“I am not insane. Go in, and Hester will explain.”
He turned away, and she went back to the dusky room and 117 threw herself down on the sofa, opposite to the portrait of the U.S. surgeon.
Of what passed during the following two hours, she retained, in after years, only a dim, confused, painful memory of prayers and promises made to God in behalf of the absent.
Once before, when Miss Jane’s death seemed imminent, she had been grieved and perplexed by the possibility that Dr. Grey would inherit the estate and usurp her domains; but to-day, when the Great Reaper hovered over the panting, emaciated sufferer, and simultaneously threatened the distant brother and sole heir of the extended possessions which this girl had so long coveted, the only thought that filled her heart with dread and wrung half-smothered cries from her lips was,—
“Spare his life, oh, my God! Leave me penniless—take friends, relatives, comforts, hopes of wealth—take all—take everything, but spare that precious life and bring him safely back to me! Have mercy on me, O Lord, and do not snatch him away! for, if I lose him now, I lose faith in Christ—in Thee—I lose all hope in time and eternity, and my sinful, wrecked soul will go down forever in a night that knows no dawning!”
For six months she had been indeed,—
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“A faded watcher through the weary night— A meek, sweet statue at the silver shrines, In deep, perpetual prayer for him she loved;” |
but patience, dragging anchor, finally snapped its cable, and now, instead of an humble suppliant for the boon that alone made existence endurable, she fiercely demanded that her idol should not be broken, and, battling with Jehovah, impiously thrust her life down before Him as an accursed and intolerable burden, unless her prayers were granted. Ah, what scorpions and stones we gather to our boards, and then dare charge the stinging mockeries against a long-suffering, loving God! Ten days before, Salome had meekly prayed, “Thy will be done,” and had comforted herself with the belief that at last 118 she was beginning to grow pious and trusting, like Miss Jane; but, at the first hint of harm to Dr. Grey, she sprang up, utterly oblivious of the protestations of resignation that were scarcely cold on her lips, and furious as a tigress who sees the hunter approach the jungle where all her fierce affections centre. God help as all who pray orthodoxly for His will, and yet, when the emergency arrives, fight desperately for our own, feeling wofully aggrieved that He takes us at our word, and moulds the clay which we make a Pharisaical pretense of offering!
A slow drizzling rain whitened the distant hills, that seemed to blanch in their helplessness as the wind smote them like a flail; and it wove a grayish veil over the leafless boughs of bending, shivering elms, on the long, dim avenue. The wintry afternoon closed swiftly, and, in its dusky dreariness, Salome listened to the tattoo of the rain on the roof, and to the miserere that wailed through the lonely chambers of her soul. The chill at her heart froze her to numbness and oblivion of the coldness of the atmosphere, and, when a servant came in to close the window against the slanting sleet, she lay so still that the woman thought her asleep, and stole away on tip-toe. The room grew dark; but, through the half-opened door, the light from the hall lamp crept in and fell on the gilded frame and painted face of the portrait, tracing a silvery path along the gloomy wall. As the night deepened, that wave of light rippled and glittered until the handsome features in the picture seemed to belong to some hierarch who peeped from a window of heaven, into a world drenched with unlifting darkness.
That oval piece of canvas had become the one fetich to which Salome’s heart clung in silent adoration, defiant of the iconoclastic touch of reason and the adverse decree of womanly pride; for natures such as hers will always grovel in the dust, hugging the mutilated fragments of their idol, rather than bow at some new, fretted shrine, where other images hold sway, commanding worship. Looking up almost wolfishly at that tranquil, shining countenance, she said to her sullen, mourning heart,—