disease, was only due to the secret charity of a certain gentleman, who, declaring he was indebted to us, secretly supplied me with means of support.

"But of all this you care little.

"You had rather hear about the evening watch with its hopeful a.s.surance, 'Yet another day and she will be here,' to be followed so soon by the despairing acknowledgement, 'Yet another day and she has not come!' or of those dark hours when the Colonel lay blank and white upon his pillow, with his eyes fixed on the door which would never open to the beating of a daughter's heart, while the gray shadow of an awful resolution deepened upon his immovable face. What that resolution was I could not know, but I feared it, when I saw what a sternness it gave to his eye, what a fixedness to his set and implacable lip; and when in the waning light of a certain December afternoon, the circle of neighbors about his bed gave way to the stiff and forbidding form of Mr. Phelps, I felt a thrill of mortal apprehension and only waited to hear the short, 'It shall be done,' of the lawyer to some slowly whispered command of the colonel, to rise from my far off corner and stand ready to accost Mr. Phelps as he came from the bedside of the dying man.

"'What is it?' I asked, rushing up to him as he issued forth into the hall, and seizing him by the arm, with a woman's unreasoning impetuosity. 'I have nursed his daughter on my knee; tell me, then, what it is he has ordered you to do in this final moment?'

"Mr. Phelps for all his ungainly bearing, is not a hard-hearted man, as you know, and he doubtless saw the depth of the misery that made me forget myself. Giving me a look that was not without its touch of sarcasm, he replied, 'The colonel has made me promise, to see that a plank is nailed across the front door of this house, after his body has been carried out to burial.'

"A board across the front door! His anger then was implacable. The withering curse that had rung in my ears for ten years, was to outlive his death! With a horrified groan, I pressed my hands over my eyes and rushed back. My first glimpse of the Colonel's face showed me that the end was at hand, but that fact only made more imperative my consuming desire to see that curse removed, even though it were done with his final breath. Drawing near his bedside, I leaned down, and waiting till his eye wandered to my face, asked him if there was nothing he wished amended before his strength failed. He understood me. We had not sat for so long, face to face across the chasm of a hideous memory, without knowing something of the workings of each other's mind. Glancing up at his wife's portrait which ever faced him as he lay upon his pillow, his mouth grew severe and he essayed to shake his head. I at once pointed to the portrait.

"'What will you say to her when she meets you on the borders of heaven?'

I demanded with the courage of despair.' She will ask, 'Where is my child?' And what will you reply?'

"The fingers that lay upon the coverlid moved spasmodically; he eyed me with a steady deepening stare, awful to meet, fearful to remember. I went on steadily; 'She has gone out of this house with your curse; tell me that if she comes back, she may be greeted with your forgiveness.'

Still that awful stare which changed not. 'I have watched and waited for her every day since her departure,' I whispered, 'and shall watch and wait for her, every day until I die. Shall a stranger's love be greater than a father's?' This time his lips twitched and the grey shadow shifted, but it did not rise. 'I had sworn to do it,' I went on. 'When you lay there at the top of the stairs, smitten down by your first shock, I told her, come sickness, come health, I should keep a daily vigil at that door of the house which your severity had not closed upon her; and I have kept my word till now and shall keep it to the end. What will you do for this miserable child of whose being you are the author?'

"With indescribable anxiety I paused and watched him, for his lips were moving. 'Do for her?' he repeated.

"How awful is the voice of the dying! I shivered as I listened, but drew near and nearer, that I might lose no word that came from his stony lips.

"'She will not come,' gasped he, with an effort that raised him up in bed, and deepened that horrible stare, 'but--'

"Who shall say what he might have uttered if Death's hand had delayed a single instant, but the inexorable shadow fell, and he never finished the sentence.

"My child, these are frightful things for you to hear. G.o.d knows I would not a.s.sail your pure ears with a tale like this, if it were not for the help and sympathy I hope to gain from you. Sin is a hideous thing; the gulf it opens is wide and deep; well may it be said to swallow those who trust themselves above its flower-hung brink. But we who are human, owe something to humanity. Love stops not because of the gulf; love follows the sinner with wilder and more heart-breaking longing, the deeper and deeper he sinks into the illimitable darkness. Ten years have pa.s.sed since we laid the Colonel away in the burying-place of all the j.a.phas, and dutiful to his last request, nailed up the front door of his speedily to be forsaken mansion. In all that time my watch has remained unbroken in this house, which by will he had left to me, but which I secretly hold in trust for her. The hour of six has found me at my post, sometimes elate with hope, sometimes depressed with repeated disappointments, but whether hopeful or sad, always trustful that the great G.o.d who Himself so loved all sinners, that He gave the life of His Son to rescue them, would ultimately grant me the desire of my heart.

But the decrepitude of age is coming upon me, and each morning I leave my bed, with growing fear lest my infirmities will increase until they finally overcome my resolution. Child, if this should happen, if lying in my bed I should some day hear that she had come back, and failing to find the lamp burning and the welcome ready, had gone away again--But the thought is madness. I cannot bear it. A sinner, lost, degraded, suffering, starving, perhaps, is wandering this way. She is hardened and old in guilt; she has drunk the cup of life's pa.s.sions and found them corrupting poison; all that was lovely and pure and good has withdrawn from her; she stands alone, shut off by her sin, like a wild thing in a circle of flame. What shall touch this soul? The preacher's voice has no charm for her; good men's advice is but empty air. G.o.d's love must be mirrored in human love, to strike an eye so unused to looking up. Where shall she find such love? It is all that can rescue her; love as great as her sin, as boundless as her degradation, as persistent as her suffering. Child--"

"I know what you are going to say," suddenly exclaimed Paula, rising up and confronting Mrs. Hamlin with a steady high look of determination.

"In the day of your weakness or illness you want some one to unlock the door and light the lamp. You have found her!"

XXVIII.

SUNSHINE ON THE HILLS.

"If I speak to thee in Friendship's name, Thou think'st I speak too coldly; If I mention Love's devoted flame, Thou say'st I speak too boldly."

--MOORE.

The story told by Mrs. Hamlin had a great effect upon Paula, not only on account of its own interest and the promise it had elicited from her, but because of the remembrances it revived of Mr. Sylvester and her life in New York. Any vision of evil or suffering, any experience that roused the affections or awakened the sensibilities, could not fail to recall to her mind the forcible figure of Mr. Sylvester as he stood that day by his own hearthstone, talking of the temptations that a.s.sail humanity; and any reminiscence of him must necessarily bring with it much that charmed and aroused. For a week, then, she felt the effect of a great unsettlement. Her village home appeared a prison; she longed to run, soar--anything to escape; the horizon was full of beckoning hands. A brooding melancholy settled upon her reveries; the prospect of a life spent in the narrow circle to which she had endeavored to re-accustom herself, became unendurable.

Thus it is with us. We slide in a groove and seem happy, when suddenly a book we read, a story we hear, an experience we encounter, shakes us out of our content, and makes continuance in the old course a violation of the most demanding instincts of our nature.

In the full tide of this unrest, Paula went out for a solitary walk on the hills. Nature can soothe if she cannot satisfy. Then the day itself was one to make the soul glad and the heart rejoice. As the young girl trod the meadows, she wondered that she could be sad. Earth and air were so full of splendor. Nature seemed to be in league with the angels of light. September stood upon the earth like a G.o.ddess of might and glory.

Every tint of green that variegated the mountain-side, wooed the eye with suggestions of unfathomable beauty. A bough of scarlet flame lit here and there amid the verdure, served to illuminate the woods as for the pa.s.sage of a king; and not Solomon in all his glory ever wore an aspect more sumptuous than the flowers that flecked the meadow and fringed the hardy roadside with imperial purple. A wind was blowing, a keen but kindly breeze, laden with sweetness and alert to awaken aeolian airs from the boughs of whistling beech and alder. Even the low field gra.s.ses seemed to partake in the general cheer, and nodded to each other with a witching and irresistible abandon. Had a poet been at her side, or any one capable of divining the hidden things of nature, what a commentary to all their united thoughts she would have found in the delicious tremble of the laughing leaves, in the restless music of the runaway brooks, in the lowly crickets with their single song, in the cloud-haunting birds with their trailing melodies, and in all the roll and rumble of earth's commingled noises. Alluring as was the book of nature, she could not read it alone. She felt the lack of a loving hand to turn the page. "Is it that I am lonely!" she murmured.

The thought deepened her trouble. Coming down from the hillside, she entered a skirting of woods that ran along by the river. Here she had always found peace and some of her richest treasures of thought. Through this opaline archway she had walked with her fancies, like Saint Catherine with her lily. It was sacred to all that was sweet and deep and pure within her. "Lonely!" she whispered; "I will not be lonely. To some G.o.d gives years of happy companionship; to others but a day. Shall one complain because it has fallen to his portion to have the lesser share? I will remember my one day and be glad."

"My one day!" She caught herself at the utterance and literally started at the suggestion it offered. There was but one person whom she had seen but for a day. Could she have been thinking of him?

With a flush deep as the autumn leaves she carried, she was hurrying on, when suddenly in the opening before her, a shadow fell, and a mellow voice exclaimed in her ear,

"Do I meet Miss Fairchild in her native woods?"

It was Clarence Ensign.

The surprise was very great and it took her a moment to steady herself.

She had felt so a.s.sured that she should never see him or any other of her New York friends again. Had not Cicely written that he had gone West, soon after her own departure from New York. With a deepening of his voice Mr. Ensign repeated the question.

At once the day seemed to acquire all it had hitherto lacked. Looking up, she met his eye fixed admiringly upon her, and all that was merry, lightsome and gay within her, leaped at once to the surface. Ignoring his question with smiling abandon, she exclaimed,

"What shall be done to the man who delights in surprises and startles timid maidens without a cause?"

"He shall be held in captivity by the hand of his denouncer, until he has sued for pardon and obtained her generous forgiveness," returned he, holding out his palm.

She barely touched it with her own. "I see that your repentance is sincere, so your pardon shall be speedy," laughed she.

"Your discrimination is at fault, I never felt more impenitent in my life. I am a hardened wretch, Miss Fairchild, a hardened wretch! But you do not ask me from what corner of the earth I have come. You take me too much for granted; like the chirrup of a squirrel, let me say, or the whistle of a bullfinch. But perhaps you think I inhabit these woods?"

"No; but a day like this is so full of miracles, why should we be astonished at one more! I suppose you came on the train, but should not be surprised to hear you started, like Pluto, from the earth. Anything seems possible in such a sunshine."

"You are right, and I have sprung from the earth. I have been buried five mortal months in a law-suit out west, or else I should have been here before. I hope my delay has made me none the less welcome."

He was holding back a branch as he spoke, and his eyes were on a level with hers. She felt caught as in a net, and struggled vainly to keep down her color. "No," said she, "welcome is a guest's due, whether he come early or late. I should be sorry to be lacking in the duties of a hostess, though my drawing-room is somewhat more s.p.a.cious than cosy,"

she continued, looking around on the fields into which they had emerged, "and my facilities for bespeaking you welcome greater than my power to make you comfortable."

"Comfort is a satisfaction of the mind, rather than of the body. I am not _un_comfortable, Miss Fairchild." Then as he stooped to relieve her of half her burden of trailing leaves and flowers, he exclaimed in a matter-of-fact tone, "Your aunt is a notable woman, Miss Fairchild, I admire her greatly."

"What!" said she, "you have been to the cottage? You have seen Aunt Belinda?"

"Of course," laughed he, "or how should I be here? You have been sent for, Miss Fairchild, and I am the humble bearer of your aunt's commands.

But I forget, the practical has nothing to do with such a day. I am supposed to have sprung from the ground, and to know by instinct, just in what nook you were hiding from the sunlight. Very well. I acknowledge that instinct is sometimes capable of going a great way."

But this time her ready answer was lacking. She was wondering what her aunt would think of this sudden appearance of a stranger whose name she had never so much as mentioned.