“Carl and I are fitting up the house for the family,” Hester said one day. “They are all to come up the last of the month. I shall be so glad! It is delightful to go through the dear old familiar rooms, and look from the windows, just as I used to. We new-furnish the parlors only. Mamma wishes to use all the old things she can.”
“I cannot stop to-day,” Edith said; “but I would like to see the house soon. You know I saw only the outside of it when I was here before.”
“Carl is going to England before they come up,” Hester said hesitatingly. “I don’t know why he does not wait for them, but he has engaged passage for next week. I believe he means to be gone only a month or two.”
Edith leaned back in the carriage, and made no reply. When she spoke, after a while, it was to ask to be taken back to Mrs. Williams’.
From Dick Rowan’s wandering talk, she had learned the history of his last few weeks. She perceived that Father John and his household must have known perfectly well what their visitor’s trouble was, and that they had watched over and sympathized with him most tenderly. Dick’s pride was not of a kind that would lead him to dissemble his feelings or conceal them from those of whose friendship and sympathy he was assured. Why should he conceal what he was not ashamed of? he would have asked. She learned that he had spent hours before the altar, that he had fasted and prayed, that he had gone out in the storm at night, and walked the yard of the priest’s house, going in only when Father John had peremptorily commanded him to. These reckless exposures, combined with mental distress, had caused his illness. Dick had never before been ill a day, and could not believe that a physical inconvenience and discomfort, which he despised, would at last overpower him.
One Sunday afternoon, a week after Edith’s arrival, the patient opened his eyes, and looked about with a languid but conscious gaze, all the fever and delirium gone, and, also, all the human dross burned out of him. No person was in sight, and his heavy lids were dropping again, when his glance was arrested by a pictured face so perfect, that, to his misty sense, it seemed alive. It was an exquisite engraving of Rubens’ portrait of St. Ignatius, not the weak and sentimental copy we most frequently see, but one full of expression. Large, slow tears, unnoted by him, rolled down his face. The lips, slightly parted, and tremulous with a divine sorrow, were more eloquent than any words could be. His finger pointed to the legend, “Ad majorem Dei gloriam,” and one could see plainly that in his fervent soul there was room for no other thought. With such a face might St. John have looked, bearing for ever in his heart the image of the Crucified.
The first glance of Dick Rowan’s eyes was startled, as though he saw a vision, then his gaze became so intense that, from very weakness, his lids dropped, and he slept again. In that slumber, long, deep, and strengthening, the slackened thread of vitality in him began to knit itself together again.
“All we have to do now is to prevent his getting up too soon,” the doctor said. “It would be like him to insist on going out to-morrow.”
The danger over, a breath of spring seemed to blow through the house. The servants told each other, with smiling faces, that Mr. Rowan was better. Mrs. Williams waked up to the fact that her personal appearance had been notably neglected of late, and, after kissing Edith with joyful effusion, went to put on her hair and a clean collar. Miss Williams opened her piano, put her foot on the soft pedal, and played a composition which made her father look at her wonderingly over his spectacles. Had it not been Sunday, he would have thought that Ellen was playing a polka. In fact, it was a polka, and sounded so very much like what it was that Mr. Williams presently ventured a faint remonstrance.
“Oh! nonsense, papa!” laughed the musician over her shoulder. “It is a hymn of praise, by Strauss.”