III The Hickory’s Son
Chapter I “Love Is Not Love That Alters When It Alteration Finds”
Three weeks after Eloise was injured and while her life was yet despaired of by the physician, my Aunt Lucretia came to me. I was sitting on the rustic bench beneath the hickories. Night after night I had sat there, watching the light from her window, and the coming and going of the physician and nurses. To-day there had been a consultation. My Aunt had sent for a famous surgeon of Philadelphia, and all afternoon he had been in the sick room. When I saw my Aunt I knew that his decision had been reached, and though I sat still, apparently calm, my heart was smothered within me. She said very distinctly, “It’s her spine, Jack, he says she will never walk again.”
I found myself an hour afterwards taking the old path to the dairy. I saw the light from Tammas’s cottage shining far out into the night. I was wandering around numbed, stunned. As I passed the paddock I heard Satan whinny appealingly to me. From the little window in his stall he had thrust out his great head. This was the horse we had all feared, and had cruelly misnamed. The great vicious horse that had almost killed the groom, that had only been conquered by one woman, had his head on my shoulder and was whinnying softly. I knew that he was begging for news of Eloise, and for sympathy; and, dumb as he was, he knew that I would understand.
“She insists that she must see you to-night,” said my Aunt Lucretia, when I reached the house.
She led me up the old, familiar stairs, and down the great hall to Eloise’s room. She stopped at the door.
“You will find her very brave,” said my Aunt, “very brave, and so must you be,” she added, giving me a quick look.
Then she opened the door, and I stood looking at Eloise, with drawn, tied lips, and a great choking in my throat, trying to return the smile she was giving me from among her pillows. I stood still, I could not move, my limbs seemed to have caught the dead numbness of my heart.
“I want you right here by me a moment, Jack,” she said calmly. “You’ll let him sit on the side of the bed, Miss Rose, just a moment. I’ll not exert myself.”
She was more beautiful than ever. Her brave body had lost none of its suppleness and grace; her face shone, and over the pillow her hair was massed in great red-gold waves against the white of the linen.
“See,” she said, taking my hand, “see, Jack, I can move my head and both my arms. Isn’t that fine? And the doctor says I shall always be able to do that, and, well—” she smiled, “he says there is no reason why I should not outlive all of you to be an old woman. A crippled old woman—”
I turned my head quickly. As she had spoken I saw again the brave, beautiful creature, coming in head-long flight at the six-foot bar, and the triumphant smile that lit her face, sky-lined forever in my memory, as she lifted her horse almost straight up towards the sky.
She was speaking now to the nurse. “If you please, just a moment Miss Rose—Aunt Lucretia, I would like to speak to Jack alone. I shall not exert myself.” I heard them go out. “There! I have been thinking, Jack, all these weeks—one can think so very much lying in bed, and see so very, very far. I have been thinking and seeing, Jack. It’s so easy to think and so hard to see. But—but—I have prayed, too, about it—to help me see. Praying is seeing’s eyesight, Jack. I want you to promise me something. It is what I have seen in my prayer—it is the last thing I shall ever ask of you—for you have done me so many favors, dear Jack.”
I could not speak.
“The Earl—Colonel Goff—they let me see him to-day. It hurt me more than my own hurt to see the poor man suffer so in the blame he puts upon himself for the accident. He won’t see, Jack,—he can’t—that it was God’s way of settling it—God’s way. For He alone knew how foolish I was—how wicked to sell myself as I did—and how my heart, though I did not know it till that day, Jack—has always been yours!”
I took her in my arms, my face pressed against her cheek.
She lay still, patting my face with her hand and saying: “I am—it is—well, it seems also to be one of God’s ways:
‘We look before and after
And pine for what is not.’”
I heard her try to laugh in her old, brave way. She was looking again into my eyes, and I sat holding her hand.
“But Colonel Goff,” she went on, “gentleman that he is, thinks he must settle the account for his blundering ride, and begs me to marry him anyway; I, a cripple for life. He forgets that God balanced it when he stopped me from the sin of selling my heart for—for—his bauble—
“I have sent him away satisfied, Jack. I believe he would love me truly,” and she smiled, “now that he sees that I cannot ride. Love me for myself and not for my riding; but I shall love only you, Jack, till I die—the old crippled woman.”
She was silent for a moment. “And the compensation for my admitting it—you know it is costing me something—you don’t know how hard it is for me to say it first, Jack; but the compensation I claim, will you give it to your little lame girl? It is this, and now nod your head, say ‘yes’ Jack. I’ve seen—Elsie loves you, and you must—you must marry the child. She is everything you want, and you half-way love her already. It will be easy now, Jack, promise it; for your sake—for both your sakes, I’m asking. Promise me, Jack, I want to see you happy.”
She had my hand against her cheek, fondling it. Her eyes had never seemed so beautiful.
“Do you remember the kind of love I said I had for you that first night after I came home?” She pressed my hand against her cheek again. “And the kind you said you’d never felt, but would give your life to feel?” Again I felt the pressure. “That kind which I told you of, and which I have had for you all the time, is that kind that Shakespeare told of when he said:
“‘Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.’
“That’s the kind I have for you, Eloise—have always had; and do you remember the love you said you wanted, you’d give your life for, yourself, your soul and your body. ‘I, who wish it so, to be widowed of it all my life’—those were your words. How they cut into my heart—that love, Eloise, can’t you see? Don’t you know that it is yours and you are widowed of it no longer?”
She put her arms around my neck and pulled my face down to hers, smothering her mouth in my kisses.
“Oh, Jack, why did you say it—see it? Why did you not let me fool myself—fool you? Why—and—oh, if you had only not seen it—not let me know you saw it! Love? Don’t you know now that the kind I said I’d have is as I said it was? Worth life—worth death—worth all—worth all—then God help me, Jack, if I sin—God forgive me, but I’d rather hold it to my heart a helpless cripple that I am—hold it never to satisfy it—never to know what it means, helpless, bed-ridden cripple that I am than to be the well, strong thing I was without it. Oh, Jack, don’t you know now what I mean?”
She kissed me again and again, holding my cheek to hers.
“Good-by, you’ll not see me again, Jack, so good-by, Jack, forever. And in time, though you’ll never forget me nor cease to love me, you will do as I said; for yours is youth and love and strength, and they must be mated. When you can think of me without tears, without sorrow or pity, but as one who has lived and is gone—only as the memory of a sweet dream that might have been—then, dear, dear Jack, remember the last request I made of you, remember to make Elsie happy; and in time—in time, Jack, oh, what a love-maker he is! be happy yourself. Hold me a moment, just a moment to your heart—then—kiss me again and say with me the little prayer Aunt Lucretia used to make us say, holding hands in the long ago.”
Holding her face against mine, and with clasped hands as of old, we said:
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
Although the words of Eloise came to me again and again as I rode home that night, I was never so happy, nor so hopeful. Yet she had said, “Good-by, good-by, Jack, I shall never see you again.”
“I shall see her to-morrow night,” my heart kept saying over and over. “I will not give her up; I will marry her, if I have to carry her in my arms through life!”
But the next night when I rode over my grandfather met me at the door. He greeted me with petulant indifference. Both Eloise and Aunt Lucretia had left that morning—where, he did not know. She was a hopeless cripple with a broken spine, and was carried away in a cot to some institution where she might be cared for properly for the balance of her life. I forgave the old man because he was old—the reiterated statement that he had made allowance for her care himself, for although she was no blood kin, and had no claim upon him, she had been with him all her life, and was a ward of his daughter.
I could learn nothing from the servants. Aunt Lucretia, Eloise, and the nurse had gone. They had carried Eloise in a cot to the train and boarded it. It was Thomas, the driver, who gave me Aunt Lucretia’s letter. She wrote, “I have thought it all over, Jack, and this is the only thing to do. All of them are agreed, that she can never walk again. To keep her at home will only make life a tragedy to you both. It is best that you never see her again, nor she you. Sentiment is one thing, and life another. Sometimes they go together, and it is well. But when they cannot, when sentiment lives and that love of nature which reproduces life is dead, it is folly to quibble, for the loss of being is the loss of life. Be sensible, brave, and manly as you have always been and forget Eloise. Changed conditions change one’s life. You must change yours. I have a request to make. I shall be at home in a month, but I do not want you ever to mention Eloise to me, for I shall not tell you where she is. This is hard, but I am doing it for your good, as I have always done, my dear boy. When I return if she is alive you may write to her, since she has begged me so, and this is the only one happiness the poor child will have in her stunted life, and I will see that she gets the letters, though she can never reply. It is best to forget.”
The little note Eloise sent brought tears. It was a heart’s-ease that Aunt Lucretia had evidently gathered for her, and under it was written, “I am widowed of love but I am wedded. Forgive me, forget me, but love me always, Jack, as I shall you—Eloise.”