“Hester! you do not know what you are saying!” March came around and faced her, trying to quiet her by cold, stern authority.
It was thrown away. She raved on—still tearing away with her tiny fierce hands at her heaving throat as if to give speech freer vent.
“I do know—oh, we are graduates in these frolicsome escapades! It is inconsiderate in him—” with a horrid laugh—“to give his wife, his wife’s sister, and the family factotum such a job as carrying him all this way. To do him justice, he seldom forgets the decencies so entirely. If I had my way, he should lie here all night. Only his wife would come out and stay with him. What are you staring at me for, Mr. Gilchrist? Here is our family skeleton! Does it frighten you out of your wits?”
Her croaks of laughter threatened dissolution to the fragile frame. It was an awful, a repulsive exhibition.
“It is you who have lost yours!” rejoined March gravely. “Your father may be dying, for aught you know. A hundred men fell in the streets of New York to-day, overcome by the heat—and we are wasting precious minutes in wild, nonsensical talk. If you will let Homer take you to the house, and compose yourself sufficiently to prepare your mother for the shock of seeing her husband brought in insensible, we may save him yet. Go! and send Homer back at once.”
The wild eyes surveyed him piercingly; with a low, meaning laugh, she sank back among her cushions.
“I think”—she said distinctly and deliberately—“that you are the best man God ever made! Go on, Tony!”
Left alone with the unconscious man, March stooped and rolled him entirely over. He had been lying, face downward, his cheek to the sward; one arm was by his side, the other was thrown in a natural position above his head. His pulse was almost normal, although somewhat sluggish; his respiration heavy, but not stertorous: his complexion was not sanguine. His breath and, March fancied, his whole body reeked of opium. March shook him gently. He slept on. With a disgustful shiver, he forced himself to pass an arm under his head and lift it to his knee. There was no change in the limp lethargy. The young man laid him down, and, rising, stood off and looked at the pitiable wreck. Hester’s frenzied tirade had disabused the listener’s mind of the suspicion of suicide. He could no longer doubt that here was the unraveling of the complex design that had vexed his heart and head. The popular preacher was not the first of brilliant parts and high position who had fallen a victim to a debasing and insidious habit, but his skill and effrontery in concealing the truth were remarkable. Yet—might not March have divined the nature of the mystery before this revelation? The peculiar brilliancy of the deep-set eyes; his variable spirits; his fluent and, at times, erratic speech; the very character of his pulpit eloquence—might have betrayed him to an expert. His wife’s nervous vigilance and eager assiduity of devotion—above all, the episode of the midnight toilers, and the conflicting stories of the need of that toil—finally—and he recalled it with a bursting heart—Hetty’s declaration to her lover that there were insurmountable obstacles to their union—were as clear as daylight now. The sudden illness of that memorable Saturday night was stupor like that which now chained the slave of appetite to the earth.
How often and with what excess of anguish the revolting scene had been enacted only the two unhappy sisters knew, unless the still more hapless daughter were in the secret. Her wail, “Oh, God of mercy! it has come at last!” was a key to depths of suspenseful endurance and labyrinths of unavailing deception.
Unavailing, for the instant of detection was the beginning of the end. The man was ruined beyond redemption. A whisper of his infirmity would be the loss of place, reputation, and livelihood, and his innocent family would go down quick into the pit with him. This was the vision of impending gloom that had disturbed what should be sunny deeps in the sweetest eyes in the world to him. This was the almost certain prospect that made her write, “I can never be more than your friend!”