Читать книгу The Gayworthys - Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney - Страница 22

Gabriel, leaning over his father's bed, heard the click of the bones as they came into place under the doctor's grasp. At the same moment, the old man opened his eyes. There was a quieter look in them, though with a vague amaze, than they had worn for long.

"Where am I? What ye doin' to me?" he asked, feebly.

"You've had an accident, and hurt your arm. Lie still," replied the Doctor.

"An accident? I donno nothin' about it. Where's ma'am?"

"I'm here," said his wife, standing on the other side. But her white face grew whiter, as she spoke, and she would have dropped, if Mary Makepeace had not held her.

"She's clear beat out; and her head's been bad all day, and she must go to bed, herself, this minute," said Mary Makepeace leading, or mostly, lifting her, along. Mrs. Hartshorne yielded, in a sick dizziness that made the faces round her all turn strange, and the look of the kitchen, as she moved across it to the little bedroom on the other side, like a place she had never been in before; and presently the Doctor stood by her, in turn, feeling her pulse gravely, and ordered that nobody should talk to her, and that all the questioning neighbors in the front room should be told to go away; and promised that Prue should come over, directly, with something that she must take.

So that week began.

A week of ceaseless watching, and nursing, and fear. Gabriel, except his coat, had never his Sunday clothes off, through it all. They couldn't keep it from the old man that his wife was very ill. That, and the corporal shock which he had suffered, seemed to suspend the workings of diseased fancy. He lay, in a childish sort of contented helplessness, asking, now and then, how "ma'am" was, and "when she was coming." In all this time, he recollected nothing, apparently, of that which he himself had done. How it would be with him, by and by, the doctor could not promise; though he still said, "We'll hope." For the present, he was simply, as it were, benumbed, subdued.

Joanna Gayworthy was angry in her secret heart with Prue, for the privilege she had of entering fearlessly the afflicted home, and ministering there, day and night. Because she was a widow, and almost forty, she could do it. She was "just the person to be there," as people said. What great difference did the years make? She felt herself grown old enough, of late, if that were all. And her hopeless life looked to her like a long widowhood just entered. But she must sit at home,—she and Rebecca, whom she almost hated, too, for her calmness, and keep down all her restless thoughts and questionings, and not dare even to ask what she most wanted to be told, when the others now and then came in; seeming indifferent almost, through fear of showing too much. She wanted to know how Gabriel looked, and what he said; she wanted to know if anybody said words of comfort to him, now and then, as there ought to be somebody to do; if anybody made him eat and rest; or whether he too were wearing himself ill, with nobody to notice. She wanted,—oh, this was not half! What her woman's heart wanted, was to go to him, in spite of all; to take her stand beside him; to tell him that his pain was her pain, and that she had come to bear it with him, for that she would not be divided from him now!—What a strange world and way we live in! This she did not do; she held herself back with a fierce might, because she must; because the words had never been spoken,—because she had stopped them, frivolously, when she knew they were on his lips,—that should have given her this right; because what another even like her might have done, in simple neighborly kindness, it was quite impossible for her, with her secret consciousness, to do.

Prue came and went; Rebecca asked, sometimes, if she could not do something to help or relieve her. Prue always answered, "no; it was not necessary. She and Mary Makepeace were getting along quite well." Joanna, if she had dared to say one word at all,—she thought so to herself,—would never have been put off in that tame way!

"About the same!" Who has not known the agonizing insignificance and delay of that sick-room bulletin, which denies not hope, yet, day by day, lets fear settle down more heavily? Gabriel heard it from the doctor, at each frequent visit; Prue repeated it, in the intervals, at each asking look from him, and to the old man's queries. "Will nobody tell me anything more?" his thought questioned, bitterly. Yet he dared not press them to say more.

Joanna heard it till she ceased to make inquiry. "What is the use?" she cried out, vehemently, to Rebecca. "They won't tell anything, till it tells itself."

That day came. On Saturday, Prue came back, needed no more.

"Here, mother, is your posy," Gabriel said again, through sobs, on Sunday, kneeling at her side. They were the last week's withered flowers. He found them in his mother's drawer with the folded muslin pelerine as she had put them away,—who knows with what foreboding? He laid them, reverently, on the dead hands that never would reach out for posy more, and went away into the garden, to gather her yet one,—the last.

On Monday, all the neighbors came, from all the country-side, and the church-bell tolled, and they buried her.

When everybody else was there, Joanna could come too. Yes, like any common curious acquaintance,—the motherless girl who had loved Gabriel's mother secretly, as if she were her own. To stand there in the hushed and crowded parlor, to hear the prayer, and to struggle against tears, till she looked, and wondered if she were grown cold, and stony, and unfeeling,—to see Gabriel go by, with bared head, unwitting of her presence, separated from her and all by the sacred isolation of his great grief, and then to go home, having never said a word to him through all, since she laid her hand upon his arm, and called him by his name, a week ago, in the church gallery.

The old man wept feebly, when Gabriel told him tenderly, that they had lost her. Then he grew quieter than before, scarcely speaking; and seemed to notice little of what went on about him. He slept a good deal, during the next two days. It was on Tuesday, just at evening, that he turned his head, with an earnest look, toward Gabriel, as he sat by the bedside; and spoke, slowly, most like one awaking from a dream.

"Well.—She's gone. Ain't she?"

Gabriel bent his head, and groaned, "Ay!"

"Yes. She's gone. She can't take care of me, now. And I'm,—Gabriel,—there's something slipping away from me, like I've felt as if it was a goin', this long time. But I've held on. Yes, I've held on. I didn't want,—Gabriel,—oh, dear! to give quite up and let it go. And so I've been contrary and fractious. I ain't now. But it's going; and there's something I want to say to you, Gabriel, first, quick. You mustn't let me plague you, when I get worse. Send me away somewhere; I wanted, sometimes, to get off; there's places, you know,—where they take care of folks,—that—go out of their minds!"

He said these last words in a whisper, as if so, in the avowal of his strange, secret consciousness, he gathered up the last strength of his failing faculties, at the moment he also let go the sole cord holding him to safety; and looked up into his son's face with an expression at once bewildered, helpless, pleading, and defiant.

Then the young man stood up, in his strength.

"Father," he said, calmly, "I don't think that is going to happen to you. And—whether or no—here I am; and here I stay, and stand by you, as long as we both live; and no man—nor woman—shall hinder, or come between. So help me, God!"

The poor, harassed intellect that was just casting itself adrift, caught at the brave, loving words of promise, and struggled back. The old man laid his hand—the one hand he could move—in Gabriel's. His eye softened. There came a tenderness into it—a trust—a gleam of peace. "Will you?" he said in such a tone as a child might. "You was always a good boy, Gabriel."

"He has passed a mental crisis," Dr. Gayworthy said, afterward. "He will never be quite himself again. But the trouble has taken a different turn. He may live for years,—the longer for this feebleness of brain, in fact,—and be no worse than he is now."

This, then, was the likelihood that lay in the future. And Mr. Hartshorne, though I have spoken of him as his neighbors did,—and as it is the fashion of New England country-folks to speak, even of a man of forty, if he have a son arrived at manly estate,—was not, literally, an old man. He was yet under sixty. He might live twenty years.

Yet Gabriel Hartshorne, with never a thought of the how long, bound a vow upon his heart, and took up this, his cross.

The next Sunday, there were prayers in church, for "the young brother, sorely and doubly stricken."

Nobody prayed for Joanna. But she prayed—she who best knew how—out of her pain—for him.

Also, that same day, the banns of marriage were published between Anastasia Lawton and Gordon King.

I have not done with my two young sisters. But this—the story of their youth—is told. Many a life-story ends to human knowledge, as abruptly. Fate does not round and finish all, in the first, few years of mortal experience. Things don't go on, in eventful succession, day by day, in the real years, as they do, page by page, in a novel. God gives us intervals; and we can neither skip nor turn the leaves faster than they write themselves. Threads drop midway in the web, and only the Heavenly Weaver can find or reunite them. We wait, and grow gray with waiting, for the word, the seeming accident, the trifle, that may or may never, He knows,—come into the monotony of our chilled existence, and alter it all for us; joining a living fiber once again, that may yet thrill with joy, to that we lost, far back in the old Past, wherein it throbbed so keenly.

But you will know, now, as you see them so, while younger lives press forward to the front and claim the fresher interest,—how it came to pass that, years after, there were these two maiden sisters, counting uneventful days in the old home at Hilbury.

All that most people knew was that "there had been once, folks thought, a sort of kindness between Gabriel Hartshorne and Joanna Gayworthy, but it never came to anything; and after his father's mind failed, and his mother died, he seemed to give up all thoughts of marrying, and just settled down to taking care of the old man and looking after the farm. As to Rebecca, she never was anyway like other young people. She was a born saint if the Lord ever made one."