XL.
It would lead us far too widely from the simple order of our narrative to detail the early history of Madame Arles; and although the knowledge of it might serve in some degree to explain the peculiar interest which that poor woman has shown in the motherless Adèle, we choose rather to leave the matter unexplained, and to regard the invalid enthusiast as one whose sympathies have fastened in a strange way upon the exiled French girl, and grow all the stronger by the difficulties in the way of their full expression.
Madame Arles did not forego either her solicitude or the persistence of her inquiry under the harsh rebuff of the Doctor. Again and again, after nightfall, he saw her figure flitting back and forth upon the street, over against Adèle's window; and the good man perplexed himself vainly with a hundred queries as to what such strange conduct could mean. The village physician, too, had been addressed by this anxious lady with a tumult of questionings; and the old gentleman—upon whose sympathies the eager inquirer had won an easier approach than upon those of the severe parson—had taken hearty satisfaction in assuring her, within a few days after the night interview we have detailed, that the poor girl was mending, was out of danger, in fact, and would be presently in a condition to report for herself.
After this, and through the long convalescence, Madame Arles was seen more rarely upon the village street. Yet the town gossips were busy with the character and habits of the "foreign lady." Her devotion to the little child of the outcast Boody woman was most searchingly discussed at all the tea-tables of the place; and it was special object of scandal, that the foreign lady, neglectful of the Sabbath ministrations of the parson, was frequently to be seen wandering about the fields in "meeting-time," attended very likely by that poor wee thing of a child, upon whose head the good people all visited, with terrible frowns, the sins of the parents. No woman, of whatever condition, could maintain a good reputation in Ashfield under such circumstances. Dame Tourtelot enjoyed a good sharp fling at the "trollop."
"I allers said she was a bad woman," submitted the stout Dame; and her audience (consisting of the Deacon and Miss Almiry) would have had no more thought of questioning the implied decision than of cutting down the meeting-house steeple.
"And I'm afeard," continued the Dame, "that Adeel isn't much better; she keeps a crucifix in her chamber!—needn't to look at me, Tourtelot!—Miss Johns told me all about it, and I don't think the parson should allow it. I think you oughter speak to the parson, Tourtelot."
The good Deacon scratched his head, over the left ear, in a deprecating manner.
"And I've heerd this Miss Arles has been a-writin' to Mr. Maverick, Adeel's father,—needn't to look at me, Tourtelot!—the postmaster told me; and she's been receivin' furren letters,—filled with Popery, I ha'n't a doubt."
In short, the poor woman bore a most execrable reputation; and Doctor Johns, good as he was, took rather a secret pride in such startling confirmation of his theories in respect to French character. He wrote to his friend Maverick, informing him that his suspicions in regard to Madame Arles were, he feared, "only too well-founded. Her neglect of Sabbath ordinances, her unhallowed associations, her extreme violence of language, (which was on a signal occasion uttered in my hearing,) have satisfied me that your distrust was only too reasonable. I shall guard Adaly from all further intercourse with extreme care."
Indeed, Miss Eliza and the Doctor (the latter from the best of motives) had scrupulously kept from Adèle all knowledge of Madame Arles's impatient and angry solicitude during her illness. And when Adèle, on those first sunny days of her convalescence, learned incidentally that her countrywoman was still a resident of the village, it pained her grievously to think that she had heard no tender message from her during all that weary interval of sickness, and she was more than half inclined (though she did not say this) to adopt the harshest judgments of the spinster. There was not a visitor at the parsonage, indeed, but, if the name were mentioned, sneered at the dark-faced, lonely woman, who was living such a godless life, and associating, as if from sheer bravado, with those who were under the ban of all the reputable people of Ashfield.
When, therefore, Adèle, on one of her early walks with Reuben, after her recovery was fully established, encountered, in a remote part of the village, Madame Arles, trailing after her the little child of shame,—and yet darting toward the French girl, at first sight, with her old effusion,—Adèle met her coolly, so coolly, indeed, that the poor woman was overcome, and, hurrying the little child after her, disappeared with a look of wretchedness upon her face that haunted Adèle for weeks and months. Thereafter very little was seen of Madame Arles upon the principal street of the village; and her avoidance of the family of the parsonage was as studied and resolute as either the Doctor or Miss Eliza could have desired. A moment of chilling indifference on the part of Adèle had worked stronger repulse than all the harsh rebuffs of the elder people; but of this the kind-hearted French girl was no way conscious: yet she was painfully conscious of a shadowy figure that still, from time to time, stole after her in her twilight walks, and that, if she turned upon it, shrank stealthily from observation. There was a mystery about the whole matter which oppressed the poor girl with a sense of terror. She could not doubt that the interest of her old teacher in herself had been a kindly one; but whatever it might have been, that interest was now so furtive, and affected such concealment, that she was half led to entertain the cruellest suspicions of Miss Eliza, who did not fail to enlarge upon the godlessness of the stranger's life, and to set before Adèle the thousand alluring deceits by which Satan sought to win souls to himself.
Rumor, one day, brought the story, that the foreign woman, who had been the subject of so much village scandal, lay ill, and was fast failing; and on hearing this, Adèle would have broken away from all the parsonage restraints, to offer what consolations she could: nor would the good Doctor have repelled her; but the rumor, if not false, was, in his view, grossly exaggerated; since, on the Sunday previous only, some officious member of his parish had reported the Frenchwoman as strolling over the hills, decoying with her that little child of her fellow-lodger, which she had tricked out in the remnants of her French finery, and was thus wantoning throughout the holy hours of service.
A few days later, however, the Doctor came in with a serious and perplexed air; he laid his cane and hat upon the little table within the door, and summoned Adèle to the study.
"Adaly, my child," said he, "this unfortunate countrywoman of yours is really failing fast. I learn as much from the physician. She has sent a request to see you. She says that she has an important message, a dying message, to give you."
A strange tremor ran over the frame of Adèle.
"I fear, my child, that she is still bound to her idolatries; she has asked that you bring to her the little bauble of a rosary, which, I trust, Adaly, you have learned to regard as a vanity."
"Yet I have it still, New Papa; she shall have it"; and she turned to go.
"My child, I cannot bear that you should go as the messenger of a false faith, and to carry to her, as it were, the seal of her idolatries. You shall follow her wishes, Adaly; but I must attend you, my child, were it only to protest against such vanities, and to declare to her, if it be not too late, the truth as it is in the Gospel."
Adèle was only too willing; for she was impressed with a vague terror at thought of this interview, and of its possible revelations; and they set off presently in company. It was a chilly day of later autumn. Only a few scattered, tawny remnants of the summer verdure were hanging upon the village trees, and great rows of the dead and fallen leaves were heaped here and there athwart the path, where some high wall kept them clear of the winds; and as the walkers tramped through them, they made a ghostly rustle, and whole platoons of them were set astir to drift again until some new eddy caught and stranded them in other heaps. Adèle, more and more disturbed in mind, said,—
"It's such a dreary day, New Papa!"
"Is it the thought that one you know may lie dying now makes it dreary, my child?"
"Partly that, I dare say," returned Adèle; "and then the wind so tosses about these dead leaves. I wish it were always spring."
"There is a country," said the parson, "where spring reigns eternal. I hope you may find it, Adaly; I hope your poor countrywoman may find it; but I fear, I fear."
"Is it, then, so dreadful to be a Romanist?"
"It is dreadful, Adaly, to doubt the free grace of God,—dreadful to trust in any offices of men, or in tithes of mint and anise and cumin,—dreadful to look anywhere for absolution from sin but in the blood of the Lamb. I have a conviction, my child," continued he, in a tone even more serious, "that the poor woman has not lived a pure life before God, or even before the world. Even at this supreme moment of her life, if it be such, I should be unwilling to trust you alone with her, Adaly."
Adèle, trembling,—partly with the chilling wind, and partly with an ill-defined terror of—she knew not what,—nestled more closely to the side of the old gentleman; and he, taking her little hand in his, as tenderly as a lover might have done, said,—
"Adaly, at least your trust in God is firm, is it not?"
"It is! it is!" said she.
The house, as we have said, lay far out upon the river-road, within a strip of ill-tended garden-ground, surrounded by a rocky pasture. A solitary white-oak stood in the line of straggling wall that separated garden from pasture, and showed still a great crown of leaves blanched by the frosts, and shivering in the wind. An artemisia, with blackened stalks, nodded its draggled yellow blossoms at one angle of the house, while a little company of barn-door fowls stood closely grouped under the southern lea, with heads close drawn upon their breasts, idling and winking in the sunshine.
The young mother of the vagrant little one who had attracted latterly so much of the solitary woman's regard received them with an awkward welcome.
"Miss Arles is poorly, to-day," she said, "and she's flighty. She keeps Arthur" (the child) "with her. You hear how she's a-chatterin' now." (The door of her chamber stood half open.) "Arty seems to understand her. I'm sure I don't."
Nor, indeed, did the Doctor, to whose ear a torrent of rapid French speech was like the gibberish of demons. He never doubted 't was full of wickedness. Not so Adèle. There were sweet sounds to her ear in that swift flow of Provençal speech,—tender, endearing epithets, that seemed like the echo of music heard long ago,—pleasant banter of words that had the rhythm of the old godmother's talk.
"Ah, you're a gay one! Now—put on your velvet cap—so. We'll find a bride for you some day—some day, when you're a tall, proud man. Who's your father, Arty? Pah! it's nothing. You'll make somebody's heart ache all the same,—eh, Arty, boy?"
"Do you understand her, Miss Maverick?" says the mother.
"Not wholly," said Adèle; and the two visitors stepped in noiselessly.
The child, bedizened with finery, was standing upon the bed where the sick woman lay, with a long feather from the cock's tail waving from his cap. Madame Arles, with the hot flush of the fever upon her, looked—saving the thinness—as she might have looked twenty years before. And as her flashing eye caught the newcomers, her voice broke out wildly again,—
"Here's the bride, and here's the priest! Where's the groom? Where's the groom? Where's the groom, I say?"
The violence of her manner made poor Adèle shiver.
The boy laughed as he saw it, and said,—
"She's afraid! I'm not afraid."
"Oh, no!" said the crazed woman, turning on him. "You're a man, Arty: men are not afraid,—you wanton, you wild one! Where's the groom?" said she again, addressing the Doctor, fiercely.
"My good woman," says the old gentleman, "we have come to offer you the consolations that are only to be found in the Gospel of Christ."
"Pah! you're a false priest!"—defiantly. "Where's the groom?"
And Adèle, hoping to pacify the poor woman, draws from her reticule the little rosary, and, holding it before the eyes of the sufferer, says, timidly,—
"My dear Madam, it is I,—Adèle; I have brought what you asked of me; I have come to comfort you."
And the woman, over whose face there ran instantly a marvellous change, snatched the rosary, and pressed it convulsively to her lips; then, looking for a moment yearningly, with that strange double gaze of hers, upon the face of Adèle, she sprang toward her, and, wreathing her arms about her, drew her fast upon her bosom,—
"Ma fille! ma pauvre fille!"
The boy slipped down from the bed,—his little importance being over,—and was gone. The Doctor's lips moved in silent prayer for five minutes or more, wholly undisturbed, while the twain were locked in that embrace. Then the old gentleman, stooping, says,—
"Adaly, will she listen to me now?"
And Adèle, turning a frightened face to him, whispers,—
"She's sleeping; unclasp her hands; she holds me tightly."
And the Doctor, with tremulous fingers, does her bidding.
Adèle, still whispering, says,—
"She's calm now; she'll talk with us when she wakes, New Papa."
"My poor child," said the Doctor, solemnly, and with a full voice, "she'll never wake again."
And Adèle, turning,—in a maze of terror, as she thought of that death-clasp,—saw that her eyes had fallen open,—open, and fixed, and lustreless. So quietly Death had come upon his errand, and accomplished it, and gone; while without, the fowls, undisturbed, were still blinking idly in the sunshine under the lea of the wall, and the yellow chrysanthemums were fluttering in the wind.