Gilbert was sitting there in the dark, beside a table on which the light revealed a curious store of medicines and restoratives, the contribution of all the boarders: five or six flagons of cologne and one of bay rum; a case bottle of brandy; a bottle of Bourbon whisky; a pint of Bass’s pale ale; the medicines left by the doctor; some phials of homœopathic pellets from Mrs. Stevenson, who used the high-potency medicines; a tiny bottle of liquid nux from Mrs. Gilbert, who preferred the appreciable doses, and despised all who did not; a lemon; three oranges; a box of guava jelly—from one of the young girls. Mrs. Farrell’s tragic gaze met Gilbert’s lowering eyes and wandered with them to this array; they both smiled, but she was the first to frown. She beckoned him from the room, and “Here is your lamp,” she said. “Don’t turn it down or it will smoke, but set it where it won’t shine in his eyes. I’m going to be there in that room.” She pointed down the passageway toward Rachel’s door. “If he needs the least thing you’re to call me.” Her severity would have admonished any levity that lingered in Gilbert’s heavy heart, as she put the lamp in his hand.
“Let me light you back to your room,” he said, with moody humility.
“No, I can find the way perfectly well in the dark,” she answered. “Or—yes, you had better come, so as to make sure of the right door in case you need me. You think I tried to make you quarrel!” she said in a swift undertone, as they passed down the hall; “but I never meant it, and you know that, whatever you think. Oh, I have been punished, punished! But I’m glad you held out against me about the room,” she added. “He would have been as true to you; and if you had let me do anything to make him seem silly, I should have hated you!”
He saw with a man’s helplessness the tremor of her lips, and then she had opened and closed the door, and he stood blankly staring at it.
In the morning Easton was well enough to sit up in an easy-chair, and was fretfully eager to return to his hotel. It was clear that he was intensely vexed at having caused the sensation of the day before, and that the fear of giving further trouble galled him with the keenest shame. They were only too glad to release him from the fond imprisonment to which Mrs. Farrell would have sentenced him, on condition that he would consent to occupy the room vacated by Mrs. Burroughs for a few days, and be cared for better than he could be at the hotel, until he was quite well again.
But in a few days he was not quite so well. He fell from his dull languor into a low fever, and from feebly lounging about his room and drowsing in an easy-chair it came to his not rising one morning at all.
Thus his hold upon the happiness so fiercely pursued, and now within his grasp, relaxed, and a vast vagueness encompassed him, in which he strove with one colossal task: to make Gilbert see a certain matter as he saw it, which was not at all the matter of their quarrel, but some strange abstraction, he never could make out what, though their agreement upon it was a vital necessity. He was never delirious, but he was never sure of anything; a veil was drawn between his soul and all experience; he could not tell, when he had been asleep, that he had slept; his waking was a dream; the world moved round him in elusive shadow.
He was what one of the ladies called comfortably sick. It was not thought from the first that he was in danger, and as it turned out he was not. But if he had lain for a month at the point of death, he could not have been more precious to that houseful of women, who enjoyed every instant of the poetic situation; maid and matron, those tender hearts were alike glad of the occasion to renew in this fortunate reality their faith in romance, and they turned fondly to Mrs. Farrell for a fulfillment of their ideal of devotion. It looked on the face of things rather like expecting devotion from a Pompeian fresco, so little did her signal beauty seem related to the exigency, so far should sickness and sorrow have been from her world. But here Mrs. Farrell most disappointed those who most feared her picturesque inadequacy. She threw herself into her part with inspiration; rising far above the merely capable woman, she made her care of Easton a work of genius, and not only divined his wants and ministered to his comfort with a success that surprised all experience, but dealt so cunningly with his moods that he was at last flattered into submission if not resignation. In the beginning he was indeed a most refractory object of devotion; he chafed so bitterly against his helpless lapse into the fever, he was in such a continual revolt against his hospitable detention at the farmhouse, and was so weighed down, through all the hazy distance in which his life ebbed from actual events, with the shame of being a burden, that no magic less than hers could have consoled him. But she overcame his scruples and reconciled him to fate, so that it did not seem an unfair advantage to inflict the kindness against which he could not struggle; and she had her way with him, even to excess. Since she was not allowed to give up her room to him, she devoted herself in the moments of her leisure to the decoration of his chamber. She upholstered it almost anew with contributions from the ladies of scraps of chintz, mosquito-netting, and dotted muslin; she shut out the garish light with soft curtains; she put on the plain mirror and toilet table what Gilbert called a French cap and overskirt, and she furbelowed the mantelpiece. She took Mrs. Woodward’s ivies and trained them up the corners, and she had a great vase on the table, often renewed with autumnal wild flowers, ferns, and the firstlings of the reddening sumac leaves. As a final offering she brought in her spinning-wheel—the mania was then just beginning—and set it by the hearth. It must be owned that when all was done the place had a certain spectacularity; the furniture and ornaments wore somehow the air of properties; on the window seats, which she had contrived for greater coziness of effect, it was not quite safe to sit down. But her friends—and all the ladies were her friends now—easily forgave this to her real efficiency and her unsparing self-sacrifice; the two young girls worshiped the carpets she trod upon, and the whole sympathetic household sighed in despair at the perfection with which she, as one may say, costumed the part. She had ordinarily indulged a taste for those strong hues that went best with her Southern beauty, but now her robes were of the softest color and texture; she moved in slippers that made no sound; in emblem of devotion to the sick-room she denied herself every ornament; at first she even left off her Etruscan ear-rings, and kept only a limp scarf of dark red silk, tied at her throat in a sentiment of passionate neglect. In behalf of Easton’s peaceful dreams she banished the Japanese fans, with their nightmare figures, and as she sat fanning him with a quaint, old-fashioned fan of white feathers, which she had skillfully mounted on a long handle, her partisans declared, some that she looked like an Eastern queen, other some, like an Egyptian slave. They remembered her afterward in this effect, and also how she used to look as she stood at dusk lighting the little tapers which she had found at a queer country store in an out-of-the-way village of the neighborhood, and setting them afloat in a vase of oil, to illumine the chamber during the night. She realized the character as thoroughly in other respects; she met the friendliness all round her with gentle appreciation, availed herself of it little or nothing, and for the most part quietly withdrew from it. Her defiant airs were all laid aside; her prevailing mood was serious; she often spoke earnestly of matters which certainly had not commanded her open reverence before; there was a great change in her in every way, and some, who had always longed to like her, liked her now with thankful hearts for the opportunity. Among these Mrs. Gilbert made her advances like one who has an atonement to offer; Mrs. Farrell frankly accepted the tacit regret, and visited a good deal in her room.
But as the sick man’s disorder slowly ran its course, and the days took him further and further from any joy in her, Mrs. Farrell seemed to lose her hold of the situation, and another change came over her, in which she fell from her high activities into a kind of dull and listless patience, and dragged out the time, uncheered by the inspiration that had hitherto upheld her. She seemed not to know what to do. The spring was gone, the impulse exhausted, in that strange nature, which knew itself perhaps as little as others knew it. Those were the days when she surrendered her authority to Rachel, and served under her about Easton, who had also fallen largely to the care of Gilbert and Ben Woodward. Few young ladies would not willingly assume the task of nursing a young man through a low fever in a romance, but the reality is different. If it had been something short and sharp, a matter of a week’s supreme self-devotion, it would doubtless have been otherwise with her; she was capable of great things, but a long trial of her endurance must finally lose its meaning. She had times of melancholy in which she sat behind her closed doors for hours, or when she went lonely walks through the woods or fields. She withdrew herself more and more from the society that sought her, and got a habit of consorting with poor old Nehemiah as he dug his potatoes or gathered his beans, and seemed to find him a relief and shelter. Heaven knows what they talked of. Doubtless, as she followed him from one potato hill to another, and listened to his discourse, he admired her taste for serious conversation, and was obscurely touched that such resplendent beauty should be so meekly contented with his company. She no longer teased Ben Woodward, whose open secret of a passion for her she used to recognize so freely; she was the boy’s very humble servant in manner; and to Rachel’s efficiency and constancy she was the stricken thrall. It was touching to see how willingly subservient she was to the girl, and how glad she was to be of any use that Rachel could think of. One night, after they had sat a long time silent by the taper’s glimmer while Easton slept, she suddenly caught Rachel by the arm and whispered, “Why don’t you say it? How can you keep thinking it and thinking it, and never say it? For pity’s sake, speak this once, and tell me that you know I did it all, and that you despise me!”
“I don’t judge you,” said Rachel; “and I have no right to despise anyone. You know, yourself, whether you are to blame for anything.”