XXIII. THE MEETING OF MAURICE AND EUTHYMIA.
These autumnal fevers, which carry off a large number of our young people every year, are treacherous and deceptive diseases. Not only are they liable, as has been mentioned, to various accidental complications which may prove suddenly fatal, but too often, after convalescence seems to be established, relapses occur which are more serious than the disease had appeared to be in its previous course. One morning Dr. Butts found Maurice worse instead of better, as he had hoped and expected to find him. Weak as he was, there was every reason to fear the issue of this return of his threatening symptoms. There was not much to do besides keeping up the little strength which still remained. It was all needed.
Does the reader of these pages ever think of the work a sick man as much as a well one has to perform while he is lying on his back and taking what we call his “rest”? More than a thousand times an hour, between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand times a week, he has to lift the bars of the cage in which his breathing organs are confined, to save himself from asphyxia. Rest! There is no rest until the last long sigh tells those who look upon the dying that the ceaseless daily task, to rest from which is death, is at last finished. We are all galley-slaves, pulling at the levers of respiration,—which, rising and falling like so many oars, drive us across an unfathomable ocean from one unknown shore to another. No! Never was a galley-slave so chained as we are to these four and twenty oars, at which we must tug day and night all our life long.
The doctor could not find any accidental cause to account for this relapse. It presently occurred to him that there might be some local source of infection which had brought on the complaint, and was still keeping up the symptoms which were the ground of alarm. He determined to remove Maurice to his own house, where he could be sure of pure air, and where he himself could give more constant attention to his patient during this critical period of his disease. It was a risk to take, but he could be carried on a litter by careful men, and remain wholly passive during the removal. Maurice signified his assent, as he could hardly help doing,—for the doctor's suggestion took pretty nearly the form of a command. He thought it a matter of life and death, and was gently urgent for his patient's immediate change of residence. The doctor insisted on having Maurice's books and other movable articles carried to his own house, so that he should be surrounded by familiar sights, and not worry himself about what might happen to objects which he valued, if they were left behind him.
All these dispositions were quickly and quietly made, and everything was ready for the transfer of the patient to the house of the hospitable physician. Paolo was at the doctor's, superintending the arrangement of Maurice's effects and making all ready for his master. The nurse in attendance, a trustworthy man enough in the main, finding his patient in a tranquil sleep, left his bedside for a little fresh air. While he was at the door he heard a shouting which excited his curiosity, and he followed the sound until he found himself at the border of the lake. It was nothing very wonderful which had caused the shouting. A Newfoundland dog had been showing off his accomplishments, and some of the idlers were betting as to the time it would take him to bring back to his master the various floating objects which had been thrown as far from the shore as possible. He watched the dog a few minutes, when his attention was drawn to a light wherry, pulled by one young lady and steered by another. It was making for the shore, which it would soon reach. The attendant remembered all at once, that he had left his charge, and just before the boat came to land he turned and hurried back to the patient. Exactly how long he had been absent he could not have said,—perhaps a quarter of an hour, perhaps longer; the time appeared short to him, wearied with long sitting and watching.
It had seemed, when he stole away from Maurice's bedside, that he was not in the least needed. The patient was lying perfectly quiet, and to all appearance wanted nothing more than letting alone. It was such a comfort to look at something besides the worn features of a sick man, to hear something besides his labored breathing and faint, half-whispered words, that the temptation to indulge in these luxuries for a few minutes had proved irresistible.
Unfortunately, Maurice's slumbers did not remain tranquil during the absence of the nurse. He very soon fell into a dream, which began quietly enough, but in the course of the sudden transitions which dreams are in the habit of undergoing became successively anxious, distressing, terrifying. His earlier and later experiences came up before him, fragmentary, incoherent, chaotic even, but vivid as reality. He was at the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long, narrow galleries, or rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a large part of their lives, like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters of some old building. How close the air was in the stifling passage through which he was crawling! The scene changed, and he was climbing a slippery sheet of ice with desperate effort, his foot on the floor of a shallow niche, his hold an icicle ready to snap in an instant, an abyss below him waiting for his foot to slip or the icicle to break. How thin the air seemed, how desperately hard to breathe! He was thinking of Mont Blanc, it may be, and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he remembered well as one of the great trials in his mountain ascents. No, it was not Mont Blanc,—it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits; it was Hecla that he was climbing.
The smoke of the burning mountain was wrapping itself around him; he was choking with its dense fumes; he heard the flames roaring around him, he felt the hot lava beneath his feet, he uttered a faint cry, and awoke.
The room was full of smoke. He was gasping for breath, strangling in the smothering oven which his chamber had become.
The house was on fire!
He tried to call for help, but his voice failed him, and died away in a whisper. He made a desperate effort, and rose so as to sit up in the bed for an instant, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back upon his pillow, helpless. He felt that his hour had come, for he could not live in this dreadful atmosphere, and he was left alone. He could hear the crackle of fire as the flame crept along from one partition to another. It was a cruel fate to be left to perish in that way,—the fate that many a martyr had had to face,—to be first strangled and then burned. Death had not the terror for him that it has for most young persons. He was accustomed to thinking of it calmly, sometimes wistfully, even to such a degree that the thought of self-destruction had come upon him as a temptation. But here was death in an unexpected and appalling shape. He did not know before how much he cared to live. All his old recollections came before him as it were in one long, vivid flash. The closed vista of memory opened to its far horizon-line, and past and present were pictured in a single instant of clear vision. The dread moment which had blighted his life returned in all its terror. He felt the convulsive spring in the form of a faint, impotent spasm,—the rush of air,—the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into which he was precipitated. One after another those paralyzing seizures which had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to repeat themselves, as real as at the moment of their occurrence. The pictures passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared almost as if simultaneous. The vision of the “inward eye” was so intensified in this moment of peril that an instant was like an hour of common existence. Those who have been very near drowning know well what this description means. The development of a photograph may not explain it, but it illustrates the curious and familiar fact of the revived recollections of the drowning man's experience. The sensitive plate has taken one look at a scene, and remembers it all,
Every little circumstance is there,—the hoof in air, the wing in flight, the leaf as it falls, the wave as it breaks. All there, but invisible; potentially present, but impalpable, inappreciable, as if not existing at all. A wash is poured over it, and the whole scene comes out in all its perfection of detail. In those supreme moments when death stares a man suddenly in the face the rush of unwonted emotion floods the undeveloped pictures of vanished years, stored away in the memory, the vast panorama of a lifetime, and in one swift instant the past comes out as vividly as if it were again the present. So it was at this moment with the sick man, as he lay helpless and felt that he was left to die. For he saw no hope of relief: the smoke was drifting in clouds into the room; the flames were very near; if he was not reached and rescued immediately it was all over with him.
His past life had flashed before him. Then all at once rose the thought of his future,—of all its possibilities, of the vague hopes which he had cherished of late that his mysterious doom would be lifted from him. There was something, then, to be lived for, something! There was a new life, it might be, in store for him, and such a new life! He thought of all he was losing. Oh, could he but have lived to know the meaning of love! And the passionate desire of life came over him,—not the dread of death, but the longing for what the future might yet have of happiness for him.
All this took place in the course of a very few moments. Dreams and visions have little to do with measured time, and ten minutes, possibly fifteen or twenty, were all that had passed since the beginning of those nightmare terrors which were evidently suggested by the suffocating air he was breathing.
What had happened? In the confusion of moving books and other articles to the doctor's house, doors and windows had been forgotten. Among the rest a window opening into the cellar, where some old furniture had been left by a former occupant, had been left unclosed. One of the lazy natives, who had lounged by the house smoking a bad cigar, had thrown the burning stump in at this open window. He had no particular intention of doing mischief, but he had that indifference to consequences which is the next step above the inclination to crime. The burning stump happened to fall among the straw of an old mattress which had been ripped open. The smoker went his way without looking behind him, and it so chanced that no other person passed the house for some time. Presently the straw was in a blaze, and from this the fire extended to the furniture, to the stairway leading up from the cellar, and was working its way along the entry under the stairs leading up to the apartment where Maurice was lying.
The blaze was fierce and swift, as it could not help being with such a mass of combustibles,—loose straw from the mattress, dry old furniture, and old warped floors which had been parching and shrinking for a score or two of years. The whole house was, in the common language of the newspaper reports, “a perfect tinder-box,” and would probably be a heap of ashes in half an hour. And there was this unfortunate deserted sick man lying between life and death, beyond all help unless some unexpected assistance should come to his rescue.
As the attendant drew near the house where Maurice was lying, he was horror-struck to see dense volumes of smoke pouring out of the lower windows. It was beginning to make its way through the upper windows, also, and presently a tongue of fire shot out and streamed upward along the side of the house. The man shrieked Fire! Fire! with all his might, and rushed to the door of the building to make his way to Maurice's room and save him. He penetrated but a short distance when, blinded and choking with the smoke, he rushed headlong down the stairs with a cry of despair that roused every man, woman, and child within reach of a human voice. Out they came from their houses in every quarter of the village. The shout of Fire! Fire! was the chief aid lent by many of the young and old. Some caught up pails and buckets: the more thoughtful ones filling them; the hastier snatching them up empty, trusting to find water nearer the burning building.
Is the sick man moved?
This was the awful question first asked,—for in the little village all knew that Maurice was about being transferred to the doctor's house. The attendant, white as death, pointed to the chamber where he had left him, and gasped out,
“He is there!”
A ladder! A ladder! was the general cry, and men and boys rushed off in search of one. But a single minute was an age now, and there was no ladder to be had without a delay of many minutes. The sick man was going to be swallowed up in the flames before it could possibly arrive. Some were going for a blanket or a coverlet, in the hope that the young man might have strength enough to leap from the window and be safely caught in it. The attendant shook his head, and said faintly,
“He cannot move from his bed.”
One of the visitors at the village,—a millionaire, it was said,—a kind-hearted man, spoke in hoarse, broken tones:
“A thousand dollars to the man that will bring him from his chamber!”
The fresh-water fisherman muttered, “I should like to save the man and to see the money, but it ain't a thaousan' dollars, nor ten thaousan' dollars, that'll pay a fellah for burnin' to death,—or even chokin' to death, anyhaow.”
The carpenter, who knew the framework of every house in the village, recent or old, shook his head.
“The stairs have been shored up,” he said, “and when the fists that holds 'em up goes, down they'll come. It ain't safe for no man to go over them stairs. Hurry along your ladder,—that's your only chance.”
All was wild confusion around the burning house. The ladder they had gone for was missing from its case,—a neighbor had carried it off for the workmen who were shingling his roof. It would never get there in time. There was a fire-engine, but it was nearly half a mile from the lakeside settlement. Some were throwing on water in an aimless, useless way; one was sending a thin stream through a garden syringe: it seemed like doing something, at least. But all hope of saving Maurice was fast giving way, so rapid was the progress of the flames, so thick the cloud of smoke that filled the house and poured from the windows. Nothing was heard but confused cries, shrieks of women, all sorts of orders to do this and that, no one knowing what was to be done. The ladder! The ladder! Five minutes more and it will be too late!
In the mean time the alarm of fire had reached Paolo, and he had stopped his work of arranging Maurice's books in the same way as that in which they had stood in his apartment, and followed in the direction of the sound, little thinking that his master was lying helpless in the burning house. “Some chimney afire,” he said to himself; but he would go and take a look, at any rate.
Before Paolo had reached the scene of destruction and impending death, two young women, in boating dresses of decidedly Bloomerish aspect, had suddenly joined the throng. “The Wonder” and “The Terror” of their school-days—Miss Euthymia rower and Miss Lurida Vincent had just come from the shore, where they had left their wherry. A few hurried words told them the fearful story. Maurice Kirkwood was lying in the chamber to which every eye was turned, unable to move, doomed to a dreadful death. All that could be hoped was that he would perish by suffocation rather than by the flames, which would soon be upon him. The man who had attended him had just tried to reach his chamber, but had reeled back out of the door, almost strangled by the smoke. A thousand dollars had been offered to any one who would rescue the sick man, but no one had dared to make the attempt; for the stairs might fall at any moment, if the smoke did not blind and smother the man who passed them before they fell.
The two young women looked each other in the face for one swift moment.
“How can he be reached?” asked Lurida. “Is there nobody that will venture his life to save a brother like that?”
“I will venture mine,” said Euthymia.
“No! no!” shrieked Lurida,—“not you! not you! It is a man's work, not yours! You shall not go!” Poor Lurida had forgotten all her theories in this supreme moment. But Euthymia was not to be held back. Taking a handkerchief from her neck, she dipped it in a pail of water and bound it about her head. Then she took several deep breaths of air, and filled her lungs as full as they would hold. She knew she must not take a single breath in the choking atmosphere if she could possibly help it, and Euthymia was noted for her power of staying under water so long that more than once those who saw her dive thought she would never come up again. So rapid were her movements that they paralyzed the bystanders, who would forcibly have prevented her from carrying out her purpose. Her imperious determination was not to be resisted. And so Euthymia, a willing martyr, if martyr she was to be, and not saviour, passed within the veil that hid the sufferer.
Lurida turned deadly pale, and sank fainting to the ground. She was the first, but not the only one, of her sex that fainted as Euthymia disappeared in the smoke of the burning building. Even the rector grew very white in the face,—so white that one of his vestry-men begged him to sit down at once, and sprinkled a few drops of water on his forehead, to his great disgust and manifest advantage. The old landlady was crying and moaning, and her husband was wiping his eyes and shaking his head sadly.
“She will nevar come out alive,” he said solemnly.
“Nor dead, neither,” added the carpenter. “Ther' won't be nothing left of neither of 'em but ashes.” And the carpenter hid his face in his hands.
The fresh-water fisherman had pulled out a rag which he called a “hangkercher,”—it had served to carry bait that morning,—and was making use of its best corner to dry the tears which were running down his cheeks. The whole village was proud of Euthymia, and with these more quiet signs of grief were mingled loud lamentations, coming alike from old and young.
All this was not so much like a succession of events as it was like a tableau. The lookers-on were stunned with its suddenness, and before they had time to recover their bewildered senses all was lost, or seemed lost. They felt that they should never look again on either of those young faces.
The rector, not unfeeling by nature, but inveterately professional by habit, had already recovered enough to be thinking of a text for the funeral sermon. The first that occurred to him was this,—vaguely, of course, in the background of consciousness:
“Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego came forth of the midst of the fire.”
The village undertaker was of naturally sober aspect and reflective disposition. He had always been opposed to cremation, and here was a funeral pile blazing before his eyes. He, too, had his human sympathies, but in the distance his imagination pictured the final ceremony, and how he himself should figure in a spectacle where the usual centre piece of attraction would be wanting,—perhaps his own services uncalled for.
Blame him not, you whose garden-patch is not watered with the tears of mourners. The string of self-interest answers with its chord to every sound; it vibrates with the funeral-bell, it finds itself trembling to the wail of the De Profundis. Not always,—not always; let us not be cynical in our judgments, but common human nature, we may safely say, is subject to those secondary vibrations under the most solemn and soul-subduing influences.
It seems as if we were doing great wrong to the scene we are contemplating in delaying it by the description of little circumstances and individual thoughts and feelings. But linger as we may, we cannot compress into a chapter—we could not crowd into a volume—all that passed through the minds and stirred the emotions of the awe-struck company which was gathered about the scene of danger and of terror. We are dealing with an impossibility: consciousness is a surface; narrative is a line.
Maurice had given himself up for lost. His breathing was becoming every moment more difficult, and he felt that his strength could hold out but a few minutes longer.
“Robert!” he called in faint accents. But the attendant was not there to answer.
“Paolo! Paolo!” But the faithful servant, who would have given his life for his master, had not yet reached the place where the crowd was gathered.
“Oh, for a breath of air! Oh, for an arm to lift me from this bed! Too late! Too late!” he gasped, with what might have seemed his dying expiration.
“Not too late!” The soft voice reached his obscured consciousness as if it had come down to him from heaven.
In a single instant he found himself rolled in a blanket and in the arms of—a woman!
Out of the stifling chamber,—over the burning stairs,—close by the tongues of fire that were lapping up all they could reach,—out into the open air, he was borne swiftly and safely,—carried as easily as if he had been a babe, in the strong arms of “The Wonder” of the gymnasium, the captain of the Atalanta, who had little dreamed of the use she was to make of her natural gifts and her school-girl accomplishments.
Such a cry as arose from the crowd of on-lookers! It was a sound that none of them had ever heard before or could expect ever to hear again, unless he should be one of the last boat-load rescued from a sinking vessel. Then, those who had resisted the overflow of their emotion, who had stood in white despair as they thought of these two young lives soon to be wrapped in their burning shroud,—those stern men—the old sea-captain, the hard-faced, moneymaking, cast-iron tradesmen of the city counting-room—sobbed like hysteric women; it was like a convulsion that overcame natures unused to those deeper emotions which many who are capable of experiencing die without ever knowing.
This was the scene upon which the doctor and Paolo suddenly appeared at the same moment.
As the fresh breeze passed over the face of the rescued patient, his eyes opened wide, and his consciousness returned in almost supernatural lucidity. Euthymia had sat down upon a bank, and was still supporting him. His head was resting on her bosom. Through his awakening senses stole the murmurs of the living cradle which rocked him with the wavelike movements of respiration, the soft susurrus of the air that entered with every breath, the double beat of the heart which throbbed close to his ear. And every sense, and every instinct, and every reviving pulse told him in language like a revelation from another world that a woman's arms were around him, and that it was life, and not death, which her embrace had brought him.
She would have disengaged him from her protecting hold, but the doctor made her a peremptory sign, which he followed by a sharp command:—
“Do not move him a hair's breadth,” he said. “Wait until the litter comes. Any sudden movement might be dangerous. Has anybody a brandy flask about him?”
One or two members of the local temperance society looked rather awkward, but did not come forward.
The fresh-water fisherman was the first who spoke.
“I han't got no brandy,” he said, “but there's a drop or two of old Medford rum in this here that you're welcome to, if it'll be of any help. I alliz kerry a little on 't in case o' gettin' wet 'n' chilled.”
So saying he held forth a flat bottle with the word Sarsaparilla stamped on the green glass, but which contained half a pint or more of the specific on which he relied in those very frequent exposures which happen to persons of his calling.
The doctor motioned back Paolo, who would have rushed at once to the aid of Maurice, and who was not wanted at that moment. So poor Paolo, in an agony of fear for his master, was kept as quiet as possible, and had to content himself with asking all sorts of questions and repeating all the prayers he could think of to Our Lady and to his holy namesake the Apostle.
The doctor wiped the mouth of the fisherman's bottle very carefully. “Take a few drops of this cordial,” he said, as he held it to his patient's lips. “Hold him just so, Euthymia, without stirring. I will watch him, and say when he is ready to be moved. The litter is near by, waiting.” Dr. Butts watched Maurice's pulse and color. The “Old Medford” knew its business. It had knocked over its tens of thousands; it had its redeeming virtue, and helped to set up a poor fellow now and then. It did this for Maurice very effectively. When he seemed somewhat restored, the doctor had the litter brought to his side, and Euthymia softly resigned her helpless burden, which Paolo and the attendant Robert lifted with the aid of the doctor, who walked by the patient as he was borne to the home where Mrs. Butts had made all ready for his reception.
As for poor Lurida, who had thought herself equal to the sanguinary duties of the surgeon, she was left lying on the grass with an old woman over her, working hard with fan and smelling-salts to bring her back from her long fainting fit.
XXIV. THE INEVITABLE.
Why should not human nature be the same in Arrowhead Village as elsewhere? It could not seem strange to the good people of that place and their visitors that these two young persons, brought together under circumstances that stirred up the deepest emotions of which the human soul is capable, should become attached to each other. But the bond between them was stronger than any knew, except the good doctor, who had learned the great secret of Maurice's life. For the first time since his infancy he had fully felt the charm which the immediate presence of youthful womanhood carries with it. He could hardly believe the fact when he found himself no longer the subject of the terrifying seizures of which he had had many and threatening experiences.
It was the doctor's business to save his patient's life, if he could possibly do it. Maurice had been reduced to the most perilous state of debility by the relapse which had interrupted his convalescence. Only by what seemed almost a miracle had he survived the exposure to suffocation and the mental anguish through which he had passed. It was perfectly clear to Dr. Butts that if Maurice could see the young woman to whom he owed his life, and, as the doctor felt assured, the revolution in his nervous system which would be the beginning of a new existence, it would be of far more value as a restorative agency than any or all of the drugs in the pharmacopoeia. He told this to Euthymia, and explained the matter to her parents and friends. She must go with him on some of his visits. Her mother should go with her, or her sister; but this was a case of life and death, and no maidenly scruples must keep her from doing her duty.
The first of her visits to the sick, perhaps dying, man presented a scene not unlike the picture before spoken of on the title-page of the old edition of Galen. The doctor was perhaps the most agitated of the little group. He went before the others, took his seat by the bedside, and held the patient's wrist with his finger on the pulse. As Euthymia entered it gave a single bound, fluttered for an instant as if with a faint memory of its old habit, then throbbed full and strong, comparatively, as if under the spur of some powerful stimulus. Euthymia's task was a delicate one, but she knew how to disguise its difficulty.
“Here is a flower I have brought you, Mr. Kirkwood,” she said, and handed him a white chrysanthemum. He took it from her hand, and before she knew it he took her hand into his own, and held it with a gentle constraint. What could she do? Here was the young man whose life she had saved, at least for the moment, and who was yet in danger from the disease which had almost worn out his powers of resistance.
“Sit down by Mr. Kirkwood's side,” said the doctor. “He wants to thank you, if he has strength to do it, for saving him from the death which seemed inevitable.”
Not many words could Maurice command. He was weak enough for womanly tears, but their fountains no longer flowed; it was with him as with the dying, whose eyes may light up, but rarely shed a tear.
The river which has found a new channel widens and deepens it; it lets the old water-course fill up, and never returns to its forsaken bed. The tyrannous habit was broken. The prophecy of the gitana had verified itself, and the ill a fair woman had wrought a fairer woman had conquered and abolished.
The history of Maurice Kirkwood loses its exceptional character from the time of his restoration to his natural conditions. His convalescence was very slow and gradual, but no further accident interrupted its even progress. The season was over, the summer visitors had left Arrowhead Village; the chrysanthemums were going out of flower, the frosts had come, and Maurice was still beneath the roof of the kind physician. The relation between him and his preserver was so entirely apart from all common acquaintances and friendships that no ordinary rules could apply to it. Euthymia visited him often during the period of his extreme prostration.
“You must come every day,” the doctor said. “He gains with every visit you make him; he pines if you miss him for a single day.” So she came and sat by him, the doctor or good Mrs. Butts keeping her company in his presence. He grew stronger,—began to sit up in bed; and at last Euthymia found him dressed as in health, and beginning to walk about the room. She was startled. She had thought of herself as a kind of nurse, but the young gentleman could hardly be said to need a nurse any longer. She had scruples about making any further visits. She asked Lurida what she thought about it.
“Think about it?” said Lurida. “Why should n't you go to see a brother as well as a sister, I should like to know? If you are afraid to go to see Maurice Kirkwood, I am not afraid, at any rate. If you would rather have me go than go yourself, I will do it, and let people talk just as much as they want to. Shall I go instead of you?”
Euthymia was not quite sure that this would be the best thing for the patient. The doctor had told her he thought there were special reasons for her own course in coming daily to see him. “I am afraid,” she said, “you are too bright to be safe for him in his weak state. Your mind is such a stimulating one, you know. A dull sort of person like myself is better for him just now. I will continue visiting him as long as the doctor says it is important that I should; but you must defend me, Lurida,—I know you can explain it all so that people will not blame me.”
Euthymia knew full well what the effect of Lurida's penetrating head-voice would be in a convalescent's chamber. She knew how that active mind of hers would set the young man's thoughts at work, when what he wanted was rest of every faculty. Were not these good and sufficient reasons for her decision? What others could there be?
So Euthymia kept on with her visits, until she blushed to see that she was continuing her charitable office for one who was beginning to look too well to be called an invalid. It was a dangerous condition of affairs, and the busy tongues of the village gossips were free in their comments. Free, but kindly, for the story of the rescue had melted every heart; and what could be more natural than that these two young people whom God had brought together in the dread moment of peril should find it hard to tear themselves asunder after the hour of danger was past? When gratitude is a bankrupt, love only can pay his debts; and if Maurice gave his heart to Euthymia, would not she receive it as payment in full?
The change which had taken place in the vital currents of Maurice Kirkwood's system was as simple and solid a fact as the change in a magnetic needle when the boreal becomes the austral pole, and the austral the boreal. It was well, perhaps, that this change took place while he was enfeebled by the wasting effects of long illness. For all the long-defeated, disturbed, perverted instincts had found their natural channel from the centre of consciousness to the organ which throbs in response to every profound emotion. As his health gradually returned, Euthymia could not help perceiving a flush in his cheek, a glitter in his eyes, a something in the tone of his voice, which altogether were a warning to the young maiden that the highway of friendly intercourse was fast narrowing to a lane, at the head of which her woman's eye could read plainly enough, “Dangerous passing.”
“You look so much better to-day, Mr. Kirkwood,” she said, “that I think I had better not play Sister of Charity any longer. The next time we meet I hope you will be strong enough to call on me.”
She was frightened to see how pale he turned,—he was weaker than she thought. There was a silence so profound and so long that Mrs. Butts looked up from the stocking she was knitting. They had forgotten the good woman's presence.
Presently Maurice spoke,—very faintly, but Mrs. Butts dropped a stitch at the first word, and her knitting fell into her lap as she listened to what followed.
“No! you must not leave me. You must never leave me. You saved my life. But you have done more than that,—more than you know or can ever know. To you I owe it that I am living; with you I live henceforth, if I am to live at all. All I am, all I hope,—will you take this poor offering from one who owes you everything, whose lips never touched those of woman or breathed a word of love before you?”
What could Euthymia reply to this question, uttered with all the depth of a passion which had never before found expression.
Not one syllable of answer did listening Mrs. Butts overhear. But she told her husband afterwards that there was nothing in the tableaux they had had in September to compare with what she then saw. It was indeed a pleasing picture which those two young heads presented as Euthymia gave her inarticulate but infinitely expressive answer to the question of Maurice Kirkwood. The good-hearted woman thought it time to leave the young people. Down went the stocking with the needles in it; out of her lap tumbled the ball of worsted, rolling along the floor with its yarn trailing after it, like some village matron who goes about circulating from hearth to hearth, leaving all along her track the story of the new engagement or of the arrival of the last “little stranger.”
Not many suns had set before it was told all through Arrowhead Village that Maurice Kirkwood was the accepted lover of Euthymia Tower.
POSTSCRIPT: AFTER-GLIMPSES.
MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD. ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, May 18.
MY DEAREST EUTHYMIA,—Who would have thought, when you broke your oar as the Atalanta flashed by the Algonquin, last June, that before the roses came again you would find yourself the wife of a fine scholar and grand gentleman, and the head of a household such as that of which you are the mistress? You must not forget your old Arrowhead Village friends. What am I saying?—-you forget them! No, dearest, I know your heart too well for that! You are not one of those who lay aside their old friendships as they do last years bonnet when they get a new one. You have told me all about yourself and your happiness, and now you want me to tell you about myself and what is going on in our little place.
And first about myself. I have given up the idea of becoming a doctor. I have studied mathematics so much that I have grown fond of certainties, of demonstrations, and medicine deals chiefly in probabilities. The practice of the art is so mixed up with the deepest human interests that it is hard to pursue it with that even poise of the intellect which is demanded by science. I want knowledge pure and simple,—I do not fancy having it mixed. Neither do I like the thought of passing my life in going from one scene of suffering to another; I am not saintly enough for such a daily martyrdom, nor callous enough to make it an easy occupation. I fainted at the first operation I saw, and I have never wanted to see another. I don't say that I wouldn't marry a physician, if the right one asked me, but the young doctor is not forthcoming at present. Yes, I think I might make a pretty good doctor's wife. I could teach him a good deal about headaches and backaches and all sorts of nervous revolutions, as the doctor says the French women call their tantrums. I don't know but I should be willing to let him try his new medicines on me. If he were a homeopath, I know I should; for if a billionth of a grain of sugar won't begin to sweeten my tea or coffee, I don't feel afraid that a billionth of a grain of anything would poison me,—no, not if it were snake-venom; and if it were not disgusting, I would swallow a handful of his lachesis globules, to please my husband. But if I ever become a doctor's wife, my husband will not be one of that kind of practitioners, you may be sure of that, nor an “eclectic,” nor a “faith-cure man.” On the whole, I don't think I want to be married at all. I don't like the male animal very well (except such noble specimens as your husband). They are all tyrants,—almost all,—so far as our sex is concerned, and I often think we could get on better without them.
However, the creatures are useful in the Society. They send us papers, some of them well worth reading. You have told me so often that you would like to know how the Society is getting on, and to read some of the papers sent to it if they happened to be interesting, that I have laid aside one or two manuscripts expressly for your perusal. You will get them by and by.
I am delighted to know that you keep Paolo with you. Arrowhead Village misses him dreadfully, I can tell you. That is the reason people become so attached to these servants with Southern sunlight in their natures? I suppose life is not long enough to cool their blood down to our Northern standard. Then they are so child-like, whereas the native of these latitudes is never young after he is ten or twelve years old. Mother says,—you know mother's old-fashioned notions, and how shrewd and sensible she is in spite of them,—mother says that when she was a girl families used to import young men and young women from the country towns, who called themselves “helps,” not servants,—no, that was Scriptural; “but they did n't know everything down in Judee,” and it is not good American language. She says that these people would live in the same household until they were married, and the women often remain in the same service until they died or were old and worn out, and then, what with the money they had saved and the care and assistance they got from their former employers, would pass a decent and comfortable old age, and be buried in the family lot. Mother has made up her mind to the change, but grandmother is bitter about it. She says there never was a country yet where the population was made up of “ladies” and “gentlemen,” and she does n't believe there can be; nor that putting a spread eagle on a copper makes a gold dollar of it. She is a pessimist after her own fashion. She thinks all sentiment is dying out of our people. No loyalty for the sovereign, the king-post of the political edifice, she says; no deep attachment between employer and employed; no reverence of the humbler members of a household for its heads; and to make sure of continued corruption and misery, what she calls “universal suffrage” emptying all the sewers into the great aqueduct we all must drink from. “Universal suffrage!” I suppose we women don't belong to the universe! Wait until we get a chance at the ballot-box, I tell grandma, and see if we don't wash out the sewers before they reach the aqueduct! But my pen has run away with me. I was thinking of Paolo, and what a pleasant thing it is to have one of those child-like, warm-hearted, attachable, cheerful, contented, humble, faithful, companionable, but never presuming grownup children of the South waiting on one, as if everything he could do for one was a pleasure, and carrying a look of content in his face which makes every one who meets him happier for a glimpse of his features.
It does seem a shame that the charming relation of master and servant, intelligent authority and cheerful obedience, mutual interest in each other's welfare, thankful recognition of all the advantages which belong to domestic service in the better class of families, should be almost wholly confined to aliens and their immediate descendants. Why should Hannah think herself so much better than Bridget? When they meet at the polls together, as they will before long, they will begin to feel more of an equality than is recognized at present. The native female turns her nose up at the idea of “living out;” does she think herself so much superior to the women of other nationalities? Our women will have to come to it,—so grandmother says,—in another generation or two, and in a hundred years, according to her prophecy, there will be a new set of old “Miss Pollys” and “Miss Betseys” who have lived half a century in the same families, respectful and respected, cherished, cared for in time of need (citizens as well as servants, holding a ballot as well as a broom, I tell her), and bringing back to us the lowly, underfoot virtues of contentment and humility, which we do so need to carpet the barren and hungry thoroughfare of our unstratified existence.
There, I have got a-going, and am forgetting all the news I have to tell you. There is an engagement you will want to know all about. It came to pass through our famous boat-race, which you and I remember, and shall never forget as long as we live. It seems that the young fellow who pulled the bow oar of that men's college boat which we had the pleasure of beating got some glimpses of Georgina, our handsome stroke oar. I believe he took it into his head that it was she who threw the bouquet that won the race for us. He was, as you know, greatly mistaken, and ought to have made love to me, only he did n't. Well, it seems he came posting down to the Institute just before the vacation was over, and there got a sight of Georgina. I wonder whether she told him she didn't fling the bouquet! Anyhow, the acquaintance began in that way, and now it seems that this young fellow, good-looking and a bright scholar, but with a good many months more to pass in college, is her captive. It was too bad. Just think of my bouquet's going to another girl's credit! No matter, the old Atalanta story was paid off, at any rate.
You want to know all about dear Dr. Butts. They say he has just been offered a Professorship in one of the great medical colleges. I asked him about it, and he did not say that he had or had not. “But,” said he, “suppose that I had been offered such a place; do you think I ought to accept it and leave Arrowhead Village? Let us talk it over,” said he, “just as if I had had such an offer.” I told him he ought to stay. There are plenty of men that can get into a Professor's chair, I said, and talk like Solomons to a class of wondering pupils: but once get a really good doctor in a place, a man who knows all about everybody, whether they have this or that tendency, whether when they are sick they have a way of dying or a way of getting well, what medicines agree with them and what drugs they cannot take, whether they are of the sort that think nothing is the matter with them until they are dead as smoked herring, or of the sort that send for the minister if they get a stomach-ache from eating too many cucumbers,—who knows all about all the people within half a dozen miles (all the sensible ones, that is, who employ a regular practitioner),—such a man as that, I say, is not to be replaced like a missing piece out of a Springfield musket or a Waltham watch. Don't go! said I. Stay here and save our precious lives, if you can, or at least put us through in the proper way, so that we needn't be ashamed of ourselves for dying, if we must die. Well, Dr. Butts is not going to leave us. I hope you will have no unwelcome occasion for his services,—you are never ill, you know,—but, anyhow, he is going to be here, and no matter what happens he will be on hand.
The village news is not of a very exciting character. Item 1. A new house is put up over the ashes of the one in which your husband lived while he was here. It was planned by one of the autochthonous inhabitants with the most ingenious combination of inconveniences that the natural man could educe from his original perversity of intellect. To get at any one room you must pass through every other. It is blind, or nearly so, on the only side which has a good prospect, and commands a fine view of the barn and pigsty through numerous windows. Item 2. We have a small fire-engine near the new house which can be worked by a man or two, and would be equal to the emergency of putting out a bunch of fire-crackers. Item 3. We have a new ladder, in a bog, close to the new fire-engine, so if the new house catches fire, like its predecessor, and there should happen to, be a sick man on an upper floor, he can be got out without running the risk of going up and down a burning staircase. What a blessed thing it was that there was no fire-engine near by and no ladder at hand on the day of the great rescue! If there had been, what a change in your programme of life! You remember that “cup of tea spilt on Mrs. Masham's apron,” which we used to read of in one of Everett's Orations, and all its wide-reaching consequences in the affairs of Europe. I hunted up that cup of tea as diligently as ever a Boston matron sought for the last leaves in her old caddy after the tea-chests had been flung overboard at Griffin's wharf,—but no matter about that, now. That is the way things come about in this world. I must write a lecture on lucky mishaps, or, more elegantly, fortunate calamities. It will be just the converse of that odd essay of Swift's we read together, the awkward and stupid things done with the best intentions. Perhaps I shall deliver the lecture in your city: you will come and hear it, and bring him, won't you, dearest? Always, your loving