Hetty's Strange History

VII.

It was settled that they should set out for home a week from that day. “Only seven days left,” said the doctor. “What can I do in that time?”

Never was man so baffled in attempts to woo. Hetty saw nothing, heard nothing, understood nothing; unwittingly she defeated every project he made for seeing her alone; unconsciously she chilled and dampened and arrested every impulse he had to speak to her, till Dr. Eben's temper was tried as well as his love. Sally, the baby, the nurse, all three, were simply a wall of protection around Hetty. Her eyes, her ears, her hands were full; and as for her heart and soul, they were walled about even better than her body. Nothing can be such a barrier to love's approach as an honest nature's honest unconsciousness. Dr. Eben was wellnigh beside himself. The days flew by. He had done nothing, gained nothing. How he cursed his folly in having let two whole months slip away, before he found out that he loved this woman, whom now he could no more hope to impress in a few hours' time than a late afternoon sun might think to melt an iceberg.

“It would take a man a lifetime to make her understand that he loved her,” groaned the doctor, “and I've only got two days;” and more than ever his anxiety deepened as he wondered whether, after they returned home, she would allow him to continue these friendly and familiar relations. This uncertainty led to a most unfortunate precipitation on his part. The night before they were to go, he found Hetty at sunset sitting under the trees, and looking dreamily out to sea. Her attitude and her look were pensive. He had never seen such an expression on Hetty's face or figure, and it gave him a warmer yearning towards her than he had ever yet dared to let himself feel. It was just time for the lamp in the lighthouse to be lit, and Hetty was watching for it. As the doctor approached her, she said, “I am waiting for the lighthouse light to flash out. I like so to see its first ray. It is like seeing a new planet made.” Dr. Eben sat down by her side, and they both waited in silence for the light. The whole western and southern sky glowed red; a high wind had been blowing all day, and the water was covered with foamy white caps; the tall, slender obelisk of the lighthouse stood out black against the red sky, and the shining waves leaped up and broke about its base. But all was quiet in the sheltered curve of the beach on which Hetty and Dr. Eben were sitting: the low surf rose and fell as gently as if it had a tide of its own, which no storm could touch. Presently the bright light flashed from the tower, shone one moment on the water of the river's mouth, then was gone.

“Now it is lighting the open sea,” said Hetty. In a few moments more the lantern had swung round, and again the bright rays streamed towards the beach, almost reaching the shore.

“And now it is lighting us,” said Dr. Eben: “I wish it were as easy to get light upon one's path in life, as it is to hang a lantern in a tower.”

Hetty laughed.

“Are you often puzzled?” she asked lightly.

“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 assured 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 assertion that they were friends. He half dreaded to see her the next morning, lest there should be some change, same 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 snatch from work, Old Cæsar 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 passed 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 gratitude almost like that they felt to God 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 door-way, 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 masses 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 light-house less,” said Dr. Eben.

“Oh,” exclaimed Hetty, “what a lovely idea! who said that? Who called the stars lighthouses?”

“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.”

Hetty was silent. The mention of light-houses had carried her thoughts back to that last night at “The Runs,” when, with Dr. Eben by her side, she had watched the great revolving light in the stone tower on the bar.

Dr. Eben was thinking of the same thing; he wondered if Hetty were not: after a few moments' silence, he became so sure of it that he said:

“You have not forgotten that night, have you?”

“Oh, no!” replied Hetty, in a low voice.

“I should like to think that you did not wish to forget it,” said the doctor, in a tender tone.

“Oh, don't, please don't say any thing about it,” exclaimed Hetty, in a tone so full of emotion, that Dr. Eben's heart gave a bound of joy. In that second, he believed that the time would come when Hetty would love him. He had never heard such a tone from her lips before. Her hand rested on his arm. He laid his upon it,—the first caressing touch he had ever dared to offer to Hetty; the first caressing touch which Hetty had ever received from hand of man.

“I will not, Hetty, till you are willing I should,” he said. He had never called her “Hetty” before. A tumult filled Hetty's heart; but all she said was, in a most matter-of-fact tone: “That's right! we must go in now. It is too cold out here.”

Dr. Eben did not care what her words were: nature had revealed herself in a tone.

“I'll make her love me yet,” he thought. “It won't take a great while either; she's beginning, and she doesn't know it.” He was so happy that he did not know at first that Hetty had left him alone in front of the fire. When he found she had gone, he drew up a big arm-chair, sank back in its depths, put his feet on the fender, and fell to thinking how, by spring, perhaps, he might marry Hetty. In the midst of this lover-like reverie, he fell asleep in the most unlover-like way. He was worn out with his long night's watching. In a few minutes, Hetty came back with hot broth which she had prepared for him. Her light step did not rouse him. She stood still by his chair, looking down on his face. His clear-cut features, always handsome, were grand in sleep. The solemnity of closed eyes adds to a noble face something which is always very impressive. He stirred uneasily, and said in his sleep, “Hetty.” A great wave of passionate feeling swept over her face, as, standing there, she heard this tender sound of her name on his unconscious lips.

“Oh what will become of me if I love him after all,” she thought.

“Why not, why not?” answered her heart; wakened now and struggling for its craved and needed rights. “Why not, why not?” and no answer came to Hetty's mind.

Moving noiselessly, she set the broth on a low table by the doctor's side, covered him carefully with her own heavy cloak, and left the room. On the threshold, she turned back and looked again at his face. Her conscious thoughts were more than she could bear. In sudden impatience with herself, she exclaimed, “Pshaw! how silly I am!” and hastened upstairs, more like the old original Hetty than she had been for many days. Love could not enthrone himself easily in Hetty's nature: it was a rebellious kingdom. “Thirty-seven years old! Hetty Gunn, you're a goose,” were Hetty's last thoughts as she fell asleep that night. But when she awoke the next morning, the same refrain, “Why not, why not?” filled her thoughts; and, when she bade Dr. Eben good-morning, the rosy color that mounted to her very temples gave him a new happiness.

Why prolong the story of the next few days? They were just such days as every man and every woman who has loved has lived through, and knows far better than can be said or sung. Love's beginnings are varied, and his final crises of avowal take individual shape in each individual instance: but his processes and symptoms of growth are alike in all cases; the indefinable delight,—the dreamy wondering joy,—the half avoidance which really means seeking,—the seeking which shelters itself under endless pleas,—the ceaseless questioning of faces,—the mute caresses of looks, and the eloquent caresses of tones,—are they not written in the books of the chronicles of all lovers? What matter how or when the crowning moment of full surrender comes? It came to Eben and Hetty, however, more suddenly at last than it often comes; came in a way so characteristic of them both, that perhaps to tell it may not be a sin, since we aim at a complete setting forth of their characters.

VIII.

For three days little Raby had been so ill that the doctor had not left the house day nor night, except for imperative calls from other patients. Each night the paroxysms of croup returned with great severity, and the little fellow's strength seemed fast giving way under them. Sally and Hetty, his two mothers, were very differently affected by the grief they bore in common. Sally was speechless, calm, almost dogged in her silence. When Dr. Eben trying to comfort her, said:

“Don't feel so, Mrs. Little: I think we shall pull the boy through all right.” She looked up in his face, and shook her head, speaking no word. “I am not saying it merely to comfort you; indeed, I am not, Mrs. Little,” said the doctor. “I really believe he will get well. These attacks of croup seem much worse than they really are.”

“I don't know that it comforts me,” replied Sally, speaking very slowly. “I don't know that I want him to live; but I think perhaps he might be allowed to die easier, if I didn't need so much punishing. It is worse than death to see him suffer so.”

“Oh, Mrs. Little! how can you think thus of God?” exclaimed the doctor. “He never treats us like that, any more than you could Raby.”

“The minister at the Corners said so,” moaned Sally. “He said it was till the third and fourth generations.”

At such moments, Dr. Eben, in his heart, thought undevoutly of ministers. “A bruised reed, he will not break,” came to his mind, often as he looked at this anguish-stricken woman, watching her only child's suffering, and morbidly believing that it was the direct result of her own sin. But Dr. Eben found little time to spare for his ministrations to Sally, when Hetty was in such distress. He had never seen any thing like it. She paced the house like a wounded lioness. She could not bear to stay in the room: all day, all night, she walked, walked, walked; now in the hall outside his door; now in the rooms below. Every few moments, she questioned the doctor fiercely: “Is he no better?” “Will he have another?” “Can't you do something more?” “Do you think there is a possibility that any other doctor might know something you do not?” “Shan't I send Cæsar over to Springton for Dr. Wilkes; he might think of something different?” These, and a thousand other such questions, Hetty put to the harassed and tortured Dr. Eben, over and over, till even his loving patience was wellnigh outworn. It was strengthened, however, by his anxiety for her. She did not eat; she did not drink; she looked haggard and feverish. This child had been to her from the day of his birth like her own: she loved him with all the pent-up forces of the great womanhood within her, which thus far had not found the natural outlet of its affections.

“Doctor,” she would cry vehemently, “why should Raby die? God never means that any children should die. It is all our ignorance and carelessness; all the result of broken law. I've heard you say a hundred times, that it is a thwarting of God's plan whenever a child dies: why don't you cure Raby?”

“That is all true, Hetty,” Dr. Eben would reply; “all very true: it is a thwarting of God's plan whenever any human being dies before he is fully ripe of old age. But the accumulated weight of generations of broken law is on our heads. Raby's little life has been all well ordered, so far as we can see; but, farther back, was something wrong or he would not be ill today. I have done my best to learn, in my little life, all that is known of methods of cure; but I have only the records of human ignorance to learn from, and I must fail again and again.”

At last, on the fourth night, Raby slept: slept for hours, quietly, naturally, and with a gentle dew on his fair forehead. The doctor sat motionless by his bed and watched him. Sally, exhausted by the long watch, had fallen asleep on a lounge. The sound of Hetty's restless steps, in the hall outside, had ceased for some time. The doctor sat wondering uneasily where she had gone. She had not entered the room for more than an hour; the house grew stiller and stiller; not a sound was to be heard except little Raby's heavy breathing, and now and then one of those fine and mysterious noises which the timbers of old houses have a habit of making in the night-time. At last the lover got the better of the physician. Doctor Eben rose, and, stealing softly to the door, opened it as cautiously as a thief. All was dark.

“Hetty,” he whispered. No answer. He looked back at Raby. The child was sleeping so soundly it seemed impossible that he could wake for some time. Doctor Eben groped his way to the head of the great stairway, and listened again. All was still.

“Hetty!” he called in a low voice, “Hetty!” No answer.

“She must have fallen asleep somewhere. She will surely take cold,” the doctor said to himself; persuading his conscience that it was his duty to go and find her. Slowly feeling his way, he crept down the staircase. On the last step but one, he suddenly stumbled, fell, and barely recovered himself by his firm hold of the banisters, in time to hear Hetty's voice in a low imperious whisper:

“Good heavens, doctor! what do you want?”

“Oh Hetty! did I hurt you?” he exclaimed; “I never dreamed of your being on the stairs.”

“I sat down a minute to listen. It was all so still in the room, I was frightened; and I must have been asleep a good while, I think, I am so cold,” answered Hetty; her teeth beginning to chatter, and her whole body shaking with cold. “Why, how dark it is!” she continued; “the hall lamp has gone out: let me get a match.”

But Dr. Eben had her two cold hands in his. “No, Hetty,” he said, “come right back into the room: Raby is so sound asleep it will not wake him; and Sally is asleep too;” and he led her slowly towards the door. The night-lamp was burning low; its pale flame, and the flickering blaze of the big hickory logs on the hearth, made a glimmering twilight, whose fantastic lights and shadows shot out through the door-way into the gloom of the hall. As the first of these lights fell on Hetty's face, Dr. Eben started to see how white it was. Involuntarily he put his arm around her; and exclaimed “How pale you are, my poor Hetty! you are all worn out;” and, half supporting her with his arm, he laid his free hand gently on her hair.

Hetty was very tired; very cold; half asleep, and half frightened. She dropped her head on his shoulder for a second, and said: “Oh, what a comfort you are!”

The words had hardly left her lips when Doctor Eben threw both his arms around her, and held her tightly to his breast, whispering:

“Indeed, I will be a comfort to you, Hetty, if you will only let me.”

Hetty struggled and began to speak.

“Hush! you will wake Raby,” he said, and still held her firmly, looking unpityingly down into her face. “You do love me, Hetty,” he whispered triumphantly.

The front stick on the fire broke, fell in two blazing upright brands to right and left, and cast a sudden flood of light on the two figures in the door-way. Sally and Raby slept on. Still Doctor Eben held Hetty close, and looked with a keen and exultant gaze into her eyes.

“It isn't fair when I am so cold and sleepy,” whispered Hetty, with a half twinkle in her half-open eyes.

“It is fair! It is fair! Any thing is fair! Every thing is fair,” exclaimed the doctor in a whisper which seemed to ring like a shout, and he kissed Hetty again and again. Still Sally and Raby slept on: the hickory fire leaped up as in joy; and a sudden wind shook the windows.

Hetty struggled once more to free herself, but the arms were like arms of oak.

“Say that you love me, Hetty,” pleaded the doctor.

“When you let me go, perhaps I will,” whispered Hetty.

Instantly the arms fell; and the doctor stood opposite her in the door-way, his head bent forward and his eyes fixed on her face.

Hetty cast her eyes down. Words did not come. It would have been easier to have said them while she was held close to Doctor Eben's side. Suddenly, before he had a suspicion of what she was about to do, she had darted away, was lost in the darkness, and in a second more he heard her door shut at the farther end of the hall.

Dr. Eben laughed a low and pleasant laugh. “She might as well have said it,” he thought: “she will say it to-morrow. I have won!” and he sank into the great white dimity-covered chair, at the head of Raby's bed, and looked into the fire. The very coals seemed to marshal themselves into shapes befitting his triumph: castles rose and fell; faces grew, smiled, and faded away smiling; roses and lilies and palms glowed ruby red, turned to silver, and paled into spiritual gray. The silence of the night seemed resonant with a very symphony of joy. Still Sally and Raby slept on. The boy's sweet face took each hour a more healthful tint; and, as Doctor Eben watched the blessed change, he said to himself:

“What a night! what a night! Two lives saved! Raby's and mine.” As the morning drew near, he threw up the shades of the eastern window, and watched for the dawn. “I will see this day's sun rise,” he said with a thrill of devout emotion; and he watched the horizon while it changed like a great flower calyx from gray to pearly yellow, from yellow to pale green, and at last, when it could hold back the day no longer, to a vast rose red with a golden sun in its centre.

IX.

That morning's light could have fallen on no happier house, the world over, than “Gunn's.” A little child brought back to life, out of the gates of death; two hearts entering anew on life, through the gates of love; half a score of hearts, each glad in the gladness of each other, and in the gladness of all,—what a morning it was!

Doctor Eben and Hetty met at the head of the stairs.

“Oh, Hetty!” exclaimed the doctor.

“Well?” said Hetty, in a half-defiant tone, without looking up. He came nearer, and was about to kiss her.

She darted back, and lifting her eyes gave him a glance of such mingled love and reproof that he was bewildered.

“Why, Hetty, surely I may kiss you?” he exclaimed.

“I was asleep last night,” she answered gravely, “and you did very wrong,” and without another word or look she passed on.

Doctor Eben was thoroughly angry.

“What does she mean?” he said to himself. “She needn't think I am to be played with like a boy;” and the doctor took his seat at the breakfast table, with a sterner countenance than Hetty had ever seen him wear. In a few moments she began to cast timid and deprecating looks at him. His displeasure hurt her indescribably. She had not intended to offend or repel him. She did not know precisely what she had intended: in fact she had not intended any thing. If the doctor had understood more about love, he would have known that all manifestations in Hetty at this time were simply like the unconscious flutterings of a bird in the hand in which it is just about to nestle and rest. But he did not understand, and when Hetty, following him into the hall, stood shyly by his side, and looking up into his face said inquiringly, “Doctor?” he answered her as she had answered him, a short time before, with the curt monosyllable, “Well?” His tone was curter than his words. Hetty colored, and saying gently, “No matter; nothing now,” turned away. Her whole movement was so significant of wounded feeling that it smote Doctor Eben's heart. He sprang after her and laid his hand on her arm. “Hetty,” he said, “do tell me what it was you were going to say; I did not mean to hurt your feelings: but I don't know what to make of you.”

“Not—know—what—to—make—of—me!” repeated Hetty, very slowly, in a tone of the intensest astonishment.

“You wouldn't say you loved me,” replied the doctor, beginning to feel a little ashamed of himself.

Hetty's eyes were fixed on his now, with no wavering in their gaze. She looked at him, as if her life lay in the balance of what she might read in his face.

“Did you not know that I loved you before you asked me to say so?” she said with emphasis. It was the doctor's turn now to color. He answered evasively:

“A man has no right to know that, Hetty, until a woman tells him so.”

“Did you not think that I loved you,” repeated Hetty, with the same emphasis, and a graver expression on her face.

Dr. Eben hesitated. Already, he felt a sort of fear of the incalculable processes and changes in this woman's mind. Would she be angry if he said, he had thought she loved him? Would she be sure to recognize any equivocation, and be angrier at that?

“Hetty,” he said, taking her hand in his, “I did hope very strongly that you loved me, or else I should never have asked you to say so; but you ought to be willing to say so, if it be true. Think how many times I have said it to you.”

Hetty's eyes did not leave his: their expression deepened until they seemed to darken and enlarge. She did not speak.

“Will you not say it now, Hetty?” urged the doctor.

“I can't,” replied Hetty, and turned and walked slowly away. Presently she turned again, and walked swiftly back to him, and exclaimed:

“What do you suppose is the reason it is so hard for me to say it?”

Dr. Eben laughed. “I can't imagine, Hetty. The only thing that is hard for me, is not to keep saying it all the time.”

Hetty smiled.

“There must be something wrong in me. I think I shall never say it. But I suppose”—She hesitated, and her eyes twinkled. “I suppose you might come to be very sure of it without my ever saying it?”

“I am sure of it now, you darling,” exclaimed the doctor; and threw both his arms around her, and this time Hetty did not struggle.

When Welbury heard that Hetty Gunn was to marry Doctor Ebenezer Williams, there was a fine hubbub of talk. There was no half-way opinion in anybody's mind on the question. Everybody was vehement, one way or the other. All Doctor Eben's friends were hilarious; and the greater part of Hetty's were gloomy. They said, he was marrying her for her money; that Hetty was too old, and too independent in all her ways, to be married at all; that they would be sure to fall out quickly; and a hundred other things equally meddlesome and silly. But nobody so disapproved of the match that he stayed away from the wedding, which was the largest and the gayest wedding Welbury had ever seen. It went sorely against the grain with Hetty to invite Mrs. Deacon Little, but Sally entreated for it so earnestly that she gave way.

“I think if she once sees me with Raby in my arms, may be she'll feel kinder,” said Sally. James Little had carried the beautiful boy, and laid him in his grandmother's arms many times; but, although she showed great tenderness toward the child, she had never yet made any allusion to Sally; and James, who had the same odd combination of weakness and tenacity which his mother had, had never broken the resolution which he had taken years ago: not to mention his wife's name in his mother's presence. Mrs. Little had almost as great a struggle with herself before accepting the invitation, as Hetty had had before giving it. Only her husband's earnest remonstrances decided her wavering will.

“It's only once, Mrs. Little,” he said, “and there'll be such a crowd there that very likely you won't come near Sally at all. It don't look right for you to stay away. You don't know how much folks think of Sally now. She's been asked to the minister's to tea, she and James, with Hetty and the doctor, several times.”

“She hain't, has she?” exclaimed Mrs. Little, quite thrown off her balance by this unexpected piece of news, which the wary deacon had been holding in reserve, as a good general holds his biggest guns, for some special occasion. “You don't tell me so! Well, well, folks must do as they like. For my part, I call that downright countenancing of iniquity. And I don't know how she could have the face to go, either. I must say, I have some curiosity to see how she behaves among folks.”

“She's as modest and pretty in her ways as ever a girl could be,” replied the deacon, who had learned during the past year to love his son's wife; “you won't have any call to be ashamed of her. I can tell you that much beforehand.”

When Mrs. Little's eyes first fell upon her daughter-in-law, she gave an involuntary start. In the two years during which Mrs. Little had not seen her, Sally had changed from a timid, nervous, restless woman to a calm and dignified one. Very much of her old girlish beauty had returned to her, with an added sweetness from her sorrow. As she moved among the guests, speaking with gentle greeting to each, all eyes followed her with evident pleasure and interest. She wore a soft gray gown, which clung closely to her graceful figure: one pale pink carnation at her throat, and one in her hair, were her only ornaments. When Raby, with his white frock and blue ribbons, was in her arms, the picture was one which would have delighted an artist's eye. Mrs. Little felt a strange mingling of pride and irritation at what she saw. Very keenly James watched her: he hovered near her continually, ready to forestall any thing unpleasant or to assist any reconciliation. She observed this; observed, also, how his gaze followed each movement of Sally's: she understood it. “You needn't hang round so, Jim,” she said: “I can see for myself. If it's any comfort to you, I'll say that your wife's the most improved woman I ever saw; and I 'm very glad on't. But I ain't going to speak to her: I 've said I won't, and I won't. People must lie on their beds as they make 'em.”

James made no reply, but walked away. It seemed to him that, at that instant, a chord in his filial love snapped, and was for ever lost.

Moment by moment, Sally watched and waited for the recognition which never came. Bearing Raby in her arms, she passed and repassed, drawing as near Mrs. Little as she dared. “Surely she must see that nobody else here wholly despises me,” thought the poor woman; and, whenever any one spoke with especial kindness to her, she glanced involuntarily to see if her mother-in-law were observing it. But all in vain. Mrs. Little's pale and weak blue eyes roamed everywhere, but never seemed to rest on Sally for a second. Gradually Sally comprehended that all her hopes had been unfounded, and a deep sadness settled on her expressive face. “It's no use,” she thought, “she'll never speak to me in the world, if she won't to-night.”

Even during the moments of the marriage ceremony, Hetty observed the woe on Sally's countenance; and, strange as it may seem,—or would seem in any one but Hetty,—while the minister was making his most impressive addresses and petitions, she was thinking to herself: “The hard-hearted old woman! She hasn't spoken to Sally. I wish I hadn't asked her. I'll pay her off yet, before the evening is over.”

After the ceremony was done, and the guests were crowding up to congratulate Hetty, she whispered to James:

“Bring Sally up here.”

When Sally came, Hetty said:

“Stand here close to me, Sally. Don't go away.”

Presently Deacon Little approached with Mrs. Little. Hetty kissed the good old man as heartily as if he had been her father; then, turning to Mrs. Little, she said in a clear voice:

“I am very glad to see you in my house at last, Mrs. Little. Have you seen Sally yet? She has been so busy receiving our friends, that I am afraid you have hardly had a chance to talk with her. Sally,” she continued, turning and taking Sally by the hand, “I shall be at liberty now to attend to my friends, and you must devote yourself to Mrs. Little;” and, with the unquestioning gesture of an empress, Hetty passed Mrs. Little over into Sally's charge.

Nobody could read on Hetty's features at this moment any thing except most cordial good-will and the tender happiness of a bride; but her heart was fighting like a knight in a tournament for rescue of one beset, and she was inwardly saying: “If she dares to refuse speak to her now, I'll expose her before this whole roomful of people.”

Mrs. Little did not dare. More than ever she dreaded Hetty at this moment, and her surprise and fear added something to her manner towards Sally which might almost have passed for eagerness, as they walked away together; poor Sally lifting one quick deprecating look at Hetty's smiling and inexorable face. Deacon Little hastily retreated to a corner, where he stood wiping his forehead, endeavoring not to look alarmed, and thinking to himself:

“Well, if Hetty don't beat all! What'll Mrs. Little do now, I wonder?” And presently, as cautiously as a man stalking a deer, he followed the couple, and tried to judge, by the expression of his wife's face, how things were going. Things were going very well. Mrs. Little had, in common with all weak and obstinate persons, a very foolish fear of ever being supposed to be dictated to or controlled by anybody. She was distinctly aware that Hetty had checkmated her. She had strong suspicions that there might be others looking on who understood the game; and the only subterfuge left her, the only shadow of pretence of not having been outwitted, was to appear as if she were glad of the opportunity of talking with Sally. Sally's appealing affectionateness of manner went very far to make this easy. She had no resentment to conceal: all these years she had never blamed Jim's mother; she had only yearned to win her love, to be permitted to love her. She looked up in her face now, and said, as they walked on:

“Oh! I did so want to speak to you, but I did not dare to.”

It consoled weak Mrs. Little, for her present consciousness of being very much afraid of Hetty, to hear that she herself had inspired a great terror in some one else; and she answered, condescendingly:

“I have always wished you well,”—she hesitated for a word, but finally said,—“Sally.”

“Thank you,” said Sally. “I know you did. I never wondered.”

Mrs. Little was much appeased. She had not counted on such humility. At this moment they were met by the nurse, carrying Raby; and he was a fruitful subject of conversation. Presently he began to cry; and Sally, taking him in her arms, said, as if by a sudden inspiration, “I think I had better take him upstairs. Wouldn't you like to go up with me, and see what lovely rooms Hetty has given to Jim and me?”

The friendliness of the bedroom, the disarming presence of the baby, completed Mrs. Little's surrender; and when James Little, missing his wife, went to her room to seek her, he stood still on the threshold, mute with surprise. There sat his mother with Raby on her lap; Sally on her knees by an opened bureau-drawer, was showing her all Raby's clothes, and the two women's faces were aglow with pleasure. James stole in softly, came behind his mother, and kissed her as he had not kissed her since he was a boy. Neither of the three spoke; but little Raby crowed out a sudden and unexplained laugh, which seemed a fitting sign and seal of the happy moment, and set them all at ease. When Sally described the scene to Hetty, she said:

“Oh, I was so frightened when Jim came in! I thought he'd be sure to say something to his mother that would spoil every thing. But the Lord put it into Raby's head to go off in one of his great laughs at nothing, and that made us all laugh, and the first thing that came into my head was that verse, 'And a little child shall lead them.'”

“Dear me, Sally, does any thing happen that doesn't put you in mind of some verse in the Bible?” laughed Hetty.

“Not many things, Hetty,” replied Sally. “Those years that I was alone all the time, I used to read it so much that it 's always coming into my head now, whatever happens.”

After the last guest had gone, Doctor Eben and Hetty stood alone before the blazing fire. Hetty was beautiful on this night: no white lace, no orange blossoms, to make the ill-natured sneer at the middle-aged bride attired like a girl; no useless finery to be laid away in chests and cherished as sentimental mementos of an occasion. A substantial heavy silk of a useful shade of useful gray was Hetty Gunn's wedding gown; and she wore on her breast and in her hair white roses, “which will do for my summer bonnets for years,” Hetty had said, when she bought them.

But her cheeks were pink, her eyes bright, and her brown curls lovelier than ever. Dr. Eben might well be pardoned the pride and delight with which he drew her to his side and exclaimed, “Oh, Hetty! are you really mine? How beautiful you look!”

“Do you think so?” said Hetty, taking a survey of herself in the old-fashioned glass slanted at a steep angle above the mantel-piece. “I don't. I hate fine gowns and flowers on me. If I'd have dared to, I'd have been married in my old purple.”

“I shouldn't have cared,” replied her husband. “But it is better as it is. Welbury people would have never left off talking, if you had done that.”

They were a beautiful sight, the two, as they stood with their arms around each other, in the fire-light. Dr. Eben was tall and of a commanding figure; his head was almost too massive for even his broad shoulders; his black hair was wellnigh shaggy in its thickness; and his dark gray eyes looked out from under eyebrows which were like projecting eaves, and threw shadows on his cheeks below. Hetty's fair, rosy face, and golden-brown curls, were thrown out into relief by all this dark coloring so near, as a sunbeam is when it plays on a dark cloud. The rooms were full of the delicate fragrance of apple blossoms. The corners were filled with them; the walls were waving with them. Sally had begged permission to have, for once, all the apple blossoms she desired; and, despite groans and grumblings from Mike, she had rifled the orchards.

“Faith, an' a good tin bushel she's taken off the russets,” Mike said to Norah; “an' as for thim gillies yer was so fond of, there's none left to spake of on any o' the trees. Now if she'd er tuk thim old blue pearmain trees, I wouldn't have said a word. But, 'Oh no!' sez she, 'I must have all pink uns;' an' it was jest the pink uns that was our best trees; that's jest as much sinse as ye wimmin 's got.”

“Wull, thin, an' I'm thinkin' yer wouldn't have grudged Miss Hetty her own apples, if it was in barrls ye had 'em,” replied the practical Norah, “an' I don't see where 's the differ.”

“Yer don't!” said Mike, angrily. “If it had ha plazed God to make a man o' yer, ye'd ha known more 'n yer do;” and with this characteristically masculine shifting of his premises, Mike turned his back on Norah.

Neither Hetty nor Doctor Eben had ever heard that lovers should not wed in May; and, as they looked up at the great fragrant pink and white boughs on the walls, Hetty exclaimed: “Nobody ought to be married except when apple-trees are in bloom. Nothing else could have been half so lovely in the rooms, and the fire-light makes them all the prettier. What a genius Sally has for arranging flowers. Who would have thought common stone jars could look so well?”

Sally had taken the largest sized gray stone jars she could buy in Welbury, and in these had set boughs six and seven feet long, looking like young trees. On the walls she had placed deep wooden boxes with shield-shaped fronts; these fronts were covered with gray lichens from the rocks; the rosy blossoms waved from out these boxes, looking as much at home as they did above the lichen-covered trunks of the trees in the orchard.

“Poor dear Sally!” Hetty continued, “she had a hard time the first part of the evening. That stony old woman wouldn't speak to her. But I took her in hand afterward. Did you observe?”

“Observe!” shouted Dr. Eben. “I should think so. You hardly waited till the minister had got through with us.”

“I didn't wait till then,” replied Hetty, demurely. “I was planning it all the while he was telling me about my duty to you. I didn't believe he could tell me much about that, anyway; and the duty that weighed on my mind most at that minute was my duty to Sally.”

And thus, in the flickering fire-light and the apple-blossom fragrance, the two wedded lovers sat talking and dreaming, and taking joy of each other while the night wore on. There was no violent transition, no great change of atmosphere, in the beginnings of their wedded life. Dr. Eben had now lived so much at “Gunn's,” that it seemed no strange thing for him to live there altogether. If it chafed him sometimes that it was Hetty's house and not his, Hetty's estate, Hetty's right and rule, he never betrayed it. And there was little reason that it should chafe him; for, from the day of Hetty Gunn's marriage, she was a changed woman in the habits and motives of her whole life. The farm was to her, as if it were not. All the currents of her being were set now in a new channel, and flowed as impetuously there as they had been wont to flow in the old ones. Her husband, his needs, his movements, were now the centre around which her fine and ceaseless activity revolved. There was not a trace of sentimental expression to this absorption. A careless observer might have said that her manner was deficient in tenderness; that she was singularly chary of caresses and words of love. But one who saw deeper would observe that not the smallest motion of the doctor's escaped her eye; not his lightest word failed to reach her ear; and every act of hers was planned with either direct or indirect reference to him. In his absence, she was preoccupied and uneasy; in his presence, she was satisfied, at rest, and her face wore a sort of quiet radiance hard to describe, but very beautiful to see. As for Dr. Eben, he thought he had entered into a new world. Warmly as he had loved and admired Hetty, he had not been prepared for these depths in her nature. Every day he said to her, “Oh, Hetty, Hetty! I never knew you. I did not dream you were like this.” She would answer lightly, laughingly, perhaps almost brusquely; but intense feeling would glow in her face as a light shines through glass; and often, when she turned thus lightly away from him, there were passionate tears in her eyes. It very soon became her habit to drive with him wherever he went. Old Doctor Tuthill had died some months before, and now the county circuit was Doctor Eben's. His love of his profession was a passion, and nothing now stood in the way of his gratifying it to the utmost. Books, journals, all poured in upon him. Hetty would have liked to be omniscient that she might procure for him all he could desire. Every morning they might be seen dashing over the country with a pair of fleet, strong gray horses. In the afternoon, they drove a pair of black ponies for visits nearer home. Sometimes, while the doctor paid his visits, Hetty sat in the carriage; and, when she suspected that he had fallen into some discussion not relative to the patient's case, she would call out merrily, with tones clear and ringing enough to penetrate any walls: “Come, come, doctor! we must be off.” And the doctor would spring to his feet, and run hastily, saying: “You see I am under orders too: my doctor is waiting outside.” Under the seat, side by side with the doctor's medicine case, always went a hamper which Hetty called “the other medicine case;” and far the more important it was of the two. Many a poor patient got well by help of Hetty's soups and jellies and good bread. Nothing made her so happy as to have the doctor come home, saying: “I've got a patient to-day that we must feed to cure him.” Then only, Hetty felt that she was of real help to her husband: of any other help that she might give him Hetty was still incredulous; intangible things were a little out of Hetty's range. Even her great and passionate love had not fully opened her eyes to all love's needs and expressions. All that it meant to her was a perpetual doing, ministration, a compelling of the happiness of the loved object. And here, as everywhere else in her life, she was fully content only when there was something evident and ready to be done. If her husband had taken the same view of love,—had insisted on perpetual ministerings to her in tangible forms,—she would have been bewildered and uncomfortable; and would, no doubt, have replied most illogically: “Oh, don't be taking so much trouble about me. I can take care of myself; I always have.” But Doctor Eben was in no danger of disturbing Hetty in this way. Without being consciously a selfish man, he had a temperament to which acceptance came easy. And really Hetty left him no time, no room, for any such manifestations towards her, even had they been spontaneously natural. Moreover, Hetty was a most difficult person for anybody to help in any way. She never seemed to have needs or wants: she was always well, brisk, cheery, prepared for whatever occurred. There really seemed to be nothing to do for Hetty but to kiss her; and that Doctor Eben did most heartily, and of persistence; and Hetty liked it better than any thing in this world. With his whole heart and strength, Eben Williams loved his wife; and he loved her better and better, day by day. But she herself, by her peculiar temperament, her habits of activity, and disinterestedness, made it, in the outset, out of the question that any man living with her as her husband should ever fully learn a husband's duties and obligations.