Loveliness: A Story

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

As an instructed man, of course this subject was not wholly unfamiliar to him, but it was wholly foreign. Hitherto he had given it polite and indifferent attention, and had gone his ways. Now he read like a man himself bound, without anæsthesia, beneath the knife. Now he read for the child's sake, with the child's mind, with the child's nerves, and with those of the little helpless thing for whom her life was wasting. He tore from his shelves every volume, every pamphlet that he owned upon the direful subject which that June night opened to his consciousness; and he read until the birds sang.

With brain on fire, he crept, in the brightness of coming day, to his wife's side.

"Tired out, dear?" she asked gently. Then he saw that she too had not slept.

"Adah has such dreams," she explained; "cruel things,—all the same kind."

"About the dog?"

"Always about the dog. I have been sitting up with her. She is—not as strong as—not quite"—

The professor set his teeth when he heard the mother's moan. When she had sunk into broken rest he stole back to his study, and locked out of sight the pamphlet which Loveliness had chewed. So, with the profound and scientific treatises on the subject, arguing and illustrating this way and that (some of these had cuts and photogravures which would haunt the imagination for years), he crowded the whole out of reach. His own brain was reeling with horrors which it would have driven the woman or the child mad to read. Scenes too ghastly for a strong mind to dwell upon, incidents too fearful for a weak one to conceive, flitted before the sleepless father.

Now the professor began to do strange and secretive things. Unknown to his wife, unsuspected by his fading child, he began to cause the laboratories of the city and its environs to be searched. In the process, curious trades developed themselves to his astonished ignorance: the tricks of boys who supply the material of anguish; the trade of the janitor who sells it to the demonstrator; the trade of the brute who allures his superior, the dog, to the lairs of medical students. Dark arts started to the foreground, like imps around Mephistopheles concealed. From such repellent education the professor came home and took his little girl into his arms, and did not speak, but laid his cheek to hers, and heard the piteous, familiar question, "Papa, did you promise me they'd be kind to Loveliness?" It was always a whispered question now; for Adah had entirely lost command of her voice, partly from weakness, partly from the old injury to the vocal organs; and this seemed, somehow, to make it the harder to answer her.

So there fell a day when the child in the window, propped by more than the usual pillows, sat watching longer than usual, or more sadly, or more eagerly,—who can say what it was? Or did she look so much more translucent, more pathetic, than on another day? She leaned her cheek on one little wasted hand. Her great eyes commanded the street. She had her pilot's look. Now and then, if a little dog passed, and if he were gray, she started and leaned forward, then sank back faintly. The sight of her would have touched a savage; and one beheld it.

A man in a yellow jersey passed by upon the other side of the street, and glanced over. His straight, black brows contracted, and he looked at the child steadily. As he walked on, it might have been noticed that his brutal head hung to his breast. But he passed, and that cultivated street was clean of him. The carrier met him around the corner, and glanced at him with coldness.