Chapter 7

Thus we brought our precious entomologist through the disorder's first crisis, which generally comes exactly on the seventy-second hour, and in due time through the second, which falls, if I remember aright, on the ninth day. What I do recall with certainty, was that it came on one of the days of the city's heaviest mortality and that two of our children, and my next neighbor's wife, came down with the scourge.

And O, the beautiful days and the beautiful nights! It seemed the illusion of a dream, that between such land and sky, there should be not one street in that embowered city unsmitten by sorrow and death. Out of yonder fair home on the right, they carried yesterday, the loved mother of five children--but the Baron is better. From this one on the left, will be borne to-morrow such a man as no city can lightly spare, till now a living fulfilment of the word "Be thou clean"--but the entomologist will be ever so much better.

To be glad of it, you needed only to hear Senda allude to him as "Mine hussbandt." Why did she never mention him in any other way? The little woman was a riddle to me. I did not see how she could give such a man such a love, and yet I never could see but she was as frank as a public record. Stranger still was it how she could be the marital partner--the mate, to speak plainly--of such a one, without showing or feeling the slightest spiritual debasement. Finally, however, I caught some light. I had stepped over to ask after "Mine hussbandt," everyone else of us being busy with our own sick. Senda was letting Fontenette take her place in the sick-room, which, of course, was shut close. I silently entered the room in front of it, and perceiving that Mrs. Fontenette had drawn her into the other front room, adjoining--a door stood half open between--and was tempting her with refreshments, I sat down to await their next move. So presently I began to hear what they said to each other in their gentle speculations.

"A wife who has realized her ideal," Mrs. Fontenette was saying, when Senda interrupted:

"Ah! vhat vife is sat? In vhat part of se vorldt does she lif, and how long she is marriedt? No-o, no! Sare is only vun _kindt_ of vife in se _whole_ vorldt vhat realize her ideal hussbandt; and sat is se vife vhat idealize her real hussbandt. Also not se hussbandt and se vife only; I sink you even cannot much Christ-yanity practice vis anybody--close related--vissout you idealize sem. But ze hussbandt and vife--

"You remembeh sat sehmon, 'Be'--O yes, of course. Vell, sat is vun sing se preacher forget to say--May be he haf not se time, but I sink he forget: sat sare is no hussbandt in se whole vorldt--and also sare is no vife--so sp'--spirit'--spirited? no? Ah, yes--spiritual!--yes, sank you. Vhen I catch me a bigk vord I am so proudt, yet, as I hadt a fish caught!"

I was willing to believe it, but thought how still more true it was of Mrs. Fontenette. But the gentle speaker had not paused. "Sare iss no vife so _spiritual_," she repeated, triumphantly, "and who got a hussbandt so spiritual, sat eeser vun--do you say 'eeser vun'?"

"Either one," said her hostess, reassuringly.

"Yes, so spiritual sat eeser vun can keep sat rule inside--to be pairfect' clean, if sat vun do not see usseh vun _idealize_."

I made a stir--"Hmm!" Whereupon she came warily to the door. I sat engrossed in a book and wishing I could silently crawl under it snake fashion; but I could feel her eyes all over me, and with them was a glimmering smile that helped them to make me tingle as she softly spoke.

"Ah!--See se book-vorm! He iss all eyes--and ee-ahs. Iss it _not_ so?"

"Pardon," I murmured; "did you spe'--has any one been speaking and I have failed to give attention?"

"O no, sir! I sink not! Vell, you are velcome to all you haf heardt; but I am ve'y much oblige' to you for yo' 'hmm.' It vas se right sing in se right place. But do you not sink I shouldt haf been a pre-eacheh? I love to preach."

I said I knew of three men in one neighborhood with whom she might start a church, and asked how was the Baron.

Improving--would soon be able to sit up. She inquired after my children.

It was quite in accord with a late phase of Mrs. Fontenette's demeanor that on this occasion she did not appear until I mentioned her. She had not come near me by choice since the night the Baron was found and sent to my address, although I certainly was in every way as nice to her as I had ever been, and I was not expecting now to be less so.

When she appeared I asked her if a superb rose blooming late in August was not worth crossing to our side of the way to see. She knew, of course, that sooner or later, as the best of a bad choice, she must allow me an interview; yet now she was about to decline on some small excuse, when her eyes met mine, and she saw that in my opinion the time had come. So she made her excuses to her guest and went with me.

She gave the rose generous notice and praise, and as she led the way back lingered admiringly over flower after flower. Yet she said little; more than once she paused entirely to let me if I chose change the subject, and when at the gate I did so, she stood like a captive, looking steadily into my face with eyes as helpless as a half-fledged bird's and as lovely as its mother's. When I drew something from my breastpocket, they did not move.

"This," I said, "is the letter that was found on the Baron the night he was taken ill. Your husband handed it to me supposing, of course, I had written it, as it was in one of my envelopes, and he happens not to know my handwriting. But I did not write it. I had never seen it, yet it was sent in one of my envelopes. I haven't mentioned it to anyone else, because--you see?--I hope you do. I thought--well, frankly, I thought if I should mention it first to you I might never need to mention it to anyone else." I waited a moment and then asked, eyes and all: "Who could have sent it?"

"Isn't," she began, but her voice failed, and when it came again it was hardly more than a whisper, "isn't it signed?"

Now, that was just what I did not know. Whatever the thing was, I had never taken it from the envelope. But the moment she asked I knew. I knew it bore no signature. We gazed into each other's eyes for many seconds until hers tried to withdraw. Then I said--and the words seemed to drop from my lips unthought--"It didn't have to be signed, Mrs. Fontenette, although the handwriting is disguised."

Poor Flora! I can but think, even yet, I was kinder than if I had been kind; but it was brutal, and I felt myself a brute, thus to be holding her up to herself there on the open sidewalk where she dared not even weep or wring her hands or hide her face, but only make idle marks on the brick pavement with her tiny boots--and tremble.

"I--I had to write it," she began to reply, and her words, though they quivered, were as mechanical as mine. "He was so--so--imprudent--my husband's happiness required----"

I stopped her. "Please don't say that, Mrs. Fontenette. Pardon me, but-- not that, please." I felt for an instant quite cruel enough to have told her what ebb tides she had given that husband's happiness; what he had been so near doing and had been led back from only by the absolute christliness of that other woman and wife, whose happiness scarcely seemed ever to have occurred to her; but that was his secret, not mine.

She broke a silence with a suppressed exclamation of pain, while for the eyes of possible observers I imitated her in a nonchalant pose. "You wouldn't despise me if you knew the half I've suffered or how I've striv-- --"

I interrupted again. "O Mrs. Fontenette, any true gentleman--at thirty- five--knows it _all--himself_. And he had better go and cut his throat than give himself airs, even of pity, over a lady who has made a misstep she cannot retrace."

Her foot played with a brick that was loose in the pavement, but she gave me a melting glance of gratitude. After a considerable pause she murmured, "I will retrace it."

"I have kept you here a good while," I said. "After a moment or so drop your handkerchief, and as I return it to you the letter will be with it. Or, better, if you choose to trust me, we'll not do that, but as soon as I get into the house I'll burn it."

"I can trust you," she replied, "but----"

"What; the Baron--when he misses it? O I'll settle that."

She gave a start as though I had shouted.

I thought it a bad sign for the future, and the words that followed seemed to me worse. "Isn't it my duty," she asked--and her eyes betrayed unconsciously the desperateness of her desire--"to explain to him myself?"

I answered with a question. "Would that be in the line of retracement, Mrs. Fontenette?"

"It would!" she responded, with solemn eagerness. "O it would be! It shall be! I promise you!"

"Mrs. Fontenette," said I, "consider. If his wife"--she flinched; she could do so now, for the sudden semi-tropical darkness had fallen--"if his wife-or your husband"--she bit her lip--"knew all--would they think that your duty? Would it take them an instant to refuse their consent? Would they not firmly insist that it is your duty never again to see him alone?"

Her only reply was an involuntary moan and a whitening of the face, and for the first time I saw how deep into her soul the poison had gone.

"My friend," I continued, "you must not think me meddlesome--officious. I can no more wait for your permission to help you than if you were drowning. Perhaps for good reasons within _me_, I know, better than you, that you-and he--are on a slippery incline, and that whether you can stop your descent and creep back to higher ground than either of you has slipped from is not to be told by the fineness of your promises or resolves. I cannot tell; you cannot tell; only God knows." ...

"Please, sir," said a new maid--in place of one who had gone home fever struck and had died--"yo' lady saunt me fo' to tell you yo' little boy a sett'n on de back steps an' sayin' his head does ache him, an' she wish you'd 'ten' to him, 'caze she cayn't leave his lill' sisteh, 'caze she threaten with convulsion'."

XV

Mrs. Fontenette and the maid silently ran in ahead of me; I went first to the mother. When I found Mrs. Fontenette again she had the child undressed and in his crib, and I remembered how often I had, in my heart, called her a coward.

She saw me pencil on a slip of paper at the mantelpiece, and went and read -"You mustn't stay. He has the fever. You've never had it."

She wrote beneath--"I should have got it weeks ago if God paid wages every day. Don't turn me off."

I dropped the paper into the small firegrate, added the other from my breastpocket, and set them ablaze, and the new maid, entering, praised burning paper as one of the best deodorizers known.

So my dainty rose-neighbor stayed; stayed all night, and all the next day and night, and on and on with only flying visits to her home over the way, until we were amazed at her endurance. The little fellow was never at ease with her out of his wild eyes. Her touch was balm to him, and her words peace. Oh, that they might have been healing also! But that was beyond the reach of all our striving. His days were as the flowers and winged things of the garden-kingdom, wherein he had been--without ever guessing it-- their citizen-king.

It awakens all the tenderness at once that I ever had for Mrs. Fontenette, to recall what she was to him in those hours, and to us when his agonies were all past, and he lay so stately on his short bier, and she could not be done going to it and looking--looking--with streaming eyes.

As she stood close by the tomb, while we dumbly watched the masons seal it, I began to believe that she blamed herself for the child's sickness and death, and presently I knew it must be so. One of those quaint burial societies of Negro women, in another quarter of the grounds, but within plain hearing, chose for the ending of their burial service--with what fitness to their burial service I cannot say, maybe none--a hymn borrowed, I judge, from the rustic whites, as usual, but Africanized enough to thrill the dullest nerves; and the moment it began my belief was confirmed.

My sin is so dahk, Lawd, so dahk and so deep, My grief is so po', Lawd, so po' and so mean, I wisht I could weep, Lawd, I wisht I could weep, Oh, I wisht I could weep like Mary Mahgaleen!

Oh, Sorroh! sweet Sorroh! come, welcome, and stay! I'd welcome thy swode howsomever so keen, If I could jes' pray, Lawd, if I could jes' pray, Oh! if I could jes' pray, like Mary Mahgaleen!

My belief was confirmed, I say; but I was glad to see also that no one else read as I read the signs by which I was guided. At the cemetery gate I heard some one call--"Yo' madam is sick, sih," and, turning, saw Mrs. Fontenette, deathly white, lift her blue eyes to her husband and he get his arm about her just in time to save her from falling. She swooned but a moment, and, in the carriage, before it started off, tried to be quite herself, though very pale.

"It's nothing but the reaction," said to me the lady who fanned her, and we agreed it was a wonder she had held up so long.

"Hyeh, honey," put in the child's old black nurse, in a voice that never failed to soothe, however grotesque its misinterpretations, "lay yo' head on me; an' lay it heavy: dass what I'm use-en to. Blessed is de pyo in haht; she shall res' in de fea' o' de Lawd, an' he shall lafe at heh calamity."

I was glad to send the old woman with them, for as we turned away to our own carriage, I said in my mind, "All that little lady needs is enough contrition, and she'll give away the total of any secret of which she owns an undivided half."

But a night and a day passed, and a second, and a third, and I perceived she had told nothing.

It was a terrible time, with many occasions of suspense more harrowing than that. Our other children were getting on, yet still needed vigilant care; the Baron was to be let out of his room in a day or two, but my fat neighbor had come down with the disease, while his wife still lay between life and death--how they finally got well, I have never quite made out, they were so badly nursed--and all about us were new cases, and cases beyond hope, and retarded recoveries, and relapses, and funerals, and nurses too few, and ice scarce, and everybody worn out with watching-- physicians compelled to limit themselves to just so many cases at a time, to avoid utterly breaking down.

As I was in my fat neighbor's sick chamber one evening, giving his nurse a respite, word came that Fontenette was at my gate. I went to him with misgivings that only increased as we greeted. He was dejected and agitated. His grasp was damp and cold.

"It cou'n' stay from me always," he said in an anguished voice, and I cried in my soul, "She's told him!"

But she had not. I asked him what his bad news was that had come at last, but his only reply was,

"Can you take _him_? Can you take him out of my house--to-night--this evening--now?"

"Who, the Baron? Why, certainly, if you desire it?" I responded; wondering if the entomologist, by some slip, had betrayed _her_. There was an awe in my visitor's eyes that was almost fright.

"Fontenette," I exclaimed, "what have you heard--what have you done?"

"My frien', 'tis not what I 'ave heard, neitheh what I 'ave done; 'tis what I 'ave got."

"Got? Why, you've got nothing, you Creole of the Creoles. Your skin's as cool as mine."

"Feel my pulse," he said. I felt it. It wasn't less than a hundred and fifty.

"Go, get into bed while I bring the Baron over here," I said, and by the time I had done this and got back to him his skin was hot enough! An hour or two after, I recrossed the street on the way to my night's rest, leaving his wife to nurse him, and Senda to attend on her and keep house. I paused in the garden and gazed up among the benignant stars. And then I looked onward, through and beyond their ranks, seemingly so confused, yet where such amazing hidden order is, and said, for our good Fontenette, and for his watching wife, and for all of us--even for my wife and me in our unutterable loss--"Sank Kott! sank Kott! it iss only se yellow fevah!"

XVI

Three days more. In the third evening I found the doctor saying to Mrs. Fontenette:

"Nine o'clock. It's now seven-thirty. Well, you'd better begin pretty soon to watch for the change.

"O, you'll know it when you see it, it will be as plain as something sinking in water right before your eyes. Then give him the beef-tea, just a teaspoonful; then, by and by, another, and another, as I told you, always keeping his head on the pillow--mind that."

Out beside his carriage he continued to me: "O yes, a nurse or patient may break that rule, or almost any rule, and the patient may live. I had a patient, left alone for a moment on the climacteric day, who was found standing at her mirror combing her hair, and to-day she's as well as you or I. I had another who got out of bed, walked down a corridor, fell face downward and lay insensible at the crack of a doorsill with the rain blowing in on him under the door--and he got well. As to Fontenette, all his symptoms so far are good. Well--I'll be back in the morning."

So ran the time. There were no more new cases in our house; Mrs. Smith and I had had the scourge years before, as also had Senda, who remained over the way. Fontenette passed from one typical phase of the disorder to another "charmingly" as the doctor said, yet he specially needed just such exceptionally delicate care as his wife was giving him. In the city at large the deaths per day were more and more, and one night when it showered and there was a heavenly cooling of the air, the increase in the mortality was horrible. But the weather, as a rule, was steady and tropically splendid; the sun blazed; the moonlight was marvellous; the dews were like rains; the gardens were gay with butterflies. Our convalescent little ones hourly forgot how gravely far they were from being well, and it became one of our heavy cares to keep the entomologist from entomologizing--and from overeating.

From time to time, when shorthanded we had used skilled nurses; but when Mrs. Fontenette grew haggard and we mentioned them, she said distressfully: "O! no hireling hands! I can't bear the thought of it!" and indeed the thought of the average hired "fever-nurse" of those days was not inspiring; so I served as her alternate when she would accept any and throw herself on the couch Senda had spread in the little parlor.

XVII

At length one day I was called up at dawn and went over to take her place once more, and when after several hours had passed I was still with him, Fontenette said, while I bent down,

"I have the fear thad's going to go hahd with my wife, being of the Nawth."

"Why, what's going to go hard, old fellow?"

"The feveh. My dear frien', don't I know tha'z the only thing would keep heh f'om me thad long?"

"Still, you don't know her case will be a hard one; it may be very light. But don't talk now."

"Well--I hope _so_. Me, I wou'n' take ten thousand dollahs faw thad feveh myself--to see that devotion of my wife. You muz 'ave observe', eh?"

"Yes, indeed, old man; nobody could help observing. I wouldn't talk any more just now."

"No," he insisted, "nobody could eveh doubt. 'Action speak loudeh than word,' eh?"

"Yes, but we don't want either from you just now." I put his restless arms back under the cover; not to keep the outer temperature absolutely even was counted a deadly risk. "Besides," I said, "you're talking out of character, old boy."

He looked at me mildly, steadily, for several moments, as if something about me gave him infinite comfort. It was a man's declaration of love to a man, and as he read the same in my eyes, he closed his own and drowsed.

Though he dozed only at wide intervals and briefly, he asked no more questions until night; then--"Who's with my wife?"

"Mine."

He closed his eyes again, peacefully. It was in keeping with his perfect courtesy not to ask how the new patient was. If she was doing well,--well; and if not, he would spare us the pain of informing or deceiving him.

Senda became a kind of chief-of-staff for both sides of the street. She would have begged to be Mrs. Fontenette's nurse, but for one other responsibility, which we felt it would be unsafe, and she thought it would be unfair, for her to put thus beyond her own reach: "se care of mine hussbandt."

She wore a plain path across the unpaved street to our house, and another to our neighbor's. "Sat iss a too great risk," she compassionately maintained, "to leaf even in se daytime sose shiltren--so late sick--alone viss only mine hussbandt and se sairvants!"

The doctor was concerned for Mrs. Fontenette from the beginning. "Terribly nervous," he said, "and full from her feet to her eyes, of a terror of death--merely a part of the disease, you know." But in this case I did not know.

"Pathetic," he called the fevered satisfaction she took in the hovering attentions of our old black nurse, who gave us brief respites in the two sick-rooms by turns, and who had according to Mrs. Fontenette, "such a beautiful faith!" The doctor thought it mostly words, among which "de Lawd willin'" so constantly recurred that out of the sick-room he always alluded to her as D.V., though never without a certain sincere regard. This kind old soul had nursed much yellow fever in her time, and it did not occur to us that maybe her time was past.

When Mrs. Fontenette had been ill something over a week, the doctor one evening made us glad by saying as he came through the little dining-room and jerked a thumb back toward Fontenette's door, "Just keep him as he is for one more night and, I promise you, he'll get well; but!"--He sat down on the couch--Senda's--in the parlor, and pointed at the door to Mrs. Fontenette's room--"You've got to be careful _how_ you let even that be known--in there! She can get well too--if--" And he went on to tell how in this ailment all the tissues of the body sink into such frail deterioration, that so slight a thing as the undue thrill of an emotion, may rend some inner part of the soul's house and make it hopelessly untenable.

"Iss sat not se condition vhat make it so easy to relapse?" asked Senda.

He said it was, I think, and went his way, little knowing to what a night he was leaving us--except for its celestial beauty, upon which he expatiated as I stepped with him to the gate.

XVIII

He had not been gone long enough for me to get back into the house- Fonteette's--when I espied coming to me, in piteous haste from her home around the corner, the young daughter of another neighbor. Her hair was about her eyes and as she saw the physician had gone, she wrung her hands and burst into violent weeping. I ran to her outside the gate, pointing backward at Mrs. Fontenette's room, with entreating signs for quiet as she called--"Oh, _where_ is he gone? Which way did he go?"

"I can't tell you, my dear girl!" I murmured. "I don't know! What is the trouble?"

"My father!" she hoarsely whispered.

"My father's dying! dying in a raging delirium, and we can't hold him in bed! O, come and help us!" She threw her hands above her head in wild despair, and gnawed her fingers and lips and shook and writhed as she gulped down her sobs, and laid hold of me and begged as though I had refused.

I found her words true. It took four men to keep him down. I did not have to stay to the end, and when I reached Fontenette's side again, was glad to find I had been away but little over an hour.

I sent the old black woman home and to bed, and may have sat an hour more, when she came back to tell us, that one of the children was very wakeful and feverish. Senda went to see into the matter for us, and the old woman took her place in the little parlor. Mrs. Smith was with Mrs. Fontenette.