Chapter 13

Some ten years ago, while he was yet in the university, he had made the acquaintance of a young girl, Emily Gerstad, the daughter of a widow in whose house he lived. She was a wild unruly thing, full of coquettish airs, frivolous as a kitten, but for all that, a phenomenon of most absorbing interest. She was a blonde of the purest Northern type, with a magnificent wealth of thick curly hair and a pair of blue eyes, which seemed capable of expressing the very finest things that God ever deposited in a woman's nature. It was useless to disapprove of her, and to argue with her on the error of her ways was a waste of breath: her moral nature was too fatally flexible. She could assume with astonishing facility a hundred different attitudes on the same question, and acted the penitent, the indifferent, the defiant, with such a perfection of art as really to deceive herself. And in spite of all this, poor Storm soon found that she had wound herself so closely about his heart, that the process of unwinding, as he expressed it, would require greater strength and a sterner philosophy than he believed himself to possess. He had always been shy of women, not because he distrusted them, but because he was painfully conscious of being, in point of physical finish, a second-rate article, a bungling piece of work, and naturally felt his disadvantages more keenly in the presence of those upon whom Nature had expended all her best art. He was, according to his own assertion, an idealist by temperament, and had kept a sacred chamber in his heart where the vestal fire burned with a pure flame. Now the deepest strata of his being were stirred, and he loved with an overwhelming fervor and intensity which fairly frightened him. In a moment of abject despair he proposed to Emily, and to his surprise was accepted. And what was more, it was no comedy on her part; he even now believed that she really loved him. All the turbulent forces of her being were toned down to a beautiful, womanly tenderness. She clung to him with a passionate devotion which seemed to be no less of a surprise to herself than it was to him--clung to his stronger self, perhaps, as a refuge from her own waywardness, listened with a sweet, shame-faced happiness to his bright plans for their common future, and shared his pleasures and his light disappointments with an ardor and an ever ready sympathy, as if her whole previous life had been an education for this one end--to be a perfect wife and to be his wife.

But alas, their happiness was of brief duration. At the end of a year he had finished his legal studies, and passed a brilliant examination. An excellent situation was obtained for him in a small town on the sea-coast, whither he removed and began to prepare for the foundation of his home. It was here he contracted his taste for quaint furniture, all that was now left to him of his happiness--nay, of his life. Suddenly, at the end of eight months, she ceased writing to him--a fact which after all, argued well for her sincerity; full of apprehension, he hastened to the capital and found her engaged to a young lieutenant,--a dashing, hare-brained fellow, covered all over with gilt embroidery, undeniably handsome, but otherwise of very little worth. At least that was Storm's impression of him; he may have done him injustice, he added, with his usual conscientiousness. A man who sees the whole structure of his life tumbling down over his head is not apt to take a charitable view of the author of the ruin. A week later, Storm was on his way to America,--that was the end of the story.

Yes, if my friend had died, according to his promise, the story would have ended here; but, as for once, he broke his word, I am obliged to add the sequel. I noticed that for some time after his recovery he kept shy of me. As he afterward plainly told me, he felt as if I had purloined a piece of his most precious private property, in sharing a grief which had hitherto been his own exclusive treasure.

III.

Fürcht' dich nicht, du liebes Kindchen, Vor der bösen Geister Macht; Tag und Nacht, du liebes Kindchen, Halten Engel bei dir Wacht.--HEINE.

Once, on a warm moonlight night in September, Storm and I took a walk in the Park. The night always tuned him into a gentle mood, and I even suspect that he had some sentiment about it. The currents of life, he said, then ran more serenely, with a slower and healthier pulse-beat; the unfathomable mysteries of life crowded in upon us; our shallow individualities were quenched, and our larger human traits rose nearer to the surface. The best test of sympathy was a night walk; two persons who then jarred upon each other might safely conclude that they were constitutionally unsympathetic. He had known silly girls who in moonlight were sublime; but it was dangerous to build one's hopes of happiness upon this moonlight sublimity. Just as all complexions, except positive black, were fair when touched by the radiance of the night, so all shades of character, except downright wickedness, borrowed a finer human tinge under this illusory illumination. Thus ran his talk, I throwing in the necessary expletives, and as I am neither black nor absolutely wicked, I have reason to believe that I appeared to good advantage.

"It is very curious about women," he broke forth after a long meditative pause. "In spite of all my pondering on the subject, I never quite could understand the secret of their fascination. Their goodness, if they are good, is usually of the quality of oatmeal, and when they are bad--"

"'They are horrid,'" I quoted promptly.

"Amen," he added with a contented chuckle. "I never could see the appropriateness of the Bible precept about coveting your neighbor's wife," he resumed after another brief silence. "I, for my part, never found my neighbor's wife worth coveting. But I will admit that I have, in a few instances, felt inclined to covet my neighbor's child. No amount of pessimism can quite fortify a man against the desire to have children. A child is not always a 'thing of beauty,' nor is it apt to be a 'joy for ever'; but I never yet met the man who would not be willing to take his chances. It is a confounded thing that the paternal instinct is so deeply implanted, even in such a piece of dried-up parchment as myself. It is like discovering a warm, live vein of throbbing blood under the shrivelled skin of an Egyptian mummy."

We sauntered on for more than an hour, now plunging into dense masses of shadow, now again emerging into cool pathways of light. The conversation turned on various topics, all of which Storm touched with a kindlier humor than was his wont. The world was a failure, but for all that, it was the part of a wise man to make the best of it as it was. The clock in some neighboring tower struck ten; we took a street-car and rode home. As we were about to alight (I first, and Storm following closely after me), I noticed a woman with a wild, frightened face hurrying away from the street-lamp right in front of us. My friend, owing either to his near-sightedness, or his preoccupation, had evidently not observed her. We climbed the long dimly lighted stairs to his room, and both stumbled at the door against a large basket.

"That detestable washwoman!" he muttered. "How often have I told her not to place her basket where everybody is sure to run into it!"

He opened the door and I carried the basket into the room, while he struck a match and lighted the drop-light on the table.

"Excuse me for a moment," he went on, stooping to lift the cloth which covered the basket. "I want to count--Gracious heavens! what is this?" he cried suddenly, springing up as if he had stepped on something alive; then he sank down into an arm-chair, and sat staring vacantly before him. In the basket lay a sleeping infant, apparently about eight months old. As soon as I had recovered from my first astonishment, I bent down over it and regarded it attentively. It was a beautiful, healthy-looking child,--not a mere formless mass of fat with hastily sketched features, as babes of that age are apt to be. Its face was of exquisite finish, a straight, well-modelled little nose, a softly defined dimpled little chin, and a fresh, finely curved mouth, through which the even breath came and went with a quiet, hardly perceptible rhythm. It was all as sweet, harmonious, and artistically perfect as a Tennysonian stanza. The little waif won my heart at once, and it was a severe test of my self-denial that I had to repress my desire to kiss it. I somehow felt that my friend ought to be the first to recognize it as a member of his household.

"Storm," I said, looking up at his pale, vacant face. "It is a dangerous thing to covet one's neighbor's child. But, if you don't adopt this little dumb supplicant, I fear you will tempt me to break the tenth commandment. I believe there is a clause there about coveting children."

Storm opened his eyes wide, and with an effort to rouse himself, pushed back the chair and knelt down at the side of the basket. With a gentle movement he drew off the cover under which the child slept, and discovered on its bosom a letter which he eagerly seized. As he glanced at the direction of the envelope, his face underwent a marvellous change; it was as if a mask had suddenly been removed, revealing a new type of warmer, purer, and tenderer manhood.

The letter read as follows:

"DEAREST EDMUND:

It has gone all wrong with me. You know I would not come to if there was any other hope left. As for myself, I do not care what becomes of me, but you will not forsake my little girl. Will you dear Edmund? I know you will not. I promise you, I shall never claim her back. She shall be yours always. Her name is Ragna; she was born February 25th, and was christened two months later. I have prayed to God that she may bring happiness into your life, that she may expiate the wrong her mother did you.

I was not married until five years after you left me. It is a great sin to say it, but I always hoped that you would come back to me I did not know then how great my wrong was. Now I know it and I have ceased to hope. Do not try to find me. It will be useless. I shall never willingly cross your path, dear Edmund. I have learned that happiness never comes where I am; and I would not darken your life again,--no I would not, so help me God! Only forgive me, if you can, and do not say anything bad about me to my child--ah! what a horrible thought! I did not mean to ask you that, because I know how good you are. I am so wild with strange thoughts, so dazed and bewildered that I do not know what I am saying. Farewell, dear Edmund.--Your, EMILY.

If you should decide not to keep my little girl (as I do not think you will), send a line addressed E.H.H., to the personal column in the 'N.Y. Herald.' But do not try to find me. I shall answer you in the same way and tell you where to send the child. E.H."

This letter was not shown to me until several years after, but even then the half illegible words, evidently traced with a trembling hand, the pathetic abruptness of the sentences, sounding like the grief-stricken cries of a living voice, and the still visible marks of tears upon the paper, made an impression upon me which is not easily forgotten.

In the meanwhile Storm, having read and reread the letter, was lifting his strangely illumined eyes to the ceiling.

"God be praised," he said in a trembling whisper. "I have wronged her, too, and I did not know it. I will be a father to her child."

The little girl, who had awaked, without signalling the fact in the usual manner, fixed her large, fawn-like eyes upon him in peaceful wonder. He knelt down once more, took her in his arms, and kissed her gravely and solemnly. It was charming to see with what tender awkwardness he held her, as if she were some precious thing made of frail stuff that might easily be broken. My curiosity had already prompted me to examine the basket, which contained a variety of clean, tiny articles,--linen, stockings, a rattle with the distinct impress of its nationality, and several neatly folded dresses, among which a long, white, elaborately embroidered one, marked by a slip of paper as "Baby's Christening Robe."

I will not reproduce the long and serious consultation which followed; be it sufficient to chronicle the result. I hastened homeward, and had my landlady, Mrs. Harrison, roused from her midnight slumbers; she was, as I knew, a woman of strong maternal instincts, who was fond of referring to her experience in that line,--a woman to whom your thought would naturally revert in embarrassing circumstances. She responded promptly and eagerly to my appeal; the situation evidently roused all the latent romance of her nature, and afforded her no small satisfaction. She spent a half hour in privacy with the baby, who re-appeared fresh and beaming in a sort of sacerdotal Norse night-habit which was a miracle of neatness.

"Bless her little heart," ejaculated Mrs. Harrison, as the small fat hands persisted in pulling her already demoralized side curls. "She certainly knows me;" then in an aside to Storm: "The mother, whoever she may be, sir, is a lady. I never seed finer linen as long as I lived; and every single blessed piece is embroidered with two letters which I reckon means the name of the child."

Storm bowed his head silently and sighed. But when the baby, after having rather indifferently submitted to a caress from me, stretched out its arms to him and consented with great good humor to a final good-night kiss, large tears rolled down over his cheeks, while he smiled, as I thought only the angels could smile.

I am obliged to add before the curtain is dropped upon this nocturnal drama, that my friend was guilty of an astonishing piece of Vandalism. When my landlady had deposited the sleeping child in his large, exquisitely carved and canopied bed (which, as he declared, made him feel as if a hundred departed grandees were his bed-fellows), we both went in to have a final view of our little foundling. As we stood there, clasping each other's hands in silence, Storm suddenly fixed his eyes with a savage glare upon one of the bed-posts which contained a tile of porcelain, representing Joseph leaving his garment in the hand of Potiphar's wife; on the post opposite was seen Samson sheared of his glory and Delilah fleeing through the opened door with his seven locks in her hand; a third represented Jezebel being precipitated from a third-story window, and the subject of the fourth I have forgotten. It was a remnant of the not always delicate humor of the seventeenth century. My friend, with a fierce disgust, strangely out of keeping with his former mood, pulled a knife from his pocket, and deliberately proceeded to demolish the precious tiles. When he had succeeded in breaking out the last, he turned to me and said:

"I have been an atrocious fool. It is high time I should get to know it."

A week later I found four new tiles with designs of Fra Angelico's angels installed in the places of the reprobate Biblical women.

IV.

"Wer zum ersten Male liebt, Sei es auch glücklos ist ein Gott."--HEINE.

During the following week, Storm and I, with the aid of the police, searched New York from one end to the other; but Emily must have foreseen the event, and covered up her tracks carefully. Our seeking was all in vain. In the meanwhile the baby was not neglected; my friend's third room, which had hitherto done service as a sort of state parlor, was consecrated as a nursery, a stout German nurse was procured, and much time was devoted to the designing of a cradle (an odd mixture of the Pompeiian and the Eastlake style), which was well calculated to stimulate whatever artistic sense our baby may have been endowed with. If it had been heir to a throne, its wants could not have been more carefully studied. Storm was as flexible as wax in its tiny hand. Life had suddenly acquired a very definite meaning to him; he had discovered that he had a valuable stake in it. Strange as it may seem, the whole gigantic world, with its manifold and complicated institutions, began to readjust itself in his mind with sole reference to its possible influence upon the baby's fate. Political questions were no longer convenient pegs to hang pessimistic epigrams on, but became matters of vital interest because they affected the moral condition of the country in which the baby was to grow up. Socialistic agitations, which a dispassionate bachelor could afford to regard with philosophic indifference, now presented themselves as diabolical plots to undermine the baby's happiness, and deprive her of whatever earthly goods Providence might see fit to bestow upon her, and so on, _ad infinitum_. From a radical, with revolutionary sympathies, my friend in the course of a year blossomed out into a conservative Philistine with a decided streak of optimism, and all for the sake of the baby. It was very amusing to listen to his solemn consultations with the nurse every morning before he betook himself to the office, and to watch the lively, almost child-like interest with which, on returning in the evening, he listened to her long-winded report of the baby's wonderful doings during the day. On Sundays, when he always spent the whole afternoon at home, I often surprised him in the most undignified attitudes, creeping about on the floor with the little girl riding on his back, or stretched out full length with his head in her lap, while she was gracious enough to interest herself in his hair, and even laughed and cooed with much inarticulate contentment. At such times, when, perhaps, through the disordered locks, I caught a glimpse of a beaming happy face (for my visits were never of sufficient account to interfere with baby's pleasures), I would pay my respectful tribute to the baby, acknowledging that she possessed a power, the secret of which I did not know.

But in spite of all this, I did not fail to detect that Storm's life was not even now without its sorrow. At our luncheons, I often saw a sad and thoughtful gloom settling upon his features; it was no longer the bitter reviling grief of former years, but a deep and mellow sadness, a regretful dwelling on mental images which were hard to contemplate and harder still to banish.

"Do you know," he exclaimed once, as he felt that I had divined his thoughts, "her face haunts me night and day! I feel as if my happiness in possessing the child were a daily robbery from her. I have continued my search for her up to this hour, but I have found no trace of her. Perhaps if you will help me, I shall not always be seeking in vain."

I gave him my hand silently across the table; he shook it heartily, and we parted.

It was about a month after this occurrence that I happened to be sitting on one of the benches near the entrance to Central Park. That restless spring feeling which always attacks me somewhat prematurely with the early May sunshine, had beguiled me into taking a holiday, and with a book, which had been sent me for review, lying open upon my knees, I was watching the occupants of the baby carriages which were being wheeled up and down on the pavement in front of me. Presently I discovered Storm's nurse seated on a bench near by in eager converse with a male personage of her own nationality. The baby, who was safely strapped in the carriage at the roadside, was pleasantly occupied in venting her destructive instincts upon a linen edition of "Mother Goose." As I arose to get a nearer view of the child, I saw a slender, simply dressed lady, with a beautiful but careworn face, evidently approaching with the same intention. At the sight of me she suddenly paused; a look of recognition seemed to be vaguely struggling in her features,--she turned around, and walked rapidly away. The thought immediately flashed through me that it was the same face I had seen under the gas-lamp on the evening when the child was found. Moreover, the type, although not glaringly Norse, corresponded in its general outline to Storm's description. Fearing to excite her suspicion, I forced my face into the most neutral expression, stooped down to converse with the baby, and then sauntered off with a leisurely air toward "Ward's Indian Hunter." I had no doubt that if the lady were the child's mother, she would soon reappear; and I need not add that my expectations proved correct. After having waited some fifteen minutes, I saw her returning with swift, wary steps and watchful eyes, like some lithe wild thing that scents danger in the air. As she came up to the nurse, she dropped down into the seat with a fine affectation of weariness, and began to chat with an attempt at indifference which was truly pathetic. Her eyes seemed all the while to be devouring the child with a wild, hungry tenderness. Suddenly she pounced upon it, hugged it tightly in her arms, and quite forgetting her _role_, strove no more to smother her sobs. The nurse was greatly alarmed; I heard her expostulating, but could not distinguish the words. The child cried. Suddenly the lady rose, explained briefly, as I afterward heard, that she had herself lately lost a child, and hurried away. At a safe distance I followed her, and succeeded in tracking her nearly a mile down Broadway, where she vanished into what appeared to be a genteel dressmaking establishment. By the aid of a friend of mine, a dealer in furnishing goods, whom I thought it prudent to take into my confidence, I ascertained that she called herself Mrs. Helm (an ineffectual disguise of the Norwegian Hjelm), that she was a widow of quiet demeanor and most exemplary habits, and that she had worked as a seamstress in the establishment during the past four months. My friend elicited these important facts under the pretence of wishing to employ her himself in the shirtmaking department of his own business.

Having through the same agency obtained the street and number of her boarding-place, I visited her landlady, who dispelled my last doubts, and moreover, informed me (perhaps under the impression that I was a possible suitor) that Mrs. Helm was as fine a lady as ever trod God's earth, and a fit wife for any man. The same evening I conveyed to Storm the result of my investigations.

He sat listening to me with a grave intensity of expression, which at first I hardly knew how to interpret. Now and then I saw his lips quivering, and as I described the little scene with the child in the park, he rose abruptly and began to walk up and down on the floor. As I had finished, he again dropped down into the chair, raised his eyes devoutly to the ceiling, and murmured:

"Thank God!"

Thus he sat for a long while, sometimes moving his lips inaudibly, and seemingly unconscious of my presence. Then suddenly he sprang up and seized his hat and cane.

"It was number 532?" he said, laying hold of the door-knob.

"Yes," I answered, "but you surely do not intend to see her to-night."

"Yes, I do."

"But it is after nine o'clock, and she may--"

But he was already half way down the stairs.